Hezbollah (26 page)

Starting in the 1980s, DEA agents noticed that so-called Lebanese Colombians were increasingly involved in the movement of drugs and money laundering for drug cartels through the port of Barranquilla on Colombia’s Caribbean coast. Some were involved in the shipping business and sidestepped into drugs through their involvement in other trade-based money laundering schemes that depended on a reliable stream of foreign currency income. Working with the drug cartels provided this revenue stream and opened the door to money laundering and drug shipment.
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In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive No. 221, establishing drug enforcement as a US national security priority. Three years later, the DEA set up a bank of its own, Trans America Ventures Associates, for the express purpose of luring traffickers looking for a place to launder their drug money. Using this bank, DEA undercover agents and informants targeted drug kingpins’ financial managers, money launderers, and associates in what became known as Operation Green Ice. More than 170 people were ultimately arrested and tens of millions of dollars seized.
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Several of the individuals targeted in this sting were Lebanese. Regarding the development of Hezbollah’s role in narcotics, DEA agents would later comment, “We were already looking at some of the same Lebanese guys [back then], but the Hezbollah link [we see now] is new to us.”
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There is, however, no one model for Lebanese criminals involved in drugs and tied to Hezbollah. “Some belong to families tied to Hezbollah, some just pay money to Hezbollah because it represents ‘the cause’ [of resistance against Israel and the West]. Some of what we see is Hezbollah actively involved in drugs [as a group],
some is just Lebanese Shia involved in drugs who happen to be sympathetic to Hezbollah” and support the group but are not members of or directed by Hezbollah.
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Both baskets of Hezbollah supporters, however, whether members or sympathizers, were put at ease by a fatwa issued in the mid-1980s providing religious justification for the otherwise impure and illicit activity of drug trafficking. Presumed to have been issued by Iranian religious leaders, the fatwa read: “We are making drugs for Satan—America and the Jews. If we cannot kill them with guns, so we will kill them with drugs.”
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According to the FBI, “Hezbollah’s spiritual leader has stated that narcotics trafficking is morally acceptable if the drugs are sold to Western infidels as part of the war against the enemies of Islam.”
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While Hezbollah is involved in a wide variety of criminal activities, the connection between drugs and terrorism has grown particularly strong, especially in South America. In March 2009, Adm. James G. Stavridis, then commander of US Southern Command, testified before the House Armed Services Committee about the threat to the United States from illicit drug trafficking—“including routes, profits, and corruptive influence”—and “Islamic radical terrorism.”
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One of the most significant takedowns to date was dubbed Operation Titan, a two-year investigation of a cocaine smuggling and money laundering operation in Colombia run by a Hezbollah figure named Chekry Harb who used the alias Taliban. The case began when agents overheard Harb talking to cartel members on wiretaps targeting a Medellín, Colombia, cartel called La Oficina de Envigado. By June 2007, an undercover DEA agent met Harb in Bogotá and learned details about Harb’s smuggling routes, including one that involved shipping cocaine to Jordan’s Aqaba port and then smuggling it overland to Syria. At one point, Harb bragged to the undercover agent that he could get 950 kilos of drugs into Lebanon within hours, prompting the agent to casually suggest he must have Hezbollah connections in order to operate so freely there. According to the agent, Harb just smiled and nodded.
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In time the undercover agent got close enough to the cartel to serve as one of its money launderers. The agent laundered some $20 million, enabling the DEA to follow the money and map out much of the cartel’s operations. But before Harb could identify his Hezbollah contacts to the DEA undercover agent, the operation broke down, reportedly due to CIA interference.
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Over the course of the operation, Colombian and US agents arrested more than 130 suspects, seized $23 million, deployed 370 wiretaps, and monitored 700,000 conversations. Harb’s network reportedly paid Hezbollah 12 percent of its narco-income. “The profits from the sales of drugs went to finance Hezbollah,” Gladys Sanchez, lead investigator for the special prosecutor’s office in Bogotá, commented after the October 2008 arrests. Among those reportedly cooperating in this narcotics and money laundering enterprise were members of the Northern Valley Cartel, right-wing paramilitary groups, and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
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Despite the collapse of the intelligence operation, Harb was ultimately convicted on drug trafficking and money laundering charges and placed, along with several of his associates, on the US Treasury Department’s list of Specially Designated Narcotics Traffickers.
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Authorities came to a similar conclusion in April 2009, when they arrested seventeen people in the Dutch Caribbean island of Curaçao for involvement in a “Hezbollah-linked drug ring.”
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The suspects included locals, as well as individuals from Lebanon, Cuba, Venezuela, and Colombia. According to the Dutch Prosecution Service, the drug network shipped containers of cocaine from Curaçao to the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and Jordan. Others were shipped from Venezuela to West Africa and from there onward to the Netherlands, Lebanon, and Spain. In still other cases, couriers smuggled smaller amounts of cocaine on flights from Curaçao and Aruba to the Netherlands. Drug profits were invested in real estate in Colombia, Venezuela, and Lebanon. According to prosecutors, “the organization had international contacts with other criminal networks that financially supported Hezbollah in the Middle East. Large sums of drug money flooded into Lebanon, from where [
sic
] orders were placed for weapons that were to have been delivered from South America.”
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Iran’s intelligence penetration of South America has expanded significantly since the AMIA bombing. Testifying before Congress in the weeks following the attack, the State Department’s coordinator for counterterrorism expressed concern that Iranian embassies in the region were stacked with larger-than-necessary numbers of diplomats, some of whom were believed to be intelligence agents and terrorist operatives: “We are sharing information in our possession with other States about Iranian diplomats, Iranian terrorist leaders who are posing as diplomats, so that nations will refuse to give them accreditation, or if they are already accredited, to expel them. We have had some success in that respect, but we have not always succeeded.”
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Another witness recounted meeting with senior government officials in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina regarding overrepresentation at Iranian embassies in the region in March 1995—eight months after the AMIA bombing. Officials in Chile and Uruguay, the countries of most concern regarding Iranian overrepresentation at the time, indicated that “the activities of those at the [Iranian] embassy were being monitored and that this was very clearly a concern.”
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Fifteen years later, the commander of US Southern Command indicated the Iranian presence in the region had grown still larger, expanding from just a handful of missions a few years earlier to twelve by 2010. That, plus Iran’s traditional support for terrorism, concerned Gen. Douglas Fraser. “Transnational terrorists—Hezbollah, Hamas—have organizations resident in the region,” Fraser noted.
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Just two years later, in a statement before the House Armed Services Committee, Fraser warned of Iran’s success circumventing international sanctions by establishing modest economic, cultural, and security ties, mostly in nations like Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, and Cuba. Iran, Fraser added, also propagates its agenda through its thirty-six Shi’a cultural centers. The Fundación Cultural Oriente, for example, an Iranian outreach center dedicated to strengthening Iranian ties to Latin America, was run by the radical cleric Mohsen Rabbani. The cleric oversaw several media outlets and recruited students from the region to study in Iran.
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Over the next few years, evidence emerged that Rabbani’s activism and involvement in terrorism targeting South America had not waned since Argentina indicted him and Interpol issued a Red Warrant arrest notice for his role in the AMIA bombing. In 2007, Rabbani helped four men who were plotting to bomb John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York (JFK), according to court documents. The four men had sought technical and financial assistance for their plot, which they code-named Chicken Farm.
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Three of the plotters were Guyanese, including Russell Defreitas, a baggage handler at JFK who had become an American citizen. The last co-conspirator, Kareem Ibrahim, was an imam and leader of the Shiite Muslim community in Trinidad and Tobago. All four were ultimately convicted in federal court in the Eastern District of New York.

