The CIA has delivered tens of millions of dollars in cash packed in suitcases and backpacks to the office of Afghan President Hamid Karzai for more than a decade, the New York Times reported Monday.

“We called it ‘ghost money’,” Khalil Roman, Karzai’s deputy chief of staff from 2002 to 2005, told the Times. “It came in secret, and it left in secret.”

The money was aimed at obtaining influence, but instead fueled rampant corruption, current and former officials told the newspaper.