Narcotopia, Part Two - Thy Will Be Done | Investigation
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Warning, this episode contains descriptions of violence and references to drug abuse and suicide. Listener discretion is advised. This is True Spies, the podcast that takes you deep inside the greatest secret missions of all time. Week by week, you'll hear the true stories behind the operations that have shaped the world we live in. You'll meet the people who live life undercover.

What do they know? What are their skills? And what would you do in their position? I'm Rhianna Needs, and this is True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Narcotopia, part two. Thy will be done. They dropped him on his head again, and they dropped him on his head again. And I don't know if it was the third, the fifth, or the seventh time, but he was out.

When we last left Wa state leader Saul Lu, he had been suspended from a banyan tree by his feet, then dropped on his skull over and over again. So for that night at least they dragged Saul Lu back to his room, presumably concussed, and left him there, probably thinking he would die in the night. If you haven't heard part one of this series, go back and have a listen now. If you have heard it, here's a refresher.

Sawloo, one of Waa state's founding fathers, had long dreamed of ridding his country of narcotics and giving his people a better life. In hopes of making that happen, he'd become an informant for the DEA, using a safe house in Burma and handing over confidential Waa state documents, dripping with details about the inner workings of Narcotopia. But it's hard to keep secrets when you're working in a police state.

And once he was found out, Sawloo's Burmese captors did everything in their power to make his life miserable, however short that life might turn out to be. Sure, they could have shot him in the head the first day, but they wanted that signed piece of paper and they wanted to be able to tell the DEA, hey, Americans, nice try, but this guy is actually the big drug trafficker and he's been lying to you and we have a signed confession.

Of course, murdering a DEA asset is a risky business, especially in a country whose repressive regime has been sanctioned by U.S. authorities. The economy is already in the toilet. One thing that sparks mass uprisings in this country is when the economy gets so bad that people can't

take it and they're willing to go out onto the streets. And the United States, as an economic superpower, had the ability to turn that dial and do more economic warfare on the country and make life worse for the regime. So it's not helpful to have to go to the Americans and say, I know you were thinking about maybe waiving those sanctions, but we just killed one of your DEA informants. But it wasn't just his alliance with the Americans that protected Sorlu.

He had his own powerful connections right at home. If there was ever any doubt that Sao Lu was really high up among the Wa, it was proven in the aftermath of him nearly dying under that tree. Because when the leader of Wa state found out, he went to the dictator running Myanmar's regime and he said, you got to release my guy.

And the dictator said, your guy is a spy for the Americans. And the WA leader, Zhao Nili, said, I don't care. You're going to release him right now. We already have WA soldiers in plainclothes filtering into Lazio, into the city where he's held. We absolutely will, in his words, turn your command center into dust. In other words, if you don't release our leader, you can begin preparing for war.

The dictator, having heard that, said, "You have to release Saulu." We can't have the Americans and the WA coming after us at the same time. It's exactly what they wanted to avoid. Saulu's son, Isaac, had been visiting the command center on his bicycle, bringing food for his father. But one day, he received an unexpected welcome. The commander of the base walks out and snaps at him and says, "Why are you on a bike? Why didn't you bring your truck? Go home. Get your truck."

Because Isaac can't very well bring his father home on a bicycle. So Isaac, bewildered, goes home and returns with the family truck. He's led into the subterranean prison cell where they've been keeping his father. Of course, he's beaten severely and really in bad shape at this point. And he says, Dad, they're letting you go. Let's get out of here.

And Sa Lu kind of waves his arm at him like he's not in any big hurry. And even as Sa Lu's son told me, even the guards were like, oh my, doesn't this guy want to get out of here? He's endured the worst things that any human can endure. But he just wasn't fussed about it. And he said, no, first son, we're going to pray. So the men got down on their knees on the floor of the filthy prison cell.

