Narcotopia, Part One - Agent Superstar | Investigation
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Warning, this episode contains harsh language and descriptions of violence. 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. Saul Liu viewed himself as an instrument sent by God to rescue and save his people. And I think he viewed other people as instruments of God sent to do God's other chores.

Narcotopia, part one. Agent Superstar. Power necessitates secrecy. Behind every global leader lurk numerous intelligence agencies, their tentacles meddling, unseen, in matters large and small. But the rule doesn't only apply to the world's superpowers. The same secrecy can be found in even the smallest, most insular enclaves.

This is the story of one such place, told by a journalist who spent years trying to break down its barriers. I just kept throwing myself against the wall and throwing myself up against the wall and throwing myself up against the wall. And finally, a door opened. It was Saw Liu who opened the door. Saw Liu was the key to unlocking this story, a leader of this isolated domain.

He may have been a big fish in a small pond, but that wouldn't preclude him from eventually drawing the attention of the US Drug Enforcement Agency and the ire of the CIA. But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Before you can understand Saw Liu, you need to understand the world he comes from. Your guide is a journalist who has given this misunderstood region a closer look than just about any other Westerner.

Hi, I'm Patrick Nguyen. I'm the author of Narcotopia: In Search of the Asian Drug Cartel that Survived the CIA. The narcotopia I have in mind is often referred to as the Golden Triangle. It's an area primarily in Burma that also spills over into Thailand, Laos, China. It's a drug production area historically, at least for the past hundred so years.

Today, the primary export of narcotopia is methamphetamine. Before that, the region was a hotbed of opium production. And these illicit products keep parts of the area afloat. Drugs aren't the backbone of the economy. They are the economy. Like Patrick said, the region he calls narcotopia encompasses parts of several different countries in Southeast Asia.

But this story is primarily about one particular nation, an autonomous country that falls within Burmese borders, a place called Wa State. Not familiar with Wa State? You're not alone.

From the second I heard of it, I was completely captivated that there's this country that's unacknowledged by the UN, but a country, a functioning nation state that's on the map that's not delineated on the map. So if you go into Google Maps, there's no "wa" state. If you look on a globe in some kid's classroom, there's no "wa" state.

But if you were to actually go there, there is very much a WA state. It has borders that are well enforced. You can't just go if you want to go. It's inside the country of Myanmar, but Myanmar officials know better than to just walk right in. They can't. They'll be arrested, questioned, possibly worse.

Populated by an indigenous group called the Wa, Wa State is about as large in size as the Netherlands, with a population of 600,000. The Wa boast technological infrastructure, an educational system, and more weapons and troops than many UN-recognized countries. And yet, on the international stage, the Wa continue to be underestimated.

Certainly, the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, they'll tell you it's just a drug cartel. Actually, in one of their releases, they said it's run by basically drug lords who purport to lead an independence movement. They don't just purport to, they do run an independent state. And it's a lot more complicated than just a drug fiefdom or some jungle mafia land. Way more complicated than that.

True as that may be, there have been few attempts to set the record straight, at least until now. The problem is the leaders of Wa State aren't just dying to tell their story to the West. They're not super eager to tell their story to the outside world. For good reason, because if you Google the Wa or Wa State, you're just going to get back all these hits about drug trafficking and child soldiering.

and criminality. You're going to get a lot of stuff about head hunting and putting skulls on sticks, which is a ritual that ended quite a few decades ago, but it was something that was practiced. They know that they're going to be portrayed in a really negative light. So they've given up on caring to a certain degree what the West thinks about them. It wasn't always that way, but that's where they've arrived. Enter an American reporter living in Bangkok.

A man with an unlikely affinity for the Wa people. I'm descended from Appalachian stock in the US. This accent is fake. I had a totally different accent when I was growing up. And I was worried I'd be made fun of as I left my very small town. You could call it a soft spot or you could call it a chip on my shoulder. If you tell me there's this group of people up in the mountains over here and they're just...

For 10 years, Patrick fostered a desire to visit Wastate to meet the people who had been written off by the rest of the world.

