Part II
Everywhere and Nowhere
From its headquarters in the Middle East, Hezbollah extends its criminal reach to Latin America, Africa and the United States.
On Feb. 12, 2008, CIA and Israeli intelligence detonated a bomb in MughniyehImad MughniyehA Hezbollah mastermind who
oversaw its international operations and, the DEA says, its drug
trafficking, as head of its military wing, the Islamic Jihad
Organization.’s car as he was leaving a celebration of the
29th anniversary of the Iranian revolution in Damascus, Syria. He was
killed instantly. It was a major blow to Hezbollah, but soon after,
wiretapped phone lines and other U.S. evidence showed that his criminal
operation was busier than ever, and overseen by two trusted associates,
according to interviews with former Project Cassandra officials and DEA
documents.
One was financier Adham TabajaAdham TabajaLebanese businessman, alleged co-leader of Hezbollah Business Affairs Component and key figure directly tying Hezbollah’s commercial and terrorist activities..
The other, the interviews and documents reveal, was Safieddine, the key
link between Hezbollah — which was run by his cousin, Hassan Nasrallah
and his own brother Hashem — and Iran, Hezbollah’s state sponsor, which
saw the group as its strategic ally in defending Shiite Muslims in the
largely Sunni Muslim states that surrounded it.
Investigators
were also homing in on several dozen key players underneath them who
acted as “superfacilitators” for the various criminal operations
benefitting Hezbollah, Iran and, at times, their allies in Iraq, Syria,
Venezuela and Russia.
But it was
Safieddine, a low-key, bespectacled man with a diplomatic bearing, who
was their key point of connection from his base in Tehran, investigators
believed.
The
Colombia and Venezuela investigations linked him to numerous
international drug smuggling and money laundering networks, and
especially to one of the biggest the DEA had ever seen, led by
Medellin-based Lebanese businessman Ayman JoumaaAyman Saied JoumaaAccused drug kingpin and financier whose vast network allegedly smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. with Mexico’s Zetas cartel and laundered money..
JoumaaAyman Saied JoumaaAccused drug kingpin and financier whose vast network allegedly smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. with Mexico’s Zetas cartel and laundered money.’s network rang alarm bells in Washington when agents discovered he was working with Mexico’s brutal Los Zetas
cartel to move multi-ton loads of cocaine directly into the United
States, and washing $200 million a month in criminal proceeds with the
help of 300 or so used car dealerships. The network would funnel huge
amounts of money to the dealerships to purchase used cars, which would
then be shipped to Benin, on Africa’s west coast.
Arctic Ocean
U.s.
Mexico
Drugs from Colombia and
Venezuela shipped to U.S.
via Mexico
Pacific Ocean
Freshly laundered money is
returned to U.S. to buy used cars
Colombia
Altantic Ocean
Venezuela
Pro-Hezbollah money
houses and banks,
Beirut
Drugs flow
to Europe
Benin
Used cars bought in U.S.,
shipped to West Africa
for resale
Used car proceeds
couriered to Lebanon
Indian Ocean
Drugs are sent from Colombia
and Venezuela to Europe via West Africa
Antarctica
As the task force investigators intensified their focus on Safieddine, they were contacted out of the blue by AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise.,
the Defense Department official, who was at Special Operations Command
tracking the money used to provide ragtag Iraqi Shiite militias with
sophisticated weapons for use against U.S. troops, including the new and
lethal IED known as the “Explosively Formed Penetrator.” The
armor-piercing charges were so powerful that they were ripping M1 Abrams
tanks in half.
“Nobody had seen weapons like these,” Asher told POLITICO. “They could blow the side off a building.”
Asher’s
curiosity had been piqued by evidence linking the IED network to phone
numbers intercepted in the Colombia investigation. Before long, he
traced the unusual alliance to a number allegedly used by Safieddine in
Iran.
“I had no clue who he was,” Asher recalled. “But this guy was sending money into Iraq, to kill American soldiers.”
“I had no clue who he was. But this guy was sending money into Iraq, to kill American soldiers.”
— David Asher on Abdallah Safieddine.
Thanks to that chance
connection, the Pentagon’s then-head of counternarcotics, William
Wechsler, lent Asher and a few other Defense Department experts in
tracking illicit money to the DEA to see what they might find.
