After 15 years of legal battles the CIA agrees to pay $3 million to a former DEA agent who accused a former CIA official of illegally eavesdropping on him as part of a joint CIA and State Department effort to thwart DEA’s anti-narcotics mission in Burma in the early 1990s.

Richard Horn was stationed in Burma in the early 1990s as the DEA country attaché to Burma, a nation that is ranked as one of the top opium poppy producing countries in the world. He was in charge of overseeing DEA’s mission in Burma involving eradication of the opium poppy, which is used to produce heroin.

Bill Conroy of Narco News covers the latest on State Secrets Privilege recipient Richard Horn. As always Conroy dares to dig and cover this significant story when the rest of the media stenographers are avoiding it like the plague and as they are told by their mighty government sources above.

“The CIA’s efforts to undermine Horn’s work in Burma in getting that nation’s government to stem the flow of heroin to the United States should come as no surprise to those who are familiar with the “Agency’s” history. It seems the CIA, over the decades, has often found itself in the corner of narco-traffickers and thugs who support the Agency’s covert objectives in areas deemed critical to U.S. special interests – whether that be in Southeast Asia, Central Asia or Latin America.”

The CIA list of hotshots involved in the case includes former CIA Director George Tenet and recently retired Acting CIA General Counsel John Rizzo. Tenet and Rizzo played major roles in setting up the legal basis to justify the CIA’s use of torture. Here is Mr. Rizzo in action during the agency’s cover up operation on torture:

And now, as part of the Horn case filed in a Washington D.C. federal court, we find a U.S. District judge, former FISA court member Royce Lamberth, opening the door for sanctions to be brought (as a result of the fraud, or lie, perpetrated on the court) against Tenet and Rizzo — as well as several other current and former CIA officials, among whom is Robert Eatinger, the current Acting Deputy General Counsel for Operations in the CIA’s Office of General Counsel (OGC).

If Lamberth’s judicial opinions in the Horn case are allowed to remain in the court record — to be recalled and cited going forward by other lawyers, judges and academics — then untold damage could be done to the reputation of the CIA and its leadership. Those judicial opinions memorializing the CIA’s fraud on the court also would serve as a permanent reminder of the occasionally dubious credibility of the Agency’s pronouncements invoking national security and the state-secrets privilege.

As part of this article Conroy provides a complete timeline and background on Horn’s case, involved CIA culprits, and of course, the mind-boggling and nauseating conclusions and implications. I highly encourage you to read Bill Conroy’s A+ piece: Click Here. Afterwards we will have plenty to discuss over here, and plenty to show those who write off CIA’s long past and still present involvement in global Narco-Trafficking as fiction or conspiracy!

This site depends exclusively on readers’ support. Please help us continue by contributing directly and or purchasing Boiling Frogs showcased products.

The revelation1 that Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s brother Wali is on the Central Intelligence Agency payroll and is a known drug lord has complicated President Obama’s already torturous internal debate on Afghanistan and dredged up questions about long-standing ties between the C.I.A. and illegal drugs.

Though controversial, there is evidence that from Laos2 to Nicaragua3 to Afghanistan, and many places in between, the C.I.A has a long history of links to illegal drugs as a means to buy allies and fund off-the-books missions.  

The C.I.A first backed Afghan drug lords in 1979, according to David Musto and Joyce Lowinson, members of the White House’s Strategic Council on Drug Abuse, who wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed on May 22, 1980:

“We worry about the growing of opium in Afghanistan or Pakistan by rebel tribesmen who apparently are the chief adversaries of the Soviet troops in Afghanistan. Are we erring in befriending these tribes as we did in Laos when Air America (chartered by the Central Intelligence Agency) helped transport crude opium from certain tribal areas?”4

Drug Enforcement Agency reports in 1980 showed Afghan rebel movements were “determined in part by opium planting and harvest seasons.”5 

One U.S.-backed drug lord was Yunas Khalis. “He spent most of his time fighting, but the wars were not primarily with the Soviets,” writes Alexander Cockburn and Jeffery St. Clair.6 “Instead, Khalis battled other Afghan rebel groups, the object of the conflicts being control of poppy fields and the roads and trails from them to his seven heroin labs near his headquarters in the town of Ribat al Ali. Sixty percent of Afghanistan’s opium crop was cultivated in the Helmand Valley, with an irrigation infrastructure underwritten by USAID.”

The Soviets withdrew. But there have been consequences for the short-term strategy of “the-enemy-of-my-enemy-is-my-friend,” when your new friends are opium kingpins or religious extremists. The civil war that followed brought the Taliban to power, with its monstrous mistreatment of women and girls. That did not stop the U.S. from negotiating with them over a pipeline deal, which eventually fell through.7

The Taliban then hosted Osama bin Laden in the run-up to 9/11 and the current eight-year U.S. war began. The stated purpose is to prevent the Taliban from regaining power so it cannot again facilitate another strike against the U.S. But security analysts are far from convinced  that would likely happen again.    

