Among the lessons learned by the criminals and the terrorists are the strategies that are most effective for different types of networks. For intelligence and law enforcement to respond effectively, they must accelerate their capacity to confront a rapid evolution of strategies, tactics, and behaviors in networks—much more rapid than has ever been observed before, as criminals and terrorists learn and adopt effective tactics from each other. Mexican smugglers now dig Gaza Strip–style tunnels under the US-Mexico border, while cartels behead opponents and post the videos online. Other classic criminal tactics have been modified to inspire terror and maintain control over territory.
More straightforward than any of these aspects, however, is the simple basis for collusion: insofar as criminals are highly effective at accomplishing tasks that are necessary to terrorists, terrorist organizations are paying clients of criminal organizations. Their collusion—or, more simply, the terrorist use of criminal services—presents major security threats. Criminal networks can provide terrorists with cross-border transportation and logistics, as well as cover for the clandestine movement of goods and people, including terrorist operatives and their weapons. The profits gleaned from the illicit trafficking that is the business of transnational organized criminals undermine state-imposed financial sanctions on terrorist groups.
EATING THE STATE
The most obvious mutual benefit criminals and terrorists occupying the same space create for each other is the exhaustion of state resources, both financial and judicial. But the causes and the effects of the interaction are subtler and more pernicious. The interaction between terrorists and international criminals with regard to the state has three aspects: (1) they collude against a common enemy (particularly the state’s law enforcement security forces); (2) they exploit state weakness, because both groups arise in response to state shortcomings; and (3) they parasitically feed upon each other’s externalities.
The violent acts of terrorists cause the mass public to doubt their government’s ability to provide protection; criminals (despite occasionally colluding with governments) breaking accepted rules and violating law and order cause citizens to lose confidence in their governing institutions. When the citizens lose faith in their government, they will accept the rule of strongmen and terrorist groups.
Take the classic case of that most famous criminal organization: the Italian Mafia. Through its infiltration of Italy’s law enforcement agencies and legislature, the organization has hindered the state’s ability to protect its citizens and administer justice—a weakness the Mafia cultivates and exploits by signaling to its constituents that “only we can protect you, so be loyal to us.” The Mafia has infiltrated the Italian government and bent it to its will in some places, so that the state sometimes serves the Mafia. Any state whose competence, integrity, or efficiency is questioned by its citizenry is well poised for overthrow by a terrorist group, which will effectively exploit and compound the citizens’ doubts.
These gray areas can serve as a springboard to greater legitimacy for the criminal and terrorist organizations, further complicating interdiction as “dirty” and “clean” markets intertwine. Transnational criminals work with banks, governments, mining companies, security firms, and even charities. They launch public relations campaigns whose strategies are designed to gain them legitimacy, weaving moving narratives of community spirit by positioning themselves as champions of disaster victims (such as in the Japanese Yakuza’s prompt dispatch of aid to the survivors of the 1995 Kobe earthquake) or as champions of national or cultural identity (whether in Kosovo, Chechnya, or Kurdistan)19 or of the poor (as did Pablo Escobar in Medellín, Colombia). In these interactions, legitimate and criminal businesses interface and dirty money and goods infiltrate the global financial and trade systems, touching each and every one of us, the consumers.
DIRTY MONEY
The money is huge: an estimated $1.6 trillion was laundered through the global financial system in 2008, one year into the global financial crisis.20 This is all money seeking a “legitimate” and untraceable home somewhere, as the bankers take their cut and the money flows through the system and back into the hands of criminals and corrupt officials. The illegal economy is full of dark corners arrived at by the tangled pathways of illicit trade.
Illicit money flows into the United States through conduits, including facilitators who allow access to the financial system and to financial institutions that ignore their anti–money laundering obligations. These channels allow kleptocrats, criminals, and in some cases terrorists or their sympathizers to inject billions of dollars of illicit wealth into the stream of licit commerce, corrupting markets, financial institutions, officials, and communities. In the process, they prevent fair and open markets from reaching their full economic potential; in the developing world, they keep communities from building the markets and investment frontiers of tomorrow.
Given that illicit trade (dealing in counterfeit goods; trafficking in drugs, weapons, or people; laundering money) is estimated to account for 8 to 15 percent of world GDP, it is hardly surprising that the licit and illicit economies connect and feed off each other in interesting and dynamic ways. This is termed “the gray economy,” and it is not happening in some faraway land; it is happening in London, New York, Dubai, and your local bank.
Compounding these complexities is the rather more mundane reality that illicit business hides amid legitimate business that crosses borders every day, whether via shippers and government agencies (as with guns) or via tourists and immigrants (as with counterfeit pharmaceuticals and cigarettes). Some of this traffic is a result of good business practice: for a truck returning from making a delivery, it is better to come back full rather than empty. Differentiating between clean and dirty commerce is not easy.
