Harpoon

by Nitsana Darshan-Leitner

  The DEA estimated that Joumaa laundered as much as $200 million in narcotics proceeds per month. Joumaa’s network shipped cocaine to Africa, where it was parceled and later shipped to the Middle East and Europe. The profits from those sales were then sent back to Lebanon, where they were processed through exchange houses, like the Hassan Ayash Exchange Company and the Ellissa Exchange Company in Beirut. The money was sent via wires transfers from the Lebanese Canadian Bank, to businesses in the United States, where used cars were purchased. Hezbollah’s West African operation would never have been possible without the LCB laundering the proceeds. The DEA speculated that a small portion of the money from this scheme was diverted to Iranian intelligence and the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard as tribute to the mullahs and the intelligence services in Tehran.

  By early 2011, the sheer might of the American judicial system came crashing down on Hezbollah and the LCB. The overall effort of American law enforcement to finally shut down the LCB “money-washing machine” was codenamed Operation Pegasus.

  On February 10, 2011, the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network officially identified the Lebanese Canadian Bank as a money-laundering institution. The declaration forced U.S. financial institutions to immediately cease all interactions and transactions with the LCB; the bank was prohibited from sending money to the United States. The LCB had enabled Hezbollah-related operations and interests to conduct massive cash transactions, in some cases as much as $260,000 per day, without disclosing the source or purpose of the money.

  The U.S. Department of the Treasury declaration turned the LCB toxic. Bankers, especially in the litigious atmosphere that the terror-victim lawsuits had created, were wary of any connection to a financial institution that openly did business with the likes of Hezbollah. The upside of doing business with the terrorist organizations had finally sunk deep below the potential downside of criminal prosecutions: massive fines and menacing civil actions. The seventy-one-year-old, venerable financial institution was beginning to gasp its last breaths.

  On November 23, 2011, Ayman Joumaa himself was indicted in the Eastern District of Virginia on charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and conspiracy to commit money laundering related to drug trafficking by Mexican and Colombian drug cartels. Well protected in Lebanon by an army of drug soldiers, Joumaa has, at the time of this book’s writing, yet to be brought to face justice before a U.S. federal judge.

  Finally, in December 2011, two years after Shurat HaDin helped sue the bank and after Lebanese Central Bank Governor Riad Salameh publicly declared that his banking system wasn’t connected to the Party of God, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York unsealed a $483 million civil forfeiture action against the LCB. The pursuit of the money came under the provisions of the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which allowed the U.S. government to demand civil money-laundering penalties. “Hezbollah, like any other criminal enterprise, wants to convert cash into usable funds that can be transferred through the formal financial system,” David S. Cohen, the undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence at the Treasury Department, would later say.11

  The LCB never recovered from Operation Pegasus. The bank ceased operations in 2012. The Lebanese Canadian Bank’s assets were ultimately acquired by the Société Générale de Banque au Liban. Known as the SGBL, the bank could not commence business until it settled with the U.S. government, paying a penalty of $102 million. The SGBL also undertook to pay off the debts of the LCB, including a reserve for claims made against the bank. Claims against the Hassan Ayash Exchange Company, one of the companies that took the drug sales receipts and laundered them through LCB wire transfers, forfeited more than $720,000 to the United States. Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, would later comment, “Money is the lifeblood of terrorist and narcotics organizations. We will use every resource at our disposal to separate terrorists and narco-traffickers, and the banks that work with them, from their illicit funds, even those hidden in foreign accounts.”12

  The DEA’s partnership with its partners in Israel had reaped enormous rewards. The connection between drug traffickers and terror networks was clear, and the end of the Lebanese Canadian Bank was a severe body blow to Hezbollah, enhancing both American and Israeli national security.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Money in the Crosshairs

  Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.

