The Lebanese Connection

Stanford University Press

Contents

Chapter One

THE YEAR WAS 1950. Charles Siragusa, one of only a handful of elite overseas agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, arrived in Beirut on September 7 to personally investigate one of the world's major—but least known—drug markets. A veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, Siragusa headed the FBN's "Italian squad" in New York after the war. He then shipped off to Rome, where he searched for clues to Mafia control of the Italian heroin trade. Now he was tracking narcotics back to their source in the Middle East.

Posing as a rich New York racketeer, Siragusa found evidence of drugs within hours of landing in Beirut. Acting on a tip, he visited the Victory Bar, a seedy but full-service establishment that catered to American sailors and oil pipeline workers in the Middle East. The owner, a paunchy, gregarious Armenian named Artin Guedikian, accepted Siragusa's cover story and was soon quoting prices by the kilo for opium, heroin, and hashish, a highly potent drug made from the marijuana plant.

Guedikian happily regaled Siragusa with stories of his many satisfied customers, like one U.S. Air Force major who smuggled enough hashish to Cairo to finance the opening of a new automobile dealership in California. The bar owner, who boasted of smoking hashish with his many "policeman friends," explained that modest payments of baksheesh to customs officials protected his outbound shipments from Beirut. Astonished by the brazen nonchalance of his unwitting informant, Siragusa reported back to headquarters: "The unbelievable situation here enables me to understand what tremendous quantities of narcotic drugs and hasheesh reach our shores, and there is very little we can do to stop it!"

A couple of days later, Guedikian and two of his nephews hired a taxi to show Siragusa around the heart of Lebanon's drug country—the Bekaa Valley. In the ancient city of Baalbek, the administrative center of the northern Bekaa, Guedikian introduced Siragusa to a major wholesaler of hashish and opium, whose villa backed onto a "large plantation" of marijuana. Promising to do more business if satisfied, the undercover agent bought large drug samples—just over a kilo of opium and a brick of hashish—for a mere $115. Once the deal was completed, they stepped into another room to admire the drug seller's arsenal of machine guns and pistols before parting as new friends.

Returning to Beirut, they stopped along the highway at a roadside shed selling grapes. Guedikian asked the proprietor if he had any marijuana. The man took them a few hundred yards off the road where they "came upon a field of marijuana 4' in height," Siragusa reported. "The plantation was so large, I could not see the end of it. It extended all the way up to the mountainside.... It was a tremendous farm." The congenial farmer—smoking a cigarette, wearing a white undershirt and scarf, and carrying a gun—posed with Siragusa and Guedikian for a group photo in his field of waist-high hemp plants.

Siragusa would have loved nothing better than to turn the whole lot of them in. An experienced American diplomat based in Beirut set him straight. The major-league dealers whom Siragusa had proudly identified were pikers compared to the country's real drug lords. And they were easy to infiltrate because they had nothing, absolutely nothing, to fear.

Siragusa learned that the biggest marijuana farmer in Lebanon was also the biggest landowner in the Bekaa Valley, one Sabri Hamadeh. But his power extended far beyond the Bekaa thanks to his political machine:

Sabri Bey HAMEDE is the President of the Chamber of Deputies, the richest and greatest landowner in the Bekaa district. The eight deputies, representing his district, were hand-chosen by him. One of these deputies is Ibrahim HAIDAR, who is an independently wealthy land owner. The other deputies in this district were alleged to have paid up to 250,000 Lebanese Lira for their positions.... The voting public always votes into office the ticket drawn up by HAMEDE. In reality, HAMEDE is the feudal lord of his district.

Allied with Hamadeh, according to Siragusa's embassy informant, was Ahmed el Asad, the richest landowner in southern Lebanon, also a member of the Chamber of Deputies and Minister of Public Works. "Asad controls the South Lebanon district in which area are located the small ports of Tyre and Sidon," Siragusa learned. "The hashish produced from the marihuana farms in Bekaa valley is transported to these ports, from where it is smuggled by small boats to Alexandria, Egypt for the rich Cairo market. The hasheesh that is smuggled into the United States may come from Alexandria, Egypt or directly from Beirut, Lebanon."

The clincher was that both men, in turn, were allegedly allied with the country's Maronite president, Bechara Khoury, and its Sunni prime minister, Riad Sulh. "Since ... these corrupt politicians derive tremendous profits from the production of hashish, they would look with extreme disfavor upon any overt or covert act on the part of a foreign representative, particularly an American, to disrupt their financial status," Siragusa explained. Should any policeman make a drug arrest, "Hamede would undoubtedly order the summary dismissal of such a police official and possibly have the man murdered. I would be murder victim number 2."

