CIA Hatched a Unique Plot to Disrupt Afghan Opium
In this 2017 file photo, an Afghan man walks through a poppy field in the Surkhroad district of Jalalabad, east of Kabul, Afghanistan. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul, File)
The United States is taking an increasingly bold and highly visible approach in its fight against international drug trafficking—a stark contrast to a clandestine strategy the Washington Post has now revealed from the Afghanistan war years. According to the report, the CIA quietly conducted a years-long effort between 2004 and 2015 in which modified poppy seeds were secretly dropped over Afghan fields. The idea: weaken the potency of the heroin ultimately produced from those crops.
The program was run through the CIA’s Crime and Narcotics Center and was kept so tightly classified that even many senior figures in the Pentagon and the State Department had no knowledge of it.
Did the effort succeed? The answer appears mixed. One former U.S. official familiar with the operation told the Post that the seeds seemed effective at first, but their impact appeared to diminish over time. The initiative was also enormously costly, contributing to its eventual shutdown. “The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” the official said, though he still described the program as a creative, unconventional attempt to tackle the drug trade without military force.
The initiative unfolded amid broader disagreements among U.S. agencies over how to curb Afghanistan’s opium economy—from proposals for aerial herbicide campaigns to ideas about buying the crop for legitimate pharmaceutical supply chains. In the end, official reviews concluded that neither the CIA’s secret seed drops nor any other U.S. or allied strategy resulted in a lasting decrease in Afghan poppy cultivation or opium output.
The Post notes that the seeds weren’t genetically engineered; rather, they were selectively bred to produce poppies less capable of yielding potent heroin.
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