Blood Profits

by Vanessa Neumann

  Taking a deep breath, we turned our attention back to our notes and peered through our video camera. The little red recording light blinked. Was that Hezbollah supreme commander Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah himself? Impossible—he never left his bunker, they said: too many assassination attempts. But with all of Hezbollah’s senior leadership there, sure … possible. Stroking the diamond cross dangling from my neck and concealed under my clothes, I checked the skies for incoming CIA or Israeli missiles.

  On the stage an operatic singer led the crowd in signing a song to Hassan Nasrallah: “I would sacrifice my soul to you, Hezbollah.” In the first row, beside the Hezbollah grandees, sat Ziad Rahbani, a renowned Communist and musician who was an icon during Lebanese’s civil war in the 1980s. The next presenter onstage started chanting verses of the Koran, with a play on words on the day when the promise comes true—presumably that day, May 11, 2012. The rally celebrated Hezbollah’s reconstruction of Dahieh, the Beirut suburb that is their stronghold and that took heavy bombing from Israel in the 2006 war. The 2006 war that destroyed Dahieh started when Hezbollah fired rockets into Israeli border towns and kidnapped two Israeli soldiers. Because Iran so amply supplied Hezbollah, the group is widely viewed as the first proxy war between Iran and Israel.

  Israel did not win.

  The Iranian-supplied weapons were on prominent display in the beautifully produced film playing on the screen. In it, camouflaged special operators called in airstrikes and mobile launchers spat out multiple rockets in response. Somber music played as the film revealed the death and destruction the Israeli rockets wrought in densely populated Dahieh: buildings collapsed on the bodies of children; distraught mothers wailed for their dead babies.

  Then came the film’s glorious conclusion: Hezbollah rebuilds Dahieh for its people. Buildings rose, children went back to school, and seemingly everyone waved Hezbollah flags in gratitude. Gratitude. Joy. Euphoria. Ecstasy. Until Daesh appeared, Hezbollah were the masters of asymmetric warfare—warfare of the hearts and minds. The danger of such messaging is that people become reliant on handouts from one party—in this case, Hezbollah—eroding national identity, which is always tenuous at best in Lebanon anyway. This propagates division and the manipulation of the people in favor of proxy interests.

  Hassan Jeishy, the managing director of the Waad construction company, talked on stage about how difficult life had become under the oppression of the international community, which blocked funding to companies, especially Jihad al-Binah, the Hezbollah construction company sanctioned by the US Treasury Department. But Hezbollah and Waad prevailed nonetheless, he claimed.

  In reality, the Lebanese government contributed 33 percent of the $400 million for the reconstruction, and the rest of the money came from the Gulf States (which are overwhelmingly Sunni, the rival Islamic sect), on the basis that this was a Muslim country attacked by Israel. Regardless, Hassan Jeishy thanked Iran, local businesses, and NGOs—but not the Gulf States of Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait that actually sent the money. Regarding the government, he acknowledged that it had played a role, but said that it had also hindered the reconstruction’s happening sooner. Jeishy was reinforcing the Hezbollah narrative that would strengthen the group’s support and grow its constituency; he was not telling the truth.

  The fifty thousand or so live spectators became even more frenzied as the face of Hassan Nasrallah appeared on the screen and he began his speech to his people.

  “Today is Fatima’s birthday,” he said, invoking the name of the daughter of the Prophet Muhammad, whose husband was Imam Ali, the first imam of the Shia sect. “Today is as important a victory as July twenty-second, when Hezbollah defeated Israel. That was a victory of war; this is a victory of reconstruction.”

  “Time to go,” whispered my colleague. “We’ll get the transcript in the morning.”

  Escorted out of our enclosure and through the crowd by a guard, we came across a formal grouping of five- to seven-year-old children in military uniform. As I raised a camera to take their photo, a Hezbollah guard lunged at me, yelling: “Americaaahnn! Americaaahnn!”

  I thought fast. “No, yo no soy Americana. Soy de Venezuela. Amo Hezbollah.”

  No, I am not American. I am from Venezuela. I love Hezbollah.

