Welcome to the One CA Podcast. This is your host, Jack Gaines. 1C A is a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with a partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of Foreign Relations.
To contact the show, e-mail us at capodcasting@gmail.com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www.civilaffairsassos.org. I'll have those in the show notes. So basically we developed a research study, yeah, with the Center for International Private Enterprise to document what has been developed after or during the COVID-19 to fight up the corruption.
Today we have Mr. Carlos Diaz from Global Integrity who interviewed me on anti corruption programs that I've been working on for Civil Affairs and DoD overall a couple of times. I also turned the tables on him to discuss current events and his experiences growing up on the border of Colombia and Venezuela. This episode is a little different because I'm the one being interviewed, but I thought it would make a great show, so let's get started. Most of my anti corruption work
is foreign facing. And it's looking at adversaries and their use of corruption as a foreign policy tool to displace the US national security infrastructure and either place a illicit. Structure in order for. Them to be oligarchs and rob a country of all its resources, or to? Displace international rule of law in order to build out their own rule of law to where they make the rules and laws and everyone else follows them.
And The thing is. My work is mostly taking things like Global Magnitsky and not only using it in the standard traditional way than name and shame and and sanction. I try to use it in a way where I give people an option that they can't refuse. I try to freeze assets. I try to freeze their financial structures. I try to go after their families, financial structures, their friends, anything in their administration that they are hiding money through. Go after intermediaries.
If they're in a place where I can indict them and remove them from the playing field so that the oligarch or autocrat are isolated and then say, hey, actually you can have all this stuff back if you leave the country and. And here's a series of reforms we want you to incur so that no one behind you gets the same idea. So that's what I worked on during the COVID era, and I sent you a packet that I had created. It's actually Trafficking Counter Illicit Trade Task Force.
It was designed for C J's TF HOA, which is in Djibouti. It's a tactical task. Force underneath. US Africa Command. And I'll have some time to look into that. OK the reason I think this is important is that state has its way of targeting anti corruption and sometimes it works and. USA is. Building out a new process where they're trying to energize their networks, Promoting investigative journalism and NGO's in a country to feed any instances of.
Corruption. But at least the people who are entrenched, like when South Sudan broke away from Sudan, one thought it was a great thing. It was going to be an opportunity to use that oil to develop the nation, build up the education, economic structure. But the military leader came in and took it over, which happens almost every time you have a revolt. And there's got to be a way to shape those people, and usually it's by mapping their intent.
What their wants are and then holding up for ransom basically kind of in a it's not extortion, it's reverse extortion because they're stealing minerals and they're laundering money and they're doing everything that illicit actors do. They're selling anything they can to make money, human trafficking, doing human slavery, everything, drugs, whatever they can do. But they're doing it for a
reason. They have an intent, and if you can target that intent, then you can shape the behavior of that actor. Most of them are not reasonable people. These guys know that any day they could be dead or gone. So they're porting as if it's the last day of their life in that job. And so you have to go after that behavior. You have to go after the things they want. And once you capture them, then you dangle them and say, okay, these are the behaviors we want. You're caught.
You know you're going away. This is what we want. We want you to be the last ruler like this in the country and you're going to become the Great Reformer. And we want you to put in these reforms and make it to where no one else can do what you did, what you achieved.
You played that ego. I'm pretty sure they're showing you tricks to make sure that no one else can take power, you know, circumvent the legal system, circumvent the financial system, and they become a partner and actually reforming the country. Then they become a hero. While they take their money and run and that's what I'm trying to do, I'm trying to weaponize anti corruption so that we can start using them more effectively against autocrats.
Because right now countries like Russia are having a much better job at finding corrupt people and placing them in positions authority versus our ability to find honest people and place them in positions of authority. The tactic and the angle that you're laying out, because I haven't heard that right. And so my question for you and the work that you do is how do you identify new Windows of opportunity for the corruption efforts during that COVID-19 time?
Well, the biggest shift I saw with COVID was the movement over to a digital workspace and digital exchanges because no one wanted to touch many and yet we all needed food, but we didn't want to touch anyone or get too close. And I think that that accelerated both good and bad. I mean, accelerated remote work to where people can be in more comfortable spaces and do their job more effectively.
But it also opened up avenues for things like rampant cryptocurrency that was so far ahead of regulation that it was just a Ponzi scheme. Digitization of the global marketplace and people really accelerated and that's been a great thing, but now we got to catch up with the regulations. You read that you identify with this opportunity to add corruption initiatives. The actions of the digital economy exposed a lot of the corrupt action practices.
It was harder for people to travel, therefore corrupt actors had to use. Intermediaries to get things done, but they became more visible because the digital footprint was a lot better because you couldn't just walk into a bank. And so it put a lot of exposure on the issue. So yeah, I found a lot of opportunity and it really helped to track foreign asset flows. It's given an advantage. The problem is to accelerated things like cartel financial systems to where now.
