Pubdate: Fri, 02 Feb 2007
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: Front Page
Copyright: 2007 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298
Author: James Risen
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Afghanistan
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

AN AFGHAN'S PATH FROM ALLY OF U.S. TO DRUG SUSPECT

WASHINGTON -- In April 2005, federal law enforcement officials 
summoned reporters to a Manhattan news conference to announce the 
capture of an Afghan drug lord and Taliban ally. While boasting that 
he was a big catch -- the Asian counterpart of the Colombian cocaine 
legend Pablo Escobar -- the officials left out some puzzling details, 
including why the Afghan, Haji Bashir Noorzai, had risked arrest by 
coming to New York.

Now, with Mr. Noorzai's case likely to come to trial this year, a 
fuller story about the American government's dealings with him is emerging.

Soon after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Mr. Noorzai agreed to 
cooperate with American officials, who hoped he could lead them to 
hidden Taliban weapons and leaders, according to current and former 
government officials and Mr. Noorzai's American lawyer. The 
relationship soured, but American officials tried to renew it in 
2004. A year later, Mr. Noorzai was secretly indicted and lured to 
New York, where he was arrested after nearly two weeks of talks with 
law enforcement and counterterrorism officials in a hotel.

In fighting the war on terrorism, government officials have often 
accepted trade-offs in developing relationships with informants with 
questionable backgrounds who might prove useful. As with Mr. Noorzai, 
it is often not clear whether the benefits outweigh the costs.

The government's shifting views of Mr. Noorzai -- from sought-after 
ally to notorious global criminal -- parallels its evolving 
perspective on Afghanistan's heroin trade.

In the first years after the United States invasion in late 2001, 
military and intelligence officials mostly chose to ignore opium 
production and instead dealt freely with warlords, including drug 
traffickers who promised information about members of the Taliban and 
Al Qaeda or offered security in the chaotic countryside. But in more 
recent years, as poppy production has soared and financed a revived 
Taliban insurgency that is threatening the country's stability, the 
Americans have begun to take some more aggressive steps.

"In Afghanistan, finding terrorists has always trumped chasing drug 
traffickers," said Bobby Charles, the former top counternarcotics 
official at the State Department.

He and other officials acknowledge that the United States initially 
may have had little choice other than to turn to tribal leaders with 
murky motives for help in bringing order to an essentially lawless 
society. But Mr. Charles pushed for the Bush administration to 
recognize suspected drug lords like Mr. Noorzai as a long-term 
security issue. "If we do not now take a hard second look at 
counternarcotics," he said, "we will not get a third look."

Administration officials say that they are working to develop a more 
effective drug strategy in Afghanistan, which now accounts for 82 
percent of the world's opium cultivation, according to a United 
Nations report last September. That could include broader eradication 
programs, alternative crop development and cracking down on drug 
lords, but any such efforts are complicated by fears that they could 
increase instability.

Federal prosecutors in New York handling Mr. Noorzai's case refused 
to comment for this article, as did spokesmen for the Drug 
Enforcement Administration, Central Intelligence Agency and United 
States Central Command.

Mr. Noorzai, who has been held in a New York jail for nearly two 
years, has pleaded not guilty to charges that he smuggled heroin into 
New York and denies any involvement in drug trafficking. His New York 
lawyer, Ivan Fisher, argues that the arrest hurt the government's 
ability to gain information about the escalating Taliban insurgency.

"Haji Bashir has been making efforts to reach working agreements with 
the Americans in Afghanistan since the 1990s," Mr. Fisher said.

Several intelligence, counterterrorism and law enforcement officials 
confirm that American officials met repeatedly with Mr. Noorzai over 
the years. Because they provided few details about the substance of 
the talks, it is difficult to determine how useful Mr. Noorzai's 
cooperation proved to be. He was not paid for his information, and 
the relationship was considered more informal, the officials said.

At times, there was confusion within the government about what to do 
with Mr. Noorzai. In 2002, while he was talking to the American 
officials in Afghanistan, a team at C.I.A. headquarters assigned to 
identify targets to capture or kill in Afghanistan wanted to put him 
on its list, one former intelligence official said. Like others, he 
would only speak on condition of anonymity because such discussions 
were classified.

The C.I.A. team was blocked, the former official recalled. Although 
he never received an explanation, the former official said that the 
Defense Department officials and American military commanders viewed 
counternarcotics efforts in Afghanistan at the time as a form of 
"mission creep" that would distract from the fight against terrorism.

Mr. Noorzai, a wealthy tribal leader in his mid-40s who lived with 
three wives and 13 children in Quetta, Pakistan, and also owns homes 
in Afghanistan and the United Arab Emirates, is from the same region 
that helped produce the Taliban. A native of Kandahar Province, he 
was a mujahedeen commander fighting the Soviet occupation of 
Afghanistan in the 1980s. In 1990, according to his lawyer, he agreed 
to help track down Stinger missiles provided to the Afghan resistance 
by the C.I.A.; agency officials were worried about their possible use 
by terrorists.

