Blood Profits

by Vanessa Neumann

  When the Algerian Special Forces ended the four-day siege, the blazing noonday sun shone down on the corpses of thirty-eight hostages and twenty-nine militants. The US, UK, France, and Japan were shocked and confused: they had received no advance word of the assault, had no idea how many of their citizens had been killed. Even the rescue itself had been brutal, in keeping with the Algerian government’s history of violent responses to Islamist militancy.

  Algeria’s interior minister, Daho Ould Kablia, confirmed that the 830 hostages had been held by forty members (not thirty, as first reported) of an Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) offshoot, Al-Mourabitoun (“The Signed-in-Blood Brigade”), commanded by Mr. Marlboro.

  Belmokhtar had learned to fight as a mujahideen in 1980s Afghanistan, against the Soviets. Because of the successful expulsion of the Soviets, jihadists consider Afghanistan hallowed ground: the site of their first successful jihad against an outside and apostate oppressor, the Soviets. It was in Afghanistan that Belmokhtar met Osama bin Laden, joined Al Qaeda, and named his son Osama in homage. When he returned to North Africa, he led AQIM, and it was then he became known as “Mr. Marlboro.” After a falling-out with Al Qaeda (some say because they felt he was more focused on making money from the illicit cigarette trade than on waging jihad), he founded his own terrorist militia, al-Mulathamun (“The Masked Men”).

  In 2013 Mr. Marlboro’s al-Mulathamun Battalion merged with the Movement for Unity and Jihad in West Africa (MUJAO), both of which were offshoots of Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. In May, they carried out joint suicide bombings in Niger that killed at least twenty people. The merger was complete, and the Signed-in-Blood Brigade was born.

  The newly formed brigade announced its intentions to “rout” France and its allies in the region and to violently implement sharia (Islamic law) in West Africa. The group carried out attacks against French interests in the region, including African military units coordinating against Islamist forces, and African civilians. According to the US State Department, the Signed-in-Blood Brigade poses “the greatest near-term threat to US and Western interests in the Sahel.”1

  Commanded by Mr. Marlboro, the Signed-in-Blood Brigade was also responsible for the November 2015 attack on the Radisson Blu hotel in Bamako, Mali, that left nineteen hostages and two attackers dead, and the January 2016 siege of the Splendid Hotel in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, where twenty-two (out of 148) hostages were killed. Mr. Marlboro has been declared dead three times, but all indications are that he is still alive.

  According to the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), about 15 percent of the cigarettes smoked in the West African region are bought on the black market and trafficked through West Africa. AQIM and the splinter group MUJAO have been taxing traffickers in return for safeguarding their passage for decades. The smuggling of cigarettes to North African markets began to thrive in the early 1980s, and it developed into a large-scale business controlled by a few major players. Cigarette smuggling in particular has greatly contributed to the emergence of the practices and networks that have allowed drug trafficking to grow, eroding state institutions and thereby further destabilizing countries throughout the region, including Libya and Algeria.

  Mr. Marlboro’s cigarettes often enter West Africa through Ghana, Benin, and Togo. A second route is via Guinea, where the supply, according to the UNODC, vastly exceeds the country’s demand. The cigarettes are then moved to Mali by road or by boat on the Niger River, where there is little risk of detection. Mauritania is a third distribution hub, for smuggled goods bound for Senegal, Morocco, and Algeria. In each case, Mr. Marlboro makes enormous profits, either by charging a “tax” for the safe passage of the cigarettes along the route or by facilitating their transport, using 4×4s, trucks, motorcycles, and even bicycles.2

  Cigarettes imported through Mauritania supply a large portion of the Algerian and Moroccan markets, while those imported through Cotonou in Benin and Lomé in Togo are routed through Niger and Burkina Faso to Libya and Algeria. In 2009, UNODC estimated cigarettes smuggled along these routes accounted for around 60 percent of the Libyan tobacco market (or $240 million in proceeds at the retail level) and 18 percent of the Algerian market (or $228 million).3

