The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime says countries around the world are detecting and reporting more victims of human trafficking than ever before. One of the reasons for the increase in reporting could be that there is much more attention placed on the issue than in years past.
In the United States, which is fertile ground for human trafficking, some groups of former special operations professionals are utilizing the skills honed overseas, back home, with a mission to better train, equip and advise local law enforcement officers on how to identify and tackle the issue in their own towns.
One of those groups is the non-profit DeliverFund, founded by special operations veteran Nic McKinley. The fund – made up of former special operations experts from the CIA, NSA, FBI, Delta Force and Navy SEALS, went operational in the U.S. on April 1, 2015 and today, employs 29 people. They’re getting ready to hire more.
Cipher Brief COO and Senior editor of Cipher Select, Brad Christian, talked with McKinley about his new mission and the progress he’s making.
Christian: You started out your career in government working in Air Force Special Operations as a PJ, [Pararescuemen] then transitioned over to supporting the intelligence community. What made you say, "I've got to start the DeliverFund?"
McKinley: So, I want back up just a little bit, and ask you a couple questions. With your own background in special operations and the IC, [ED Note: Brad Christian is also a former Green Beret, A former Army Ranger and a former contractor for GRS] you've been on a lot of missions, you've done a lot of operations. You know everybody, especially with your background, from many different lines of work. How many of those guys do you know who've ever done a human trafficking mission?
Christian: I'm not sure if I know anyone that's actually worked on a human trafficking mission.
McKinley: That's the problem, the fact that we even have to have that conversation. You probably know guys who have been on counter narcotics missions or anti-proliferation missions, or weapons-proliferation and things like that. But it’s hard to find anybody who's been on a counter human-trafficking mission within the federal government.
The idea started for me when I was working overseas. We were tracking bad guys, and if they were a human trafficker, and we were tracking them, it was usually because they were doing something else as well. They were a bomb maker and they happened to sell kids. They were a document forger and on the side, they ran an underground brothel. Human trafficking is not usually the primary mission. And if I were to ask you right now, given your knowledge of the federal government, when it comes to human trafficking, who's got the ball? You’d probably say nobody does.
Who's got the ball in narcotics? The DEA. Who's got the ball on weapons? ATF, predominantly. But who's got the ball on human trafficking? Well, what day of the week is it? And what's the mood of the supervisor? That’s the problem. I'm sure you’ve seen human trafficking throughout your career. And you probably assumed somebody was doing something, because you can't help but see it when you’re working in places like Iraq, or many of the other places we work. So, you just assume that somebody out there is doing something about it. I had to do the same human trafficking training that everybody else had to do, so that also led me to assume that somebody was actually doing something meaningful about the problem.
I was actually in Afghanistan, and we had some really good intel on a human trafficking ring that was associated with a bombing ring. This wasn't a bomber who was trafficking kids; it was just human trafficking, that's what it was. Our team had this information and was trying to figure out who to give it to and we couldn't come up with an answer. Nobody would take the information and it turned out that’s because there wasn't actually a reporting requirement for it. So, that experience made me curious, and I started digging through the system trying to figure out who was responsible for tackling this? I mean, we can kill people with flying robots from 6,000 miles away. Surely, we're doing something about this problem.
A short time later, I was overseas in another location, and was part of a Hostage Working Group. Those groups are usually focused on some do-gooder who decided they were going to ride their bike across Afghanistan to prove that the Taliban really weren’t that bad, and now they're in captivity. But one day we learned that there were two little girls from the U.S, who had been abducted by their father, it was a non-custodial parental abduction. So, they'd been abducted by their father, and taken overseas, because he was a dual-citizen. And we believed that he had sold the girls to his brother. And I thought, "Well, I'll just send a couple of guys, and we'll go check this out. We'll go see what we can figure out." Our JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] rep said "No, no, no, you can't do that.” He said that because they were U.S. citizens, it was a higher-level issue. So, I thought, "Okay, well what about the bureau guy [FBI]?" "Well, he's a bureau guy, so he does and says what the bureau people say." So, really, in the span of about 30 minutes, I watched the most powerful military, economic, and intelligence capability the world has ever seen, talk itself out of helping two little girls who were stuck in a country that they didn't ask to go to. The proper legal paperwork was all there, there was an extradition order from a judge, but we were in a non-extradition country. And I just thought, "Wow, we can do all these crazy things, but we can't go help these girls. I've got the resources, I've got the training, I've got the network. All I need to do is fund it, and so I'm going to do this in the private sector." That's how Deliver Fund was born.
Christian: And you operate now in the U.S., essentially training law enforcement authorities on how to fight this fight?
McKinley: My first mission was just to try and figure out what was really going on, and who's who in the zoo, like you do when you show up in a country. I found out that there was no connection with law enforcement at the local level. Federal agents had the connection with their programs. But most of the federal agents who were assigned to human trafficking task forces in the U.S., had that as a secondary or even a tertiary duty, and they really didn't get around to it all that often. So, it was the local guys who were doing the heavy lifting. But they really didn't have any equipment, any tech skills, and they didn't have any training to be able to go out and do this. Local law enforcement officers got assigned to the human trafficking unit, and the next day they show up to an office in plain clothes and started fighting human trafficking. I mean, that was about the extent of what the transition was like for them.
