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A year ago, Jeff Rigsby hammered out a 13-post thread to X dissecting the feasibility of a proposed natural gas pipeline connecting Turkmenistan to India, via Afghanistan. The writing was characteristic of his style: urgent, heavily researched and focused on a niche topic that he kept returning to. (“People are probably tired of seeing me tweet that the TAPI pipeline… is never going to be built,” he wrote.)
The 54-year-old American had many such interests. His 12,000 posts — some with millions of views — spanned issues from public health to energy, across geographies from South Asia to Switzerland.
The thread was emblematic of him in other ways, too. Rigsby had typed it out from his apartment in Kabul, a city he had moved back to two years prior. Afghans he knew were simultaneously fascinated and terrified by his willingness to expound on all manner of topics, including those that might ultimately be critical of the ruling Taliban authorities. He was, one Kabuli friend told me over the phone, “truly a friend to the Afghans.”
At that point, Rigsby had been on the road for some 30 years. A precocious North Carolina boy who enrolled at Harvard at 16, he had left the US soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall, arriving in Kabul via Japan, China, a prior period in Afghanistan, and Ethiopia.
And by 2024, he was a relic. Armed with little more than his US passport, he crossed borders largely unimpeded, his goal — as his family put it — simply to do good and extend his values beyond his country’s borders. Along the way, he taught English, unearthed abuse in orphanages, and combatted lead poisoning. He was the stocky, restless, and at times confusing embodiment of a bygone age, one in which the US actively sought to project itself beyond its borders, for better or worse, into places in which it had no obvious stake.
The Nov. 18, 2024, thread about the pipeline was his last. Nine days later, the staff in his popular, security-guarded apartment building grew worried that they hadn’t seen him. They called the Kabul police, who broke down the door to his apartment to find him dead.
Jeff Rigsby was always an anomaly. He raced through Charles E. Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina and set off to college. He rarely returned home, even during the summer. His younger sister, Dana Gossett recalls Rigsby as socially awkward but brilliant.
After Rigsby graduated Harvard in 1990 with a degree in Economics and East Asian studies, he began his international tour, heading to Japan to teach English before moving to Shanghai in the mid-1990s, where he co-authored a Human Rights Watch investigation into abuse within the Chinese orphanage system. The Chinese authorities ejected him from the country soon after the report was published, but Rigsby was not easily deterred: He went to Hong Kong — then still a British colony — where he legally changed his name from Jefferson Marshall Rigsby to Mark Jefferson Rigsby, obtained a new passport, and crossed back into mainland China. However, within 36 hours, the police were outside his hotel room, giving him a day to leave the country.
Accepting defeat, he returned to Hong Kong, where he continued to work for Human Rights Watch. And from there, he went to Afghanistan.
“When my mother was alive,” Gossett, now a gynecologist in New York City, said, “I used to say that he chose his destinations based on what was most likely to give her a heart attack.”
Rigsby returned to the US infrequently, and when he was away, barely kept in touch with his family. He exchanged emails with his father, a retired classics professor, about once a month — often to ask for money.
When he was home, the distance between the siblings felt vast, Gossett said. She described herself as family-oriented, living in a multigenerational townhouse in Manhattan; Rigsby, upon meeting her first daughter, turned to her and asked with bafflement, “Why did you want to have a child?” (“It wasn’t intended to be insulting,” Gossett explained. “It was just a genuine lack of understanding of what that human impulse was.“)
Gossett recalled another of Rigsby’s brief trips home where he stayed with her in order to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Even then, he kept working, diving into public records about a variety of issues, filing freedom of information requests about then-Congressman George Santos. Long after Rigsby left the US again, strangers would show up to Gossett’s front door with stacks of documents for him.
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Rigsby made his first trip to Afghanistan in 2009, initially to work with an NGO trying to develop transport infrastructure. This was during the saggy middle of the war, when then-President Barack Obama was looking to bolster US forces in Afghanistan and decisively rout the Taliban once and for all.
Rigsby ultimately left in 2014 when the road-building project collapsed. From there, he headed to Ethiopia in hopes of building a silkworm industry. “The look on your face reflects the way we all felt about this,” Gossett said upon seeing my reaction. He rented a facility in Oromo province, where he worked until the country’s civil war broke out in 2022. Forced to leave, he moved back to Afghanistan.
Here, his story and that of his country diverges. US troops pulled out of Kabul in August 2021, and the Taliban almost effortlessly took control of the capital. In response, the US embassy shut down operations and Washington froze $7 billion in Afghan funds, refusing to recognize the Taliban as Afghanistan’s official government.
All of Rigsby’s Western acquaintances were gone, and few of his countrymen remained. But he returned.
In public comments, he seemed to have had a love-hate relationship with Afghanistan. He found the country beautiful, and wasn’t deterred by the withdrawal of US troops. In fact, he delighted in the fact that he could now visit provinces that were unsafe during wartime. He seemed immune to America’s national mood swings, simply seeing a lovely country with a struggling people, and the possibility of a better future.
But, as he said on The KnownUnknowns podcast in 2022, soon after he returned to Afghanistan, “you have to be willing to put up with a good deal of inconvenience” to live there. Access to electricity was unreliable, and thus Afghan winters were unbearably cold. People burned trash and tires to generate heat. The air quality became horrible. So, during the colder months, Rigsby would take refuge in India.
