DEA closes 2 offices in China as agency struggles to stem flow of fentanyl chemicals

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration is closing two of its hard-won offices in China, The Associated Press has learned.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration 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 precursor chemicals into the country that 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 stretched resources on where we can make the greatest impact in saving American lives,” DEA Administrator Anne Milgram told agents last week in an email that also outlined plans to close a dozen other offices worldwide to reduce the DEA’s current footprint of 93 offices in 69 countries.

Although rumored for months, it was unclear why the DEA was closing its offices in Shanghai and Guangzhou, leaving only offices in the capital Beijing and the autonomous city of Hong Kong, and how that might affect its fentanyl efforts. The DEA said only that the move followed a data-driven process intended to maximize the agency’s impact.

“Americans have a right to know why this decision was made and what the DEA plans to spend taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars on,” said Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Chuck Grassley, Republican of Iowa.

DEA veterans say it was another setback in the often-faltering cooperation between the two geopolitical rivals. Although China has added dozens of fentanyl-making chemicals to its list of controlled substances and warned companies not to ship them, the country remains the world’s largest source of precursors in a fentanyl crisis that’s responsible for nearly 100,000 American deaths a year.

“We have to work with the Chinese and get them to stop the flow of precursor chemicals,” said Mike Vigil, former head of the DEA’s foreign operations. “And it’s hard to develop those relationships with less presence 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 center for trafficking and organized crime, and a similar one in Shanghai, the country’s financial center.

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 agents assigned to the offices on the ground faced difficulties obtaining visas and numerous restrictions as U.S.-China relations deteriorated.

China suspended drug cooperation in 2022 in retaliation for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan, a self-governing island claimed by Beijing. But those efforts appeared to improve recently after President Joe Biden met with 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 fled the U.S. after he was named in a criminal indictment filed in federal court in Los Angeles on fentanyl trafficking charges.

Milgram increasingly emphasizes that such cooperation could disrupt China’s drug precursor trade and its role as a magnet for laundering illicit drug proceeds worldwide.

“This work has been constructive so far, but I believe it’s too early to know whether we’re going to see the results that we want to see,” Milgram told a congressional panel earlier this year. “If we could stop the flow of precursors from China, we could have a significant impact.”

China declined to comment on what it called an internal DEA matter. 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 side can work with China in the same direction and continue pragmatic cooperation in counter-narcotics based on mutual respect, coping with differences and mutual benefits.”

Collectively, the 14 offices the DEA plans to close represent more than 100 agents and employees, including several in Russia, Cyprus and Indonesia, home to thriving criminal underworlds with connections to Latin American cartels that smuggle much of the cocaine, methamphetamine and fentanyl sold in the U.S.

Other offices set to close include: 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 José Irizarry, a disgraced former DEA agent in Colombia who admitted funneling millions of dollars from drug laundering operations to finance a global ride of parties and prostitutes.

That study noted that the now 50-year-old agency had never conducted such an assessment to account for changing threats, and recommended “adapting” its fentanyl response tools.

Four of the offices to be 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 unit of local police trained and vetted by the DEA was behind 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.

“This is shortsighted,” he said. “Those relationships are crucial and they are not easy to repair.”

William Warren, former DEA regional director in the Middle East, noted that the agency can also serve as a vital additional set of 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 that the DEA provides to other federal agencies keeps Americans safe from all kinds of threats.”

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Mustian reported from New York.

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Contact AP’s global investigative team at [email protected].