The Dark Art

Edward Follis, Douglas Century

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I was responsible for all blood. If anything happened to any of my agents or informants during an operation—even routine travel outside of the secure US Embassy compound—the weight was on me.

By early 2006, I was the country attaché, a senior member of the Drug Enforcement Administration at Level GS-15—in military terms, the pay-grade equivalent of a full-bird colonel. But I kept on doing what I’d always done: working the street. It was unheard of for a GS-15 to be tearing around a war zone in a Land Cruiser, toting an M4 carbine and a Glock 9mm, running undercover ops in the most hostile and lawless regions of Afghanistan. My superiors at DEA headquarters were often none too pleased when they read the stream of cables, emails, and sixes my team were filing from Kabul.

Honestly, it was the only way I knew how to do my job. I was never a traditional desk boss. Whether in Los Angeles, El Paso, Bangkok, Tel Aviv, Cairo, or Kabul, I was always a street agent. That’s why the DEA boys in the Los Angeles Division started calling me Custer. Fuck the odds: I was always ready to get into the game. They gave me an old framed photograph of General Custer taken a few weeks before Little Bighorn: typical black humor between cops. The portrait was hanging over my desk.

Our embassy in Kabul is a huge complex—the perimeter entrusted to a contingent of Gurkhas from Nepal, experts at security and counterterrorist work. The compound itself, which cost the United States $880 million, is surrounded by thick citadel-like walls. Unlike Baghdad, there’s no Green Zone in Kabul. Outside those high concrete walls, things were never safe. Every day there were insurgency attacks. I lived in a small apartment directly under the ambassador’s residence, and I’d wake up most mornings, ears assaulted by the sound of explosions. When Ramadan began in September 2006, we were hit by bombings for sixty days continuously.

Every time you drove out of the embassy you were a target for a suicide bomber with a VBIED—vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. I had a silver-metallic Land Cruiser with Level 3 body armor, but it could never withstand a direct hit. If you were at an intersection, you had to be ever-vigilant for VBIEDs. Even cruder: In the mob crowding the streets, asking for handouts, some kid rolls a hand grenade under the chassis and—no last-second prayers—that’s the end of it.

It was a bright June morning, and the mountain bowl of Kabul was already heavy with the promise of a hot, fetid afternoon ahead. I was at my desk, right under the imperious gaze of Custer, when I got a call from Group Supervisor Mike Marsac, who was managing one of our daily undercover operations.

I’d approved an op in which my investigative assistant Tariq, along with an Afghan informant code-named 007, was sent in undercover to purchase three kilograms of heroin for fifteen grand.

The dealers we were targeting were a smaller tributary crew, but I had a hunch that infiltrating them could lead us deeper into the orbit of the biggest opium and heroin organization on the planet and the man reputed to be their leader: the mysterious Haji Juma Khan.

It should have been a routine buy: I’d done hundreds of them in my career. But now I heard Marsac out of breath—scared shitless: “Ed, they’re fuckin’ gone!”

“Who?”

“Tariq and Double-Oh- Seven. They were just grabbed and bagged.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“I don’t know how—they were snatched off the street.”

“Mike, where are our people now?”

“We don’t know.”

“Shit.” The reality stung like some whipped-up mountain sandstorm: There’d been a security breach.  We’d had surveillance units, our DEA agents, and a team from the CNPA—the Counter Narcotics Police of Afghanistan—parked in undercover vehicles at both ends of the street. But somehow during the operation we’d been betrayed. With geometric  precision two compact cars—an older red Toyota Corolla and a gray Honda Civic—came screeching in.

The Corolla parked diagonally in front of our undercover vehicle; then the Civic rammed in tight behind. No possible way out. As Mike Marsac described it, four guys—all Afghans—snatched Tariq and 007, pulled them into their vehicle, and made a clean getaway. All in a period of less than ninety seconds. So fast that our surveillance people couldn’t race to the scene. Tariq and 007 were gone. The speed of the boxing maneuver told me one thing: Whoever snatched our people were trained intelligence operatives.

“Who’re we looking at here?” Marsac asked.

“It’s too textbook perfect,” I said. “These guys were raised by the fuckin’ KGB.”

I made a flurry of calls to the Langley boys and to the National Directorate of Security (NDS), the domestic intelligence service of Afghanistan. In effect, I was talking to two heads of the same hydra: Although the NDS was an autonomous branch of the Afghan government, our spooks were the puppet masters of the Afghan intelligence apparatus.

“Listen to me—I just lost two people!” I shouted into my Motorola.

Blanket denials. One spook with a midwestern accent kept telling me: “No, we have  operations today, but nothing involving counter-narcotics.”

I hung up on her midsentence. There was only one possible explanation: a rogue group of Afghan intelligence officers. Agents from the NDS who’d been trained by the Soviets at universities in Moscow and military bases had now gone into side business for themselves. Sure, the business of ripping off actual dealers. They must have had me and my people under surveillance and assumed that our guys—Tariq and 007—were real heroin dealers. It was a validation of our undercover disguises and techniques that we were so utterly believable as an authentic Afghan drug-trafficking organization.

The rogue unit had planned an audacious rip: kidnap Tariq and 007, steal the dope, steal the buy money, then sell the three kilograms of heroin at pure profit. A couple of dead heroin dealers in the Afghan desert: Who was going to ask any questions?

No cooperation from the spooks. We’d have to get them ourselves. I grabbed Special Agent Brad Tierney, my right-hand man in Kabul. Brad had been a US marshal in Tulsa before  landing at DEA. Fifty-three years old, tall, with thick brown hair, Tierney was a cop’s cop. A guy you could trust with your life. In fact, in the recent past, I’d done just that. Tierney had been stationed in Bangkok with me for my three-and-a-half-year stint, during which I worked to infiltrate the Shan United Army, the world’s largest drug insurgency. It was funny that so many agents stationed in Afghanistan had served with me either in Thailand or when I was in El Paso working the Mexican cartels. As if all the scattered knights and bishops and rooks had been reassembled for one final chess match . . .

The Dark Art Edward Follis, Douglas Century