A Kingdom of Their Own

by Joshua Partlow

  “You don’t understand my family,” Mahmood told him, as Meyer recalled.

  “Well, let me talk to you.”

  Meyer seized the opportunity and drove over to one of Mahmood’s homes that was located a few minutes from the embassy.

  “You don’t have a security detail,” was the first thing Mahmood told him.

  “Why?” Meyer asked. “Do I need one?”

  In that first meeting, Mahmood sought to impress on Meyer the probity of his business dealings. He offered documents and tax records, and explained his associations with Aino Mena in Kandahar and the country’s most successful financial institution, Kabul Bank. Meyer saw Mahmood as a salesman, a man earnestly trying to hawk the notion that he was clean.

  From Mahmood and his other contacts, Meyer began learning more about New Ansari. The picture kept getting uglier. Every day, the company’s couriers were toting carry-on luggage stuffed with cash onto commercial flights out of Kabul’s airport. Afghanistan did not have currency controls, so anyone could declare unlimited travel cash. Some of New Ansari’s employees lived in Dubai. They would take a morning flight to Kabul, collect their cash, and fly back in the afternoon, repeating the commute several times a week. Meyer’s team found one Afghan traveler carrying three suitcases stuffed with $3 million in American currency and $2 million more in Saudi Arabian riyals. In April 2010, one New Ansari courier declared $700,000 on a flight to Dubai. Upon inspection, the customs agent found $600,000 more. The man had so much cash, one American official recounted, “he did not realize how much he really had.” In the last half of 2009, New Ansari’s couriers had declared $948 million at the Kabul airport, almost all of it headed for Dubai. The Afghan government collected less in revenue that entire year.

  That summer, Meyer’s team made one of its first breakthroughs in the New Ansari case. His Afghan eavesdroppers heard the deputy chairman of Afghan United Bank talking about payments with one of Karzai’s cabinet ministers, Mohammad Sediq Chakari. Chakari, a member of the Northern Alliance and a respected Arabic scholar, was in charge of the Ministry of Hajj and Religious Affairs, the government office that organized annual travel for thousands of Afghans to the holy Islamic site Mecca, in Saudi Arabia. A hajj trip was a highlight of any Muslim’s religious life. For most who made the journey, it was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. In a place as poor as Afghanistan, families saved up for years for the chance to go. From the New Ansari phone intercepts, Meyer’s team came to learn that Chakari was profiting from an elaborate kickback scheme. As they explained the scheme, the Afghan government allotted a fixed number of pilgrims to more than ten travel agencies based in Dubai, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere. Chakari made it known that to win one of the contracts, the agencies had to pay a fee per pilgrim. Each agency ended up paying an average of $75,000 to him to secure licenses to transport and house Afghans on their journey. Here was an obvious target, a man the embassy described in a cable as “known for being corrupt.” Chakari was not close with Karzai, so he would likely have little palace protection, and his crimes were cheating Muslims, in a country that prided itself on its reverence for Islam.

  “We were trying to find a high-level government official who could be arrested, to try to start the whole idea that you could deal with these major corruption issues,” Meyer said. “It was just assumed that this would be a no-brainer.”

  Meyer’s investigation would ultimately help the Afghan government recover more than $1 million. In addition to the kickbacks, Chakari also sold Saudi visas for $2,000 each; five had gone to former Guantánamo Bay detainees with links to Pakistani extremist groups. The bribery was increasing the cost for average Afghans to travel to Mecca by hundreds of dollars, making it the most expensive country in the region for pilgrims. Meyer had been told that Iran had opened its borders to Afghan Shiite pilgrims who wanted to make the trip from there, as it cost so much less. There were also phone calls that indicated that Chakari was talking with contacts from a range of insurgent groups, including the Taliban, the Haqqani network, and Hezb-i-Islami. In October 2009, an Afghan intelligence officer had arrested two hajj ministry employees acting as couriers for Chakari and seized $362,000 and some Saudi riyals. At the couriers’ trial, the judge played recorded conversations between the Afghan United Bank vice chairman, Haji Mohammad Rafi Azimi, and the minister, Chakari, discussing bribes.

