The Purpose of Paranoia: The Influence of Conspiracy on American Cinema

WARNING: SPOILERS!

There are few historical events that would capture the influence of American cinema more than the Watergate scandal that plagued America during the early 70s. The revelations that were uncovered during the Watergate investigation, and the investigations that it spawned, created a public distrust in the federal government. The growing claims of conspiracy and cover up over the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy, and his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy would also lead people to think twice about taking what the government said at face value.

            

One out of the three movies in Alan J. Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy” (Klute, All The President’s Men and The Parallax View) The Parallax View (1974) would completely sum up the feelings of distrust and paranoia that existed during the 1970s. The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty as a news reporter whose ex-girlfriend witnesses a Bobby Kennedy-esque assassination, acts as a time capsule of the 1970s.

Right when The Parallax View was released, the point of political paranoia in the United States was at its highest. The Watergate Committee, which led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, had spawned more investigations into the federal government. The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities was formed after the Watergate Committee. The Committee to Study Governmental Operations was organized to investigate the crimes of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, such as the FBI, since their complicity in Watergate proved that they were capable of breaking charter. When disturbing information started to be uncovered when the investigation of the CIA started, the Church Committee was formed to just investigate the crimes of the CIA.  During the Church Committee various domestic crimes of the CIA were uncovered, including OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD, which proved that the CIA had influence in both domestic and foreign media. When CIA involvement in the JFK assassination was deemed a possibility, the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed. The HSCA would re-investigate the assassinations of both President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The Kennedy assassination would once again be thrust it into the mindset of the public.

Even though The Parallax View would debut before most of these committees would be formed, it would be an eerie omen. Similar to the omens that would haunt Frank Sinatra during the early 50s and 60s. In 1954, Sinatra would star in a movie called Suddenly. He would play the leader of three gangsters that would capture the town’s sheriff (Sterling Hayden) and would hatch a plan to assassinate the President of the United States when his train stopped in town. The plan is strangely similar to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Sinatra would create a sniper’s nest on the top story of a house looking over the railroad where the President would stop. When asked why he was using a sniper rifle instead of a tommy gun by one of his cohorts, Sinatra would reply that the rifle would pack more of a punch. Of course, the film is not exactly like the Kennedy assassination, Sinatra and his men are stopped before they could assassinate the President. President Kennedy would not be so lucky. After the Kennedy assassination, Sinatra would sell all the rights he had to the film, casting it into the realm of the public domain. Sinatra would suffer another ill-fated omen with his film, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The film again stars Sinatra as a Korean vet who eventually uncovers that he and his fellow squad members were captured and brainwashed by communist during combat. The group’s former Staff Sergeant, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), would be hypnotized to assassinate the Vice-Presidential rival of his stepfather. Again, the end turns out differently, where Shaw assassinates his MaCarthyish stepfather and his mother (Angela Lansbury), who was revealed to be working with the communist. Shaw then kills himself, realizing that he posed a continuous threat. During the Church Committee, it was revealed in OPERATION ARTICHOKE that the CIA had been trying to hypnotize assassins since the early 50s, similar to the methods used in The Manchurian Candidate. The research to make a sleeper assassin would continue through the 60s and 70s in the infamous MKULTRA programs. A popular conspiracy theory for both of the assassinations of President and Senator Kennedy is that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were sleeper assassins, who were triggered to kill by the CIA.

The plot of The Parallax View would also contain elements of both Kennedy assassinations. As stated earlier, reporter Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) has an ex-girlfriend who witnesses an assassination of a state senator that greatly compares to the assassination conspiracy theories of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. One assassin shoots the senator at close range, serving as a distraction, while another assassin is able to finish him off. Three years after the assassination, Frady’s ex comes to visit him, saying she is fearful for her safety. She reveals that several people who witnessed the assassination of the senator have suffered strange and unexplained deaths. This is an obviously nod to the list of people who suffered equally strange deaths that witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Daley Plaza on November 22, 1963. Frady eventually uncovers that a company named Parallax has been hiring angry, anti-social outcasts (similar to Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan), who unknowingly, are going to take the fall for political assassinations. Frady goes undercover and applies to be one of these patsies and watches a film that shows a montage of pictures. Within this montage are pictures of stereotypical American images: apple pie, the American flag, and the nuclear family. But as the montage speeds up images of racial violence, graves, Nazis, and the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald are embedded into the montage.

