Hezbollah (79 page)

At the April 2009 meeting in southern Florida, the part of the source’s boss was played by an undercover FBI agent. The three men dined at fancy restaurants and negotiated terms for the sale of stolen US currency and multiple counterfeit currencies. According to Harb, the eighteen- to twenty-hour days worked by Hezbollah’s representatives to counterfeit US dollars also included currency from “Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the European Union.” All told, the Hezbollah officials provided the source a little less than $10,000 in counterfeit US currency.
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At one point Harb showed the undercover agent a Swedish krona bill with stains from a dye-pack security system used by banks to mark stolen funds. According to Harb, the bill was part of a $2 million bank heist Hezbollah supporters pulled off in Sweden. He explained that Hezbollah cells conduct robberies all over the world and send the money to Iran, where it is held before ultimately being distributed to Hezbollah in Lebanon.
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Keen to impress his hosts, Harb “threw the name Hezbollah all over the place.” He himself was involved in the part of the group he described as “terrorism Hezbollah,” which he said was active “all over the world.” The medical clinic he ran in Dahiya was simply a cover for his Hezbollah activities, he noted, adding that the Dahiya is “all Hezbollah, terrorism Hezbollah.” His own father-in-law, Hassan Hodroj, was involved with the smuggling of weapons, Harb boasted.
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When they got down to business, Harb explained that Karaki is a major figure in Hezbollah’s forgery operations, a role that would also allow for the production of forged passports and visa stamps if desired. A couple of weeks after the meetings in Florida, Karaki and the source spoke by phone and Karaki instructed the source to send photographs for use in fraudulent passports to Karaki’s home address and to fax the corresponding biographical information for each passport to Dib Harb. Less than two months later, Harb and Karaki delivered fraudulent British and Canadian passports to the source using the pictures and biographical information he had provided.
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The meetings in southern Florida went so smoothly that the source was invited back to Beirut to meet senior Hezbollah officials, including Karaki and Harb’s father-in-law Hassan Hodroj. Even before the source traveled to Beirut, however, the conspiracy suddenly branched out to include weapons procurement. In mid-May 2009, Moussa Hamdan asked the source to provide pistols, to be concealed in stolen vehicles that would be shipped to Lebanon. There was good money to be made, Hamdan stressed, adding that he knew someone in Beirut who could move weapons through Beirut ports without being checked. He bragged that he could introduce the source to a buyer interested in bulk quantities of pistols and rifles.
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“We weren’t ready for this,” conceded one US official, speaking of the sudden request for weapons. On his arrival in Beirut in mid-June, Harb escorted the source to a meeting with an unnamed Hezbollah official, where they discussed firearms Hezbollah wanted to buy. When the source insisted on being assured by high-level Hezbollah officials that the weapons were bound for Hezbollah and would not be intercepted, Harb immediately phoned a senior Hezbollah official, who gave the necessary assurances. “The source expressed amazement that Harb could so easily contact a high-level Hezbollah figure,” according to an FBI affidavit, prompting Harb to display an entry in his phone for a named “high-level Hezbollah official.”
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Three days later, Harb and the source met in Beirut with Harb’s father-in-law Hassan Hodroj, who served on Hezbollah’s political council. In a sign of Hodroj’s place in the Hezbollah hierarchy, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah had attended Dib Harb’s wedding. Publicly described as a Hezbollah spokesman and the head of its Palestinian issues portfolio, Hodroj was also involved in Hezbollah’s procurement arm.
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Hodroj knew what he wanted: 1,200 Colt M4 assault rifles, which the source said he could procure for $1,800 apiece. Hodroj added that payment would be made in cash to make it harder for authorities to track the payments back to Hezbollah. Hodroj told the source that Hezbollah had no need for the Glock pistols the source had told Harb he could also procure, explaining that Hezbollah needed only “heavy machinery” for the “fight against the Jews and to protect Lebanon.” Like Dani Tarraf, Hodroj wanted the weapons shipped to the port of Latakia, Syria, which he described as “ours.” But the source should move forward with caution, Hodroj counseled, because if caught dealing with Hezbollah, someone in America could “go to jail for 100 years.”