THE POWER OF NARRATIVE
The terrorist cause is far from dead. Regardless of how badly a terrorist group may have “sold out” to the profit motive, grievance is a good fund-raiser: grievance recruits more angry young men and women every hour of every day. A good grievance is still the best tool to raise donations, recruit fighters, and motivate the diaspora. I have seen how both criminals and terrorists use the classic manipulations of subversive identity politics: to be one of us, you will support our cause; to be a good citizen, you need to be a good supporter of our revolutionary cause—you will fund it, you will advocate it, and you will enjoin others to do so, too.
The leaders manipulate the emotions of their likely supporters by setting up a mythic persona, which the average person who wants to be a good patriot or citizen will do his or her best to resemble. After all, everyone wants to belong to the “cool kids” group. Everyone wants to be respected and admired and to have friends who are also respected and admired. No one wants to be ridiculed or excluded. This natural tendency is the key to manipulation of group identity and to the dynamics that exist among the individuals in that group. One can manipulate not only emotions, but values as well.
Our emotions influence what we value and see as important. Pride, vanity, and resentment are perfect examples: they are temporary emotions, but they can also be someone’s main character feature, so that his or her emotional predisposition is to be proud, vain, or resentful. “If I’m proud, I will value respect or independence or both. If I’m vain, I will value praise and attention. If I’m resentful, I will value stories of perceived rivals brought low.”21 This is how life narratives are told—or manipulated. Manipulate how people see themselves and their life stories, and you can manipulate the people. After all, this is how parents raise children to have appropriate and proportionate responses to the world around them, teaching them “This warrants sympathy,” “This should make you proud,” et cetera.
In the context of terror, the shortest route to pride is making others fear you. Fear is power.
What is happening in the world today is less about religion and ideology than it is about power. If you strip away the terrorist rhetoric on religion, the scenario is the
same as always: thugs inspiring fear to consolidate their power. Religion is their excuse, fear their method.
Terrorists and the Mexican cartels operate much the same way: they control territory, kill their enemies, and videotape beheadings to intimidate those who would challenge them. The Mexican cartels also use religious insignia to mark their territory and legitimize their power. The violence we see across our television screens at night is at least as much about getting and keeping power as it is about Christians or Jews or Muslims.
People will support the powerful; they want to be part of the power structure, not excluded from or by it. In the Middle East, this is called “Strong Horse” politics. (Osama bin Laden famously said: “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature, they will like the strong horse.”22) The Middle East is a region defined over centuries by violent power struggles between factions, and America has less blame to bear than is generally attributed to it either by liberals or by the Middle Eastern warring factions manipulating narratives in their quest for power.23 I saw in Lebanon how Sunni and Shia, rulers and rebels, all claim they want America out—even as they ask for money, weapons, and military intervention to fight their cause against the other side, whom they have been fighting since the eighth century.
Beyond that hypocrisy, America, as the world’s strongest military force, is a natural target for a group (Sunni or Shia) who wants to earn credibility and publicity, to be known as the one who can get things done—and therefore attract more fighters and more money, and ultimately more power. By attacking America and claiming to rout it from the region, a violent extremist group can earn a loyal following. It is a branding exercise.
The extent to which the violent extremists need America as a whipping boy was highlighted by the beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff by Daesh. Up until that point, America was not paying attention to Daesh, was exiting rapidly from Iraq, and had no interest in doing anything more in Syria than provide a few weapons. Like a spoiled child frustrated that it can’t get the attention it wants, the group beheaded two Americans and posted the videos. That worked: the videos of two beheaded Americans posted on social media was enough to get the US military to reverse course and go back into Iraq.
The Middle East (whether North Africa, the Levant, or the Persian Gulf) is not a region with a culture or a history of liberal democracy. A fellow CNN en Español panelist (an Iranian living in Israel) was brave enough to make this point on air: the problems of the Middle East lie in the Middle East. A history of oppressive rule by a corrupt elite is at the heart of the region’s cycle of violence—a process witnessed firsthand by many who have worked in the region. The people don’t trust their politicians; they trust only their revolutionaries.
The growth of militant Islamism is a historical consequence of the region’s experimentation with secular political Islam (as in Turkey, Egypt, and Libya) practiced under autocratic presidents-for-life who banned other political parties. As corrupt dictators banned rival political parties and stifled dissent, the only space left for group gatherings expressing alternate views became the mosque. As anger and frustration grew, they became increasingly couched in religion. So religion took up the role of revolution and tapped into an old paradigmatic persona: the good revolutionary Muslim.
The persona of the honorable religious fighter is not unique to Muslims; Christians have their version of it too—and not just in the Middle East during the Crusades, but in the New World, since the Conquest. In 1481, Pope Sixtus IV issued a papal bull entitled Aeterni Regis (King Eternal) that argued that pagan natives’ right to self-rule was overridden by papal responsibility for their souls. Thus, conquering non-Christian lands was a moral duty to the conquered: Europeans were told to conquer them to save their heathen souls. But they were told it would save European souls as well. The Conquerors then effectively became “holy warriors,” purifying themselves and their community in the fight.