It
was a fruitful partnership. Asher was accustomed to toiling in the
financial shadows. During his 20-plus years of U.S. government work, his
core expertise was in exposing money laundering and schemes to avoid
financial sanctions by rogue nation states, terrorist groups,
organized-crime cartels and weapons proliferation networks.
Usually,
his work was strictly classified. For Project Cassandra, however, he
got special dispensation from the Pentagon to build networks of
unclassified information so it could be used in criminal prosecutions.
Asher
and his team quickly integrated cutting-edge financial intelligence
tools into the various DEA investigations. With the U.S. military’s
help, agents translated thousands of hours of intercepted phone
conversations from Colombia in Arabic that no one had considered
relevant until the Hezbollah links appeared.
When the translations were complete, investigators said, they painted a picture of SafieddineAbdallah SafieddineHezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group's “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking.
as a human hub of a criminal enterprise with spokes emanating from
Tehran outward into Latin America, Africa, Europe and the United States
via hundreds of legitimate businesses and front companies.
Safieddine
did not respond to requests for comment through various intermediaries
including Hezbollah’s media arm. A Hezbollah official, however, denied
that the organization was involved in drug dealing.
“Sheik
Nasrallah has confirmed lots of times that it is not permitted
religiously for Hezbollah members to be trafficking drugs,” the official
said. “It is something that is preventable, in that we in Islam have
things like halal [permitted] and haram [prohibited]. For us, this is
haram. So in no way is it possible to be done.”
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The accusation that
Hezbollah is involved in drug trafficking, the representative said, “is
part of the campaign to distort the image of Hezbollah as a resistance
movement against the Israelis. Of course, it is possible to have
Lebanese people involved in drugs, but it is not possible for them to be
members of Hezbollah. This is absolutely not possible.”
Asked
about Safieddine’s role in the organization, the official said, “We
don’t usually expose the roles everyone plays because it is a jihadi
organization. So it is a little bit secret.”
Safieddine’s
cousin Nasrallah, the Hezbollah leader, has publicly rejected the idea
that Hezbollah needs to raise money at all, through drugs or any other
criminal activity, because Iran provides whatever funds it needs.
Safieddine
himself, however, suggested otherwise in 2005, when he defiantly
refuted the Bush administration’s accusations that Iran and Syria
supplied Hezbollah with weapons. Those countries provided “political and
moral” support only, he told Agence France-Presse. “We don’t need to
arm ourselves from Tehran. Why bring weapons from Iran via Syria when we
can procure them anywhere in the world?”
“We don't need to arm ourselves from Tehran. Why bring weapons
from Iran via Syria when we can procure them anywhere in the world?”
— Abdallah Safieddine to Agence France-Presse in 2005.
Safieddine may have been
right. Agents found evidence that weapons were flowing to Hezbollah from
many channels, including networks that trafficked in both drugs and
weapons. And using the same trafficking networks that hummed with drugs,
cash and commercial products, agents concluded, Safieddine was
overseeing Hezbollah efforts to help Iran procure parts and technology
for its clandestine nuclear and ballistic missile programs.
“Hezbollah
operates like the Gambino crime family on steroids, and he is its John
Gotti,” said Kelly, referring to the infamous “Teflon Don” crime boss
who for decades eluded justice. “Whatever Iran needs, Safieddine is in
charge of getting it for them.”
“Hezbollah operates like the Gambino crime family on steroids, and he is its John Gotti.”
— Jack Kelly on Abdallah Safieddine.
The Bush administration
had made disrupting the networks through which Iran obtained parts for
its weapons of mass destruction programs a top priority, with
then-Deputy National Security Adviser Juan Zarate
personally overseeing an interagency effort to map out the procurement
channels. A former Justice Department prosecutor, Zarate understood the
value of international law enforcement operations, and put DEA’s Special
Operations Division at the center of it.
But even then, other agencies were chafing at the DEA’s role.
A Series of Roadblocks
Much of the early
turbulence stemmed from an escalating turf battle between federal law
enforcement and intelligence agencies over which ones had primacy in the
global war on terrorism, especially over a so-called hybrid target like
Hezbollah, which was both a criminal enterprise and a national security
threat.
The “cops” from the FBI and
DEA wanted to build criminal cases, throw Hezbollah operatives in prison
and get them to turn on each other. That stoked resentment among the
“spooks” at the CIA and National Security Agency, who for 25 years had
gathered intelligence, sometimes through the painstaking process of
having agents infiltrate Hezbollah, and then occasionally launching
assassinations and cyberattacks to block imminent threats.
