The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook
An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah's billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House's desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.
Advertisement
Part I
A global threat emerges
How Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion.
In
its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama
administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting
drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even
as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a
POLITICO investigation.
The
campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug
Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had
transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political
organization into an international crime syndicate that some
investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and
weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
Over
the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility
in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and
informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S.
and foreign security agencies.
They
followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and
on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and
Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it
was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and
shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating
witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the
innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.
They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash,
and traced what they believed to be the innermost circle of Hezbollah
and its state sponsors in Iran.
But as Project
Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama
administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of
roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of
participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events
shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court
records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some
significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial
sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed,
hindered or rejected their requests.
The
Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other
authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as
Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly
laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a
U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State
Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries
where they could be arrested.
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise.,
who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense
Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this
entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was
done from the top down.”
Advertisement
The untold story of Project
Cassandra illustrates the immense difficulty in mapping and countering
illicit networks in an age where global terrorism, drug trafficking and
organized crime have merged, but also the extent to which competing
agendas among government agencies — and shifting priorities at the
highest levels — can set back years of progress.
And
while the pursuit may be shadowed in secrecy, from Latin American
luxury hotels to car parks in Africa to the banks and battlefields of
the Middle East, the impact is not: In this case, multi-ton loads of
cocaine entering the United States, and hundreds of millions of dollars
going to a U.S.-designated terrorist organization with vast reach.
Obama
had entered office in 2009 promising to improve relations with Iran as
part of a broader rapprochement with the Muslim world. On the campaign
trail, he had asserted repeatedly that the Bush administration’s policy
of pressuring Iran to stop its illicit nuclear program wasn’t working,
and that he would reach out to Tehran to reduce tensions.
The man who would become Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and then CIA director, John BrennanJohn BrennanObama's White House counterterrorism adviser, who became CIA director in 2013., went further. He recommended in a policy paper
that “the next president has the opportunity to set a new course for
relations between the two countries” through not only a direct dialogue,
but “greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political
system.”
Barack Obama
John Brennan
Former U.S. president
Former CIA director
By May 2010, Brennan, then
assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism,
confirmed in a speech that the administration was looking for ways to
build up “moderate elements” within Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah
is a very interesting organization,” Brennan told a Washington
conference, saying it had evolved from “purely a terrorist organization”
to a militia and, ultimately, a political party with representatives in
the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet, according to a Reuters report.
“There
is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us
what they’re doing,” Brennan said. “And what we need to do is to find
ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to
build up the more moderate elements.”
In
practice, the administration’s willingness to envision a new role for
Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with its desire for a negotiated
settlement to Iran’s nuclear program, translated into a reluctance to
move aggressively against the top Hezbollah operatives, according to
Project Cassandra members and others.
Lebanese arms dealer Ali FayadAli Fayad(aka Fayyad). Ukraine-based arms merchant suspected of being a Hezbollah operative moving large amounts of weapons to Syria.
, a suspected top Hezbollah operative whom agents believed reported to
Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria
and Iraq, was arrested in Prague in the spring of 2014. But for the
nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top Obama administration
officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to
extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying
aggressively against it.
Fayad,
who had been indicted in U.S. courts on charges of planning the murders
of U.S. government employees, attempting to provide material support to a
terrorist organization and attempting to acquire, transfer and use
anti-aircraft missiles, was ultimately sent to Beirut. He is now
believed by U.S. officials to be back in business, and helping to arm
militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons.
Project
Cassandra members say administration officials also blocked or
undermined their efforts to go after other top Hezbollah operatives
including one nicknamed 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.,” allowing them to
remain active despite being under sealed U.S. indictment for years.
People familiar with his case say the Ghost has been one of the world’s
biggest cocaine traffickers, including to the U.S., as well as a major
supplier of conventional and chemical weapons for use by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his people.
And when Project Cassandra agents and other investigators sought repeatedly to investigate and prosecute Abdallah SafieddineAbdallah SafieddineHezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group's “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking.,
Hezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran, whom they considered the linchpin
of Hezbollah’s criminal network, the Justice Department refused,
according to four former officials with direct knowledge of the cases.
The
administration also rejected repeated efforts by Project Cassandra
members to charge Hezbollah’s military wing as an ongoing criminal
enterprise under a federal Mafia-style racketeering statute, task force
members say. And they allege that administration officials declined to
designate Hezbollah a “significant transnational criminal organization”
and blocked other strategic initiatives that would have given the task
force additional legal tools, money and manpower to fight it.
Former
Obama administration officials declined to comment on individual cases,
but noted that the State Department condemned the Czech decision not to
hand over Fayad. Several of them, speaking on condition of anonymity,
said they were guided by broader policy objectives, including
de-escalating the conflict with Iran, curbing its nuclear weapons
program and freeing at least four American prisoners held by Tehran, and
that some law enforcement efforts were undoubtedly constrained by those
concerns.
