Joshua Sinai at the
Washington Times offers a review of Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and Samuel M. Katz’s
Harpoon: Inside the Covert War Against Terrorism’s Money Masters.
Terrorist groups like ISIS
raise hundreds of millions of dollars to finance their activities and attacks
through illicit means. The Islamic Republic of Iran bankrolls its Palestinian
Hamas and Lebanese Hezbollah proxies with large flows of cash. Hezbollah raises
additional funds by engaging in criminal enterprises such as narco-trafficking
across several continents.
Hamas, from its base in the
Gaza Strip, smuggles funds to its operatives in the Palestinian territories in
the West Bank. These and other terrorist groups also raise funds from their
supporters in Europe and the United States, which are sent back through illicit
means to their safe havens in the Middle East.
Terrorist groups’ activities,
such as sustaining their organizational structures, acquiring weapons,
organizing terrorist operations, as well as managing their non-terrorist
activities such as managing their social-welfare and educational services, are
dependent on continuous funding streams. Counterterrorism agencies, therefore,
understand that their terrorist adversaries’ funding sources represent an
important center-of-gravity to significantly weaken their overall warfare
effectiveness.
In “Harpoon: Inside the
Covert War Against Terrorism’s Money Masters,” Nitsana Darshan-Leitner and
Samuel Katz shed light on previously classified accounts of how Israel, facing
wide-ranging terrorist attacks from Hamas, Hezbollah and others, forged its
intelligence, military, police and diplomatic services into an effective task
force — code-named Harpoon — to counter terror-based financing around the
world.
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