Further
complicating the picture was the role of the State Department, which
often wanted to quash both law-enforcement actions and covert operations
due to the political backlash they created. Hezbollah, after all, was a
leading political force in Lebanon and a provider of human services,
with a sincere grass-roots following that wasn’t necessarily aware of
its unsavory actions. Nowhere was the tension between law enforcement
and diplomacy more acute than in dealings with Hezbollah, which was fast
becoming a key part of the Lebanese government.
Distrust among U.S. agencies exploded after two incidents brought the cops-spooks divide into clear relief.
In
the waning days of the Bush administration, a DEA agent’s cover was
blown just as he was about to become a Colombian cartel’s main cocaine
supplier to the Middle East — and to Hezbollah operatives.
A
year later, under Obama, the State Department blocked an FBI-led Joint
Terrorism Task Force from luring a key eyewitness from Beirut to
Philadelphia so he could be arrested and turned against SafieddineAbdallah SafieddineHezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group's “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking. and other Hezbollah operatives in a scheme to procure 1,200 Colt M4 military-grade assault rifles.
In
both cases, law enforcement agents suspected that Middle East-based
spies in the CIA had torpedoed their investigations to protect their
politically sensitive and complicated relationship with Hezbollah.
The
CIA declined to comment on the allegation that it intentionally blew
the cover of a DEA agent or any other aspect of its relationship with
Project Cassandra. The Obama State Department and Justice Department
also declined to comment in response to detailed requests about their
dealings with Hezbollah.
But
the tensions between those agencies and the DEA were no secret. Some
current and former diplomats and CIA officers, speaking on condition of
anonymity, portrayed DEA Special Operations agents as undisciplined and
overly aggressive cowboys with little regard for the larger geopolitical
picture. “They’d come in hot to places like Beirut, want to slap
handcuffs on people and disrupt operations we’d been cultivating for
years,” one former CIA case officer said.
“They’d come in hot to places like Beirut, want to slap
handcuffs on people and disrupt operations we’d been cultivating for
years.”
— Former CIA case officer on how the DEA operated.
KellyJohn “Jack” KellyDEA
agent overseeing Hezbollah cases at Special Operations Division, who
named task force Project Cassandra after clashes with other U.S.
agencies about Hezbollah drug-terror links. and other
agents embraced their swashbuckling reputation, claiming that more
aggressive tactics were needed because the CIA had long turned a blind
eye to Hezbollah’s criminal networks, and even cultivated informants
within them, in a misguided and myopic focus on preventing terrorist
attacks.
The unyielding posture of Kelly, AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise.
and their team also rankled some of their fellow law-enforcement agents
within the FBI, the Justice Department and even the DEA itself. The
more Kelly and Asher insisted that everyone else was missing the
drug-crime-terror nexus, the more others accused them — and their team
out at Chantilly — of inflating those connections to expand the task
force’s portfolio, get more funding and establish its importance.
After
a few years of working together on the Hezbollah cases, Kelly and Asher
had become a familiar sight in the never-ending circuit of meetings and
briefings in what is known as the “interagency process,” a euphemism
for the U.S. national security community’s efforts to bring all elements
of power to bear on a particular problem.
From outward appearances, the two made an unusual pair.
Kelly,
now 51, was a streetwise agent from small-town New Jersey who cut his
teeth investigating the Mafia and drug kingpins. He spent his infrequent
downtime lifting weights, watching college football and chilling in
cargo shorts.
Asher, 49,
speaks fluent Japanese, earned his Ph.D. in international relations from
Oxford University and has the pallor of a senior government official
who has spent the past three decades in policy meetings, classified
military war rooms and diplomatic summits.
Both
were described by supporters and detractors alike as having a similarly
formidable combination of investigative and analytical skills, and the
self-confidence to match it. At times, and especially on Project
Cassandra, their intensity worked to the detriment of their careers.
“It
got to the point where a lot of people didn’t want to have meetings
with them,” said one FBI terrorism task force supervisor who worked
often with the two. “They refused to accept no for an answer. And they
were often given no for an answer. Even though they were usually right.”
