The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  Daud was now a three-star general and had a powerful reputation, one of the few high-ranking men in Afghanistan whose integrity was unquestioned.

  “General,” I said, “two of my guys are gone—kidnapped.”

  “Who are they, Ed?” he asked.

  I told him. “But nobody’s talking. NDS all swear it wasn’t them.”

  Working two sets of cell phones, General Daud and I organized a dragnet. If my people had been kidnapped by legit traffickers, they’d be taken out of Kabul, held as hostages, and bartered for ransom. The dragnet consisted of my DEA guys, General Daud’s CNPA officers, members of the National Interdiction Unit, and uniformed Afghan police—more than three hundred sets of eyeballs working all investigative leads and exit routes from Kabul.

  It’s the peril of doing drug enforcement in a war zone: There are no blue-on-blue safeguards. Among the DEA, CIA, and various Afghan police and intel agencies, there are no counterchecks to avoid an undercover stepping—unsuspectingly—onto the set of another undercover op and getting popped.

  • • •

  Mohammad played his trump card: He called the office of the National Directorate of Security and spoke to General Ahmad Nawabi, the second-in-command of the NDS in Kabul. Brad and I raced over to the NDS headquarters. It was a dreamlike vision: We were no longer in Afghanistan. The gates parted to reveal lush foliage, a small garden, a well-groomed soccer field. A verdant oasis amid the outlaw frenzy of downtown Kabul.

  The building itself was poured concrete, early-’80s construction; it had been used for interrogations by the KGB. I ran up three flights of stairs and saw grisly reminders of the building’s more recent use under the Taliban. On one flight a few of the floor tiles were tinged pink, stained by the blood of “transgressors” who Mullah Omar’s henchmen had flogged for blasphemy, adultery, or other violations of Sharia law.

  Afghan guards led us at gunpoint straight to General Nawabi. He was waiting for me in his leather desk chair, casually smoking, eyebrows furrowed. He wore a charcoal suit, a striped gray-and-blue tie, his gray beard perfectly trimmed. We wasted no time on handshakes or pleasantries.

  “Are you listening to me?” I said. “Don’t tell me this was some random rip-off. It was done with geometric precision. I know these are your people.”

  Nawabi grimaced and then, without warning, he left us alone in his office. I couldn’t hear what he was saying next door, but he was obviously on his private cell. When he returned, he gave me a straight fucking answer for the first time.

  “It seems we have found your people.”

  “Yeah? Where the hell are they?”

  Nawabi cleared the phlegm in his throat. He spat out an address: My guys were being held at a building on the eastern outskirts of Kabul. Brad Tierney and I bolted outside. By now the sun was brutally hot. The streets of Kabul would be surging with mobs of pedestrians, street vendors, Muslims on their way to mosques. I decided we’d have better odds undercover. This wasn’t by the book, but then very little in Afghanistan ever was. I grabbed the duffel bag I kept discreetly hidden in the Land Cruiser.

  “Haji up,” I said. We threw on our UC garb: the white cotton tops of the shalwar kameez, black scarves around our faces, and two Massoud caps—tan-colored beret-like hats that were the favored headgear of the Lion of Panjshir himself. I was gunning the gas, on the edge, swerving the heavy armored Toyota as if I’d taken a straight shot of adrenaline. The streets of Kabul swarmed around us like a medieval bazaar. I had tunnel vision, oblivious to the thumping as the side mirrors of the Land Cruiser clipped pedestrians, knocking more than a few to the pavement. Tierney had tunnel vision, too. Behind us, we heard angry shouting.

  I glanced at Brad. “Look, man,” I said. “Whatever we gotta do—I mean whatever we’ve gotta do—we’re gonna get them the fuck out today.”

  “You bet the fuck we are.”

  As I raced through the Kabul side streets, we made a solemn vow to each other—as men, not cops. We weren’t anticipating a shoot-out, though anything was possible in Kabul. I drove out on the winding highway that leads to the eastern outskirts. I looked up at those towering humpbacked mountains and saw scores of Afghan women and boys trundling down thousands of feet just to get their daily water.

