Hezbollah (59 page)

Apparently keen to the refueling ruse, Hariri became nervous or angry (or both) over the delay and shot a French businessman, Zavier Beaulieu, through the mouth. Passengers in the back of the plane did not hear the shot but grew nervous when Hariri sent crew members to collect passengers’ passports. At the time, France and Iran were engaged in a heated diplomatic spat over France’s effort to arrest an Iranian diplomat. US intelligence would assess that “Hizballah’s desire to take revenge on France—which has a number of pro-Iranian terrorists under arrest—helps to explain why Hariri singled out French passengers first.”
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The turning point came when passengers overheard Hariri saying, “It is in Beirut that my problem will be solved.” Then, when an announcement over the intercom indicated that the hijacker planned to reroute the flight to Beirut, several passengers scrambled for the doors to try to escape. “Beginning then,” one passenger recalled, “we felt really threatened.” Luckily, a Congolese crew member was able to overwhelm Hariri, and passengers flung a side door open and slid down emergency chutes to the tarmac. The brave crew member was shot in the stomach and seriously wounded, but
he survived. As the passengers escaped and more crew members wrestled the hijacker to the ground, Swiss security forces stormed and secured the plane.
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Hariri, it turns out, not only went through Hezbollah military training but had been detained for ten months by Israeli authorities in the early 1980s on suspicions of terrorism. Saying he was prepared to die for his religion, Hariri would tell the court that sentenced him to life in prison, “You say I am a fundamentalist. I accept.”
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Hariri admitted carrying out the hijacking on Hezbollah’s orders, saying it was an honor to be a “fighter for Allah.”
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Seventeen years later, Swiss authorities released Hariri from jail and deported him to Lebanon, well short of his full life sentence. Even his seventeen-year sentence proved eventful, including two attempted jail-breaks, the first in 1992 and the second a decade later. Although his second escape was successful, after two months, authorities tracked him down in Morocco. In August 2003, after nine months of legal machinations, Hariri was extradited back to Switzerland. His release and deportation to Lebanon occurred after he became eligible for parole fourteen months later.
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In line with the CIA’s initial suspicion, however, Swiss authorities continued to investigate someone they believed may have helped Hariri during his escape. It was not clear if that someone was believed to be connected to Hezbollah or not.
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An October 1987 intelligence report noted that “the Air Afrique hijacking dovetails with information that suggests Hizballah has increased planning for operations outside the Middle East.” One reason Hezbollah was looking abroad was that Western targets were growing scarce in Lebanon following Hezbollah’s kidnapping campaign, and those few remaining targets had been significantly hardened against potential attackers. Meanwhile, improved security measures in Europe meant more restricted access to targets of interest there.
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Considering Hezbollah’s commitment to terrorism and the permissive operating environment that pervades the African continent, US intelligence warned, “We believe that Hizballah will turn increasingly to Africa as a site for terrorist operations.” One reason for this concern was the level of support Hezbollah enjoyed in Africa. “Hizballah already has political supporters in place in several West African countries, some of whom presumably could recruit terrorist operatives from local Lebanese communities.” The CIA warning continued, “Local Hizballah supporters—or, as in Hariri’s case, relatives of Hizballah members—could provide logistic support to operatives sent from Lebanon for specific operations.”
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In a late July 1988 piece weighing the likelihood of an Iranian-sponsored attack in retaliation for the accidental US Navy downing earlier that month of Iran Air flight 655, the CIA speculated that Hezbollah terrorists could hijack or bomb a US airliner. “They would probably try to mount this kind of operation from an Asian or African airport where security is lax, American targets are more accessible, and local support networks are in place,” the CIA assessed.
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Later reports confirmed
such suspicions were on the mark. In December 1989, CIA analysts wrote that following the Hezbollah hijacking of a Kuwaiti airliner out of Bangkok in April 1988, “the group was linked to operational activity in Ivory Coast and elsewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa” in 1988 and 1989.
