Unmasking Hezbollah – Drug trafficking and terror (1/3) | DW Documentary

Unmasking Hezbollah – Drug trafficking and terror (1/3) | DW Documentary

Everyone in Beirut that day felt they were been personally targeted. I thought that it was another bombing to assassinate me. When we walked outside, it was as if we were walking into hell. The roads are blocked! Go to the hospital on foot! It was as if the city had been laid into a coffin, and it has never emerged from it. A massive explosion has shook Lebanon’s capital, Beirut. More than 100 people have died. More than 4,000 have been injured. The cause is still not clear. It seems a fire caused the explosion of some 2,700 tons of ammonium nitrate, stored at the port. 2,750 tons of ammonium nitrate. Only Hezbollah could unload ammonium nitrate at the port. Nothing happens at the Beirut port without Hezbollah’s knowledge. So this nitrate belonged to Hezbollah… Hezbollah brought it there and stored it there for six years – Hezbollah. Today, I want to offer a categorical, absolute, formal, and definitive denial: We have nothing at the port. Hezbollah is a political party. It is a social movement. It is also a massive militia. Larger, better armed, better trained than the Lebanese Armed Forces. It is an international terrorist organization. Hezbollah made al-Qaeda look like the minor leagues. We determined during Project Cassandra that Hezbollah was operating like a global drug cartel. We viewed them as one of the most significant transnational criminal organizations/cartel/mafia that we had ever come across. Hezbollah’s dangerous. Hezbollah’s big. Hezbollah’s not 10-feet-tall. The shadow of Hezbollah hangs over the explosion at Beirut’s port. Any investigation has seemed impossible. It’s as if the Islamist organization has absolute impunity. For 40 years, its members have infiltrated Lebanese politics and defied justice. This Shia Muslim group dreams of establishing religious law, Sharia, like in Iran. And yet, in the mid-2000s, several agents from the DEA, the US Drug Enforcement Administration, tried in secret to bring down Hezbollah. Their investigation took them to four continents, revealing the hidden face of Hezbollah – Arabic for “Party of God” – before foundering. Their operation’s code name was Cassandra, named after the figure in Greek mythology who foresaw misfortune but was ignored. The investigation began in the United States, in the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center. I’m a former agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration, known as the DEA in the United States. I worked in the DEA for 28 years. The Drug Enforcement Administration was formed to be the lead agency in America to go after the drug trafficking organizations. I’m from New York, obviously saw the devastation of 9/11. My brother was in the United States Air Force. He went to Afghanistan to fight for the country, and he came back in a body bag, because his helicopter crashed during the operation Enduring Freedom. So I’m very passionate about national security and public safety. So, I was actually given a golden opportunity to run the DEA Special Operations Division post-9/11. Jack Kelly is a DEA agent. We recruited him to work at the Special Operations Division. When he first got there, he was working in the Latin America section, which was focusing on Colombia. So, he became the leader of the team. So, I’m a supervisor now at Special Operations Division. The idea is to follow the money to attack these cartels. So, us in an undercover fashion, is posing as criminals that know how to launder money, and we would do that for the cartel and that would afford us to infiltrate cartels at the highest level, because we were doing what their bosses considered the most important thing: Getting the money back into their hands from the drugs that were sold in places like the Bronx, NY. How are you? Good, praise be to God. Is everything OK? Have you finalized the sale? The finca? Yes. Of course, thank God. Great. During the wiretap investigations in Colombia, we were intercepting a lot of Arabic conversations. That was something new to me. As the head of the Special Operations Division, like, I didn’t really understand it, and I had to learn over the years, like, what was going on. Hello. Hello. Listen, I need a favor. It’s very important. Tell me, what is it? I need to borrow 20,000 dollars – it’s for them. I’ll pay you back tomorrow in Lebanon. Yes, of course. The information we’re receiving is that Hezbollah as an organization has made a presence in Latin America, specifically to be involved in the cocaine trade and