Subject: SDFLs obstruction of a 960a indictment will have far reaching implications including threats to our National Security
October 8, 2008
From: Jack Kelly
To: DEA officials
I appreciate the tremendous support DEA
management has given to Operation Titan. And I understand that its felt
we have no options left. Let me clearly lay out what I think are the
tremendous implications of what has occurred and then I will leave you guys alone.
Email recreation
An early flash point was Operation TitanOperation TitanA joint investigation with
Colombian authorities into a global money-laundering and
drug-trafficking alliance between Latin American traffickers and
Lebanese operatives., the DEA initiative in Colombia.
After its undercover agent was compromised, DEA and Colombian
authorities scrambled to build cases against as many as 130 traffickers,
including a Colombian cartel leader and a suspected Safieddine
associate named Chekry Harb, nicknamed El Taliban.
For
months afterward, the Justice Department rebuffed requests by task
force agents, and some of its own prosecutors, to add narcoterrorism
charges to the drug and money-laundering counts against Harb, several
sources involved in the case said. Agents argued that they had evidence
that would easily support the more serious charges. Moreover, Harb’s
prosecution was an essential building block in their larger plan for a
sustained legal assault against Hezbollah’s criminal network.
Its centerpiece would be a prosecution under the Racketeer ActRICO caseThe Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act increases the severity of penalties for crimes committed in as part of organized crime.,
a powerful tool used by the Justice Department against sophisticated
international conspiracies, including the Mafia, drug cartels and
white-collar corporate crimes. A RICO case would give the task force the
ability to tie many seemingly unconnected conspiracies together, and
prosecute the alleged bosses overseeing them, like Safieddine,
participants say.
After
the Justice Department’s final refusal to bring narcoterrorism charges
against Harb, Kelly sent an angry email to the DEA leadership warning
that Justice’s “obstruction” would have “far reaching implications
including threats to our National Security” given Hezbollah’s
mushrooming criminal activity.
Of
particular concern: A 25–year-old Lebanese man that Kelly described as
the network’s “command and control element,” according to the email.
The young man was not only in contact “with JoumaaAyman Saied JoumaaAccused drug kingpin and financier whose vast network allegedly smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. with Mexico’s Zetas cartel and laundered money.
and some of the other top drug traffickers in the world” but also
“leaders of a foreign [country’s] black ops special forces; executive
leadership of Hezbollah; and a representative of a company which is most
likely facilitating the development of WMDs.”
“We
should also not forget,” he added, “about the 100’s of used car
companies in the states — some of them owned by Islamic Extremists —
which are part of this network.”
In interviews, former task force officials identified the young man as SafieddineAbdallah SafieddineHezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group's “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking.’s son, and said he acted as his father’s liaison in Beirut.
All
of that information was shared with other law enforcement and
intelligence agencies — and the White House — via the DEA’s Chantilly
nerve center. But by early 2009, Obama’s national security team batted
down Project Cassandra’s increasingly urgent warnings as being overly
alarmist, counterproductive or untrue, or simply ignored them, according
to Kelly, Asher, Maltz and other participants in and out of government.
By
following the money, though, Asher had become convinced that the task
force wasn’t overhyping the threat posed by Hezbollah’s criminal
activities, it was significantly underestimating it. Because Hezbollah’s
drug trafficking was bankrolling its Islamic Jihad military wing and
joint ventures with Iran, as Asher would later testify before Congress,
it represented “the largest material support scheme for terrorism
operations” the world had ever seen.
Foreign and resident bank deposits in Lebanese Central Bank
Both resident and nonresident deposits grew despite war and global financial crisis, suggesting to investigators that drug proceeds were flooding the financial system.
Resident deposits
Total deposits
Financial crisis
176T
Resident deposits
in local currency
132
Sept. 11 attacks
Israel–Hezbollah War
88
44
Resident deposits
in foreign currency
0
2000
’02
’04
’06
’08
2010
’12
’14
’16
Nonresident deposits
Total deposits
Financial crisis
53.0T
42.4
31.8
Sept. 11 attacks
Israel–Hezbollah War
21.2
Deposits of
nonresidents
10.6
0
2000
’02
’04
’06
’08
2010
’12
’14
’16
As proof, AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise.
would often bring PowerPoints to interagency drug and crime meetings,
showing how cash reserves of U.S currency in Lebanon had doubled, to $16
billion, in just a few years, and how shiny new skyscrapers were
popping up around Beirut, just like Miami, Panama City, Panama, and
other cities awash in drug money.
