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]
”They don’t care at all”
Asked to reconcile the war on drugs with the agency’s record, Kiriakou offers what he calls an easy but cynical answer: “The CIA has never cared about drugs. They don’t care at all. They don’t care if everybody in the world is addicted to drugs.”[16]
The substitution he describes is ideological. For most of the agency’s existence it cared about stopping communism, and if communist rebels in Colombia or Venezuela could be turned to that purpose, then the cultivation was simply not the agency’s concern — “cultivate as much cocaine you want. We don’t mind.”[17]
He uses the Netflix series Narcos as a shorthand, noting it is written from the DEA’s perspective and that the station chief in it freezes the pursuit because the cartel in question was useful against communist rebels. “That’s the CIA.”[18][19]
The choice never made
Pressed that this is not cynicism but immorality, Kiriakou agrees and restates the question as one of national character: do you want to be “the shining beacon of hope for democracy and civil rights and civil liberties and human rights”, or “the arms dealer that allows for trafficking… because of your obsession with communism”? “You can’t be both. It has to be one. The United States has never made that choice. They want to be both” — going embassy to embassy preaching human rights, religious tolerance and minority rights while running secret prisons, torture programmes, assassination squads and kidnapping teams.[20][21][22]
The jurisdictional excuse
Explaining how cocaine could move from Nicaragua to Los Angeles with American knowledge, Kiriakou sets the two agencies side by side. The Drug Enforcement Administration was present in Nicaragua and existed to stop the flow. The CIA “doesn’t care about drugs in many cases it’s perfectly happy to allow drugs into the United States if it helps them to fight communism or contemporaneously to fight terrorism drugs are dea’s problem the CIA is not going to trouble itself with drugs.”[23][24]
Applied to the Contras, that posture produced a distinction he is careful to preserve: the agency did not own the cocaine, it permitted its transshipment — “totally immoral and illegal. It’s actually a death penalty case to import large amounts of drugs like that.”[25]
The same logic reappears in his account of Afghan heroin and of fentanyl: tolerated flows serving a strategic end. And the accountability outcome was the one he returns to — after three federal investigations found Gary Webb correct, “no one at the CIA was ever prosecuted no one was ever even fired or suspended for trafficking cocaine into the United States.”[26]
The two Contra groups, and the trade between them
Kiriakou’s fullest statement of the mechanism separates the Contras by geography. “There were two different Contra groups, one in the north of Nicaragua and one in the south. We were working with the Contras in the north. The Contras in the south were taking in Colombian cocaine.”[27]
“And the CIA involvement at the very least was to allow the cocaine through the north of Nicaragua unmolested, knowing that that cocaine was making its way to the United States. And in response to that, we would get no pushback from the southern Contras to the arming of the northern Contras — and indeed the southern Contras would continue to fight against the Sandinistas.”[27][28]
His conclusion is bracketed at both ends: “it’s been pretty well documented that the CIA at the very least allowed cocaine to come into the country, and at worst facilitated cocaine coming into the country.”[28]
The disagreement inside the profession
Asked to adjudicate between Sheriff David Hathaway — thirty years at the DEA, including senior management — who agrees with him, and Jack Devine, who denies it adamantly, Kiriakou chose: “I think the sheriff is right. I think Jack Devine is wrong.”[29][30]
He extends the same judgement to Dewey Clarridge’s personal involvement — “I believe that he was” — adding that he has “researched the daylights out of this.”[31]