[Written in the spirit of Philip Agee, this article continues CovertAction Magazine’s efforts to spotlight the crimes of the CIA, past and present.—Editors]
The March 8, 2026, issue of The New York Times Magazine featured an article by Matthieu Aikins and Wesley Morgan entitled “America’ Secret Veterans: They Fought For the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. Now, 10,000 Former Zero Unit Soldiers Are in the United States and Living in Fear.”[1]
The article focused on veterans of a CIA-funded and directed death squad in Afghanistan known as “Zero Units” who are struggling to integrate into American society and make a living after obtaining visas to live in the U.S.
One of the veterans profiled, Mohammad Iqbal, was working maintenance at a hotel in a working-class suburb of San Diego trying to support six kids.
He reunited with his old war comrades in November when another member of the Zero Units, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, made national news by shooting two Army National Guard soldiers in Washington, D.C.
Aikins and Morgan wrote that, “although intended as a covert program, the Zero Units expanded into a sophisticated standing army controlled by the C.I.A.” which was “dogged by allegations of abuses” and “labeled by some critics as death squads.”
These latter allegations derived from the fact that the Zero Units conducted “snatch and grab” operations where they would kidnap suspects identified through blacklists who were then subjected to torture in U.S.-run prisons and often never heard from again.
In 2018, the United Nations reported that the Zero Units were responsible for a majority of civilian casualties during government raids. Human rights groups and journalists reported that they carried out indiscriminate killing and civilian executions.
The CIA dismissed these latter reports as “Taliban propaganda,” though even the Afghan government complained about Zero Units killing civilians—like in Kandahar Province in 2009, where they killed the provincial police chief and nine other local government officials.
According to Aikins and Morgan, former member of the Zero Units testified that “potentially illegal killings” were “tacitly condoned, ordered or even carried out by American advisers in the name of preventing militants from returning to the battlefield.”
A former Joint Strategic Operations Command (JSOC) officer described watching an aerial video where a CIA adviser working with Zero Units shot and killed a man taken prisoner who had been observing an Afghan army truck go by.
A military investigation into the incident was turned over to the CIA’s Inspector General’s office, which rejected as baseless the claim that CIA personnel were involved in extrajudicial killing—which is known to be untrue.
The Zero Units were formed in the early 2000s as an off-shoot of Northern Alliance militias trained by the CIA and U.S. Special Forces in the 1990s and after the U.S.-NATO invasion of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attack.
According to Aikins and Morgan, the Pentagon faced legal restrictions on paying foreign fighters, but not the CIA, which was legally permitted to hand out wads of cash to local warlords.
The CIA consequently began hiring more and more Afghan fighters directly into what it called Counter-Terrorism Pursuit Teams, which would evolve into the Zero Units.
While the CIA paramilitaries who ran the program called themselves “advisers,” as in the early period of the Vietnam War, according to Aikins and Morgan, they not only trained their recruits, but also “commanded them on missions and fought alongside them in battles.” At least nine CIA officers are estimated to have died fighting directly with the Zero Units.
Aikins and Morgan emphasized that the Zero Units were similar to “other units within the U.S.-led special operation campaign, which as time went on placed an increasing emphasis on killing rather than capturing those they suspected of being militants. Aggressive raids in enemy-held terrain in some cases escalated to the killing of unarmed men who posed no immediate threat.”[2]
One Special Operations veteran who was on multiple Zero Unit missions in which unarmed captives were shot, said “we’d hear: ‘this guy is a bomb maker who keeps killing U.S. troops. He isn’t going to resist. He’s just going to surrender but he’s just going to be released.’ So an adviser would tell a couple of guys to stay back and then kill him. Afterward, photographs of the bodies would be taken with guns planted on them. This kind of execution would usually take place after most of the raid force left the target to limit the number of people with direct knowledge. ‘I’ve seen it happen both ways, where a couple of Americans stayed behind and did it and where Afghans were told to do it. They were doing it willingly, but on American’s instructions.’”
