Afghan heroin policy is the term John Kiriakou uses for the post-2001 United States arrangement in Afghanistan under which heroin-poppy cultivation was, according to Kiriakou’s 2009 investigation for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, protected and actively encouraged by U.S. military and Central Intelligence Agency personnel.[1][2]
The reversal: zero to 93 per cent
The figure Kiriakou uses to date the change is a before-and-after. “The Taliban banned the cultivation of heroin poppy. So in 2000, Afghanistan accounted for 0% of the world’s heroin.” By the time he travelled to Kandahar and Lashkar Gah as senior investigator for Senator Kerry’s committee, Afghanistan was producing “93% of the world’s heroin.”[3][4] Asked in April 2026 for the share in the last year of Taliban rule, he gave it as “Zero. None” — and said the country was then “a net food exporter to Iran and to Pakistan.” His summary of what followed is a single line: “as soon as we took over, it was all about the heroin.”[5]
The agricultural reversal recurs in his other tellings. As recently as the 1970s Afghanistan was a net food exporter, feeding itself and exporting rice to Pakistan and Iran, before farmers converted their fields to opium poppy after the Taliban’s overthrow.[6][7] DEA charts he was shown corroborate it: the Taliban produced almost no poppy while in power, and none at all in 2001.[8]
The strategic rationale
Kiriakou sent the paper he had written eyes-only to a friend at the Drug Enforcement Administration for comment before publication, and the friend called back three days later. Speaking at a secret DEA facility in rural Virginia, the officer summed up the calculus: “Buddy, you know you’re never going to get this published, right? Afghanistan produces 93% of the world’s heroin. All of that heroin goes to Iran and Russia, and we want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies. It weakens their cultures. It makes them easier to beat if we have to fight them.”[9][2][10] The same officer noted that the United States also benefited from a domestic heroin supply that largely bypassed Afghanistan, stating that “it’s just too hard to get it from Afghanistan all the way to the United States when it can just come right up through Mexico.”[11]
A military contact reinforced the picture in a different medium, showing Kiriakou a nighttime satellite heat-image of southern Afghanistan in which pinpricks of light turned out to be heroin processors cooking poppy in small huts across the region.[12][13]
In December 2025 Kiriakou restated the policy in the first person plural, and without hedging. “We knew that Afghanistan was producing 93% of the world’s heroin, but that almost all of that heroin was destined for Russia and Iran, and it weakened their societies. That’s better for us if they’re weak.”[14] Asked in 2019 why U.S. policy tolerated the 93 per cent figure, he answered as plainly: “because we make money on both ends of it — none of that heroin comes here, it goes to Iran and it goes to Russia.”[15]
The Helmand investigation
Pulling rank to get there
As senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kiriakou told John Kerry he wanted to go to Afghanistan and produce an in-depth Senate study on heroin trafficking. Nobody wanted to help. In a separate retelling he says the investigation began when two DEA officers, acting unofficially as whistleblowers, reached out to him at the committee asking for help on Afghan poppy cultivation; the military “did not like the idea, not even a little bit.”[16][17][18]
Refused a flight from Bagram to Kandahar, Helmand and Lashkar Gah as too dangerous and because he was a civilian, he invoked his Senate staff rank — equivalent to a brigadier general — to force the issue: “I have the rank of Brigadier General. I’m not asking you. I’m telling you.”[19][20] It was, he says, “the only time in my career I ever pulled rank on someone” — a rank he had always felt strange about and had never used, and which he calls “the only time I ever pulled that card” in his entire career.[21][22]
An ocean of poppy
He flew into Lashkar Gah, where a State Department-led Provincial Reconstruction Team worked alongside military and USAID staff on projects like electrical grids and water wells, and where, approaching the town, poppy fields stretched for miles in every direction with rivers diverted to irrigate them.[23][24] In his own words: “all you can see for miles around is poppy. Nothing but poppy, like an ocean of poppy.”[20]
The farmer’s answer
Through the State Department contact who ran the Provincial Reconstruction Team, Kiriakou persuaded a reluctant U.S. military escort to take him into the fields. In the fullest telling of the 2011 Senate Foreign Relations Committee trip he flew to Bagram Air Base and took a helicopter into a village in Helmand; told that talking to a poppy farmer was a very bad idea, he pressed — “No, no, it’s important for my study. I have to do this.” They drove out in a convoy of four or five jeeps with a translator and found a farmer working his field.[25][26]
Speaking through a Pashtu translator, he asked what he later called a naive question — why cultivate poppy instead of vegetables such as onions, pomegranates or tomatoes, which offer two growing seasons, can be eaten, and can be exported. The farmer replied: “The Americans told me in 2001 that if I told them where the Arabs were, I could grow all the poppy I wanted.” In the telling Kiriakou says was not funny at the time and is only funny in retrospect, the farmer added a second half: “…that if I told them where the Arabs were hiding, I could grow all the poppy I wanted. And now you come here and you tell me I can’t grow poppy.”[27][28][29][30][31]
Kiriakou pressed — “What American told you you could grow poppy?” — and the interview ended on the spot. The U.S. security officer escorting him said “meeting over” and physically pulled him back to the jeep; in other accounts the handler’s words are “That’s it. We have to go. It’s too dangerous here. We have to go. Everybody in the jeeps” and “Meeting’s over. We’re under threat. We have to get back to Bagram.” Kiriakou’s assessment of the timing: “He did it on purpose.”[32][33][34][31][35][36]
The farmer’s testimony is Kiriakou’s evidence for how the arrangement was communicated at ground level: impunity in exchange for cooperation with U.S. intelligence objectives, and an escort empowered to end the conversation the moment the question turned to who had made the promise.