Frady continues to stalk the man who believes will be his handler for Parallax. Believing that Parallax is not aware of his deception, Frady tries to prevent the assassination of another U.S. Senator. Not only does Frady fail, but Parallax has caught on to Frady and ends up framing him for the assassination. Frady is quickly killed by a Parallax assassin (dressed as a security guard) and the film ends with a governmental committee stating that Frady was a crazed, lone assassin, similar to the explanations given by the U.S. government over Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

            

The Parallax View wouldn't be the only film that uniquely captured the rampant paranoia of the 70s. Sydney Pollock’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) would also be an early post-Watergate film. Directed by Sydney Pollock and starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, and Max von Sydow, Three Days of the Condor is about bookish CIA analyst Joe Turner (Redford) who comes back from a lunch run to discover that all of his coworkers have been murdered by assassins. Turner starts to play a cat and mouse game with his CIA handlers and the mysterious operative Joubert (von Sydow), who continues to hunt him down. It is eventually uncovered that CIA Deputy Director of Operations, Leonard Atwood, ordered the massacre of Turner’s co-workers because Turner was about to uncover a secret operation that would allow the CIA to take over Middle East oilfields. The movie is filled with paranoia and intrigue, but it is the ending of the movie that really portrays the cloak and dagger nature of the CIA. Turner eventually uncovers the plot, and confronts Atwood at his house at gunpoint. Joubert disrupts them and then unexpectedly kills Atwood. Though initially Joubert had been hired by Atwood to assassinate Turner, his superiors, discovering the secret plot, hired Joubert to take out Atwood. Joubert is courteous towards Turner, and even warns him to leave the country because the CIA may still try to have him killed. Turner leaks the story to The New York Times, and the film ends with a freeze frame of Turner looking over his shoulder; making sure that nobody is following him.

            

Three Days of the Condor would be one of the first in a slew of films that portrayed the shadowy world of intrigue that CIA agents traverse. A few years after Three Days of the Condor, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) would bring the shadowy world of assassination back to the screen. The film stars John Travolta as Jack Terry, a sound mixer for films who records the assassination of a governor. Dismissed as a Chappaquiddick-esque auto accident by the authorities, Terry holds the only piece of evidence that proves that it was an assassination plot. He is soon stalked by a mysterious government operative (John Lithgow), who is revealed to be an agent gone rouge. Lithgow’s character slightly compares to E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the leaders of Nixon’s infamous “plumbers”, who organized the never carried out assassination of reporter Jack Anderson without the approval of the White House. 

Also, Terry having electronic evidence to prove that there was a conspiracy behind the murder is a reference to the infamous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

By the end of the 20^th Century, mainstream political conspiracy thrillers were in full swing with Enemy of the State (1998) and Arlington Road (1999). Enemy of the State starts Will Smith, Gene Hackman, John Voight, Gabriel Byrne, Jason Robards, and Tom Sizemore. The film is about Robert Clayton Dean (Smith), a lawyer who is given a videotape that shows a Congressman (Robards) being murdered in broad daylight by assassins working for NSA official Thomas Reynolds (Voight). Reynolds soon find outs that Dean has the evidence and starts systematically running his life, by getting him fired from his job and freezing his assets. Dean eventually stumbles across retired NSA operative Edward Lyle (Hackman, in a role that is a direct throwback to his character in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974)), who helps Smith avoid the government agents after him. The climax of the film happens in the backroom of a restaurant owned by D.C. mob boss Joey Pintero (Sizemore), who ends up in a Mexican standoff with Reynolds and his agents. The climax is important, not just because Sizemore has the privilege of being the only actor to portray the leader of a Mafia organization in Washington D.C., but because the ending could be a reference to the relationship that existed between organized crime and the intelligence community. During the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, it was revealed that the CIA worked with New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, and Chicago lieutenant Johnny Roselli in an effort to assassinate Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro. (It is important to note that both Roselli and Giancana were both brutally murdered after their testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Teamsters Union Boss Jimmy Hoffa would also disappear around the same time of these murders.)

