SWHT African Forced Organ Harvesting, Prostitutions & Bride Kidnapping

This interview features Clifford Brown, a retired Foreign Service Officer and attorney, discussing his nearly 30-year career with USAID (Agency for International Development) and his work on global development, anti-drug programs, governance, and human trafficking. Brown recounts postings across Africa, Central America, Colombia, Kyrgyzstan, Guinea, Sierra Leone and Peru, and explains the agency's broad remit: projects that fell between military and diplomatic efforts, from health and disaster response to economic development and environmental conservation.

Career and Service

• Joined USAID in 1987 after practicing law; served about 27 years overseas in regional and country positions.
• Roles included legal advisor, management positions, deputy director in Bogota (anti-drug programs), country representative in Kyrgyzstan, and mission director in Guinea.
• Returned to the U.S., practiced family law and bankruptcy, later worked as a contractor and as a senior advisor with the American Bar Association.
• Authored Inside USAID: An Odyssey of Foreign Assistance, a collection of field stories illustrating the agency's work and fragile social contexts abroad.

Human Trafficking and Organ Harvesting

Brown describes disturbing firsthand observations and reports of transnational trafficking networks that move people—particularly women—from Southeast Asia to West Africa and vice versa. Key points:

• Trafficked women were forced into prostitution aboard ships and in port cities; passports were confiscated and victims were frequently kept under house arrest.
• When victims resisted, some were killed for organs; Brown links this practice to a broader global demand, citing reports of organ procurement in China and a book (Kill to Order) alleging organs are available quickly for those who can pay.
• Transport and jurisdictional challenges complicate enforcement: crimes often occur at sea or across borders, making interception, evidence and legal authority difficult.
• Corruption and weak law enforcement enable traffickers—sometimes law enforcement and political actors are bribed or complicit.

Domestic and Local Trafficking

• Brown highlights bride kidnapping and forced marriages in Central Asia as a pervasive form of domestic trafficking, often tolerated through tradition despite being illegal.
• He also notes U.S. domestic vulnerabilities: homeless and runaway teens are at high risk of exploitation, and in some places shelters and protections are limited by law.

Institutional Loss and Policy Concerns

• Brown laments the dismantling of USAID (as he describes it), noting loss of institutional knowledge, project documentation and evaluation capacity that hampered humanitarian, health and development programs.
• He argues USAID projects often returned economic value to the U.S. (through contractors and services) and addressed fragile social systems that can rapidly unravel.
• He stresses that geopolitical priorities and military spending often overshadow foreign assistance despite its practical, on-the-ground impact.

Responses and Prevention Efforts

• Public awareness campaigns in origin countries are one practical approach Brown supports—broadcasts and translated programs to warn potential victims about trafficking recruitment tactics.
• He describes collaborative efforts with a group (Order of the Eagle) and individuals like Major Jason Hatch to develop prevention programs.
• Effective law enforcement requires international cooperation, evidence-gathering and mechanisms to assert jurisdiction over vessels and transnational smugglers.

Notable Illustrative Stories

• Accounts from Guinea: port-based sex trafficking involving Asian crewmen, port collaborators, and transport of organs; violent instability and the difficulty of intervening during conflict.
• Kyrgyzstan: bride kidnapping traditions, corruption in the energy sector, and a personal incident where Brown’s wife was briefly kidnapped after his public commentary about corruption.
• Colombia: programs to encourage farmers to grow legal crops instead of coca.

Conclusions and Recommendations

Brown emphasizes the scale and brutality of modern trafficking and organ harvesting, the enabling role of corruption, and the need for sustained institutional capacity, international cooperation, and public awareness in origin communities. He advocates restoring and preserving development expertise and records, improving cross-border law enforcement, and investing in prevention and support services (including youth shelters) to reduce vulnerability.

The interview closes with references to Brown’s book and a recommended title on organ trafficking; Brown encourages public attention to trafficking and recovery of institutional tools that enable effective responses.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Welcome back to the secret world of human trafficking. I'm your host, David J. Story. I'm also the author of the Omega book series. Today we have a special guest. His name is Clifford Brown. He has served several positions in U.S. aid down in Africa. He's going to address some issues that he ran into while he was down there working at U.S. AIDS. Those issues are forced organ harvesting, prostitution, and bride kidnapping. Here we are with uh Clifford Brown. And what I want you to do, Clifford, is go ahead and introduce yourself to everyone and tell us a little bit about yourself.

