The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  Although Afghanistan is ostensibly our ally—and counter-narcotics partner—many of us within the counter-narcotics community have come to refer to the nation as the “Narco-terrorist Islamic Republic of Afghanistan,” a national security threat posed by the confluence of endemic political corruption, highly structured drug cartels, and extreme terrorist organizations.

  • • •

  Everything changed for me on September 11, 2001. On the morning of the attacks, I’d been at the DEA headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, and had seen the American Airlines Flight 77 jetliner hit the Pentagon, roughly two hundred yards from my office window.

  I watched the fireball in real time. I saw that grisly “pie slice” crater, first flaming and then smoldering . . . After recovering from shock, I rushed over to the Pentagon to pull out bodies—but there were no bodies to pull out.

  In the following weeks, I desperately wanted to get into the fight overseas. Over and over, I told my friends and family:

  “I want a shot at Bin Laden.”

  Then, in 2006, the position of assistant regional director and country attaché to Afghanistan opened up—the two jobs were being consolidated into one. It was, to say the least, an unpleasant posting.

  Back then, we had scant military support for our counter-narcotics efforts in Afghanistan. And making matters worse, other intelligence entities were undermining everything that DEA was trying to accomplish from a counter-narcotics standpoint. Still, I remained gung-ho.

  “If I want to go after Bin Laden,” I told my family, “this is the way to do it. If I take this job, I’ll be right there, going after the traffickers who finance his whole terror network.”

  Everybody in my family—my mother and stepfather, Ray; my younger brother; all my friends at work—said the same thing:

  “Eddie, don’t take it. You’ve got a promising future in the DEA—don’t throw it away in Afghanistan.”

  Finally, one Tuesday morning, I awoke with the answer clear in my mind.

  You know what you need to do. If you have any chance to do this guy, Ed, if you think you can help bring down UBL, you’ve got to do this. Everyone else wants you to put your career first, but you’ve got to go to Kabul.

  I applied for the position and the DEA administrator, Karen Tandy, thought I was the right guy. Like that old saying “It takes a thief to catch a thief,” my own variation spun through my thoughts: It might take a zealot to catch a zealot.

  • • •

  Almost as soon as I arrived as country attaché, stationed in the US Embassy compound in Kabul, I assessed that we had serious problems—in terms of both morale and tradecraft.

  Before arriving in-country, I’d read all the existing DEA files. We had myriad major Taliban-linked opium warlords to contend with. The primary three “Hajis” on our radar were Bagcho Sherzai, Khan Mohammad (not to be confused with Muhammad Khan), and HJK.

  There was no way to target these opium lords using traditional—military-style—operational methodology. At some point soon, I knew, we’d need to go undercover, just as street cops would, into the hinterlands of that untamed war zone.

  But before I could even think about going undercover myself, my primary task was to change the mind-set of our DEA staff in Kabul. It was only my fifth day in-country; I brought all thirty of my people into the big conference room of the embassy, both my permanent agents and all our support staff.

  I was dressed in an open-necked shirt, intentionally casual, no spit and polish. Even before speaking, I could see—just glancing around my group—that my men were disheartened and disenchanted; they’d spent months—some of them years—fighting a battle they felt we could never fully win.

  A lot of the DEA special agents who’d volunteered for the Kabul posting wanted to put on military fatigues and strap on heavy weapons; they wanted to go up in the Super Stallion and Cobra helicopters; they wanted to engage the Taliban drug traffickers as the military would. True, they’d been trained in law enforcement techniques, but they’d also volunteered for service overseas.

  It was understandable: Nobody volunteers for duty in Afghanistan to work as an undercover narc. They all signed up to see action.

  But trying to take down this massive, sprawling world of heroin and opium kingpins—scattered across a vast, often unnavigable country—was impossible using a paramilitary mind-set. My men were being beaten down: depressed, fatigued, and frustrated on a daily basis.