While he reported on organized crime in Southeast Asia, he kept putting feelers out, hoping to find an in with the Wa. Anybody who might have an association with them, I would press them to get me an invitation or just let them know I want to come. There's other less powerful ethnic armed groups in their orbit. And if I would meet someone from one of these places, I would say, hey, do you know anyone who's high up over in Wa state?

For the most part, those requests were ignored. Occasionally, he received a polite refusal. In 2019, I took another shot. I was attempting to see if they'd changed their mind.

And I wrote to the office of someone who is effectively their ambassador to the outside world, their main ambassador. I sent an email to him asking if I could just come and meet him and give him my pitch for why I deserve to meet and interview the leaders of WA State.

That was, to put it lightly, no small ask. From most people's perspective, this is sort of like trying to line up a coffee date with El Chapo or something. Also, it's just the odds were completely against me. But to my surprise, I got a email back that essentially said, yeah, come on over to the quote unquote embassy. The email didn't give a time.

They didn't give an address. Just come to the embassy. The main WHA embassy is in a town that's outside of WHA state, but close to it. It's in a town in Burma called Lasho. And so I replied saying, great, can I come Thursday? Can I come Monday? Can I come at this time? Can you send me a Google Maps link or something like that? And I just got radio silence.

But what was a guy like Patrick going to do? Sleep on the opportunity he'd been waiting on for a decade? He decided to venture out without waiting for confirmation. But before he did any reporting, he'd have to line up an interpreter. I had reached out to the one travel agency I could find. And again, long shot, I just said, do you have anyone around who can speak Wah and English? And to

And to my surprise, they wrote back and said, actually, we do know a guy. He doesn't work for us, but we just know him. He's in town. One of the few Wa guys who speaks English, and he used to work for the government in Wa state. And I thought, oh, this is perfect. This guy with connections. To protect the interpreter, Patrick has given him the pseudonym Jacob. Jacob told Patrick he'd pick him up at the Lashio Airport. Patrick said that wouldn't be necessary, but the interpreter insisted.

So I come out of the airport in Lazio, which resembles more like an open-air bus station. It's quite small and dilapidated. I walk out to grab my luggage, and this guy just comes right at me with his handout. And it's Jacob, and he's really polite. Oh, Mr. Patrick, nice to meet you. Mr. Patrick. This is a positive start, because Patrick knows while State isn't going to throw open any doors for him,

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He's going to be my liaison. He's going to be the guy who speaks Wah and hopefully knows where the "Wah embassy" is. And I'm just praying, I hope that maybe he even knows the envoy, the guy who can give me the golden ticket to go to Wah state. Of course, I can't just blather all of that at him as soon as I see him. I'm trying to make friends with him. Patrick doesn't want to move too fast and risk spooking the guy who could be his ticket to Wah state.

He lets Jacob take the lead. And he starts asking me a series of questions. Where am I from? I'm American. Okay. Are you married? Yeah, I'm married. Oh, where's your wife from? She's from Thailand. Okay, okay, that's great. And he wanted to impress me with how many languages he speaks. It's quite a lot. English, Wa, Burmese, Shan, some Chinese, and a little bit of Thai. So I thought, this guy is pretty clever. He's no dummy.

So far, so good. The men are getting along. Patrick takes a liking to his interpreter, who's not only polite, but seems earnest too. And as we're driving around, we get to know each other better. I start asking him, do you know anybody inside the Wa government? Yeah, of course, all Wa people, we kind of know each other. I asked him, okay, are you in the Wa army? And he said, no.

And he said it like that. It was a very unconvincing no. - Jacob dropped Patrick at his hotel and told him he'd collect him tomorrow. But in the morning, Jacob arrived with bad news. The WHA envoy had been called to the Capitol on urgent business. The meeting was off. Instead, Jacob agreed to show Patrick around Lazio. Because both had planned to spend the week on WHA state business, they had plenty of time to kill.

As we got to know each other, I learned that he wasn't currently in the Wa army, but he was a former fairly high-ranking officer in the Wa army. He did know the envoy, and he did have the ability to introduce me to certain people within the Wa leadership. Aha. Noted. Jacob drove Patrick up a hill to a middle-class neighborhood. Everyone who lives here is Wa, he said.

