DEA closes two offices in China as agency struggles to stem flow of chemicalsExBulletin

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is closing two of its hard-won offices in China, the Associated Press has learned. The decision comes as the agency struggles to stem the flow of chemicals used as precursors for drug use into China, which have fueled a fentanyl epidemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of Americans.

“These closures reflect the need to focus the DEA’s limited and finite resources on 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.

While the rumor has been circulating for months, it’s unclear why the DEA is closing its offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou, leaving only its offices 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 how the DEA plans to spend its hard-earned taxpayer dollars,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa.

DEA veterans say it’s the latest 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 not to transport them, the country remains the world’s largest source of precursors in a fentanyl crisis that has killed nearly 100,000 people in the United States each year.

“We have to work with the Chinese and get them to stop the flow of precursor chemicals,” said Mike Vigil, former head of foreign operations for the DEA. “And it’s hard to develop those relationships with fewer representatives in the country.”

It took years of U.S. requests before China finally agreed in 2017 to allow the DEA to open offices outside the capital, Beijing. Expectations were high for the two-agent office in Guangzhou, a major trade and crime center, and a similar one in Shanghai, the country’s financial heart.

But a U.S. official familiar with the closures, who spoke to the AP anonymously to discuss a sensitive diplomatic matter, said China’s cooperation was largely nominal 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 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 drug enforcement official. A few months later, authorities in Beijing arrested a Chinese national who had fled the United States after he was charged in a federal court in Los Angeles with trafficking fentanyl.

Milgram increasingly emphasizes that such cooperation could disrupt China’s drug precursor trade and strengthen 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, coping with differences and mutual benefit.”

In total, the 14 offices the DEA plans to close have more than 100 agents and employees. Several of these offices, including those in Russia, Cyprus and Indonesia, are home to thriving criminal networks with ties to Latin American cartels that smuggle the bulk 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 moves come 18 months after an outside investigation into the DEA’s global presence followed an AP investigation into a foreign corruption scandal involving Jos Irizarry, a discredited former DEA agent in Colombia who pleaded guilty to embezzling millions of dollars from drug-trafficking money laundering operations to fund a global party and sex frenzy.

The study found that the now 50-year-old agency had never conducted such an assessment to take into account the evolving threats, and recommended “adjusting” its resources to combat fentanyl.

Four of the offices being closed – the Bahamas, Haiti, Myanmar and Nicaragua – are in countries that, along with China, the White House has designated as major drug production or transit areas.

André Kellum, who retired as regional director for Africa in 2021, was particularly critical of the closure of the office in Senegal, where an elite local police unit trained and managed 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 capturing Brazil’s top drug trafficker.

“It’s a short-sighted approach,” he said. “These relationships are crucial and they’re not easy to repair.”

William Warren, former DEA regional director in the Middle East, stressed that the agency can also serve as an additional pair of important American eyes in countries that are hotbeds of gun 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 the DEA shares with other federal agencies protects Americans from all kinds of threats.”