  —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

  Hussam Qawasmeh was a member of perhaps the most powerful clan in Hebron. The Qawasmehs were a prominent force when the city was under British rule, and their influence continued after the West Bank was annexed by Jordan in 1950. When Israel took control of the West Bank following the 1967 Six Day War, the large Qawasmeh family remained well respected; people from all over sought their counsel. The family passionately opposed Israeli control over their lives, and, as devout Muslims, many had taken senior leadership positions in the local Hamas organizations in recent years. Hussam, thirty-nine years old, was a regional commander in the terrorist organization; devout, he wore a long and full black beard and glasses, and his scholarly appearance hid a stocky frame and a muscular build that made him look like a brawler. Hussam felt it was his obligation, as one of Hebron’s first citizens, to lead the struggle against the Zionist enemy. This pressing sense of obligation and duty weighed heavily upon him when he caught up with friends or talked to his brothers in Hamas at daily prayers.

  One night in early June 2014, Hussam Qawasmeh met with his young nephew Marwan, and a family friend named Amer Abu Aisha, at his home. The three sat around the dining room table eating sunflower seeds and drinking tea. They spoke softly, fearing that the Israelis might be listening, but in heated discussions the three shared ideas for an operation against Israel. They wanted to perpetrate something spectacular. The talk turned to kidnapping an Israeli soldier so that he could be exchanged for Palestinian prisoners serving lengthy or life sentences in Israeli jails. The three discussed the Gilad Shalit operation and how that abduction had rocked Israel to its inner core. Shalit was kidnapped in 2006, and Hamas held Israel captive for five long years until Prime Minister Netanyahu’s government agreed to release 1,200 prisoners in exchange for the one Israeli serviceman; Hussam’s brother had been one of the prisoners released in the lopsided deal and then deported to the Gaza Strip.1 Hussam and his cohorts plotted well into the night.

  The kidnap plan that the three conjured up was simple but daring. Hussam Qawasmeh was responsible for intelligence. He selected Gush Etzion junction, a remote crossroad frequently used by off-duty soldiers to hitchhike rides to Jerusalem, as the kidnap location. He also found several safe houses, isolated and easy to defend, where the abducted soldier could be held and moved in case Israeli security forces came too close. Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha would kidnap the victim. The two would masquerade as Orthodox Jews and once the soldier was lured into the car, they would subdue and secure him.

  The plan required two vehicles: one for the abduction and the other to move the soldier from house to house after the kidnapping. The first car was disposable, and would be destroyed to ensure that the kidnappers left no evidence behind. The team also needed weapons, two M16s they assessed, in case the soldier was armed and tried to resist. Finally they needed two pistols, in case something went wrong in the car.

  Hussam conducted a cost analysis of the plan, and he assessed he’d need $65,000. He approached the al-Nur Foundation in Gaza, a well-established charity that supported the families of the Hamas suicide bombers, and paid their monthly families stipends to live on. Al-Nur was known to finance attacks against Israelis, and the charity’s administrators agreed to grant Hussam the money in order to carry out such a noble mission. Qawasmeh’s mother, who had permission to travel to and from Gaza, retrieved the money, and smuggled the funds to them in Hebron. The weapons were purchased. The two cars were paid for.
Hussam found a few isolated homes that he could rent with no questions asked.

  The kidnappers set out on their operation on Thursday evening, June 12, 2014. They dressed as Orthodox Jews, and played Israeli music on their car radio. They drove to the Gush Etzion junction and looked for a soldier. But it was already the beginning of the weekend and it was getting late; there were no soldiers in sight.