SPEAKER_03 0:58

Well, thank you, David. I'm happy to have this opportunity. I I'm a retired Foreign Service officer and an attorney. I joined the uh foreign aid agency that was destroyed last year back in 1987. I had been a partner in a in a law firm in Beverly Hills, and I but I really wanted to work overseas, use my Spanish. I I picked that up after college in a fellowship in Latin America. So when I saw that the Agency for International Development, that's AID, but nowadays they call it USAID, uh they needed attorneys that were willing to go overseas and that had a foreign language, so I jumped at the opportunity and I spent the next 27 years doing that. Um I lived in I had regional jobs, but I was based in Nairobi and I traveled all over Africa for three years, and then I was transferred back to Central America because that's where the Spanish was that I wanted to use, and I was in Central America for nine years. I was in Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua. Um again, my job was regional, so I went all over basically uh giving advice to the to the missions. USAID is a was an agency that had people in about 80 countries, and uh what we would do is we would bring in uh contractors or non-governmental organizations from the U.S. And they would typically engage in a whole range of activities that that our government thought would be useful overseas. I like to say that what we did was everything that was in the middle between military and what embassies do, and we would make jokes that those people in the embassy they write cables and they have a lot of meetings, but we get stuff done on the ground, and almost anything was fair game. Um what people are lamenting most now about the destruction of the agency is the the la the end of our humanitarian work, the disaster responses and the health programs and and whatnot. And uh that's particularly relevant now that there's this Ebola outbreak in the DRC, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But anyway, I spent uh almost three decades with USAID. I I about halfway through my career, I stopped being a legal advisor and I moved into management. And um uh after Central America, I was a deputy director for the mission in Bogota, Colombia. We had a big anti-drug program there that was uh trying to get farmers to grow cocoa or chocolate, the the pod that is used to make chocolate, instead of coca, which is used to make cocaine. Um and then from there I moved to Kyrgyzstan, uh, where I was the country representative, and we had a big program that did all sorts of things. Kyrgyzstan was one of the former parts of the Soviet Union, so there were many different kinds of programs there to sort of help them along in the path toward private sector economy and whatnot. And then the last place I worked was in uh at least as a diplomat, uh, I was in Guinea. Uh I was the mission director for two programs. I was based in Conakry, Guinea Conakry in West Africa, and but I was also uh managing the program in Sierra Leone. Uh we didn't have uh official staff over there, we had contractors in Sierra Leone, but I could drive there in about five hours. So that was the place I retired from, and it's where I learned some of the most horrendous stories about human trafficking that uh we can get into. I came back to the States. I retired in 2009. I came back to my hometown in Washington State. I practiced law there for a while, a very different kind of law. I had been a commercial business lawyer in in California, but I practiced uh family law and personal bankruptcy work in Washington State. I missed the international world, so I went back myself as a contractor to Peru in 2013, and I was there for three years uh working again in the counter-drug program, but I wasn't uh a diplomat. I was a technical advisor to the mission. I left that job at the end of 2016, and I I uh came back to the East Coast instead of going back to Washington State, and I'm a retired attorney here. I'm uh I'm in the process of getting admitted to the Maryland bar, but I'm not practicing full-time. After I left Guinea, uh I learned from a former colleague in Guinea about some details of what was going on in West Africa, and it was about the human trafficking, not only of the ladies they brought to Africa, but the body parts that they send back to Southeast Asia. And that inspired me to take another job with the American Bar Association, the Rule of Law Initiative, and I was a senior advisor in their technical uh their Africa area, and I traveled back and forth to Africa for one year with the ABA, uh, trying to get people and donors interested in this subject, and I I failed. I I could not get people to believe that it was real or that if they did believe it, they couldn't figure out what they could do about it. So that's what's inspired me.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

I found some people just don't want to admit or talk about talk about human trafficking. I had a lady at a book signing I had uh uh not too long ago, and she asked me about my books, and I said it about human trafficking, and she just freaked out. She said, I don't want to talk about it. She turned around, she said, you know, I don't want to hear anything about it. She just put her hands over her ears and walked up. I thought, well, that's the problem that no one wants to talk about it, no one wants to address it. That's exactly and that's why it continues to grow. That's exactly go ahead and tell us what you've learned about that you know, the human trafficking and the uh the body parts. I mean, you know, that's that's definitely something that not a lot of people know about.

