A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  When Kirk Meyer first got to Kabul, in 2006, the Drug Enforcement Administration had just twelve people on the ground in Afghanistan, a country that produced 80 to 90 percent of the heroin consumed in the United States. As deputy attaché, Meyer developed a reputation as a dogged agent, albeit one who abraded some colleagues. “I don’t think Kirk really had interpersonal skills,” one of his bosses told me. Near the end of the Bush administration, Meyer was asked to stand up a new team dedicated to interrupting “terrorist” financing, which meant trying to block the flood of money the Taliban used to run their thirty-thousand-man insurgency. The model for the new unit was another American team, the Iraq Threat Finance Cell, which had been started in Baghdad four years earlier to block funding for the Sunni insurgent groups and Shiite militias. In Afghanistan, the Taliban had a multiheaded fund-raising machine: the opium business, Middle Eastern donations, the Pakistani government, taxes and extortion, protection payments, and safe-travel fees that American-funded development contracts would pay to pass through areas the insurgents controlled. “The Taliban was generating enormous amounts of revenue,” recalled Mike Braun, who was the DEA’s chief of operations in Washington at the time. “We needed to have a more robust presence in Afghanistan or it was going to bite us in the ass.”

  American soldiers and diplomats didn’t know much about how all of this worked or how to deplete the Taliban’s income. Stuart Jones, the twenty-eight-year-old Treasury Department attaché in Kabul, recalled spending an excruciating day at ISAF headquarters trying to come to a collective agreement on how much money the Taliban raised each year, and where it came from. The soldiers and civilians made broad assumptions based on scant evidence. The final conclusion was somewhere in the hundreds of millions. “It was a guess in the end,” Jones said.

  Much of the money moved through the hawala, a money-transfer network akin to a low-tech Western Union that was common throughout the Islamic world. In Kabul, the Shahzada hawala market was located in the old city, in a crowded bazaar on the banks of the trash-clotted river, where vendors squatted on the ground leafing through fat stacks of currency. A customer would deposit cash at one hawala, and the recipient could pick up his money in another country, with the debts, written by hand in ledgers, being settled later between brokers. It was a world poorly understood by foreigners. The hawaladars often intermarried and relied on family partners to exclude the untrustworthy. One study estimated there were more than nine hundred hawalas in Afghanistan, whereas there were fewer than twenty banks. The State Department estimated that 80 percent of all Afghan financial transactions were executed on the hawala market. With no government oversight, smugglers and drug traffickers preferred this system to move their profits. The Afghan government officials who were supposed to regulate this industry were so intimidated by these businessmen that they wrote their reports on blank paper, with their names omitted, in case they were leaked into the wrong hands.

  The largest of the 170 registered hawalas in Kabul was called New Ansari. Twice a week, the central bank held auctions where they sold off excess U.S. dollars to keep the currency stable. New Ansari would buy 90 percent of the U.S. dollars and set the country’s exchange rate. The business had been started two decades earlier by Haji Abdullah Barakzai Ansari, a black-bearded Kandahari man who allegedly made his fortune during the Taliban era by selling opium.

  Over the years, key posts in the company were passed on to relatives and other associates, who diversified its operations. The Ansari relatives owned a bank, Afghan United Bank, which had a branch inside Mahmood Karzai’s gated community in Kandahar. They also owned a fuel import company, an Internet provider, and construction companies and held exclusive license to sell Thuraya satellite phones in Afghanistan. They had donated to Hamid Karzai’s reelection campaign. New Ansari’s customers, and their methods of doing business, became a fixation for law enforcement officers at the U.S. embassy. The Americans believed the company was moving Taliban funds and also that its owners were considering relocating to America. The company’s president and its day-to-day manager had moved their families to Dubai and were educating their children in English-language schools. They had explored buying businesses in the United States as a way of securing U.S. visas, and they had set up corresponding banking relationships with the New York branch of a Pakistani bank. “They would have gotten into the U.S. financial system,” recalled an American official who tracked them. “And that was one of the things we were trying to stop.”