  We needed to go from behaving like soldiers to using the techniques of street agents—the mentality and tradecraft I’d first learned in LA Division Group Four—and applying them to a combat zone. No one had yet brought undercover skills to play in Afghanistan.

  There were a few nods around the room, but mostly blank stares. Only a couple of the guys had ever worked undercover. And if they had, they’d been in urban areas like Detroit, New York, or LA. But working as a UC in the States, whether in the inner city or the suburbs, is nothing like being undercover in a place like Kabul.

  First order of business: I told them to get out of their BDUs—battle dress uniforms, the basic fatigues that are used by the armed forces as their standard uniform for combat situations—and start dressing like the DEA special agents they were. When necessary, I knew, we’d be donning the garb of various Afghan ethnic groups to go undercover, so around the embassy, I did not want to see any of my people wearing BDUs.

  I had one DEA special agent—actually a valuable investigator—who walked into the embassy carrying a live grenade. He was strolling around the embassy compound, in those damn battle fatigues, strapped with an M67—the standard 6.5-ounce fragmentation hand grenade used by the US military.

  I took him aside and, without hesitation, gave him a private tongue-lashing.

  “What’re you doing? Get that grenade out of here. Christ! You’re a DEA agent—not a Marine!”

  • • •

  There was certainly no need for any of us to be armed inside the secured embassy compound. In addition to the intense perimeter security of Gurkhas, I had the members of the DEA’s Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Teams (FAST). In the early 1990s, as part of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s global counter-narcotics strategy, DEA formed five elite Foreign-Deployed Advisory and Support Teams. One of the FAST teams is permanently stationed in Afghanistan; the other four are based out of Marine Corps Base Quantico and are dispatched to various hot zones around the globe.

  A typical FAST team is comprised of eight special agents, an intelligence specialist, and a team leader. Much of their equipment is supplied by the Pentagon.

  I met with Jeff Higgins—a GS-14—who was overall commander of the FAST team members. A lot of my FAST guys had been tacticians, shooters, raid agents. They’d been the “hard men”—worn the DEA windbreakers and Teflon vests, carried the battering rams—the first guys through the door during raids.

  I had to turn them into what Rogelio Guevara and José Martinez had taught me to be when I was still a kid in LA: premier investigators and undercover operatives.

  “We are not doing military-style eradications,” I told Higgins. “We are developing cases for prosecution, here and in other competent authorities: England and Germany and Turkey—but especially back home in the USA. Understand that. When we go out on operations, we are doing so strictly from a law enforcement mind-set.”

  A lot of my FAST team guys would only be working on the periphery of our upcoming missions. They were going to be “tacticians,” as I liked to call them, but I still had to show them adequate respect. I’d need them to take care of business when the bullets started flying. My first week of briefings around the embassy was essentially an attempt to hit a reset button on our operational techniques. There’d been a clear demarcation of duties when I arrived, but I now, with a sense of relief, was confident that I’d melded the tactical FAST guys with my core investigators and molded them i
nto a single and cohesive law enforcement team.

  • • •

  The principal law we were operating under was US Code Title 21, 960a, the 2006 narco-terrorism statute that afforded the Drug Enforcement Administration greater latitude to operate abroad, targeting and arresting these Taliban-linked opium kingpins and extraditing them to the Southern and Eastern Districts of New York, as well as the federal court in Washington, DC. The new statute also gave us federal budgetary consideration and access right up the chain of command, even a seat at the table with the National Security Council.

  Under my watch, the first major trafficker we targeted was Bagcho Sherzai, against whom I would later testify in court as a subject-matter expert. In terms of sheer income from illicit drugs, Bagcho is ranked—even today—as perhaps the most successful heroin trafficker in history. Through surveillance and informants, we developed solid intel that Bagcho was exporting heroin to more than twenty different countries, including the United States. He lived in Marco Khune, a village in Nangarhar Province, but also kept a fortified compound in Hayatabad, outside of Peshawar, Pakistan.

