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https://www.wsj.com/articles/law-enforcement-police-developing-countries-856c41e2

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

World
They pursue matters ranging from heroin smuggling to protecting pangolins, pursuing
American interests when regular cops can’t be trusted

By Michael M. Phillips Follow

July 4, 2023 5:30 am ET

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

A pangolin rescued from alleged traffickers in a alleged pangolin traffickers, said of the vetted officers. “They
sting operation last August in Kenya. PHOTO: basically work at the behest of a foreign nation. It’s not right.” 
DIRECTORATE OF CRIMINAL INVESTIGATIONS

Ryan Williams, a supervisory special agent with the State Department, with a 16-year-old Somali American, at the Gigiri Police Station
in Nairobi. PHOTO: MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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.

U.S. Ambassador to Kenya Meg Whitman and Mohamed Amin, director of the Kenyan Directorate of
Criminal Investigations. PHOTO: YASUYOSHI CHIBA/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES

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.

A Kenyan detective assigned to the U.S. Embassy, left, talks with Ahmed Mohamed Abdi, director of
Mustaqim Rehabilitation Centre. PHOTO: MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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.

A U.S. embassy Criminal Fraud Investigator, right, escorts American and British youths out of Mustaqim Rehabilitation Centre. PHOTO:
MICHAEL M. PHILLIPS/THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

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.
Sandalwood set ablaze at the Directorate of Criminal Investigations headquarters in Nairobi. PHOTO: DANIEL
IRUNGU/EPA/SHUTTERSTOCK

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.