But the former officials denied that they derailed any actions against Hezbollah or its Iranian allies for political reasons.
“There
has been a consistent pattern of actions taken against Hezbollah, both
through tough sanctions and law enforcement actions before and after the
Iran deal,” said Kevin Lewis, an Obama spokesman who worked at both the
White House and Justice Department in the administration.
Lewis,
speaking for the Obama administration, provided a list of eight arrests
and prosecutions as proof. He made special note of a February 2016
operation in which European authorities arrested an undisclosed number
of alleged members of a special Hezbollah business affairs unit that the
DEA says oversees its drug trafficking and other criminal money-making
enterprises.
Advertisement
Project
Cassandra officials, however, noted that the European arrests occurred
after the negotiations with Iran were over, and said the task force
initiated the multinational partnerships on its own, after years of
seeing their cases shot down by the Justice and State departments and
other U.S. agencies.
The
Justice Department, they pointed out, never filed corresponding U.S.
criminal charges against the suspects arrested in Europe, including one
prominent Lebanese businessman formally designated by the Treasury
Department for using his “direct ties to Hezbollah commercial and
terrorist elements” to launder bulk shipments of illicit cash for the
organization throughout Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
A
former senior national security official of the Obama administration,
who played a role in the Iran nuclear negotiations, suggested that
Project Cassandra members were merely speculating that their cases were
being blocked for political reasons. Other factors, including a lack of
evidence or concerns about interfering with intelligence operations
could have been in play.
“What if the CIA
or the Mossad had an intelligence operation ongoing inside Hezbollah and
they were trying to pursue someone . . . against whom we had impeccable
[intelligence] collection and the DEA is not going to know that?” the
official said. “I get the feeling people who don’t know what’s going on
in the broader universe are grasping at straws.”
The
official added: “The world is a lot more complicated than viewed
through the narrow lens of drug trafficking. So you’re not going to let
CIA rule the roost, but you’re also certainly not going to let DEA do it
either. Your approach to anything as complicated as Hezbollah is going
to have to involve the interagency [process], because the State
Department has a piece of the pie, the intelligence community does,
Treasury does, DOD does.”
Nonetheless,
other sources independent of Project Cassandra confirmed many of the
allegations in interviews with POLITICO, and in some cases, in public
comments.
One
Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written
testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign
Affairs, acknowledged that “under the Obama administration … these
[Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking
the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”
As a result, some Hezbollah
operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury
designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial
markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served
briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser
for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators” arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote.
Bauer, in an interview, declined to elaborate on her testimony.
AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise.,
for one, said Obama administration officials expressed concerns to him
about alienating Tehran before, during and after the Iran nuclear deal
negotiations. This was, he said, part of an effort to “defang, defund
and undermine the investigations that were involving Iran and
Hezbollah,” he said.
“The closer we got
to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said.
“So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether
it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations — even
the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission — it was
assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama
administration.”
With much
fanfare, Obama announced the final agreement on implementation of the
Iran deal on Jan. 17, 2016, in which Tehran promised to shelve efforts
to build a nuclear weapons program in exchange for being released from
crippling international economic sanctions.
Within months, task force officials said, Project Cassandra was all but dead. Some of its most senior officials, including Jack 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., the veteran
DEA supervisory agent who created and led the task force, were
transferred to other assignments. And Asher himself left the task force
long before that, after the Defense Department said his contract would
not be renewed.
As a result, the U.S.
government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other
criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit
conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and
Russian governments — all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad
and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and
former U.S. officials.
Nicolas Maduro
Vladimir Putin
Bashar Assad
Venezuela
Russia
Syria
The derailment of
Project Cassandra also has undermined U.S. efforts to determine how much
cocaine from the various Hezbollah-affiliated networks is coming into
the United States, especially from Venezuela, where dozens of top
civilian and military officials have been under investigation for more
than a decade. Recently, the Trump administration designated the
country’s vice president, a close ally of Hezbollah and of
Lebanese-Syrian descent, as a global narcotics kingpin.
Meanwhile,
Hezbollah — in league with Iran — continues to undermine U.S. interests
in Iraq, Syria and throughout wide swaths of Latin America and Africa,
including providing weapons and training to anti-American Shiite
militias. And Safieddine, the Ghost and other associates continue to
play central roles in the trafficking of drugs and weapons, current and
former U.S. officials believe.
“They
were a paramilitary organization with strategic importance in the
Middle East, and we watched them become an international criminal
conglomerate generating billions of dollars for the world’s most
dangerous activities, including chemical and nuclear weapons programs
and armies that believe America is their sworn enemy,” said Kelly, the
supervisory DEA agent and lead coordinator of its Hezbollah cases.