THE "PETROLEUM OF LEBANON"

Cannabis—or hemp—has been used as a productive source of food and fiber in many lands for centuries. But hashish, a potent, psychoactive drug formed from the plant's resin, has been called "the petroleum of Lebanon." It became the most valuable of Lebanon's export cash crops, which included silk, olive oil, and tobacco.

By the late nineteenth century, Egypt was the world's largest market for hashish, supplied mostly by Greek farmers and traders. When the Greek government banned cultivation around the end of World War I, production shifted to Greater Syria, including today's Lebanon. Lebanese farmers began growing cannabis in the 1920s, under the French mandate, to avoid economic ruin after the local silk industry collapsed in the face of competition from Japanese silk and synthetic rayon.

Hashish production was then—and still is—centered in the fertile Bekaa Valley, an area rich in Roman ruins, as well as fruits, vegetables, and other crops. Running for about seventy-five miles, the Bekaa is sandwiched between the Lebanon and Anti-Lebanon mountains. Its relatively dry climate—often hot but with morning dew—suits the hardy cannabis plant. Hemp grown there produces copious quantities of the sticky resin used to make hashish. Local farmers, mostly Shiites, sow the seeds in March or April, apply fertilizer and irrigation when available, and reap the shoulder-high plants in September or October. Several days of drying and storage, followed by threshing and beating of the female plants in a closed room or barn, produce resin dust that is collected, sifted, and pressed into cakes or bricks of high-grade hashish. Each acre raises about a ton of cannabis, enough for thirty-five to sixty pounds of potent hashish.

A top Lebanese police official once estimated that during the French Mandate—from the 1920s to mid-1940s—"more than 50% of the Lebanese economy depended upon the production of hashish." By 1928, Bekaa farmers were producing an estimated sixty tons of hashish annually, 90 percent for export to Egypt. Smugglers moved bricks of hashish aboard ships, trucks, and camels herded by Bedouin tribesmen through Palestine, with the connivance of senior Egyptian police and customs officials and some members of the British military. Corrupt French officials and detectives of the Lebanese Sûreté (Public Security) also took advantage of their position by smuggling drugs in official vehicles or taking bribes to let drugs pass through checkpoints. Driving this profitable commerce were politically connected Lebanese hashish growers such as Agriculture Minister Ibrahim Haidar, who benefited not only from French training in agronomy but also from French irrigation projects in the Bekaa. Other Lebanese notables, who were not personally implicated in the business, defended the hashish trade as a boon to the rural population. As the president's son, Raymond Eddé, told a French official in 1939, "we do not understand ... why the Mandate prohibits the cultivation of hashish, a source of income for our 'villagers.'" French authorities were loathe to risk alienating powerful local elites, whose support they needed for effective governance, by cracking down too hard on the source of their income and patronage. In effect, official corruption became an instrument of colonial rule.

During World War II, public security forces in Lebanon conducted hashish eradication campaigns with considerable fanfare but insignificant results. In March 1944 the new government of Lebanon warned that it was "determined to take drastic measures towards the destruction of all Hashish plantations by means of the Gendarmerie and the Police Forces." But members of the British Security Mission, who gave assistance, admitted privately that they had to apply "considerable direct pressure ... on a reluctant Gendarmerie" to get any action, particularly given the challenges of trying to tame the "utterly lawless area" inhabited by fierce and well-armed tribes in the northern valley. A British report on the 1944 campaign noted that cannabis was being planted "on a greater scale than ever before" and that "the present scale of punishment for infractions of the Anti-Narcotic Laws is far too low to act as a deterrent." In particular, the weak laws and trivial fines did nothing to "discourage the large landowner, middle man and smuggler" or the "big dealer who at present enjoys complete immunity." Instead, "it is the poor labourer working for the big landowner who gets punished as he is always put forward as the grower and his employer escapes." That year, however, authorities did intercept a large shipment of hashish into Palestine, allegedly belonging to the secretary of parliament and the head of Lebanon's internal security forces.

The domination of hemp cultivation in the Bekaa Valley by large landowners followed the feudal traditions of Lebanese agriculture. As Siragusa reported, major growers enjoyed the protection and patronage of the speaker of Lebanon's Chamber of Deputies, Sabri Hamadeh, a Shiite and one of the most powerful of the region's political bosses, representing the northern town of Hermel. The dynastic clan he led traced its roots back to the fifteenth century. As the price for their "protection," powerful political leaders, Christian as well as Muslim, extorted a substantial share of the hashish crop from local farmers.

