Biden Swap Freed Drug Trafficker on Special Ops Kill List

Bashir Noorzai was targeted for Taliban support

Before he graced the cover of TIME magazine as Afghanistan’s, and the world’s, most prolific heroin kingpin, and before the White House’s prisoner swap Monday that traded him for kidnapped American contractor Mark Frerichs, Haji Bashir Noorzai had another, far more dangerous identity. 

As few people outside the closed world of counter-terror missions know, Noorzai was a high-priority target on the U.S. special operations forces’ highly classified kill-or-capture list, because he was pouring millions of narcodollars into the Taliban treasury.

“We were running around Afghanistan looking for him from 2001 to 2005,” a retired, formerly high-ranking U.S Army. special operations commander tells SPYTALK.  “I was almost exuberant when we found out that Mike’s team got him.”

“Mike” was Michael Braun, chief of operations for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.  He oversaw, among other things, an intricate sting that lured Noorzai to his arrest in New York City in April 2005.  Braun’s team was a group of agents from the DEA’s Special Operations Division who focused on “narcoterrorists,” meaning, people who use drug money to finance terrorism.   

The special ops commander was exuberant because DEA’s guileful collar, which went down in an Embassy Suites hotel in Manhattan, no shots fired, meant that American soldiers could stop pounding sand outside the wire, searching for the extremists’ elusive paymaster.  

“U.S. military special operations forces considered Noorzai a Tier 1 target,” Braun says. U.S. intelligence showed that he was using his formidable resources to sustain the Taliban’s war against the fragile Afghan government and its U.S. and NATO allies.