Harpoon

by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner

  Harpoon, and other facets of Israeli intelligence, thought of innovative ways—mostly nonlethal—that could be used to interrupt the flow of drugs and cash. They discussed innovative ideas, such as enlisting the services of certain types of insects, namely caterpillars, that could eat the drugs or the cash before the contraband could reach a junkie in Europe and a bank in Lebanon. Dagan’s spies were asked to be original and imaginative. It was a new reality for them, and in the end traditional and conventional solutions were found to make sure that not every shipment made it to the Lebanese capital.

  Operations mounted against the convoys by Israel were meant to disrupt the delivery process, not kill anyone. These commando raids were late-night operations executed under the cover of darkness that intercepted the vehicles bound for the Lebanese capital; narcotics were destroyed and cash was retrieved.

  But deep penetration raids into Lebanon were risky. In a nation like Lebanon, where information held unique value to militias and criminal gangs, a phone call, a tip, could often achieve the same effects as a battalion of reconnaissance commandos. There were gangs operating throughout Lebanon that made a lucrative living robbing drug traffickers, smugglers, and other criminals. These gangs came from all the ethnic groups that formed the Lebanese mosaic, but they were all heavily armed and ruthless. It is not known how many tips these gangs received from anonymous sources; the robberies, though, netted tens of millions of dollars in untraceable bills and hundreds of kilograms of drugs.

  The intelligence effort—one that was passive and preemptively deterrent—was designed to let the Venezuelans, the Syrians, and Hezbollah know that the secret operation was secret to no one. It was hoped, in both Israel and in the Beltway, that the campaign against the cocaine pipeline could be stopped; if the effort wasn’t going to bankrupt the endeavor, then both Harpoon and the DEA wanted it to rob Hezbollah of critical funds. When Ghazi and his partners took extra precautions to protect their loads, the DEA tipped off the Lebanese Central Office for Drug Control, the national law enforcement arm whose mission was to stifle the brisk heroin, marijuana, and cocaine trade emanating from the country. In one such major arrest, the CODC raided a house, south of Beirut, confiscated about fifty kilograms of cocaine, and arrested five members of the network; one Venezuelan national and four Lebanese were taken into custody. The drugs were worth more than $8 million and were part of 255 kilograms that the gang had planned to smuggle out of the country.26

  The DEA was also able to tip off European law enforcement agencies about possible shipments of Venezuelan cocaine headed for the continent via Lebanese merchant ships.

  The DEA’s cooperation with Israel had uncovered a brand-new universe of state and hostile terrorist entities joining forces to establish global pipelines of lucrative narcotics smuggling. The interdiction—by Lebanese gangs and “others”—of narcotics and cash meant problems for Ghazi and his crew. He was ultimately pulled from his post and placed in a lesser position in Lebanon, where he lost hands-on control of the cocaine flowing in on commercial flights.

  And now the DEA decided that they wanted to publicize the threat of narco-terrorism emanating from Lebanon and the threat that it posed to the United States. In 2009, Mark Braun, the head of DEA Special Operations, testified about the growing threat before a Senate subcommittee on African Affairs for the Committee on Foreign Relations. “Mark my words,” Braun warned, “as we speak here today, operatives from al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas—perhaps others—are rubbing shoulders with Latin American and Mexican drug cartels.”27

  It is difficult to quantify the dollar amount that the joint American-Israeli operation cost Hezbollah. Ghazi Atef Nasser al-Din was a pawn, a player, in a larger network involving governments but that depended on Hezbollah’s vast reach throughout the world and the Party of God’s dependence on criminally produced revenue as a major component of their annual operational budget. “The American-Israel cooperation shut the spigot on one stream of money,” Uri remarked, “and it opened others, and those had to be attended to.”28 Hezbollah was in no position to absorb additional losses. The Party of God had absorbed a blow of shock and awe to the midsection following the Ezzedine affair, and the dilution of their cocaine portfolio through Syria now had delivered another major loss.