  On the day the Afghan Sensitive Investigative Unit moved to arrest Chakari, one of President Karzai’s aides called the deputy attorney general and told him to drop the case. Meyer was in the deputy attorney general’s office when he took the phone call. “I was a little shocked,” he said. Despite a travel ban in his name, Chakari, a dual Afghan-British citizen, arrived at the Kabul airport waving a letter from the attorney general’s office, saying he had cooperated in the case and was free to leave. After he touched down safely in London, the attorney general’s office insisted that since Chakari had not been convicted of anything, they could not stop him from traveling.

  These types of events were testing the patience of the Western leaders who were giving their taxpayer money to Karzai’s administration, while debating whether to send even more troops. Around the time of Chakari’s escape, British prime minister Gordon Brown gave a speech threatening to limit British support for the war. “Sadly, the government of Afghanistan has become a byword for corruption,” he said. “And I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm’s way for a government that does not stand up to corruption.”

  In Kabul, Meyer was appalled. When he brought up the escape, Attorney General Mohammad Ishaq Aloko wasn’t interested in discussing it. Aloko wanted to talk about another case: the Afghans had just caught Dutch and American nonprofit workers carrying some gospel music in their backpacks.

  “He was all excited about that, but he could care less about the guy who was overcharging people who’d saved their entire lives to go on an Islamic pilgrimage,” Meyer said. “One would think that the fact that he was stealing money from the hajj would be something nobody would countenance. Little did we know this would be something that many people would countenance.”

  Chakari’s escape didn’t deter Meyer, and he continued to pursue New Ansari. Because of the difficulty of getting firsthand information about the hawala business, Meyer regularly met with the New Ansari leadership in Kabul, at a suite they kept at a downtown hotel, over lunches and dinners at the Serena, and at homes of their associates. The money exchangers dismissed Meyer’s questions about their customers and the exodus of cash out of the country. They were moving bags of cash to Dubai, Haji Mohammad Jan told him, because the United Arab Emirates was a major trading partner. Afghans sent their money to buy goods that were shipped back home, or they bought houses and apartments because the real estate market was booming. Some people shipped cash on commercial airlines because they wanted to avoid paying bank transfer fees, he explained. If anything untoward happened at New Ansari, he said, he was not aware of it.

  His family business was no money-laundering scheme.

  The embassy leadership generally encouraged Meyer’s investigations and allowed him to keep following leads. But some of Meyer’s tactics worried his colleagues. Fellow diplomats worried that his investigations were too politically explosive; others just wanted him to be careful as he drove around Kabul.

  Part of Stuart Jones’s job as a Treasury official was to teach Afghans working in the financial sector about modern banking practices and to train hawaladars to follow the law. Meyer saw this as a way to get to know them but also as an opportunity to gather intelligence. When the Afghan financial intelligence unit invited top bankers and money exchangers to the Serena Hotel for a training session, the session was videotaped in part so that Meyer could review the faces of the bankers for his investigation files. Jones got upset when he found out.

  On another occasion, the New Ansari chief executive, Mohammed Khan, asked to meet Meyer at the Serena to discuss bulk currency shipments and show Meyer his records. Ov
er lunch, the executive presented Meyer one of his ledgers as he was making a point. Meyer seized the opportunity. “You don’t mind if I photocopy this?” he asked. Khan agreed and Meyer paid the hotel staff to make the copies. The records confirmed his suspicions when Meyer later compared them with New Ansari’s cash declarations at the airport. The company was underreporting their shipments by several million dollars per month.

  Meyer still felt he needed better information and started planning a raid on New Ansari’s offices to seize records and customer logs. Jones was worried about the operation. Before coming to Afghanistan, Jones had worked on strategic issues at the National Counterterrorism Center. In Kabul, he regularly briefed ISAF leadership and senior officials in Washington. He tried to keep the larger goals of the war in mind. What would they accomplish by chasing around every corrupt Afghan official? How much did they actually know about New Ansari’s alleged misdeeds?

  Jones brought up his concerns with his superiors at the embassy. He didn’t want to stop the raid, but he was worried about its aftermath. Other diplomats saw Meyer as smart and dedicated but lacking in diplomatic finesse. They also worried that the Afghan team working with Meyer might get burned because of its association with him. “Kirk was a loose cannon,” another Treasury Department official said. “He wanted to be involved in what was sexy. He went looking for action. And he found it.”

