Hezbollah (39 page)

Although the information was tantalizing, the government was in a bind, unable to initiate discussions with Hammoud about the subject matter for which he was on trial and represented by legal counsel. Eventually, a plan was hatched to arm Walcott with a recording device and have him meet with Hammoud.

Walcott and Hammoud engaged in three separate conversations. The first was captured by a recording device and produced no useful information. The second was initiated by Walcott himself (in violation of the FBI’s instructions) and was thus unauthorized by the FBI. However, after the conversation, Walcott contacted the FBI in order to turn over an unsigned letter written in Arabic that he claimed Hammoud had given him. According to the FBI, the letter introduced Walcott to unnamed individuals and said, in part: “I retained A.G. [Walcott’s] service for a substantial fee, his assignment is to put bullets into the skull of the arrogant, bastard prosecutor.” Alternatively, the letter suggested, he could blow up the evidence against Hammoud.
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An FBI translator’s analysis of the letter would later conclude that it was written by someone who was illiterate or had limited knowledge of Arabic—since the writer most likely copied from an Arabic writing table—and was inconsistent with other communications discovered during the Hammoud investigation.
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Fingerprint analysis determined that the fingerprints on the letter were Walcott’s and a third party’s—the latter of which did not belong to Hammoud.
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Did somebody write the letter for Hammoud, or was it all fabricated by Walcott?

At their third meeting, Walcott asked Hammoud to provide him with the potential victim’s name. This time Hammoud was crystal clear, repeating and spelling out Bell’s name (no spelling champion, he misspelled Bell’s name as Bill).
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When Walcott further mentioned that he had decided to shoot Bell rather than use an explosive device, Hammoud did not seem surprised and simply warned Walcott to be careful. However, Hammoud did not incriminate himself during any of the conversations: He made no direct statements ordering or requesting criminal activity, and when presented with the evidence against him, he denied his involvement and even offered to take a polygraph in order to prove his innocence.
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He did, however, tell Walcott that he was worried about his younger brother because he was a member of Hezbollah and had come to the states only to satisfy his mother. Mohammad says of his brother and other Hezbollah members, “[People like] my brother … they hate to come here, you know. Those [are people] waiting for the one day when they [are] going to meet God.” Furthermore, Hammoud told Walcott that his brother was happy when the visa application he filed at the US embassy in Beirut was denied and explained that he had to ask his wife for help in finding a wife for his brother so that he could legally enter the United States.
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As the Charlotte case would show, Hezbollah is involved in arms trafficking and procurement not only in less-developed countries but in the West as well. “Ironically, the black market in developed countries also provides an excellent opportunity to engage in arms trafficking activities,” according to a study of Hezbollah prepared for US Special Operations Command. “Both U.S. and Canadian authorities track
Hezbollah’s procurement of proscribed high-tech military and other equipment,” the study notes.
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Hezbollah has been especially active procuring items from North America. An early example is Fawzi Mustapha Assi, a naturalized US citizen from Lebanon. He ultimately pleaded guilty to charges of providing material support to a terrorist organization for his attempt to smuggle night-vision goggles, a thermal imaging camera, and two global positioning modules to Hezbollah. Described by US authorities as a Hezbollah procurement agent, Assi first fled the United States after his arrest in 1998 but returned and surrendered to authorities in May 2004.
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Before his arrest, FBI agents watched as Assi tossed a variety of items into two different area dumpsters. A dumpster dive revealed that the items included literature on military equipment and remote-controlled aircraft, lists of Israeli government cabinet addresses downloaded from the internet, articles on the effects of napalm, and more.
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And although he was caught in 1998—while attempting to transfer these items to Hezbollah at Detroit Metropolitan Wayne County Airport—he had apparently succeeded in the past. According to Dbouk’s longtime friend Said Harb, Dbouk described Assi as “‘the guy’ for getting equipment on behalf of Hezbollah until he got caught and fled the U.S. to Lebanon.” Dbouk continued, telling Harb that he, Dbouk, “personally met this individual [Assi] at the airport in Beirut to ensure Hezbollah got the equipment he obtained.”