  The Afghan Threat Finance Cell opened in the fall of 2008. At the beginning, the “cell” was three people. In addition to Kirk Meyer, the director, there were two deputies: a Marine reservist dispatched from Centcom and Frank Calestino, a squat thirty-two-year-old Treasury Department official with swept-over brown hair and the streetwise style of a Boston cop. Several Afghans had told Meyer that Ansari once had a personal relationship with Mullah Omar. As the story went, Omar asked Barakzai to stockpile opium. When the Taliban banned all new production, the opium price skyrocketed, and they split the proceeds. While Meyer didn’t have evidence the story was true, it had become part of New Ansari’s origin story. Calestino had served on the Iraq team, amid gun battles and IED blasts, and helped Meyer write the concept paper for the Afghan version. Nobody in Kabul had prepared for their arrival. Neither the embassy nor the military headquarters really knew why they were there or wanted to help them. When Calestino’s plane touched down at Bagram Airfield on November 17, 2008, he didn’t even know where he would sleep. He hitched a ride to his office, which turned out to be in a dilapidated trailer with a leaky roof and failing plumbing. Its electrical wiring ran out the back of the trailer and hung on a broken tree branch. In one of the rooms, Calestino saw a dusty computer, along with a note of greeting from Meyer. “I found a laptop,” he read. “See if it works.”

  The trailer became both home and office. They had started working before the interagency process in Washington had approved their creation. Without a budget or staff, they fended for themselves. Calestino made a PowerPoint presentation about what he wanted to do and Meyer shopped around to military officers asking for help. They cadged bathroom supplies and bottled water from the soldiers on base. They borrowed a Defense Intelligence Agency conference room at Bagram to go over their classified intelligence. When the Treasury attaché Stuart Jones visited Bagram, he found Meyer and Calestino mostly fighting logistical battles rather than the Taliban: finding secure communication lines to read intel reports, procuring a television. “Stu, we can’t even buy toilet paper,” Calestino complained.

  As the months went on, Meyer’s team would grow to more than seventy people—soldiers, civilians, and officers from a broad swath of the government, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the Pentagon think tank the Institute for Defense Analyses. Eventually, they moved their main office to a fenced-in section of ISAF headquarters in Kabul. Meyer added staff at the Kandahar and Bagram Airfields and at military bases in Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif, and Helmand Province. As a DEA special agent, Meyer could recruit and pay and run informants. He could enter the Bagram prison and talk to detainees because of an exemption that allowed agents to act as interrogators.

  During Meyer’s earlier tour, he had helped the DEA create an Afghan police team known as the Sensitive Investigative Unit (SIU). This was a “vetted” unit, where the officers got special training and underwent background checks and regular polygraph tests to ensure their loyalty. A tandem team, called the Technical Investigative Unit (TIU), ran a wiretapping program. The DEA could use these police to get search warrants and develop the intelligence needed to capture drug bosses operating in Afghanistan. Afghan law allowed wiretapping, with certain restrictions. Terrorism cases offered the most flexibility; investigators could listen to phone lines for an unlimited duration. For drug cases, the law allowed authorities to wiretap a single phone line once, for a period of 120 days, after judicial approval. One benefit of these law enforcement wiretaps to Meyer and his team wa
s that they were unclassified and, thus, could be shared widely within the Afghan government and the coalition. There were plenty of other eavesdropping operations in Kabul—run by the NSA, the CIA, and British intelligence, among others—but what they recorded was so highly classified it was difficult to organize large groups of people to act on the tips.

  One day in early 2008, Meyer sat down to lunch with an Afghan customs official who had requested a meeting and received one such tip. At the small Kabul restaurant, the customs official pulled out documents recording bulk cash shipments worth millions of dollars in various currencies headed for Dubai. On each one, the courier was employed by New Ansari.

  “I don’t know what they are doing, but it must be illegal,” the customs official told Meyer. “The country doesn’t have this kind of money.”

