The Dark Art

by Edward Follis

  I traveled to Israel and worked closely with the newly established anti–organized crime unit of the Israeli police. As soon as I got to Tel Aviv, I met with the brigadier general in charge.

  “Do you know how important this is to us?” he told me. “This guy is our John Gotti. But we will never get a fair trial here. Abergil is still running everything from prison here.”

  It was tough negotiating, but in the end the stakes were high enough that we hammered out a compromise with the Israeli Supreme Court.

  On January 12, 2011, Yitzhak and Meir Abergil, together with three other crime family members, were extradited to the United States, arriving in Los Angeles, and were charged in a seventy-seven-page, thirty-two-count federal indictment with murder, massive embezzlement, money-laundering, racketeering, and running the largest Ecstasy ring in the United States.

  Facing a life sentence in prison, in May 2012, Yitzhak Abergil pleaded guilty in a Los Angeles federal court to being part of a racketeering enterprise that distributed Ecstasy and whose members employed murder as a routine tool of enforcement. On May 21, 2012, in a landmark plea agreement, the formerly “untouchable” kingpin was sentenced to ten years in prison.

  • • •

  We were also in the midst of developing cutting-edge technology and social networking to take down some of the world’s most notorious narco-terrorists. No one had done this before, certainly not in American law enforcement. I established the Special Investigations Unit, a dedicated narco-terrorism investigative team based in the LA Division office. I loaded it up with my best investigators interested in developing narco-terrorism cases, going exclusively after the big guns: Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah.

  As with any Internet start-up, it took months to work out the kinks, but we finally began to establish undercover personas—or avatars—in the online world of narco-terrorists. These virtual personas would enter forums to discuss radical politics, fundamentalist Islam, all in pursuit of dangerous narco-terrorists.

  The Special Investigations Unit quickly became a beehive of high-speed modems and tapping keyboards and a gaggle of languages: I had to bring in translators expert in Pashtun, Baluchi, Farsi, Dari, and Arabic. Our work in the unit led to one of the first drug-related investigations of Hezbollah in the United States. To my mind, this unit represents the investigative future, the leading edge in our fight against the global threat of narco-terrorism on both the real-life and virtual fronts.

  • • •

  Even after I’d left Afghanistan, in a sense I was always there with HJK.

  It was by far the biggest case of my life, the culmination of a lifelong career working undercover, cultivating informants, gathering actionable intel. Some twenty-seven years of law enforcement training, every instinct and trick of the trade came, into play as I engaged and befriended the wealthiest heroin trafficker on earth.

  After my return to Los Angeles, I went to Walmart and bought a Samsung flip phone solely for calls from HJK. He’d sometimes call me three times in one night. There’s more than eleven hours’ time-zone difference between Kabul and LA, so it was the middle of the day for him. Routine questions, checking in—occasionally more serious information he had on some major Taliban figure that he hoped would buy him some capital with me.

  • • •

  But by the summer of 2008, there’d been a dramatic policy shift in Washington. In mid-July, I learned—from Jimmy Soiles, the same Boston-born agent who’d been my undercover tutor in Paris—that the Department of Defense had placed Haji Juma Khan on the “kinetic” list.

  An innocuous-sounding euphemism—more palatable, I suppose, than “targeted for elimination via unmanned aerial vehicle.”

  Placing HJK on the kinetic list meant that the DoD was going to call in a strike to take him out.

  They didn’t want to “eliminate” Haji Juma Khan while he was at his compound, surrounded by civilians—his various wives and scores of kids and whatever other bystanders might end up as “collateral damage.” The plan was simple, Jimmy explained. The DoD wanted me to make one last call on the Samsung, to lure HJK via cell phone to a highway someplace in Nimruz. I begged for some leeway—just a few more months.

  “Ninety days,” I said to Jimmy. “Give me ninety days.”

  “Sixty,” Jimmy said sharply. “You’ve got sixty, Ed.”

  Sixty more days.