According to family lore, this light bulb unscrews itself from the ceiling, drops to the floor, and they expect it to shatter, but it goes like "bing" and rolls into a corner. And in family lore, they believe that that light bulb was unscrewed by the hand of God to teach them a lesson that glass is seemingly fragile, and God had cast it down against this presumably cement floor, but it didn't break. You'd think it would break, and it didn't break.

And along the same lines, Saw Loo, you'd think he would break in there, but he didn't break. Wait a minute. Did that really happen? Patrick Wynne spent a lot of time reporting on Wa State and talking to Saw Loo. He knows how lucky he was to have been granted that degree of access. And he also knows that he might want to take some of what he heard with a grain of salt.

On the other hand...

Some of what initially seemed fantastical to Patrick turned out to be 100% true. If it's something about the DEA and the CIA, I can use my reporting chops to go find people who were involved and get them to corroborate. I was astounded at some stuff I thought, okay, this looks great in my notebook. I'm going to go talk to his DEA handler.

And he's going to say, no way, it didn't happen like that. But they all said, yeah, that's what happened. The amazing thing about Saul Liu is as I talked to the people in his life, even people that disliked him, he had been through a lot and it was all true. Right. Back to the action. Wa State had been reunited with one of its beloved leaders,

But all was not well for Soorloo. Because remember, on the international stage, while state isn't just an unrecognized country populated by a non-threatening indigenous group, it's a drug cartel, one of the biggest in Southeast Asia. And the U.S. was in the midst of a drug war.

The CIA understands that narcotics are power. I mean, narcotics, it's just like oil. It's this commodity that is so in demand that it can finance and give rise to an entire nation or at least keep an entire nation running. The CIA is all about monitoring power around the world, figuring out how to manipulate it in America's interest. So the CIA naturally has a strong interest in any powerful narcotics trafficking group.

And not just an interest in wiping them out. If that narcotics trafficking group can be useful to the CIA, meaning can they provide intel on American rivals? Can they provide intel on communist China or Hezbollah or Russia? Then they'll want to talk to them and they'll want to squeeze that information out of them and they will be deemed useful.

Which makes you wonder, why didn't the CIA want to get inside the WA? Why not develop a relationship with the Sorlu? The CIA didn't like the WA because they had gotten cozy with the DEA. Extraordinary as that is. America's premier drug enforcement administration becoming friendly with one of the biggest drug cartels in Southeast Asia. Against all odds, they had.

And the CIA didn't like that the DEA was talking to them, working with them, making grand plans that were beyond the DEA's remit. So that was sort of the original reason that the CIA didn't like the WA. But there were other reasons the CIA was unhappy with the WA. A major one being it had formed a peace agreement with Myanmar's military regime in order to remain an autonomous state.

That means it wasn't taking part in any of the Americans' efforts to undermine that regime. Roy State only has a population of about 600,000.

But even a tiny bit of negative attention from the U.S. can have disastrous consequences on a small place like Wa State. I'm sure the CIA sits around and thinks about Iran all the time. I'm sure they think about Xi Jinping all the time. But if you are on the outs with the empire, even if you're a relatively small group that probably most people in the DEA and CIA don't really think about,

and you're a target, you might have a dozen people, a dozen federal officials who have weakening your group on their portfolio. And they don't have to do much to make your life pretty miserable if you're an indigenous group in the mountains of Southeast Asia. Which is precisely what happened next. The CIA successfully ruined Saulu's dream.

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Saw Loo had survived torture, imprisonment, and attempted murder. Now he was back home in Wa State. But he hadn't received a hero's welcome. No, he was seen as pathetic. And Saw Loo had made a lot of big promises about how the Americans were going to come in and save the Wa, and the Wa leaders soured on him. They said, basically, your love affair with the Americans is not taking us down the right path.

This is not working anymore. And this experiment we had where we were going to trust the Americans to do some good by us is over. The intractable Saw Liu held fast to his belief that Wa State should break away from the narcotics trade. And his point of view was tolerated for a while. But in 1995, the chairman of Wa State suffered severe health challenges and was forced to step down.