  • • •

  In order to get near Bagcho we had no choice: We’d have to go down to Jalalabad—which was one of the most dangerous places on earth, even deadlier to an American than Ciudad Juárez. Even our US Marines would only go down to Jalalabad in numbers: at least two or three platoons driving Humvees, armed with M50 machine guns.

  To clear the operation, I went into the office of Ambassador Ronald Neumann; he was a veteran State Department official, and as savvy a diplomat as I’ve ever worked with. Neumann had formerly been a deputy assistant secretary of state, and knew the intricacies of the Middle East far better than me. He’d already served as ambassador to Algeria and Bahrain and was most recently stationed in Baghdad with the Coalition Provisional Authority.

  During his swearing-in ceremony at the State Department, Ambassador Neumann had announced that his priorities in Kabul were “fighting narcotics, establishing rule of law, and enhancing security.” He’d argued that only by fighting the narcotics barons in Afghanistan would we “ensure that the country will never again be a safe haven for terrorists.” Ambassador Neumann often told me that he’d inherited his commitment to diplomacy and to the nation of Afghanistan from his father, who was US ambassador to Afghanistan in the 1960s.

  I sat down at the ambassador’s desk, laying out an undercover op against Bagcho.

  “Haji Bagcho Sherzai?” he said, incredulous. “Ed, can we actually get this guy down there in Jalalabad?”

  “Yes, sir. I believe we can bag him. But we can’t lure him here to Kabul. We have no other option. We’re going to have to go get him down there in his stronghold.”

  The ambassador was no shrinking violet, and he was the only US State Department official with whom I’d entrust our UC activities.

  “Okay, Ed,” he said. “You’ve got my support. Just promise me you’ll come back here alive.”

  In effect, as he well knew, this was our first high-risk test to see how the DEA could function under our new rules of law enforcement engagement in a war zone.

  • • •

  I little realized, when I took the position of DEA country attaché and assistant regional director, managing fifty special agents and scores of support staff, that it would be an unceasing battle with the corruption of the Karzai government and our own recalcitrant intelligence agencies.

  Desperately in need of an Afghan ally, in my official capacity as the country attaché, I began to meet regularly with General Mohammad Daud Daud, the deputy minister for counter-narcotics, and he quickly became one of my dear friends.

  Together we put in countless hours to develop Afghanistan’s first dedicated counter-narcotics police agency. Within weeks of my arrival in Kabul, General Daud was telling me, over jasmine tea at his humble residence, his stories of having fought the Soviet Red Army as a mujahideen. He’d lived in a cave, like a prehistoric man, for more than seven years. He knew the austerity under which the typical Afghan was prepared to live.

  “Ed, most of you Americans don’t understand this,” he said. “They truly want nothing you have. They do not want to live a Western lifestyle. They’ve lived like this, and will continue to live like this, for centuries.”

  When the Soviet Union invaded, rival warlords had banded together in ranks of mujahideen: warriors in a jihad for Allah. Demonstrating asceticism beyond Western comprehension, the mujahideen drove the great Soviet military machine out of Afghanistan.

  With General Daud’s help, we also had to train the prosecutors in the newly formed Afghan system to manage actual drug courts—with due process, cross-examination of witnesses, adequately trained defense counsel—rather than the previous draconian Sharia laws. We also crafted a version of a controlled-substances act modeled on our own in the United States—a team of assistant US attorneys had come to Afghanistan to help local prosecutors write those statutory requirements.

  • • •

  I needed five guys, including myself, for the Jalalabad undercover operation. For a month, all five of us had grown out our facial hair. We were going down to Jalalabad in full “Haji” mode: dressed in linen shalwar kameez with black scarves around our faces. I had a Pashtun-speaking tailor come into the embassy and make us each our own shalwar kameez. On our heads, we’d all wear Massoud caps.

