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.