The BMPE is used by drug dealers to launder money and to dispatch it overseas without rousing the suspicion of international law enforcement and bank monitors. It’s a simple system in which drug money is sold to South American brokers, who then deposit the cash in legitimate accounts or use it to purchase goods such as cars, appliances, or jewelry; some of the money is used to pay debts, such as rent or mortgages. The goods are shipped back South America, usually Colombia or Venezuela, and then sold on the black market in their original currency. The proceeds are then given to the narco-traffickers. Former U.S. Customs Service, and New York Police Department, Commissioner Ray Kelly called the Black Market Peso Exchange “the largest, most insidious money laundering system in the Western Hemisphere.”8
Ghazi Atef Nasser al-Din had a partner, a Lebanese-born merchant and money launderer named Fawzi Kana’an. Kana’an was born in 1943 and hailed from Ba’albek, an ancient Roman town in the Beka’a Valley in Lebanon. He immigrated to Venezuela in 1977, years before the zealots from Tehran and Qom turned his hometown into the ground zero for Iranian military intervention in Lebanon. Kana’an was a successful businessman who had skillfully negotiated the dangerous streets of Caracas to open two successful travel agencies: the Byblos Travel Service, and the Hillal Travel Company, both on the upscale Avenida Baralt. The travel agencies were the ideal conduit for monies to be wired back to Lebanon. It was a highly lucrative enterprise.
But Ghazi’s fortunes soon changed for the better. He became friends and then partners with members of President Hugo Chávez’s government. One man that Ghazi grew particularly close to was Tareck El Aissami, Chávez’s interior minister. El Aissami was a Druze. His father had come to Venezuela from Syria and was a successful businessman who espoused radical Arabic socialist politics.9 He was also a major link connecting Hezbollah, Iran, and the Chávez junta. According to some reports, El Aissami’s financial empire boasted front companies and properties, all shielded by accounts in banks throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. His network used the Lebanese Canadian Bank to launder untold millions of dollars and move multiton shipments of narcotics for cocaine cartels as well as Hezbollah.10
Ghazi also befriended Nicolás Maduro, the minister for foreign affairs and a crony of Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez. Venezuela had turned into an oil-rich rogue nation that stuck its middle finger in the eyes of the United States at every turn. Although the nation was awash with petrodollar profits, it was also a criminal state that trafficked in narcotics and maintained close ties to Iran, Syria, and, of course, Hezbollah. Maduro’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs became a one-stop shop—for a hefty fee, of course—for Venezuelan passports and identity cards. The Venezuelan travel booklets soon flooded the southern slums of Beirut and the training camps of southern Lebanon.
One man who received a Venezuelan passport was an Israeli Arab named Kais Obeid; Obeid was a low-level criminal and Hezbollah operative who had played a role in the kidnapping of a reservist Israeli officer, as well as the financing of certain Palestinian cells during the intifada. Obeid was a member of Hezbollah’s Unit 1800, a covert force of operatives who recruited, funded, and led Palestinian terror squads against the Jewish state.11 Before he fled Israel to Lebanon, Obeid had been involved in cocaine smuggling operations with Israelis, including several military officers, involving South American narcotics in Lebanon that were to be sold in Israel.12 Other Hezbollah operatives in the Middle East—men who had never stepped foot on South American soil let alone ever uttered a word in Spanish—were also provided with genuine Venezuelan passports and cedulas, or identity cards courtesy of Maduro’s Foreign Ministry.
Maduro had an insatiable appetite for money and skullduggery. But he saw tremendous promise in Ghazi both for his own enrichment and to advance Venezuela’s foreign policy initiatives. Caracas used its oil and drug money to fund regional operations, such as providing assistance to the FARC, the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia. The Marxist FARC had waged a relentless war against the Colombian government since 1964, and drug trafficking was a major source of their income. To enhance the operation, Foreign Minister Maduro deputized Ghazi into the ranks of Venezuela’s diplomatic corps. To make the growing business even more successful, Ghazi was even named the charge d’affaires at the Venezuelan embassy in Damascus. “It was a remarkable development,” Uri L. recalled, “to think that a nation with an airline, an army, an intelligence service, and diplomatic outposts all over the world, was nothing more than a criminal organization was sobering. The fact that the drug business was funding Israel’s enemies was a situation that could not proceed.”