What he put in the report
What he did with it he states plainly: “So I put in my report I believe the American military is protecting the poppy farmers. I don’t know why.”[37]
Why the report was killed
When Senator Kerry received the paper, his response was recorded as: “You know, on second thought, I don’t think it really does any good for us to publish this paper. It’s just it’s angry and it points the finger and I think we should probably just kill it.”[11] In the retelling to Scott Horton, Kerry’s response is given more simply: he “told him to drop it.”[38][39] In a third telling, Kiriakou says Kerry did not kill the paper outright but refused to approve the section describing the farmer’s account of the Americans’ 2001 poppy-for-informants promise, so what was eventually published amounted to maybe 20% of what the paper was originally supposed to contain.[40]
Kiriakou’s own account of why is the DEA friend’s: “He was right. Kerry never allowed me to publish it because the CIA told Kerry not to allow me to publish it.”[41] Because the fuller account of the farmer interview was never published at all, he says it was also never classified — meaning he remains free to discuss it publicly today, even though the CIA was furious he had gone out to the poppy fields and pulled rank to get there.[42]
Warlords, rare earths, and what the occupation protected
Kiriakou recalls the military empowering Hamid Karzai’s government even as Karzai’s own brother was, in his telling, the biggest heroin trafficker in the region, and cites a CIA saying that “you can’t buy an Afghan warlord but you certainly can rent one” — describing millions of dollars in cash dropped from helicopters to buy warlords’ temporary cooperation.[43][44]
He names rare earth minerals and poppies as the real reasons the United States remained in Afghanistan, arguing the Taliban — whom he calls “a thousand years behind us technologically” — were never an actual threat to the country.[45] On the mineral side, a co-guest put Afghanistan’s rare-earth reserves at an estimated $23 trillion, discovered around 2015–2016, raised as context alongside competing claims about Ukraine’s own mineral wealth.[46]
Where the heroin goes, and the cooperation that did not happen
Kiriakou pairs the production figure with its destination, and uses the pairing as an argument for cooperation with adversaries rather than as an accusation. Afghanistan produces 93 per cent of the world’s heroin, almost all of it going to Russia and Iran, which have the highest heroin addiction rates in the world; the United States has a heroin problem of its own. This, he argues, is an area where Washington and Moscow can cooperate with nothing to do with politics or a hot war.[47][48]
Asked by the Russian ambassador over lunch whether the two governments could still work together on anything, his first answer was narcotics: “Afghanistan produces 93 per cent of the world’s heroin. Almost all of that heroin goes to Russia and Iran — and Russia and Iran have the highest rates of opioid addiction in the world, five times the rate of opioid addiction that we have here in the United States. So we can absolutely cooperate on counter-narcotics, which we don’t do.”[49] In a 2019 account he specifies the ordering — Iran having the highest opioid addiction rate in the world and Russia following closely — with some of the crop reaching Europe and none of it reaching the United States.[50][51]
Raised again in 2022, the traffic figures for him not as a policy question but as evidence of a missed alignment. Both countries “had a terrible time in Afghanistan,” and the product went overwhelmingly to one of them: “Afghanistan produces 93% of the world’s heroin, and most of that heroin goes to Russia and to Iran. We could have really worked together to make the world a better place.”[52][53] He groups it with counterterrorism and counter-proliferation as the three files on which “it would have been actually quite easy to cooperate on a very deep level” — and attributes the failure not to the substance but to the terms Washington attached.[54]
Why eradication was ruled out
Kiriakou says that after the Helmand trip he put the question to two European envoys — the British ambassador to Afghanistan and the Italian ambassador — and that both told him the same thing: the poppy crop cannot be wiped out. The reasons he reports are legal and political rather than agricultural. Using napalm would be a war crime. Using a herbicide such as Roundup would mean that every Afghan child subsequently born with a birth defect or a developmental disability would be attributed to the poisoning of the environment.[55]
He closes on the position he says the question ultimately rests at, and does not endorse it: that the heroin does not come to the United States, and so is not an American problem.[56]
The moral question
Pressed in April 2026 on whether anyone in the rooms where the policy was formed ever objected that the United States could not flood other people’s countries with heroin, Kiriakou’s answer was that the question was never raised in his presence: “I never sat in a meeting like that. The meetings were all about how do we win? How do we get a leg up? How do we implement the policy that we want whatever country to follow? That was it.”[57]