Afghanistan: No Anomaly
The CIA’s participation in extra-judicial assassinations has a long history that goes back to the CIA’s founding era. Under Operation Rollback, the CIA recruited ex-Nazi agents to infiltrate Eastern European countries to try to foment sabotage behind enemy lines.
In South Korea, the CIA and its predecessor agencies trained and equipped right-wing vigilantes described by journalist Mark Gayn as resembling “Hollywood underworld killers” who beat and killed leftists and were sent to try to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Il-Sung.[3]
The Truman administration initiated a clandestine police training program, continued under Eisenhower and expanded upon by the JFK and LBJ administrations, in which CIA advisers helped create blacklists that were used to target “subversives” in political sweep operations. Many CIA-trained units evolved into death squads—like in the Philippines, Indonesia and South America under the infamous Operation Condor.[4]
In more recent years, the CIA trained terrorist commando units in Iraq and Syria that carried out extrajudicial killings and other atrocities and proto-fascist elements in Ukraine that celebrated the murder of civilians on a CIA-linked website.
Below are some more details on CIA-supported death squads that provide an important reason why we need to build a movement to abolish the CIA.
Vietnam: Operation Phoenix
Douglas Valentine’s book The Phoenix Program detailed the CIA’s work with “hunter-killer teams” known as Provincial Reconnaissance Units (PRUs) that would kidnap, torture and execute suspected National Liberation Front (NLF) cadres who were fighting for Vietnam’s liberation.
Phoenix targets developed from CIA blacklists included civilian government officials and town mayors. The CIA adopted psychological warfare tactics whereby they would murder civilians while dressed up as NLF guerrillas so the atrocities could be blamed on them.
Over time, the Phoenix Program developed into a giant extortion racket. PRU agents and corrupt South Vietnamese government officials would use it to carry out private vendettas and kill personal enemies or force people to give them huge sums of money under the threat of death.
Navy SEAL Elton Manzione was typical in coming to the realization that “we were no longer the good guy in the white hat defending freedom” but, rather, “assassins pure and simple,”[5] just like the CIA officers who worked with the Zero Units in Afghanistan.
Indonesia and Laos
In the 1980s, Attorney Daniel Sheehan interviewed CIA operatives Edwin Wilson and Carl Jenkins who told him of the central role that the CIA played in setting up death squad operations on behalf of the Indonesian army, using the model of the Phoenix program in Vietnam.
The CIA had helped facilitate a coup in Indonesia in 1965 against socialist leader Ahmed Sukarno that empowered right-wing General Mohammed Suharto who mobilized death squads to liquidate the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI), fueling a bloodbath that left between one to three million people dead.
In the late 1970s, CIA-backed death squads extended their operations into East Timor under the direction of Thomas G. Clines, a deputy of Theodore Shackley who served as CIA Station Chief in Saigon from 1968-1972 when he helped run the Phoenix program.
Shackley also served as CIA Station Chief in Vientiane, Laos from 1966-1968 where he coordinated a secret dirty war against the communist Pathet Lao who won the country’s only free election in 1958 that was sabotaged by the CIA.
Financed largely through the narcotics trade, death squad operations in Laos were carried out by Hmong irregular forces who had been molded into a CIA clandestine army and were the equivalent of the PRU in the Phoenix program.
When one of Shackley’s protégés, Harold Chipman, gave the green light for killing a suspected Vietnamese double agent, he tellingly told the assassins: “Shack won’t mind; he carried out 250 political murders in Laos.”
In April 1963, a CIA trained Police General in Laos, Siho Lamphouthoucoul, coordinated the assassination of Quinim Pholsena, Laos’s Foreign Minister and head of the “Peace and Neutrality” party.
Quinim was intent on strengthening the ties between Laos’ then-neutralist government and the left-wing Pathet Lao, which went against the Kennedy administration’s strategy of isolating the Pathet Lao and forging a coalition between Lao neutralists and far-right Generals backed by the Pentagon and CIA
Quinim Pholsena’s wife, Chy, who was herself shot but survived, told Australian journalist Wilfred G. Burchett there was “no doubt that [Phoumi] Nosavan [right-wing General on CIA payroll] and the CIA had arranged the assassination [of her husband].”
