Harpoon

by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner

  The money from the narcotic sales was sent to the shell companies and exchange houses in West Africa. Accra, the capital of Ghana, was the airport of choice. Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines flew a route connecting Accra and Beirut. The airport was located in south Beirut, the ground zero of Hezbollah’s power base, and most of the airport’s employees were Shiites who had earned their positions courtesy of the Party of God. Once the flight from Africa landed in the Lebanese capital, the cargo was met by heavily armed Hezbollah squads who loaded the bulk loads of tightly packed clear plastic blocks of $100 bills into the cargo holds of shiny black Suburban and Pajero SUVs; Hezbollah shooters stuck out through the sunroofs, aiming their RPK light machine guns at anyone who looked suspicious. Lebanese customs officials were not allowed to get near the aircraft.

  Billions of dollars were sent in such a manner. The remainder of the cocaine cash was delivered to Beirut by a well-oiled Hezbollah machine of money couriers, cash smugglers, hawaladars (those who used the informal Islamic method for transferring money across borders), and currency brokers. The cash, met at Beirut International Airport by Hezbollah units, was then transferred to money changers who deposited the drug profits into Lebanese bank accounts. From these banks the funds were transported to exchange houses and, ultimately, to Lebanese financial institutions. Once safe, the monies were then wired to the United States so that Hezbollah front companies could buy used vehicles and then ship them back to West Africa; the front companies in the United States were owned by Hezbollah operatives, or Lebanese immigrants with pro-Hezbollah sympathies. Proceeds from the car sales were intermingled with the cocaine profits and the money laundered.

  This scheme netted hundreds of millions of dollars for Hezbollah. Some of the money went toward advanced technological gear, such as night vision equipment, that Hezbollah used against Israel in Lebanon and against U.S. troops in Iraq. A percentage was sent as tribute to Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders in Tehran.

  Both the Americans and Israelis were stymied by the growing global spread of this highly lucrative and national-security-threatening global narcotics-and-dollar enterprise. Whenever the DEA or Harpoon tried to box the Iranians and Hezbollah in to limit their expansion, the Revolutionary Guardsmen and the men from Beirut simply moved the boundaries. The fight became a stubborn tug-of-war on a global chessboard.

  Spies, drug dealers, arms merchants, and former soldiers looking for a war of fortune were highly visible on the streets of the West African capitals, and especially inside the bars of the prominent hotels. Everything and everyone was for sale in the capitals of Dakar, Banjul, Bissau, Freetown, Monrovia, Yamoussoukro, and Abidjan: blood diamonds, stolen iron ore shipments, drugs, guns, and women of all ages. A former U.S. State Department Diplomatic Security Service special agent who had worked in American embassies in West Africa once commented that “you needed a scorecard to tell who’s who amidst the unsavory characters that one would see on the streets and especially inside the hotel bars.”

  The local state security agents, psychopathic criminals who terrorized for the greater good, tried to maintain control over the moral void; mostly they tried to secure a cut for themselves, and enough of a payoff to take care of their commanding officers. The rule of law, it seemed, didn’t translate easily into the local West African dialects. Business disputes were settled in back alleys and usually with a gunshot to the head.

  The boys from Lebanon were used to lawless chaos. They thrived in cities with checkpoints and armed thugs demanding a bribe. They didn’t do much to conceal their identities. They spoke loudly in Arabic, congregated largely with each other, and ate in Lebanese restaurants. The Hezbollah money movers made a point to have a good time as they trekked across the precarious routes that connected the money pickup points and the transit hubs along West Africa’s Atlantic coast. They drank alcohol even though it was strictly haram, or forbidden. They spent cash on prostitutes, even though HIV and other diseases were rampant among the working women. Gambling was not unheard of. For the Israelis and Americans who tried to blend in and remain inconspicuous to gather intelligence on the men and the money they moved, the Lebanese were surprisingly easy to follow. The money was easy to follow, too.