What became even more remarkable was the fact that commercial flights commenced in 2007 between Simón Bolívar International Airport in Caracas and Imam Khomeini International Airport in Tehran: a very unusual commercial flight path that couldn’t rationally be marketed as a tourist destination. Of course the flights made a refueling stop in Damascus before continuing east. There were two sets of flights—one operated by Iran Air, and the other by Conviasa, the Venezuelan state-owned airline. The roundtrip fare was an estimated $1,450. The U.S. State Department contended that passengers boarding the flights in Caracas were mysteriously not subjected to passport and immigration controls. “The concerns are just not in the abstract,” former CIA Director Michael Hayden said. “We saw people traveling who made us wonder.”13 The flights were known as “Aeroterror.”14
With Ghazi situated as the number two Venezuelan diplomat at the embassy in the Syrian capital, the flights from South America carried drugs and cash in diplomatic pouches. It was the mother of all schemes and immensely profitable to all concerned.
Ghazi Atef Nasser al-Din became the darling of the Damascus diplomatic circuit. One American security officer who worked at the U.S. embassy and requested anonymity said that the wives of the ambassadors loved him.15 Handsome and urbane, he represented Venezuela in Syria with an air of confidence that only a drug lord could possess. It was, of course, pure arrogance. Drugs and protection made him all-powerful. His diplomatic passport made him untouchable.
Israel’s intelligence community kept a watchful eye on Hezbollah’s involvement in the cocaine and heroin trade. Israel’s spymasters were horrified when, in 1998, U.S. President Bill Clinton removed both Lebanon and Syria from the list of nations that trafficked in narcotics.16 Israeli intelligence chiefs couldn’t understand the American move. Not only were poppies cultivated by farmers in the Beka’a Valley, but the area was also an epicenter of criminal activity, ranging from the counterfeiting of U.S. currency and the euro to the counterfeiting of prescription medication.17 Hezbollah’s criminal reach was global.
Dagan, though, was infuriated by the Venezuelan-Syrian-Hezbollah nexus, and pushed Harpoon to act. Targeting Ghazi presented a sobering challenge to Harpoon. Regardless of his drug-dealing endeavors, Ghazi was a diplomat, protected by the Geneva Protocols; extrajudicial treatment of diplomats was frowned upon in international circles. In Damascus, Ghazi was protected by Syria’s security services, Hezbollah, and agents from Venezuela’s Dirección de Servicios de Inteligencia y Prevención, the DISIP.* Syria was closer to Israel’s borders than Venezuela, but it was dangerous and difficult for Israeli intelligence to operate inside Bashir al-Assad’s police state. Dagan remained undaunted, however. “Dagan was determined to put a serious crimp in the Hezbollah drug trade,” a former Harpoon officer remembered, “but Dagan knew that this would not be something that Israel or the Mossad could do alone. It would have to enlist international support. And that meant the United States.”18
In 2007, Syria’s continuous rogue policies had earned the regime its spot in President Bush’s self-declared Axis of Evil. The Mossad and other facets of Israel’s intelligence community had learned of the top-secret construction of a nuclear reactor in Deir ez-Zor in northeastern Syria, near the Iraqi frontier; the facility had been designed and was being built by North Korean nuclear engineers. The
intelligence-gathering operations were far-reaching and global. According to foreign reports, details of the reactor were retrieved by Mossad agents in London who swiped them from the laptop of one of the Syrian nuclear engineers involved in the project.19 The proof of Syria’s nuclear intentions was irrefutable.
Prime Minister Olmert took the intelligence to President Bush. Meir Dagan also traveled to Langley to share the intelligence findings with the CIA in the hope that the United States would see fit to take preemptive action; Dagan ventured to the White House, as well. But President Bush, embroiled in two wars already, was wary. Faced with no other choice, Israeli Prime Minister Olmert opted to go it alone and before it became operational with the threat of any nuclear material being released into the environment. At just after midnight on September 7, 2007, Israeli warplanes struck the under-construction nuclear reactor and destroyed the entire facility. The raid became known as Operation Orchard.