And the state's new commander-in-chief was particularly close with Wa State's finance czar, essentially its principal drug trafficker.

a man named Wei Shikang. And Saw Lu's vision was antithetical to the drug lord's vision. The drug lord's vision was to make sure that Wa State remained a refuge for production of drugs, raking in a lot of money, sustaining the state. We don't care what anyone thinks about us. This is how we make money if you don't like it too bad. When Saw Lu ran afoul of the drug lord, the drug lord stripped him of his position in the government.

and then of his military ranking. And one of the other Wa leaders had to hide Saw Lu in a hole in the ground for some period of time to keep him alive. One evening, Saw Lu and his wife heard a knocking at their door. It was Wa State's former chairman carrying with him a heavy bag full of money, more money than most Wa people would make in their entire lives. Run, the chairman told him. You can't stay in Wa State, they'll kill you.

But Saw Loo wouldn't budge. He hadn't yet fulfilled his mission. So at the behest of the chairman, soldiers barged into the room and dragged Saw Loo out. For his own good, they told his wife. The soldiers drove him into a dark forest. Only with flashlights were they able to find a steel hatch in the ground. The men lifted the hatch to reveal a deep hole, about as large as a telephone booth.

Saw Lu did as he was told and lowered himself inside for his own good. After everything he'd been through, Saw Lu was finally beginning to realize he might not be able to deliver the change he'd dreamed of.

Eventually, Saw Alu is pulled out and told, you're on house arrest. You're just making too many problems. We don't love the drug trafficking either, but this is how we make our money and you've just got to accept it. And so for years, five years or so, he seemed to be processing that and accepting it and receding into the background and didn't make a fuss. Ironically, while Saw Alu waited in the shadows...

Wa state did surrender its drugs, in a way. I said earlier that Wa leaders don't necessarily care what the outside world thinks about them. But in this case, they did. They thought that if they could show the world that we're actually going to rid ourselves of heroin production, you don't have to come in and smash us up. We're going to do it ourselves, that they could buy some respect on the world stage. The Wa hacked down their prized poppy plants.

With no crops on the ground, how could they possibly be producing opium? And if they weren't producing opium, how could they be worth monitoring? This is a livelihood for the majority of the Wa people. And it put them at a serious financial risk. And they really wanted credit from the world for doing this. Of course, no Wa leader would want to wipe out the drug industry all at once. Drugs were his people's entire livelihood. No.

The Wa were cooking up another plan, quite literally. At the same time, they did bring in a different product, and that was methamphetamine. The drug czar Wei Shukong developed the strategy and honed the product.

WHA drug producers turned meth crystals into a fine powder, then added a dash of caffeine and some binding agents and bundled it all up into small tablets. They're little pink pills. They're like the size of a baby aspirin. They smell like vanilla or like Oreo cream frosting. And they contain about 20% meth. This was at the tail end of the last millennium.

By now, people in Southeast Asia who had once worked in less developed economies were earning enough to spend on recreation. As it turned out, they were happy to spend on war-produced speed. Wei Shukong's business gambit paid off.

They're focusing on the Asian market and they're not sending them to the United States. They thought the DEA and America in general would just sort of back off. Today, the Asian meth economy is the biggest in the world. It's valued at somewhere around $60 billion by the UN. The Wah remain key players in that. This was hardly the dream Saw Liu once held for his country.

But the one-time leader was condemned to watch the changes unfold from his house arrest. Until the early 2000s, when finally he petitioned the Wah leadership, "Will you take me off house arrest? Will you let me live as a normal person? Will you let me come and hang out at central headquarters and just live as kind of a respected elder of the Wah people?"

They said, well, yeah, five years, you probably learned your lesson. By this point, you know, and I know, this was not a man to learn his lesson. Within months of him getting that liberty to leave his house, he brought up the fact that he had medical conditions and they were best hospitals were in northern Thailand, 200 miles away.