They move so much cash through casinos and into the digital currency world that it's a wildfire. It's amazing how much goes through those things. Yeah. And let me make an additional question on top of that. Was this more the way that you identify the opportunity? Was it more like in a gut feeling or do you have like a formal criteria to approach? A lot of it was interviews with people that I know that work in
the trades. Folks that were financial assets and counter fraud and just talking to them, that's the majority of where I learned what was going on. And then listening to Bloomberg and Financial Times about some of the trends going on and and kind of doing it a cross reference between behaviors motive and current trends. That's when we started finding out about tumbling people would. Use tumblers to to wash their cryptocurrency from illicit trade and make it come out clean.
But also, you know, by raising that issue, it allowed white hat hackers to actually crack those things and track where the illicit finances go. Let me just post another question. What type of factors do you think contributed to your ability to identify these opportunities to be? Understanding more of these new ways of corruption or how the funding was moving or as you mentioned, power dynamics in certain countries. In 2013, how was the State Department leave for counter
Taliban influence? And part of that was understanding the networks that supported the Taliban and also building both counter governance model to break down the Taliban's efforts to build a shadow government but also. Build up the local government and local leaders so that they
had good governance in the area. From that I. Went on to AFRICOM where I work, strategic communication and they spent a lot of time on things like Ebola and counter ISIS, but I also spent a lot of time at OECD, that kind of illicit trade and trafficking task force focusing on things like. Free trade zones and the question that goes through and how to respond to counterfeit products and trade practices, how financial movements were avoiding taxation and other
things. So it's kind of the part of my style of forensics because I've just observed it for so long and and been a part of it. So that type of skills that you have. Definitely works well in different contexts because you're mentioning that you work with different country contexts and for that you need to connect with people on the ground and be strategic on the different type of trades or exchange of products to understand schemes.
So definitely having that set of skills play, it's an ability to identify or take on an opportunity that opens. For instance, when elections come or power dynamics are, you know, doing their moves. Right. My job and and career is both communication and influence. So it's all about knowing what sways people where their intent is, whether their core values and then how I can work with them to align with their core values. Do you find more or less opportunities to implement?
And corruption efforts done before the COVID-19. I found it was hard at first because everyone was locked down. It was early on and most people were taking shelter and just figuring out what's going on. The corrupt practices also slowed down because people couldn't get banking done, they couldn't get international
transactions done. It all kind of lulled, but then as the restrictions loosened up. Things like cryptocurrency, as I've already mentioned, and illicit trade and trafficking, and now nations that have part of their foreign policy, illicit trade, trafficking or part of their economic structure really put it into practice. The PRC. To me, their economic model is not the same as ours. We should not be comparing GNP to GNP. They have a whole arm of government solely focused on.
Fentanyl, precursor production and distribution, money laundering, human trafficking. John Cassara has a great book that has about 7 different indictments of what China has been doing. The problem is we don't compare that part of their GNP to the rest of it. We don't add it together to see what their total global economic income is, because I think they're actually on par with us if you add that on. So that's where I see that,
COVID. Has kind of reshuffled the deck for a lot of countries, Myanmar COVID allowed the military government to stay in power a lot longer because there wasn't an international response. But it was hard to get international pressure on that nation because of COVID. And so it allowed them to build PRC, supported fentanyl precursor factories in the country, and start building up casinos right there on the Chinese border. And it allowed that nation to rulers to get a step ahead of
the international community. It just depends on each country and its players. Yeah. So I was just going to say that did you find more or less opportunities? I think the answer was less opportunities in the beginning, but more opportunities later on. Yeah, it went rampant later on. And how do you prioritize or determine which opportunity to pursue? By the most risk to the international.
Rules based order. So what is the most risk to the international rules based norms Drug cartels launder their money through? China to me is the biggest financial risk to international rules based norms because it takes networks that are both governmental and criminal and ties them together and. Those networks run through every country in the world, which means that those networks can also transport weapons, people and resources to where you don't know what's going on in a country.
And we've seen some of this in places like Transnistria, where Russian illicit networks were bringing in supplies and support for troops in case the Russians went into that area during the war. So it's that whole global mafia network that is just under visibility but is everywhere it's permeating that gives me concern because it can displace the global financial system. Well, moving away from the tales in the China, I just want to know how do you prioritize the
way of pursuing an opportunity? Geez. It's hard. It depends on. Where I've got. Access and and influence. I mean, there's a lot of great opportunities. Like I've recently tried to help kick start the Ukraine reconstruction planning and NGO support and I keep getting the door slammed in my face. It's just so early that a lot of people don't see the value in planning for Ukraine reconstruction while others are holding their cards so close because they don't know what a right step is.