  The collusion between smugglers and state officials has compromised the customs services through corruption. For part of its journey, the merchandise is transported in large trucks on main roads, with the collusion of corrupt Malian and Nigerian security officials. In Libya, cigarette smuggling is controlled by networks in the security apparatus dominated by members of the Qadhadfa tribe. In the triangle connecting Mauritania, Mali, and Algeria, Sahrawi networks—often with the direct involvement of officials in the Polisario Front, which seeks independence for Western Sahara—trade subsidizes Algerian goods and humanitarian aid southward in exchange for cigarettes bound northward to Algeria and Morocco.4

  THE BIRTH OF ASYMMETRICA

  It was in 2013 while smoking shisha (the molasses-based tobacco concoction smoked in a hookah, the ornate water pipe used throughout the Middle East)—under the shadow of the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai—that I conceived of my company, which would become Asymmetrica. The sun had set and I was chatting poolside at the Palace Hotel with Michael Waltz, a friend and colleague who was also in Dubai on business. Waltz is a former Green Beret who spent an exceptional amount of time in Afghanistan, then served in the White House and the Pentagon before returning to the field. He has the unusual perspective of being part of the Washington, D.C., policymaking machine, then living the consequences of implementing those policies on the ground, and then returning to Washington. He is also a successful entrepreneur.

  On this particular trip to the United Arab Emirates, he was introducing Afghan Pashtuns (the tribe from which the fierce Taliban are drawn) to people who would help them set up businesses to rebuild Afghanistan, to make them productive citizens rather than insurgents: the Afghan version of the DDR (disarmament, demobilization, and reintegration) Colombia implements. I was there for different reasons, but I had a business idea of my own.

  “There are two segments of people who care about illicit trade,” I said, “businesses and security agencies. Businesses see it as a market problem—illegal competition eating at market share and damaging their brands by counterfeiting. Security agencies see it as a ‘threat finance’ problem, a generator of funds to bad guys. But they can’t speak each other’s languages. I understand business more than security, but if I can be the bridge between the two, I think I have a business.”

  Waltz liked my idea. Since 2010, I had been in business as Vanessa Neumann, Inc., consulting on Venezuela, Colombia, and the flows of dark money between and from them, but in that moment I saw clearly my targeted growth niche and began to develop a strategy to conquer it.

  Waltz invited me to join him on his trip with the Pashtuns to Abu Dhabi the next day. The bus ride from Dubai to Abu Dhabi was civilized enough. I knew enough to put a hijab (the Muslim head scarf) in my bag, but I did not wear it on the bus. Neither did the woman who sat next to me: Shahla Nawabi, who owned a business in Kabul but lived half of the time in London. Shahla was quite forceful and opinionated: a fellow woman born in a country that celebrates male domination but who then got accustomed to the ways of Western liberalism. I recognized the phenomenon; we got on well.

  Our first stop was the Sheikh Zayed Mosque, the United Arab Emirates’ religious heart. Enormous and gleaming in perfect white marble, it made you feel as if you were entering Heaven—which is the point. My hijab wouldn’t cut it. I had to cover my clothes with an abaya, the long flowing robes devout Muslim women wear over their clothes. I put on one of the all-black, sweaty, and rather smelly ones they had to lend visitors, but I made a mental note to visit the shopping mall right next to the Palace Hotel when I got back to Dubai and purchase a couple of my own for the future.

  Great Muslim mosques are spectacular to behold. Figurative depictions of the human form and of Allah are not allowed
in Islam. The elaborate decoration centers on Arabic calligraphy of unimaginable delicacy and ornateness. The walls and ceilings and floors are inlaid with lapis lazuli, onyx, opals. The feeling these mosques impart is one of transcendent peace.

  From the mosque, we went to the Afghan Embassy. Here my hijab would suffice, but I committed a cultural faux pas. Entering the drawing room where we would be received by the ambassador, I found a free spot on a sofa. No sooner had my rear end touched the fabric than the two seated men sprang up as if it were on fire and promptly scooted to the other side of the room. I sat there alone, until the Afghan-British businesswoman Shahla joined me.