And could he maybe just go to northern Thailand to get his medical problems, some the result of torture, looked at? Seems reasonable enough. Saw Loo was granted permission to travel. As soon as he got to northern Thailand, he connected with a DEA operative. And Saw Loo and this DEA operative began planning a way to revive Saw Loo's dream, to bring it back from the dead, against all odds.

Get it? Whiskey Alpha? Whiskey Alpha was a plan.

And the plan involves whipping up a small militia of Wah, mostly Baptists, and other disaffected Wah who were maybe not happy with the current leadership and wanted to unite the Wah with the United States, whipping them into a militia and essentially staging a coup. The details of how the plan formed are a bit murky.

Patrick pieced together what he could from speaking with Saul Liu and from his sources at the DEA. When I talked to Saul Liu, he was more taciturn about how heavily he was involved in this plot. He was certainly aiding it and he was certainly a principal part of it. The DEA operator who was really steering the plot, he wanted to go in and possibly capture some of the Wa leaders who were the masterminds of the drug trade.

In any case, the overall strategy was this. Send in a dissident army and take down the city government. Install a new ruling council and make sure Soilu has a seat at the table.

Saul Liu would tell me that he certainly didn't mean anyone any harm. He didn't want any of the leaders to die or anything like that. It wasn't meant to be very violent, but they thought that they could go in and seize the reins, so to speak. If I could try to channel Saul Liu, he would probably say, look, I mean, I wasn't going to kill them or anything. I just wanted to, you know, run the place as a council. Hey, if they agreed to not traffic drugs anymore, they could be on the council too.

Sawloo had hatched the plan with his DEA handler, but they hadn't exactly floated it with the agency. When it came time to seek approval from the higher-ups, Whiskey Alpha was met with less enthusiasm. From what I gathered from talking to other DEA agents, when the DEA heard about this, they said no.

This is a paramilitary operation going into a sovereign state, Myanmar, Burma, to go after a rogue nation state and overthrow. I mean, the DEA is trying to seize a ton of heroin, but they're not necessarily trying to do regime change. To be fair, that was a lesson Sorlu had already learned the hard way.

Getting too big for their britches is exactly what got the DEA in trouble before with respect to the WA. So as far as I could tell, this idea didn't make it too far up the food chain. And this was pretty sad for Saul Liu because it indicated to him that maybe he was a little washed up.

that it was his last chance to achieve this wild dream of fusing the Wa and the Americans together and be united in this great holy union and all this stuff. Yeah, that wasn't going to work. So would Sawlu finally resign himself to the fact that Wa state was and forever would be a narcotopia? No, that wasn't the end. It's never the end. No.

All right. Onwards. The DEA knew it couldn't wipe out the Wa government. And the CIA attention was probably on the war on terror at this point. It's hard to rile up the American public to go after the Wa when no one knows who the Wa are. So they sanctioned the Wa government and indicted much of the leadership. They did so under the Kingpin Act.

A kingpin being someone so key to the drug trade that if they were to fall, an entire cartel would collapse like a house of cards. So all of Wa State was declared a kingpin.

Meaning, any American or even foreign national who has any transaction or dealings with any WA official. By the way, there's tens of thousands of WA officials from nurses to accountants to the leadership to soldiers, everyone. If you have a financial transaction with them and you have any exposure to the US financial system, you're in big trouble because you've infected the US financial system with dirty drug profits.

Finally, American intervention had made an impact on the war. And that impact can be felt today, but not in the way Saw Loo had wanted.

Its economy is effectively cut off from the global financial system. I don't think that Joe Biden knows that. I'm not sure that the director of the CIA ever thinks about that. But it's a decision that the U.S. made, and it has profound implications. Our empire can do just a little something, and it will have profound implications on an entire race of people. Remarkably, Solu was able to repair his relationship with Waa leadership.