Privately,
Asher began to tell task force colleagues, the best way to take down
the entire criminal enterprise — especially such a politically sensitive
one as Hezbollah — was to go after its money, and the financial
institutions assisting it. Their first target would be one of the
world’s fastest-growing banks, the Beirut-based Lebanese Canadian Bank
and its $5 billion in assets.
Blocked Efforts, Missed Opportunities
Asher knew how to
successfully implode the financial underpinnings of an illicit,
state-sponsored trafficking network because he’d already done it, just a
few years earlier, as the Bush administration’s point man on North
Korea. In that case, he used the post-9/11 PATRIOT Act to cut off
Pyongyang by going after Banco Delta Asia, a Macau-based bank that made
illicit financial transactions on behalf of the North Korean regime.
In
Beirut, Asher and his team worked with an Israeli intelligence
operation to penetrate the Lebanese bank’s inner workings and diagram
its Byzantine money flows. They gathered evidence showing how JoumaaAyman Saied JoumaaAccused drug kingpin and financier whose vast network allegedly smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. with Mexico’s Zetas cartel and laundered money.’s
network alone was laundering $200 million per month in “bulk proceeds
of drug sales” through the bank and various money exchange houses,
according to Justice and Treasury department documents.
Much
of the freshly laundered cash, the records show, was then wired to
about 300 U.S. used-car dealers to buy and ship thousands of vehicles to
West Africa.
Task force
agents also documented how Safieddine was a financial liaison providing
Hezbollah — and, of potentially huge significance, Iran — with VIP
services at the bank, including precious access to the international
financial system in violation of U.S. sanctions, according to those
records.
By then, the task force was
working closely with federal prosecutors in a new Terrorism and
International Narcotics Unit out of the Justice Department’s Southern
District of New York. The Manhattan prosecutors agreed to file criminal
charges against the bank and two senior officials that they hoped to
turn into cooperating witnesses against Hezbollah and Safieddine,
several participants said.
The
Obama White House said privately that it feared a broader assault on
Lebanese financial institutions would destabilize the country. But
without the threat of prison time, complicit bank officials clammed up.
And without pressure on the many other financial institutions in Lebanon
and the region, Hezbollah simply moved its banking business elsewhere.
Soon
afterward, Kelly said, he ran into one of the unit’s top prosecutors
and asked if there was “something going on with the White House that
explains why we can’t get a criminal filing.”
“You
don’t know the half of it,” the prosecutor replied, according to Kelly.
“Right now, we have 50 FBI agents not doing anything because they know
their Iran cases aren’t going anywhere,” including investigations around
the U.S. into allegedly complicit used-car dealers.
“Right now, we have 50 FBI agents not doing anything because they know their Iran cases aren’t going anywhere”
— Jack Kelly on what a Justice Department official told him about the chilling effect of Obama's rapprochement with Iran.
Justice
Department officials involved, including then-U.S. Attorney Preet
Bharara and other prosecutors, declined requests to discuss the bank
case or others involving Hezbollah.
That
October, Asher helped uncover a plot by two Iranian agents and a
Texas-based Iranian-American to hire Mexican cartel gunmen to
assassinate Saudi Arabia’s U.S. ambassador in a crowded Washington cafe.
A month later, prosecutors indicted Joumaa, accusing him of working
with Mexico’s Zetas cartel and Colombian and Venezuelan suppliers to
smuggle 85 tons of cocaine into the U.S., and laundering $850 million in
drug proceeds.
Task force agents hoped
those cases would win them the political support needed to attack the
Hezbollah criminal network and its patrons in Tehran. Instead, the
opposite appeared to be happening.
DEA
officials weren’t included in the Justice and FBI news conference on
the assassination plot, and claim it was because the Obama White House
wanted to downplay the drug-terror connection. And Joumaa’s indictment
didn’t mention Hezbollah once, despite DEA evidence of his connections
to the group dating back to 1997.
By the
end of 2012, senior officials at the Justice Department’s National
Security and Criminal divisions, and at the State Department and
National Security Council, had shut down, derailed or delayed numerous
other Hezbollah-related cases with little or no explanation, according
to Asher, Kelly, Maltz and other current and former participating
officials.