  West Africa became a focal point in the discussions that Uri Bar-Lev had with his counterparts at DEA headquarters. Bar-Lev received sanitized intelligence from Harpoon. “We were careful to make sure that our sources, our methods, were concealed in the information we released to the Americans,” a member of the Harpoon task force explained. “We trusted the Americans, they were our partners, but we always had to be careful to maintain the integrity and origins of our intelligence.”6 The Americans, too, were wary about sharing the true names of the operatives in the field who would slip a prostitute a few hundred dollars for information about the Lebanese man she had just been with. Spies never trusted one another.

  In the information that they did share, a common denominator intrigued both Harpoon and the DEA. The profits, the skim, and the financing channels that enabled this enormous multinational operation to flourish all ran through one Beirut financial institution: the Lebanese Canada Bank, or LCB, a Beirut financial institution that maintained thirty-five branches in Lebanon and one global representative headquarters in Montreal, Québec, in Canada. Its net assets exceeded $5 billion and it had extensive interactions with the major U.S. banks in New York City.

  The LCB had already sparked enormous interest in Dagan and his team. Soon, ideas for operations against the bank were being scribbled on whiteboards inside the DEA offices as well.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Malware and Moles

  There is no place where espionage is not possible.

  —Sun Tzu

  The one rule of espionage is that there are no rules. Everyone and everything is fair game. The profession of spying is one of moral ambiguity, based on the manipulation of weaknesses and vulnerabilities. These operational guidelines are the doctrinal DNA behind the Mossad’s legendary status as one of the world’s top espionage services. The moments of James Bond–like daring, such as the abduction of Holocaust villain Adolf Eichmann or the exploits of superspy Eli Cohen in Syria, were awe-inspiring operations that made headlines and created New York Times best sellers and Hollywood blockbusters. But the day-to-day unreported grind of gathering, analyzing, and acting on intelligence is what allows people to sleep soundly in their beds.

  There are numerous ways by which the spooks manipulated weaknesses and vulnerabilities in their targets. Some tools are technical. IMINT is image intelligence, the use of satellite and aerial reconnaissance photography to observe locations from national boundaries. SIGINT, or signal intelligence, is the interception of signals, either between individuals or between machines and computers, to gather intelligence. ELINT, the monitoring of electrical signals and electromagnetic signatures, is particularly effective in combat when measures and countermeasures needed to be deployed. And, of course, there is HUMINT, the classic spies-in-the-field meeting with sources and assets, engaged in the skullduggery of breaking into hotel rooms, blackmailing targets, and abducting threats to national security.

  Computer intelligence, or cyberwarfare, was the newest domain. The more the Internet becomes a center of our lives, the more vulnerable we are to others peeking in or interfering with our online activities. Accessing an adversary’s computer could produce a virtual warehouse of files; tapping into their e-mails on a continuous basis could reel in a bonanza that even the most talented spy of days past would never have been able to photograph with a small Minox B spy camera. E-mails can be forwarded and manipulated. Missives with a seemingly genuine attachment can act as a Trojan horse; a hidden virus can secret its way into a computer or even enter and take over an entire network, releasing vast destruction when triggered by the click of a mouse. Manipulated properly, with the right software, an innocently opened e-mail or a strategically inserted thumb drive, can give an intelligence service the power to completely shut down m
ultiple networks. Such a shutdown, halting operations for public services and for security forces, could paralyze a nation.

  Every intelligence agency in the world, and even the terrorists they hunted, used a combination of all these means to gather information on friends and foes, and to cause mischief and mayhem. Israel did it better than most.*

  For years, A’man, the Shin Bet, and the Mossad sought out men and women who displayed unique operational talents. These skills included a mastery of Arabic and Persian, tactical prowess, personalities that worked well alone and under enormous stress. People from different backgrounds, especially Diaspora Jews1 who could work internationally using their genuine papers, always topped the lists of the intelligence service headhunters. The shooters, and those who had the right stuff for dangerous missions on dark and treacherous nights, veterans of elite commando units, were soon joined on the recruitment lines by computer and technology geniuses and mathematical whizzes, “jobniks,” as they were once referred to, who could, in the course of their military service, innovate new tools and outside-the-box concepts.