  We pulled up to the curb, double-checking the address. It was an old white-and-gray concrete office building, also from the Soviet era: nondescript and boxlike, pockmarked by decades-old civil war shelling. There wasn’t an external threat at the building’s entrance or perimeter, so we left our M4s behind. Brad and I stepped outside, drawing the Glocks from our leather holsters.

  • • •

  We ran up a rank-smelling stairwell, and by the time we’d reached the fifth floor, I could hear thudding and shouting and moaning and I could feel my heartbeat up into my throat. We burst through an unlocked door and saw that Tariq and 007 had been savagely beaten. They were slumped over on a blood-smeared fabric sofa, drifting between half conscious and half dead.

  We immediately faced off with the four kidnappers. They were dressed like Westerners, not Hajis: light-colored polo shirts and khakis and dress shoes.

  At first glance, they must have thought we were Taliban, but we ripped off the black-and-tan scarves and identified ourselves as DEA agents.

  The commander of the unit, a diminutive Pashtun, spoke an educated—albeit heavily accented—English. His enforcer was wearing a blood-spattered pale linen shirt. He had a damaged eye; a crude gauze patch covered the wound. He also looked Pashtun, about six-two and 230 pounds. Hours later, we learned that he’d been a prizefighter, some Russian-trained heavyweight, and he’d certainly put his boxing skills to creative use. He’d beaten Tariq and 007 professionally, methodically: cracked ribs, smashed eyes, busted noses, knocked-out teeth.

  The kidnappers were staring us down. But they weren’t showing any weapons, so Brad and I holstered our Glocks. A crazed cacophony of cursing and shouting ensued.

  “Who the fuck are you guys?”

  “We’re conducting a drug investigation,” the commander said finally, calmly.

  I looked down at the sofa. Tariq had regained consciousness but could scarcely sit upright. It looked like our informant, 007, might already be dead.

  “Where’s the heroin? Where’s the three kilos?” Brad shouted.

  “It has been turned in for evidence.”

  “Evidence—what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “And where’s the money?” I said.

  The hulking one-eyed boxer simply shrugged at me.

  “There was fifteen Gs for three fuckin’ kilograms!”

  The room was tight. Things were getting so heated, so explosive—somebody was going to get popped any second. I looked down at Tariq and 007: They were both bleeding heavily, eyes rolling back, drifting away . . .

  • • •

  I didn’t give a shit about the missing cash or heroin. First and only priority—I needed to get our guys back to our embassy compound, where they could receive medical attention. Brad and I lifted them onto our shoulders, like a couple of firefighters, pushed past the kidnappers, and lugged them down the five flights.

  I kicked open the front door, and we burst back into the blinding daylight. A gawking mob had surrounded my Land Cruiser, angry Afghan men, young and middle-aged, pressing in close, undulating like some great human jellyfish. With our black scarves off, they could see our sunburned American faces now; they’d pegged us for imposters—interlopers—infidels.

  We pressed forward, through louder shouting, cursing. I felt hot breath on my neck.

  The mob parted. We pushed forcibly into the Land Cruiser. Tariq and 007 both slumped over unconscious in the backseat.

  “Twenty minutes,” Brad said, once I was speeding on the highway into Kabul.

  “No doubt,” I said, “if that . . .”

  Tierney was rig
ht: If we’d showed up twenty minutes later, our guys would’ve been gone. The boxer would have beaten them to death.

  CHAPTER 1

  GROUP FOUR

  My first day on the job I was terrified.

  Wasn’t too worried about the work.

  I was scared out of my mind that I might be late. It seems ludicrous to me now—Los Angeles would soon enough become my adopted hometown—but as a newly minted DEA agent entering strange and frightening territory, I was driving those Los Angeles freeways for the first time. My aunt’s place was about thirty miles from the DEA office, and I had no idea how bad the traffic might be.

  I hardly slept, got up at four a.m., was showered and dressed in my dark-blue suit, waiting for first light. Drove into downtown LA and was in the office at six a.m. sharp. DEA headquarters was then in the heart of the financial district, right in the Los Angeles World Trade Center, a low-rise office complex on 350 South Figueroa Street, with a staff of about one hundred.