cocaine proceed money laundering. One of the top lieutenants is a guy that speaks Arabic. And his name is Taliban. They call him Taliban. Because they call every Arab guy down there Taliban after 9/11. We do some searches. Some quick searches in different databases, and we find out that his name is Chekri Harb. Chekri Harb was known to people in the US government. Chekri Harb was tied directly to Iran, Hezbollah, and possible terrorist attacks. So, what happens, is we introduce undercover agents. One of the undercovers is *****. So, *****, because he’s of Lebanese descent, speaks Arabic fluently. And ***** is actually going to meet Chekri in Colombia. So, Chekri Harb tells the undercover: “I move multi-ton loads of cocaine to port Aqaba in Jordan and then it gets moved through Syria into Lebanon.” ***** says: “Well, I imagine then you must be pretty close to Hezbollah, if you’re going be moving cocaine through Syria and Lebanon.” And Chekri Harb just smiles widely and nods his head: “Yes, I am working with Hezbollah.” So, Chekri Harb says to the undercover: “We have a project for you. We have 20 million dollars that needs to be laundered. Can you do that for us?” The undercover says: “Certainly, we can do that for you.” Our undercover agent did such a good job, convincing them that he was this real bad guy, they offered him the contract to pick up 20 million dollars, which he did! 20 million is a lot of money, I’m not aware of too many, you know, undercover agents picking up 20 million dollars from bad guys. Now that the undercover appeared to be a criminal superstar in the mind of Medellin, perhaps ***** could run operations in the Middle East, so basically, this DEA undercover was going to become the Medellin lieutenant in charge of Middle East cocaine trafficking and money laundering. We have found this incredible new definitive tie between Colombian cocaine trafficking, specifically out of Medellin, to an Islamic extremist terrorist organization that killed more Americans than anybody before 9/11. So, this was extraordinary, it was a novel idea. But I think to other people in the United States government, it seemed fanciful because they had never heard of anything like this and basically, the “party line” was that Hezbollah was too religious to be involved in drug trafficking. Why are the Americans saying this? What do they have against Hezbollah? For us, drugs are haram. Our religion forbids us from buying and dealing drugs. So how could we traffic drugs when we prohibit them? It’s not true. Let me tell you a secret: 30 years ago, we decided we wouldn’t take part in any trade at all – not big nor small. And not even in partnership with others either. Because in any business, there are always issues with corruption, and you have to make concessions. The Americans claim that Hezbollah is involved in corruption and money laundering. They want to tarnish our reputation and convince their people that they’re on the “good” side, and that they’re fighting terrorists and corruption. All these weapons, these rifles, these fists, and the blood of martyrs show the entire world that after all these decades, the path of despair has come to an end. Where in the world is Hezbollah operating as terrorists? Nowhere. We’re a resistance movement. They don’t want us to resist? Hezbollah resists. Hezbollah is honest. Our history speaks for itself. The fighting in Beirut has become indiscriminate violence. It’s no longer clear who is fighting whom. The search for Hezbollah drug traffickers led the DEA agents to dig into the chaotic, violent history of Lebanon, the birthplace of the “Party of God.” In 1975, civil war broke out in Beirut. The war was mainly fought between the various religious and cultural communities — Christians, Sunni Muslims, Shia Muslims, Druze, and Palestinians. In June 1982, another party joined the war: The Israeli Army, which invaded Lebanon to fight the Palestinians. The fighting threatened stability in the Middle East. French and US soldiers arrived, hoping to restore peace. They became the target of a then-unknown organization, which had sworn to rid Lebanon of any foreign presence. The so-called “dirty war” began. In 1982 when Hezbollah was formed, I was one of the founders. We opposed the Western presence in Lebanon. We have always wanted them to leave the country and stop influencing the situation in Lebanon. Beirut has once again been struck by a terrible attack. This time, the Americans were the target, in their own embassy. It’s believed about 40 people were killed. I saw a building suddenly collapse. It was the US Embassy. The first major confrontation