The neighborhood was filled with two-story homes and a red-brick Baptist church. In the early 1900s, an American missionary originally from Nebraska, this guy with the big walrus mustache, named William Marcus Young, went to Burma. And he specifically wanted to go to save the souls of, now we would call them indigenous people, and at the time he would have called them tribesmen.

So with this incredible conviction, he went into Wa areas and astonishingly, he did manage to convert a good number of Wa villages to Christianity, to this really austere militant baptism. And there is this belief in Jacob that it's a little uncomfortable for me to say, but essentially that their people need to be saved. And Jacob had asked my religion,

And not knowing what to say, I said, well, I was raised in a Baptist town. I went to Baptist church as a kid. And he kind of lit up at that. That really meant something to him. Many of the people who lived in Jacob's area had been pushed out of Wastate by its a-religious leadership because of their Christian faith.

But even with the war state's explicit rejection of Christianity, Baptist teachings had remained a powerful, if unacknowledged, force in the region. Well after the death of William Marcus Young. Finally, Jacob and Patrick's tour came to an end at a slightly ramshackle family home. Would Patrick pay him the honor of joining him and his wife for dinner?

And then as we walk into his house, his wife has prepared this amazing spread of food with this like fried golden fish and pork and this wa dish, which has this sort of risotto like consistency. It's this rice dish. They've prepared this big spread for me, a stranger.

The entire reputation of WAP people is that they're unwelcoming. And this was so welcoming. They were so kind to me and they were just ready to share their lives with me. And it made a big impression on me. Still, Patrick had traveled a long way with a big goal in mind. He needed something from these people, more than just a hot meal. And in all their time driving around Larchio together, Patrick had become hopeful that Jacob might be able to provide it.

So while we're at dinner, I really lay out what I'm trying to do. I'm desperate after trying many years to interview someone from the WA inner circle. I just want to know a big shot decision maker who can tell me what it has been like to create this state, to run it, how they feel about its reputation, how they would justify heavy involvement in the narcotics trade.

And after a while, he said, "Um, that's really what you want to do?" I said, "Yeah." And the atmosphere got really strange. I realized I had mentioned heroin and methamphetamine and how I wanted to know the ins and outs of that trade. And I thought maybe I had offended my hosts. It is rude to go into someone's house and start talking about methamphetamine and heroin. These weren't members of a drug mafia.

They were a respectful Baptist family. I just worried that I'd put my foot in it. Jacob's wife scooted her chair back, kind of disappeared into the back garden, and she's walking under these banana trees, and she's making a call, and her voice sounds very serious. And I'm like, okay, who is she calling? This is getting weird. I don't love this. She comes back to the table, and she gives her husband Jacob a look.

And he looks back at her and they have a quick conversation in Burmese. Jacob turns to me and says, OK, you're going to meet a leader. Great. Tomorrow. No, right now. He lives five minutes up the street. I said, OK, who is this guy? And he's like, he's my father in law.

The trio set out walking. They had to move fast before Jacob's father-in-law retired to bed. Jacob is giving me his backstory as fast as he can give it. Oh, he's this great statesman. He was a great warrior. He was there at the very beginning, the founding of the state. He knows all of the other leaders. He's describing him basically as the Ben Franklin of the Waugh.

They approached a gated compound surrounded by security cameras. A servant girl opened the gates for them and showed them into the Wa leader's home. Despite the security measures, the interiors were modest and the decor somewhat retro. Teal walls, doilies on the tables, nothing new, nothing fancy.

And we sit down and a servant brought us cookies and said the man of the house will be down in a minute. I do remember looking up on the wall and seeing a portrait of a blonde Jesus. And I thought, oh, okay, they're really Baptist. Also hanging on the wall were portraits of family members who had attended college, all decked out in their graduation caps and gowns. In the center of this familial hall of fame was a portrait of the patriarch of the household,

The eminent erstwhile Wa leader, a man whose name, Jacob said, was Saw Loo. He looked very debonair. He was in a Wa uniform, this green Wa uniform with this kind of glint in his eye. He was a younger man at the time. And it did strike me that most pictures of Wa leaders I'd seen were presented in a negative context. DEA's most wanted man type of thing. So that made an impression on me.

