Joze Pelayo/Iran’s lucrative crime-terrorism nexus with Venezuela continues amid coronavirus/جوس بيلايو: تواصل واستمرار علاقات واعمال الإرهاب بين إيران وفنزويلا بالرغم من جائحة الكورونا/Thomas Harding: Hezbollah suffers blow to funding from Iran amid pandemic/توماس هاردنك: في ظل جائحة الكورونا حزب الله يعاني من شح التمول الإيراني/Hanin Ghaddar on Weakening Hezbollah’s Control of Lebanon/حنين غدار في مقابلة تتناول سيطرة حزب الله على لبنان

Iran’s lucrative crime-terrorism nexus with Venezuela continues amid coronavirus
Joze Pelayo/Al Arabiya/April 22/2020
جوس بيلايو: تواصل واستمرار علاقات واعمال الإرهاب بين إيران وفنزويلا بالرغم من جائحة الكورونا

Hezbollah suffers blow to funding from Iran amid pandemic
Thomas Harding/The National/April 22/2020
توماس هاردنك: في ظل جائحة الكورونا حزب الله يعاني من شح التمول الإيراني

Hanin Ghaddar on Weakening Hezbollah’s Control of Lebanon
Marilyn Stern/Middle East Forum Radio/April 22/2020/حنين غدار في مقابلة تتناول سيطرة حزب الله على لبنان

