The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  When you first encounter the Khyber Pass, you feel the presence of all the would-be invaders, from Alexander the Great through the Brits and the Soviets. Even today, monuments left by British Army units, as well as hillside forts, can be viewed from the highway.

  The Khyber is essentially a massive cavern. Today—and for generations—it’s been known as outlaw country. You wander off that road and you’re very quickly in the barely controlled Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATAs).

  Life is worth pennies down there. From those towering cave-pocked cliffs, any Afghan sniper can take you out with a rifle without you even seeing it coming.

  While driving my Corolla, I was looking up at the cliffs, thinking of the Sean Connery character, Danny, in The Man Who Would Be King—the British mercenary overtaken by his own hubris, ultimately killed by Afghan tribesmen on this same desolate terrain, while belting out the famous Irish patriotic ballad:

  The minstrel boy to the war is gone,

  In the ranks of death you’ll find him;

  His father’s sword he has girded on,

  And his wild harp slung behind him;

  “Land of Song!” said the warrior bard,

  “Though all the world betrays thee,

  One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,

  One faithful harp shall praise thee!”

  • • •

  We made it safely through the Khyber Pass, rumbling through the Northwest Frontier, skirting the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the barrels of our AKs bobbing in the backseat, but I knew we were still constantly being watched . . .

  Somehow—miraculously—our cover held.

  Jalalabad was inarguably the most dangerous city in the region. There was no corner of that swarming city where a Westerner could feel safe. I’ve been in some scary locations—Thailand, Burma, Ciudad Juárez—but Jalalabad was like no place I’d ever been in my life.

  And the opium bazaar was like no other drug location on the planet. It almost resembled a flea market, but instead of a bunch of costume jewelry and old furniture and bicycles, there were dozens of stands selling different brands of pure opium and refined heroin and morphine base.

  The place was huge and carnival-like; the atmosphere is actually convivial.

  To do the actual drug buy, I sent two of my Afghan guys in—most crucially our indigenous Pashtun-speaking informant Aziz. The opium bazaar was so brazen, you could openly buy kilos, or even make a consignment order for a larger purchase.

  Before I sent Aziz on the set, I’d secured a “hawk” around his neck.

  The hawk is a covert recorder—not US government–made but produced by a private-sector company and state-of-the-art. The hawk records clear video as well as audio. It’s undetectable. The downside is that, unlike a Kel device, it doesn’t transmit: It simply records, so the backup team can’t rush on the set if shit goes bad.

  At this time the hawk was so new—so minute, so sophisticated—that even if the Taliban drug lords were to examine it, they would never even know what they were looking at.

  I was hanging back, dressed in my Talib disguise, watching as Aziz met face-to-face with Haji Bagcho Sherzai. Bagcho was surprisingly small, about five-foot-two, with a friendly-looking face and snow-white beard. The first bombshell piece of evidence was the moment we got him admitting to his opium production and heroin sales on the hawk videotape.

  Then Aziz purchased two kilograms of pure heroin from Bagcho’s stall in the bazaar. That was all we needed from that raucous opium marketplace.

  • • •

  Immediately after the heroin purchase, I called in the FAST boys. I got Jeff Higgins on the radio.

  “All right, Higgins. Unleash your dogs.”

  Now the FAST team members could go in and do what they’d been trained to. They stormed into the bazaar and kicked ass.

  The entire bazaar went berserk. At any time one of these Talibs could have whipped out an AK. But we were lucky: We acted so quickly, we avoided a gunfight.

  Higgins and our FAST team tore the place apart, seized all the ledgers, all the evidence that we’d need from Bagcho’s booth in the bazaar.

  Shortly thereafter, we executed raids on Bagcho’s various residences in and around Jalalabad. We seized one ledger that was a treasure trove of records of all his narcotics deals and finances.

  His workers had written everything down—old-school. They didn’t even use calculators. Every single major opium transaction was handwritten in those kinds of ledger books that haven’t been used by accountants in the States in decades.

