Exclusive — CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis: CIA to Create a ‘Finely Tuned Machine’ to Destroy the Cartels
The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) is opening its aperture on terrorism and is readying to unleash its capabilities against international cartels smuggling drugs across the nation’s borders, according to an exclusive interview with CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis at CIA headquarters on Friday.
As early as this week, the agency is preparing to launch the Americas Counternarcotics Mission Center, which will merge agency personnel who focus on counternarcotics and personnel who focus on the Western Hemisphere, for closer and faster coordination, he said.
He said the goal is to create a “finely tuned machine” to destroy the cartels, whose members the Trump administration have designated as foreign terrorists. The agency is aiming to use its experience in hunting down radical Islamist jihadists honed over the past 25 years, and apply it to destroying the cartels’ networks abroad.
It will mark a big shift for the agency that has primarily focused its fight against counterterrorism fight in Middle East and South Asia.
Ellis said that focus is not going away, but that it will now include Latin America — which has been neglected over the past two decades. For example, he noted that at the CIA’s headquarters, one has to walk through a kitchen to get to the counternarcotics center conference room.
That will change, he said, joking that some linguists may need to switch from Arabic to Spanish.
Symbolic of this shift is Ellis’s first official trip as deputy CIA director to the border near San Diego, California. During that visit, he met with personnel from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and Customs and Border Patrol, with whom the CIA will be working closely in this effort.
“It’s a whole of government effort,” he said.
However, Ellis said there is a public impression that the fight against the cartels is mainly a domestic law enforcement effort, but noted that there is a lot of work to be done across the border and overseas — from locating labs to the tracing precursor chemicals of drugs.
“The drug trafficker is a savvy, sophisticated adversary,” Ellis said. “[We’re] looking further upstream to identify those networks beyond our borders and dismantle them.”
Ellis indicated the agency would do this work with the partnership of other countries. “The Mexican government doesn’t want cartels operating in their country,” he said.
Ellis said the agency’s activities may not be visible, given the nature of the agency’s work, but the results ultimately would be seen in fewer deaths from fentanyl and other illicit drugs.
As far as visible results so far, he noted the numbers of those illegally crossing the border have already gone down dramatically.
“It’s night and day from before January 20,” Ellis said.
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