(ix) Trafficking in South East Asia generally
Most of the DEA attention is focussed (rightly, in my view) uron Thailand, and when I asked, they were not as informative about traffic down through the Kalaysian peninsula They did, however, refer to the establishment of the SNO pro ramme office in Southern Thailand. The Thai/Malaysia border is not very well controlled because of the presence of Communist insurgents, and there is much general contraband across it. They said that they were having difficulty in obtaining co-operation with the Malaysian Narcotics Bureau; which did not surprise me, as I thought that the head of it (a man called Abu Bakir) was more of a bureaucrat and a politician than an active agent, and I doubt very much whether he would be willing to be pushed around. Doyle reported that he Australians were experiencing similar difficulties. He also s ́id that Hannam, the Head of the Narcotics Bureau in Singapore, was not very active, and that he might be in some sort of difficulty because of domestic restures in Singapore. In the circumstances I doubt whether it would be opportune at present to approach either of these two to establish better intelligence exchange links, which I had been thinking of as a possibility in view of the evidence that we are getting some heroin through Fenang and Singapore.
TRAFFICKING IN NORTH AMERICA AND EUROPE (Items 3, 4 and 7)
11.
A number of DEA agents gave presentations under these items: Peter Niblo on the situation on the west coast of America; Jack Taylor on the east coast of America,
ith particular respect to New York; Michael Antonelli on cases in western Europe. Mr Jordan and Commander Morrison spoke about the UK scene. Much of what was said was historical, but the following main points of interest emerged:
(i) Both in the United States, particularly on the east coast, and in Europe, there was evidence of far more heroin from South East Asia, and in Europe, from Hong Kong, than the Hong Kong authori ies had realised In 1973, 22% of the heroin seized in the New York area vas of South East Asian origin. Since 1972 there had been 18 sizeable cases in Europe, ranging from 2 to 8 kilos; in these cases, amongst those arrested were 34 Hong Kong nationals, 7 Halaysians and 2 from Singapore. Faris and Amsterdam, both with six cases, were the main scenes of activity. Although the traffic in Europe (and perhaps in the US) was not organised in the same way as rafficking in South East Asia, there was a clear involvement, both in Europe and the US, of Hong Kong Chinese working on a scale which produced lucrative results.
(ii) Hong Kong law enforcement agencies have virtually no information about this traffic, since very little seems to get passed through official channels either from the US or from Europe. The case histories which were recited suggested a connection, in one instance at least, between trafficking networks in the US and London, and Hong Kong; one of the people involved in the United States was a London-based merchant who had a link with a company in London called the Lea Green Import Company, and with one in Hong Kong called the Asian Trading Company. It was alleged that information about these cases was passed to the DEA agents based locally, but it was not known whether this information had then been transmitted to the local law enforcement agencies. There is need for
a surer passing of detailed information about cases in the US to Hong Kong and, where the UK is involved, to and from the UK. The Interpol link does not seem to work effectively in these cases.
This
(iii) The US have been working on developing what they call "conspiracy cases", which involve the building up of a detailed picture of supply networks. is part of their increased effort to develop intelligence. They have also been doing some work or the building up of "trafficker profiles", which seers interesting; part of this involves the construction of the history of persons' international movements, and the attached paper, Appendix IV, gives an example
5.
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