The explosion killed nine
people and wounded around 100. Rafik Hariri was quickly removed
from the wreckage of the car but was pronounced dead
on arrival at the hospital. The car bomb, which contained at
least 350 kilograms of explosives, left a crater ten
meters in diameter. It was impossible for the former
prime minister to survive the attack. Hariri was a threat to Syrian
domination in Lebanon. Syria has been a
close ally to Hezbollah. Rafik Hariri was pushing
too hard on things that were going to undermine
their position in Lebanon. And that was
not to be allowed. That was the day
Hezbollah came to power. They took control of
the land, the government, the presidency of the republic,
and they neutralized the army. That is when they began to
physically eliminate anyone in Lebanon who dared to say “no” to
Hezbollah the “Party of God.” We determined through our
investigation that Hezbollah was operating like
a global drug cartel. So, we wanted to apply the
same logic that was successful going after the Italian
organized crime families, going after the
cartels in Colombia. I mean, the cartels are good, but
Hezbollah’s another whole level. The assassination of former
Prime Minister Rafik Hariri sent a shockwave through Lebanon
and the international community. All eyes turned to Syria,
which stood accused of being the mastermind
behind the attack. After large-scale demonstrations,
Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s troops, which had occupied parts of
Lebanon for 29 years, had to withdraw. With the Syrian withdrawal, Hezbollah
lost a long-time ally and protector. And Hezbollah found itself
accused of being involved in Rafik Hariri’s
assassination. Now weakened, Hezbollah
continued on its path of violence. First in Lebanon itself, where
Hezbollah waged a campaign against its
political opponents. And then, outside
its borders, where Hezbollah attacked
its sworn enemy, Israel. We were convinced that the
Israelis would only release prisoners as part of a
prisoner exchange. So we needed to have Israeli
prisoners in order to secure the release of Lebanese
prisoners from Israeli prisons. Hezbollah has captured
two soldiers in Lebanon. We have no details about Hezbollah’s
kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers. Israel is taking the
incident very seriously. We knew there
was a risk of war. But we estimated that risk
to be around five or 10%. We did not expect a
war of that magnitude. Here along the
Israeli-Lebanese border, tanks and helicopters have
been shelling the region all day. The Israeli army has
entered southern Lebanon. The Lebanese government,
which Hezbollah is part of, is trying to undermine
regional stability. Lebanon is
responsible for this. If the Israelis believe they
will recover their soldiers through military operations,
they are delusional. We had a terrible suspicion: Maybe one of the reasons for this war was that we confronted
Hassan Nasrallah and Hezbollah with facts that showed Hezbollah was
behind the assassination of Hariri. Hezbollah kidnapped
two Israeli soldiers and caused the situation to explode. We stayed the first days, and Hezbollah
was coming, you have to leave, you have to leave. So, I believe profoundly
that Hezbollah expected what
would happen later. They expected these
extremely heavy bombardments. Since 20 years I am living here,
in the southern suburbs of Beirut, which are called
“the Dahieh.” So, we are really in a kind of
ghetto here, controlled by Hezbollah. During the war, there was a
group of Hezbollah fighters, sitting in our garden, discussing, in
other words, having a kind of meeting. And I was panicking
because I thought: If the drones will capture
Hezbollah sitting in our garden, they will bombard
the whole house. And as there was this kind of
tension, I made a very bad joke. I just I don’t know what
took me, but I just said: Would you like to
have a picture of you? And somebody answers
me: If you take one, the Americans would
pay you one million dollars. So, I mean I said, Sorry,
sorry, sorry, it was a bad joke. I will go up
the apartment. I need some clothes,
and I will leave. So, I left. And two years later, the Hezbollah commander
Imad Moghnieh is assassinated. And all of
a sudden, there is this huge
three-meter-long posters everywhere in the streets of
Imad Moghnieh. And I’m telling myself,
I have seen him. And at one point it
just made this click. And I realized the
guy who told me, The Americans would have paid you
a million dollars was Imad Moghnieh. After 33 days of
Israeli bombings, Hezbollah obtained a ceasefire
without releasing the two hostages. In Beirut, Hezbollah’s
leader Hassan Nasrallah celebrated the victory of the
militia over its longtime enemy. Praise be to God
for this victory! Hassan Nasrallah had
bolstered his status as a hero in much of
