Hezbollah

by Levitt, Matthew

  A Tucson Police Department memo from September 2010 cited similar concerns, stating that the relationship “bares alarming implications due to Hezbollah’s long established capabilities, specifically their expertise in the making of vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED’s).”86 Around the same time, Arizona’s Division of Emergency Management reported that border patrol agents had recovered military-style patches on clothing near the US-Mexico border. One patch contained the Arabic word for martyr, and another depicted a plane flying head-on into skyscrapers.87

  The arrest in New York City of Jamal Youssef, a former member of the Syrian military, provides even more insight into Hezbollah’s foothold in Mexico. Youssef, a known international arms dealer, attempted to sell military-grade weapons to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). The weapons included automatic rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, hand grenades, M60 machine belt-fed guns, antitank munitions, and C4 explosives—all reportedly stolen from Iraq and stored in Mexico at the home of Youssef’s relative, who he claimed was a Hezbollah member—to be sold in exchange for hundreds of kilograms of cocaine.88

  Just over the California-Mexico border, the city of Tijuana hosts San Ysidro, the busiest land-border crossing in the world. It is there in summer 2010 that Mexican authorities reportedly foiled an attempt by Hezbollah to establish a network in Central America. According to press reports, Hezbollah operatives led by Jameel Nasr employed Mexican nationals who had family in Lebanon to set up a network targeting Israeli and Western interests. Nasr, who frequently traveled to Lebanon to meet with Hezbollah commanders, according to these reports, also routinely traveled throughout Latin America. In 2008, Nasr spent two months in Venezuela, a country with close ties to Iran and a well-established Hezbollah presence.89

  Moving Dirty Money

  With so many successful fundraising schemes at the ready, Hezbollah needed effective means of moving the proceeds of its criminal enterprises to Lebanon. Often operatives would send money back with friends, relatives, or others from the Lebanese community who were traveling to Lebanon. Some were couriers by happenstance, pleased to help a friend transport money home, possibly not even aware the money was intended for Hezbollah. Others were knowing participants who willingly carried funds to Lebanon for Hezbollah, either out of ideological devotion or for a fee. But Hezbollah never put all its eggs in one basket, using hawala dealers (informal value transfer systems based on trust), money-service businesses such as Western Union, charities, and various old-fashioned smuggling techniques to move money to Lebanon. In some cases, the means Hezbollah operatives used to move their money effectively laundered the money as well.

  While Mahmoud Kourani boasted that his friend employed at Beirut International Airport helped smuggle cash into the country, Hezbollah supporters in the United States had access to an airport employee much closer to home. From 1999—three years after immigrating to the United States from Lebanon—until his arrest in 2007, Riad Skaff worked as a ground services coordinator for Air France at Chicago’s O’Hare International Airport. With an active airport security badge, Skaff had full access to all secure areas of an international terminal. For a fee, Skaff smuggled bulk cash packages onto airplanes, circumventing security inspections. At one point Skaff told an undercover agent posing as an individual seeking to smuggle $25,000 in cash to Lebanon, “I am in charge of the plane, everything…. It is dangerous, if they catch [me], they take me to jail.” Skaff did smuggle the money onto an Air France flight to Paris, noting to the undercover agent that millions of dollars pass through Paris to Lebanon daily. Skaff later smuggled $100,000 and a cellular jammer on another Paris-bound flight for the undercover agent. A month later he smuggled a package containing four night-vision rifle scopes and two night-vision goggles onto a Paris-bound flight.90

  In a government sentencing memorandum filed after Skaff pleaded guilty to all the charges against him, prosecutors put Skaff’s illicit conduct in the context of Hezbollah support activity. Arguing that Skaff’s conduct “in essence was that of a mercenary facilitating the smuggling of large amounts of cash and dangerous defense items for a fee,” prosecutors noted he was fully aware the items were destined for Lebanon, “a war-torn country besieged by the militant organization, Hezbollah.”91 Prosecutors never accused Skaff of being a Hezbollah supporter, just a criminal happy to accommodate the needs of potential Hezbollah supporters for a fee.92

