Trump cartel terrorist designation
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Early in his second term, Donald Trump's State Department designated drug cartels as terrorist organizations. John Kiriakou says that at the time, this was widely understood inside the intelligence and defense community as essentially a paperwork exercise, a designation that would free up agencies such as the NSA and DIA to spend money on intercepting communications and training foreign nationals, spending that would otherwise require separate authorization.

In April 2025 he offered a specific piece of evidence for that reading. A week or two after the designation was announced, Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked whether the CIA would be using drones against the cartels and, in Kiriakou's account, "said flat out, no." Kiriakou's inference is the obvious one: "So why bother making the designation? It was just to allow the transfer of money from the CIA to other operational entities to use in this fight against the cartels." He restates it without hedging, "this was purely a bureaucratic, budgetary and paperwork exercise to allow the free transfer of money", and predicts no change in behaviour, because "there's not going to be this big move inside the CIA to focus on the cartels."

The reason he gives for that prediction is career incentives rather than policy. At the agency, he says, arriving as a Spanish speaker was "pretty much a career ender" unless you intended to spend your career on Latin American political issues, and showing any interest in drugs was a career ender outright, "because nobody gives a shit about drugs at the CIA." Asked about the recurring scene in the Netflix series Narcos in which a CIA station chief turns up and wrecks an operation to take Pablo Escobar or the Cali leadership, his verdict is that the portrayal was accurate, and for a structural reason: the agency "never cared about drugs. They cared about communism back at that time. They cared about terrorism a little bit later. They care about proliferation. They don't care about drugs."

A justification for force

Kiriakou says the designation has since taken on a different, more consequential meaning in Trump's own use of it: because Trump declared cartels, without ever naming a specific cartel, to be terrorist organizations, he believes this gives the U.S. government the right to attack any vessel Trump personally deems to be linked to a cartel.

Kiriakou's revised reading

Kiriakou initially took the designation to be legalistic rather than military. "At first I thought that he did that solely for legalistic reasons, because it would serve to free up budgets, and it would also authorise NSA to begin wiretaps or interceptions of the cartels' communications, which is awesome, great." What changed his assessment was the use it was put to: "but declaring them terrorist groups, other than allowing the Pentagon to drone their boats, which may or may not be their boats, I think it's misguided."

His alternative is the ordinary one: "I'm more of a civil libertarian in this respect, in that if these people are so dangerous and have committed such terrible crimes against the United States, charge them with a crime. You can't just not like somebody's face so you fly around the world to kill them. We're a nation of laws and we should abide by those laws." See expanding the definition of terrorism.

See also

- Donald Trump
- John Kiriakou