SPEAKER_03 7:07

No, no, it's uh well uh this is not for kids, but I I will get into what I know about it. Um I was in Guinea at a particularly crazy time. The president had died, uh Lasana Conte died, and and the army couldn't figure out who was going to take charge. So they were they were in gun battles with each other, and we couldn't go to work. We were hunkered down in our homes for many times. Uh and uh these battles just raged throughout the city. Well, we we had a guy that was our defense attache officer. He was a an army major, he had a budget, and his job was to befriend senior people in the Guinean military, and he had uh a budget that allowed him to do that, and they loved to come over in his house and have the free drinks and whatnot, even though it's a Muslim nation. Um anyway, he was one night down in downtown Conakry uh with some of these Guinean officers that he was um entertaining, and there were two Asian women that came up to him. These ladies did not speak French, and the local dialect was Susu. Of course, they didn't speak that either, but they spoke enough English to tell him their story. And it was basically this they had been approached in their homelands, one was from the Philippines, one was from Thailand, and they were told that the sailors on these ships, big freighters uh that you know carry uh containers to and from Africa and Southeast Asia. Uh I was a sailor myself, uh, so I could believe this part of the story. There's a lot of room on a ship, especially a freighter. And you I had seen guys bring bring things on that didn't belong on the ship, but uh I I never saw people bring humans. I can believe, though, that they were doing it with these freighters because they they were bigger than the one I was on. In any event, these ladies were brought to Africa, they took their passports away from them, they were forced to become prostitutes. So there were homes that these, and it was a business the crewmen were running on the side. The management of the company, the the first these two ladies had come in on a Maersk line. That's a Danish company, but you know, this is I'm not here to say that Maersk is condoning this or even perhaps aware of it. But in any event, the crewmen were most of them were from Southeast Asia. So they could speak the language, the local languages, and they lured these ladies on board. And then they they had people that were they were cooperating with in the ports, and this does not go on just in Conakry, but in the other major ports in West Africa, it happens there too. And I can talk a little further about corruption in that area and why it's so prevalent. But in any event, the the the crewmen are afraid to come ashore because of HIV-8. So they have homes for these ladies. They're kept in these homes, they're forced to stay there, they're under house arrest, and they're they'll work in the bar downstairs or the restaurant, but at night they'll take them out to the ships on smaller boats, and that's where they ply their trade. Now, when they object, the nice way to put this is they become involuntary organ donors. That means exactly what you can assume it means. These ladies are literally for their body parts. There is another side business that's going on, partly because of so many Chinese construction projects in Africa. The uh the Chinese are building entire soccer stadiums, railroads, roads, they have a lot of, but they bring their own people in. They don't hire the local workers. They bring a whole crew in and they'll set up a city and it's uh like a company town. And there are charter flights that go back and forth to Southeast Asia. Well, those crewmen uh apparently have discovered these organs, or it was arranged with maybe they know the crewmen on those ships, but in any event there is a business that transports the organs back to China. And that uh that phenomenon is hard for people to believe in the 21st century, but it's been going on for thousands of years, frankly. Not the organ part, but the the prostitute part. The organ part is relatively new because uh you know they haven't been doing organ transplants too long. There's a book that just came out uh called Killed to Order. It came out in early March, and it's about the fact that in China you don't have to wait for an organ transplant. Uh if you've got enough money, there is a kidney available or a liver or whatever. And it's available because, according to the author of that book, it's it's coming from the prisoners that they have, either the Uyghurs in the far west part of China, the Xinxiang province, or from the Falong Gung, it's a uh uh religion of some sort that they uh they declared to be illegal. So they those people are also involuntary organ donors. But um I personally saw a video of uh what can happen when they're trying to harvest organs. Now, I should preface this by saying that the the sex trade business goes on in both directions. They'll bring Asian women to Africa, they will also take African women to other ports in the Middle East or Odessa and the Black Sea uh and other parts. And so the there are African women that are taken uh overseas, and there are Southeast Asian women that are brought into Africa. I guess the men in the different areas consider the other race a little more exotic, uh, but there's a lot of money in it. And uh, was uh a young African woman who was surrounded by about six African men. You can't see their faces, they're all speaking Portuguese. And uh they tell her um hold a steel plate on your head, and she does that, and then they whack that plate and knock her unconscious, and they all all six of them start massaging her arms and legs. This is to keep the blood flowing. And I I could not watch the rest of it, but um this is a f a real phenomenon that's that's out there, it's taking place, and it's not getting enough attention from law enforcement.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

No, uh unfortunately, I guess they they're understaffed like a lot of a lot of places are, and uh yeah, the the trafficking trade uh is growing. I mean these traffickers they're making more money off of selling bodies and I guess body parts too than they were when they were selling drugs. And you know a person can uh a a person can be used several times, but you know, drugs you you can only use that once and it's gone. Yeah, and and and and that's that's sad.

SPEAKER_03 14:16

There have been estimates of that that the the income, the illicit income out of human trafficking is probably greater than that of drugs. I I don't know. I haven't done that research how I would do it. Yeah, I've heard that too from several different places. I do know that the the law enforcement, at least in that part of the world, when a single Cessna flies across the Atlantic, it it may refuel on some island, but when it lands in West Africa, that plane has more value on it than the entire in the case of Guinea-Bissau, for instance, uh which is a Portuguese-speaking country just north of Guinea, uh, that plane has more value on it than the entire budget for the for the year for the entire police force. So you can imagine that's why they can buy off the police. They own, the drug traffickers own those countries. I mean, they they they in Guinea, the president's own son was caught at the border driving back from Sierra Leone with a with a car full of of drugs and and about half a million dollars worth of money and gold in it. Um it's it's the Wild West. It really is the Wild West.

SPEAKER_00 15:28

I'm sure. I'm sure it is. I mean money. If you have enough money, you can pretty much buy anything.