  In 2007, proactive investigative techniques exposed another illicit money transfer system that could have benefited Hezbollah, this time in upstate New York. Looking over currency transaction reports (CTRs) filed by financial institutions for transactions of more than $10,000, members of the Intelligence Collection and Analysis team at the Buffalo Office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) found approximately 324 reports, representing a total of more than $12 million in transfers over approximately two years, all tied to the Social Security number of one person: Saleh Mohamed Taher Saeed, a Yemeni American. During the same period another batch of CTRs totaling more than $2.5 million was associated with the Social Security number of Yehia Ali Ahmed Alomari, another Yemeni American. The ensuing investigation led to money laundering charges against Saeed, Alomari, and another Yemeni living in the Rochester area, Mohamed al-Huraibi. The three ran a money laundering conspiracy that transferred abroad large sums of money that they knew were or believed to be the proceeds of criminal activity.93

  Based on statements of support for Hezbollah by a couple of Saeed’s associates, ICE agents inserted a Lebanon-born undercover agent into the investigation who posed as a Hezbollah member. Shortly thereafter, in May 2006, the undercover agent and the informant met with the suspects at Saeed’s store, where they discussed Hezbollah and the situation in the Middle East. Three months later they all met again, this time in a hotel room that law enforcement officials wired for audio and video surveillance. The undercover agent and the informant handed over some $60,000 they wanted to send to Lebanon, money they stressed was intended to help their own families and assist Hezbollah’s efforts to rebuild Lebanon. Three months later they provided another $30,000 to be transferred to Lebanon, emphasizing this time that the money was the product of Hezbollah scams selling stolen and counterfeit goods and prescription drugs. Three months later, in February 2007, they were even more specific about the nature of their activities, telling Alomari and al-Huraibi that the $20,000 they now wanted to send “would be utilized by Hezbollah in Lebanon to re-arm and purchase military goods.”94 Lawyers for the defendants ultimately maintained their clients believed the money they were illegally transferring was to help fellow Yemenis, not fund Hezbollah, but nonetheless the three men pleaded guilty to money laundering in August 2009.95

  The crime, in the case of Talal Chahine, owner of the famous La Shish restaurant chain in metropolitan Detroit, was one of massive tax evasion, with some $20 million secreted to Lebanon over a five-year period. Millions more were laundered through Lebanon and sent back to the United States. Chahine fled the United States in September 2005 and remains a fugitive, but his wife pleaded guilty to her role in the scheme in December 2006.96 Federal prosecutors indicated they suspect a Hezbollah connection, noting that Chahine and his wife were guests of honor at an August 2002 fundraising event in Lebanon at which Chahine and Sheikh Mohammad Fadlallah were the keynote speakers. FBI agents seized a letter from the Chahine home thanking him for sponsoring forty Lebanese orphans, which prosecutors alleged was a “euphemism used by Hezbollah to refer to the orphans of martyrs.” Agents also seized photographs of Chahine and his family posing in and around a Hezbollah outpost in Lebanon. Chahine, the government explained, had “connections at the highest levels” of Hezbollah.97 In 2006, Chahine denied all charges in an emailed statement from his company’s public relations firm, conceding he contributed to Fadlallah’s al-Mabarrat Charity Association but noting the charity openly ran a branch in the Detroit area.98 Al-Mabarrat’s Dearborn office was raided, but not ultimately shut down, by the FBI in Ju
ly 2007.99

  The June 3, 2010, arrest of Hor and Amera Akl—dual US-Lebanese citizens living in Ohio—reflected more explicit attempts to transfer funds to Hezbollah. During recorded meetings with an FBI informant, Amera stated that she “dreamed of dressing like Hezbollah, carrying a gun and dying as a martyr,” while Hor was recorded boasting that Hezbollah stored “artillery, firearms, and rockets” in his family home in Lebanon. The couple revealed that they had previously delivered money to Hezbollah representatives in Lebanon by hiding cash in magazines and on their person. With the informant, they discussed ways of clandestinely taking money out of the United States, as well as the requirements for Western Union money transfers. The June 2010 arrest of the couple occurred after they were observed by authorities concealing $200,000 in a Chevy Trailblazer they planned to ship to Lebanon.100 Court documents indicate the couple was planning to send somewhere between $500,000 and $1 million to Lebanon and to charge about a 30 percent commission fee for the service.101 The two pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in May 2011.102