  For whatever reason, I was still confident I could find another way out, one that’d keep HJK alive, keep him talking, using him to our advantage in these escalating narco-terror wars . . .

  Strange as it sounds, beyond his value as a source of useful information, I’d come to care a great deal for HJK—not as a target but as a man.

  More importantly, I’d always envisioned the inevitable endgame being HJK in my custody—in a federal prison cell—continuing to provide valuable and actionable intel that could save American lives, perhaps lead us to UBL and other high-ranking Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, not charred to death in a smoldering Toyota on a red-dust highway somewhere in the province of Nimruz . . .

  I couldn’t share our confidential intel with anyone, of course. Night after night, I imagined what Don Carstensen would have done, what Rogelio and José and all my earliest teachers in Group Four would have done.

  Most of all, I thought of HJK, asking me that question in our favorite Persian restaurant.

  Why was there no other way?

  One Thursday, at 3 a.m., eyes wide open, the solution suddenly hit me.

  Time had almost run out; I couldn’t stall Jimmy or the brass at the Department of Defense any longer. The strike was scheduled in less than a month.

  In my dark bedroom, I heard myself mumbling the paradox aloud: “I have to take his life away from him to save his life.”

  • • •

  I picked up the Samsung and reached HJK at his compound in Baluchistan. Without any small talk, I let him know I had a lucrative business opportunity for him, but it was such a sensitive issue, it wasn’t safe to talk on the phones.

  We had to see each other immediately.

  “Meet me here,” he said.

  “Can’t,” I said.

  “Kabul.”

  “No, we can’t do it in Kabul.”

  “Where then?”

  “Nowhere in Afghanistan.”

  He was leery. He certainly wouldn’t consent to flying to America again, or any country in Western Europe. He finally agreed to meet me in Dubai, but I said that wouldn’t do.

  For minutes we went back and forth, but he was dug in, insisting that the meeting happen only in the Middle East.

  “How about Indonesia?” I finally suggested.

  “Indonesia?” He mulled it over.

  “Yes, I could meet you in Jakarta.”

  There was a long silence, and I could sense that his trepidation was softening.

  At last the tentativeness left his voice.

  Jakarta seemed safe enough to him. Indonesia, after all, is the world’s most populous Islamic nation. It was also, from my perspective, a country where, as SES, I’d conducted several friendly and mutually beneficial counter-narcotics operations with local Indonesian authorities.

  “Jakarta,” he said finally.

  “Yes, I’ll see you in Jakarta.”

  I snapped shut the Samsung flip phone and felt a sudden stab of pain.

  I knew that had been our last call.

  • • •

  It was the blackest of black ops—required our Afghan counterparts to acquire the false passport and visas for Haji Juma Khan. The twist: Haji Juma Khan, traveling under a fake identity, would now be thrust into the undercover role as we hustled him on board an Emirates flight to Jakarta.

  The operation alone would wind up costing us in excess of $1 million.

  He was flying commercial—first class—but we soon found that
there was no airline flight that would get me there in time to meet him in Indonesia, on October 22, 2008; DEA had to lease a private Russian-owned G-V jet to scoop me up at Long Beach Airport.

  I’ve never traveled so fast in my life: We flew over the Pacific at 750 knots—so fast that the pilots and navigator had to stand forward most of the time. Stopping to refuel in the Marshall Islands, the G-V overshot the tiny runway, nearly crashing into the drink.

  Upon touchdown in Jakarta, I rushed down the tarmac in a sweat.

  I saw, coming off the Emirates flight, this lumbering behemoth: all of six-foot-five and 370 pounds, long black beard; wearing his white shalwar kameez with a few visible grease stains, brown sandals, his white Haji hat, and a badly fitting black blazer that looked like it had been purchased at a flea market in Kabul back in 1973.

  He had no bodyguards or lieutenants around him or any luggage, just a single busted-up carry-on, the wheels of which were so warped that it was bouncing toward me . . .

  “Mister Ed!” he shouted, smothering me in one of his bear hugs, lifting me off the ground, kissing me twice, in quick succession, on each cheek.