Much of the actual smuggling was handled by small-time gangsters allied with large landowners and wealthy merchants. After Lebanon achieved independence, notes Michael Johnson, "the security forces and police often turned a blind eye to hashish smuggling, gun running, prostitution and protection rackets, in order to win over the support of criminal networks which had previously gained protection from the za'ims (feudal elite)."

An American diplomat who surveyed the state of Lebanon's drug market in 1948 confirmed how deeply it implicated Lebanon's political class:

The principal offenders are undoubtedly the Shia Deputies Ibrahim Haidar and the present President of the Parliament, Sabri Hemade, whose constituents are the main source of this drug.... During the Mandate, and later during the war period, these two leaders were kept in check by the French and British authorities. ... Since the withdrawal of Allied troops in December of 1946, the cultivation of Indian hemp, from which the drug is derived, has increased in alarming proportions. Fields of hemp are now visible from the highway near Hermel and Baalbek.

During a recent hunting trip near the domains of Ibrahim Haidar, I had occasion to talk to the nephew of the latter, one Mustapha Haidar, who explained the procedure by which the Government authorities exercised "supervision and control" of the growing of Indian hemp. He explained that when the Government inspectors are scheduled to arrive at a particular locality, a small area of hemp is roped off. When the inspectors come to the roped off area they write a so-called "protocol," or deposition, concerning the spot surveyed, and submit this report to the Government. After being wined and given baksheesh, the inspectors depart. A fine is paid by the proprietor for the illegal cultivation (of the roped-off area), and everybody is satisfied.

Rumor in Beirut has it that many officials are implicated in the distribution of hashish. The French Legation states that persons in the President's entourage are prominent in this traffic. In any event, the protection enjoyed in high places by the hashish growers is so great that it is not likely that any action can be taken against them under the present regime. In fact, it would take a minor revolution to break up the gang which is now operating in the Lebanese hashish market.

A year later, one "politically prominent" cannabis grower in the Bekaa Valley, a close kin of Lebanon's consul in New York, told a similar story to an FBN agent who posed as an American farmer interested in learning the art of cultivating marijuana. The Lebanese planter, surrounded by family and neighbors who eagerly chimed in, explained that the government levied insignificant fines on the trade simply to line some officials' pockets and satisfy the international community. Of late, he complained, hashish producers had fallen on hard times as a result of oversupply, after Hamadeh and other landowners "greatly increased" their acreage planted in hemp. In 1950, the wily Hamadeh began promoting a crop eradication campaign, allegedly to reduce the oversupply of hashish and eliminate some "bothersome" competitors. Hamadeh, appropriately enough, sat on the parliamentary committee for hashish destruction.

Others in high office were reportedly implicated as well. Two-term prime minister Riad Sulh was said to have once been an honest man but "joined forces with the ruling and corrupt high echelon and he is now 'one of the boys.'" Abdallah Yafi, another multiterm prime minister, reportedly protected at least one set of father-and-son racketeers and drug traffickers in Beirut. He also appointed as minister of agriculture a noted landowner implicated in hashish production.

As for the notoriously corrupt President Bechara Khoury, who had negotiated the National Pact with Sulh, one U.S. narcotics agent reported in 1949, "The President of the Republic last year [was] talked out of planting hashish in a new apple orchard his American adviser had planted for him." Khoury's brother and son were widely known to have "a finger in every business deal and every senior governmental appointment and realized money from both." His son Khalil was reportedly caught with one of Lebanon's leading opium traffickers, Omar Makkouk, by Egyptian police in 1950. To avoid an embarrassing scandal, Prime Minister Sulh had to visit Egypt to intercede and prevent judicial action against them.

By 1950 Lebanon and Syria together were producing about three hundred tons of hashish a year, nearly all for export. The size of the traffic was becoming an international scandal. The New York Times called it "a black spot on the record of the Lebanese Republic." Egypt demanded action by its fellow Arab countries, estimating the value of hashish reaching its streets at $40 million. In 1951 Egypt complained to the United Nations that the traffic in Lebanese hashish—much of it through Israel—had become a major drain on the country's foreign exchange.

CROP ERADICATION

On occasions when Lebanese government officials ordered raids on cannabis fields to show the world its serious commitment to law and order, local militia put up fierce resistance, causing "dozens of fatalities" each year. One abortive attempt by the government in 1947 to send in the army left eighteen soldiers and three peasants dead.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Lebanese Connectionby Jonathan V. Marshall Copyright © 2012 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of Stanford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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