between Hezbollah and the Americans. The second attack targeted the multinational forces composed primarily of Americans, but also French, British, and Italian personnel. We figured out they had to have at least 2,000 pounds of TNT. He was observed coming at a high rate of speed, from the south of the building, crashed through the gate and through the guard post, and then detonated inside the lobby. There is a crater down there, about 30 feet deep and about 40 feet across. This was the first suicide bombing in Lebanon. There was nothing like it before. Not in our region, and not in our country. Hezbollah brought this terrorist method onto Lebanese soil. Following orders issued by the leader of Hezbollah’s armed forces, we will carry out a suicide bombing and make the earth tremble beneath the feet of our enemies, the United States and Israel. Martyrs are without a doubt the biggest secret of our success. Because in any fight, your opponent is trying to kill you, to take your life. But if losing your life is not that important to you, if achieving your goal is what matters most of all – your opponent loses all power over you. Suicide bombing as a message is: “We will stop at nothing. We are smarter than you. You are a big bureaucracy, and we can beat you.” So, France and the United States were on the same boat at this point, we were trying to figure out what is happening in Lebanon? We want to know the names of our enemy. I want a picture. I want to know where they are, and how we get to them. Once we find them, we have Delta Force which I work with very closely, we go kill him. Those were my orders. War, for an intelligence officer, really it gets your adrenaline going. This is in 1982, 1983, I was on the border with Lebanon. And that was a real fascination because we were at war. You’re seeing the Israeli jets come down the Bekaa, you’re driving down the road and the “New Jersey” is shelling above you. These Navy bombs, they’re as big as Volkswagens. So that was my entrée into the Middle East. Hezbollah, as a name, did not exist in ‘82. They bring all the disparate groups, Shia groups together, and created a unified resistance. We did not want the occupier to know who are fighters were. We took advantage of that period to organize ourselves. After that, we carried out operations in the name of the “Islamic Resistance.” It wasn’t until 1985 that we officially announced the existence of Hezbollah. The Lebanese Shiite population are determined to put an end to 1,300 years of humiliation. In the wake of the Iranian revolution, Lebanese Muslim extremists founded a new political party, Hezbollah, or the “Party of God.” The goal of these fanatics is clear. They say: “We are the soldiers of Allah, and we thrive in death. We want an Islamic Republic. We will make Lebanon a new Vietnam.” Remember 1982 is just not quite three years after the Iranian Revolution. And for the Iranian Revolution, one key pillar was the export of the Revolution. The Iranians came to Lebanon and said, look: “We will help you if you help yourselves and put a fighting group together. You people know how to shoot guns, you know how to blow stuff up. We will give you the money, we will not interfere. You know how to do it. Go do it.” Things were already spiraling. Hezbollah had become a major player, with the new method of using car or truck bombs driven by suicide bombers. And then we entered another phase, which was hostage-taking. Good morning, everyone. It’s the third hijacking this week involving Beirut, and this time the plane and most of the passengers are from the United States. TWA flight 847 was en route from Athens to Rome this morning, when it was hijacked by suspected Shiite Muslims and forced to fly to Beirut. They are beating the passengers. They are beating the passengers. They are threatening to kill them now. They are threatening to kill them now. We want some fuel now. We’re standing in front of the TWA flight 847. Only a few people can come here. I can see Captain John Testrake, next to one of the gunmen, in the cockpit. How do you feel? We’ll ask you more questions when the engines are off. Captain Testrake, can you tell me what has happened to you and what’s happening to you now ? Not very much is happening to us now… You talked to them. Do they speak English? Can you communicate with them? Sometimes better than others. It depends on who’s on board. Many people in America are calling for some kind of rescue operation. I think that we’d all be dead men if they did because we are continually surrounded by many, many guards. Imad Moghnieh was the man inside the cockpit of the TWA