  When Meyer started the Threat Finance Cell, the Afghan SIU was working out of a house in downtown Kabul and not getting much done. “Nobody was really using them,” he said. He started building a relationship with the SIU’s commander, Colonel Asadullah Babakarkhel, an Afghan cop since the Soviet days, and started training and mentoring programs. With these police teams, Meyer had access to bilingual Afghan eavesdroppers who listened to calls and typed out thousands of pages of translated transcripts. At its height, as many as 250 Afghan “monitors,” working from cubicles inside a large metal building, were producing intelligence for Meyer.

  In May 2009, three months before the Afghan presidential election, the Threat Finance Cell began to intercept the first cell phone calls of the New Ansari hawala. In retrospect, that was the moment the scales would fall away for the Americans in Kabul. Those conversations in effect unmuted the chattering hive mind of the war’s underworld, and began to reveal a scale of crime, theft, and deception that even the most jaded among the investigators had not envisioned. Meyer had worked in Southeast Asia for years but had never seen crime anywhere near as brazen as in Afghanistan. On one level, the Taliban and Karzai’s government were at war, but that did not mean they were constantly at odds. Meyer began to believe that agendas of people who appeared to be enemies often overlapped, particularly when it came to making money. “The bad guys are interlocked with corrupt officials, drugs, insurgents and select people in the financial community. We are attacking those networks,” Meyer told a Kabul visitor. “Corrupt government officials are talking to the Taliban to ensure that they get their cut of the drug profits. It’s a lot more complicated than we ever imagined.”

  The FBI, along with Britain’s Serious Organised Crime Agency, had created a similar organization that worked in tandem with the Threat Finance Cell. Their group was known as the Major Crimes Task Force (MCTF), and it had been established to pursue kidnapping cases (occurring at a rate of about five per day), organized crime, and, increasingly, public corruption cases. It became the largest international task force the FBI had ever operated, including more than one hundred Afghan police and sixty Afghan intelligence officers.

  On October 19, 2009, officers from the MCTF arrested Afghan brigadier general Saifullah Hakim, the chief of the border police in Kandahar, and two of his subordinates, for theft, bribery, and money laundering. Using wiretaps and financial records, the investigators had found that Hakim and his men were falsifying police pay records, claiming that 2,800 police were on their rolls, while only 1,200 of them actually existed. The salaries for the “ghost” policemen were being skimmed off for their own use. For those fighting crime in Afghanistan, the arrests were a rare win, but the tactics used proved even more important. As a classified U.S. embassy cable noted, “these arrests show a significant step forward in anti-corruption efforts,” as “it is the first use of evidentiary intercepts for non-counternarcotics activity.”

  Wiretapping was spreading beyond drug cases and showing results. New Ansari was moving $3 to $4 billion a year, and now the Americans could listen to its lenders talk about where it was going. An embassy cable reported that the available intelligence “strongly suggests” that the “New Ansari hawala network is facilitating bribes and other wide-scale illicit cash transfers for corrupt Afghan officials and is providing illicit financial services for narco-traffickers, insurgents, and criminals through an array of front companies in Afghanistan and the UAE.”

  Meyer had been tasked with fighting the Taliban, but his attention was soon drawn toward bankers, ministers, and palace advisers—the elite of the government that America was ostensibly in Afghanistan to defend. “Every case we ever did began with New Ansari,” one U.S. official said.

  —

  The cargo truck drove slowly down the barricaded lane and pulled to a stop outside the entrance to the U.S. embassy. It was dark and the street was deserted, except for the idling armored vehicle on permanent standby. A few hours earlier, the twenty-three-year-old son of one of Afghanistan’s wealthiest financiers had called Stuart Jones, the Treasury Department’s attaché. A lanky southerner with an Arkansas drawl, Jones was a charming guy and made friends easily. The man on the phone, Haji Bashir, told Jones he had received a shipment of pomegranates from his family home in Kandahar, and he wanted to present some to the U.S. embassy as a gift. His father, Mohammad Jan, the manager of New Ansari, would be happy if he would accept.

  “That’s very kind of you,” Jones said.

  “I’m coming tonight.”

  Jones laughed. That wouldn’t be possible. He was busy with work. Maybe next week.

  “No, it has to be tonight.”

