Hezbollah (77 page)

Based on information from law enforcement and other sources, the US Treasury Department reported that the LCB was complicit in international drug trafficking and money laundering activities. In one of the cases cited by the Treasury Department, an individual who used the LCB to exchange laundered funds was a Latin
America–based member of a Lebanese drug trafficking organization involved in moving large quantities of drugs from Latin America to destinations throughout Africa, Europe, and the Middle East. For more than a decade, according to information released by the Treasury Department, this individual and members of his family, all Hezbollah supporters, engaged in a variety of trade-based money laundering schemes involving American drug traffickers and Lebanese money launderers.
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Nine months after his designation as a narco-trafficker in February 2011, Ayman Joumma was indicted on charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and money laundering, including coordinating cocaine shipments for sale in the United States.
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Joumma first emerged on DEA agents’ radar when he placed a call to a phone tied to Chekry Harb, the Hezbollah-affiliated drug trafficker in Colombia (discussed in
chapter 4
). Joumma had arranged for the proceeds of cocaine sales to be picked up at a Paris hotel and then laundered back to Colombia, but the pickup turned out to be a sting operation. Listening in on the line, agents heard Joumma nonchalantly muse, “I just lost a million euros in France.” Cell phones seized at the Paris hotel tied Joumma, himself a Lebanese Sunni Muslim, to Hezbollah. Meanwhile, Israeli intercepts documented Joumma’s contact with a member of Hezbollah’s Unit 1800. This contact worked for a senior Hezbollah operative named Abu Abdullah, who, Israeli officials believe, dealt with Hezbollah’s drug operations. Abu Abdullah’s name arose in the DEA intercepts too. In one conversation Chekry Harb complained about “the sons of whores I owe money to.” In response, a relative from his hometown in Lebanon cautioned that the “people of Abu Abdullah, the people we do not dare have problems or fight with,” were looking for him, and their money.
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Al-Manar (the Beacon), Hezbollah’s satellite television station, aired its first broadcast on June 3, 1991.
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Almost two decades later, two New York–based individuals would be sentenced for providing support to the station in exchange for thousands of dollars. As Hezbollah’s primary mouthpiece and propaganda tool, al-Manar specializes in programming glorifying terrorism and inciting violence, racial hatred, and anti-Semitism. The self-declared “station of resistance,” al-Manar promises to wage “psychological warfare against the Zionist enemy” and has called for violence against Americans in the Middle East.
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Moreover, it has made the United States a key target of its programming and portrayed it as a global oppressor. In a September 2002 speech broadcast on al-Manar, Hezbollah secretary-general Hassan Nasrallah declared, “Our hostility to the Great Satan is absolute…. Death to America will remain our reverberating and powerful slogan: Death to America!”
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At the time of al-Manar’s founding, the station reportedly received seed money from Iran and had a running budget of $1 million.
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By 2002, its annual budget had grown to approximately $15 million.
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Middle East analysts and journalists maintain that most of this funding comes from Iran. An assessment by former al-Manar program director Sheikh Nasir al-Akhdar, however, asserted that al-Manar receives
a large portion of its budget through subsidies offered by Hezbollah and contributions from supportive individuals and institutions.
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Al-Manar is operated by Hezbollah members, reports directly to Hezbollah officials, and follows Hassan Nasrallah’s orders.
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As of 2000, most of the station’s forty journalists were former guerrilla fighters.
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Recall Mohammad Dbouk (see
chapter 6
), who used his al-Manar credentials to perform preoperational surveillance to plan Hezbollah attacks on Israeli soldiers. Dbouk accompanied Hezbollah units on their missions, filmed their live attacks, and used the resulting footage to produce propaganda videos. Some of these videos were later found in Hezbollah members’ homes in Charlotte, North Carolina, where they were used to solicit funds at local gatherings.
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In 2009, Arab media widely reported the discovery of an Egypt-based Hezbollah cell in late 2008 that contained at least one al-Manar employee who used his al-Manar credentials as a cover for collecting intelligence information for potential attacks.