  Meyer’s determination to push ahead struck others as arrogant. His attitude, one colleague recalled, was “If you get in my way, fuck you. If you disagree with me, you’re uninformed.” When questioned about whether New Ansari actually represented a strategic threat to the American mission, or whether the U.S. embassy should be stalking dirty hawala dealers, Meyer argued that he had better information. “He would say, ‘These guys think we’re all complete idiots. They do. They think we’re all out to lunch. They think we think they like us. They don’t like us. They see us as an opportunity to steal a bunch of money, and that’s exactly what they’re doing. If you don’t think that, then you’re deluded.’ ”

  Both Meyer and Calestino took corruption personally. They felt taxpayer money was being squandered by backstabbing Afghan partners. They felt an example must be made. No amount of disapproving démarches or finger-wagging warnings could move Karzai to discipline his thieving ranks. The problem required real consequences: convictions, prison sentences, lost jobs, blocked dollars. Calestino would muse about going into President Karzai’s office in the palace, taking him by the back of the head, slamming his face against his desk, and telling him the United States is in charge, and if Karzai wanted his failed country to survive, he would do what was told. “Kirk used to say all the time his goal was to take down the Karzai government,” one colleague recalled.

  Meyer had his own fantasy scenario he sometimes joked about. On a tour of the Central Bank, he’d once watched, stunned, as hawaladars holding battered suitcases swarmed around the tellers’ barred windows; each either filling their suitcases with fistfuls of cash or thrusting it at the tellers. As Meyer looked around at the mayhem, he noticed there were hardly any security guards. The main bank vault looked like it had been constructed in the nineteenth century. In his fantasy, after taking down Karzai, Meyer would rob the Central Bank. He would have Frank Calestino, his deputy, strip down to his underwear in the fountain outside the Central Bank. Every Afghan in the building would want to come look at a diplomat in his underwear in a fountain. And while that was happening, Meyer would be inside the Central Bank’s ancient vault.

  “Have you ever seen the vaults in the Central Bank?” Meyer would tell his colleagues. “They’re full of cash. And I’m going to grab all of it. Because it’s our money.”

  —

  On January 14, 2010, the Sensitive Investigative Unit, under Meyer’s supervision, had carried out its raid on two of New Ansari’s branches in the Shahzada money market in Kabul, as well as one of their satellite phone shops, carting away computers and forty-two thousand documents. Targeting such a politically connected company had been an enormous risk for the Afghan police involved, particularly the SIU commander, Colonel Babakarkhel. To avoid leaks, Babakarkhel had not alerted Central Bank regulators, or the attorney general’s office, or even his own boss, Interior Minister Haneef Atmar, about their operation. He had, however, convinced a friend at the Interior Ministry to provide backup police in case things turned violent. The timing of the raid, on a Thursday afternoon, had been chosen specifically to minimize the political blowback, as the Afghan government would be closed on Friday, part of the Muslim weekend. Meyer later came to believe that New Ansari bosses had transferred some of their files to a secret storage facility before the police moved in, but even so, he netted more than he’d hoped. “It was boxes and boxes and boxes,” Meyer said. “It was a huge trove.”

  Because New Ansari was so important to the Afghan economy, and because the vast majority of its clients were law-abiding citizens moving small sums of money, absconding with all of their company records was bound to be disruptive. To avoid panicky customers, and assure people this wasn’t simply a robbery, the police posted notices in Dari (the type of Persian spoken in Afghanistan) on the doors of the New Ansari offices, explaining the situation. For two days inside the SIU offices, police working around the clock scanned and copied reams of documents, so the files could be returned by Saturday morning.

  “This raid was unprecedented,” one of Meyer’s subordinates said. “These guys were operating with impunity. And this was the first time there was an attempt to enforce Afghan laws on money laundering.”