  “Where’s the car?”

  “The car is this way,” my colleague said, pointing down the street, past the security checkpoints, as she lifted her phone to her ear to call the driver and make sure he would be at the agreed pickup spot.

  In Lebanon, I was informed by Ali Al-Amine, editor of a publication whose English name is Southern Affairs, that Hezbollah has eighty thousand employees, making it the size of Intel, BP, Verizon Wireless, or 3M. To be clear, the armed forces are only a small fraction of these eighty thousand; most of them are medical personnel, teachers, store owners, et cetera—all sorts of people are on the Hezbollah payroll. Lebanese Hezbollah is often called a state-within-a-state, because it has its own charities, hospitals, schools, food, water and electricity distribution systems, trash collection, and of, course, propaganda machine—not least of which is Al-Manar, its television station, which broadcasts twenty-four hours a day, all over the world. And now it has Hispan TV, broadcasting in Farsi to a growing number of Latin American countries, mainly the Bolivarian ones: Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia. Hezbollah challenges the Lebanese government for the loyalty of its constituents, making itself both an opponent and a necessary partner for a national government that is weak and riven by confessionalism, a political system of power sharing though which political office is distributed according to different religions or ethnic groups. Northern Ireland has a similar system. While praised as constitutional power sharing, it generates (often unsavory) competition among the different ethnic or religious groups in power.

  THE CASE OF THE LEBANESE CANADIAN BANK

  The 2011 case of the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LBC) had exposed the inner workings of Hezbollah’s illicit trade network from South America to the US to West Africa and into the Levant. The bank was the hub of an intricate money-laundering mechanism that laundered money from Colombia’s FARC and the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas by mixing it with money from the sales of used cars, purchased by Hezbollah reps in the US and exported to West Africa. The result was hundreds of millions of dollars churning through the bank accounts of West African Shiite businessmen, who traded in everything from diamonds to cosmetics to frozen chicken, as fronts for Hezbollah.5

  It seems the car sales might have served two purposes: they allowed for the combining of criminal and legitimate money, but possibly also provided the means for smuggling contraband (including bulk cash) inside the cars themselves. The whole scheme was uncovered by pulling the thread on Lebanese Hezbollah senior personnel’s direct involvement with the South American cocaine trade. Ayman Joumaa, the Lebanese-Colombian indicted for money laundering, is charged with buying used cars in the US, shipping them to West Africa, where they were sold, and flying the cash into money exchange houses in Beirut and then into the LCB, which was previously a subsidiary of the Royal Bank of Canada Middle East.

  But the cash was too much even for a booming trade in used cars. Investigators concluded that cash from the car sales was being “layered” with the proceeds of drug sales in Europe. Then some of the money returned to the US to buy more used cars.

  For Hezbollah, money laundering and military strategy were combined in Lebanon’s richest real estate deal: Christian Lebanese jeweler Robert Mouawad sold 740 acres of land overlooking the Mediterranean for $240 million to a Shia Muslim diamond dealer, Nazem Said Ahmad—but the real money behind the deal, the development corporation’s major investor, was a relative of a Hezbollah commander, Ali Tajeddine. Real estate and diamonds are both great ways to store and transfer value, but in this case the land acquisition extends Hezbollah’s presence into a religiously diverse region that is not predominantly Muslim. The investor who bought the land (Tajeddine’s relative) personally received money through companies k
nown to be Hezbollah fronts and from dealers of conflict diamonds.

  The Lebanese Canadian Bank was punished with a USA Patriot Act Section 311 designation, which initially cut the bank off from the global banking system—until it was purchased by the Société Generale Bank of Lebanon (SGBL). According to the Center for a New American Security: “SGBL apparently has not provided full access to the former LCB records, nor has it proved that it has closed Hezbollah bank accounts or verifiably stopped Hezbollah money laundering and Iran sanctions evasion schemes.”6

  At the center of the LCB money-laundering network sat Ayman Joumaa, a Sunni Muslim of the Medellín cartel with deep ties to Shiites in the Hezbollah strongholds of southern Lebanon. When money is involved, ideology goes out the window. A friend of my grandmother’s used to say: “Money doesn’t care who owns it.” I have learned in my work that people don’t care with whom they do business, as long as the money flows. My clients often struggle to understand when I explain the tangled networks to them: enemies do business together. Joumaa is accused of coordinating shipments of Colombian cocaine to the ultraviolent Los Zetas cartel in Mexico for sale in the United States, and of laundering the proceeds. According to his indictment, he single-handedly laundered $200 million a month for Hezbollah.