  One ledger, cataloguing Bagcho’s activities during 2006, reflected heroin transactions of more than 123,000 kilograms. The evidence was incontrovertible that Bagcho used a portion of his drug proceeds to provide the Taliban governor of Nangarhar Province and two Taliban commanders responsible for insurgent activity in eastern Afghanistan with cash, weapons, and other supplies so that they could continue their jihad against US and other Coalition troops.

  We later learned perhaps the most stunning statistic of all: Based on heroin production statistics compiled by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in 2006, Haji Bagcho conducted heroin transactions worth more than $250 million, approximately 20 percent of the world’s total production for that year.

  In Nangarhar, Bagcho was not only the biggest drug warlord; he was sending millions of dollars to Japan, importing vehicles. In fact, ironically, as I later found out, the very Toyota Corollas I had purchased turned out to be ones that Bagcho’s organization had imported from Japan.

  Once we garnered all the evidence against Bagcho, we had to take it to the US prosecutors. We first took the case to the Southern District of New York. They weren’t interested; for a variety of political reasons, they balked.

  So we went to the Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs Section (NDDS) within the Department of Justice.

  NDDS gladly took the case and indicted Haji Bagcho Sherzai. He was “rendered”—but only after the president of Afghanistan had, reluctantly, given us authorization. Despite what you hear in the press, rendering a wanted criminal to the United States is not extralegal—it’s not in violation of international law: It’s just an atypical way of doing an extradition. There was no extradition treaty between the United States and Afghanistan, so we had no other option but to render Bagcho.

  Most of the times when we render an Afghan opium kingpin, we get him across the border into Pakistan, load him onto a military helicopter, then onto a long-range transport aircraft, which flies nonstop to Dulles Airport. As soon as he lands in the United States, he is formally charged and locked up in the US federal system.

  After a high-profile trial in Washington, DC, Bagcho Sherzai became only the second person to be convicted under the Title 21, 960a, narco-terrorism statute.

  He received a sentence of life in prison.*

  • • •

  Only hours after we had successfully rendered Bagcho, we received an even more alarming piece of intel, again through one of our highly reliable Pashtun-speaking informants in Jalalabad.

  Yet another Taliban-linked opium warlord was planning an attack on our troops. Though he wasn’t as big as Bagcho in terms of annual opium and heroin sales, this warlord proved a greater risk to our armed forces in the region.

  Haji Khan Mohammad was a diminutive, black-bearded Taliban—who looked, frankly, like a pint-sized version of Bin Laden. At first glance, we thought Mohammad was simply another opium trafficker. We targeted him, and I decided to send down one of our most-capable Pashtun-speaking informants.

  I briefed the informant in my office.

  “Make sure you get inside his underwear,” I said.

  He stared at me, uncomprehending.

  Within the embassy walls, I was known for that phrase, but it meant nothing to Pashtun-speakers.

  “I just mean, ge
t right next to him,” I said.

  We sent our informant in, wearing the hawk, for a face-to-face meeting with Mohammad—we often also referred to him as HKM. He bought a few kilos of dope from Mohammad. From that initial meeting, the informant spent weeks gradually gaining HKM’s trust and actually befriended him. Of all the major traffickers in the region, HKM was the most extreme Taliban supporter and financier. Through the informant, we learned about a Taliban rally scheduled to take place just outside Jalalabad in Nangarhar Province.

  It was a nighttime rally, visibility would be low, so we could now assume the calculated risk of sending in actual DEA agents—white American faces thoroughly obscured by Afghan head wraps and scarves—to observe the Taliban rally undercover.

  Now we weren’t dealing strictly with opium and heroin merchants but with actual frothing fundamentalists, and those rallies—all recorded on our hawk devices—were an invaluable intel source. At these rallies, Taliban fanatics would go into a state of reverie: They had no governors on their mouths. All their screaming, their hatred, their threats against Americans came out unfiltered. They named names, shouted accolades and praises about all the local Taliban cohorts and traffickers in Nangarhar Province who supported them.