  Some of these brilliant men—and women—were conscripted straight out of high school into A’man’s Unit 8200. The unit had at one time been the nation’s eavesdropping force, but it quickly became something akin to a MIT lab or even James Bond’s weapons developer, Q—matching military necessity with high-tech innovation. The men and women who emerged from the ranks of Unit 8200 made headlines using the skills and ideas they perfected to develop top-secret projects during their service to create high-tech applications with far-reaching civilian uses. The unit drove Israel’s reputation as the world’s leading startup nation. Veterans of the unit include Gil Shwed, the founder of Check Point, whose net worth today is $2.2 billion; Avishai Abrahami,2 founder of Waze, which sold itself to Google for $1.8 billion; Nir Zuk, founder of Palo Alto Networks, whose company is worth $260 million; and the seven founders of NICE Systems, which earned over $250 million in profits in 2016.

  Many Unit 8200 servicemen and women who wanted to stay inside the system were recruited by the other areas of the military or by the Shin Bet. The war against Hezbollah—and Iran—would need all of Israel’s spies, those in the trenches and those sitting behind a keyboard.

  Iran, with its nuclear weapons program, and Hezbollah, boasting a criminal enterprise with thousands of missiles aimed at Israel’s population centers, both posed an existential threat to Israel. As such, every tool, weapon, strategy, and technology at Israel’s disposal were enlisted into the fight.

  The head of a service like Dagan, according to one Harpoon veteran, faced a dilemma: “Do you follow or do you foil? Do you continue to observe a target and see where the surveillance and the intimate interception lead, or do you wrap up an operation and stop a target being an active threat? In some cases, ‘follow or foil’ was a judgment call; in other cases, where the threat was imminent, there was little choice at all.”3 The combination of HUMINT, SIGINT, special operations, FININT (financial intelligence), and cyberwarfare tools at the Mossad’s disposal gave Meir Dagan a new range of options when it came to this all-important question. And he wanted to use them all in an aggressive campaign against Iran’s nuclear ambitions and against Hezbollah’s ability to once again rain rockets down on Israel’s cities. Dagan wanted to foil his foes and their finances. His American partners had a different view.

  The American unit that chased terrorist money at the CIA’s Financial Intelligence Operations unit (FINO) was headed by Philip Rosenberg. A thin and balding man, he was a sharp dresser with a prominent nose. FINO, established in the wake of the 9/11 attack, was placed under the National Clandestine Service’s organizational chart. Rosenberg, an economist by trade, had served in a number of intelligence posts overseas, utilizing his financial skills for covert operations on behalf of the Americans. He was known among his colleagues as “Nervous Phil,” for his wild enthusiasm and creative approaches, and in 2004 he was given the CIA’s Directors Award by George Tenet for FINO’s work.

  Rosenberg was initially very suspicious of the Israelis, and he was quite reluctant to work with them. But he was eventually won over by men like Uri and Shai, and, of course, Meir Dagan. Rosenberg was impressed by the quality of the intelligence that Harpoon provided. He understood what the Harpoon boys were trying to do and realized it complemented his own efforts, while providing additional reach to the American program. There was a sharp difference of opinion, though. Rosenberg expended considerable effort to persuade the Israelis not to obstruct the flow of terror money but rather to follow it and see where it would lead them. Rosenberg’s philosophy was to blend SIGINT and land-based data to track terrorists across the planet.4 The goal, after all, was often not to immediately capture the target, but rather to see where the intelligence would lead.

  This tactical disagreement had repercussions back at headquarters in Tel Aviv, inside Harpoon’s staff meetings and operational discussions. The Shin Bet advocated for the quick kill, taking out the suspects right away, while the Mossad representative frequently supported Rosenberg’s thesis of, according to one Harpoon veteran, “feeding a hooked whale more and giving him more line.” This was the case except when it involved Hezbollah.

