The U.S. Funds Shadow Police Units All Over the World

NAIROBI—The sting operation went off perfectly. Kenyan police detectives subsidized by the U.S. government pretended to be in the market for a live pangolin, an endangered, armadillo-like animal whose scales and meat fetch a high price in parts of Asia.

A Kenyan undercover agent flashed a wad of cash and invited the alleged ringleader of the poaching gang to close the sale inside a black Land Cruiser, rented with funds from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Within moments, Kenyan police surrounded the SUV and arrested three suspects. An officer designated as pangolin-handler donned leather gloves, seized the animal, which curled up into a defensive ball, and secured it in a wooden crate padded with fabric.

The arrest of the alleged pangolin traffickers in August, on Kenya’s Indian Ocean coast, was a tiny victory for wildlife conservation. Some 2.7 million pangolins are poached in Africa each year, pushing them to the edge of extinction, according to the African Wildlife Foundation.

It was also a prime example of how U.S. law-enforcement agents operate behind-the-scenes overseas. In more than a dozen developing countries where the U.S. believes police agencies are so riddled with corruption that they can’t be trusted, American embassy personnel handpick their own local law-enforcement units, screen them for misconduct and, to a large degree, assign them missions aligned with U.S. interests.

The U.S. State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs says it has vetted members of 105 police units worldwide for agencies including the Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security.

Because some agencies do their own vetting, the State Department said it was unable to provide a global count of U.S.-aligned units or the officers they employ. It said there was no central office tracking all of the units’ activities or the total government spending that goes into them.

The State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security alone says it has 16 vetted units established under agreements with governments from Peru to the Philippines. The Fish and Wildlife Service funds police in Uganda and Nigeria.

In Kenya, the FBI, Homeland Security, Drug Enforcement Administration and Fish and Wildlife Service each have their own vetted detectives from the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations. The units pursue matters ranging from heroin smuggling to passport and visa forgery to human trafficking and criminal abuse of American citizens. American agents stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi don’t have arrest powers in Kenya, but their local partners do.

Kenyan officials stress that the units ultimately answer to Mohamed Amin, Kenya’s director of criminal investigations, in keeping with local law and the U.S.-Kenyan agreements that established them. In practical terms, the Kenyan detectives often take strong guidance from U.S. embassy officials.

“We, for the most part, have operational control,” said Supervisory Special Agent Ryan Williams of the State Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security, who directed a five-person Kenyan police unit out of the U.S. embassy in Nairobi.  Kenyan detectives undergo a polygraph test before being offered a position in the unit.

 The global spread of U.S.-vetted foreign police units is little known and faces little public scrutiny. Some Kenyans who do know of the units’ existence bridle at the notion that foreigners wield so much influence in domestic law enforcement. 

 “They don’t have autonomy,” Murigi Kamande, lawyer for the alleged pangolin traffickers, said of the vetted officers. “They basically work at the behest of a foreign nation. It’s not right.” 

The DEA pioneered the strategy during the cocaine wars in Colombia, Bolivia and Peru in the 1980s. Resident American narcotics agents, frustrated by the drug cartels’ influence over local police, took it upon themselves to identify officers they felt they could trust, according to research conducted at the time by Ethan Nadelmann, then a Princeton University professor. At the time, the DEA’s ability to keep vetted units clean and effective depended on extensive diplomatic pressure from the U.S. government, Nadelmann found.

Now the practice has become routine and global for law-enforcement agencies throughout the U.S. government. The units operate under memorandums of understanding between the U.S. and local authorities.

 In May, a vetted American embassy unit in the South American country of Guyana helped track down and arrest a man wanted in the U.S. for sexual assault of a child, according to the State Department. A Colombian unit dismantled a seven-city human-smuggling operation that was charging $4,000 to $5,000 a head to provide migrants with fake documents to secure U.S. visas, according to Colombian and U.S. authorities.

Kenyan officers who win positions in vetted units get upgraded training, the prestige of working in an elite squad and, depending on the unit, as much as twice their usual pay. U.S. agencies provide intelligence they might not share with ordinary Kenyan police.

“The benefits of such collaborations and partnerships are immense, and the most important being the assurance of the safety and security of the people we serve,” said Inspector Mike Mugo, a spokesman for the Kenyan Directorate of Criminal Investigations, or DCI.

Vetted units tend to perform significantly better than their un-vetted counterparts, securing higher arrest, prosecution and conviction rates, according to a U.S. Embassy spokesman in Nairobi.

There have been a few instances in which detectives from vetted units have proven corrupt, but the embassy spokesman said the “bad actors were quickly identified, removed and replaced before there could be significant impacts.” Those Kenyan officers were usually exposed through repeated lie-detector testing, the spokesman said.

Mugo, the Kenyan DCI spokesman, said he knew of no cases in which vetted officers had compromised investigations or otherwise been corrupted.

In recent months, DCI chief Amin has appeared alongside U.S. Ambassador Meg Whitman to announce American reward money for wanted terror suspects and to preside over the destruction of tons of allegedly smuggled sandalwood, an endangered tree.

The Kenyan National Police Service has been criticized by civil-society groups and politicians for rampant corruption and other serious problems. Traffic officers routinely demand bribes from drivers. The country’s president, William Ruto, accused the DCI’s elite Special Services Unit of extrajudicial killings and closed it down last year.

“We cannot deny the fact that we have a few rogue police officers in the service, just like we have errant officers in other professions,” said Mugo, the DCI spokesman.  