  “Geez, that’s no joke, is it?”

  “No,” she answered. “Just wait until the lunch. Not only will we women be seated alone at our table, we’ll probably have empty tables around us.”

  Before lunch, however, we sat through a presentation on the changes in Afghanistan since the American invasion in late 2001. At the question-and-answer session, Shahla raised her hand. The presenting Muslims ignored her as they took questions from the men. She kept her hand raised. The Muslim presenters continued to ignore her and started to move on as if she did not exist. I protested. So did a few men in the audience. In the end—because other men protested—the presenters relented and acknowledged Shahla, but they only answered her vaguely, and rather dismissively.

  On our way to the lunchroom, I noticed a Pashtun I had not seen on the bus. He took my breath away. He was in full tribal dress, and an intricately wrapped turban of the most exquisite colorful weave sat atop a face that seemed to have popped right out of one of those Romantic portraits in the Frick Collection, with pale blue eyes thickly rimmed in kohl, a long narrow hooked nose, and a long beard died red with henna. He was glorious, and unrepentantly proud of his tribe. He must have noticed my stunned reaction, because he smiled at me, which is unusual for such a traditional Muslim man.

  Shahla was only partly right about lunch. When we sat down to eat, it was indeed only the two of us at the table. But then the ambassador joined us, clearly making a point. Other men followed. The ambassador smiled at us.

  “I believe in progress,” he said.

  I smiled back. It was a reminder of how women’s equality is by no means the norm in the world. It hardened my resolve as an entrepreneur.

  EVOLUTION

  My professional profile ramped up another notch on March 5, 2013, when my phone started ringing nonstop. The news confirmed what I suspected was the cause: the Venezuelan president, Hugo Chávez, had died. I was flooded with requests for comment by the world’s media, both international and local. I called my assistant, Danielle Schwab, to come over to my house and help me manage the chaos, and I stayed up all through the night and the following day giving interviews, often just fifteen minutes apart. As producers altered their schedules, I was sometimes in the crazy situation of giving two interviews simultaneously, one on Skype, the other on the phone. Poor Danielle also traipsed with me to television studios; she set up a Google Hangout for me to do an interview with HuffPo Live as soon as I stepped off the stage at Fox.

  Every media outlet had its own agenda: the right-wingers were gleeful he was dead; the left-wingers thought it was the tragic death of a hero and crafted complex conspiracy theories that ultimately blamed the CIA. I tried to stick to the facts of Chávez’s rise, his consolidation of power, the country’s economic troubles, the causes of the inefficacy of the opposition, and what might come next for Venezuela’s economy and foreign policy. Regardless of where the interviewers stood on the political spectrum, they all predicted a warming of US-Venezuela relations, with Venezuela returning to being an American ally, as it was when I was a child growing up in Caracas. No, I contradicted. Why would it change? What would drive that change? Chávez may be dead, but the Chavistas remain deeply entrenched, and hating America has been good for them, bringing them power and money. Until they have more to gain with the US than they do with Russia, Iran, and China, this pattern won’t change. I could hear the deflation in their voices, but I was right.

  The night of March 4, I had to fly to Geneva to sign what would become my long-term corporate client for the next several years. I had not slept in two days. I picked up my suitcase, without any idea what my housekeeper had put in it, and headed to JFK. Upon arriving at my hotel in Lausanne the next day, I had three hours to rest, shower, and change before going to my would-be client’s massive headquarters to lay out my strategic plan to combat illicit trade in their industry.

  A month later, in April 2013, I returned to the OECD for the start of its Task Force on Charting Illicit Trade (which in 2016 was renamed Countering Illicit Trade, to everyone’s relief), chaired by David Luna. In 2013, we had our work cut out for us: it was a bit like herding cats. Government and industry do not tend to work well together and, because of their differing objectives, in many cases are barred from doing so. Getting industry and government to share information and their experiences was not simple, though that is exactly what this task force was supposed to accomplish. I was appointed to head the tobacco group, which I did for two years, until 2015. The work entailed gathering data on cigarette smuggling from the major tobacco producers, law enforcement agencies, and multilateral groups like the World Customs Organization, then collating it all into a text that was balanced and gave an accurate portrayal.

