The Spy Is An Eye: My Washington Times Piece On Suspected Terrorist Spy Who Scouted New York City Targets

The Washington Times published my piece on a suspected terrorist spy who was scouting targets in New York City.

The Department of Justice announced on Sept. 19 that Alexei Saab, 42, of Morristown, New Jersey, aka Ali Hassan Saab, Alex Saab and Rachid, was charged in a nine-count indictment for offenses related to his surveillance of possible targets for Hezbollah. 

“According to the allegations, while living in the United States, Saab served as an operative of Hezballah and conducted surveillance of possible target locations in order to help the foreign terrorist organization prepare for potential future attacks against the United States,” Assistant Attorney General for National Security John C. Demers said in a statement. “Such covert activities conducted on U.S. soil are a clear threat to our national security and I applaud the agents, analysts, and prosecutors who are responsible for this investigation and prosecution.”

This indictment is the latest case of a terrorist spy performing reconnaissance of American bridges, power plants, shopping malls, military bases and other potential future targets.

An old al Qaeda manual discovered by the Manchester Police in the United Kingdom back in 2000 revealed the terrorist groups’ guidance to terrorists, as well as to terrorist spies. The 180-page training manual’s 11th and 12th chapters dealt with espionage.

“The spy is called an eye because his work is through his eyes or because of his excessive preoccupation with observation, as if all his being is an eye,” the manual noted.

As a terrorist “Eye,” Saab surveilled dozens of locations in New York City, including the United Nations headquarters, the Statue of Liberty, Rockefeller Center, Times Square and the Empire State Building. According to the indictment, he provided detailed information and photographs on these locations to the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), a component of Hezbollah responsible for the planning and coordination of intelligence, counterintelligence, and terrorist activities on behalf of Hezbollah outside of Lebanon. 

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2019/sep/23/suspected-terrorist-spy-is-arrested-for-surveillin/ 

The Secret Backstory Of How Obama Let Hezbollah Off The Hook: An ambitious U.S. Task Force Targeting Hezbollah's Billion-Dollar Criminal Enterprise Ran Headlong Into The White House's Desire For A Nuclear Deal With Iran.

Josh Meyer at POLITICO offers a piece on how the Obama administration killed a major DEA operation against the Hezbollah terrorist group, who are major drug traffickers, so Obama could get his Iran nuclear deal (and to his mind, his august place in history).

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and traced what they believed to be the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

The money, allegedly laundered through the Lebanese Canadian Bank and two exchange houses, involved approximately 30 U.S. car buyers.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher

Veteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise., who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The untold story of Project Cassandra illustrates the immense difficulty in mapping and countering illicit networks in an age where global terrorism, drug trafficking and organized crime have merged, but also the extent to which competing agendas among government agencies — and shifting priorities at the highest levels — can set back years of progress.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/obama-hezbollah-drug-trafficking-investigation/ 

Why The CIA Killed Terrorist Imad Mughniyeh

Imad Mugniyeh, although not as well known as bin Laden, was a vicous terrorist with a good deal of American blood on his hands.

Matthew Levitt at politico.com offers a piece on why the CIA assassinated Mugniyeh in 2008.

The CIA doesn’t assassinate often anymore, so when it does the agency picks its targets carefully. The story uncovered last weekend by the Washington Post and Newsweek the CIA’s reported role in the February 2008 assassination of Hezbollah master terrorist Imad Mughniyeh is the stuff of a Hollywood spy thriller. A team of CIA spotters in Damascus tracking a Hezbollah terrorist wanted for decades; a custom-made explosive shaped to kill only the target and placed in the spare tire of an SUV parked along the target’s route home; intelligence gathered by Israelis, paired with a bomb built and tested in North Carolina, taking out a man responsible for the deaths of more Americans than anyone else until 9/11.

 

And yet, while the ‘what,’ ‘where,’ ‘when’ and ‘how’ of the story shock and amaze, the ‘who’ should not. Most people—including Hezbollah—assumed it was the Israelis, acting alone, who killed Mughniyeh. The Israelis certainly had the motive, given Mughniyeh’s role in acts of terrorist targeting Israelis and Jews around the world, from infiltrating operatives into Israel and shooting rockets into Northern Israel, to terror attacks targeting Israeli diplomats and local Jewish communities in places like Buenos Aires. Speaking by video teleconference at Mughniyeh’s funeral in 2008, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah quickly threatened Israel with “open war” for the killing of Hajj Radwan (aka Mughniyeh).

But the CIA had motive too, and for the many within the agency—indeed, as a matter of institutional memory—the hunt for Imad Mughniyeh was personal. Mughniyeh was behind the 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut, which took out the entire CIA station there as well as the visiting head of the agency’s Middle East analysis branch. (In fact, word of the CIA’s role in Mugniyeh’s killing first leaked in a biography of that officer, Robert Ames, by Kai Bird, published last year.) Mughniyeh reportedly planned the 1984 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks and watched the attack unfold through binoculars from the top of a nearby building. His hand touched Hezbollah plots from Germany to Kuwait and from Argentina to Thailand.