He didn’t work for anyone. His rent was only a couple hundred dollars per month, but he made ends meet by renting out two apartments in Athens that he had bought when Greece suffered a financial crisis a decade prior, and fell back on borrowed funds from his family.
Back in Afghanistan, he saw the potential for what he believed were practical solutions to address the country’s myriad problems. So from 2022 to 2024, the last two years of his life, he worked tirelessly — spearheading investigations, confronting government officials, frantically tweeting each and every finding, right up until the day he died.
Rigsby initially lived in a hotel, then a guesthouse owned by a 27-year-old Afghan named Noor Ahmad, before finding his own apartment in May 2024.
He remained extraordinarily meticulous. He investigated the Fund for the Afghan People — a Switzerland-based nonprofit intended to divert funds from the country’s central bank aid to ordinary Afghans — spending months visiting banks and questioning Swiss, Afghan, and US officials before publishing his findings: that $3.7 billion in Afghan assets were effectively frozen. Two days before posting the pipeline thread, he published another about discrepancies in the minutes of a meeting of the nonprofit’s board. He also dug into the School of Leadership, Afghanistan, Afghanistan’s only boarding school for girls, which relocated to Rwanda in 2021, and discovered through public records that the organization may have embezzled millions of dollars.
His dedication perplexed many people around him. As Rigsby wrote in a 2023 thread, “People… thought I was a little weird. (It’s a common problem. I’m used to it.)”
Rigsby was also always alone. As far as his sister, Gossett, was aware, her brother never had a romantic partner, and he claimed to have been taking testosterone blockers — the kind used in “chemical castration,” which he believed would extend his lifespan.
In early 2024, his focus shifted to lead poisoning. Afghanistan has had one of the highest rates of lead poisoning worldwide, and cookware seems to have been the culprit. The danger hid in the smelting process: Companies melt down car parts and other scrap metal to manufacture pots, ignorant of the toxic impact they have on the final product.
Rigsby began visiting factories and using borrowed Taliban equipment to test lead levels in the cooking pots, according to WhatsApp messages he sent to friends. He reached out to experts around the world, dead-set on finding a feasible solution to present to Taliban officials he was pestering. He convinced the commerce ministry to investigate Rashko Baba, a prominent pressure cooker manufacturer. And he tweeted about it incessantly, with one 26-post thread garnering 6.2 million views. Local media would publish articles based on his efforts.
Taliban officials Rigsby met were suspicious of an American getting so involved in what appeared to be a local issue. Ahmad tried to help him understand: “In Afghanistan, you can’t just randomly walk into a ministry and tell them, ‘This is a good idea, you should implement it,’ you know?” he said. “And he was like, ‘No no no, but we should try.’”
Within a few months of returning to Afghanistan in 2022, Rigsby had been arrested at least three times, according to his podcast interview. In the fall of 2024, he began to get nervous.
When the owner of Rashko Baba complained to the Taliban about the bad press stemming from Rigsby’s investigations, Taliban officials banned some TV news stations from airing stories about the issue. He started mentioning his fear of arrest in WhatsApp messages with contacts. In early November, ahead of a scheduled meeting at the health ministry, his regular taxi driver told Rigsby he had been instructed not to pick him up, without specifying by whom.
Rigsby turned to Obaidullah Baheer, an Afghan scholar and lecturer with ties to the Taliban. Baheer said he asked Taliban officials about Rigsby’s reputation within the government, and they told Baheer they didn’t have anything against him.
Weeks later, staff who worked at Rigsby’s apartment building grew concerned that Rigsby hadn’t been seen for a while, according to Ahmad. Someone called the local police, who broke down his apartment door and found his body. He appeared to have died several days earlier.
Word of Rigsby’s passing spread quickly around Kabul. Ahmad was constantly getting questions about what happened to his American friend. He didn’t know how to answer. He asked various policemen and government officials what happened, but he didn’t learn much.
When Baheer heard of Rigsby’s death, he didn’t believe he’d been killed by the Taliban. “They would have either not extended his visas or detained him,” he said. “They can make much more out of a hostage than they can a dead Jeff Rigsby.” Instead, Baheer’s mind jumped to the possibility that the targets of Rigsby’s many investigations may have been involved. But both the Taliban’s claim that there was no foul play, and the fact that the US authorities didn’t raise any concerns, served as confirmation in Baheer’s mind that Rigsby’s death had been natural.
Rigsby’s body was returned to New York in December. When it arrived, Gossett visited the funeral director and asked to see the body to check for signs of violence — “I’m a doctor,” she said. The funeral director advised against it. Rigsby’s body had been poorly embalmed and was at least partially decomposed. He didn’t want Gossett to see anything she wouldn’t be able to unsee.
The family didn’t have a funeral. They talked about it, but Rigsby had been living outside of the US for so long, they wouldn’t know who to invite. His body was cremated, and his father brought his ashes down to Durham — back to his hometown.
The loss sits strangely for Gossett. On one hand, Rigsby had extracted himself from the family early on. “I knew him very little,” she explained. But he was still her brother. She remembers sitting by his bedroom window on Christmas Eve when they were kids, waiting for Santa to come. He would claim to hear the jingle bells, and she would pretend to, too, unsure who was tricking who, but happy to be spending time with him.
It was “really sad to think about him dying alone in his apartment, sick, with no one to take care of him,” she said. “But, he also chose that.”