Roux and get him to the United States, they needed to lure him somewhere else—preferably a country from which he could be easily extracted.

Since early 2011, as revelations about the vastness of Le Roux's activities stacked up and he'd made the CPOT list, Brill and Bai- ley's investigation had finally begun drawing interest from other quarters of the U.S. government. After years of fighting to con- vince anyone at the DEA that Le Roux was the real deal, they sud- denly found themselves fighting off attempts to glom on to the case.

Among those who had started taking an interest in Le Roux were agents in two high-profile sections of the Special Operations Division, where Bailey had once been posted. Known internally as the "nine-five-nine" and "nine-sixty" groups, they were named for the pair of amendments to U.S. drug laws that empowered them. The 959 provision, dating from 1980s efforts to combat cocaine trafficking, made it illegal for anyone to even attempt to import narcotics into the United States from anywhere in the world. The 960a provision, established by the 2006 USA PATRIOT Act reau- thorization, gave SOD expanded powers to pursue so-called nar- coterrorists, drug-trafficking organizations connected to terrorism. The two SOD groups were given wide latitude to conduct investi- gations and busts outside the United States, and 960 offenses came with twice the penalties of typical drug prosecutions. In the years since the September 11, 2001, attacks, SOD's powers and budgets had vastly expanded under both provisions, fueled by a belief in a growing nexus between America's terrorist enemies and the inter- national drug trade. "They have a big budget, and they do big cases," summed up Bailey.

Much of the two divisions' work was classified, but 960 had conducted some highly public—and at times, controversial— undercover sting operations, in which paid informants played the part of buyers, luring would-be terrorists into drug trafficking, or vice versa. Much of the work involved coordinating with law en- forcement counterparts overseas. DEA agents rarely made the ac-