  Dagan wanted to bankrupt the Party of God and deny it the financial means to survive. The Mossad director read the intelligence briefs coming back from Washington, D.C., and West Africa concerning the drug profits laundered in and out of Lebanon’s banks, and it gave him and his team ideas. The Lebanese banking system was complicit in funding the bloodshed, earning hundreds of millions of dollars in fees and profits from handling drug money. It was itself a criminal enterprise.

  Hezbollah touted itself as a highly disciplined military and political force built on strength and Shiite rage. Hezbollah military parades in southern Beirut featured rigid lines of marching soldiers, some wearing explosive vests, who goose-stepped in precise cadence. Lebanon’s history of violence and factional fighting created a vacuum that enabled the Party of God to flex its military muscle—and its use of all-out terror—to achieve its political aspirations. Sheikh Nasrallah had taken Hezbollah from a terrorist army at war with the United States and Israel and turned it into the de facto ruler of the country. Hezbollah ran a semiautonomous state within a state that discarded the notion of Lebanese independence and any hope for a representative democracy. Hezbollah had its own network of social services and it had an indigenous foreign policy; Nasrallah’s army could obliterate the Lebanese Armed Forces if it so desired. But for all its conventional power, the organization was still run like a ragtag band of guerrillas. Clans ruled the military wing. Greed and corruption turned the ruling elite, men who were supposed to bring about Shiite representation based on religious principles, into a gang of feuding hucksters with their own special interests, always trumping the welfare of the communities they swore to advance.

  Hezbollah did not run a central bank that financed its wars and its benevolent projects. There was no party reserve into which Iranian cash flowed. Party of God commanders did not have Hezbollah-issued credit cards. All matters pertaining to money passed through an entity known in Arabic as the Hezbollah Bayt al-Mal, or the Hezbollah House of Money. The Bayt al-Mal was controlled lock, stock, and barrel by Nasrallah, and his office supervised all of the financial services for the Party of God. The Bayt al-Mal is Hezbollah’s unofficial treasury, holding and investing its assets and serving as a hub for all of the group’s investments and interactions—from the acquisition of state-of-the-art night vision equipment on the black market to acquiring real estate holdings.

  The Bayt al-Mal national headquarters was a building nestled inside the Shiite slums of south Beirut, Hezbollah’s stronghold. The structure was draped in Hezbollah flags that were positioned near billboards, some two stories tall, depicting the group’s martyrs who had been killed in the wars with Israel. A small guard of heavily armed men, an elite cadre of Hezbollah special operations shooters, maintained careful watch. Heavy machin
e-gun positions, capable of shooting down supersonic fighter bombers or helicopter gunships, were positioned behind sandbags on the building’s roof.

  The Bayt al-Mal boasted other branches, of course. There were small offices in additional Lebanese cities like Burj al-Barajinah, Sidon, Tyre, Nabatieh, and Ba’albak. The Bayt al-Mal employed bureaucrats, accountants, secretaries, and auditors who made the machinery of Hezbollah’s money function. The institution was slowly entering the twenty-first century by computerizing its files and systems. Israel’s air raids on Lebanese banks during the 2006 Second Lebanon War resulted in damages that weren’t limited to the stacks of $100 bills and Lebanese pounds that burned like dry bush in a forest fire. Ledgers, files, and notes, some written in giant notebooks that could have been used a century earlier in the Ottoman Empire and during French rule, also went up in flames. Permanent records were lost forever. Computers had to be installed and networks built from scratch. Specialists had to be brought in to run the systems, and staffers, some who conducted financial transactions the way their parents had once done in the villages of southern Lebanon, had to be retrained and certified.

  The Bayt al-Mal was just one piece of the Hezbollah financial fortress. Another piece was a mysterious investment and brokerage house called the Yousser Company for Finance and Investment. The Yousser Company was used as cover for many of the Bayt al-Mal transactions, to launder loans and commercial business before they reached legitimate banks—and those used as venues by Hezbollah—for business around the world. The proxies, shell companies, Beirut post office boxes, and investment houses were nothing more than import-export companies providing a layer of cover to the complex and illegal Hezbollah financial empire.