Corruption, Civil War, and the International Drug Traffic Jonathan V

The Lebanese Connection Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures The Lebanese Connection Corruption, Civil War, and the International Drug Traffic Jonathan V. Marshall

Stanford University Press Stanford, California Stanford University Press Stanford, California ©2012 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marshall, Jonathan, 1955- author. The Lebanese connection : corruption, civil war, and the international drug traffic / Jonathan V. Marshall. pages cm.--(Stanford studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic societies and cultures) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8047-8131-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Drug traffic--Lebanon--History. 2. Drug traffic--Political aspects--Lebanon--History. 3. Political corruption--Lebanon--History. 4. Lebanon--History--Civil War, 1975-1990. I. Title. II. Series: Stanford studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic societies and cultures. HV5840.L4M37 2012 363.45095692--dc23 2012004378 Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/14 Minion Contents

Introduction 1 1 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 14 2 The French Connection 33 3 The Intra Bank Connection 49 4 The Path to Civil War 59 5 The Civil War Drug Boom 75 6 The Syrian Connection 113 7 The Drug Melting Pot 133 8 From Narco-State to Failed State 163

Acknowledgments 177 Appendix: Drug Production Statistics 179 Notes 185 Index 253 Map 1 Lebanon Introduction

You can’t have any power in Lebanon, whether military or political, if you don’t profit from drugs. U.S. drug enforcement officer, Nicosia1 although just a tiny sliver of a country, Lebanon is recognized worldwide not only for its rich cultural heritage and thriving diaspora but also for its tragic destiny. Before the Balkan wars brought the terrors of political collapse and mass murder to the doorstep of Western Europe, Lebanon provided a frightening illustration of how quickly modern civilization can descend into barbarism. Once an envied Arab model of democracy, pluralism, and affluence, Lebanon plunged seemingly overnight into civil war in 1975. It shocked the world with images of raw savagery and senseless destruction. When hostili- ties finally ended in 1990, the country had suffered $25 billion in damages, the emigration of more than half a million people, and the deaths of about 150,000 out of about 3.5 million inhabitants.2 That would be equal, proportionately, to more than twelve million dead in the United States. Lebanon did not suffer alone. Its civil war became a de facto regional conflict that sucked in neighboring Israel and Syria, along with Iraq, Iran, and Libya; the United States and France; and even the Soviet Union. It also became a demoralizing object lesson for the United States, in the wake of the Vietnam debacle, of a superpower’s impotence in the face of determined local adversaries. Long before the onset of civil war, however, Lebanon was already a leading contributor to another source of international conflict: the “war on drugs.” De- cades ago it became one of the world’s major exporters of opiates and hashish to international markets. In the process it was corrupted by the trade as much as it profited.

1 2 Introduction

In 1948 an American diplomat in Beirut commented on the “alarming” increase in hashish production from marijuana fields that were visibly spreading along one of the country’s northern highways. Citing evidence that “persons in the President’s entourage are prominent in this traffic,” he reported that “it would take a minor revolution to break up the gang which is now operating in the Lebanese hashish market.”3 In 1954 the commissioner of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) declared in a letter to Lebanon’s ambassador that “the illicit narcotic traffic in the United States is, in a large measure, being supplied by Lebanese narcotic traffickers.” An accompanying memorandum stated with even greater force: Bei“ rut is probably the greatest single transit port in the international traffic in narcotics. . . . Certain of the largest traffickers are so influential politically, and certain highly placed officials so deeply involved in the narcotic traffic, that one might well state that the Lebanese Government is in the narcotic business.”4 In October 1960 another FBN agent reported that Lebanon was unique for its size as a “focal country in the international illicit traffic for all three categories of narcotics”—opiates, hashish, and cocaine.5 The same day that he wrote from Beirut, narcotics agents in New York City arrested a Guatemalan diplomat and confiscated one hundred kilos of pure, white heroin, one of the largest seizures in history. The ambassador had smuggled hundreds of pounds of morphine base from Lebanon to France, where underworld chemists refined it into heroin worth more than $12 million at wholesale. The case was one of the biggest made against what would come to be popularly called “the French Connection.” The seizure forced U.S. authorities to dramatically revise upward their estimates of the size of the international heroin traffic. Beirut’s drug lords, they now figured, were exporting one hundred kilos of heroin precursor every month.6 Ten years later, in June 1970, Attorney General John Mitchell announced that federal agents had just pulled off the largest nationwide narcotics raid in history, arresting 135 suspects in ten major cities across the country. The ring was allegedly responsible for an astonishing 30 percent of the heroin and 75 percent of the cocaine sold at wholesale in the United States. Although the cocaine hailed from the Andes, this book will show for the first time that much of the heroin came from labs in Lebanon.7 Americans who preferred to “trip” on softer drugs in the 1960s and 1970s could buy domestic or Mexican marijuana on almost any street corner. But for the highest quality, most powerful high, no “weed” could match Lebanese hashish. Young wanderers began traveling the “hippie trail” to Lebanon in search of Introduction 3 its famed product—all too often landing in jail. Meanwhile, multiton seizures of Lebanon’s potent hashish on the Eastern Seaboard became routine testimony to the staggering size of this transoceanic trade. By 1990 Lebanon found itself at the center of politically explosive allegations that its Syrian occupiers had turned the fertile Bekaa Valley into a giant drug production zone, piling up profits for corrupt rulers in Damascus while exporting “narco-terrorism” to the West. The truth, as we will see, is that both Israel and Syria took advantage of their enclaves in Lebanon to privilege traffickers who cooperated with their respective intelligence services. Though never as notorious as Colombia in the era of the Medellin “cartel” or Mexico today with its bloody drug wars, Lebanon fostered crime and corruption on a scale grand enough to qualify it as one of the modern era’s first true “narco-states.” Although the term has more shock value than analytical rigor, it accurately suggests the extent to which the drug trade permeated Leb- anon’s economy and engaged its political rulers, economic elites, and peasant farmers. As we will see, more than a few presidents, prime ministers, members of parliament, judges, police chiefs, and bankers were implicated in this enormously profitable but illicit enterprise. After 1975, with the onset of civil war and the breakdown of state institutions, Lebanon arguably declined from a narco-state to a “failed state.” While this term, too, is subject to the usual academic debate,8 it broadly applied to Lebanon from 1975 to 1990:

What is central to a failed state is that the state apparatus is unable to uphold an effective monopoly of violence over its whole territory, lacks an effective judicial system to guard the rule of law and promulgate judgments that are internationally regarded as legitimate and sound . . . and cannot prevent various forms of transnational economic crime or the use of its territory for the perpe- tration of violence (politically motivated or otherwise) against other states in the international system.9

The collapse of state authority in Lebanon only strengthened the hold of drugs on the country’s shrinking economy and on competing political and military forces. Exports of hashish and heroin sustained not only the rural population but rival militia organizations that had to raise millions of dollars to finance weapons purchases and bloated payrolls. During this period authorities on the international drug trade described Lebanon as a “prime example where terrorist factions take advantage of the 4 Introduction drug traffic to obtain the necessary logistics to carry out their activities” in the furtherance of “civil war and transnational terrorism,” to quote John War- ner, chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration’s International Programs Staff.10 Lebanon represented the leading edge of what another senior DEA official in 1985 called “a major change in the historical pattern of drug trafficking” from a focus on profits to the involvement of “rural insurgents, urban terrorists, liberation movements, arms traffickers, left and right wing political groups and high-level officials . . . to finance political objectives.” He added, ominously, “This expanding use of drug trafficking for political purposes has already had an effect on, and could have far-reaching implications for, drug law enforcement worldwide and U.S. foreign policy.”11 Considering the importance of the drug trade to modern Lebanon’s tragic history, and the importance in turn of Lebanon to the rise of the international drug trade in the post–World War II era, the story of its deep entanglement with narcotics has received remarkably little systematic attention by historians or other scholars.12 Major histories of twentieth-century drug trafficking barely mention Lebanon at all.13 The one published book on the country’s drug economy, by a Lebanese agronomist, offers surprisingly little detail on the history or politics of trafficking.14 The case of Lebanon earned chapter- length consideration in a pioneering but highly politicized account of “narco- terrorism,” defined by the author as “the use of drug trafficking to advance the objectives of certain governments and terrorist organizations.”15 A handful of penetrating scholarly essays have used Lebanon to illuminate the connection between drugs, militia, and civil war, but they are short and thematic rather than richly detailed.16 As a contributor to the academic and journalistic literature on drug trafficking in various other parts of the world, I hope to fill some of the gaps in our knowledge of this overlooked subject, with a focus on the years 1950 to 1990. I write this study with humility, since I am not a scholar of Lebanese history and can read Arabic and Hebrew sources only in translation. Nonetheless, by pull- ing together a large body of untapped material, I hope to illuminate the inter section of crime, politics, and war in Lebanon and motivate others to shine further light on it. Finding and assessing sources involving criminality and corruption can be difficult and treacherous. I have drawn extensively from archives of formerly secret U.S. government files, supplemented by interviews with retired narcotics agents. Published government reports and academic histories of Lebanon Introduction 5 offered valuable nuggets. I also combed through a large number of contemporary accounts from brave and enterprising reporters, published in more than eighty news outlets in more than a dozen countries. Not surprisingly, given the unique challenge of reporting on the underground economy in the midst of a vicious conflict, these accounts leave holes and may contain errors. Taken together, however, they paint a striking picture of the extraordinary contribution of drug profits to fueling the engines of Lebanon’s civil war. Needless to say, all accounts of the drug trade must be examined skepti- cally. “Lebanon was always awash in rumors and intrigue, so it was very hard to filter out fact from fiction,” one former U.S. drug agent cautioned me. “There were so many competing elements who would disparage each other, floating rumors and disinformation.”17 Skepticism is also warranted toward estimates of the magnitude of the traffic, a matter I discuss in the appendix. Due caution is especially wise given the extreme political passions that drugs arouse. Drug charges have the power not merely to stain individual rep- utations but, in the modern era, to justify wars. In December 1989 the United States launched Operation Just Cause to overthrow the regime of Gen. Manuel Noriega in Panama, citing his affiliations with drug traffickers as a rationale. Not long thereafter, partisans of Israel compared Syria’s leaders to Noriega, calling on Washington to take similar “decisive action” against the allegedly drug-tainted rulers of Damascus.18 In view of these stakes I have tried, however imperfectly, to acknowledge ambiguities in the evidence and to treat one-sided indictments critically.

Divided We Fall Although Lebanon’s flourishing drug trade provided essential resources to sustain and inflame the civil war, and even triggered flash points contributing to the outbreak of full-scale violence in 1975, the major causes of the conflict lay elsewhere. Those causes resist simple explanation, but most experts agree they centered on long-standing, unresolved tensions between Lebanon’s disparate confessional groups and sects, which were aggravated by the polarizing Arab- Israeli conflict and compounded by the destructive interference of Cold War superpowers and their proxies:

The sources of Lebanon’s conflict can also be seen in more political terms, not as a rivalry between confessional communities, but as a competition over the reform of state institutions. This competition was waged between a diverse set 6 Introduction

of political groups divided between a traditional and patrimonial ruling class and competing modernist left-wing and right-wing ideological parties. These actors appealed in their mobilisation strategies both to political platforms and to the diverse and overlapping ethnic and cultural affiliations of Lebanon’s population. The Lebanese civil war originated from the concurrence of this competition with a security crisis induced by Palestinian guerrilla groups. When war broke out in 1975, state authority fragmented and diverse militant parties and local defence groups replaced state security agencies.19

Still other scholars have traced the fault lines in Lebanese politics to the psychological fragility of a society based on minority groups, each insecure of its position after the end of Ottoman and French rule. Insecurity in turn bred a sense of victimization and even paranoia. “Long before the war began,” argues Mounir Elkhamri, “the Lebanese were enmeshed in a political and psychological ‘economy of scarcity’ which left everyone feeling both vulnerable and opportunistic, and thus prone to aggressiveness.”20 Lebanon was a unique half-Christian, half-Muslim enclave carved out of the remains of the Ottoman Empire. Within the region known as Greater Syria, Christians were a small minority. They consisted mainly of Greek Orthodox living in Beirut and Catholic Maronites who occupied fortified villages on Mount Lebanon. As far back as 1861 the Maronites sought the protection of Christian Eu- rope, convincing France to intervene on their side in a dispute with members of the Druze, a monotheistic religious sect indigenous to the region. As a result, the Maronites won a degree of local autonomy. After World War I, with the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Maronites again appealed to France; the Clemen ceau government, having imposed a protectorate over Syria under a mandate from the League of Nations, carved out Greater Lebanon. Its enlarged borders, including the mostly Shiite Bekaa Valley, encompassed an all-too-slight Chris- tian majority—enough to aggrieve Muslims, who had long enjoyed majority status under the Ottomans, but not enough to alleviate Christian apprehensions about becoming outnumbered. Under French administration, Maronites dominated local government, the army, the courts, and licensed businesses. They enjoyed access to the best schools, including French language instruction that was essential for political, social, or business advancement.21 “Of all the Christian communities in the country,” notes Walid Khalidi, the Maronites were “the most conscious of their group identity, the best organized politically and militarily, and the most articulate and militant.”22 Introduction 7

France finally granted Lebanon its independence in November 1943. Pre- paring for that day, Christian and Muslim leaders hammered out an agreement called the National Pact, a power-sharing arrangement along confessional lines. It divided the spoils of government based on the country’s last official census in 1932, which gave the Christians a slight edge in population. Under the pact, Christians claimed the country’s powerful presidency, which had veto power over legislation, the power to appoint the prime minister, and the right to pre- side over a council of ministers. Sunni Muslims had a lock on the prime minister’s office. The speaker of parliament was reserved for a Shiite Muslim. Within the parliament, or Chamber of Deputies, Christians were to outnumber Mus- lims and Druze six to five. Just as important, Lebanon’s army, the final arbiter of political power, was always commanded by a Christian general, as was the powerful head of military intelligence (Deuxième Bureau). The National Pact attempted to preserve social peace by giving each of the country’s major confessional groups a say in governance, while reassuring the Christians of their local privileges and security in a region of Muslims. Orig- inally a symbol of mutual compromise, it ultimately became a major source of popular grievances. At bottom it signified not a healthy spirit of collaboration but the deep and lingering distrust between Lebanon’s various groups. It con- tinuously reinforced each individual’s sense of belonging to a sect or religious community first and a country second. Its rigid formula, unresponsive to the country’s political and demographic evolution, froze political inequalities into place. As a result, Lebanon’s “constrained democracy” offered few good political avenues for challenging glaring economic and social inequities.23 Last but not least, the pact tended to perpetuate the status quo of pervasive clientelism and corruption in Lebanese political and social relations. These ills were fed by personal loyalties to family, clan, and village that outweighed loyalty to the state or nation. The system sustained a privileged class of political bosses, many of them from powerful landowning families, known as the zuama. As these elites competed for power, wealth, and status, their ability to command the loyalty of entire communities generated social strife and helped to keep the country fragmented.24

Regional Conflicts Aggravating Lebanon’s internal tensions were a series of regional political and military storms that battered Lebanon like a small buoy in a large and violent ocean. Lebanon was still in its infancy as an independent state when Jewish 8 Introduction nationalists defeated Arab armies and created the state of Israel. More than one hundred thousand Palestinian refugees fled north to Lebanon, where they settled—supposedly only temporarily—in United Nations–sponsored refugee camps. Native Lebanese felt torn between sympathy for their fellow Arab victims, resentment at the sheer number and growing influence of these foreigners, and disagreement over the proper course of relations with Israel. Regional Arab nationalism and Cold War proxy rivalries also widened Leb- anon’s political divisions. In 1956 Israel, France, and Great Britain seized the Suez Canal, making Egyptian President Gamel Abdel Nasser an instant hero to Arab nationalists, including many Lebanese Muslims. Fear of pan-Arab radicalism gripped conservative monarchies in the region and their American and British patrons, who formed a regional working group in Beirut to combat the perceived new threat.25 Within Lebanon the Americans found an ally in President Camille Chamoun, a French-educated former diplomat and strong defender of Christian privilege, who conspicuously supported Western intervention against Nasser.26 With Chamoun’s backing, the CIA poured cash into the June 1957 Lebanese parliamentary elections to back pro-Western candidates against Nasserite rivals. Unfortunately, the heavy-handed intervention cost many traditional Muslim leaders their seats, provoking cries of outrage. Mean- while, a bungled coup attempt in Damascus by the CIA and British intelligence prompted Syria first to invite teams of Russian advisers and then to accept a federal union with Egypt—the United Arab Republic—which alarmed both Lebanese Christian leaders and the Eisenhower administration.27 Lebanon’s religious fault lines began slipping conspicuously. Emboldened Muslims rioted in the spring of 1958 when an antigovernment newspaper editor was murdered and rumors circulated that President Chamoun planned to amend the Constitution to run for a second term. In July pro-Soviet Iraqi army officers seized power in Baghdad and murdered the royal family. Terrified that he would become the next victim of Arab radicalism, Chamoun declared a state of emergency. President Eisenhower acted quickly to reaffirm the relevance of U.S. power in the oil-rich region and “see that the Persian Gulf area stays within the Western orbit,” as he put it to the British prime minister. Eisenhower ordered the Sixth Fleet offshore and landed fourteen thousand marines in Beirut. Under occupation the Chamber of Deputies elected the respected army commander Fuad Chehab, a moderate reformer, to replace Chamoun as president in September. Calm returned as popular fears of a Chamoun dictatorship dis- sipated. The marines soon withdrew without a fight. But as former CIA officer Introduction 9

Victor Marchetti noted, “What had been perhaps the most stable state in the Middle East was on the road to total polarization and eventual disintegration.”28 Ironically, while Western intervention on behalf of Lebanon’s Maronite leadership had helped trigger the crisis, it was the Maronites who emerged feeling especially insecure. President Chehab, himself a Maronite, disturbed hard- core co-religionists by appointing large numbers of Muslims to a government of reconciliation. Christian leaders were keenly aware of the demographic tide favoring Muslims and the political tide seemingly favoring Nasserism. “Long- term trends in Lebanon clearly favor some increase in Moslem influence and greater identification with Arab nationalism in general,” noted a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate on Lebanon in 1960. Although the assessment did not predict a serious attempt by Lebanon’s Muslims either to unite with the UAR or to suppress “pro-West or Christian elements,” it cited

considerable apprehension, not only among Christians, that the next parliament will be dominated by Moslem extremists bent on destroying the delicate balance of the confessional system. Many Christian politicians fear that UAR influence and money, chiefly originating in Syria, will be used to bring this about, with the aim of controlling Lebanon if not actually absorbing it. They insist that strong Western support is needed to enable their forces to rally and to counter the trend.29

Chehab and his successor, Charles Helou, ran relatively technocratic governments that presided over rising prosperity. Relying heavily on the military intelligence service, the Deuxième Bureau, they undercut the power of traditional political bosses. Under their leadership, and with the help of a regional petroleum boom, Beirut strengthened its position as the Arab world’s financial center and a major trading hub. Their administrations brought roads, schools, and electric power to long-neglected Shiite villages for the first time.30 Had reforms continued and the wider region remained calm, Lebanon might have healed or at least coped with many of its social divisions. Unfortunately, the Six Day War of 1967 shattered any such prospects. In addition to inflaming the passions of many Arabs, the fighting and its aftermath galvanized Palestinian refugees in Lebanon to escalate their guerrilla raids and terror attacks against Israel. Israel, in turn, launched devastating reprisal raids that exposed the impotence of Lebanon’s military. Responding to Israeli pressure, the Lebanese government attempted to crack down on Palestinian commandos. The army skirmished with Palestin- ians throughout much of 1969, antagonizing many Lebanese Muslims without 10 Introduction decisive results. That November, in Cairo, Al Fatah leader Yasir Arafat reached an agreement with the Lebanese army, calling off the fighting, and supposedly reining in the guerrillas, but giving the Palestinians substantial autonomy over their camps in southern Lebanon. Many Christians, including Pierre Gemayel, Maronite leader of the Phalange (Kataeb) Party, bitterly opposed the agreement. As Palestinian raids and Israeli reprisals continued, animosity grew between the Christians, who favored using the army to crack down on the unwelcome Pales- tinians, and Lebanese Muslims, who sympathized with their cause. This destabilizing influence of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute on Lebanese politics and society deepened after the expulsion of Palestinian militants from Jordan in late 1970, following their failed attempt to overthrow the Hashemite monarchy. The arrivals of thousands of new guerrillas swelled Palestinian numbers in Lebanon to about four hundred thousand. Many radicals felt no obligation to abide by the Cairo Accord. They arrogantly challenged the Christian-led Lebanese army, kept southern Lebanon in turmoil, and drove a further wedge between fearful Christians and Muslims. The government of Suleiman Franjieh (1970–76), a corrupt and relatively unsophisticated Maronite strongman, proved woefully inadequate to the growing challenge.

Social and Economic Disparities Compounding these political divisions were social grievances born of great disparities of wealth and development. An American visitor in 1950 remarked, “There are only two classes of people in Beirut, the very rich and the very poor, no middle-class.”31 In 1965 former president Chehab told the Beirut newspaper Le Soir in his first public statement after leaving office, “18 percent of the population control 60 percent of the national income; the remaining 82 percent of the population own only 40 percent of the income. So, is it logical to expect the rising generations—the generations of high education, the transistor era and the era of television and other information media—to keep quiet about this unfair distribution of wealth?”32 The inequality was particularly notable between groups; Lebanese Christians, for example, on average earned 58 percent more than the country’s Shiites.33 Decadent rich who played alongside abject poverty made these inequalities all the more glaring. “Beirut’s sweet life,” one journalist observed in 1971,

seems to be getting sweeter all the time. In an area increasingly turning to puri- tanical revolutionary regimes, Beirut remains the last of the Middle East fleshpots, Introduction 11

frivolous and rollicking. . . . In Beirut, men have made fortunes bringing in arms through the free port, indifferent as to whether they end up in the hands of roy- alists or revolutionaries, Palestinians or Israelis. In Beirut, too, men prosper by importing blondes from Europe who are agreeable—for a pretty penny indeed— to spend three to six months as concubines for oil-wealthy desert sheiks. . . . In Beirut, the Saudi prince doffs his desert robes and dons his well-cut suit from Saville Row, and his wife sheds her long black veil for the latest Parisian fashions.34

Only a few miles from Beirut’s luxury high-rise apartments and world-class restaurants, however, were squalid Shiite slums and Palestinian refugee camps. Druze villages without power or telephone service lay only an hour’s drive from the country’s sophisticated international financial and trade center.35 Such divisions encouraged identity politics, based either on shared grievances or shared fear of losing privileges. Affluent Christians could not help but be alarmed at the specter of huge numbers of poor Muslims living in Beirut’s “misery belt,” absorbing the radical doctrines espoused by Palestinian activists. The start of the civil war itself is typically dated by historians to April 1975, when a bloody clash between Christian militia and Palestinian commandos unleashed an orgy of violence that soon engulfed all groups in the country. The war is frequently characterized as having three major phases: 1975–77, which saw fierce fighting in Beirut leading to the city’s division between Christian and Muslim sectors across the “green line”; 1978–82, a period of escalated fighting, involving both Syrian and Israeli forces, culminating in Israel’s massive invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon; and 1983–90, during which Israel sponsored a Christian-led army in the South, the Shiite Hezbollah emerged as a radical force, and Syria tightened its control over major parts of the country, ultimately wielding its power to enforce an imper- fect political accord. Unlike many civil wars, spawned by an ambitious insurgent group’s effort to radically change or overthrow the state, Lebanon’s had a peculiarly defensive character—fueled by group distrust that morphed into hatred and threw the country back into a Hobbesian state of nature. In the ensuing melee there were no hard-and-fast rules. Temporary alliances formed across confessional or sectarian lines, while murderous rivalries among presumed allies claimed numerous victims. As we will see, one of the few shared interests that encouraged intergroup cooperation during the long conflict was the same drug trade that financed the violence. 12 Introduction

State Failure and Civil War Lebanon’s plight became an ugly universal metaphor for grotesque communal violence and terror. As William Harris notes, the French dictionary Larousse in 1991 may have been the first reference work to define the word Lebanoniza- tion (“Libanisation”) to mean the “process of fragmentation of a state, as a result of confrontation between diverse communities.”36 Its only parallel was the term Balkanization to describe the divided and warring communities in southern Europe. Lebanon’s agonies, like those of the Balkans, aroused renewed interest after 9/11, with the recognition that weak and failed states could become breeding grounds for international terrorism, transnational crime, and other threats to order and security.37 Policy makers and scholars have also become increasingly aware of the reverse—the growing power of criminal organizations to corrupt state institutions and subvert the rule of law. The result may be weakened states, the rise of criminal “shadow states,” and at the extreme, state failure and un- checked violence.38 I hope with this study of Lebanon to accelerate the nascent investigations of these connections. As Peter Andreas has complained, “The criminalized dimensions of intrastate conflicts . . . tend to be neglected, underexplored, or treated too narrowly and one-dimensionally by students of world politics. . . . More broadly, Security Scholars have traditionally shied away from examining the ‘covert world.’ . . . Smugglers, arms traffickers, and quasi-private criminal combatants are typically not treated as central players. This is strikingly apparent by the virtual absence of these actors from the pages of the leading international relations and security journals.”39 I also aim to shed light on the causes of civil war and state failure. Case studies of state failure—or, as Lebanon’s example is sometimes termed, state collapse—typically identify several common syndromes that afflict societies in its aftermath: the tendency of people to seek protection in familiar kin, ethnic, linguistic, or confessional groups once the wider bonds of social trust have been shattered; the growth of militia, paramilitary groups, and even foreign military forces to fill the vacuum left by the demise of state security forces; the creation of “quasi-states” as these new armed groups organize and defend territories within the former state; and—most relevant to this study—the emergence of “war economies,” based on predation, smuggling, and other criminal activities, to support their ongoing military enterprise.40 As we will see, Leba- non exemplified all of these characteristics during its civil war. Introduction 13

Civil conflict is, of course, both a potential cause and a frequent consequence of state failure. One influential and provocative school of economists has argued that social and political grievances typically assumed to be the causes of civil wars are usually smokescreens for baser motives—greed, for short. In particular these analysts highlight competition over rents from valuable primary commodities—such as oil, blood diamonds, or timber—as motivating such conflicts. Lebanon’s civil war provides plenty of grist for a test of this thesis. As we will see, the verdict is mixed. But the drug trade did weaken the legitimacy of state institutions and contributed to intergroup conflict before the outbreak of civil war. Once the war began, Lebanon’s illicit “war economy” both enabled and helped motivate a prolongation of the country’s deadly conflict. The proceeds of the country’s drug trade, estimated at up to a billion dollars a year, provided militia leaders with the resources to pay their fighters a regular salary and arm them with the best weapons—assault rifles, armored vehicles, rocket-propelled grenades, and artillery—that money could buy on the gray and black markets. In time the competition over drug profits became a key driver of positional battles between rival armies that jockeyed for control over routes and ports through which drugs were transported. 1 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon

the year was 1950. Charles Siragusa, one of only a handful of elite overseas agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, arrived in Beirut on September 7 to personally investigate one of the world’s major—but least known—drug markets. A veteran of the Office of Strategic Services, the World War II forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, Siragusa headed the FBN’s “Italian squad” in New York after the war. He then shipped off to Rome, where he searched for clues to Mafia control of the Italian heroin trade.1 Now he was tracking narcotics back to their source in the Middle East. Posing as a rich New York racketeer, Siragusa found evidence of drugs within hours of landing in Beirut. Acting on a tip, he visited the Victory Bar, a seedy but full-service establishment that catered to American sailors and oil pipeline workers in the Middle East. The owner, a paunchy, gregarious Arme- nian named Artin Guedikian, accepted Siragusa’s cover story and was soon quoting prices by the kilo for opium, heroin, and hashish, a highly potent drug made from the marijuana plant. Guedikian happily regaled Siragusa with stories of his many satisfied customers, like one U.S. Air Force major who smuggled enough hashish to Cairo to finance the opening of a new automobile dealership in California. The bar owner, who boasted of smoking hashish with his many “policeman friends,” explained that modest payments of baksheesh to customs officials protected his outbound shipments from Beirut. Astonished by the brazen nonchalance of his unwitting informant, Siragusa reported back to headquarters: “The unbelievable situation here enables me to understand what tremendous quantities of narcotic drugs and hasheesh reach our shores, and there is very little we can do to stop it!”2

14 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 15

A couple of days later, Guedikian and two of his nephews hired a taxi to show Siragusa around the heart of Lebanon’s drug country—the Bekaa Valley. In the ancient city of Baalbek, the administrative center of the northern Bekaa, Guedikian introduced Siragusa to a major wholesaler of hashish and opium, whose villa backed onto a “large plantation” of marijuana. Promising to do more business if satisfied, the undercover agent bought large drug samples— just over a kilo of opium and a brick of hashish—for a mere $115. Once the deal was completed, they stepped into another room to admire the drug seller’s arsenal of machine guns and pistols before parting as new friends. Returning to Beirut, they stopped along the highway at a roadside shed selling grapes. Guedikian asked the proprietor if he had any marijuana. The man took them a few hundred yards off the road where they “came upon a field of marijuana 4' in height,” Siragusa reported. “The plantation was so large, I could not see the end of it. It extended all the way up to the mountainside. . . . It was a tremendous farm.” The congenial farmer—smoking a cigarette, wearing a white undershirt and scarf, and carrying a gun—posed with Siragusa and Guedikian for a group photo in his field of waist-high hemp plants.3 Siragusa would have loved nothing better than to turn the whole lot of them in. An experienced American diplomat based in Beirut set him straight. The major-league dealers whom Siragusa had proudly identified were pikers compared to the country’s real drug lords. And they were easy to infiltrate because they had nothing, absolutely nothing, to fear. Siragusa learned that the biggest marijuana farmer in Lebanon was also the biggest landowner in the Bekaa Valley, one Sabri Hamadeh. But his power extended far beyond the Bekaa thanks to his political machine:

Sabri Bey HAMEDE is the President of the Chamber of Deputies, the richest and greatest landowner in the Bekaa district. The eight deputies, representing his district, were hand-chosen by him. One of these deputies is Ibrahim HAIDAR, who is an independently wealthy land owner. The other deputies in this district were alleged to have paid up to 250,000 Lebanese Lira for their positions. . . . The voting public always votes into office the ticket drawn up by HAMEDE. In reality, HAMEDE is the feudal lord of his district.

Allied with Hamadeh, according to Siragusa’s embassy informant, was Ahmed el Asad, the richest landowner in southern Lebanon, also a member of the Chamber of Deputies and Minister of Public Works. “Asad controls the South Lebanon district in which area are located the small ports of Tyre and 16 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon

Sidon,” Siragusa learned. “The hashish produced from the marihuana farms in Bekaa valley is transported to these ports, from where it is smuggled by small boats to Alexandria, Egypt for the rich Cairo market. The hasheesh that is smuggled into the United States may come from Alexandria, Egypt or directly from Beirut, Lebanon.” The clincher was that both men, in turn, were allegedly allied with the country’s Maronite president, Bechara Khoury, and its Sunni prime minister, Riad Sulh. “Since . . . these corrupt politicians derive tremendous profits from the production of hashish, they would look with extreme disfavor upon any overt or covert act on the part of a foreign representative, particularly an Ameri- can, to disrupt their financial status,” Siragusa explained. Should any policeman make a drug arrest, “Hamede would undoubtedly order the summary dismissal of such a police official and possibly have the man murdered. I would be murder victim number 2.”4

The “Petroleum of Lebanon” Cannabis—or hemp—has been used as a productive source of food and fiber in many lands for centuries. But hashish, a potent, psychoactive drug formed from the plant’s resin, has been called “the petroleum of Lebanon.”5 It became the most valuable of Lebanon’s export cash crops, which included silk, olive oil, and tobacco.6 By the late nineteenth century, Egypt was the world’s largest market for hashish, supplied mostly by Greek farmers and traders. When the Greek government banned cultivation around the end of World War I, production shifted to Greater Syria, including today’s Lebanon.7 Lebanese farmers began growing cannabis in the 1920s, under the French mandate, to avoid economic ruin after the local silk industry collapsed in the face of competition from Japanese silk and synthetic rayon.8 Hashish production was then—and still is—centered in the fertile Bekaa Valley, an area rich in Roman ruins, as well as fruits, vegetables, and other crops. Running for about seventy-five miles, the Bekaa is sandwiched between the Leb- anon and Anti-Lebanon mountains. Its relatively dry climate—often hot but with morning dew—suits the hardy cannabis plant.9 Hemp grown there produces copious quantities of the sticky resin used to make hashish. Local farmers, mostly Shiites, sow the seeds in March or April, apply fertilizer and irrigation when available, and reap the shoulder-high plants in September or October. Several days of drying and storage, followed by threshing and beating of the fe- Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 17 male plants in a closed room or barn, produce resin dust that is collected, sifted, and pressed into cakes or bricks of high-grade hashish. Each acre raises about a ton of cannabis, enough for thirty-five to sixty pounds of potent hashish. A top Lebanese police official once estimated that during the French Man- date—from the 1920s to mid-1940s—“more than 50% of the Lebanese economy depended upon the production of hashish.”10 By 1928, Bekaa farmers were producing an estimated sixty tons of hashish annually, 90 percent for export to Egypt.11 Smugglers moved bricks of hashish aboard ships, trucks, and camels herded by Bedouin tribesmen through Palestine, with the connivance of senior Egyptian police and customs officials and some members of the British military.12 Corrupt French officials and detectives of the Lebanese Sûreté (Public Security) also took advantage of their position by smuggling drugs in official vehicles or taking bribes to let drugs pass through checkpoints. Driving this profitable commerce were politically connected Lebanese hashish growers such as Agriculture Minister Ibrahim Haidar, who benefited not only from French training in agronomy but also from French irrigation projects in the Bekaa.13 Other Lebanese notables, who were not personally implicated in the business, defended the hashish trade as a boon to the rural population. As the president’s son, Raymond Eddé, told a French official in 1939, “we do not understand . . . why the Mandate prohibits the cultivation of hashish, a source of income for our ‘villagers.’” French authorities were loathe to risk alienating powerful local elites, whose support they needed for effective governance, by cracking down too hard on the source of their income and patronage. In effect, official corruption became an instrument of colonial rule.14 During World War II, public security forces in Lebanon conducted hashish eradication campaigns with considerable fanfare but insignificant results.15 In March 1944 the new government of Lebanon warned that it was “determined to take drastic measures towards the destruction of all Hashish plantations by means of the Gendarmerie and the Police Forces.” But members of the Brit- ish Security Mission, who gave assistance, admitted privately that they had to apply “considerable direct pressure . . . on a reluctant Gendarmerie” to get any action, particularly given the challenges of trying to tame the “utterly lawless area” inhabited by fierce and well-armed tribes in the northern valley. A Brit- ish report on the 1944 campaign noted that cannabis was being planted “on a greater scale than ever before” and that “the present scale of punishment for infractions of the Anti-Narcotic Laws is far too low to act as a deterrent.” In particular, the weak laws and trivial fines did nothing to “discourage the large 18 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon landowner, middle man and smuggler” or the “big dealer who at present enjoys complete immunity.” Instead, “it is the poor labourer working for the big landowner who gets punished as he is always put forward as the grower and his em- ployer escapes.”16 That year, however, authorities did intercept a large shipment of hashish into Palestine, allegedly belonging to the secretary of parliament and the head of Lebanon’s internal security forces.17 The domination of hemp cultivation in the Bekaa Valley by large land owners followed the feudal traditions of Lebanese agriculture. As Siragusa reported, major growers enjoyed the protection and patronage of the speaker of Lebanon’s Chamber of Deputies, Sabri Hamadeh, a Shiite and one of the most powerful of the region’s political bosses, representing the northern town of Hermel. The dynastic clan he led traced its roots back to the fifteenth century.18 As the price for their “protection,” powerful political leaders, Christian as well as Muslim, extorted a substantial share of the hashish crop from local farmers.19 Much of the actual smuggling was handled by small-time gangsters allied with large landowners and wealthy merchants.20 After Lebanon achieved independence, notes Michael Johnson, “the security forces and police often turned a blind eye to hashish smuggling, gun running, prostitution and protection rackets, in order to win over the support of criminal networks which had previously gained protection from the za’ims (feudal elite).”21 An American diplomat who surveyed the state of Lebanon’s drug market in 1948 confirmed how deeply it implicated Lebanon’s political class:

The principal offenders are undoubtedly the Shia Deputies Ibrahim Haidar and the present President of the Parliament, Sabri Hemade, whose constituents are the main source of this drug. . . . During the Mandate, and later during the war period, these two leaders were kept in check by the French and British authorities. . . . Since the withdrawal of Allied troops in December of 1946, the cultivation of Indian hemp, from which the drug is derived, has increased in alarming proportions. Fields of hemp are now visible from the highway near Hermel and Baalbek. During a recent hunting trip near the domains of Ibrahim Haidar, I had occasion to talk to the nephew of the latter, one Mustapha Haidar, who explained the procedure by which the Government authorities exercised “supervision and control” of the growing of Indian hemp. He explained that when the Govern- ment inspectors are scheduled to arrive at a particular locality, a small area of hemp is roped off. When the inspectors come to the roped off area they write a Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 19

so-called “protocol,” or deposition, concerning the spot surveyed, and submit this report to the Government. After being wined and given baksheesh, the inspectors depart. A fine is paid by the proprietor for the illegal cultivation (of the roped-off area), and everybody is satisfied. Rumor in Beirut has it that many officials are implicated in the distribution of hashish. The French Legation states that persons in the President’s entourage are prominent in this traffic. In any event, the protection enjoyed in high places by the hashish growers is so great that it is not likely that any action can be taken against them under the present regime. In fact, it would take a minor revolution to break up the gang which is now operating in the Lebanese hashish market.22

A year later, one “politically prominent” cannabis grower in the Bekaa Valley, a close kin of Lebanon’s consul in New York, told a similar story to an FBN agent who posed as an American farmer interested in learning the art of cultivating marijuana. The Lebanese planter, surrounded by family and neighbors who ea- gerly chimed in, explained that the government levied insignificant fines on the trade simply to line some officials’ pockets and satisfy the international community. Of late, he complained, hashish producers had fallen on hard times as a result of oversupply, after Hamadeh and other landowners “greatly increased” their acreage planted in hemp.23 In 1950, the wily Hamadeh began promoting a crop eradication campaign, allegedly to reduce the oversupply of hashish and eliminate some “bothersome” competitors.24 Hamadeh, appropriately enough, sat on the parliamentary committee for hashish destruction.25 Others in high office were reportedly implicated as well. Two-term prime minister Riad Sulh was said to have once been an honest man but “joined forces with the ruling and corrupt high echelon and he is now ‘one of the boys.’”26 Abdallah Yafi, another multiterm prime minister, reportedly protected at least one set of father-and-son racketeers and drug traffickers in Beirut.27 He also appointed as minister of agriculture a noted landowner implicated in hashish production.28 As for the notoriously corrupt President Bechara Khoury, who had negotiated the National Pact with Sulh, one U.S. narcotics agent reported in 1949, “The President of the Republic last year [was] talked out of planting hashish in a new apple orchard his American adviser had planted for him.”29 Khoury’s brother and son were widely known to have “a finger in every business deal and every senior governmental appointment and realized money from both.”30 His son Khalil was reportedly caught with one of Lebanon’s leading opium traffickers, Omar Makkouk, by Egyptian police in 1950. To avoid an embarrassing 20 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon scandal, Prime Minister Sulh had to visit Egypt to intercede and prevent judicial action against them.31 By 1950 Lebanon and Syria together were producing about three hundred tons of hashish a year, nearly all for export.32 The size of the traffic was becoming an international scandal. The New York Times called it “a black spot on the record of the Lebanese Republic.” Egypt demanded action by its fellow Arab countries, estimating the value of hashish reaching its streets at $40 million.33 In 1951 Egypt complained to the United Nations that the traffic in Lebanese hashish—much of it through Israel—had become a major drain on the country’s foreign exchange.34

Crop Eradication On occasions when Lebanese government officials ordered raids on cannabis fields to show the world its serious commitment to law and order, local militia put up fierce resistance, causing “dozens of fatalities” each year.35 One abortive attempt by the government in 1947 to send in the army left eighteen soldiers and three peasants dead.36 Political bosses put up fierce resistance, too. In 1951, when Lebanese premier Abdallah Yafi directed army troops to destroy hashish crops in response to Egyptian pressure, “men who had occupied high office went livid with rage,” the New York Times reported.37 Yafi, a Sunni Muslim, particularly provoked powerful members of the Christian Maronite community who dominated the hashish traffic. One of his targets was said to be President Khoury’s son Khalil. Yafi was forced to resign in February 1952 in favor of the more pliable Sami el-Sulh, another prominent Sunni and Riad’s cousin. Sulh, now in his third term as prime minister, surprised the government by giving a blistering speech con- demning President Khoury and his family for crimes including murder, protection of illegal gambling, and hashish trafficking. The ensuing political furor drove Khoury from office but had no lasting effect on the illicit drug traffic.38 In 1954 Yafi returned as prime minister, and the government began its usual summer crop eradication campaign in the hemp fields. The population of Baalbek called a general strike to demand Yafi’s resignation. Peasants in Her- mel and other towns fired on government workers tasked with destroying the plants. When President Camille Chamoun proposed launching a military campaign against some of the growers in the Bekaa Valley the next year—in keeping with his political goal of weakening the power of traditional rural bosses39— his Maronite army commander, Lt. General Fuad Chehab, refused to order air Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 21 strikes and proposed instead an economic development program. The result was business as usual.40 General Chehab’s cousin, Emir (Prince) Farid Chehab, oversaw narcotics enforcement as head of Lebanon’s public security agency, or Sûreté Générale.41 He helped American officials understand the mostly theatrical nature of the hashish eradication program. The annual campaign, he acknowledged, was “not seriously intentioned” and was conducted “strictly” to appease the Egyptian government. Any crop destruction was confined to the smaller plots of non- politicians and poor peasants. “This practice has worked for the benefit of the big landowners since it removes bothersome competition and raises the market price of the latter’s hashish stocks,” Chehab explained. He added that responsibility for ensuring that the big landowners were untouched fell to the chief of the gendarmerie in the Bekaa Valley, who was “an intimate friend of the current Prime Minister” [Sulh].42 Farid Chehab also acknowledged to one senior American drug agent the fu- tility of chasing the kingpins of hashish, who were “the wealthy and the political, including members of Parliament up to and including the President of the Republic [Chamoun] and the Prime Minister [Sami Sulh].”43 Chehab warned that his own men could not be trusted to make cases in an environment of such total corruption.44 Although most of the country’s hashish was exported, police winked at a modest amount of local consumption as well. “U.S. sailors on shore leave in Beirut used hashish,” notes one historian, “as did the American employees of Beirut-based oil companies, who also took cocaine when frequenting the city’s brothels.”45 An FBN agent reported that use of hashish and other narcotics “does not seem confined by limits of social or economic class.” He continued:

There is one hotel in the Place des Canons which literally reeks with the smell of burning hashish throughout the late afternoon, evening and night. . . . On one occasion, the writer saw a man who had been openly sniffing cocaine at a table in a nightclub, walk over to and engage in conversation with a person who was identified by several people to this writer as a high official in the port police.46

The hashish traffic was briefly disrupted by the country’s civil crisis in1958 . Chamoun’s departure as president that September restored a measure of calm. According to one scholar, “Perhaps no better indicator of the return to normal can be found than that, on November 4, custom officials arrested seven persons who were trying to smuggle 1,400 kilograms of hashish out of Lebanon.”47 22 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon

Such arrests were more the exception than the rule, however. In Septem- ber 1960 the Egyptian director of the Permanent Anti-Narcotic Bureau of the Arab League met with Lebanon’s prime minister, Saeb Salam, to request more aggressive measures to eradicate the cannabis crop. As related by a senior U.S. narcotics agent, Salam replied that “it was impossible for him to do anything about this situation because of the political implications.”48 An American news correspondent reported that Egypt’s demand for cooperation was pushing Lebanon reluctantly in the right direction. “Before Mr. Nasser raised his voice against the trade, Lebanese traffickers regarded the antinarcotics drive as a Western, and specifically United States, effort,” he observed. “Such an argument does not prevail in the case of President Nasser. Not only does the Arab trafficker flout the outstanding leader of Arab nationalism if he exports drugs to Egypt; but cooperation with Egyptian authorities in stamp- ing out the traffic bears the stamp of Arab virtue.” But the writer acknowledged the difficulty of changing Lebanon’s ways: “Corrupt elements within the Leba- nese customs service are linked with some politicians and gangster elements to protect and foster the trade. Without the connivance of Lebanese customs, narcotics experts say, Lebanese smuggling would dwindle sharply.” He also cited the strong distrust of authority ingrained in many Lebanese over the centuries, encouraged by “the sharp division of the Lebanese people among rival religious sects and clans.”49 Other observers were equally discouraged. A senior FBN agent complained flippantly, “You couldn’t throw a tomato into a crowd of Lebanese and not hit a hashish trafficker.”50 A French economic consulting firm hired by the government in the early 1960s reported, in a suppressed study, that “hashish smuggling and prostitution were two major sources of national income.”51 A Time magazine reporter remarked in 1966, “Smuggling of everything from hashish to hand grenades proceeds under the benign eye of the customs inspector, and buying a judge’s opinion is sometimes as easy as buying a crate of Lebanese apples.”52

Bekaa and the Green Plan Nonetheless, the administration of President Charles Helou made a stab at reform in 1966, starting with the firing of thirteen judges and fifty-eight members of the internal security forces suspected of misconduct.53 In the face of “harassment from the hashish lobby,” his government that spring also launched a campaign to suppress the growing of hemp by encouraging the cultivation of Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 23 sunflowers.54 With seeds and technical assistance from France and Syria, a pilot project on 440 acres yielded a much bigger sunflower crop than expected. An edible-oil refinery bought the entire output, eliminating the need for government purchases to prop up the farmers. Enthused by the results, the government fashioned a “Green Plan” to supply seeds, fertilizer, and technical assistance to cannabis farmers to help them switch to sunflowers. But when the entrenched hashish interests in parliament refused to deliver the needed appropriations, Mahmoud Banna, director general of Internal Security, approached the U.S. embassy, pleading for a mere $70,000 to purchase farm machinery needed to make the program a success. Besides reducing Lebanon’s contribution to the international narcotics traffic, he pointed out, the program promised to “reorient” the political thinking of disaffected residents of the northern Bekaa Valley away from Syria and toward Lebanon. The embassy “strongly” supported his request, citing Banna’s integrity and record of cooperation with the United States. The price tag was small, too. “This gesture could bring significant political rewards in an area where radical and anti-U.S. political trends are making headway—quite apart from the encouragement this would give to Banna and the [Government of Lebanon] to keep up the good work,” it advised Washington.55 The Federal Bureau of Narcotics also supported the aid request, noting that support for Lebanon’s Green Plan would “greatly enhance the cooperation provided our agent in Beirut in de- veloping narcotic arrests and seizures in the traffic affecting the United States” and generally “promote conditions more favorable to the effective suppression of the morphine base traffic responsible for much of the heroin addiction in the United States.”56 But drug enforcement ranked low on Washington’s list of foreign priorities, with the Cold War in full swing and the Vietnam War rapidly escalating. The State Department begged off, explaining that the Agency for International De- velopment had no funds for such programs. Officials conferred with the Rocke feller and Ford Foundations, but they too declined. After months of silence, the State Department informed the Beirut embassy that it should reply that the U.S. government “regrets very much that it has been unable [to] respond to [Ban- na’s] request or to tap sources outside government that might be of help in time for [the] 1967 program.”57 Helou’s government pressed ahead. Despite its limited resources, nearly a thousand farmers ultimately received payments to undertake crop substitution.58 Production of sunflower seeds soared from fifty tons to twenty-six hun- 24 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon dred tons, while hemp cultivation plummeted from six thousand hectares to five hundred.59 At least, that was the official story. Skeptics, who abounded, noted that “the significance of all these figures is rather difficult to assess without knowing the size of the farms involved and whether production may not have begun or been increased in other areas,” in the words of one State Department cable. “Certainly it is truth that hashish cultivation continues in Lebanon on a significant scale.”60 As testament to that fact, Egypt complained that Lebanon’s hashish exports actually doubled from 1967 to 1968. A Lebanese newspaper reported in 1971 that the crop substitution program was failing because sunflowers cost more to raise than hemp plants and sold for much less. Lebanese officials privately admitted to international antidrug agencies that “they would not for political reasons induce any financial strains on peasants in the region,” especially given the history of armed conflict over hashish suppression campaigns.61 And many Lebanese frankly saw little harm in the business of growing hemp, which provided thousands of poor families with a livelihood. One former member of parliament from the impoverished Baalbek region declared, “Until there is [a viable substitute], our region will continue to plant. At any rate, people selling hashish are not causing as much harm as those making atomic bombs in many parts of the world.”62

Resisting Arrest An American embassy official in 1970 offered the harshest assessment of Leba- non’s progress in fighting drugs, declaring flatly that “the government’s efforts to convert hashish growers to sunflower growers has so far failed.” With hashish trafficking “built into the Lebanese political system,” the country’s narcotics police simply stood no chance, he maintained. In particular they were denied access to the northern Bekaa Valley, a designated military area, by the gendarmerie who patrolled it with benign neglect toward the traffic. “It is not merely a question of the dependence of recalcitrant tribesmen on their only lucrative crop,” he continued:

The Northern Beka’a is under the political control of the Chehabist machine which has dominated Lebanese politics for the past twelve years. While the Embassy has no documentary evidence, the circumstances suggest that, in return for their electoral and financial support, the politicians from this area have been Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 25

accorded immunity from prosecution for hashish violations. It is generally assumed that a central figure in Lebanon’s hashish traffic is Sabri Hamadeh, deputy from Baalbek and perennial Speaker of Parliament. According to our information, Hamadeh’s son has twice been caught transporting hashish, and twice released when the case was quashed. There are also many security officials who may or may not be members of the Chehabist machine but who are reputedly receptive to bribes from smugglers. They include Customs Director Salhab, Beirut Police Chief Hasan, and Gendarmerie Chief Nawfal. Even if the Chehabists should be ousted in the current presidential election, we would not expect any significant reduction of the hashish traffic. Abdallah Ghafari, a professional hashish smuggler, is a henchman of Chehab’s chief rival, former president Camille Chamoun. No public revulsion against the hashish trade is imminent, since the Leb- anese people are traditionally tolerant of their leaders’ foibles and the use of hashish, although increasing, is not yet a serious social problem here.63

In 1971 Lebanon’s government transferred responsibility for security in the northern Bekaa Valley from the army to the Ministry of Interior. However, At- torney General Michel Tohmeh privately admitted that the change would “have little or no effect on efforts to halt hashish growth.” He said arrests were made mainly of “relatively innocent growers” and “the means were not available to carry out appropriate arrests against the truly guilty cultivators.”64 The untouchability of senior figures in the drug trade became apparent in the wake of a seizure of hashish in Crete in August 1970, which unleashed a major political scandal stirred up by Christian and Druze politicians against their Shi- ite rivals. It all began when California narcotics agents received a tip that two Americans were flying a plane to Lebanon to pick up hashish. With help from Interpol, authorities tracked it to Maine, Greenland, Iceland, Holland, Italy, Cy- prus, and finally Lebanon. The plane landed at a small airstrip near Baalbek and loaded up with hashish after dropping off a shipment of contraband cigarettes. Customs police rushed to the scene, only to be pinned down by gunfire from two dozen armed men, allowing the plane to take off. Greek police finally seized the aircraft when it stopped on their territory for fuel and repairs. It was carrying nearly fifteen hundred pounds of hashish worth about 3$ .5 million.65 Several days later the Druze interior minister, Kamal Jumblatt, implicated two unnamed members of the Chamber of Deputies, “one of whom occupies 26 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon a very important position.” The first was evidently the Shiite speaker of parliament, Sabri Hamadeh, who angrily accused the minister of suffering from “a grandeur complex” and engaging in a political vendetta. The other alleged culprit was the deputy representing Baalbek, Niaf al-Masri. Masri insisted that the American plane landed near his house “purely by coincidence” but failed to explain why his son had met the smugglers at the plush Hotel St. Georges in Beirut. Masri tried to deflect his involvement by accusing Jumblatt of hiding wanted criminals at his mountain redoubt, a charge that independent observers found plausible.66 Thanks to their political clout, both Shiite deputies escaped prosecution, though Masri’s son remained a wanted man.67 A member of the U.S. House Foreign Affairs Committee complained in a report the following year that “despite the notoriety given to this seizure, Masri is still untouched and still serves as an active member of the Chamber of Deputies.” The same went for Hamadeh, though he had been identified for many years as “one of the largest hashish growers in Lebanon.”68 To their credit, however, honest members of the Lebanese police arrested a variety of domestic and foreign notables during this period, even if their counterparts in the judiciary often dropped charges.69 In 1971 police at Beirut Inter- national Airport arrested the sons of Lebanon’s army chief of staff and Sûreté chief, traveling together to Frankfurt via Paris with thirty-one kilos of hashish.70 Others arrested during this period included the secretary general of the Egyptian presidency, the partner of a brigadier general from Oman, and a major-general from Sudan. (The latter arrest led to the resignation of the Sudanese vice president and defense minister, who was allegedly implicated.)71

