It was early morning on April 1 when Mohammad Halimi, a 53-year-old exiled Afghan scholar, got a panicked message from his son. Halimi’s name had just appeared in a viral post on X, shared by none other than the site’s owner and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.
The post, which Musk shared with his 222 million followers, was real. It had already been picked up by the local press back home. And it was potentially deadly.
“United States Institute of Peace Funded Taliban,” the post read. At the bottom, the post named Halimi and described him as a “former Taliban member,” and the payments to him as U.S. support for the militants.
Halimi couldn’t make any sense of it. Critics of U.S. foreign aid efforts might argue that his small contract of $132,000 with USIP amounted to waste. But if there was one thing Washington should have known about Halimi, it was that he was no enemy of America.
It was true that he’d once worked for the Taliban government that ruled Afghanistan in the 1990s, but he had switched sides after the United States invaded following 9/11. He had even served as a cabinet minister in the U.S.-backed Afghan government, where he often shared his knowledge of the Taliban’s internal workings with intelligence officials and military leaders.
In fact, during President Donald Trump’s first term in office, Halimi was part of a team of advisers that helped the U.S. prepare for difficult diplomatic talks with the Taliban, which eventually included guarantees to allow American troops safe passage out.
And his political views were easy to figure out: Halimi had made numerous media appearances as one of the Taliban’s more ardent critics, accusing them of straying from Islam’s true principles.
This all made him an obvious target. The Taliban had attempted to assassinate Halimi as a traitor at least three times during the U.S. occupation. And the U.S. government knew he had faced real danger in the past. He narrowly managed to flee Afghanistan in the final days before the U.S.-backed government fell to the Taliban, with the help of the second-highest-ranking CIA officer in the country. Since then, he had tried to live a mostly quiet life, partly to keep the relatives he’d left behind safe from retribution.
The work he was pursuing with USIP had nothing to do with supporting the Taliban. It was the opposite.
ProPublica has obtained records making clear that Musk and his team at the newly formed DOGE should have known this too. Halimi’s work at USIP was spelled out in precise detail in the agency’s records, down to the tasks he performed on specific days. His role at the institute was far from top secret, but it had been treated as highly sensitive and confidential
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