“If they are violating U.S. statutes,” he asked, “why can’t we bring them to justice?”
Kelly and Asher are among the
officials involved in Project Cassandra who have been quietly contacted
by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, who said a
special POLITICO report April 24 on Barack Obama’s hidden Iran deal
concessions raised urgent questions about the need to resurrect key law
enforcement programs to counter Iran.
That
won’t be easy, according to former Project Cassandra members, even with
President Donald Trump’s recent vow to crack down on Iran and
Hezbollah. They said they tried to keep the project on life support, in
hopes that it would be revived by the next administration, but the loss
of key personnel, budget cuts and dropped investigations are only a few
of many challenges made worse by the passage of nearly a year since
Trump took office.
“You can’t let
these things disintegrate,” said Kelly. “Sources evaporate. Who knows if
we can find all of the people willing to testify?”
Derek MaltzDerek MaltzSenior DEA official who as head of Special Operations Division lobbied for support for Project Cassandra and its investigations.,
who oversaw Project Cassandra as the head of the DEA’s Special
Operations Division for nine years ending in July 2014, put it this way:
“Certainly there are targets that people feel that could have been
indicted and weren’t. There is certainly an argument to be made that if
tomorrow all the agencies were ordered to come together and sit in a
room and put all the evidence on the table against all these bad guys,
that there could be a hell of a lot of indictments.”
But Maltz said the damage wrought by years of political interference will be hard to repair.
“There’s no doubt in my mind now that the focus was this Iran deal and our initiative was kind of like a fly in the soup,” Maltz said. “We were the train that went off the tracks.”
Project
Cassandra had its origins in a series of investigations launched in the
years after the 9/11 attacks which all led, via their own twisted
paths, to Hezbollah as a suspected global criminal enterprise.
Operation TitanOperation TitanA joint investigation with
Colombian authorities into a global money-laundering and
drug-trafficking alliance between Latin American traffickers and
Lebanese operatives., in which the DEA worked with
Colombian authorities to explore a global alliance between Lebanese
money launderers and Colombian drug trafficking conglomerates, was one.
Operation Perseus, targeting Venezuelan syndicates, was another. At the
same time, DEA agents in West Africa were investigating the suspicious
flow of thousands of used cars from U.S. dealerships to car parks in
Benin.
Meanwhile, in Iraq, the U.S.
military was probing the role of Iran in outfitting Shiite militias with
high-tech improvised explosive devices known as Explosively Formed
Penetrators, or EFPs, that had already killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers.
All of these paths eventually converged on Hezbollah.
This
wasn’t entirely a surprise, agents say. For decades, Hezbollah — in
close cooperation with Iranian intelligence and Revolutionary Guard —
had worked with supporters in Lebanese communities around the world to
create a web of businesses that were long suspected of being fronts for
black-market trading. Along the same routes that carried frozen chicken
and consumer electronics, these businesses moved weapons, laundered
money and even procured parts for Iran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic
missile programs.
As
they pursued their investigations, the DEA agents found that Hezbollah
was redoubling all of these efforts, working urgently to raise cash, and
lots of it, to rebuild its south Lebanon stronghold after a 2006 war
with Israel had reduced it to rubble.
Dating
back to its inception in the early 1980s, Hezbollah, which translates
to “Party of God,” had also engaged in “narcoterrorism,” collecting a
tariff from drug dealers and other black-market suppliers who operated
in territory it controlled in Lebanon and elsewhere. Now, based on the
DEA’s extensive network of informants, undercover operatives and
wiretaps, it looked like Hezbollah had shifted tactics, and gotten
directly involved in the global cocaine trade, according to interviews
and documents, including a confidential DEA assessment.
“It
was like they flipped a switch,” Kelly told POLITICO. “All of a sudden,
they reversed the flow of all of the black-market activity they had
been taxing for years, and took control of the operation.”
Operating like an
organized crime family, Hezbollah operatives would identify businesses
that might be profitable and useful as covers for cocaine trafficking
and buy financial stakes in them, Kelly and others said. “And if the
business was successful and suited their current needs,” Kelly said,
“they went from partial owners to majority owners to full partnership or
takeover.”
Hezbollah even
created a special financial unit that, translated into English, means
“Business Affairs Component,” to oversee the sprawling criminal
operation, and it was run by the world’s most wanted terrorist after
Osama bin Laden, a notoriously vicious Hezbollah military commander named Imad 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., according to DEA interviews and documents.
Mughniyeh
had for decades been the public face of terrorism for Americans,
orchestrating the infamous attack that killed 241 U.S. Marines in 1983
in their barracks in Lebanon, and dozens more Americans in attacks on
the U.S. Embassy in Beirut that year and an annex the year after. When President Ronald Reagan
responded to the attacks by withdrawing peacekeeping troops from
Lebanon, Hezbollah claimed a major victory and vaulted to the forefront
of the Islamist resistance movement against the West.