The war has the support of some Western women’s rights groups who contend that preventing a Taliban comeback is enough reason to spill blood and treasure.  Many Afghan women disagree, arguing that NATO has made life worse for them.  The U.S. backed-Karzai and tribal chiefs are little better. Girls now go to school. But Karzai signed a law making it illegal for a Shia wife to refuse sex with her husband, who can deny her food if she does.

Washington says it’s trying to interdict 92 percent of the world’s opium that fuels organized crime and enslaves 15 million addicts around the world, mostly in Europe, Russia and Iran. But opium production continues to increase and provides substantial funding for the religious Taliban. According to a new U.N. report, the Taliban derive as much as $160 million a year through imposition of an ushr tithe on opium production and trade. 

“We are already a narco-state,” Mohammad Nader Nadery of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission told the Christian Science Monitor. “If the governors in many parts of the country are involved in the drug trade, if a minister is directly or indirectly getting benefits from drug trade, and if a chief of police gets money from drug traffickers, then how else do you define a narco-state?”

Abdul Karim Brahowie, Afghanistan’s minister of tribal and frontier affairs, told the paper “the government has become so full of drug smugglers that cabinet meetings have become a farce.”8  After Malalai Joya, a Member of Parliament, denounced drug traffickers and warlords in government, she escaped several attempts on her life.

The U.S. supports this drug-lord-infiltrated government with significant aid—a total of $5.1 billion in fiscal year 2009, according to the Congressional Research Service. C.I.A. budget outlays are secret. But the Pentagon provides 56 percent of this total fighting the drug-lord-supported Taliban partly by hiring illegal militias owned by drug lords, according to a recent New York University study. “The use of unregistered [private security companies] and militia groups by NATO … and US military contingents is widespread, “ said the report, The Cost of Security in Afghanistan. “Many of these [private security providers] serve as ready-made militias that compete with state authority and are frequently run by former military commanders responsible for human rights abuses or involved in the illegal narcotics and black market economies.”

Among the owners of these militias are Karzai’s brothers, Wali and Hasmat, as well as Hamid Wardak, the son of Defense Minister Rahim Wardak; Gul Agha Shirzai, the governor of Nangarhar province; and Hajji Jan Mohammad Khan, the former governor of Uruzgan, the report says.

In August, the Pentagon put 50 Taliban-tied drug traffickers on a list to be captured or killed. But it singled out none tied to the government.

The war in Afghanistan seems like a large-scale Brooklyn turf battle among petty drug gangs with government and Western-backed drug lords battling against the Taliban’s for control of a $65 billion a year illegal industry.

U.S. and C.I.A. intentions might well spring from a sincere belief that it takes getting in bed with anyone to stop another 9/11. But these drug lords may well be taking the U.S. taxpayer for a ride, gladly welcoming American support to help them gain opium market share.

The report says illegal, armed militias hired by the U.S. are better paid and equipped than the Afghan national army. The report estimates that $600 million are paid to these militias a year, though the exact amount is unknown. “Financing armed, alternative power structures fulfills security needs in the short-term at the cost of consolidating government authority in the long-term,” it says.

The Afghan Ministry of Interior has issued operating licenses to only 39 of these groups “to prevent their involvement in criminality,” but “the interests of Afghan elites and the international community have proven an obstacle to strengthening and enforcing the existing national regulatory and legislative framework.” In other words, the report says the U.S. and Afghan leaders have fostered the criminality of these groups.

Is this a temporary arrangement to defeat the Taliban after which the U.S. would then turn against its own drug lords? That hardly seems likely given that a military defeat of the Taliban would require as many as 800,000 U.S. troops, according to the U.S. Army’s new field manual on counter-insurgency.  In fact there has been a direct correlation between the growth of NATO forces and the growth of the Taliban, spurring the argument that a reduction of the one will lead to the reduction of the other.

In some past cases, the C.I.A. used laundered drug money to finance operations. A Congressional investigation could determine whether that is still happening. Former C.I.A. director George Tenet complained at the beginning of the war that the agency’s efforts were being underfunded9.  Where did those bags of cash given out to warlords come from?

At the very least, the Pentagon and the C.I.A. are supplying arms and money to keep the Afghan drug trade going. I asked a senior U.N. official familiar with the U.N.’s anti-drug policies whether he thought the C.I.A. was profiting from the Afghan drug trade. “You have good instincts, follow your guts,” he told me.

Officials are either in denial, or want to hide from the taxpayers their unwitting generous support of misogynistic drug gangs to fight the Taliban. I asked a senior U.S. official at the U.N. about the payments to Karzai’s brother. She told me she knew nothing about it.

I then asked U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon at a press conference. He wouldn’t comment on Wali Karzai, but said, “I have been repeatedly urging, whenever I had an opportunity of meeting President Karzai in the past, that he must make sure to eradicate these corrupt practices, including opium cultivation and opium trafficking. … Unless he addresses these corrupt practices prevalent in Afghanistan, it will not be possible to expect to have credible governance.”

It’s no wonder President Obama is taking so long.  There is no solution: only bad short-term outcomes, some worse than others.