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Iran’s lucrative crime-terrorism nexus with Venezuela continues amid coronavirus
Joze Pelayo/Al Arabiya/April 22/2020
جوس بيلايو: تواصل واستمرار علاقات واعمال الإرهاب بين إيران وفنزويلا بالرغم من جائحة الكورونا
Tehran’s global network of militias is once again under scrutiny since the US in January killed the man responsible for leading Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ Quds Force, General Qassem Soleimani.
The oldest and arguably most important of the Iranian-backed non-state militia groups is Hezbollah in Lebanon.
The proxy has been and remains embedded in Venezuela, aligned and coordinating with the political establishment in Caracas on criminal activities.
Now is the time for the United States Drug Enforcement Administration to realize the goal of its over a decade-long initiative, Project Cassandra, which aims to weaken Hezbollah’s funding from its global crime and drug trafficking networks.
Hezbollah and its affiliates should be designated by the US government as an International Criminal Network, as they continue to weave their illicit web in the face of the coronavirus pandemic.
Hezbollah in Venezuela
Hezbollah serves as one of Iran’s most powerful surrogates and has mastered the art of using the global Lebanese diaspora for their own interests. The group has evolved from a Lebanese militia into a major player in the Lebanese government—despite being designated in 2018 as a “top transnational organized crime threat” by the US attorney general.
Hezbollah works directly with weak and autocratic governments like Venezuela, in criminal activities such as money laundering from the sales of drugs, weapons and illicit goods. These activities have become critical to Hezbollah and Iran in recent months as extensive US sanctions, the oil price war, and the shock from the coronavirus have weakened the Iranian economy and significantly reduced the amount of support groups like Hezbollah receive from their Iranian patrons.
Both Iran and Venezuela seem to be aligned in their urgent pursuit to ease US sanctions. However, despite having severe domestic challenges, COVID-19 has not stopped the regime in Tehran from providing support to destabilizing militias in Arab countries and beyond.
Although the United States has attempted to combat these activities, Hezbollah has extended its operational scope beyond the financing of terrorism and money laundering. As Iran’s international reach has become more sophisticated, Hezbollah has increasingly become self-sufficient, using both the international financial system and Lebanon’s political and financial framework.
While US law enforcement efforts have often focused on the tri-border area between Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay, in recent years Venezuela’s Margarita Island – an economic free-zone and a popular vacation destination, and host to one of the largest Lebanese communities in Venezuela – has started to make “the tri-border area look like a kindergarten,” according to Roger F. Noriega, a former assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs under the George W. Bush Administration.
Hezbollah’s approach to burrow into Venezuela comes with a quest for cover and operational support, such as the reported purchase of Venezuelan passports, visas and identity cards at the Venezuelan embassy in Iraq, paying up to $15,000 “under the complacent glance of the Venezuelan diplomatic authorities,” according to the PanAm Post.
Project Cassandra Versus the JCPOA
Project Cassandra, launched in 2008, has been the most comprehensive US government effort thus far to counter Hezbollah funding from illicit sources. The Drug Enforcement Administration has led the fight to combat Hezbollah’s developing profile as an international crime syndicate, with an estimated profit of $1 billion per year, according to some investigators.
During eight years of investigation, including wiretaps, undercover operations and informants, 30 US and foreign security agencies tracked Hezbollah’s network and activities, including particularly large cocaine shipments through Latin America to the United States, Europe, West Africa and the Middle East.
As Project Cassandra officials were preparing prosecutions, arrests, and sanctions, their efforts were delayed and opposed by others in the US. government. David Asher, a Pentagon illicit finance analyst who helped oversee the project, said “this was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” in an interview with American news outlet Politico.
Then-CIA Director John Brennan was primarily focused on combating only the most extreme elements within Hezbollah. Therefore, President Barack Obama’s administration declined to designate Hezbollah in general as a “significant transnational criminal organization,” although the group was already designated as a Foreign Terrorist Organization by the US Department of State and it and several individuals in the group were under multiple State and Treasury Department sanctions.
This cautious approach developed in the context of efforts to secure a nuclear deal with Iran. According to former Treasury official Katherine Bauer’s testimony to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, “Under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”
Asher said, “The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away.”
Hezbollah’s Global Crime Network
Some Venezuelans of Arab descent have contributed to Iran’s international outreach and fundraising in the Western Hemisphere. The key figures in this network include Tareck Zaidan El Aissami, Ghazi Nasr Al Din, and Fawzi Kanan.
El Aissami, a Venezuelan of Syrian and Lebanese descent, and a former vice president of Venezuela, has been sanctioned by the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control and is now featured on the United States’ Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s most-wanted list as a specially designated narcotics trafficker pursuant to the Kingpin Act.
The Kingpin Act is used to block all property, interests in property, financial transactions, and dealings within the United States and its financial system, as well as with US persons. El Aissami is reported to have supervised several operations in which “… he oversaw or partially owned narcotics shipments of over 1,000 kilograms from Venezuela on multiple occasions.”
El Aissami is also alleged to have provided Hezbollah affiliates with Venezuelan passports and IDs during his tenure at Venezuela’s Ministry of Interior, Justice, and Peace.
Additionally, Ghazi Nasr Al Din, a Venezuelan of Lebanese descent who served as a Venezuelan diplomat in Damascus and Beirut, and facilitated the granting of visas and passports, raised and laundered money for Hezbollah. Nasr Al Din has been sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control and added to the FBI’s Seeking Information – Terrorism list.
According to the US government, Nasr Al Din met with senior Hezbollah officials in Lebanon to discuss such activities. Kanan, another Venezuelan of Lebanese origin, has been similarly sanctioned for using Biblos Travel Agency in Venezuela for reportedly couriering funds to Lebanon in the aid of Hezbollah.
Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, repeatedly visited Venezuela to try to increase cooperation between the two countries, including the establishment of a Caracas-Tehran flight by the Venezuelan airline Conviasa with a layover at a Syrian military base. By March 2019, Iran’s Mahan Air had adopted this route as a nonstop flight.
In 2018, Mahan was sanctioned by the Office of Foreign Assets Control and banned by France and Germany for transporting military equipment, Iranian operatives, and personnel to Syria and providing various services to the IRGC. During a visit to Venezuela in February 2019, according to sources of Kuwait’s Al Seyassah, Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah offered Maduro support from the group’s militants living in South America and the protection of security installations by battle-tested specialists.
Nasrallah added: “This is only a portion of what the party can offer to Venezuelan President Maduro and the memory of his predecessor, President Hugo Chavez, in return for the support from the two to Hezbollah and to Iran, especially in terms of providing the needed funds for the activity of the party.”
According to the Treasury Department, Hezbollah diverts profits from drug sales in Europe to exchange houses in Lebanon. Laundered money is returned to the United States to buy used cars that are then shipped to West Africa for resale with the profits ultimately transferred to Hezbollah.
On January 31, 2020, Iranian national Bahram Karimi was charged by the US Department of Justice for his connection in a scheme initiated by the governments of Iran and Venezuela to launder $115 million through the US financial system “for the benefit of various Iranian individuals and entities.”
The challenges facing Latin American efforts to counter these networks were illustrated by the fate of Alberto Nisman, an Argentinian prosecutor. Nisman spent a decade investigating Iran’s activities in the Western Hemisphere, including the 1994 Argentine Israelite Mutual Association bombing in Buenos Aires. Nisman was murdered four days after issuing a formal complaint in 2015, in addition to a 500-page report in 2013 (along with a US Congressional Research Service synopsis in 2016) that documented how Iran and Hezbollah had been working in Latin America for decades.
The report tracked the use of embassies, cultural organizations, and other institutions as fronts for intelligence operations—an approach that has also been used by Iran against Kuwait and Bahrain in recent years.
Iran’s State-Crime-Terrorism Nexus with Venezuela
According to senior DEA agent Jack Kelly, former Venezuelan intelligence chief Hugo Carvajal, who was arrested in Aruba on drug charges, was “the main man between Venezuela and Iran, the Quds Force, Hezbollah, and the cocaine trafficking.” Carvajal, who was due to be extradited to the United States from Spain, went missing in November 2019.
According to the Washington Post, the most recent former head of the Venezuelan intelligence General Manuel Figuera, who is now living in exile in the United States, affirmed in June 2019 that he was aware of “… intelligence that Hezbollah had operations in Caracas, Maracay, and Nueva Esparta, apparently geared toward illicit business activity to help fund operations in the Middle East.”
Although US sanctions on Venezuela may limit Hezbollah’s ability to use the country to launder money and fund its fighters, it will probably remain able to conduct drug trafficking operations in cooperation with the Venezuelan military, as the latter also thrives on the potential dividends.
Officials of Venezuela’s interim government led by Juan Guaidó insist that Hezbollah is highly invested in keeping Maduro in power, and the State Department has documented meetings between Hezbollah and Maduro officials as recent as November 2019. Iran’s state-crime-terrorism network presents a challenge to security and economic stability, especially when it converges with permissive operating conditions and corruption.
As the US steps up its campaign against drug trafficking, Hezbollah’s entrenchment within Venezuela’s establishment is a global problem. Iran’s own neighbors and especially the citizens of Iran, Venezuela, and Lebanon, are the ones to pay the heaviest price of such a destabilizing network during a global pandemic.
Project Cassandra’s unrealized goal to designate Hezbollah and its affiliates as an International Criminal Network under Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations would allow the United States to “deal with the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States constituted by the growing threat of significant transnational criminal organizations.”
As criminal gangs and terrorist organizations continue to exploit the COVID-19 crisis, collaborate, adapt, and form networks – and as these continue to target the GCC – international cooperation must be intensified to counter this threat.
*Joze Pelayo is a research consultant, and was recently with the Arab Gulf States Institute (AGSIW) in Washington DC, a think tank dedicated to providing expert research and analysis of the social, economic, and political dimensions of the Gulf Arab states.