Over the next 25 years, Iran’s financial and military support
for Hezbollah enabled it to amass an army with tens of thousands of
foot soldiers, more heavy armaments than most nation-states and
approximately 120,000 rockets and ballistic missiles that could strike
Israel and U.S. interests in the region with devastating precision.
Hezbollah
became an expert in soft power, as well. It provided food, medical care
and other social services for starving refugees in war-torn Lebanon,
winning credibility on the ground. It then evolved further into a
powerful political
party, casting itself as the defender of poor, mostly Shiite Lebanese
against Christian and Sunni Muslim elites.
But even as Hezbollah was moving into the mainstream of Lebanese
politics, Mughniyeh was overseeing a secret expansion of its terrorist
wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization. Working with Iranian intelligence
agents, Islamic Jihad continued to attack Western, Israeli and Jewish targets around the world, and to conduct surveillance on others — including in the United States — in preparation for future attacks.
Hezbollah
mostly left the United States alone, in what was clearly a strategic
decision to avoid U.S. retaliation. But by 2008, the Bush administration
came to believe that Islamic Jihad was the most dangerous terrorist
organization in the world, capable of launching instantaneous attacks,
possibly with chemical, biological or low-grade nuclear weapons, that
would dwarf those on 9/11.
Advertisement
By funding terrorism
and military operations through global drug trafficking and organized
crime, Mughniyeh’s business affairs unit within Islamic Jihad had become
the embodiment of the kind of threat the United States was struggling
to address in the post-9/11 world.
The
DEA believed that it was the logical U.S. national security agency to
lead the interagency effort to go after Mughniyeh’s drug trafficking
networks. But within the multipronged U.S. national security apparatus,
this was both a questionable and problematic assertion.
Established by President Richard Nixon in 1973
to bring together the various anti-drug programs under the Department
of Justice, the DEA was among the youngest of the U.S. national security
agencies.
And while the DEA had
quickly proven itself adept at working on the global stage — especially
in partnerships with drug-infested countries desperate for U.S. help
like Colombia — few people within the U.S. government thought of it as a
legitimate counterterrorism force.
In
the final years of the Bush administration, though, the DEA had won the
support of top officials for taking down two major international arms
dealers, a Syrian named Monzer al-Kassar and the Russian “Lord of War,” Viktor 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.. And thanks to supportive Republicans in Congress, it had become the beneficiary of a new federal law that empowered its globe-trotting cadre of assault-weapon-toting Special Operations agents.
The
statute allowed DEA agents to operate virtually anywhere, without
permission required from other U.S. agencies. All they needed to do was
connect drug suspects to terrorism, and they could arrest them, haul
them back to the United States and flip them in an effort to penetrate
“the highest levels of the world’s most significant and notorious
criminal organizations,” as then-Special Operations chief MaltzDerek MaltzSenior DEA official who as head of Special Operations Division lobbied for support for Project Cassandra and its investigations. told Congress in November 2011.
As they crunched the massive amounts of intel streaming into the DEA’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Operations Center in Chantilly, Virginia, the agents on Operation TitanOperation TitanA joint investigation with
Colombian authorities into a global money-laundering and
drug-trafficking alliance between Latin American traffickers and
Lebanese operatives., Perseus and the other cases began to connect the dots and map the contours of one overarching criminal enterprise.
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..
Joumaa’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
Atlantic 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.”
Advertisement
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.
Part III
A battle against enemies far and near
As negotiations for the Iran nuclear deal intensify, the administration pushes back against Project Cassandra.
More than a year into Obama’s second term, many national security officials still disagreed with 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 Asher
about whether Hezbollah fully controlled a global criminal network,
especially in drug trafficking and distribution, or merely profited from
crimes by its supporters within the global Lebanese diaspora. But
Project Cassandra’s years of relentless investigation had produced a
wealth of evidence about Hezbollah’s global operations, a clear window
into how its hierarchy worked and some significant sanctions by the
Treasury Department.
A
confidential DEA assessment from that period concluded that Hezbollah’s
business affairs entity “has leveraged relationships with corrupt
foreign government officials and transnational criminal actors …
creating a network that can be utilized to move metric ton quantities of
cocaine, launder drug proceeds on a global scale, and procure weapons
and precursors for explosives.”
Hezbollah's network moved "metric ton quantities of cocaine
[to] launder drug proceeds on a global scale, and procure weapons and
... explosives."
Excerpt of a Confidential DEA assessment
Hezbollah “has at its
disposal one of the most capable networks of actors coalescing elements
of transnational organized crime with terrorism in the world,” the
assessment concluded.
Some top
U.S. military officials shared those concerns, including the four-star
generals heading U.S. Special Operations and Southern commands, who
warned Congress that Hezbollah’s criminal operations and growing
beachhead in Latin America posed an urgent threat to U.S. security,
according to transcripts of the hearings.