  SMUGGLING DRUGS FROM THE BEQAA VALLEY TO AMERICA: A TRUE STORY

  I arrived at the Winter Garden of the World Financial Center in early December 2015 to meet a socially connected but notorious former drug trafficker who in the late 1970s smuggled hashish from Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley (the Hezbollah stronghold) into the United States: Richard Stratton. I figured if I wanted to understand the drug smuggling business connecting through Lebanon, I should ask an expert. In 1977–1978 Stratton vertically integrated his hashish trade.

  Prior to that, he had been smuggling small quantities in suitcases, and then in sailboats. But then, in a midnight raid at his lodgings in Beirut, Stratton had been taken to meet a judge at his home. The judge informed him of the stiff sentences Stratton could be facing, before turning and introducing him to the head of customs, who told Stratton that Stratton would now be working with him.

  From that point on, with government complicity in this criminal activity that essentially made the corrupt politicians a key component of the drug trafficking network, Stratton’s loads grew, and were soon being shipped on commercial airliners into Boston Logan and New York John F. Kennedy airports. He also continued to send loads by sailboats into Montauk, New York. As the commercial smuggling grew, he took a bonded warehouse in New Jersey and acquired a trucking company to enable his distribution through the college campuses and hippie communities of the Northeast.

  The loads from Beirut needed cover. Stratton used dates. He went to Baghdad to buy the dates, and then arranged for them to be shipped overland from Baghdad to Beirut, where they were stored. He then went to Baalbek, in Lebanon’s Beqaa Valley, and bought 7.5 metric tons (16,534.7 pounds) of the best hashish available: zahra (loosely, “beautiful flower” in Arabic) and double zahra. He began competing with Afghani hash, which was of inferior quality.

  Stratton blames Lebanese warlord families for ruining the US market for Lebanese hash by importing product of lower price but lesser quality. Those networks could export in much greater bulk than Stratton could manage. When the US market became less favorable, Stratton kept his importation lines into the US and started moving his product overland into Canada. This is what is known in illicit trade as the balloon effect: when a network is squeezed in one location, it shifts distribution to another.

  An American named Pierre, who lived in Florida, was the “Wizard of ID”: he provided all the passports, driver’s licenses, and other documents Stratton and his network of smugglers needed. He was what we call in the security business a “key facilitator.”

  The head of the hashish growers’ organization in the Beqaa was a man named Abu Ali. Stratton says he met Abu Ali’s son in Texas, where he was an American soldier with ASIA (Army Support Intelligence Activity) at Fort Hood; the group gathered highly compartmentalized military intelligence. Stratton says that he once came home to find his garage filled with US military-grade weapons that were being moved from Houston to Beirut for the civil war in support of Bachir Gemayel, who commanded the Lebanese Forces militia and was a senior leader of the right-wing Christian Phalange Party, which the CIA was reputed to have backed in the Lebanese civil war.

  In 1982, Gemayel was indeed elected president of Lebanon, but he died before he could take office, when a bomb planted by a Syrian agent blasted Phalange headquarters. According to Stratton, it was rumored that the US Drug Enforcement Administration and CIA were doing controlled shipments of heroin from the Jafar family in Baalbek to Detroit. Controlled shipments are standard in complex intelligence operations: an undercover intelligence operative becomes part of the criminal network and gives it drugs or money in order to trace the movements and find out who is involved, because the only way to map the network is to flow through it.