the Arab world. In his view, Hezbollah’s
militia had humiliated Israel. But they needed money to
finance Lebanon’s reconstruction. This was the moment the DEA — the
US Drug Enforcement Administration had been
waiting for. Its agents in Washington
were monitoring all the movements of
funds arriving in Beirut. They were searching
for evidence of drug money in payments
arriving from around the world. In 2006, the Israeli air force destroyed
every major bridge in Lebanon. They destroyed many
of the road systems. Airports were
impacted. The place
was chaos. Lebanon was in deep
trouble, financially. Normally when somebody
bombs a country, their credit rating
goes down, you know. Money doesn’t flood into the
country, OK? I’m a finance guy. It’s not how things
normally work. But in Lebanon,
miracles happen. They need the money and
lo and behold, what happens? This amazing amount of
money was rushing into Lebanon. I remember well, the war ended at
7 o’clock, 8 o’clock in the morning and Hezbollah was
present everywhere. People were able to go somewhere to
complain that they lost their house. A member of their
family was killed. Thousands of families
had lost everything. Hezbollah was
offering compensation. People were receiving
around 10,000 dollars. The money was of
course coming from Iran. We receive
aid from Iran. That's common
knowledge. But Hezbollah also derives income from
the “khums” tax that the faithful pay. Under Shia doctrine, the faithful
must pay 20% of their profits to the “ulamas,” the
clerics, every year. Those clerics use the money
from the faithful to support Muslims, and the poor, with
what they need to live. Hezbollah makes plenty of
money through business activity, it makes money
through donations. But at the end of the day, they’re
reliant on Iran for their big bucks. And how much money, more
or less, does it represent? Hundreds of millions
of dollars a year. Hundreds of millions of
dollars a year. In cash. We don't provide any
information about our budgets, our weapons,
or our personnel. Those are
party secrets. In 2007, the Lebanese banking
system began to explode in growth. We realized and what I realized,
as I started to look into it, a huge amount of that
money was drug money. But the key thing is, who
organized this scheme? Well, ultimately, Imad
Moghnieh himself. Hezbollah leaders have
made public statements that the drug
industry is forbidden. Sometimes
the bad guys lie. And they look
the other way. The US Treasury Department is the
finance ministry of the United States. And we knew
we had power. We knew
we had tools. We knew we had
authorities to reach into Beirut, to reach into the Lebanese
financial system and put our finger on their skull a
little bit and say: OK, now we’re going to
start impacting your ability to feel comfortable where you
thought you were the safest. The US government
went on the offensive. DEA agents were
tasked with infiltrating the illicit financing networks
established by Hezbollah’s military strategist,
Imad Moghnieh. Wire taps helped
the DEA identify international money laundering
circuits and the organization of Hezbollah's covert network, which worked with South
American drug cartels. So, the team
identified the network. We identified what we
called the “super-facilitators.” Like the biggest members
of the organization. Like in an organized crime
family, these were the bosses, right? Or in a cartel, we call
them “cell heads,” right? With Hezbollah, it was
the “super-facilitators.” Pretty quickly we identified
a Latin American drug lord, tied to Medellin, but
operating in Lebanon, and looked like Hezbollah
strongholds in Lebanon. A Lebanese male
called Ayman Joumaa. Ayman Joumaa was far, far
above a guy like Chekri Harb, because he’s a
very powerful man. He is the bridge between the Colombian
cartel’s money and Hezbollah’s. He was the only
guy who was a Sunni, who was living in the hardest
core Shia area of southern Beirut, in a beautiful apartment,
I believe on the beach. He was guarded by Hezbollah
guards and things, very unusual. So, our entire focus
was on Ayman Joumaa and how we can possibly infiltrate
his network right in Lebanon. Ayman Joumaa
wanted to meet with us. Sometimes our top
international targets, they get wind of the indictment. Or we let them know,
sort of in a quiet way: Hey, you know,
you’re indicted. And what happens is, through a lawyer
they have, or maybe even directly it could start with a
direct conversation, is that the bad guy wanted to see if
he could work out some sort of deal. It was under the guise
that Ayman Joumaa was going to cooperate with the
Drug Enforcement Administration, which I was never going
to let that happen if I could. In my mind this is the guy that we
need to put in jail, not to cooperate. So, we set