In
early 2014, Kelly and other task force members briefed Attorney General
Eric Holder, who was so alarmed by the findings that he insisted Obama
and his entire national security team get the same briefing as they
formulated the administration’s Iran strategy.
So
task force leaders welcomed the opportunity to attend a May 2014 summit
meeting of Obama national security officials at Special Operations
Command headquarters in Tampa, Florida. Task force leaders hoped to
convince the administration of the threat posed by Hezbollah’s networks,
and of the need for other agencies to work with DEA in targeting the
growing nexus of drugs, crime and terror.
The
summit, and several weeks of interagency prep that preceded it,
however, prompted even more pushback from some top national security
officials. MonacoLisa MonacoLisa Monaco replaced John Brennan as the White House counterterrorism and homeland security adviser.,
Obama’s counterterrorism adviser, expressed concerns about using RICO
laws against top Hezbollah leaders and about the possibility of
reprisals, according to several people familiar with the summit.
They
said senior Obama administration officials appeared to be alarmed by
how far Project Cassandra’s investigations had reached into the
leadership of Hezbollah and Iran, and wary of the possible political
repercussions.
As a result, task force
members claim, Project Cassandra was increasingly viewed as a threat to
the administration’s efforts to secure a nuclear deal, and the
top-secret prisoner swap that was about to be negotiated.
Monaco’s
former subordinate, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the White
House did not attempt to curb DEA-led efforts against Hezbollah because
of the Iran deal. But the subordinate said the White House felt a need
to balance the drug agency’s interests with those of other agencies who
often disagreed with it.
“The
intelligence community fundamentally doubted the intel” from the DEA,
the subordinate recalled. “I spent so much time trying to get them to
work together.”
Nonetheless, after the meeting in Tampa, the administration made it clear that it would not support a RICO case, even though AsherDavid AsherVeteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise. and others say they’d spent years gathering evidence for it, the task force members said.
In
addition, the briefings for top White House and Justice Department
officials that had been requested by Holder never materialized, task
force agents said. (Holder did not respond to requests for comment.)
Also, a top intelligence official blocked the inclusion of Project
Cassandra’s memo on the Hezbollah drug threat from being included in
Obama’s daily threat briefing, they said. And Kelly, Asher and other
agents said they stopped getting invitations to interagency meetings,
including those of a top Obama transnational crime working group.
That
may have been because Obama officials dropped Hezbollah from the formal
list of groups targeted by a special White House initiative into
transnational organized crime, which in turn effectively eliminated
DEA’s broad authority to investigate it overseas, task force members
said.
“The funny thing is Tampa was
supposed to settle how everyone would have a seat at the table and what
the national strategy is going to be, and how clearly law enforcement
has a role,” Jack RileyJack RileyTop DEA special agent who helped run the drug agency during the Obama administration's tenure., who was the DEA’s chief of operations at the time, told POLITICO. “And the opposite happened. We walked away with nothing.”
Willfully blind to the threat
After the Tampa meeting,
Project Cassandra leaders pushed – unsuccessfully, they said – for
greater support from the Obama administration in extraditing Fayad from
the Czech Republic to New York for prosecution, and in locating and
arresting the many high-value targets who went underground after hearing
news of his arrest.
They
also struck out repeatedly, they said, in obtaining the administration’s
approval for offering multimillion-dollar “rewards for justice”
bounties of a type commonly issued for indicted kingpins like Joumaa,
and for the administration to unseal the secret indictments of others,
like 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., to improve the chances of catching them.
And
task force officials pushed the Obama team, also unsuccessfully, to use
U.S. aid money and weapons sales as leverage to push Lebanon into
adopting an extradition treaty and handing over all of the indicted
Hezbollah suspects living openly in the country, they said.
“There were ways of getting these guys if they’d let us,” Kelly said.
Frustrated, he wrote another of his emails to DEA leaders in July 2014, asking for help.
The
email stated that the used-car money-laundering scheme was flourishing
in the United States and Africa. The number of vehicles being shipped to
Benin had more than doubled from December 2011 to 2014, he wrote, with
one dealership alone receiving more than $4 million.
And
despite the DEA’s creation of a multi-agency “Iran-Hezbollah Super
Facilitator Initiative” in 2013, Kelly said, only the Department of
Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection was sharing
information and resources.
“The FBI
and other parts of the USG [U.S. government] provide a little or no
assistance during our investigations,” Kelly wrote in the email. “The
USG lack of action on this issue has allowed [Hezbollah] to become one
of the biggest transnational organized crime groups in the world.”
Around
this time, people outside Project Cassandra began noting that senior
administration officials were increasingly suspicious of it.
Subject: Email subject unknown
July 29, 2014
From: Jack Kelly
To: DEA officials
… The USG lack of action on this issue has allowed Hizballah to become one of the biggest Transnational Organized Crime groups in the world.