...Twenty-four years after Bill Buckley’s abduction, the CIA got its payback. A former CIA operative told Newsweek that publicly acknowledging the CIA’s role in Mughniyeh’s demise was long overdue. “It sends the message that we will track you down, no matter how much time it takes,” he said. “The other side needs to know this.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/02/mughniyeh-assassination-cia-115049.html#.VNrbBct0yM9

You can also read the Washington Post' s piece on the killing of Mughniyeh via the below link:

http://www.pauldavisoncrime.com/2015/02/a-terrorist-operator-on-black-side-cia.html

A Terrorist Operator On The Black Side: CIA And Mossad Killed Senior Hezbollah Terrorist in 2008 Car Bombing

Although not as well known as bin Laden, Imad Mughniyah was a terrorist with a good bit of  American blood on his hands.

Adam Goldman and Ellen Nakashima at the Washington Post offers a piece on the killing of the Hezbollah terrorist in 2008.

On Feb. 12, 2008, Imad Mughniyah, Hezbollah’s international operations chief, walked on a quiet nighttime street in Damascus after dinner at a nearby restaurant. Not far away, a team of CIA spotters in the Syrian capital was tracking his movements.

As Mughniyah approached a parked SUV, a bomb planted in a spare tire on the back of the vehicle exploded, sending a burst of shrapnel across a tight radius. He was killed instantly.

The device was triggered remotely from Tel Aviv by agents with Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, who were in communication with the operatives on the ground in Damascus. “The way it was set up, the U.S. could object and call it off, but it could not execute,” said a former U.S. intelligence official.

... The United States has never acknowledged participation in the killing of Mughniyah, which Hezbollah blamed on Israel. Until now, there has been little detail about the joint operation by the CIA and Mossad to kill him, how the car bombing was planned or the exact U.S. role. With the exception of the 2011 killing of Osama bin Laden, the mission marked one of the most high-risk covert actions by the United States in recent years.

... Ryan C. Crocker, the U.S. ambassador in Iraq when Mughniyah was killed, said: “All I can say is that as long as he drew breath, he was a threat, whether in Lebanon, Iraq or anywhere else. He was a very intelligent, dedicated, effective operator on the black side.”

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/cia-and-mossad-killed-senior-hezbollah-figure-in-car-bombing/2015/01/30/ebb88682-968a-11e4-8005-1924ede3e54a_story.html

U.S. Combats Nexus of Terrorists And Transnational Criminal Organizations

Jim Garamone at the American Forces Press Service offers the below piece:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 30, 2014 - U.S. national security officials have long been worried about the nexus between terrorists and transnational criminal organizations.

That's because these developed global networks also carry the potential of trafficking in weapons of mass destruction and related materials.

"The same networks and same recombinant pipelines that are used to successfully move an enormous amount of a multitude of illicit products -- from cocaine to weapons to bulk cash to human beings -- can easily be used and likely will be used for illicit proliferation purposes," said Douglas Farah of IBI Consultants. He spoke at a recent Proliferation Security Initiative table top exercise sponsored by U.S. Southern Command that examined ways nations can work together to combat these networks.

Transnational criminal organizations have long been a challenge in Southern Command's area of responsibility. Colombian rebels, who have fought the government in Bogota since the 1960's have used drug smuggling to finance their operations.

Hezbollah -- an Iranian-sponsored terror group -- has long been active in South America including being implicated in the deadly bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires in 1994, as well as more recent accusations of being involved in laundering drug money from the region.

In 2011, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Navy Adm. Mike Mullen said the growth of transnational crime in Africa -- notably for drugs -- has also touched on a number of other problem areas including human trafficking and syndicates working with terror organizations. Such organized crime, Mullen said, "is not just about drugs, ... it's immigration, it's people, it's weapons."

"As criminal and terrorist networks increasingly overlap and find new and innovative ways to work together when it is mutually beneficial, the likelihood of [WMD-related trafficking] increases," Farah said.

The table top exercise in Miami brought together fourteen PSI-endorsing nations from across the Western Hemisphere, as well as Australia and Poland, united in their commitment to stopping or disrupting shipments of WMDs and WMD-related materials.

"In the Western Hemisphere, we have an opportunity to get ahead of the threat, and in Miami we saw that the region is motivated to cooperate in new ways. Interdiction -- consistent with national laws and international legal frameworks -- can have a strategic effect through cooperation," said Rebecca K.C. Hersman, (seen in the above DoD photo) deputy assistant secretary of defense for countering weapons of mass destruction.

How to counter the emerging threat was another focus. Under the Proliferation Security Initiative, there is now a more systematic capacity building effort called the Critical Capabilities and Practices framework. The Miami exercise was the first presentation of this framework and an associated toolkit that provides specific measures to enhance a nation's capability to interdict -- from legal tools and rapid decision making best practices to operational training, in concert with other U.S. government programs like the U.S. State Department's Export Control and Related Border Security Program.

More than 100 countries have endorsed PSI. They cooperate to enhance interoperability and improve national capacities to act with speed and effectiveness to stop WMD, their delivery systems, and related items. PSI participants are addressing the proliferation challenge on all fronts – air, land, and sea transport of WMD, their delivery systems, and related items, financial transactions in support of proliferation, and networks of persons engaged in the deadly trade.

The next major PSI exercise, Fortune Guard 14, will be hosted by U.S. Pacific Command in August.