(music)
(children laughing)
(music)
SPEAKER: Take this square world and blast off for Kicksville.
RICHARD: America's public enemy number one is drug abuse.
SPEAKER: Heroin destroys everything.
MALE: Prescribing pain pills created huge numbers of addicts.
PEOPLE: People die! (inaudible).
SPEAKER: Opium is cash, it's like you're growing bills on the bush.
Crime and drug abuse go hand in hand, it's like peanut butter and jelly.
KAMALA: There's now an understanding
that the war on drugs was an abject failure.
SPEAKER: You have to stop and ask yourself, how did we get here.
NEWSREADER: Take a look at the highlights for today,
New York City, beautiful day here. 80 degrees today. Saint Louis 83.
JEFF: September 11th, 2001, started like every other day.
I was at the gym,
when I heard that a plane had hit the World Trade Center.
So I went into the other room in the gym and I watched it on TV.
NEWSREADER: It's 8:52 here in New York.
We understand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center.
JEFF: And then the second plane hit the tower
and I knew we were looking at terrorism.
As a Law Enforcement Officer,
I just wanted to get there as quickly as possible,
to help in whatever way I could.
I jumped in my car and I put on the red light
and I sped to Manhattan as quickly as I could.
As I was coming round the bend on the West Side highway,
one of the NYP Detectives said that the tower was gone.
RADIO COMMUNICATION: (Inaudible).
SPEAKER: Holy (bleep).
RADIO COMMUNICATION: (Inaudible).
JEFF: So we were driving into this huge bellowing cloud of smoke
with people running around,
just in total fear, running through the streets.
MEMBERS OF PUBLIC: (Screams).
JEFF: I carried bodies out of debris.
I actually stood there in the rubble
looking at a hole in the sky where the Towers had once stood
and I vowed I was going to avenge this,
I was going to use my investigative skills to go after
the terrorists who had done this.
My name is Jeffery James Higgins, I was a DEA Agent for 20 years.
GEORGE W: We cannot know every turn this battle will take,
yet we know our cause is just
and our ultimate victory is assured.
My fellow Americans, let's roll.
JEFF: I knew Afghanistan had the highest concentration of terror groups in the world,
and it was also the hub of all opiate trafficking in the world.
US SOLDIER: Let's get out of here.
JEFF: So I suspected that there was a connection between terrorism
and narcotics trafficking.
I'd been trying to get into counter-terrorism
for two and half or three years but I hadn't had much luck,
and then DEA re-opened its office in Afghanistan
and, of course, I jumped at it.
Flying in between the mountains and the Hindu Kush,
the mountains are gorgeous and there's overwhelming natural beauty.
And then we landed and the city of Kabul opened up before us,
and the smell of feces and dust filled the cabin.
It's horrible air quality, there's smog, you have this cacophony of sounds.
After years of trying to get involved,
I was literally going to the ground zero for narco-terrorism.
The DEA office in Afghanistan was a two man operation,
with myself and John O'Rourke.
JOHN: Kabul in the early days really was the city of the Wild West.
We had no infrastructure, the comm equipment wasn't set up.
We had sporadic electricity, no guns, no case files, no informant files.
Everything had to be created from scratch.
And we came to realize that no-one wanted to talk about the drug problem.
SOLDIER: They're such pretty flowers, so colorful. Right.
JOHN: The military was very focused on military objectives
and counter-terrorism, and they were told,
if they were walking through a poppy field
while on patrol just leave it alone.
They did not want to get involved in the drug business.
JEFF: I had meetings with high ranking people in the intelligence community
who were arguing that there was no nexus between drugs and terrorism,
even though all of DEA's cases generated in Afghanistan.
We're showing that the Taliban were being funded by drugs.
RADIO COMMUNICATION: (Inaudible). US SOLDIER: Go.
JEFF: So we had to start by working with Afghan Counter Narcotics police officers.
WALEED: It just came positive. JEFF: Okay.
JEFF: He was the one Afghan Police Officer
that we would almost always take with us
to have the authority to be able to do what we were doing.
