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

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.

A pangolin rescued from alleged traffickers in a sting operation last August in Kenya. Photo: Directorate of Criminal Investigations

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.”

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.

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