Agents discovered
“an entire Quds force network” in the U.S., laundering money, moving
drugs and illegally smuggling Bell helicopters, night-vision goggles and
other items for Iran, Asher said.
“We
crashed to indict” the elite Iranian unit, and while some operatives
were eventually prosecuted, other critically important indictments “were
rejected despite the fact that we had excellent evidence and testifying
witnesses,” said Asher, who helped lead the investigation.
In
Philadelphia, the FBI-led task force had spent two years bolstering its
case claiming that Safieddine had overseen an effort to purchase 1,200
military-grade assault rifles bound for Lebanon, with the help of Kelly
and the special narcoterrorism prosecutors in New York.
Now, they had two key eyewitnesses. One would identify SafieddineAbdallah SafieddineHezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group's “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking.
as the Hezbollah official sitting behind a smoked-glass barricade who
approved the assault weapons deal. And an agent and prosecutor had flown
to a remote Asian hotel and spent four days persuading another
eyewitness to testify about Safieddine’s role in an even bigger weapons
and drugs conspiracy, multiple former law enforcement officials
confirmed to POLITICO.
Convinced
they had a strong case, the New York prosecutors sent a formal
prosecution request to senior Justice Department lawyers in Washington,
as required in such high-profile cases. The Justice Department rejected
it, and the FBI and DEA agents were never told why, those former
officials said.
Justice Department officials declined to comment on the case.
Kelly
had been searching for an appropriate DEA code name to give to
collaborating agencies so they could access and contribute to task force
investigative files. He found it while reading the Erik Larson book “In
the Garden of Beasts,” in which the former U.S. ambassador to Germany
named his U.S. speaking tour about the growing Nazi menace after the
famous mythological figure whose warnings about the future were
unheeded.
Now the project had its name: Cassandra.
Internal DEA insignia for Project Cassandra.
Standing Down on Hezbollah
After Obama won reelection
in November 2012, the administration’s pushback on Hezbollah drug cases
became more overt, and now seemed to be emanating directly from the
White House, according to task force members, some former U.S. officials
and other observers.
One reason,
they said, was Obama’s choice of a new national security team. The
appointment of John Kerry as secretary of state was widely viewed as a
sign of a redoubled effort to engage with Iran. Obama’s appointment of
Brennan — the public supporter of cultivating Hezbollah moderates — as
CIA director, and the president’s choice of the Justice Department’s top
national security lawyer, Lisa MonacoLisa MonacoLisa Monaco replaced John Brennan as the White House counterterrorism and homeland security adviser.,
as Brennan’s replacement as White House counterterrorism and homeland
security adviser, put two more strong proponents of diplomatic
engagement with Iran in key positions.
Another
factor was the victory of reformist candidate Hassan Rouhani as
president of Iran that summer, which pushed the talks over a possible
nuclear deal into high gear.
The
administration’s eagerness for an Iran deal was broadcast through so
many channels, task force members say, that political appointees and
career officials at key agencies like Justice, State and the National
Security Council felt unspoken pressure to view the task force’s efforts
with skepticism. One former senior Justice Department official
confirmed to POLITICO that some adverse decisions might have been
influenced by an informal multi-agency Iran working group that “assessed
the potential impact” of criminal investigations and prosecutions on
the nuclear negotiations.
Monaco
was a particularly influential roadblock at the intersection of law
enforcement and politics, in part due to her sense of caution, her close
relationship with Obama and her frequent contact with her former
colleagues at the Justice Department’s National Security Division,
according to several task force members and other current and former
officials familiar with its efforts.
Some
Obama officials warned that further crackdowns against Hezbollah would
destabilize Lebanon. Others warned that such actions would alienate Iran
at a critical early stage of the serious Iran deal talks. And some
officials, including MonacoLisa MonacoLisa Monaco replaced John Brennan as the White House counterterrorism and homeland security adviser., said the administration was concerned about retaliatory terrorist or military actions by Hezbollah, task force members said.
“That
was the established policy of the Obama administration internally,” one
former senior Obama national security official said, in describing the
reluctance to go after Hezbollah for fear of reprisal. He said he
criticized it at the time as being misguided and hypocritical.
“We’re
obviously doing those actions against al Qaeda and ISIS all the time,”
the Obama official said. “I thought it was bad policy [to refrain from
such actions on Hezbollah] that limited the range of options we had,”
including criminal prosecutions.
