According to an exclusive interview with CIA Deputy Director Michael Ellis on Friday, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) has opened an opening on terrorism and is preparing to unlock its capabilities against international cartels smuggling drugs across borders.
As early as this week, government agencies are preparing to launch the Americas Countanarcotics Mission Center. It says it will fuse countercatics focused on the Western Hemisphere and staff-focused agency staff for faster coordination.
He said it was about creating “finely tuned machines” to destroy the cartels the Trump administration has designated as foreign terrorists. The agency aims to use the experiences that it applied to hunting radical Muslim jihadists that have been honed over the past 25 years and destroying the network of cartels overseas.
This will mark a major change for institutions that have focused primarily on fighting counterterrorism battles in the Middle East and South Asia.
Ellis said the focus has not disappeared, but now includes Latin America. This has been ignored over the past 20 years. For example, he said at the CIA headquarters, he had to walk through the kitchen to reach the meeting room at the counteralcotics centre.
That would change, he said, joked that some linguists might need to switch from Arabic to Spanish.
The symbol of this shift is Ellis’ first official trip as Associate CIA Director to the border near San Diego, California. During that visit, he met with officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security, and Customs and Border Patrol.
“It’s the whole government effort,” he said.
But Ellis said he had the general impression that the fight against the cartel is primarily a domestic law enforcement effort, but noted that there is a lot to be done in the lab and overseas.
“Drug traffickers are savvy and sophisticated enemies,” Ellis said. “[We’re] Looking further upstream, we identify those networks across our borders and dismantle them. ”
Ellis noted that government agencies will do this work with partnerships in other countries. “The Mexican government does not want cartels to operate in their own country,” he said.
Ellis said the agency’s activities may be invisible given the nature of the agency’s work, but ultimately, the number of deaths from fentanyl and other illegal drugs has decreased.
As for the visible outcomes so far, he has noticed that the number of people crossing the border illegally has already dropped dramatically.
“It’s lunch and lunch from before January 20th,” Ellis said.
Follow Kristina Wong on Breitbart News x, The true societyor on Facebook.