Four years later, around the same time the last defendants in the JFK Airport bomb plot were convicted, reports of Rabbani’s continued activities in South America emerged in the Brazilian press. Security had become a priority in Brazil as the country began preparations to host first the 2014 World Cup and then the 2016 Olympic Games. But as security experts looked closely at Brazil, they expressed concern about the country’s lax counterterrorism legal regime and weaker-still enforcement. In April 2011
Veja
, a weekly newsmagazine, ran an article that discussed how Rabbani “frequently slips in and out of Brazil on a false passport and has recruited at least 24 youngsters in three Brazilian states to attend ‘religious formation’ classes in Tehran.” In the words of one Brazilian official quoted by the magazine, “Without anybody noticing, a generation of Islamic extremists is appearing in Brazil.”
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As for Hezbollah, a former FBI agent who worked on Hezbollah and the AMIA bombing notes that Hezbollah’s role in criminal activities and fraud has only grown. The group now engages in shipping fraud, for example, involving containers that enter Brazil at the port of São Paulo and then “disappear on their way up the river toward Foz in the tri-border area.”
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To be sure, Iran and Hezbollah remain hyperactive in South America—a fact that has the full attention of US intelligence officials and their counterparts south of the border. Consider, for example, that the October 2011 IRGC Qods Force plot to kill the Saudi ambassador to Washington reportedly also included plans to attack the Saudi and Israeli embassies in Buenos Aires.
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In a July 2012 report, the State Department concluded that although the department knew of no credible information indicating Hezbollah operatives were engaged in “terrorist training or other operational activity” in the tri-border area, Washington “remained concerned that these groups used the region to raise funds from local supporters.”
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But even back in 1994, as Rabbani and his Hezbollah hit squad laid the groundwork for the AMIA attack, other groups of Hezbollah operatives were engaged in fundraising, procurement, and operational activities across the globe. In Saudi Arabia, one network was carrying out surveillance of US targets for still another spectacular bombing. In the United States, the FBI was knee-deep investigating Hezbollah cells from New York and Boston to Detroit and Los Angeles. And in Thailand, a Hezbollah plot targeting the Israeli embassy in Bangkok was well under way.