  It also took Karzai’s palace by surprise. For the clique of wealthy and politically connected Afghans unaccustomed to being challenged by rules or laws, this was an unusual warning. Haji Naqib, who ran the New Ansari–affiliated business Afghan United Petroleum, called Karzai personally to alert him to the operation. “A lot of important people have money with New Ansari,” Naqib told me later. “If these people don’t receive their money on time, there could be protests.”

  Within two days, New Ansari representatives held two meetings in the palace to complain. A large group of elders and businessmen from Kandahar—250 of them, by Naqib’s count—came to the palace to see President Karzai. Some of these same men had financed Karzai’s first days in Kandahar in 2001. They were men he listened to, fellow tribesmen and leaders from his hometown, and they played on his already heightened suspicions about U.S. motives. The Americans had singled them out, they argued, not because they were guilty but because they were Kandahari Pashtuns.

  Not long after the raid, Naqib and Haji Mohammad Jan came to the U.S. embassy to meet with Stuart Jones and Earl Anthony Wayne, one of Eikenberry’s deputies who oversaw economic affairs. The Afghans were confident and suave. Haji Mohammad Jan, in particular, exuded wealth and sophistication. He was around forty years old and had started in the hawala business as a teenager. He often wore luxurious white robes and expensive watches. “He looked like money that hadn’t even been printed yet,” Jones said.

  The intelligence reports that the Americans had on Mohammad Jan suggested that he was moving away from the drug trade and illicit finance operations and toward his more respectable businesses. Afghan United Bank already had nine branches across the country and had plans to open twenty-one more. He had purchased a 7.5 percent stake in Aino Mena. The homes are so nice there “you would not believe they were in Afghanistan,” Mohammad Jan told the diplomats. Just in the past year, he’d invested $85 million in Afghan businesses. He also planned to fund an insurance business, a fruit-harvesting facility, a bottled-water plant, a group of carpet weavers, and a university in Kandahar. “Reputation is the key currency of business in Afghanistan,” he boasted. And his was sterling: he was “the business leader of the south,” he said. When Wayne raised the allegations about laundering money and financing terrorists, Mohammad Jan waved them off.

  The New Ansari bankers kept their cool with the American diplomats, but they were furious. They were p
articularly angry with Haneef Atmar, the interior minister, who oversaw the police and whom they assumed had approved the raid. Atmar had not been in Karzai’s favor for a while. Anyone with the stature of a cabinet minister, particularly one as important as the interior minister, would have enemies in Afghan politics. He also carried the stain of his affiliation with the Communist government during the Soviet years. But to Karzai and others in the palace, his true badge of dishonor was being beloved by the Americans. Atmar was a young, educated, English-speaking Pashtun, a potential future president—the type of politician American diplomats constantly tried to cultivate, and that Karzai worried about. Two weeks after the raid, Atmar told the Obama administration’s drug czar, Gil Kerlikowske, that the operation had hurt him. People were calling him the “American minister.”

  “These are powerful people,” Atmar told him. “And they raise hell.”

  Within a few months, Karzai fired Atmar from his cabinet post. The proximate cause was a barrage of rockets that fell during a high-profile peace conference in Kabul, an embarrassing security breach. But Atmar believed that this was just an excuse. He privately blamed his taking part in the New Ansari raid for causing his demise. Palace aides confirmed his suspicions. “Atmar was never trusted after that,” one of them told me.

  Meanwhile, over at Camp Falcon in Kabul, because of the raid on New Ansari “the wires went crazy,” as one of Meyer’s team members put it.

  The ever-attentive eavesdroppers had been recording all the acrimonious fallout: New Ansari and Afghan United Bank officials calling the palace to complain; parliament members and bankers urging the attorney general to shut down the case. A series of phone calls between Haji Naqib, the Afghan United Petroleum chairman, and Mohammed Zia Salehi, the palace aide, were particularly interesting. Naqib asked Salehi to help stop the investigation into New Ansari. In return, according to investigators, he promised to buy Salehi a car for his son. The details played out in further conversations: the men would buy Salehi’s son a red 2009 Toyota Corolla, worth about $10,000. Naqib and another associate, Mirwais, would make the purchase and deliver the car. Salehi later informed his boss, Ibrahim Spinzada, who in turn told a man referred to as “the Chief.” Investigators assumed that man was President Karzai.