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Prominent Hezbollah members have been major shareholders in al-Manar’s parent company, the Lebanese Media Group, according to the US Treasury Department and corroborated by Nayef Krayem, al-Manar’s third general manager and chairman of the board. Al-Manar, Krayem noted, “gets money from the shareholders [who] are leaders in Hezbollah…. [Al-Manar and Hezbollah] breathe life into one another.”
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Hassan Fadlallah, the station’s public relations director, once declared: “Neutrality like that of Al Jazeera is out of the question for us. We cover only the victim, not the aggressor. CNN is the Zionist news network, Al Jazeera is neutral, and Al Manar takes the side of the Palestinians. We’re not looking to interview [former Israeli prime minister Ariel] Sharon. We want to get close to him in order to kill him.”
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In response to al-Manar’s incitement of racial hatred, many countries have banned the station from broadcasting, including France, Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia.
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At a meeting of European Union member states in March 2005, media regulators agreed European satellites would no longer be allowed to carry the channel. In essence, this action banned al-Manar from broadcasting throughout the European Union.
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The move was supported by the Palestinian Authority, which was frustrated with al-Manar’s recruitment of suicide bombers out to sabotage the Palestinian Authority’s fragile truce with Israel.
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While European countries banned Hezbollah’s al-Manar because it incited hatred, the US ban focused on the channel’s affiliation with Hezbollah. In December 2004, the US State Department added al-Manar to the Terrorism Exclusion List, effectively preventing the immigration and accelerating the deportation of non–US citizens associated with the station, as well as the removal of al-Manar from US television providers.
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Two years later, the Department of the Treasury named al-Manar a Specially Designated Global Terrorist entity, noting that al-Manar supported fundraising and recruitment efforts by Hezbollah through advertisements and requesting donations on air. According to the Treasury Department, al-Manar broadcast an invitation from Hezbollah secretary-general Nasrallah for all Lebanese citizens to volunteer for Hezbollah military training. The station also provided support to Palestinian terrorist groups. In one example cited by the US
Treasury, al-Manar transferred tens of thousands of dollars to a charity controlled by Palestinian Islamic Jihad.
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Al-Manar’s list of offenses included transferring funds to supporters in the United States. In 2006, two New Yorkers were arrested for supporting Hezbollah by conspiring to broadcast al-Manar programming to US customers. In exchange for thousands of dollars from al-Manar, Javed Iqbal and Saleh Elahwal allegedly provided satellite transmission services to al-Manar through the then–New York-based satellite transmission company HDTV Ltd.
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In late 2005, Elahwal emailed a representative of al-Manar offering HDTV’s services to broadcast the station in North and South America; within a month he would travel to Beirut to sign a contract with Hezbollah. Throughout 2005 and 2006, al-Manar wired funds to HDTV’s bank account through a Manhattan bank. Subsequently, Iqbal and Elahwal shipped satellite receivers to al-Manar TV in Beirut and confirmed, in emails to al-Manar representatives, that HDTV would begin broadcasting al-Manar.
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Ultimately, Iqbal and Elahwal were sentenced to sixty-nine and seventeen months, respectively, for providing material support to Hezbollah.
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Across the county, investigations into petty criminal activities, including food stamp fraud, misuse of grocery coupons, and sale of unlicensed T-shirts, have led to criminal fundraising plots tied to Hezbollah. As of 2002, US officials believed “a substantial portion” of the estimated hundreds of millions of dollars raised by Hezbollah and other Middle Eastern terrorist groups comes from the $20 to $30 million annually brought in by the illicit scam industry in America.
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In November 2007, after a two-year investigation centered on the Los Angeles garment district, a multiagency task force arrested a dozen suspects on narcotics trafficking, sale of counterfeit goods, and money laundering. The investigation, dubbed Operation Bell Bottoms, culminated in arrests of Ali Khalil Elreda and his associates. Elreda was detained at the Los Angeles International Airport attempting to smuggle $123,000 in money orders and cashier’s checks to Lebanon stuffed in a child’s toy.
