Air America (book)

Air America is a 1978 non-fiction book by Christopher Robbins, a journalist investigating CIA drug trafficking and front companies for The Observer.

The book chronicles the investigative reporting of Robbins from his accidental discovery of the very existence of a company named Air America to the end of the former CIA-owned company, ultimately privatized.

It is the story of one of the world's biggest covert operations: Air America was owned by the CIA, started from the scratch of bunch of other agency-owned air assets. Air America—at its peak—became the biggest civil air fleet in the world.

From the 1950s to the early-1970s, Indochina had been the landscape of vast major drug and military operations played by many actors including European an communist countries. When the US military involvement started, costs rose and new resources, especially for covert operations, were needed. Since the time of the Anglo-Chinese war, opium was the main source or wealth in the region. CIA and Air America used to fly those skies from the times of the Korean War. A new facility was built inside CIA headquarters in northern Laos where bulk opium was refined into heroin and shipped abroad. Within a decade of military intervention, in the early seventies, Indochina had become the world's leading opium producer, reaching a 70% worldwide marketshare.

Air America's pilots flew dangerous missions, those no one else would fly, frequently under enemy fire.

Air America's motto was "Anything, anywhere, anytime". "Anything" included food, medical supplies, weapons, and drug-related items. The most important precursors required for refining raw opium into heroin are ether and acetic anhydride. Because of its use for the synthesis of heroin by the diacetylation of morphine, acetic anhydride is today listed as a US DEA List II precursor, and officially restricted in many other countries.

Many missions were in fact aid-oriented missions to provide logistical support and food to allies who were fighting the war along with the South Vietnamese and the US. Most of the time, pilots did not know what were they delivering, just when and where, no matter what the weather was like, or whether it was day or night.

...
Wikipedia