flight. Moghnieh was the big point man for Hezbollah’s early terrorist activities. He was not a particularly religious person at first. He served as a bodyguard but went on to become the head of Hezbollah’s terrorist operations, in part by being involved in almost everything from the beginning. Here is a guy who was on the kill list of the Mossad, of the CIA, for many years. Moghnieh was in the airplane. We found his fingerprint. But that was not Moghnieh at the window. He would never do that, never show his face in public – never, never, never, never. He never showed himself to the hostages. Because he knew one day they’d be released, and he didn’t want to be identified. He was a ghost, and he knew how to remain a ghost. I planned to kill him. His entire group operated in secret. We didn’t know anything about them. They were small in number, but they carried out significant attacks. Hezbollah had nothing to do with the kidnappings and attacks on Marines and French paratroopers. The GIs seem happy to leave Lebanese soil and board the American warships patrolling off the coast. The Iranians oversaw the most potent asymmetrical military force in modern history, or ever. Don’t forget the French and the Americans were run out by a guy who had about 20 people. In history, there is nothing to compare it with. Imad Moghnieh and Hezbollah had won. The Americans and French left Lebanon, humiliated and scarred by ongoing suicide bombings and hostage-taking. But the “dirty war” of the 1980s had left its mark. Washington eventually designated Hezbollah as a foreign terrorist organization, and Imad Moghnieh became a marked man. In the mid-2000s, when the agents of the DEA launched Project Cassandra, they thought they could avenge those killed in Beirut and eliminate their old enemy, Imad Moghnieh. They were planning the infiltration of Hezbollah’s trafficking networks in Jordan. But the agents from the CIA, the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, weren’t happy to see these “cowboys” encroaching on their domain. The Jordanian anti-narcotics police go up on intercepts of numbers identified in Jordan, linked to Chekri Harb. And what happened was, is that there was going to be a big meeting in Amman, Jordan. And at that meeting, Chekri Harb was told to introduce the DEA undercover to an extremely significant member or members of Hezbollah. You’re telling me this guy can be fully trusted. There’s no risk? There’s nothing to worry about. It’s important we know where he’s from. No, no! He’s not a risk, don’t worry. All right. We were hearing and we believed for various reasons that Harb was under the guidance and protection of Moghnieh. We’re under a time crunch now, because the undercovers obviously can’t move cocaine with Hezbollah and wouldn’t be able to launder money for Hezbollah. So, we realized that whatever evidence we gained in this Amman, Jordan meeting, might be the last chance. And a day or two before, the meeting was shut down by members of the US embassy in Jordan. They did not allow the undercover agent to meet with the operatives on the ground in Jordan. And there was no real explanation given. Which, to be honest was very, very annoying and very disturbing. You had folks in the intelligence community, that had 30 years of knowledge on Hezbollah, pretty much looking down at the DEA, like: “How does the DEA know about Hezbollah?” DEA became like a fly in their soup. The undercover reached out to Chekri Harb. Chekri Harb wouldn’t talk to him, Chekri Harb wouldn’t respond. So, he had completely blown off, so we lost our undercover infiltration of Chekri Harb. So, the opportunity was lost. Burned. Not only was the opportunity burned, but our DEA undercover’s life was now in big-time danger. As the head of the Special Operations Division, that pissed me off. The CIA, the US intelligence agency, had capsized Project Cassandra, organized by the DEA, the anti-drug agency. The rivalry between the two agencies was emblematic of Washington’s weakness in the face of an enemy that had mutated and matured. By that time, Hezbollah was more than a terrorist faction. It presented itself as a respectable political party, with representatives in the Lebanese parliament who defended the interests of the long-marginalized Shia community. Their political leader was Hassan Nasrallah, a cleric trained in Iran. In the background, Hezbollah – with its military leader Imad Moghnieh – continued fighting the war against Israel, calling itself the resistance. Unlike the Western nations who had left Lebanon, the Israeli military continued to occupy the south of the country. The Israelis