  As with our outfits, the authenticity of our vehicles was paramount to the mission. We clearly couldn’t drive our government Land Cruisers. It would be like having a bull’s-eye on our backs for any suicide bomber. I acquired the money to buy four old Toyota Corollas—rust-flecked, dented, six or seven years old. I lined the floors of the Toyotas with ballistic blankets to protect us from IEDs and hand grenades.

  Some of the agents were frankly alarmed by the sight of those fragile-looking Japanese compact cars.

  “Look, I told you: We’re not military,” I said. “We’re undercover cops. We’re pursuing these traffickers in their own environment. That means using their own vehicles.”

  “What the hell?”

  They all—to a man—looked at me like I’d become unhinged.

  “We’re not gonna get within miles of Jalalabad driving a bunch of armored Land Cruisers or Suburbans,” I said. “And we’re gonna carry AK-47s. We’re not caring any American guns.”

  Carrying an M4—toting a US military weapon—would have instantly blown our cover, so we were armed only with those AK-47s, the weapon most favored by the Taliban and Al Qaeda—and by the foot soldiers of heroin kingpins like Haji Bagcho Sherzai and Haji Juma Khan.

  • • •

  For the Jalalabad mission to succeed, I needed to go into the field personally. In order to enter Jalalabad—as a GS-15 and the DEA’s country attaché, undercover—I needed written authorization from headquarters.

  Luckily, by the time of the mission, the approval had come through from the administration back in Arlington.

  There was no way, other than firsthand observation, to grasp the scope of the drug-trafficking problem. No one—neither the Afghan intel services nor our own spooks at Langley—had a handle on the details of the heroin pipeline, from the cultivation of the poppy crop to its refinement into opium paste, morphine base, and ultimately processed heroin. Our lofted high-resolution optics surveillance can only do so much.

  The mission was going to be high-risk, and I knew I couldn’t rely solely on my FAST team guys. In order to go down to a place as violent as Jalalabad and capture actual prosecutorial evidence, I needed further backup.

  The ops plan was to infiltrate the biggest opium bazaar in Afghanistan. It was located right in the heart of Jalalabad. There was no way I could accomplish that with my DEA guys alone—even with the FAST team on the periphery.

  By now I had befriended a military colonel named Greg Pate, USMC. There were various branches of the armed services I cou
ld have turned to, but I only trusted the Marines. There’s a strong, lifelong sense of brotherhood among us.

  I met with Colonel Pate in my embassy office.

  “I need peripheral support,” I told him. “I may need a quick reaction force. I may need medevac. I may need Humvees with 50-cals.”

  Colonel Pate almost laughed in my face.

  “Jalalabad? We don’t go down there unless we’re in company strength. You’re taking a handful of your guys and Afghan nationals in some Corollas?”

  “Yeah, this is what we’re doing. Get ready.”

  “Are you fucking crazy?”

  “I don’t know if I’m fucking crazy, but it’s what we’re doing.”

  We had the full support of the USMC, but I also managed to convince this young Marine colonel to have his men operating under DEA rules of engagement: no hoo-rah, no M4s drawn, no BDUs—no hard-core jarhead shit.

  • • •

  Of all the remote and desolate regions of Afghanistan, nothing is more sobering than traveling through the Khyber Pass. Since the Coalition invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, few Americans have gone through the Khyber Pass unscathed.

  Along the drive, we hit all kinds of checkpoints, and sharp-eyed Taliban guards would mistake us for actual fundamentalists, asking us in Pashtun:

  “Are you Talib?”

  We returned hard stares—not a word of English to give us away.

  We’d always let Aziz, our Afghan investigative assistant, answer the questions.

  The Talibs could only see our eyes behind our sand-flecked scarves. We drove those rattling Corollas up into the Khyber Pass, following the thousand-year-old opium smuggling route into the Kush.

  The Khyber Pass, at an altitude of 3,500 feet, connects Afghanistan and Pakistan. Once a crucial part of the ancient Silk Road, it’s considered one of the oldest trade passages in the world. Throughout history it has been an important trade route between Central Asia and South Asia as well as a strategic military location.