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While public announcements about the November arrests made no mention of a terrorism connection, several sources close to the Elreda investigation claimed the ring smuggled criminal proceeds to Hezbollah. According to a Department of Justice press release, officers seized thirty kilograms of cocaine and hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of counterfeit clothing during the investigation.
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As a source told the press, “this was a classic case of terrorism financing, and it was pretty sophisticated how they did it.”
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In fact, while the case originated with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department (LASD), it was turned over to the FBI when the terrorism angle became clear.
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Focusing on a group of Lebanese immigrants living in the Los Angeles suburb of Bell, investigators noted certain local families had relatives who had fought (and died) with Hezbollah in the July 2006 war.
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In October 2006, a private trademark investigator contacted the LASD about an ongoing investigation of Hip Hop Connections, a retail store in Los Angeles County.
In coordination with the LASD, the investigator arranged to purchase a large number of Nike shoes from Mohammad Khalil Elreda, whose brother Ali owned the store. The shoes were sent to Nike for a detailed examination and determined to be counterfeit. Los Angeles law enforcement soon discovered that Ali Elreda was on felony probation for dealing counterfeit goods.
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Two years earlier, another private investigator identified several counterfeit jerseys, T-shirts, and pairs of sweatpants at Hip Hop Connections over several visits. When investigators returned to the store to serve Ali Elreda a cease-and-desist notice in April 2004, he agreed to turn over the counterfeit items. According to investigative reports, however, Ali’s sister arrived as investigators inventoried the counterfeit goods and belligerently insisted they were genuine. A few months after this incident, the LASD arrested Ali Elreda for selling counterfeit goods and seized $16,060 worth of retail items. A weapons charge was added when police found a handgun in a front-counter cabinet and a semiautomatic rifle in a storeroom.
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Counterfeiting crimes by Hezbollah supporters predate the Elreda group’s arrest, as affirmed in a 2005 congressional hearing by John Stedman of the LASD, who recounted two notable instances in particular. In one instance, during a search of a suspect’s home in which thousands of dollars in counterfeit clothing were seized, Stedman saw small Hezbollah flags displayed next to a photograph of Nasrallah. When Stedman identified Nasrallah in the photo, the suspect’s wife said, “We love him because he protects us from the Jews.” Also in the home were dozens of audiotapes of Nasrallah’s speeches and a locket containing Nasrallah’s picture. In 2004, while serving a search warrant at a Los Angeles County clothing store, detectives recovered thousands of dollars in counterfeit clothing and two unregistered firearms. The suspect was found to have a tattoo of the Hezbollah flag when he was booked into custody.
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The financial rewards from petty crime like counterfeiting can be immense, but the practice makes it difficult for a criminal network to use traditional banking practices. In a Los Angeles case, investigators discovered more than $800,000 in cash throughout the suspect’s home, hidden under the bed in trash bags and stashed in trash cans and the attic, with over $10,000 in a child’s piggy bank. In another case US Customs officers at Los Angeles International Airport stopped a Lebanon-bound woman with $230,000 in cash strapped to her body. The woman told the customs officers that she was heading to Lebanon for vacation. According to Stedman, authorities learned that the woman owned a chain of cigarette shops and seized more than a thousand cartons of counterfeit cigarettes and an additional $70,000 in cash, along with funds from wire transfers to banks throughout the world.
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Bragging to a government informant about his ties to Hezbollah, Mahmoud Kourani once let it slip that a few years before he had entered the country, another Hezbollah supporter named Mohammed Krayem had sent money to his brother,
the Hezbollah military commander, to fund the purchase of military equipment from members of the United Nations Protection Forces in Lebanon.
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In other cases, however, Hezbollah procurement agents sought to purchase weapons and military equipment in North America. Mohammad Dbouk and his associates in Canada focused on dual-use items (discussed in
chapter 6
), but others sought far more lethal equipment.