and the Westerners do not understand Hezbollah’s doctrine, or its principles. Hezbollah is based on faith in Islam, and Islam is based on jihad. And Hezbollah is stronger than ever, despite all the countries that accuse it of terrorism. We don’t need anyone else. We only want to take back and liberate our country. This was Hezbollah’s golden age. They captured the heart and soul of the Arab people for quite a while. Even though they were Shiite, and 90% of the world’s Muslim population is Sunni. You have to look at Hezbollah, I mean, whoever’s side you are on, as Robin Hood. Look, if you are Lebanese and you’re tired of being humiliated, who do you have? You’ve got Hezbollah and that’s it. The children, the elderly, everyone was out on the streets. In some places, Hezbollah had to say, “Hey, grandpa, slow down! You have to at least wait until the Israelis are gone!” That’s how Hezbollah is! Hezbollah always looks after you. If you have the slightest injury, they always care for the wounded, and their families. They take care of everything. Please, I beg you, for the love of God! …My back! Lie back down. For Hezbollah, fighting, politics, social welfare provision, they’re all about creating a culture of resistance, of “muqawama.” Today we’re a true popular force, with women and children, men and the elderly. The entire family belongs to Hezbollah. We’re not an ordinary organization. The Sayyid is the military leader, as well as the political leader. There’s no distinction between the two. Hassan Nasrallah is an impressive, formidable man. He’s an exceptional public speaker, and his spoken Arabic is perfect. So he can talk to all the Muslims in the world. Our project, and we have no choice but to carry it out, for we are followers of a doctrine – our project is to create an Islamic state with Islamic governance. Think of Nasrallah as Robespierre. Uncorruptible, trying to create a revolution, and he’s done the best he could. I got to know his excellency Sayyid Hassan Nasrallah personally. At one meeting before 2000, I put my hand on his shoulder. Someone took a photo of us. This ring came from Sayyid. And this copy of the Quran, this also came from Sayyid. During what you might call the “glory days” of Hezbollah, we used to go to Nasrallah’s place. I remember how we would change cars, and drive away from the garage in another vehicle. They didn’t blindfold you, but you didn’t really know where you were. You’d know you were in the southern suburbs. The party’s security quarter, what is called the “murabba,” was located there. Why haven’t the Israelis killed him with a drone? Because they can’t find him. He knows about telephones. He knows about drones. He knows all this stuff. He knows how to stay alive. He’s a survivor like Moghnieh. Same mold. Sometimes he’s very direct, sometimes he just touches on topics. You should know that in Muslim communities, there’s something we call “Taqiyya.” I’m Druze, and we also practice it. Taqiyya is not duplicity. It’s a kind of decorum where you don’t always reveal the entire truth. We didn’t yet see him as the monster who would later devour Lebanon. In the early 2000s, the West didn’t notice Hezbollah expanding its influence in Lebanon. At the time, the international community was focused on Iraq. The US had just invaded the country and was facing fierce resistance from local militias. Many of them were Shiite, armed and financed by Iran. What the US didn’t know at the time, was that Lebanese fighters from Hezbollah had come to help their Iraqi brothers in the name of Shiite solidarity and the fight against their common enemy. It started with the war in Iraq and my involvement as an adviser to a US Special Operations Command on the ground in Iraq against the IEDs, which were called Explosively Formed Projectiles, EFPs. This weapon, the way it was designed, had extraordinary ferocity and explosive impact. Come here man! Check this out! I think I found something. Those are like bombs! Look at that thing! A very small tube with a copper plate would yield a huge explosion, enough to cut an M1A1 tank almost in half, which we’ve never seen anyone able to do with any sort of normal explosive. It was a signature weapon. So, the fact that it was being used against American forces told me that Hezbollah had to be on the ground. Hezbollah instructors train approximately 20 to 60 Iraqis at a time, sending them back to Iraq, organized into these special groups. They’re being taught how to use EFPs, mortars, rockets. The Explosive Formed Projectile, that was being employed in Iraq, against American forces, was designed by Hezbollah. And the man behind