So, I thought, "Huh, that's interesting. Local law enforcement in this example are similar to a host nation partner force, which I knew about from my previous roles. Awesome. Time to “equip, train and advise." So, that's exactly what we do at DeliverFund. We equip them with technology, we train them on how to use those products. We also train them on things that you would think that a lot of these detectives would get, but they don't, especially in the smaller jurisdictions, like surveillance, counter-surveillance, counter-intelligence methodologies and those types of things. We started doing that, and then we started getting calls from law enforcement, because they just didn't know who else to call. We got a call from one law enforcement officer who was working a case in the southwestern United States. He said, "Hey, I've got a girl who has agreed to cooperate and tell us who her trafficker is, but she doesn't actually know who her trafficker is. I don't know what to do, so I'm calling you guys." We did a series of interviews with the victim, got enough detail to be able to start piecing together a picture, sent our people out on the streets and across the internet, and ended up identifying the guy. Long story short, he's currently serving a federal sentence of 15 years.
So, at that point, we had a proof of concept and we knew this was going to work. And then it was just a matter of scaling that up. So, we next started getting into building technology products. There's a tech product called ‘The Platform for the Analysis and Targeting of Human Traffickers’, or PATH. It’s powered by our friends at CaseWare and it essentially connects local and state law enforcement officers, and a few federal agents. But the focus is on local and state law enforcement officers across the country, the way for example that a company like Palantir would connect end users in Afghanistan. So, it allows all of these different law enforcement officers and the Deliver Fund analysts to collaborate on cases so that the heat can be cross jurisdictional for the traffickers.
The Cipher Brief: So, what kind of demand is there today?
McKinley: We actually have a waiting list. When we first started doing this, one of my first hires was a former Delta guy. He speaks 14 languages and has a master’s degree in computer science. He is that guy who we were all trying to be, and he worked for us. If you now put yourself in a law enforcement officer’s shoes, we said, "Hey, some former special ops, CIA, and Delta guys are going to come help you do your job. They don't want anything from you, other than for you to go arrest traffickers. And they're not going to take public credit for your wins."
A lot of cops were like, "I don't know, this just seems too good to be true. I don't believe it." So, we really had to prove ourselves to our law enforcement partners over the first six months. But then word started getting out. And we’re approaching the end of our third year. And we actually have a waiting list for law enforcement officers asking for our help.
Christian: Why is there a waiting list?
McKinley: The reason we have a waiting list is because we can't afford to support all the law enforcement officers that are asking for our help. The equip, train, and advise package for DeliverFund, costs us $16,000 per law enforcement officer. So that's a heavy lift. We've been very fortunate that as a charity, we have taken off like a rocket ship. And last year we surpassed seven figures in revenue. But that is still not enough to support all the law enforcement officers who are asking for our help. We'll eventually get to them all, but for us, it's literally just a resource issue of time, money, and people.
Christian: How do you assess the overall problem, the trends? Are things getting better or worse? How do you get the message out? And are people hearing it?
McKinley: We get the message out through the traditional venues, and through the generosity of folks like yourself. That's what we do. Really, the crux of the issue isn't whether or not we can completely end human trafficking. That's like trying to end terrorism. It's never going to happen. But we can reduce it to manageable levels that we can combat. And just like we all know the best way to fight domestic terrorism in the United States is to go overseas, where the enemy is, and kick their ass over there, the best way to fight human trafficking, worldwide, is to fight it in the richest country. And one of the richest countries, obviously, is the United States of America. We like to point out how there's trafficking in Thailand, there's trafficking in India and all these different places. But much of that trafficking is actually being driven by the western markets: predominantly, the United States, and similar countries. So, why don't we fight it over here, where we can do it for pennies on the dollar, and we can clean up our own backyard, and fight trafficking worldwide while doing it?
One of the common misconceptions about trafficking is that the victims are predominantly foreigners being brought into the United States. In U.S. trafficking, that's not the case at all. The majority of your victims are U.S. citizens, who are being trafficked to U.S. men, predominantly by U.S. men. There are some women who are traffickers and buyers as well. But by and large, the market is driven by men. So why are we not here in this country, going after those guys because this is their home turf, just like we go after terrorists on their home turf? So, it's just applying counter-terrorism methodologies, and using those to fight human trafficking.
We are big fans of the work of Professors Siddharth Kara and Orlando Patterson, both out of Harvard. They're the experts on the economics of this issue. And at the end of the day, this isn't like terrorism in that there is no ideology. Nobody traffics human beings for ideological purposes. They do it for the money. So, we have to take a market-risk approach to fighting human trafficking. It's not just about getting human traffickers arrested and it’s not just about getting victims rescued. It's about tearing apart and creating chaos within a human trafficking market, and that's the thing that we’ve figured out how to do.
I think special operators and intelligence professionals are the people best equipped to go after this problem of human trafficking. You don't send the sheep after the wolves. You send other wolves. And that's what we are. And we have honed those skills through 18-plus years of war. We're better warriors than anybody in the history of the world. And, we have the technology to be able to scale our capabilities. Let's use those skills and if you're a guy like me, or a girl like one of my analysts, and you're not going to go fight the enemy on their turf anymore, let's let this be our issue. Let's have the special ops community and the intelligence community responsibly fight this issue. And I say "responsibly" because I get lots of people who want to go be rogue vigilantes and say, "I was kicking doors in Afghanistan, so we could go kick doors in the United States and fight human trafficking." It's like, "Yeah, that's a felony, bro." You can't do that. You're on an equip, train, and advise mission to help law enforcement. And it's not to go point out that law enforcement is doing anything wrong. When you realize how little support law enforcement gets, it's amazing that they accomplish what they do. It's about scaling their capability, and that's the way we responsibly do this. And so, that's one of the messages I would like for people to understand. And I would like for the special ops and intelligence community to be known for combatting human trafficking in our time. Because we are the right people to do it.
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