Right after Enemy of the State debuted at the box office, Arlington Road, another political thriller, was released. Instead of focusing on the government being the antagonist, Arlington Road is about widowed university professor Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), who suspects that his new neighbors (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) are terrorists. Professor Faraday, who specializes in American terrorism, becomes obsessed with investigating his neighbors and foiling their terrorist plot. Arlington Road would be the first in several films that depicted the paranoia of terrorism, especially after the 9/11 attacks. Civic Duty (2006) and the television show 24(2001-2010), for example, both deal with the paranoia and mass hysteria concerning terrorism in a post 9/11 world.

As the first decade of the new century came to a close, there would be several films made about CIA corruption, conspiracy, and its relationship with Islamic fundamentalism: Munich (2005), Syriana (2005), The Bourne Trilogy, Rendition (2007), Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), Body of Lies (2008) and The Ghost Writer (2010). But it would be two films (technically one is a miniseries) that focused on the early years of the CIA that would be the best. Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) and TNT’s highly fictionalized miniseries The Company(2007) are both based on the early years of the CIA and both have CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton as a central character in the story. It would be the haunting last words of The Good Shepherd that would sum up the attitude of the CIA since its founding: I remember a senator once asked me. When we talk about "CIA" why we never use the word "the" in front of it. And I asked him, do you put the word "the" in front of "God"?

DASVIDANIYA!: A Brief History of Russian Organized Crime

Note: This was a paper for a history class and in no way covers the entire history of Russian organized crime. For further reading, see the bibliography section at the bottom of the page.


Fate had it that when I found myself at the head of the state it was already clear that all was not well in the country. Those are the words spoken by Russian President Mikhael S. Gorbachev as he announced his resignation from the USSR. It would be the advent of the free market which would give rise to organized crime in not only Russia, but in all of the republics which formerly comprised the Soviet Union.

Of course, organized crime existed in Russia before the fall of the Soviet Union. Unlike the various organized crime groups in the United States, ethnicity did not play a major factor in membership. Serving time in Russian prisons, Stalin’s brutal gulags, replaced the binding role of ethnicity. A professional criminal class began to develop within the gulags. This criminal elite adopted certain rules, behaviors, values, and sanctions that bounded them to the “vory v zakone” or “thieves law”. While the vory were considered by their peers to be the top criminals, the true people that sat on top of the hierarchy of organized crime in Soviet Russia were either Communist Party members or state officials that abused their power and authority. These corrupt Soviet officials developed a symbiotic relationship with the criminal class. The bribes that funneled up from the criminals to officials caused the state not only to allow organized crime to exist, but encouraged and protected it because the state itself benefited from organized crime.  A clear criminal organization, composed of three levels, really only began to take shape at the end of the 1960s, during the corrupt Brezhnev era. The top level of the structure was occupied by Soviet leaders and corrupt officials. The second level was composed of normal people that worked for the state, but produced goods outside state mandated quotas and sold them on the black market for profit. The third level was made up of the professional criminals who ran various criminal enterprises. All of these levels existed before the 1960s, but it was only when gangsters became more involved in white collar crimes did they absorb into one organization.

            
During the 1970s, after the Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking, the Soviet Union temporarily loosened immigration restrictions for Jewish immigrants, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to immigrate to America. It is widely believed that the KGB used this opportunity to rid the gulags of its most vicious criminals, who continued their life of crime in the United States.  One of the earliest identified Russian gangs in the United States was the Potato Bag Gang.  Operating out of Brighton Beach, the gang members would pose as sailors who would offer to sell people a bag full of gold rubles for a thousand dollars. The victim would be shown a sample coin, which was real, and was given a large bag that ended up being filled with potatoes instead of coins. Russian gangs would become more and more involved in more serious criminal enterprises like prostitution, extortion, and theft. As Russian gangs became deeper involved in the criminal underworld, they would develop business relationships with the American Mafia. Russian organized groups would eventually spread across the country into California. 