  A year later, the FBI would foil another scheme, this time in Virginia, to send money to Hezbollah hidden in the tires of used cars to be shipped to Lebanon. In 2010, Mufid Kamal “Mark” Mrad told an FBI source he had previously sent money and other contraband to Lebanon through a contact at the Lebanese embassy who gave him access to a diplomatic pouch and would return hashish from Lebanon through the same diplomatic pouch. As for sending money to Hezbollah? “What’s a hundred thousand [dollars]? It’s nothing.” Sending money in cars was nothing new, but the higher ups had to be paid their cut, Mrad explained. The “Shiites are all sending [money] the same way…. How do you think the money from Africa is getting to Beirut?”103

  Still more imaginative methods of transferring criminally obtained money have been uncovered by US investigators, such as the case of Ayman Joumma and the Lebanese Canadian Bank (LCB; see chapter 9). Authorities charged that as part of a money laundering scheme, funds were sent from Lebanon to the United States to purchase used cars. Subsequently, the used cars were shipped to and sold in West Africa, where the proceeds were mixed with proceeds from narcotics trafficking and transferred back to Lebanon.104

  From 2008 to 2010, the Cybamar Swiss Family of Companies—a Michigan-based firm with several offices worldwide—reportedly shipped used cars worth more than $1 billion along with “hundreds of millions’ worth of used cars purchased with funds from the Lebanese Banks” from the United States to the tiny West African nation of Benin.105 In 2011, two Dallas-area car dealers were charged in a similar scheme to launder drug money through the purchase of used cars in the United States.106 The cases were not entirely shocking: An earlier Hezbollah case on the East Coast involved shipping stolen cars from the United States to Benin and, in a few cases, receiving payment for other stolen property by wire transfer from Africa.107 What did surprise was the explosive growth of the illicit used-car industry, with Google Earth images showing a tremendous increase in the size of car parks in Benin from 2003 to 2011.108

  Based on information from law enforcement and other sources, the US Treasury Department reported that the LCB was complicit in international drug trafficking and money laundering activities. In one of the cases cited by the Treasury Department, an individual who used the LCB to exchange laundered funds was a Latin America–based member of a Lebanese drug trafficking organization involved in moving large quantities of drugs from Latin America to destinations throughout Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. For more than a decade, according to information released by the Treasury Department, this individual and members of his family, all Hezbollah supporters, engaged in a variety of trade-based money laundering schemes involving American drug traffickers and Lebanese money launderers.109

  Nine months after his designation as a narco-trafficker in February 2011, Ayman Joumma was indicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and money laundering, including coordinating cocaine shipments for sale in the United States.110 Joumma first emerged on DEA agents’ radar when he placed a call to a phone tied to Chekry Harb, the Hezbollah-affiliated drug trafficker in Colombia (discussed in chapter 4). Joumma had arranged for the proceeds of cocaine sales to be picked up at a Paris hotel and then laundered back to Colombia, but the pickup turned out to be a sting operation. Listening in on the line, agents heard Joumma nonchalantly muse, “I just lost a million euros in France.” Cell phones seized at the Paris hotel tied Joumma, himself a Lebanese Sunni Muslim, to Hezbollah. Meanwhile, Israeli intercepts documented Joumma’s contact with a member of Hezbollah’s Unit 1800. This contact worked for a senior Hezbollah operative named Abu Abdullah, who, Israeli officials believe, dealt with Hezbollah’s drug operations. Abu Abdullah’s name arose in the DEA intercepts too. In one conversation Chekry Harb complained about “the sons of whores I owe money to.” In response, a relative from his hometown in Lebanon cautioned that the “people of Abu Abdullah, the people we do not dare have problems or fight with,” were looking for him, and their money.111