  The sight of a large diesel truck rolling up to the embassy gates after nine p.m. did not please the Nepalese Gurkhas assigned to guard the compound. They muttered into their radios as several muscle-bound Afghans stepped out to unload the cargo. The guards sent out their bomb dogs to sniff the vehicle. Jones strolled outside to meet the banker’s son. When he saw the truck, two scenarios flashed into his mind. “This is either a bomb, or this is a lot of pomegranates. If it’s a bomb, it’ll be quick. If it’s a bunch of pomegranates, then surely they’re not all for me.”

  Jones looked into the cargo hold. It was stacked floor to ceiling with crates and crates of pomegranates. Should he just take a couple from one of the crates? he asked. “Oh no,” the man said. “These are all for you.”

  Jones laughed. There must be some mistake, he said. He couldn’t accept this many pomegranates.

  “It will be a great insult if you don’t take all of them.”

  So for the next hour and a half, until nearly midnight, the Afghan men unloaded dozens of crates and carried them one by one into the U.S. embassy. The Americans feasted on them for weeks—glazes, juices, sauces, parties dedicated solely to martinis made with Stoli vodka and pomegranate—so much, that “if it had been a Trojan horse of poisoned pomegranates,” Jones said, “it would have killed the whole embassy.”

  Jones was a loose, casual guy, not well suited to all the self-serious rules and restrictions that came with a posting in Kabul. He believed that accepting a truckload of fruit from a notorious Afghan money mover was one of those cultural goodwill gestures required in a foreign land. Kirk Meyer didn’t like it. He had been investigating Mohammad Jan and the rest of the New Ansari crew and considered them to be a dangerous mafia family helping to corrupt the Afghan government. Meyer would tell Jones that he had him on videotape accepting the late-night pomegranate shipment. He told him that his wiretaps had picked up New Ansari associates gloating about bribing all the key people at the U.S. embassy with pomegranates and that Jones had been duped by this elaborate scheme. Meyer began referring to it as “Pomegranate-gate.”

  “I think he was pulling my leg, but he was enjoying the opportunity to watch me squirm,” Jones recalled.

  Meyer made some people uncomfortable at the embassy. Because of his recurring insomnia, vampirish intensity, and exhausting work habits, his nickname was “the Count.” He had a quiet voice and a dry, far-off way about him, a cynic in a land of sinners. But there was also something idealistic and prone to outrage in his manner, particularly when i
t came to injustices against the American taxpayer. He could berate his underlings but would also offer gestures of his time and attention that showed people how much he cared. To his adversaries, he had a beat cop’s tenacity and would not be intimidated by either Afghan mobsters or his American bosses. The crimes he was investigating genuinely galled him.

  “He was a pit bull. Passionate. He refused to back down,” one embassy staffer said of Meyer. Another colleague called him a brilliant law enforcement officer, “an amazing talent.” A Chicago native, Meyer used to compare himself to lineman William “Refrigerator” Perry of the 1985 Super Bowl champion Bears. “I’ve got one play,” Meyer would say. “Up the middle.”

  He and Calestino made an odd couple of war-zone gumshoes. Meyer was tall with a grim demeanor and a doomsday view of the war. Calestino, about two decades Meyer’s junior, was short (5 feet, 4 inches), scrappy, and easily excited. While other American diplomats stayed behind the blast walls and barricades, Meyer and Calestino constantly ventured into the Kabul throng. They would hop into their up-armored SUV, without guns or bodyguards, and drive themselves around the capital, listening to Tom Jones. They met scores of Afghan bankers and politicians and hawaladars at their homes and in Kabul restaurants and hotels. They hopped on DEA airplanes for meetings in cities across the country and flew to Dubai to track down leads among the Afghan business community.

  Meyer first met Mahmood Karzai in early 2010, after an interview that Meyer gave to National Public Radio where he mentioned some illicit land deals in Kandahar involving Ahmed Wali Karzai. Mahmood called the office of the deputy ambassador, Earl Anthony Wayne, who wasn’t around, so Wayne’s secretary walked the phone over to Meyer.