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In other cases, individuals found to be procuring weapons for Hezbollah in the United States had connections to Canada as well. Take the case of Ali Boumelhem, who bought several twelve-gauge shotguns over a two-year period at Michigan gun shows (despite having a criminal record). In late 2000, Boumelhem and others loaded a forty-foot-long shipping container with car parts outside their Detroit auto repair shop. The bill of lading listed the container’s contents as car engines and transmissions, but the FBI was aware it held more. A cousin had tipped off authorities that Boumelhem was sending weapons to Hezbollah, and provided a videotape of him firing an assault weapon in the desert and voicing support for Hezbollah. As an FBI surveillance team watched, a truck transported the container to a railway yard in Detroit, where it was scheduled for transport to Montreal. The container was seized at the railway yard, where US customs agents searched its contents and found ammunition, a shotgun, and spare parts for automatic weapons all hidden in a car door. Another shotgun and a two-way radio were found elsewhere in the container. Boumelhem was arrested in mid-November 2002 at Detroit Metropolitan Airport holding a one-way ticket to Lebanon. After a one-week trial, he was convicted on seven federal counts.
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Hezbollah has long maintained a particularly active procurement effort in Canada. Not only does the group have a significant pool of members, supporters, and sympathizers in Canada, but the country’s strong position in industry, trade, and finance make it an attractive place to procure dual-use items. The immigration case of Mohammad Hussein al Husseini, who was ultimately ordered deported from Canada in 1994, sheds significant light on Hezbollah’s presence in the country. Interviewed by Canadian security officials, al Husseini provided information both on
Hezbollah attacks abroad and on the group’s presence and activities in Canada. He specified that “Hezbollah has members in Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto—in all of Canada.” Referring to the situation in Montreal, al Husseini implied that he could provide Canadian authorities information about cigarette and weapons smuggling if the Canadian government would cut a deal with him.
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Mohammad Hassan Dbouk and his brother-in-law, Ali Adham Amhaz, ran the Canadian portion of Hezbollah’s funding and procurement network under the command of Haj Hassan Hilu Laqis (then Hezbollah’s chief military procurement officer). Their activities were funded in part with money that Laqis sent from Lebanon, in addition to their own criminal activities in Canada.
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Under the win-win scam, they procured materials for Hezbollah and still made a profit. While their credit card and bank frauds covered the cost of the items they bought for Hezbollah, they still received fifty cents on the dollar from Laqis for the materials they procured.
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At one point Harb told Mohamad Hammoud about the Canadian dual-use procurement ring and asked if he wanted to help. “No,” Hammoud replied, “I’m helping in my own way.”
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The items that the Hezbollah procurement network purchased or discussed purchasing in North America for smuggling into Lebanon were used, according to a defense specialist who served as an expert witness, to increase Hezbollah’s tactical capabilities on the battlefield. Commander James Campbell, a former Defense Intelligence Agency counterterrorism intelligence officer, said the list was ambitious and indicative of Hezbollah’s increasing military sophistication: night-vision devices (goggles, cameras, and scopes), surveying equipment, global positioning systems (watches and aviation antennas), mine and metal detection equipment, camera and video equipment, advanced aircraft analysis and design software, and a variety of computer equipment including laptops, high-speed modems, processors, joysticks, plotters, scanners, and printers. Commander Campbell pointed out to the jury several video clips—from videos seized at Mohamad Hammoud’s home—of Hezbollah militants using the kind of equipment Dbouk’s network procured for Hezbollah in Canada.
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Such examples were not coincidental, given that Hezbollah sought specific items its fighters needed in the field. For example, the procurement network was asked to send specific compasses because “the guys were getting lost, you know, in the woods, or whatever, and they need compasses.”
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In one instance, Said Harb provided Dbouk with $4,000 toward the purchase of such items. As Harb later recalled in testimony, Dbouk once asked him, when the two met in Canada, “Would you like to get anything, you know, for the guys?” Instructed to explain this more clearly, Harb elaborated: “We were talking about Hezbollah. Hezbollah has social, military, political, different branches within Hezbollah. We were talking about the military branch. You know, The Resistance.”
