There was rightful rejoicing throughout the land when Kash Patel was sworn in as America’s next Director of the FBI on February 21. What a terrific story. A brilliant and dedicated public servant outrageously persecuted by a federal agency goes on to lead that very agency. But here’s a little secret: America has another Kash Patel waiting in the wings.
The other “Kash Patel,” whose life story bears remarkable similarities to Patel’s, is named Donald Im. Don’s dedication and love of country led him on a dual career path. One, to become an Assistant Special Agent in Charge in the DEA’s Special Operations Division, retiring after 31 years of service, and on a parallel path, retiring from the US Special Operations Command as a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Reserves after 27 years of service, with deployments to Afghanistan and Iraq, where he was the architect and designer of the Afghan Threat Finance Cell. He is one of America’s leading experts on money laundering and threat finance. He has testified in multiple venues before the House of Representatives on Chinese involvement in drug money laundering and fentanyl production, as well as the Senate on the use of shell companies by criminal organizations. If ever America needed a general in its undeclared war on China, Don Im is the ideal candidate.
Don, like Kash Patel, is a patriotic and outspoken son of persecuted Asian immigrants who came to this country seeking a better life. He rose through a remarkable career in law enforcement, the intelligence community, and the US military. In his case, Don’s father fled North Korea as a child after his own father had been executed by the North Korean Communists. The elder Im, along with his younger siblings, were saved from starvation by US Army soldiers conducting a patrol near the 38th parallel after a month-long treacherous march down to South Korea in the 1950s to evade the Communists. Don’s mother, born in Japan to Korean parents and whose cousins were killed in the bombing of Hiroshima, married his father while he was serving as a soldier for the Republic of Korea and detailed as a military policeman to the US Army’s 55th MP Company on the DMZ.
His father emigrated to the United States in 1967 and worked as a bartender to bring Don, his little sister, and mother to the States in 1970 and settled down in Adelphi, Maryland. They established a business there, which Don’s parents ran for a remarkable 49 years. They raised three successful children, Don being the eldest, and the youngest currently serving as a Maryland police officer.
In full disclosure, Don and I have been close friends since we were young intelligence analysts in a DEA intelligence unit focused on Latin American drug money laundering. We hit it off immediately when we first met in October 1991. We would eventually collaborate in the production of intelligence products and conduct training assignments, teaching domestic and foreign law enforcement officers around the world on various aspects of money laundering intelligence and investigations.
As a young analyst in the 90s, before becoming a DEA special agent, Don wrote a seminal intelligence report on the warping effects of the drug trade on the Colombian economy. The report, titled Colombian Economic Reform: The Impact on Drug Money Laundering Within the Colombian Economy, was inadvertently released to the press and caused a firestorm, but led to Colombia enacting anti-money laundering laws and regulations. He helped target Pablo Escobar’s finances and after Escobar’s demise, Don targeted the Cali Cartel by identifying the Cartel’s leader’s financial and business operations for the first-ever Office of Foreign Asset Control (OFAC) sanctions in late 1995.
Although our career paths diverged, Don would remain with the DEA until retirement, conducting undercover financial money laundering operations in New York City and South America. He initiated one of the largest money laundering prosecutions in history against HSBC Bank. He gradually rose through the ranks, with increasing positions of responsibility, becoming a subject matter expert in Chinese money laundering. Don, with a degree in economics, recognized the dangers of this Chinese menace as early as 2012 and strove to bring attention to it, briefing officials in the White House and Congress as early as 2017, long before most Americans were even aware of China’s role in the production and spread of fentanyl and other illicit drugs, which has taken an estimated 1.5 million American lives.
I put on my investigative reporter’s hat recently and interviewed Don over a couple hours. Talk about a wealth of knowledge about China and its role in international drug trafficking. His 30,000-foot perspective is one that does not view drug trafficking in isolation as a simple moral and social scourge. For China, it is central to maintaining the Communist Party’s dominance and China’s position in the world using unrestricted warfare tactics.
“The global drug markets have allowed Chinese provincial leaders access to cheap and abundant capital that would otherwise be insufficient from legitimate Chinese investments and loans,” he told me. Don noted that the global heroin, methamphetamine, cocaine, ecstasy, fentanyl, and marijuana trade generates estimated annual revenues of between one- to three-quarters of a trillion dollars, whereby China has been successfully tapping into this abundant source of easy capital through its worldwide diaspora networks and highly secretive organized criminal triads.
He said, “Drug money is one of their [China’s] primary sources of capital for growth and sustainment.” Drug money, he says, allows the Chinese to offset their expenditures on their military weapons technology industry. “Drug revenue,” he tells me, “has generally become China’s ad hoc bank.”
Don then becomes more expansive in his analysis, stressing that China views drug trafficking and organized crime generally as a key plank in its unrestricted asymmetric warfare against the West. He shows me a quote that he keeps on his phone from the late Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, who succeeded Mao Zedong. It reads: “As long as organized crime groups support national interests, the CCP is prepared to cooperate with them.”
China, he says, uses unrestricted warfare with all elements of society working in tandem to protect the Chinese Communist Party—including the government, the military, “private” corporations, state-owned enterprises, and organized crime groups. It is an all-of-society approach to maintaining the CCP’s power.
The United States, he says, must adjust to a flexible and coordinated strategy to counter the CCP. “Going after China’s global drug revenue stream will help strangle China’s economic and national security influence strategy called the Belt & Road Initiative.” Presently, our national security structure is ineffective in countering such asymmetric threats. He says our departments and agencies operate in “silos,” with the military, law enforcement, diplomatic, economic, and intelligence communities operating within their own authorities based on an archaic independent performance matrix and budgetary goals. He states that the US national security structure requires the removal of an entrenched bloated bureaucracy in order to address Chinese asymmetric warfare tactics exploiting the West’s democratic and free open-market form of governance and economies.
There are many current and recently retired members of the military and law enforcement, like Don Im, who are ardent supporters of President Trump’s vision and the Make America Great Again agenda. Their expertise and patriotism, like that of Kash Patel, should be brought to bear as the new administration takes on the herculean task of reining in our adversaries around the globe.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and nonprofit sectors for 38 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. (The views expressed are the author’s alone and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)