Still, the first rule for the elite Kenyan units assigned to the U.S. Embassy is that they don’t tell other police the plan. The vetted officers know that if word of an operation leaks, the chances are that when they arrive, the elephant ivory would be hidden or the fake U.S. passports destroyed.

 “Even police are our own enemies sometimes,” said Inspector Josphine Korir, who runs the nine-officer Kenyan wildlife-crime unit. Her team is funded by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which is required by U.S. law to combat trafficking in protected species.

The Kenyan diplomatic-security team directed by Agent Williams of the U.S. Embassy focuses on gangs that forge U.S. passports. Increasingly the officers have been rescuing young Somali-Americans from centers that market themselves to desperate diaspora parents as experts in drug treatment and Islamic education, but can be abusive.  

In September, Williams got a tip that U.S. citizens were being held against their will at Mustaqim Rehabilitation Centre in Nairobi’s heavily Somali Eastleigh neighborhood. The U.S. Embassy considers the densely populated area too dangerous for Americans and Williams himself couldn’t go on the raid.

His Kenyan team assembled unmarked SUVs at a nearby police station, but didn’t tell the station commander the details of their operation. Twice before, the unit had raided rehab centers only to find staff had been tipped off and moved the Americans elsewhere.

This time, a Kenyan reconnaissance team loitered outside of the rehabilitation center in the morning, watching who came and who went. Then the police raiding team pulled up, pretending to be health officials conducting a routine welfare check.

The officers pushed their way into the padlocked inner courtyard, where dozens of young men wandered aimlessly or knelt in prayer.

The detectives demanded the staff identify the foreign residents. Among them was a slender 16-year-old in a North Face hoodie. He was born in Minneapolis and said his mother had had him taken in handcuffs to Mustaqim six weeks earlier due to his errant teenage behavior.

“She thought it was a good place,” the boy said.

Instead, residents complained to police that they were routinely beaten and chained up.

The center’s director, Ahmed Mohamed Abdi, dismissed their allegations. “As long as someone is here, they’ll complain about something,” he said, although he acknowledged that residents who don’t comply with Islamic teachings are locked in a punishment room.

The detectives bundled two Americans and two Britons into the vehicles and drove them to a police station. They left young Somali-Kenyan men and women at the center, despite their pleas to leave. The U.S. Embassy contacted the U.K. High Commission to care for the Britons and offered the Americans hotel rooms for the night and tickets back to the U.S.

Inspector Korir, commander of the U.S.-financed wildlife unit, grew up in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley, where she would scan the plains for impalas and dik-diks, skittish minuscule antelope with implausibly large eyes.

She studied wildlife management and joined the police in 2013 when she heard there were positions for graduates with wildlife and forestry degrees.

Advising her team is a former agent for the U.K. National Crime Agency, paid by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service through a New York nonprofit, Focused Conservation.

A year ago, the U.S. Embassy in Nairobi announced a $1 million reward for information leading to the capture of Abdi Hussein Ahmed, who had been indicted in a New York federal court on charges of trafficking 10 tons of elephant tusks, 420 pounds of rhino horn and 22 pounds of heroin.

Ahmed, a Kenyan, was allegedly the last member of a five-man smuggling gang still at large. Kenyan intelligence agents discovered he was hiding out in Meru, a town on the slopes of Mt. Kenya.

In early August, a Kenyan intelligence officer, joined by a Fish and Wildlife agent from the U.S. Embassy and the British adviser, briefed Korir’s unit at its secret headquarters in Nairobi. She dispatched a team to Meru and waited by the phone. “When your colleagues are out, you don’t sleep,” she said.

That night, one of her men called with news that the team had arrested Ahmed in a $3-a-night rental house, seizing his phone, clothing and Quran as possible evidence. Korir immediately thought about the State Department reward, only to realize later that police aren’t eligible.

The team rushed Ahmed back to Nairobi, where American DEA, FBI and Fish and Wildlife agents participated in the interrogation. A month later, three U.S. Fish and Wildlife agents escorted Ahmed on the flight to New York City. He pleaded guilty to conspiring to traffic in wildlife and narcotics, according to court records. He was sentenced in May to four years in prison.

Korir’s unit, which also investigates trafficking in endangered plants, scored another win in September when the police got a tip that Calvin Juma Boy Ombata, a senior DCI officer who wasn’t part of a U.S.-vetted unit, was smuggling sandalwood in Samburu County, Kenya.

Sandalwood, which is used in perfume, soap and traditional medicine, has been virtually wiped out in Uganda and Tanzania, and is listed as endangered in Kenya. Korir assembled a team of her officers and drove seven hours to Samburu. They found 13.5 tons of sandalwood in two vehicles at Juma’s home, along with a military rifle and ammunition, Korir said.

Juma pleaded not guilty and is currently standing trial in Nairobi. He could face a fine of about $21,000 or five years in prison, according to his attorney. Juma said the wood wasn’t his, and that much of it was evidence from a smuggling case he himself was investigating, the attorney said.

The three alleged pangolin poachers arrested in August pleaded not guilty in Kenyan court. They face a minimum of three years in prison if convicted, according to their lawyer.

Like most Kenyans, the presiding judge had never seen a pangolin. During one hearing, the U.S.-funded police adviser googled “pangolin” and approached the bench to show the judge what the case was all about. The animal, which weighed 29 lbs., had a street value of $30,000, according to a court document.

Wildlife officials tagged the rescued pangolin with a tracking device and released it into a forest. Later the pangolin was spotted alive, but without the device; officials suspect a hyena chewed it off.