            
It was a certain set of circumstances at the end of the Soviet Union that lead to the criminal underworld thriving upon the introduction of the free market. President Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader that reintroduced the notion of private business ownership back into Russia after sixty years of strict state control. Gorbachev’s Law of Commons allowed private Russian entrepreneurs to open up businesses, but with the ability for anyone to open up a business came competition. Business rivals would employ hired thugs to muscle in on the competition. The Russian police didn’t have the financial backing to compete with the onslaught of violence that was unleashed by the introduction of private ownership. This caused the street gangs to become privatized law enforcement agencies. According to McMafia, by Misha Glenny, “Instead of paying taxes to the state (which had no idea how to tax new small-scale private enterprise, businessmen willingly handed over between 10 and 30 percent to local thugs that would ensure in exchange that they could continue trading, free from the violence of the gruppirovki, or street gang, working on behalf of the competitors.”

           
Law enforcement agencies, both in America and Russia, began to notice that many Russian criminals connected to organized crime had scores of tattoos decorating their bodies. Same with the Japanese Yakuza, tattoos are an important part of Russian crime. “The tattoos present a picture of the inmate's criminal history. Tattoos are like a passport, a biography, a uniform with medals. They reflect the convict's interests, his outlook on life, his world view. A prisoner with an incorrect or unauthorized tattoo could be punished or killed by fellow inmates.” The importance of the relationship between tattoos and the Russian criminal culture can be seen in the movie Eastern Promises. Directed by David Cronenberg, the film stars Viggo Mortensen as a Russian gangster who works for a powerful vor in contemporary London. There is a scene where Mortensen’s character is being accepted into the criminal organization he is working for, but must go through a rigorous interview with the vor leadership. Mortensen is completely nude during this ceremony, so that the vor may see the tattoos housed on his body. 

Though it looked as if criminal gangs were taking over Russia, “...it was indeed tamed stuff. The mob was largely a collection of inchoate street gangs who still had to watch their backs for the cops or the KGB.”  It wasn’t until Boris Yeltsin came into power, after a failed coup against Gorbachev, that organized criminals would be able to evolve into the global power that it is today. Yeltsin announced in 1992 that the Russian government would free all prices. Price liberalization would be to Russian criminals what prohibition was to criminals in America. While the prices of goods on which the everyday Russian were concerned about, like food, was liberalized; the prices on goods such as: oils, gas, diamonds, and metals stayed at their Soviet-subsidized prices. Prices on theses natural resources can be as much as forty times cheaper than the world market price. Conveniently, at the same time the government decided to privatize the monopoly that the Soviet Union had imposed on the import/export of all goods and commodities.  It was this set of circumstances that lead to a super wealthy upper class of Russians, referred to as the oligarchs. But while a few private citizens were reaping the riches of the introduction of capitalism into Russia, most of the population fell further into poverty, with only a weak middle class that stood in between. Another problem with the emergence of the free market was that “the police and even the KGB were clueless as to how one might enforce contract law. The protection rackets and Mafiosi were not; their central role in the new Russian economy was to ensure that contracts entered into were honored.” This meant that the oligarchs of Russia and organized criminals again entered into a seemingly beneficial relationship. Even though the new capitalist society in Russia was built on blood, organized criminal gangs enforced a degree of stability during this economic transition.

With this new influx of money and power into the hands of criminals, the title of vor was able to be purchased. The ability to simply purchase the title, instead of earning it by serving several years in prison, led to the debasement of the authority and respect that came with the title, and eventually to the destruction of the highly organized hierarchy of thieves that existed in the Soviet prisons. The destruction of the “thief’s law” crumbled into street gangs and other simple criminal networks.  A factor that set apart Russian organized crime from organized crime in other countries is that “there were about twenty major gangs in Moscow, and dozens of minor gangs, some of them Slav and some Caucasian. Although there were tensions between the so-called ethnic groups, both sides were wary of each other’s influence and power.” This meant that organized crime was so prevalent after the introduction of capitalism that dozens of groups co-existed (or tried) in one city. If that many gangs existed in Moscow at one time, that would only mean that thousands of criminal organizations existed across Russia during this time. It was during this Darwin-esque period in the Russian underworld that some of these organized gangs evolved from the private enforcement arm of the oligarchs into highly organized criminal organizations. One of the best examples of this was Chechen organized crime. Chechen gangsters were notorious for their violence and ruthlessness. But according to Mark Galeotti, a fifteen year veteran of studying organized crime in Russia, “The Chechen mafia became a brand name, a franchise, a McMafia if you like. They would sell the moniker “Chechen” to protection rackets in other towns provided they paid, of course, and provided they always carried out their word. If a group claimed a Chechen connection but didn’t carry out its threats to the letter, it was devaluing the brand. The original Chechens would come after them.” This meant that as Russian organized crime developed, it was not guided by strict “family loyalties”, like the American Mafia, but rather by transactions.