Even the ones under indictment as a result of his work for the DEA. He palled around with them. He palled around with some of the DEA's most wanted men in Asia.

And he remained in cahoots with the DEA, using those connections in his home country and channeling intel over to the Americans. Saul Liu then became pretty much a classic CI, a classic confidential informant. The DEA gave him a satellite phone, which he would hide on his property.

He had a lychee farm growing lychee, these sweet fruits, and he would hide the phone on his property. And when he would hear snippets of useful information from the leadership, he would memorize things that they said and he would go whisper them into his satellite phone and the DEA would listen and they would file their reports. That's about the best that the DEA could do. And that's about the best that Saul Luke could do. But one day...

Uniformed men calling themselves special police broke into So Lu's house. They began ransacking the place, refusing to say what they were looking for, then abducted him while his wife watched on in horror. So Lu was once again tossed behind bars in a secret prison in the Wa state capital.

Once again, he was very badly beaten and tortured. They kept him in a cell that, at least the cell wasn't pitch black. The problem was that half the roof was missing. It's very cold, and it would even rain sometimes, so he's exposed to the elements. At this point, Saulu is in his 60s. He's diabetic. He's being beaten with clubs, and any rational person would assume that he was going to die under a treatment like that.

Seoul was charged with non-conformism, unauthorized contact with a Western country and unpatriotic behavior. What happened next was tragically familiar.

Saul Liu was asked to sign a confession saying that he was a top CIA asset, that he was also a drug trafficker, basically something to ruin his name among the Wa people. Again, why not just shoot him in the head? He has this influence among the Wa people. He is known as someone with a lot of gravitas. Better to ruin his name and reputation and

and then put him back in a prison or let him waste away or then kill him. Of course, once more, the embattled Wa leader made it very hard for anyone to disgrace his name. But this time, his physical endurance was tested beyond anything he'd survived before.

Beaten with clubs, kept in metal shackles, he's on death's door. Still, he will not sign that confession. Eventually, some sympathetic guards reach out to his family and they say, "Saul looks like he's dying. He had gone unconscious, he was in some sort of like, view state. It looked like he was really finally ready to die."

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Wa's state leadership began to realize they'd gone far enough. The torture had been relentless. His prison wards had long ceased demanding that he sign a confession. But over time, it became clear that the optics of Saw Liu's death simply wouldn't serve the nation's higher-ups in the long run. They thought, you can't kill the guy. Too many Wa people will be upset about it.

And yet...

Even in his dying days, the threats continue. Secret police are milling about the house, coming in whenever they please, smoking on the porch, basically letting Saul Lu know that you're not out of hot water yet.

We don't care that you're half dead. More punishment is coming. Amidst all of this, somehow, Saw Lu, mostly paralyzed on one side, manages to get out of bed and get into his back garden where he has hidden his satellite phone that the DEA gave him. He uncovers the satellite phone and calls his DEA handler and says...

This is what's happened to me. I've been tortured. He said it looks like they might actually kill me. This looks like it's it. What can you do to save me? What can you do to help me? He tells them everything. And his DEA handler gets very emotional and says, I'm just so sorry. Over the phone, his handler's breathing sounded wet and labored. Sorlu wasn't sure how to respond.

I'm just so sorry for everything. Everything that you've given the DEA, I'm just so sorry, but we can't help you. And Saw Lu returns the phone to its hole in the ground and I guess gets back into bed undetected and just waits to see what will happen. That would be the last time Saw Lu ever spoke to his handler. A week later, the American would die by suicide. But Saw Lu somehow...

was granted the chance to live. At the very end, he always thought Americans would save his people. They couldn't even save him. It ends up being his own Wa people that save him. Not in some grand act of heroism, not in a covert operation with a chase scene or a Hollywood movie plot twist. His liberation was an act of resignation on the part of the Wa government.

enough of the leaders thought, we're not going to let this guy die. We know he's a giant pain in the ass. We know he is a terrible pain in the neck. If we keep him around, yes, he will cause trouble, but the guy's heart is in the right place. We just can't see him die.