unknown 15:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:39

I don't know if that uh is a full description, full enough of my my own career. We w USAID was, as I said, the the the agency that got involved in everything between military and pure diplomacy. So almost anything was fair game. Um uh but the the trafficking part is one of the subjects that I'm concerned uh uh enough about to try and publicize this. I I was so offended last year when aid was was destroyed, they called us a bunch of uh Trump and Elon Musk said that we were all collectively a bunch of crooks, that we were all corrupt, and hell, I gave up two-thirds of my income to join the agency. Um and the fact is that half of the administrators of this agency in the period I was with with it were appointed by Republicans, and not a single one of them has come out in favor of it. And one of them said that all of the accusations against us were pure garbage. I mean, when they when they hire people, they were all mid-career. They didn't hire people straight out of school. They were mid-career people, and after they get hired, there's a big security check. It takes six to nine months, they check our background, and everything we did was was vetted with the Congress, with the congressional committees, with the White House, with the Office of Management of Budget, with the State Department. We weren't doing anything secret, or and the idea we were skimming money off is was just nonsense. So I was so mad about that. I wrote I wrote my own, I had been collecting stories over many years, and uh I I published a book called Inside USAID, an Odyssey of Foreign Assistance, and it's a collection of tales about you know what was going on in the places I I lived in. Um we can talk more about that if if you wish. But it was uh Yeah, yeah, go ahead and tell us a little bit about your book. I was in some places that fell apart rather quickly and unexpectedly, and that's another reason I'm I'm uh trying to get the word out about uh the the book itself, because I don't think people in the U.S. realize how fragile the social consensus is. And I g I I have several examples, but perhaps the best one, and this is not one I lived through, but when the Soviet Union fell apart, I don't know if you re recall how surprising that was, how unexpected it was. And it was because the social consensus in the Soviet Union itself was very fragile, and they didn't realize that. But all of a sudden the whole place just dissolved. And I have lived through that in in several countries. I was in Kyrgyzstan the night that I was the acting DCM. The DCM means the deputy chief of mission. The the real guy was on vacation, so the ambassador asked me to be his number two guy. And that that night there were there were rent a crowds. You know, people were protesting in front of the White House. But most of the people in both crowds had been paid for by some very wealthy people. And the crowds were battling with each other, and the president was he he was an enlightened fellow. He told his troops he didn't want any deaths or injuries, so the guns were not loaded. Well, the kids figured that out. They got over the fence, they got into the White House, they ransacked it, and the the president left the country, flew to Almaty, which was about a three-hour drive away, but he went in a helicopter, and then he ended up in Moscow teaching math. The place has never been the same. That night the police disappeared and and kids raged through the city, burning up shops, breaking into shopping malls. It was nuts. Um and it was not terribly unlike conicry when La Sana Conte died and the military started fighting each other. That's an a third example. I was also in Guatemala City the very day that the president decided that his Congress was too corrupt and his Supreme Court wasn't making the kinds of decisions he wanted. So he called out the army and he surrounded the Congress and he surrounded the Supreme Court and they arrested everybody. Well, that didn't last long. It it lasted about two weeks, and the guy fled to uh Panama with uh several million dollars. But because the U.S. took a strong stand and we told the army, look, you you can't let this stand because uh if you do, we're not gonna do business with you anymore. And the army officers were making a lot of money on the side, you know, controlling the the more lucrative import and export businesses. So that didn't didn't last. But the point is that the social consensus is a fragile thing. And I don't think we are uh recognizing how how dangerous it is here that our we're so polarized now. Because t to think that we're immune to this sort of thing would be pretty naive.

SPEAKER_01 20:35

And that's another point I try to make uh in the book. The corruption angle is also uh something I've talked about.

SPEAKER_03 20:46

Uh in my own wife was was kidnapped in Kyrgyzstan um because uh I was too outspoken about high-level corruption, and it was in the energy sector. Uh electricity is the easiest thing in the world to smuggle. If your borders were built at a time when it was one big country, then there's no meters right at the border. So what's going on, what was going on in in Kyrgyzstan in those days is that people were on the take uh in both both Kazakhstan to the north, which had a lot of, has a lot of oil, and they were they had the money, and Kyrgyzstan was pretty broke. So the guys that worked for the energy department in Kyrgyzstan would allow electricity to go through the wires, and they would get their money under the table from these rich people in Kazakhstan. I knew the details of this because uh we were involved in the energy sector trying to to to uh improve their ability to prevent households from stealing electricity. Because everybody in rural uh Kyrgyzstan is an electrician. They all know how to steal electricity uh by wiring around uh just connecting their homes directly to the power lines. And um I I told other Donors about it, including the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. And I did so on a uh in in offices that in retrospect I now realize were bugged because I was on a television program there. Uh I was interviewed by a local station and I told them I had married a Kyrgyz woman, which I did. And we're still married 20 years later. We've got three kids, but um she's she she was my Russian teacher and she still is. At any event, um when I had that interview a week later, uh she was she was kidnapped as she came out of a uh hairdresser's uh salon. She was getting ready for the Marine Ball. Every year these embassies put on uh big birthday parties for the Marines. They have Marine Guards and they have the birthday party for the Marines, and it's a big fancy dance. Uh so she was uh uh getting ready for that. When she came out of the hairdresser, three young guys jumped in and took her out of town, tied her up, and she got loose eventually, and that was uh the end of our our stay in Kyrgyzstan. The embassy said, You gotta get out of here just uh for your own safety's sake. But I tell that story. Um corruption is out there in in in every country and at a very high level, and there's no reason to think that that the human traffickers aren't participating in that as well, in terms of buying off law enforcement and whatnot.

SPEAKER_00 23:28

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I'm sure they are. That's why that's why one reason why it's spreading so so well is you know, a lot of politicians and law enforcement, they're just turning turning their back on it and just letting it go because, you know, they're getting getting uh some kickback on it, getting money. And uh until I guess that stops, it's going to continue to grow.

SPEAKER_03 23:57

Yeah, it's uh it's a tough phenomenon. One of the problems that we had when w and I had with the American Bar Association is there's different jurisdictions involved, and when you have crimes that a lot of it takes place at sea, the transport of these women through international waters, um the same major that brought the whole issue to my attention, he he at one point he knew that there was a ship leaving Conakry with with African uh women on board who were being taken north, and he was trying to get the British Navy to intercept one of these ships at Gibraltar, and the Admiral up in uh Gibraltar just laughed at him and he said, How how can I go out there and just stop a commercial vessel based on the phone call from some guy, even a guy with at your level in the U.S. Embassy? I don't have the right to do that. And and if if you're gonna try and get a search warrant, well, how do you do it? And in which from which country? And that's what makes international trafficking so difficult because you know they're on international waters, uh you've got to have some pretty convincing proof, but then you've got to find a court that will take jurisdiction of it and issue some order that gives you the authority to go out and stop the boat and search it and try and find the st the the ladies that they've they've hidden on the boat. And it the jurisdictional issues were it once I got over the barrier of it's too hard to believe. Um the next question was, well, how could we do anything about it? The only solution that we've uh come up with uh and when I say we, I'm still involved with uh Major Hatch is his name, Jason Hatch, and and he is uh involved in a group called the uh the Order of the Eagle. It's a it's a it's a old knighthood that was created by the one of the kings of Georgia, the country of Georgia. And uh that that group is now trying to create a radio program and they will translate it into local languages. And the purpose of it would be to broadcast it in the countries where these ladies are recruited and try to make them aware. They don't believe everything you hear. If someone tries to promise you a trip to the US or a a free trip to Europe, uh it's there's probably it's too good to be true, and it's not gonna happen, and something else far worse probably will happen. Um that's all we've come up with in terms of just trying to make women in these various countries aware of it.

