Leak gives glimpse into cloak-and-dagger world of ‘controlled’ drug deliveries

A large truck carrying sacks of potatoes pulls into a warehouse in the Colombian port city of Cartagena in late October 2019. Once inside, two men unload the real cargo: 700 kilos of cocaine.

They hand the drugs over to a trusted partner who has elected to transport the drugs to Spain. He does as promised — but on a commercial Iberia flight under the watch of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

This type of operation, which was detailed in leaked files from the Colombian prosecutors’ office, is known as an “international controlled delivery.”

It is a secretive practice that foreign law enforcement agencies such as the DEA have been using in partnership with Colombian authorities to infiltrate criminal gangs in order to gain intelligence on their movements, and eventually make arrests.

The program is subject to judicial review in Colombia, and two former DEA agents told the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRP) that the agency adheres to strict protocols in carrying out the deliveries. But transparency advocates said that the program’s secrecy raises questions about oversight — especially since authorities have uncovered serious corruption issues in similar DEA-run programs.

Tom Devine, legal director for the Government Accountability Project, a Washington D.C.-based advocacy group, said the DEA should implement an outside review process over the use of international controlled deliveries to ensure they are safeguarded against abuses.

“There won’t be accountability unless one is established,” said Devine, whose group represents whistleblowers, including DEA agents who have been punished for reporting corruption.

In the Cartagena case, the drugs were received by an undercover Colombian agent and sent to a laboratory for testing, after which they were transferred to DEA agents who arranged the flight to Spain, according to a field report of the handover included in the leaked documents. There, in what appeared to be the same operation, local police arrested three people who arrived to pick up the delivery in a parking lot outside of Madrid.

The DEA seldom details its use of international controlled deliveries in its press releases or other public reports. Reporters could find no published record of statistics on the practice, and the agency did not respond to questions about the program.

But a massive leak of millions of emails from Colombia’s prosecutor’s office offers rare details about the inner workings and the scope of the program in that country. By combing through the leaked data, reporters found at least 92 individual requests made to Colombia’s judiciary — which must authorize parts of the operations — to approve controlled drug deliveries between 2017 and 2022. The vast majority were filed by U.S. law enforcement agencies, chiefly the DEA, but there were also requests by authorities in Spain, France, the Netherlands, England and Australia.

In total, Colombia’s judiciary greenlit the use of up to $38.7 million and 44 tons of cocaine for such operations over the five-year period. Reporters found proof that at least two-thirds of the requests were approved and discovered no documentation of any rejections. Colombian prosecutors declined to provide statistics or any other information about the program.

The project — led by OCCRP in partnership with Centro Latinoamericano de Investigación Periodística — began with a leak of emails from the Colombian Prosecutor’s Office, which were shared with media outlets around the world.

Reporters examined and corroborated the materials with hundreds of other documents, databases, and interviews.

READ MORE: Explore the full NarcoFiles project

Luis Moreno, a retired State Department official who headed the narcotics control office in Bogotá, told OCCRP that details of the operations were not made public in court documents or press releases because that could put the lives of agents or informants at risk.

“The very nature of the operation, because you are playing with people’s lives really, secrecy is of utmost importance,” Moreno said. But he acknowledged that a lack of transparency can create opportunities for abuse: “That very secrecy which you need to conduct the operation is also conducive to people doing bad things.”

Since 2000, Colombia has received some $13 billion in U.S. aid as part of the “War on Drugs.” But the efforts have failed to stem the flow of drugs and Colombia remains the world’s top producer, much of it going to consumption in the United States.

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While there is almost no publicly available information about controlled deliveries, several high-profile cases have revealed corruption in similar DEA-supported anti-narcotics operations in Colombia. In February, the head of Colombia’s asset forfeiture unit, a key institution in its anti-narcotics efforts, was arrested on corruption charges.

Three alleged co-conspirators, who were members of DEA-funded “Sensitive Investigation Units” — elite units often involved in carrying out the deliveries — were accused by the prosecutor’s office of extorting “high sums of money” to keep suspects from being extradited to the United States. The former asset forfeiture unit head was convicted in October. The status of the case against the others is unclear.

How It Works

The leaked documents give a rare glimpse into how controlled deliveries work in practice.

First, the DEA, or another foreign partner, informs Colombian prosecutors in a formal letter about their knowledge of a transnational crime group. They then request the help of a Colombian undercover agent to pose as a trafficker, as well as permission to obtain and transport the group’s drugs with the goal of gaining information about its structure and securing evidence against its members. They ask for specific quantities of drugs and money and the operation is often set for a period of one year.

Prosecutors put the request before a special Colombian judge, who accompanies the case and can authorize wiretaps and entry into homes and offices.

Once the drugs are secured — frequently with the help of an informant working with the DEA — the contraband can then be transported abroad, often by the DEA or to its agents in foreign countries, with the aim of investigating and arresting those on the receiving end.