Hezbollah suffers blow to funding from Iran amid pandemic
Thomas Harding/The National/April 22/2020
توماس هاردنك: في ظل جائحة الكورونا حزب الله يعاني من شح التمول الإيراني
Terror group set to lose large chunk of income from Iran but sophisticated European financing operations continue. But the group’s financing has become so sophisticated that it can rely on significant income from activities in Europe through fundraising that includes fake orphanages.
There are now renewed calls for more European governments to proscribe both Hezbollah’s political and military wings as terrorist organisations to clamp down on the funding.
The blow to funding has emerged in a paper on Hezbollah’s finances by Dr Matthew Levitt, a former FBI analyst.
The huge drop in oil prices, US President Donald Trump’s “maximum pressure” campaign and sanctions on Iran has meant that funding could be cut by $280 million (Dh1.02 billion) from an estimated annual $700m.
Dr Levitt, speaking to an online seminar hosted by the Royal United Services Institute, said that on three previous occasions Tehran has “very suddenly cut back its financing for Hezbollah” by 40 per cent, according to Israeli intelligence.
“I should imagine it’s happening again,” he said.
Sanctions and a need to focus on internal domestic issues, including the Covid-19 crisis that has infected 86,000 Iranians, has probably forced Iran to cut funding.
But Dr Levitt, of the Washington Institute, warned: “This has led Hezbollah to have its own source of income so that if Iranian income had to shrink a bit, it would be OK.”
In the paper he outlines how the organisation has made extensive provisions to continue funding from the Shiite diaspora.
“The group’s independent fundraising, conducted alongside its generous subsidies from Iran, are also intended to guarantee the group’s future independence through diversified funding no matter what happens to Iran,” Dr Levitt wrote.
“That is, Hezbollah likely wants to ensure that even in the event that Iran were to ever strike a ‘grand bargain’ with the West, the group would continue to be able to exist and function on its own.
“Hezbollah funds are spent primarily on furthering the group’s overall agenda of establishing a Shia entity in Lebanon and radicalising Muslims against the West.
“To that end, the majority of its funds finance social welfare and political activities that finance terror in a more indirect fashion.”
Dr Levitt told the audience that the terrorists had been able to “find a gap in the seams of European law enforcement” and had discovered it was a “fairly comfortable place” in which to raise funds.
This was partly due to a political decision by areas of Europe not to proscribe both wings of Hezbollah.
This has allowed fund-raising in “legitimate” areas such as orphanages.
And people with dual nationalities, as well as criminal gangs, were being used to open companies that launder cash, move weapons and aircraft equipment, or raise funds.
Dr Levitt concluded by urging countries such as Germany to designate the whole of Hezbollah as a terrorist groups.