SPEAKER_00 26:45

Yeah. The traffickers, you know, they're they're very smart. You know, they know how to groom and talk to these people to, you know, get them to you know, come on board with them.

SPEAKER_01 26:58

And you know, they promise them money, fame, better life in another country, and it never happens. It's a sad situation.

SPEAKER_03 27:12

And again, what what make to me what what is particularly galling, at least when when you say it existed, we had people out there that were, you know, aware of s phenomena like that. And it was a I like to say it made us collectively wiser. Um when the agency was destroyed, we had 60 years worth of project documentation, and we had uh a whole center called the Center for Development Evaluation and Information. They took it offline, and to me it was like burning down the library in Alexandria several thousand years ago, and a lot of wisdom went up in cyber smoke at that point because we don't have we don't have people out there that can even learn about um what's going on on the ground and let alone do anything about it. Um and that was that's particularly uh regretful. And y you mentioned, David, that you're in different countries. I'm sure some of them probably have people there know what USAID was, and there's there's literally tens of thousands of careers that were destroyed when they they took that agency down.

SPEAKER_01 28:23

It was a hopefully uh hopefully they'll bring it back. I hope so. Oh I'm sure.

SPEAKER_00 28:33

I'm sure that not a lot not a lot of people agreed with what what happened, but yeah, I I don't know all the details of why they did what they did, but it's I guess above my pay grade and hopefully uh they'll sort things out and and reinstate a lot of it back once they go through the details and find, you know that you know they were doing a lot of good. And maybe they'll you know cut back on some of the programs that they feel that wasn't beneficial. But who knows? I I quit trying to figure out the logic of government.

SPEAKER_03 29:18

Yeah, it's it's hard to to understand all of it. And and I I make one other point in the book about why different things became the priorities. It was and I think it was more of an art than a science that you know we would always go into a given country and negotiate an agreement with the host government, and uh both sides would agree on something that seemed to make sense. Um we created entire industries in Central America. Uh we've, for instance, uh brought in a contractor who who tried to grow some onions up in the mountains in Honduras and and send them in a container to Miami, and lo and behold, yeah, we figured out that you can actually do that. You can provide onions to the U.S. at a time when they don't have any. And ten years later, half a million people are making their living doing that. And we did that with many different projects. Uh I mean, snow peas uh in Guatemala, strawberries and flowers and uh melons, shrimp farms. We created entire industries. So it what we did was not always just humanitarian stuff, almost anything was fair game. At one point, the environmentalists wanted to set up a corridor of national parks so animals in Central America could run back and forth without bumping into highways, and or at least they'd have bridges they could go under and whatnot. And we we made it happen. We got the governments together and persuaded them to create a contiguous system of national parks. When the Soviet Union did fall apart, um they wanted people that could train the accountants, train the lawyers and what private sector business was all about. And we got that job. So we we had all kinds of there was one time smoke, smoke from forest fires in northern Guatemala was floating up into Texas and Florida, and the congressman up here called us and said, What are you gonna do about it? Okay, well, we didn't realize we were a firefighting agency too, but that was our job. We had to, you know, get tankers uh uh hired and and and and oversee projects, bring in the the you know, the implementers. We always work through these implementers, but we got stuff done, and uh it it's just a tra such a tragedy that it's the agency is not not out there. It's it's not only a tragedy. I mean, you know, almost something like that. There's one website that counts the number of deaths now. It's getting up close to 800,000 deaths that have happened since the agency was destroyed because of the health programs that were terminated. Um entire refugee camps in Africa that used to be feeding places for some of the refugees fleeing, say, from the civil war in Sudan.

SPEAKER_01 32:02

Now they're they arrived there and there's no food, there's nobody there. It's gone. And you know, in the context of that, the human trafficking is is one of those issues.

SPEAKER_03 32:15

We're not out there trying to do anything about it now.

SPEAKER_00 32:19

Yeah, I'm s I'm sure that's growing without you know any anybody monitoring it or or trying to to stop it. I'm sure that's growing just just like it is here in the United States.

SPEAKER_03 32:40

Yeah, I I I told you that when I got back in 2009, I I tried I was practicing law for a while, but the most meaningful thing I did there was work on a shelter for homeless teenagers. And uh that was a problem I was not really aware of until I came back. But the phenomenon in this country of teenagers who either leave home, they don't get along with their parents, or they get booted out is a very big one. And and in many states, and Washington State was one of these, it was it's a crime to shelter a homeless teenager. You have to send the kid back to his home, his or her home. And the law doesn't contemplate, well, what what if the parents don't want him back? Or what if the kid just refuses? You know, if you're 18 or older, you can go to the gospel mission or the the VFW mission or wherever. You can spend the night there as an adult, but as a as a teenager, it's illegal. It's illegal to help that teenager. It's a misdemeanor in Washington State to help a homeless teenager unless you have a license from the state. So that was our our goal, and we got a lot we had a big fundraising event, and we finally got the county to to give us a license. And that was after even though I was in USAID perhaps almost 30 years, that single uh shelter that I helped set up when I was briefly retired is something I'm more proud of than anything I ever did in USAID. It's still there. It's fifteen years later, it's still up and running.