  You’d have thought that this fellow was an illiterate peasant who’d stepped out of a village in Nimruz and barely had enough money to pay the visa fee. Not the head of the biggest heroin and opium operation in Southwest Asia, a narcotics kingpin grossing more than $1 billion a year.

  The Indonesian cops standing nearby—to a man, devout Muslims—did know the truth: As HJK walked through the airport, wheeling that wobbly carry-on, several policemen fell to their knees in front of “the Great Haji” as if he were some kind of deity.

  • • •

  In the end I managed to fulfill that bizarre paradox.

  We were in a diplomatic and jurisdictional gray area: We now had an ironclad indictment against HJK in New York, but the United States has no extradition treaty with Afghanistan, and Haji Juma Khan was traveling with a UAE passport and doctored visas anyway.

  I’d prearranged with the Indonesian authorities that they would deny HJK entry to their country so he could not exit the Jakarta airport; we had to get him back on a plane immediately. Would we be accused of snatching HJK in yet another controversial rendition as we’d done with Haji Bagcho Sherzai and Haji Khan Mohammad?

  Ultimately, before this could blow up into an international incident, with HJK now in DEA custody, seated aboard the G-V, I made a command decision, yelling at the pilots:

  “Take the fuck off!”

  I’d absorb the diplomatic and legal flak. Flying back over Asia, our pilot climbed up past 35,000 feet, higher than radar could detect.

  The pilot and copilot frantically called me on the sat-phone.

  We now faced a more pressing concern: There was not enough jet fuel to get back to New York or any place in Europe where we were authorized to land. The DEA administrator called the State Department directly. Noting that HJK had provided more than $100 million to the Taliban and Al Qaeda, State gave us “top priority” and confirmed our previously authorized clearance to land and refuel in Malta.

  Ultimately, we got HJK safely into LaGuardia.

  As soon as he landed, he was arrested under the 2006 US narco-terrorism statute, facing a multiple-count indictment of “Conspiracy to Distribute Narcotics with Intent to Provide Material Support to an Organization Engaged in Terrorism” and housed in the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Lower Manhattan.

  He was behind bars, but from my point of view, at least he was alive.

  EPILOGUE

  Haji Juma Khan is currently still incarcerated at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City. Facing a life sentence in federal prison, Haji Juma Khan has officially pleaded “not guilty,” but no trial date has yet been set.

  HJK’s current judicial status is officially categorized as “sealed” for reasons of national security.

  The full extent of the information HJK provided us has never been told—may never be told—because the details remain under seal by federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York.

  My conversations with Haji Juma Khan led to actionable movement against the Taliban’s third-in-command and to capture-or-kill operations against the very uppermost level of Al Qaeda figures, including Usama Bin Laden, who was hiding in Pakistan.

  • • •

  “Narco-terrorism,” a word first coined by Peruvian president Fernando Belaúnde Terry in 1983 and made infamous with Pablo Escobar’s violence targeting the government and people of Colombia, has now vastly expanded from being a crisis limited to Latin America.

  Indeed, narco-terrorism is now the face of twenty-first-century organized crime. Far-flung groups like the Taliban, Hamas, Hezbollah, and FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) are two-headed monsters: hybrids of highly structured global drug-trafficking cartels and politically motivated terrorists.

  Increasingly, the sale of narcotics is the first line of financing for acts of terrorism. For example, the March 11, 2004, coordinated train bombings in Madrid that killed 191 people cost relatively little—an estimated $70,000—and were financed primarily through the sale of hashish and Ecstasy.

  On our own shores, the 2014 death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman from a heroin overdose shed new light on the rapidly growing crisis of opiate abuse and addiction across the United States. The most current estimates are that first-time heroin use has increased in the United States by nearly 60 percent over the past decade. Many of us in the DEA and local law enforcement have seen it firsthand: Young people first get hooked on prescription opiates—often legally prescribed to their parents, pilfered from family medicine chests—and then start looking to buy five- and ten-dollar bags of heroin on the street.