The religious semiotics were so prevalent that upon landing in Venezuela, Christopher Columbus wrote in his diaries that he had found the Garden of Eden. The myth of the noble savage has persisted and become transmuted over time to a more modern persona:24 the savior of Latin American culture, the good revolutionary, the anti-imperialist defender of the native against the foreign or white oligarchic ravager. I saw how effective this was in the country of my birth, Venezuela. Hugo Chávez, who attempted a coup, won an election on a wave of class (and ethnically tinged) discontent and rewrote the constitution to centralize power. Now Venezuela is a violent and corrupt dictatorship, economically imploding while its people starve. It is also a key component in a broad and powerful crime-terror pipeline.
2
Learning About Crime, Terror, and Corruption
It was in my birthplace of Venezuela that I first learned about the vast expanding tentacles of crime-terror pipelines. The 2008 seizure of the laptop of Raúl Reyes, a commander of the Colombian narcoterrorist insurgency FARC—taken during a 2008 raid on his camp just across the Colombian border in Ecuador—confirmed what I and many others had long suspected: that the regime of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez, was giving material support to the drug trafficking and terrorist operations of neighboring Colombia’s FARC insurgency.
The files, reviewed by the think tank with which I had worked a couple of years earlier—the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a specialist in wars and military matters—revealed that Chávez’s supporters, the Chavistas, were making huge personal profits by trafficking in drugs, giving safe haven to terrorists, and facilitating terrorists’ access to very deadly weapons, including “MANPADs,” which can be foisted by one man on his shoulder, then fire a missile capable of bringing down an airliner. The files detailed how Chavistas were shipping Colombian cocaine they got from the FARC on to the Mexican drug cartels (fueling slaughter in Central America and across the US Southwest border) and to the Lebanese Hezbollah terrorist group, an Iranian proxy so well armed it fought Israel to a tie in the 2006 war. All of these activities continue in 2017, and Lebanese Hezbollah is responsible for very lethal terrorist attacks both in Latin America (killing Chavistas’ fellow Latinos) and against the US in the Middle East: 241 US Marines were killed when Hezbollah bombed their barracks in Beirut in 1983; 29 were killed and 242 injured in the March 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires; 85 were killed and hundreds more injured again in Buenos Aires in July 1994 at the Argentine-Israeli Mutual Association.
Furthermore, my government’s narcoterrorism and corruption was couched as some socialist liberation from US-led imperialist oppression: this “anti-Yankee” and “anti-oligarchy” narrative was the excuse the government was using to rewrite the constitution and centralize power under a charismatic populist president, ensuring that those in power could stay in power—making money and spreading slaughter around the world—for years to come, if not indefinitely. On top of it all, while I saw it for what it was (a cynical kleptocratic crime-terror pipeline), a lot of the rest of the world thought this Bolivarian Revolution was a great idea—even as late as 2009.
PRESS AND POLITICS
“We have learned some things about your background,” said The Guardian newspaper editor on the phone.
“What things about my background exactly?” I retorted.
“Well, that you come from a wealthy Venezuelan family, so you would obviously be opposed to Hugo Chávez.”
It was early February 2009, and I had called the editorial desk and asked them for comment on an op-ed by their deputy editor, Seumas Milne, now UK Labour Party spin doctor, praising Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in the typical style of liberals who had not previously been able to find Venezuela on a map, but wanted to believe in some mojito-sipping version of Lawrence of Arabia—never mind that he was dismantling government institutions and centralizing power around his cult of personality.
International celebrities were piling in fast: actor Sean Penn, who’d been an avid and vociferous supporter since he’d
first traveled to Venezuela to meet Chávez in 2007 (since then Penn has interviewed and defended criminal despot “El Chapo” Guzmán and seemingly wants to shape US drug policy); film director Oliver Stone, who went on to make a cinematic hagiography called South of the Border; actor and director Danny Glover, who received $18 million to make a film (which he has yet to deliver) about the life of Haitian revolutionary Toussaint Louverture; documentarian Michael Moore, who met Chávez at the Venice Film Festival in 2009 and posted pictures on social media of them together and praised him as a fellow enemy of President Bush; model Naomi Campbell, renowned for her temper, who’d been to Caracas, waved to the people from Miraflores presidential palace, and called Chávez her “Rebel Angel.”
I was disgusted. Celebrities and The Guardian were using their media power to anoint a putschist populist, and some celebrities even benefited financially themselves, through projects directly financed by corruption or by hitching onto the geopolitical enfant terrible du jour to renew their media brands. Besides that, to my mind they were playing with the lives of millions of my compatriots.
“So are you saying that I, a native-born Venezuelan, am not entitled to my opinion? Is The Guardian going on record that its editorial line is that the voice of a native is to be silenced if it does not fit the newspaper’s editorial definition of the correct socioeconomic background or political stance, in favor of a foreigner who has never been there?”
“No, that’s not what we’re saying,” he persisted. “But isn’t it true that he is taking the oil wealth away from the oligarchy and giving it to the poor?”
“No, it’s the foreigners, including you Brits, who exploited Venezuela’s oil wealth from 1918 until 1976, when it was nationalized by the Venezuelan government. It was never in private hands. I’ve actually written about this in other British publications.”
Blood Profits Page 3