SPEAKER_00 34:16

Wow. It's sad that you know they weren't able to to help teenagers. And that's uh that's a lot of times where it starts. Prostitution and That's right. And trafficking is is uh through runaways or uh maybe uh what I I call 'em perverts who groom some kid or child through the internet to get them to, you know, rebel against their parents and and leave. And then they end up on the streets and you know, without the smarts on how to survive. And they you know, they end up turning to drugs and and prostitution just just to survive, and then have the uh the courts and the the government not helping them. That that just adds to the problem. Yeah. Well, you know, thankfully, you know, organizations like yourself and all like that, you know, s trying to step up and fill the gap. And uh hel help these teenagers.

SPEAKER_03 35:24

Yeah, well, a lot of the big cities do have licensed shelters for for homeless youth, but but it's a process to get it, uh to get that kind of license. And it's uh at least where I was in southeastern Washington State, um that was near where the Columbia and the Snake Rivers come together. They're not it's not near any real big city. And uh and yet it's kind of about 250,000 people there, but I'm sure there are many um other communities in the U.S. that have the same issue. But you go into Baltimore or New York or Portland, Oregon, Seattle, you can find shelters for teenagers, but not certainly not where I was, and I'm sure that problem is still a big one. And like you say, that when when uh particularly a girl is homeless, uh t prostitution is a is is a tempting way to make a survival. Well yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:18

It is cause you got all these perverts out there that are looking for teenagers or or even preteens to uh to use them and abuse them and sexually and uh otherwise. Uh it's not only girls. It's uh you know, there's a uh a decent percentage of uh boys too that are you know trapped into the trafficking and and prosecution. Yeah. Uh you know, whatever reasons. Well, tell us uh where we can get your book.

SPEAKER_03 36:55

Well, it's on Amazon, it's Barnes and Noble. If you just Google Inside USAID, um again, it's an Odyssey. I it's it's a different stories. I mean, every country I lived in was was a little different. So I spend some time in the chapters. I sp at the beginning I'll I'll give sort of a broad overview of of the agency itself and and uh the kinds of things we did. Um I don't try to you know make it a complete history of of the agency by any means, but I do give enough background that I think people can understand what what the uh what the agency was. We were prohibited from bragging about what we did in the U.S. We there was a law that said we couldn't spend any money for publicity within the United States, and that was to prevent. I guess the guy that introduced that law, he was uh Hickenlooper was the name of the amendment. So it was some congressman named Hickenlooper. It came out of the 60s or early 70s before I joined the agency. I joined in 87. So we couldn't brag about what we were doing locally. Um they didn't want us influencing our own budget. They wanted our budget to come out of you know needs that were identified by by Congress and by the executive branch only. And they didn't want you say even talking about you know why we might need more money to do what we were doing. Um one year I remember uh two B-1 bombers went down. One of them crashed in Texas and one of them crashed in Montana. Each of those planes cost more than half a million dollars, or $500 million, not half a million, five hundred half a billion dollars to build. Each of those planes, that that number was bigger than all of the foreign aid we were giving to sub-Saharan Africa in each of those years. It was a drop, compared to the military budget, it was a drop in the bucket. And and that's one of the points I make in the book. I mean, we we were spending money uh overseas, but most of it actually came back to the U.S. because we were hiring people here to go out there and meet with people and and uh you know, teach them how to do things differently, whether it was in tax collection or hospital management or running court systems or or teaching uh farmers to do things differently, teaching business associations how to lobby together for changes they needed in order to you know to be more successful in their business, how to repair water systems. I mean, the list I could just go on and on and on, but it it was way more than just health pro health projects and and disaster responses. It was, like I said, anything that was in between pure diplomacy and military. And and God knows, you know, there's a lot of stuff that we wish could happen overseas, and that was our tool to do it. So anyway, the book goes through uh you know the over gives you the big picture of what why we existed and what we the kinds of things we did. And then I talk about the various places I was, and as I said before, many of them fell apart rather quickly. I was in Haiti right after the military government had actually come told the soldiers to go out and shoot people while they were standing in line to vote. And and I remember taking the shuttle car from my the hotel I was staying in up in Port-au-Prince, which is way up on the mountain above uh well, the the hotel was in Péchonville, which is uh above Port-au-Prince, and I I drove down on this narrow little road in a bulletproof car, and we were passing bodies on the shoulder of the road from the violence that had gone on for those elections. Um the stories were just unbelievable at times. I I opened the book with a story of how I was trying we were trying to give away, literally give away by financing $20 million. And this was to the newly existing country of Eritrea in uh north of Ethiopia. They had just fought one of the longest civil wars in history, and uh it's uh it's a high-altitude country. During World War II, we had this uh the U.S. Army had a big listening post there to capture electronic signals from all over the Middle East and Europe, and it's in a very strategic location near the mouth of the Red Sea. So the U.S. was trying to position itself as uh a friendly nation to this new regime because uh it wasn't clear that anybody they were gonna align with anybody. And those are that was in the days of uh not that long after the Cold War uh had ended. But I was down there trying to find somebody that would take $20 million worth of imports. They were gonna have to buy stuff in the U.S., but whatever they needed to get their country back on its feet, um, we were willing to finance up to $20 million worth of imports of products from the United States, provided they were going to be used for peaceful purposes. And that was basically it. So I I go around the entire government was located in the barracks that had been built 40 years earlier to house the soldiers who were running that listening post. And it was an old bunch of buildings uh uh semi-falling apart, and I walked into one big building, walked down the hall. There was a little office, and there was this eight and a half by eleven inch white piece of paper that was scotch taped to the wall, to the door, and it said Ministry of Education. So I knock on the door, I go in, and the whole ministry is there. There's four people. And two of them were Eritrean women. The women fought in that civil war and they were in the army. They were dressed up in their army uniforms. They one guy had his feet on the desk and they had their rifles next to them, and I made my pitch. I said, you know, who what you say was, why I was there, and I said, We've got 20 million bucks for you. And they look at me and they said, No, we don't want to. Uh because if we take it, it looks like you're bribing us to do something. I said, Well, it might look that way, but look, you can tell me what you're gonna do. Uh we we'd like we'd like to help you, you know, get this country up and running as a as a real country instead of some more leftover battleground, because it was a terrible civil war. I did that for about a month, going around trying to offer this to various ministers, and they all said, no, we don't want it. I said, to hell with it. I went back and went back to Nairobi where I had a job as a lawyer there. I had been got temporarily designated as a program officer to go get this program off the ground, but I didn't do it. And that's the opening story in the book. And the point I make there is that a lot of the p times I found myself in like some sort of never never land. It's just unreal the kinds of things that you can see happen overseas.