  Ghazi Atef Nasser al-Din was a wakeup call for Harpoon and the DEA. The Venezuelan-Iranian-Hezbollah cocaine network was a stark reminder that there is an inseparable connection between terrorism and criminal activity—and both were fueled by money. In offices in Arlington, Virginia, as well as in Israel, men and women scribbled on white boards with ideas on how to disrupt the flow of drugs and money in particular from South America into the Middle East and beyond. Questions remained unanswered for Meir Dagan and the Harpoon team. What new spigot would Hezbollah open next? What did they do with the hundreds of millions it collected from operations around the world? Once again Lebanon’s banks, the ones that laundered and safeguarded much of the drug money, were placed in the center of Israel’s crosshairs.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Follow the Money

  Intelligence work has one moral law—it is justified by results.

  —John le Carré, The Spy Who Came In from the Cold

  Uri Bar-Lev was a special operations legend in Israel. A former combat engineer officer who had lost part of a leg while in service, Bar-Lev was tapped, in 1986, by the then head of IDF Central Command, Major General Ehud Barak, to establish a counterterrorist undercover unit made up of paratroopers who could masquerade as indigenous Palestinians to gather intelligence and make terror arrests. The unit was known as Duvdevan, or “Cherry,” and was the first undercover counterterrorist force that the State of Israel had raised since Dagan’s unit in Gaza sixteen years earlier. Duvdevan was highly active during the first intifada and incredibly effective.

  In 1992, the Israeli police commissioner tapped Bar-Lev to create a Duvdevan-like unit for the Jerusalem Police District that could stem a series of destructive terrorist attacks in Israel’s capital. Bar-Lev traded in his olive drab fatigues for the blue tunic of the police force and created a squad that was designated as Unit 33. The unit, made up of Duvdevan veterans and the kind of street-smart free spirits that were usually recruited by the intelligence services, was a smashing success and sealed Bar-Lev’s standing in the police hierarchy. He climbed up the chain of command. In 2009, at the end of his career, Israel’s minister for internal security appointed Assistant Commissioner Bar-Lev to serve as the Israeli law enforcement attaché to the United States.

  For years, Israel’s police attachés were stationed in New York City and the Israeli consulate on Forty-Second Street in midtown Manhattan. To Israelis, New York City was the epicenter of the world, and the New York Police Department was one of the most important departments to liaise with. It was also easy for an Israeli police representative to hail a cab to John F. Kennedy or LaGuardia Airports and fly nonstop to meet any other commissioner in the United States or Canada. The New York posting was one of the most sought after in the police—the shopping, the night life, and the dining out was considered a lottery winning assignment for a police general at the tail end of his career.

  But after 9/11, Israel’s police representatives to the United States worked out of the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C. The U.S. capital was not New York City, and a town house in Georgetown or one of the other suburbs in and around the Beltway was not considered as chic as a duplex in a luxury doorman building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But Washington, D.C., was convenient for the police generals to meet with their American counterparts in American federal law enforcement. The 9/11 attacks turned the United States and Israel into inseparable allies in the law enforcement campaign against terror. Technologies that were standard security tools in Israel’s fight against suicide bombers and active shooters were eagerly reviewed by the newly formed U.S. Department of Homeland Security; Israeli expertise, namely the sharing of counterterrorist tradecraft, for U.S. law enforcement, al
l traveled through the police attachés office in Washington, D.C.

  Most of all, though, the posting to the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., made interaction with America’s federal law enforcement a convenient and expedient affair. The exchange of sensitive law enforcement material was always made in person. The police attaché met with his counterparts at Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters to discuss ongoing Hamas, PIJ, and Hezbollah investigations that fell under FBI jurisdiction; the attaché traveled to the offices of the Secret Service to talk shop concerning mutually connected investigations, such as Palestinian gangs using forged credit cards and Hezbollah cells flooding Israel with bundles of counterfeit U.S. dollars. Bar-Lev made his rounds, introducing himself to the various undersecretaries and commissioners.