And so they sweep him out of Wa State. They arrange with Burmese officials like, hey, will you let this guy come back to Burma? I know you've got your beef with him. He's an old man. He's half dead. Just please let him come back and live in Lascio. And that's what he did. Saw Liu move back to Lascio, back to the home where this saga began.

in the living room where an American reporter asked to hear his story. I later heard from Saulu's wife. I asked, what did he think I was when I showed up that first night? And she said, we talked about it later before bed. And he kind of looked you over and he decided that you probably weren't a DEA guy or a CIA guy.

I don't know whether to be flattered or insulted by that. He said, I think this man has come to write a book about me. Which is precisely what Patrick did. Based on hours and hours of conversation with Saul Liu, plus extensive interviews with sources in the CIA and DEA. Saul Liu viewed himself as an instrument sent by God to rescue and save his people. And I think he viewed me as sent by...

to record his story. Patrick was able to tell a tale no other journalist has been able to touch. But you might be wondering...

Did he ever actually make it to Wa State? January of 2020, I was receiving promising signals from a Wa envoy that myself and a small team of other journalists that I had corralled would be allowed to come to the capital of Wa State, Pangsang. We even had a planned route of how we would get there. And so we were going to take a boat into the back door of Wa State. They didn't promise who we would meet, but...

They were going to let us. I assumed it was going to be a dog and pony show, basically. Still, better than nothing. We're ready to go. And then we get a message that says, hold on, hold on. Xi Jinping is in Myanmar. And it was a bit of a surprise visit. Xi Jinping had come to make nice with Myanmar's generals, talk.

talk about some ports and pipelines and things like that, infrastructure. And from the WHA perspective, you don't want to have foreigners on your turf when Xi Jinping is in your general zone doing diplomacy. Because if something happened to us, even if it was just an accident, you know, even if someone broke their leg, or if we did something on Twitter or something, it would distract attention from Xi Jinping. Fair enough. You're a tiny little country that has been blacklisted by the U.S.,

Makes sense you wouldn't want to ruffle the feathers of yet another superpower. On his way back to Beijing, Xi Jinping stops in a Wa village right on the other side of the border. His children greet him and they bring him to the ceremonial drum and he's whacking the drum, wishing Wa people riches and good rains and a good harvest and all this stuff. It's this PR move to say, hey, America may hate you, but China's

China backs the wall. That was Xi Jinping's one of his last public appearances, as far as I can tell, because right after that, a mysterious virus starts emanating from the city of Wuhan. And I think everybody knows what happened next. Right. You know, this part of the story.

And in COVID's early days, Patrick begins to see the writing on the wall. I knew that going into Hua state on an official visit was not going to happen. Not only was everything locked down, but the Hua officials kind of took China's lead in deciding how to handle COVID. The Hua don't have great hospitals and clinics. I mean, that's why Saolu wanted to bring in the Americans to build them. So they locked down too.

But in Burma, COVID was just one piece of the chaos. In November 2020, the country's National League for Democracy party won a landslide victory in its national elections. A few months later, the country's military, who had rejected the results of the election, staged a coup. By 2021, Myanmar was...

experiencing a raging revolution where people both in the lowlands and the mountains and everywhere got completely fed up with the military regime and there was a mass popular revolt to destroy it once and for all. Amidst that civil war, the military was hoarding all medical supplies, oxygen tanks, things like that. It became very difficult to get. COVID just wiped people out in Myanmar.

It was horrible. It was really horrible. The virus was still raging when one day on a beach in Thailand, Patrick received an unexpected message. It was around dusk and my phone pinged.

and it was Sa Lu's son-in-law, Jacob. And it was a picture of Sa Lu laying in bed. And that's a really odd thing to send to someone. But when I looked closer at the photo, I could see that he looked gray and almost like a wax figure.

