John Kiriakou has stated his personal belief that the CIA facilitated the arrival of cocaine into the United States — contributing to the crack epidemic — and has described firsthand discovery of CIA involvement in Afghan heroin cultivation through his work as a Senate Foreign Relations Committee investigator. He frames his authority on the subject by way of his own career: fifteen years at the CIA, the first half in analysis and the second half in counterterrorism operations, including a stint as chief of CIA counterterrorist operations in Pakistan after 9/11.[1]
Cocaine and the crack epidemic
Kiriakou described a widely known internal awareness at the CIA of reporting that the agency had been responsible for the arrival of massive quantities of cocaine that eventually reached Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Oakland and became the crack epidemic. He stated that fully fifty percent of CIA personnel believed the reporting was accurate. His own position: “I believe it. And of course, now historically, we know that that was true. The CIA facilitated the arrival of cocaine.”[2][3]
Afghanistan — 93% of world heroin
After leaving the CIA, Kiriakou served as senior investigator on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He flew to Afghanistan to conduct a study on the heroin poppy crop. His conclusion: Afghanistan, under American military control, produced ninety-three percent of the world’s heroin, and the CIA was facilitating its cultivation. He wrote the findings up and, before delivering them to Committee Chairman John Kerry, shared the report with a friend at the DEA for review.[3][4]
The DEA officer called back and told him: “Buddy, you know you’re not going to get this published.” His explanation: ninety-three percent of Afghanistan’s heroin flows to Iran and Russia. “We want them to be addicted to heroin. It weakens their societies. It makes them easier to dominate. We want them all to be drug addicts.”[5][6]
Kiriakou submitted the report to Kerry. Kerry killed it. The paper was never published.[6]
The fentanyl parallel
Kiriakou drew a direct parallel to the current fentanyl crisis in the United States. Fentanyl comes from China. The reason the United States cannot stop it, in his assessment, is the same logic in reverse: “The Chinese want us to be addicted to fentanyl. It weakens our society and it makes it easier for them to dominate us.” His summary: “What goes around comes around.”[6][7]
Why the CIA doesn’t care about drugs (Scott Michael Nathan)
John Kiriakou says the recurring Narcos scene where a CIA station chief wrecks a DEA raid reflects reality: drugs are the DEA’s problem, not the CIA’s, whose concern is communism and terrorism — so it will “work with the drug cartels if they’re going to tell us where the communists are.”[8][9] He adds that cartels are not terrorists by definition, since they do not use violence against the public to instill terror — they are “drug kingpins.”[10] In a separate interview making the same point, Kiriakou says the CIA’s focus follows whatever “operating directive” (OD) is current — communism, terrorism, or another priority — and “doesn’t give a damn about narcotics” in itself; in Colombia, where the operating directive was fighting communist insurgency, the agency would work with cartels such as Cali against the communists, putting it directly at odds with the DEA.[11][12] Kiriakou cautions, however, that this “enemy of my enemy” logic can be flawed: the U.S. armed both Iran and Iraq during their war in the late 1970s despite both being American enemies, on the mistaken theory that one enemy fighting another makes it a friend.[13]
Rebutting the on-air denial (Judging Freedom)
John Kiriakou rebuts former CIA officer Jack Devine’s televised claim that the agency “never” worked with drug traffickers by pointing to Manuel Noriega, a paid CIA source for decades, and to Iran-Contra. The CIA, he says, “looked the other way” while kingpins moved drugs so long as they cooperated against communists.[14][15]