Then, in through the door walked the Baptist warrior himself. He was in his mid-70s at the time. A little bit heavyset, but you could tell maybe back in the day as a young man he had some brawn to him. Personality-wise, it's like he's made of granite. He's from an older time. He really struck me as almost this Old Testament-like character. He's got dark eyes and he really looks you right in the eyes when he speaks to you.

He's just a serious, solemn person with the energy of someone who's been sent to this earth with a purpose. I was just drawn to the certainty, like the rock-solid nature of this man. Patrick asked Sorlu if he could take notes, and the old man assented. This was the journalist's white whale, exactly the kind of sit-down with a WHA leader he had long dreamed of having.

Now the opportunity had fallen in his lap, and he hadn't even had time to prepare. It was all happening so quickly. And he said, what do you want to know? So began the first of many conversations Patrick would have with Wa founding father, Suoloo. The Wa leader was willing to answer almost any question the journalist put in front of him. It was only important that he got the chronology straight. So, in that spirit...

Let's begin at the beginning. Back before the Wa people declared their sovereignty and created what's known today as Wa State,

William Marcus Young and his family converted the parents and grandparents of Saul Lu. So from his first breath, Saul Lu comes into this world where he's told that most of our people need to be saved. They are uncivilized. They need to be baptized. They need to be Christianized.

Young and his fellow evangelists considered one traditional Wa practice to be particularly unchristian in nature. Pre-1960s, it was very common in Wa villages for Wa warriors to post human heads on sticks around the perimeter of their walled fortresses.

They didn't do this just to be over the top. They did this because a human skull is a very effective way of saying no trespassing that anyone can understand. They were people that had been targeted by multiple empires, the British, the Chinese, and they wanted to be left alone. Young's followers believed it was their responsibility to rid the Wa people of this practice. And Saw Lu very much subscribed to the way of thinking the American Baptist oracle had taught his family.

That drive to save his people informed Saul Liu throughout his entire life. Saul Liu had been born in communist China, but as a kid, he escaped to the foothills of the Burmese mountains with other Baptists who had been unable to practice their religion.

By the time he was coming of age in the 1960s, China's leadership sought to expand its regime by any means necessary. And the vulnerable nation of Burma presented an easy target. So Lu never learned for sure how the Burmese military discovered him. But in 1966, when he was 22, intelligence officers invited him for tea. They explained that the Wa people were under threat from the same forces that had made him a refugee as a child.

By coming to work for them, he could help save the Wa people. He'd give them guns to fight Chinese intruders and do everything he could to tamp down on Wa infighting.

He was no huge fan of Myanmar's military regime, but by keeping tabs on the hinterlands where the ethnic minorities live in the mountains, it enabled him as a community leader to protect his small group of Wah people, really the people in his immediate neighborhood. So, Tsao-lu was the golden boy for Myanmar's regime, so they left his 300 or so people in his community alone.

Saw Loo was rewarded for his success within his small community and granted a promotion as an intelligence officer. At the same time, he and his wife ran their local church and opened an orphanage. They maintained a relatively quiet local life until 1989, when a small group of Wa led an uprising and claimed their land as their own. Then those revolutionaries got in touch with Saw Loo.

He became a Wa leader upon the foundation of Wa state, their own indigenous government, their own nation state. And from the very beginning, Wa state had to fund itself. It's this landlocked, unacknowledged state up in the mountains where you can hardly grow any decent crops. One crop you can grow in Narkatopia is poppies.

The seed capsules in a poppy plant exude a milky latex, which is dried and processed to produce heroin and other opioid drugs. So from the very beginning, it veered towards becoming a narco state. You might say a government with an in-house drug cartel to finance the state.

Saul Liu wanted to take it in a different direction. He thought that opium and heroin was wickedness, that as long as they produced drugs, the outside world would think of them as uncivilized and this depraved people. On the other side of the world, a version of that very narrative had taken hold.

By the mid-1980s, a war on drugs had begun to rage in the United States, with ramifications across the globe. This is when you have Nancy Reagan, the president's wife, going on TV and saying there's no moral middle ground. The United States is just dead set on eradicating drugs and we're really going to do it. So it was a really draconian attitude towards drugs.

