A bag of 4-fluoro isobutyryl fentanyl seized during a police raid is displayed at the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Special Research and Testing Laboratory in Sterling, Virginia, on August 9, 2016.
Cliff Owen/AP
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Cliff Owen/AP
The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) will close two of its hard-won offices in China, The Associated Press has learned, a move that comes even as the agency struggles to disrupt the flow of precursor chemicals from the country that have fueled a fentanyl epidemic blamed for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
“These closures reflect the need to leverage DEA’s limited and finite resources to target areas where we can have the greatest impact in saving American lives,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told agents last week in an email that also included plans to close a dozen other offices around the world to reduce the DEA’s current footprint of 93 offices in 69 countries.
Although the rumor has been circulating for months, it’s unclear exactly why the DEA is closing its Shanghai and Guangzhou offices, leaving only those in the capital Beijing and the autonomous city of Hong Kong, and how that might affect its fentanyl efforts. The DEA has said only that the decision follows a data-driven process aimed at maximizing the agency’s impact.
“Americans have a right to know why this decision was made and where the DEA intends to reallocate hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” said Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
DEA veterans say it’s another setback in the often-hesitant cooperation between the two geopolitical rivals. Even as China has added dozens of fentanyl-producing chemicals to its list of controlled substances and warned companies against transporting them, the country remains the world’s largest source of precursors in a fentanyl crisis that has caused nearly 100,000 deaths a year in the United States.
“We have to work with the Chinese and get them to help stop the flow of precursor chemicals,” said Mike Vigil, a former DEA foreign operations chief, “and it’s hard to develop those relationships with fewer representatives in the country.”
It took years of U.S. requests before China even agreed to allow the DEA to open offices outside the capital Beijing in 2017. Hopes were high for its two-agent office in Guangzhou, a major center of trade and organized crime, and a similar outpost in Shanghai, the country’s financial hub.
But a U.S. official familiar with the closures who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive diplomatic matter said China’s cooperation was largely in name only and that officers assigned to the field offices faced difficulties obtaining visas and numerous restrictions as U.S.-China relations deteriorated.
China suspended its anti-drug cooperation in 2022 in retaliation for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Beijing-ruled Taiwan. But those efforts appear to have improved more recently, after President Joe Biden met with his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, in San Francisco last year.
The DEA’s Milgram traveled to China in January with Todd Robinson, the State Department’s top counternarcotics official. A few months later, authorities in Beijing arrested a Chinese national who had fled the United States after being named in a criminal indictment in federal court in Los Angeles for trafficking fentanyl.
Milgram has increasingly highlighted how such cooperation could help disrupt China’s precursor trade and its role as a magnet for laundering drug proceeds around the world.
“This work has been constructive so far, but I think it’s too early to know whether we’re going to get the results we want,” Milgram told a congressional committee earlier this year. “If we could stop the flow of precursors from China, we could have a significant impact.”
China declined to comment on the case, which it said was the responsibility of the DEA. However, Liu Pengyu, a spokesman for the Chinese embassy in Washington, praised recent cooperation between the two countries on fentanyl, citing a recent visit to DEA headquarters by a delegation led by the director general of China’s Narcotics Control Bureau.
“China hopes that the US can work with China in the same direction and continue practical cooperation in drug control based on mutual respect, management of differences and mutual benefit.”
In total, the 14 offices the DEA plans to close have more than 100 agents and employees, and some of them, including in Russia, Cyprus and Indonesia, are home to thriving criminal networks with ties to Latin American cartels that smuggle most of the cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl sold in the United States.
Other offices are expected to close in the Bahamas, Egypt, Georgia, Haiti, Kazakhstan, Mozambique, Myanmar, Nicaragua and Senegal. Milgram also announced plans to open offices in Albania and Jordan.
The actions come 18 months after an outside review of the DEA’s global footprint, following an AP investigation into a foreign corruption scandal involving Jose Irizarry, a disgraced former DEA agent in Colombia who confessed to embezzling millions of dollars from drug money laundering operations to fund a global party and sex spree.
The study noted that the now 50-year-old agency had never conducted such an assessment to reflect evolving threats, and recommended a “rightsizing” of resources to combat fentanyl.
Four of the offices to be closed – the Bahamas, Haiti, Myanmar and Nicaragua – are in countries that, along with China, have been designated by the White House as major drug production or transit areas.
Andre Kellum, who retired in 2021 as regional director for Africa, was particularly critical of the closure of the Senegal office, where an elite local police unit trained and controlled by the DEA was responsible for dozens of major arrests. Close ties to authorities in Mozambique, where the DEA opened an office in 2017, were key to catching Brazil’s largest drug trafficker.
“It’s a short-sighted approach,” he said. “These relationships are critical and are not easily rebuilt.”
William Warren, a former DEA regional director in the Middle East, stressed that the agency can also act as a vital extra pair of American eyes in countries that are hotbeds of arms smuggling, human trafficking and terrorist groups.
“The DEA is a force multiplier for national security,” he said. “It’s not just about seizing drugs. The leads, information and intelligence that the DEA shares with other federal agencies protect Americans from all kinds of threats.”