That they're not taking calls, they're not discussing and planning opportunities. So to me that missing an opportunity to build a country out after the conflict ends to where it's very structure doesn't need corruption. It'll be so wealthy and empowered and financially stable, politically stable, that corruption is not necessary. Everyone has a good job, everyone's getting paid well, the taxes are going into the coffers, structure is running
great. But. I'm afraid that we're going to all fight inwardly about who's going to be the lead and who's going to be the funder, and we're going to end up waiting till the last second and it's going to be this crazy rush to rebuild Ukraine. It's going to look like hell. Well, yeah, it's a tough one. Especially because I sort of disagree on the length of the of the conflict. Just a small parenthesis because. Each party thinks they're going
to win some point. They feel like they're doing the part, but I don't see any. Well, that's a different conversation. But so going back to to what what you were saying, Jack. So definitely it depends on the access or refills that you have on on an opportunity. Let me ask you in the COVID-19, let's say from 2020 to 2022.
That was the case, right? So if you took action and thing that you were doing for work, it depended on the influence or the information or access to that information, right? Yeah, the paper I sent you, it's a real page Turner, but the concept behind that in the slides are what I've been working on the entire time and then supporting other efforts like. Editing documents from OECD USA just to help spot risks in their concepts that they weren't looking at. But yeah, my prime has been the
reverse. Extortion. Oligarch targeting or kliptocrat targeting. It's been my effort. OK. Definitely. I'll take a look. Sorry if I that's OK. I have it here. And yeah, it definitely highlights transnational way of doing things. Sure. I mean, it's written for the Army, so I apologize for. It's pretty interesting, the things that you're saying around the laundry money cartels, because I live in Columbia and I'm from a small town really next to Venezuela.
Yeah, definitely. Networks are connected. They end up running most part of the system, basically. Yeah, well, the thing about Colombia, it's a good news story. The violence has reduced. And there is cooperation now, it seems, between the government and the FARC, but also with the cartels that are still running cocaine out of the country to where they know that if they start getting into violence again, it's going to bring in
international response. So kind of like Mexico, they've learned to keep everything down below and whenever a a local guy or woman gets. Into the business and they start becoming too aggressive. They're they're doing a good job of policing their own and making sure that the locals are treated decently. And this is what I'm finding. And especially in areas where there's not a lot of governance. In areas that have a lot of governance, there seems to be some weird cooperation under the table.
And I can't speak a lot about Colombia, but from what people have told me though. Is that it does seem to be much more calm and stable and people are able to do their lives without getting hit up on all the time. Is that a reasonable position? Definitely. It's just that after the peace process half of the guerrilla FARC turning their guns and the other stay arm and and yeah, but because, I mean they're motivated by trading coke with
the cartels. And right now there is another peace accords moving on with ELNLANA. Yeah, that's difficult to manage because there is no cease of fire during the those talks. So it's every every week we heard attempts to kill police or army. So it's kind of like a tense environment, but the peace process is still moving on, for instance yesterday. A really big head of the rights. How do you call that out of the
fences? It's like really right movements that partner with army that they were in the illegal side of things. They started talking about their their connections with the government and the really powerful families in the government here. And that's like blowing people's minds because you know it's. People telling the truth and you know, that's the the way of things. They were in the 90s, you know. Yeah. People that have power of defending themselves by financing illegal groups to
fight the other illegal groups. So, but yet again, yes, situation is much better. I mean you sort of feel like a different environment for tourism and investment despite all things, you know. And also, you live on the border of Venezuela, so you've probably had a few refugees come over as well A. Few thousand, yes.
I lived there for a while so yeah it's it's it is pretty tense and also that they moved to Colombia and then down South to Chile and then up north to Mexico trying to cross the border. Sure you US is sending airplanes full of migrants. You know, they're defenseless. They don't have money. They're all papers. The ones with money made it in. There's whole hotels in Miami full of Venezuelans that are living there, just waiting for the coup or whatever to stabilize.
The funny thing is, I think COVID actually has extended the life of or Maduro. Also, I think Ukraine conflict has benefited. Venezuela, because they have oil, and even though their infrastructure is terrible, because all the money is being tucked away in people's pockets, it's a resource that is vital right now. Yes. And our government is hearing and approaching Venezuela. As you know, they were best
friends. So, yeah, president of Colombia was recently with Biden trying to bridge the relationship there. Yeah, the things are moving around that and as fellow president that he's willing to stay for a long time. So going back to one answer, you said that you did not act on a particular window opportunity. So the first question was if you identify windows of opportunity and you say yes because of the context and but when we asked in the survey if you took action or not.
To take advantage of those windows of opportunity opening, you said no. Yeah, the only thing I did was write about the White House his memo on corruption as a threat to national security. I revised an older article I had written with Jodi Vatori and published it again to highlight the memo and how that is opening up opportunities for.
