Hezbollah (36 page)

Bassam’s younger brother Mohammad Gharib Makki had become a US citizen and, together with his cousin Hassan Gharib Makki, lived in New York. Authorities arrested Mohammad on February 22, 1995, and charged him with mail and wire fraud violations. Targeting Mohammad’s clothing business, Nadia Fashions, prosecutors accused him of engaging in insurance and credit card fraud, among other criminal activities, which served as fundraising schemes to benefit Hezbollah. By one account, Mohammad was the leader of a Hezbollah “New York cell” and a senior Hezbollah lieutenant who reported directly to Hassan Nasrallah.
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Mohammad was released on $100,000 bail. Though his US passport was confiscated, Mohammad fled the country traveling on his Lebanese passport and remains a fugitive today.
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Officials also describe Bassam and Mohammad Makki’s cousin Hassan as a senior Hezbollah member. He, too, is believed to reside in Lebanon, having fled the United States after Mohammad’s arrest.
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Just a few months after Mohammad Makki’s arrest, in October 1995, the seriousness of the Hezbollah threat in the United States was again brought to light through intelligence indicating that the organization “had dispatched a hit squad to assassinate National Security Advisor Tony Lake.” Lake was temporarily moved into a safe house until the threat was run aground.
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Three years passed before FBI agents working out of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) received word that Mohammad Makki had attempted to secure a US tourist visa for his American passport in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. He was detained on September 18, 1998, by the Paraguayan National Police, who contacted their American counterparts. When American investigators arrived, they discovered that the man who presented Mohammad Makki’s US passport in Paraguay, which had been issued in Damascus as a replacement, was not Mohammad. A fingerprint check indicated that the person using Mohammad Makki’s passport was actually his cousin Hassan. He was arrested and flown back to the United States to stand trial in Washington, D.C., on charges of misusing a US passport. Matters then took yet another strange turn. At the bond hearing, prosecutors announced that further investigation revealed that the individual in custody was, in fact, neither Mohammad Makki nor his cousin Hassan Makki. It was Bassam Makki, who was back on assignment after his failed bombing attempt in Germany nine years earlier.
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During his trial Bassam claimed that he owned an internet service provider (ISP), “Internet Center,” and that he worked with the “Computer Center” from 1992 to 1996. But investigators found no evidence for the purported business in Beirut. They checked with officials at the largest ISP in Lebanon, who confirmed that they had never heard of the defendant.
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However, at his trial, defense lawyers presented advertisements in Lebanese newspapers for the purported business, as well as statements by co-owners affirming Bassam’s position within the organization. According to a US embassy source, a business called Internet Center was located in a part of Beirut under Hezbollah control.
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Any claim that Bassam Makki was simply looking to import computers to South America fell apart, though, as the investigation proceeded.