  But the kidnappers did see some individuals at a bus stop as they slowed down. They were three Israeli teenagers who had finished school late and were heading home. Two of the boys, Naftali Frenkel and Gilad Shaer, were sixteen; the third, Eyal Yifrah, was nineteen. When the car door opened, all three of the teenagers surprised the Hamas men by jumping into the back seat together to hitch a ride. The Palestinian brothers did not expect three healthy young people, and they briefly panicked. Pulling themselves together and pointing their pistols, they yelled at the teens that they were being kidnapped and ordered them to put their heads down. Shaer had managed to dial 100 on his cellular phone, the number to summon police, and whispered to the police operator: “They kidnapped me.” His plea for help was followed by shouts in Arabic, then by the sounds of gunfire, all of which was recorded by the police switchboard.2

  The terrorists didn’t plan to kill their captives, but the operation hadn’t gone as they intended, and they improvised. Marwan Qawasmeh and Amer Abu Aisha drove to the rendezvous point where the second vehicle was waiting. They loaded the bodies to the new car and set fire to the first. They nervously drove around the Hebron hills looking for a place to hide the three murdered teens so that the Israelis wouldn’t find them. By morning, though, all of Israel had heard the news reports that the three teenagers were kidnapped.

  The Shin Bet, the IDF, and the Israel National Police launched a Herculean effort to locate the three boys. They found the burned-out car and feared that the three were already dead. The IDF launched Operation Brother’s Keeper to find the three teens and to apprehend those responsible. IDF commanders enlisted the services of Bedouin soldiers, famed trackers who usually patrolled Israel’s frontier, to search for footprints or any other telltale clues in the Spartan terrain of hills and caves.3 For almost three weeks all of Israel stood on edge awaiting news of the kidnapped students. On June 30, an Israeli volunteer, one of hundreds that joined the search, discovered the bodies of the three boys in a field northwest of Hebron. Their bodies were buried under a pile of rocks.4

  The security forces realized that their suspicion was true: The teens had been shot at close range—murdered shortly after being seized. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed a decisive Israeli response.

  Hamas rocket fire commenced shortly after word was released that three Israeli teens had been abducted. Throughout June, Hamas launched hundreds of mortar rounds and missiles into Israel. The IDF responded with air strikes designed to destroy Hamas launching sites and to obliterate a sophisticated and expensive network of tunnels that were used to transport terrorists into Israel. The fighting once again forced the population of southern Israel into air raid shelters. At just after dawn on the morning of July 12, a large force of Hamas terrorists emerged from a tunnel into Israel proper; the gunmen, many carrying RPG antitank rockets, suddenly came out of an opening burrowed in a field inside a kibbutz a few hundred meters from the Gaza frontier. Israeli forces killed the raiders, thwarting what would have been a disaster—the terrorists had planned to perpetrate a mass shooting in the kibbutz and then bring abductees back into the Strip to be held hostage, no doubt used as bargaining chips for Hamas to negotiate the release of its prisoners.5 The situation had become untenable. Prime Minister Netanyahu had had enough.

  The following day Israeli forces entered the Gaza Strip. The operation was codenamed Protective Edge.

  Since it seized control of the Gaza Strip in a bloody coup in 2007, Hamas had spent seven years reinforcing the home to over one million Palestinians into an urban fortress. Neighborhoods were ringed by improvised explosive devices; booby traps were everywhere and Hamas fighters hid behind the civilian population almost daring Israeli forces to engage them. The fighting inside the neighborhoods of northern Gaza was fierce. Much of it was house-to-house and hand-to-hand. Operations were mounted underground, to root out the tunnels and the men who deployed inside them. But casualties mounted on all sides.

  Israeli forces had learned, through the intelligence it had gathered, that the elite of the Hamas force, the men on the front lines battling Israeli infantry and reconnaissance units, were rumbling to their wives and families over not being paid and that morale was low. The men doing the fighting hadn’t received their salaries in weeks. Their anger was close to undermining the entire military campaign. It was a cash economy. Each fighter had to sign for his stipend inside a notebook ledger, complete with carbon paper. The archaic system was akin to how the old Turkish pasha paid his soldiers and policemen during Ottoman times.

  It was nearly impossible for Hamas to get cash into the Strip during wartime. Israeli aircraft flew constant sorties overhead, and ground forces maintained a determined vigil over key access points. The lack of money meant that the families of the fighters couldn’t buy food and clothing. Many inside Gaza began to openly mock their political leadership—especially the jet-setters who lived in Doha and were worth billions. Hamas leaders worried of an insurrection. Calls were made for an emergency delivery of dollars. The Israelis learned that the money would be routed through the Sinai Desert.

