Blood Profits

by Vanessa Neumann

  I didn’t answer.

  “Let me guess…” He looked back at me. “No wonder the Americans have no idea what is going on in this country.” He paused. “He’s not even a real sheikh, you know. He’s a farce.”

  Maybe so, but he was clearly a man non-Muslims knew quite well and who generated some strong responses. And that interested me. When we left the christening, I called the sheikh and gave Lee Smith’s cell phone number for him to call me back.

  The next day, Lee and I were standing on a sidewalk when his phone rang. It was the sheikh.

  “Hello, sir, thank you for calling me back. I was referred to you by our mutual friend…”

  He spoke no English.

  “Bonjour, monsieur. Merci de m’appeller. Notre ami…”

  He spoke no French.

  I spoke no Arabic.

  I handed the phone to Lee, who did speak Arabic. The sheikh told Lee where and when I should meet him: in one hour at the Habtoor Grand Hotel in Sin El Fil.

  “You know this place?” I asked Lee.

  “Sure. It’s the business district, just a couple of miles that way.”

  I was soon in the back of a taxi with Lee leaning through the driver’s window, giving the driver the address. Lee would not be going with me, having his own interview to do; we would meet up again at the end of the day. I traveled alone in the back of a taxi, with no Arabic and no idea where I was going. When I arrived, I paid the fare on the meter and got out at a very large but run-down Western hotel, clutching my Moleskine notebook and a pen.

  I scoped out the lobby and I peered at the arriving cars, then realized I hadn’t asked the sheikh what he looked like and hadn’t told him what I looked like or what I was wearing. How would we know each other? I waited outside, where the cars pulled up: if I made myself obvious, he would find me. A very old Mercedes pulled up with a man behind the wheel wearing a thawb (a white robe-dress men wear in the Persian Gulf) and the red-and-white keffiyeh of a Gulfie sheikh—rather different from the Europeanized Muslims of the Gemmayzeh neighborhood where I was staying.

  “Vanessa?”

  “Yes.”

  “Get in.”

  I hesitated. I hadn’t anticipated this.

  “Get in,” he repeated.

  I got in and shut the door. He pulled away.

  “We go my house.”

  “Your house?”

  “Yes.”

  He drove through streets that got increasingly narrower, through neighborhoods that were more remote and poorer. I didn’t think many foreigners made it into these parts of Beirut. This sort of thing usually ends badly, in a YouTube video, I thought.

  We pulled up at one of a series of low, narrow, and plain concrete buildings with small doors, like the sort I knew from Caracas slums; he certainly seemed to live simply. After parking on the street, he opened the building’s front door, beckoning me in. It was dark inside; all that was visible was a stairwell leading up.

  Again, I hesitated.

  Then I proceeded.

  My heart thumped.

  No one would know where to find me. How would I escape if I got into trouble? We arrived at an apartment, and he beckoned me to the sofa. He gently raised his palm to me, indicating that I should wait. He made a call on his cell phone in Arabic, not a word of which I could understand. When he hung up, he explained.

  “Friend. Colonel. Coming. Speak English.”

  “Okay,” I answered, and waited.

  After about twenty minutes, a man in military uniform arrived. He introduced himself as a colonel; he said he would be our interpreter. He was terse, forthright, and physically strong, as befit a military man, but how much he was translating the cleric’s ideas and how much he was espousing his own would never be known—an unreliable narrator, indeed.

  I asked the sheikh, via the colonel, whether he/they had ever seen drugs or money coming in from South America, Venezuela in particular.

  “Money comes in from Venezuela. So much money. A roomful of cash,” affirmed the colonel, sweeping his arms out in a gesture of large size. “I’ve seen it.”

  He was likely boasting about his reach, his importance, his involvement in dark international matters. It was impossible for me to assess his honesty on the spot, without corroboration. But I figured that if he was feeling talkative, I’d keep asking. How about the Colombian cocaine? What did he know about that?

  “Hezbollah has always had a relationship with the Colombian FARC,” the colonel said. “But the election of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela helped Hezbollah a lot. The drugs that had been flown in little planes are now in industrial airliners and military planes with government protection.”

