A former State Department official revealed Tuesday what he describes as a decades-long, taxpayer-funded drug economy that funneled U.S. resources into heroin production under the guise of foreign aid and national security.
Former official with the U.S. Department of State Mike Benz said the U.S. government built a black market drug economy during the Cold War to support Afghan militants fighting the Soviets. That covert operation quickly evolved into a self-sustaining heroin network. Benz further alleged that the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded irrigation canals later used to cultivate Afghan opium poppies, a critical item to heroin production.
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“What I’m trying to say here is this was a CIA, DOD, black market drug economy that was set up during the Cold War to support the Afghan warriors as they were fighting the Soviets, but then it became a lucrative market unto itself,” Benz said. “And people wonder, how is it that they get away with this? How is it that USAID, for example, could have been irrigating the poppy crops? USAID was funding the Afghan irrigation canals used in heroin production, and this comes straight from the U.S. Inspector General for Afghan Reconstruction.”
USAID and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are tasked with playing significant roles in promoting democracy and development globally, often with overlapping functions. USAID leads U.S. development assistance, including democracy aid, while NED, a nonprofit organization funded by Congress, supports democracy promotion activities, particularly in areas where official U.S. entities face legal or political constraints.
Benz mentioned a report from a watchdog that detailed how U.S. funds were used to build and maintain irrigation systems later found to support heroin production.
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“The watchdog, established by Congress, wrote in his quarterly report six years ago that actually USAID was keeping the drugs flowing. USAID was cultivating the poppy, growing it, and understand USAID, USAID, and the U.S. Institute of Peace are part of a family,” Benz added. “They operate together. In the U.S. Institute of Peace, I was sort of adjacent to NED, in that you had, originally you had the State Department, and that was what would do overt operations and some covert operations, but not much.”
Benz went further, tying together several U.S. entities as layers of “plausible deniability” designed to shield direct accountability.
“There was basically two-track diplomacy stuff, but not really a bustling covert ops. That was done primarily through the military with the OSS in World War II and some of the early special operations before that, but that was never really organized until about 1948,” Benz said. “The CIA was created as a plausible deniability layer for the State Department, and then USAID was created as a second plausible deniability layer for the CIA, and then NED and the U.S. Institute of Peace were created as a plausible deniability layer a little bit below.”
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The June 2018 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction report said that U.S.-funded irrigation projects, intended to support alternative agriculture, inadvertently facilitated opium poppy cultivation by enhancing water access in regions with a history of such farming. Additionally, the report says that alternative development programs, often short-term and reliant on substituting other crops for poppy, sometimes even contributed to increased poppy production.
USAID reportedly directed billions in taxpayer funds toward foreign projects that advanced left-wing agendas, despite the high risk of those funds reaching the Taliban or entities linked to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. President Donald Trump and Department of Government Efficiency Chair Elon Musk began dismantling USAID in February, announcing plans to fold its functions into the State Department.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