  All our people inside the rally were wired up with hawks, and besides Mohammad, we identified additional traffickers operating in Nangarhar. It was rather like the FBI back home, when Mafia families have a wedding or christening; all the feds will aggregate on surveillance, using long-range lenses to take pictures of the attendees and the cars’ license plates.

  From this rally, we learned that Mohammad was not only selling heroin, he also was stockpiling a cache of weapons, including Russian rockets.

  And it was more than just foaming at the mouth. HKM directly told two of our informants, all recorded on our hawks, that he was going to use those weapons against our military forces in Jalalabad at our forward operating base.

  When the intel came to me, I went straight back to Ambassador Neumann’s office.

  “This is even more pressing than heroin,” I told the ambassador. “They’re about to drop rockets on our boys.”

  “How imminent is the threat?” he asked.

  “I think they’re going to attack Jalalabad within a matter of days.”

  Ambassador Neumann questioned me on our sources of intel. I told him how we’d made the initial purchase of dope from HKM, which in turn had led to us infiltrating the Taliban rally.

  “What are you going to do, Ed?”

  “We’re going to arrest him.”

  That was one of the ambassador’s main diplomatic agendas. He always stressed the need to teach Afghans good governance, to lead by example: show them that we abided by the rule of law—not just in principle but also in practice. Ambassador Neumann was an unyielding proponent of that. He didn’t like the so-called “kinetic” list—by which the Department of Defense often targeted these opium warlords, without arrests or trials, simply using stealth drone strikes.

  He truly believed, as an idealist, that we were there to rebuild the country. We were not there to have our FAST teams out on paramilitary raids; we were there to inspire the local Afghan police into developing a functioning state. Jeffersonian democracy may not have been feasible, given the complexities of the tribal and regional history, but the ambassador believed that we were there to serve as a model, to inspire an Afghan variation of our Western democratic rule of law.

  • • •

  We knew now that Mohammad was unequivocally a Taliban financier, but he was also known to be extremely elusive. We targeted him and other Nangarhar-based traffickers we’d learned about during the rally. They all lived near Jalalabad, but more in the outlying province south of the city, near Tora Bora—the remote cave complex where we nearly caught Bin Laden in 2001.

  This was more than a typical Drug Enforcement Administration operation. We had to run it the way the spooks would—as a black op. We used optical surveillance to follow Mohammad’s people. Sure enough, the information from the rally wasn’t idle talk: He had stockpiled a cache of Russian rockets, mostly Type 63 or Type 81 Russian-made 107mm.

  I made one of those executive decisions that never get documented in the official reports. “We’re not making any arrests at this point,” I said. “We’ll just go take the missiles.”

  And that’s what we did. Jeff Higgins led the FAST team out there, and in the middle of the night, in some remote desert patch, they started digging with spades. They found Stingers, MANPADS, and those Soviet-era surface-to-air rockets.

  We loaded them up in our vehicles and disappeared into the Afghan night.

  It was, again, a classic strategy for creating internal dissension. I was applying the street-policing technique that Steve Whipple had taught me of “tickling the wire” back in El Paso and Ciudad Juárez. Soon enough, the theft of the rockets caused major dissension within Mohammad’s group.

  We were up on all their cell phones, of course, and we quickly heard all the chatter: They thought that someone was betraying them from inside; that one of them had turned informant or, worse, was selling the rockets for his own personal profit.

  It crushed all internal cohesiveness and trust. One by one, they began to turn on one another. And through that dissension, flipping informants, we lured Mohammad out.

  We didn’t even charge him with the potential attacks on our forward operating base; we simply made the drug-trafficking case stick. Got him across the border into Pakistan, rendered him on charges of violating the 960a statute, and like Bagcho he was immediately on a Dulles-bound C-130 military jet.

  Also like Bagcho, the Taliban opium lord ultimately got life in a US federal prison. My strategy of taking the street-policing techniques I’d first learned under Rogelio Guevara and José Martinez, then furthered working with Mike Bansmer in Thailand and Steve Whipple in El Paso, was paying impressive and immediate dividends.