  Khalid Jafar died in the explosion of the Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Jafar was a frequent passenger on that route, accompanying the drug shipments. But something went wrong the day Pan Am 103 exploded over Lockerbie: one of the drug suitcases was replaced with a bomb.

  MONSAR AL-KASSAR AND PAN AM 103

  The families of the victims of Pan Am 103 hired a private investigative firm called Interfor, headed by an Israeli ex-Mossad operative, Juval Aviv. The Interfor Report, as it has come to be known, poses a number of theories. One of them is that the bomb was planted by Hezbollah or other groups who were targeting the five Beirut station CIA operatives they had learned were on the flight. The CIA allegedly had the flights under surveillance because of shipments of interest from the Soviet-controlled Eastern Bloc via Pan Am through Frankfurt, Berlin, and Moscow.7

  The report claims the route was controlled by Monser al-Kassar, who was married to Syrian president Hafez al-Assad’s sister. Al-Kassar was a major trafficker of weapons and drugs, and also an asset of Iranian intelligence. It is suspected that the Beirut station of the CIA was trying to use al-Kassar to free the American hostages in Iran, as well as to get weapons for the Nicaraguan Contras: in other words, he was involved in the Iran-Contra affair.

  Monser al-Kassar was a Syrian-born arms smuggler who rose to prominence via his work with Eastern European intelligence agencies in the early 1980s and sold arms to Bosnia, Croatia, and Somalia in violation of UN sanctions. He was arrested in 1992 in Spain for his involvement in the Achille Lauro hijacking.8 Arms dealers like al-Kassar and Viktor Bout (who supplied weapons to wars on every continent of the world at one time) were key nodes linking criminals to terrorists in a global network. Bout was a well-known weapons supplier to the Colombian FARC, too.

  The investigations and prosecutions of two key facilitators in the crime-terror pipeline illustrate both the threat convergence and the political aspirations of the actors. Bout and al-Kassar were lured by the promise of multimillion-dollar sales of arms to the FARC to achieve political objectives in line with their personal views. For al-Kassar, it was going after the Colombian army; for Bout, it was going after American advisers to the Colombian government and military.

  The crime-terror pipeline links not only crime and terrorism, but insurgency as well. Terrorists are funded by crime and criminals with political agendas: both are facilitated by government corruption. Both groups are also used by governments (or government agencies) as proxies to achieve defined objectives. Once again, both are significantly funded by US consumption of narcotics. All the while, the violence spreads like a virus across oceans and continents, to be inscribed on the bodies of the dead, the maimed, the tortured, the enslaved, and the refugee.

  6

  The War Games Begin

  My trip to Lebanon put me on the map in a way I did not expect. In the summer of 2012, I’d been home only a couple of weeks when I got an email from US Army’s Asymmetric Warfare Group inviting me to participate in a �
�vulnerability assessment exercise” (a war game, they were honest enough to call it) on the Levant. I did not know it yet, but it was my turning point: I would learn how the US military thinks about groups like Lebanese Hezbollah and the crime-terror pipeline of which those groups are a part. Then I would see these pipelines at work in Central America: the violence from drugs pushing people toward the US and terrorist groups exploiting those flows, while state governments are increasingly overwhelmed. At the end of the line is the American consumer, citizen, and taxpayer, buying the drugs or profiting from modern slavery while the smuggling networks bring violence to our neighborhoods.

  The Asymmetric Warfare Group is a unit of highly trained warriors who are also strategic thinkers. Their job is to identify vulnerabilities in the systems of opponents that we can exploit to our advantage, and to identify our own weaknesses and come up with quick solutions, whether they have to do with military hardware, personnel, or tactics. The best way to describe it is as the ultimate game of chess: a group representing the US and its allies sits in one room (the blue cell), the opponent group in another (the red cell), and other groups like the UN or NGOs in another (the gray cell). There can be other cells, depending on game design. Each cell devises secret strategies and takes actions, of which it informs only a roaming moderator with a laptop that runs the algorithms of the game. After each round, everyone sees who did what to whom and then each cell has to decide what to do next. The Asymmetric Warfare Group brings in civilian consultants to these games, and I was asked to participate in the next one.