The following excerpts are adapted from the author’s book Dark Wire: The Inside Story of the Largest Law Enforcement Sting Operation Ever, which details how the FBI created its own tech start-up to wiretap the world. This remarkable operation sheds light on the lengths to which both authorities and drug traffickers have gone, with serious privacy implications for everyone. – Editors
The hotel was entirely overrun with cops. Cops in suits. Cops in more casual clothes. Cops eating the buffet of sliders and shrimp. Cops helping themselves to the unlimited coffee. And cops joking and laughing while presenters spoke from the stage in a large conference room.
At the two-and-a-half-day law enforcement and industry-only summit in Vancouver, Canada, in April 2022, the attending officers milled between the room for presentations and a market-style area with contractors trying to sell their wares. From small desks covered in brochures, the vendors offered different ways to track, subdue, and interrogate targets.
After a long first day of seminars about artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, it was the FBI’s Muse and Kalina’s turn to speak. At just past 3:15 p.m., the pair walked onstage and overlooked the audience, packed around circular tables. The pair were here to talk all about Operation Trojan Shield, nearly ten months after the FBI revealed it had run Anom for nearly its entire existence.
Kalina opened with a joke. After landing and passing through the border, Canadian immigration were “so nice.” Then they got into a cab. The driver was “so nice.” Then at the first talk of the conference that morning, Beverly Priestman, a gold medalist and head of the Canada Women’s National Soccer Team, spoke about beating the Americans.
“Wait a minute, this has taken a bit of a turn,” Kalina said to laughter from the audience.
For the next nearly hour and a half, Muse and Kalina gave the attending law enforcement officers a high-level run-through of Anom. As the pair’s voices boomed through the hall, participants at one table flicked through details of the case on their phones. They Googled news articles and giddily showed each other photos of the Anom app they found online.
Muse and Kalina reeled off Anom’s seizure and arrest figures: 500 arrests on the joint action day; 12 tons of cocaine; 1.5 tons of meth; 1.5 tons of amphetamine (such as Microsoft’s lab in the countryside); 17 tons of precursor chemicals; 22 tons of hash or marijuana; 300 firearms. The seizures had continued well past Anom’s big day of action the previous year. In September 2021, UK authorities intercepted a luxury yacht called the Kahu sailing from the Caribbean. While at sea, police raided the yacht. Packed among the yacht’s interior was a massive two tons of cocaine. The tip came from the AFP’s earlier monitoring of Anom.
Anom’s arrests had also increased since the joint action day. At the conference Muse told the audience, “We did surpass the one-thousand-arrest mark a couple of months back.” It was difficult for the San Diego FBI to keep tabs on how many people each agency involved in Anom had arrested. But the number is likely to keep climbing. Since the joint action day, the San Diego FBI has received requests from even more countries for data that might help them in their own investigations. The data has been used in courts to successfully prosecute and convict people, not just seize their drug shipments. And with Anom’s secret now revealed and much less worry about corrupt officials leaking it, the FBI traveled to other countries outside of the OTF and provided them with information. That includes Serbia, where the FBI’s Belgrade office is also responsible for liaising with Bosnia-Herzegovina and Montenegro. For these trips, the FBI tried to prioritize countries where Anom saw the most users—an indication of Anom’s growth in the region.
Some of the more recent arrests were in Australia, where authorities entered a second phase of Operation Ironside in December 2021. This new wave of action identified around 160 targets, including trusted insiders, perhaps at ports or logistics firms, who help facilitate drug shipments, and Italian organized crime figures based in Australia. Later, the AFP secured more top priority targets thanks to Anom. In August 2022, Australian police got their hands on Mark Buddle, the leader of the Comanchero biker gang, and part of Ayik’s Aussie Cartel. Authorities say Buddle was allegedly connected to a drug trafficking syndicate that operated out of Hong Kong and Turkey and that used Anom. Shortly before news of Anom broke, he left his hideout in Dubai and went on the run in Iraq, before returning to Northern Cyprus. Turkish authorities caught Buddle and deported him to Australia. The Australians officially had the head of the Comancheros in their hands. The arrest, like Operation Ironside more generally, left the Comancheros in tatters. Duax “Dax” Ngakuru, Ayik’s childhood friend also hiding out in Turkey, was then said to have become the international leader of the biker gang.
But barely five months later, Turkish authorities busted him too. As soon as the Comancheros spawned one head to replace its severed one, authorities sliced it off again. At the time of this writing, it appears the leadership of the Comancheros is in flux. With those arrests and a handful of others, Turkey became more hostile to its criminal residents, just like Dubai did.
Ayik appeared immune to arrest even as his associates dropped off one by one around him. Six months after the joint action day, once criminals learned he was, in a way, the reason they had been spied on through Anom, a dormant Google account in Ayik’s name sprang back to life. Its owner left reviews for restaurants and tourist hot spots all across Turkey. Despite the AFP’s insistence, or hope, that Ayik turn himself in, he did not.
Microsoft too seemed safe in Turkey. In June 2023 the US State Department offered a bounty of up to $5 million for information that led to his arrest and/or conviction. That was an extraordinary amount of money: the State Department offered an identical sum for each of the four sons of infamous drug kingpin El Chapo, as well as the boss himself at one point. The key to Ayik’s and Microsoft’s freedom was that both had obtained Turkish citizenship, creating an impenetrable legal barrier around them.
Members of the underworld were in shock then when Turkish authorities did finally strike against the pair. In a series of dramatic raids later that year, police grabbed Ayik, Microsoft, and more than thirty other people, including “The Turkish Boys” Baris Tukel and Erkan Yusef Dogan. In a video, Ayik laid on his stomach while being detained. Propped up to his knees, Ayik stared forward into space, shirtless. The king of encryption was finally in handcuffs. Microsoft looked gormless when heavily armed officers surrounded him.
Behind the scenes, the AFP had worked with their Turkish counterparts on a compromise: prosecute Ayik under Turkish domestic law rather than extradite him to Australia for crimes back home. That way, even though Ayik was a Turkish citizen local police could still disrupt his drug trafficking empire. Ayik’s direct workmates didn’t think this was the conclusion of the kingpin’s story though. Maybe he will slip out of the authorities’ hands once again. “It’s a big blow but it’s not the end,” one said.
In the months and year following Anom’s big bang, authorities continued to pick up other alleged Anom phone sellers. Those included Shane Ngakuru, whom Thai police grabbed just south of Bangkok in October 2022. Ngakuru was a member of the Comancheros and Dax’s cousin. Anom struck the outlaw motorcycle gang, again.
The Belgian police may have only arrested around two dozen people when it first announced the Sky hack. But that access to hundreds of millions of messages led to many, many more. In November 2022, Europol along with police in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Spain, and the UAE targeted a so-called super cartel and arrested forty-nine people in part using Sky messages. In May 2023, Europol announced the takedown of the Balkans’ biggest drug lords. What the encrypted phone cases managed to do, and continued to do even years after the fact, was bring down groups that were ordinarily resilient, or even invisible, to the authorities.
The hack of Encrochat continued to provide results too. In 2022, cops chased down a most wanted fugitive who was hiding out in Marbella from UK police.