The agencies to build out a formal anti corruption platform that targets foreign policy which is what I'm still working on. That's actually why I'm building these weaponized systems for DoD so that it can be involved. And now that state and aid have got plans for on ground field operations, DoD needs to do the same thing so that then.
We can all start to plan together on using either AIDS model of atmospherics and reporting or states model of negotiations or sanction, or then Dod's model for the really sticky characters of influence and leveraging. Can you hold on a second? Sorry, give me a seizure. Hey, sorry, my wife is going to an Alicia Keys concert. Congratulations. That sounds great. Just asking me for money. I don't carry cash anymore. No, no one does. See, that's what COVID did.
It moved us closer to what Japan does, where you can take your phone and wave it in front of a Coke machine and it'll pop out a soda for you. Right. I'm sorry, I interrupt you. So you you were basically saying that you as a way of acting, write down an article help DoD to, you know, build this platform, right? But I was ranting on reflecting, reflecting, reflecting. That's a great way to say ranting.
No, I was just saying that this is attempt to become more effective in the field, just like aid and state are starting to do. They're realizing that you can't just sit at the policy level and send out dictums on antichruption and and make a difference because they go to the embassies and the embassies passing to the partner nation.
They go, yeah, this sounds great, we'll run it through parliament, They run it through parliament, they pass a piece of paper and then they stick it on a wall and they do nothing with it. So we're all realizing you can't just. Do big thought victims. We actually have to do actual accountability and tracking and influence to get things done. And what do you think about the enablers that I? Had a nice conversation with an enabler from Zimbabwe. He talked about he he's a banker
financier guy who does. Cryptocurrency for Zimbabwe. And he runs money and he's got companies around the world for handling financial assets. And he was a perfect target. He was exactly what I was, you know, I've been browsing about for about these enablers who hide under the covers and enable dictators to keep power because they don't have the limelight that causes the target to be placed on them.
They're they're business people, so usually you can turn them, you know, for me and law enforcement, I see them as an opportunity to have a meeting with them and give them an offer to start turning over evidence quietly so that they can keep the wealth they have and normally they'll do it. If they won't, then you can start freezing their assets and finding a way to stick them in jail. Something related to getting closer to the outcomes of actually fighting cat corruption.
We have used it and it was effective and. That model anymore? I've written it up, but I've never seen it used again. Basically there was an election for a major African country, the president, he was going to throw
the election and stay in power. And the US Treasury and the UK Treasury went to. The ruler and his administration had basically made an offer, said we're going to freeze your billion dollars in personal assets and all your abilities to exchange commodities unless you run peaceful, free and fair elections, lose the election and have a peaceful transition out
of the country. And so the the guy, his administration took the money and they had a peaceful, free and fair election and transition. Everyone was waiting for the other shoe to drop. It never did because. There was an agreement under the table like most power brokers do in these countries that were for the benefit of the country versus the benefit of a particular person. You know, commercial companies
do this all the time. What I'm proposing is we stopped looking at those things from a high handed position and realized that the world does run that way and we need to start performing at that level as well if we want the outcomes. That we want, which is stable governments, stable regions, an accountable economic system. Then we have to get dirty.
We have to get down there. We have to make sure that what happens in the the back door also is reasonable and doesn't allow for somebody from the military to take over our country and just run it for their personal gain. You mentioned in the survey that you felt somewhat confident related to a positive outcome after efforts being done during COVID-19. So could you tell us why you
feel this way? I felt that way because the White House released that memo on corruption as a threat to national security, and the US Helsinki Commission expanded the Magnitsky Act and then also implemented the Global Magnitsky Act additionally. The UK started doing transparency laws to make it to where shell companies had to reveal who their beneficial owner was. Canada and the US started looking at that as well.
So there was a real groundswell of accountability that would help with the national security side of corruption, foreign actors who use corruption as a national security weapon. And so I was, I was feeling confident about that. As these tools grow and mature, now we need to bring in the more tactical things, which is what I'm trying to build. Thanks so much Jack. I mean it has been a wonderful talk and and thank you for sharing your experiences and and
insights. Appreciate and and yeah but so far thank you for your contributions and and looking forward to to share with you these findings. Yeah. Does that mean any time? Thank you. Take care. Okay bye. Thanks for listening. If you get a chance, please like and subscribe and rate the show on your favorite podcast platform. Also, if you're interested in coming on the show or hosting an episode, e-mail us at capodcasting@gmail.com.
I'll have the e-mail and CA association website in the show notes and now most importantly to those currently out in the field working with a partner, nations, people or leadership to forward US relations. Thank you all for what you're doing. This is Jack, your host. Stay tuned for more great episodes, One CA podcast.