  On August 23 the intelligence services picked up the trail of a man in his twenties traveling across Sinai with $13 million in cash packed inside four large leather suitcases. The cash had come from a money changer in the town of El Arish on the Mediterranean coast who, after receiving confirmation that covering funds had entered a bank account in the Persian Gulf, prepared the stacks of $50 and $100 bills. Bribe money helped the man make it across the barren deserts without running into the Egyptian secret police or packs of Bedouin gangsters. The senior Hamas leadership thought it wise to send him without a heavily armed contingent of bodyguards; groups of men attracted attention, and the spies were everywhere. The man would have to protect the money with his life. If it was lost, he knew, his entire family would be killed.

  It took the courier just under a day to cross the twenty-eight miles to the Egyptian side of the border. He took a circuitous route toward the rendezvous point and changed his car a few times, always making the switch under an awning to fool the Egyptian and Israeli drone operators whose devices were constantly overhead. When darkness fell, he was driven to a safe house, a nondescript two-story home where an elite Hamas bodyguard squad awaited him. The suitcases were removed from the car and brought to the center of the room, where prayer rugs were rolled out and a small meal of rice and poultry prepared. A tunnel, well illuminated and ventilated, had been dug underneath the safe house. The man would have to wait until dawn, however, before making his move: Israeli warplanes owned the darkened skies over Gaza and watched everything that moved.

  At just before dawn the envoy sent a brief SMS message to his patrons, who were impatiently waiting for the money on the Gaza side of the tunnel in Kishta, a Hamas stronghold in the town of Rafah. The text consisted of a code word indicating that the courier was coming across; the phone, like the man, was a throwaway, the SIM card, from Etisalat—one of the largest carriers of international voice traffic in the Middle East and Africa—was destroyed immediately after the message was sent. It took him and his bodyguards nearly an hour to cross the tunnel into Palestinian Gaza. The tunnel was narrow, and movement inside the confining space was slow and uncomfortable. As the man neared the exit, a smile came over his face. The cash had been delivered. His mission was over. He would be allowed to return to his family.

  A black Mercedes, parked under concealment of a grape arbor, was waiting for the luggage. Inside the car was Mohammed el-Ghoul, Hamas’s head of payroll. El-Ghoul was short and thin, with an oval face and a spotty beard. He was a member of the Hamas ruling
council and a diplomat, maintaining a dialogue with members of the ruling clan in Qatar, and with the finance offices of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ ultrasecretive al-Quds special operations force in Tehran. He negotiated with money changers in the Gulf and middlemen in the Arab world with banking connections. El-Ghoul was one of the most important men in Hamas: He decided who was paid and when.

  The four suitcases were hurriedly placed into a different car, a Chinese-made BYD sedan that was waiting nearby. Once the money was loaded into the car, the trunk was tied down with bungee cords. El-Ghoul sat in a rear seat, sandwiched in between two bodyguards. Speaking into a mobile phone whose SIM card he would destroy by sunset, he gestured to the driver to head north, through the rubble of the night’s Israeli air strikes, in the direction of the fighting near Beit Lahiya. Hamas forces battling Israeli commando units had not been paid in a month, and it was urgent to get the cash to them before the nighttime operations commenced.

  Several miles away an Israeli Air Force AH-64D Longbow attack helicopter hovered over the Mediterranean Sea, awaiting word from a command center near the front lines confirming that the money had been loaded into the vehicle. The weapons officer locked his sights on the fuzzy image of the sedan over the horizon, awaiting the code word to green light the launch. It came. With the push of a button, a single AGM-114 Hellfire antitank missile accelerated to supersonic speed and slammed into El-Ghoul’s Chinese-made car. The sedan evaporated into a fireball and a cloud of black smoke. Chunks of the vehicle, and shards of flesh and bone, were blown hundreds of feet away.6