And I recognized his bedroom, because I'd seen it before. And I recognized a black leather Bible on the bookshelf behind him. And there was someone, presumably a government worker, in a full blue biohazard suit. It was a really morbid thing to see. And before I could even reply, another photo, like ping, came onto my iPhone.

and it was a photo of a grave site and there was a wooden cross above this open grave and all these people around with

biohazard suits on. I later found out those were his family members, the few that could even come to his grave site. And over the grave, there's a wooden cross and painted on it in white was Ta Saloo. Ta means respected elder, had his birth date on it. And it said in Wa, that means sleep in Lord Christ. I, um, yeah, sorry, I'm a little speechless here.

Sorlu's family had indicated to Patrick that he was having a hard time staying cooped up in lockdown. The guy had been tortured. He had his sensitive parts hooked up to a truck battery before. He'd had his back beaten with bicycle chains. COVID just didn't scare him. And so he continued to go outside the house and meet people when he probably shouldn't have.

Solu didn't live to see his dream realized. His people never received the support from the US that would have allowed them to live as he wished them to live. But Patrick argues that the Waa did achieve something formidable.

A lot of people have heard the phrase "Free Tibet." People also hear about how the Uyghur people in China are subjugated by China's Communist Party. There are campaigns to help them as well. There's no "Free the Wah" campaign. You're not going to see "Free the Wah" on any bumper stickers. They don't make a very good cause because they freed themselves.

If they didn't have narcotics, if they didn't rely on the narcotics trade to sustain a state, to buy weapons, to form an army, to defend their homeland, they would have just been rolled over like so many other indigenous people around the world. I know they didn't free themselves the way that America approves of, and I know that narcotics ruin lives. I just don't see another way

that they could have defended themselves. This is a story about survival by any means necessary. Patrick did make it to Wa State, just briefly, to a no-man's land near the border with Thailand. But the heart of this story, the real gold of Patrick's reporting, he had found in Lashio.

completely by chance, just because he'd happened to work with a translator with a celebrity father-in-law. The fact that I ended up telling the story of the Wa people through Saul Lu, I think it did turn out for the best, because I'm not trying to tell people what it's like to be Wa. I have no business telling people that. That's not my job. I'm not qualified to do that. What I was qualified to do was to...

show how America and its empire has affected this indigenous group in the mountains of Southeast Asia. Google Wa civilization and you won't see much because they're so used to being talked about as drug runners and headhunters. And I hope that in some small way, my book is able to push back on that and to show why Wa figures made the choices they did.

Can we just acknowledge that this nation state exists just because they don't have their flag up on the wall at the UN? It exists. So let's reckon with that fact and stop talking about it like it's just some jungle mafia hideout, because it's much more than that. You can learn the full, extraordinary story of Saw Loo and the Wah people in Patrick's new book, Narcotopia, in search of the Asian drug cartel that survived the CIA. I'm Rhianna Needs.

Join us next week for another daring encounter with true spies. Disclaimer. The views expressed in this podcast are those of the subject. These stories are told from their perspective and their authenticity should be assessed on a case-by-case basis.

If you're enjoying this podcast, please click now to give it a five-star rating or leave a review. Ratings and reviews help people discover the podcast and help us bring you more great stories. And if you have some time, why not forward the podcast to a friend? In a short space of time, he had become one of the Soviets' most valuable assets. I found out that you could volunteer for something called the Night Shift.

This was manning the station to receive and act on reports that came in at night from all over the world. So not only had I access to the material passing through Section 5, I was able to pick up intelligence from every corner of the globe where SIS had active operations. Added to which, some parts of SIS used the night shift to share intelligence considered too sensitive for normal channels. I suppose you could say all my Christmases had come at once. Except being an atheist, I didn't believe in Christmas, of course. Ha!

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