And defeating drugs was more than just a domestic problem. In order to stop the flow of illicit substances flooding into the United States, the Drug Enforcement Agency, or DEA, set up outposts in the places where those substances originated. Thailand, being a particular thorn in the American side, got two DEA offices, one in the capital, Bangkok, and one in Chiang Mai.

In Chiang Mai, the DEA wedged itself into a consulate where the CIA already had a presence. And soon, the two agencies were at odds with one another. The squabbles that emerged between the DEA and CIA might seem granular in nature to an outsider, but their disagreements would soon have major consequences in Suol-lu's story.

Patrick says they all go back to a set of fundamental cultural differences between these two agencies. CIA officers, spies in general, they see narcotics agents as cops, as law enforcement. They might like them, they might respect them, but ultimately they think that they are, I'm generalizing here, a lower tier than spy.

The DEA is on one track. The DEA wants to bust drug cartels, seize narcotics, arrest people. The CIA sees the bigger picture. The CIA is out to maintain American supremacy, to manipulate the world as best they can in America's interest. And they just don't think that the DEA should be playing on that level.

As an informant for the Burmese military, Saw Loo had crossed paths with the DEA, handed over little drips of intel here and there, nothing major. At times, he would get approached by the DEA because he did know a lot of what was going on up in the mountains. But later, Saw Loo saw an opportunity to go big with his relationship with the DEA.

Sawloo wanted to level up Wa citizens' quality of life, to improve their education system and expand their access to quality healthcare. He knew that being seen as a pariah by the international community made his dreams for the Wa people unlikely to realize. He was drawn towards looking towards America to save his people, and that's why he collaborated with the DEA.

At first, Saw Loo didn't reveal his relationship with the DEA to the Wa government. But over time, he began to feed the agency documents straight from the Wa army that revealed proprietary information about Wa state poppy crops. In 1990, Saw Loo hatched a plan that he floated to his fellow Wa leaders and, with their permission, to the DEA.

This is a time when from Washington State, just vast amounts of heroin were going towards the U.S. It's like a fire hose of heroin just blasting the U.S. So there was this real drive within the DEA to find some way to shut off that fire hose of drugs that were just going towards the U.S. That enabled Sao Lu to make the case of like, hey, I can neutralize one of the biggest drug cartels in the world.

in Southeast Asia if you work with me. Usually, like in Mexico and Colombia, the DEA team up with local cops and they go try to bust up cartels or seize drug traffickers. Saul Liu said, it's not going to work that way. You have to unite with us.

In other words, he'd give the DEA secret intel into the inner workings of Narcotopia in exchange for support for his country. As we wind down the drug trade, you guys have to bring in money and aid and modernization so that it's a fair trade-off. So it was a totally different way of looking at the drug war.

Saw Liu wanted to burn it all down. Not all at once. Drugs were the bread and butter of WHA state. They couldn't just surrender their entire economy. But Saw Liu believed that with help from the Americans, they could slowly neutralize the WHA drug trade.

The Wa government was funded by the second biggest drug cartel in Southeast Asia. And by partnering with him, Suoloo argued, the DEA could ultimately play a role in shutting the whole thing down. And to his credit, the guy is so convincing that he convinced a number of DEA agents to pursue this dream. Suoloo was sharing high-level Wa state documents with his handlers.

but he wanted them to know that he wasn't interested in informing on his own people. He deflected attention to a larger cartel in Burma, one that, he said, was run by a businessman with bad intentions. The war, on the other hand...

were a down-on-their-luck indigenous group just doing what they had to in order to survive. The DEA agents that worked with him realized that this guy was... He saw himself as a messiah, that he was propelled not by desire to snitch on his rivals or get envelopes of cash or anything like that, but because he had this obsession with bringing in America to save his people.

Let's return to Saw Loo's living room in that gated compound in Larchio. Just imagine being in Patrick's shoes. You've been chasing after a story and for years have been met with one closed door after another.

Now, you've finally walked through one that's open. Suddenly, you find yourself in Saw Lu's world, a place that's more extraordinary, more secretive, more laden with intrigue and revelations than you could possibly have imagined. There's no doubt in his mind that you want to be locked into his world.