El Salvador
Beginning in the early 1960s under John F. Kennedy, the CIA supplied Salvadoran police and security forces with the names and whereabouts of political dissidents who were targeted for liquidation. These dissidents threatened the U.S. foreign policy goal of keeping El Salvador subordinate and its economy open to corporate exploitation and integrated with other Central American countries in a regional common market.
Journalist Allan Nairn noted that, “During the Kennedy administration, agents of the U.S. government in El Salvador set up two official security organizations that killed thousands of peasants and suspected leftists over the next 15 years. These organizations, guided by American operatives, developed into the paramilitary apparatus that came to be known as the Salvadoran death squads.”[6]
One of the key figure helping to establish police paramilitary agencies in El Salvador that evolved into death-squads was Arthur “Bull” Simons, a Green Beret who had done similar work serving with White Star Special Forces teams in Laos.
Stewart Klepper wrote in CovertAction Information Bulletin (1981) that the Salvadoran death squads developed “homespun methods of terrorizing the population, such as hacking their victims to pieces with machetes and pouring acid over their faces.”
In the 1980s, these tactics were directed against the leftist Farabundo Marti Liberation Front (FMLN), which took to guerrilla warfare after the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero by a death squad unit headed by Roberto D’Aubuisson.
A protégé of the father of Salvadoran death squads, Jose Alberto Medrano, whom a State Department official termed “the CIA’s boy,”[7] D’Aubuisson was trained at the International Police Academy (IPA) in Washington, D.C., in 1971 and the U.S. Army School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, in 1972, and spent time with U.S. Special Forces in Panama.
Robert E. White, U.S. ambassador to El Salvador from 1977 to 1980, said that D’Aubuisson had a “sick mind” and was a “pathological killer.”
He was involved in the slayings of six Jesuit priests in 1989 and many other acts of violence against clerics and others, including the 1980 killing of Mario Zamora Rivas, El Salvador’s Attorney General.
According to Colonel Roberto Eulalio Santibañez, D’Aubuisson’s death-squad network was overseen by Colonel Nicolás Carranza, director of the Treasury Police, who was paid $90,000 a year by the CIA through much of the 1980s.
Two of D’Aubuissson’s former associates said that D’Aubuisson also received CIA money and had a “disturbingly close relationship” with a particular U.S. military attaché.
Iraq
In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney called for the “Salvador Option” in Iraq—meaning the creation of counter-terrorism (i.e., “death”) squads to defeat a mounting insurgency against U.S. occupation forces.
Cheney called upon Special Forces veterans who had operated in El Salvador’s 1980s war, such as James Steele, who was appointed chief adviser to Iraqi police commandos that tortured suspected insurgents and took retribution on Sunnis who had supported Saddam Hussein.
As U.S ambassador to Iraq, the Bush-Cheney administration had John Negroponte, a protégé of Henry Kissinger who had been U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s where dirty war operations in Central America were headquartered.
With such men in charge, journalist Dahr Jamail wrote that it was “no coincidence that daily life in Iraq came to resemble what the death squads generated in Central America…Hundreds of dead lay unclaimed at the morgue—blood-caked men who had been shot, knifed, garroted or apparently suffocated by the plastic bag still over their head. Many of the bodies were sprawled with their hands still bound.”[8]
Fitting a long-standing precedent, the U.S. favored hard-liners like Adnan Thabit, head of the police commando working under Steele, who hosted a grotesque “reality” show on U.S.-backed Al-Iraqiya television that displayed badly beaten Iraqis confessing to resistance activities.
The head of the Ministry of Interior in 2005-2006, Bayan Jabr, oversaw a torture chamber beneath his office in which survivors were left with drill marks on their skulls.
