How Much U.S. Money Did Departing Afghan Officials Steal? How Much Cash Fits On A Helicopter?

When President Ashraf Ghani and his top aides fled Afghanistan on a fleet of four helicopters last August, did they take millions in U.S. aid cash with them?

That’s the question investigated for the past year by the U.S. Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR). Its report released Tuesday, “Theft of Funds from Afghanistan: An Assessment of Allegations Concerning President Ghani and Former Senior Afghan Officials,” comes to no clear conclusions about whether Afghan leaders pulled off one of the greatest heists in history as they abandoned their country to the Taliban. It’s more than a footnote query since the U.S. provided upwards of half the Afghan national budget. About $200 million was allocated to just two controversial contingency budgets, money that SIGAR concludes “had earned a reputation for being slush funds disbursed with minimal oversight.”

Two officials, the Afghan ambassador to Tajikistan and another at the Russian embassy in Kabul, contended shortly after Ghani and his entourage fled the country that there was $169 million on their custom-built Soviet helicopters. SIGAR doesn’t know if that’s true but is skeptical it was that much since that “amount of cash would have been difficult to conceal.” In $100 bills, it would have weighed nearly two tons and formed a block 7.5 feet deep, 3 feet wide, and 3 feet tall. Since the helicopters didn’t have separate cargo holds, the cash would have been visible in the cabin next to the passengers. Since no eyewitnesses told SIGAR they saw such a large block of money, the investigators are uncertain of the $169 million figure.

The report cites the difficulty of using Ghani’s armored Land Cruisers to transfer the two tons of cash to the helicopters. SIGAR points out that the hot weather (87 degrees) and Kabul’s high altitude (5,900 feet), meant that the fully fueled helicopters required reduced payloads. A former SIGAR “senior official” is quoted in the final report saying, “It’s not easy to move that much money.”

It might not be easy but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. SIGAR tries hard in its final report to dismiss the $169 million amount. What if it was half that, and all the calculations of difficulty become suddenly much simpler?

Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security (NDS) had an annual budget of $225 million, and tens of millions of that was in cash. The money was supposed to support anti-Taliban militias and buy the loyalty of key warlords and power brokers. One senior Afghan official told U.S. investigators that by August 2021, the NDS had $70 million in cash reserves. The day before Ghani and his top aides left the country, “this cash reserve of U.S. dollars disappeared from the NDS vault.”

There was only a small amount of money there when the Taliban arrived the next day. Some former Afghan officials said the cash was intact and given to the Taliban, who later stole it. It might be a good excuse for the missing money but there’s no evidence to support the claim. Instead, eyewitness accounts in the SIGAR report paint a picture of a collapsing government in which officials were in a frenzied free-for-all to get as much money as possible on their way to the exits. One official in a different Afghan department that was flush with about $39 million in cash was offered half that money if he turned the rest over to government colleagues.

What happened to the tens of millions in cash in the National Directorate of Security? The SIGAR report leaves that hanging. It doesn’t even know if the money was U.S. government funding since it “has never been privy to the NDS budget.”

“Media and academic accounts have suggested that the CIA historically funded the NDS,” SIGAR concluded.

One of the few matters on which the SIGAR report is confident is that Ghani’s private security guards, who were left behind in Kabul by his helicopters, gathered about $5 million in cash at the presidential palace later that afternoon and put it in four large bags “in the trunks of cars belonging to the president’s motorcade.” The Russian embassy in Kabul contended early on that the $5 million was left behind only because “not all of it would fit in the helicopters.”

Multiple senior Afghan officials said that the $5 million was Ghani’s “personal money and declared in his assets.” Other former officials said it was provided for “post-election finances” by the United Arab Emirates after Ghani won the 2019 Afghan election. Ghani refused an interview with U.S. investigators, instead directing them to submit written questions to his legal representation, a top criminal defense lawyer, Reid Weingarten, senior partner at Steptoe, a prestigious Washington firm. Ghani’s answers, sent on July 28, addressed only six of SIGAR’s 56 questions. As for the $5 million in cash, Ghani’s attorneys said it was “from the sale of property in Lebanon and personal property in the U.S., in addition to funds from other sources, such as a salary from the Institute for State Effectiveness, a pension from the World Bank and apartment rent.” They said that Ghani intended to use most of it to “establish a foundation in his ancestral village, including a presidential library, an Islamic Studies Center and an agricultural center.”

Even some members of Ghani’s former staff don’t believe that. Such a noble philanthropic goal was unlikely to be funded, SIGAR noted, by “keeping cash under the proverbial mattress for nearly six years.”

SIGAR said that while fleeing government officials took as much cash as they could carry, they were limited by the “payload and performance limitations of the helicopters.” SIGAR thinks it is “unlikely to be true” that Ghani and his aides managed to pack tens of millions in cash on their escape to Uzbekistan. More likely, it might have been as little as $500,000.

The SIGAR report doesn’t inspire much confidence and its conclusions are admittedly best guesses, often based on second-hand hearsay. “Since undeclared cash leaves no paper trail,” the report said, investigators had to rely on eyewitnesses instead of documentary evidence. Some key witnesses were “well-known Afghan officials,” all allies of Ghani. It’s impossible to judge their credibility or motivations since SIGAR agreed to their requests for anonymity.

The unsatisfying bottom line in the much-anticipated report is that “it remains a strong possibility that significant amounts of U.S. currency disappeared from Afghan government property in the chaos of the Taliban takeover—including millions from the presidential palace and the NDS vault. Attempts to loot other government funds appear to have been common. Yet with Afghan government records and surveillance videos from those final days likely in Taliban hands, SIGAR is unable to determine how much money was ultimately stolen, and by whom.”