Investigators quickly learned that Bassam had used his brother’s passport to travel from Lebanon to Asunción, Paraguay, on September 14, 1998, aboard an Air France flight. He was met by Hussein Ali Hmaied, a Lebanese resident of Ciudad del Este and an allegedly central Hezbollah figure in the tri-border area.
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According to FBI special agent Hector Rodriguez, Makki “was accompanied by a key Hezbollah facilitator throughout his trip there.”
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Upon arrival, the two immediately went to the Brazilian consulate to apply for a tourist visa to Brazil. Suspicious Brazilian officials notified the US embassy, which then contacted the FBI.
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State Department Diplomatic Security agent Michael J. Hudspeth found that despite Makki’s protestations to the contrary, his travel to South America was not related to opening an import-export business. In his affidavit to the court, Hudspeth declared that “whatever Bassam’s activities were in Paraguay, Bassam was sent to Paraguay at the express direction of [Hezbollah secretary-general] Nasrallah and was executing specific functions of the Hezbollah.”
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According to a Lebanese Shi’a confidential informant, the FBI informed, “Makki was involved in the military arm of Hezbollah, primarily in the physical training of Hezbollah terrorists.” While the specific purpose of Makki’s presence in the tri-border area was unknown, the various figures he met with suggest the reasons behind his trip.
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On arrival in Paraguay, Makki was chaperoned by Hussein Ali Hmaied, who served as the liaison between the Abdallah and Barakat clans. Hmaied owned an office and warehouse at the Galeria Page shopping center, which was designated by the US Treasury Department as a Hezbollah front in December 2006. An informant identified Hmaied as a “trusted assistant” of Abdallah, the owner of Galeria Page, as well as a business partner of Hussein Ali Barakat, Assad Ahmad Barakat’s right-hand man. These ties allowed Hmaied to operate as a bridge between the two factions. Hmaied himself admitted to accompanying Makki in a written statement to the Fifth Duty Magistrate in Ciudad del Este, though he denied having any connection to Hezbollah or knowing Makki well.
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During his brief time in the tri-border area, Makki reportedly met with several local Hezbollah leaders. Almost immediately after his arrival in Ciudad del Este, Makki met with Hussein Alawieh, a senior Hezbollah member who owned Fatima Import Export and Alawieh Import Export, as well as another business in Canada. The informant described Alawieh as the “primary connection and the most important
family member with ties to the Hezbollah in Canada.” Also, according to the informant, Alawieh had told his colleagues that a relative on his mother’s side with the last name Makki had come from Lebanon to invest almost $2 million in the area.
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Agent Rodriguez’s informant also personally witnessed Makki meeting with Ali Moussa Barakat—the father of Hussein Ali Barakat, Hmaied’s business partner—at the Galeria Page shopping center, next to Hmaied’s office. The informant stated that the elder Barakat was an arms trafficker who came to Paraguay in the 1970s because of “personal problems he had encountered in Lebanon.” Later, he spent significant sums to “fix” those problems and lived in West Beirut.
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To some, Makki’s travel to South America was specifically intended to mend ties between the region’s two main Hezbollah factions. Getting them to put aside their rivalry was seen as critical to focusing on their shared commitment to support Hezbollah financially and, at times, operationally. Furthermore, some suspect Makki’s meeting with Hussein Alawieh—fingered as a primary link between Hezbollah supporters in the tri-border area and those in Canada—may have focused on efforts to help Makki travel to Canada or to the United States through Canada.
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As often occurs with Hezbollah operatives, officials were ultimately unable to collect sufficient evidence for use in public court pointing to Makki’s terrorist activities. On December 16, 1998, Makki pleaded guilty in Washington, D.C., federal district court to passport violations and served a few months in prison. In December 1999, he was transferred to Miami, where he pleaded guilty to making false statements to federal agents and served a few months more in prison. Finally, on March 7, 2000, he was deported to Lebanon.
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The connection between US-based Hezbollah figures and activity in the tri-border area remained on the US radar over the next several years. In 2007, for example, agents from the Miami JTTF learned of a serious breach of US sanctions related to Hezbollah. During the investigation, US law enforcement discovered that two Miami businessmen, Khaled T. Safadi and Ulises Talavera, along with Paraguayan businessman Emilio Jacinto Gonzalez-Neira, were exporting Sony-brand electronics through Miami to an electronics distributor in Ciudad del Este. What caught the attention of the JTTF was the location of the Paraguayan business, operated by Samer Mehdi, in the Galeria Page shopping center.
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The 2006 Treasury Department designation of the center proscribed any transactions or financial dealings with US persons or companies.
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Later, Khaled Safadi was revealed to be the cousin of Marwan Safadi, also known as Marwan Kadi, a Paraguayan national arrested in 1996 for plotting to bomb the US embassy in Asunción. Marwan was later extradited to Canada, where he was convicted on drug trafficking charges.
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The Miami investigation revealed that between March 2007 and January 2008, the defendants knowingly engaged in export violations by doing business with Galeria Page even after it was designated. To conceal the shipments, they filed Shipper’s Export Declarations with false ultimate consignees and marked invoices with fake addresses. Wire transfer payments between Mehdi and the US-based Sony distributors were also routed in such a way as to mask their origins.
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Over a period
of about a week in 2007, three separate shipments netted nearly $400,000 in profits for those involved.
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On February 18, 2010, Safadi, Talavera, and Gonzalez-Neira were arrested by US law enforcement and indicted the next day. Though Samer Mehdi was also indicted, he remains a fugitive from justice.
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After prosecutors agreed to drop charges relating to the Treasury ban on dealings with Galeria Page, Safadi pleaded guilty to lesser charges of conspiring to violate US export law. On January 21, 2011, he was sentenced to six months’ home confinement along with six months’ probation.
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Even as American intelligence and law enforcement agents ran informants who collected information on Hezbollah in places like South America, Hezbollah did the same in reverse. Once, agents from the FBI’s New York office arrived in the tri-border area to quietly investigate Hezbollah activities. The trip was not made public, and even the host country was only informed of the visit just prior to the agents’ landing. Yet as the agents were walking across the tarmac, only minutes after landing, their pagers went off with instructions to call home. Imagine their shock when they were informed by officers at the New York field office that photographs of the agents coming off the plane had just arrived on the FBI fax machine in New York. The pictures included no text but the message was clear: We knew you were coming, we know you are here. You may be watching us, but we are watching you, too.
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Although known to operate in major cities, Hezbollah maintained a presence in smaller communities as well. By 2003, the FBI would reportedly be investigating “hundreds of suspected Hezbollah members or sympathizers in the United States—including several dozen émigrés believed to be hard-core Hezbollah believers.” These investigations were spread across the country, from New York and Boston to Los Angeles. “You could almost pick your city and you would probably have a [Hezbollah] presence,” as one law enforcement official put it.
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Among the lower-profile cities in which Hezbollah would stake out ground was Charlotte, North Carolina.