  I pulled down South Figueroa, parked, and went upstairs. The only other soul in the place was Lekita Hill, a DEA secretary who was to become one of my closest friends and my emotional rock as I took on increasingly difficult, logistically complex, and politically sensitive investigations.

  In the Los Angeles Division, I was assigned to Enforcement Group Four—the Heroin Task Force, where I was to learn the nitty-gritty of undercover narcotics operations firsthand. The task force was filled with these older, irreplaceable lawmen, veterans who’d been rewriting the playbook on how to be an undercover.

  As I arrived on the scene, Group Four had just suffered an intense trauma, one that had played out in the national headlines and was still being written about almost daily when I came on the job. Three sterling men had all been caught in a deadly shoot-out in an undercover operation down in Pasadena. The only one left to talk about it was DEA Special Agent José Martinez; the other two undercover agents, Paul Seema and George Montoya, had been shot to death by a thug wielding a .45 semiautomatic.

  José, the driver during the undercover operation, badly wounded in the shoot-out, would receive the Medal of Valor personally from President Reagan.

  Shortly before I started in Group Four, the Los Angeles Times ran a front-page story that spotlighted the high-risk world I was about to enter. I remember reading the story at my aunt’s kitchen table.

  A SHADOW WORLD OF LIFE AND DEATH:

  WORKING MOSTLY UNDERCOVER, DEA AGENTS LIVE WITH DANGER AND OFTEN DIE UNHERALDED

  The article described, in great detail, the brutal killings of agents Seema and Montoya, explaining that no matter the level of street smarts, instinct, and training of the undercover agents, drug dealers almost always have the upper hand, armed with “absolute greed” and a callous willingness to instantly kill both other dealers and “federal officers who play too convincingly their roles” while undercover:

  “Television glorifies us as fun and games and cops and robbers,” said Rogelio Guevara, a Los Angeles agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration, a friend of both men. “But [DEA work] is also very real, a very dangerous job, and it is for keeps.

  “We have the highest assault rate of any federal law enforcement agency, and if anything, we’re seeing an increase. That’s nothing to brag about, just a sad truth . . .”

  It was daunting to enter into that tight-knit Group Four family. I sensed it immediately: This was a family of trauma, a family of hurt. I didn’t know George Montoya or Paul Seema personally—though ironically enough, years later, when I was living in Thailand, I would hear repeatedly from people who’d known Paul as a young man; he’d been with the CIA before he transitioned over to the DEA. People in Thailand regarded the murdered agent with respect bordering on reverence.

  When I came on the job, the details of that trauma were still murky to me: I knew that two agents had been murdered in a heroin transaction while working undercover. The one who’d survived, albeit badly wounded, came back to working undercover just a few months after the shooting and was now sitting six feet away from me.

  José Martinez was to become my partner, indispensable friend, and invaluable mentor.

  José was known as a premier undercover, probably the best UC we had working in Group Four at the time. He stood only about five-five but was strong as a bull, never backed away from anyone. José had been a top collegiate wrestler. He’s Mexican-American but has a very pale complexion and jet-black hair—I guess the conquistadors’ DNA still runs heavy in his genes, not the more Aztec features so many Mexicans share. José speaks flawless English, but also Castilian Spanish, a variety of Mexican dialects, and Spanglish. His skills on the street were intuitive—stuff you could never learn in a classroom or some practical exercise at the federal academy.

  José took me under his wing; I became his junior partner. That first Christmas in LA, I spent with José and his family. We put in a lot of long nights working surveillance, out on undercover jobs, talking about the Pasadena shooting.

  The bullet scars on his legs were still pink and cherry red; the trauma was equally fresh in his mind. He needed to talk to somebody about it, needed some clarity, needed to make sense of what had happened to his two dear friends. You never really get closure when you’ve lost two of your partners and nearly died yourself.

  José, more than anybody in Group Four, pushed me hard to get into the undercover roles. He read me immediately; he knew that UC work was best suited to my personality. He had an uncanny—almost innate—knack for it, and he immediately recognized the same traits in me.