The UN’s Assessment Helou’s successor, President Suleiman Franjieh, maintained the Green Plan but had only limited interest in promoting crop substitution.72 One reason was the continued shortage of international aid. When his government proposed a major expansion of the program to promote rural development, U.S. embassy officials lay low lest they be asked for financial support. Back in Washington an inter- agency working group on Middle Eastern narcotics had decreed that hashish ranked far below opiates on its list of priorities in the “international battle against drugs” and that enforcement should take precedence over crop substitution.73 The Lebanese government’s request to the United Nations for financial and technical support prompted a 1972 study mission by the UN Fund for Drug Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 27

Abuse Control, which produced one of the most comprehensive reports on the state of hemp cultivation in the country. The confidential analysis described the extent of hashish production, the social conditions supporting it, and the financial rewards it brought to cultivators and landowners alike.74 According to the report, hemp fields covered an area of twenty-five hundred square kilometers in the North Bekaa, encompassing the District of Her- mel and the northern part of the District of Baalbek. The impoverished region, dominated by tribal clans, was “a refuge area for outlaws and local people are highly suspicious of the government,” the report observed. “In reality it has been an island of isolation insofar as the Government is concerned.” The region supported no industry, enjoyed no access to agricultural credit or extension services, and had few schools or health facilities. In the poorest areas illiteracy rates for children ran more than 50 percent. Although the area’s alluvial soils were often fertile, the report noted, the lack of developed water resources limited agricultural productivity. Unrestricted goat grazing and widespread tree cutting for fuel frustrated efforts to reforest the area and protect watersheds. Most farmers eked out an existence on parcels of only a few acres—and only 35 percent of the land was owned by those who cultivated it. “Without hashish income the people would not likely have enough for their bare subsistence,” the mission reported. Hashish, which earned farmers an average of twelve hundred Lebanese pounds per acre (and three times as much on irrigated land), had obvious appeal. “An estimated 15,000 persons in the Baalbek-Hermel producing areas are reported to get some income from hashish, whether as growers, processors or traders,” the report noted. “In the heart of the producing areas up to 2/3 of families of the villages are involved in hashish.” But the financial rewards were only part of the story. Hemp cultivation “increased rapidly over the past 10–15 years in great part with the encouragement of certain political leaders who promised the planters that their crop would not be destroyed on condition that leaders would receive one-third of the harvest.”75 Although hashish kept them from starving, poor sharecroppers saw only a tiny share of the profits. Other observers noted that landowners contributed little or nothing toward fertilizer, insecticides, or other inputs.76 Over time, moreover, the grip of Lebanon’s elites on the drug market grew tighter. Writes Brian Evans, “During the 1960s urban financiers and merchants continued to buy estates in the Biqa’ and other rural areas. They expelled the peasants who had worked the land as sharecroppers, preferring to hire Syrians and Palestinians 28 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon as day laborers.” By the mid-1970s, according to Kamal Jumblatt, leader of the Progressive Socialist Party, more than half of all land in the Bekaa belonged to five extended families.77 This tight control reflected an equally dangerous concentration of wealth in the economy as a whole: by one estimate a mere thirteen families controlled half of all companies and capital investment in the entire country.78 Although most of the growers were Shiite, U.S. drug agents were frequently reminded that the Lebanese hashish traffic was protected and even dominated by powerful Maronite interests. In 1966 an American agent tracking the movement of tons of hashish discovered more than he bargained for: a fully equipped printing press for counterfeit bills and $150,000 in counterfeit U.S. currency in the basement of a Maronite church run by the bishop of Baalbek, Abdallah Nujaim. The prelate hopped a plane for Italy, seeking protection in the Vatican, before authorities could issue an arrest warrant. Although stripped of his post, he retained a titular position in the church.79 Another elderly Maronite priest made repeated hashish runs through Montreal airport until an alert customs officer finally arrested him in February 1971.80

Hashish and the Hippie Trail Hashish became an ever more prized crop within Lebanon as new markets opened internationally, making the country a household name among members of the 1960s drug culture. The explosion of pot consumption in affluent countries, particularly in Europe and North America, provided a rich and almost limitless market for prized Lebanese “Red” and “Gold” hashish. Leba- non also became a favorite stop on the “hippie trail” that welcomed cannabis worshippers across an arc stretching from Morocco to Afghanistan and Nepal.81 For serious hashish connoisseurs the trip was worth it. A kilo that sold wholesale in the United States for $1,500 cost as little as $15 in Lebanon.82 The downside was the risk of arrest and imprisonment—a fate that befell at least twenty Americans in 1969 alone, along with an assortment of Western Europeans. “Most did not expect the Lebanese law to be as severe in application as it is, and none anticipated being confined in such crowded and depressing jails as are found in Lebanon,” commented one American diplomat. Also troubling to offenders and the embassy alike was

the inequity involved in the arrest of relatively minor hashish users and small- time smugglers while hashish is openly produced and sold in great quantities Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 29

in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. . . . The large producers, purveyors, and smugglers of hashish seem rarely to be prosecuted. . . . Several Americans have alleged that they informed the Lebanese authorities in detail about those who sold them the hashish, but no arrest has yet come to our attention as a result of this information, and no American has benefitted from this cooperation.83

By the early 1970s, three agents of the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Danger- ous Drugs (BNDD), the successor agency to the FBN, were assigned to Lebanon. They were said to “spend at a minimum sixty percent of their time on problems relating to controlling international trafficking in hashish.”84 As demand exploded in the United States, hashish seizures by U.S. Customs soared from 191 pounds in 1968 to 3,122 pounds in 1970 to 9,456 pounds in 1972.85 The sudden emergence and popularity of ultrapotent hashish oil, first seen by American drug agents in 1971 when Lebanese police seized a fifty-one-kilo shipment, sig- naled a significant expansion of the trade.86 Another sign of the times was the arrest in 1973 of eight suspects—nearly all in their twenties—at a farmhouse in rural Maryland with twelve hundred pounds of Lebanese hashish, the largest quantity confiscated to that time on the East Coast.87 One young entrepreneur who capitalized on the West’s insatiable appetite for mind-altering substances was the charming British rogue Dennis Howard Marks, who spent his years at Oxford smoking copious amounts of dope. He discovered how to turn his pleasurable hobby into a wildly profitable business after bringing cannabis products home from a trip to Afghanistan in the late 1960s. Marks never looked back. Connecting with a crooked Irish Republican Army member from Belfast, Marks began importing Lebanese hashish as early as 1971. One of his sources was an employee of Middle East Airlines who recruited Lebanese diplomats to help smuggle hundreds of kilos of hashish to the Eastern Seaboard of the United States via Paris and Geneva. (The embarkation point for the drugs was the Christian-dominated port of Jounieh.) One of their customers was an Irish American dope dealer who worked for a Mafia crime family in New York. Marks managed to beat one arrest by convincing a jury in 1981 that his work was sanctioned by the British secret service (MI6), for which he was indeed an informant. He went on to create one of the world’s largest smuggling networks, before being arrested in Majorca in 1988 following his indictment in Miami.88 One of Marks’s major U.S. connections was the Brotherhood of Eternal Love, a far-flung drug network named after a religious foundation established 30 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon by the former Harvard professor and “tripper” Timothy Leary. It pioneered the professional smuggling of bulk hashish and other cannabis products to the United States, starting in 1968.89 The Brotherhood enjoyed extraordinary success until November 1971, when one of its members was arrested in Leba- non with eight hundred pounds of hashish. Later investigations showed that the Brotherhood had imported some four thousand kilos of Lebanese hashish into the United States—at a profit of $900 a pound. In all, the roundup of the Brotherhood’s organization led to more than one hundred arrests. Authorities estimated that the colorfully named gang earned $200 million in its heyday.90 Not all of the Brotherhood’s leaders were committed to Leary’s vision of spiritual awakening and emotional healing through tripping, however. One of the ring’s most wanted fugitives was Ronald H. Stark, a New York chemist who mastered the synthesis of LSD and was credited with the Brotherhood’s development of extremely potent hashish oil. In the late 1960s and early 1970s Stark traveled for hashish supplies to the Bekaa Valley, where he allegedly befriended Musa Sadr, an Iranian-born cleric and champion of the dispossessed Shiites.91 To move drugs from the region, Stark teamed up with members of the Sicilian Mafia who imported stolen cars into Palermo with hidden stashes of Lebanese hashish. He also moved loads into Italy aboard yachts. Stark, a master of ten languages, claimed at various times in his career to be Lebanese or Palestinian. He was a mystery man to federal narcotics agents, who never succeeded in prying his file from the FBI. In November 1972 authorities raided one of Stark’s drug labs in Brussels, leading to his indictment the following spring by a federal grand jury. Finally, in 1975, Italian police were led by an anonymous call to arrest him in Bologna, where he was living with his family in a hotel under a false name with a fake British passport. Although suspected of murky involvement with Italian neofascists, secret service agents, and Palestinian terrorists, Stark by 1979 was a free man, released by a magistrate who declared, “Many circumstances suggest that from 1960 onwards Stark belonged to the American secret services.” Arrested again in Holland in possession of sixteen kilos of hashish, he was deported to the United States, only to be released when the Justice Department claimed it was too late to make a case against him.92 Lebanese hashish also made its way in quantity to Australia, which had a large population of Christian Lebanese expatriates and a consuming public dialed into the same cultural revolution that had swept the United States and Europe in the 1960s. Catering to the needs of Australia’s Lebanese hashish im- Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon 31 porters was a new Sydney-based bank called Nugan Hand, founded in 1973 by an Australian lawyer and an American former Green Beret and CIA contract operative. Specializing in tax evasion, money laundering, arms dealing, and drug trafficking, Nugan Hand hired a Lebanese immigrant, George Shaw, to seek deposits from drug traffickers, including Lebanese hash dealers and Chi- nese heroin merchants. It offered them secret accounts, offshore payments, and protection from tax authorities. “The whole purpose,” Shaw later testified, “was to attract people with ‘black money’ and to assure them that their anonymity would be preserved.” Nugan Hand reportedly even opened some kind of office in Lebanon to facilitate services to such depositors. But the bank collapsed in 1980 after its cofounder, Frank Nugan, committed suicide, leaving behind an enduring mystery about its alleged international intelligence connections.93

President Franjieh’s International Incident Lebanon’s most politically explosive smuggling case, which created an international incident, was one that never happened. It occurred in November 1974 when Lebanon’s president, Suleiman Franjieh, flew to New York to address the United Nations, as a representative of the Arab League, in an effort to win observer status for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). In his entourage were the cream of Lebanon’s political and social elite: two former presidents, four former prime ministers, and three former speakers of the Chamber of Deputies. Tipped off that Franjieh’s delegation might try to smuggle hashish into the country, U.S. Customs officials subjected the delegation’s baggage to repeated searches by drug-sniffing dogs—viewed by many Arabs as unclean animals. They found nothing. Convinced that the humiliation was a crude political signal of Washington’s disapproval of his administration, Franjieh called off a planned visit with President Ford. The American ambassador privately described Franjieh’s fury as “almost irrational.” Washington issued an apology, blaming the incident on “an unfortunate misunderstanding.”94 In Lebanon the incident gave ammunition to fierce critics of Franjieh, such as Raymond Eddé, whose political attacks reached a level of acrimony that the U.S. embassy termed “unusual by even Lebanese standards,” and which undercut the cabinet’s “task of coming to effective grips with Lebanon’s myriad domestic and external problems.”95 The tip was at least superficially plausible, given the Franjieh family’s un- seemly history. As former U.S. intelligence operative Wilbur Crane Eveland observed, “Among other rackets, gun running, dope smuggling, and extortion filled 32 Hashish, the Petroleum of Lebanon

Suleiman Franjieh’s family coffers.” In 1972 Franjieh reportedly took a $3,000 bribe to arrange the release of an American imprisoned for hashish smuggling. Franjieh’s son Tony, minister of post and telegraph during his father’s presidency, was notorious for his involvement in the hashish trade and for taking bribes in exchange for contracts and licenses.96 In 1984 a reporter with good sources in the DEA told a congressional committee that “private armies under the control of the pro-Syrian Frangieh family in the Bekaa Valley . . . rely on narcotics for as much as half of their treasury.”97 But according to the DEA’s senior agent in Lebanon in 1974, Victor Maria, the tip that so embarrassed the Lebanese government did not come from his shop but rather, he deduced, via the CIA. Embassy officials discussed it prior to Franjieh’s departure in a meeting at the U.S. ambassador’s office and agreed the claim was implausible. “There was no reason why the president of Lebanon would want to put himself in that position,” Maria recalled. To prevent any possibility of an incident, the embassy passed the information along to Franjieh’s chief of staff before the president’s entourage left Lebanon. The CIA was put in charge of liaising with the appropriate U.S. and Lebanese agencies. Maria was shocked by what then transpired in New York. In response to demands from a senior Lebanese security official for an explanation, Maria was authorized to say only that the source was an “informant outside Lebanon who has long been [a] reliable source of information for U.S. authorities on international narcotics control matters.” He surmised that the false tip came from a certain country neighboring Lebanon that opposed Franjieh’s mission to plead the PLO’s case before the United Nations.98 If so, it was an adept but poisonous piece of disinformation that further weakened the Lebanese government on the critical eve of the outbreak of civil war. 2 The French Connection

lebanon owed its emergence as a center of drug trafficking more to geography and history than anything special about its soils. The country’s location had made it a hub of commerce and smuggling for millennia. As the president of the International Chamber of Navigation of Beirut noted, “Beirut Port stands as the nearest port to any of the capital cities of the Arab Hinterland. Therefore, and in spite of all obstacles . . . it will always be more profitable for Arab traders to use Beirut Port than their own national ports” for trade.1 Historical developments reinforced Beirut’s commercial position in the nineteenth century. Beirut established itself as early as the 1820s as the leading port serving Damascus, a thriving Ottoman metropolis described by one French commercial memoir in 1826 as “the trade entrepôt of the East Indies, Persia, China, and the whole of Arabia.” The 1830s saw the rapid expansion of Beirut as a commercial center connecting Syria to Europe, including the French port of Marseille.2 French capital played a decisive role in Beirut’s growth and thus the direction of its trade. In 1863 a French company completed a road connecting Beirut to Damascus—the only carriageway in Syria at the time—reinforcing Beirut’s position as “the unrivaled port-city . . . of the Syrian coast.”3 Bei- rut’s importance grew even more toward the end of the century thanks to French engineers who created a modern port and a rail line linking the city with Damascus. The rapid expansion of commerce in turn encouraged the development of banking services. The city’s liberal atmosphere and range of entertainments made it an even more attractive place for people of means to do business—illicit as well as licit.4

33 34 The French Connection

Leveraging those commercial assets, Lebanon was inducted into the big leagues of drug-trafficking nations through the dubious agency of its French overseers, who made Beirut the administrative center of their Mandate after World War I. Just as Lebanon’s public administration, currency, and economy were tied to France, so was a significant portion of its drug market. This connection gave Lebanon unique entrée into the lucrative trade in opiates that French gangsters developed on a truly global scale. Even after Lebanon obtained its independence, it retained close political, business, and cultural links to the former mandate power,5 which facilitated the flow of opiates through Lebanon to France and on to world markets. “Close economic personal ties between the French and Lebanese [traffickers] prevail from the days when that territory was under the French flag,” reported one senior FBN agent in 1960.6 As with other sectors of Lebanese society, the French drug connection particularly privileged Lebanon’s Maronite traffickers, both during the Mandate and after independence. Fluent in both French and Arabic, these traffickers made ideal intermediaries between French criminals, Syrian smugglers and Turkish opium producers. The so-called French Connection, made famous by the 1969 book by Robin Moore and 1971 movie starring Gene Hackman, flourished for decades. In1930 , for example, agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics discovered 612 kilos of heroin and morphine smuggled aboard the Atlantic passenger liner Ile de France.7 The original suppliers of this loose-knit connection were French pharmaceutical laboratories. They produced morphine both for the licit medical market and the criminal U.S. narcotics syndicate run by the New York gangster Arnold Rothstein, the primary supplier to American addicts after passage of the Harrison Narcotics Act in 1914. American gangsters flocked to France after Prohibition to order champagne, cognac, and fine wines; French morphine and heroin soon entered the same smuggling pipeline.8 The French labs in turn re- lied on opium from poppies grown in the Anatolian highlands of Turkey and smuggled through Syria to Lebanon for export by ship. It was a classic case of a neocolonial periphery supplying raw materials for value-added manufacturing in the center. French improvements to regional transportation infrastructure smoothed the way for this commerce.9 Even in the earliest days of the French connection, the traffic was dominated by clannish Corsican-born gangsters and sailors, who migrated with hundreds of thousands of others from their impoverished island to the bustling port of The French Connection 35

Marseille. This former Phoenician seaport became a center for smuggling not only drugs but cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, counterfeit currency, and other contraband. Its first legendary crime boss was Paul Carbone, who got his start in the drug underworld by supplying muscle for the Turkish operations of the international smugglers George and Elias Eliopoulos.10 The Eliopoulos brothers, who “virtually monopolized world narcotic traffic” from 1929 to 1931, supplied heroin from France and Turkey to Rothstein’s successors in New York’s underworld.11 Eliopoulos was protected by a senior French police official until burned by a drug rival who apparently had even greater pull with the authorities, Paris restaurateur Louis Lyon. With protection from police and national politicians, Lyon brazenly operated a heroin factory across the street from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Lyon employed a Peruvian diplomat to smuggle heroin into the United States until his lab blew up in 1935, exposing his operation.12 Soon the center of drug trafficking shifted back to the great port of Mar- seille. Police first discovered illegal heroin laboratories there, run by Carbone’s gang, in 1937.13 Within a few years, however, the world heroin trade was all but shut down by World War II.

The Rise of the Corsicans The Corsican Mafia renewed their tight grip on the transatlantic heroin trade soon after the war ended. Several factors contributed to their success. One was the disruption of competing heroin supplies from China as a result of the Com- munist victory in 1949. Closer to home, the Corsicans were aided by alliances with both the French Socialist Party and the American CIA, which supported them to break the back of the Communist-led dock unions in Marseille.14 Cor- sican criminals also enjoyed free rein thanks to the underfunding of drug enforcement in the huge port city, where as few as two agents were given the hopeless task of policing the vast criminal milieu.15 The Corsicans received another boost from the disruption of Italian narcotics supplies in 1950, when the government cracked down on the production of medicinal heroin by pharmaceutical laboratories in northern Italy, some of which was illegally diverted to Mafia-controlled black markets. The Corsicans, many of whom spoke Italian, had no trouble reaching a working criminal alliance with their Sicilian “cousins” to share the trade. As the Federal Bureau of Narcotics noted, “The strong affinity between these two groups readily provided for a smooth-working organization which obtained massive quantities of morphine base from Lebanon and Syria. There, French- 36 The French Connection speaking merchants contracted to accumulate large quantities of morphine base on orders placed by the Corsican racketeers with whom they had dealt in other commerce during previous years.”16 With their de facto control over France’s leading port and connections to many French seamen, the Corsican underworld was ideally positioned to import and refine opium or morphine base before shipping heroin on to New York and other Eastern Seaboard ports. Although the trade flourished through the 1950s, U.S. drug agents only fully appreciated its huge magnitude in 1960, when a major French Connection case broke involving Lebanon. A tip to an American drug agent in Beirut led to the dramatic New York arrest of Mauricio Rosal, Guatemala’s ambassador to Belgium, the Netherlands, and Luxembourg. Abusing his diplomatic status, Rosal had smuggled morphine base from Beirut to Marseille, and heroin to the United States, for the Corsicans. The seizure of one hundred kilos of heroin—the biggest in three decades—opened many eyes, as noted in the official history of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration:

Narcotics agents had been seizing about 200 pounds of heroin in a typical year, but intelligence showed that the Corsican traffickers were smuggling in 200 pounds every other week. Rosal alone, in one year, had used his diplomatic status to bring in about 440 pounds. The FBN’s 1960 annual report estimated that from 2,600 to 5,000 pounds of heroin were coming into the United States annually from France. The French traffickers continued to exploit the demand for their illegal product, and by 1969, they were supplying the United States with 80 to 90 percent of the heroin consumed by addicts. The heroin they supplied was approximately 85 percent pure.17

More than a decade before the Rosal case, the FBN was already aware of the proliferation of heroin-smuggling organizations—involving not only Corsicans in Marseille, Montreal, Havana, and Mexico City but also Italian mafiosi, East European refugees, American criminals of Jewish and Italian ethnicity, and even ex-Nazis living in South America. The difficulty of suppressing such diverse and far-flung networks led U.S. drug agents to try to “strike at the roots in the Middle East,” in the words of Commissioner Harry Anslinger of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics.18 As we have seen, the FBN tested Lebanon’s waters in 1950, sending its sea- soned agent Charles Siragusa undercover to Beirut, posing as an American gangster.19 He was astounded by the ease of buying drugs. The going rates The French Connection 37 quoted to him on his first day in Beirut were $70 a kilo for opium, $75 for hashish, $1,500 for heroin.20 Back at his base in Rome, Siragusa caught wind that “diplomatic personnel of the Lebanese legations, particularly in Rome and Paris, were sources of supply for heroin and for the morphine base used in clandestine heroin laboratories in France.”21 In 1952 he reported that Lebanon’s senior diplomat in Rome had for at least two years been “supplying very large quantities of Turkish morphine base and crude opium to traffickers in Paris and Rome,” smuggled into Europe by diplomatic pouch or by airline pilots. A close relative of the diplomat, and member of Lebanon’s delegation to the Vatican, was also implicated in trafficking multikilo loads of morphine from Beirut. Under American pressure both were ostensibly recalled by their government, but the latter popped up only a month later as a diplomat in Paris under a false name. The FBN’s Anslinger cited that fact without comment in a 1953 letter to Lebanon’s ambassador to the United States, noting that yet another suspected trafficker was Lebanon’s former delegate to UNESCO, the nephew of the minister plenipo- tentiary of Lebanon in Paris.22 Siragusa’s ongoing inquiries laid bare the full supply chain. Surplus opium harvested by licensed Turkish farmers was being diverted to the black market and moved by Kurdish smugglers across the border at Gaziantep to Aleppo, Syria. From there, some was converted to morphine base in local laboratories, but much was transported to Beirut for processing by more sophisticated chemists. Smugglers then shipped the semirefined product to France or Italy for final conversion into heroin.23 Turkish farmers, licensed by their Provincial Technical Agricultural Office, typically received eight dollars to twelve dollars per kilogram from the government’s opium monopoly, which supplied the pharmaceutical market. Well- connected black market opium buyers managed to skim off 6 to 8 percent of the total crop (which amounted to 340 tons in 1962) by paying an additional one dollar to five dollars per kilo. Protection was guaranteed by large payoffs from the major drug clans to senior government officials, including the chief of Istanbul’s police and the head of the Central Narcotics Bureau in Ankara. By the time the opium crossed the Syrian border, by truck, car, or camel, its value had grown four to five times. Chemists in Aleppo, Syria, or in Beirut would then convert the opium into morphine base, in a ratio of about ten to one.24 By 1954 it was clear to the FBN just how pivotal Lebanon was to the world heroin market. “The location of Lebanon on the eastern Mediterranean coast 38 The French Connection and in proximity to Turkey, Syria and Iran make this country of vital importance in the international narcotic traffic,” the bureau declared in a major status report. “Beirut is probably the greatest single transit port in the international traffic in narcotics.” Anslinger concluded that “the illicit narcotic traffic in the United States is, in a large measure, being supplied by Lebanese narcotic traffickers.”25 The same high-level corruption that supported Lebanon’s enormous hashish export trade also protected its opiates pipeline to Western Europe and the United States, the FBN observed:

All indications point to the fact that the large scale shippers of contraband narcotics out of Beirut owe the success of their activities to protection from highly placed persons in the Lebanese government, and in some cases it seems they also enjoy the use of capital furnished by persons in high positions. . . . Various investigations have indicated that contraband is not only frequently placed on vessels with the knowledge of police officials, but also often by them. . . . It is the con- sensus in Beirut that certain of the largest traffickers are so influential politically, and certain highly placed officials so deeply involved in the narcotic traffic, that one might well state that the Lebanese Government is in the narcotic business.26

The FBN concluded that it would be “absolutely impossible for any investigation to be conducted” in such a corrupt atmosphere. In short, Lebanon had become one of the first true narco-states of the post–World War II era.

Corruption in the Ranks Convinced nonetheless of the need to establish a permanent presence in the Middle East, Siragusa opened an office in Beirut in 1954 headed by the sea- soned FBN agent Paul Knight, an Exeter-and-Harvard man.27 Seeking a local ally, Knight and Siragusa first checked out the country’s national police and security chief, Farid Chehab. Chehab, cousin of the army commander, General Fuad Chehab, collaborated closely with the CIA and the intelligence services of pro-American countries in the region.28 One informant praised him as “a good family man,” extremely well connected, likely backed by the British intelligence services, and uncorrupted by personal involvement in the narcotics trade, though acquainted with all the major traffickers.29 A senior security officer at the U.S. embassy called Chehab “one of the most cooperative officials of the Lebanese government as far as American interests are concerned.” With regard to corruption he added, “Honesty is a relative term. One might say that Shahab The French Connection 39 is more honest than most local government officials.”30 More troubling was the assessment of a senior French police official, who claimed that Chehab was profiting from the sale of counterfeit gold coins in Saudi Arabia. Apparently well-placed narcotics traffickers also knew about his sideline and blackmailed him into leaving them alone.31 Siragusa was introduced to Chehab in August 1954. They got off to a good start, with Chehab declaring that he favored more cooperation with the United States on drug issues.32 In subsequent meetings the Sûreté director was dis armingly frank. He readily acknowledged the role of senior officials, up to the president and prime minister, in protecting the hashish trade. He explained that senior politicians and their criminal associates began diversifying into opiates around 1947, with Corsicans and Italians as their customers, when they “began to realize the greater profits to be gained.” He conceded that the pen- alties imposed on traffickers were only a sham. He offered sage advice about overcoming the government’s inertia by shaming it in international forums, including the United Nations.33 Chehab was always clear, however, that he would not stick his neck out to be publicly associated with drug enforcement actions he deemed “politically hazardous.”34 Chehab, a Maronite with close ties to President Chamoun, took pains to warn Siragusa against the country’s other major drug enforcement agency, the Customs police. Customs, he noted, fell under the Ministry of Finance and was beholden to the prime minister, a Muslim. Customs officers, he claimed, were often “bribed by the traffickers to put narcotic contraband onboard ships and airplanes.” To look like they were doing their jobs, he added, Customs police would sometimes plant inferior drugs on foreign ships calling at Beirut and then make well-publicized seizures. Anyone arrested would be released quietly a few days later and “paid for their troubles.” Customs would also pay rewards in such cases to nonexistent informants—its own corrupt officials.35 The FBN’s collaboration with Chehab initially showed quick results, with several arrests from U.S.-sponsored undercover investigations. Among those picked up were two of Lebanon’s leading opiate traffickers, Omar Makkouk and Youssef El Etir. Police seized more than three hundred kilos of opium and four kilos of hashish. Knight viewed the new relationship as “a giant step forward.” Members of the underworld, he claimed, were deeply concerned by this potentially serious new turn. Siragusa praised Chehab for “a good start” but cautioned that seizures came in below expectations, apparently because of leaks in the investigation.36 40 The French Connection

The honeymoon didn’t last long. Knight learned that one of Chehab’s close friends, the chief of the antisubversive section of the Sûreté, was “completely corrupt” and in league with Lebanon’s most notorious drug trafficker, Sami Khoury. Chehab, he discovered, had revealed one of the FBN’s best confidential sources to this official and was “dragging his feet” with respect to investigating Khoury. To clinch matters, the CIA wanted Chehab to themselves and discouraged the FBN from establishing closer relations with the security chief. Siragusa’s devious conclusion: “We will have to work more closely with the Customs and try to keep Chehab from knowing about it.”37 Siragusa was under no illusions. The head of Beirut’s Customs police, Cap- tain Edmond Azizeh, had gone from being “almost penniless” to a “rich man” at age thirty thanks to winning his appointment through the patronage of Hamid Franjieh, Suleiman’s older brother and a senior member of parliament. “Since then [Azizeh] has purchased a winter home in Beirut, a summer residence nearby and conducts a high scale of living, although he earns a meager salary,” Siragusa reported in 1954. “He works closely with the biggest narcotics gangs here.”38 Even so, Knight observed, Azizeh’s Customs police seemed more dedicated and professional than Chehab’s Sûreté detectives. One of Azizeh’s patrons, “a racketeer of great political influence in Lebanon,” did Knight the favor of sending “an extremely detailed list of almost all the members of the Samil Khoury organization” in Lebanon and in France, complete with details of their modus operandi.39 In short the FBN and Azizeh had enough enemies in common to do business together. Knight’s senior informant was the prominent Maronite smuggler and gam- bler Hannah Yazbek.40 Knight explained Yazbek’s significance:

They had a system in Beirut not unlike that in Chicago, in which the city was divided into ethnic and religious neighborhoods. Each neighborhood had a strongman, the abada, from whom criminals and businessmen alike bought protection. Hannah Yazbek, otherwise known as Abu George [meaning father of George], was the Maronite abada. He was a hashish smuggler connected to the Gemayel family, which controlled the Fascist Phalange and had collaborated with the Vichy French, so he was not beloved of the British or Israelis. But he was essential to getting the job done.41

By March 1955 Siragusa could report to Anslinger that Azizeh, “our spark- plug collaborator,” had made four major cases against the Khoury organization, arresting five defendants, seizing 404 kilos of opium and 31 kilos of morphine The French Connection 41 base, obtaining confessions about prior smuggling to France of equally large loads, and establishing Khoury’s guilt. Customs police even had the pleasure of seizing a fancy Jaguar car used by Khoury for smuggling.42 The Federal Bureau of Narcotics ginned up a laudatory wire story praising Siragusa and his “crack team of American agents” for helping to smash a “multi-million-dollar smuggling ring whose opium and morphine was intended for U.S. addicts.”43 Azizeh pulled the same trick, cultivating a Beirut newspaper that branded him “the No. 1 enemy of all smugglers.”44

The Lebanese Kingpin Once the publicity faded, the culprits paid only trivial fines, and judicial authorities declined to prosecute Khoury. Azizeh paid for his overzealousness by being arrested and held for five days when one drug defendant complained of being beaten by a Customs agent.45 The disappointing outcome, which went unreported, was a telling sign of Khoury’s unmatched influence. The youngest son of a family of traffickers, he was named by the United Nations Narcotics Commission in 1957, at the remarkably young age of thirty, as one of the world’s leading narcotics kingpins. Always impeccably dressed, he was said to bear “a certain resemblance to the youthful King Hussein of Jordan.”46 Khoury was born in 1927 to a Christian family from Zahle, a city east of Beirut and the capital of the Bekaa governate.47 It was also notorious as “the H.Q. of the big [hashish] dealers” who supplied cannabis seeds to cultivators in much of the valley.48 Khoury was “raised and reared through the Eliopoulos ring,” according to a former U.S. drug agent who knew him well. “He became legendary by age 16 . . . and became a master with tentacles through half the world.” Khoury took advantage of his Christian connections to export drugs through Maronite-controlled ports like Jounieh.49 Khoury had his first significant run-in with the law in 1948 at the age of twenty-one. Egyptian narcotics police seized a plane carrying 266 kilos of hashish and 47 kilos of opium when it landed on a disused airfield en route to Cairo. Arrested were the director of Beirut’s airport and Khoury, who masterminded the operation. The drugs had been supplied by Khoury’s father and brother. Sami was sentenced to three years in prison. An Interpol report said, “His years in prison produced a measure of prudence in Khoury, with the result that he has since shown considerable circumspection.”50 Indeed, although Khoury left plenty of tracks, he continued to be remarkably elusive. In 1951 a French spy tipped off the Lebanese Sûreté to a stash of 42 The French Connection drugs hidden in the French passenger liner Champollion, bound for Marseille with its Corsican crew. Police discovered roughly six hundred pounds of opium on board and traced it back to Khoury, who was barely out of prison. Two years later, another police raid uncovered a similar load of opium aboard the St. Hélène, apparently smuggled onto the ship with the connivance of Leba- nese police officers. Investigations showed the corruption went all the way up to narcotics police commissioner Mounir Alaouie, who was one of Khoury’s senior accomplices.51 Siragusa continued to investigate Khoury’s operations to little avail. In Rome he learned that Khoury was supplying opiates to the Italian Mafia, smuggled via Egyptian ships.52 Siragusa became convinced that Khoury was the “di- recting genius of the entire traffic between the eastern Mediterranean and the ports of Italy and France.” In 1955 the FBN informed Interpol that “it is now beyond doubt that Khoury is the most important narcotics trafficker in the Middle East. . . . And apparently his political influence is considerable, for, once again, he has not been arrested.”53 When FBN undercover agent James Attie got too close to Khoury’s ring, he was detained, interrogated, and slapped around by the corrupt head of the Lebanese Sûreté’s antisubversive branch, further justifying the FBN’s decision to cooperate instead with Customs.54 Or so it seemed. Another FBN informant, the nephew of Sûreté director Farid Chehab, offered American agents tips on a major drug lab operated by Khoury’s partner, Omar Makkouk, judged by the FBN to be the Middle East’s outstanding criminal chemist. The nephew added that “Captain Edmond Azizi is also a member of the KHOURY organization, and arranges for large shipments of narcotics to be placed aboard vessels bound for France and Italy.”55 Was the tip true, or was it disinformation planted by Azizeh’s rival in the corrupt Sûreté? In Lebanon’s wilderness of mirrors it was always hard to say.56 Makkouk was finally arrested in May 1956—by Customs police. In a public statement Siragusa called him “one of the great five international smugglers in the Middle East.” Nearly two decades older than Khoury, the Beirut-born Makkouk was the grand old man of the region’s dope trade. A press account noted that Makkouk had been jailed and fined for narcotics trafficking in 1939 and 1943 but since then had been “highly protected.” The article, no doubt inspired by Customs, added that security police had “shown some weakness” in efforts to apprehend him.57 In any event Makkouk was soon back running a major clandestine drug lab on an isolated mountain near Beirut.58 Meanwhile, Makkouk’s partner, Khoury, was still at large. Interpol distrib- The French Connection 43 uted an arrest warrant for the Lebanese kingpin in 1956, but he continued to earn his nickname, “the untouchable.” As one journalist close to Siragusa explained, “High officers of the Lebanese army and police, not to mention Mem- bers of Parliament and Ministers, were busily growing illegal hashish on their private estates and farms for Khoury’s ‘black drug’ trade to Egypt.”59 Evidently Khoury also enjoyed protection in France, where he reportedly “bought new Cadillacs almost every time he came to Paris” and enjoyed conju- gal visits with his wife, a buxom, blonde, Corsican-born cabaret singer living in Paris.60 The secret of his immunity was no doubt the high-level influence of his Corsican partners, who had “financial and social connections” to “the highest levels of French government, industry and society, including the cabinet, police, and military,” according to a classified CIA report.61 On his visits to France the Lebanese drug lord also managed to meet the legendary Corsican heroin chemist Dominique Albertini, who had set up smuggling connections in North America during visits in the early 1950s to Detroit and Montreal.62 Scrutiny of Khoury’s international cable traffic showed that he was also in regular touch with the lords of the Corsican underworld in Mon- treal and Havana. Finally tailed by French police during one of his visits to confer with Corsican gangsters in Marseille, he was arrested in Paris with two lieutenants at his wife’s luxury apartment in November 1956. His wife reportedly thanked an arresting officer, saying, “This is going to be excellent publicity for me!” Authorities dropped charges against the group, and Khoury decamped for Beirut. According to a French police report, “he had a hero’s welcome from his fellow countrymen.”63 Less fortunate was a member of the Italian-American Mafia in New York who purchased more than thirty kilos of pure heroin from Khoury and the Corsicans to end a heroin drought on the East Coast in 1956. The shipment was seized, and the mafioso was murdered the next year.64 In 1957, responding to heavy criticism from the United Nations, Lebanese authorities sought to polish their tarnished reputation by staging an elabo- rate raid on some of Khoury’s drug labs. Captain Azizeh earned points with FBN agent Joe Salm by sanctioning the arrest of Youssef El Etir, a leading drug courier, and Makkouk, the great chemist.65 Police seized more than thirty kilos of morphine base and heroin.66 The far-ranging investigation ultimately led to the indictment of sixty-two suspected traffickers in New York, led by a Philadelphia-based mobster and former bootlegger.67 But once the media fanfare died down, it was business as usual for the Khoury ring. By 1958 Khoury’s 44 The French Connection associates were meeting in Beirut to sell morphine base to the French Connec- tion chemist Dominique Albertini.68 Lebanon’s political crisis in the summer of 1958 brought to power General Fuad Chehab, army commander and cousin of the country’s corrupt security chief. General Chehab, though allegedly implicated in protecting key traffickers despite his reputation as a reformer,69 sought for his own reasons to break the stranglehold of traditional feudal elites, many of whom were enriched by the hashish trade. Paul Knight claimed that the new government really meant what it said about cracking down on narcotics offenders and pronounced that “many old-timers, such as Samil Khoury, have definitely lost their influence.”70 As a show of their determination, Lebanese police arrested Khoury and Makkouk early the next year for attempting to bribe a policeman.71 Khoury received a sentence of only four months. Apparently the reforms of the Chehab era went only so far. Local newspapers reported the frustration of senior police investigators that “certain judges were authorizing the dis- charge of well-known smugglers a few hours after their arrest.”72 Paul Knight admitted in late 1960 that “the narcotic laws are weak, punitive provisions are inadequate and judicial processes are unrealistic, antiquated and ineffective.”73 Based on the record-setting bust of Guatemalan ambassador Rosal in New York City in October 1960, the Federal Bureau of Narcotics estimated that Beirut’s drug lords were still exporting one hundred kilos of morphine every month. The FBN even had intelligence that one heroin chemist was operating a laboratory in the home of Prime Minister Salam’s brother.74 Nonetheless, Khoury’s arrest “was a gentle hint from the new government that his immunity was over,” one journalist claimed. “Sammy took the hint, and discreetly retired to enjoy his vast fortunes.” According to this account, however, Khoury retired only from day-to-day operations, which he put in charge of his brothers. Khoury continued indirectly to manage long-distance smuggling between Lebanon and South America, importing women and cocaine while exporting drugs to the United States via a cadre of Latin American diplomats and Corsicans who had dispersed to Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay.75 He remained involved in arms trafficking, cigarette smuggling, and currency counterfeiting.76 The king of Lebanese drug lords apparently retired permanently in 1965. Re- ports surfaced that a Jordanian hashish dealer, irate over an alleged double-cross, had Khoury and Mounir Alaouie murdered.77 FBN agents heard that the hit was ordered by one of King Hussein’s uncles, who was a drug kingpin himself.78 That The French Connection 45 would have been Hussein’s maternal uncle, the pro-Western and “rabidly anti- Palestinian” Sharif Nasser Ben Jamil, who was subsequently appointed commander-in-chief of the armed forces in 1969. Sharif Nasser was notorious for using Jordanian army trucks to smuggle Lebanese hashish into Jordan.79 This story of Khoury’s death may have been just a convenient cover, however, to protect the retired kingpin; two years after Khoury’s alleged death, Jordan’s Princess Muna al-Hussein reportedly spotted him alive and well in London.80 Certainly Khoury was a master of trickery. One way he stayed on top was by discreetly helping the FBN make some notable cases against his competitors. In January 1959 he helped Knight (who then obligingly vouched for Khoury’s alleged retirement) roll up three of his former partners.81 All returned to trafficking after serving only brief sentences.82 In 1963 newly arrived FBN agent Dennis Dayle quickly learned that he lacked the clout to put Khoury behind bars. Invited to Khoury’s beach house for an informal chat over shots of Johnny Walker and a bowl of pistachios, Dayle politely turned down a huge bribe. Switching to Plan B, Khoury agreed to continue acting as an informant against his rivals. The FBN’s attitude toward the man it called one of the “top international traffickers of all time” was “we had to take what we could get.”83 Dayle reported back to headquarters in March 1964 that his new informant was “not involved in the traffic of narcotic drugs at this time” and was merely engaged “in the black market of cigarettes, and in the trafficking of hashish from Lebanon to Egypt via Israel.”84 Dayle may have been too trusting.85 Only three months later he had to report on the seizure in Beirut of a “complete heroin lab and sixty-two grams [of] morphine base,” with Khoury as one of the defendants.86 Still, Khoury proved of some value by supplying the identity of several Cor- sican traffickers, Turkish ships carrying morphine base, and trafficking networks in Latin America.87 But when Khoury offered to set up a sting operation against a Marseille police superintendent, French authorities balked. The police officer, who had joined Corsican crime lord Antoine Guerini to become a major force in the French Con- nection, was also an agent of the French intelligence service, Service de Docu- mentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage (SDECE).88 Years later, an analyst with the FBN’s successor, the BNDD, was struck by the intelligence background of many French Connection traffickers. “The conclusion was inescapable,” he declared with some hyperbole: “SDECE was in the drug business.”89 46 The French Connection

Mr. French Connection One Corsican crime associate whom Khoury evidently did not betray was Guerini’s foe in the Corsican underworld, Marcel Francisci. Dubbed “Mr. Heroin” by Time magazine, Francisci emerged by the early 1960s as a leader of the French Connection.90 He allegedly supplied narcotics to Khoury’s friends Dominique Albertini and Dominique Venturi in Marseille, as well as to Mon- treal crime lord Jean Venturi. Francisci traveled frequently to Lebanon, where he owned several businesses.91 Francisci owed much of his power in the criminal underworld to his political connections at home. In 1942, after the Allied invasion of North Africa, Francisci joined the Free French. For his wartime exploits he won several Resis- tance medals, including the Croix de Guerre. After the war he joined Charles de Gaulle’s political movement, then moved to Tangiers, where he profited from importing American whiskey and cigarettes and from illegal currency trading.92 He was first implicated in heroin trafficking in1951 , when police broke up a ring using French seamen to smuggle drugs to a member of a Mafia crime family in New York. Francisci, however, was not arrested.93 In 1958 Francisci led the electoral campaign in Corsica for de Gaulle’s new political party, L’Union pour la nouvelle République. After de Gaulle was elected president that year, two of Francisci’s closest friends within the senior ranks of the party joined the cabinet of Interior Minister Roger Frey to direct police operations throughout France. When de Gaulle’s decision to pull out of Algeria provoked a terrorist backlash from right-wing extremists, one of Francisci’s friends recruited killers from among his Corsican allies to neutralize them. The counterterror force was called Service d’Action Civique (SAC). At a Paris restaurant owned by Francisci, the Corsican entertained Gaullist politicians, secret service leaders, and senior SAC directors.94 Francisci’s role in the international drug trade grew as these intelligence organizations turned more and more to the heroin traffic for funding irregular operations against de Gaulle’s enemies.95 In the late 1960s Francisci waged war with the dominant Guerini clan for a bigger slice of the profits from heroin smuggling and illicit gambling. After three years of gunplay the murder of Antoine Guerini in 1967 left Francisci one of the undisputed leaders of the Corsican underworld.96 Francisci began visiting Lebanon in the late 1940s, soon after it achieved independence from France. On those visits he reportedly met and became partners with Khoury, who in turn visited Francisci in Tangiers. In the late 1950s Francisci obtained the lucrative gambling concession at the elegant Casino du The French Connection 47

Liban near Beirut.97 The gambling house was reportedly “one of the three biggest casinos in the world and possibly the most profitable.”98 The Casino du Liban received its exclusive gaming license from the Cham- oun government on July 29, 1957. The opulent entertainment complex, perched on a rocky hill overlooking the Mediterranean (and the Maronite-controlled port of Jounieh), opened with a huge display of fireworks on the night of De- cember 17, 1959. It instantly became one of the top tourist attractions of the Middle East—drawing celebrities such as Jordan’s King Hussein, the shah of Iran, Prince Albert of Monaco, actor Omar Sharif, and shipping magnate Aris- totle Onassis. Before long it was deemed “a cornerstone in the Lebanese economy.” It attracted international performers such as Duke Ellington, Jacques Brel, Danny Thomas, and Julio Iglesias; featured spectacular shows with scant- ily clad Western girls; and even hosted the “Miss Europe” ceremonies for several years. Buoyed by a regional sea of petrodollars, the casino’s revenues—divided between company shareholders and the state—amounted to nearly three hundred million Lebanese pounds from 1962 to 1974. It even continued to operate for some years during the civil war.99 FBN agent Dayle, like other intelligence agents from several countries, kept a close watch on the Casino du Liban. “It was an international consortium of tremendously powerful financial potentates, who undoubtedly . . . had access to narcodollars and arms dollars,” he recalled years later. “There were many Eu- ropean investors and many Middle and Near East investors, principally from the Mediterranean region.”100 The casino was a favorite playground for Saudi sheiks and rich Arab businessmen, such as Adnan Khashoggi, who brokered French arms to Saudi-backed royalist forces in Yemen in the early 1960s.101 Avid gamblers from all over the Arab world flew on Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines to Beirut, filling the casino’s vast gaming halls.102 It was also a favorite gathering place for foreign businessmen, diplomats and spies.103 The French SDECE, in particular, likely used Francisci’s privileged position with the casino to gather regional intelligence and facilitate France’s covert but lucrative guns-for-drugs trade in the Middle East.104 Needless to say, the casino was a favorite playground of criminals as well, starting with Khoury and members of his gang. One frequent visitor was the French SDECE agent and international heroin smuggler André Labay, who also frequented Francisci’s Paris restaurant. Labay was known to the FBI and Inter- pol as a courier of cash for the American Mafia.105 The casino was particularly valuable to Francisci’s circle as a laundering 48 The French Connection

facility for drug profits. The FBN learned that Khoury and an accomplice “would drive to Damascus, Syria, to purchase morphine base, then bring it back across the border, with the help of accomplices in Lebanese customs, to Beirut’s Casino du Liban, where they made arrangements, through Corsican associates of Marcel Francisci, to transport it to secret labs in and around Mar- seille.”106 Khoury often met Francisci personally at the casino, whether for business or pleasure, until the Lebanese drug boss either was murdered or chose to disappear in 1965.107 3 The Intra Bank Connection

drugs were just one of the many valuables smuggled by Lebanese traders, who were equally adept at moving gold, diamonds, and cash.1 The expertise and discretion of Lebanon’s bankers in handling cash was of particular value to drug traffickers, who needed ways to launder and safeguard their profits.2 And no Lebanese institution was more expert or discreet than the Beirut-based Intra Bank, the largest bank in the Middle East. Widely reputed by law enforcement officials to be Marcel Francisci’s favored venue for laundering heroin profits, Intra was, from the beginning, “alleged to be deeply involved in the traditional intrigues of the Middle East—narcotics, gunrunning, terrorism, and the coup d’etat,” in the words of author Jim Hougan.3 Despite its unsavory associations, Intra was considered “a pillar of the Arab financial world” until its shocking—and politically charged—collapse in 1966. At its peak the bank held almost 40 percent of all deposits in Lebanon and owned 56 percent of all the country’s banking assets. Intra had branches or af- filiates in sixteen countries. It held a majority stake in the highly profitable Mid- dle East Airlines (favored by gold and drug smugglers throughout the region)4 and a controlling interest in Beirut Harbor Corporation and Hotel Phoenicia, among many other Lebanese properties. It also owned a major commercial office building and branch office on New York’s Fifth Avenue, the La Ciotat ship- yards in Marseille, and valuable real estate on the Champs-Elysees in Paris.5 Most significant, it owned the Casino du Liban, where Francisci had the gambling concession, making Intra all the more natural a repository of untraceable proceeds from Lebanon’s drug traffic.6

49 50 The Intra Bank Connection

Smugglers of all sorts availed themselves of Intra Bank’s services. It was a prime depository for many of the world’s leading arms traffickers, who received financing from Lebanese traders for illegal weapons sales in the Southern Ara- bian peninsula (Yemen and Aden), Cyprus, Sudan, Nigeria, Rhodesia, South Africa, and Kurdish communities in the Middle East.7 Wealthy Arabs with too many petrodollars on their hands, looking for a savvy bank in the region to look after their wealth, fattened its deposits further. Intra’s discretion was guaranteed by the passage of a national bank secrecy law in 1956. The law made it a crime for bank managers or employees to disclose information about clients. It also permitted banks to open numbered accounts on behalf of customers known only to the institution’s director.8 Otherwise, the country’s banking industry operated almost entirely without oversight or regulation and without even a central bank until 1964.9 As a result Lebanon was prized as a “haven for cash for anybody with a balance to hide—U.S. tax evaders, oil-rich sheiks who want to lay something by for the rainy day of revolution, and assorted racketeers and purveyors of stolen or smuggled wealth from all over the world,” observed Life magazine in 1967.10 That went for drug traffickers as well.