As we have shown in our investigations the Super Facilitator network
uses this criminal activity to provide massive support to the Iranian
Hizballah Threat Network and other terror groups helping fuel conflict
in some of the most sensitive regions in the world.
See below string of emails for an example of how long DOJ has been under-performing on this issue to the detriment of national security...
See below string of emails for an example of how long DOJ has been under-performing on this issue to the detriment of national security...
Email recreation
Douglas Farah, a
transnational crime analyst, said he tried to raise the Project
Cassandra investigations with Obama officials in order to corroborate
his own on-the-ground research, without success. “When it looked like
the [nuclear] agreement might actually happen, it became clear that
there was no interest in dealing with anything about Iran or Hezbollah
on the ground that it may be negative, that it might scare off the
Iranians,” said Farah.
Asher,
meanwhile, said he and others began hearing “from multiple people
involved in the Iran discussions that this Hezbollah stuff was
definitely getting in the way of a successful negotiation,” he said. One
Obama national security official even said so explicitly in the same
State Department meeting in which he boasted about how the
administration was bringing together a broad coalition in the Middle
East, including Hezbollah, to fight the Islamic State terrorist group,
Asher recalled.
Indeed, the
United States was seeking Iran’s help in taking on the Islamic State. As
the nuclear deal negotiations were intensifying ahead of a November
2014 diplomatic deadline, Obama himself secretly wrote to Iran’s supreme
leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, to say the two countries had a mutual
interest in fighting Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria, The Wall
Street Journal reported.
Kerry,
who was overseeing the negotiations, rejected suggestions that the
nuclear deal was linked to other issues affecting the U.S-Iranian
relationship.
“The nuclear
negotiations are on their own,” he told reporters. “They’re standing
separate from anything else. And no discussion has ever taken place
about linking one thing to another.”
“The nuclear negotiations are on their own. They’re standing separate from anything else.”
— Secretary of State John Kerry to reporters.
But even some former CIA officials said the negotiations were affecting their dealings in the Middle East and those of the DEA.
DEA
operations in the Middle East were shut down repeatedly due to
political sensitivities, especially in Lebanon, according to one former
CIA officer working in the region. He said pressure from the White House
also prompted the CIA to declare “a moratorium” on covert operations
against Hezbollah in Lebanon, too, for a time, after the administration
received complaints from Iranian negotiators.
“During
the negotiations, early on, they [the Iranians] said listen, we need
you to lay off Hezbollah, to tamp down the pressure on them, and the
Obama administration acquiesced to that request,” the former CIA officer
told POLITICO. “It was a strategic decision to show good faith toward
the Iranians in terms of reaching an agreement.”
The Obama team “really, really, really wanted the deal,” the former officer said.
The Obama team “really, really, really wanted the deal.”
— Former CIA officer on how intelligence operations were also impacted by negotiations with Iran.
As a result, “We were making
concessions that had never been made before, which is outrageous to
anyone in the agency,” the former intelligence officer said, adding that
the orders from Washington especially infuriated CIA officers in the
field who knew that Hezbollah “was still doing assassinations and other
terrorist activities.”
That
allegation was contested vehemently by the former senior Obama national
security official who played a role in the Iran nuclear negotiations.
“That the Iranians would ask for a favor in this realm and that we would
acquiesce is ludicrous,” he said.
Nonetheless,
feeling that he had few options left, Asher went public with his
concerns at a congressional hearing in May 2015 saying, “the Department
of Justice should seek to indict and prosecute” Hezbollah’s Islamic
Jihad Organization as an international conspiracy using the RICORICO caseThe Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act increases the severity of penalties for crimes committed in as part of organized crime.
statute. That was the only way, he testified, for U.S. officials to
“defeat narcoterrorism financing, including that running right through
the heart of the American financial system,” as Hezbollah was doing with
the used-cars scheme.
The
nuclear deal was signed in July 2015, and formally implemented on Jan.
17, 2016. A week later, almost two years after his arrest, Czech
officials finally released Fayad to Lebanon in exchange for five Czech
citizens that Hezbollah operatives had kidnapped as bargaining chips.
Unlike in the case of 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., the former arms trafficker for Putin,
neither Obama nor other senior White House officials made personal pleas
for the extradition of Fayad, task force officials said. Afterward, the
U.S. Embassy in the Czech Republic issued a statement saying, “We are
dismayed by the Czech government’s decision.”
For
the task force, Fayad’s release was one of the biggest blows yet. Some
agents told POLITICO that Fayad’s relationships with Hezbollah, Latin
American drug cartels and the governments of Iran, Syria and Russia made
him a critically important witness in any RICO prosecution and in
virtually all of their ongoing investigations.