the creation of this weapon was Imad Moghnieh. So, I started hearing about the President’s man. They called him the President’s man because he had worked directly for President Bush and the Bush White House. I was focusing on the finances, and I was aware that a great deal of money involving the EFP networks, in Iraq, was being derived from cash houses in Lebanon. Something sort of remarkable happened. We started to see phone selectors, that were tied to the financing of IED attacks in Iraq. That were then apparently in touch with numbers in South America. I was like… Did they mean to call Colombia? I said, what does this mean? This is very bizarre. But this pattern kept happening. Why are these people in contact, what are they talking about, what are they doing? And I realized suddenly – are these guys turning to Colombian sources of narco-financing to fund their operations on the ground in Iraq? A light went on in my head because I was familiar with narcotics trafficking, global money laundering for organized crime. Drug money at one level or another, was making its way, the profits were making their way, into the war in Iraq. Wow, if we could track this money and we could tie it to drugs and then we were able to pursue the drug trafficking, and start to take down the drug business, we could start to really put a financial hit around Hezbollah’s ability to operate in Iraq. My orders were to attack this foggy situation and then to try to tie this into the leadership. And the leadership being Imad Moghnieh. So I wanted to go after Imad Moghnieh. Hezbollah was developing this worldwide capability and generating billions of dollars. And we had to take action. For them to turn to narcotics trafficking was the greatest gift we could ever be given. Suddenly we had a way of using lawfare, not warfare, to attack a terrorist organization’s finances. And when I briefed it up the chain at US central command, to General Allen and through him to General Petraeus, they’re like: “Hot sh*t! That’s a great idea! We couldn’t dream of something better than this, because we can’t fight those guys.” Washington regarded Hezbollah’s involvement in the death of US soldiers in Iraq as a declaration of war, and relaunched Project Cassandra. The DEA had free rein to tackle the “Party of God” in the name of national security. I wanted to go after their money. I wanted to go after their networks. I wanted to take down their finances. I wanted to go after their banks. They had criminalized themselves. We needed to reveal that to the world and to their own people!

In 2008, the United States launched “Project Cassandra”. The aim was to uncover how Hezbollah uses drug trafficking and money laundering to finance its military and terrorist activities. The three-part series tells the story of the project.

By 2008, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration had gathered sufficient evidence to show that Hezbollah had transformed from a military and political organization into an international crime syndicate. They were making billions from drug and arms trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities. “Project Cassandra” was the ambitious, top-secret project designed to stop them.

On 4 August 2020, the city of Beirut was devastated by the explosion of hundreds of tons of ammonium nitrate stored in the port. All eyes turned to Hezbollah, a Shiite party and militia linked to Iran that controls a large part of Lebanon. Despite pressure from both citizens and the international community, Hezbollah (literally: the “party of God”) refused to allow any independent investigation into the causes of the explosion.

Hezbollah emerged in 1982 as a resistance organization against the Israeli occupation. Even then, it was supported by Iran. For 40 years, its fighters have infiltrated all areas of the Lebanese state and risen to become the country’s dominant force.

In the mid-2000s, however, a handful of police officers from the American Drug Enforcement Agency (D.E.A.) attempted to bring down Hezbollah. They operated in the greatest secrecy. The code name of their operation: Cassandra. Their investigation begins in the United States, in the still-smoldering ruins of the World Trade Center.

The three-part series tells the story of “Project Cassandra,” based on the testimony of DEA agents and other people involved. It also tells the story of the rise of Hezbollah and provides insights into complex geopolitical contexts.

Part 1: https://youtu.be/1gDvIexJYXE
Part 2: https://youtu.be/ovezVfPAu9c
Part 3: https://youtu.be/nrltqY3xDHg

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