Jabr worked closely with David Petraeus, a Special Forces adviser in El Salvador in the 1980s, who ran the military police training program in Iraq, and Steven Casteel, who as Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) intelligence chief in the 1990s, oversaw the killing of drug lord Pablo Escobar and trained Andean security forces known for “disappearing” peasant leaders and union activists.[9]
Muntadher al-Samari, an Iraqi General who worked with Colonel Steele to rebuild Iraq’s police force, told The Guardian that, one day when he was having lunch with Colonel Steele and Colonel James Coffman, the door opened, and “Captain Jabr was there torturing a prisoner. He [the victim] was hanging upside down and Steele got up and just closed the door, he didn’t say anything—it was just normal for him.”
Al-Samari continued by noting that America’s top brass and the Iraqi leadership knew all about the secret prisons where Iraqis were being tortured. “The things that went on there: drilling, murder, torture [were] the ugliest sort of torture I’ve ever seen.”
Syria
Under the billion-dollar Operation Timber Sycamore, headed by David Petraeus, the CIA trained and supplied Syrian rebel commandos in the familiar manner from bases in Jordan and Turkey.
These commandos killed 11,000 civilians in government-controlled Aleppo in the first four years of the war, carried out suicide bombings, and tortured and beheaded captives.[10]
In December 2021, The New York Times reported on the existence of a clandestine army unit in Syria which, from 2014 to 2019, launched tens of thousands of bombs and missiles and repeatedly killed civilians in an operation overseen by General Stephen Townsend, who was later appointed to head the U.S. Africa Command.
According to the Times, Townsend’s unit “circumvented rules imposed to protect noncombatants, and [raised] alarm…by killing people who had no role in the conflict: farmers trying to harvest, children in the street, families fleeing fighting, and villagers sheltering in buildings.”
Similar abuses were carried out by anti-Assad Kurdish militias advised and equipped by U.S. military officers commanded by General Christopher Donahue, a “star of the clandestine world of Special Forces,” according to The New York Times, who had “previously hunted terrorist chiefs in the shadow of Iraq, Libya and Afghanistan” and went on to command murderous U.S.-Ukrainian operations in eastern Ukraine and Russia.[11]
Ukraine
In September 2023, The Economist ran a remarkable story entitled “Ukraine’s Assassination Program: Its Agents Have Become Expert in Dark Revenge,” which spotlighted how the Ukraine Security Service’s (SBU’s) Fifth Directorate and Special Operations Forces (SSO) ran an assassination program across regions of Ukraine occupied or reintegrated into Russia. [12]
An unnamed SBU counter-intelligence officer is quoted as saying that it made him uncomfortable that “marginal figures” were being targeted in operations that were designed “to impress the president rather than bring victory any closer.” The same officer noted that Ukraine’s assassination campaign “risked exposing sources and the extent of Ukrainian infiltration into Russia,” adding that “our security services shouldn’t do things just because they can.”
The Economist, predictably, did not mention the CIA, though we know from Vasily Prozorov, a former SBU officer who defected to Russia, that the SBU had been advised by the CIA since 2014, and that CIA employees have come to the SBU’s central office to plot secret operations.
A Ukrainian hit list on the Myrotvorets website advertised itself as a CIA project based in Langley, Virginia, the location of the CIA’s headquarters.
One of the CIA’s most valued assets in Ukraine’s Phoenix-type program, Kyrylo Budanov, personally oversaw countless numbers of adventurist sabotage operations, drone strikes and political assassinations of both Russian military and civilian figures on Russian soil.
The victims included Illia Kyva, the former head of the Socialist Party in Ukraine’s parliament, whom Ukrainian military intelligence took credit for murdering in a Moscow park.
Commanders with the Donetsk People’s Army, civilian officials in towns in eastern Ukraine that voted to rejoin Russia, and journalists who were critical of the Ukrainian government were also targeted in car bombings and other terrorist attacks directed by Ukrainian military intelligence units that fell under Budanov’s command.
According to Andrii Telizhenko, a former Ukrainian diplomat and parliamentary aide now living in Switzerland, the CIA “controls almost everything in Ukraine. They have agents working under cover as journalists and political advisers, and control a lot of politicians and other prominent people [through financial payoffs]. Further, the CIA directly advises President [Volodymyr] Zelensky. The Americans who are brought to advise him are CIA.”