By age fifteen, in 1989, Mohamad Youssef Hammoud was already serving in Hezbollah’s military wing in Lebanon. In a picture taken at the time, Hammoud poses at a Hezbollah center in a military-style camouflage jacket with an AK-47 automatic weapon in front of a picture of Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeini. But to understand the young militant’s path from the Levant to serving as a pizza delivery man and then the kingpin of an interstate smuggling ring, all the while keeping in touch with Hezbollah figures back in Lebanon, we must return to his place of origin.

Hammoud was born September 25, 1973, in Lebanon, at the Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp south of Beirut.
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Weeks later, the Middle East was engulfed in yet another Arab-Israeli war. In the war, the Israelis recovered from a surprise attack to come within striking distance of Damascus on the northern front, and Cairo to the south. Although Arab leaders proclaimed victory, the shame of their defeat would
fuel Arab extremism in the region. For the Israelis’ part, the technical win came with deep national wounds.

In 1975, civil war broke out in Lebanon, affecting Hammoud even more directly. The Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) had become a de facto state within a state in Lebanon since the PLO leadership was kicked out of Jordan in 1970. The fifteen-year civil war—the backdrop for Hammoud’s youth—devastated Lebanon. And it all played out in the Bourj el-Barajneh refugee camp, where his family lived along with many Palestinian refugees and poor Shiites. According to Mohamad, an Israeli rocket landed near a party of schoolchildren celebrating the end of the school year in 1982, knocking him unconscious and killing a friend.
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Hammoud described Bourj el-Barajneh as a “less than middle class area” that was at the center of violence for as long as he could remember. As a teenager, Mohamad was originally impressed with Amal. “They had very good principles … fighting the occupation and helping poor people and all that good stuff.” But over time Amal became corrupt, Mohamad explained. “If you see somebody wealthy in the area, you can tell that’s an Amal figure because he would have the best car, the best house and everything.” Amal, Mohamad recalled, was suddenly only interested in protecting the interests of certain segments of the Shi’a community and not others. In turn, Hezbollah’s social service activities and its success fighting Israel earned Mohamad’s admiration. He acknowledged knowing that Hezbollah also engaged in other activities, like blowing up buildings and kidnapping people and hijacking airplanes, but that did not stop him from joining Hezbollah’s version of the Boy Scouts, the Imam al-Mahdi Scouts.
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The scouts, Lebanon’s
Daily Star
reports, “teaches young boys the basics of religion, jihad and the ways of the revolution as a prelude to carrying weapons in the anti-Israeli resistance in the South.”
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