“He
is one of the very few people who could describe for us the workings of
the operation at the highest levels,” Kelly said. “And the
administration didn’t lift a finger to get him back here.”
One
senior Obama administration official familiar with the case said it
would be a stretch to link the Fayad case to the Iran deal, even if the
administration didn’t lobby aggressively enough to have Fayad extradited
to the United States.
“I guess
it’s possible that they [the White House] didn’t want to try hard
because of the Iran deal but I don’t have memories of it,” said the
former official. “Clearly there were things that the Obama
administration did to keep the negotiations alive, prudent negotiating
tactics to keep the Iranians at the table. But to be fair, there was a
lot of shit we did during the Iran deal negotiations that pissed the
Iranians off.”
Afterward, Czech President Milos Zeman told local media he had freed FayadAli Fayad(aka Fayyad). Ukraine-based arms merchant suspected of being a Hezbollah operative moving large amounts of weapons to Syria.
at the personal request of Putin, a close ally of both the Czech
Republic and Iran, who had lobbied hard for his release in a series of
phone calls like the ones Project Cassandra officials were hoping Obama
would make.
In
announcing the arrests, the DEA and the Justice Department disclosed
for the first time the existence of Project Cassandra, as well as its
target, the drug-and weapons-trafficking unit known as Hezbollah’s
Business Affairs Component. In a news release, DEA also said the
business entity “currently operates under the control of Abdallah
Safieddine” and TabajaAdham TabajaLebanese businessman, alleged co-leader of Hezbollah Business Affairs Component and key figure directly tying Hezbollah’s commercial and terrorist activities..
Jack RileyJack RileyTop DEA special agent who helped run the drug agency during the Obama administration's tenure.,
the DEA’s acting deputy administrator, said in the news release that
Hezbollah’s criminal operations “provide a revenue and weapons stream
for an international terrorist organization responsible for devastating
terror attacks around the world.”
Riley
described the operation as “ongoing,” saying “DEA and our partners will
continue to dismantle networks who exploit the nexus between drugs and
terror using all available law enforcement mechanisms.”
But
Kelly and some other agents had already come to believe that the
arrests would be a last hurrah for the task force, as it was crumbling
under pressure from U.S. officials eager to keep the newly implemented
Iran deal intact. That’s why Project Cassandra members insisted on
including SafieddineAbdallah SafieddineHezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group's “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking.’s
name in the media releases. They wanted it in the public record, in
case they had no further opportunity to expose the massive conspiracy
they believed he had been overseeing.
A last hurrah
The news release caused a
stir.
The CIA was furious that Project Cassandra went public with details of
Hezbollah’s business operations. And the French government called off a
joint news conference planned to announce the arrests. 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., who was
already in Paris awaiting the news conference, said European authorities
told him the French didn’t want to offend Iran, which just 11 days
after the nuclear deal implementation had agreed to buy 118 French
Airbus aircraft worth about $25 billion.
Two
weeks later, after firing off another angry email or two, Kelly said he
was told by his superiors that he was being transferred against his
wishes to a gang unit at DEA headquarters. He retired months later on
the first day he was eligible.
Several
other key agents and analysts also transferred out on their own accord,
in some cases in order to receive promotions, or after being told by
DEA leaders that they had been at the Special Operations Division for
too long, according to Kelly, Asher, Maltz and others.
Meanwhile,
the administration was resisting demands that it produce a long-overdue
intelligence assessment that Congress had requested as a way of finally
resolving the interagency dispute over Hezbollah’s role in drug
trafficking and organized crime.
It
wasn’t just a bureaucratic exercise. More than a year earlier, Congress
– concerned that the administration was whitewashing the threat posed
by Hezbollah – passed the Hizballah International Financing Prevention
Act. That measure required the White House to lay out in writing its
plans for designating Hezbollah a “significant transnational criminal
organization.”
The
White House delegated responsibility for the report to the office of the
director of National Intelligence, prompting immediate accusations by
the task force and its allies that the administration was stacking the
deck against such a determination, and against Project Cassandra, given
the intelligence community’s doubts about the DEA’s conclusions about
Hezbollah’s drug-running.
“Given
the group’s ever-lengthening criminal rap sheet around the world,
designating it as a TCO [Transnational Criminal Organization] has become
an open-and-shut case,” Matthew LevittMatthew LevittFormer top Treasury financial intelligence official, FBI analyst whose book on Hezbollah and its global activities sounded early alarms about its drug trafficking., a former senior Treasury official, said of Hezbollah in an April 2016 policy paper for a Washington think tank.
Agents
from Project Cassandra and other law enforcement agencies “investigate
criminal activities as a matter of course and are therefore best
positioned to judge whether a group has engaged in transnational
organized crime,” wrote Levitt, who is also a former FBI analyst and
author of a respected book on Hezbollah. “Intelligence agencies are at a
disadvantage in this regard, so the DNI’s forthcoming report should
reflect the repeated findings of law enforcement, criminal courts, and
Treasury designations.”