JEFF: We were trying to figure out who were the major players,
who were the terrorists,
who were the drug traffickers, how were they working together.
How was the drug trade actually working in Afghanistan.
And so we started developing informants.
JOHN: And what we were hearing was,
hey you need to go talk to this gentleman
and he will tell you about this person,
and you would hear different names.
But repeatedly from various sources we heard one name,
and it became readily apparent as we started the game,
more and more intelligence,
that this guy really was one of the kingpins
of kingpins in Afghanistan.
JEFF: It would take years of investigation before the full breadth
of his organization was understood.
His name was Haji Bagcho.
When we would try to get informants to give us information about him,
people would physically shake talking about him.
(music)
JEFF: We started developing informants.
So we'd bring in whoever we could who wanted to tell us
something about the criminal underworld that was in Afghanistan.
And that's what eventually led us to Muhammad.
JEFF: This area that we were in, in Nangarhar,
it was a constant state of warfare on some level
and people like Muhammad were sick of it.
He didn't like the Taliban, he really just wanted to live a normal life.
JEFF: Bagcho was a target that we had looked at for years,
so when we finally found somebody
who could talk directly to him, that was exciting.
He was looking to help us,
but he understood by providing evidence
against the most powerful heroin trafficker in the world,
he was going to put himself and his family in jeopardy.
JEFF: Bagcho had heroin production happening in labs,
big labs down in the deserts in Helmand and Kandahar,
but also in the north in places like Kunduz and Badakhshan,
and in the East in Nangarhar which was a very criminal province.
That's where Bagcho was from.
JEFF: Afghanistan was the first time that DEA ever operated in a war zone.
It meant we didn't have freedom of movement.
Leaving a base was exceedingly dangerous
and every time we left the wire,
we were under threat of attack.
Oh, (bleep)... Hey, fire back.
(multiple shots)
JOHN MANNA: DEA created the FAST team because
they needed a way to beef up our operations
so they could operate in a military environment.
Our job was to find a lab and go smash it.
I was a former Marine, we had former Army, Navy, Airforce.
We had two Seals on my team.
My name is John Manna and I was with DEA for over 30 years.
FAST stands for Foreign-deployed Advisory and Support Team.
One of the nicknames for the FAST team was the Fake ass Seal Team.
We did joke about it but we were some capable guys.
NEWSREADER: In its own surge, the DEA has increased agents
here tenfold in the last year.
JEFF: The FAST teams gave us the weaponry and the training
we needed to operate in a war zone.
In places where carrying a Glock handgun and a shotgun wasn't enough.
We had military grade weapons and we trained
with the entire Special Operations community.
UNKNOWN: Let's go!
JOHN MANNA: We hit labs in Helmand valley and on the east side of Afghanistan
up in the mountains.
Almost every lab was controlled by Haji Bagcho.
As soon as you're there you're starting to wire it up to blow it up
because you can't be sitting around waiting
because that's giving the Taliban time to go ahead and hit you.
The labs, they all looked the same.
You're going to see a lot of 55 gallon drums filled with water,
you're going to see some opium, what they call the press,
that's used to press out the water.
You could probably put together an Afghan heroin lab for under a $100.
Though the labs were very rudimentary,
they could take opium and turn it into something
that's very, very valuable.
Probably $90,000 a kilo if it got to the States.
JOHN MANNA: I've probably been to
60 or 70 labs at least
and we realized you're not fixing the problem
by just destroying the lab, you're not.
You're disrupting, temporarily disrupting.
JEFF: We'd been hitting labs and things that were affiliated with him.
We needed to do something more.
You have to go to the source, you have to cut the head off the snake.
I needed to change focus and try to arrest Bagcho.
JEFF: We'd known where Bagcho lived for several years
and what we found in that part of Nangarhar
were most of the police chiefs were working with the Taliban
and working with the drug traffickers.
In fact they were even transporting drugs in police vehicles.
NEWSREADER: Historic days in Afghanistan.
