Harpoon
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Dagan, interviewed for Israeli television after he left office, refused to speak openly about the successes he was proudest of as Mossad director—the man was not one to ever discuss anything that could even hint as leaking classified information. But he did say what his two greatest disappointments were. The first was not definitively determining the fate of Ron Arad, an Israeli Air Force F4E Phantom navigator held by Hezbollah and possibly Iran. The second was the failure to bring back the body of Eli Cohen, the agency’s legendary spy who provided Israel with invaluable intelligence on the Syrian military and who was hanged in Damascus; his body, at the time of this book’s writing, remains in Syria.21
Meir Dagan had gone from a newcomer to Israel, the son of a family that paid a terrible price in Hitler’s Holocaust, to a man in charge of one of the country’s most important pillars of defense. In Harpoon, he defined a new way in which intelligence could be used to deplete a terrorist army of its means, and not only its men. Dagan’s journey was an improbable one but, as Dagan once commented, it was “proof that anything was possible.”22 In January 2011, in a quiet ceremony at the prime minister’s office, Netanyahu hugged his spymaster and thanked him for his many years of service. When Dagan left Mossad headquarters, many of the cool-thinking and courageous intelligence agents quietly wept to see their chief leave the building. It had been a golden age for Israel’s espionage service.
Meir Dagan woke up the morning after as a civilian for the first time in nearly half a century. The old soldier and spook, though, Meir Dagan had no intention of fading away.
Dagan’s view that terror funding was a new battlefield, and his belief that Iran should be strangled financially rather than hit by aircraft in a sure-to-fail attempt at shock and awe, left behind another legacy.
Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks against the United States, the Central Intelligence Agency was authorized by the Bush administration to embark on one of the most secretive programs of the American-led war on terror. The initiative, known as the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program (TFTP), entered the highly secure Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) network to monitor bank transfers made all around the world. Virtually every bank, every financial institution of note, is connected to SWIFT, which is a Belgian-based, highly secure network that allows banks to safety and confidentially interact and do business with one another. SWIFT provides the mechanism by which some 7,800 financial institutions around the world transfer money.23 SWIFT is a cooperative, consisting of more than two thousand organizations, and virtually every financial institution uses its codes and services. Any bank, from a major icon of global finance in midtown Manhattan to a small Islamic credit union on the byways of Peshawar, can communicate with any other bank and transfer and receive money courtesy of the SWIFT network. Banks have to have SWIFT codes to wire money. It is an essential tool of international commerce; SWIFT enables over eleven million transactions a day.24
The joint CIA-Treasury operation was carried out with the assistance of the National Security Agency’s massive eavesdropping program, which monitored telephone calls, facsimiles, e-mails, and text messages—without warrants—of more than five thousand Americans who were suspected of maintaining terrorist ties.25 The two programs worked in parallel and complementary directions, each often enhancing the efforts of the other. Phil Rosenberg ran it for the Agency; Undersecretary Stuart Levey’s Terrorism and Financial Intelligence unit ran Treasury’s half.
