RECEIVED IN
REGISTRY M14
་
FAS
19/2
PCF Gregory-Hood Esq
22
NOV 1973
HKK 1912
1912
South East Asian Department Foreign & Commonwealth Office London SW1
Dear Peter,
NARCOTICS
Mr. Evenson
Mr. Schort
того
tave
Enter.
亿
งา
112.
BRITISH EMBASSY
PUSD HMOD
BANGKOK
25 October 1973
де
te Speston 1235100
It doen wet supmie
near "cleanser
Har the queat
then enterd
те
་ ་
in this my to his week
to glance Marag
10/20/1
тр
尸
May Hood
29/10
1. In the wake of the departure from Thailand of Thanom, Praphass and Narong their misdeeds and corrupt activities real or imagined have been assiduously publicised by the newspapers. Many of these reports reflect rumours which have been common currency for years, but the fact that the sycophantic and inaccurate Bangkok press has now chosen to puolish what they concealed for so long, gives the rumours no greater standing than they had before, though this is not to say that the rumours were not and are not true.
2. For years it has been alleged that Praphass, Prasert and particularly Narong were involved in the drug trade; there are stories of an angry phone call by Marong to officers who had just made a seizure of his opium; of Army trucks bringing the opium down from the North immune from police search; of Narong owning the trawler Mahachai I seized off South Vietnam. It was therefore with interest that the country read recent reports of an interview with Col Pramual, a former narcotics suppression official, one of Prasert's closest associates now doing 25 years for trafficking in narcotics. He is reported to have said that Narong had a nationwide network of traffickers and that most of the drug shipments by boats to llong Kong and Vietnam belonged to him. Heroin and morphine were brought down from the North by military trucks and kept at the headquarters of the 11th Infantry Regiment, before being loaded on to ships. Narong was in the process of making himself the leading narcotics agent in South East Asia and he had therefore decided to eliminate all his rival traffickers. Lo Hsing Han worked for him, that is why he tried to iush up new stories about the capture or Lo Hsing Han and endeavoured to get him released, a move which was thwarted by the publicity given to the incident. Lu Pen hia, another trafficker who worked for Narong was arrested because Narong suspected that he had double-crossed him by the transhipping of some bullion from a boat just before it was seized by the South Vietnamese. Pramual claimed that Narong had started to try to get him arrested after the seizure on July 1971 of a drug shipment worth 4,000m Baht off the South Vietnam coast. Narong was also trying to implicate Prasert in drug trafficking but was unable to find concrete evidence. It is also claimed that laj Gen Vichien Songkaew was replaced as head of the Crime Suppression
CONFIDEITIAL
/Division
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