Monaco
declined repeated requests for comment, including detailed questions
sent by email and text, though a former White House subordinate of hers
rejected the task force members’ description of her motives and actions.
The
White House was driven by a broader set of concerns than the fate of
the nuclear talks, the former White House official said, including the
fear of reprisals by Hezbollah against the United States and Israel, and
the need to maintain peace and stability in the Middle East.
Brennan
also told POLITICO he was not commenting on any aspect of his CIA
tenure. His former associates, however, said that he remained committed
to preventing Hezbollah from committing terrorist acts, and that his
decisions were based on an overall concern for U.S. security.
For
their part, task force agents said they tried to work around the
obstacles presented by the Justice and State Departments and the White
House. Often, they chose to build relatively simple drug and weapons
cases against suspects rather than the ambitious narcoterrorism
prosecutions that required the approval of senior Justice Department
lawyers, interviews and records show.
At the same time, though, they redoubled efforts to build a RICORICO caseThe Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act increases the severity of penalties for crimes committed in as part of organized crime. case and gain Justice Department support for it.
Their
ace in the hole, Kelly and Asher said they told Justice officials,
wasn’t some dramatic drug bust, but thousands of individual financial
transactions, each of which constituted an overt criminal act under
RICO. Much of this evidence grew out of the Lebanese Canadian Bank
investigation, including details of how an army of couriers for years
had been transporting billions of dollars in dirty U.S. cash from West
African car dealerships to friendly banks in Beirut.
The
couriers would begin their journeys at a four-star hotel in Lome, Togo,
lugging suitcases stuffed with as much as $2 million each, Kelly said.
And the task force was on the tail of every one of them, he said, thanks
to an enterprising DEA agent who had found a way to get all of their
cellphone numbers. “They had no idea what we were doing,” Kelly said.
“But that alone gave us all the slam-dunk evidence we needed” for a RICO
case against everyone involved in the conspiracy, including Hezbollah.
The couriers were lugging suitcases stuffed with as much as $2
million each, and the task force was on the tail of every one of them.
Such
on-the-ground spadework, combined with its worldwide network of
court-approved communications intercepts, gave Project Cassandra agents
virtual omniscience over some aspects of the Hezbollah criminal network.
And
from their perch in Chantilly, they watched with growing alarm as
Hezbollah accelerated its global expansion that the drug money helped
finance.
Both Hezbollah and
Iran continued to build up their military arsenals and move thousands
of soldiers and weapons into Syria. Aided by the U.S. military
withdrawal from Iraq, Iran, with the help of Hezbollah, consolidated its
control and influence over wide swaths of the war-ravaged country.
Iran
and Hezbollah began making similar moves into Yemen and other
Sunni-controlled countries. And their networks in Africa trafficked not
just in drugs, weapons and used cars but diamonds, commercial
merchandise and even human slaves, according to interviews with former
Project Cassandra members and Treasury Department documents. Hezbollah
and the Quds force also were moving into China and other new markets.
But Project Cassandra’s agents were most alarmed, by far, by the havoc Hezbollah and Iran were wreaking in Latin America.
A Threat in America’s Backyard
In the years after the 9/11
terrorist attacks, when Washington’s focus was elsewhere, Hezbollah and
Iran cultivated alliances with governments along the “cocaine corridor”
from the tip of South America to Mexico, to turn them against the United
States.
The strategy worked
in Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, which evicted the DEA, shuttering
strategic bases and partnerships that had been a bulwark in the U.S.
counternarcotics campaign.
In
Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez was personally working with
then-Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and Hezbollah on drug
trafficking and other activities aimed at undermining U.S. influence in
the region, according to interviews and documents.
Hugo Chavez
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad
Former Venezuelan president
Former Iranian president
Within a few years,
Venezuelan cocaine exports skyrocketed from 50 tons a year to 250, much
of it bound for American cities, United Nations Office of Drugs and
Crime statistics show.
And
beginning in 2007, DEA agents watched as a commercial jetliner from
Venezuela’s state-run Conviasa airline flew from Caracas to Tehran via
Damascus, Syria, every week with a cargo-hold full of drugs and cash.
They nicknamed it “Aeroterror,” they said, because the return flight
often carried weapons and was packed with Hezbollah and Iranian
operatives whom the Venezuelan government would provide with fake
identities and travel documents on their arrival.