  It was inevitable that South American cocaine traffickers and narcoterrorists would become of increasing importance to Hezbollah and other groups.1 While intelligence officials believe that Hezbollah used to receive as much as $200 million annually from its primary patron, Iran, and additional money from Syria, both these sources have largely dried up due to the onerous sanctions imposed on the former and the turmoil in the latter.

  The colonel then proceeded to explain how far Hezbollah’s tentacles spread and how they are a full Iranian proxy. Hezbollah, he explained, have a close relationship with North Korea, and the Al Mahdi Army in Iraq (with one million fighters under the command of Shia cleric Moqtada Al Sadr) is also trained and supported by Hezbollah. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps is actually a part of the Lebanese army, he said.

  Lebanon is interesting, I said, because it is a microcosm of the broader Middle East: a petri dish of proxy struggles. If you can figure out who is fighting whom and who is aligning with whom in Lebanon, you can probably expand to figure out those patterns in the broader Middle East. There are so many proxy interests, however, that I could not see how there would ever be peace either in Lebanon or the Middle East, I said. The colonel agreed.

  He identified four major interests that are obstacles to regional peace: Syria and Iran (which could be considered almost as one, he said), Israel, and then Americans and the West. They each use the presence of their enemies to justify their own agendas, he claimed.

  “Iran wants Israel in the region because it justifies its nukes. Israel wants a strong Hezbollah in Lebanon because it justifies US support. But Israel and Syria understand each other: the border between them is quiet.”

  As proof that Syria would never attack Israel, he offered two examples. First, Syrians shoot Lebanese farmers, but not Israelis. Second, Hezbollah’s chief of international operations, Imad Mughniyah, was killed in 2008 by a car bomb in Syria, only two hundred meters from the presidential palace. Mughniyah had been implicated in some of Hezbollah’s most spectacular terrorist attacks, including those against the US Embassy in Beirut and the Israeli Embassy in Argentina.2 The Syrians never retaliated against Israel for the killings in their country. It still was not clear to me why the anecdotes were evidence that Syria would never attack Israel, but the colonel seemed to be hinting at dark hidden networks that cross borders and align interests of groups that claim to be enemies but are not as adversarial as they appear. That would hardly be a surprise in the tangled web of the Levant, where the US is often perceived as naïve.

  The United States, he said, also unwittingly ends up funneling aid to the terrorist group, including US money earmarked to teach English. The prime example is that of a USAID program in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley—a Hezbollah stronghold (and also where the colonel was born)—which it co-implemented with the DC-based development organization Creative Associates International. The project, which ran from 1998 through 2003, was for the Organization for Social and Agricultural Development in the Beqaa Valley. Hezbollah took the credit for all the local development, increasing their support among the very grateful local population. They even directly received some of the funds, the colonel claimed.

  “So what are America’s options?” I asked.

  “The only solution,” he said, “is to back neutral partners in Iraq, Bahrain, et
cetera.” He named six “moderate” Shia he thought America should back. The Free Shia movement that Sheikh Mohammed (whom I was supposedly interviewing through the colonel) represented was intended to remove the obstacles that Hezbollah imposed on the Shia community—namely, that they must support violent extremism.

  “It is a big lie that Hezbollah and Iran impose control in the Shia world and they are isolated from the others,” insisted the colonel. He went on to highlight some differences: “The Shia in Iraq and Afghanistan like the US; the Shia in Lebanon don’t like the US,” he explained.

  As evidence, he cited the fact that the president of Iraq gave US president George W. Bush the sword of Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad, whom Shias consider the founder of their sect. It’s hardly a surprise, if you know your history. Iraqi president Saddam Hussein was a Sunni, and repressed the Shias. He was also the archenemy of Iran: the Iran-Iraq War lasted from 1980 through 1988 and killed nearly a million people.

  When the US invaded Iraq in 2003 and eliminated Saddam’s loyalists in the Ba’ath Party (a process called “de-Ba’athification”), it put in power a leader who was from the Shia sect Saddam had oppressed. That instantly turned Iran’s archenemy, Iraq, into Iran’s ally and puppet. Iraq’s ousted Sunnis then sought revenge, unleashing the brutal insurgency that would eventually result in the rise of Daesh, which Americans call ISIS. But there was no Daesh yet when I was speaking to the sheikh and the colonel in Beirut. It was May 2012, the Arab Spring was in full bloom, and Americans still thought that was generally a good thing.

