The Washington Post revealed the CIA secretly dropped modified poppy seeds over Afghanistan for a decade to weaken its opium trade, a covert operation that proved costly and largely ineffective.
In a revelation that reads like spy fiction, The Washington Post has uncovered a decade-long covert operation by the US Central Intelligence Agency to weaken Afghanistan’s billion-dollar heroin industry — not with missiles or bombs, but with poppy seeds.
According to The Washington Post, the CIA dropped billions of modified poppy seeds across Afghan farmlands from 2004 to 2015, aiming to quietly degrade the potency of the country’s opium crop. The clandestine effort, confirmed by 14 former US officials familiar with the classified mission, was designed to make heroin production unprofitable by lowering the chemical yield of the plants.
“It was out-of-the-box thinking — a nonmilitary solution to a deeply military problem,” a former US official told the paper.
The programme unfolded alongside the 20-year American war in Afghanistan, where heroin not only funded Taliban operations but also seeped into the fabric of government corruption. By the mid-2000s, Afghanistan supplied roughly 90 percent of the world’s heroin, making narcotics control central to Washington’s war strategy.
The CIA’s secret operation began in late 2004, using British C-130 aircraft for nighttime drops over Helmand and Nangarhar — Afghanistan’s two main poppy-growing provinces. The agency’s Crime and Narcotics Center, flush with post-9/11 funding, oversaw the mission. The modified seeds, while not genetically engineered, were selectively bred to reduce alkaloid levels — the compounds that make poppies a raw material for heroin.
The plan was as ingenious as it was audacious: over time, these low-potency plants would cross-fertilize with native varieties, quietly lowering the drug content of Afghanistan’s opium harvest.
But the secrecy was so tight that even some senior Pentagon and State Department officials were unaware of the programme’s existence. Former Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s government was reportedly kept in the dark throughout.
Though former officials told The Post the scheme showed “some success” for a few years, others said it made little long-term impact. “The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze,” one participant admitted, pointing to the CIA’s ballooning costs and the resilience of Afghanistan’s opium economy.
A 2018 report by the US Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction later concluded that no American counter-drug initiative led to lasting reductions in poppy cultivation — suggesting that even seeds engineered for sabotage could not uproot Afghanistan’s dependence on opium.
“It was a clever idea,” another ex-official said, “but in the end, Afghanistan grew back stronger — just like the poppy fields.”