  • • •

  The opium bazaar takedown of Bagcho Sherzai and the seizure of Mohammad’s cache of rockets were major successes, to be sure, but of the three Afghan opium lords—the three Hajis—I worked with during my time as country attaché in Kabul, I little realized that it would be with the most enigmatic of the trio that I would become most intimate; that indeed we would start to think of—and even to refer to—each other as brothers.

  CHAPTER 8

  SHIRAZ

  He was a lumbering mountain of a man, standing six-foot-five, weighing more than 370 pounds—a billionaire narco-trafficker with the build of an NFL lineman. None of our intel photos had done HJK justice: When I first met him, he was so massive, he could scarcely fit through the doorway of my apartment at the US Embassy.

  His full tribal name was Haji Juma Khan Mohammadhasni—that’s how he was listed in our DEA files—but I never heard anyone call him that. Among Afghans in the street, he’d be spoken of, reverentially, in half-whispers, by other aliases: Haji Abdullah and Haji Juma Khan Baluch.

  To me he was simply HJK.

  The name itself is a string of lofty titles: “Juma Khan” translates as “Mr. Friday.” And “Haji,” again, is the honorific bestowed on a man who’s made pilgrimages to Mecca—Islam’s holiest site. Being a Haji afforded HJK enormous respect in the Afghan streets, but also—as I would later see when I lured him into coming to Jakarta in 2006—from millions of Muslims, even members of law enforcement, around the world.

  Like many major traffickers, Haji Juma Khan was no fundamentalist. He was first and foremost a savvy businessman, a man who knew how to save his own skin—along with his billions of dollars—navigating the murderous years of Soviet invasion, civil war, the rise of the Taliban, and the 2001 invasion by our Coalition forces.

  He was an ethnic Baluch—one of the country’s smaller minority tribes—so his power was centered in the Baluchistan region, but his organization spread over swaths of eastern Iran, west
ern Pakistan, and southern Afghanistan. He’d seized control of the desert province of Nimruz in late 2001 and turned it into his personal fiefdom. The Nimruz region is dotted with labs producing opium paste and morphine base: simple shacks where turbaned men use chemicals and vats of boiling water to refine bars of sticky brown opium into bags of powdery white or brown heroin.

  • • •

  Haji Juma Khan’s personal wealth was staggering, his profits calculated in the billions. The DEA believed that several hundred million of his narco-dollars went straight to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, as well as to other jihadist and Baluch insurgent groups.

  HJK was known to be a close confidant of Usama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar. He’d been a founding member of the Quetta Shura—the elite council composed of top leadership of the Afghan Taliban, known to be directing the military insurgency against our US and Coalition forces.

  But Haji Juma Khan also had friends and relatives within the highest ranks of government. Within the Karzai administration, his cousin was minister of tourism and tribal affairs. I personally saw HJK coming to stay in the minister’s residence whenever he visited Kabul. Indeed, the British intelligence agents at MI6 reported that HJK had allegedly used Ahmed Wali Karzai—the president’s own half-brother, who has since been assassinated—as “a conduit to bribe both governors to allow narcotics to be processed and transported through their provinces without impediment.”

  • • •

  One warm Thursday night in Kabul, I found HJK holding court at his favorite Persian restaurant, Shiraz, where he sat in his usual corner table, back to the wall, eyes on the door. The restaurant staff treated him like royalty. Shiraz was no dive; it was the equivalent of a five-star restaurant, though a fine meal there would only cost us a few US dollars.

  The restaurant was dim, mostly candlelit, with a few shaded bulbs, the carpets a deep shade of maroon. All around us, the walls were decorated with wooden-framed pictures of young Persian women draped in their classical dress; the intent was lurid, but the only flesh you could see was the two inches around their eyes. But such eyes! Almond-shaped, jet-black, piercing, all-knowing eyes. A hundred of the most gorgeous, heavily lashed Persian eyes watching you from every wall and corner of the restaurant. It was the closest you’d ever see to a sexually explicit image in Afghanistan.