If he pulls out the troops and the Taliban resume power the Republicans would skin him alive in the mid-term and next presidential election.  He cannot send the 800,000 troops the Army manual says is needed. If he deploys 40,000 more they will get bogged down, casualties will mount, with no resolution to the war, and he’ll suffer politically too. I’m not sure he likes the idea of forming alliances with drug traffickers, but what would be the consequences if he publicly confirmed the Wali Karzai story and said those days were over?

Perhaps the president might listen to the Afghan people.  They want development, an end to occupation, to corruption, to civilian casualties at NATO’s hands and an alternative to both the Taliban and the government.10

That means Obama needs to find a counterforce to drug gangs on all sides. One idea might be to support Pashtun and Baluchi movements.

The Pashtun Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan were part of Afghanistan, Afghans claim, for a thousand years until the Afghan Amir ceded control to Britain after the Second Anglo-Afghan War. Britain made it part of British India in 1893. The border was known as the Durand Line—named for Mortimer Durand, the British India foreign secretary, who negotiated it. It split the Pashtun people into two different countries.

The same happened to the Baluchis further south.  When Pakistan succeeded British India in 1947 it took over the border provinces, where it is currently fighting the Pakistani Taliban, with the fate of Pakistan and possibly its nuclear arsenal at stake.

One option for Obama is for the U.S. and the C.I.A. to fight the drug lords on all sides and instead foster a popular Pashtun alternative to both the Taliban and the Pashtun Karzai.  The White House has talked about a so-called “small-t” Taliban strategy. But there are no “moderate” Taliban. They are extremists by definition that do not represent most Pashtuns who are fed up with the corruption, violence and trafficking of both sides. 

There is a huge pool of disaffected people to work with. But Pakistan’s ISI intelligence agency has made a point of killing “moderates” that try to form political groups by inviting them in and then disposing of them, say Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould.11 “It’s a very nasty business and the U.S. has been supporting it for 30 years,” they told me. “Most Afghans that work for the Taliban do it for the money, not for politics.” In that sense, though they may be working for the Taliban, they are not ideological members.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert Gates threatened a few days ago to cut off aid to Karzai’s government if he does not fight corruption in earnest. That is a start that could lead to withdrawing aid from drug lords, starting with Karzai’s brother, and supporting anti-Taliban Pashtuns, even with arms.

This might be underway. The New York Times reported on November 21: “American and Afghan officials have begun helping a number of anti-Taliban militias that have independently taken up arms against insurgents in several parts of Afghanistan, prompting hopes of a large-scale tribal rebellion against the Taliban. The emergence of the militias, which took some leaders in Kabul by surprise, has so encouraged the American and Afghan officials that they are planning to spur the growth of similar armed groups across the Taliban heartland in the southern and eastern parts of the country.”

If indeed these independent militias are not tied to the drug trade, with NATO they could battle drug gangs on both sides to eradicate the crop while development aid is poured into alternative industries and agriculture. The C.I.A. could drop its adopt-a-drug trafficker program. If you defeat drugs, you could defeat the Taliban and Afghan government corruption. Let them thrive and this conflict will carry on, unless the U.S. and NATO could live with a narco-state, as long as its friends, and not the Taliban, are running it.

Joe Lauria is an author, foreign affairs correspondent and investigative reporter. He has covered the United Nations for 19 years for numerous newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, the Boston Globe, the London Daily Telegraph, the Montreal Gazette and the Johannesburg Star. Joe is a member of the Sunday Times of London’s investigative unit. He is co-author of A Political Odyssey, a look at America’s defense industry and the false threats it thrives on.

1 Very possibly leaked to the New York Times by U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, who crossed swords with Karzai, or Peter Galbraith, the deputy U.N. representative, who was fired by the U.N. for speaking out against Karzai’s attempt to steal the Aug. 20 presidential election.  This article appeared 11 days before the scheduled second round of the election, made necessary because Karzai was found to have cheated in the first round, and appeared designed to hurt Karzai’s chances of re-election. He was declared the winner when his challenger withdrew because Karzai refused to replace corrupt members of the so-called Independent Electoral Commission.

2 See James Mills, The Underground Empire, p. 33 and Joe Trento, Prelude to Terror, p. 31-38 and Alexander Coburn and Jeffery St Clair, Whiteout, p. 246-247.

3 Alexander Coburn and Jeffery St Clair, Whiteout, p. 1-60.

4 ibid, p. 260

5 ibid, p. 260

6 ibid, p. 256

7 See Forbidden Truth: U.S.-Taliban Secret Oil Diplomacy and the Failed Search for Bin Laden, by Jean-Charles; Dasquie, Guillaume Brisard, 2002.

8 Scott Baldauf and Faye Bowers, “Afghanistan riddled with drug ties,” Christian Science Monitor, May 13, 2005.

9 Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, p.435.

10 WHAT AFGHANS WANT by Andrew Garfield, Foreign Policy Research Institute, October 30, 2009

11 See Paul Fitzgerald and Elizabeth Gould, Invisible History: Afghanistan’s Untold Story, Jan. 2009