There was an unmistakable Marxist element in the gunrunner's far-left worldview. It was clear from our conversation that he hated America and he loved communist Cuba.

My interest in the rising cross-border criminal class from Mexico stemmed from a then recently-published book by Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., titled Red Cocaine: The Drugging of America and the West. This book describes "long-term Russian and Chinese intelligence operations aimed at achieving the demoralization and ultimate control of the West…." After preparing for several years, the Soviet special services entered the world of drug trafficking in 1960. They called it "Operation Friendship of Nations." Soviet dictator Nikita S. Khrushchev got the idea from Chairman Mao Zedong of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), who had instructed his subordinates to "begin cultivating opium on a grand scale" in 1928. According to Douglass, "Mao's strategy was simple; use drugs to soften a target area. Then after a captured region had been secured, outlaw the use of all narcotics and impose strict controls to ensure that the poppies remained exclusively an instrument of the state for use against its enemies." [P. 11]