As
expected, the administration’s final report, which remains classified,
significantly downplayed Hezbollah’s operational links to drug
trafficking, which in turn further marginalized the DEA’s role in
fighting it, according to a former Justice Department official and
others familiar with the report.
Once
the Obama administration left office, in January 2017, the logjam of
task force cases appeared to break, and several task force members said
it wasn’t a coincidence.
An alleged top Hezbollah financier, Kassim TajideenKassim TajideenAn alleged top financier for Hezbollah, whose global business empire allegedly acted as a key source of funds for its global terror network.,
was arrested in Morocco — seven years after Treasury officials
blacklisted him as a sponsor of terror — and flown to Washington to
stand trial. Asher said task force agents had kept his case under wraps,
hoping for a better outcome in whatever administration succeeded
Obama’s.
The Trump administration also designated Venezuelan Vice President Tareck AissamiTareck El AissamiVenezuelan vice president involved in alleged decade-long drugs, weapons and fake passport conspiracy between Caracas government, Hezbollah and Iran.
as a global narcotics kingpin, almost a decade after DEA agents became
convinced he was Hezbollah’s point man within the Chavez, and then
Maduro, regimes.
Ironically,
many senior career intelligence officials now freely acknowledge that
the task force was right all along about Hezbollah’s operational
involvement in drug trafficking. “It dates back many years,” said one
senior Directorate of National Intelligence official.
Meanwhile,
Hezbollah — in league with Iran, Russia and the Assad regime — has all
but overwhelmed the opposition groups in Syria, including those backed
by the United States. Hezbollah continues to help train Shiite militants
in other hotspots and to undermine U.S. efforts in Iraq, according to
U.S. officials. It also continues its expansion in Latin America and,
DEA officials said, its role in trafficking cocaine and other drugs into
the United States. And it is believed to be the biggest trafficker of
the powerful stimulant drug Captagon that is being used by fighters in
Syria on all sides.
Progress has
been made on other investigations and prosecutions, current and former
officials said. But after an initial flurry of interest in resurrecting
Project Cassandra, the Trump administration has been silent on the
matter. In all of the Trump administration’s public condemnations of
Hezbollah and Iran, the subject of drug trafficking hasn’t come up.
In
West Africa, satellite imagery has documented that the Hezbollah
used-car money-laundering operation is bigger than ever, Asher told
lawmakers in recent testimony before the House Foreign Affairs
Committee.
Hezbollah’s used-car money-laundering operation in West Africa
Satellite images show the growth of used cars in lots close to Port of Cotonou in Benin.
BENIN
2002
2015
And Hezbollah continues
to scout potential U.S. targets for attack if it decides Washington has
crossed some red line against it or Iran. On June 1, federal
authorities arrested two alleged Hezbollah operatives who were
conducting “pre-operational surveillance” on possible targets for
attack, including the FBI headquarters in New York and the U.S. and
Israeli embassies in Panama.
“They are a global threat,
particularly if the Trump relationships turn sour” with Iran, Syria and
Russia, said Magnus Ranstorp, one of the world’s foremost Hezbollah
experts.
The June arrests “bring
into sharp focus that the Iranians are making contingency plans for when
the U.S. turns up the heat on Iran,” said Ranstorp, research director
of the Center for Asymmetric Threat Studies at the Swedish National
Defence College, who is in frequent contact with U.S. intelligence
officials. “If they think it requires some military or terrorist
response, they have been casing targets in the U.S. since the late
1990s.”
Ranstorp said
U.S. intelligence officials believe that Hezbollah’s U.S.-based
surveillance is far more extensive than has been publicly disclosed, and
that they are particularly concerned about the battle-hardened
operatives who have spent years on the ground in Syria.
“The
U.S. intel community is very concerned about this,” Ranstorp said.
Hezbollah’s agents “have become extremely sophisticated and good at
fighting.”
MaltzDerek MaltzSenior DEA official who as head of Special Operations Division lobbied for support for Project Cassandra and its investigations.,
the longtime head of DEA Special Operations, who retired two months
after the Tampa summit in 2014, has lobbied since then for better
interagency cooperation on Hezbollah, to tackle both the terrorist
threat and the criminal enterprise that underwrites it.
Turf
battles, especially the institutional conflict between law enforcement
and intelligence agencies, contributed to the demise of Project
Cassandra, Maltz said. But many Project Cassandra agents insist the main
reason was a political choice to prioritize the Iranian nuclear
agreement over efforts to crack down on Hezbollah.
“They
will believe until death that we were shut down because of the Iran
deal,” Maltz said. “My gut feeling? My instinct as a guy doing this for
28 years is that it certainly contributed to why we got pushed aside and
picked apart. There is no doubt in my mind.”
No comments:
Post a Comment