  To call it complicated and politicized would be an understatement: each group had divergent agendas, and everyone knew it. At first, the only ones who provided detailed information were the tobacco companies, who had reams of data on what brands were illegal and how much of each was being sold in which country. The government agencies disputed their numbers, but refused to provide their own. There were even heated arguments about how the measurements were taken and who was behind the smuggling. It was interesting, if often frustrating, and it seemed that the only countries that cared much about it were the US and—to a much lesser extent—the UK. Both countries criticized plenty, saying they had different information, but refused to share that information or add any comments to the documents. I suspected something else was going on.

  By that time in 2013, I had a strategic business plan, a steady client, and my pro bono role at the OECD, but I still kept my finger on the pulse of what was happening under the Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela as Nicolás Maduro, a former bus driver who’d become foreign minister and then vice president, assumed the presidential mantle after Chávez’s death.

  The encrypted exchanges with what I termed “my kids”—a network of young tech-savvy university students who wanted change in Venezuela—continued until I landed in Caracas on May 12, 2013, and arranged to finally meet a couple of them in person a few days later. We alternated our meeting sites between random public lunch spots and one trusted friend’s home. To meet the first of the kids, I went with what had become my standard security contingent: an armored SUV with a driver and a shooter in the front seat beside him, with a second car following us as backup. In 1970s Caracas, when I was a child, there were a lot of organized kidnappings of the wealthy, so it was not uncommon for me and my friends to have bodyguards, or at least a driver with a weapon and training in “close personal protection.” When I worked in Caracas in the early 1990s, it was normal that our cars, which looked like the average Toyota or Nissan, would be armored with reinforced doors and thick bulletproof glass.

  Since the Chavista rise to power, however, criminality, popular anger, and political repression had all skyrocketed and law enforcement had fallen into chaos: Caracas became one of most violent cities on earth. By the time I landed in May 2013, I had three things to fear: general criminals who would shoot you just for your cell phone or, if you looked like your family might be able to afford a $30,000 ransom, take you in an opportunistic “kidnap express,” release you, and do the same thing to someone else the next day; the half of the population (Chavista) that hated my half (opposition), leading to class violence with racial underpinnings; and an oppressive
regime that used Soviet-style surveillance and detained and tortured critics like me. I had to be careful to keep me, my family, and anyone I spoke to out of trouble.

  Three days after my arrival, on May 15, 2013, I met the kid with whom I had established the greatest rapport. He hopped into my SUV and we drove around fairly randomly while we chatted in person for the first time. He asked whether I in any way worked for the US government.

  “No. I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. I have a brother in Caracas to protect.” The Chavista regime is rabidly anti-American; if I were mistakenly perceived as working for the US government, he could be imprisoned, tortured, or killed by the regime. “I’m just an academic trying to understand what has happened here,” I explained.

  He was disappointed; I guess he thought I would be more helpful to their cause if I were working with the US government.

  After about twenty minutes of driving around, we made it to a downtown street and went to an arepera. Arepas are corn patties shaped like hamburgers that you cut open and stuff with whatever you like: eggs for breakfast, or chicken or pork with avocado for lunch.

  Later, in 2017, it was nearly impossible to have an arepa: Empresas Polar, the country’s largest food and beverage company, which makes the Harina P.A.N. (the corn flour used to make arepas) and Polar beer, halted production because they couldn’t obtain the foreign currency needed to purchase raw materials. Currency controls had been imposed by the government: you had to ask permission to convert your sales in the local currency of the Bolívar Fuerte into US dollars to pay your suppliers. The government regulated both the price at which you could sell your goods in Venezuela and your access to dollars to pay the suppliers.