Rags to Riches Intra’s founder and proprietor, Yousef Bedas, made the most of that favorable environment—which he called “a green oasis of free enterprise”—until his spectacular downfall. A Palestinian Christian, not a native-born Lebanese, he was the son of a bank executive who also directed Russian Orthodox schools in Jerusalem.11 Starting as a messenger boy, young Bedas worked his way up to head the Jerusalem branch of the Arab Bank, Ltd. When the Arab-Israeli War broke out in 1948, he fled to Lebanon with more than one hundred thousand other Palestinian refugees. Classified as “non-nationals,” these refugees were barred from government jobs and even from entering the state school system. “Needless to say, the aggravated low standard of living has produced a large group containing persons who will engage in any activity whatsoever in order to earn money,” commented one U.S. government report, noting the presence of some “old-time narcotic smugglers” among the refugee population. With only $4,000 to his name, Bedas managed to open a tiny currency exchange office in Beirut. His shabby two-room operation was modest, but its name was not: International Traders—the genesis of Intra.12 The Intra Bank Connection 51

Bedas benefited from the economic boom that Lebanon enjoyed after the 1948 war. As Michael Davie notes:

Beirut had acquired extraordinary advantages out of the 1948 war: Haifa port was closed to Arab shipping, while Beirut’s was the best-equipped of the Levant; banks thrived in the liberal economic status the country had given itself; newly discovered oil in the Persian Gulf and in Saudi Arabia had created revenues that only Lebanese banking know-how could manage in the Arab countries; local man-power was skilled and its elite well trained by the two main univer- sities (American University of Beirut and the Jesuit Université Saint-Joseph); the newly built airport was cosmopolitan and “modern,” with none of the restrictions found in other Arab countries.13

Bedas aggressively courted wealthy clients at Beirut’s hotels and racked up impressive currency trading profits during the Korean War until he amassed enough capital to open Intra Bank in 1951. His license to operate was backed by two elder statesmen: Prime Minister Abdallah Yafi and President Bechara Khoury. Bedas had the advantage of a particularly well-connected business partner: the Greek Orthodox Lebanese parliamentarian Mounir Abou Fadel, who later became deputy speaker of the Chamber of Deputies. Cementing their partnership, Bedas married Abou Fadel’s niece.14 Bedas quickly grew his operation by attracting funds from Palestinians displaced by the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 and rich Egyptians who parked their flight capital in Beirut after the fall of King Farouk in Nasser’s 1952 coup. He also profited from the burgeoning trade in gold from Europe and the Middle East through Lebanon, which permitted gold imports without duty, and on to India, where demand for the precious metal was high for use in jewelry.15 Last but not least, he financed the traffic in contraband, especially hashish.16 Soon Bedas was cutting loan rates to compete with other Beirut banks, forging partnerships with Bank of America and Chase Manhattan Bank, and opening regional branches in Syria, Iraq, Jordan, and Qatar. He continued to expand even during the 1958 civil war; while other banks suffered capital flight, he opened a branch in London and an affiliate bank in Geneva.17 Business acumen was not the only explanation for Bedas’s golden touch; he carefully cultivated friendships with Lebanese presidents, prime ministers, and finance ministers. Lebanon’s banking industry epitomized the feudal traditions that still held sway over what appeared to be an unbridled free market. In the 52 The Intra Bank Connection

words of Kamal Dib, the banking sector “worked as an important bridge for financiers who want to get involved in politics. As early as the 1960s, at least 25 percent of Lebanon’s politicians had had a head start in banking. . . . Since independence, and through extending loans and grants and financing election campaigns, banks have built a network of connections with the warlord and zaim families.”18

Intelligence Connections Bedas took care to stay on particularly good terms with members of military intelligence, who kept him well informed. He and Francisci were both business partners with Col. Gaby Lahoud, a childhood friend of the Chehabist chief of the Lebanese Deuxième Bureau (army intelligence).19 According to one scholar, “A good portion of the favours that Intra benefited from were provided by the Deuxième Bureau, in return for which the bank financed elections, distributed cash gifts in the guise of loans, employed clients of Shihabist notables and paid bribes of all types.”20 Another secret of Bedas’s success was his trusted relationship with the CIA, which had made Beirut the center for all covert operations in the Middle East. As the chief of Lebanon’s army counterintelligence service observed, “Spies come here because Beirut offers them something which other capitals do not, namely the banking secrecy privilege.”21 (Among the many Lebanese officials on the CIA’s payroll in the 1950s was President Chamoun, responsible for passing the country’s bank secrecy law in 1956.) Wilbur Eveland, a U.S. emissary to Lebanon in the mid-1950s and an active participant in events leading up to the 1958 crisis, recalled:

Harvey Armado, head of the regional finance office of the Beirut CIA station, was one of the busiest members of the staff. Beyond his fiscal responsibility for the administrative and operational activities of all stations in the Middle East, Armado worked under direct orders from Washington on worldwide financial transactions. Having no prohibitions on foreign-exchange transactions, Lebanon was an ideal location for such activities. There were no currency restrictions or controls, and money of every nation, including Israeli pounds, was traded there. With his own connections, Harvey employed the facilities of many of the hundreds of banks and money changers operating in Lebanon. In this way he could make even million-dollar transactions without drawing attention or risking their being traced to a single source. In addition, he re- The Intra Bank Connection 53

ceived cash from Washington and other stations for laundering. . . . It was a huge operation.22

Eveland learned that one of Armado’s favorite money laundries was Intra Bank. Despite the bank’s fast business pace, Bedas continued to provide a personal touch, taking CIA officers into his private office to handle their checks. Eveland, who smuggled half a million Syrian pounds from Lebanon into Syria to finance an anti-Communist coup in 1956, also used Bedas’s services. “It was possible,” Eveland mused, “that Harvey [Amato]’s transactions had contributed to Intra’s remarkable growth.”23 As Eveland explained at length in his memoir, Amato’s transactions through Intra and other banks for the purpose of buying the 1957 parliamentary election also contributed significantly to the destabiliza- tion of Lebanese politics by alienating Muslims and raising fears of a Chamoun power grab. Intra also became deeply entwined with French intelligence and political circles after it established an alliance with Marcel Francisci through the Casino du Liban. Bedas was reportedly close to the French heroin trafficker, money courier, and SDECE agent André Labay.24 Bedas’s and Francisci’s ally in the Lebanese Deuxième Bureau, Col. Lahoud, was a close collaborator with French intelligence, as well as with the CIA.25 In 1961 Bedas sought to open a branch in Paris, only to be turned down by the French Banking Control Commission. That verdict was overturned by higher political authority; Intra obtained its operating license thanks in part to the intervention of Interior Minister Roger Frey, who oversaw the recruitment of Corsican gangsters into de Gaulle’s parallel security service, SAC, and who was the immediate superior of Francisci’s two closest friends in the Gaullist government. Subsequently, Intra took significant ownership positions in two major French companies: CEMA, a construction materials supplier, and Marseille-based Chantiers navals de La Ciotat, the country’s second-largest shipbuilder.26 A secret investigation by French Treasury and U.S. narcotics officials concluded that Bedas overpaid grossly for the Marseille shipyard—apparently to launder French Connection drug money recycled from North America through Caribbean and Swiss banks. Francisci became a shareholder in both companies in 1963, no doubt at Bedas’s invitation.27 It may also be significant in regard to the Intra-drug connection that Bedas’s general assistant at the bank was said to be smuggling kilogram-sized loads of cocaine into Beirut from Frankfurt, providing him with the funds to maintain a beach house on the Côte d’Azur, among other luxuries.28 54 The Intra Bank Connection

Intra had other significant links to France as well. One of its directors, a former Saudi finance minister, purchased arms for various Arab states from a French firm owned by the industrialist Gilbert Beaujolin and his partner Col. Roger Barberot. Both men were reportedly key members of the Gaullist intelligence apparatus. Barberot later gained notoriety as the man who recruited the French Connection heroin courier Roger Delouette into SDECE.29 Another key member of the bank’s board of directors was Kamal Adham, who founded Saudi Arabia’s General Intelligence Department in 1963. He led the department until 1977, when he went into business with the country’s “retired” CIA station chief. Described as King Faisal’s “closest confidant and adviser,” Adham—though of Turkish and Albanian descent—was half brother to Faisal’s favorite wife. Trained at the Langley, Virginia, headquarters of the CIA, which helped him set up the fledgling Saudi department, Adham reportedly became one of the agency’s “principal liaisons for the Middle East in the 1960s” and “one of its closest friends anywhere outside the United States.” He also maintained close liaison with the intelligence services of Britain and France.30 But the brash, overconfident Bedas also made powerful enemies as he guided his bank’s soaring growth. The rival bankers he outcompeted—represented by Pierre Eddé, president of the Association of Lebanese Bankers—resented his success. Politicians turned against him as well. Although Bedas paid modest bribes without complaint, as a necessary cost of doing business, he reportedly refused to extend huge unsecured loans to Lebanon’s premier, Abdallah Yafi, and to the powerful Sunni deputy and former prime minister, Saeb Salam.31 After 1964, moreover, Bedas lost one of his most powerful allies when President Fuad Chehab’s term ended.32 Above all, many of Lebanon’s traditional elites—even his fellow Chris- tians—despised the upstart Palestinian refugee who flaunted his wealth. As Dib put it, Bedas “underestimated the clan politics and family ties that under- lined Lebanese culture,” a handicap he could not overcome simply by becoming a Lebanese citizen.33 The Palestinian-born journalist and longtime Beirut resident Said Aburish called Intra Bank a “challenge to Maronite hegemony over Beirut” and said the dominant elite “saw [Bedas’s] success as aiding the anti-Maronite forces of the country.”34 His status as an outsider was reinforced with every reminder that Palestin- ian refugees—unwelcome guests in Lebanon—were a destabilizing force. Intra Bank was dragged into this political maelstrom when several of its employees were accused of plotting the assassination of al-Hayat’s publisher, a critic The Intra Bank Connection 55 of Nasserism and radical Palestinian activism, in May 1966. Observes Charles Winslow,

Whatever the political basis for the crime, and the possibilities are many, some of the trail led directly back to Intra Bank. Were there competing Lebanese financiers, aided and abetted by the Deuxième Bureau, who came to the view that this Palestinian bank was not only too big and powerful for Lebanon but also a Trojan Horse from which the country could be attacked? Were al-Hayat and Intra Bank the initial victims of the civil war in Lebanon?35

Collapse If the erosion of domestic support left Bedas vulnerable, so did his gamble on locking up the bank’s assets in long-term investments, which left it short of liquidity and overextended. Big as his bank was by Lebanese standards, it did not begin to have the resources to resist the financial shock waves that emanated from the United States as the Vietnam War heated up in 1966. To control rising inflation fed by spending on the war, the Federal Reserve Board raised interest rates, which prompted Western European central banks to follow suit to defend their currencies. Suddenly banks in Germany and London were paying much higher rates on deposits than Intra Bank. Depositors withdrew their money from the Beirut institution, squeezing its liquid reserves.36 Time magazine put a conspiratorial gloss on what happened next:

Britain moved first. Unhappy over Bedas’ refusal to buy British Aircraft VC10s for Intra-owned Middle East Airlines (MEA), Whitehall pressured Kuwait into transferring funds away from Intra and into Britain to shore up the pound. Then the government of France, which owns 15% of MEA, covets the rest, and doesn’t like pro-American Bedas in any case, blocked an Intra bid to build a seriously needed new European headquarters in Paris. Next Russia, always glad to oblige in such matters, had its Narodny Bank withdraw the $5,000,000 it had deposited with Intra. Narodny staffers then spread the rumor that Intra was sick. Intra’s trouble was still far from hopeless, but the smell of blood was in the financial air. Pro-Saudi Arabian politicians in Lebanon cited leftist newspaper attacks on King Feisal to persuade some Saudis to make immense withdrawals.37

Supposedly adding to Intra’s travails were the machinations of American billionaire Daniel Ludwig, principal owner of Lebanese International Airways, who was angered by Bedas’s refusal to sell him the bank’s interest in Middle 56 The Intra Bank Connection

East Airways. Ludwig allegedly pressured Chase Manhattan Bank, where he had large deposits, to withdraw support from Intra in its critical hour.38 U.S. narcotics officials reportedly even suspected an alleged French heroin dealer of helping to organize a run on the bank’s deposits for reasons never clearly defined—perhaps as retribution for a drug-linked financial deal gone bad.39 Intra Bank was arguably solvent—but certainly needed a major injection of liquidity to weather the crisis.40 There was precedent for such intervention; a year earlier, the Lebanese affiliate of a Geneva bank ran out of cash and was floated by the Central Bank and various leading Beirut banks to avoid under- mining confidence in Lebanon’s financial system.41 But when Bedas turned to the Central Bank for a $33 million bridge loan, his political enemies rejected him coldly. The deputy governor of the Central Bank reportedly told Bedas, in denying him the needed funds, “You are not Lebanese and Lebanon does not want you to control its economy.” The rumor mill quickly went into overdrive—a campaign described by a Time magazine correspondent as “too well-orchestrated to be an accident, even by Beirut’s rumour-mongering standards.” Soon every bank in Beirut was withdrawing funds from Intra. Even the Palestine Liberation Organization pulled out its deposits. Police had to restrain rioters from storming the bank. In a single day Intra lost $70 million, all but wiping out its reserves.42 Intra closed its doors on October 14, 1966, and did not reopen for another two months. Its collapse “represented the world’s greatest bank catastrophe since the Second World War,” according to R. T. Naylor.43 As a financial panic gripped the entire country, the government declared a three-day bank holi- day, and the country’s prime minister resigned. Loans dried up, shrinking construction, trade, and most other sectors of the economy. As one Beirut daily lamented, “An earthquake has hit us.”44 President Helou defended the government’s refusal to save Intra, charging that Bedas had lied to him and sought open-ended commitments of support without any accounting of the bank’s assets and liabilities.45 But many observers suspected that the crisis was driven fundamentally by official attempts to punish the bank. As noted by Life magazine, “Lebanese officials were criticized by the International Monetary Fund and many European bankers, who feel that even with a modest advance, which could have been fully backed by collateral, Intra could have ridden out the crisis with ease.”46 A subsequent bank examination determined that Intra had violated the country’s financial standards by maintaining inadequate liquid assets, engaging The Intra Bank Connection 57 in insider loans, and improperly diverting funds.47 After the collapse, the bank’s acting general manager, a former U.S. Treasury attaché, insisted to the contrary that “many highly publicized irregularities . . . were really [the] result of per- fectly acceptable banking transactions,” though he admitted that funds were sometimes “stuffed into secret accounts” by unseasoned personnel “out of ig- norance [about] how else to handle them.”48 Authorities arrested four of Intra’s directors and several of its auditors. Bedas himself fled to Brazil before being arrested in Switzerland, where he died in custody. One important effect of Intra’s collapse was a marked increase in the clout of American banks, at the expense of Lebanese and French capital.49 As we will see, this shift of financial power paralleled the American-led dismantling of the French Connection, but also shifted Lebanese public opinion in favor of left- wing nationalists.50

Political Polarization The perception that the bank was “murdered” rather than killed by incompe- tence or bad luck had profound effects on Lebanese politics. The chairman of Middle East Airlines, Najib Alamuddin, later declared that “the affair was the beginning of the disintegration of Lebanon and its old type of Lebanese government, a system corrupt in style and morals that had plagued Lebanon since independence and finally plunged the nation into a civil war that threatened its very survival as an independent state.”51 Based on numerous interviews with participants in Intra’s downfall, the widely respected Palestinian-born journalist Said Aburish concluded that “the collapse of INTRA Bank was engineered by the Maronite-controlled Lebanese Central Bank with considerable help from Maronite politicians and Israeli agents.” He went on:

The fall of Bedas served notice that the Maronites were declaring war on the Pal- estinians in their midst. Their efforts “to purify” their country suited the Israelis, who saw in the bank a major source of support for Palestinian aspirations. . . . This formalized the Maronite-Israeli alliance. Until then it had been a situation of mutual fear and resentment of the Muslim majority in the Middle East, a con- vergence of interest. After the demise of INTRA, cooperation between the two sides was through direct contact. The Israelis gained an ally within the Arab camp; the Maronites discovered a potential new protector. Above all, the Maronites demonstrated a willingness to destroy the country to maintain their supremacy.52 58 The Intra Bank Connection

Whether or not Aburish paints a fair portrait, his perception was widely held by aggrieved Palestinians in Lebanon, who made up one-tenth of the population. It was also a perception held by decidedly moderate Muslims such as business leader Hani Salam, brother of the prime minister. Salam informed an American diplomat that the militant Maronite patriarch, Boulos Boutros Meouchi, viewed Intra “as a predominantly Moslem organization which was, by its size and influence, becoming a threat to Christian domination of the banking and commercial section of the Lebanese economy.” Salam added that Meouchi, who was reportedly holding clandestine meetings with other influential Christians to counter Muslim demands for political reform, had urged the government “to smash Intra once and for all in the interests of the Christian community.”53 Such polarization upset Lebanon’s political equilibrium as much as its economy. Intra’s demise, according to Winslow, convinced “non-establishment leaders, most of them Muslim, that Lebanon was laissez-faire only for the members of the club. . . . Minds were now set; the Palestinians and their sympathizers had no real friends in Beirut.” With the bank’s collapse, Lebanon

lost an important basis for moderating Palestinian behavior. Successful Pal- estinians not only would have made Lebanon seem more hospitable for that community, but also would have helped give the financial establishment greater leverage over those who might have wanted to assault the state. . . . Institutions like Intra Bank represented an alternative to violence as a way for Palestinians to survive their statelessness in Lebanon.54

Now that alternative was gone, and other crises would soon convince more Palestinians to choose the path of revolutionary armed struggle. 4 The Path to Civil War

as a tiny nation immersed in one of the world’s most volatile regions, Leba- non never enjoyed the luxury of setting its own political agenda. In June 1967 the country was hit with an enormous seismic shock: the Six Day War. Israel, taking advantage of Egyptian provocations, swiftly conquered the West Bank, Gaza, and Syria’s Golan Heights. Lebanon’s Christian army commander refused to follow orders from the Muslim prime minister to support Syrian forces— sparing Lebanon from being overrun by Israel but driving a political wedge between the two primary religious camps.1 The war also produced another wave of refugees entering into Lebanon, adding to the political and military clout of the Palestinians. By 1974, Palestin- ians numbered about four hundred thousand in Lebanon, about one-sixth of the country’s total population.2 Most lived in refugee camps and slums that formed the “belt of misery” around the more prosperous and tourist-friendly neighborhoods of Beirut. Their augmented presence helped suck Lebanon inexorably into the “low- intensity conflict” that ensued. In 1968 the PLO made Beirut its international headquarters and thus a prime target for Israeli attacks. That year, after the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) began hijacking El Al passenger jets, helicopter-borne Israeli commandos raided Beirut airport and blew up thirteen civilian aircraft—without a shot fired by Lebanon’s army. While Christian leaders cited such interventions as reason to contain the Palestinians, a majority of Muslims were swayed instead by the broad Arab antipathy toward Israel. Sporadic clashes ensued between armed Palestinians and the Lebanese army, along with large and often violent street demonstrations.3

59 60 The Path to Civil War

In November 1969, hoping to constrain the militant and restless Palestin- ian refugee community, the Lebanese government accepted the so-called Cairo Agreement, brokered by Egypt’s Nasser. Secretive and ambiguous, it gave Pal- estinian commandos based in camps around Beirut and southern Lebanon a de facto right to govern themselves without army interference and even take part in “armed struggle” against Israel, as long as they stayed out of Lebanese politics. Residents of the refugee camps readily admitted they had no intention of exercising self-restraint when it came to attacking Israel. “Lebanon must realize that it cannot live in the Arab world without paying a price,” declared one Palestinian intellectual and Fatah member. “And that price is allowing Pales- tinian commandos to operate on Lebanese territory.”4 Needless to say, these heavily armed foreigners, who occasionally extorted money for their cause at gunpoint and continued to provoke retaliatory Israeli raids, alarmed the dominant Maronite elite while alienating even many local Muslims.5 Lebanese Christians—and some traditional Muslim elites—were further alarmed when the country received another major influx of Palestinian radicals in 1970. The militant newcomers arrived from Jordan, driven out during the “Black September” showdown with the Hashemite king. They created additional strains at a time when Lebanon’s leadership was particularly fragile: the election of Suleiman Franjieh as president in August 1970 by a one-vote margin in the Chamber of Deputies was the closest and one of the most controversial in Lebanon’s history. Armed confrontations between Palestinians and other factions further po- larized Lebanese society. The high-stakes drug traffic fueled some of these confrontations, as in one famous incident from 1970:

On March 25, 1970, commandos, accompanying the body of a guerrilla killed by hashish smugglers the day before, got caught in a traffic jam in the village of Kahhalah (on the Damascus road). The ensuing clash with the Christian villagers and the army left two dead and several others on both sides wounded. The Palestinian convoy, on its return trip from Damascus, clashed again with the Kahhalah villagers, losing six of its commandos in the firefight. Additional clashes occurred on the outskirts of Beirut as the Phalangists fought elements of the [Palestinian] militia. Pierre Gemayel’s son, Bashir, was captured but later released through government intervention. . . . The number of violent incidents increased rapidly following this last event as the Phalangists began to make it their mission to oppose the Palestinian commandos.6 The Path to Civil War 61

South Lebanon became an increasingly bloody battlefield for regional antagonists. In March 1972, responding to Palestinian raids, Israel invaded southern Lebanon, driving thousands of Shiite refugees north. In May the PFLP teamed up with Japanese terrorists to kill twenty-six people at Lydda Airport in Tel Aviv. Israel retaliated with a bloody four-day blitz against southern Leba- non, killing dozens of Palestinian commandos and a hundred civilians. After the massacre of the Israel Olympics team in September, Israel invaded again, killing more than four hundred people.7 In April 1973 Israeli commandos raided Beirut and assassinated three Palestinian guerrilla leaders—a demonstration of Lebanon’s impotence that triggered an enormous protest march and government crisis that led to the resignation of Prime Minister Saeb Salam.8 Israeli patrols intruded into southern Lebanon almost daily; the Lebanese army claimed a total of thirty thousand incursions of one kind or another from 1968 to 1974.9 In 1974 radical Palestinian commandos based in Lebanon sharply escalated their terrorist raids against Israel—killing sixteen civilians and two Israeli soldiers in the northern Israel town of Kiryat Shemona, a family in the Galilee settlement of Maalot, and twenty-one children at an Israeli school. An especially fierce Israeli raid in January1975 triggered secondary clashes between the PFLP and Lebanese army units.10 The Lebanese government faced an unpal- atable choice between risking a civil war by taking on heavily armed Palestin- ian commandos or sending the army south to defend the country’s territory against the far more lethal Israelis. Most often it opted not to act, hoping for some miraculous deliverance.

The Rise of Armed Militia Such turmoil fostered the destabilizing growth of indigenous militia groups, both for communal defense and to pressure the Lebanese government to act. “There were a lot of political parties, each with their own militia, and they had forebodings of bad times to come,” recalled Allan McClain, a U.S. narcotics agent who headed the Beirut office from 1968 to 1974. “They began acquiring arms, which took money. They were organizing, getting ready” for possible conflict.11 Pierre Gemayel’s Maronite Kataeb, or Phalange Party, made no secret of its intentions. “Should the state fail in its duty or weaken or hesitate,” the party wrote Franjieh in February 1973, “then Mr. President, we shall ourselves take action; we shall meet demonstrations with bigger demonstrations, strikes with more extensive strikes, toughness with toughness, and force with force.” The Christian-led government took no action to restrain the Phalangists’ mobili- 62 The Path to Civil War zation.12 Inspired by fascist youth movements of the 1930s, they built a para military force of at least ten thousand under the command of Pierre’s son Bashir. The fact that the weakened state tolerated or could do nothing to stop the rise of the Phalangist militia only reinforced the popular perception of its political paralysis and encouraged other religious, party, and clan factions to form their own militia. President Franjieh himself maintained hundreds of fighters in his family bastion of Zgharta. Chamoun’s National Liberation Party had its Tiger militia, two thousand strong, headed by his son Dany. It operated in the Chouf region south and east of Beirut, sandwiched between Franjieh’s forces to the north and Gemayel’s. The Parti Populaire Syrien, dominated by Greek Orthodox, had fighters of its own. Then there were the three thousand mostly Druze militia of Kamal Jumblatt and his Progressive Socialist Party, who increasingly took the side of the Palestinians. Other militia included the Senti- nels of the Independent Nasserite Movement; the Amal, founded by Shiites in southern Lebanon; and even one affiliated with the Armenian community’s Tashnaq Party.13

Destabilizing Lebanon’s Drug Trade The substantial cost of paying the salaries of these thousands of fighters—typically $75 to $400 per month per person, depending on rank—became a major preoccupation of militia sponsors. But one of the key sources of the militias’ wealth—the drug trade—was undergoing its own upheaval at the same time, caused by seismic shifts in the international drug traffic triggered by Washington. In the Bekaa Valley the hashish business went on much as usual under the patronage of large and politically powerful landowners. As a military zone, pop- ulated by heavily armed drug clans, it was off-limits to Lebanese police and U.S. narcotics agents, much like the tribal North-West Frontier Province in Pakistan.14 The heroin traffic, however, was in temporary retreat. Lebanese judiciary police claimed by 1970 to have shut down all the country’s heroin labs and to have put nearly all of its major heroin merchants out of business.15 American officials in Beirut, taking their cue from their local counterparts, declared the traffic in opiates “not that significant a problem,” although cross-border smuggling from Syria remained of some concern.16 That assessment may have been a tad optimistic. As late as 1971, a special U.S. congressional report on the world heroin traffic still described Lebanon as a linchpin of the illicit supply chain, beginning in Turkey and extending through Marseille, that provided America’s estimated 250,000 addicts with The Path to Civil War 63 their daily fix at an estimated cost of $3 billion a year.17 In early 1972 an inter- agency working group on the Mideast narcotics trade in Washington also took issue with the embassy’s dismissive attitude:

We continue to be concerned over smuggling of opium and its derivatives through Lebanon. . . . We realize that there is a serious lack of hard intelligence on this problem, but we understand that an opium processing laboratory was recently discovered in Lebanon. In addition, BNDD is currently actively investigating several cases involving smuggling of hard drugs through Lebanon to Lebanese expatriates living in Latin American countries. Also, it occurs to us that as opium production is phased out of Turkey it is likely that production might shift eastward. If this were the case, trafficking through Lebanon might increase substantially.18

In February 1972, Lebanese police arrested the assistant chemist of a heroin lab in Beirut—the first such lab discovered in five years—but apparently not the main chemist or the lab’s financial backer. And seizures of heroin and morphine base jumped from less than a kilo in 1971 to 43 kilos in 1972, supporting the working group’s fears.19 Lebanese police continued through the early 1970s to arrest a variety of midlevel traffickers, ranging from priests to one Mexican, who “flabbergasted” U.S. agents by being so far from home.20 Presumably he came for the pure white heroin available only from the finest Lebanese and French labs—far superior to the crude brown heroin smuggled across America’s southern border. The Mexican, like many other traffickers in Lebanon, bought his heroin from the late Sami Khoury’s master chemist Omar Makkouk, who was hiding out in Aleppo, Syria. Makkouk remained a formidable and nearly untouchable criminal—“a pretty slick character” in the words of one U.S. drug agent who never managed to collar him. Makkouk typically dealt in modest quantities— five to ten kilos at a time—minimizing his chances of getting caught. He also demanded payment in cash before delivery, putting a severe strain on the limited resources of undercover drug agents. Makkouk could get away with this unheard-of practice because his heroin was so fine, purer even than the U.S. government’s reference standard.21 However, U.S. narcotics officers, acting as Interpol agents, did catch Makkouk’s son, who had learned his father’s trade as a drug chemist, with a few kilos of heroin. Despite a brutal interrogation by Lebanese police, he did not give up his father. A payoff from Makkouk apparently soon bought his son’s release.22 64 The Path to Civil War

Makkouk turned out to be a major supplier of heroin for one of the largest U.S. drug rings ever rounded up. In late 1969 or early 1970 Lebanese police working with U.S. agents busted a top Lebanese trafficker in Beirut with a ten- kilo load. The importance of the case became apparent when an attorney from the predominantly Christian town of Zahle came to the BNDD’s Beirut office with a suitcase full of cash, offering several hundred thousand dollars in exchange for dropping the case. The agents politely declined. When the case went to trial, the judge sabotaged it and then retired the very next day. Police officials, outraged by this flagrant show of corruption, eventually forced a new trial and sent the trafficker away to prison—or so it seemed. When BNDD agents went to question him several months later, he was nowhere to be found.23 Eventually the errant convict showed up. He revealed under interrogation that many prior shipments of similar size had made it through to the United States unscathed. The destination was Miami, via Venezuela. And the ultimate buyer was one Allen Rudd.24 Allen Eric Rudd-Marrero was a twenty-nine-year-old pilot and nightclub owner living in Coral Gables. In June 1970 he was named as a “kingpin” along with at least 150 other defendants in Operation Eagle, the largest U.S. narcotics bust up to its time. Authorities claimed that the ring distributed 80 percent of all cocaine and 30 percent of all heroin in the United States. It did business in at least ten major U.S. cities, from New York to Los Angeles. Many of the rank and file were Cuban veterans of the CIA-led Bay of Pigs invasion; the ringleaders had close connections not only with the CIA but with Santo Trafficante, the powerful Mafia boss based in Tampa who did business with the French Connection. The ring’s coleader, who allegedly threatened to ex- pose a friend of President Nixon if arrested, was killed in a shootout with drug agents.25 While agents of the BNDD rounded up the culprits in the United States, they apparently paid too little attention to their coconspirators abroad. In retrospect the Venezuela connection looms large. Only many years later would drug agents come to see Venezuela as “the Mafia’s main narcotics terminal in the Western Hemisphere.” The former head of the Sicilian Mafia, Salvatore Greco, had already set down roots there in 1963 as a key player in the international drug trade. The country’s role as a drug transshipment point grew after 1970 under the criminal leadership of three Sicilian-born brothers of the Cuntrera family. Earlier they had moved from Sicily to Montreal, where they became the biggest Cana- dian smugglers of French Connection heroin to the United States.26 (Later, as we The Path to Civil War 65 will see, a leader of their Montreal operation, Nick Rizzuto, would be implicated as a top importer of Lebanese hashish.) As the early 1970s progressed, Lebanese middlemen continued to act as brokers and financiers for the heroin business, but Turkish drug lords increasingly began processing opium in labs close to home and transporting morphine base to Europe hidden in international trucks passing north through Bulgaria and Yugoslavia rather than by ship from Lebanon to Marseille. Turkey itself began losing market share to Mexico,27 the Golden Crescent of Southwest Asia (Af- ghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran),28 and the Golden Triangle of Southeast Asia (Burma, Laos, and Thailand).29 The Nixon administration’s “war on drugs” accelerated these geographic shifts in production by making Turkish poppy cultivation enemy number one. A public relations campaign unleashed by the White House accused Turkey of supplying “up to 80 percent of the heroin smuggled into the United States.”30 A crackdown on peasant poppy cultivation was a nonstarter in a democratic Turkey, but the military seized power in 1971, changing the equation. By 1972, through a combination of intimidation and promises of foreign aid, Washing- ton succeeded in pressuring Turkey to suspend opium cultivation. Although this step would have only a small and temporary impact on the global availability of heroin, it squeezed the Lebanese drug market, putting at risk illicit sources of income to powerful social groups that were urgently mobilizing resources to defend their political interests and physical security. At the same time, the Nixon administration also put intense pressure on the French government to mop up the remnants of the Corsican Mafia. The White House was delighted by the Pompidou government’s “outstanding” response. The French quintupled the number of judicial police assigned to narcotics enforcement from 1969 to 1971.31 In support of that mission, the BNDD’s Beirut office sent undercover informants to France to help infiltrate and disrupt the narcotics underworld.32 This crusade did double duty by targeting criminal intelligence assets of the Gaullist regime, which Washington distrusted for pursuing a policy of “neutralism” that undercut U.S. strategic ambitions from Europe to Vietnam. Danish crime reporter Henrik Kruger states that the resulting crackdown on the traditional French pillars of the opiates trade caused “staggering losses” in the Marseilles heroin underworld. Police arrested 134 gangsters in 1971 and 1972 alone. More than half of the suspects killed or captured in those two years “were connected to intelligence agencies SDECE and/or SAC,” he adds. The arrest or 66 The Path to Civil War dispersal of expert chemists, the heavy police presence in Marseilles, and the loss of opium from Turkey made it nearly impossible for the Corsicans to reconsti- tute their traditional business. The share of the U.S. heroin market served by France fell from an estimated 80 percent in 1970 to less than 15 percent by 1975.33 The BNDD officer who oversaw the smashing of the French Connection, John Cusack, understood that the reprieve was only temporary. “As opium availability ends in Turkey,” he noted, “the question is whether the criminal elements operating the laboratories at Marseille will turn directly to Afghanistan and Pakistan to establish morphine base production and smuggling to Mar- seille, or whether Turkish or Lebanese violators will establish this service for them in Afghanistan and Pakistan.”34 As it happened, several members of the French underworld managed to escape arrest by fleeing to Lebanon, where they eventually became drug chemists and operations experts for various militia who were beginning to build war chests from drug profits.35 But with the geographic shift in cultivation sources and trafficking routes, and the passing of leaders in the drug business like Khoury, Francisci, and finally even Makkouk, Lebanon was losing both its primacy in the world opiates market and a significant if undocumented source of national income.36

The Triggers for Civil War Disruptions in Lebanon’s drug trade—from abroad with the breakup of the French Connection, and at home owing to more honest and vigorous policing—inevitably brought new players to the fore. One notable change was the increased activity of traffickers in Palestinian refugee camps that swelled with new arrivals after 1970. “Things got worse for police with the Palestinian influx,” recalled Allan Mc- Clain, the BNDD’s agent in charge at the time. “Traffickers were smart enough to insist that deals take place in the refugee camps. Police couldn’t go there because the government feared it would stir up unrest. I don’t think the Palestinians were involved; others were using them as a shield, using their camps as a sanctuary. This became more and more common toward the end of my tenure” in 1974.37 Lebanon’s police got around that obstacle at least once, with a little trickery. They put in a call to McClain’s fellow agent Jeff Kildow, asking him to undertake a simple undercover mission. Kildow was unhappy to learn that he would have no backup, but his Lebanese counterparts assured him that it would be a simple job. Kildow quickly lost track of his whereabouts as his driver nav- The Path to Civil War 67 igated the winding back streets of Beirut’s neighborhoods. He ended up in a crowded quarter, negotiating with some very dangerous sellers armed with Kalashnikov rifles. Kildow talked them into accompanying him with the drugs back to downtown Beirut, where he had said he had left his money. Police were waiting and arrested the traffickers with 38.5 kilos of morphine base, the biggest seizure of its kind in many years. Later, instead of congratulating Kildow, the U.S. ambassador chewed him out for venturing into unauthorized territory to do the buy. Kildow had unwittingly gone undercover into the Sabra refugee camp in South Beirut.38 Kildow observed that, as a rule, Lebanese traffickers were relatively cooperative with each other, unlike many in Mexico or Colombia. But rising sectarian violence left its mark on the drug trade as well, contributing to outbreaks of violence that kept the country on edge. In late July 1974, for example, a dispute between two smugglers, one Christian Lebanese and one Palestinian, triggered two days of fierce clashes between the heavily armed Phalangist militia in the Chris- tian suburb of al-Dikwana and Palestinian guerrillas in the refugee camp of Tal al-Zatar. Such confrontations radicalized both Maronites and the Palestinian “street,” making political accommodation ever more difficult. The poisonous atmosphere also confirmed the Maronites in refusing Druze and Muslim demands for reform of the National Covenant, whose frozen formulas for political representation no longer reflected the growing Muslim demographic majority.39 Also highly provocative were a series of raids by Christian-led army units against poor Shiite Muslim farmers in the Bekaa Valley in 1974. Troops burned hashish fields and battled gunmen employed by the large Muslim landowners who controlled production of the drug crop.40 This sudden crackdown, after years of tolerance, was both evidence and a source of growing antagonism between Christians and Muslims. As rival factions in Lebanon stepped up their defensive military prepara- tions in the early 1970s, securing access to financial resources became a top priority. Christians who dominated the higher value segments of the hashish market began diverting more of the profits to militia activities. As Ralph Cwerman notes,

At first, Christian leaders would simply send military units to the Bekaa, where they would extort payment from drug growers. But as local resistance grew, the method of collection changed to a kind of “export tax” imposed on drug farmers and independent smugglers. Christian militias established checkpoints 68 The Path to Civil War

on the vital roads leading from the Bekaa to specific ports on the coastline which smugglers had been using for years. Stationed along these checkpoints, “government tax collectors,” accompanied by armed forces to insure payment, would stop all vehicles and search for drugs. Payments ranged anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the cargo’s value. In addition, “customs officials” were present at most drug handling ports just in case one of the hashish convoys slipped by a roadblock. By the mid-1970s Christian drug barons had set up their own smuggling networks and were reportedly making over a billion dollars a year from Christian-run ports.41

It could not have taken long for other groups to recognize the strategic value of controlling ports through which valuable drugs and other contraband flowed. That factor may help explain the explosive confrontation between Christian and Palestinian factions at the port of Sidon in February 1975, a significant precursor to the civil war that broke out only two months later. The so-called Fishermen’s Dispute was triggered by the government’s controversial decision to grant a special ninety-nine-year charter in the predominantly Muslim port to an industrial-scale fishing enterprise, Protein Company. Its chairman was Camille Chamoun, Christian leader of the Na- tional Liberal Party. Chamoun was an instantly polarizing force; besides his brazen purchase of the parliamentary elections in 1957, which led to the 1958 crisis, his personal Tiger militia “earned a reputation for undisciplined thug- gery outstanding even in Lebanon,” notes R. T. Naylor. “Among its jobs was aiding the expansion of the [Chamoun] family business empire and protecting its smuggling rackets.”42 A local Sunni politician stoked the fears of fishermen that Protein would threaten their livelihood. As he led a protest march with other city leaders, an unknown assassin shot and killed him. His funeral turned into one of the largest public demonstrations in Lebanese history. Muslim rioters, joined by Pal- estinians from nearby refugee camps, began blocking roads and clashing with the army. The violence claimed the lives of at least six soldiers and eighteen civilians over the next five days. Eventually, the government withdrew troops and the violence subsided.43 The Sidon incident is widely considered one of the major events “mark- ing the passage of Lebanon from a kind of chaotic peace to war.”44 In the wake of the bloodshed triggered by the Fishermen’s Dispute, Muslims and Jumblatt’s The Path to Civil War 69

Druze demanded reforms of the army, which they derided as an instrument of Maronite rule. Christians in turn rallied to support the army as the last line of defense against rising Muslim radicalism. The result was a widespread loss of faith in the once respected institution, rendering it “virtually useless for domestic functions,” according to Kamal Salibi.45 To make matters worse, the government of Suleiman Franjieh, which had squeaked into power in 1970 by only a single vote, had lost nearly all legitimacy amid widespread charges of corruption and mismanagement.46 If the Sidon incident was the gunpowder that set off the civil war, writes Edgar O’Ballance, the spark was the so-called Rumaniyeh incident on April 13—ironically only one day after the government bowed to Muslim demands and reversed its privileged concession to Protein at Sidon. The day’s violence began with the killing of two Christian militia members by Palestinian commandos, possibly as part of a botched plan to assassinate Phalangist leader Pierre Gemayel. His militia forces went on high alert. Within hours a bus filled with Palestinians, apparently members of the Iraqi-backed Arab Liberation Front, lost its way down the Ayn al-Rumaniyeh road and passed the trigger-happy Christians. The Phalangists opened fire, slaughtering twenty-seven Palestinians and two other passengers.47 This massacre ignited fires of revenge that the weakened state was in no position to extinguish. As news of the killings spread, small gun battles erupted spontaneously in cities and suburbs across the country. Lebanese Muslims joined Palestinians in retaliating against Christian militia and their communities, prompting pitched battles in Beirut, Tripoli, and Sidon. Radical Palestinian groups, like the Arab Communist Organization, Arab Liberation Front, Demo- cratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Organization of Revolutionary So- cialist Action, and PFLP contributed to the chaos by bombing Western business targets, kidnapping foreigners, and stepping up raids against Israel. Israel invaded South Lebanon yet again that May, killing seven Lebanese soldiers and prompting Libya to increase its military aid to Muslim forces in Lebanon. Air, land, and sea attacks by Israel in August against targets in Tyre further exposed the impotence of the Lebanese state. Compounding the violence and apparent anarchy was the hasty recruitment by various militia of street thugs who served as enforcers for powerful political bosses and often doubled as hashish traffickers. They “used the outbreak of war to become involved in a rapidly expanding criminalisation of the economy,” notes Jago Salmon. “Whilst perhaps justifying their actions in the discourses of popular Maronitism or neighbourhood defence . . . , these leaders 70 The Path to Civil War became powerfully entrenched within their localities through the exploitation of protection rackets and looting.”48 By September 1975, writes Sandra Mackey, “ideology began to vanish in a maelstrom of base and petty interests. The Ma- ronite militias killed one another for control of the port of Beirut and the big profits it engendered. They fought for a percentage of the hashish trade and for the right to rob some particular bank.”49

The Lebanese Arms Race As growing violence and government gridlock exposed the army’s impotence, rival militia rushed to protect themselves. They threw up roadblocks and kidnapped or executed unlucky travelers who showed identity cards with the wrong religion. Beirut’s neighborhoods turned into armed camps. Christian residents fled West Beirut for neighborhoods in the East, dividing the city by religion along the “Green Line.” Widespread shelling killed thousands that summer, despite repeated efforts by Syria to broker ceasefires. Within months Phalangist militia were firing rockets into Beirut’s major shopping district, causing massive destruction. Accusations by Kamal Jumblatt that Christians were stockpiling arms shipped into Lebanon by the CIA and Israel via the port of Jounieh inflamed the crisis.50 Major militia groups and their thuggish street enforcers had ample fire- power to keep Lebanon in chaos. Libya alone claimed to have contributed $500 million to selected Muslim factions—“enough to buy the entire surplus Ameri- can weaponry left behind in Vietnam,” according to one private arms dealer.51 Iraq’s generous support allowed one militia group to pay new recruits $250 a month, plus an additional $100 for each promotion they earned.52 With such infusions of money rival factions rushed to build their arsenals, as the pro- Phalangist historian Antoine Abraham observes:

The various left-wing groups, which were still isolated from the Lebanese political scene, began to rearm by night. The ports of Tyre, Sidon, and Tripoli unloaded an amazing variety of Soviet-made arms, which had been channeled through Eastern Europe. Latakia, the Syrian port, transshipped arms into Lebanon. The supplies were paid for by the Libyan Arab Republic, and some weapons were sent directly from that nation. The rightists, meanwhile, began to make arms purchases from West Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal and other international arms dealers. These were a less deadly variety than the weapons supplied by the Soviet Union, but they were nonetheless devastating. The Path to Civil War 71

The weapons were paid for by “unknown” anticommunist nations in the area, presumably the Saudis and the Gulf States. Internal sources in Lebanon simply did not have the capital necessary for such expensive weapons.53

As we will see, the sources of weapons delivered to the Christian militia were hardly “unknown,” and internal resources—including drug profits—were a major source of the funds used to buy them. Lebanon’s militia showed no ideological favoritism as they scoured the international market for pistols, rifles, machine guns, mortars, rocket launchers, and light artillery.54 Bulgaria, ostensibly an East bloc ally of the PLO, sold several large shipments of AK47s and other small arms to right-wing Christian forces in 1974 and 1975, until Lebanese communists protested that the weapons would be used against leftist groups in the country.55 Christian groups even bought surplus Russian arms directly from Palestinians who had received them from Syria.56 The suppliers and their routes were diverse, making them hard to trace or shut down. According to British journalist Anthony Sampson, “Some weapons came through Morocco, some through Spain, some through Marseille, some (I was told by a Falangist agent at Junieh) even came from the Mafia, transferred in Italy. One important source was West Africa, which has many Leba- nese expatriates in countries which are glad to sell weapons at a profit. (Ghana had AK47s provided by Israel to Biafra during Nigerian civil war.)”57 One of Sampson’s unembarrassed informants was Dany Chamoun, son of the former prime minister and commander of the Tiger militia:

At the Hotel Montemar, overlooking the port of Junieh, he talked with boyish enthusiasm about buying weapons as if he were describing a supermarket. He had been given his first machine gun, he said, at the age of five, and had learnt how to strip and assemble it. Chamoun said, “The Lebanese love to buy guns, They buy guns to impress each other, and they take pride in their guns, more than in their nation. People here will never give up their personal weapons—it’s like losing their wife.”58

Christian forces had begun squirreling away small arms as early as 1958, when the American landing of marines brought an influx of M16 rifles into the country. (Many years later, CIA director William Colby acknowledged arming the Christians in line with the agency’s practice of equipping minorities to stop Communist gains.) The pace of weapons stockpiling and practice drilling by Christian militia forces accelerated after 1969, when the Cairo Accord ratified 72 The Path to Civil War the presence on Lebanese soil of armed Palestinians.59 The Christian-led army aided the Phalangist militia by quietly turning over Soviet bloc arms seized during raids on Palestinian guerrilla camps in the late 1960s.60 Soon the Gemayel, Chamoun, and Franjieh clans were going on international shopping sprees for ever more powerful weapons, to stay ahead of their Muslim and Palestinian foes. In return for drugs European smugglers reportedly provided arms via Zurich, Berne, or Hamburg.61 In January 1975 an alert reporter for the Hartford Courant noticed an un- marked DC-7 at Bradley Airport, under heavy police guard. After tracing its owner to a Delaware shell company, he was able to get confirmation from the State Department that the aircraft was carrying a cargo of firearms to Lebanon. Months later the State Department admitted that it had granted export licenses to Sarkis Soghanalian, a broker for Colt Arms, to ship small arms and ammunition to “responsible elements, Christian elements” in Lebanon. Soghanalian claimed he was selling only pistols and revolvers to the Lebanese government, not heavy weapons like mortars and rockets.62 He later admitted that cover story was a fraud, and an inspection in Lisbon of one of his cargo planes turned up twenty tons of weapons from a Portuguese arms factory destined for Beirut.63 Soghanalian, as it happened, was on his way to becoming one of the world’s largest private arms dealers. His sales would eventually surpass a billion dollars a year to clients such as the CIA, Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, the Nicaraguan Contras, the Argentine government during the Falklands War, and Iraq during its war with Iran in the 1980s. Born in Syria to Armenian parents, he was raised in a poor suburb of Beirut, served in the French army, and married his American wife in Lebanon. In the late 1950s he worked both as an “ace auto mechanic favored by Lebanese President Camille Chamoun and Jordan’s King Hussein” and as a gunrunner for Christian forces fearful of the wave of Nasserite sentiment sweeping the Arab world. Soghanalian boarded a ship with his Mercedes sports car—a gift from Hussein—and decamped for the United States, where he made his new home. In 1973 he began buying weapons on the international market—first American, then mostly from the East bloc—for the Lebanese army and then for Christian militia groups.64 As Soghanalian told an interviewer years later, “Most of my trade has been with the U.S. blessing. Without it, you could not succeed. You would be all alone in the field.”65 His main U.S. patron in these early years was not the CIA, as it would later become, but the Defense Intelligence Agency. He was also close to the Saudi intelligence chief (and former Intra Bank director) Kamal Adham.66 The Path to Civil War 73

Another intelligence-connected arms merchant accused of supplying the Lebanon conflict was Samuel Cummings, owner of the International Arma- ment Corp., based in Alexandria, Virginia. He had served with the CIA during the Korean War and subsequently collaborated with the agency on many deals. Lebanese leftists accused him of shipping $2.5 million worth of arms—including M16 rifles and machine guns—to a pro-Israeli extremist group, Guardians of the Cedars, in November 1975. Payment was reportedly arranged by a Paris- based real estate firm headed by a Christian from North Lebanon.67 Cummings denied the report, saying it was impossible to obtain government licenses for sales of arms to Lebanon. “If Interarms were involved in supplying the Chris- tians,” journalists Patrick Brogan and Albert Zarca later noted, “it can only have been for a few months, early in the conflict, and with the approval of the Brit- ish and Americans before those governments and Israel stepped in and started doing it directly themselves.”68 By 1976 strong evidence pointed to at least some CIA assistance in providing funds and arms to various Christian militia, coor- dinated by the CIA station in Athens.69 Saudi agents were also happy to support Christians who shared their en- mity toward radical Palestinians. The French muckraking weekly Canard Enchaîné named the Saudi arms broker Adnan Khashoggi as a supplier of the Phalangists in 1975.70 (Khashoggi was also a business partner of the ubiquitous Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham.)71 American bankers reported that certain Saudi intermediaries brokered $200 million in contributions from conservative Arab governments to the Lebanese Christians early in the war. But Saudi Arabia broke off its support in early 1976, according to Joseph Fitchett of the Washington Post, “shortly after newspaper photographs circulated in the Arab world showing cross-wearing Christian fighters mistreating and humiliating Muslims in Karantina, a Muslim slum here razed by the Christians.”72 More consistent support came from the state of Israel. It had quietly forged ties with the Phalangists as early as 1948 and debated invading Lebanon in the mid-1950s to help the Maronites establish a “Christian state.” Israel armed Christian forces covertly in 1958, after the Chamoun government’s electoral theft triggered a political crisis. Israeli intelligence officials stayed in close touch with Christian political and militia leaders when the 1975 civil war broke out but initially provided only light arms. In the spring of 1976 representatives of Is- rael’s foreign and military intelligence agencies met in the port of Jounieh with Dany Chamoun, leader of the Tigers, and with Phalangist leaders Amin and Bashir Gemayel. Although concerned by the volatile and even savage conduct of 74 The Path to Civil War

Christian forces, Israel began delivering huge shipments of heavy arms to them through the port of Jounieh in June and July 1976, enabling them to undertake more aggressive military operations.73 From 1975 to 1977 the Rabin government spent an estimated $150 million on military supplies for the Maronites; by 1980 Israeli aid reportedly totaled more than $1 billion.74 Israel reportedly also trained thousands of Phalangist militia forces at secret bases in northern Israel and instructed their elite intelligence service, under Elie Hobeika, in techniques of counterintelligence and interrogation.75 Farther afield, Christian militia also tapped the large diaspora of overseas Lebanese—many of them fellow religionists—in the United States, Latin America, West Africa, and Australia.76 Phalangist forces supplemented these external resources by outright looting.77 They were suspected of involvement in the biggest bank robbery in history—the theft of at least $20 million from the British Bank of the Middle East in January 1976. (The crime, officially unsolved, has also been blamed on radical Palestinians, a joint Palestinian-Phalangist team with Italian or Corsican Mafia support, and even rogue members of the British Special Air Services.)78 Even more profitable was the systematic looting by Phalangist forces of Beirut’s port, which sustained losses on the order of $700 million.79 Last but not least, as we will see in the next chapter, Christian and other militia groups had access to hundreds of millions of dollars a year in drug revenue for arms, other supplies, and payrolls. In such a bloodthirsty conflict, drug trafficking was perhaps the least of crimes but surely one of the most profitable. 5 The Civil War Drug Boom

The main business of Lebanon is the production and export of heroin and hashish. Michael Pavlick, DEA official (1988)1 as the fighting wreaked increasingly severe damage on such traditional pillars of Lebanon’s economy as tourism, banking, and agriculture, illicit drugs became one of the prime sources of funds for militia rearmament, operations, and simple enrichment. The collapse of central government authority and the spread of violence effectively neutered drug enforcement activities by Leba- nese and American agents. One DEA agent was kidnapped and interrogated at the Palestinian camp a few days after the civil war broke out but was released unharmed thanks to the quick intervention of the Lebanese police. Another agent’s car was bombed, and a third agent was shot at as he drove through Beirut. The DEA “put on ice” its operations in Lebanon and removed its agents to Amman, Ankara, and Paris. The DEA did not reopen an office dedicated to Lebanon until 1982—and for reasons of security located it in Cyprus.2 Traffickers were quick to take advantage of the chaos. In May1975 , a month after the civil war began, German police confiscated nearly three tons of Leba- nese hashish—the largest drug seizure in the country’s history.3 The masterminds were not ordinary criminals. As a reporter noted the following year, such hashish exports were protected by “prominent Lebanese political figures” and “leading Lebanese warlords, who can count on their own militias for protection.” As we will see, one such politician and warlord was President Suleiman Franjieh, who negotiated the sale of hundreds of kilos of hashish to one of the leaders of the Canadian Mafia in the period 1975–76.4 In January 1977 Greek police discovered 10.7 tons of hashish—said to be “the biggest haul of drugs ever captured at sea”—hidden on a Cypriot freighter loaded in the Lebanese Christian port of Jounieh and bound for Antwerp. The

75 76 The Civil War Drug Boom ship’s Greek captain confessed that the drugs were payment for a large supply of arms to the Phalangist militia. A Greek official acknowledged that his country’s free ports at Salonika and Piraeus had become major supply centers for arms to both Christian and Muslim forces in Lebanon. “Taking advantage of the Greek ports’ special status, under which goods delivered for transshipment are placed inside warehouses and need not be inspected, Beirut gun traffickers descended on Greece,” one report explained.5 Further evidence of the growing of the guns-for-drugs trade between Leba- non and Europe surfaced in July 1977, when French police in St. Tropez arrested six Germans, including Christina von Opel, playgirl heiress of an automobile fortune, with 1.5 tons of Lebanese hashish, which they planned to sell to West German arms dealers. Five months later, German police seized a coastal freighter with nearly three tons of hashish intended as payment for weapons bound for Lebanon.6 North American hash smokers also rewarded Lebanon’s drug lords. In 1977 an Ottawa restaurant owner, later convicted in absentia after he fled to Leba- non, imported forty-five hundred pounds of hashish, worth as much as $9 million wholesale, in tin crates via the port of New York. The judge in the case declared, “The crime was of such staggering magnitude it boggles the imagination.”7 All of these shipments, in turn, were put to shame in 1978, when U.S. authorities discovered twenty-two tons of Lebanese hashish aboard a Liberian- flag cargo ship in New York harbor.8 Lebanon’s hashish growers were now harvesting the largest crops in their history. By one estimate marijuana plantations in 1977 covered about ten thousand hectares, four times the prewar average.9 As one awestruck reporter wrote that year, “I saw a crop that stretched into the horizon, a massive field more than a mile in length.”10 Another reporter estimated the value of the hash crop at $900 million in 1977. “Interviews with scores of residents of the valley confirmed that the local police either look the other way or moonlight as drug smugglers,” he added.11 Lebanon’s hashish production continued to soar, reaching as much as seven hundred tons by 1980, compared to a prewar total of about one hundred tons.12

The First Opium Poppies The disorder also gave Lebanese dealers freedom to turn the damaging cut- back in the Turkish opium pipeline into a lucrative new opportunity. In 1976 Bekaa Valley farmers, tutored by experienced Turkish growers, planted their first The Civil War Drug Boom 77

seventy-five acres of opium poppies. Drought-tolerant poppies flourished in the warm, dry soil. Taking advantage of cheap Palestinian labor, growers increased the area planted in poppies to two hundred acres the next season.13 By the fall of 1977, after harvesting a record hashish crop, the two dozen powerful families who controlled most drug cultivation in the Bekaa Valley were said to be rapidly shift- ing resources to opium. Colorful poppies soon covered some twenty-five hundred acres, causing “intense concern” among U.S. and Turkish narcotics agents, according to one report.14 By early 1978, the International Narcotics Control Board was warning of Lebanon’s emergence as a significant producer of opium.15 The economic logic for cultivating and trafficking opium was compelling. A grower could sell a kilo of opium for hundreds of dollars, several times more than an equivalent load of cannabis would bring.16 By the time Lebanese heroin reached consumer markets, it was selling for as much as $350,000 per kilo.17 Thanks to the high value per unit of weight and volume, smugglers could maximize profits and minimize risks by carrying small, easily concealed quantities of heroin.18 Opium poppies offered another attraction: the convenient fit of their growing season with cannabis plants. Poppy seeds were planted in October, just after the marijuana harvest was complete, and the poppies were harvested in mid-May. Opium was also a boon to the rural economy because of its extensive re- quirement for labor.19 To harvest the poppies, field hands slice each seed pod with a knife or razor blade and collect the milky liquid as it oozes out to form a brownish gum.20 Increased cultivation of opium poppies, along with the traditional cannabis crop, provided important seasonal employment for desperately poor Palestinians housed at the decrepit Wavel refugee camp deep in the Bekaa Valley, near Baalbek.21 The next obvious step was for Lebanon to revive the drug labs that once made it a production hub for the world heroin traffic. European chemists, displaced by the breakup of the French Connection, flocked to Lebanon in the late 1970s to convert local opium, as well as morphine base imported from South- west Asia, into heroin.22 By the mid-1980s the Bekaa Valley and Christian-held quarters of Beirut harbored dozens of small heroin and morphine labs.23 But given the extraordinary risk of kidnapping or worse—several members of the French underworld were early victims of car bombings and other assassinations—the best foreign chemists plied their expert trade in the mountains above the Bekaa Valley, in Christian-held territory.24 78 The Civil War Drug Boom