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Investigations into Hezbollah’s activities in Europe and Africa in 1989 led to further revelations about Hezbollah’s logistical support network in Africa. An investigation initiated that August led to the arrest of a former French vice consul to Conakry, Guinea, for selling fifty blank French passports to Shi’a extremists. According to a US intelligence report, the investigation began when British authorities found “an authentic, French passport, issued in Conakry, among the belongings of a Hizballah operative who was killed when the bomb he was assembling in his London hotel room exploded.” In the ensuing investigation, British authorities determined that the consular officer sold the authentic but blank passports to extremists with ties to Hezbollah. “The incident,” the report concluded, “is another sign that Hizballah has an infrastructure in Africa that can be tapped to support terrorist operations elsewhere in the world.”
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US intelligence remained concerned about Hezbollah’s growing international support structure and operational capabilities in places like Africa. Writing in July 1992, the CIA assessed that Hezbollah’s expanded international support network improved its ability to carry out attacks in unlikely places: “Hezbollah’s efforts to expand its international support infrastructure have enhanced the group’s ability to target U.S. and Israeli interests, particularly in non-traditional venues such as Eastern Europe, Latin America, and Africa.”
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Nearly two decades later, this assessment would still ring true. On August 5, 2008, a Nigerian official learned from Moshe Ram, Israeli ambassador to Nigeria, that Hezbollah was planning an attack against Israeli targets in West Africa. This was no empty threat. According to Ram, “[we] got a security threat yesterday from Hezbollah that our embassies in West Africa will be attacked.”
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Hezbollah’s institutionalized presence in Africa, a benefit of operating within large, long-standing Shi’a communities, presents the group with especially lucrative fund-raising opportunities. “Hezbollah uses the region extensively to raise funds, recruit new members and launder money,” Former
Washington Post
West Africa bureau chief, Doug Farah, noted. “Because it is part of a large community, its presence there is much greater than that of al Qaeda, and more institutional. Because of that, it is both easier to identify and more difficult to uproot.”
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To be sure, not all Shi’a and certainly not all Lebanese living in Africa support Hezbollah. “It is important to note,” a 2011 Congressional Research Service report stressed, “that the Lebanese community in West Africa is not monolithically Muslim nor completely supportive of Hezbollah, but mirrors the same religious and political divisions present in Lebanon.” Yet according to the report, the Lebanese diaspora communities in West and
central Africa continued to provide Hezbollah “a significant amount of financing.”
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The vast majority of these funds are raised through expatriate donations, Mafia-style shakedowns, front companies, and even blood diamonds and drugs.

Hezbollah’s well-oiled campaign to solicit charitable donations from expatriate communities in Africa is perhaps best illustrated by the tragic crashing of a Union des Transport Africaines (UTA) charter flight in December 2003. Technical problems delayed the flight’s departure, which had originated in the Guinean capital Conakry, and stopped in Freetown, Sierra Leone, before making a stop in Cotonou, Benin, before the final leg to Beirut. That Christmas day, the Lebanese-owned UTA plane, flight 141, registered in Guinea, clipped a building just after takeoff at 2:55
PM
. The plane then exploded and crashed into the shallow surf just off the Atlantic coast, killing 141 of the 161 passengers on board.
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Most of the casualties were Lebanese businessmen working in West African nations; fifteen were Bangladeshi peacekeepers returning to Lebanon from missions in Sierra Leone and Liberia.
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Ten of those killed came from Kharayeb, a small village in southern Lebanon. Among the village’s 5,000 residents, 300 had immigrated to Benin, “where they work, mainly in the car trade between Germany and Africa,” a village official explained. “Theirs was an economic success story. You can see the proof in the beautiful villas they had built here [in Kharayeb] on the flanks of the hillsides.”
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One passenger stood out, however: Sheikh Ali Damush, described as a representative of Hezbollah.
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According to press reports, a “foreign relations official of the African branch of the Lebanese Hezbollah party and two of his aides” were among those killed. These press reports also claimed the Hezbollah officials were carrying $2 million in contributions, raised from wealthy Lebanese nationals living in Africa, to the organization’s headquarters in Beirut. Arab reports indicated further that the $2 million “represented the regular contributions the party receives from wealthy Lebanese nationals in Guinea, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Benin, and other African states.”