Dirty Work of Corporations and Empire
CIA whistleblower Philip Agee frequently pointed out that the CIA did not formulate policy, but functioned as the enforcement arm of a plutocratic elite that worked to enhance the power of U.S. multinational corporations around the world through violence or the threat of it.
The death squads created by the CIA discussed in this article were designed either as part of an imperialist strategy of divide and conquer or to root out left-wing or other political groups that threatened unfettered U.S. access to raw materials around the world and the ability of U.S. corporations to plunder at will.
The Ukraine death squads have been specifically developed as part of a policy designed to destabilize and weaken Russia so that it cannot function as a potential geo-political rival to the U.S. and hinder U.S. control over Central Asia’s rich oil and gas resources and the mineral wealth lying underneath the Arctic.
One potential model for today is the 1975/1976 Church Committee hearings into CIA abuses that helped expose the sinister nature of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam.
Social justice advocates should push for an updated congressional investigation into the CIA’s backing of death squads, and for creation of a new political movement to transform U.S foreign policy and abolish the CIA.
The online version of the article is titled “They Fought for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. In America, They’re Living in Fear.” ↑
Aikins and Morgan further noted that, “in Britain and Australia, government inquiries have unearthed evidence of summary executions of captives, a war crime, and subsequent cover-up by their nations special operations units, and U.S. force have faced similar allegations.” ↑
Jeremy Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression: Police Training and Nation-Building in the American Century (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2012), 86. ↑
Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression. ↑
Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program, rev ed. (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2000), 12. ↑
Nairn concluded that “U.S. complicity in the dark and brutal work of El Salvador’s Death Squads is not an aberration. Rather, it represents a basic, bipartisan, institutional commitment on the part of six American Administrations—a commitment to guard the Salvadoran regime against the prospect that its people might organize in ways unfriendly to that regime or to the United States.” ↑
Medrano was brought for a three-month training tour with Green Berets in Vietnam where he learned the ins and outs of counterinsurgency. He said: “In this revolutionary war, the enemy comes from our people. They don’t have the rights of Geneva. They are traitors to the country. What can the troops do? When they find them, they kill them.”
Quoted in Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, 246. The Guardian reported that 3,000 bodies a month were turning up on the streets of Iraq—many of them innocent civilians—and that gruesome tortures were carried out in U.S.-run detention centers in the attempt to extract information from detainees. Steele reportedly left Iraq in September 2005 and went back to Texas to work for a company owned by Texas oilman Robert Mosbacher. ↑
Kuzmarov, Modernizing Repression, 247. ↑
Jeremy Kuzmarov and Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Montreal: Baraka Book, 2025), 87, 89. ↑
Kuzmarov and Kovalik, Syria, 168. ↑
“Ukraine’s Assassination Program: Its Agents Have Become Expert in Dark Revenge,” The Economist, September 9, 2023, 46. Ukraine’s most recent assassination was of the chief engineer of the Zaporozhskaya nuclear power plant, Alexander Yakovlev, who was murdered in a drone strike on July 15 that was condemned by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) because of the threat to nuclear safety caused by Yakovlev’s death.
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.”
He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of eight books, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025), and Political Assassinations in America: The Intricate Nexus of Deep State Crime (Clarity Press, 2026).
Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency .
He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
The majority of this article is very factual and true but towards the end of the article the writer’s pro Russia anti Ukraine bias comes into action:
Some claims are unproven and widely rejected by intelligence experts, as Telizhenko is identified by the U.S. Treasury and intelligence officials as an active spreader of Russian disinformation and is subject to U.S. sanctions. The U.S. Treasury Department sanctioned Andrii Telizhenko for being part of a Russia-linked foreign influence network and attempting to sway U.S. elections. The U.S. government revoked Telizhenko’s visa in 2020.: U.S. intelligence agencies and political experts have characterized his claims as attempts to advance Kremlin-directed agendas.
Most of the comments in this article are factual and true but
The Myrotvorets website did not officially advertise itself as a CIA project. The bizarre “Welcome to the CIA project website!” message was a sarcastic or satirical remark placed on the site’s main newsfeed in July 2019 to mock pro-Russian figures and conspiracy theorists