DEA informants identified the location of several heroin laboratories operating in both Muslim and Christian-held areas of Lebanon. But the intelligence was of little value. Washington acknowledged that local police were powerless to dismantle the drug labs “because the various local militia groups that control parts of the [Bekaa] valley are stronger and better equipped than government forces.” Syrian military forces in the area also kept government officials at bay. Police were said to be “reluctant to make an arrest for fear that the suspect will soon be free and might seek retaliation.”25 The pace of Lebanon’s heroin trade picked up almost as soon as the civil war broke out in 1975.26 That fall, DEA agents arrested Miami auto body shop owner Samih Masri and an accomplice for conspiring to import $24 million in heroin from Lebanon into South Florida. An undercover agent testified that Masri boasted that “officials in the government were supplying the heroin, so there was no need to worry about security in Lebanon.” He further quoted Masri as saying that his “people in Lebanon had some diplomats who would take care of taking as much as 20 kilos each time they came into the country.” Masri received a twelve-year sentence.27 In 1978 French police at Orly Airport, with help from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, arrested an obscure Syrian named Ghassan al-Kassar, who was believed to head a heroin-trafficking ring based in Lebanon. Canadian officials noted that Lebanon appeared to be reemerging as a heroin center.28 As we will see, members of the Kassar family would go on to become some of the most notorious names in international drug trafficking. Confirmation of Lebanon’s importance as a supplier of the U.S. heroin market came in June 1981, with the indictment in New York of seventeen individuals who allegedly imported more than one hundred pounds of heroin with a street value of $90 million over the previous two years. The ring included members of the Italian Mafia, part of a “Sicilian Connection” that emerged from the ashes of the French Connection. It also included an expatriate Syrian national accused of supplying the Sicilian drug labs with morphine base from Lebanon.29 Within Lebanon, drugs did not simply finance the violence; they fueled it, as well, by amplifying the deadly effects of youthful bravado and pervasive fear among militia members. In January 1976 Christian forces invaded the Karantina quarter of Beirut, near the port, which was held by Palestinians who harassed the Christians’ lines of communication between Beirut and Maronite regions north and east of the capital. Over a period of three days Christian forces mas- The Civil War Drug Boom 79 sacred nearly a thousand Muslims before bulldozing the entire neighborhood. “Christian militiamen with outsize wooden crosses around their necks, high on hashish or cocaine, and some wearing Nazi surplus helmets, killed to their heart’s content,” reported the Washington Post’s Jonathan Randal.30 The Karantina massacre unleashed a furious cycle of bloody reprisals. Within days thousands of Palestinian commandos, Muslim militia, and armed volun- teers from various Muslim countries stormed the coastal village of Damour, a Chamoun stronghold south of Beirut. They looted and burned houses and killed more than a hundred civilians. Many more savage attacks would follow, including the slaughter of thousands of Palestinians at the Tal Zaatar refugee camp in August 1976 by the Guardians of the Cedars, Chamoun’s Tigers, and allied Christian militia.31 As Tony Badran notes, “Control of supply, access and strategic routes” was “at the heart” of many of these vicious battles.32 The dizzy escalation of violence spared no one. In June 1976 the new U.S. ambassador to Lebanon was on his way with another senior American diplomat to present his credentials to President Elias Sarkis when they were kidnapped at a militia checkpoint in Beirut by radical Palestinians and then executed, despite efforts by Fatah leader Yasir Arafat to save them.33 Syrian President Hafez al-Assad feared that continued anarchy—and further Christian setbacks—could prompt Israel to invade Lebanon. To deny Israel an excuse for advancing along the road to Damascus, Assad appealed to the leftist Lebanese National Movement in 1976 to ease its military pressure on Christian enclaves. Jumblatt rebuffed him and forged ahead, even attacking Lebanon’s presidential palace and forcing Assad’s friend Franjieh to retreat to the mountains. As the Christian position grew more tenuous, President Sarkis invited thirty thousand Syrian troops into Lebanon in mid-1976—with the quiet approval of Washington and later the public support of the Arab League—to help restore peace on terms favorable to the Christians. It was the start of what would become a twenty-nine-year occupation. Within days of that intervention PLO chief Yasir Arafat accused Syria’s forces of “pressing ahead to liquidate the Palestinian revolution and the Leba- nese National Movement.”34 Syrian troops attacked the Muslim-held port of Sidon and supported offensives by Christians—who carried U.S. assault rifles in Russian-made armored vehicles—against Palestinian positions.35 By Octo- ber Syria’s Arab Deterrent Force had defeated the Lebanese National Movement and stabilized Christian positions. Syrian forces now occupied much of the Bekaa Valley and the port of Tripoli. At Israel’s insistence, however, Syria left the 80 The Civil War Drug Boom port of Jounieh—a key gateway for Israeli guns and Lebanese drugs—in Chris- tian hands.36 Syria’s controversial defense of Christian territory, and its bloody confrontations with radical Palestinian forces in Lebanon in 1976,37 no doubt strengthened bonds of trust between Christian traffickers and Syrian occupiers. The country was now effectively divided into three main sections. The southern third and West Beirut were controlled by Muslim militias and Pales- tinian factions. Christians held East Beirut and much of the western half of the country stretching north, including much of Mount Lebanon. Syria controlled the Bekaa Valley and far north. This division brought a modicum of stability. The overall level of violence in the country diminished, foreign diplomats began returning, business picked up, and rebuilding began.38 Christian forces took advantage of the relative calm to unite in 1977 under the banner of the Lebanese Front, with a combined militia called the Lebanese Forces. The Lebanese National Movement, on the other hand, was shaken by the assassination in March 1977 of its leader, Kamal Jumblatt, possibly by Syrian agents. To his son Walid fell the challenge of maintaining the diverse coalition, composed of Druzes, Sunnis, Shiites, and Palestinians. Outside intervention quickly disturbed the brief calm. That summer, the Israeli Defense Forces began supporting armed Christian groups and direct- ing artillery fire against Muslim and Palestinian positions in southern Lebanon in order to scuttle Syria’s attempts to broker a political settlement. Prime Min- ister Menachem Begin declared it Israel’s “duty” to prevent Palestinian “genocide” against the Christians.39 In response Palestinian guerrillas fired Katyusha rockets into Galilee, causing four minor injuries, and into the resort town of Nahariya, killing three Israelis. Israel retaliated with armored incursions and heavy bombing raids, killing more than one hundred villagers in southern Leb- anon. Israel launched a full-scale invasion the next spring, causing more than two hundred thousand Lebanese and Palestinians to flee their homes.40 During 1978 and 1979 intense Israeli bombardments largely depopulated a fifteen-mile- wide band of terrain along the border, which the IDF put under the control of a rightist Christian officer, Major Saad Haddad.41

Fighting over Drug Profits When Lebanese fought Lebanese, drug profits were sometimes the source of conflict. On the third anniversary of the outbreak of the civil war a bloody clash developed when a Christian drug dealer from Ain Rummaneh, the Beirut suburb where the whole conflict began in April 1975, was hassled by The Civil War Drug Boom 81 rivals in the Muslim suburb of Shiyah. Before long, members of the two communities were firing away at each other. At the request of President Sarkis Syria stepped in to quell the violence. Palestinian gunmen held their fire but the Christians did not, until Syria blasted them into submission. “As has become customary, there was much destruction and at least 50 victims,” according to one news report.42 Militia forces also engaged in more concerted operations to capture profits from the drug trade. In particular they vied for control of suitable ports along the coast and, when that failed, built new ones illegally. Success in this competition for control of shipping outlets could bring tens or hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue with which to build up militia payrolls and import heavy arms; failure could result in a group’s inexorable demise in Lebanon’s Darwinian struggle. After the Phalangists laid waste to Beirut harbor, they and other militia converted private harbors up and down the coast into jealously protected sanctu- aries for their illegal smuggling. By May 1976, for example, the former yacht harbor of Aqua Marina near Jounieh became the Phalangists’ portal for Sher- man tanks and heavy artillery from Israel.43 Walid Jumblatt built his own harbor at Jiyé. One of the most impressive of the illegal new ports was at Halate, just north of Jounieh. Controlled by the Christian Lebanese Forces, it was

a completely self-contained deep harbor facility surrounded by expensive chalets and a high concrete wall. Armed guards are posted at the entrance, and black Lincolns and Mercedes come and go through an electronic gate. Inside, cargo ships are refitted and repainted with new markings and registration numbers for their next shipment of hashish and heroin. Atop the office complex a radar dish scans the sea and the sky while a helicopter takes off, carrying drug lords back to their fields in the Bekaa. “We saw pictures of this port and couldn’t believe it,” one DEA agent confided. “There, in the middle of this war-ravaged country, a multimillion dollar port—the place looks like Miami!”44

By the 1980s, according to Dib, “imports through illegal ports and smuggling had cost the government US$50 million per month in lost customs and excise revenues.”45 Well-established ports, with their developed harbors, were even more valuable. Under cover of civil war, Christian-held Jounieh became a major center for importing thousands of stolen luxury cars from Antwerp via Larnaca in Cyprus, using the same Lebanese expatriate networks that sold drugs in Europe Map 2 DEA map of Lebanese militia and drug zones. Source: DEA, 1980. The Civil War Drug Boom 83 and supplied Lebanon with stolen Belgian weapons.46 Not surprisingly, even at the height of the civil war in the early 1980s, Jounieh was said to be “resplendent with boutiques, hotels and casinos.”47 Competition over port access divided the Christian side, though it was nom- inally unified under the Lebanese Forces. Chamoun’s Tigers and Gemayel’s Pha- langists fought pitched battles in the late 1970s over Beirut’s harbor in order to pocket levies on legal and illegal shipments. By one estimate, Gemayel’s forces cleared five billion Lebanese pounds from that port between1975 and 1983.48 Gemayel also had beefs with the Franjieh family, which controlled lucrative hashish and opiate transit routes in northern Lebanon, exiting through Trip- oli. The Franjieh family’s close ties to Syria and its ruling Assad family represented a troublesome split in the Israel-Maronite alliance.49 Emboldened by the Begin government, Gemayel’s Israeli-armed and -trained militia began infiltrating northward, threatening the Franjiehs’ exclusive coastal “rackets and mo- nopolies.” Suleiman Franjieh’s son Tony, a notorious hashish trafficker, warned Bashir Gemayel, “Put one foot north of Jounieh and we’ll break it for you.”50 That may have been his last boast. On June 13, 1978, a squad of Phalangist militia, dispatched by Bashir Gemayel and commanded by the fierce Samir Geagea, ambushed supporters of the Franjieh clan near their home base of Zgharta. The assailants then wiped out all inhabitants of the family palace, including Tony and his wife, their baby daughter, maid, chauffeur, and dog. Th result, to Israel’s liking, was a critical rupture between Syria and the remaining Maronite leaders. That fall, Chamoun’s forces provoked a new round of fighting with Syria, aiming to force its troops out of Lebanon after President Sarkis announced that he would renew their mandate.51 Israel’s armed forces shelled Beirut and buzzed the city with its military jets to intimidate Syria on Gemayel’s behalf. But Gemayel’s success in taking over many of his adversaries’ rackets had a costly downside. Israel now demanded that he pay for the arms it shoveled through Jounieh, noting that his territory was “bursting at the seams with money.”52 Bashir Gemayel next targeted the coveted economic base of his rivals the Chamouns and their Tiger militia.53 On July 7, 1980, Lebanese Forces units loyal to Gemayel attacked a wide range of Chamoun’s assets, including his family compound at the Safra Beach Club. Under heavy bombardment Cham- oun’s forces were decimated—along with dozens of Pakistani port workers and other civilians. When the dust settled, Gemayel had taken control of the key prize: five ports through which the Tigers ran hashish. With a great public 84 The Civil War Drug Boom show of rectitude, Gemayel announced a crackdown on the Chamoun clan’s rackets and closed the ports—only to reopen them quietly three weeks later.54 Although Dany Chamoun was forced into exile in France, Gemayel shrewdly bought the loyalty of his defeated enemy by giving the remaining Chamouns a share of the profits from the port they once controlled at Dbeyeh.55 Last but not least, Phalangist forces that December retook from Syria’s occupying army the predominantly Christian city of Zahle, a key drug transshipment center in the Bekaa Valley on the road between Beirut and Damascus. The Begin government agreed to back them, “thereby propelling Israel into the [next] stage of its deepening involvement in Lebanon and the establishment of a fatal covenant between Israel and the Maronites,” in the words of Zeev Schiff and Ehud Yaari.56 When the cold of winter gave way to spring, Gemayel provoked a showdown with Syria, aiming to force Israel to defend the Maronites at Syria’s expense. Phalangist fighters near Zahle began shelling Syria’s army headquarters and fired on sentries guarding a key point on the Beirut-Damascus highway. Syria counterattacked, hurling tank rounds and artillery against its foes. As the Phalangists hoped, Israel shot down two Syrian army troop carriers, prompting Syria in turn to escalate by installing antiaircraft missiles. Israeli leaders finally realized the crisis had been manufactured to suck them into the fray. Washington intervened diplomatically to give them a face-saving way to hold fire. The crisis was defused—until Israel’s massive invasion of Lebanon a year later—when Phalangist militia withdrew and Syria resumed its amicable, laissez-faire relations with the local Christian population.57

The Gemayels and Drugs Posing as Lebanon’s saviors, Gemayel’s Lebanese Forces denied taking over the lucrative drug trade at the ports and transshipment centers they now controlled. The writer Barbara Newman, a friend of Bashir’s, depicted him as a courageous strongman with zero tolerance for hard drugs. Harkening back to an incident in the mid-1970s, she wrote:

Bashir’s intelligence people had imprisoned four people from the Bekaa Valley who were caught trying to sell three kilos of heroin in East Beirut. One of the four jailed was a good friend and political supporter of Sheikh Pierre [Gemayel]. Sheikh Pierre called one of Bashir’s intelligence staff, Paul Ariss, and demanded that he release the man. Ariss replied, “Sheikh Pierre, if it was hashish I wouldn’t care, but this was heroin. It kills people. And they’ve been dealing in kilos.” The Civil War Drug Boom 85

“They were exporting the drug,” Sheikh Pierre replied. “It’s not our problem.” Ariss said he would check with Bashir, which infuriated Pierre Gemayel. He shouted, “You don’t have to check with Bashir. I’m telling you to release him!” Ariss called Bashir and recounted the conversation. Bashir told Ariss to keep the smugglers in prison and to ignore his father.58

Few informed observers believed such tales.59 Even if this self-serving account can be believed, other family members evidently sided with the père Gemayel. On April 9, 1980, Italian police arrested Jean Michel Gemayel, Bashir’s cousin, carrying a kilo of pure heroin. He explained to police that he was an international arms buyer for the Phalangists, in Italy merely to buy accessories. Lebanon’s ambassador to Italy tried to intercede, seeking lenience based on the young Gemayel’s prominent family connections in government, business and the church. The court nonetheless sentenced him to nine years in prison, explaining that “all the personal relations that Gemayel unraveled in his account can only serve to delineate the picture of a vast international conspiracy in the commerce in drugs.”60 Gemayel’s arrest in Italy was a small sign of a major transformation taking place in the international drug trade: the replacement of France by Italy as the springboard for heroin to North American markets.61 As one French journalist noted, “Since 1979, tens of tons of Afghan opium . . . are being routed through Iran, Iraq, Syria as far as Beirut, where the drug is loaded aboard freighters which make their way to Italian ports.”62 The Gemayels’ success in seizing key drug ports in Lebanon enabled the family to rely on economic patronage in addition to force and terror to con- solidate its control over Lebanon’s fractious Christian community. As one correspondent noted in 1982,

Bachir Gemayel’s victorious militias, subsequently consolidated as the Lebanese Forces, today control the bulk of Free Lebanon’s protection rackets and vice trade, parceling out a percentage of the profits to the smaller Christian militias. Their income comes from the estimated $1 billion to $3 billion a year hashish trade, “taxes” on most of the goods coming in or going out of Free Lebanon’s seven ports and “income taxes” levied on the population—up to 20 percent in the case of big businessmen.63

Although the United States probably had little leverage, critics alleged that Washington was turning a blind eye to Christian-led trafficking for political 86 The Civil War Drug Boom reasons. According to journalist Jonathan Kwitny, “Both the Treasury Depart- ment’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms and the Drug Enforcement Administration launched extensive investigations into narcotics dealing by Lebanese Christians during the 1970s. These investigations produced many accusatory field reports, but few prosecutions, before the investigations were ordered closed down by Washington. Some agents blame foreign policy considerations for the shutdown; proof isn’t available.”64 The primacy of politics over drug enforcement reached extremes during the Reagan administration, which funneled billions of dollars to drug-trafficking insurgents in Afghanistan and Central America to wage covert wars against the Soviet Union and its allies. In the case of Lebanon, one CIA analyst remarked, the Reagan administration “tended to see the world in terms of black-and- white, good-or-bad. This led them to see the Christians in Lebanon as good and the PLO, the Muslims, and the others as bad, when we knew that the Maronites were just as ruthless and manipulative as anyone else.” According to a postmor- tem published by the CIA, one reason no one disabused administration leaders of their simplistic worldview was that the CIA’s Directorate of Operations had thrown its support behind Bashir Gemayel: “Even before the Israeli invasion, a covert network had been in place for dealing with the Gemayels, a network that would have bypassed the [CIA’s intelligence] analysts completely. Whatever information could be learned from Bashir Gemayel, and later from his brother Amin, and whatever actions the Maronites undertook at the behest of top US administrators would be largely beyond the analysts’ ken.”65 In fact, according to Bob Woodward, Bashir had been recruited by the CIA in the early 1970s while working for a Washington law firm, then coveted as a “major asset” once he took over the Phalangist militia in 1976. Although the CIA station in Beirut viewed Bashir as a “barbaric, cynical manipulator who played off the Israelis and the Americans to obtain support and equipment,” Woodward explained, the CIA’s operatives in Israel, reflecting the views of their host, welcomed Bashir as a strongman who could bring order to Lebanon.66 Other sources suggest that the CIA began delivering arms to Gemayel through Israel as early as 1977, stepping up deliveries and training before his deadly assault on Chamoun in July 1980.67 Sometime in 1981, President Reagan authorized secret payments of $10 million to the Lebanese Forces under Bashir’s command—even though the volatile Lebanese strongman had been suspected only a year earlier of plotting to assassinate U.S. ambassador John Gunther Dean for criticizing Christian mili- The Civil War Drug Boom 87 tia attacks against Palestinian civilians.68 The CIA also brought Bashir’s ruthless intelligence chief, Eli Hobeika, and his top lieutenants to the United States for training in 1981. That August, the State Department hosted a series of meetings in Washington, D.C., with Gemayel, signaling the administration’s confidence in his ability to revive the Lebanese state and unite the country under pro-Western leadership.69 The Israelis also backed him lavishly.70 They aimed boldly to install a friendly Christian leader in power and then sign a formal peace treaty—on favorable terms—with a second Arab state. But Defense Minister Ariel Sharon and Prime Minister Menachem Begin knew that arms and training alone would not ensure Bashir’s political supremacy. To achieve that end, and realize their dream of rid- ding Lebanon of the PLO, they launched “Operation Peace for Galilee,” Israel’s most overwhelming invasion of Lebanon, on June 6, 1982. Within three days, after uprooting hundreds of thousands of Lebanese, Israeli tanks and personnel carriers rolled into Beirut’s southern neighborhoods. Israel laid siege to West Beirut for six weeks, producing thousands of civilian casualties, before PLO fighters agreed to evacuate the country. A multinational force of U.S. Marines and British, French, and Italian troops took up positions in Beirut that August to oversee the Palestinian evacuation and protect civilians. On August 23 Bashir was elected president and began preparing to take office, promising a “new era of peace, security and tranquility.” (In celebration his gunmen careened through Beirut in cars decked out with Gemayel’s portrait, letting loose bursts of deadly gunfire.)71 Three weeks later, Bashir met with Sharon and a senior Mossad official “to advance the Israeli-Christian relationship to full-fledged military cooperation.” Meanwhile, his militia joined Israeli army units at checkpoints in a show of strength.72 From that high point of Christian-Israeli hegemony, things went downhill fast. A pro-Syrian group managed to plant a bomb inside Phalangist headquarters in East Beirut and assassinate Bashir on September 14, one week before he was to take office. His militia, supplemented by members of the Israeli-backed South Lebanon Army, then took revenge, slaughtering and dismembering hundreds of Palestinian men, women, and children at the Sabra and Shatilla refugee camps while Israeli forces stood nearby. As the political situation turned worse, Bashir’s brother Amin, a strongly pro-American businessman, succeeded him as president. Although Amin enjoyed the backing of U.S. Marines, the limitations of Washington’s power were savagely highlighted in April 1983, when a suicide bomber destroyed the U.S. 88 The Civil War Drug Boom embassy in West Beirut, killing sixty-three people and wiping out the CIA station along with the agency’s senior Near East expert. On May 17 Amin signed a peace agreement with Israel. Syria was outraged, but President Reagan sent Amin a secret letter promising support.73 Backed by Washington’s goodwill and Israel’s military umbrella, units of the Lebanese Forces in late 1982 began intruding into the traditional stronghold of the Druze in the Chouf Mountains east and southeast of Beirut. When Walid Jumblatt’s militia took advantage of a partial Israeli troop withdrawal to attack the Lebanese Forces, forcing many Christian villagers to flee, Amin appealed to Washington. U.S. air and naval forces bombarded Muslim and Druze villages in the mountain region. The indiscriminate attacks succeeded only in generating more fanatical, anti-Western anger. U.S. soldiers, some of whom became heavy drug users during their stay in Lebanon out of boredom and frustration, were unprepared for what came next.74 In October 1983 suicide bombers struck the U.S. marine and naval barracks in Beirut with six tons of high explosives, killing 241 troops. It was America’s worst single-day military loss since Iwo Jima in 1945 and underscored again the limits of U.S. power. U.S. military forces would pull out of Lebanon in February 1984, and Amin would cancel his agreement with Israel that March. At the same time, militant groups like Hezbollah stepped up their hostage-taking, most devas- tatingly with the seizure of CIA station chief William Buckley in March 1984.75 Amin’s government and Washington’s strategy of support both lay in tatters. Washington’s alliance with the Gemayel family continued to undercut its commitment to fighting smuggling from the region. Investigative reporters Jo- seph Volz and Lars-Erik Nelson concluded in 1983, as Kwitny had earlier, that the United States government was not pressuring Lebanon to curb the drug trade:

The reason: the drug traffic comes extremely close to members of the current [Christian-led] Lebanese government, and any U.S. crackdown could impinge on diplomatic efforts to strengthen that government and secure a withdrawal of Israeli and Syrian troops from Lebanon. . . . Despite the evidence, a senior U.S. official said there are no plans to crack down on the drug trade in Lebanon, mainly because the United States does not want to offend President Gemayel.

Citing a former chair of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Control, the reporters noted that while no evidence directly linked President Amin Gemayel to drug trafficking, his family-led Phalangist party, “through its control of the Port of Beirut, has long been involved in the hashish trade.”76 The Civil War Drug Boom 89

Drug Boom, Economic Boon The DEA in mid-1981 conceded it was hearing reports of “a resurgence of narcotics trafficking and heroin production activity in Lebanon.” Drug enforcement operations by the central government, it noted with considerable un- derstatement, were “hampered by the turbulent situation within the country.” Particularly in rural areas “controlled by family clans and tribes,” the absence of central government authority created “an atmosphere conducive to the flagrant pursuit of illegal activities by members of these clans.” The agency also observed that rival political and religious factions were acquiring “cash, weapons, and ammunition, which allegedly are obtained by participation in the drug trade.”77 Grown under the protection of heavily armed local clans, hemp plants reportedly occupied 80 percent of all farmland in the Upper Bekaa Valley by late 1981 and accounted for almost a third of the country’s export income. In a classified assessment the CIA estimated that the crop pumped more than $500 million annually into the local economy, enriching desperately impoverished farmers and weakening the traditional power base of local members of parliament.78 “Stone villas are replacing mud-walled huts,” reported the New York Times’ John Kifner. “Big shiny cars, many of them originally stolen from the streets of Beirut, push through the narrow streets. While most roads in Lebanon are marked with potholes, here there is mile after mile of smooth road, privately paved with hashish money. . . . There are now factories, financed with hashish profits, making paper tissues and plastics. There is also a new trout hatchery.”79 Said the wife of one clan leader, “If a man grows the hashish, he can marry off his daughter, feed his family. Our sons can go to the university and become doctors and engineers.”80 Another clansman, with more modest aspirations, declared, “If we didn’t have hashish to export, people would be eating each other out of hunger.”81 The crop also enriched middlemen, who discovered the virtues of peaceful cooperation in a land that was otherwise gripped by ruthless violence:

Under the eyes of Syrian soldiers, in their guise as the peacekeeping troops of the Arab Deterrent Force, the hashish . . . is brought out and distributed abroad, to Europe, the United States, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, primarily through the Christian areas controlled by the private armies of both the Phalangist Party and their bitter enemies, the Franjieh clan in the northern mountains. All have reason to be happy with the arrangement. . . . Now, dealers and narcotics 90 The Civil War Drug Boom

experts say, most of the hashish goes out through the string of illegal ports that have sprung up along the Christian coastline north of Beirut, which have also siphoned millions of dollars away from the Government docks.82

One leading narcotics dealer in the southern suburbs of Beirut confirmed, “We do not recognize factional divisions. . . . We deal honorably with our merchant colleagues in the other areas, do not commit aggression against their borders, and always take their acknowledged rights into consideration as to whether a major transaction will take place among them or through them.”83 The hundreds of millions of dollars that poured into the pockets of those middlemen created a bizarre contrast between conspicuous wealth and appall- ing destruction that stunned many visitors. Throughout Beirut, wary residents still ducked behind sandbags to avoid snipers. Bullet holes pockmarked buildings like a bad case of acne. Rockets, mortars, and artillery tore gaping chunks out of high-rise offices and stores. The bankrupt government no longer picked up piles of garbage throughout Muslim West Beirut. Electricity and phone service were spotty at best. “But for those who can tolerate the constant killing, the lack of essential services, the filth and the devastation,” observed Kifner,

Beirut can be a land of wild prosperity and gaudy consumption. Smuggling, gunrunning, narcotics and hashish trafficking and assorted rackets of as- tounding ingenuity, along with the hundreds of millions of dollars that other Middle Eastern countries are pouring in to maintain various militias and guerrilla groups have financed the growth of a wealthy new elite. The owner of a chic boutique near formerly elegant Hamra Street says that his business for the last three years has been his best in 30. Women he has never seen before walk in and buy half a dozen expensive dresses at a time. In a corner florist’s shop the other night, a man with an automatic pistol stuffed behind his belt, blithely wrote a check for $700 worth of flowers. He explained that he was celebrating the birth of a son.84

This illicit wealth also enriched Lebanon’s traditional financial sector. Total bank deposits in the country quadrupled between 1975 and 1982, supporting the opening of ten new banks. Experts pointed to the influx of remittances from overseas Lebanese workers, infusions of aid from various Arab states, and the “sizeable contribution” made by Lebanon’s “largest cash crop—hashish.”85 As one American banker explained, “Commerce here is completely unimpeded by The Civil War Drug Boom 91 government. . . . The force of the gun is the only limit. One big contract, one smuggled cargo and you’re set for life. The government’s power to find out how you make it or even if you have it is nil.”86 Drug profits also brought prosperity to port towns outside of Beirut used for contraband exports. As Kifner reported in 1981, “The new construction is even more striking up the coast around the Christian port of Junieh, where there are luxurious sea-front residences and resorts and where an elegant gal- lery of shops, boutiques and restaurants called Espace 2001 recently opened.”87 By 1983, however, a legacy of ruined infrastructure, the closure of the U.S. embassy, and the departure of the PLO—along with the million dollars a day it pumped into Lebanon’s economy—plunged the country into “its deepest crisis since the civil war started in 1975,” in the words of former finance minister Elias Saba. Lebanon thus became all the more dependent on its main exports, hashish and opiates.88 Amid all this frenzied consumption and savage violence, more and more Lebanese escaped by getting high. Large numbers of militia members—mostly young males, liberated by war from family and social constraints—began abusing drugs once destined only for sale abroad, despite periodic crackdowns by their senior leaders. In time, less-disciplined militia groups began paying fighters with drugs instead of cash. By 1980 Lebanon was estimated to have one hundred thousand regular users of hashish, a number that soon rose to a quarter million.89 As big as the domestic market had become, there was plenty of hash left for consumption abroad. In August 1980 New York State police discovered more than one and a half tons of the potent Lebanese resin in an apartment in a Catskills community. The stash, which took up seventy-five large canvas bags, had an estimated street value of $14 million.90 In 1981 U.S. Customs officers broke up a huge smuggling operation that imported a staggering forty tons of Lebanese hashish to the Eastern Seaboard.91 Just two months later, Coast Guard divers salvaged thirty-four thousand pounds of Lebanese hashish dumped off the coast of New Jersey.92 In 1982 an American smuggler who remained in Lebanon after the civil war began was arrested back in the United States for conspiring with a retired chief of Lebanese Customs to import multiton loads of the drug into the United States.93 Richard Stratton, a good friend of novelist Norman Mailer, claimed he was merely an innocent writer-researcher who owed his Texas horse ranch and other holdings to investments by unnamed “prominent figures” from the 92 The Civil War Drug Boom

Middle East. The DEA, which had him in its sights for five years, called Stratton “a major trafficker,” and a Toronto detective called him “the biggest fish in the biggest drug network in Canada.”94 In a subsequent brief memoir Stratton observed that he owed his success as a drug trafficker to more than personal ingenuity: “When I was smuggling hash out of the Middle East during the long and bloody civil war in Lebanon (a war that had more to do with fighting for control of the multibillion-dollar drug trade than it did with religion), I met and worked with intelligence operatives and major criminals who openly traded in arms and drugs with CIA connivance and protection.”95 In the same year that Stratton was arrested, an international police investigation involving ten countries in North America and Europe led to the seizure off the coast of Greece of twenty-two metric tons of Lebanese hashish and twenty-six kilos of heroin with a street value of nearly $400 million. Police arrested one ringleader in Montreal, but the Lebanese mastermind, Joseph Saba, managed to flee.96 Canadian police predicted, accurately, that plenty of other smugglers would take their place. Multiton seizures of hashish from Lebanon were an almost yearly occurrence.97

The Montreal Connection One of the biggest wholesale buyers of Lebanese hashish in Canada was the powerful Montreal-based crime family led by Frank, Vic, and Pepe Cotroni. The criminal history of these Calabrians dated back to the Lebanese-French Connection of the 1950s. Another major importer was their Sicilian-born colleague Nick Rizzuto, who ultimately edged out the Cotronis to become leader of the Montreal underworld and Canada’s most powerful mobster. His criminal portfolio included distribution of multiton quantities of heroin, cocaine and hashish, as well as loan sharking, gambling, fraud, and contract “hits.” Riz- zuto’s eldest son, Vito, was implicated but not charged in a 1986 deal with Samir Geagea and other Phalangist leaders to import 24 metric tons of hashish, worth more than $60 million on the street. He was charged in connection with the seizure of sixteen metric tons of Lebanese hashish in 1987 off the coast of New- foundland—and again for conspiring to import a staggering thirty-two metric tons in 1988. But Rizzuto was acquitted in one case and charges were dismissed in another because prosecutors illegally obtained recordings of his legal team. No wonder Vito was known as the “Teflon Don.”98 Canadian and U.S. investigators learned over the course of a multiyear investigation into the Canadian connection that the Cotroni and Rizzuto crime fam- The Civil War Drug Boom 93 ilies had been purchasing vast amounts of hashish and heroin from Christian Phalangist leaders for more than fifteen years. Montreal police detected phone calls from Frank Cotroni in 1975 and 1976 to the home of Suleiman Franjieh, then president of Lebanon; Cotroni then traveled to Cyprus to arrange delivery of 550 kilos of hashish. In return, besides cash, the Canadian Mafia supplied the Phalangists with large quantities of arms, including American M16 rifles and ammunition stolen from an armory in Boston, as well as heavy machine guns, grenades, and C-4 plastic explosives. One informant told Canadian police of an incident in which one mobster shot up a Palestinian refugee camp to demonstrate the efficacy of his weapons.99 One of the key organizers of the guns-for-drugs traffic between Lebanon and Canada in the late 1970s to early 1980s was Joseph Abizeid, a Montreal-based member of a family of Maronite notables from Zgharta, home of the Franjieh clan. His family was also said to be close to Habib Marrouri, “a senior officer in the Christian Phalangist militia and a frequent visitor to Montreal.” Over the course of two years of surveillance and months of wiretaps, Canadian police learned that Abizeid was plotting with members of the Montreal Mafia, Mar- rouri, and Paul Franjieh, the former president’s nephew, to assassinate the president of Lebanon, Elias Sarkis, for interfering with their drug shipments. Unknown to Abizeid, the man he hired to organize the hit, a leading Houston criminal, was protecting his own growing drug empire by feeding information to the FBI and DEA. Canadian police finally rolled up Abizeid’s operation in 1981, only to have the case thrown out because of a technical flaw in the wiretap application. That was just as well; authorities later learned that family members in Lebanon were prepared to seize the Canadian embassy if he were convicted.100

The Shift to Heroin Lebanon’s drug production continued to shift from hashish to the more lucrative opium and heroin. Two key political developments accelerated that trend. One was the assassination in October 1981 of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, who had arranged the appointment of one of Egypt’s leading hashish import- ers to head the government-sponsored National Democratic Party in Alexan- dria;101 Sadat’s successor, Hosni Mubarak, squeezed Lebanon’s largest hashish market by installing a more committed customs chief in Alexandria. Even more catastrophic was Israel’s massive invasion of Lebanon in June 1982, which thoroughly disrupted land and sea commerce and the old political arrangements that permitted drugs to pass with little impediment. The resulting fragmenta- 94 The Civil War Drug Boom tion of Lebanon made bulky hashish shipments much more risky and favored the smuggling of high-value, easily disguised parcels of morphine and heroin. As a result, much of the 1982 hashish production went into storage. The sharp drop in drug revenue contributed to a nationwide recession in 1983.102 In 1984, according to the Beirut newspaper Daily Star, hemp cultivation in the Bekaa Valley plummeted to only a quarter of its level in 1983, as growers shifted to legal cash crops like sunflower seeds and especially to more valuable and more readily transported opium.103 Ten kilos of opium grown and harvested in the Bekaa Valley would sell for $2,000 to $4,000, a handsome amount for most families in that former agricultural backwater. Refined into heroin in a garage laboratory, however, its value-to- weight ratio soared as much as sixty times, to between $12,000 and $15,000 per kilogram. After leaving Lebanon, its value would jump again to anywhere from $80,000 to $200,000 per kilo on the U.S. wholesale market. The price would multiply many times from there by the time it hit the street in diluted form.104 By one estimate, production of opium in the northern Bekaa Valley jumped from fifteen hundred kilograms in 1984 to nearly two thousand kilograms in 1985.105 Lebanese police claimed in 1986 that about 15 percent of Bekaa farmers were growing opium poppies.106 It was not uncommon for a “distinguished family” in Baalbek to maintain a heroin lab inside its home. One such entrepreneur, who boasted of making as much money in a day as he might have in a month as a pharmacist, said he disposed of heroin “through special channels in which senior officials, the militia leaders and the district toughs play a prominent role.” One of the prominent outlets for his drugs, he said, was through Israel, via its proxy, the South Lebanon army. But he complained that the threat of kidnapping, heightened by the growth of Hezbollah and the Shiite Amal militia, had cut into the number of buyers who would visit the Bekaa Valley to make deals.107 As with the hashish trade, heroin brought not only prosperity but fruitful collaboration among people of diverse, feuding religions. As an example, one Israeli police intelligence report cited

the Shi’ite village Brital located southeast of the Ba’albek-Zahleh road. The village inhabitants are mostly employed in growing cannabis and opium poppy, and there are four laboratories which produce heroin. One of the laboratories is owned by the Sekaaf family, Christians from Zahleh, the second, by the Shi’ite Hamiyah family from Ba’albek, the third by the Christian Habesha family from Dir el-Ahmed and the fourth, by the Sherif family from Elimona.108 The Civil War Drug Boom 95

Through such collaboration, Lebanese of all persuasions managed to keep the U.S. market well supplied. In early 1984 the DEA and the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) announced a joint investigation into the emergence of a guns-for-drugs traffic between Lebanon and Detroit, a city with tens of thousands of heroin users and one of the largest populations of Leba- nese immigrants in the United States. (One Detroit resident in the mid-1970s was Nabih Berri, who later became speaker of Lebanon’s National Assembly and leader of the Shiite Amal movement.) The DEA estimated that Lebanon had supplied almost a ton of high-grade heroin to the U.S. market in 1983—one-fifth of all heroin entering the country—of which more than half came through De- troit. Lebanese traffickers were said to use “svelte Scandinavian girls” as couriers to ethnic Arab contacts in East Coast cities and Detroit. In turn ATF reported seeing “instances of local Arabs smuggling guns out of Detroit to people in the Mideast,” for a markup of 1,000 percent. Faced with the specter of a sinister connection between the two sets of traffickers, DEA authorities in Washington created a special Middle East investigative unit based in Detroit.109 The DEA chief in Detroit, Robert De Fauw, held out few chances of ultimate success. “There are 60,000 addicts in Detroit,” he said, “and if they want Leba- nese heroin, someone is going to find a way to get it to them no matter what we do.” Support for that view came just a few months later when, just across the border in Canada, a woman was found dead after three condoms filled with heroin burst in her intestines. In all, she was carrying half a kilo, worth $1 million, in her bowels.110 Detroit was hardly the only entry point for Lebanese heroin into the United States. In late 1984 federal drug agents made undercover buys of the drug from a group of traffickers, mostly ethnic Lebanese, in New York, Los Angeles, and Houston. The alleged ringleader, a Lebanese-born man from Boston, told undercover agents that the heroin was moved from Lebanon through Syria, Turkey, Cyprus, and Italy. Authorities claimed his ring smuggled tens of millions of dollars worth of the drug.111

The DEA and Counterterrorism The DEA had better luck busting gangs in the United States than in penetrating the tight-knit clans and militia in Lebanon itself. Even more than other Ameri- cans in that lawless country, U.S. drug agents were marked men, targeted by kidnappers and terrorists. After the car bombing of the U.S. embassy in Beirut on September 7, 1984, one DEA agent who survived the attack suggested in an 96 The Civil War Drug Boom interview that the motives may have been criminal rather than political: “Our presence in Beirut was noticed, and I suspect that Islamic Jihad terrorists as- saulted us, not for political reasons, but rather to warn us that we should not try to touch their sacrosanct drugs business.”112 The DEA pulled all its visiting agents out of the country and back to Cyprus. The Nicosia office grew quickly. In 1984 it consisted of two DEA agents and one West German agent. By 1990 the DEA’s contingent was supplemented by two agents from Germany, one from Great Britain, two from France, one from Scandinavia, and others from Australia, Italy, and Greece—all working closely with the Cypriot narcotics squad.113 These agents had no illusions about stopping drugs within Lebanon itself, unless opportunities arose to play one militia group against another. The central government existed mostly in name only. Drug enforcement fell to the In- terior Ministry, which was led for a period in the mid-1980s by a son-in-law of Suleiman Franjieh. Needless to say, police did not go looking for drug labs in Zgharta, the Franjieh family’s stronghold.114 One U.S. drug agent explained the constraints of his job: “The only way we can cope with Lebanon is by intelligence, trying to learn what’s going on inside, so we can arrest people when they go outside.”115 To gather such intelligence, the DEA tried to penetrate Lebanon’s secretive drug market by recruiting informants able and willing to risk moving about the country. The DEA attaché in Cyprus, Micheal Hurley, had become adept at setting up long-distance informant networks while working previously in Southwest Asia, gathering intelligence on remote tribal areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was surprisingly easy: “You just had to go to the embassy visa line and ask if anyone wanted to snitch,” he quipped.116 Hurley’s allies in Lebanon included three senior police officials—a Druze, a Sunni, and a Maronite Christian—who collaborated from their respective zones in divided Beirut. When they caught and “turned” a trafficker traveling to the United States, they would pass him across the Green Line to the Christian side, where the Maronite police colonel would put him on a ferry to Cyprus. There the DEA would sometimes arrange a “controlled delivery” of the drugs to their destination in the United States—with close agent supervision all the way—in order to bust the U.S. end of the connection.117 Lebanon’s narcotics police, although dedicated, had only limited geographic sway. To extend DEA’s reach, Hurley developed close relations with the Lebanese Forces, drawing on Lebanese friends from New York to make intro- The Civil War Drug Boom 97 ductions. His connection to the Lebanese Forces was cemented when he passed an informant’s tip to Samir Geagea, warning of an imminent car bomb attack against him. Geagea’s men intercepted the bomb and were forever grateful. “If we wanted something done they would do it for us,” Hurley recalled. “They had more control than the police or army.”118 Geagea’s forces came in handy when Hurley needed to extricate an Ameri- can who got himself and the DEA into trouble by pretending to be an under cover agent in Lebanon. Steven John Donahue was a major trafficker in Lebanese hashish arrested in Newark in December 1982. He pleaded guilty a few months later to mere possession of marijuana with intent to distribute in return for helping the DEA make cases. Before long, however, he fled to Leb- anon to escape the DEA’s clutches. It proved a perilous refuge. In 1984, news accounts reported that Donahue had been kidnapped in Beirut for “poking his nose into the business” of a prominent Christian drug clan. He reportedly told his Lebanese contact that he wanted to buy one hundred kilos of heroin, only to be exposed as a DEA informant by a clan family member who worked for Interpol. Donahue’s abductors demanded a sizeable ransom but did not otherwise harm him. After his family paid $400,000 for his release, the story went, his captors finally handed Donahue over to Christian associates in the eastern Bekaa Valley, who then drove him to the U.S. embassy in Beirut in the summer of 1986. At the time of his release his wife told reporters that he had been working as a DEA informant. Donahue himself boasted later of working for the agency on a “large-scale project.” In the course of a lawsuit later brought by Dona- hue against the agency, a senior DEA official acknowledged that Donahue had worked on a Lebanese drug case in Athens, Greece, but said he warned Do- nahue against going to Lebanon. The DEA heard from its sources that Dona- hue partied and did business with smugglers in Christian East Beirut, staying in Lebanon to escape the restrictions of his plea bargain. When Donahue got into trouble and enlisted his family as noisy advocates, the head of the DEA station in Cyprus sent a message to members of the Rahmé family, a Chris- tian clan of drug dealers, demanding that they release Donahue or “be targeted by customs officials for intense searches when crossing international borders.” (Jean Rahmé was implicated in a French case in 1989–90 in smuggling multikilo loads of heroin and hashish to finance Samir Geagea’s Chris- tian militia.) The Rahmés sent word back that Donahue was there of his own accord. Hurley, the DEA station chief, ultimately asked the chief of the Leba- 98 The Civil War Drug Boom nese Forces militia (presumably Samir Geagea), with whom he had friendly relations, to kick Donahue out of the country—so the DEA could arrest him as a fugitive.119 Donahue wasn’t the only missing American the DEA sought to free in Leb- anon. The DEA went into full search and rescue mode after the March 1984 kidnapping of the CIA’s Beirut station chief and top counterterrorism expert, William Buckley.120 To help find him, the drug agency used its connections with various militia and underworld factions to supplement the eyes and ears of the CIA and U.S. military intelligence—as it often had over the years in other parts of the world.121 Efforts to rescue Buckley and other U.S. hostages took the CIA down a black hole. “It was a brutal, ugly story, but people were selling information, selling hostages, selling their rings, selling their clothes, selling letters, trying to make money out of the hostage business,” recalled Clair George, the CIA’s director of operations.122 Frustrated by the failure to find Buckley, the frantic CIA director, William Casey, in January 1985 convened an interdepartmental group on terrorism to oversee and coordinate the rescue mission. The Drug Enforcement Adminis- tration joined that group “in order to improve coordination and cooperation,” according to long-forgotten testimony in May 1985 by the director of the State Department’s office on terrorism, Robert Oakley.123 Soon the DEA’s agents would become involved in covert operations directed by the National Security Council’s Col. Oliver North, not to apprehend drug pushers but to bribe terrorists to free Buckley. The ground was prepared for the DEA’s new counterterror mission by the Reagan administration’s relentless linkage of drug trafficking and terrorism. Its rhetoric was usually aimed against leftist regimes such as Cuba, but officials held up Lebanon as a case in point as well. “Lebanon stands out as a prime example where terrorist factions take advantage of the drug traffic to obtain the necessary logistics to carry out their activities,” wrote John Warner, chief of the DEA’s International Programs Staff, in 1984. “All factions involved in the civil war and transnational terrorism are taking advantage of the narcotic situation to further their objectives.”124 From the start the DEA handled its new mission with extraordinary sen- sitivity. It kept no written records and even the DEA’s general counsel was reportedly never informed that drug agents were now acting as cloak-and-dagger operators for the CIA and National Security Council. “There was no reporting The Civil War Drug Boom 99 responsibility to anyone,” said Sen. Paul Trible (R-VA). “There were no controls on how the money was spent or for what purpose.”125 The DEA’s new role was initiated in January 1985 when the chief of security at the White House asked his neighbor, DEA agent William Dwyer, whether the drug agency could help locate Buckley. Dwyer in turn recommended his colleague Frank Tarallo, who had extensive experience in the Middle East. Before long, Assistant National Security Adviser John Poindexter agreed to add the DEA to the hostage task force. The DEA assigned to it an agent of Lebanese descent, Abraham Azzam, along with Dwyer and Tarallo. The drug agency contributed $20,000 to cover their expenses and informant payments.126 These agents reportedly “paid thousands of dollars to Lebanese hashish dealers and other informants to pinpoint the hostages’ location.”127 Before long, Dwyer and Tarallo developed a promising Lebanese Druze informant—a West Beirut military commander named “Elias”—who claimed to be in touch with someone who could obtain the hostages’ release.128 The informant, meeting with Azzam and the other two agents in Geneva and in New York, claimed that to swing the deal he needed $50,000 up front and a U.S. guarantee to sell arms to the kidnappers. Soon the terms of trade escalated to $1 million per hostage, plus $50,000 for the informant.129 The CIA was skeptical but agreed to pay “Elias” a first installment of $50,000. It balked when he demanded another $200,000 to pay his contact in Lebanon—a narcotics trafficker. Neither Azzam nor the CIA minded paying a drug criminal; they simply questioned whether he could be trusted to deliver.130 Azzam also worried that the whole bribery plot would blow up in the DEA’s face if reported by the CIA to legislative oversight committees. As North informed his boss, Robert McFarlane, “He is concerned that when the Congres- sional committees are made aware of the $200K that DEA would be tainted by another CIA failure.” As a result, the DEA field agents kept Azzam in the dark about their operations.131 The informant “Elias” now came back with evidence that he could deliver: a newspaper on which Buckley had ostensibly jotted his initials. There was just one problem: the handwriting wasn’t Buckley’s and neither was the middle initial. “We came to the conclusion that . . . it was a big scam,” said the CIA’s Clair George. “No big surprise. . . . We were scammed regularly on the hostage business and others.” Even the DEA’s Azzam thought it “stunk.”132 But this obvious fraud didn’t deter North from charging forward. In a memorandum to National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, North advised that 100 The Civil War Drug Boom rescuing Buckley would cost a cool $2.2 million. The DEA, he wrote, believed that “this effort will produce two hostages and that additional hostages will be released for $1 million each.” North regretted that “the price cannot be negotiated down given the number of people requiring bribes.” Further money would be needed to rent a safe house and yachts for the hostage transfers. “Travel arrangements and operations costs are currently being financed from funds normally available to the Nicaraguan resistance,” he reported, foreshadowing the creative accounting that would lead to the Iran-Contra scandal. Another $2 million would come from the Dallas billionaire H. Ross Perot, whose can-do spirit had paid off in 1980 with a successful mission to rescue two employees held in an Iranian prison. North recommended that the two DEA agents be formally assigned to the NSC for the duration of the hostage ransom operation. McFarlane approved.133 Attorney General Edwin Meese and ultimately President Reagan himself supplied the O.K.134 Meese later told Congress, “I did authorize DEA to cooperate with National Security Council staff in anything that would be helpful to get back the hostages, but ransoming . . . was never discussed with me.” Meese also said it was “not my understanding they (the agents) were to be used for operations.”135 The two agents now assigned to North were paid out of Swiss bank accounts that his private agents maintained for the Contra supply operation and the in- famous Iran arms-for-hostages deals. The DEA agents received half a million dollars in cash to fund their undercover work through mid-1986.136 The agents had become, for all intents and purposes, North’s personal go- fers. In June 1985 he ordered them to hand over to their Lebanese intermediary $200,000 in bribe funds supplied by Ross Perot. It vanished, with the DEA’s source supplying convenient excuses.137 Unbeknownst to them, Buckley was already dead.138 Before he died, his revelations to Hezbollah and Syrian interrogators may have blown the cover of nearly every CIA agent in the Middle East—and along with them, details of their operations.139 Still North persevered. In August he assigned the two DEA agents to travel to Geneva to get travel papers for a Saudi prince who claimed he could free various hostages. The U.S. ambassador in Bern, however, refused the agents’ request for a false U.S. or Swiss passport to help smuggle the man into Leba- non.140 It was just as well: the “prince” turned out to be an Iranian who swin- dled North out of several hundred thousand dollars.141 Months later, North’s phony prince was convicted of bank fraud in Philadelphia.142 The Civil War Drug Boom 101

This fiasco displayed all too well the same ineptitude shown by the White House’s arms-for-hostage deals with Iran, whose revelation by a Lebanese magazine in late 1986 would seriously damage the Reagan presidency. The DEA’s Abe Azzam was not surprised. “Ollie was grandstanding,” he said. “He was throwing a Hail Mary pass and hoping he could get all the hostages standing in front of the White House wrapped in a ribbon.”143 The DEA’s collaboration with North resulted in at least one success. In the fall of 1986 North and other members of a top secret counterterrorism group met in the White House to plan the kidnapping of Fawaz Younis, a Beirut-based radical who had hijacked a Royal Jordanian jet on June 11, 1985, at Beirut airport. (After flying to Tunis, the plane returned to Beirut, where the hijackers released the passengers and crew and then blew up the plane on the tarmac.)144 Working closely with the CIA and FBI, the DEA used its informants to com- pile a profile of Younis and track his day-to-day movements. Eventually the drug agents recruited a former Lebanese criminal who had known Younis since 1981. The informant renewed his contact with Younis, offered him a job smuggling drugs, and lured him in September 1987 to Cyprus, where U.S. agents grabbed him.145 He was reportedly “the first Middle East terrorist suspect arrested abroad and returned to the United States.”146 Younis claimed he had been working with the Shiite group Amal to pressure the Arab League into removing all Palestinians from Lebanon. He was convicted in 1989 and sentenced to thirty years in prison but was deported to Lebanon in 2005.147 Revelations of the DEA’s expansive role in Lebanon dismayed some members of Congress. Sen. Trible, a member of the Iran-Contra investigating committee, called it “another example of a private operation run by government officials without supervision and the checks and balances that make our government work right.”148 Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-AR) said he was “incensed” to hear of the DEA’s role and declared, “Their authority goes to interdicting drugs, not looking for hostages, no matter how laudable a goal.”149 Congress- man William Hughes (D-NJ) noted that the operation could jeopardize the DEA’s mission abroad “if other countries believed that they were engaged in espionage, counterespionage, [or] counterintelligence” unrelated to drug enforcement.150 The House and Senate Iran-Contra committees concluded that the North-DEA operation “violated the law” because Congress was not informed.151 Attorney General Edwin Meese, however, claimed the administration had no obligation to disclose the operation because the DEA was not “an intelligence agency.”152 102 The Civil War Drug Boom

