National security experts have detailed the links between groups like Hezbollah and ISIS with transnational criminal organizations.
The lack of cooperation between federal agencies to combat transnational drug trafficking, terrorism and organized crime is “unacceptable” this long after 9/11, and the U.S. does not need more “Beltway meetings” to determine the correct way to respond to the threat, Derek Maltz, executive director for government relations at surveillance software company Pen-Link, Ltd., told House members Tuesday.
“We all know what the answer is,” he said during a House Financial Services Terrorism and Illicit Finance Subcommittee hearing. “Forming a task force is great. We need complete sharing, though. Proactive investigations, high-level indictments, extraditions, with powerful U.S. Treasury actions, are really going to help us a lot to help us go after this problem.”
Maltz commended Attorney-General Jeff Sessions for his “bold leadership” in targeting the U.S.’s “serious gaps” in combatting transnational criminal activities, through actions such as forming the Hezbollah Financing and Narcoterrorism Task Force in January. But Maltz said the formation of additional task forces or centers to investigate transnational crime would be redundant and unhelpful.
Formation of the task force occurred after POLITICO found that a Justice Department-led interagency program to track activities of the organization known as “Project Cassandra” withered as the Obama administration worked to lead five other world powers in concluding the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.
Maltz also worked nearly 10 years as special agent in charge for the Drug Enforcement Administration’s Special Operations Division at DOJ, where he oversaw Project Cassandra.
“There was a lot more involved” than a simple lack of interagency coordination that stymied Project Cassandra, said Maltz, whose tenure ended in July 2014.
“Obviously, there were other things that were going on at the time,” he said. “There were other initiatives, other priorities for other agencies, and so I’m not privy to all of those other details.”
But Maltz followed up by stating that Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad, whom the POLITICO article described as a suspected top Hezbollah operative that agents believe reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, was cleared to return to Lebanon two years after being detained in Czech custody in 2014.
Fayad had been indicted in U.S. courts on charges of plotting to murder U.S. government employees, attempting to materially support a terrorist organization, and attempting to deal and use anti-aircraft missiles, but was never extradited to the U.S.
Also testifying during the hearing, Joseph Humire, executive director of the nonprofit global research organization, the Center for a Secure Free Society (SFS), called for the U.S. to target Hezbollah’s logistics network and to designate the group as a transnational criminal organization, in part, to delegitimize their reputation among the Lebanese people.
SFS researchers have found that Hezbollah-linked individuals based in the South American Tri-Border Area – a historic crime-terror hub at the intersection of Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil – have started 18 companies in recent years, irrespective of Treasury sanctions imposed on 11 individuals residing in Brazil and Paraguay since 2004 for providing financial support to the Hezbollah network.
During the hearing, George Mason University Schar School of Policy and Government professor Louise Shelley said terrorists thrive off funds from transnational criminal networks.
“While much transnational crime exists today apart from terrorism, there’s almost no terrorism that exists today without funding from transnational crime,” she said. “We need to think of these transnational terrorists as diversified businessmen.”
Shelley called on decision-makers to counter terrorism by scrutinizing groups’ financial streams, including public-private partnerships, using a “whole-of-society approach” involving entities outside government.
The U.S. has crippled ISIS mostly through the “deliberate use of financial targeting,” which hadn’t been used in previous anti-terror campaigns, testified Celina Realuyo, professor of the practice of national security affairs for the William J. Perry for Hemispheric Defense Studies at the National Defense University.
By targeting the “entire supply chain,” including oil refinery incomes, Realuyo’s analysts have noticed an 80 percent decrease in ISIS finances from January 2015 to last summer, she said.
“We do believe that this dramatically contributed to bringing ISIS to its knees, and its inability to pay its foreign fighters, which actually then led to tremendous gains on the military campaign,” Realuyo said.
During a Senate Finance Committee hearing earlier this month focusing on counterfeits, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., was critical of interagency efforts to counter trade-based money laundering.
He said people close to such efforts informed him that the coordination is “very bad, that it’s siloed, and that there’s not the cooperation between agencies required for it to be effective,” noting that “as best as we can tell,” the U.S. confiscates only about 6 percent of an estimated $110 billion per year moved from the U.S. to Mexico, by cartels.
During Tuesday’s House Financial Services subcommittee hearing, Shelley said counterfeit sales are the most lucrative form of transnational crime, and called on the U.S. government to intensify monitoring of those sales as well as illicit cigarette sales.
She noted in her written testimony for the hearing that use of counterfeits as a funding source was associated with the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993.
“We need a strategy that extends beyond law enforcement and military responses and addresses the diversity of illicit trade now funding terrorism,” Shelley stated in written testimony. “More oversight needs to be provided over Free Trade Zones that are key to the facilitation of illicit trade. Consumers must be made aware of the risks to security by purchasing counterfeit goods and other illicit products.”
Deeper unity needed on transnational threats, experts say