up a meeting, it was actually at the
Trump Tower in Panama City. The agents and the
prosecutor and the lawyer were all wearing really nice clothes, and I decided to
just go in in my shorts and a t-shirt into
the Trump Tower. I was the only guy
wearing shorts and a t-shirt, but I think I was
doing it on purpose, because I didn’t want
to give Joumaa any idea that I thought like I’m doing
anything special for the guy. From my 20 years of experience
working with criminals and mafiosos, that he appeared to me to
be a hardcore mafia member. So anytime we caught
each other’s glance, he had this look of like, If I get
the chance, I’m going to kill you. He’s a mob
boss, no doubt. I stayed real quiet through most of
the meeting, and then finally I say: This is just You haven’t
given us sh*t. There is absolutely nothing
that you have given us, that we didn’t
already know. So, we went our
separate ways. It does appear that both inside
and outside the Trump Tower, they were surreptitiously
taking pictures of us. And it was basically
certain that Hezbollah had launched an intelligence
investigation on Asher and myself, basically the
Cassandra taskforce. They tried to contract other
criminal groups, including cartels. So, they would pay if
these people would kill us. Are you scared? No, definitely
not scared. No, I took it as You took it as
a compliment. And you also felt like: Wow,
we must really be doing our job, because they’re
so pissed off at us. They’re so angry. So yeah, just
in that way. You’re going to have to ask Dave
Asher, if he was scared, I don’t know. I wasn’t scared
but who knows. When I started Project Cassandra
with my partner Jack Kelly and our fearless leader Derek
Maltz, they knew I had another job. But I don’t think they quite
realized where I worked. I worked at 375 Park Avenue
in New York, on the 33rd floor, for a two billion dollars hedge
fund where I was a partner. This is my
side project. You know, half the day I’m
managing billions of dollars in loans and equity
investments. And the rest
of the day, I’m hanging out with
guys like Jack Kelly and others inside the
CINTOC which was, like You know, I’d fly from New
York on a plane, right into Dulles, and I’d be dressed like
this, you know, business suit. These guys were wearing
blue jeans and t-shirts and sh*t, acting like a bunch of
baboons. And I’m like: Hey, I just met with,
you know, George Soros! The US Department of Justice
decided to charge Ayman Joumaa with drug trafficking
and money laundering, but he had already
gone underground. Project Cassandra
was stepped up. About 100 agents were now working
to find Ayman Joumaa's accomplices. The investigation
focused on Venezuela, a South American
country hostile to the US. Its president at the
time, Hugo Chávez, was favorably inclined to the
enemies of the United States first and foremost the
Islamic Republic of Iran and its protégé, Hezbollah. I come from a family that
believes in government service and serving society and
it was a path to maybe try to do a little of
good in the world. We were out of DEA’s
Special Operations Division, and we were called the
Bilateral Investigative Unit. So originally, we were
focused on kingpins, kind of the
untouchables in the world. But we quickly started
to really see a big nexus between a lot of these
groups involved in terrorism and how they’re being financed
through the narcotics trade. Derek Maltz was our special agent
in charge for most of my tour there. Derek’s the best. We started realizing how Hezbollah
was moving operations into Venezuela, in an opportunity to
generate, you know, millions and millions of dollars
to help them fund their operations. It was very apparent, after
the war in 2006 with Israel. Ayman Joumaa and
the network of Hezbollah operatives were very closely
aligned with the corrupt military and corrupt government
officials at the highest levels of Venezuelan
government. What happened was that the
majority of Colombian cocaine entering the United States and
Europe comes out of Venezuela. It’s not Venezuelan cocaine,
but Venezuela is the gateway. And through our
penetrations in Venezuela, we also started to learn
a lot about Hezbollah. We did learn, through
our investigations that a Venezuelan official went
over to a meeting in Damascus, Syria, and was offered
the assistance of Hezbollah. There has been reporting that
it was Nasrallah at the meeting. I think it was much more
likely that it was Imad Moghnieh, the head of military
operations for Hezbollah. Clearly, both were very contrary
to the national security policies of the United
States. They believed they
shared a common enemy. And Hezbollah was certainly
offering their expertise in resistance and creating
militia systems. Some of the other, I think, interesting
connections that came out were, for example, there is an airline