SPEAKER_00 43:57

Uh and I know that. A lot of people complain about the United States, you know, they can't get the newest iPhone or or you know designer clothes, but you know, we got it made over here. Yeah. And yeah.

SPEAKER_03 44:16

We were living at at the intersection of the the the modern world and and the the rural world as it existed like 200 years ago. I remember my my secretaries in in the office in Nairobi. I was not in the embassy that got bombed, but I was about two blocks away from it. And uh my secretaries, both of them came from rural African villages. Both of them could put bottles of water on their head and walk around the office balancing these jugs of water on their head uh because they learned to do it as little girls, because that's how they had to go get their water. But they were working in a modern office building, and I don't know, the intersection of the third world and the modern world was uh it was quite an eye-open.

SPEAKER_00 45:04

I'm sure it was. And I I think uh it would uh help a lot of people if they had the opportunity like you to spend some time in some of these other countries and just to see how you know how other other people live.

SPEAKER_03 45:21

It was never boring. And I look back on it. The downside was I didn't put down roots, so that's why I ended up back here in DC instead of back in my hometown, because my roots became the people I worked with instead of any particular place. And uh I I I'm still somewhat of a global nomad. At least I have the mentality of a global nomad.

SPEAKER_01 45:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 45:46

That's what the book's about. It's it's about the places I was in and some of the issues that came up and some of the crazy things that happened during my own career.

SPEAKER_00 45:56

Hopefully uh we can get some uh people to uh look take a look at your book and and buy it.

SPEAKER_01 46:05

They can a little learn a little bit about how the rest of the world is. It's not always ice cream and and television. Yeah, something you know.

SPEAKER_00 46:19

A lot of a lot of places you live that don't even know what a television or ice cream is.

SPEAKER_03 46:24

Yeah. Well, one of the things I uh a phrase that I I use early in the book, one one project officer told me once, he said, we all work on the forces on the margin of forces we barely understand. And in my old age, I'm I'm starting to question you know whether these national borders are actually helping us or or hindering us, because what I see going on now with with uh that that recent visit um to to China, it looked like Louis XIV had come to town. Um and I talk about some of the presidential visits we had when I was in different places. It was it's absolutely amazing the kind of money and and the cost of these things. It's like the the king himself is showing up, and it's uh but what we've done with these borders is we've facilitated enormous militaries that are by law required to respond to the whims of a single individual, or barely, you know, the guy at the top, whether it's Vladimir Putin, whether it's President Xi in China, or whether it's our own president. And those militaries, they all were created because, well, we need it because the guy next door has one. But now what we've done is we've got huge military establishments around the globe that are not going to be directed by any kind of democratic vote. They're going to be directed by the whims of their particular commander-in-chief. And I I'm now starting to question whether these borders even belong uh are doing any good, frankly. I d I think uh they may be counterproductive, but that's another topic entirely.

SPEAKER_00 48:12

Yeah. Well, you have anything else you want to share about you know the trafficking and the uh uh the body parts?

SPEAKER_03 48:20

I guess we didn't talk about the bride kidnapping uh business.

SPEAKER_00 48:24

No, yeah, yeah, you mentioned that. Uh go ahead. I forgot all about that.