  Bar-Lev was quite effective as the Israeli law enforcement ambassador to the United States. Tall and lean with a shaven head, he had a fondness for fashion and the better things in life. He was a cigar smoker and was good at telling war stories. Many of the alpha males loved having a cocktail with Bar-Lev at one of the Beltway’s many lounges where the men in power shared drinks and talked shop. He liaised with everyone in D.C. connected to America’s war on terror and crime—from the U.S. Marshals Service to the heads of IRS enforcement.

  Much of his work, though, involved the DEA. Israeli organized crime gangs were heavily involved in the Ecstasy trade that ranged from Tel Aviv to New York, with stops in Belgium and the Netherlands. Most of the mutual cooperation, however, focused on Hezbollah. “There was a lot of common interest and parallel investigations involving Hezbollah,” Bar-Lev remembered, “and both the DEA and the Israel National Police were determined to join forces and do what we could to stop the terrorists from flooding our countries with drugs and then using the money to ultimately kill innocent people. We had a lot to offer.”1

  Bar-Lev was also Harpoon’s police representative in the United States. When the Harpoon roundtable met, the police commander assigned to Dagan’s task force would be the one to communicate with Bar-Lev in the United States requesting action and assistance. “If we needed anything from the DEA or any of the other facets of American police, we first had to sanitize the intelligence. The Americans always liked to look at what we had and names, dates, locations, and anything that would reveal our sources had to be removed,” Shai explained. “The sanitized material was then transmitted from the police representative sitting with us at Harpoon to the embassy in Washington for further action. This was the protocol and it was important that we adhered to it.”2

  Meetings between Bar-Lev and his counterparts at DEA became routine. Both agencies had common interests; intelligence was shared and methods sought so that the two entities could effectively work together. Israel had extensive experience in battling terrorists, and Bar-Lev, serving in several administrative posts, had supervised operations against Hamas and against its money. Hamas was a unique criminal target; because it was an organized crime gang that wasn’t in it for profit. There were few assets to confiscate as penalty for the excesses of living a criminal lifestyle, unlike the Colombian cartels that the DEA had targeted so successfully for years, which built regal palaces complete with zoos, aquariums, and gold-covered furniture, as well as other extravagances that exceeded what movie stars, star soccer players, and heads of state could ever dream of owning. Hezbollah was run differently, like a combination of Hamas and the Colombians. The profits went to fund the struggle, but the cash was used by the narco-masterminds to fund lavish lifestyles that didn’t correspond with the strict restrictions of their public Shiite devotion.

  The Israeli police attaché also met senior agents from the Special Operations Division, as well as the DEA’s Counter-Narco-Terrorism Operations Center to convey the intelligence that he received on secure e-mail servers at the embassy from headquarters in Jerusalem. The discussions were detailed and operational. Sometimes the discussions, involving the latest intelligence on some of the most unsavory characters in the terrorism and narcotics underworld, were held in Outback Steakhouses and in Starbucks. The men always selected tables in the rear; Bar-Lev liked to sit with his back to the wall facing the entrance.

  The back-and-forth flow between the Israeli police and the DEA agents was voluminous.

  Federal agents and U.S. attorneys measure success and failure solely by indictments and convictions. The scuttlebutt at the federal judiciary was that cases of passport and visa fraud brought by the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service were liked the best, because those cases had a universal conviction rate; most cases were ultimately pleaded out. U.S. attorneys loved conviction rates—it helped them get appointed to the federal bench. The combined Harpoon and DEA effort against the Venezuelan-Hezbollah drug ring was not viewed favorably by the U.S. attorney or the Department of Justice. It seemed too complicated, too costly, and too time-consuming. But the operation against Ghazi Atef Nasser al-Din was just beginning.

  The joint U.S.-Israeli effort was just as much an espionage mission as it was the commencement of a criminal investigation. The bilateral exchange utilized the very best American human intelligence assets in Colombia and Venezuela. The Israelis utilized their resources outside the country, and monitored communications of the known men in the Hezbollah narcotics corporation that were responsible for coordinating drug shipments and money. As their investigations deepened, both the DEA and the Israelis were surprised to learn that all roads led to Africa.