D.E.A. officials say that at the same time, Mr. Noorzai was a major 
figure in the Afghan drug trade, controlling poppy fields that 
supplied a significant share of the world's heroin. He was also an 
early financial backer of the Taliban. Agency officials say he 
provided demolition materials, weapons and manpower in exchange for 
protection for his opium crops, heroin labs, smuggling routes and followers.

Mr. Noorzai was in Quetta when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, and he 
returned soon after to Afghanistan, according to his lawyer. In 
November 2001, he met with men he described as American military 
officials at Spinboldak, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, Mr. Fisher 
said. Small teams of United States Special Forces and intelligence 
officers were in Afghanistan at the time, seeking the support of 
tribal leaders.

Mr. Noorzai was taken to Kandahar, where he was detained and 
questioned for six days by the Americans about Taliban officials and 
operations, his lawyer said. He agreed to work with them and was 
freed, and in late January 2002 he handed over 15 truckloads of 
weapons, including about 400 antiaircraft missiles, that had been 
hidden by the Taliban in his tribe's territory, Mr. Fisher said.

Mr. Noorzai also offered to act as an intermediary between Taliban 
leaders and the Americans, his lawyer said. Mr. Noorzai said he 
helped persuade the Taliban's former foreign minister, Wakil Ahmad 
Mutawakil -- the son of the mullah in Mr. Noorzai's hometown -- to 
meet with the Americans. In February 2002, the Taliban official 
surrendered after what press accounts described as extensive 
negotiations and was sent to the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He 
was freed in 2005.

Mr. Noorzai also persuaded a local tribal figure, Haji Birqet, to 
return to Afghanistan from Pakistan, the lawyer said. But he said the 
Americans, falsely warned that Mr. Birqet and Mr. Noorzai were 
plotting to attack United States forces, killed Mr. Birqet and 
wounded several family members in a raid on his compound.

Saying that his credibility had been hurt by the imprisonment of Mr. 
Mutawakil and that he was angered by the attack on Mr. Birqet, Mr. 
Noorzai broke off contact with the Americans and fled to his home in 
Pakistan, according to Mr. Fisher.

The government officials could not confirm whether Mr. Noorzai had in 
fact played a role in those negotiations. There may be another 
explanation for his exile, however. In May 2002, one of his tribal 
commanders was killed in an American raid along a drug-smuggling 
route that the Americans suspected was used to help the Taliban, and 
Mr. Noorzai may have feared for his own safety.

Nearly two years later, in January 2004, Mr. Charles, the State 
Department official, proposed placing him on President Bush's list of 
foreign narcotics kingpins, for the most wanted drug lords around the world.

At that time, Mr. Charles recalled in an interview, no Afghan heroin 
traffickers were on the list, which he thought was a glaring 
omission. He suggested three names, including Mr. Noorzai's, but said 
his recommendation was met with an awkward silence during an 
interagency meeting. He said there was resistance to placing Afghans 
on the list because countering the drug trade there was not an 
administration priority. Mr. Charles persisted, and in June 2004, Mr. 
Noorzai became the first Afghan on the list.

Two months later, a team of American contractors working for the 
Federal Bureau of Investigation contacted Mr. Noorzai and arranged a 
series of meetings with him in Pakistan and Dubai, according to 
several government officials and Mr. Noorzai's lawyer. They wanted to 
win his cooperation and learn about Al Qaeda's financial network and 
perhaps the whereabouts of the former Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad 
Omar. The Americans met with Mr. Noorzai, but the talks fizzled 
because F.B.I. agents who were supposed to join them were unable to 
do so, one official said.

In 2005, the contractors, by then working for the D.E.A., reconnected 
with Mr. Noorzai and once again met with him in Dubai.

This time, however, the objective had changed. Mr. Noorzai had 
secretly been indicted by a federal grand jury in New York on drug 
smuggling charges in January 2005. Now the contractors needed to 
persuade Mr. Noorzai to come to the United States.

Mr. Fisher said the Americans were particularly interested in gaining 
Mr. Noorzai's help in tracking the flow of money to the Taliban and 
Al Qaeda. They were seeking information about Mullah Omar and other 
Taliban figures. The Americans asked Mr. Noorzai to come to the 
United States to meet with their superiors, he added.

Mr. Noorzai's lawyer said his client agreed to make the trip only 
after receiving assurances that he would not be arrested. Mr. Fisher 
also says that he has obtained transcripts from tape recordings made 
by the government at the sessions.

Mr. Noorzai flew to New York in April 2005 and was taken to an 
Embassy Suites hotel, where he was questioned for 13 days before 
being arrested, his lawyer said.

Mr. Noorzai has been charged with conspiring to import more than $50 
million worth of heroin from Afghanistan and Pakistan into the United 
States and other countries. The indictment says that he imported 
heroin to New York in the late 1990s and that unnamed co-conspirators 
also did so in 2001 and 2002.
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