The possibility that Syria could build a nuclear reactor in secret underscored the danger posed by the Assad regime. “My patience ran out on President Assad a long time ago,” Bush said at a White House press conference, in 2007. “The reason why is because he houses Hamas, he facilitates Hezbollah, suicide bombers go from his country into Iraq, and he destabilizes Lebanon.”20 The time was perfect for the U.S. government to support Israeli efforts against the Venezuelan and Hezbollah drug ring run out of Damascus.
Under Meir Dagan’s leadership, a close-knit, never-before-exhibited relationship was forged between the CIA and the Mossad. Both agencies shared a skeptical and suspicious history. The CIA had always feared that many elements of Israel’s political hierarchy—and, indeed, Israel’s intelligence services—were penetrated by the KGB operatives or the Warsaw Pact espionage services. There were, of course, many inside the CIA who harbored strong anti-Semitic hatred, and they viewed American support for the State of Israel as part of a grand Jewish plot. And, of course, the arrest and conviction of Jonathan Jay Pollard, the American intelligence analyst who spied on behalf of Israel, had further strained the relationship between the espionage services of the two allies.
But both agencies also realized just how very much they had in common on the global battlefield. Meir Dagan was viewed as the larger-than-life figure whose word was rock-solid and whose ability to get the mission done knew no bounds. “He exhibits tough love,” former CIA Director Michael Hayden said with a smile, in an interview for Israel’s Channel One. “There is a softness there, but there’s a hard shell around it. He’s a thoroughgoing professional.”21
At Langley, or at Mossad headquarters in Israel, Dagan was always referred to as the general. The Israeli spymaster enjoyed the respect, and CIA chiefs enjoyed his company. “Dagan was always smiling and determined to tell a joke or a funny story,” Uri recalled. A joke, sometimes, helped to alleviate the stress of the life and death matters being discussed in a SCIF, or Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, behind fortified doors guarded by armed men. The intelligence file on Ghazi Atef Nasser al-Din was discussed at one of these closed-door meetings. Dagan sought the CIA’s help. But Ghazi wasn’t an Agency priority, and the CIA wasn’t interested. But the Drug Enforcement Administration was. The agency was already working its own Ghazi file involving the nexus between Hezbollah and cocaine.
The DEA was created on July 1, 1973, by President Richard M. Nixon to replace the small and little-known Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. The United States, following the flower-power movement of the 1960s and its relaxed attitude toward drugs, found itself battling new society standards and a stream of heroin and other drugs flowing into the country from Southeast Asia and Southwest Asia. The DEA, part of the Department of Justice, is responsible for battling drug smuggling and use within the United States, and leading major criminal investigations—and operations—in the continental United States and overseas.
There was always an international component to the DEA. DEA representatives were stationed at key U.S. embassies overseas in nations such as Pakistan and Thailand that were either producers of narcotics or key stops on smuggling routes to the United States. During the Cocaine Cowboy years in southern Florida in the early 1980s and then in the years to follow, the DEA became an intrinsic force throughout Latin America; DEA personnel and units were embedded inside the police and paramilitary forces fighting cocaine trafficking in Colombia, Mexico, and a half-dozen other nations throughout the Caribbean. The DEA maintained a small air force and navy.
Although the DEA responded to the September 11, 2001, attacks like all other federal law enforcement entities by sending resources to newly established frontline posts in Afghanistan, as well as reinforcing agents assigned to the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan, and the consulates in Lahore, Peshawar, and Karachi, the agency sought a more active role in what became known as the global war on terror. Frontline status in the American-led effort—especially high-profile arrests and prosecutions—meant congressional exposure and funding. Funding for an agency meant relevance and survival.
The DEA, and its special operations assets, had extensive networks in Colombia and Venezuela. Years of fighting the cocaine trade led to an intimate knowledge of the terrain and the personalities involved. All of the DEA personnel in-country, or in-theater, were fluent Spanish speakers; many were the first-generations sons—and daughters—of immigrants from those nations. The DEA also had links, through a liaison agent stationed at the U.S. embassy in Beirut, with Lebanese law enforcement and the agency that was responsible for combating narcotics trafficking. Many of those police commanders were Maronite Christians or Sunni Muslims, and they despised what Hezbollah had done to their country. The DEA also maintained excellent relations with the Israel National Police, both through the U.S. embassy in Tel Aviv and by way of the Israel National Police attaché posted to the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. The attaché was the conduit for information and leads going back and forth across the ocean.