out of Venezuela called Conviasa. Some have called
it Aero Terror. And we started to learn there
was a weekly flight to Tehran. Very often, it stopped
over in Damascus. Planes loaded with weapons, you
know, RPGs, surface-to-air missiles, AK rifles into Venezuela
from these flights. And also, they were picking
up large sums of cash, you know, cocaine, bringing
that stuff back into the Middle East. You get seven to ten tons coming
out of Venezuela a week, OK. Seven to ten tons
is a lot of coke! This partnership, this
narco-terrorist partnership, was emerging between the government
of Venezuela under Hugo Chavez and the Iranians
and Hezbollah. We welcome you, distinguished
leader of a heroic people, the Iranian people, and
the leader of a revolution, the sister of the Venezuelan
revolution, the Islamic revolution. Today, Venezuela
is celebrating. Welcome, my
brother! Salam alaikum! Drugs became part
of the resistance. Narco-resistance. Trafficking the dope erodes
the infidels and hurts their youth. Spoils their power. We started to see some really
higher-level Venezuelan officials, persons like Tareck El Aissami
who’s the former minister of interior and I believe the
former vice president. He’s of Lebanese Syrian descent,
ties back to that part of the world. Tarek is one of those
really powerful officials who has so much influence in a country
that he allows the system to operate. He allows the drug
traffickers to be protected. He allows flights to leave
without people doing their job and inspecting it. He allows travel documents to be
issued for persons in other countries that otherwise might not be eligible
for receiving those travel documents. He allows massive amounts
of monies to be laundered through formal
financial institutions. Yesterday the Department of Treasury’s
Office of Foreign Asset Control, known as OFAC, designated
Venezuelan national Tareck El Aissami, as a specially designated
narcotics trafficker for playing a significant role in
international narcotics trafficking. Hezbollah wanted to get closer
and closer to being involved in the distribution
and laundering. They became a sort of end-end
element in the drug trafficking. Not something you see normally
a terrorist organization do. When it came
to drug business, these guys were eager to
make a buck and very aggressive. And not necessarily
that careful. They have been seeking for
more than 20 years to do him harm, until God finally
chose him as a martyr, and he was killed by the
assassins of the prophets who foster
division on Earth. US and Israeli teams put together
a very, very small explosive. Ultimately, one night, coming
out of Syrian military intelligence, Imad Moghnieh got into his vehicle
and the explosive was detonated, killing him
instantly. May God
preserve his soul. The man whose existence
was denied during life. But in death,
embraced. He and only he
held this mystique. The removal of Imad
Moghnieh, I think, was a very significant
takedown for the organization. With the death
of Imad Moghnieh, Hezbollah didn't just
lose its top military leader; it also lost the man who
controlled the organization's illicit financial flows. That weakened Hezbollah’s
power inside Lebanon. But the “Party of God” has a history
of, when cornered, going on attack. Hassan Nasrallah decided to take
the offensive and launch a coup. That day, the streets of
Beirut were completely empty. The Lebanese Army appeared
to have vanished, as if by magic. The chief of defense
said to me, Get out of here. Take an
armored car. Don't stop at
any roadblocks. Drive through
the roadblocks. If you’re shot at, have
your people shoot back. I was a government
minister! On that day, the Hezbollah militia,
dressed in black, invaded the capital. It was like when Mussolini
marched on Rome. It was as though Hezbollah
had taken off its mask. Hezbollah wasn’t there to
defend Lebanon against Israel it wanted full
control of Lebanon. It was working its way
forward, taking control bit by bit. This gradual erosion of state
power would eventually lead us to the situation
that still exists today, with Hassan Nasrallah holding
absolute power over Lebanon. What happened on May
7th put an end to a huge plot that was being organized
against our Resistance. I can tell you this: Their
aim was to provoke a war between the Lebanese
Army and our Resistance. And they failed! There was one person
making the decisions. That was
Hassan Nasrallah. But behind him, the real
decision-maker was Tehran. In my opinion, this was an
attempted coup to achieve their goal of making Lebanon
a province of Iran. They have been building up
over the years a parallel system. So, you can go here to a
supermarket controlled by Hezbollah, where you find
Iranian products. There are hospitals under