He talks slow. He has this sandpapery, raspy voice. And I see him telling the story. Everything else kind of blurs out and he just can trap you in his gaze. Look, this is a guy that convinced DEA agents to work with a drug producing organization rather than try to destroy it. I don't know any other examples of that in DEA history.

Saw Lu was a charismatic presence, no doubt. But it wasn't just charm that won the DEA over. They made a big bet on his ability to deliver valuable intelligence. And boy, did he deliver. The DEA is getting gold standard level intelligence from the drug producing hinterlands of Myanmar, which is producing well over half the heroin that's hitting American streets.

In fact, when I initially reached out to the DEA agents that Saul Liu had worked with, and I said, "Hey, do you know about Saul Liu?" They were like, "Who is this again?" I described him and they said, "Oh, that's Superstar." And how was Superstar getting his intel? Well, for one thing, he kept going to church.

Anyone who's lived in a small Baptist town knows that Baptists love to gossip. And apparently the same is true if you're an indigenous person in Myanmar. In his own organization, in Wah State, he didn't need to ask anyone for information. He had access to everything right up to the very top. He had a very close relationship with the leader. But he was also telling the DEA what was going on in all of these other drug trafficking organizations in Myanmar, in Burma.

Because these Baptists, because they had been taught how to read and write by American missionaries, they were more literate than the average person living in the mountains. All those literate Baptists had plenty of job opportunities. And jobs in Wa State are mostly in the drug trafficking business.

I know everyone thinks that they're all just sitting around swilling whiskey and being ruthless and blah, blah, blah. But no, it's a logistical operation. They're trying to move something from point A to point B without getting caught. And someone who is literate and even a little bit educated, they're going to have a premium in the market when they're looking for a job.

With a rolodex full of chatty Baptists, Sawaloo could dish up precisely the information the DEA was looking for. The DEA guys I talked to who read these reports said they were just incredible. It had coordinates of drug labs and acreage of poppy fields and where they were, who's beefing with who. It was like an almanac of all the crime happening in the mountains of Myanmar.

For a while, the arrangement worked beautifully. But there was a fly in the ointment, because the DEA had an uncomfortably close bedfellow in the CIA. And over time, America's most powerful intelligence agency caught wind of Superstar.

CIA and State Department became aware of Saul Liu and they weren't big fans. For starters, they didn't like that the DEA and Saul Liu were coming up with such a grandiose vision that really would have changed the landscape in Burma. If Saul Liu's dream came true, it would have some spillover effects.

you would have in Burma, a country that the CIA hated, a country that the State Department hated, fantastic news coming out of this country. In other words, if the drug trade began to dry up in Burma, its military regime would get the credit, no matter if the war and the Americans were secretly behind the achievement.

The other problem is that the DEA was talking to Myanmar's military regime in ways that the CIA didn't like. DEA guys go to countries like Mexico and they team up with the local cops to bust drugs. That was seen as a no-go zone for the State Department and the CIA. You're not going to team up with police and troops who are suppressing a democratic revolution. So for many, many reasons, the CIA felt that the DEA was way too big for their britches

and that Sao Lu was enabling that. And so if they could neutralize Sao Lu, they could neutralize the DEA's dreams in Myanmar. Patrick reached out to Sao Lu's handlers at the DEA, the ones who remembered him as superstar. They told him that the CIA began to make their lives very uncomfortable.

Their homes were bugged, they alleged. Their phones wiretapped. They said they were harassed and, in some cases, sent home from their postings early. Then there was the matter of how the CIA handled Superstar himself.

To neutralize Sao Lu, they used a couple of covert tactics. According to one DEA agent, a manifesto that Sao Lu had written about how he wanted to unite the Americans and unite the Wa also contained some cheap shots at Myanmar's regime. And so according to this DEA agent, they stole the manifesto and showed it to Myanmar's regime. Suffice to say...

Myanmar's military junta would not be entertained by Sao Lu's vision for the future of the Wa nation. Myanmar's regime then and now is pretty sadistic and frankly racist and tends to view any ethnic minorities, of which Sao Lu was one,

as potential traitors to the regime. So, the regime was dead set on managing any possible contact between the United States and indigenous people. America does have a history of going into countries that it doesn't like and agitating or riling up certain armed groups who may or may not be ethnic minorities to go against a regime that they dislike.