SPEAKER_03 48:29

Uh I'll one of the tales I talk about is the phenomenon of bride kidnapping in Central Asia. And that was also something that was unbelievable to me when I first got there. And I didn't start the project, but the guy before me had actually given a grant to the University of Central Asia out of Vienna to come to town and film for families as they went through the process of allowing their son to go out and literally take a bride. And these kids don't date in the rural parts of China, uh of Kyrgyzstan, sorry. It was a tradition in the old days before the Soviet Union that this is how the Kyrgyz rural men got their wives. They would literally ride their horses out and just grab a woman and bring her back to his house. And and the way it's happening now, um they don't ride horses out there, but they get their buddies together and they'll go out with a car. And the first family that that was uh shown in this film that uh that we financed. Uh the man, he's a young guy, and he's getting dressed up, he's shining his shoes, he's he's looking good, he's got a suit on, and his grandmother is there, and she's saying, Don't get a pretty one. I don't want a pretty one, I want one that's gonna work. And then the film crew follows the guy. He gets in a car with his buddies, they go out to a bus stop, and a school bus is pulled up, and kids are standing in line, ready to get on the bus. He and his buddies get out and they grab a teenage girl out of the line and they bring her back in the car. She's kicking and screaming, saying, No, I've got to go to school, I've got a test, and they tell her, honey, your school days are over. They take her back to the groom's home, they put her in a corner. She is surrounded by the groom's elder women relatives, his aunts, his grandma, his two grandmas, presumably, and other uh, you know, women friends of the groom's family. They surround this girl and they say, put on the scarf. That will indicate that you you've accepted your fate. We all did it. This is how you need to do it. And in that case, she did ultimately accept the scarf. But there are times when the girls refuse to do it, they're determined not to get married, and sometimes they're allowed to go home, sometimes the the ladies will come out and tell the man, go in there and do what you need to do. And that means go in there and rape that woman, and then her parents won't take her home, won't accept her if she does try to run back. We knew of there was a one of my colleagues who'd been in the Peace Corps in Kyrgyzstan, he was friends with a home that was occupied by several women who were in those circumstances. They couldn't go home to their own home and they didn't get married, so they were living with each other in this in this home. But the there were three of these, well, four of these families that were interviewed, and the same film crew went back a year later and interviewed the women, or three of them, because the fourth one had committed suicide. Um I have personally sat in in rooms surrounded by uh by Western dressed women and men, and I've heard these ladies, young college-age women, tell me this is our tradition, this is how we do it. This is if we didn't do it this way, we wouldn't we wouldn't have families. And the men would say the same, this is our tradition. And I said, Well, slavery used to be a tradition out here too. Does that make it right? But it's it's it's an amazing phenomenon, but it's still going on. And uh it was illegal and it was suppressed during the Soviet Union. It is still illegal, but it's not suppressed. And it it that's the domestic version of trafficking that's going on in so many places in in Central Asia now.

SPEAKER_00 52:34

Oh, yeah, and it it's happening uh other parts of the world too. I mean, child brides, you know, you know, 10-year-old girls being forced to marry old men, and so it's it's uh it's another part of trafficking in a way.

SPEAKER_03 52:51

There are times forced marriages. Yeah, the sometimes the kids would arrange it. They'd make it look like it was a kidnapping because they wanted to get married, and that's how they would do it. Um but you know, we estimated something like two-thirds of the of the uh um rural marriages were done that way. And and and for me, it's it hit home particularly. My own wife's elder sister. My own my wife is Kyrgyz, but I I didn't kidnap her. But her her older sister was. And uh the I mean the guy knew her, she knew who the guy was. She had not agreed to get married to this guy, but you know, 30, 40 years later, they're still married and they've got kids.

SPEAKER_01 53:32

That's how it happened. It's a real phenomenon.

SPEAKER_00 53:38

It just these customs in different parts of the world just are so different from ours, and that we just can't understand how how you could be forced to be married. And uh, but it's it's normal in some countries. You know, that's that's the way life is. And uh we we as Americans just don't don't understand that because you know we're we're all into the freedom and freedom of choice and all like that. But you know, a lot of countries they don't have the freedom that we do.

SPEAKER_03 54:11

Yeah, and we don't have the we don't have the religious uh impact that used to, you know, direct human behavior like we we once had. The the kids are not willing to let their parents make the decisions for them. So they just they have to make so many decisions on their own. Uh in in that particular example in Kyrgyzstan, at least the ladies are not being allowed to make that decision. They're more like they just accept it as a reality when they do accept it. Well, I thank you, David, for letting me ramble on about about using No problem.

SPEAKER_00 54:49

No problem. We learn I think we learned a lot uh about other countries and how they how they work on top of uh you know the trafficking and uh what really is shocking to me is the body parts, the uh you know, the sell of those. And that's gonna be an another topic that I'm gonna be covering on my podcast pretty soon is you know organ harvesting.

SPEAKER_03 55:13

Yeah, I'll send you the link to that book I mentioned. Uh please do order, that's the name of it.

SPEAKER_00 55:19

Yeah, please do. I I'd like to uh look at that book and maybe have the uh the author of that book on on my show. Okay. Well, thank you, and uh I'll let you know when this this goes out.

SPEAKER_03 55:33

Super. Well, good luck with the editing. I'm sure you'll have a lot of stuff to reshuffle or whatever, but I appreciate the opportunity. And I'll check on your too.

SPEAKER_00 55:45

All right, bye-bye. Thank you. That's it for our show for today. Thank you for joining in. I hope you were able to learn something today that may help you understand what is going on around you, allowing you to be aware of the dangers to yourself and perhaps a loved one, and maybe inspire you to get involved in the fight to stop human trafficking. Please follow me on Facebook, subscribe to my podcast, email me at David Jstory dot com with your questions or comments. Music by Tunerill dot com. And please remember, always watch your six and others too.