Sex Workers & A Secret Charity: The Story Of Cory Mills’s ‘F*cking Bananas’ Afghanistan Mission
The embattled Florida Republican’s political origin story is shrouded in its own scandal.
The nation, or at least the Fox News nation, first met Cory Mills in the summer of 2021, a few months into his first congressional campaign.
The Biden administration’s military withdrawal from Afghanistan had erupted in chaos, overwhelming the government’s resources to evacuate American citizens. And Mills—a former Army medic who drove an ambulance in Iraq—seized a chance to take the national stage and separate himself from the primary pack: He joined a private extraction team to evacuate a family of American citizens fleeing the Taliban.
In his many retellings of the saga since then, Mills leans into the drama, styling himself as much an active member of the special forces as an active member of Congress.
“I’m actually the only member of Congress who actually went over and conducted rescues of Americans in Afghanistan when Biden and his administration intentionally left Americans to die,” Mills told Fox News in 2023, promoting congressional hearings on the withdrawal. (This isn’t true: Then-Rep. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK)—who now serves in the Senate—was also involved in Afghanistan rescue efforts, a fact that was widely reported at the time and often mentioned in stories featuring Mills.)
Nonetheless, the mission made Mills a MAGA star and Fox News darling. He hyped the trip in numerous media interviews at the time, citing what Mills characterized, falsely, as his “special operations background” while trashing the State Department. Eventually, Mills parlayed this experience into a seat in Congress, racking up a landslide 2022 midterm victory in Florida’s newly gerrymandered 7th district. By the summer of 2024, Mills had climbed the MAGA ladder, and was in the presidential V.I.P. box at the Republican National Convention alongside presidential nominee Donald Trump and his vice presidential pick, J.D. Vance.
If Mills has a political origin story, it’s the Afghanistan mission. He has discussed the operation in countless media and political appearances over the last four years, including on the House floor, and often goes out of his way to mention it. The mission also inspired him to set up a nonprofit to fund similar rescue operations—though Mills has kept that a secret, never reporting this group on his congressional ethics statements. Federal law requires members and candidates to disclose nonprofit affiliations.
Mills has even tried to replicate the mission three times: In Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, attack; in Haiti amid social upheaval in early 2024; and in North Carolina and Tennessee after Hurricane Helene last October. (Helicopters that Mills and his personal private pilot used on the Haiti and Helene missions had been flagged by Federal Aviation Administration officials for regulatory and safety violations while Mills was airlifting sick people and disabled children, court filings show.)
But people familiar with the Afghanistan mission say Mills has never told the full story—and that if he did, the public would have a very different image of him. For one thing, three sources said Mills hired sex workers during the Afghanistan operation, on several occasions.
The revelations come as Mills finds himself increasingly isolated politically, with a battery of scandals—domestic assault allegations, his military record, and most recently a restraining order for cyberstalking and revenge porn—sparking public rebuke from MAGAfied Republican colleagues.
While Mills often casts himself as key to the Afghanistan rescue—including in congressional remarks—three people familiar with the effort said the operation’s success was more in spite of Mills’s involvement than because of it.
The office of Rep. Ronny Jackson, a Texas Republican, asked Mills to help rescue the American family—a woman named Mariam and her three children, who were from Jackson’s district. The family even made a video a year after the rescue, which Mills has posted to social media, thanking him and saying they missed him.
There’s no evidence Mariam’s family was “left behind” by the Biden administration, a claim Mills made in a later congressional hearing. To the contrary, State Department records released in response to a Freedom of Information Act request show the Biden administration was engaged in a frantic, coordinated effort to extract her and her children.
In a Fox News interview, Mills said Mariam’s family made multiple attempts to reach out to the State Department, but “got no help.” However, real-time State Department emails show that embassy staff made several attempts to contact her. When she finally replied, the emails say, “she informed us that she did not want our help. She would depend on Cory Mills.”
But Mills wasn’t going it alone. He tagged along with a team of seasoned military veterans and tacticians who were deploying to the region in a private capacity, anticipating months of potentially deadly work extracting Americans from the destabilized country. Mills, who brought a personal friend with him, had a narrower objective, helping this team evacuate Mariam’s family.
The team planned to land in Afghanistan, but they were re-routed to Tbilisi, Georgia, where they staged the operation from a hotel and waited for the go signal. In Tbilisi, however, Mills set the team on edge with what three people familiar with the events described as reckless and unprofessional personal behavior. This included hiring sex workers with his friend more than once, even after they were told to stop.
“It was every night,” one source said.
“That happened three nights in a row to the point where I said, ‘I’m done, I don’t want to associate with it,’” another person recalled.
I obtained a photo of Mills with one of the sex workers, which a person with knowledge of the events confirmed as authentic.
(A month after Mills returned from this trip, someone posted what appears to be a review of Mills on a mobile app popular among sex workers who use it to clandestinely share information about clients. The review—posted to Mills’s personal phone number, which the app also tied to his weapons dealing company—said in full, “Wants BBBJ,” slang that even the Justice Department recognizes as “bareback blow job,” or oral sex without a condom. The October 2021 review was taken down after I asked Mills about it.)
The sources described Mills’s behavior on the trip as not just unprofessional, but dangerous—destabilizing the focus of special ops vets preparing for a mission they believed would likely spill over into armed combat. The team was also under a standard assumption they’d be surveilled in that part of the world, including in the rooms the hotel had given them, but two people said Mills seemed disturbingly casual about the prospect that his behavior could compromise the mission.
