Nasrallah's men inside America
 It began, as the Feds tell the tale, with a run-of-the-mill tax-fraud
scheme. Imad Hammoud and his ring of Lebanese Americans from the Detroit
area would buy boxes of cigarettes in North Carolina, where the state
tax on smokes is among the lowest in the country, allegedly truck the
goods back to Michigan and sell them at a profit of more than $10 a
carton. Hammoud, an immigrant with ties to Hizbullah, according to an
indictment filed with a U.S. district court in Michigan earlier this
year, would then wire a portion of the earnings to a member of the group
in Lebanon.
By 2002, Hammoud and some of his colleagues were believed to be
running $500,000 worth of cigarettes a week across state lines and
expanding into stolen contraband and counterfeit goods, including Viagra
tablets.
During a three-month period that year, authorities allege, more than
90,000 Viagra knockoffs were purchased, with a plan to sell them as the
real thing. "They're small, they're high in demand and they're easily
transportable," says Bob Clifford, a senior FBI agent. "They're the
perfect medium."
The Hammoud case is among a handful of money scams uncovered across
the country in recent years bearing Hizbullah's fingerprints. Though the
revenues are not huge, the cases together underscore a daunting reality:
one of the most proficient terrorist groups in the world has at least a
small web of operatives in America who, prosecutors believe, are loyal
to Hassan Nasrallah. Hizbullah has not targeted Americans since the
1980s, when attacks on a Marine barracks in Lebanon and on the U.S.
Embassy there killed more than 300 people.
Strategic decision
Sometime later, the group apparently made a strategic decision not to
tweak the world's only superpower. Law enforcers say there's been no
sign the fighting between Israel and Hizbullah, with all the Arab anger
it stirs against America, will goad the group into action against the
United States.
Still, security officials worry that if Hizbullah does one day decide
to strike, it can exploit an already-existing network in this country.
"You often see in these groups that people who deal in finances also
have military backgrounds," says Chris Hamilton, who was the FBI's unit
chief for Palestinian investigations until last year. "The fact is, they
have the ability [to attack] in the United States."
The FBI has made Hizbullah a central target of its counterterrorism
efforts, setting up a unit dedicated to tracking the group and assigning
agents to develop sources in Lebanese and other Middle Eastern
communities across the country. Clifford, who once headed the unit on
Hizbullah and Iran, made his biggest Hizbullah bust six years ago,
cracking a North Carolina ring that forged credit cards and laundered
money, using some of the profits to buy gear for Hizbullah.
The ringleader, Mohammed Hammoud (no relation to Imad), was convicted
of providing "material support" for terrorism and sentenced to 155 years
in prison. Although he and his followers were not linked to actual
terror attacks, the FBI found evidence they did engage in "tactical"
arms training and would have been ready to strike if told to do so. "If
they were given an order to conduct an operation in the United States,
they would have found a way to do it," Clifford says.
What might prompt Hizbullah to issue such an order? American
screw-tightening on Iran over its nuclear program, for one. Iran is
Hizbullah's main political and financial backer.
Some analysts believe the group's deadliest terrorist attacks,
including bombings at Israel's Argentine Embassy in 1992 and at a Jewish
community centre in Buenos Aires in 1994, were ordered up by Iranian
handlers. "It would be enough for the Iranian leadership to say the word
for Hizbullah to launch an attack," says Congressman Ed Royce, a
Republican from California who chairs the House subcommittee on
international terrorism and nonproliferation.
But Hamilton, who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute
for Near East Studies, says Hizbullah would be more likely to attack
Americans abroad. "They would go for soft targets in places where they
have lots of resources," such as South America or Turkey.
Other experts believe Hizbullah would have too much to lose from an
attack on American soil. "Their fund-raising activities have been very
fruitful in the United States," says Dennis Lormel, who was the FBI's
section chief for terrorist financing until 2003. "With Israel clamping
down on their other sources of revenue, it wouldn't make sense for them
to wreck their own ability to continue making money here."
Lebanese immigrants
Support for Nasrallah runs high in Lebanese communities across the
country, and it spikes when Israel's war with Hizbullah or with
Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza heats up. When Los Angeles County
sheriff's deputy Lt. John Stedman searched the home of a Lebanese
immigrant in Los Angeles two years ago, he found Hizbullah flags
decorating the walls, along with pictures of Nasrallah and audiotapes of
his speeches.
"We love him," Stedman quotes a resident of the home as saying,
"because he protects us from the Jews." In a case against a Lebanese
immigrant in Dearborn, Mich., who is suspected of tax fraud, prosecutors
have showcased pictures of the suspect seated alongside Mohammed Hussein
Fadlallah, Hizbullah's spiritual leader, at a 2002 fund-raiser in
Lebanon.
But Arab-American leaders complain law enforcers are too quick to
equate the pride some ex-patriates take in Hizbullah's stand against
Israel-or even just the sympathy they feel for the Lebanese people-with
support for terrorism.
"Any time somebody sends money to somebody in Lebanon, they
[prosecutors] say it's for Hizbullah," says Maurice Herskovic, who
initially represented one of the defendants in the Detroit case. Last
month two of the defendants reached a plea bargain with prosecutors,
admitting to several fraud charges that carry a penalty of up to 30
months in prison, but they were not charged with terrorism.
Hammoud was not among them. Though three of his brothers entered
not-guilty pleas in the case, prosecutors say Hammoud slipped out of the
United States and is probably back in Lebanon, where Hizbullah gunmen
are waging bloody street battles with Israeli troops.
"This is a new organization [compared with what it was years ago],"
says Bob Baer, a retired CIA agent who spent years in the Middle East.
"It's fighting a conventional war." Yet it also has the capacity to
carry out devastating terrorist attacks. In Europe and South America,
and possibly in the United States as well, that's a threat law enforcers
must take seriously.
(NewsWeek International)
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