From
there, the operatives spread throughout the subcontinent and set up
shop in the many recently opened Iranian consulates, businesses and
mosques, former Project Cassandra agents said.
But
when the Obama administration had opportunities to secure the
extradition of two of the biggest players in that conspiracy, it failed
to press hard enough to get them extradited to the United States, where
they would face charges, task force officials told POLITICO.
One
was Syrian-born Venezuelan businessman Walid Makled, alias the “king of
kingpins,” who was arrested in Colombia in 2010 on charges of shipping
10 tons of cocaine a month to the United States. While in custody,
Makled claimed to have 40 Venezuelan generals on his payroll and
evidence implicating dozens of top Venezuelan officials in drug
trafficking and other crimes. He pleaded to be sent to New York as a
protected, cooperating witness, but Colombia — a staunch U.S. ally —
extradited him to Venezuela instead.
The
other, retired Venezuelan general and former chief of intelligence Hugo
Carvajal, was arrested in Aruba on U.S. drug charges. Carvajal “was the
main man between Venezuela and Iran, the Quds force, Hezbollah and the
cocaine trafficking,” Kelly said. “If we had gotten our hands on either
of them, we could have taken down the entire network.”
"If we had gotten our hands on either of them, we could have taken down the entire network."
— Kelly on the extradition of a top Venezuelan official and a drug kingpin.
Instead, Venezuela was now
the primary pipeline for U.S.-bound cocaine, thanks in part to the
DEA’s success in neighboring Colombia. It had also become a
strategically invaluable staging area for Hezbollah and Iran in the
United States’ backyard, including camps they established to train
Shiite militias.
And at the center of much of that activity was the GhostThe GhostOne
of the most mysterious alleged associates of Safieddine, secretly
indicted by the U.S., linked to multi-ton U.S.-bound cocaine loads and
weapons shipments to Middle East., another suspected Safieddine associate so elusive that no photos of him were said to exist.
Project
Cassandra agents came to regard the Ghost as perhaps the most important
on-the-ground operator in the conspiracy because of his suspected role
in moving drugs, money and munitions, including multi-ton loads of
cocaine, into the United States, and WMD components to the Middle East,
according to two former senior U.S. officials.
Now, he and JoumaaAyman Saied JoumaaAccused drug kingpin and financier whose vast network allegedly smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. with Mexico’s Zetas cartel and laundered money.
were living in Beirut, and Project Cassandra agents were so familiar
with their routines that they knew at which cafe the two men gathered
every morning to drink espresso and “discuss drug trafficking, money
laundering and weapons,” one of the two former officials said.
The Ghost was also in business with another suspected Safieddine associate, Ali FayadAli Fayad(aka Fayyad). Ukraine-based arms merchant suspected of being a Hezbollah operative moving large amounts of weapons to Syria.,
who had long been instrumental in providing weapons to Shiite militias
in Iraq, including through the deadly IED network that had killed so
many U.S. troops, the former officials believed.
Now,
they had information that Fayad, a joint Lebanese and Ukrainian
citizen, and the Ghost were involved in moving conventional and chemical
weapons into Syria for Hezbollah, Iran and Russia to help President
Assad crush the insurgency against his regime. Adding to the mystery:
Fayad served as a Ukrainian defense ministry adviser, worked for the
state-owned arms exporter Ukrspecexport and appeared to have taken BoutViktor Anatolyevich BoutVladimir
Putin's arms dealer, known as the "Lord of War." Convicted of
conspiracy to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to Colombian
narcoterrorists.’s place as Putin’s go-to arms merchant, the former officials said.
So
when Fayad’s name surfaced in a DEA investigation in West Africa as a
senior Hezbollah weapons trafficker, agents scrambled to create a sting
operation, with undercover operatives posing as Colombian
narcoterrorists plotting to shoot down American government helicopters.
Fayad
was happy to offer his expert advice, and after agreeing to provide
them with 20 Russian-made shoulder-fired Igla surface-to-air missiles,
400 rocket-propelled grenades and various firearms and rocket launchers
for $8.3 million, he was arrested by Czech authorities on a U.S. warrant
in April 2014, U.S. court records show.
The
Fayad sting — and his unprecedented value as a potential cooperating
witness — was just one of many reasons Project Cassandra members had
good cause, finally, for optimism.
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