the control of Hezbollah. There are banks under
the control of Hezbollah. I mean Iran has a
long-term strategy. This strategy draws
upon a historical fantasy, of reestablishing the
former Persian empire, all the way to the
Mediterranean Sea. Thanks to Iran's
unwavering support, Hezbollah had considerable
control over political, economic, and judicial
life in Lebanon. But during its investigation, the
DEA had an important advantage the deep pockets
of the United States. When tracing
Hezbollah's drug money, the DEA found itself in the
Shia communities of West Africa, which is also home to a
large Lebanese diaspora. So, during Project Cassandra,
we actually identified probably one of the biggest trade-based
money-laundering schemes that I’m aware of to support terrorist
organizations like Hezbollah. West Africa was a hub for global
cocaine trafficking around the world. And so, we started to put a lot
of resources into West Africa. We had aerial photos
in 2006 and the land was completely vacant
along the coastline. There’s just these
big stretches of beach. And then in 2007 you start to
see these used car lots emerging. In 2008, they’re
full of cars! Like 30,000 to 40,000 cars a week
are going through these car lots. We didn’t really
understand it. I mean, nothing wrong
with importing cars and doing international
car business. It’s a legal
business. Who owned
those car lots? Well, quite a few of them
were owned by Lebanese who were supporters
of Hezbollah. Ali Kharroubi
was living in Benin. He was one of the main
guys that established working with Ayman Joumaa
and all of these guys that were establishing
Hezbollah’s operations in Africa. They would take the drug
money, buy used cars, send those used
cars to West Africa. Sell the used cars, then send the money, the
clean money, back to Lebanon. And then it would go make
its way back to South America, to buy more cocaine and
the same would continue. And the beauty of it is, there
were legitimate business owners that were
making money. People in West Africa were
getting cars, so they were happy. And Hezbollah under the radar
was getting their cut of the profits to develop the cashflow that they
needed to carry out their global agenda. What money laundering
are they talking about? We have neither bank
accounts nor trading companies. There are individuals who run
businesses and who are Shiite, and some of them may be
engaged in illicit activities. But what does that
have to do with us? We estimated about 200 million
dollars a month was being generated from this scheme. That’s over Do the math. 200 million
times 12. That’s 2.4 billion
dollars, annually. Figuring that out was enough
of a challenge, let me tell you. It was complicated. The money moves back
to buy more narcotics, and this thing
keeps repeating. Except as it repeats, it gets
bigger, and bigger, and bigger. That’s when we started to see
our opportunity to try to choke it. Hezbollah had
a plan in place. And that was: Let’s
take over a bank. And the easiest way to
do that was in Lebanon. By 2009, 2010, we started to look at
the Lebanese Canadian Bank seriously. We wanted to figure out what
this bank was doing and then, I wanted to penetrate the
bank and get inside of it. And we were Colombian
drug traffickers. Not me, my guys. And my launderers. And what was the relationship between
Lebanese Canadian Bank and Hezbollah? We later learned,
that in effect, Hezbollah had about 28% ownership
of the Lebanese Canadian Bank. For us, it was the smoking gun
because it backed up all the analysis and the other evidence
we had been gathering. We're
old-fashioned. We carry our
money in suitcases. And it's only because we have cars
that we don't carry it on donkeys. Otherwise, we’d carry it
on horses and donkeys. You know, they take hundreds
of millions of dollars in cash. They literally bring
it on in on pallets, dump it at the bank and suddenly, it’s
inside the Lebanese banking system. How much? Billions! Billions
of dollars a year. Hezbollah accounts,
through credits and debits, move 5 billion
dollars in 18 months, just through Lebanese
Canadian Bank accounts. That shows you the
significant amount of money. I wanted to
target that bank. And then I wanted
to bankrupt that bank. And that’s exactly
what we did. Section 311 is often described as the
atomic bomb of Treasury authorities. So, the practical result means
that you lose, as a matter of law, your access to the
US financial system, in this case Lebanese Canadian Bank. It becomes much, much more difficult
to engage in any dollar transactions. Informally, you’ll
probably lose almost all of your financial relationships anywhere
in the world. I like to think of it
as a big bowl of yarn. And as you pull the string of yarn,
more and more and more cases came out. Authorities are still
