On Monday, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) confirmed that Nigeria’s current President, Bola Tinubu, is an active asset of the agency. This revelation emerged in a filing at the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, where the CIA, FBI, and DEA opposed a civil lawsuit seeking Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) disclosure on Tinubu’s drug trafficking investigation records.
Renowned investigative journalist David Hundeyin, on his X (formerly Twitter) handle, reported that the CIA, FBI, and DEA filed a memorandum opposing the motion for summary judgment in the FOIA disclosure case regarding President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s drug trafficking investigation records. Hundeyin and his collaborator, PlainSite founder Aaron Greenspan, seek to have the redactions removed from the previously partially released files.
In the filing, the CIA effectively confirmed that Nigeria’s sitting president is an active CIA asset. An excerpt from the CIA filing reads: “Human sources can be expected to furnish information to the CIA only when they are confident the CIA can and will do everything in its power to prevent the public disclosure of their cooperation. In the case of a person who has been cooperating with the CIA, official confirmation of that cooperation could cause the targets to take retaliatory action against that person or against their family or friends. It also places in jeopardy every individual with whom the cooperating individual has had contact.
“Thus, the indiscretion of one source in a chain of intelligence sources can damage an entire spectrum of sources. As such, confirming or denying the existence of records on a particular foreign national, like Tinubu, reasonably could be expected to cause damage to U.S. national security by indicating whether or not the CIA maintained any human intelligence sources related to Tinubu, and identifying any access or lack of access any such sources had to intelligence concerning him..”
The DEA’s filing further opposed the request for unredacted disclosure, stating: “We oppose full, unredacted disclosure of the DEA’s Bola Tinubu heroin trafficking investigation records because we believe that while Nigerians have a right to be informed about what their government is up to, they do not have a right to know what their president is up to.”
David Hundeyin concluded his report by saying: “At this point, I think there is nothing more to be said about the direct role that the US government plays in ensuring that Africa is constantly destabilised and afflicted with terrible leaders who create poverty and devastation.”