But members of Congress should not have been so surprised. It had been common practice for several decades for narcotics agents to work on CIA assignments. In 1980 Rep. Les Aspin (D-WI) had warned that this relationship opened a gaping loophole in federal oversight of the CIA. “Covert operations could be assigned to intelligence agencies other than the CIA—and there are [a] lot of them,” he noted. “How many people are aware that the Drug Enforce- ment Administration has intelligence agents all over the world?”153

The Mid-1980s Drug Boom Along with kidnapping and terrorism, narcotics cultivation and trafficking flourished in Lebanon in the latter half of the 1980s. In October 1985 the CIA’s classified National Intelligence Daily noted that “the lucrative drug trade” was helping to sustain an economy that had “shriveled to about half its prewar level.” The hashish market was now back in full bloom after the disruption caused by Israel’s 1982 invasion. The CIA reported that hemp cultivation in the Bekaa Valley was “unencumbered by government control or Syrian interference” and was worth between $600 million and $1 billion a year.154 The multiagency Na- tional Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee estimated that Lebanon accounted for 60 percent of world hashish production and about 30 percent of U.S. imports.155 One Lebanese farmer complained that a shortfall in rain had hurt the hemp crop, “but it’s still okay—our hashish is never bad.”156 Meanwhile, reports out of Lebanon indicated a sharp rise in poppy cultivation, covering anywhere from several hundred to as much as three thousand hectares. The State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters stated in 1986 that Lebanon had once again become “a key processing/ transshipment center in the mid-East” for opiates and that its clandestine labs were refining opium from Southwest Asia into heroin for export to the United States and Europe.157 A congressional staff study mission to the region the same year noted that traffickers were favoring heroin, since it was “much more compact, and more lucrative, than hashish and therefore easier to smuggle.” Exports of the powerful drug from Lebanon “have increased dramatically, and there is no reason to expect different developments in the future failing a settlement of the Lebanese civil conflict,” it concluded, adding that there were reports of “extremely high level involvement by the Lebanese government in the narcotics trade.”158 Who were those “high-level” drug profiteers? Besides the usual names, including the Gemayel and Geagea families, a DEA report indicated that one of The Civil War Drug Boom 103 the major buyers of opium from farmers in the Bekaa was Abdel Mawla Amhaz, a member of parliament and Shiite clan leader from the town of Nabha, north of Baalbek. His partners in that ecumenical business were Tony Franjieh (before his killing) and Habib Taouk, from a Maronite clan near Nabha.159 Lebanese entrepreneurs were also importing large amounts of coca base from Latin America for processing into cocaine. Members or allies of the Ni- caraguan contras reportedly took advantage of Washington’s protection to export cocaine from Central America in exchange for Lebanese arms.160 Lebanese traders also reportedly swapped arms for cocaine in Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Paraguay, then transshipped it to countries in the Arabian peninsula and Persian Gulf.161 The State Department’s narcotics office concluded that there were no prospects for curbing rampant drug production and smuggling:

Lebanon has fragmented into a patchwork of virtually autonomous states with the central government controlling only a small fraction of the national territory. It is not in a position to curb the narcotics trade or provide reliable data on production or trafficking. Traffickers and producers, however, have adapted to the chaotic conditions. By paying “road taxes” to the forces controlling various areas of the country, they are able to move their products to the international market through Medi- terranean ports such as Tripoli or through the Beirut and Damascus airports.162

These assessments of Lebanon’s huge and pervasive drug trade gleaned support from French journalist Rémi Favret, who visited the Bekaa in 1986. Might- ier than any military or political force in the region, he reported, “is the drug trade, the industry that pays for all the guns, the ammunition and the men in this bitter and bloody war.” He cited DEA estimates that “drug profits account for a good 50 per cent of the entire Lebanese economy.” One crop of marijuana alone was “enough for the Lebanese war to be self-perpetuating.”163 Yet the huge economic stakes persuaded the various armed factions of the area—Palestinian, Shiite, Sunni, Druze, Christian, and Syrian—more often than not to stay at peace, Favret noted. Like the CIA, he portrayed the Syrians more as bystanders who took their cut of the profits than as masterminds of the Bekaa’s illicit commerce. Instead of picking a fight with heavily armed local growers, Syrian forces “made a point of not interfering.” This spirit of cooperation, along with good weather, helped make the 1986 fall hashish crop the most abundant in more than a quarter century. It followed 104 The Civil War Drug Boom a successful spring harvest of opium poppies that, in Favret’s words, covered “the normally austere slopes . . . with millions of white and crimson blooms.”164 Favret reported that drugs had become more important than ever to sustaining the country’s major armed factions outside the valley. “If, by some miracle, you could wipe out all the dope from Lebanon, the Christian camp, for example, wouldn’t last 15 days,” one Beirut diplomat told him. “The fact is they get most of their revenue from drugs, whether operating clandestine ports, getting paid off by some big traffickers, or just using drug money to build hotels or leaving it sitting in banks.” Favret explained that Shiite growers often sold their hashish crops at the predominantly Christian village of Deir al Ahmar. It was a long-standing transit point for drug convoys headed across Mount Lebanon to the mountain town of Bcharre in the heart of Phalangist territory. From there drugs moved north, through the Franjieh family’s territory to Tripoli, or west to Byblos and Jounieh, controlled by Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces militia. Geagea’s men would hide bags of heroin inside tires and then haul them out to sea to waiting yachts, where smugglers handed over suitcases filled with U.S. dollars or Leba- nese pounds.165 Whatever peaceful coexistence was maintained among drug traders in the Bekaa did not extend to the country’s ports, where militia factions continued to compete fiercely for the enormous profits they enabled. One particularly bloody example was Tripoli—a city of five hundred thousand held hostage to vicious battles fought from 1982 to 1985 between the Sunni Islamic Unifica- tion Movement and the Alawite, Syrian-backed Arab Red Knights, the militia of the Arab Democratic Party. Despite Syrian efforts to mediate, indiscriminate artillery barrages killed hundreds of civilians and wounded many hundreds more.166 During the height of the violence, in August 1984, the correspondent Samir Ghattas reported that the conflict “focused on control of the city’s port and the lucrative trade in hashish. . . . The Tripoli clashes are considered by most analysts to be gang warfare rather than sectarian strife.”167 The Syrian army finally entered Tripoli in late 1985 and crushed the Islamist militia. Not surprisingly, militia groups ignored a Lebanese government decree in October 1984 to close all illegal ports. On the contrary, they continued to build new ones, like the makeshift port of Khalde, slapped together by Walid Jumblatt’s Druze forces in former Christian territory just south of Beirut. (One of Jumblatt’s cousins insisted, “We don’t allow imports of weapons, gold, diamonds or hashish.” He said nothing about exports, however.) When the militia The Civil War Drug Boom 105 couldn’t attract enough business, a reporter observed, they used gunboats to force ships to unload at their ports to drive up revenues.168

International Markets Lebanon’s ports had no trouble finding outbound business, however. In No- vember 1985, for example, Cypriot authorities seized fourteen tons of hashish from five Lebanese and eleven Turks aboard three motorboats.169 In 1986 the Greek freighter Florida apparently shipped ten tons of hashish and an unknown quantity of heroin from Lebanon to Italian Mafia buyers; details emerged the next year when the crew was arrested by Phalangists and held at a port near Beirut for failing to pay for their drugs.170 Multiton seizures by Spanish, Egyptian, and U.S. authorities over the next few years called continuing attention to Lebanon’s enormous hashish trade.171 Lebanon remained an important supplier of heroin as well, despite Afghan- istan’s growing market share as mujahedin took on the Red Army by selling opium for guns. From 1985 to 1987, according to one report, the number of heroin labs in Lebanon doubled to about one hundred.172 Heroin production reached about ten tons in 1988, about one-eighth the total in Afghanistan.173 An expert in Congress warned in 1989 that “heroin production has exploded in Lebanon, quintupling over the past two years, to the point where it produces as much heroin as Mexico.”174 The arrest in 1990 of twenty-two members of one of the largest heroin importing rings on the East Coast—nine of whom were residents of Leb- anon—put the spotlight on that country’s continuing importance in the world narcotics market. The Justice Department claimed the organization was “responsible for the importation of hundreds of kilograms of relatively pure” heroin into the United States, Canada, and Europe. One of the kingpins was identified as Kamal Charif, who “owned and operated one of the largest heroin processing facilities in the Bekaa Valley,” according to the affidavit of a DEA undercover agent. The smugglers reportedly paid Syrian authorities $10,000 per kilo to move their heroin through military checkpoints for export to Cyprus.175 Customs officials in Cyprus admitted their inability to stop more than a few tributaries of the vast river of hashish and heroin flowing out of Lebanon. Along with drugs came money—vast amounts of it:

Money couriers sometimes come through Larnaca on the overnight boat from [the Christian port of] Juniye, Lebanon, carrying millions of dollars in cash, 106 The Civil War Drug Boom

according to customs officials. They say they believe it is drug money but they can do nothing about the currency shipments as long as the couriers register the money and do not keep it on Cyprus. One customs official said he has seen as much as $50 million in cash bound for Switzerland pass through Cyprus.176

Lebanon’s drug exports were supported by members of the country’s worldwide diaspora who provided trustworthy smuggling connections.177 For example, DEA officials reported that Lebanese drug couriers sometimes traveled via airports in West African cities, as well as Nairobi and Addis Ababa, where large numbers of expatriate Lebanese lived.178 Australians of Lebanese origin also played a major role in that country’s drug market. A third of all Lebanese-born prisoners were reportedly convicted of drug crimes, about seven times the rate for Australian-born prisoners.179 In 1987 Sydney police caught Bardia Ibrahim, age sixty-three, with 1.4 kilos of heroin—worth more than A$1 million—buried in several hundred packets of chewing gum. Police later arrested her local contact and another alleged accomplice who turned out to be members of the Zgharta militia, headed by Suleiman Franjieh. The drugs were reportedly sent from Lebanon by a cousin of Franjieh who used Ibrahim as an unwitting courier.180 Meanwhile, in the United States, a joint Justice-Treasury drug task force reported in 1985 that Lebanese trafficking activity was soaring in Boston, Detroit, and New York—“cities with large Lebanese communities having extended family connections.” It estimated that Lebanese traffickers controlled one-sixth of the U.S. heroin market, up from only 6 percent a year earlier. “This trend co- incides with increasing reports of heroin conversion laboratories in Lebanon,” it noted.181 Like Australia, the U.S. market was a prime target for smugglers from the Franjieh clan. Two alleged relatives of Suleiman Franjieh reportedly imported between one and three kilos of heroin into the country each month over a period of a year and a half. They met couriers at various U.S. airports and transported the contraband to the greater Detroit metropolitan area for sale. Their ring was busted in 1988, and most members pleaded guilty.182 Their fate evidently didn’t deter a man claiming to be the brother of the late President Elias Sarkis, the moderate Maronite who governed from 1976 to 1982. When he tried to pass innocently through Customs at Kennedy International Airport in December 1988, Gabrayel Sarkis, seventy, was caught carrying five pounds of heroin strapped to his back.183 The Civil War Drug Boom 107

Domestic Power Struggles, 1987–1989 In the absence of a real state capable of enforcing law and order, notes Faw- waz Traboulsi, authority was splintered “in favour of no less than ten militia- controlled ‘cantons’ most of which were built around an access to the sea and controlling among them up to 18 ‘illegal’ ports.” The nominal Lebanese state, he observes, “was at times reduced to the sheer parameter of the presidential palace” in Babda, stripped of resources by the loss of customs and tax revenues to the militia.184 CIA analysts noted in early 1988 that “increasing competition between rival militias for funds intensifies the factional struggle and increases the irrelevance of the state.” With the decline of Lebanon’s economy, they added, “militia warlords . . . are increasingly turning to smuggling and drug trafficking as sources of revenue. The militia ports are convenient depots for drugs and illegal arms, as well as for good[s] stolen from other ports.”185 In this lawless environment old alliances gave way to new power struggles, as often as not among groups within the same broad confessional community. Hundreds died when Lebanese Forces militia loyal to Samir Geagea battled rival Lebanese Forces leader Elie Hobeika—partly over policy differences with respect to Syria and Muslim political demands but also over control of lucrative contraband ports.186 On the Muslim side the fast-growing Shiite Amal militia engaged in bloody clashes against radical Palestinians, with occasional interventions by Syria (usually against the Palestinians). Unlikely new alliances formed as well. Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein backed Christian groups, including Samir Geagea’s Lebanese Forces, who were enemies of his enemies: Iran, its Hezbollah proxies, and Syria. At various times, Phalangist militia secretly aided Palestinian commandos and even the Islamic Unification Movement, an Islamist group tied to Hezbollah.187 With Iranian support Hezbollah grew as a force, over time replacing Amal as the leader of militant Shiites in the Bekaa Valley and southern Lebanon. One key setback to efforts at reconciliation within Lebanon was the assassination of the moderate Sunni premier, Rashid Karami, on June 1, 1987. Karami, an advocate of Syrian-led efforts to broker a peace agreement, was blown up by a bomb planted on an army helicopter carrying him, and other government officials, from his home city of Tripoli to West Beirut.188 Karami had submitted his resignation a month earlier, but President Amin Gemayel, who respected and needed his Muslim counterpart, refused to accept it. 108 The Civil War Drug Boom

Early investigations suggested that the bomb was probably planted at an army base near Jounieh—a bastion of Samir Geagea’s anti-Syrian Lebanese Forces.189 According to an article published the following year by a DEA employee, “intelligence sources say the recent helicopter bomb that killed Leba- nese Prime Minister Rashid Karami was the result of Karami’s support of the Syrian army in the Bekaa, a move that threatened to choke off the Christians’ drug supply routes.”190 Geagea was convicted of the crime in 1994 but was released under an amnesty in 2005.191 When the six-year term of President Gemayel ended in September 1988 without a clear successor, Geagea seized the day. His gunmen preempted the Gemayel family’s dynastic ambitions by seizing a Phalangist militia barracks and several Christian radio stations, before putting Amin Gemayel under house arrest and sending him packing to France. Geagea’s program was simple: no cooperation with Syria and, if necessary, a partitioning of the country into Chris- tian and Muslim zones.192 A CIA intelligence analysis at the time called the Israeli-trained Geagea “ambitious, ruthless, highly charismatic and an excellent military tactician” with an affinity for “the extremist wing of the Christian community.” He had six thousand armed men under his command, with access to a force double that size in case of a general mobilization.193 The country was left again with rival claimants to power and no consen- sus on a process for peacefully resolving disputes. Into the vacuum stepped Gen. Michel Aoun, Maronite leader of Christian East Beirut, who proclaimed himself the rightful leader of Lebanon. He was Gemayel’s last-minute appoin- tee as interim military commander and “emergency prime minister,” a post traditionally reserved for a Sunni Muslim. Competing with Aoun for influence was Dr. Selim al-Hoss, acting prime minister at the end of Gemayel’s presidency, who represented impoverished Muslim West Beirut. But Muslim factions clashed rather than rallying together. Amal traded fire with Hezbollah, while outnumbered Sunni forces stayed put around Sidon. Walid Jumblatt, meanwhile, withdrew his Druze militia to his redoubt in the Chouf Mountains. As factional fighting resumed, John Kifner reported that Lebanon was “sinking ever closer to disintegration in the worst crisis of its 14 years of civil war.” Electricity and water supplies dwindled, rampant inflation depleted the Lebanese pound, and vast numbers of refugees hunted for basic food and shel- ter to survive. Despite the claims of rival national leaders, he wrote, “the real power, as always, lies with the gunmen in the streets: the neatly uniformed Leb- The Civil War Drug Boom 109 anese Forces in the Christian area, and the bearded fighters of uncountable factions in the Muslim sectors.”194

Aoun’s Gambit The rehabilitation—or reinvention—of Lebanon’s state was finally set in mo- tion by Aoun, who shrewdly commanded the army to attack not only the militia but the racketeering enterprises and illegal drug ports that sustained them. In February 1989 General Aoun’s U.S-trained and Iraqi-armed troops took on Lebanese Forces militia in East Beirut for a week, killing dozens. Aoun said one of his key goals was to break their ability to tax business enterprises, basic services, and travel through the Christian-held zone—a form of extortion that raised $400,000 a day. Significantly, Aoun also made it a priority to take control of Beirut’s busiest dock, the fifth basin, which Lebanese Forces had seized in 1976. Their taxes on licit and illicit goods transiting through the dock robbed the central government of resources it needed to maintain an army, a stable currency, and any semblance of authority. Aoun launched an air and naval blockade along the coast in early March to oust militia forces from all illegal ports, which he termed “dens of terrorism and drug trafficking.”195 Notes Charles Winslow:

Closing down the ports was tantamount to getting serious about the situation in Lebanon. Ports like Khalde and Jiyyah, south of Beirut, and Silāta, north of Jubayl, were entry points for arms as well as exit points for narcotics. . . . But the general’s gambit came to naught. When Robert Franjieh announced that he would hand over his port (Silāta) in the north of Lebanon to General Aoun, Syrian forces moved in, took it over, and prevented the Lebanese government from assuming control. When the General’s military tried to stop ingress and egress from the Druze ports (Khalde and Jiyyah), Jumblat had his PSP gunners open up against B‘abdā and East Beirut from their Chouf outposts in the mountains.196

Also remaining under militia control were Amal’s port of Ouzai, just south of Beirut; Sidon, patrolled by a Sunni militia group; and the Hezbollah- controlled port of Sarafand in the south. At the extreme southern end, exports (including drugs) passed through border territory occupied by the South Leba- non army, proxies for Israel.197 In all, these ports reportedly provided militia groups with $500 million in revenue annually.198 110 The Civil War Drug Boom

Aoun triggered a much more intense fight when, in a fit of megalomania perhaps inspired by his Iraqi backers, he declared a “war of liberation” against Syr- ia’s forty-thousand-strong occupying army. With support from Druze militia, Syria responded by shelling East Beirut on March 14. Aoun and his newly har- nessed Lebanese Forces responded in kind, setting off twenty-nine days of relentless rocket and heavy artillery barrages. Residents of Beirut lived for weeks at a time in bomb shelters. The battle killed 270, wounded 900, and drove 300,000 people from Beirut. Most basic services, including telephone and garbage collection, came to a halt. Fires destroyed two hospitals, and artillery damaged five others. One local businessman called it “the worst bombardment of all the war,” no small claim.199 In October 1989 an Arab League conference in Taif, Saudi Arabia, worked out a new formula for communal power sharing in Lebanon. The plan called for restoring central state authority and gradually withdrawing Syrian forces from Beirut to the eastern Bekaa Valley, pending negotiations on their permanent status. The formula included modest provisions for limiting Christian political dominance, including some reductions in presidential powers and in their number of reserved parliamentary seats. Aoun, however, rejected the accord. At the end of January 1990 Aoun resumed his showdown with Geagea’s Lebanese Forces, accusing them of criminal drug trafficking. (His charge was amply vindicated in May 1990, when a tribunal in Marseille convicted ten of Geagea’s supporters, including his lover, of importing dozens of kilos of heroin and hashish for the benefit of his Lebanese militia.)200 Aoun’s television station showed daily footage of drugs being confiscated from Lebanese Forces barracks. “We want to build a sound republic, not a heroin republic that the militiamen intend to establish,” the general declared.201 Aoun’s drug war killed more than 440 people, wounded at least 1,700 and created more than 75,000 refugees. Aoun finally had some success in choking off the economic base of his rivals. A French news agency reported in mid-1990 that hashish and opium farmers were finding it hard to market their crops and faced bankruptcy: “16 uninter- rupted months of fighting in Lebanon, since early 1989, have paralyzed traffic at the country’s ports—notably Juniyah, controlled by the Lebanese Forces militia.” Farmers were said to be open to planting other crops if offered financial assistance.202 In early 1990 Aoun’s rival claimant as president, Syrian-backed Elias Hrawi, proposed a 1960s-style crop substitution program to wean Bekaa farmers off The Civil War Drug Boom 111 of cannabis and poppies. The cabinet approved a $6 million “green plan” to help irrigate and fertilize the valley to make it suitable for growing legal cash crops like fruits and vegetables. The proposal won support from Damascus, which pledged to speed farm shipments through checkpoints to prevent spoil- age. Syria asked Washington for financial and technical assistance.203

Endgame The competition between Aoun and Hrawi was finally decided, like most issues in Lebanon, by brute force. In October 1990 Syria’s army mounted a full-scale assault on East Beirut and put the Christian general out of business. Literally under the gun, Lebanese banks handed over $25 million in Aoun’s accounts to the Hrawi government.204 Borrowing a key tactic from Aoun, an official said the Hrawi government had its eyes on twelve seaports used by Christian and Muslim militia for shipments of drugs, weapons, and other goods. If those ports could be shut down, “militia leaders would be caught between a hammer and a hard rock,” he said. “Without money to pay their fighters, they’ll gradually disintegrate.”205 Backed by fifteen thousand Syrian troops, the Lebanese army in March1991 succeeded in seizing three of the major smuggling ports still occupied by militia groups: Dbeiye, a few miles north of Beirut, held by the Lebanese Forces; Ouzai, the Amal-controlled port in Beirut’s southern suburb; and Khalde, a Druze stronghold. “The seizure of the ports will enable the Government to impose restrictions on imports and curtail the smuggling of contraband,” reported Ihsan Hijazi of the New York Times. “On many occasions, the illegal piers were used for smuggling drugs, and the cultivation of hashish and opium poppy in eastern Leba- non thrived during the civil war years.”206 The Syrian-led crackdown on militia smuggling pinched off the longstand- ing pipeline of hashish from the Lebanese Forces to the Canadian Mafia, ac- celerating a shift in Canada’s drug market to cocaine. But the partial cleanup of illegal ports did not wipe out Lebanon’s drug traffic overnight.207 In August 1991 authorities in Boston seized more than three tons of hashish, said to be worth more than $100 million on the street, from the Bekaa Valley. The subsequent indictment claimed that Syrian and Lebanese government officials conspired with the traffickers to facilitate the shipment, which the U.S. attorney for Boston called “the largest (hashish seizure) in known history here, certainly in New England.”208 112 The Civil War Drug Boom

And if one virulently anti-Syrian Christian source is to be believed, Presi- dent Hrawi—a pro-Syrian Maronite landowner from Zahle in the Bekaa, and son of an alleged major hashish producer209—had dealings of his own with the drug underworld. Hrawi allegedly did business with a Lebanese oil distributor who was imprisoned in Geneva in 1988 for laundering drug money. Hrawi was also said to be “associated” with a Bekaa deputy in the heroin business.210 Several years later, Hrawi’s son Roy was named as a prominent drug trafficker by a popular Shiite MP from the Bekaa Valley, who was stripped of parliamentary immunity after being accused of drug crimes himself. The deputy, Yahya Shamas, asserted that Roy Hrawi was involved in the attempted murder of a customs official who was investigating cocaine found in a container in the Port of Beirut. Roy Hrawi denied the charges and sued for slander. Shamas was later convicted, and no charges were brought against the president’s son.211 Although drug trafficking remained a rampant social ill,212 at least it no longer functioned as a primary driver of the war economy. Under Syria’s watch- ful eye Lebanon’s militia gave up their heavy weapons, disbanded their cantons, and rejoined the army, police, and civil service. Militia bosses took a substantial share of cabinet posts and began investing their war chests in commercial businesses and real estate, hastening the reconstruction of Beirut. The Taif Accord’s modest political reforms shifted the allocation of political and administrative posts to promote greater equality between Muslims and Christians. Syrian interference, political roadblocks, corruption, and extreme economic inequality remained huge challenges.213 The country also continued to suffer immensely as the battleground for violent rivalries played out among Israel, Syria, and Islamic fundamentalists. Still, Lebanon had started back on a long and sometimes treacherous path toward the recovery of its economy, civil society, and state institutions. 6 The Syrian Connection

foreign intervention—most notably by Syria and Israel—shaped Lebanon’s drug trade no less than its civil war. More than a few critics, indeed, have attributed to Syria most of the blame for Lebanon’s bounty of hashish and heroin after 1976.1 In 1990 Ralph Cwerman, an American adviser to the Israeli mission at the United Nations, wrote:

With tens of thousands of troops stationed in the Bekaa, Damascus has long controlled Lebanon’s drug-producing region. . . . Senior Syrian military and intelligence officers stationed in the Bekaa have long been directly or indirectly involved in trafficking and have grown rich off the drug trade—which explains why there is such heavy competition among Syrian officers to be posted in Lebanon. . . . How far up the Syrian military ladder does drug involvement extend? According to senior intelligence experts in Israel and the West, it reaches the inner circle of Syria’s government.2

In March 1987, the Reagan administration denied certification to Syria under Section 481(h) of the Foreign Assistance Act, which bars most aid to major drug source or drug transit countries that fail to cooperate fully with the United States.3 Nonetheless, senior U.S. officials stopped short of accusing the Damascus regime of criminal collusion with narcotics producers and smugglers. The State Department, in its 1989 annual report on the world narcotics traffic, stated that Syria appeared to have “acquiesced in the drug production and trafficking in the areas over which it exercises active control.”4 John Kelly, assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs, said in 1989 that “the narcotics coming out of the Bekaa Valley are a tremendous in-

113 114 The Syrian Connection escapable fact” but refused to point any fingers at Damascus. “I’ve heard the allegation,” he averred. “I haven’t seen the evidence.”5 A senior DEA official told Congress that year, “We do not really have any information about the Syrian forces actually transporting the drugs.”6 Establishing Syrian culpability was of much more than academic interest to Middle East pressure groups; it could derail any diplomatic rapprochement between Washington and Damascus. As one American official stated, “It is in the Israelis’ interest to spin the drugs claim in order to keep Syria on the US State Department list of countries involved in drug trafficking.”7 The administration’s reticence to condemn Syria’s leaders as masterminds of the regional drug trade prompted the Israeli government adviser Cwerman to charge in 1990 that “Washington ignores Syrian complicity in the drug trade, acutely aware that raising the issue might jeopardize a valuable channel to Leb- anese hostage-takers and would unnecessarily offend Syrian President Hafez Assad. Now that Syria is one of the three Arab nations with troops in the multinational force in the Saudi desert, it is even more unlikely that Washington will focus on the issue.”8 Indeed, President Bush reportedly did not raise the drug issue with Syrian President Assad when the two met in Geneva that November to discuss Syria’s joining the coalition against Iraq.9 By 1991 Washington was a bit more forthcoming about Syrian involvement in the Lebanese traffic. The DEA and State Department now pointed to the Syr- ian army’s role in convoying shipments of hashish to coastal ports in trucks and even helicopters. For every kilo of heroin that passed through Syria’s checkpoints, U.S. sources allowed, army commanders charged $5,000 to $10,000. On the other hand, American officials still declined to conclude that trafficking was an instrument of state policy. “We don’t have any reports that Assad himself has personally profited from this or that he’s pushing it,” said Melvyn Levitsky, assistant secretary of state for international narcotics matters.10 Los Angeles Times reporter Nick Williams Jr. similarly cited “western diplomats” as saying “it is not the army as an institution that is dirty, but rather some individual officers.”11

The Israeli Indictment Starting in 1990, even before Syria joined the U.S.-led coalition in the Gulf War, relations between Damascus and Washington began to thaw. That spring, the Syrian government managed to obtain the release of two American hostages held captive in Lebanon, through a combination of patient negotiations and arm-twisting.12 In November 1991, after the successful culmination of the Gulf The Syrian Connection 115

War, Syria attended a U.S.-sponsored Middle East peace forum in Madrid and announced its willingness to negotiate a settlement with Israel. The reward: a meeting between Presidents Bush and Assad, the first between U.S. and Syr- ian heads of state in thirteen years. Syria built on that political momentum by releasing thousands of political prisoners at the end of the year and providing exit permits for Syrian Jews in April 1992.13 Strong supporters of Israel in Congress began voicing concern that the Bush administration had made secret concessions to Syria in return for its cooperation and moderation.14 Not by coincidence, it would seem, Syria became the sudden target of numerous drug exposés published by pro-Israeli sources in late 1991 and 1992.15 Many of these indictments were apparently inspired, directly or indirectly, by a report titled “Syrian Involvement in Drug-Related Activities in Lebanon,” prepared by Israel’s police intelligence service in 1990 or 1991.16 The report, some fifty pages long, must be taken seriously, given Israel’s undoubted intelligence capabilities.. The fact that the report was written in English rather than Hebrew, however, suggests the intent to reach a foreign audience, possibly with a political agenda. Indeed, one Israeli journalist reported that the document was “compiled with the objective of presenting it to the CIA and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, in a bid to convince Washington to think twice before removing Syria and Lebanon from its list of countries sponsoring the drug trade.”17 The report began by citing estimates (of unspecified origin) that Lebanese drug sales earned $1.5 billion to $2 billion per year, about 40 percent of Leba- non’s GNP. Of that total, Syria’s take was estimated between $500 million and $700 million annually, “a respectable sum which should not be disdained” in view of Syria’s economic crisis and the heavy burden of its military spending. Later, however, the report admitted, “We do not possess information which separates Syrian income derived from drugs from that derived from the official Syrian financial structure and from private factors.” The report included a photocopy of a travel pass issued in the names of De- fense Minister Mustafa Tlass, General Ali Duba, head of the Security and In- telligence Division of the army, and his representative in Lebanon, Brigadier General Ghazi Kanaan. Allegedly the document was sold to known drug traffickers in return for an unspecific “hefty payment.” The report alluded to “many reports” from 1976 to the mid-1980s regarding the use of military vehicles belonging to Syria’s Defense Brigades, including 116 The Syrian Connection

helicopters, to move drugs from the Bekaa Valley to ports in northern Leba- non or into Syria itself. It particularly implicated forces under the command of Rifaat Assad, the president’s brother. The document also referenced a 1986 report claiming that Syria’s intelligence and security forces had accepted tens of thousands of dollars to transport three tons of opium to the port of Ouzai in southern Beirut. Any serious analysis would have questioned why smugglers would choose to export a large fraction of Lebanon’s entire opium crop in one shipment, when converting it to morphine base or heroin would have been far more profitable. Besides allowing Syrian officials of all ranks to profit from “direct and indi- rect involvement in the drug process,” the document asserted, Damascus facilitated the trade to help Syria “control or at least influence” many of Lebanon’s warring factions and “terrorist organizations,” which depended on drug revenues. As a prime example it alleged that Walid Jumblatt’s militia produced heroin in laboratories in their Chouf Mountain redoubt, using morphine base from the Bekaa Valley. They allegedly exported the drugs via the port of Jiyé while importing cocaine base from South America for domestic consumption and reexport to foreign markets. The report alleged that when fighting closed Jiyé, General Kanaan helped Jumblatt maintain his transportation routes in return for “great sums of money.” Syria could also punish factions opposed to Damascus by cracking down on their ability to reap drug profits. The report cited a case in April 1987 when Syrian forces destroyed hashish crops in Shiite areas around Baalbek under Hezbollah control. “Syrian forces surrounded the fields and gave the growers 48 hours notice of their intentions,” it said. A similar enforcement action took place the same month in a poppy growing area dominated by Hezbollah. The report admitted that no evidence directly linked President Assad to the drug trade but said of his brother Rifaat, “He is corrupt and knows no limits. . . . His sources of wealth are varied. Some may have come from legal business deals; however, for the most part, his dealings have been illegal. Most of his activities center on receiving bribes for arms deals and drug smuggling, which continue to this day.” In addition to the alleged involvement of Rifaat’s Defense Brigades in protecting and transporting drugs after Syrian forces entered Lebanon in 1976, the report cited an elite militia force under his command, the Red Riders, which allegedly controlled smuggling through the port of Tripoli. The dossier also claimed that Rifaat “received protection money from large-scale dealers.” (The report was notably silent on the fact that Rifaat The Syrian Connection 117 was sent into exile in 1984 and won libel judgments against newspapers alleging his involvement in drugs.) The report also noted in passing that a nephew of President Assad was arrested at Damascus Airport by security forces “when he attempted to smuggle out drugs and counterfeit dollars.” His arrest would appear, however, to indicate the regime did not condone crimes committed even by members of Assad’s extended family. The report said Syria only went through the motions of enforcing its official antidrug policy, including highly publicized (but limited) crop destruction operations, seizures of drug shipments (usually from dealers who did not pay protection money), and cooperation with Jordan and Saudi Arabia for drug interdiction at their borders. Crop destruction typically involved only 1 to 10 percent of the cultivated area, the report estimated. In exchange for protection, the Syrians allegedly taxed growers $100 to $200 for every quarter acre (dunam) of poppies grown; higher-level traffickers allegedly paid several thousand dollars to a Syria brigadier general for the right to operate heroin laboratories. Traffick- ers also paid Syrian forces an export tax at the port of Tripoli. While some of the money lined the pockets of senior officials, the report maintained, much of it was distributed as “salary supplements” to Syrian soldiers to maintain their loyalty and morale. The consequences for nonpayment ranged from cutting off water supplies to arrest. Finally, it acknowledged that Syrian motives may not have been entirely corrupt. Syrian forces “have a certain indisputable interest” in maintaining peace in the portions of Lebanon that they occupied. “The protection which they provide for the drug industry enables the existence of this relative calm so necessary for Syrian strategic presence in the Lebanese Valley.” The report also conceded that over time the Syrian government may have become more serious about fighting drugs as a result of a growing domestic addiction problem fed by returning soldiers who had been exposed to cheap drugs in Lebanon. For example, it cited the transfer in 1987 of a Syrian colonel based in Lebanon “so that an investigation could be carried out concerning sus- picions that members of the Syrian High Command in Beirut were involved in drugs.” It also admitted that “President Assad personally appointed some of his senior advisers to deal with the ‘plague of corruption,’ in addition to ‘handling’ Syrian involvement in smuggling and drugs.” The unpublished but widely circulated Israeli report likely helped to inspire a searing public indictment of Syria produced in November 1992 by the Demo- 118 The Syrian Connection cratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice, chaired by Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat and one of the Senate’s most fervent supporters of Israel.18 The report’s title—“Syria, Pres- ident Bush, and Drugs: The Administration’s Next Iraqgate,” suggests a possible partisan motive as well for the exposé:

According to this political indictment, the Bush administration simply refuses to admit the extent to which drug corruption has been institutionalized in the Syrian military forces now occupying Lebanon. More importantly, the Admin- istration has virtually ignored the important fact that the Syrian Government and the Syrian military, as institutions, directly benefit from their associations with drug traffickers. Without Syrian military participation, the present system of growing, producing and transporting drugs in Lebanon today would simply collapse.19

The report maintained that only “small quantities of hashish . . . were produced in Lebanon prior to the Syrian invasion in 1976,” thus flagrantly exaggerating Syria’s responsibility for the country’s drug problems. Based on inspection of classified U.S. government intelligence files, staff discussions with other unidentified experts, and published accounts—very few of them ever cited specifically, and most consisting of anonymous hearsay— the report claimed that ordinary Syrian officers and troops earned as much as $30,000 a year from drug-related bribes in Lebanon. Senior Syrian officials were said to have “amassed an illicit fortune” by cooperating with traffickers there. In all, the report claimed that Syrian officials collected “anywhere from $350 million to more than $1 billion a year from those who seek to peddle their poison in the United States.” The numbers were impressive but suspect. If true, the Syrians would have appropriated most of the profits of the trade for themselves, leaving implausibly little for the growers and traffickers. As if that were not enough, the report charged that “Syrian-sponsored traffickers have begun to develop increasingly close ties with both the Colombian cartels and South American terrorist groups.” Throwing in every bit of sensa- tional gossip, it added that “the ultra-violent Peruvian terrorist group, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), may also be coordinating its drug and terror tactics with similar groups and traffickers in Syrian-occupied Lebanon.”20 And it speculated wildly that the Syrian Defense Ministry’s attempt to purchase a fluid filtration plant might have been aimed at “producing both an extremely high- grade form of heroin and biological weapons material.”21 The Syrian Connection 119

The conclusion was alarming: “The Syrian Government’s continued support of terrorist groups based in Lebanon, its recent acquisition of several ‘dual-use’ technologies with the active support and encouragement of the Bush Admin- istration, and its persistent involvement with known drug traffickers, make it clear that Hafez Assad’s Syria has the capacity to become as great a threat to American interests in the Middle East as Saddam Hussein’s Iraq ever was.”22 Read in the post–Iraq War era, many of these claims are disturbingly remi- niscent of the inflammatory rhetoric about “weapons of mass destruction” that the George W. Bush administration used two decades later to justify “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” In both cases the claims gained credibility from the echo effect of widespread repetition in the popular media. And, it must be admitted, they gained credibility from particles of truth that effective propaganda exploits. Without citing sources, but closely paralleling the Israeli report, Schumer’s staff accused several leading Syrian officials by name: • Rifaat Assad was “the leading baron of the Lebanese drug trade” from 1976 to 1984, when he was exiled for trying to replace his brother as the head of state. He used troops, trucks, and aircraft associated with the 569th Syrian Army division to run drugs from fields and labs to ports and airports. • Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass was “associated” with “at least three known drug traffickers.” He provided visas for smugglers traveling to Argentina, Germany and Spain and sold travel permits to friends of the Defense ministry, including at least some traffickers.23 • General Ali Duba, head of military intelligence, was “connected” to the Jafar clan of hashish growers. He used drug profits to pay for his intelligence service’s needs rather than line the pockets of corrupt officials. • Gen. Ghazi Kanaan, head of military intelligence in Lebanon, provided protection, for a price, to nine Lebanese traffickers; mediated disputes between various Lebanese factions (“presumably for a fee”); and issued travel passes to some known traffickers.24 These assertions were supported by bits of anecdotal evidence pointing to Syrian military corruption: • In 1986 the Spanish government expelled the Syrian consul general and the chief security officer of the Syrian embassy in Madrid following a criminal investigation into several shipments of heroin seized in 1985. Schumer’s staff said that Syria’s ambassador “reportedly ran the drug ring,” although it did not indicate any action taken against him.25 120 The Syrian Connection

• Some Syrian soldiers were allegedly implicated along with members of the Sicilian Mafia in a multiton shipment of hashish seized by Italian authorities off the coast of Sicily in 1986. The Honduran-registered freighter was also carrying several pounds of heroin and morphine base.26 • In January 1990 a French court convicted two current or former members of Syrian military intelligence for attempting to smuggle into France eight tons of Lebanese hashish that had been loaded at the Syrian-controlled port of Tripoli.27 (This was the well-known Cleopatra Sky incident.)28 • A seizure of more than three tons of Lebanese hashish in Boston on August 9, 1991, led the FBI to assert that the culprits had paid bribes “to political figures within the country of Lebanon, to figures within the military establishment, both in Lebanon and in Syria.” According to the staff report, one of the recipients was Defense Minister Tlass.29

Live and Let Live Syria’s culpability was real enough, but it was much more complicated than pictured by Israeli officials or their American allies, who aimed to indict rather than explain. Syria’s occupation of most of the Bekaa Valley in 1976 put tens of thousands of troops in close proximity to Lebanon’s hashish and poppy fields and drug warehouses, giving them some accountability. But the Lebanese government never called Syria into the country to police the drug trade. As one reporter observed in 1977, “Syrian soldiers of the Arab League peacekeeping force maintaining token posts in Baalbek and outlying towns have ignored the hashish business so far. ‘They say they are here to maintain peace and not get involved in internal matters,’ said a local official.”30 Syria knew that any attempt to enforce Lebanon’s long-ignored antinarcotics laws would provoke fierce resistance from heavily armed landowners, farmers, and militia, at best distracting from Syria’s political and military aims and at worst risking a military debacle. As the Israeli police report conceded, Da- mascus needed allies in the Bekaa, not angry insurgents. Even with forty thousand soldiers in Lebanon, Syria was not omnipotent. One reporter called attention to the “arsenal of weapons” hoarded by the drug clans to deter “the rare official harassment.” One clan leader boasted of having three thousand “sons” who could man numerous antiaircraft guns and “three Soviet-made tanks captured during the civil war.”31 AP’s Terry Anderson observed in 1983, before he was taken hostage, “the Syrians actually control only The Syrian Connection 121 the main roads, the front lines and a few rear areas where their forces are con- centrated. Elsewhere in the valley are Iranians, Libyans, Palestinians of various factions and half a million Lebanese Muslims of the Shiite and Sunni sects and Christians, with their own militias ranging from rightist to leftist.”32 A French journalist who bravely visited the Bekaa in 1989, told much the same story:

The Syrians levy taxes but rarely search any trunks in order not to provoke the anger of the clans. It is they [who are] the true masters of the valley. . . . These Shiite families are capable in an hour of lining up a thousand rifles. When their interests are threatened, they don’t hesitate to kill Syrian officers. But they prefer to invite the military to their festivals, and thus to ensure their complicity.33

Christopher Wenner, a fearless if imprudent British documentarian, toured the Bekaa in the late 1980s. He filmed Shiite clan members, flanked by antiaircraft guns, who boasted, “No government has ever been able to stop us. . . . Everyone has weapons and keeps a year’s supply of ammunition, and if anybody attacks him, or his property, all his family protects him and fights by his side.”34 Syria’s predicament should be all too familiar to leaders of NATO countries fighting in Afghanistan. For the better part of a decade NATO forces there re- sisted calls to eradicate opium crops that produce most of the world’s heroin. U.S. and British commanders openly opposed driving peasants into the arms of the Taliban by destroying their source of livelihood. Despite frequent complaints about corruption, Washington also chose not to crack down on senior politicians and warlords connected to the Kabul regime who allegedly protected and profited directly from the drug traffic. In addition, American soldiers have become significant consumers and petty traffickers of hard drugs in the country.35 In a meeting circa 1990 with U.S. ambassador Edward Djerejian and Mi- cheal Hurley of the DEA, Syria’s Interior Minister admitted that some of his countrymen were implicated in drug trafficking. Citing a number of prisoners as evidence that his government did not ignore the problem, he promised to act on any information brought to his attention. And he pointedly reminded them of America’s notorious experience in Vietnam as evidence of the difficulty of containing a drug epidemic linked to a foreign occupation.36 Having decided quite reasonably not to upset the traditional social order in the Bekaa, some Syrian officers did take the opportunity to skim profits off the enormously lucrative drug trade—both to subsidize the occupation and enrich 122 The Syrian Connection themselves and their troops. In the view of Elizabeth Picard this behavior was simply “a reflection of the Damascus regime: a military-mercantile coalition for which power was a source of personal enrichment.”37 Syria’s Public Secu- rity Forces, which sought to cooperate with the DEA in fighting drugs, complained that they had no influence over Syrian military units in Lebanon, which blocked arrests of traffickers by Lebanese narcotics police.38 Wenner, the TV documentarian, also confirmed that Syrian troops in the heart of the drug-growing region took bribes to let drug shipments through their checkpoints. They generally respected peaceful hashish commerce between Shiite clans, like the five-thousand-strong Jafar family, and Christian middlemen in Deir al Ahmar. He noted, however, that heroin chemists hid from both the Syrian army and Islamic radicals, suggesting their presence was unwelcome.39 Evidence of Syria’s modus vivendi with the traffickers struck Terry Ander- son at the Christian-held town of Zahle, Sami Khoury’s birthplace. After a series of inconclusive skirmishes, the Syrians allowed the Lebanese Forces to hold the town of fifty thousand inhabitants, which was surrounded by marijuana fields and served as a major transit center for drugs leaving the Bekaa Valley. “The Syrians guard checkpoints leading into town, but never try to enter,” An- derson observed. “The rightists never go out in uniform or armed. Otherwise, cars and trucks go unmolested.”40

The Assad Connection Syria may not have masterminded the traffic in drugs from Lebanon, but senior officials were repeatedly implicated by drug informants. DEA heard as early as 1976 that Syrian president Hafez Assad’s nephew Firaas, an army captain, was protecting drug cultivators in the Bekaa Valley and escorting trucks filled with hashish to Syria or to the port of Tripoli, a major drug embarkation point under the control of the Syrian army.41 Firaas was the son of strongman Rifaat Assad, whose Brigades for the De- fense of the Revolution allegedly provided security in the Bekaa for authorized drug clans and their shipments.42 Certainly Rifaat was no Boy Scout. Targeting Islamist enemies of the regime, he most notoriously wiped out a Sunni uprising in the Syrian city of Hama in 1982. He also directed Syrian support to various Palestinian guerrilla groups, though he opposed radical anti-PLO dissidents such as Abu Nidal. He was often accused of financing black operations (and amassing huge personal bank accounts) through a variety of illicit means, including trafficking in stolen cars and drugs with the pro-Syrian Christian mili- The Syrian Connection 123 tia leader Tony Franjieh. But Micheal Hurley, who oversaw Lebanon operations for the DEA from 1984 to 1990, said he never saw hard evidence against Rifaat, only allegations.43 Rifaat was not merely his brother’s hatchet man, however. He apparently questioned the regime’s dependence on the Soviet Union, its support for radical Palestinian splinter groups, and the rigidity of the state’s economic controls. His friendship with conservative Arab leaders discontented many radicals. He finally miscalculated in late 1983 when several powerful generals turned to him for leadership after Hafez fell ill. In late March 1984 Rifaat moved tanks to the capital but backed down at the last minute when his older brother suddenly recovered. Rifaat was dispatched first to Moscow and then exiled to Geneva, though officially he remained one of Syria’s vice presidents.44 Rifaat and a large entourage including two of his four wives soon moved to Paris, where he enjoyed friendly relations with key French politicians and security officials, although some of his operatives had been expelled from France only two years earlier on suspicion of terrorism.45 From Paris Rifaat directed a variety of commercial activities, some aboveboard and some rumored to be criminal. His son Firaas, in particular, was suspected of smuggling. Police in Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland became aware by 1983 that car theft in Europe was being organized on a continent-wide scale. Luxury cars stolen throughout the region were being delivered to Lebanon at Beirut or Tripoli. Among those implicated were a Lugano resident connected to the Italian Mafia, an Athens-based swindler, and a sometime collaborator of the Syrian secret service living in Paris. A tip, possibly from Syrian intelligence, led French police to connect a drug dealer at the Lebanese end of the stolen car ring to a suspected terrorist arms cache in Paris that included sixteen kilos of explosives and a handful of guns. Swiss and Italian police reportedly learned from telephone taps that the entire operation was being run by Firaas Assad. When the Paris-based Syrian co- conspirator was arrested, he reportedly also implicated Firaas as his boss.46 Rifaat, for his part, strenuously denied the many criminal allegations against him and backed up his denials with several successful libel suits. Critics claimed that witnesses were intimidated. Supporters said his many enemies— ranging from Israel to the Muslim Brotherhood—were conspiring to blacken his reputation.47 Whatever the truth, Rifaat remained welcome in France so long as he stayed strictly aloof from terrorist activities. With his diplomatic passport he enjoyed 124 The Syrian Connection virtual immunity from searches. His entourage, in turn, freely carried guns and reportedly moved about with false passports while border officials looked the other way. “We tolerated the presence of armed guards and covered up several pieces of Syrian mischief because they were not disruptive of public order,” one adviser to President Jacques Chirac told a French magazine. “But each month without a terrorist attack was a month well worth the price.”48 Rifaat may have enjoyed some degree of protection from the CIA as well. According to the newspaper columnist Jack Anderson, Rifaat was

a longtime, clandestine operator for the Central Intelligence Agency, feeding the CIA information about other countries in the Middle East and passing back-channel information to Washington for [Hafez] Assad. . . . Some CIA officials became uncomfortable with the relationship after their dealings with Panama’s Manuel Noriega came to light. The two men are similar in that Rifaat has made money off drug running in the Syrian-controlled Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, and the information he gives the CIA is often of dubious quality. But there is [a] difference between Rifaat Assad and Noriega. Assad’s past record is more brutal.49

Syria and the al-Kassar Family One especially noteworthy Syrian family—the al-Kassars—was implicated in shadowy black markets for more than half a century. According to the Schumer subcommittee staff report, few if any criminal families have enjoyed their geographic reach, ecumenical political connections, and apparent immunity:

The al-Kassar brothers—Monser, Ghassen, Haitham, and Mazin—control one of the world’s largest arms and narcotics networks. Their empire of legal and illegal businesses is worth millions of dollars. The al-Kassars’ ability to provide governments with access to arms and equipment through irregular channels allows them to do business with high-level government officials who wish to deal “off the record” with terrorists or other politically sensitive groups. Al- though the risk of providing such services can be high, the dividends are at least as equally high because governments who receive such services apparently “look the other way” with respect to the brothers’ trafficking activities.50

The patriarch of the family, Mohammed al-Kassar, reportedly began smuggling hashish from the Bekaa Valley to Damascus in 1946. A Syrian diplomat and supporter of the ruling Baath Party, Mohammed was appointed ambas- The Syrian Connection 125 sador to India in 1970. He was relieved of his post after he tried to smuggle one hundred kilos of hashish into India in his diplomatic luggage.51 Mohammed had four sons. His eldest, Ghassan, began smuggling drugs in the 1960s and was first arrested in Milan in 1969 in connection with a Bul- garian car-smuggling ring. Released but kept under surveillance, he was arrested twice more the following year for trafficking in stolen cars in Vienna and Trieste, both times with his younger brother Monzer. Within a couple of years Ghassan allegedly began acting as an informant for the DEA, reporting on Communist Bulgaria’s role in the narcotics traffic, an issue of special interest to the CIA. Ghassan was arrested yet again in January 1978, along with a member of a powerful Sicilian Mafia family and one other Syrian, at Orly Air- port. The gang was carrying 1.8 kilos of high grade heroin—worth $80,000 a kilo wholesale—destined for Canada. Ghassan received an eight-year sentence from a Paris court in 1979 but allegedly was freed in 1982 after paying bribes.52 Monzer, the most notorious of the brothers, was first arrested in Syria in the 1960s for stealing cars.53 He next ran afoul of European police for smuggling hashish to Denmark. When authorities there issued an international warrant for his arrest in 1973, the British secret service (MI6) reportedly offered him protection if he informed on terrorism and the arms trade, including gunrunning from Libya to Northern Ireland. Monzer was allegedly permitted to open a trading firm in England—where he could be kept under close surveillance—to continue his smuggling. In 1974 British authorities reportedly detained him for smuggling cannabis oil into the country, a move apparently aimed at putting pressure on him to cooperate.54 He was next convicted in the UK in 1977 on stolen cars charges.55 Sometime the same year, Interpol apparently put out an alert that he was suspected of supplying drugs from one or more terrorist groups to the Italian Mafia in exchange for weapons.56 The Schumer subcommittee staff report asserted that Monzer al-Kassar had brokered heroin deals “regularly exceeding 100 kilograms” and was known as “the Drug Prince of Marbella” owing to the lavish villas he maintained in that Spanish resort, allegedly paid for with narcotics profits.57 In 1987 al-Kassar reportedly hosted Colombian cocaine baron Jorge Ochoa, a leader of the Cali Cartel, at his Marbella estate.58 Later that year, Spanish authorities expelled him from the country because of his involvement in arms and drugs trafficking.59 In the early 1990s a number of press reports exposed his connections with major drug money launderers of Syrian extraction in Argentina.60 In all al-Kassar reportedly surfaced in more than seventy-five DEA investigations.61 126 The Syrian Connection

Monzer was repeatedly linked to terrorism—and reportedly was even sentenced by a British court to eight years in jail in the mid-1980s for supplying explosives used in a terrorist attack in Paris against Jewish targets.62 He was also believed to have helped Abu Abbas, head of the Palestine Liberation Front, escape arrest for hijacking the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985.63 In 1987 the U.S. State Department accused Monzer and his brothers of having indiscriminate ties to numerous rival Palestinian militant groups, including the PLO, its arch- enemy the Abu Nidal organization, George Habash’s Popular Front for the Lib- eration of Palestine-Special Command, Ahmed Jibril’s Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, and Naif Hawatmeh’s Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine.64 Last but not least, he had close relations with senior members of the Syrian government. According to the Schumer subcommittee staff report, “He is married to the sister of General Ali Dubah, the Chief of Syrian Military Intelligence, and has been romantically linked with a niece of Hafez Assad. Monser is also considered to be good friends with Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass.”65 Al-Kassar leveraged these connections—and his access to East bloc weapons factories—to make himself indispensable to otherwise hostile foreign governments. For example, although he was sentenced in absentia by a French court for heading a “criminal terrorist organization,” according to Schumer’s staff, “in 1988 he was allowed to re-enter France without being taken into custody, reportedly because he played a key role in France’s alleged exchange of arms for its hostages in Lebanon.”66 Washington displayed similar ambivalence toward him. Although the U.S. government officially considered him both a wanted drug trafficker and a terrorist, the Reagan White House—or at least operatives reporting to National Security Council staffer Oliver North—arranged to pay him $500,000 from a secret Swiss bank account in July 1986 to buy Polish arms for the Nicaraguan contras. The money came from profits on the undercover sale of arms to Iran, authorized by the administration in the hopes of freeing U.S. hostages in Leb- anon.67 The Schumer report adds that “there is strong reason to believe that al-Kassar also helped to arrange shipments of either U.S. or Eastern Bloc arms to Iran in September 1985, presumably as part of North’s efforts to persuade the Iranians to release the American hostages.” (As former National Security Adviser John Poindexter testified on the Iran-Contra affair, “When you’re buying arms on the world arms market . . . you often have to deal with people you might not want to go to dinner with.”)68 The Syrian Connection 127