Millions of people have taken a giant step on the long road to democracy.
The country's first direct presidential election has taken place.
Indira leader, Hamid Karzai is expected to be the winner.
JEFF: Haji Bagcho, with his level of influence and power,
is incredibly dangerous and was a huge influence
on the corruption of Afghanistan and Afghan officials.
The problem was what to do with terrorists,
drug traffickers and other criminals that you arrest.
If you put them into the Afghan judicial system
they would often bribe somebody and get released.
Eventually people started to notice the nexus between drugs and terrorism
because the evidence was overwhelming.
CONDOLEEZZA: The terrorism feeds on the drug trafficking and fuels
and funds the terrorists,
so this is a link that we absolutely have to break.
GEORGE W: The bill gives law enforcement new tools
to combat threats to our citizens
from international terrorists to local drug dealers.
JEFF: I was really pleased,
the law was a huge new tool that we had to go after terrorists.
JEFF: My partner and I were staying at the Jalalabad airfield
and it was a fort operating base in the Nangarhar province
where we were able to go out into the province
which is the heart of heroin trafficking in eastern Afghanistan.
It was also the home base of Haji Bagcho.
And we needed evidence to show that he was engaged in this trafficking.
And when you're going after the head of a major organization,
getting someone who can talk to him on tape or on video is huge.
So we had Muhammad make a series of phone calls directly to Haji Bagcho
claiming that he wanted to buy large amounts of heroin
to get it out of Afghanistan.
The most pure heroin is known as "Spin Moll" which is white stuff.
Spin is the heroin that we were looking for
and that is sent to other countries.
JEFF: He was just pale, like he was so scared, he was pale
and he was shaking when he dialed the phone.
JEFF: When we first heard Haji Bagcho's voice on that call
we got pretty excited because this was as close as anyone
had been able to get to Bagcho in years of investigation.
JEFF: So we'd had some evidence directly from Bagcho
but what we needed was actual drugs because to prove something
beyond a reasonable doubt you really need the product.
So our next step, pick up the kilos of heroin from Bagcho's residence
in the belly of the beast.
JEFF: We have Bagcho's voice recorded, setting up the deal.
Then he arranged a time for Muhammad to go
and pick up the 2 kilograms sample from Bagcho's residence.
My partner and I got into our Afghan gear.
We just went out in a couple of vehicles.
My partner took him in a bus and I covered them in another car
and drove him near Bagcho's residence.
Let him out on foot and we watched him go to Bagcho's residence.
JEFF: Bagcho lived in the Markoh village in eastern Nangarhar.
It was an area that was just infested with Taliban.
Not only were we worried, is the deal going to happen
but we have the source who's trusting us to keep him safe.
Muhammad went to Bagcho's house and met someone at the residence.
If Bagcho knew Muhammad was working for us they would kill him.
So I told Muhammad that we would protect him
and if anything happened we could rush in and rescue him.
JEFF: Muhammad walked away and we surveilled him to make sure
that nobody was watching him and when we had the opportunity,
we picked him up off of the street.
We believe we had enough evidence for a prosecutable case in the United States
but we still wanted to execute a search warrant at Bagcho's residence
to try to get more information,
but, also to try to arrest Bagcho.
Bagcho lived in a very large residence.
Think like a medieval castle, very tall walls around it, big open courtyards,
and this area was a Taliban controlled area.
JEFF: As we were flying in, I was on the headset in the helicopter,
it was a Chinook, and I heard one of the pilots say,
there's a man running out of the back of the residence,
and I was like, 'son of a gun' because we knew that was going to happen.
When we landed, we you know, assaulted the residence.
US SOLDIER: Alright, get in, get in, get in!
JEFF: We secured it, there were a bunch of people inside.
Everyone got handcuffed.
JEFF: I went to that back door and Bagcho had run out of his shoes.
His two shoes were like this outside the back door
where he'd literally run out of his shoes.
So yes, Bagcho was there, Bagcho fled.
JEFF: In Afghanistan, they use a monetary system known as Hawala.