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In support of its procurement efforts for “the Resistance,” the Canadian Hezbollah network considered supplementing its income through other schemes, including importing counterfeit $100 bills from Lebanon or taking out life insurance policies for Hezbollah operatives committing acts of terrorism in the Middle East.
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Neither of these ideas were acted upon, in part because the network had more money
than it needed through basic credit card bust-out schemes, but it demonstrates the ingenuity of Hezbollah logisticians. As for the insurance scheme, in effect, the Hezbollah network considered trying to take out a life insurance policy in Canada for a prospective Hezbollah fighter in Lebanon who might be killed carrying out a suicide attack, or otherwise engaging in combat from which he would not return. Concerned a Canadian insurance company would not honor the policy of a suicide bomber, Dbouk suggested a death certificate could be produced falsely claiming the person was a civilian killed while “sitting in his village.”
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In the years since the July 2006 war, Hezbollah’s procurement program has taken on renewed importance as the group has spent most of its time replenishing its weapons stocks. Big-ticket items, like missiles, are provided by Iran and sometimes Syria. But other items, from small arms and ammunition to shoulder-fired rockets and dual-use items, are also procured globally through Hezbollah networks. According to Sheikh Nabil Qaouq, a Hezbollah commander in southern Lebanon, “the resistance is using this period to prepare, to train, to strengthen capabilities, and the enemy itself can attest to this.”
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Speaking in December 2011, Nasrallah himself underscored the group’s procurement efforts. “We will never let go of our arms,” he said. “Our numbers are increasing day after day, and we are getting better and our training is becoming better and we are becoming more confident in our future and more armed. And if someone is betting that our weapons are rusting, we tell them that every weapon that rusts is replaced.”
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In 2001, Mohamad Dbouk was indicted in US federal court under Operation Smokescreen. According to US investigators, Dbouk is an Iranian-trained Hezbollah operative and “an intelligence specialist and propagandist [who] was dispatched to Canada by Hezbollah for the express purpose of obtaining surveillance equipment.”
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According to information collected by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) during its investigation into Mohamad Dbouk’s activities in Canada, first in Montreal and then in Vancouver, Dbouk was acting under the direction of Hezbollah’s then chief of procurement, Haj Hassan Hilu Laqis, who was based in Lebanon. Mohamad Dbouk reportedly lived in the Detroit area for about six months, taking his activities to the US side of the Ambassador Bridge linking Michigan and Ontario.
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Dbouk solicited the assistance of his friend Said Harb to help facilitate the purchase of dual-use equipment and to test a scheme to use counterfeit credit cards to purchase these materials.
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According to CSIS intercepts, in 1999 Dbouk informed an unidentified male that he had known Harb for more than fifteen years and that the two had been jailed and beaten together (presumably during the Lebanese civil war).
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Harb was already at the center of a laundry list of criminal enterprises and frauds, but it was his relationship with Dbouk that brought him to the attention of CSIS agents who were already monitoring Dbouk’s activities.
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US Attorney Robert Conrad, whose office successfully prosecuted the Hezbollah case in Charlotte, testified before the US Congress that according to human source intelligence (HUMINT), “Dbouk is such a major player in the Hezbollah organization that on five separate occasions his application to be a martyr was rejected.” Given his overall intelligence, his military training, and his expertise in information operations, Dbouk was too valuable a commodity to expend on a martyrdom mission.
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Dbouk appears to have accepted Hezbollah’s refusal to send him on a martyrdom mission, and dove into his procurement responsibilities in an attempt to secure a place in heaven through devotion to his assigned task. According to the CSIS intercepts, in a conversation with someone named Said (last name unknown), Dbouk tried to discuss politics and Said said he wanted to be careful about what they discussed on the telephone. Ignoring the kind of operational security protocol for which Hezbollah is well known, Dbouk responded that “he did not care about anything and was committed to securing all the items for the brothers at any cost; he was attempting to avoid going to hell and secure a place in heaven by so doing.”
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