The CIA allegedly also used al-Kassar’s services in the 1980s. He was credited with providing the agency with a videotape of its Lebanon station chief, Wil- liam Buckley, who was kidnapped in Beirut on March 16, 1984, by a pro-Iranian Hezbollah cell.69 On the CIA’s behalf he also procured Soviet-bloc weapons from Polish and Bulgarian manufacturers for the Afghan mujahedin, to disguise the Western source of their military aid.70 Some of these allegations are plausible but impossible to verify. Some other widely publicized charges have proven to be false. In 1989, for example, al-Kassar’s name surfaced in connection with the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, on December 21, 1988, killing all 259 passengers and crew. According to a widely circulated but later thoroughly debunked investigative report prepared for Pan Am, the West German federal criminal police in the early to mid-1980s had been monitoring al-Kassar’s use of Frankfurt airport for smuggling heroin with the help of certain Turkish baggage han- dlers. The report claimed that the Germans and a unit of the CIA, aware that al-Kassar had helped release some French hostages from Lebanon, then “approached al-Kassar and offered to allow him to continue his drug-smuggling routes, and especially into the U.S., if he helped arrange release of the American hostages via his well-placed contacts.” Meanwhile, the scenario continued, al- Kassar’s associate Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, had been commissioned by the Iranian government to seek revenge for the shooting down of an Iranian passenger jet by the USS Vincennes. Jibril supposedly learned of al-Kassar’s smuggling connections at Frankfurt airport and used them to plant the deadly bomb in the baggage hold of Pan Am 103. Official investigators roundly denounced this story, which was never substantiated.71 Adding spice to the story were claims that the DEA had been using al- Kassar’s drug network to import selected shipments of drugs into the United States to boost the credibility of its undercover narcotics informants. Reports broadcast by NBC and ABC-TV claimed that a Lebanese American who died in the crash, Khalid Jaafar, was such an undercover agent and courier for the DEA and suggested that he had been tricked into carrying a bomb onto the flight. The DEA hotly denied the allegation. The source of the story eventually pleaded guilty in federal court to perjury, destroying its credibility.72 The United States finally dropped its hands-off approach toward al-Kassar in 2007, when he was arrested at Madrid airport and extradited for conspiring to sell arms, including surface-to-air missiles, to two DEA undercover agents 128 The Syrian Connection who posed as buyers for the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). Announcing the arrest, U.S. officials said he had “supported terrorists and insurgents by providing them with high-powered weapons that have fueled the most violent conflicts of the last three decades.” His customers included groups in Nicaragua, Brazil, Cyprus, Bosnia, Croatia, Somalia, the Palestinian territories, Iran, and Iraq.73 A New York jury convicted him in 2009 and sentenced him to thirty years in prison.74

Case Histories A variety of other criminal cases and diplomatic contretemps also pointed to Syrian corruption. In May 1985 Spain expelled two senior Syrian diplomats—a consul general and head of embassy security—who were implicated along with seven other members of the embassy staff in several important seizures of heroin. The investigation developed out of a 1982 seizure of forty kilos of heroin in Madrid at the house of a Syrian. The Spanish press named the Syrian ambassador, Riad Siajj, as a patron of Syrian drug trafficking throughout Europe.75 The 1986 trial and conviction of a Jordanian national, Nezar Hindawi, for conspiring to blow up an Israel El Al passenger jet implicated Syrian military intelligence not only in international terrorism but in smuggling drugs, weapons, and explosives into Great Britain. Hindawi linked both the Syrian ambassador to London and the head of Syrian military intelligence to the plots and prompted the United Kingdom to break diplomatic ties with Damascus.76 Hindawi’s brother, Ahmed Hazi, stood trial the same year in West Berlin for bombing an Arab social club with explosives supplied by the Syrian embassy in East Berlin. Hazi’s partner, Farouk Salameh, was a drug dealer who had been recruited to the terrorist plot by a deputy to the head of Syrian Air Force intelligence. Salameh admitted that he had asked for heroin supplies as payment, to which his handler supposedly replied, “Everything in its time.”77 In 1987 a Cairo newspaper—possibly prejudiced by Egypt’s hostility toward Syria—reported that Italian police had uncovered evidence of heroin smuggling by members of the Syrian embassy in Rome, who used their diplomatic pouches to import narcotics. Supposedly the diplomats in question admitted they were smuggling on behalf of “prominent figures” in the Syrian government and deposited their proceeds in Swiss bank accounts.78 DEA sources called attention to a case of two Syrians arrested in Milan in March 1988, carrying 10 kilos of heroin and 1.5 kilos of cocaine. Both admitted to police interrogators that they were smuggling on behalf of a Syrian colonel The Syrian Connection 129 based in the Bekaa Valley. The drug agency also pointed to evidence that Syr- ian soldiers loaded a freighter at Tripoli harbor with 4.2 metric tons of hashish in November 1988.79 Last but not least, the breakup of a U.S.-French-Sicilian drug operation led to the capture of two senior French chemists who operated drug labs in Leba- non from 1979 to 1984, François Scapula and Philippe Wiesgril. Wiesgril told a judge that his lab was protected by Syrian military units, who lent them an army field telephone when they needed to make overseas calls.80 (The two men were also implicated, with Lebanese drug kingpin Joseph Saba, in a huge heroin lab discovered in Switzerland in 1985.)81 Much less plausibly, Cable News Network (CNN) reported in 1989 on a “secret surveillance tape” released by the (conservative Christian) National Alliance of Lebanese Americans, purporting to show Pablo Escobar, feared leader of Colombia’s Medellin Cartel, meeting at a hotel in Larnaca, Cyprus, with Reiss Assad, another son of Rifaat and nephew of Syrian president Hafez Assad. The same organization also released what they said was a DEA tran- script of their conversation, from a bug placed in their room. Supposedly Escobar offered “to help smuggle cocaine along Syrian routes to Canada and the United States.” Why would Colombian suppliers ship their product all the way to Syria just to get it back into the United States? The DEA’s top agent in Cyprus at the time, Micheal Hurley, recalls no evidence that such a meeting ever took place.82

A Change of Heart? After years of pointedly not interfering with local drug clans in Lebanon, Syr- ian forces in 1986 had a deadly run-in with the Jafar family, a major force in Bekaa’s hashish trade. The firefight cost the lives of several Syrian officers. As punishment Syria broadcast warnings that it would stamp out illegal crops in areas under its control. By the spring of 1987 opium supplies were dwindling and prices had tripled.83 General Ghazi Kanaan, commander of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, told a French interviewer in 1987 that his security forces were dedicated to uprooting armed militia and criminal gangs that sought to undermine the authority of the state. “We are doing our best not to act like an army of occupation,” he said. “We are trying to help the legitimate authorities, wherever they may be, to exercise their duties without hindrance. As we have said repeatedly, we are not in Lebanon to replace the state.” 130 The Syrian Connection

As part of this mission, Kanaan said, Syrian troops were actively destroying hashish and poppy fields in the Bekaa Valley:

At the beginning of 1987, Syria held a meeting for political officials, mayors, and deputies from the Bekaa. The drug fields had to be destroyed. Some farmers needed a great deal of persuading, but we are on the way to our goal. We made the decision for one reason: The danger of drug use by young Lebanese and young people throughout the world. . . . We were vehemently criticized [by the Lebanese Forces] for the drop in income of farmers living off these crops. I think our decision was a humanitarian one, from both the national and international viewpoints. We will stand by our decision. Large stocks have already been destroyed. The real losers are the rings that transported and sold the narcotics. Talks between the Lebanese government and some international organizations are under way to help small farmers switch over to different crops.84

The impact of Syria’s crackdown on drug crops was limited at best. Un- named U.S. officials told a reporter that Syria only destroyed crops on about 140 hectares, a trivial ten percent of the area claimed to have been eradicated. Partly for that reason, the Reagan administration refused to certify Syrian cooperation in drug enforcement.85 An independent research agency in Beirut reported the following year that the area under poppy cultivation fell by one- third in 1987 as a result of Syrian intervention—but that cultivation of hashish soared nearly 50 percent.86 The State Department cited unconfirmed media reports that Syria continued to press farmers to destroy their hashish and opium crops in 1988 but ran into opposition from farmers who complained about the lack of substitute crops.87 Syria apparently backed down. Only a year later, one observer reported, “hashish farmers in the lush, Syrian-patrolled Bekaa Valley are openly working their crops and defending their businesses. At four spots along the highway leading to the ancient town of Baalbek, Bedouins—their heads covered with kaffiyeh, checkered Arab scarves—work in broad daylight preparing tons of dry hashish piled in and around unfinished buildings.”88 Well-publicized Syrian crop seizures in 1991 were dismissed by the State Department as “show raids.”89 Syria made a number of showy busts of traffickers as well. In April1989 Syr- ian police seized a refrigerated truck that had been driven from Lebanon to Damascus and was bound for Europe, with more than a metric ton of hashish concealed in secret compartments.90 Two months later, Syrian security forces said they foiled a gang that tried to smuggle 620 kilos of Lebanese hash- The Syrian Connection 131 ish through Syria to Egypt.91 But such seizures were consistent with a policy of picking off smaller fry—and those who didn’t pay off the appropriate officials—while continuing to protect the established smugglers. In March 1990 the Bush administration refused to certify Syria’s cooperation with narcotics enforcement, a prerequisite for receipt of significant U.S. economic and military aid. (The denial was of largely symbolic importance, since Syria was not receiving U.S. aid in any case.) “We believe that Syria tolerates and profits from the drug production and trafficking in the areas over which it exercises control,” the State Department reported as explanation. “Of greatest concern are numerous credible reports of the involvement of some Syrian officers and soldiers in facilitating the Bekaa drug trade through bribes and other corruption.”92 In contrast, Washington did certify Lebanon under the Foreign Assistance Act, despite its acknowledged status as “a major drug producing country,” because of the “vital national interest” in preserving “U.S. assistance to Lebanese government efforts to maintain a professional and well-trained Lebanese Army, a key element in the eventual restoration of government control and stability.”93 Hoping to appease Washington, Syria continued to make a show of fighting drugs. In March 1991, timed for a visit to Damascus by Secretary of State James Baker, Syrian forces staged raids in Lebanon that allegedly netted eighty tons of hashish, thirty pounds of opium, and twenty-six pounds of cocaine, collectively worth as much as $40 million.94 In May 1991 two Syrian generals paid their respects at the Drug Enforcement Administration to emphasize their serious interest in law enforcement cooperation.95 In September 1991 Syria and Lebanon signed a pact to stamp out drugs—a condition of aid from Washington.96 The two countries soon claimed to have plowed under two thousand hectares (forty-nine hundred acres) of cannabis shortly before harvest time.97 One Lebanese supplier said disparagingly, “They are destroying the hashish which is visible from the main roads. But they will never wipe out the trade. It has made too many people rich to be stopped. There are many hidden places, which only we know about, where we can grow anything.”98 But a United Nations inspection team in 1992 claimed that opium and cannabis production in the Bekaa had been “wiped out by the Syrian army,” leaving plowed land where poppy fields once stretched for miles. Officials reported an eight-fold jump in the price of opium in Beirut.99 Some observers credited a growing drug-abuse problem in Syria itself with motivating a more genuine crackdown on Lebanese drug cultivation.100 In a 132 The Syrian Connection

1993 interview Syrian president Hafez al-Asad acknowledged that “our real fear was for our soldiers, who live among the people in Lebanon where drugs have for a very long time been a source of income.” He admitted that “smugglers have used Syria as a country of transit” but denied allegations of systemic corruption, noting that the regime had not hesitated to jail “relatives of a number of high officials” found guilty of misconduct. As for the Bekaa Valley, he said, Syria intervened “to solve a political problem and end the civil war,” not to “chase smugglers.” Nonetheless, he maintained, Syria was helping Lebanon eradicate drugs, though “of course smuggling is something which continues.”101 Although Syria continued to treat Lebanon as a lucrative target of economic exploitation long after the end of the civil war,102 it did finally make real progress in curbing the drug economy. The State Department reported in 1996 that Lebanon had worked a near miracle against drug cultivation with Syrian help:

Lebanon appears to have won the fight against illicit crop cultivation due to the joint Lebanese-Syrian eradication efforts since 1992. There appears to be no cultivation of opium poppy and cannabis (for hashish production) also has all but disappeared. There are some small farms in the Baalbek Hermel region which are still engaged in illicit cultivation, but they appear to be few in number. When such farms are discovered, authorities make arrests immediately and eradicate the crops. . . . The joint Syrian-Lebanese effort since 1992 to eradicate the cultivation of cannabis and opium in the Bekaa Valley is a significant accom- plishment which has been confirmed by a variety of sources.103

Despite strenuous lobbying by Israel, the Clinton administration removed Syria and Lebanon from the State Department’s list of major drug producers in late 1997.104 7 The Drug Melting Pot

besides syria, many other foreign—and nontraditional domestic—actors contributed in various ways both to Lebanon’s drug traffic and its drawn-out conflicts. They included Lebanon’s other major neighbor, Israel, as well as uprooted Palestinians, the radical Hezbollah movement, and Lebanon’s most significant ethnic minority, the Armenians.

The Israelis Though Israel’s critics have charged it with many crimes and misdeeds, its complicity with the regional drug trade has largely escaped notice. Israel has played an important role as a transit country and facilitator of this traffic, often for political ends, in ways that bear more comparison to Syria than it would ever admit. For all the extraordinary circumstances of its founding, Israel was born with most of the foibles of other more prosaic states. As early as November 1948, crime experts warned that Israel was plagued with “widespread narcotics smuggling” by Central European drug rings, aggravated by Palestine’s traditional role as a way station for Lebanese hashish.1 Three years later, Egypt registered a formal complaint with the United Nations, charging that Israel was conspiring with Lebanese drug merchants to smuggle vast amounts of hashish over its border, worsening Egypt’s addiction problem and draining it of scarce foreign exchange. Significantly, one of the FBN’s first investigations in the Middle East targeted a Lebanese drug ring that exported hashish to Egypt and opium to a heroin lab operating in Tel Aviv.2 A Lebanese newspaper reported that Lebanon’s first heroin laboratory was opened in1949 by a

133 134 The Drug Melting Pot

Syrian Jew from Aleppo, Mayer Chabatay, who fled to Israel after the lab was seized in 1950.3 One of the earliest FBN agents stationed in the Middle East, James Attie, claimed that Sami Khoury, the Lebanese drug kingpin, sold fifty thousand submachine guns to Israel as a sideline to his lucrative business smuggling morphine. More damningly, Attie asserted that “the Israelis provided the contacts and money that enabled Khoury to move narcotics across Europe. With protection guaranteed by Mossad, Khoury packed his car full of morphine base and drove to France, where he stayed at an Israeli safehouse.” Attie also stated that “the Israelis prevented the FBN from conducting investigations against drug-dealing Israeli agents in Aleppo, Syria, the major transit point in the region.” Attie’s explosive claims may have been colored by his personal hostility toward Israel as an Arab American, and some fellow agents questioned his mental stability.4 An FBN agent of unquestioned reliability, however—Dennis Dayle—reported that Khoury was busy trafficking hashish through Israel to Egypt in the early 1960s.5 A high-level American emissary to Lebanon, Wilbur Crane Eveland, saw evidence in 1956 of a flourishing hashish trade across the border with Israel.6 After the Sinai campaign, Egyptian arms and ammunition captured by the Israelis found their way into the hands of Lebanese and Syrian hashish smugglers, according to a report from the British-owned Arab News Agency, citing the Leba- nese Ministry of Interior.7 In 1959 an FBN agent stationed in Beirut learned from an informant that hashish smugglers were crossing in large numbers through Israel to Gaza with the cooperation of border guards, customs officials, and Israeli naval patrols. “In order to show the public that the guards and/or customs guard are on the alert, prior arrangements are made between the trafficker and the authorities,” he reported. “Large first grade qualities are permitted to be smuggled, then at prearranged incidences (sic), the guards or customs make a fairly large seizure of inferior quality, including making arrests of secondary persons who usually have been in disfavor in the smuggling gang.”8 As a general rule Israeli authorities did not interfere with Bedouin smugglers as long as they remained loyal to the state of Israel. The well-informed British newsletter Israel & Palestine reported that Israel suspended this privilege temporarily in the early years when smugglers began dropping off parcels of hashish along the way to supply Israel’s domestic market. After armed clashes between the Bedouins and the Israeli army, the two sides held a reconciliation The Drug Melting Pot 135 feast at the intelligence headquarters of the army’s Southern Command in 1953, and the regulated traffic continued, unimpeded, for many years.9 The old modus vivendi between smugglers and Israeli security forces continued after the Six Day War—but now including some of the newly occupied territories. Citing “Western intelligence agents,” the Christian Science Monitor reported in 1970 that “the Israeli intelligence service permits Arab smugglers to move shipments of narcotics across Israeli-held territory. The smugglers are Bedouin tribesmen. In return for the transit route, they give the Israelis military information about Arab positions.”10 The Canadian scholar R. T. Naylor confirms, “Drugs from Lebanon would move into Israel, be transferred to Gaza and then infiltrated into Egypt by boat. The final leg was handled by the same Palestinian networks that plied the gold and cigarette smuggling trade with license from the Israeli occupation authorities to put to sea at night.”11 Evidence that the traffic never stopped surfaced in 1978, when narcotics officers from the Tel Aviv police force raided an apartment occupied by two army soldiers and found twelve kilos of Lebanese hash along with small amounts of opium. Under interrogation the servicemen gave up their boss, a military intelligence captain. The latter eventually broke, implicating a major in the military intelligence organization AMAN and suggesting that authorization for the drug ring went as high as one of the army’s three regional commanders. Before the investigation could continue, however, military police asserted jurisdiction and quashed the case. The two implicated intelligence officers remained on duty. According to Israeli investigative reporter Yigal Laviv,

the interrogation and surveillance concerning the captain and the major proved that, for many years, military intelligence helped its own informers to smuggle drugs from Lebanon into Jordan and Egypt, through Israeli territory. The drugs were brought into Israel in cars, and escorted all the way by Intelligence Corps personnel, so as to prevent that any part of the drugs should be “lost” on Israeli soil. The idea was to give the drugs safe conduct through Israel but to ensure that they be used by Arabs, in neighboring states.

Some of the drugs were nonetheless diverted and sold in Israel—ostensibly for criminal profit. However, Laviv continued:

The two interrogated officers also hinted at another possibility: that the funds amassed through drug-peddling inside Israel were not used for private purposes; instead, it seems a definite possibility that this was “black money” laboriously 136 The Drug Melting Pot

gathered in order to feed one or the other secret fund, used by some official source for purposes which cannot be talked about. And for which no funds can be allotted from the official Defense Budget, which is carefully audited. Since censorship has done its best to close the lid over the whole story, the Israeli public is unable to know what the funds really have been used for.

Laviv reported that senior officers in AMAN pointed the finger at General Shlomo Gazit, commander of AMAN (and, briefly, coordinator of Mossad), for killing the drug investigation. Gazit had previously served as chief of staff to the commander of the Southern Front, Army Chief of Staff Rafael Eytan.12 In 1996 the Sunday Times (London) finally put a name on the secret Israeli policy of running drugs to Egypt: Operation Lahav (Hebrew for “blade”). Ac- cording to the paper, which interviewed eight Israeli army officers, military convoys continued moving tons of Lebanese hashish to the Egyptian border at least to the end of the 1980s. “Commissions from the lucrative deals are claimed to have been channeled into a secret IDF [Israeli Defense Forces] fund which paid for other covert operations,” the story reported. Said one former Israeli army colonel quoted in the article, “I have no regrets. It allowed us to control and practically avoid drug smuggling into Israel and increase the use of drugs within the Egyptian army.” The report was quickly dismissed by the Israeli army as “false and malicious.” Former Egyptian Gen. Amin Howeidi denounced it as a “stupid fiction” concocted by Mossad to sow doubt about the reliability of Egypt’s military.13 The sanctioned drug traffic was facilitated by Israel’s invasion of southern Lebanon in March 1978, in retaliation for a PLO terror raid. Israel’s Operation Litani killed about two thousand Lebanese, displaced a quarter million more, and created a security zone under the command of a former Lebanese army officer, Saad Haddad. Haddad’s South Lebanese Army, a Christian force, was outfitted with surplus Israeli army uniforms and weapons and let loose to pa- trol the border area. It led to the wide-open trading of goods between Lebanon and Israel.14 Israel’s momentous invasion of Lebanon in 1982 killed thousands more civilians and guerrilla fighters, uprooted hundreds of thousands more inhabitants, and effectively eliminated the border between the countries. Not far behind Israeli army units came Israeli merchants, peddling everything from fruits and vegetables to industrial goods that once had been restricted by the Arab embargo.15 But the southward flow of drugs picked up as well, without The Drug Melting Pot 137 the discipline previously imposed by Israeli military intelligence. Notes Naylor, “Israeli soldiers bartered their weapons for hashish and opium, then reported the arms lost in action. Military vehicles carrying bales of marijuana made their way back across the border.”16 A year after the invasion, an Israeli police spokesman reported that the black market price of hashish in Jerusalem had fallen more than 50 percent, a “sure indicator of the significant rise in the supply.” The chief of special investigations for the Israeli National Police said, “We feel like Sisyphus. . . . The temptation is so strong and the profit is so great that there is no vacuum there. One goes, another one replaces him immediately.” In a sign of the times police in June 1983 broke up what they called “the biggest drug ring in Israeli history,” arresting a Druze officer in the Israeli army along with thirty-four accomplices. They had been running Lebanese hashish into Israel in army water and gas tanks.17 The noted Israeli journalist David Oren reported in 1984 that Israel had quietly imported seven hundred tons of hashish and half a ton of heroin from Lebanon in the previous year. “It is now a clear fact: Israel has become one of the main paths of international drug commerce,” he declared. A Lebanese trafficker told him, “The Israeli invasion was the best thing that ever happened to the hashish business in Lebanon” because it increased the ease and security of that commerce.18 Israel’s subsequent withdrawal to a “security zone” along Lebanon’s southern border did little to reestablish the rule, much less the spirit, of law. In 1986 Israeli police arrested three regular Israeli army soldiers for smuggling several pounds of heroin, worth millions of dollars on the street, from Lebanon. Two of the soldiers were stationed in the ten-mile-wide security zone. All three held the rank of sergeant-major, making the case especially serious.19 More IDF officers were implicated in drug smuggling from Lebanon in 1989, and a police officer was charged with importing three tons of hashish from Israel’s northern neighbor.20 Many of the drug shipments south to Israel were supplied by its own allies. In late 1987, Israeli police caught wind of a plot by Israeli drug dealers to import huge quantities of heroin and hashish by sea from a Lebanese supplier— “a known figure among the political leadership of the country”—based at the Christian port of Jounieh. Police undercover agents facilitated the transfer of two tons of drugs before arresting several members of the Israeli gang.21 Lebanese drugs also entered Israel from the East. In early 1987 security forces reportedly arrested the Greek Orthodox patriarch of Jerusalem as he tried to 138 The Drug Melting Pot enter the occupied West Bank from Jerusalem, carrying heroin and gold worth $1 million. He was released after asserting diplomatic immunity.22 All of these smuggling channels, as well as Israel’s conquest of Arab communities in the West Bank and Gaza, contributed to what the Israeli media termed an “alarming increase in drug users” at home, particularly Jewish youth.23 Cheap hashish became readily available in East Jerusalem, prompting complaints from one Israeli authority that it was being widely abused by “show-business people, bohemians, pseudo-bohemians and their camp followers, considerable segments of high school teenagers, and university students.” A huge influx of young American tourists after 1967 also contributed to the rise of a new, if still modest-sized, drug culture.24 In 1977 an Israeli commission on organized crime pegged the total population of hashish users at one hundred thousand, of whom a third were teenagers.25 By 1989 the country’s drug users numbered an estimated three hundred thousand, of whom one-tenth were considered hard-core addicts.26 Police estimated that Israelis consumed about one hundred kilos of heroin annually, enough for 2.5 million hits. They also put the size of Israel’s domestic drug market at $2 billion annually.27 (Another reporter cited an implausibly high police estimate that 2.5 tons of heroin passed into Israel from Lebanon in 1989, some intended for transshipment to other countries.)28 All these drugs fostered the rise of Israeli organized crime gangs, including the notorious but untouchable “godfather” of Tel Aviv, Yekheskiel Aslan.29 Reflecting the country’s rising sense of insecurity, the Knesset in 1989 formed a special committee on combating drug abuse, which demanded a much tougher war on drugs.30 “Israel is in a bad geo-narcotic situation,” explained Rafi Peled, head of Israel’s police criminal intelligence division. “Heroin can be bought relatively cheaply on the Lebanese border. A dealer can buy a kilo for $8,000, while a Eu- ropean dealer must pay for the same merchandise up to $30,000.” Heroin was so cheap that it now accounted for an estimated 44 percent of all Israeli drug abuse.31 The director of Israel’s antidrug authority lamented, “We are experi- encing the increasing ability of drug traffickers to evade our sophisticated border protection capability.”32 This rising flood of drugs prompted Israel to launch yet another invasion of Lebanon, albeit on a much smaller scale than usual. In April 1988 more than one hundred Israeli police, accompanied by soldiers, raided three villages in southern Lebanon, looking for drugs. They seized 110 pounds of hashish and nearly 9 pounds of heroin and cocaine, as well as miscellaneous weapons. A The Drug Melting Pot 139 police spokeswoman said the sweep was mounted to “keep drug merchants away from Israel” after several attempts by smugglers to move drugs across the border.33 Israeli military officers did not think much of the effectiveness of their police colleagues, however. “Many dealers were arrested,” acknowledged one senior IDF officer. “Some of them were expelled outside the security zone, and others remained under arrest. Suddenly, police representatives came and stated, ‘These are persons who are working with us.’ In a short time, all drug dealers were released. Is it possible to work like this?”34 In August 1989 Israeli security forces raided the village of Killah in southern Lebanon and arrested Mohammed Biro, accused by Israeli police of being the “biggest drug dealer in the Middle East.” He had been sentenced in absentia to death in Egypt for attempting to smuggle $50 million worth of drugs—three hundred kilos of opium, another three hundred kilos of heroin, and sixteen hundred kilos of hashish—aboard a boat seized in the Suez Canal. (Moham- med’s son Ali, who was captured on the boat, was also sentenced in Egypt to hang.) After his arrest Israeli police told a magistrate that Biro was responsible for smuggling a load of twenty-one kilos of heroin seized just two weeks earlier near Haifa. A convicted drug dealer confirmed that Biro was “the greatest of drug dealers. . . . He sells only in great quantities.” Biro’s name also surfaced in the Haifa trial of Israeli narcotics detective Col. Meir Benyamin for stealing drugs smuggled into the country from Leba- non. According to the Jerusalem Post, “In one of the hearings, Benyamin’s lawyer, Meir Ziv, claimed that Israeli police have known about Biro’s drug deals for years but allowed Biro free passage to and from Israel. Ziv said the police refrained from arresting Biro because he gave information about Israelis who purchased drugs from him. Ziv also claimed that Biro helped the police solve many drug cases, with the police taking credit for breaking the cases.”35 Biro was later revealed to be a corrupt Lebanese customs officer who cultivated friends high up in the Israeli government. He even hosted Defense Min- ister Moshe Arens at his home in South Lebanon. Arrested as part of the same smuggling case was Hassan Obeid, deputy head of the local council of Taibeh and son of an Arab member of the Israeli Knesset. Both men received long sentences; Biro died in prison in 2003.36 Israeli journalists later cited the case not as an example of effective police work but rather as an attempt to contain the embarrassing consequences of Is- raeli police collusion with Lebanese smugglers. Lawyers for some Israeli dealers 140 The Drug Melting Pot claimed that their Lebanese suppliers were only arrested—like Biro—“in cases when the amount of drugs smuggled into Israel was particularly large.”37 The most authoritative account of that collusion was offered by Etty Has- sid, a reporter for Yerushalaim, who read secret trial transcripts and managed to report some of the key facts despite heavy censorship. She cited one case of a major in military intelligence Unit 504—which was actively involved in supporting the hashish trade from Lebanon to Egypt in order to cultivate informants—who was arrested for selling hashish from the intelligence unit’s stockpiles. She also highlighted the 1989 acquittal of Col. Benyamin, the narcotics detective, despite testimony from two Israeli dealers who worked for the Maronite drug lord Ramzi Nahara. They spoke of smuggling 250 kilos of heroin into Israel using Nahara’s status as a protected collaborator with Israeli police, Shin Bet, and Unit 504.38 Hassid was outraged:

Even though it may be hard to believe, the state of Israel is actively engaged in drug trade, especially on its northern Lebanese borders. The participants are on one side the Israeli army, Shabak, Mossad and the Israeli police, and on the other side, Lebanese drug merchants, Israeli Bedouins from the Negev and retired [Israeli] senior officers. The operational principle is: We will close our eyes to all the filth to which you stoop, and even give you some money, if only you provide us with intelligence of interest to us. In my article I am going to prove it or at least to substantiate it as highly probable on the basis of the trials of large-scale drug merchants. Since I was forced by censorship to skip some facts, let me tell you that the realities are even more ghastly than what you find here. What I do reveal is ghastly enough. It turns out that the state of Israel, which professes to wage an uncompromising struggle with the epidemic of drug addiction, is in reality the largest-scale importer of drugs in the Middle East. It is as if we were trying with one hand to apprehend the drug users and peddlers or at least pretending to do so, while using the other hand to plunge the syringe deep into the drug addict’s veins.39

Tired of having his country singled out for blame in connection with drugs, Lebanon’s ambassador to the United Kingdom, Mahmoud Hammoud, told the British press in 1991, “There is solid information that drugs are transported from the so-called ‘security zone’ in southern Lebanon to inside Israeli territory in Israeli military vehicles. This indicates that the Israeli army is deeply involved in facilitating drug trafficking to Israel and later to Egypt and Europe.” The Drug Melting Pot 141

An Israeli embassy spokesman replied, “To the best of our knowledge, nothing of this kind is going on—indeed, to the contrary.”40 Inevitably, Israeli involvement in the regional drug trade spilled over into wider markets as well. In 1970, acting on a tip, Israeli police foiled a plot by Moroccan and Yemeni Jews to smuggle 103 kilos of hashish to the United States from Haifa.41 In 1975 German police busted a group of Israeli heroin traffickers in Frankfurt, whose distribution network was the biggest the country had seen since World War II.42 In the late 1970s the DEA heard from an Israeli smuggler that a prominent Israeli general with alleged ties to organized crime figures in his country had smuggled half a ton of hashish to Latin America, allegedly in exchange for cocaine that he then shipped to Florida.43 In 1986 three Israelis along with two British anarchists were arrested for smuggling 1.8 tons of “Lebanese Gold” hashish into England, worth about $9 million, in a container shipment of furniture. British customs investigators determined that their suppliers were Lebanese Christian Phalangists, who expected the drugs to finance purchases of machine guns, grenade launchers, and surface-to-air missiles. One of the Israelis had previously been charged in 1982 by Israeli military police with attempting to smuggle hashish from Leba- non, where he was serving as an army reservist; mysteriously, he was allowed to flee the country for England, then permitted to return again to Israel in1985 without legal consequences. At least one of the other Israelis was reportedly a former member of Mossad. A fourth Israeli was arrested by the FBI in Phila- delphia for allegedly trying to hire a helicopter pilot to rescue the prisoners in England.44 As Israeli criminals grew more experienced in international operations, they became more intimately involved with leaders of the Colombian drug cartels and other sophisticated trafficking groups.45 Initially, certain Israeli army veterans trained the cartels’ paramilitary forces and laundered some of the immense piles of cash the traffickers accumulated. In time, however, Israelis began moving drugs themselves through the same international channels. DEA agents, working with Israeli detectives, busted a major Israeli-American heroin ring in early 1991. Its couriers had moved multiple kilos of heroin from Lebanon into Israel and from there to Europe.46 Israeli criminals also developed ties with leading Turkish narcotics traffickers, as evidenced by a major bust in Istanbul in 1991, which implicated three Israelis and led to the seizure of forty-two kilos of pure heroin, worth nearly $6 million.47 All of this proved not that Israelis were especially prone to crime but only that they were as human as their neighbors. 142 The Drug Melting Pot

The Palestinians Assessing the role of Palestinians and radical Lebanese Shiites in the drug trade is problematic for several reasons beyond the inherent difficulty of penetrating the veil of secretive, violent organizations. One major obstacle is the prevalence in the West of Israeli-inspired propaganda campaigns to blacken the reputation of its enemies. All factions in major conflicts typically engage in such disinformation campaigns, but Israel enjoys special success in the United States, where it has a sympathetic audience and a vaunted reputation for the prowess of its intelligence services. Many journalists make a regular practice of basing stories on Israeli informants described only as reliable “Western intelligence sources.” Another problem is the fluid organizational structure of many guerrilla groups. If members of one Palestinian faction were arrested in possession of drugs, were they operating as criminals on their own behalf or as representatives of their organization? If the latter, was their organization working secretly with leaders of the Palestine Liberation Organization or only for its own ends? In truth the PLO was a loose confederation of armed groups without much central control. After 1974 the so-called Rejectionist Front, including the PFLP, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command (PFLP-GC), Arab Liberation Front, and others, further undercut the PLO’s solidarity. The splintered structure of most Palestinian groups gave the PLO and its leaders convenient but sometimes legitimate “deniability” toward criminal acts perpe- trated by its supporters. Like most other groups in Lebanon, the PLO was plagued by rivalries that often turned fierce and bloody48—making it readily possible for drug trafficking to be carried on by small factions without the umbrella organization’s sanc- tion.49 Yet to an uninformed Western audience any mention of “Palestinian” involvement in drugs suggested PLO culpability.50 Israel in particular was quick to point the finger at PLO leader Yasir Arafat for actions that were clearly per- petrated by his rivals in the broader Palestinian community. Perhaps the most notorious example was the Begin government’s cynical use of the assassination of its ambassador to the United Kingdom by the Abu Nidal organization— sworn opponents of the PLO—as a casus belli for invading Lebanon in 1982 to wipe out the PLO.51 The paradigmatic case against the PLO as a “narco-terrorist” organization was articulated by Israeli-born drug researcher and journalist Rachel Ehrenfeld.52 In her simplistic formulation, widely popularized by officials and neoconserva- The Drug Melting Pot 143 tive ideologues during the Reagan-Bush era, “the use of the illegal drug trade as a weapon was developed by the former Soviet Union as part of its unconventional warfare doctrine. The PLO simply added illicit drugs to its arsenal as another excellent source of funding.”53 Speaking to an Israel Bonds luncheon in the San Francisco Bay Area in Oc- tober 1990, she charged that the PLO was raising $150 million a year from worldwide drug sale to finance the intifada in the West Bank and Gaza as well as operations in Lebanon and elsewhere. “The money is used to buy arms and safe houses, to pay for propaganda, to finance publications, to fund all their activities,” she claimed.54 In her book Narco-Terrorism, published the same year, Ehrenfeld elabo- rated on the guerrilla organization’s alleged criminal operations: “Its super- sophisticated network of worldwide contacts has made the PLO, even more than the Syrians, the most successful purveyor of drugs originating from the Middle East,” she declared. “In fact, before the PLO was largely expelled from Lebanon by the Israelis in 1982, it is estimated that the organization earned $300 million from the narcotics trade yearly, approximately three times what it earned from supportive Arab regimes.” As a clincher she cited an alleged declaration by PLO Treasurer Sallah Dab- bagh at a secret emergency meeting of the organization’s finance committee on February 20, 1983: “The entire future of the PLO operation for liberation may hinge on our exporting more drugs throughout the world.”55 Pretty damning stuff—if it could be reliably substantiated. Her main source for these claims? An unpublished paper by Ralph Cwerman, former director of research at Israel’s Permanent Mission to the United Nations and senior aide to UN ambassador Benjamin Netanyahu.56 Another Israeli journalist, Dennis Eisenberg, charged in 1990 that “Yasser Arafat’s PLO (known locally as the ‘poppy lovers organization’) uses its links with the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to rake in massive profits from sending drugs via Holland to its network of agents in Britain, West Germany, and Ireland for international distribution.” Eisenberg claimed that “European police first stumbled on this trade when Scotland Yard special units, in cooperation with the Dutch Narcotics Squad, unearthed a haul of 300,000,000 pounds’ worth of top-grade ‘Lebanese Gold’ transported from Lebanon in two freighters chartered by the PLO.”57 Surely, however, even the most nefarious of Pal- estinian narco-terrorists would have had a tough time getting their hands on drugs worth roughly half of Lebanon’s entire annual narcotics production. 144 The Drug Melting Pot

Other journalists cloaked their reliance on partisan Israeli sources with ci- tations to unnamed “Western intelligence and law enforcement agencies.” Thus did Nathan Adams of the Reader’s Digest support his claim in 1983 that “the PLO purchases an estimated 40 percent of its light-infantry weapons with either heroin, hashish, or morphine base produced by PLO- and Syrian-controlled or protected laboratories either in Syria or in Lebanon’s notorious Bekaa Valley.”58 Claire Sterling, a journalist who made heavy use of similar sources, declared that four-fifths of the PLO’s arms passed through Bulgaria, “half of it paid for in drugs.”59 The hawkish Israeli counterterrorism writer Yonah Alexander told a U.S. congressional committee in 1985 that the PLO acquired 50 percent of its weapons during the Lebanon conflict from the Bulgarian state trading firm Kintex, using drugs to finance its purchases.60 (He admitted that Kintex also sold arms to “Lebanese Christian factions.”)61 However, a senior DEA official testified only months earlier that “no direct association between Kintex and the PLO . . . has been established to our information.”62 Journalists Neil Livingstone and David Halevy, in a harshly critical work on the PLO based on unnamed intelligence sources, claimed in 1990 that even before the civil war, “the PLO was given 10 percent of the estimated $1.5 billion industry” in return for its agreement not to interfere with drug convoys in the Bekaa Valley. After the collapse of state authority, they asserted, the PLO “greatly expanded its illegal operations,” including “taking control of many of the major drug routes . . .”63 The Israeli police intelligence report on Syrian narcotics dealings, cited in the previous chapter, also addressed claims of “narco-terrorism” by Palestin- ian groups. Asserting “there is much information” connecting them to “nar- coterror activity . . . directed mainly against Israel,” it cited as evidence only “reports by American experts such as Astar Wolff, a former Congressman who was a member of the FDA, Nathan Adams, an expert on terror and drugs, the former Senator from Florida, Paula Hopkins, Michael Landon, from the Cen- ter for Strategic Research and International Relations in Georgetown Univer- sity, and others.”64 The report thus managed to garble mentions of New York Congressman Lester Wolff, a member of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, not the FDA; Sen. Paula Hawkins, a conservative Republican; and Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative polemicist and adventurer at the misnamed Georgetown Center for Strategic and International Studies.65 One hopes such mistakes did not reflect the quality of Israeli intelligence more generally. The Drug Melting Pot 145

An altogether different view came from James Adams, a journalist with the Sunday Times (London), in his 1986 book The Financing of Terrorism. No apologist for Palestinian radicals, he nonetheless took issue with the barrage of claims linking them to drugs:

Israeli propaganda has made much of PLO involvement in the drugs business. . . . Such broad accusations are a serious misrepresentation of the real situation. There is no doubt that some groups falling under the umbrella of the PLO have been and are engaged in both the production and the distribution of drugs, but there is absolutely no evidence to support the contention that this is an officially PLO-backed enterprise. On the contrary Yasser Arafat is known to be personally opposed to any traffic in drugs for the very reason that the Israelis would make so much use of the information in their propaganda—it would be bad both for the PLO’s image and for their other business interests. As in all such matters, the truth is both more complex and ultimately more disturbing than is conventionally portrayed.66

As far back as 1972, syndicated columnist Jack Anderson cited persistent reports that “Palestinian terrorists [in Lebanon] are actually raising their arms money by smuggling dope.” But he added, “The intelligence data in our hands, however, fails to pin down this charge.”67 During a 1983 trial of Houston nightclub owner and racketeer Sam Camma- rata, government prosecutors claimed that Cammarata had visited Lebanon in 1980 with a Houston-based shipping official who was identified by the DEA “as a major heroin and hashish trafficker who assisted the Palestine Liberation Or- ganization in trading drugs for guns.”68 Years later, however, it would be revealed that Cammarata had in fact been importing multiton loads of Lebanese hashish via Mexico in partnership with a senior member of the Franjieh clan’s Chris- tian militia.69 U.S. government agencies also conceded publicly that evidence against the PLO was weak. “While reporting is sparse we suspect that the PLO may be ex- ploiting the Lebanese drug trade for their own personal gain or to finance their own military objectives,” one State Department assessment noted in 1989. “We do not, however, have direct evidence.” The Drug Enforcement Administration went further in exonerating the umbrella organization: “DEA has no information linking the PLO to the drug trade. Anyone involved in drug trafficking claiming to be a member of the PLO is probably involved in the activity for his personal financial gain, not for the organization.”70 146 The Drug Melting Pot

Former DEA agent Victor Maria, who oversaw antidrug operations in the Middle East for much of the 1960s and 1970s, recalled being asked by a senior government official in Washington to furnish evidence that the PLO was amassing a vast fortune from the sale of drugs to finance terrorist operations worldwide. His office in Lebanon reported back that most of the trade was dominated by various Christian families, who controlled access to drug shipment routes and ports. His superiors blasted him for lack of cooperation and again demanded evidence. But Maria stood his ground and refused to play political games, reporting once again that he had no information to substantiate charges against the PLO. “There was an orchestrated effort to put the PLO in a bad light,” he recalled. “Anyone who worked there and knew the climate in Washington knew what was going on.”71 The PLO did not have a finer sense of morality than other factions in Leba- non or any squeamishness about breaking the law. It did, however, enjoy ample financial support from several Arab states and ready access to arms in Eastern Europe. It also earned money from a variety of industrial and commercial enterprises, which employed more than ten thousand people in Lebanon and earned it the moniker “PLO Inc.”72 Large-scale involvement in the drug traffic would have been unnecessary, distracting, and risky.73 Nonetheless, some Palestinian guerrillas, including those under the PLO umbrella, were occasionally implicated in drug cases. In 1971 German police broke up a narcotics smuggling ring in Offenbach, led by four Jordanian-born Palestinians who were said to be active in Fatah and the Palestine Liberation Front.74 A 1977 cannabis smuggling case, which led to the conviction of a half- Egyptian British citizen, reportedly uncovered links to arms smuggling on behalf of unnamed Palestinian groups in Lebanon.75 In 1982 Swedish police broke a major drug smuggling ring operating between Beirut and Stockholm. A Stockholm newspaper cited police sources as saying that PLO guerrillas supplied heroin to the Armenian-led ring, which was also assisted by a Lebanese army major. A government prosecutor did not confirm any details, saying only that the “PLO is an element in the investigation in various ways.”76 James Adams cites the case of five British yachtsmen arrested by British Cus- toms in 1984 for smuggling 4.3 tons of Lebanese hashish, worth some $12 million at retail, purchased from “certain members of the PLO.” Adams, however, terms this “a simple example of a crooked business deal” rather than a more sinister drugs-for-guns transaction. Adams also cites a more serious case, uncovered by Australian police in 1985, of a ring that apparently imported $40 million in hashish from the Bekaa Val- The Drug Melting Pot 147 ley.77 The drugs were allegedly supplied by the pro-Syrian Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine-General Command, which broke from the PLO in 1984 to join the Rejectionist Front. Its close ties to Syria (PFLP-GC leader Ahmed Jibril was a former Syrian army captain) would help explain its access to hashish in the Syrian-patrolled Bekaa. Lebanese Palestinians were also named in connection with a murky guns- for-drugs case involving the Sicilian Mafia and an Italian secret service informant. In September 1987 Italian police seized a Lebanese cargo ship named Boustany I off the coast of Bari. It carried a U.S. antihelicopter missile, Soviet- made grenade launcher, antitank bazooka, two kilos of heroin, and fifteen kilos or more of hashish. Police intelligence officials speculated that the arms were bound for Palestinian terrorist groups in Europe, possibly the Abu Nidal organization. Other informants said the arms were destined for the organization in Lebanon of Abu Abbas, who masterminded the ill-fated hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruise ship in 1985. The drugs themselves were linked to members of a Sicilian Mafia family. Soon the investigation implicated Swiss-Italian arms dealer and playboy Aldo Anghessa and Italian industrialist Ferdinando Borletti, chairman of Valsella Meccanotchnica. Borletti was charged with selling land mines illegally to the Middle East, using forged Nigerian end-user certificates.78 At least thirty-four people were arrested in what the press called “Italy’s Iran- gate scandal.” However, drugs, weapons, and terrorism charges against Ang- hessa were eventually dropped.79 Why the free pass? Anghessa applied pressure on Italian authorities by telling bits of his story to the press. He had been dealing wood in Beirut in the mid-1970s when he was recruited as an informant by a colonel in the Italian counter espionage organization SISDE (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Dem- ocratica). In return for SISDE’s protection, Anghessa exploited ties with ethnic Armenian militia forces, Phalangists, Chamoun’s Tigers, the PLO, and various dissident Palestinian groups to glean intelligence on arms, drugs, and political trends. Apparently putting too much faith in SISDE’s protective powers, Anghessa ran into trouble with German and Swiss police in 1982 for illegal Mafia associations and insurance fraud. When he got out of jail in 1984, Anghessa reconnected with Italian security officials, who steered him toward a new target: Ismail Darwish, said to be a senior official in the PLO’s largest faction, Fatah. Anghessa, representing himself as a well-connected arms dealer, managed to meet Darwish. Before long they allegedly agreed to a swap of heroin for guns and tanks. That deal supposedly 148 The Drug Melting Pot fell through when Darwish was murdered by unknown assailants in Rome on December 14, 1984. By early 1985, however, Anghessa claimed to have become tight with a Pales- tinian group within Fatah hostile to Arafat’s leadership. According to Anghessa, these Palestinians smuggled one hundred kilos of heroin into Bellinzona in return for a missile guidance system and land mines, which Anghessa sourced from Valsella.80 Even after charges against him in the Boustany I affair were dropped, Anghessa’s name continued to surface in connection with negotiations with Islamic Jihad and similar groups to free Western hostages in Lebanon.81 It should surprise no one that some Palestinians, and likely even some Pal- estinian organizations, fell prey to the lure of drug profits, although they were never major forces in the traffic. No doubt they succumbed through a combination of rationalization and greed, as revolutionary idealism gave way to oppor- tunism. In the early 1980s, leftist critics within the PLO decried the organization’s moral decline, charging that the problem “now stretches to entire agencies whose members perpetrate corrupt acts, thievery, smuggling, [criminal] trade, and protection rackets with utter impunity [thanks to] the support and protection of the senior influential leaders of the revolution.”82 Ironically, the PLO’s alleged dabbling in drugs and other criminal enterprises may have helped bridge its often deadly political divide with other groups in Lebanon, as the Palestinian scholar Yezid Sayigh observes:

Some military commanders exacted taxes on commerce in Tyre, Sidon, and similar centres, senior paramilitary officers engaged in contraband and forgery, while trade in duty-free goods flourished as PLO missions abroad gained diplomatic status. . . . The shrinkage of the Lebanese state left a void that criminal networks and PLO security agencies filled, often to their mutual benefit. . . . Indeed, the trade in smuggled goods—from cigarettes to electrical appliances, drugs, counterfeit money, forged documents, and the like—created a network of intermeshing interests between Palestinian guerrilla groups, Maronite and Muslim Lebanese militias, and Syrian units of the ADF [Arab Deterrent Force], that extended to Syria, Israel, and beyond.83

Hezbollah Hezbollah, Lebanon’s largest militant Shiite organization, was an indigenous force but subject to strong foreign influences. It emerged from the shadows in the early 1980s with financial and ideological support from Iran following The Drug Melting Pot 149 the 1979 Islamic revolution. A key tipping point in its favor was the decision by Nabih Berri, leader of the more moderate Shiite Amal militia, to join the National Salvation Committee formed by Lebanese president Elias Sarkis after Israel’s invasion in June 1982. Radical militia members defected in droves to the fledgling Hezbollah, or Party of God. Years later, more than one former Israeli leader would sheepishly acknowledge that Israel’s prolonged occupation of southern Lebanon helped rally support for this radical resistance organization.84 Hezbollah formed its initial power base among Shiites in the Bekaa Valley. Inevitably, some of its local adherents must have cultivated drugs, harvested drugs, prepared drugs for shipment, and profited from the illegal commerce in drugs. The question is whether Hezbollah encouraged and profited from that illicit trade or simply adopted a realistic live-and-let-live policy toward the valley’s poor farmers. Hezbollah had little need to supplement its treasury with drug profits, thanks to lavish funding by Iran’s revolutionary regime, estimated at $100 million per year.85 Contemporary evidence from a 1988 video documentary of the Bekaa drug trade suggests that Hezbollah and the drug clans warily respected each other without intruding on each other’s business.86 Over the years, however, numerous Israeli and pro-Israeli sources would insist on Hezbollah’s involvement in sinister drug operations.87 In keeping with its ideological agenda, the 1992 Schumer subcommittee staff report on Syrian drug trafficking attributed all of Hezbollah’s aid from Iran to profits from drug trafficking—but cited no sources.88 Israeli drug researcher Rachel Ehrenfeld likewise went on the offensive against Hezbollah: “In the mid-1980s, Hizbal- lah’s use of the illicit drug trade as a funding source and a weapon against the West was sanctioned by an official fatwa (religious edict) issued by Hizballah: ‘We are making these drugs for Satan America and the Jews. If we cannot kill them with guns, so we will kill them with drugs.’”89 How convenient of Hezbollah to enunciate so clearly and definitively its policy of poisoning the West. Her source for this self-incriminating fatwa? A book by the rightist Israeli-born analyst Yosef Bodansky, which included no citation.90 Not all Israeli sources repeated the party line, however. In 1991 Israel’s former chief of police intelligence, Commander Rafi Peled, said Hezbollah “so far had little involvement in the drug trade.” The Israeli police intelligence report on Syria noted claims by other writers of plots by Hezbollah to poison Israel with drugs but admitted “no actual evidence was found to support the actual existence of this ‘scheme.’”91 And unnamed Israeli experts told David Brooks of the Wall 150 The Drug Melting Pot

Street Journal in 1992 that Hezbollah was the only militia in Lebanon “that is not involved in the drug trade. . . . Hezbollah objects to drugs on religious grounds.”92 U.S. officials were of several minds on the issue. In 1988 one DEA official expressed skepticism about the extent of Hezbollah’s involvement in the illicit industry, telling a reporter—while acknowledging the agency’s limited information—“We know of people in Hezbollah who are involved in drugs, but does that mean that the whole Hezbollah organization is involved?”93 A “senior Justice Department official” in the Reagan administration told the Wall Street Journal the same year, “It’s become clear that members of Hezbollah are engaging in drug trafficking to support various elements of their organization. But we don’t know if the money is going directly to support terrorist activities.” The CIA was said to have concluded that “the Iranians have shown their Lebanese allies how to grow opium poppies,” an assessment the DEA reportedly had not seen.94 Given the prevalence of opium in Lebanon, it hardly seems plausible that by 1988 local farmers needed Iranian tutelage in the art of growing poppies. In 1988 a reporter for the conservative Washington Times cited anonymous “sources close to Iran” as contending that a “drastic drop in Iranian financial support” for Hezbollah had “increased the organization’s dependence on the drug trade.”95 Significantly, however, Hezbollah did not achieve political dominance in the drug-rich northern Bekaa region until 1989, when it seized the Lebanese army barracks in Baalbek.96 Lebanese peasants at this time complained that Hezbollah was threatening their livelihood by trying to end drug cultivation. Said one resident, “Some clergymen say ‘Stop dealing with hashish,’ but we reply, ‘Give us the alternative.’”97 Another farmer explained, “I decided to repent. But I plunged into poverty. The price of potatoes was low, and the villagers here do not get any form of help from the government or foreign institutions, so I resumed dealing with hashish to earn more money.”98 Eventually, Hezbollah’s hardline attitude toward drugs helped spawn the emergence of a major political rival, the organization’s former secretary general Subhi Tufayli. Appealing to Bekaa’s poor farmers, including its drug cultivators, Tufayli accused Hezbollah of neglecting the region’s suffering. In the wake of harsh crop substitution programs he would eventually lead a “revolt of the hungry” to demand irrigation projects and viable crop alternatives.99 Hezbollah was not afraid to get its hands dirty, however, when it came to resisting Israel. Evidence from heavily censored Israeli drug trials indicates that Hezbollah “turned” several Lebanese dealers, who had been serving as Israeli police or military informants, and used them to glean intelligence from Israeli The Drug Melting Pot 151 servicemen and drug traders. One Israeli sergeant, arrested for running a major smuggling ring, was accused of alerting Hezbollah to Israeli troop positions across the border. And former Lebanese drug allies of Israel in Lebanon helped Hezbollah kidnap an Israeli reserve colonel and businessman—some said he was a drug dealer as well—for ultimate use in a prisoner exchange in 2004.100 A summary of evidence against Hezbollah, compiled by the Library of Congress for the Department of Defense in 2002, noted allegations arising in the mid-1990s—after the period covered by this study—that Shiite supporters of Hezbollah in Latin America, particularly in the so-called triborder region of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina, were raising money for the organization from various illicit activities, including drugs. “In the absence of adequate documentation,” the study concluded, “it cannot be assumed that . . . large amounts of money are derived from drug trafficking.”101 It continued, revealingly:

The role of Hizballah in drug production and trade in Lebanon . . . seems not to be of major dimensions. Most sources barely mention narcotics in their discussion of Hizballah or drug production, even when speaking of the Beka’a Valley. Rather than alleging Hizballah participation, one source paraphrases a Beka’a Valley farmer to the effect that Hizballah does not encourage cultivation of cannabis but tolerates it because otherwise local farmers would starve. Still, it does appear that Hizballah operatives participate in some level of the narcotics trade, even if it is not particularly significant with respect to the narcotics trade beyond Lebanon. A different perspective on this subject comes from Israeli sources, who allege that Hizballah, Lebanese traders, and the Syrians are deeply involved in drug production and trade. In a 1998 study, analysts with the International Policy Institute for Counterterrorism in Herzlia, Israel, acknowledged official efforts to reduce cultivation of cannabis and poppy in Lebanon during the 1990s, but they claimed that the Lebanese and Syrians had then turned to the production and marketing of heroin and cocaine in place of crop cultivation. . . . Although the Israelis have a great deal of expertise when it comes to their neighbors, it should be remembered that they spare no effort to discredit Hiz- ballah and the Syrians, with whom they have been locked in combat for decades. The assertions made above should be evaluated in this light. The Israeli claims also need to be weighed against the findings of the U.S. Department of State in its International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 2001, which found that “Lebanon is not a major illicit drug producing or drug- 152 The Drug Melting Pot

transit country, although it remains a country of concern to the U.S.” Despite a resurgence in cannabis cultivation since 2000, cannabis and opium poppy production remain subdued. “There is no significant illicit drug refining in Leba- non; such activity has practically disappeared due to vigilance of the Syrian and Lebanese governments.”102

Armenians and Turks Criminals tend to organize in ways that maximize the essential element of trust. That’s why so many criminal networks have a distinct ethnic or national identity (Chinese, Irish, Italian, Jewish, Russian). As Phil Williams and others have noted, ethnically based organizations enjoy kinship loyalties, a common language, and, in many cases, shared distrust of discriminatory state authorities, all of which makes them hard to penetrate.103 Such criminals often thrive in an otherwise hostile society by selling criminal services (drugs, gambling, prostitution) to the dominant culture. In Lebanon criminal bonds typically formed around clans and confessional groups. However, the country’s major ethnic minority, Armenians, formed criminal networks of their own. Owing perhaps to the special trust forged from surviving genocide in Turkey and then the rigors of life in the diaspora, Arme- nians played a notable role in Lebanon’s (and the broader region’s) drug traffic. Armenians migrated to Beirut in large numbers in the early 1920s, seeking protection from the French after suffering massacres in Anatolia under the Ottoman Empire from 1915 through 1918. The French granted them citizenship in 1924, but the new immigrants held tightly to their language and culture. They settled chiefly in a large ghetto in East Beirut, near the port, and along the Nahr River on the city’s northern border. This geographic concentration reinforced their isolation from other peoples in Lebanon. Another smaller migration of Armenians followed in 1939; by 1973 their numbers totaled about 175,000.104 Similar migrations dispersed Armenians to diverse communities in Cali- fornia, Greece, France (particularly Marseille), and Panama. In time ethnic Armenian criminal organizations developed in many of those communities, specializing in money laundering, loan sharking, and smuggling of weapons and drugs.105 These bridgeheads provided ideal destinations for Lebanese drugs.106 Individuals of Armenian descent, like those of every ethnic group, took part in the growth of the world narcotics trade after World War II. Armenians reportedly owned many of the heroin labs used by the French Connection in the Marseille region, which is home to about eighty thousand ethnic Armenians.107 The Drug Melting Pot 153

The FBN’s first target in Beirut, in 1950, was Artin Guedikian, an Armenian bar owner who sold hashish and opium to American seamen and employees of the Trans-Arabian Pipeline project.108 Other, more notable, Armenian drug criminals included Sami Khoury’s partner Hagop Kevorkian, who smuggled narcotics from Lebanon to France and later acted as a money courier from Can- ada to Europe; and Antranik Paroutian, an associate of leading Corsican and Italian American crime bosses. Paroutian “traveled to Lebanon and Turkey to secure large quantities of morphine base to be delivered to operators of clandestine laboratories in the Marseille, France, area” and laundered drug cash into Swiss bank accounts.109 Years later, the French Armenian Robert Kechichian was identified as a key figure in the “French-Italian drug connection,” the Italian Mafia–dominated successor to the French Connection, and the main recruiter of its chemists.110 A 1968 account of one French Armenian trafficker who used Beirut as his springboard for morphine base from the Middle East described the Armenian quarter of Beirut, no doubt prejudicially, as “the haven for the criminal element of the city. . . . Criminals of all sorts were so entrenched that the Beirut gendarmes seldom if ever dared to venture within the Nahr District boundar- ies. The honest but suspicious citizens of the ghetto refused to talk or cooperate with the police; the criminal element met the police head on with revolvers, rifles and submachine guns.”111 One of the most powerful forces in the Armenian community was the ardently nationalist Armenian Revolutionary Federation, or Tashnaq Party. Formed in the Georgian city known today as Tbilisi, the party established branches in nearly three dozen countries. They organized armed guerrilla resistance to Ottoman oppression, with the ultimate goal of an independent and unified Greater Armenia. Within Lebanon, Tashnaq was considered “the best organized and most disciplined” of all political groups, despite its member- ship of just over two thousand (by the mid-1960s).112 It also enjoyed support from President Fuad Chehab and the powerful Army G-2.113 Tashnaq occasionally clashed with the smaller, pro-Soviet Hunchaq Party for control of key towns, leading to killings in the late 1920s and again in the late 1950s.114 The Tashnaq Party’s Middle East Bureau in Beirut set policy for the party worldwide. To expand its influence within the Armenian diaspora, theTashnaqs promoted a split in the Armenian Apostolic Church to undercut the traditional center of spiritual authority in Soviet Armenia. As one State Department analyst noted, the “militantly anti-communist” party “capitalized on the Cold war 154 The Drug Melting Pot struggle in the 1950s and East-West dissension to aggrandize its power in anti- communist and western countries where Armenian communities exist.”115 As Orthodox Christians, Lebanon’s Armenians mostly rallied behind Pres- ident Chamoun during the 1958 crisis and suffered casualties in the fighting. Along with Chamoun’s forces and the Phalangists, they were armed by the CIA as “part of a Cold War policy of using pro-Western minorities in the anti-Communist struggle,” in the words of CIA director William Colby. They also enjoyed support from the shah of Iran’s SAVAK (National Intelligence and Security Organization).116 In the aftermath of the civil war, Chamoun’s successor, President Chehab, arranged the first cabinet post for an ethnic Armenian.117 However, the Armenians were less enthusiastic defenders of Maronite political supremacy when the civil war broke out in 1975. Most refused to pay taxes to support the Phalangist militia or contribute armed fighters to the greater Christian cause. As a result they endured bloody clashes with both Phalangist and Chamounist forces in 1978 and 1979, particularly in East Beirut, holding their own at the cost of many lives.118 When they did take sides, followers of the Tashnaq Party nonetheless tended to ally with the Gemayel and Chamoun factions, while Hunchaq supporters favored Jumblatt’s Progressive Socialist Party and some Palestinian causes.119 Inevitably, Armenians joined in the violence and criminality that became pervasive during this period. Leftist Armenians, who might once have been content with representation by the Hunchaq Party, became attracted to the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia (ASALA), whose terrorist methods emulated those of some radical Palestinian groups. ASALA called for “revolutionary violence” to attack “Turkish imperialism” and “international imperialism,” with the ultimate aim of creating a “democratic, socialist and revolutionary” Armenia. One of its first acknowledged acts, committed only a few months after the Lebanese civil war began in 1975, was bombing the Bei- rut office of the World Council of Churches for “promoting the emigration of Armenians to the United States.” Over the next seven years ASALA assassinated at least nine Turkish diplomats or their family members abroad and attacked a passenger terminal at Ankara airport. ASALA allied itself at various times with the PLO and more left-wing, militant factions, and later with Syria and even Abu Nidal. Many ASALA supporters moved to West Beirut to show support for their leftist Muslim colleagues.120 The Tashnaqs competed with ASALA for influence among young and easily radicalized Armenians, particularly in Lebanon. In October 1975, just a few The Drug Melting Pot 155 months into the civil war, a shadowy group widely suspected of having ties to the Tashnaqs formed the Justice Commandos Against Armenian Genocide (JCAG), which took credit for a number of bombings and assassinations over the next several years. The Wall Street Journal reported in 1983 that, following the success of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in driving ASALA out of Beirut, “the Justice Commandos have yielded to CIA pressure exerted through Dashnag intermediaries and ‘frozen’ their own terror campaign.”121 John Warner, the head of DEA’s international programs, said in 1984 that “among the transnational terrorist groups,” the two Armenian ones stood out as “the most ruthless and dangerous of all.”122 Like other groups in Lebanon, radical Armenians began funding their operations with drug sales. One Ameri- can journalist with good DEA sources reported in 1984 that “Armenian terrorist groups of both the left and the right were estimated a year ago to be 90 percent financed through the sale or barter of narcotics.”123 In October 1981 Swedish and Danish police arrested nineteen Armenians for smuggling narcotics through Scandinavia. The five key figures in the ring were all Lebanese—and all apparently connected to ASALA. The gang had been formed seven years earlier by the Lebanese-born Georges Makhlouf, who had moved to the United States but was extradited to Sweden at the end of 1982. Another ASALA associate was arrested at Orly Airport in November 1981 when French police nabbed a second group of Armenian smugglers.124 In 1983 a seizure of nine kilos of heroin in Cyprus was linked to a smuggling ring that funded the organization.125 ASALA also appears to have received financial and organizational support from Behçet Cantürk, a Kurdish heroin kingpin whose mother and second wife were Armenian.126 After Turkey’s military coup in 1980, security forces there recruited ultra- right-wing criminals to strike back against ASALA. One of their agents was Abdulla Çatli, head of the notorious Grey Wolves militia. After attacking a series of Armenian and ASALA targets in France in the early 1980s, Çatli was arrested by French police in October 1984 for drug trafficking; he was jailed in Switzer- land four years later on further drug charges. He managed somehow to escape in 1990, returning to Turkey to undertake “special operations” for the police, despite being wanted there for murdering seven student members of the Turkish Labor Party. It may have been on such a special mission that Turkish security forces managed in 1994 to kill Cantürk, the Kurdish Armenian heroin smuggler.127 Associates of the right-wing JCAG engaged in narcotics trafficking as well. The Beirut-born Armenian Noubar Soufian (or Sofoyan), closely connected 156 The Drug Melting Pot with the group, confessed to financing the bombing of a Turkish tourism and labor office in Zurich on May 28, 1976. Nonetheless, Swiss authorities set him free. In 1980 or 1981 a New York grand jury indicted him for smuggling Leba- nese heroin and hashish into the United States. Undeterred, he allegedly arranged the importation of one hundred kilos of heroin to Los Angeles in August 1981. Although he was jailed by Greek police in 1981, an appeals court refused to permit his extradition to the United States, and he was returned to Lebanon. There, Soufian allegedly controlled a small shipping company that smuggled assault rifles and rocket grenades to Phalangist and Armenian militia in Beirut in exchange for heroin.128 Years later, the taint of drugs still clung to some elements of the Tashnaq. In December 1994 the president of Armenia suspended the party, claiming that it harbored a secret terrorist organization that, among other criminal enterprises, smuggled heroin from Beirut to Moscow via Armenia. Several militant Tashnaq leaders went on trial in 1995 for drug trafficking, terrorism, and political assassinations. The U.S. State Department considered the charges at least plausible.129 Elsewhere in the diaspora, ethnic Armenians with connections to the Mid- dle East played major roles in the shift of Europe’s heroin headquarters from France to Italy after the demise of the French Connection. In November 1979 stunned Italian investigators first caught wind of an enormous conspiracy to smuggle drugs from and weapons to the Middle East. A Turkish informant told police in Milan details of how Turkish traffickers moved heroin into Italy via trailer trucks owned by a Yugoslav state company. Among those he implicated in the ring were his brother, a narcotics detective in Istanbul, and one Henri (or Hanifi) Arsan (also Arslan or Arslanian), who operated out of a hotel in Trento. The seemingly routine investigation was assigned to Trento magistrate Carlo Palermo. To everyone’s surprise, Palermo’s patient and relentless digging uncovered a vast smuggling network, comprising powerful Turkish and Syrian drug bosses, Bulgarian and Yugoslav state companies and intelligence operatives, Italian mafiosi, and a host of arms dealers. Eventually, Judge Palermo implicated more than 250 conspirators.130 Arsan became a major focus of the judge’s investigation. He was an Arme- nian of Syrian origin, as were at least two of his coconspirators in the arms and drug trade.131 Though Judge Palermo had never heard of Arsan, DEA agent Thomas Angioletti had approached him as far back as 1973 for information on the international drug traffic. According to Angioletti’s report, “Arsan confirmed being a smuggler for 25 years. His principal activities involve the traffic The Drug Melting Pot 157 in arms, liquor and cigarettes between Europe and Turkey. Arsan declared he never dealt in drugs.” (Other intelligence, however, indicated that he had been “a key morphine-base supplier to the former French Connection” since the late 1960s.) Arsan agreed to go undercover for the DEA to purchase one hundred kilos of heroin from two Turkish drug bosses, Ismet Cil and Mustafa Syril. For some reason, however, the operation ran aground.132 Arsan next surfaced in Italian police reports in 1977, when he was linked to a Syrian Kurdish Mafia boss who had worked in the Marseille underworld before moving to West Berlin. Arsan by now allegedly directed a “vast traffic in heroin, morphine, arms and stolen cars.” He remained untouched, however, until Judge Palermo began investigating more than two years later.133 Bugs placed at his residence before his arrest revealed details of his plots to sell arms to both Iran and Iraq after they went to war in 1981. Before he could be fully interrogated, however, Arsan managed to break out of jail in March 1982, the first of several suspicious escapes by Judge Palermo’s defendants.134 A key breakthrough in the case was the arrest in Germany of a Turkish smuggler, Tegmen Erdem, who had done business with Arsan and Turkish ship- per Mehmet Cantas. Erdem described one meeting in California, where Cantas resided, at which Arsan discussed his role in brokering the sale of hundreds of Leopard tanks and Cobra helicopters to warring countries in the Middle East. The far-flung arms network included the Polish government, an Italian arms manufacturer, Lebanese and Swiss smugglers who brokered Israeli arms to Iran in return for discounted oil, and Syrian agents, including representatives of Rifaat al-Assad, brother of the Syrian president. As Palermo traced these links and made arrests, he was finally able to announce in November 1982, “We have dismantled the world’s biggest organization for illegal trafficking in arms.”135 Palermo also learned more from Erdem, the Turkish smuggler, about Arsan’s deep involvement in drug trafficking. Arsan had used Cantas’s ships to import hundreds of kilos of morphine base from the Middle East into Italy each month for processing by drug labs in Sicily. The scope of this multiton operation was breathtaking, dwarfing even the French Connection.136 Palermo cited information from British police indicating that Cantas used drug profits to finance arms deliveries to Palestinian and Armenian terrorists.137 Cantas reportedly assisted a plot by the Lebanese Armenian Noubar Soufian (see above) to smuggle one hundred kilos of heroin to Los Angeles in 1981.138 At or near the center of this far-flung drug network was a Turkish drug boss, Abuzer Ugurlu. He did business from the Hotel Vitosha in Sofia under 158 The Drug Melting Pot the protection of Bulgarian authorities, who were always eager to earn foreign exchange. Ugurlu reportedly brokered weapons sales to Turkey and other markets for the Bulgarian state trading firm Kintex, which had been publicly linked to the drug business as early as 1972 by Newsday. (The Long Island newspaper quoted one Turkish trafficker as saying, “If you’ve got the right connection with that agency, you can pass morphine base through Bulgaria without the slightest ripple.”) The CIA reportedly viewed Kintex as a front for the Bulgarian Secret Service, and identified Ugurlu as one of its operatives.139 Yet Kintex was hardly the dutiful agent of Soviet-bloc foreign policy that some Western critics claimed. It was an equal-opportunity merchant of death, selling boatloads of weapons to Christian militias in Lebanon in 1974 and 1975 (before the local Communist Party insisted that it stop). It even shipped arms to apartheid South Africa, prompting one U.S. National Security Council analyst to conclude, “The Bulgarians are utterly mercenary.”140 Complicating matters, Ugurlu and other major Turkish smugglers were also working for the Turkish secret services and with members of Turkey’s far-right National Action Party who used their political connections to smuggle drugs into France.141 Also selling drugs out of a safe base in Sofia was the Turkish smuggler Bekir Celenk, who later became notorious when accused of financing the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II in 1981. Like Arsan, Celenk used Cantas for many of his shipping needs, and together they reportedly controlled much of the traffic in heroin to Germany and Great Britain.142 And like Ugurlu, Celenk was said to be a Bulgarian intelligence agent who had been recruited earlier by the Turkish services. (For a criminal, working for both sides was not a mutually exclusive proposition.) Celenk had enjoyed a fruitful relationship with the head of Turkish customs until the military took power in 1980, forcing him to flee to safety in Bulgaria. Bulgaria finally expelled him back to Turkey in 1985. Under police interrogation Celenk reportedly acknowledged his involvement with Kintex in smuggling weapons from Europe to Turkey and Lebanon in exchange for Middle Eastern heroin, though he denied any connection to the pope’s would-be assassin. He also named various Turks, Armenians, Syrians, and others involved with him in the guns-for-drugs business.143 Unconfirmed reports suggested that Celenk also had a relationship with the CIA, which used heroin networks like his to infiltrate agents into the East bloc.144 Turkish drug bosses in Sofia and Istanbul, including Ugurlu, made contact with the Sicilian Mafia in1976 and were soon supplying bulk loads of morphine The Drug Melting Pot 159 base to labs operated there by Gerlando Alberti.145 The DEA caught wind of a major convocation of Sicilian crime families at a hotel in Palermo in June 1979, to ensure the smooth continuation of the heroin trade from Sicily to the United States and Western Europe. The agency estimated that the Mafia families controlled a third of the world heroin market, with annual profits of $25 billion. Confirmation came with the arrest of Alberti and about thirty others in France and Italy in August 1980. Significantly, captured with Alberti was the brilliant French Connection chemist André Bousquet, proof of a direct link from the French to the Sicilian Connections.146 Ugurlu’s Milan-based intermediary with the Italian Mafia was Salah al Din Wakkas, reputedly of Syrian nationality. Investigators concluded that he was also “one of Kintex’s most important customers and a key supplier to Lebanese and Middle East terror groups.”147 Wakkas revealed under questioning that one of the leading suppliers of both hashish and morphine base to Europe in the late 1970s was a Beirut-based drug baron who used Middle East Airlines as one of his smuggling channels. The same supplier also provided multiton loads of hashish to two Lebanese Phalangist smugglers, who in turn used the proceeds to purchase guns from West Germany.148 The key to the Turkish-Bulgarian-Italian connection was the use of false cargo documents and sealed Transport International Routier (TIR) trucks, which allowed smugglers to avoid border inspections while in transit. By some estimates, almost three-quarters of the opiates reaching Western markets in the late 1970s and early 1980s moved this way. In return tons of weapons manufactured in Western and Eastern Europe were smuggled back to the warring armies of Iran and Iraq, Syria, Lebanese militia, and various insurgent groups (PLO, PKK, Kosovar guerrillas, etc.).149 The enormous, multinational investigation triggered by Palermo’s inquiries disrupted long-standing, well-protected trafficking channels carrying billions of dollars of illicit goods. Before Palermo could dig to the bottom of the case, however, he was abruptly reassigned, his investigation terminated, and his most explosive evidence put under seal for four decades. As the author Claire Ster- ling explained, he “ran into too many secret services, powerful politicians and party financiers, corrupt public servants, bent bankers, and diplomats piloting their ships of state through tricky East-West waters.”150 Not surprisingly, the flow of heroin to Western markets was only minimally affected by the investigation. One of the new kingpins who emerged was a Turkish shipowner, Yasar Avni Musullulu, who tapped the burgeoning supplies 160 The Drug Melting Pot available in Pakistan—thanks to the tons of opium produced in Afghanistan by mujahedin allies of the U.S. and Pakistani intelligence services. Musullulu reportedly supplied the Sicilian Mafia with nearly eight tons of morphine base— worth more than $20 billion in street sales—during the mid-1980s. The DEA called him the “primary supplier of morphine base to Italian organized crime groups” in the late 1970s and early 1980s and “one of the largest suppliers of morphine base in the world.”151 In February 1987 police in Ticino, Switzerland, followed up on a tip and dismantled a Turkish TIR truck suspected of carrying contraband. Behind its seals they discovered eighty kilos of morphine and twenty kilos of heroin. The shipment’s owner was Ramazan Mirza, a Turkish Kurd known to police as a friend of Bekir Celenk and heir to Musullulu’s narcotics empire. Mirza had moved with his family to Zurich in 1979, ostensibly to trade in currency and gold. He developed close business connections with Shakarchi Trading SA, a currency firm headed by a Lebanese businessman, Mohammed Shakarchi. Its vice president was the husband of Switzerland’s justice minister, Elisabeth Kopp. Shakarchi’s first company, Shakarco AG, just happened to share a Zurich address with Yasar Musullulu before he fled the country (reportedly to Bulgaria) to avoid arrest in a 1984 case. Shakarchi also reportedly enjoyed a cozy relationship with the chief of the intelligence bureau of the Zurich police, whom he took on hunting trips to Bulgaria. Before long, reporters began surfacing claims that Shakarchi Trading had moved money for many leading Turkish traffickers, including suppliers of the “Pizza Connection,” a huge network of Sicilian traffickers in the Eastern United States that was busted in 1984. A DEA investigative memo accused Shakarchi of “mingling the currency of heroin, morphine base, [and] hashish traffickers with that of jewelers buying gold on the black market and Middle East arms traffickers.” It added that Shakarchi was “utilized by some of the world’s largest trafficking organizations to launder the proceeds of their drug-trafficking activities. Its director, Mohammed Shakarchi, has been closely associated with the heads of those criminal organizations and with corrupt government officials who aid and assist those criminal organizations.” Among other tantalizing leads, U.S. investigators traced cocaine money laundered by a Syrian-Armenian jewelry wholesaler into a Shakarchi account at New York’s Republic Bank (owned by a Lebanese-born billionaire). Moham- med Shakarchi denied ever knowingly laundering drug money, however, and neither he nor his company was ever found guilty of crimes. The Drug Melting Pot 161

The case turned messy, however, when the chief Swiss prosecutor was accused of dragging his feet against Shakarchi. Justice Minister Kopp had to resign after it was revealed that she had tipped off her husband about the investigation and advised him to resign from Shakarchi’s board. It turned out further that Swiss authorities had ignored a Turkish arrest warrant for Musullulu in 1983, allowing him to flee the country to Bulgaria, and that they had ignored numerous reports since 1976 of Shakarchi’s alleged dealings with drug smugglers. Making matters worse, the CIA had used Shakarchi to purchase $25 million in foreign exchange for use by the Afghan rebels (who just happened to be supplying the heroin, via Pakistan, to Musullulu and the Pizza Connection). Finally, a remarkably—some wondered if intentionally—sloppy subpoena for Shakarchi’s records helped him escape prosecution in the United States.152 The chain of evidence uncovered following the discovery of the drug-laden TIR truck and Mirza’s arrest also implicated several members of the Lombardy Mafia. Police found on one of them the phone numbers of two Lebanese Ar- menian financiers, Barkev and Jean Magharian, who had previously worked for Shakarchi. Arrested in July 1988, the Magharian brothers were accused by police of running the largest money laundering operation in Swiss history.153 Over the course of two years, Magharian Frères of Beirut reportedly moved two billion Swiss francs (about $1.3 billion) in cash through various financial institutions, including Crédit Suisse and Union de Banques Suisses. A Swiss prosecutor charged that at least $36 million came from a cocaine dealer in California. In March 1989 a grand jury in Los Angeles indicted the pair for conspiracy to launder money and transport currency out of the country without filing reports.154 DEA investigators learned that hundreds of millions of dollars, which originated in Lebanon from the heroin and hashish trade, were smuggled into Tur- key, where the Magharians’ couriers collected the cash. Some was flown directly from Istanbul to Zurich; the rest went by bus from Turkey to Bulgaria and then, with the assistance of a successor company to Kintex, by plane to Swit- zerland. Much of the money, the DEA learned, was coming from a Turkish partner of Musullulu in the heroin trade. The Bulgarian government took a cut of the cash—and of any other smuggled goods—to facilitate safe passage through the country.155 Once the cash was safely banked in Switzerland, “in exchange, tons of gold were shipped from Zurich to Lebanon,” according to a Swiss prosecutor.156 162 The Drug Melting Pot

The Independent (London) explained how Lebanon’s drug trade helped drive an immense underground financial network:

Turkish moneychangers exported capital gathered from around the eastern Mediterranean. Some was sent to circumvent Turkey’s exchange control laws, but the bulk of it came from the drugs business, probably from the sale of hashish and heroin from Syria and Lebanon’s dusty Bekaa Valley. From Istanbul the money, always cash in suitcases, would be loaded on to commercial airliners or lorries bound for Sofia in Bulgaria—to darken the trail—where it was transferred by Bulgarian officials on to the flight to Zurich. Most of the cash was dollar bills, but there were sizeable amounts of Deutschmarks too. Given that $1m in $20 notes weighs 113 lbs, making substantial transfers was heavy work. But routine, for the Magharians anyway. Once in Zurich, the money would be deposited in any one of the many accounts held by the [Magharian] brothers at all three leading Swiss banks, but their favourite was Credit Suisse. Between March 1985 and July 1988, when the brothers were arrested, they deposited SFr1.4bn in Credit Suisse alone. (The Swiss Bank Corpo- ration got only SFr1.2m of their business; UBS did rather better, with SFr130m). From these bank accounts some of the laundered money was withdrawn and sent back to Turkey in cash or by bank transfer, while the significant portion was spent on gold bullion, either from the big Swiss banks or from Mr Shakarchi, who was already one of Zurich’s main bullion dealers.157

The Magharians claimed they had no idea any of the money they handled came from drugs or other criminal enterprises; Barkev testified that he was assured by Turkish customers that the cash came from the Brazilian diamond trade. The court was apparently not convinced; the two brothers received sentences of four and a half years but were released for good behavior in only three years.158 Looking back on this history, the unlikely collaboration of Armenians, Kurds, and Turks in the Lebanese drug trade, like that of rival Lebanese Chris- tian and Muslim factions, demonstrates once again the power of shared business interests to overcome traditional political, cultural, and ideological divisions. Unfortunately, in other hands, drug money proved all too potent a fuel for driving the engines of Lebanon’s civil war. 8 From Narco-State to Failed State

“Look,” the [U.S.] narcotics man explained. “Money is power in Leb- anon. Money buys guns, and guns are power. It’s like gang warfare in L.A.” Los Angeles Times, April 17, 1990 because political power is profoundly shaped by the distribution of resources, the vast sums of money generated by the underground economy are critical to understanding the dynamics of the modern state. Owing to their secretive and dangerous nature, however, organized crime and narcotics trafficking are relatively understudied both by journalists and scholars. The case of Lebanon provides a striking illustration of the significance of drugs in the broader regional political economy and a reminder of why they deserve more serious attention. For at least four decades—much longer than most historians have realized— Lebanon enjoyed a key position in the international narcotics market far out of proportion to the country’s size. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics recognized Lebanon as a narco-state as early as the 1950s, both as a leading supplier of hashish and as a central cog in the Western heroin traffic. Time and again record- breaking drug busts and seizures in the United States, Europe, and other markets traced their origin back to Lebanese drugs, traffickers, and money launderers. It would be fruitless to look for some unique quality of its people or even of its soil and climate to explain Lebanon’s remarkable significance as a supplier and distributor of mind-altering substances. More likely, the explanation lies with its experience and success over the millennia as a commercial trading center; its history as a French protectorate, which gave it privileged access to West- ern markets; and the luck of its geographic position, between low-cost centers of drug production in Asia Minor and consumer markets in Europe. Those factors came together in the latter half of the twentieth century to make Lebanon a preeminent supplier of hashish to Europe and North America when changing Western norms embraced the “counterculture.” It also became a leading sup-

163 164 From Narco-State to Failed State plier of opiates before being eclipsed by Southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle and South Asia’s Golden Crescent. Another, more subtle, factor may have been the National Pact, which restricted political competition by rigidly allocating political offices among Leba- non’s major confessional groups. The result—often seen in one-party states—was to limit accountability and foster corruption.1 A circular dynamic reinforced this status quo: just as corruption fostered the narcotics trade, so drug profits aggravated the corruption of Lebanese politics, preventing law enforcement from seriously threatening this enormous underground business. Within Lebanon the drug trade brought some blessings. It allowed many Lebanese to earn their livelihood by servicing the demand of eager buyers from Egypt, France, Italy, the United States, and beyond, an extension of the country’s successful reliance on legal trade and financial services. In the Bekaa, where the state was marginalized by the powerful presence of quasi-feudal landowners and by its own indifference, drugs provided some alternative to abject poverty. For a period in the 1980s, the burgeoning trade even brought a degree of affluence to the region. It also gave extended clans the resources to keep intrusive government gendarmes and foreign occupiers at bay. But drug profits also warped the country’s economy, as well as its politics, dangerously exaggerating the role of unregulated finance and crowding out production of traditional fruits and vegetables in the Bekaa Valley. Drugs were no substitute for broad economic development, which a financially constrained and sometimes uncaring state did little to foster. By reinforcing Lebanon’s dependence on the international system, the traffic made Lebanon more vulnerable to politically enforced shifts in global supply and demand, like Turkey’s crackdown on opium production, which moved trafficking routes northward through the Balkans. Lebanon’s huge narcotics trade also made the country a persistent target of foreign political pressure. Responding to demands by the United States, Egypt, and United Nations to curtail drug cultivation, Beirut had to undertake occasional eradication campaigns that squeezed small farmers and aggravated their distrust of the state. Finally, the drug trade gave Lebanon’s occupying powers a powerful lever to manipulate the country further, by using it to reward allies and punish foes.

Greed or Grievance? If the hidden history of Lebanon’s drug trade fills an important gap in the traditional story of its recent political and socioeconomic development, it also From Narco-State to Failed State 165 sheds light on broader connections between drugs and civil wars. In particular, Lebanon offers a powerful test of influential economic models of civil conflict advanced by World Bank economist Paul Collier and several of his colleagues. Their conclusions generated widespread debate over “greed or grievance” as the better causal explanation for civil wars. Collier provocatively discounted nearly all the usual suspects—inequality, authoritarianism, ethnic and religious divisions, and the like—in favor of a reductionist explanation premised on baser profit motives. Collier argued simply that “civil wars occur where rebel organizations are financially viable.” Claimed grievances are usually spurious ratio- nalizations, he maintained. Rebellions are not social protests but rather “the ultimate manifestation of organized crime.”2 In support of such claims Collier offered a statistical analysis of civil conflicts from 1965 to 1999. He identified “the most powerful risk factor” as the share of national income from primary commodities. His interpretation: “Pri- mary commodity exports are the most lootable of all economic activities. An economy which is dependent upon them thus offers plenty of opportunities for predatory rebellion. . . . Indeed, rebel predation is just illegal taxation.”3 The “greed not grievance” school has been subjected to severe criticism on theoretical, methodological, and empirical grounds.4 It certainly does not do justice to the case of Lebanon, where sectarian divisions, inequality, political dysfunction, and foreign interventions all contributed to the breakdown of state legitimacy and authority, creating the conditions for prolonged civil war.5 Nonetheless, aspects of Collier’s case resonate with scholars of Lebanese history.6 It offers a powerful reminder that whatever the motives, conflicts can only be launched and sustained where the economic means exist. In Lebanon, drug profits certainly ranked high on the list of means that enabled and prolonged the war. Collier’s analysis was based on World Bank measures of primary commodity exports, not estimates of illegal commerce. Indeed, of the extensive literature he inspired on group competition over natural resource rents and the economic causes of conflict, relatively few studies mention drugs.7 Nonetheless, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the potential relevance of the drug traffic as a source of lootable rents. For example, Collier observed that ports and routes to them are natural “choke points” that lend themselves to competitive exploitation and rent-seeking by government and rebel forces. As we have seen, Lebanese militia fought repeatedly for control of key ports that enabled drug exports, as well as imports of arms and taxable luxury goods. 166 From Narco-State to Failed State

Collier’s team briefly considered the case of drug trafficking in 2003a book. They observed that “virtually all [drug] production through the period [1990 to 2001] has been in conflict or postconflict countries.” They posited two main reasons:

First, civil war creates territory outside the control of a recognized government on which drugs can be cultivated. It also creates an environment in which many people can behave opportunistically with no cost, because the normal policing institutions are weakened and are unable to control illegal activities. Second, during civil war conventional economic opportunities are severely reduced. International crime, of which drug production and trafficking are the prime example, provides a rare instance of a new economic opportunity.8

Again, the case of Lebanon bears out these observations. Although drug cultivation and trafficking had enjoyed substantial immunity for decades before the civil war, they grew explosively after the start of the war with the collapse of central government law enforcement and the shrinkage of other economic opportunities. International pressure on the government to keep the drug economy in check no longer mattered. DEA and other foreign drug agents could not even set foot in Lebanon for fear of kidnapping or murder. Even so, large-scale drug trafficking is not by itself a sufficient condition for triggering civil war. The majority of countries with significant drug problems—as well as those with substantial lootable resources like tropical timber or diamond deposits—did not experience civil wars in the years 1960 to 1999.9 Collier also concluded from statistical analysis that rebellions were much more likely to occur when funding was potentially available from a large dias pora (particularly in the United States). Once more, Lebanon fit their bill during its protracted war. Income from Lebanese living abroad amounted to some- where between $1.5 billion and $2.5 billion a year.10 While most of these remittances and contributions no doubt came from legal sources, some Lebanese immigrants also created large drug marketing and distribution organizations in several major consuming countries. Thus the diaspora effect in part had its roots in the international drug economy. Contrary to the economic determinists, however, the few historians of Leb- anon who have addressed the issue of drug trafficking generally agree that it was primarily a source of conflict finance and not motivatinga force behind the initiation of the civil war.11 As Brian Evans described the connection, the civil war was “not caused by the emerging drug economy any more than the drug From Narco-State to Failed State 167 economy was caused by the advent of the war. Rather, they were mutually reinforcing trends, existing in a system that was ineffective in stopping either one.”12 In Lebanon, the long-standing traffic in drugs supported rather than challenged existing political and economic power relationships, as wealthy Muslim landowners, Christian traffickers, and security officials reaped the bulk of profits, leaving many cultivators barely above a subsistence level. The drug bosses had no incentive to provoke a war with the state, which generally tolerated or even protected their business and their social position. As part of the quid pro quo, Lebanon’s traffickers kept a relatively low profile and did not flaunt their illicit occupation—unlike, say, Colombia’s Pablo Escobar, who brazenly taunted state authorities and all but invited an international campaign to im- prison or kill him.13 However, the collapse of Lebanon’s state and the ferocious competition of the country’s warring factions for resources drove the drug trade to new heights after 1975 and turned Lebanon for the first time into a major producer of opium. Heightened drug trafficking in turn increased both the intensity and duration of the war by providing the country’s resource-hungry militia with the means to afford huge purchases of foreign arms and fat payrolls, as well as to maintain civil order and administer basic services within their ministates.14 By one estimate, the tab for weapons imports alone ran nearly $4 billion from 1978 to 1986.15 In time the drug traffic in Lebanon thus became an independent economic motive for prolonging the conflict. Jürgen Endres elaborates on the impact of drugs on the Lebanese civil war:

In the midst of the general nightmare, the various Lebanese militias in particular developed economic strategies that enabled the fighting factions not only to cover their direct costs of warfare, but also to gain enormous financial profits from waging war. . . . The revenues of war supported the Lebanese militias in claiming legitimacy for ruling their respective cantons. Being able to provide social and administrative services, as well as to reallocate parts of the revenues to the population living under their domination, the militias could not only justify their mere existence but also claim to represent legitimate political authorities. Without these redistributional mechanisms based on the various forms of war economies the Lebanese war system could not have lasted for such a long time.16

Domestic militia and Bekaa clans were not the only armed groups motivated by drug profits. It is reasonable to speculate that Syria’s lengthy occupation of Lebanon was supported by local commanders who skimmed a share 168 From Narco-State to Failed State of the lucrative sale of drugs grown in the Bekaa Valley. Certainly Syria saw no conflict between its economic, political, and military goals while occupying that rich region until the prospect of improved relations with Washington motivated greater interest in drug eradication. This pattern of greed-prolonged conflict is often found wherever valuable commodities like diamonds, oil, or timber enrich warring factions. As David Keen notes, from his perspective as a specialist in West Africa,

Conflict can create war economies, often in regions controlled by rebels or warlords and linked to international trading networks. . . . Under these circumstances, ending civil wars becomes difficult. . . . Increasingly, civil wars that appear to have begun with political aims have mutated into conflicts in which short- term economic benefits are paramount. While ideology and identity remain important in understanding conflict, they may not tell the whole story. Portraying civil wars as simply revolutionary struggles between opposing sides obscures the emerging political economy from which the combatants can benefit.17

As a reminder, however, that there are few absolute rules when it comes to human behavior, Richard Snyder observes that in Burma the widespread production of opium actually contributed to the demobilization of rebel groups and the restoration of political order after 1990 once the military government shrewdly agreed to share the wealth generated by drugs with its former foes.18 In a similar vein the continuity of drug trafficking in Lebanon after 1990 may have contributed to the demobilization of militia groups by giving them a revenue source that ultimately did not require war for its perpetuation.

Did Drugs Help Initiate Conflict? Though the evidence is inconclusive, a case can also be made that drugs played a role in initiating the conflict in Lebanon, as well as sustaining it. As we have seen, the drug trade did not simply arise during the civil war as an opportunistic source of fund-raising. By the early 1970s it was deeply entrenched in Lebanese economic and political structures, helping to shape rural society, landlord-tenant relations, electoral politics, the growth of the financial sector, and many other facets of Lebanese life. Illicit profits enriched traditional social elites and strengthened their patronage power at the expense of modern state institutions and social relations. We have seen that the resistance to Chehabist reforms was prompted not only by the challenge they posed to traditional patronage politics that thrived on a From Narco-State to Failed State 169 weak state system but also by their threat to the drug trade. The political bosses’ corruption in turn eroded the legitimacy of the state and key economic institutions, including the financial sector. By artificially boosting opponents of political reform and helping to preserve many of the underlying social divisions that the National Pact papered over, the drug traffic arguably contributed, along with other domestic stresses, to the growth of violent conflict. Second, and more speculatively, there is an intriguing chronological coincidence between the breakup of the French-Lebanese Connection, the crackdown on Turkish opium production, the northward shift in drug trade routes from Central Asia to Europe, and the onset of civil war in Lebanon. Did the disruption in Lebanon’s lucrative opiates commerce put a serious economic squeeze on predominantly Christian traffickers and their powerful patrons, heightening the growing insecurity of Christian political leaders as they faced clamorous demands from Muslims for greater power sharing and security challenges from Palestinian radicals? And did clashes between Christian militia and Palestinian guerrillas over the drug trade in the early 1970s feed the growing conviction of hostile factions that only superior force could protect their financial resources in a dangerous environment? These questions must for now remain unanswered, but they certainly deserve further investigation.

Drugs and Quasi-States The large investment of time, money, and social organization needed to cultivate, harvest, process, package, market, and distribute drugs requires some modicum of stability and security over a period of at last six months. A chaotic environment characterized by random looting and violence is as fatal to the drug business as to any other. Drug rents are best extracted by either corrupt states or quasi-state organizations with de facto control over wide areas, like FARC in rural Colombia or the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. For this reason, paradoxically, even though the ballooning drug trade was both a cause and consequence of state failure in Lebanon, it also helped create temporary substitutes for the state. The exigencies of conducting this immensely profitable commerce pushed otherwise rival groups to adopt strange new modes of cooperation. Their small, statelike territories practiced a degree of peaceful coexistence and even showed modest respect for property rights. In Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley Syria’s military maintained order without challenging the heavily armed clans that grew drug crops, creating favorable conditions for 170 From Narco-State to Failed State commerce. Elsewhere, within their own cantons, Lebanese militia groups provided traditional state functions of protection and social services in exchange for taxation. In short, they enriched themselves further by putting some limits on their predation.19 Indeed, as Elizabeth Picard observes, militia groups routinely set aside their deadly rivalries in favor of “transcommunal and interregional cooperation” in order to maximize their joint drug profits:

Far from being an obstacle to trafficking, the division of Lebanon into several quasi-autonomous statelets increased the rents from the drug trade. The cooperation among militias was organized around multiple, cross- sectarian economic networks that negotiated specific divisions of labor: taxing farmers, supervising processing and packaging in remote clandestine plants, and carrying the drugs to the many illegal harbors on the Lebanese coast and from there to various intermediary points (such as West Africa) or final destinations. For purposes of drug trafficking, Amal was associated with the Progres- sive Socialist Party (PSP), and Hizbollah with the pro-Syrian militia of Tripoli, the Lebanese Forces, and even with officers of the Israeli Golani brigade that had occupied the southern region of the country since 1978. . . . Each group performed its share of operations and took its share of the profit. In that sense, there was an indisputable collective interest in protracting the Lebanese war.20

Narco-States, Failed States, and Intrastate Conflicts Despite its many unique characteristics, the narco-history of modern Lebanon has parallels in other troubled states and societies spanning many decades. Drugs have financed major insurgencies in Afghanistan, Burma, Colombia, Nicaragua, Peru, Sri Lanka, Turkey, Uzbekistan, and many other places—perhaps two dozen recent or ongoing conflicts around the globe.21 Going back in time, the Leba- nese experience had much in common with China in the early twentieth century, when warlords paid for guns and armies to maintain their regional fiefdoms through control of the opium trade. As in Lebanon, it took a national consolida- tion of China’s drug traffic to permit the re-formation of a credible central state.22 Peter Andreas, among others, documents that in the Bosnian conflict “access to supplies through smuggling networks and the involvement of quasi- private criminal actors as combatants are critical factors in explaining the outbreak, persistence, termination, and aftermath of the war.”23 That description could readily fit Lebanon as well. In both battle zones most of the fighting From Narco-State to Failed State 171 divided along sectarian lines. Each of the warring parties drew on organized crime and drug trafficking to finance its operations. And in Bosnia, as in Leba- non, those criminal elements remarkably found room for collaboration amid the unspeakable communal violence. Věra Stojarová writes that

an extraordinary organized crime network was established during the [Balkan] war. Practically, a kind of “triangle” emerged in all ethnic communities. Political elites and their police and armed forces, pre-existing criminal groups and paramilitary units formed this triangle. Almost all criminal groups were formed on an ethnic basis and operated only in those areas where their ethnicity accounted for the majority of the population. However, ethnic affiliation did not prevent criminal groups from active cooperation with other groups coming from the hostile camps in [Bosnia] or from other states in the region.24

Until 1975 Lebanon’s elites managed to share in the spoils of the drug trade while preventing its operators from disturbing the peace or seriously challenging the state. The parallels to Mexico, under the hegemonic reign of the Insti- tutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from the 1940s to the 1980s, are striking:

By and large the PRI turned a blind eye to the illicit trade, so long as the cartels gave government officials a cut of the profits and prevented the violence from spilling into the traditional plaza. The authorities responsible for regulating the drug trade—initially health officials, and later the police and the military— often functioned as middlemen between politicians and traffickers. Every so often, a high-profile arrest was made to appease the United States, which was constantly pressing for more aggressive enforcement. Luis Astorga, a historian of the drug trade, has written that in the rare instances when the police and military intervened, it was to prevent “traffickers from becoming completely autonomous or getting so wild as to go beyond certain limits of socially and historically tolerated violence.” Or, as Nuevo León’s governor from the early 1990s would later put it, “What control by the PRI governments guaranteed was that drug trafficking did not disturb the societal peace.”25

Some scholars have termed this modus vivendi a form of “state-sponsored protection racket.”26 In Lebanon that system broke down with the general erosion of trust among Lebanon’s rival factions. Sectarian antagonists no longer counted on traditional arrangements to guarantee their rightful share of political power or national wealth—including drug revenues. The resulting outbreak of civil violence in Lebanon, like the breakdown of the PRI’s monopoly on power 172 From Narco-State to Failed State in the 1990s, unleashed the drug trade from all previous restraints. In Lebanon the eventual resumption of state authority, with help from Syria, prevented the drug traffic from becoming a permanently destabilizing force. In Mexico, where the death toll from drug-related violence surpassed fifty thousand in the five years through December 2011, the outcome has yet to be written.27 Lebanon’s experience also foreshadowed—with many obvious differences—contemporary events in Afghanistan. There, mujahedin factions, driven by religious, ethnic, and nationalist motives, financed their war against the So- viets and their Afghan allies with drug profits as well as foreign financial contributions. U.S. law enforcement authorities largely turned a blind eye to the dizzy growth of Afghan opium production while Washington was lending covert support.28 But as Soviet troops prepared to withdraw, the DEA acknowledged that Afghanistan harbored nearly two hundred drug labs and was on track to replace Burma as the world’s largest producer of heroin. “Without Rus- sian soldiers to use their fancy new weapons on, the Muslim freedom fighters will probably start using the guns on one another as they struggle for power,” Forbes magazine reported in 1988. “The model may well be Lebanon. . . . ‘Money is power,’ notes one American official in the region, ‘and all the factions know that the quickest way to make money is through drugs’” (emphasis added).29 Afghanistan today leads the world in heroin production, but the parallels to Lebanon remain striking. Estimates of the annual value of Lebanon’s drug trade in the 1980s ran as high as the $2.6 billion more recently estimated by United Nations experts for Afghanistan.30 The size of the drug economy relative to GDP, estimated by the same experts at about 36 percent for Afghanistan, also fits squarely within some estimates for Lebanon. In Afghanistan “ethnic and tribal links,” like those of various Shiite clans in the Bekaa Valley, forge bonds of trust that facilitate drug cultivation and smuggling.31 Lebanon had its militia leaders; Afghanistan has its warlords. This assessment of Afghanistan’s drug economy by a United Nations team in 2006 could almost have been written of Lebanon two decades earlier:

The sheer size and illicit nature of the opium economy mean that not surprisingly, it infiltrates and seriously affects Afghanistan’s economy, state, society, and politics. It generates large amounts of effective demand in the economy, provides incomes and employment including in rural areas (even though most of the final “value” from Afghan opium accrues outside the country), and supports the balance of payments and indirectly (through Customs duties on From Narco-State to Failed State 173

drug-financed imports) government revenues. The opium economy by all accounts is a massive source of corruption and undermines public institutions especially in (but not limited to) the security and justice sectors. There are worrying signs of infiltration by the drug industry into higher levels of government and into the emergent politics of the country. Thus it is widely considered to be one of the greatest threats to state-building, reconstruction, and development in Afghanistan.32

Unconstrained drug trafficking is just one symptom of state failure shared by Lebanon and Afghanistan during their respective civil wars. The terms state failure and civil war miss, however, capturing the international dimensions of those countries’ ills. Peter Dale Scott has taken issue with the “bureaucratically convenient concept of Afghanistan as a failed or failing state” because it suggests a purely internal political illness curable through outside assistance and reform. He prefers instead the term ravaged state to convey the extent to which foreign interventions—by the Soviet Union, the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and others—have contributed to Afghanistan’s turmoil. In particular, Scott and other experts pin blame for the country’s explosive drug trade— and much of its violence—on the Pakistani and U.S. intelligence services for supporting uncompromising drug-trafficking allies, such as the infamously brutal Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.33 The term ravaged state has resonance as well for Lebanon, where prolonged and shattering military interventions by Israel and Syria, compounded by the violence of radical Palestinians and proxies for other states, contributed immensely to the breakdown of the Lebanese government and social order. As in Afghanistan, such military interventions reinforced drug trafficking as the basis of Lebanon’s war economy. From their base in the Bekaa Valley, Syrian forces facilitated and profited from the mass-scale trade in hashish and heroin. Israel armed and trained drug-trafficking Christian forces and protected Leba- nese smugglers as intelligence assets. For both intervening powers, drugs were a desirable source of military and political leverage, not an evil to be eradicated. Sadly, we can be sure that future conflicts around the globe will also find parallels in Lebanon’s tragic history. As we attempt to better understand the complex impact of vast drug wealth on political realignments and civil-state relations, with a view to reducing social conflict around the globe, the case of Lebanon will provide continued guidance and repay further study.

Reference Matter

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank several people for their generous assistance with this book. Ted Rubinstein helped sustain my interest in this topic over the years by sending me foreign news stories gathered from his wide reading. Rachel Ehrenfeld kindly gave me a copy of an Israeli intelligence dossier on Syrian drug activities. Ryan Gingeras, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and an expert on Turkish history and drug trafficking, generously shared some of the fruits of his archival research and offered valuable com- ments on the manuscript. Peter Dale Scott, a friend, mentor, and colleague over many years, also read the manuscript closely. The staff at the National Archives in College Park, Maryland, helped me navigate the complex set of State De- partment and Drug Enforcement Administration archives pertaining to Leba- non. My daughter Katie drafted the front map of Lebanon. Finally, I would like to thank former U.S. narcotics agents Dennis Dayle, Micheal Hurley, Jeffrey Kildow, Victor Maria, and Allan McClain for sharing with me their memories of distant times and places.