today pulling at the strings of the Lebanese Canadian Bank
and finding cases from North America to Africa and Europe and
across the Middle East. It was a tremendously
insightful window into a very, very broad range of
Hezbollah activities. The dismantling of the
Lebanese Canadian Bank was an important victory for
the DEA in its global campaign against the financing
of Hezbollah. The pressure was ramping up
on the Shiite Islamist organization. After several
years of obstruction, the inquiry into Rafik Hariri's
assassination was revived. The United Nations established
the “Special Tribunal for Lebanon.” For the first time, the legal
impunity under which Hezbollah had long seemed to operate was
finally being called into question. The creation of the Special Tribunal
for Lebanon is the result of a tragedy. The killing of the former prime
minister and of 22 other persons. The STL is the first
international anti-terrorist tribunal. The creation of the tribunal
was a political decision. Its operation, however, is,
and must remain, above politics. The Special Tribunal for
Lebanon is now in session Please be seated. In 2010, I joined the Special Tribunal
for Lebanon, known as the STL, which aimed to investigate
the assassination of Rafik Hariri and a group of
related crimes. It was a sensitive investigation,
because we were working abroad, in a difficult and
tense environment. We traveled in
armored cars. There were lots
of checkpoints. We lived in a
guarded residence. Every precaution was taken because
the investigators were targets. There had already been
Lebanese investigations, which provided the STL with
a great deal of information. Especially the investigation led
by a young Lebanese police officer, Wissam Eid, which
cost him his life. Wissam Eid regularly met
with international investigators to share what
he’d uncovered. Once when he was returning
from one of these meetings, his car was blown
up — they’d killed him. Hezbollah is responsible,
without a doubt. They threatened my son twice,
and told him: “Stop harassing us!” There’s no such thing
as a perfect crime. There's always a mistake that can be
the starting point of an investigation. Nearly six years on
and the assassination of former Lebanese
Prime Minister Rafik Hariri remains officially unsolved. But it is not for
lack of evidence, evidence which points directly
and indirectly to Hezbollah. Telephone data led us to a group
that probably had ties to Hezbollah. It was a group with eight
telephone numbers no more. And they only ever
communicated with each other. We discovered that those eight numbers were constantly
following Rafik Hariri. They were at the crime scene
the day of the assassination. We consider all this evidence
to be purely circumstantial. It's based on telephone
data that isn't reliable. And we also believe that the communication
networks were manipulated. Hezbollah has nothing to do with
the explosion or the assassination. I’ve seen the evidence,
and it’s very good. It’s Hezbollah
who killed Hariri. You cannot fake
this evidence. And if any Lebanese say,
Oh they made this sh*t up, the CIA did, they’re stupid. They’re liars. They’re
stupid or liars. The indictment charges
each of the four accused, that’s Mr. Salim Jamil Ayyash, Mr. Mustafa Amine Badreddine,
Mr. Hussein Hassan Oneissi and Mr. Assad Hassan Sabra, with
four crimes contrary to Lebanese law. We’ve been decided to
proceed to trial in absentia. Anyone who believes
they can just issue a warrant and think that we would allow them
to arrest even one of our fighters is utterly
mistaken! We would chop off the hand of anyone
who dares touch one of our fighters! It was a warning to the
Lebanese state and journalists. Don’t come
after us for Hariri. Because
we’ll kill you. I tell you, you go to Nasrallah’s
office, knock on the door, and say, I’m doing a
film about his killing Hariri. And you’ll probably not
come out of Lebanon alive. They don’t joke
around with this. International justice,
international law, and international arrest warrants
mean nothing at all to them. Fifteen years after Rafik
Hariri's assassination, the Special Tribunal for
Lebanon issued its verdict. Eventually, three members of Hezbollah
received life sentences in absentia. All three men
remain at large. A fourth defendant, a high-ranking
Hezbollah member, is presumed dead. Hezbollah continues
to remain unpunished, all while it rebuilds its
clandestine financing networks in other countries
and continents. They were looking for places
where they could operate. Europe is important for
Hezbollah for lots of reasons. It is a place where Hezbollah
can raise a lot of money. It is a place where it
can carry out operations. It is close
to Lebanon. France appears in some ways to
be their command-and-control center for their activities
in the rest of Europe.
