TNAG-0560-FCO40-655-Review-of-narcotics-problem-in-Hong-Kong-1975 — Page 111

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D K Timms Esq

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7 January 1975

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Dear Timms

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гвоя

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DRUG ABUSE IN HONG KONG: THE GOLDEN TRIANGLE

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As we agreed over the telephone last week, I saw Adrian Cowell, the television journalist who made the ATV film "The Opium War Lords" to give him some general briefing upon the United Kingdom's relations with Hong Kong in connection with the problems of drug trafficking in the Far East. We had a long and interesting discussion at the end of which Mr Cowell left me some papers which he had on the situation in the Golden Triangle and possible solutions to it (I am enclosing copies of this material). In view of the impending meeting with Foreign Office officials to discuss Normal Rolph's ideas about a possible new initiative against drug trafficking in South East Asia and of the relevance of Mr Cowell's experience to that discussion, I append some further information which I gleaned from him about his current activity. I am sending copies of this letter to Oaten in the UN Department and Thomas and MacPherson in the South East Asian Department and hope that they will bring it and its enclosures to the attention of which-ever official from their Department is attending the meeting on Thursday afternoon (if they are not represen- ting their Department themselves).

Partly as a result of publicity given to his film and partly as a result of the approach which he had made earlier to the United States Drug Enforcement Administration, Mr Cowell had been invited to Washington at the end of the year to meet Congressman Lester Woolf, who is the Chairman of the Committee of Congress which is studying problems relating to drug abuse in the United States ( I am not sure of its exact title). Lester Woolf has been very active in this field for some years and was the cause of substantial embarrassément to the Hong Kong Government (and I believe to the United States Government) a couple of years ago when after a visit to Hong Kong he made allegations that the United States' effort in the Far East was being seriously damaged by the "stuffiness of the colonial administration". These allegations were repudiated both by the Hong Kong Government and by the DEA. He has the reputation of being very much on-the-make and willing to use any reasonable case to further his own ambitions; this was the picture of him that

Mr Cowell himself had received. Woolf has apparently siezed upon the suggestion that Mr Cowell has been canvassing that there should be some preemptive buying of Burmese opium from the Shan State Army.

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