Hanin Ghaddar on Weakening Hezbollah’s Control of Lebanon
Marilyn Stern/Middle East Forum Radio/April 22/2020
حنين غدار في مقابلة تتناول سيطرة حزب الله على لبنان

https://www.meforum.org/60721/ghaddar-weakening-hezbollah-control-of-lebanon
Hanin Ghaddar, the inaugural Friedmann Visiting Fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, spoke to Middle East Forum Radio host Gregg Roman on April 15 about Lebanon’s Iranian-backed Hezbollah regime.
The eruption of anti-government protests in Lebanon last October marked “the first time where three main Shia cities in Lebanon (Tyre, Nabatieh, and Baalbek) participated in a national revolution,” said Ghaddar. Animated by anger over the country’s economic collapse and widespread corruption within its Iranian-backed coalition government, the street protests led to the resignation of Lebanon’s beleaguered pro-Western prime minister, Saad Hariri. Rejecting protestor demands for a reform-minded, non-partisan figure to head the new government, the Shia Islamist Hezbollah movement instead engineered the appointment of a cabinet dominated by the pro-Iranian March 8 bloc, with no representation for the pro-Western March 14 bloc. The continuing demonstrations were met by violence, but Hezbollah could not subdue them through brute force – it took the spread of coronavirus to achieve this, temporarily.
Lebanon, which experienced a civil war from the mid-70s through the late 80s, followed by Syrian domination until the Cedar Revolution in 2005, has seen Hezbollah assume greater and greater political power in the face of weakened Lebanese institutions and opposing forces. Having achieved near-absolute control of the government for the first time, however, Hezbollah faces severe challenges. Reeling from the collapse of local currency and deteriorating living conditions even before the pandemic, much of Lebanon’s population is now on the brink of starvation due to skyrocketing unemployment. International donors are unwilling to bail out the government unless it makes reforms that Hezbollah “cannot tolerate,” according to Ghaddar, because its allies depend on the spoils of corruption.
Moreover, because Iran is unable to send funds as a result of US sanctions, Hezbollah is “incapable of providing its own [Shia] constituency with jobs and basic needs” as it has done in the past. Its core base of political support is slipping. Ghaddar noted that there was a demonstration last week in Hay al-Salloum, a poor southern suburb of Beirut within Hezbollah’s stronghold of Dahiyeh.
Hezbollah is “incapable of providing its own [Shia] constituency with jobs and basic needs.”
The public is well aware that Hezbollah bears responsibility for the spread of the virus in Lebanon, which was fueled by thousands of its members and supporters traveling to and from Iran. Hiding the thousands of cases erupting within the Shia community to avoid blame, Hezbollah’s response to the spread has been to publicize a strategic “health emergency plan,” but without the resources and equipment to support it.
Ghaddar anticipates that any easing of social distancing constraints will trigger a second wave of protests, “bigger, more vicious [and] angrier,” by “hungry people in the streets who have nothing left to lose,” cutting across all segments of the poor sections in Lebanon. “[W]hen it comes to hunger … politics will not be important anymore.”
The next wave of protests will be “bigger, more vicious [and] angrier.”
Ghaddar urged the international community to press Hezbollah to yield the reins of power to a government capable of enacting reforms. The most credible figure to lead such a government is former UN ambassador Nawaf Salam, a favorite of the protestors. Vetoed by the political class, however, he would need to be supported by the international community to have “power, leverage, and authority.” Ghaddar sees the introduction of a new electoral law followed by “early elections as a second step” as the way forward for any real change to occur.
While urging Washington to put pressure on Lebanon, Ghaddar cautioned against proposals to terminate U.S. aid for the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) until Hezbollah ends its domination of the government. Instead, this aid should be “restructured and conditioned heavily” to bolster anti-Hezbollah segments of the LAF and weaken pro-Hezbollah segments. “It’s a small country and everybody knows everybody,” she added, so “it’s not difficult to figure out” which are which. Ghaddar described the military as more “nuanced” than Lebanon’s other security institutions, so pressure applied through “appointments and restructuring” can more easily undermine Hezbollah’s influence.
*Marilyn Stern is the producer of Middle East Forum Radio.