MISSOURIAN CONNECTED WAR ON DRUGS TO WAR ON TERROR

WASHINGTON -- If you want to understand the man leading the U.S.
fight against the
tightening links between narcotics and terror, some clues can be found
in Cape Girardeau, St. Louis and Springfield, Ill.

Those are the places that forged Missourian Michael Braun, chief of
operations for the Drug Enforcement Administration. These days, the
DEA's mission isn't just to combat the world's $322 billion drug
trade, but also to seek and destroy a new type of hybrid terrorist
group/drug cartel that Braun describes as "meaner and uglier than
anything law enforcement or the military have ever faced."

"It is all interconnected and getting damned scary."

It's a fight that has taken Braun from the streets of St. Louis to the
jungles of Brazil, the Mexican border and the mountains of
Afghanistan. Since 2005, he's overseen DEA operations around the
world, while also leading intelligence operations that include the
Pentagon and FBI.

A fierce demeanor, a shaved head and a beard, along with a 6-foot
3-inch, 210-pound chiseled frame give Braun the type of appearance
that not only a drug dealer might flee on a dark street. At age 55, he
gets up at 4:45 every morning to run three to four miles or lift weights.

He speaks in a surprisingly soft voice, often about the Midwestern
work ethic and values he absorbed growing up in Missouri, and the
lessons he learned from local law enforcement officers in Missouri and
Illinois.

"He's a straight-talking tough guy with all the right experiences on
the ground in the rough parts of the world," said Michael Jacobson, a
counterterrorism expert at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.

Douglas Farah, a national security consultant who works frequently
with the federal government, called Braun "the person who realized how
DEA could fit into the war on terror in a more robust way."

A Sea Of Blue

Braun traces his interest in law enforcement to a street corner near
his father's grocery in Cape Girardeau. There, at the age of 8, he
stood impressed as a steady stream of blue police cruisers arrived
from around the country for the funeral of an officer who had been
shot by two escaped convicts on a cross-country crime spree.

"Right there on that street corner I decided I wanted to be a police
officer, and I never lost sight of that," he says.

After high school, Braun joined the Marines and served in Vietnam.
While attending college in Cape Girardeau, he worked as a police
officer, and then was hired by the Illinois State Police.

In 1985, the DEA offered him a job. After topping the class at the
agency's training school, Braun worked in St. Louis, alternating
between working local drug cases and spending three to four months at
a stretch investigating drug labs and dealers in the jungles of Latin
America.

A full-time assignment to Latin America was followed by posts in
Houston, Washington, Los Angeles and Detroit as he rose through the
ranks.

When U.S. forces invaded Iraq in 2003, Braun was assigned to the
Pentagon to serve in Iraq as chief of staff for the new ministry of
interior, helping create the new Iraqi police, customs and security
forces. Two years later, he was back in Washington.

'Lightning Speed'

One key area where drugs and terrorist groups are merging is the
tri-border area of Latin America where the borders of Brazil,
Argentina and Paraguay join, Braun said. There, the Palestinian groups
Hamas and Hezbollah are active. Meanwhile, Latin American drug groups
can be found in China and elsewhere.

The al-Qaida affiliate that carried out the Madrid train bombing
funded the operation almost entirely through the sale of illicit
drugs, Braun said.

Of 43 officially designated foreign terrorist organizations, the DEA
has formally linked 19 to the global drug trade, but officials believe
60 percent are actually involved.

Ed Frothingham is the Pentagon's director of policy for transnational
threats. He said drug traffickers and terrorists are uniting and using
sophisticated technology, communications and transportation to
"outmatch most of the abilities of the countries in many places of the
world."

A decline in state sponsorship of terrorism and progress made by law
enforcement and intelligence agencies in disrupting other forms of
financing has prompted terrorist groups to get involved with drugs.

That connection requires cooperation between the DEA and the military
- -- and it's reinvigorated the drug agency.

The DEA has "briefed more generals and admirals in the last 18 months
than in the last 35 years," Braun said.

Jim Carafano, military expert at the Heritage Foundation, said the
counterterrorism mission "has given new life and more resources to
DEA."

The agency's network of informers around the world has been
particularly useful, Farah said.

They helped DEA seize $3.4 billion last year from intercepted drug
transactions, a figure Braun expects to rise to $4 billion this year.

"The nexus between drugs and terror is growing at lightning speed," he
says. "Every dollar that the DEA seizes is a dollar not in the hands
of these transnational terror organizations or drug cartels."