Another example of the blurred line between the state and organized crime can be seen under the presidency of Slobodan Milošević. Milošević, while he served as President of Serbia, developed a profitable relationship with Serbian gangsters. Serbian organized crime groups were allowed to reap the profits of smuggling oil and cigarettes during the sanctions that were enforced during the Yugoslav Wars. In return, Milošević would get part of the cut and the gangsters would carry out assassinations at his request. The war in former Yugoslavia wasn’t the only war being fought. The bloody “cigarette wars” broke out in Serbia. The scramble for the monopoly over the cigarette trade even involved Milošević’s own son, Marko Milošević. The violence would only crescendo when Milošević’s lost power in the Bulldozer Revolution of October 2000. This power vacuum resulted in several daylight assassinations of high ranking Serbian gangsters.

The organized crime bosses who survived the turmoil of the 90s in Russia welcomed the election of President Vladimir Putin. President Putin, an ex-KGB agent, restored the former power of the KGB under the name of the FSB. Putin also became the scorn of the oligarchs, who claimed that he was the reincarnation of Stalin. Putin was able to fashion a new system of government that brought the aspects of capitalism and market authoritarianism together. This caused the easy money days of the oligarchs to come to an end. The threat of money becoming scarce caused the oligarchs to continue their investment in the protection rackets of organized crime. But the gangsters employed by the oligarchs seemed to be facing a new competition, ex-KGB agents. Since the fall of the Soviet Union hundreds of ex-KGB agents found themselves without a job. Instead of joining Russia’s newly formed police service, several went into the business of organized crime. Almost all of the major oligarchs had at least one former KGB man on their payroll to advise them on security. Former Director of the CIA, John M. Deutch, said “I do agree that in Russian organized crime there is a presence of ex-security service members, KGB members, and ex-military members. That is certainly the case.” But, according to Dr. Walter Zarycky, professor of political science at New York University, “The Russian mafia and the KGB are allies, not enemies, and in many cases they are one and the same." Dr. Zarycky’s claim that Russian organized crime and ex-intelligence officers are working together makes sense. Ever since the turn of the century, Russian criminals have become involved in crimes over the internet. Several ex-KGB agents organized the Russian Business Network (RBN), which has become a notorious cybercrime organization. Using their technical skills for crime, rather than for the state, the internet service provided by the RBN creates a safe place for the sharing of child pornography, phishing/spamming scams, credit card fraud, corporate espionage, and the ability for criminals to target a victim individually. “The Russians have everyone nailed cold in terms of technical ability," said Greg Hoglund, CEO of cyber security company HBGary. "The Russian crime guys have a ridiculous toolkit. They're targeting end users in many cases, so they have to be sophisticated."

