The aide to Afghan President Hamid Karzai at the center of a politically sensitive corruption investigation is being paid by the CIA, according to Afghan and US officials.
Mohammed Zia Salehi, the chief of administration for the National Security Council, appears to have been on the payroll for many years, according to officials in Kabul and Washington. It is unclear exactly what Salehi does in exchange for his money, whether providing information to the spy agency, advancing US views inside the presidential palace, or both.
Salehi’s relationship with the CIA underscores deep contradictions at the heart of the Obama administration’s policy in Afghanistan, with US officials simultaneously demanding that Karzai root out the corruption that pervades his government while sometimes subsidizing the very people suspected of perpetrating it.
Salehi was arrested last month and released after Karzai intervened. There has been no suggestion that Salehi’s ties to the CIA played a role in his release; rather, officials say, it is the fear that Salehi knows about corrupt dealings inside the Karzai administration.
The ties underscore doubts about how seriously US President Barack Obama’s administration intends to fight corruption here. The anti-corruption drive, though strongly backed by the US, is still vigorously debated inside the administration. Some argue it should be a centerpiece of US strategy, and others say that attacking corrupt officials who are crucial to the war effort could destabilize the Karzai government.
Other prominent Afghans who US officials have said were on the CIA’s payroll include the president’s half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, suspected by investigators of playing a role in Afghanistan’s opium trade. Earlier this year, US officials did not press Karzai to remove his brother from his post as the chairman of the Kandahar provincial council. Ahmed Wali Karzai denies any monetary relationship with the CIA and any links to the drug trade.
Salehi was arrested by the Afghan police after investigators say they wiretapped him soliciting a bribe in exchange for impeding an US-backed investigation into a company suspected of shipping billions of US dollars out of the country for Afghan officials, drug smugglers and insurgents.
Salehi was released seven hours later, after telephoning the president from his jail cell to demand help, officials said, and after Hamid Karzai forcefully intervened on his behalf.
The president sent aides to get him and has since threatened to limit the power of the anti-corruption unit that carried out the arrest. Salehi could not be reached for comment on Wednesday. A spokesman for Karzai did not respond to a list of questions sent to his office.
A spokesman for the CIA declined to comment on any relationship with Salehi.
“The CIA works hard to advance the full range of US policy objectives in Afghanistan,” said Paul Gimigliano, a spokesman for the agency. “Reckless allegations from anonymous sources don’t change that reality in the slightest.”
A US official said the practice of paying government officials was sensible, even if they turn out to be corrupt or unsavory.
“If we decide as a country that we’ll never deal with anyone in Afghanistan who might down the road — and certainly not at our behest — put his hand in the till, we can all come home right now,” the US official said.
Salehi is a political survivor, who, like many Afghans, navigated shifting alliances through 31 years of war. He is a former interpreter for Abdul Rashid Dostum, the ethnic Uzbek with perhaps the most ruthless reputation among all Afghan warlords.
Dostum, a Hamid Karzai ally, was one of the CIA’s leading allies on the ground in Afghanistan in the weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. The agency employed his militia to help rout the Taliban from northern Afghanistan.
Over the course of the nine-year-old war, the CIA has enmeshed itself in the inner workings of Afghanistan’s national security establishment. From 2002 until just last year, the CIA paid the entire budget of Afghanistan’s spy service, the National Directorate of Security.
Salehi is “not a player” in the palace but more a courier of money to other Afghans, according to an Afghan politician who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared retaliation.
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