“I was incredibly careful what I said, did, breathed, ate,” one person said. “The reason that is such a profound understanding, especially on [that particular mission], is because we were going to die.”
Two sources claimed at least one of the women Mills hired spoke Russian, something they said would raise red flags for any experienced operator, given Russia’s counterintelligence history and geopolitical interests in their specific mission. (Georgia was once part of the Soviet Union but its language is separate and distinct from Russian.)
“This shit was so fucking bananas that I had trouble computing,” a person present for the events said, referencing Mills’s disregard for those risks. “I’ve been in a lot of weird places and seen a lot of weird stuff [but] I have never seen anything as aggressively blatant as him.”
When the time came to evacuate Mariam’s family, two sources said, Mills and his friend went rogue, going around the team’s back to execute his own plan and stage a personal PR coup.
“We had safe houses all the way through,” one source explained, describing an evacuation route through Afghanistan the team had figured out for the family. “We found out that Cory had told her not to go with them, and they went around us all.”
This forced the team to scramble, the sources said. The eventual evacuation took place at a Tajikistan border crossing, the sources explained, but when the Americans arrived, they found themselves facing down armed Taliban forces. The standoff grew so tense a firefight seemed possible, with one source saying Mills behaved like he wanted a conflict, “itching to blow this whole thing up and make a big story about it.”
“We didn’t want that because we knew Tajikistan was a place where we could get a lot of Americans out,” the person added. “He wasn’t thinking about that.”
Between the efforts of the private operators and State Department diplomats, Mariam and her family safely crossed the border. According to the FOIA records, however, she had waited at the crossing for at least eight hours before Mills appeared.
On the other side, Mariam and her kids posed for a photo with Mills, which soon appeared in national media. The family did not respond to a request for comment.
That same photo appears on the website for the nonprofit Mills created days after returning to the states, called “Never Forgotten Inc.” Mills launched the group with two officials at his company—a weapons manufacturing and security consulting business Mills started in 2014, called “PACEM,” with Mills himself reserving the name and registering as one of the group’s three original directors, according to Virginia corporate records.
Mills, however, has never listed Never Forgotten on any of his congressional financial disclosures, despite federal law requiring members and candidates to disclose their nonprofit affiliations. The version of the Afghanistan rescue photo posted to the group’s website blurs out Mills’s face.
Mills has also apparently failed to disclose a company in Pakistan—called “PACEM Solutions International Pvt. Ltd.”—which court filings say Mills fully owns, with records in Islamabad indicating the company is still active. Mills’s partner in that company told me in a phone call that he met Mills about a decade ago and was personally involved in Mills’s Afghanistan rescue operations. The Pakistan partner said he occasionally still works with the PACEM branches in the U.S. but maintains autonomy.
The source of Never Forgotten’s funding is unclear from its tax returns, which only list “service revenue,” with zero reported donations—despite the group’s website soliciting contributions since at least 2023, according to internet archives. It’s also not clear who the group has paid. Never Forgotten has reported more than $100,000 in expenses related to Afghanistan rescue operations, all of it in the form of professional fees paid to unidentified subcontractors.
Mills, one source said, had repeatedly expressed frustration with the funding in the middle of the Afghanistan operation.
“Cory would always say, ‘Screw it, I’m just writing a check myself,’ but he never did,” the person recalled.
“We’re all volunteers,” Mills told Fox News host Sean Hannity in a September 2021 interview about the rescue. “We’re all here at our own dimes and trying to do what we can. So I’d love to try and come back to you and post something about our foundation so we can try and get more help to get these people out.”
Never Forgotten’s statements to the IRS are inconsistent with other tax returns. In 2023, the Kash Foundation—a nonprofit founded by Kash Patel, now Donald Trump’s FBI Director—reported making a $20,000 donation to Never Forgotten in the form of a cash grant. However, Never Forgotten told the IRS it received zero dollars in contributions or grants that same year.
The Kash grant came the same year Mills’s congressional office publicly promoted Never Forgotten’s role in another rescue mission Mills participated in, this one pulling Americans out of Israel after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack. In a press release that month, Mills’s office linked to Never Forgotten’s website but didn’t disclose his affiliation, identifying the group only as a “humanitarian organization.” Two weeks earlier, Mills had personally signed and submitted Never Forgotten’s annual report as one of the nonprofit’s directors, Virginia corporate records show. In 2024, the group removed Mills from its directors, replacing him with the friend Mills brought on the Afghanistan trip; that friend was also Mills’s congressional scheduler, but left that post last year.
Weeks after launching Never Forgotten, Mills announced in November 2021 that, if elected, he’d donate his full government salary to charity, a pledge he has continually repeated. But last month, Mills posted a statement to social media “committing not to accept my congressional pay during a government shutdown.”
Mills has not answered my questions about the Afghanistan mission. And if he has indeed donated his full salary, he hasn’t publicly supported that claim. In response to my inquiries this summer, Mills posted social media photos documenting a handful of donations, complete with oversized novelty checks from a handful of charity events. The checks in those photos add up to $25,000, short of the $450,000 or so Mills has so far earned in congressional salary. None of those photos showed a check from 2023, his first year in office.
Through the end of 2023, Never Forgotten reported a total $171,000 in revenue, paying nearly all of it to unidentified subcontractors. The annual salary for a member of the House of Representatives is $174,000.