A decade before President Donald Trump boasted of “hunting” alleged “narcoterrorists” on boats off the coast of Venezuela, the Defense Department was looking for new ways to get involved in the war on drugs.

In a major report quietly issued by the federally funded Institute for Defense Analyses, researchers working for the Pentagon presented their findings, based on interviews with dozens of top drug traffickers incarcerated in the United States, on how to better disrupt transnational organized crime.

One top-line prescription: More “direct military action.”

The report, which was obtained by The Intercept through a Freedom of Information Act request and has never previously been made public, provides a window into the inner workings of major drug-trafficking networks. The report also shows the central role the Pentagon sees for itself in countering those networks at a time when the Trump administration is claiming broad war-making authorities and beginning to openly use the military to assassinate alleged smugglers.

An attorney whose client was interviewed by researchers working for the Pentagon told The Intercept that the report proves that the recent sidelining of counternarcotics police in favor of bloodshed at sea is what military insiders have wanted for years.

“There’s a huge difference between the Coast Guard or the Navy boarding what they suspect to be a boat with drugs coming into the United States, and prosecuting those people, and those people having lawyers and facing charges and appearing in court, and potentially going to prison if they’re convicted — and the summary execution of suspected drug dealers,” the lawyer said. “And now we’ve crossed that line.”

The report, issued in 2015, comes to light as the U.S. has deployed warships, fighter jets, spy planes, and thousands of sailors to the Caribbean Sea, and has carried out several high-profile strikes on small boats in international waters, mostly coming from Venezuela, a country whose leaders Trump officials decry as illegitimate.

The report shows glimmers of the mentality that Trump has made into policy with his tropical drone strikes, but the president has done little of what the Pentagon-funded researchers ultimately concluded would be the most effective means of taking on cartels: fighting corruption and arresting drug lords.

“Bad Guys”

The report is based on interviews with 62 drug-world figures, including 10 people described by the Drug Enforcement Administration as “leaders of the most prolific drug trafficking/money laundering organizations.” Supporting documents show that the idea of labeling drug gangs as foreign invaders and waging a literal war on them long predates Trump’s rise to power.

“The purpose of this research is to gain a better understanding of how transnational (worldwide) criminal organizations are structured,” researchers wrote in a 2010 memo to prospective interview subjects obtained by The Intercept. “The DoD believes this knowledge will benefit U.S. military forces who are actively involved in engaging insurgent groups that have similar ‘organized crime’ characteristics or connections.” (The Pentagon did not respond to requests for comment, and the Institute for Defense Analyses declined to comment.)

One of the report’s authors, a retired DEA chief and George W. Bush-era drug policy official named Joseph Keefe, told The Intercept that the project started in the thick of the Iraq War, when Keefe’s team saw Iraqi insurgents and drug cartels as similar organizations of “bad guys.”

“The bad guys, the Iraqis we were fighting, were similar to the bad guys Drug Enforcement fights,” he said. “It was trying to look at things through the bad guys’ mind. People don’t look at that often.”

Keefe said there is a role for the military in combating drug trafficking, but he criticized the new Trump policy of death from above.

“Working together is helpful,” he said, “but not killing everybody.”

Co-author William Simpkins, former acting administrator of the DEA, shared Keefe’s skepticism. Simpkins told The Intercept that, based on his more than three decades in drug enforcement, the people who cartels recruit for smuggling trips are by definition not high-ranking members of trafficking networks, and could even be forced to carry out the work.

© The Intercept