The Israelis maintained close relations with FINO and urged them to target the Iranians and place pressure on SWIFT not to allow the Islamic Republic’s banking sector to utilize its services. Unlike Harpoon, with its emphasis on going after the street-level cash and the specific banks, the United States finally decided to go after the Holy Grail of financial information—the system itself. TFTP was run out of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and overseen by the U.S. Treasury Department, and it functioned without ever asking the Belgians for permission. “The Agency simply managed to break into SWIFT’s databases and monitor all the financial moves that everyone, everywhere, around the world made,” a former Harpoon officer commented. “It was a masterful coup for American intelligence and they were determined to keep it to themselves and use it only in the most sensitive areas, and even then they were always quick to cover up the fact that intel from financial information had anything to do with a major operation, seizure, or extrajudicial killing.”26
Because the intelligence that TFTP produced was unique and so secretive, the Americans used it sparingly. Most of what the CIA and the Department of the Treasury did with the data remains classified. One success reported from the program was the capture of Riduan Isamuddin, the head of the Indonesian al-Qaeda affiliate known as Jemaah Islamiyah. Isamuddin, who was also known by his nom de guerre of Hambali, was called by many the Osama bin Laden of Southeast Asia. He had fought with bin Laden in Afghanistan against the Soviets and then created one of the largest Muslim terrorist armies in Asia. Hambali was behind the October 12, 2002, terrorist massacre targeting tourists in nightclubs on the tropical paradise of Bali; 202 people were killed in the multiple bombing strikes, and another two hundred seriously wounded. Hambali was arrested a year later in Thailand by counterterrorist police.27 He was renditioned to a CIA black site and then incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay. Hambali was located and apprehended as a result of the financial back-and-forth that helped to finance the Bali operation the TFTP program intercepted through SWIFT traffic. Another known TFPT success was the 2003 arrest of a Pakistani national, Uzair Paracha, who was wiring money back to banks in Pakistan in conjunction with supporting al-Qaeda. Paracha laundered in excess of $200,000 for terrorists in Pakistan.28
The Americans didn’t tell their other allies in the Five-Eyes network of intelligence agencies about TFTP. The Five-Eyes arrangement was the sharing of intelligence between agencies from the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. The CIA and the Department of the Treasury did not share word of the program’s existence with Harpoon, either. “There were some, many, at the CIA who didn’t trust us,” a Harpoon veteran admitted, “even though the sharing of intelligence often originated from the most sensitive and clandestine of sources, sources that were always redacted.”29 The arrangement was, of course, bilateral. The Israelis sanitized the raw data that they exchanged with the CIA and other agencies in the U.S. intelligence community. “We never knew who the spy chiefs would share the information with,” the Harpoon officer explained, “and we were always concerned that somehow a U.S. government official who read the material would share it with eyes we had never intended to look at the information.”30
Still, when Meir Dagan visited CIA directors George Tenet, Porter Goss, and Michael Hayden from 2002 to 2005—and enjoyed one-on-one conversations inside the director’s office at Langley—TFTP was never mentioned, even though the heads of the two services discussed some of the most compelling secrets vital to their nation’s security. Some Harpoon veterans believe that it was U.S. policy not to share the TFTP intelligence with Harpoon, because the Bush administration was adamant that the Israelis not bring down the entire Palestinian Authority’s economy.31 In 2005, the CIA disclosed some of its capability to access banking intelligence to Harpoon in a meeting in Washington, D.C. However, the Americans insisted that the intelligence could not be used without prior authorization of the United States. Secrecy was a must.
Nothing remains secret in the Beltway for very long, however. In June 2006 the New York Times—followed by the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times—caught wind of the program and ran with exposés. Forced to react, Stuart Levey spoke to the press and explained that TFTP was legal and made use of proper authorities, offering a unique and powerful window into the operations of terrorist networks. He stated, “Data from the Brussels-based banking consortium, formally known as the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, has allowed officials from the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Inves
tigation and other agencies to examine ‘tens of thousands’ of financial transactions.”32 The public revelation of the U.S. hacking the SWIFT database caused an international storm for Treasury, the CIA, and the Bush administration. The Europeans, unsurprisingly, were enraged, demanding explanations, resignations, breast beating, and reassurances. Levey’s half-hearted mea culpa did little, at first, to temper their bruised sense of indignation and betrayal.
Harpoon officials were at their desks at headquarters on the morning of June 23, 2006, when the New York Times exposé broke. Agents and officers assigned to the task force sat open-jawed and in shock reading about the revelations. Uri L. and Shai U. simply couldn’t believe it. The American effort was a masterstroke, a piece of technological espionage mastery worthy of accolades and, the Israelis hoped, increased sharing from Langley and from the Department of the Treasury’s terrorism intelligence unit.