  Rogelio Guevara, the Group Four supervisor, was my immediate boss. He’d been really tight with special agents Seema and Montoya.

  Born in Mexico, Rogelio had led a full life before joining the DEA: He’d been a butcher, and then earned his college degree in criminal justice, ultimately becoming a legend among Mexican heroin agents. In another near-fatal undercover operation, while working down in Monterrey, Mexico, Rogelio had very nearly been murdered. He lost the use of one eye for the rest of his life.

  Bandits ambushed him, put a bullet in his cranium, but he’d miraculously survived that head shot. He and his partner had come over a ridge and been confronted by a gang of more than thirty banditos, some of whom were riding horses. It was supposed to be a major undercover marijuana buy, but it turned out to be a rip. The traffickers killed Rogelio’s partner. A bandit on horseback shot Rogelio in the face. One round went in right over his eye and exited at his temple. Even today, he still has a huge dark scar down the side of his face.

  Like José Martinez, Rogelio was fearless. Strongly built, Aztec features, about six-foot-one. The long scar and his damaged eye gave him a particularly intense appearance. When I came to Group Four, he was still hopping back and forth between his supervisory role in LA and undercover work inside Mexico.

  Rogelio was a marvelous guy; more than once, he went undercover as a boss with me—which wasn’t by the DEA rulebook, especially given that he was virtually blind in one eye. It was something I watched and internalized and would carry over into my own days as a boss, as supervisor, and even higher up the chain of command in the DEA. For Rogelio, rank meant nothing. He knew it was on the street that the real police work gets done.

  • • •

  After completing the federal academy in Quantico, Virginia, I had several career options. My application to the US Secret Service was rejected, but I was offered positions with NCIS, the FBI, and the DEA. While still a military policeman in Hawaii, I’d also been recruited by the CIA—even gone through the battery of psychological tests down at Langley. I mulled things over for a day. I didn’t ask anyone’s opinion. I wanted the decision to be mine. I withdrew from both FBI and NCIS, then called the CIA as well.

  “Thanks,” I told them, “but my heart is with the DEA.”

  Honestly, I’d wanted to be a narc—working for the DEA—ever since I was nineteen years old and heard
the song “Smuggler’s Blues” by Glenn Frey. A few lines in the lyrics, about the ’80s cocaine epidemic, just leapt out of the tinny car speakers:

  It’s propping up the governments in Colombia and Peru,

  You ask any DEA man,

  He’ll say, “There’s nothin’ we can do . . .”

  Driving in my old Chevrolet, something struck a chord—I guess it must have pissed me off—and I couldn’t get the song out of my head. Obsessed about it for weeks. Talked about it constantly with my buddies. One of those crystallizing moments: I said to myself, Fuck it, I’m gonna become that DEA man. Let ’em try to tell me there’s nothing we can do . . .

  Around that same time, I stumbled on the book Serpico by Peter Maas, and it blew me away. Today, after years in law enforcement, I realize that I have some of the same personal flaws as Frank Serpico. But back then, as a very young man, I saw in his crusading, lone-wolf policing style a role model for my life. After reading Serpico, I was dead set on becoming an undercover narc. Then the movie, starring Al Pacino, came out: I saw it about six times.

  In hindsight, I can see I was an idealist—perhaps naïve—but I really thought I could make a difference. I consolidated my academic goals, focused everything in my life from that day forward toward becoming a narc. Every move and decision I made was with the goal of becoming a DEA special agent working undercover to take down drug traffickers.

  To me there was no better platform for a career in law enforcement than the Drug Enforcement Administration. DEA’s roots go back to laws enacted in 1914. Originally under the US Department of the Treasury’s Bureau of Prohibition, the agency was created on June 14, 1930. Most people don’t realize this, but for years the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) was the only law enforcement agency tackling the Mafia; J. Edgar Hoover famously denied that there was a national syndicate of organized crime families—until the public embarrassment of the Apalachin conclave in 1957 forced Hoover to admit that there was indeed a nationwide organized-crime conspiracy; Hoover stubbornly refused to use the word “Mafia,” preferring to call the gangsters members of La Cosa Nostra (LCN).