Follow the money

Israeli attorney Nitsana Darshan-Leitner has waged legal warfare targeting the funders of terrorist organizations since 2000. Through her non-profit Shurat HaDin Israeli Law Center, she serially sues rogue nations, terrorist groups and international banks on behalf of victims of terrorism. Even if it takes years for cases to wend their way through the courts, Darshan-Leitner often gets results – thus far, $2 billion in judgments, $600 million worth of liens on terrorist assets and $200 million collected from regimes that sponsor terrorism. Her excellent co-written book, Harpoon: Inside the Covert War against Terrorism's Money Masters, tells the newly declassified story of a top-secret Mossad task force spearheaded in 1997 by Maj.-Gen. Meir Dagan (who directed the Mossad from 2002 to 2011) to wage financial warfare against terrorism. As a veteran of special operations from the Gaza Strip to southern Lebanon, Dagan “realized that heroics and daring were essential in the dayto-day fight against terrorism, but Israel needed an outside-the-box solution with long-term and game-changing results,” she writes in the preface. Shurat HaDin worked closely with Operation Harpoon starting in 2002, given their complementary roles in this new financial frontier against terrorism. Thus, Darshan-Leitner was eminently qualified to write about Harpoon with the able assistance of Samuel M. Katz, author of the best-selling Under Fire: The Untold Story of the Attack in Benghazi. Harpoon (the name was chosen randomly by computer program) was later absorbed into the Defense Ministry and served as the model for post-9/11 American efforts to combat the financiers of nefarious groups from Islamic State to drug cartels. The idea is to follow the money to its source and choke it off using all means possible, thereby depriving terrorist organizations of their financial oxygen. The potential of such a bloodless but powerful approach was evident as early as 1992, when Israel deported 415 Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad terrorist leaders to Lebanon following the torture and murder of Border Police Sgt. Nissim Toledano. Until foreign governmental pressure forced the Israelis to repatriate the group, the men's absence had profound consequences. “While the 415 shivered around their South Lebanon campfires, assault rifles weren't being purchased on the West Bank black market; terrorists' widows weren't receiving their stipends; and there was no money to rent Gaza safe houses,” Darshan-Leitner writes. “Hamas operations in the Palestinian territories had come to a dead halt.” Terrorist sprees, we learn, costs tons of money. The book relates that during the second intifada, every suicide bombing was bankrolled to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars. Afterward, the sponsor (such as Hamas) paid for a lavish spread to “celebrate the martyr's death” and take care of his or her family in perpetuity. By the fall of 2002, Harpoon zeroed in on accounts held by the Arab Bank as the source of cash for a dozen deadly incidents including the Dolphinarium, Sbarro, Hebrew University and Park Hotel attacks. Stopping the flow of money from these accounts was an uphill battle until the Americans introduced a new weapon in the form of legislation “designed to prevent banks from being used to launder and dispense monies to known terrorist entities.” European cooperation was not as forthcoming, to say the least. But Dagan and his crew were always ready to try new tactics. Together with Shurat HaDin, they enlisted lawyers to pressure financial institutions and to file lawsuits on behalf of victims and their families. The book notes that just two weeks after the IDF's bombing of Hezbollah-fueling financial institutions in Lebanon and the subsequent freezing of funds in their corresponding US banks, “Hezbollah sued for a cease-fire. They had run out of cash.” Since then, efforts have been expanded to fight additional sources of terrorist dollars, including online and social-media fund-raising, drug and human trafficking and other sinister global activities. Myriad holes in the money pipeline need to be plugged, but each one makes a difference. Harpoon also focused the attention of Israel's army and police on “the men carrying the cash” – the couriers, smugglers and money changers. One of the most dramatic examples was in August 2014 during Operation Protective Edge. Israeli intelligence agents picked up the trail of a courier traveling across Sinai with $13 million in cash earmarked for Hamas's flagging war effort. Once the courier transferred his four suitcases to the car of Muhammad el-Ghoul, Hamas's head of payroll, an Israel Air Force attack helicopter dispatched a supersonic antitank missile that incinerated el-Ghoul, the car and the money. The summer war in Gaza ended two days later, as Hamas begged for a cease-fire. “Meir Dagan had been right all along. If you choke off the money, the bloodshed will end,” writes Darshan-Leitner. Harpoon makes for fascinating reading and a heightened appreciation for Israeli ingenuity in the struggle to make the world a safer place.

Follow the money

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Follow the money

Nitsana Darshan-Leitner tells the story of Operation Harpoon, which targeted Hamas, Hezbollah and others on the financial frontier

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