For decades Washington has proclaimed a global crusade — against terror, against narco-trafficking, against money laundering. Yet a growing body of evidence and longstanding allegations suggest a very different pattern: that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), operating under the cover of “covert action”, has repeatedly tolerated, enabled or even fostered illicit economics when it served narrow geopolitical goals. From the poppy fields of Afghanistan to the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia, and now into the borderless realm of cryptocurrencies, the same shadow play of strategic expediency and plausible deniability is visible. What passes in official rhetoric as the “war on drugs” often appears, to critics, less like eradication than like management — a management that sometimes lines the pockets of covert networks, warlords and, critics allege, the agencies that back them.

While the United States claims to fight terrorism, jihad and the global drug trade, there is a far uglier side to its spy apparatus — the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) — which critics say has had tentacles in many illicit markets. When inconvenient facts emerge, US authorities frequently frame controversial activities as “covert action” or “covert operations”, words that can obscure accountability and muddy public understanding.

A number of writers and investigators have alleged that the CIA was complicit in the Nicaraguan Contras’ cocaine trafficking during the 1980s, allegedly to finance the Contra groups seeking to oust the revolutionary Sandinista government. Those allegations, widely publicized in the 1990s, point to the broader problem of intelligence work intersecting with criminal economies when political aims are deemed paramount.

In 2012 Al Jazeera published a report quoting a spokesman for Chihuahua state in northern Mexico who bluntly asserted that the US Central Intelligence Agency and other international security forces “don’t fight drug traffickers” — rather, “they try to manage the drug trade”. The report observed that while accusations of official complicity usually come from activists, academics or former officials, a public statement from a Mexican government official on the record was striking and raised hard questions about the real role of great-power agencies in regions riven by cartels.

The nexus of covert Cold War policies and the rise of drug economies is well illustrated by Afghanistan. In an analysis titled “Afghan Heroin & the CIA”, the Geopolitical Monitor documented how US involvement in Afghanistan beginning in the late 1970s set conditions that allowed the opium economy to flourish.........

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