  The Lebanese colonel could not resist a little dig: “British officers are smarter than Americans: they never speak, always ask.”

  It is a bit of a global sport to make fun of the US: it is the biggest kid on the global block, so an obvious target if one wants to earn some quick street cred. I got the feeling he was also gauging my reaction, poking me to see how American I considered myself. I had told him I was Venezuelan, but he also knew I lived in New York. He could have been probing my reaction to see whether I was employed by the US government. He must have been disappointed by my flat demeanor.

  Bringing the conversation back to what I was there to learn, I asked about Hezbollah and Chávez.

  “Hezbollah will control any president with the same ideology. If Chávez goes, they will just create another Chávez. Venezuela needs its own ‘Spring,’” he offered.

  When the interview with the cleric, or the colonel, concluded, the colonel took me for lunch in the area around the Beirut-Rafic Hariri International Airport, named after the late Lebanese prime minister whom Hezbollah assassinated as his motorcade drove past a popular hotel in central Beirut—by blowing him up, along with most of his security detail, with 2,200 pounds of TNT. It is not only the airport that is under Hezbollah control, but also the area around it.

  BEIRUT OR TEHRAN?

  There were posters of “martyred” Hezbollah fighters and billboards featuring icons of Islamist militancy as well as anti-American and anti-Israeli slogans. The billboards commemorated not just Hezbollah’s supreme commander, Hassan Nasrallah, but also Iran’s Ayatollah Khamenei. There were not very many women in the streets; those who were wore burqas, the full head and body robes that cover a woman head to toe in conservative Muslim communities. I took an Hermès scarf from my handbag and wrapped it around my head like a hijab, the head scarf moderate Muslim women wear even with jeans.

  Is this what Tehran feels like?

  “Here,” he said, tossing his gun in my lap. “If they attack, you protect us.”

  Right.

  He feigned fear of Hezbollah, but during the interview, I had come to suspect he was one of them. There was no way of knowing whether the answers he was giving me were truly translations of the cleric’s responses, but I suspected there was little of the cleric in what he said. Everything about him suggested he was not entirely honest about his adversarial relationship with Hezbollah—not least because he came from Baalbek, in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, east of the Litani River. Baalbek, a UNESCO World Heritage Site that was the ancient Greek city of Heliopolis (“City of the Sun”), is Hezbollah’s heartland.

  Whatever uncertainties I had were resolved upon arriving at the restaurant. As the plates of mezze came to the table, so did inquiring Hezbollah leadership.

  “Don’t look!” the colonel said. “There are real Hezbollah moneymen at the other table.”

  One of them approached us, giving the traditional Muslim greeting: right hand to left shoulder, arm across the chest, and a head movement somewhere between a nod and a bow.

  “Al hayer.” A Muslim man never touches a woman who is not his wife. “Where are you from?”

  I opened my mouth to speak.

  “She is from Yugoslavia,” interrupted the colonel. “Yes, you are from Yugoslavia.” He looked right into my eyes.

  Two weeks later, back in New York, I dined in the great hall of the University Club with the former assistant secretary of defense who had given me the references, and I related the anecdote.

  “He said you are Yugoslav because it is the only way you can look as European as you do and still be a Muslim. This Hezbollah colonel probably saved your life.”

  Hezbollah is an Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps proxy, as evidenced by its flag and first-edition training manuals: the Hezbollah and IRGC have almost identical insignia, and Hezbollah’s first manuals were in Farsi (the language of Iran), not Arabic (the language of Lebanon and other countries in the Levant and Middle East).

  Hezbollah’s true loyalties are on display in their deployment in Syria to fight to keep Assad in power. Hezbollah, which is supposed to be a resistance group to defend Lebanese independence from foreign interference, is incongruously defending Lebanon’s oppressor: Syria.