Put to him that a government doing this cannot easily tell itself it is the good guy, he agreed and located the difficulty in his own career rather than in the abstract: “that was something that I struggled with for at least half of my career at the CIA. We’re supposed to be the good guys. So why are we doing so much of this? I just never understood it.”[58] Asked what he eventually decided the answer was, he gave one about himself: “The answer was that I had stars in my eyes. That I just was not fully understanding of realpolitik.”[58]
The candour has a harder edge elsewhere. Agreeing with a CIA colleague that Chinese-facilitated fentanyl smuggling mirrors exactly the strategy the United States used with Afghan heroin, he added bluntly that “if it makes the CIA’s job easier for Russians to have a heroin problem, God bless.”[59][60]
The fentanyl parallel
Kiriakou draws the comparison to the flow of Chinese fentanyl into the United States as the same logic running in reverse: “Why won’t the Chinese stop the flow of fentanyl to the United States? I’ll give you one guess. Because it weakens our society and it makes us easier to beat if we have to fight them in a war.”[61] He puts it the same way when explaining why he finds it plausible that China treats fentanyl deliberately: “the Chinese come to the same calculation — that fentanyl flooding into the United States weakens our society, and that’s better for the Chinese.”[14][62] In April 2026 he named it as the reason for “the predicament that we’re in” — “they want us to be addicted to fentanyl because it weakens our society.”[63]
CIA counter-terrorism operations in Afghanistan
Material in this section comes from the same Afghanistan-era interviews but concerns the counter-terrorism campaign rather than the poppy crop.
In a 2021 briefing, Kiriakou recounted that “Zubaydah created and ran the two al-Qaeda training camps in southern Afghanistan. He formed the… house of martyrs safe house in Peshawar, Pakistan…”[64] He further described his direct orders during the operation: “my orders were to sit next to his bed 24/7. George Tenet told me 24/7 CIA eyes on. He said do not leave his bedside and so I sat there 24 hours. After we caught him Abu Zubaydah came out of his coma and the first thing he said to me was he asked me to kill him, he asked me to take a pillow and smother him and I said I said oh no Abu Zubaydah.”[65] On the CIA’s handling of the detainee: “we’ve been looking for you for a long time. Nobody’s going to kill you. In fact I said you’re going to get the best medical care that the American government could provide. He cried a lot, he said that he would never know the touch of a woman, he would never know the joy of fatherhood… he recited poetry, he asked if I would pass a message to his mother.”[66]
He also highlighted the broader dilemma of detainee rights at Guantanamo: “Washington Post saying that the last minor prisoner is being released from Guantanamo. He’s an Afghan that leaves only one Afghan left at Guantanamo. He’s one of 70 people and at its height it had something like 789 people… but my god even Khalid Muhammad has constitutional rights so either charge him with a crime or let him go. Same with Abu Zubaydah, same with Ramsay Ben and Shib, same with all these guys. If you’re not going to charge them with a crime you have to let them go. They have the same right that you and I have to face our accusers in a court of law…”[67] — “or let him go same with Abu Zubaydah same with Ramsay Ben and Shib same with all these guys if you’re not going to charge them the crime you have to let them go they have the same right that you and i have to face our accusers in a court of law to face a jury of their peers and if we’re not going to allow them to do that then they have to be released with that said i don’t see guantanamo closing down until either two things”[68] — “happen these prisoners eventually die and you know that that happens with some frequency usually by suicide uh or somehow the government is able to charge them in a civilian court but the reason that hasn’t happened yet is because the cia tortured them all and because they were tortured literally nothing that they said can be used against them and without their own admissions then there’s just nothing to hold them on”[69]
Operational insights from a 2022 debrief describe a shift in tactics along the Afghan-Pakistan border: “the rest of them are gonna run into Pakistan right because we can’t bomb in Pakistan that it was an allied country so I said instead of having people all the way up and down the Afghan-Pakistan border and we’re grabbing them one at a time, let’s let them into Pakistan, let them get situated so that they feel like they’re safe again, they’re going to make a mistake they always do and then we can hit the safe houses. Instead of getting one at a time we get 20 at a time or 50 at a time…”[70] A senior operative expressed frustration with personnel assignments: “I volunteered to go to Afghanistan, everybody volunteered right and they wouldn’t take me… I said to a buddy of mine I don’t understand this, I volunteered three times, they won’t take me. How long had you been in the CIA at that point? Almost 12 years, okay, and my Arabic was fluent… they said we’re not interrogating anybody.”[71]