Close-knit cooperation with the DEA was a powerful new weapon for the Israeli efforts. The DEA brought with it the entire might of the U.S. Department of Justice. “As we used to joke in the unit,” an INP veteran explained, “the power of the American judiciary, and the other branches of government, like the Department of Treasury, wielded more force than a fleet of aircraft carriers.”22
On June 18, 2008, the United States Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) identified both Ghazi and Kana’an as individuals operating on behalf of terrorist entities or the state sponsors of terrorist entities.23 OFAC administers and enforces economic and trade sanctions against targeted regimes, terrorists, and international narcotics traffickers, with the power to impose controls on transactions and freeze assets under U.S. jurisdiction. OFAC’s origins go back to after the Second World War, when the Department of the Treasury tried to track and retrieve assets stolen by the Nazis. OFAC’s role greatly expanded following the 9/11 attacks, when the full force of the U.S. government was used to prohibit individuals and groups from having access to the U.S. financial system—which, in essence, banished terrorist groups and their financiers from global banking networks.24
The campaign against the Venezuelan-Hezbollah cocaine nexus was based on proactive intelligence. HUMINT (human intelligence, the use of spies and agents), SIGINT (signal intelligence, and the interception of phone calls and e-mails), and ELINT (electronic intelligence, the interception of electromagnetic signals from weapons systems) methods were used to monitor the traffickers in Latin America. Agents on the ground gathered intelligence about the sourcing of the cocaine, the methods of packaging, and how the packages were transported, all under the protection of the Venezuelan Ministry of Foreign Affairs, on the flights between Caracas and Damascus. Drug investigations were dangerous affairs. Throughout Maicao and the areas connecting Colombia and Venezuela, heavily armed men roamed the streets with impunity. Many of them spoke Arabic.
Some elements of Israel’s intelligence-gathering efforts were eas
y. Flight arrivals were easy enough to monitor—it was easy enough for ham radio enthusiasts in the area to listen in to Damascus International Airport ground control, so it wasn’t too much of a challenge for Unit 8200, the IDF’s eavesdropping and technical intelligence powerhouse, to do so, as well; according to some estimates, 80 percent of the raw intelligence data that reaches A’man’s Research Department for analysis originates with Unit 8200.25 Sources and assets in Syria—the details about which cannot be extrapolated—monitored the movement of drugs and money from the airport to the Venezuelan embassy on Ibn Al Khatib Street number 5, off of Rawda Square. Syrian intelligence agents, in uniform and in plainclothes, protected the building. The Venezuelan embassy was a mere one thousand feet from the U.S. embassy in the Syrian capital.
Ghazi Atef Nasser al-Din drove around Damascus in a vehicle with diplomatic plates. His home, his car, and his person were considered sovereign Venezuelan territory. It couldn’t be stopped or searched. The drugs and money also traveled in diplomatic vehicles. The contraband arrived, sometimes several times a week, on the flights from Caracas. The loads were often warehoused at the embassy; Syrian officials had to be taken care of, and the amount had to be counted and skimmed in envelopes and bundles prepared for ruling-party insiders who were promised a cut. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard also took a cut, but their parcels of $100 bills were prepacked in Caracas and left on board the flights to Tehran to be retrieved later. The drugs, and the monies destined for Hezbollah, also had to be transported from Damascus to Beirut.
The transports to Beirut were secret and designed to avoid any unwarranted attention. Sometimes cars from the embassy would make the fifty-mile trek across the Beirut-Damascus Highway—men paid off on both sides of the border made sure that the vehicles were expedited. Sometimes, the vehicles would make a more circuitous overland route, attempting to avoid the prying eyes of drones, aircraft, or satellites overhead; spies, informers, and duplicitous souls were everywhere along these traditional smuggling routes through villages and crossroads controlled by rogue men. Ghazi, and the Hezbollah drug lords, thought that overland was the safest way to transport the cash and drugs; the Venezuelans and Syrians agreed. But here, of course, was where the convoys were vulnerable.
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