B.C.P.

“Which of the B.C.P. bunch would you NOT wish to be shipwrecked with on a desert island? Well, Colen has a practical side that could produce the needed tent or coconut. Bradley could certainly trade quite well with any putative natives. Rob Pruitt would drive you crazy with his irrelevant showmanship and, after, you prepared him on the spit for dinner, would taste flabbily bland.”

That relationship ended with Khun Sa's forcible eviction, and now the B.C.P. and local Chinese financiers are trying to take over the entire drug traffic.

The B.C.P. began collecting raw opium in the early 1970s and passing it on to Khun Sa's mercenaries, who refined the substance into heroin for shipment abroad.

At the very least, the AK-47 rifles, howitzers and machine guns used by the B.C.P. could have come only from China's Yunnan province just across the border.

Western intelligence experts know very little about the B.C.P. and where it gets its support.