  The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that, in recent years, opiate overdoses claimed more lives than any other injury. The CDC also reports that 75 percent of prescription drug overdose deaths involve opioid painkillers, heroin, and morphine. A 2011 study found that prescription opioid abuse costs the United States more than $55.7 billion per year in lost productivity, not to mention the incalculable costs in health care and criminal justice spending. Death by heroin overdose has recently become alarmingly common in the northeast; the DEA reported a 67 percent increase in heroin seizures and a 59 percent increase in heroin charges in New York alone.

  Abuse of legal pharmaceutical painkillers may be the first step, but to stem the flow of heroin, we must continue to strike at the warlords of the Golden Crescent. Despite all our best efforts—and billions in counter-narcotics funding—the drug crisis is at an all-time high in Afghanistan. Opium cultivation continues to spike year after year, and heroin production accounts for approximately $3 billion, or 15 percent of the Afghan GDP.

  • • •

  Nobody fought the scourge as tirelessly as my dear friend General Mohammad Daud Daud. Even after I returned to my posting as SES in Los Angeles, we continued to talk regularly and to share advice, strategy, and intelligence. General Daud often told me—with immense frustration—that, in addition to the thousands of Taliban-linked opium producers and smugglers, there were numerous government officials implicated and arrested in the illegal opium trade.

  The Taliban heroin warlords behave much like traditional Mafia extortionists: The United Nations said that in 2010 the Taliban had made $100 million the previous year by levying a 10 percent tax on independent opium-growing farmers.

  Mohammad knew that he simply did not have the financial resources or manpower to fight the battle alone. In December 2008, General Daud spoke at a United Nations conference in Kabul and said that Afghan law enforcement agencies desperately needed international assistance in training and equipment. He talked bravely about the lack of security and the linkage between drug-trafficking and terrorism, as well as the profound corruption he had witnessed within the Afghan police and the army.

 
I was fortunate enough to be part of the DEA team providing Mohammad with that needed international assistance.

  Mohammad was a fearless man and a warrior—remained a lifelong mujahideen—in the truest sense of that word. He was ready to give up his life to help transition Afghanistan from a rogue state, under the thumb of the murderous opium warlords, into a functional modern democracy governed by the rule of law.

  “Ed, I’ve already accepted that I may be killed while serving my people,” he once told me. “I say a prayer every morning when I leave my home because I’m ready to be killed.”

  Those words struck a deep chord with me, of course. How many days on the job had I said to myself—like so many of my fellow DEA agents:

  You want to die today?

  Tragically, my dear friend’s words proved prophetic.

  In May 2011, during the Taliban’s so-called Spring Offensive, General Daud was assassinated in a suicide bomb attack, after a meeting held in the headquarters of the provincial governor of Takhar Province. Six others, including two German soldiers serving in Afghanistan, were also killed. The commander of ISAF troops in North Afghanistan, General Markus Kneip, was gravely wounded.

  The Taliban immediately claimed responsibility for the terror bombing.

  I was driving down the freeway when I heard the report on all-news radio. I immediately pulled my car off the road and shut off the engine. My hands were trembling on the steering wheel, and I sat in a daze, crying, staring at the traffic speeding past.

  The prayer rug that General Daud gave me—the same one I had carried from mosque to mosque while undercover with HJK—remains my most prized possession.

  • • •

  Undercover is an art. But make no mistake: It’s a dark and dying art. Working with intelligence operatives, flesh-and-blood undercover agents—they even have Orwellian shorthand for it now: “Hum-Int” (for “human intelligence”)—requires time, patience, and refined managerial skills. We’re relying more and more on cutting-edge technology.

  For nearly three decades, undercover was my entire life. Call me old-school. Self-effacement, subterfuge, and vigilance are the keys to outmaneuvering and outplotting those who’d like to do the same to you. Knowing how to be that facade. Knowing how to become that hologram. Knowing how to get inside people’s concentric circles without them even knowing you’re doing so.