  A Beacon of Hatred in New York

  Al-Manar (the Beacon), Hezbollah’s satellite television station, aired its first broadcast on June 3, 1991.112 Almost two decades later, two New York–based individuals would be sentenced for providing support to the station in exchange for thousands of dollars. As Hezbollah’s primary mouthpiece and propaganda tool, al-Manar specializes in programming glorifying terrorism and inciting violence, racial hatred, and anti-Semitism. The self-declared “station of resistance,” al-Manar promises to wage “psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy” and has called for violence against Americans in the Middle East.113 Moreover, it has made the United States a key target of its programming and portrayed it as a global oppressor. In a September 2002 speech broadcast on al-Manar, Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah declared, “Our hostility to the Great Satan is absolute…. Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America!”114

  At the time of al-Manar’s founding, the station reportedly received seed money from Iran and had a running budget of $1 million.115 By 2002, its annual budget had grown to approximately $15 million.116 Middle East analysts and journalists maintain that most of this funding comes from Iran. An assessment by former al-Manar program director Sheikh Nasir al-Akhdar, however, asserted that al-Manar receives a large portion of its budget through subsidies offered by Hezbollah and contributions from supportive individuals and institutions.117

  Al-Manar is operated by Hezbollah members, reports directly to Hezbollah officials, and follows Hassan Nasrallah’s orders.118 As of 2000, most of the station’s forty journalists were former guerrilla fighters.119 Recall Mohammad Dbouk (see chapter 6), who used his al-Manar credentials to perform preoperational surveillance to plan Hezbollah attacks on Israeli soldiers. Dbouk accompanied Hezbollah units on their missions, filmed their live attacks, and used the resulting footage to produce propaganda videos. Some of these videos were later found in Hezbollah members’ homes in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they were used to solicit funds at local gatherings.120 In 2009, Arab media widely reported the discovery of an Egypt-based Hezbollah cell in late 2008 that contained at least one al-Manar employee who used his al-Manar credentials as a cover for collecting intelligence information for potential attacks.121

  Prominent Hezbollah members have been major shareholders in al-Manar’s parent company, the Lebanese Media Group, according to the US Treasury Department and corroborated by Nayef Krayem, al-Manar’s third general manager and chairman of the board. Al-Manar, Krayem noted, “gets money from the shareholders [who] are leaders in Hezbollah…. [Al-Manar and Hezbollah] breathe life into one another.”122

  Hassan Fadlallah, the station’s public relations director, once declared: “Neutrality like that of Al Jazeera is out of the question for us. We cover only the victim, not the aggressor. CNN is the Zionist news network, Al Jazeera is neutral, and Al Manar takes the side of the Palestinians. We’re not looking to interview [fo
rmer Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon. We want to get close to him in order to kill him.”123

  In response to al-Manar’s incitement of racial hatred, many countries have banned the station from broadcasting, including France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia.124 At a meeting of European Union member states in March 2005, media regulators agreed European satellites would no longer be allowed to carry the channel. In essence, this action banned al-Manar from broadcasting throughout the European Union.125 The move was supported by the Palestinian Authority, which was frustrated with al-Manar’s recruitment of suicide bombers out to sabotage the Palestinian Authority’s fragile truce with Israel.126

  While European countries banned Hezbollah’s al-Manar because it incited hatred, the US ban focused on the channel’s affiliation with Hezbollah. In December 2004, the US State Department added al-Manar to the Terrorism Exclusion List, effectively preventing the immigration and accelerating the deportation of non–US citizens associated with the station, as well as the removal of al-Manar from US television providers.127 Two years later, the Department of the Treasury named al-Manar a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity, noting that al-Manar supported fundraising and recruitment efforts by Hezbollah through advertisements and requesting donations on air. According to the Treasury Department, al-Manar broadcast an invitation from Hezbollah secretary-general Nasrallah for all Lebanese citizens to volunteer for Hezbollah military training. The station also provided support to Palestinian terrorist groups. In one example cited by the US Treasury, al-Manar transferred tens of thousands of dollars to a charity controlled by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.128