  When the “Venezuelan connection” was exposed and compromised, a very sound and seemingly economic smuggling route had been dealt a serious blow. The money and the drugs were still flown to Damascus, often in diplomatic pouches, and while in Syria, under the protection of President Assad’s ruthless security forces, payouts were made for the guarantee of security. But getting the cocaine from Syria to Lebanon and then on to markets in Europe had become far riskier. Hezbollah now needed to mitigate any attempts to dilute its pot of cocaine gold.

  The Party of God had proven itself to be a resourceful foe, though. The Lebanese spirit of resilience through the civil war and domestic political chaos was a Hezbollah badge of honor, as was the ability to tap into a Lebanese Diaspora spread around the world. Lebanese Shiites had settled up and down the coastal countries of West Africa in the same way that others before them had traveled to Colombia, Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina. Lebanese were entrepreneurial and hardworking, and they negotiated their way through the local African bureaucracy of porous borders, corrupt customs officers and politicians, and lawless provinces. The terrorists discovered that in countries like Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire, Senegal, and Gambia, anyone could bribe an official and employ men—or young boys—who would carry an AK-47 assault rifle on their behalf. There were even attempts by Hezbollah and Iran to gain a foothold in Nigeria—a country where Israeli diplomatic and commercial interests were strong. In 2004 an Iranian diplomat was arrested on suspicion of spying on the Israeli embassy in the capital of Abuja; later, Nigeria’s dreaded State Security Service arrested members of an Iranian-trained terrorist cell planning to attack American and Israeli targets in the African nation.

  The African nations of West Africa were easy marks for the shrewd and cunning Lebanese Shiites. The Lebanese businessmen quickly turned neglected plots of strewn or abandoned warehouses into brand-spanking-new construction. Iranian money was invested in the infrastructure of the many businesses, many of them mere shell companies that operated behind post office boxes and offices that were nothing more than placeholders and an address to use on a shipping manifest. The businesses, especially those that were legit, were required to kick a percentage of their earnings back to Hezbollah’s coffers in Lebanon. Sheikh Nasrallah and his minions were savvy and ruthless businessmen. Shiite expatriates that didn’t send their tribute back to south Beirut were dealt with harshly. In 2004, U.S. diplomats in West Africa publicly charged that Hezbollah was “systematically siphoning profits” from the region’s lucrative diamond trade, in part by threat
ening Lebanese merchants.3

  The most successful Lebanese business in West Africa, though, was narcotics trafficking and money laundering. International law enforcement officials have long held that the $120 million that Iran donates to Hezbollah every year was a mere pittance when compared to the billions of dollars of narco-dollar profits that the Party of God earned. Religious sentiments were given the blind eye and set aside, as the illegal contraband sales were the turbo engine that allowed the terrorists to maintain their infrastructure, their lethal operations, and their opulent lifestyles. According to the Pulitzer Foundation, “Most of Hezbollah’s support comes from drug trafficking, a major moneymaker endorsed by the mullahs through a particular fatwa. In addition to the production and trade of heroin in the Middle East, Hezbollah facilitates, for a fee, the trafficking of other drug smuggling networks, such as the FARC, in the case of cocaine.”4

  When the spigots on Ghazi Atef Nasser al-Din’s Venezuelan pipeline were tightened, Hezbollah found new and remarkably clever ways to bring its cash to Lebanon via Africa. The Hezbollah scheme was simple yet ingenious. Hezbollah cocaine destined for European and Russian markets that had always been shipped through Lebanon was now sent to countries in West Africa instead. The countries were Guinea-Bissau, Mauritania, Gambia, and Sierra Leone. These nations were relatively easy prey for Hezbollah and Iranian usurpation, and the ruling dictators were always eager to align themselves with heavily armed cutthroats in positions of power who could make millions of dollars simply by looking the other way. Some of these African strongmen, like José Américo Bubo Na Tchuto, Guinea-Bissau’s former navy chief of staff, were drug warlords in their own right.5