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The final report emerging from the French investigation into the crash revealed suspicious handling of the flight from the outset. Not only was there no overall flight manifest recording the boarding and loading of passengers and baggage, but seven different manifests were found, “all badly completed.” Moreover, the flight was weighed down with around three tons of unreported baggage. This extra weight, investigators concluded, had been the direct cause of the accident, as compounded by structural flaws and several other possible contributing factors. In the final analysis, the plane crashed because of “the difficulty that the flight crew encountered in performing the rotation with an overloaded airplane.”
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By some accounts, the unregistered weight may have included as much as $6 to $10 million in cash. In a veiled reference to Hezbollah, Druze leader Walid Jumblatt suggested a scandal lay behind the UTA service that could implicate “big names.”
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The day after the crash, Lebanon’s foreign minister flew to Benin, together with a Lebanese diving team, to collect the Lebanese bodies and escort them, along with the few survivors, back to Lebanon. Also on the flight, Hezbollah indicated in a public statement, was a Hezbollah envoy. While Hezbollah quickly denied any ties
to the crash, the group’s immediate dispatching of an envoy to Benin “to console the sons of the Lebanese community” indicated the value it placed on these expatriate communities.
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The transfer of millions of dollars at a time via human courier is remarkable in its audacity, but not uncommon. In 1998, Lebanese expatriates in Senegal attempted to smuggle approximately $1.7 million to Lebanon.
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At the time, the Lebanese in Senegal claimed the smuggling operation was merely an attempt to evade Senegalese law, not to finance Hezbollah. Israeli sources, however, rank Senegal as the “secondary center for Hezbollah’s fundraising activity in Africa” after the Ivory Coast.
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In December 2010, three men were arrested when they landed at Charles de Gaulle International Airport in Paris. The individuals were attempting to fly from Benin to Beirut via Paris with $6.5 million and €48,500 in undeclared funds, and a business card for Ellissa Megastore, a car lot in Cotonou, Benin, was found on one of the men. Further, between 2007 and 2008, Ghanian customs officials reported that $1.2 billion in declared US currency had been imported across Ghana’s border with Togo, $845 million of which was declared by Lebanese nationals.
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Whatever the precise numbers, which in any event surely fluctuate, one conclusion is clear: “Many in the Lebanese diaspora community in West Africa, numbering several hundred thousand, pay a portion of their earnings to support Hezbollah in Lebanon, with the knowledge and acquiescence of the host government.”
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One person who reportedly facilitated such donations was Sheikh Abd al-Menhem Qubaysi, a Lebanese national living in the Ivory Coast. In May 2009, the Treasury Department designated Qubaysi as a terrorist financier who played a public and prominent role in Hezbollah activities in the Ivory Coast. According to intelligence released by Treasury at the time of the designation, Qubaysi served as Hassan Nasrallah’s personal representative in West Africa. “Qubaysi communicates with Hizballah leaders and has hosted senior Hizballah officials traveling to Cote d’Ivoire and other parts of Africa to raise money for Hizballah,” the Treasury added. Beyond fundraising, the Treasury found that Qubaysi helped establish an official Hezbollah foundation in the Ivory Coast “which has been used to recruit new members for Hizballah’s military ranks in Lebanon.”
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About two months after the Treasury designation, Ivorian authorities detained Qubaysi at the airport on his return to the Ivory Coast on a commercial flight from Lebanon. Since 2006, an Ivorian counterespionage unit reportedly had Qubaysi under surveillance for his role in recruiting youths to fight in Lebanon.
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Though he had lived in the country for several years, Ivorian authorities denied him entry for “security reasons” and sent him back to Lebanon on the same flight on which he arrived.
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Ivorian defense and security forces planned to search the offices of the al-Ghadur Cultural Association, an official Hezbollah foundation used to “recruit new members for Hezbollah’s military ranks” that Qubaysi helped establish. Lastminute intervention by President Laurent Ghagbo reportedly prevented the search.
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