The Underground Empire

"There will be no major arrests and no political arrests. The effect will be zero. Within six months (Bolivian drug production) will be back to normal." That gloomy forecast about "Operation Blast Furnace" was offered last week by James Mills, 54, a veteran investigative reporter who has spent the past six years probing the shadowy world of international drug dealing and the seldom effective efforts of U.S. authorities to cope with it. Mills, author of the newly published The Underground Empire (Doubleday; 1,165 pages; $22.95), was in Washington to promote his book and appear before the House Foreign Affairs Committee's Task Force on International Narcotics Control.

In The Underground Empire, Mills, a onetime reporter for LIFE magazine, offers an inside account of investigations by the Drug Enforcement Agency's now dismantled Centac operation, a global antidrug strike force. Mills became convinced that the governments of all the major drug-producing countries support narcotics traffic either tacitly or actively. But U.S. Administrations, fearful of jeopardizing diplomatic alliances, military bases or intelligence resources, habitually hold back from forcing these governments to adopt serious antidrug measures. "Without the indulgence of the U.S. Government," he writes, "the Underground Empire could not exist."

The contradictions in the U.S. stance were evident last week during a state visit by Pakistani Prime Minister Mohammed Khan Junejo. Did the Reagan Administration press Pakistan to stop producing the more than 100 tons of opium that will reach the U.S. this year as heroin? Not very hard, since the Administration was arranging to give Pakistan a six-year, $4 billion military and economic aid package with no drug-strings attached. President Reagan had other serious matters to discuss with Junejo: Pakistan's reputed effort to produce nuclear weapons (which Junejo denied) and Pakistan's support for mujahedin rebels in Afghanistan. On narcotics, the Administration and Junejo managed nothing better than statements of concern.

Mills does not belittle the tactics of the U.S. fight against drugs so much as he decries their halfhearted nature. Last year, he notes, the Reagan Administration told Bolivia that to qualify for $14.4 million in economic assistance, it would have to eradicate 10,000 acres of coca crops, roughly 9% ; of the total. Bolivia failed to do so, claiming extenuating circumstances. Yet the U.S. withheld just half the money. "The U.S. did have an eradication program in Bolivia," says Mills, "but the Bolivians didn't pay any attention to it." As a result of many such situations, he says, it is hard to find any drug agent or dealer around the world who thinks the U.S. strategy is "anything other than a joke."

DEA officials insist that the world drug situation has changed dramatically in the year since Mills finished researching and writing his book. The rise of new governments committed to combatting drug traffickers -- in Bolivia particularly -- has bolstered U.S. efforts. Reagan Administration officials point out that the U.S. has sponsored crop-eradication programs in 14 countries, reached a banking agreement with Switzerland that facilitates the monitoring of suspicious accounts, and negotiated an extradition treaty for use against drug traffickers in Colombia. Pakistan's opium crop, although large, has been reduced from 600 tons a year in 1981. The reduction may not seem big, but in the glacial world of foreign policy, things tend to move, like it or not, by small steps.