Hawala is an informal banking system.
So Hawaladars are people who work within the Hawala system,
who accept money and give money,
and Haji Bagcho, his Hawaladar was a guy named Zahir Shah.
JEFF: What we wanted was the documentary evidence to show the trail of money.
So we executed a search warrant to try to seize the ledgers from the Hawaladar.
JEFF: We had to get in, execute the search warrant,
seize what evidence we could and get out as quickly as possible.
The longer westerners were present,
the more danger there was of a Taliban attack
but also just from crowds.
Huge crowds would form and they would get violent.
JEFF: These ledgers showed just massive amounts of drug trafficking.
Based on the ledgers that we had,
we could prove that that's what he sold.
So this was the biggest heroin trafficker in the world,
someone who directly supported Narcoterrorism.
So honestly, there was just a sense of relief.
We had the evidence that we needed to, I believe, for a successful prosecution.
JEFF: Pakistan had arrested Bagcho a couple of times and, you know, let him go.
So he'd been arrested and released and then he'd been arrested again.
JEFF: This time when he'd been arrested, Pakistan agreed to turn him over
to the Afghan government.
I was thrilled and quite frankly a little surprised,
I didn't think Pakistan would ever turn him over
if they had him but they did.
JEFF: He's, you know, a little old man,
incredibly powerful and incredibly dangerous.
JEFF: Ideally we wanted Bagcho to co-operate with us
and then use his testimony and his evidence to help charge Taliban
commanders and corrupt officials but his Defense Attorney
kept telling us there was no way we would get him out of Afghanistan,
so he wouldn't let Bagcho co-operate.
JEFF: We didn't know if the Afghan government would let us take him
and there were some tense, tense moments.
But, eventually, the Afghan government agreed that it would be better
if he was tried in the United States.
NEWSREADER: Handcuffed and surrounded by agents
from the Drug Enforcement Administration,
Haji Bagcho landed at Andrews Air Force Base early this morning.
JEFF: But until you can actually go into a US court and convict him,
we weren't satisfied or comfortable.
NEWSREADER: Joining me now is a member of the DEA team
that hunted down the world's biggest heroin trafficker,
former Supervisory Agent, Special Agent, Jeffrey Higgins.
Jeffrey, thank you for coming on.
Give us a sense of what it took to capture this man
by who all accounts was a criminal mastermind.
JEFF: Well, he was the most prolific heroin trafficker
and overall drug dealer in the world.
JEFF: So the trial itself was sort of a logistical nightmare.
We had all these Afghans who needed translators,
they needed security because of the level of this case.
I was holding my breath when Muhammad walked
into the courtroom and took the stand,
where he was facing Bagcho, because this is the moment of truth,
he had to identify Bagcho, he had to describe him and point to him
and I know how terrifying that must have been.
JEFF: I sat at the prosecution table with the two attorneys
and the prosecution team.
I testified a number of times in the case and it was exhausting,
it was around the clock.
The corroborating evidence we had with the phone calls
where we had Bagcho's voice recorded setting up the deal
and the ledgers from the hawaladar, but juries are unpredictable,
you never know what they're thinking.
JEFF: Bagcho's organization distributed heroin to 22 countries
including Japan and China, the United States, like all over the globe.
So, it was very satisfying after all this work
to finally get this nexus target.
Everything I did in Afghanistan after September 11th was to fulfil my vow
to go after terrorists and the people that had targeted our country.
So I was incredibly relieved when I heard the verdicts.
NEWSREADER: The fall of Afghanistan.
Taliban fighters inside the Presidential Palace.
The Taliban declaring it the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan.
The Taliban taking a little more than a week to seize control
of almost the entire country.
JEFF: I think it's horrible. I think it's a horrible judicial decision.
We know that he distributed at least 123,000 kgs of heroin
and he was the most prolific heroin trafficker
ever to be prosecuted in the United States
and so for him not to get a life sentence for that I think is a travesty.
Captioned by SubTitlePro LLC