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Before the meeting ended, Hodroj broached one more subject: Hezbollah’s desire to procure still more sensitive items from the United States, specifically, communication and “spy” systems. Hodroj confided that he was involved in not only weapons but also technology procurement for Hezbollah and asked the source to keep his eyes open for technologies that could help Hezbollah secure its own and spy on its adversaries’ communications. In the meantime, Hodroj directed the source to work through Dib Harb to complete the deal for the M4 machine guns.
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Within three days of his meeting with Hodroj, the source heard through Dib Harb that Hodroj had been impressed with the source. But the M4 deal was serious business, Harb warned, and the source must now deliver the promised weapons. The source swore to quickly get approval for the deal from his boss, the “Philadelphia crime boss,” who would in turn run the deal by his own boss to guarantee the deal went smoothly.
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Over the following months, Harb, Hodroj, and the source spoke several times making arrangements for the M4 deal. The order was a Hezbollah priority, as became clear when the source returned to the United States. Only a few weeks passed before Harb sent the source a text message saying that the senior Hezbollah official he had met with in Beirut, the paymaster for the M4 deal, had called from Iran, where he was making headway—presumably on securing Iranian payment for the weapons—and was pushing for quick delivery of the machine guns, which he referred to in code as tires. “I just received a call from Iran from [the senior Hezbollah official] regarding the tires,” Harb texted. “He is asking me where they are and telling me that we should not delay.” A month later, Harb texted the source again stating that the M4 deal had been reviewed by “our group,” adding, “They are very happy.”
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While investigators in Major Case 251 succeeded in luring Dani Tarraf back to the United States, bureaucratic infighting undermined their effort to do the same for Dib Harb.
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The case came to a head in November 2009, when authorities rolled out three sets of indictments and exposed a Hezbollah politician’s role in global arms deals and criminal enterprises. But the multiyear investigation, which was significant enough to warrant two briefings to the president, was not quite done. Moussa Hamdan had moved out of New Jersey and settled in Brooklyn, but he fled the country to evade arrest. Had he stayed in Lebanon with Harb, Hodroj, and several of the other indicted fugitives, he likely would still be free today. Instead, he turned up in South America’s tri-border area. At the FBI’s request, Interpol issued an international arrest warrant for Hamdan. When someone applied for a Paraguayan national identity card on his behalf, officials were alerted to the outstanding warrant for Hamdan’s arrest and picked him up in Ciudad del Este, Paraguay. Hamdan was extradited to the United States and officially charged in early 2011 with providing material support to Hezbollah.
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Moussa Ali Hamdan’s partner in his criminal conspiracy was Latif Kamel Hazime, a resident of Venezuela’s Margarita Island who, like Hamdan, once lived in Dearborn, Michigan. Hazime received stolen electronics for resale beyond the reach of
US regulators who might track the serial numbers stamped on them. Hamdan’s contacts in Venezuela also gave him access to counterfeit networks there, leading Hamdan and his Venezuelan contacts to produce a fraudulent passport for an FBI source.
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A Hezbollah support network has long existed in Venezuela. According to a July 2003 report by Mark Steinitz, then–director of the terrorism analysis office in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research, “by the mid-1990s, Hezbollah had cells in Venezuela. Attention has focused on the group’s presence among Lebanese Shia in the 12,000-strong Arab community on Margarita Island.”
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A free trade zone off the coast of Venezuela, Margarita Island is believed to be a location of choice for drug traffickers and Hezbollah and other Islamist extremists.
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Several members of the Charlotte Hezbollah cell, including Mohammad Hammoud, entered the United States through Venezuela (see
chapter 6
).
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Officials remain concerned about the potential use of Venezuela as a stepping-stone from the Middle East into the Western Hemisphere. US officials say that Venezuelan officials have issued thousands of fake
cedulas
(the equivalent of Social Security cards) to individuals from Middle Eastern nations who do not qualify for them. In obtaining a
cedula
, an immigrant can then obtain a Venezuelan passport and subsequently an American visa.