It took great diplomatic skill—most of it covert—for the U.S. intelligence community to restore relations and the trust of the SWIFT conglomerate in Europe. There were apologies rendered and promises that such violation of secure networks would never happen again. TFTP continued, albeit not in so covert a manner. Still, the program was credited with assisting federal and local law enforcement in the investigations that followed the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, as well as other plots around the world involving members of the al-Quds force of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps.33
U.S. apologies to SWIFT following the New York Times article and international cooperation enabled a strong and united western front against Iran. Following the 2006 Second Lebanon War, Israel—led by men like Dagan—succeeded in convincing the U.S. government and others in the west that one of the surefire ways to slow down Iran’s nuclear pursuits was to strangle it economically. This was financial warfare as Dagan envisioned it—to use money instead of the lives of young soldiers—as a battlefield weapon, and it led to a vigorous and persistent effort to press financial institutions to remove the Islamic Republic of Iran from its network. The idea was to simply choke the Iranian economy so thoroughly that diplomacy and negotiations could transpire and so that Israel would not be compelled to go to war against Iran and its nuclear program. Lázaro Campos, SWIFT’s chief executive officer, described the move as “extraordinary and unprecedented and is a direct result of international and multilateral action to intensify financial sanctions against Iran.”34
The tactic worked. Negotiations between the United States and Iran commenced shortly after Iran’s banks were disconnected from SWIFT and isolated from the rest of the world. It was just before the mullahs in Tehran realized their country would face financial collapse unless it reached an accord with the west. The effort culminated in July 2015 with the controversial Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, known as the Iran Deal.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Operation Pegasus
At the age of fifty-three Tamir Pardo replaced Meir Dagan, and became the eleventh director of the Mossad in January 2011. He arrived with an impressive résumé. Born in 1953, to parents who hailed from Turkey and Serbia, Pardo was a native-born Israeli who was raised in Tel Aviv. He had served in the paratroopers and later as a communications officer in the elite Sayeret Mat’kal commando unit; he participated in the legendary rescue raid on Entebbe. In 1980, following a brief stint in the IAF’s top-secret Shaldag special operations targeting unit, Pardo was recruited into the ranks of the Mossad. His specialty was electronic intelligence, and he rose quickly up the chain of command; eventually becoming Meir Dagan’s deputy.1
The Mossad continued its swashbuckling and saber-wielding ways under Pardo’s leadership. “Pardo wasn’t Dagan,” a former member of Harpoon commented, “but the Mossad was still the Mossad.”2 The enemies of Israel, those who threatened the security of the Jewish State, continued to die mysterious unattributed deaths.
On July 23, 2011, Darioush Rezaei, a thirty-five-year-old scientist working on Iran’s nuclear program, was shot and killed by men on motorcycles as he returned home from picking up his daughter in a nursery near his suburban Tehran home. Rezaei, a physicist, was reportedly an expert in electronic switches, needed for the triggering of a nuclear device. Iranian counterintelligence specialists searched Tehran and the countryside for the gunmen, but the men who pulled the trigger simply vanished. The assassins left no clues, not even a spent cartridge. Publications around the world labeled the assassination as the first Israeli hit of Pardo’s term.3
With Dagan no longer at the helm, Harpoon was never the same. Uri L. remained behind for a short while, but with his mentor and friend gone, he, too, retired from national service. Lavi left for the private sector, and Shai was hired to serve as the general manager for one of Israel’s premier soccer teams.
The United States, now, took the lead with a terrorist financial center that Dagan had long wanted to see destroyed: the Lebanese Canadian Bank.
Shurat HaDin’s 2009 lawsuit against the LCB coincided with what would be the culmination of the massive U.S. law enforcement effort against Hezbollah and its laundering of drug and terror money. Hezbollah and their global cash-cleansing operation was a challenge to the DEA—an agency that had an impressive track record in bringing down Colombian cartels, Afghan poppy growers, and the heroin armies of Southeast Asia. The investigations against Hezbollah’s networks were conducted in the shadows for the most part—in treacherous locations that were far from home. The agents themselves were often at great peril. Their mission was to witness crimes and to gather prosecutable evidence that an assistant U.S. attorney could use in a federal courtroom. The material they gathered was extensive, including wiretaps. A small army of agents who were fluent in Spanish, Arabic, African dialects, and a half a dozen other languages, spent countless hours turning the raw data into actionable intelligence that could be utilized as evidence by the prosecutors. The process was painstakingly slow: five years and counting. Justice was often delayed, but it most certainly wasn’t denied. Assistant U.S. attorneys never went to court with cases they weren’t certain they’d win. Their careers were made by conviction rates and plea bargains.
