According to former Mossad officer Victor Ostrovsky in his book By Way of Deception, the Mossad intelligence agency used the Thai heroin trade as a way to raise funds for top secret operations on US soil, which were very hush-hush because it is likely that they were actually against US law.

“The Mossad had made its first contact with the opium growers in Thailand [in the late 1970s],” Ostrovsky wrote. “The Americans were trying to force farmers to stop producing opium and grow coffee instead. The Mossad’s idea was to get in there, help them grow coffee, but at the same time help them to export opium as a means of raising money for Mossad operations.”

The example of one such top-secret operation that Ostrovsky cites are the efforts in the US to undermine the Arab diplomacy which was then pushing for the Palestine Liberation Organisation to achieve greater United Nations recognition. A contemporary UN report on Thailand backs up Ostrovsky’s claims about Israeli involvement in the coffee-growing cover programme, at least.

The approach of Israel’s intelligence agencies – as with many countries’ spy agencies – seems to be that the ends justify the means. The goals of the Israeli state are so self-evidently righteous, the thinking seemed to be, that funding them with off-the-books drugs money was par for the course.

Israel’s involvement in the South American drug trade is far better documented, however, if still not very widely known. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn’s book Dangerous Liaison contains a large amount of key reporting on the issue.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, the so-called “King of Cocaine” was Pablo Escobar, the leader of Colombia’s notorious Medellin Cartel. At the height of his career, Escobar’s cartel was responsible for some 80 per cent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States. One estimate put his net worth at $30 billion.

Books, films and TV shows have been made about Escobar, including the popular Netflix series Narcos. What is perhaps less well known is that the cartel’s military forces were trained and armed by Israel, whose Colonel Yair Klein trained and armed the militias founded and controlled by the Medellin Cartel’s military leader.