  Syria militarily occupied Lebanon from 1976 through 2005, first under Hafez al-Assad and then by his son, the current tyrant murdering his people en masse, Bashar al-Assad, who was “elected” president in 2000. Bashar al-Assad is considered responsible for the assassination of Lebanese prime minister Rafic Hariri. My Lebanese colonel told me that he himself trained in Syria—that all the Lebanese military trained in Syria. It is what you might call a complicated relationship, as so much is in the Middle East.

  Neighboring Syria is ruled by the Assad family, which is Alawite, a subsect of Shia Muslim. The Shia owe their allegiance to their “homeland” of Iran (the Sunnis owe their allegiance to their “homeland” of Saudi Arabia). Syria has been backed by Russia since 1944, when the two countries established strong diplomatic relations. In 1946, the USSR backed Syrian independence from France, sealing their relationship.

  Syria then became an important piece in the Soviet Union’s Cold War chessboard, especially when in 1971 Syria gave the Soviet naval fleet its only Mediterranean naval base, in the coastal town of Tartus. On October 8, 1980 (a year after the Islamic Revolution), the USSR signed a Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with Syria, with Hafez al-Assad. The treaty remains in force, which is why Syria uses military hardware and Russia backs the Assad regime in Syria’s civil war, sending refugees flooding over the border into Lebanon. One in six residents in Lebanon today is a Syrian refugee.3

  AT THE RALLY

  As part of our efforts to figure out who were the current major players, what was going on, and what various audiences thought about it, Lee took me to the offices of his friends at the online English-language publication Now Lebanon. I told them I had worked as a journalist in Venezuela, the US, and the UK.

  They asked me on Lee’s last day: “Would you like to come with us to the Hezbollah rally tomorrow?”

  “Yes! Of course!”

  All I had to do was email the Hezbollah press office a scan of my Venezuelan passport and Now Lebanon would assert that I was a well-published journalist (entirely true) who was working with them (not entirely true).

  I tried to hide my nerves behind a big smile as the Hezbollah personnel inspected my passport and looked for m
y name in their computer. I was certain that with a quick Google search they would find my articles on Venezuela and Hezbollah narcoterrorism and I would be killed on the spot. I sat demurely and kept smiling. Surprisingly, the Hezbollah soldiers beckoned me over, handed me a press pass, and put me through airport-style security looking for weapons or explosives. They let us keep our cameras and escorted us to the media enclosure, close to the stage and next to where the VIPs would enter.

  In the press enclosure, men and women, most in Western dress and all with visible press badges, commingled, clutching notebooks or cameras. Right in front of us were the VIPs—all men. The rest of the crowd of tens of thousands was segregated: men to one side, and on the other women under hijabs, holding up photos of their “martyred” sons, soldiers for Hezbollah. From some of the buildings hung banners in Arabic script.

  “What do they say?” I asked my hostess and colleague, who had secured my press credentials for me to attend the rally.

  “They say: ‘The promise has come true.’ It’s a play on a common reference to Hezbollah, which refers to itself as ‘the true promise.’ So Hezbollah has kept its promise to the people.”

  Men in turbans streamed past us one by one, from left to right. It was remarkable to be so close to these dignitaries. Each one, as he entered the enclosed area, was greeted by a fawning and besuited usher dressed like a postmodern monk in an all-black suit that eschewed any decoration. The usher-monks escorted the arrivals along the length of the enormous stage, where operatic singers belted out passages from the Koran or the hadith,4 alternating with speakers who proclaimed the might and glory of Hezbollah and the perfidy of Israel. At the far end of the stage, the VIPs gathered as equals. We, the members of the press, had been strategically placed to witness the proceedings.

  The music rose and became up-tempo, and tens of thousands of supporters behind the press enclosure became frenzied. Images of the euphoric mass of people were projected on the giant screen above the stage: on one side, young men punched the air; on the other, old women raised huge photographs of their “martyred” sons. The uniform production value of the photographs indicated they had been supplied by Hezbollah. The camera panned over the square: posters of Hezbollah supreme leader Hassan Nasrallah clung to the sides of buildings, watched over by scouts in windows and rooftops. Fanatics clogged every square inch of street that might be an exit from the square. If events took a bad turn, there would be no escape for us.