The DEA effort against Hezbollah had two objectives: indict and convict those who were guilty of crimes, and to dismantle and crush the ability of the Lebanese Canadian Bank to launder the proceeds from Hezbollah’s operations. The effort was global in nature.
The first aspect of the DEA investigative offensive began in 2006–2007 with what was codenamed Operation Titan, a joint U.S.–Colombian investigation that focused on cocaine distribution and money laundering. The target of Titan was Chekry Harb, a Lebanese national and a narcotics kingpin who enjoyed being referred to by his nom de guerre of “El Taliban.” Harb was based in Bogota, and he was what might be called a connector. He brought together multifarious players like Hezbollah, the cocaine cartels, and local terrorist groups like FARC so that they could all engage and prosper together. Harb supervised a highly complex and highly effective money-laundering operation that cleansed hundreds of millions of dollars a year in banks and shell corporations stretching from the Panama Canal to Hong Kong. A percentage of the money that Harb’s ring earned, believed to be 12 percent, went straight back to South Lebanon. Gladys Sanchez, one of the Colombian investigators working side by side with the DEA in Bogota, confirmed, “The profits from the sales of drugs went to finance Hezbollah.”4
Both the DEA and the Colombians were tight-lipped concerning the number of agents they deployed for the operation, but courts in Colombia and the United States issued warrants for 370 wiretaps that taped 700,000 conversations. In one of the phone taps, Harb boasted that he could arrange a cocaine shipment of 950 kilograms, made in coordination with Syrian intelligence, that were sent via the Jordanian Red Sea port of Aqaba, then smuggled north overland, first into Syria and then into Lebanon, on a moment’s notice.5 Harb, along with two other Hezbollah operatives, were arrested on October 3, 2008—the DEA and the Colombians raided numerous locations and arrested 130 people.
6 Agents also seized $23 million in cash. Harb was ultimately extradited to the United States.7
Operation Titan sharpened the focus into Hezbollah’s wider operations out of South America and West Africa—a pipeline of drugs, cars, and cash that both Harpoon and the DEA discovered jointly. One name emerged repeatedly in all aspects of the criminal enterprise throughout the wiretaps and the electronic intercepts: Ayman Joumaa. Joumaa was what the DEA and the U.S. Department of Justice called a Significant Foreign Narcotics Trafficker. The designation was reserved for the mightiest drug kingpins—men like Pablo Escobar and Mexico’s Joaquín Guzmán, also known as “El Chapo,” who controlled vast narcotics empires.
Ayman Saied Joumaa was born in 1964, in the village of Qaraoun, in the Beka’a Valley, over fifty miles east of Beirut. Little is known of his early years other than that he gravitated toward a career of crime and narcotics. Joumaa, also known as “Junior,” traveled with a complement of machine-gun-toting thugs who were handsomely paid so that rivals as well as law enforcement were kept at a safe distance. Although he worked side by side with Hezbollah, Joumaa was believed to be a Sunni Muslim. The terrorist group’s leaders usually trusted only those from within their own Shiite faith, where clans and family loyalty allayed fears of betrayal, but Joumaa made up for his religious shortcomings by bringing Hezbollah lots of drugs and cash. According to Brian Dodd, head of counternarcotics operations at DEA headquarters, Joumaa couldn’t have survived without Hezbollah, and he was a source of revenue for the terrorist group.8
Joumaa also connected Hezbollah with Mexico’s drug cartels. He worked closest with the Los Zetas. Known in Mexico simply as “Z,” many law enforcement experts view Los Zetas to be the most ruthless, and the most globally sophisticated, of all the Mexican cartels.9 Joumaa also worked with the Mexican Sinaloa Cartel, considered by U.S. intelligence agencies to be the most powerful drug-trafficking organization in the world.10