And for its part, according to Patrick's sources, the CIA was not entertained by what it saw as DEA overreach. The general strategy was just to poison the well, to make it impossible for Sao Lu to achieve his dream.

And I think even now, if you were to see the DEA try to play around in foreign policy, that the CIA and the State Department would say, that's way above your pay grade. Go chase after a cartel. To protect Seoul, the DEA rented a safe house in Burma's capital city, Yangon. And for a while, they were able to protect their covert relationship.

But working under the watchful eye of a police state makes it hard to keep secrets under wraps for long. Eventually, regime spies, by trailing Saul Liu to the safe house, did figure out, oh my God, this guy's talking to the Americans. You've got

a representative from, as the regime would see it, the fiercest warrior ethnic army up in the mountains who they've never been able to control. And he's talking to a superpower that is sanctioning us, calling us thugs and awful for suppressing democracy. This was not anything that the regime wanted to see.

One morning in January 1992, Saw Lu and his son were at their home in Lashio, the same home where Patrick would meet the Wa leader nearly 30 years later. Two or three soldiers approached the house and kindly informed Saw Lu that his presence had been requested at command headquarters. Saw Lu said...

"Okay, sure." He's very suspicious. He didn't want to go alone, so he called for his son to come outside and join him. So they're put in the truck, and it's a very quiet ride to the military base. They're not sure where this is going. As soon as they go into the military base, passing through these iron gates,

Black hoods are thrown over their heads. Saw Lu's son tries to flail and resist, I think out of pure instinct, but he realizes that his hands are handcuffed. Both Saw Lu and his son are led in different directions. They can't see anything until the hoods were pulled off of their heads and they were in separate rooms in what they described as a subterranean area of the military base.

Sorlu is thrown behind bars in a dark, mildewed room with no windows and no toilet. For weeks, he was left in the cell to rot, except when soldiers yanked him out to beat and torture him. Sometimes they would whip him with a bicycle chain on his back. This is something that left scars on his body for the rest of his life. He said, they whipped my back off.

and I asked for clarification, "What do you mean?" He said, "By the time they were done with me, I didn't have a back anymore." Over and over, the soldiers tried to force a confession out of Saw Loo. They would hold this piece of paper over him, and it said, "My name is Saw Loo, and I'm an international drug trafficker, and everything that I said to the DEA is fake." Saw Loo's son was released from captivity,

But the elder man remained in detention, living under horrific conditions. Day after day after day, different modes of unspeakable torture, with the same goal in mind: to coax a false confession out of the DEA superstar.

as if Saw Liu were the type to buckle under pressure. Saw Liu is the most stubborn person I've ever met by a factor of a million. When he thinks he's right, you're not going to convince him to do anything else. He doesn't believe in little white lies. He doesn't believe in making shit up so that he can get out of the situation. He's like, no, I just, I'm not going to take the hit.

So eventually to completely break his body and spirit, they took him outside of his cell to a banyan tree. And there was a noose hanging over one of the big branches of the tree. And he thought they were going to hang him.

But instead they laid him on the ground and they tightened the noose. They cinched it around his ankles instead and then pulled on the other end of the rope so that he levitated in the air. So he's upside down and they're like, the soldiers say, are you going to sign it? We're going to drop you. And he said, no. And so the soldiers let go and Saw Lu came crashing down.

Now, this account comes to me from Sawlu, so he has some lapses of memory. But at best he could put together, they dropped him on his head again. And he somehow, barely able to speak, signaled his refusal, 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.

So for that night, at least, they dragged Saw Lu back to his room, presumably concussed, and left him there, probably thinking he would die in the night. But he didn't. Next time on True Spies. He calls his DEA handler and tells them everything. This is what's happened to me. I've been tortured. He said it looks like they might actually kill me. What can you do to save me? What can you do to help me?

And his DEA handler gets very emotional and says, I'm just so sorry. I'm Rhianna Needs. Join us for part two to hear how America's intelligence agency left a superstar asset out to dry. 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.

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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.

True Spies from Spyscape Studios. Search for True Spies wherever you get your podcasts.