1.
Buenos Aires, Argentina Judicial Branch, AMIA Indictment, Office of the National Federal Court No. 17, Criminal and Correctional Matters No. 9, Case No. 1156, March 5, 2003 (hereafter cited as AMIA indictment), 16–17.

2.
Buenos Aires, Argentina Investigations Unit of the Office of the Attorney General,
Office of Criminal Investigations: AMIA Case
, report by Marcelo Martinez Burgos and Alberto Nisman, October 25, 2006 (hereafter cited as Burgos and Nisman), 20, 378.

3.
Statements of Robert Bryant and Ambassador Philip Wilcox,
Terrorism in Latin America/AMIA Bombing in Argentina
.

4.
Gabriel Levinas, “Report about the Investigation of the AMIA Attack.”

5.
Ambassador Philip Wilcox,
Terrorism in Latin America/AMIA Bombing in Argentina
.

6.
Burgos and Nisman, 20.

7.
The sketches were published in the Buenos Aires newspaper
Clarin
on August 1 and 6, 1994, and again on September 28, 1995; see copies of the paper and details in written answers to Question for the Record for Ambassador Philip Wilcox in Testimony at Hearing on
Terrorism in Latin America/AMIA Bombing in Argentina
, 111–17.

8.
AMIA indictment, 62.

9.
Burgos and Nisman, 14.

10.
Ibid., 224–26.

11.
Ibid., 243.

12.
Ibid., 212; AMIA indictment, 130, 141.

13.
“Report of the Task Force of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI): Analysis of the Attack on the Seat of the Mutual Israeli Argentinean Association (AMIA), 18th of July, 1994, Buenos Aires, Argentina,” August 1998 (original copy in Spanish, translated to English for the author by Yair Fuxman).

14.
Burgos and Nisman, 245.

15.
Burgos and Nisman’s 2006 report states the suicide bomber likely came in through the tri-border area. But in a 2009 interview with the author, a senior Argentine law enforcement officer confirmed the investigation had “definitively” determined that Berro entered through the tri-border area. Author interview, senior Argentine law enforcement official, Washington, DC, August 16, 2009.