Using nearly identical language, many of the requests in the leaked documents sought authorization to use the same broad array of funds and substances: 200 kilograms of cocaine, five kilograms of heroin, 20 kilograms of methamphetamine, 20 kilograms of synthetic drugs and $2 million of cash of illicit origin.

In a February 2022 request, the U.S. Justice Department’s representative in Bogotá sought permission for an operation where the “seized substances” could be used as evidence for an investigation, carried out in New Jersey, into an organization that was allegedly trafficking drugs from Colombia to the United States.

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The operation would see undercover agents secure the trust of the organization and agree to transport its drugs from Colombia to the United States, the Dominican Republic or Mexico — whichever location “has been established by the organization for the delivery,” the request explains.

After undergoing lab testing for authenticity, the drugs would be flown on a commercial aircraft or a plane controlled by the U.S. Embassy, it said. Documents reviewed by reporters did not make the outcome of the operation clear.

Some requests were lighter on details. One appeal from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security said undercover agents would “coordinate the logistics for the transportation of the narcotic substance via (cargo or passenger flights), land (using buses, cars or cargo trucks) or river (with boats, speedboats or yachts) to Paraguay, Bolivia, Brazil, Honduras, Dominican Republic, Bahamas, Spain, Mexico, United States.”

That was so broad it potentially covered almost anywhere in the Americas and nearly any form of transport.

Operational Irregularities

Other documents contained more specifics — and records of irregularities in the operations. In November 2020, for example, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in San Diego requested permission from the Colombian prosecutors’ office to transport a batch of cocaine to Toronto.

In preparation, two Colombian agents kept nearly 100 kilos of cocaine — about the weight of a refrigerator — stored in their unsecured office.

This incident appears in a document addressed to the director of Colombian prosecutors’ specialized anti-narcotics office, in which the two Colombian agents are interrogated by colleagues over email about how the drugs ended up stored improperly.

These two agents, according to the document, were involved in at least 37 controlled deliveries operations linked to this case, which eventually led to the seizure of hundreds of thousands of dollars and nine arrests abroad.

But in the April 2021 document to the anti-narcotics director, the pair was shown being grilled about rule violations. They were later criminally convicted of falsifying documents, though they are challenging \the ruling.

A former DEA agent with international experience, who spoke to OCCRP on condition of anonymity, highlighted an irregularity in paperwork filed for a different operation in which an agent received funds from a criminal group that were intended to finance drug trafficking activities. The file includes a handwritten receipt from the Colombian agent to the DEA documenting the cash received.

“Bag containing undetermined amount of bulk currency,” reads the note on a receipt form, adding that it includes bills in Colombian pesos and European euros that would later need to be added up.

The ex-DEA agent noted that the document was missing the agent’s signature.

“That right there is a red flag,” he said, explaining that delivery of money or drugs requires two signatures — an agent and a witness — to guard against theft and corruption.

A recently retired DEA agent who has worked on controlled deliveries stressed that the agency does a “ton of internal record keeping” of the practice.

The work is rarely made public, he added, because most cases involve a “cooperating individual” — that is, an informant who is part of the organization and facing charges.

A second retired DEA agent said that these risks mean the process requires strict confidentiality, especially as the informant may continue to work with the DEA.

“You’re putting all these different steps in to insulate the informant,” the second retired agent said. “That’s why it almost never comes out that, ‘Oh, my gosh, this was completely orchestrated by the government, and we had a cooperating informant.’ ”

Program Oversight

Several of the cases reviewed by reporters resulted in indictments, extradition and conviction, suggesting the tactic can be effective.

But the risks of other secretive programs involving major transfers of money and contraband can be high — as demonstrated in a separate case by the conviction of DEA agent José Irizarry, who late last year began serving a 12-year prison sentence for skimming millions of dollars from controlled money laundering operations. While similar in some respects to controlled deliveries, the operations were not directly related.

In a December 2022 interview with the Associated Press, Irizarry said that the indictment “paints a picture of me, the corrupt agent that did this entire scheme. But it doesn’t talk about the rest of DEA. I wasn’t the mastermind.”

In Colombia, the controlled delivery practice is governed by a 2004 law that requires the operations to be accompanied by a specialized judge and tracks the operation’s progress. The leaked records show that Colombian agents are required to keep chain-of-custody documentation.

Undercover agents are also required to be accompanied by a “control agent,” who oversees the operation, according to authorization documents found in the leak.

The DEA did not respond to requests for comment about what oversight is exercised in the United States.

This article is part of NarcoFiles: The New Criminal Order, a transnational investigation into modern organized crime and those who fight it.

Research was provided by OCCRP ID. Antonio Baquero, Daniela Castro, Lilia Saul Rodriguez, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Aubrey Belford contributed reporting.