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Even if immigrants to Venezuela cannot find an official to bribe, they still have a good chance of gaining entry into the United States because Venezuelan passports can be forged with “child-like ease.”
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In 2003, a study in
U.S. News & World Report
found that “thousands of Venezuelan identity documents are being distributed to foreigners from Middle Eastern nations, including Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, and Lebanon,” and in 2006, the State Department divulged to Congress that border officials were seeing an increased number of third-country aliens carrying false Venezuelan documents.
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“The systems and processes for issuing” Venezuelan passports and ID cards “are corrupted on various levels,” according to State Department’s Frank Urbancic. In early 2011, Tarek el-Aissami, the Venezuelan minister of interior and justice and a prominent figure in Hugo Chavez’s government, was accused by the media of abusing his position by issuing passports to members of Hamas and Hezbollah.
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Allegations also exist that el-Aissami, who was born in Lebanon to parents of Syrian descent, oversees the recruitment of young Venezuelan Arabs to train in Hezbollah camps in southern Lebanon.
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With regard to Venezuela, lax security and tolerance of Hezbollah raise security concerns well beyond North America. In February 2003, British authorities detained Mohammed Alan, a passenger arriving at London’s Gatwick Airport from Caracas on a Venezuelan passport who had a grenade in his luggage. Venezuelan police subsequently told reporters that Alan’s identity may be false and that members of his supposed family may be tied to a Hezbollah money laundering operation run out of Margarita Island.
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More recently, in June 2008, the US Department of the Treasury designated two Hezbollah operatives in Venezuela. One, Ghazi Nasr al-Din, was a Venezuelan diplomat who had been posted to the Venezuelan embassies in both Damascus and Beirut. According to the Department of the Treasury, Nasr al-Din “is a Venezuela-based Hezbollah supporter who has utilized his position as a Venezuelan diplomat
and the president of a Caracas-based Shia Islamic Center to provide financial support to Hezbollah.” Information available to the US government demonstrated that Nasr al-Din “counseled Hezbollah donors on fundraising efforts and has provided donors with specific information on bank accounts where the donors’ deposits would go directly to Hezbollah.” Undercutting the notion that distinct wings exist within Hezbollah, he also met with senior Hezbollah officials in Lebanon “to discuss operational issues” and “arranged the travel of Hezbollah members to attend a training course in Iran.” Fawzi Kanan, the second Venezuelan individual targeted by the Treasury Department, is described as “a Venezuela-based Hezbollah supporter and a significant provider of financial support to Hezbollah [who also] facilitated travel for Hezbollah members.” Kanan trained in Iran and met with “senior Hezbollah officials in Lebanon to discuss operational issues, including possible kidnappings and terrorist attacks.”
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One example of the increasingly close Iran-Venezuela relationship is Iran Air flight 744, which travels from Caracas to Tehran with stops in Beirut and Damascus and is referred to by some investigators as “Aeroterror.”
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Most seats on this flight are reportedly not open to the public. “If you tried to book yourself a seat on this flight and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a week before, a month before, six months before—you’ll never find a place to sit there,” said former Israeli Shin Bet agent Offer Baruch. This is because the flight is reported to be reserved for Iranian agents, including Hezbollah, the IRGC, and other intelligence personnel. What concerns US intelligence officials most, though, is that when the plane lands in Caracas, its passengers do not go through Venezuelan customs or immigration, preventing any knowledge of who enters the country and what they bring with them.
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The southern border to the US homeland has been acknowledged as a weak point for decades. The threat that it poses gained unprecedented headlines following Iran’s plot to assassinate Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi ambassador to the United States in Washington, D.C. Manssor Arbabsiar, a dual US-Iranian citizen, allegedly told his cousin, a Qods Force official, that he did business on both sides of the US-Mexico border and knew a number of drug traffickers who could be of help. Once back in the United States, Arbabsiar contacted someone whom he called the Mexican, a figure whom he hired to kill the ambassador, who was in fact a DEA confidential informant.
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