Cyberspace was not the only place where Russian organized criminals were spreading to. “Law enforcement personnel in many countries — including Spain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, France, Israel, Britain, and even the United States — have been surprised by how “confidently” criminal groups consisting of people from the former Soviet Union now dominate their national criminal worlds.”  Part of the reason that criminals are able to spread abroad so successfully is because Interpol, the international police agency, does not maintain the kind of files that allow for an even approximate assessment of the number of Russian criminals operating abroad. Though Interpol hasn’t taken an interest in the spread of Russian organized crime, the National Prosecutor of Italy has claimed that here are “up to 300,000” Russian criminals operating in foreign countries. .” Europe and the United States are not the only areas that Russian gangsters have their eyes on. The longstanding institutional weaknesses of several countries in the Caribbean and Latin America have given Russian criminals the chance they need to establish themselves. The absence of transparency and effective state monitoring of the banking systems in Latin America have left them vulnerable to penetration by Russian money launderers. But just because Russian organized crime has spread across the world, doesn’t mean their hierarchy structure has. “Russian organized crime is neither monolithic nor necessarily hierarchical, especially abroad. Indeed, much of the heavy lifting in international illegal commerce, from heroin trafficking to the smuggling of radioactive material and counterfeit money, is done by ad hoc criminal coalitions with few apparent resources, little formal structure, and uncertain connections with the political or official upperworld. Such groups commonly coalesce for one or two deals, divide up the proceeds and then disband.” This could be the reason that the spread of Russian organized crime has been so difficult to stop by authorities. The ability to host small criminal groups overseas rather than expanding an entire criminal organization may be hard to catch. To quote the film The Usual Suspects, “One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.”

Despite being involved in: human smuggling, the international drug trade, murder for hire, extortion, money laundering, prostitution, and various types of cybercrime, the most alarming crime committed by Russian gangsters, both overseas and at home, are their alleged links with terrorist. In the mid-1970s, the company Inslaw, INC. developed a program called PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) to be used by the Justice Department. The program was a database designed to handle papers and documents generated by law enforcement agencies and courts. PROMIS was also a tool used by law enforcement to track people through credit card purchases, entry and exits visas, and telephone usage. Robert Hanasen, the former FBI agent who was convicted of spying, secured a copy of the PROMIS software and then sold it to Russian gangsters. Allegedly it was from there that Russian organized crime figures sold a copy of PROMIS to Osama Bin Laden for $2 million dollars. Using this program, Bin Laden would be able to penetrate U.S. databases and banking systems without being detected. He would also be able to counter the ability of various intelligence agencies to track him. On June 15, 2001, a story by Washington Times reporter Jerry Serper said “The software delivered to the Russian handlers and later sent to Bin Laden, according to sources, is believed to be an upgraded version of a program known as PROMIS.” Though the United States government continued to deny that Bin Laden had any type of program, the United States announced that they discontinued using PROMIS a year after 9/11. Britain and Germany discontinued their use of the PROMIS program shortly after the United States made their announcement.  Besides stolen government programs, there is also fear that Russian criminal syndicates may smuggle a nuclear weapon or the material to build a nuclear weapon into the hands of terrorist. A study of a number of Russia’s “closed cities”, named that because of the because of the increased security and limited access that apply to them because of its housing of nuclear weapons and material, found that Russian administrators haven’t focused enough on the possible linkage of criminals and terrorist activity. The study claims that a large number of convicts return to these “closed cities” after they serve their prison sentences. The study also claims that there is a large drug trade in the closed city of Ozersk, suggesting the presence of criminals within the closed city. This criminal presence leads to the smuggling of people into the closed city, a crime for which the penalty is not severe. Also, there is a large population of reported Islamic propagandists that in live in the towns that surround Ozersk.  It is important to note that Russian organized crime syndicates have never stolen a nuclear bomb and have put it on the black market, but according to this study the motive, means, and opportunity are there. Another link that could possibly exists between Russian gangsters and terrorist could be the drug trade. Thanks to an almost a worldwide prohibition on narcotics, terrorist organizations like the Taliban or al Qaeda fund their activities through the drug trade. The cultivation of the opium poppy has gone up more than 1000 percent since the first year of the United States invading Afghanistan. More than likely, the Taliban was rearming itself by taking control of this opium harvest and enforcing high taxes on its distribution. While profitable, most of the cash that the terrorist receive from the narcotics trade goes to paying off the network that smuggles it. It is somewhere along this distribution line that it is believed that Russian gangsters help push the drugs that help fund terrorism, either knowingly or unknowingly. 

Though its origins come from the repressive gulags that Stalin ruled over, Russian organized crime syndicates became a global power only years after the Soviet Union fell. Though at first these gangs acted as the safeguards of capitalism in Russia, they would eventually evolve not only to pose a threat to Russia, but to most of the world.

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Glenny, Misha. McMafia: A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld. New York: Knopf, 2008. Print.

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