177

appendix Drug Production Statistics

The size of the drug trade—whether globally or in national markets—is frus- tratingly elusive. Journalists and scholars all too often quote estimates of crop tonnage, drug sales, and profits without questioning their reliability or the meth- odology behind them. I have cited many such estimates throughout the course of this book as well, but now is an appropriate time to address the limits of our knowledge. Seemingly omniscient estimates from agencies like the DEA or the United Nations are sometimes no more substantial than an educated guess.1 One notorious example among many was the discovery by Mexican police in Novem- ber 1984 of ten thousand tons of marijuana growing on vast plantations, “eight times as much as the United States officially estimated was produced in all of Mexico in a year and nearly as much as estimates of America’s entire annual consumption.”2 Needless to say, U.S. authorities had no clue about the size of the drug traffic on either side of the border. The U.S. General Accounting Office also sounded the alarm over questionable production and eradication statistics that made it difficult to assess the effectiveness of drug control programs. As evidence of “confusion,” it cited two competing U.S. government statistics for coca cultivation in Bolivia in 1986 of thirty-five thousand and sixty thousand hectares, a rather sizeable spread.3 Imagine, then, the difficulty of estimating drug flows and profits in the midst of a civil war. As Ann Wrobleski, assistant secretary of state for Interna- tional Narcotics Matters, conceded in a 1988 interview, “We’ve just had trouble understanding what’s going on in Lebanon.”4 Official U.S. government statistics on foreign drug cultivation and production were generated by a subcommittee of the National Narcotics Intelligence Consumers Committee, which was formed in the early 1980s. It consisted of experts from DEA, CIA, and the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics Matters (INM).5 In its annual reports, which became the gold stan-

179 180 Appendix dard source on international drug production, INM took pains to warn that its data should be considered “estimates, rather than empirical findings,” based in some cases only on “assumptions and speculations.”6 INM admitted that even with aerial crop surveys and other estimating techniques, “the picture is not always as precise as we would like it to be. . . . Estimating the quantities of coca leaf, opium gum, and marijuana actually harvested and available for processing into finished narcotics remains a major challenge. We currently cannot accurately estimate this amount for any illicit crop in any nation.”7 Journalists and others tended to ignore this important caveat. For Lebanon, in particular, INM noted in 1985 that the “central government controls only a small fraction of the country’s territory and is not able, therefore, to provide reliable statistics on either cultivation or interdiction.”8 In 1986 the bureau observed that “Reports of poppy cultivation vary widely from 250 to 3000 hectares” but adopted no official estimate. The inherent uncertainty also led to various data anomalies. In 1985, for instance, INM estimated Leba- non’s hashish production in 1984 at 720 metric tons. The following year, the official estimate fell to 350–400 metric tons, with no explanation.9 Similarly, the estimate for acreage devoted to cannabis cultivation had been coasting along unchanged at 16,000 hectares for most of the mid-1980s, only to jump by 50 percent to 24,500 hectares in 1989, again with no explanation.10 Despite the many inherent uncertainties, no one seriously doubts the enormous size of the drug business in Lebanon during the period covered by this book. Film footage and eyewitness reports of lush fields of hemp plants or poppies extending for miles in the Bekaa Valley speak for themselves. Lebanese agronomist Hassane Makhlouf, a specialist on the region, estimated that “more than a million Lebanese profit directly or indirectly” from drug cultivation or trafficking.”11 The problem comes in trying to pin down more specific numbers. Consider the wide range of dollar estimates—and the occasional confusion of gross revenue and net profit: • “Experts say the drug trade is worth $6 billion a year to Lebanon.”12 (Dennis Eisenberg) • “The estimated value of narcotics produced in Lebanon was around $6 billion, [and] their market value reached as high as $150 billion. The yearly tributes accruing to the various parties that controlled the traffic has been estimated between $500 million to $1 billion.”13 (Fawwaz Traboulsi) • “Several independent estimates rate the value of the Syrian-Lebanese drug trade at as much as $5 billion annually.”14 (Michael Widlanski) Appendix 181

• “The region’s drug barons can expect to make more than $4 billion in profits this year.”15 (Ralph Cwerman) • “Lebanese Gold, as it is called here, is highly prized in Europe and North America, earning this country an estimated $3 billion a year.”16 (George Krimsky) • “The revenues assured by the Lebanese traffic in drugs aboard were estimated at 2 billion, 950 million dollars.”17 (Hassane Makhlouf) • Hashish growers “netted US$500 million annually between 1976 and 1990, and the various militias and whoever mattered on the ground from local politicians to foreign armies shared US$2.5 billion in drug sale proceeds.”18 (Kamal Dib) • “The profits from the drug business have been estimated [at] as much as 2 billion US dollars per year, a sum that does not include incomes from Lebanon’s role as an important transit country for drugs from East Asia.”19 (Jürgen Endres) • “The profits from drug processing, transport, and commercialization were immeasurable. . . . Le Commerce du Levant, July 11, 1988, gives a figure of $1 billion.”20 (Elizabeth Picard) • “Annual revenues from the drug trade are estimated to be in the U.S. $700 million to $1 billion range.”21 (Georges Corm) • “[Al-Nahar’s] analysis suggested annual proceeds . . . at $600 million.”22 Estimates of the relative significance of the drug traffic to Lebanon’s economy also range widely: • “20 percent of Lebanon’s gross national product”23 (Sandra Mackey) • “30 percent of the money that comes to Lebanon”24 (New York Times) • “No less than 40 percent of the Lebanese GNP”25 (Israeli police commander) • “More than one-half of Lebanon’s foreign earnings”26 (Schumer staff report) • “50 percent of Lebanon’s income from abroad”27 (Philadelphia Inquirer) • “A good 50 percent of the entire Lebanese economy”28 (Rémi Favret) Again, all estimates are enormous but more than a little imprecise. Crop size should be the easiest aspect of the drug economy to estimate, given the compact geography of the Bekaa Valley and Lebanon’s other drug- growing regions, as well as the lack of jungle cover to obscure surveillance by spy planes and satellites. Yet even estimates of drug acreage and production vary widely, as shown in the tables below. 182 Appendix

Table 1 Lebanon Drug Production Estimates (Cannabis and Hashish)

Year Crop/Drug Estimate Source* Prewar Cannabis cultivation 2,500 ha Al-Safir, Jan. 21, 1982 1950 Cannabis 2,000 ha Salem Darwich 1965 Cannabis 6,000 ha Salem Darwich 1976 Cannabis 6,000–7,000 ha Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 1977 Cannabis 10,000 ha Al-Safir, Jan. 21, 1982 1981 Cannabis 30,000 ha Salem Darwich 1983 Cannabis 20,000 ha State Department, 1985 Hashish production 700 tonnes State Department, 1985 1984 Cannabis 16,000 ha Le Commerce, May 20, 1993; Salem Darwich 15,000 ha Ghassan Sharbil 20,000 ha State Department, 1985 Hashish 720 tonnes State Department, 1985 350–400 tonnes State Department, 1986 380 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 1985 Cannabis 15,000 ha Hassane Makhlouf; Salem Darwich; Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 20,000 ha Ghassan Sharbil 20,000 ha State Department, 1986 Hashish 490 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 720 tonnes State Department, 1986 1986 Cannabis 15,000 ha Salem Darwich; Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 26,000 ha Ghassan Sharbil 16,000 ha State Department, 1991 Hashish 520 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 720 tonnes State Department, 1991 1987 Cannabis 15,000 ha Riad Fouad Saade 22,000 ha Salem Darwich; Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 27,500 ha Ghassan Sharbil 16,000 ha State Department, 1991 Hashish 600 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 700 tonnes State Department, 1991 1988 Cannabis 22,000 ha Riad Fouad Saade 25,000 ha Salem Darwich; Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 28,600 ha Ghassan Sharbil 16,000 ha State Department, 1991 Hashish 600–1,500 tonnes Lebanese Narcotics Bureau 670 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 700 tonnes State Department, 1991 2,000 tonnes Agence France-Presse, June 13, 1990 900 tons Jürgen Endres 1989 Cannabis 12,500 ha Salem Darwich 26,400 ha Ghassan Sharbil 24,500 ha State Department, 1991 Hashish 620 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 905 tonnes State Department, 1991 2,000 tonnes Agence France-Presse, June 13, 1990 1990 Cannabis 1,000 ha Salem Darwich 25,800 ha Ghassan Sharbil 15,000 ha Hassane Makhlouf 11,100 ha State Department, 1991 Hashish 560 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 100 tonnes State Department, 1991 *An annotated list of sources follows Table 2. Appendix 183

Table 2 Lebanon Drug Production Estimates (Opiates)

Year Crop/Drug Estimate Source 1981 Poppy cultivation 2,000 ha Adam Zagorin 1982 Poppies 1,000 ha Salem Darwich 1984 Poppies 60 ha Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 180 ha Ghassan Sharbil 2,000 ha Salem Darwich Opium production 1.1 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil Heroin production 175 kg Ghassan Sharbil 1985 Poppies 120 ha Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 2,000 ha Salem Darwich Opium 1.6 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil Heroin 270 kg Ghassan Sharbil 1986 370 ha Ghassan Sharbil 400 ha State Department, 1991 900 ha Riad Fouad Saade 1,500 ha Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 250–3,000 ha State Department, 1986 3,000 ha Salem Darwich Opium 2.2 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil Heroin 380 kg Ghassan Sharbil 1987 Poppies 490 ha Ghassan Sharbil 600 ha Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 1,800 ha State Department, 1991 4,000 ha Salem Darwich, 332 Opium 2.2 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 6 tonnes State Department, 1991 27 tonnes State Department, 1988 Heroin 395 kg Ghassan Sharbil 1988 Poppies 430 ha Ghassan Sharbil 600 ha Riad Fouad Saade 2,000 ha State Department, 1991 3,000 ha Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 8,000 ha Salem Darwich 1988 Opium 2.3 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 9 tonnes Lebanese Narcotics Bureau 10.5 tonnes DEA 30 tonnes State Department, 1991 Up to 60 tonnes Charles Schumer Heroin 420 kg Ghassan Sharbil 5 tonnes (3 from State Department, 1989 local opium, 2 from imported Southwest Asian opium) 1989 Poppies 410 ha Ghassan Sharbil 4,500 ha State Department, 1991 12,000 ha Salem Darwich, 332 Opium 45 tonnes State Department, 1991 Heroin 5 tonnes State Department, 1991 1990 Poppies 3,200 ha State Department, 1991 4,000 ha Le Commerce, May 20, 1993 15,000 ha Salem Darwich, 332 Opium 2.3 tonnes Ghassan Sharbil 32 tonnes State Department, 1991 Heroin 406 kg Ghassan Sharbil 6.5 tonnes State Department, 1991 184 Appendix

sources for tables 1 and 2: Adam Zagorin, “A House Divided,” Foreign Policy (fall 1982): 116. Al-Safir, Jan. 21, 1982, cited in Tabitha Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987). Charles Schumer, Report, House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice, “Syria, President Bush and Drugs: The Administration’s Next Iraqgate,” typescript, Nov. 23, 1992 (for details of this report see chap. 6 herein). DEA, cited in “Under the Influence,” Economist, Sept. 30, 1989. Ghassan Sharbil, Al-Sharq al-Awsat (London), Jan. 21, 1992. Hassane Makhlouf, Culture et trafic de drogue au Liban (Paris: Edition l’Harmattan, 1994), 41. Lebanese Narcotics Bureau, cited in “Under the Influence,” Economist, Sept. 30, 1989. Le Commerce, May 20, 1993, cited in Jürgen Endres, “Profiting from War: Economic Rationality and War in Lebanon,” in Shadow Globalization, Ethnic Conflicts and New Wars, ed. Dietrich Jung (London: Routledge, 2002), 130, 137n19. Riad Fouad Saade, South, August 1988, 45. Salem Darwich, “Enjeux de reconversion rurale dans la Béqaa (Liban): Politiques publiques et cultures illicites,” in Environnement et sociétés rurales en mutation: Approches alternatives, ed. Michel Picouet et al. (Montpellier: IRD Éditions, 2004), 330-332. State Department, Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report (various years). Notes

Abbreviations U.S. Government Records DS records Records of the Department of State, Record Group 59, National Archives Building II, College Park, MD FBN records Records of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Record Group 170, National Archives Building II, College Park, MD OSS records Records of the Office of Strategic Services, Record Group 226, National Archives Building II, College Park, MD INCSR U.S. Department of State, Bureau of International Narcotics Matters, International Narcotics Control Strategy Report

Selected News Sources AFP Agence France-Presse AP Associated Press CDS Corriere della sera CSM Christian Science Monitor CT Chicago Tribune IHT International Herald Tribune JP Jerusalem Post LAT Los Angeles Times LM Le Monde LT London Times NYT New York Times SFC San Francisco Chronicle SMH Sydney Morning Herald TGM The Globe and Mail (Toronto) UPI United Press International WP Washington Post WSJ Wall Street Journal WT Washington Times

185 186 notes to introduction

Introduction 1. Quoted in TGM, Nov. 22, 1986. 2. Kamal Dib, Warlords and Merchants: The Lebanese Business and Political Estab- lishment (Reading, UK: Ithaca Press, 2004), 297. 3. American Legation, Beirut, to Department of State, airgram A-310, July 21, 1948, box 160, FBN records. 4. Commissioner Anslinger to Ambassador Charles Malik, June 18, 1954, and attached FBN memorandum, April 12, 1954, box 160, FBN records (emphasis added). Anslinger was prone to exaggeration; in this same period he also fingered Communist China as the chief source of “dope” in the American market, a discredited claim. 5. Paul Knight to Henry Giordano, Acting Commissioner of Narcotics, memo, Oct. 3, 1960, box 160, FBN records. 6. NYT, Oct. 4 and 5, 1960; NYT, Nov. 1, 1960; John Cusack to Commissioner Anslinger, report, June 27, 1961, FBN records; see below (Chap. 2) for more on the Rosal case. 7. NYT, June 22, 1970. See below (Chap. 4) on the links to Lebanon in “Operation Eagle.” 8. See, e.g., William Easterly and Laura Freschi, “Top 5 Reasons Why ‘Failed State’ Is a Failed Concept,” Jan. 13, 2010, http://aidwatchers.com/2010/01/top-5-reasons-why-“failed -state”-is-a-failed-concept/ (accessed Oct. 12, 2011). 9. The Transnational Institute et al., Failed and Collapsed States in the International System, Dec. 2003 (www.tni.org/archives/reports/failedstates.pdf [accessed May 22, 2010]). This study asserts that “the emergence, during the last decade, of a whole series of failed and even collapsed states represents the most serious point of strain in the current international system” (3). 10. John Warner, “The Relationship Between Terrorism and Drug Trafficking,” Police Chief, March 1984, 94. 11. Statement of David Westrate, deputy assistant administrator, DEA, in U.S. Con- gress, Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joint hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency, and Drug Trafficking: Present Trends in Terrorist Activity, 99th Cong., 1st sess., 1985, 154. 12. Aspects of the drug traffic in Lebanon in the first half of the twentieth century are explored in Cyrus Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ‘Abud Yasin; or, What Narcotics Trafficking in the Interwar Middle East Can Tell Us About Territorialization,” American Historical Review 116 (April 2011): 273–306. 13. See, e.g., Pierre-Arnaud Chouvy, Opium: Uncovering the Politics of the Poppy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (Brooklyn, NY: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991); Ron Chepesiuk, Hard Target: The United States War Against International Drug Traffick- ing, 1982–1997 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999); and Michael Steinberg, Joseph Hobbs, NOTES to introduction 187 and Kent Mathewson, eds., Dangerous Harvest: Drug Plants and the Transformation of Indigenous Landscapes (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 14. Hassane Makhlouf’s Culture et trafic de drogue au Liban (Paris: Edition l’Harmattan, 1994) is the only published book that I know of on the subject, though it is so general a survey as to be of limited use. More helpful on the early origins of Lebanon’s drug trade, but weak on the civil war period, is Brian Caswallon Evans, “Evo- lution of a Drug Economy: The Case of Lebanon” (master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 1991). 15. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Narco-Terrorism (New York: Basic Books, 1990), 52–73. Reifying her subject, Ehrenfeld writes that Lebanon was “narco-terrorism’s link to Asia and Eu- rope and by extension, to North and South America. . . . In fact, modern narco-terrorism began in Lebanon” (52). Ehrenfeld, who leans heavily on the unpublished research of Ralph Cwerman, must be treated with great care. Her political agenda is embedded in assertions such as, “Narcotics provide the funds for terrorist groups operating in Leba- non, including the PLO, which help them continue their war against both Israel and the West” (55). She is also loose with facts, as when she claims that “Bekaa’s contribution to the American heroin habit [was] approximately 20 percent by 1986,” citing a State Department finding that Southwest Asia was responsible for 18 to 20 percent of the U.S. heroin market by the late 1980s (61). 16. See, e.g., Elizabeth Picard, “Trafficking, Rents, and Diaspora in the Lebanese War,” in Rethinking the Economics of War: The Intersection of Need, Creed, and Greed, ed. Cynthia Arnson and I. William Zartman (Baltimore: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2005), esp. 23–35; and Jürgen Endres, “Profiting from War: Economic Rationality and War in Lebanon,” in Shadow Globalization, Ethnic Conflicts and New Wars, ed. Dietrich Jung (London: Routledge, 2002), 119–39. 17. Retired DEA agent Allan McClain, interview by the author, Feb. 20, 2011. 18. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime and Criminal Justice, majority staff report, “Syria, President Bush and Drugs: The Administration’s Next Iraqgate,” typescript, Nov. 23, 1992 (hereafter “Schumer report”), 24; Michael Widlanski, “Assad Case,” New Republic, Feb. 3, 1992. 19. Jago Salmon, “Militia Politics: The Formation and Organization of Irregular Armed Forces in Sudan (1985–2001) and Lebanon (1975–1991)” (PhD diss., University of Berlin, 2006), 47. 20. Mounir Elkhamri et al., “Urban Population Control in a Counterinsurgency,” unpublished paper (Ft. Leavenworth, KS: U.S. Army Foreign Military Studies Office, Oct. 2004), 26. 21. On the Maronites’ special relationship with France see Sandra Mackey, Lebanon: Death of a Nation (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1989), 40–47. 22. Walid Khalidi, Conflict and Violence in Lebanon: Confrontation in the Middle East (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Center for International Affairs, 1979), 14. 188 notes to introduction

23. Samir Makdisi, The Lessons of Lebanon: The Economics of War and Development (London: I. B. Tauris, 2004), 3. 24. For the first three decades of independence, up to the civil war, a mere twenty- six families controlled more than a third of all parliamentary seats (Mackey, Lebanon, 116). 25. Wilbur Crane Eveland, Ropes of Sand (New York: Norton, 1980), 244. 26. Said K. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 194–95. 27. Eveland, Ropes of Sand, 248–64. 28. Eisenhower quote from Irene Gendzier, Notes from the Minefield: United States Intervention in Lebanon, 1945–1958 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), xxv; Marchetti quote from Jonathan Kwitny, Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World (New York: Congdon & Weed, 1984), 316. For other background on the 1958 conflict see Fawaz Gerges, “Lebanon,” inThe Cold War and the Middle East, ed. Yezid Sayigh and Avi Shlaim (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 77–101; Zachary Karabell, Ar- chitects of Intervention: The United States, the Third World, and the Cold War, 1946–1962 (Baton Rouge: LSU Press, 1999), 149–72; and Said Aburish, Nasser, the Last Arab (New York: St. Martin’s, 2004), 163–74. 29. The Outlook for Lebanon, Special National Intelligence Estimate, May 10, 1960, prepared by CIA, State, Army, Navy, Air Force, Joint Staff intelligence organizations. Released by CIA under the Freedom of Information Act (hereafter FOIA), www.foia.cia .gov/browse_docs.asp?doc_no=0000011980 (accessed July 9, 2011). 30. Nadine Picaudou, La déchirure libanaise (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1989), 103–6. 31. Charles Siragusa to Federal Bureau of Narcotics Commissioner Harry Anslinger, report, Sept. 9, 1950, box 160, FBN records. 32. Le Soir, Nov. 1, 1965, quoted in American embassy, Beirut, to Department of State, airgram A-330, Nov. 25, 1966, box 3228, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–66, DS records. 33. Latif Abul-Husn, The Lebanese Conflict: Looking Inward (Boulder: Lynne Rien ner, 1998), 15. 34. LAT, March 25, 1971. 35. Mounir Elkhamri et al., “Urban Population Control in a Counterinsurgency.” 36. William W. Harris, The New Face of Lebanon: History’s Revenge (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2006), 1; see also Samir Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon: A History of the Internationalization of Communal Conflict (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 2002), 11. 37. For a view of Lebanon within this framework see Oren Barak, “Lebanon: Failure, Collapse, and Resuscitation,” in State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, ed. Robert I. Rotberg (Washington: Brookings Institution Press, 2003), 305–39. For a general NOTES to introduction and Chapter 1 189 treatment see Stewart Patrick, “Weak States and Global Threats: Fact or Fiction?” Wash- ington Quarterly 29 (2006): 27–53; and Peter L. McGuire, “Narcotics Trafficking in West Africa: A Governance Challenge,” Pardee Papers, no. 9, (March 2010): 5. 38. United Nations International Drug Control Programme, World Drug Report (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7. For a discussion of the literature on drugs, transnational crime, and international security see Alan Dupont, “Transnational Crime, Drugs and Security in East Asia,” Asian Survey 39 (May-June 1999): 433–55; and Joshua S. Krasna, “Narcotics and the National Security of Producer States,” Journal of Conflict Studies 16 (spring 1996): 1–20. See also the sources on drug trafficking and civil war cited in chapter 8. 39. Peter Andreas, “The Clandestine Political Economy of War and Peace in Bosnia,” International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 2004), 32. 40. Transnational Institute et al., Failed and Collapsed States in the International System, 6; Robert I. Rotberg, “Failed States, Collapsed States, Weak States: Causes and Indicators,” in Rotberg, State Failure and State Weakness in a Time of Terror, 1–25, 10.

Chapter 1 1. Douglas Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf (New York: Verso, 2004), 57–58, 113–14. 2. Charles Siragusa to FBN commissioner Harry Anslinger, report, Sept. 9, 1950, box 160, FBN records. 3. Siragusa to Harry Anslinger, dispatch, Sept. 12, 1950, box 160, FBN records. 4. Siragusa to Anslinger, report, Sept. 9, 1950, box 160, FBN records. 5. LAT, Oct. 17, 1981. 6. Charles Philip Issawi, The Fertile Crescent, 1800–1914: A Documentary Economic History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 291–96. 7. Martin Booth, Cannabis: A History (New York: St. Martin’s, 2003), 120–22; Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ‘Abud Yasin,” 274. 8. Evans, “Evolution of a Drug Economy,” 68–69. 9. NYT, Oct. 5, 1981. By contrast with hemp, ordinary fruits and food crops were less well suited to the wide swings in temperature found in the valley. See Salem Darwich, “Enjeux de reconversion rurale dans la Béqaa (Liban): Politiques publiques et cultures illicites,” in Environnement et sociétés rurales en mutation: Approches alternatives, ed. Michel Picouet et al. (Montpellier: IRD Éditions, 2004), 327. 10. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, Nov. 1, 1954, citing Prince Farid Chehab, director of the Sûreté Générale, box 160, FBN records. 11. Evans, “Evolution of a Drug Economy,” 68–69. 12. CT, Dec. 2, 1947; NYT, Jan. 25, 1944; Booth, Cannabis, 122, 124. 13. CID #94605, Sept. 10, 1944, in OSS records; Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ‘Abud Yasin,” 294, 301–3. The OSS report cites as key deputies implicated in the hashish trade Ibrahim Haidar [Shiite], Yusuf Harawi [Maronite], and Rifaat Kazoum [Sunni]. 190 notes to Chapter 1

Schayegh states that “endemic corruption . . . left only small segments of officialdom untouched” (277). 14. Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ‘Abud Yasin,” 277, 294 (Eddé quote), 299–301. 15. CT, Dec. 2, 1947. 16. “Hashish Campaign—1944,” confidential report by Col. Patrick Coghill, chief of the British Security Mission, Syria and Lebanon, to Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, at- tachment to George Wadsworth, American Minister, Beirut, cable to Secretary of State, May 1, 1945, box 160, FBN records. 17. Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ‘Abud Yasin,” 294, citing Khalil Taki ed Dine and Col. Fawzi Trabulsi. 18. IHT, July 15, 1977 [Hamadi and hashish]; Samir Khalaf, Lebanon’s Predicament (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 73 [Hamadeh as political boss and clan leader]. Schayegh notes that Haidar wielded his influence to surpass Hamadeh in the extent of his cannabis cultivation (“The Many Worlds of ‘Abud Yasin,” 303). Robert Fisk writes: “Lebanon was run by . . . powerful feudal chieftains whom the Lebanese would describe as ‘honored families’ but whom the average Westerner would quickly identify as mafiosi. Every community, every tribe, had produced its leaders whose pronounce- ments, conspicuous wealth, bodyguards, cruelty, education and private armies proved more efficacious than any electoral appeal. Their principal characteristics were a declared love of Lebanon, a publicly expressed desire to respect the National Covenant and a ruthless determination to ensure that their power was passed on to their sons” (Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001], 75). 19. Alain Labrousse, La droga, el dinero y las armas (Coyoacan, Mexico: Siglo Veint iuno Editores, 1993), 139, quotes one clan elder’s reminiscence of a senior Maronite leader, a frequent presidential candidate, who demanded a quarter of the hashish crop from his village. 20. Evans, “Evolution of a Drug Economy,” 72. 21. Michael Johnson, Class & Client in Beirut: The Sunni Muslim Community and the Lebanese State, 1840–1985 (London: Ithaca Press, 1986), 141. Richard Pearse observed during this period that “political murder, gangsterism and racketeering were as common as they were in Chicago in the late twenties” (Three Years in the Levant [London: Macmillan, 1949], 161). Such conditions gave security forces an incentive to tame the criminal class by selectively turning its members into privileged allies. 22. B. E. Kuniholm, American Legation, Beirut, to Secretary of State, dispatch, July 21, 1948, box 160, FBN records. 23. Garland Williams to Commissioner Anslinger, “Hashish Traffic in Lebanon,” report, Feb. 14, 1949, box 160, FBN records. 24. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, report, Sept. 9, 1950, box 160, FBN records. 25. Paul Knight, “Hashish,” report, August 9, 1955, box 160, FBN records. NOTES to Chapter 1 191

26. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, report, Sept. 9, 1950, box 160, FBN records. 27. Paul Knight report, July 3, 1956, box 160, FBN records. 28. Yusuf Harawi, cited in CID #94605, Sept. 10, 1944, OSS records. On Harawi’s appointment to the cabinet in 1951 see “Developments of the Quarter: Comment and Chronology,” Middle East Journal 5 (autumn 1951): 492. 29. Garland Williams to Commissioner Anslinger, “Hashish Traffic in Lebanon,” report, Feb. 14, 1949, box 160, FBN records. 30. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 193–94; see also Charles Winslow, Lebanon: War and Politics in a Fragmented Society (London: Routledge, 1996), 99. 31. Paul Knight report, July 3, 1956, box 160, FBN records. As late as 1959 Khalil was still suspected of involvement in moving hashish to Egypt and morphine base to France and Italy. See Jacques Changeux memo, April 20, 1959, box 160, FBN records. 32. Booth, Cannabis, 237. 33. NYT, May 29, 1949. A figure of up to $420 million for Egypt’s spending on all drugs is cited in LAT, Dec. 10, 1950. The article notes the arrest of an Egyptian trafficker in possession of half a ton of Lebanese hashish and 180 kilos of opium, which he said belonged to a colleague who “remained above suspicion” owing to his “excellent relations with the authorities.” 34. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 121. 35. Michael Tannenbaum, “Untroubled by the War: Lebanon’s Hashish Industry,” New Leader, Jan. 2, 1978. 36. Alain Labrousse, La droga, el dinero y las armas, 139. 37. NYT, July 2, 1951. 38. Eyal Zisser, Lebanon: The Challenge of Independence (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 228, 236; Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 121; WP, August 26, 1951. For more on the Khoury family’s corruption see Mackey, Lebanon, 102. 39. On Chamoun’s manipulation of the electoral law to undercut the traditional power brokers see Elizabeth Picard, Lebanon, a Shattered Country: Myths and Realities of the Wars in Lebanon (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1996), 72–73. 40. L’Echo d’Oran, August 20, 1954; L’Orient (Beirut), August 21, 1954; Le Soir (Bei- rut), June 1, 1955; L’Orient, June 3, 1955; Al-Dustur (London), Dec. 15, 1986. 41. The organization’s functions are outlined on its website at www.general-security .gov.lb/English/History/GSFunction/Pages/ehist2.aspx (accessed July 9, 2011). 42. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, Nov. 1, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 43. Ibid. 44. Paul Knight to Charles Siragusa, Oct. 13, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 45. Eduardo Sáenz Rovner, The Cuban Connection: Drug Trafficking, Smuggling and Gambling in Cuba from the 1920s to the Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 107. 192 notes to Chapter 1

46. Unsigned memorandum, April 12, 1954 (probably by Siragusa), attached with letter from Commissioner Anslinger to Charles Malik, ambassador to Lebanon, June 18, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 47. Fahim I. Qubain, Crisis in Lebanon (Washington: Middle East Institute, 1961), 161. 48. John Cusack to Commissioner Anslinger, report, June 27, 1961, box 160, FBN records. 49. CSM, Dec. 29, 1960. 50. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 114. 51. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 200. 52. “Lebanon: Tiger at the Helm,” Time, Feb. 11, 1966. 53. Ibid.; FBN agent Arthur Doll, “Reform in Lebanon,” report, March 11, 1966, box 160, FBN records. 54. FBN agent Arthur Doll, “Hashish Eradication Program in Lebanon,” report, April 15, 1966, box 160, FBN records; CT, Oct. 30, 1966; NYT, July 24, 1966. 55. Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-140, August 18, 1966, box 3228, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, DS records. The embassy was particularly grateful to Banna for his role in seizing $150,000 worth of counterfeit U.S. currency, a sensitive case involving a Maronite bishop. See Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-155, August 23, 1966, box 3228, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–1966, DS records. 56. Henry Giordano, Commissioner of Narcotics, to Raymond Hare, Assistant Sec- retary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, Sept. 20, 1966, SOC 11-5 Leba- non, box 3228, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–66, DS records. 57. Department of State to Beirut embassy, telegram 102366, Dec. 14, 1966, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3228, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–66, DS records. 58. NYT, Sept. 28, 1969; Narcotics: Near East & South Asia, March 10, 1988, JPRS-TDD- 88-009-L, 31, citing Banwa Shukr, Al-Mukhaddirat: Ma’sat al-Shabab al-Mu’asir (1987). 59. Darwich, “Enjeux de reconversion rurale dans la Béqaa (Liban),” 330; Labrousse, La droga, el dinero y las armas, 139. 60. Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-509, Nov. 25, 1969, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3228, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–66, DS records. 61. Kettil Bruun, Lynn Pan, and Ingemar Rexed, The Gentlemen’s Club: Interna- tional Control of Drugs and Alcohol (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 208–9; L’Orient-Le Jour, June 20, 1971, translated in airgram A-243 from Beirut embassy to De- partment of State, August 11, 1971, INCO-Drugs Lebanon, box 1216, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 62. NYT, Jan. 15, 1971. 63. Beirut embassy to Department of State, “Lebanese Official Involvement in the Hashish Traffic,” airgram A-336, August 14, 1970, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. NOTES to Chapter 1 193

64. Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-351, Dec. 3, 1971, INCO- Drugs Lebanon, box 1216, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 65. WP, August 30, 1970; CT, August 31, 1970; Hartford Courant, Sept. 2, 1970; “Mich aus Mohn,” Der Spiegel, Sept. 21, 1970. U.S. authorities had advance knowledge of the smugglers’ plans. See Department of State to Beirut embassy, telegram 135131, drafted August 19, 1970, box 3076, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 66. NYT, Sept. 20, 1970; LAT, Oct. 4, 1970. 67. Andrew Tully, The Secret War Against Dope (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, 1973), 183, 189; Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-351, Dec. 3, 1971, INCO-Drugs Lebanon, box 1216, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. A police investigation in 1971, with help from BNDD agent Allan McClain, also implicated Masri’s son-in-law and nephew in dealing large quantities of hashish. See Paris embassy to Department of State, telegram 12360, July 19, 1971, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Sub- ject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 68. WP, July 10, 1971. Masri denied the congressional report, calling claims that he grew or sold hashish “an outright lie” (NYT, Oct. 29, 1971). 69. According to one U.S. embassy report, corrupt Lebanese Customs officials continued to permit shipments of hashish to transit Beirut International Airport for a bribe of five hundred Lebanese pounds per kilo. Even so, the assistant secretary of state for narcotics matters called Lebanon “our only truly effective anti-narcotic ally in the Middle East” (Beirut embassy, telegram 3679, March 29, 1974; and Department of State, telegram 170785, August 28, 1973, electronic DS records, Access to Archival Databases, www.archives.gov [retrieved May 25, 2011; hereafter “electronic DS records”]). 70. Paris embassy to Department of State, telegram 6680, April 27, 1971, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. The arrest was also noted in WP, July 10, 1971. 71. Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 671, Jan. 19, 1972; Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 749, Jan. 21, 1973; Khartoum embassy to De- partment of State, telegram 115, Jan. 25, 1972; and Khartoum embassy to Department of State, telegram 204, Feb. 14, 1972, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. Lebanese police also warned the Americans that a former member of parliament who was planning to visit New York, Joseph Skaff, was a drug smuggling suspect and should be “thoroughly searched” on arrival (see Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 881, Jan. 25, 1972, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. (Skaff was a Greek Catholic from the Zahle area.) On May 13, 1975, Lebanese Customs agents arrested Gabon’s ambassador to Egypt at Beirut International Airport with thirty kilos of hashish and seven kilos of opium, which he was transporting to Egypt (Beirut 6122, May 14, 1975, electronic DS records). 72. Al-Hayah (London), Oct. 16, 1991; Al-Dustur (London), Dec. 15, 1986; Evans, “Evolution of a Drug Economy,” 7, 76, 81–82. 194 notes to Chapter 1

73. Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram 2564, March 29, 1972, INCO- Drugs Lebanon, box 1216, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73; State Department to Beirut embassy, cable 22654, drafted Feb. 9, 1972, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. The American embassy was not happy about Washington’s decision, pointing out that “if US were responsible for turndown of Lebanon’s first ini- tiative to UN drug fund, sincerity of US interest in drug control will be seriously questioned by Lebanese. This indeed would be unfortunate” (Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 11960, Nov. 3, 1972, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records). 74. Project Preparation Mission for UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control, confidential report, April 26, 1972, attached to Beirut airgram A-201, July 28, 1972, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 75. Ibid. 76. Beirut embassy to Department of State, “Social and Political Unrest in North Leb- anon,” airgram A-66, March 9, 1971, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 77. Evans, “Evolution of a Drug Economy, 77–78. By another estimate the region’s hashish production was dominated by ten large families and twenty smaller ones by the 1970s (Tannenbaum, “Untroubled by the War”). 78. Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 128. 79. Alain Vernay, Les paradis fiscaux (Paris: Seuil, 1968), 98; Dennis Dayle, interview by the author, March 15, 1991. Dayle recalled the site of his discovery as a monastery in Jounieh, but Nujaim’s seat was in Baalbek. See www.catholic-hierarchy.org/bishop/bnu jaim.html (accessed July 9, 2011). Former FBN agent Allan McClain recalls that the priest was sentenced by an ecclesiastical court at the Vatican to several years of penal solitude and penance (Allan McClain, interview by the author, Feb. 28, 2011). 80. Testimony of Marine Corps Gen. (Rtd.) Lewis W. Walt, director, U.S. Congress, Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security Task Force Investigation on World Drug Situation, World Drug Traffic and Its Impact on U.S. Security, hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, Part 4, The Global Context: Report of General Walt, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1972, 146. 81. Nick Jones, Spliffs: A Celebration of Cannabis Culture (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2004), 45, 50; NYT, Feb. 16, 1971. 82. Report by Hon. Lou Frey, Jr., Hon. Peter N. Kyros, and Hon. James F. Hastings, Members of the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce, Concerning Narcotic En- forcement Efforts in Hong Kong, Thailand, Burma, India, Lebanon, Greece, Turkey, France, and the Netherlands, April 1973, 93rd Cong., 1st sess., 1973, 35. 83. Beirut embassy to Department of State, “Arrests of Americans on Narcotics Charges in Lebanon,” airgram A-509, Nov. 25, 1969, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3081, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69, DS records. NOTES to Chapter 1 195

84. Secretary of State William Rogers to Rep. Lee Hamilton, March 20, 1972, INCO- Drugs Lebanon, box 1216, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 85. U.S. Customs chart reproduced in U.S. Congress, Senate Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act and Other Internal Security Laws, hearings, World Drug Traffic and Its Impact on U.S. Security, part 6, 92nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1972, 294. 86. Department of State to Kathmandu embassy, telegram 179260, August 15, 1974; Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 12882, Oct. 26, 1974; and Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 13153, Nov. 2, 1974, electronic DS records. Hashish oil had a THC content of up to 90 percent, compared to maximums of 20 percent for hashish and 5 percent for marijuana (at that time). 87. WP, Nov. 2, 1973; WP, Nov. 7, 1973. Within weeks, however, U.S. officials had seized a much bigger load of hashish: two tons in New York, sold to an undercover agent by a Lebanese national. This hashish apparently originated in Pakistan, however. WP, Nov. 27, 1973. 88. Howard Marks, Mr Nice: An Autobiography (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2002), 63, 111, 130, 139; Booth, Cannabis, 278–79; Reuters, July 26, 1988; NYT, July 26, 1988; “Spain: Smugglers on Ice,” Time, August 8, 1988; Carlo Morselli, “Structuring Mr. Nice: Entre- preneurial Opportunities and Brokerage Positioning in the Cannabis Trade,” unpublished manuscript, Dec. 1999. 89. Booth, Cannabis, 235, 279. 90. U.S. Senate, Subcommittee to Investigate the Administration of the Internal Se- curity Act and Other Internal Security Laws of the Committee on the Judiciary, hearing, Hashish Smuggling and Passport Fraud: “The Brotherhood of Eternal Love,” 93rd Cong., 1st sess., 1973, 20; WP, August 6, 1972. 91. Contrary to what some writers suggest, Musa Sadr was no friend of the drug trade; he had tried to promote crop substitution programs for Shiite cannabis farmers until the civil war ended any hope of progress. H. E. Chehabi, ed., Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Years (Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 2006), 216n92. 92. U.S. Senate, Hashish Smuggling and Passport Fraud: “The Brotherhood of Eternal Love,” 14, 22, 79; Stewart Tendler and David May, The Brotherhood of Eternal Love (Lon- don: Panther, 1984), 125–28; Martin Lee and Bruce Schlain, Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD (New York: Grove, 1995), 248, 279–82, 286–87. For more on Stark’s shadowy background see David Black, Acid: A New Secret History of LSD (London: Vision, 2001), 144–87; Dick Lee and Colin Pratt, Operation Julie: How the Undercover Police Team Smashed the World’s Greatest Drug Ring (London: W. H. Allen, 1978), 83–85, 136, 333–37, 351–55; Panorama, Oct. 31, 1978; L’Espresso, Feb. 8, 1981; L’Europeo, Jan. 17, 1983; Relazione della Commissione Parlamentare d’inchiesta sulla strage di Via Fani, sul sequestro e l’assassinio di Aldo Moro e sul terrorismo in Italia (Rome: Senato della Repub- blica, 1983), 144–46. 196 notes to Chapters 1 and 2

93. John Lawrence Jiggens, “Marijuana Australiana: Cannabis Use, Popular Culture, and the Americanisation of Drugs Policy in Australia, 1938–1988” (PhD diss., Queensland University, Carseldine, April 2004), 189–90; Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the CIA (New York: Norton, 1987), 144–45. Kwitny notes the bank’s services to one George Shamoun, a Lebanese man arrested in 1980 on charges of importing twenty-two pounds of hashish oil to Australia. He was acquitted, but a task force that investigated the bank accused Shamoun and Shaw of lying about their participation in “drug-related activity” (234). Nugan Hand’s partners included three retired U.S. generals, one retired U.S. admiral, and one former head of the CIA. 94. NYT, Nov. 26, 1974; WP, Nov. 26, 1974; Jonathan Randal, Going All the Way: Christian Warlords, Israeli Adventurers, and the War in Lebanon (New York: Viking, 1983), 156–57; Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 14027, Nov. 21, 1974, electronic DS records. Franjieh was right about Washington’s coolness toward his administration; see NYT, Nov. 28, 1975; and Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 207. 95. Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 14746, Dec. 10, 1974, and telegram 14528, Dec. 5, 1974, electronic DS records. 96. Eveland, Ropes of Sand, 174, 338; James Ring Adams, The Financing of Terror (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1986), 230; Tannenbaum, “Untroubled by the War”; Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 205; Mackey, Lebanon, 50. 97. Testimony of Nathan Adams, U.S. Senate, Committee on Labor and Human Re- sources, Subcommittee on Alcoholism and Drug Abuse, hearing, Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, 98th Cong., 2nd sess., 1984, 106. 98. Victor Maria, interview by the author, March 29, 2011; Beirut embassy to De- partment of State, telegrams 14049 (Nov. 23, 1974) and 14746 (Dec. 10, 1974), electronic DS records (on pretrip discussions with presidential Chief of Staff Boutros Dib); and Department of State to Beirut embassy, telegram 259367, Nov. 24, 1974, electronic DS records (noting source of information from “outside Lebanon”).

Chapter 2 1. E. Zakhour, “The Role of Beirut Container Terminal in the East Mediterranean Basin,” no date, www.unishipgroup.com/Resources/Library/Presentation.pps#270,1,Slide 2 (retrieved July 9, 2011). In the latter part of the twentieth century, more than half of Lebanon’s trade consisted of goods passing through the country, typically on their way to other Arab states or Western Europe and the United States. Hassan Diab, Beirut: Reviving Lebanon’s Past (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999), 53. 2. Issawi, The Fertile Crescent, 1800–1914, 159–65; Diab, Beirut, 12. 3. Ralf Roth and Marie-Noelle Polino, The City and the Railway in Europe (Burling- ton, VT: Ashgate, 2003), 66. 4. Ibid., 68–70; Michael Dumper and Bruce Stanley, eds., Cities of the Middle East and North Africa: A Historical Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2007), 84–86, 179. NOTES to Chapter 2 197

5. As an example of the strong ties that continued to bind the countries, Lebanon was the only Arab country to receive French arms between 1956 and 1967; it procured the Mirage III fighter while other Arab states built their air forces around the Soviet MiG. In 1970 Lebanon’s army chief of staff, Gen. Emile Boustany, was forced to resign for allegedly taking nearly ten million francs in kickbacks for the purchase of French antiaircraft missiles. See Eric Gerdan, Dossier A . . . comme armes (Paris: Alain Moreau, 1975), 125–27, 137–38. 6. Paul Knight to Henry Giordano, Acting Commissioner of Narcotics, memo, Oct. 3, 1960, box 160, FBN records. 7. Kathryn Meyer and Terry Parssinen, Webs of Smoke: Smugglers, Warlords, Spies, and the History of the International Drug Trade (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), 251; NYT, April 17, 1930. 8. John T. Cusack, Chief of the International Operations Division of the DEA, “Re- sponse of the Government of France to the International Heroin Problem,” in Drugs, Pol- itics and Diplomacy: The International Connection, ed. Luiz R. S. Simmons and Abdul A. Said (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1974), 236. 9. On French transportation infrastructure improvements and their impact on smuggling see Schayegh, “The Many Worlds of ‘Abud Yasin,” 287–93. 10. Alan Block, “European Drug Traffic and Traffickers Between the Wars: The Pol- icy of Suppression and Its Consequences,” Journal of Social History 23 (winter 1989): 315–37; Robert Rice, The Business of Crime (New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1956), 66-150; Terry Parssinen and Kathryn Meyer, “International Narcotics Trafficking in the Early Twentieth Century: Development of an Illicit Industry,” typescript, 1991, 18–28. 11. Among the American gangsters on the receiving end of the early French Con- nection were Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, Jack “Legs” Diamond, and Arthur Flugenheimer, alias Dutch Schultz. U.S. Senate, Committee on Government Operations, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 88th Cong., 1st sess., 1964, 918–19; Will Oursler and Laurence D. Smith, Narcotics: Amer- ica’s Peril (Garden City: Doubleday, 1952), 112–31. 12. Harry Anslinger, The Murderers (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1961), 59; Meyer and Parssinen, Webs of Smoke, 256–60; Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 24–25. After World War II Eliopoulos engaged in smuggling arms to Israel, as well as in stock swindles (Val- entine, The Strength of the Wolf, 108). 13. Drug Enforcement Administration: A Tradition of Excellence, 1973–2003, 11. Avail- able online at www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/history/history_part1.pdf (accessed July 9, 2011). 14. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 58–63. 15. Cusack, “Response of the Government of France to the International Heroin Problem,” 249. 16. “France,” Exhibit 2A, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 885 (see note 11 of this chapter). 198 notes to Chapter 2

17. Drug Enforcement Administration: A Tradition of Excellence, 11–12. Other sources on the Rosal case include those cited in the Introduction, note 6; Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 203–4; and Jill Jonnes, Hep-cats, Narcs, and Pipe Dreams: A History of America’s Romance with Illegal Drugs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 179–82. 18. Quoted in Charles Wighton, Dope International (London: Frederick Muller, 1960), 39. 19. For mention of this operation, as well as a broader description of Siragusa’s career in the 1950s, see Toni Howard, “Dope Is His Business,” Saturday Evening Post, April 27, 1957, 38–39. 20. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, report, Sept. 9, 1950, box 160, FBN records. 21. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, Nov. 3, 1953, box 160, FBN records. 22. The two suspect Lebanese diplomats in Rome were Emil and Habib Khoury. See Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, reports, Oct. 29 and 31, 1952; Harold Miner dispatch from Paris to Richard Funkhouser, Department of State, Jan. 29, 1953; Com- missioner Anslinger to Charles Malik, ambassador to Lebanon, Feb. 10, 1953; Anslinger to Malik, undated (but early 1953), box 160, FBN records. A Lebanese representative to the United Nations in New York, Maurice Thabet, allegedly conspired to import opiates with a drug ring linked to the Boston mob (NYT, Feb. 7, 1958). 23. Wighton, Dope International, 29, 38–39. Other sources emphasize the primacy of Italy over France, until the 1950s, as the initial destination of Lebanese opiates. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 39. 24. “Narcotic Traffic Originating in and Emanating from Turkey, Syria, and Leba- non,” Exhibit 2, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 881–83, 889 (see note 11 of this chapter); Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 403–4 (Turkish corruption). 25. Commissioner Anslinger to Ambassador Charles Malik, June 18, 1954, with attached FBN memorandum, April 12, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 26. Ibid. (emphasis added). 27. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 115, 120–21. 28. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 195. 29. Stephen Boulos to Paul Knight, July 3, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 30. Harrison Burgess, Post Security Officer, to Charles Siragusa, July 10, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 31. A. E. Bailleul to Charles Siragusa, June 28, 1954. Bailleul added, “I believe that the narcotic traffic is too profitable for Lebanon, for an open governmental action to be seriously undertaken.” 32. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, August 7, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 33. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, Nov. 1, 1954, box 160, FBN records. NOTES to Chapter 2 199

34. See, e.g., Ralph Frias memorandum re Emir Farid Chehab, July 17, 1957, box 160, FBN records. 35. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, Nov. 1, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 36. Paul Knight to Charles Siragusa, Nov. 20, 1954; unsigned memorandum from Rome, Nov. 29, 1954; Charles Siragusa to Farid Chehab, Nov. 30, 1954, box 160, FBN records. Also see Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Annual Report, 1954, 14–15. 37. Paul Knight to Charles Siragusa, Jan. 6, 1955; Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, Jan. 28, 1955, box 160, FBN records. 38. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, August 4, 1954. See also Stephen Boulos [informant] to Paul Knight, May 5, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 39. Paul Knight to Charles Siragusa, Nov. 19, 1954, box 160, FBN records. 40. Paul Knight to George Abraham, Oct. 13, 1954, box 160, FBN records; Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 123–24. The FBN also recruited Yazbek’s nephew, Elie Yazbek, as an informant and had frequent, arms-length dealings with Antoine Yazbek, who headed the economic office of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The extended Yazbek family remained prominent in Beirut for many years. For a schematic of Beirut neighborhoods in the 1970s, showing the Yazbek (Greek-Orthodox) section, see Michael Davie, “Demarca- tion Lines in Contemporary Beirut,” in The Middle East and North Africa: World Bound- aries, ed. Clive H. Schofield and Richard N. Schofield (London: Routledge, 1994), 46. For a hint of the Yazbek family’s connections to former Saudi intelligence chief Kamal Adham see Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, The BCCI Affair: A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, 102nd Cong., 2nd sess., 1992. 41. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 120, 122–23. Valentine notes that Knight’s office also enlisted as an informant a gold trafficker, Carlo Dondola, who was reputedly a member of Gemayel’s Phalange and an intelligence agent variously for Greece, Israel, and some Arab states. 42. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, cable, March 12, 1955; Paul Knight to Charles Siragusa, April 4, 1955, box 160, FBN records. A few months later Siragusa called Azizeh “a most active and enthusiastic collaborator,” while noting that “no one in an enforcement job there can be assumed to be of unqualified integrity” (Siragusa to Anslinger, June 15, 1955, box 160, FBN records). 43. Buffalo Evening News, April 5, 1955. 44. Al Janhour al Jadid, March 27, 1955, translated in box 160, FBN records. 45. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, cable, March 12, 1955, box 160, FBN records. 46. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 40–45, 63, 25. 47. Interpol memo, August 12, 1959, to John Cusack, re: Drug traffickers arrested at Beirut, box 160, FBN records. 48. On Zahle see “Hashish Campaign—1944,” by Col. Patrick Coghill, chief of the 200 notes to Chapter 2

British Security Mission, Syria and Lebanon, to Sir Thomas Russell Pasha, box 160, FBN records. 49. Dennis Dayle, interview by the author, March 14, 1991; Appendix Exhibit 2, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 948 (see note 11 of this chapter); Alain Jaubert, Dossier D . . . comme drogue (Paris: Alain Moreau, 1976), 135. 50. Wighton, Dope International, 64–65. The 1948 arrest—but not Khoury’s involvement—was noted in a dispatch by B. E. Kuniholm, with the American legation in Beirut, to the State Department, July 21, 1948, box 160, FBN records. 51. Wighton, Dope International, 65–67; Jean-Pierre Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection (Ottawa: Optimum, 1976), 99. Alaouie became a trafficker circa 1953. Even- tually he left the Sûreté and conducted his business from an office in Beirut’s Kit-Kat nightclub. See Appendix Exhibit 2, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 945 (see note 11 of this chapter). Alaouie was listed by FBN agent Fred Wilson in 1962 as one of the key people “that would be necessary for a narcotic agent to meet and work with” in Lebanon, though he was described as being of “questionable reliability” (Wil- son memo, June 25, 1962, box 160, FBN records). 52. Wighton, Dope International, 67. Wighton reports that Khoury’s opium was processed by two chemists in Milan, both friends of Charles “Lucky” Luciano, a deported American Mafia boss (130). Histories inspired by the Federal Bureau of Narcot- ics often portrayed Luciano as the mastermind of the post–World War II heroin trade, despite compelling evidence to the contrary. For a critique of the Luciano kingpin theory see Meyer and Parssinen, Webs of Smoke, 283–85; and Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 108. 53. Wighton, Dope International, 70. 54. Paul Knight to Charles Siragusa, April 30, 1955; Charles Siragusa to Commis- sioner Anslinger, May 10, 1955, box 160, FBN records. The incident is also mentioned in Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 159. 55. E. P. Gross report re: Claude Shehab et al., Oct. 30, 1955, box 160, FBN records. 56. FBN undercover agent James Attie appears to have believed that Azizeh was in Khoury’s pocket and that Knight was naive about the loyalty of his informants; see Val- entine, The Strength of the Wolf, 125. 57. Al Sayad (Beirut), June 14, 1956. 58. “Examples of Significant Cases in the Illicit Traffic,” undated memo, 1957, box 160, FBN records. 59. Wighton, Dope International, 71. On Khoury’s “unparalleled political strength” see also McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 39. 60. Wighton, Dope International, 62; Jaubert, Dossier D, 134; Derick Goodman, Vil- lainy Unlimited: The Truth About the French Underworld Today (London: Elek Books, 1957), 110. 61. James Mills, The Underground Empire (New York: Dell, 1986), 555. According to NOTES to Chapter 2 201

Time magazine (“The Milieu of the Corsican Godfathers,” Sept. 4, 1972), the Corsicans had “infiltrated the police, the military, the customs service and the French equivalent of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, the SDECE (for Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage).” The magazine added, “The Corsican influence in French law-enforcement agencies is also believed to have been a large factor in the French government’s reluctance to crack down on the Corsican narcotics laboratories in Marseille until drugs became a problem—and a political issue—in France.” 62. Albertini in turn visited Khoury and his agents Nasser Abdul Rahman and Mounier Alaouie in Beirut. See Wighton, Dope International, 183–85, 194, 207. 63. Wighton, Dope International, 72–78; Goodman, Villainy Unlimited, 109–12; Alain Staur, “Beirut: New Shanghai?” La Revue du Liban, Dec. 1957. Khoury’s contacts in Montreal and Havana were Paul Mondoloni, Albert Bistoni, and Jean Baptiste Croce. Siragusa wrote: Croce handled the smuggling of morphine base and opium obtained from Lebanon. It was converted into heroin in France. Meanwhile in Cuba, Mondoloni received orders from Mafia overlords in the States and Canada for wholesale orders ranging from 20 to 200 pounds of pure heroin. He, in turn, relayed the orders to Croce in Marseille. Seamen, principally Corsicans, were employed to smuggle the deliveries into New York or Canada for nationwide distribution. Sometimes, the large shipments were made directly to Mondoloni in Havana, and he would arrange for them to be transshipped to the United States. And as a profitable sideline, Mondoloni had active interests in gambling casinos in Havana and Camaguey, Cuba. (Charles Siragusa, Trail of the Poppy [Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966], 192) 64. Siragusa, Trail of the Poppy, 80, referring to Frank Scalise. Sources disagree on the agency and motivation of his murder. Wighton strongly implies the failed drug deal cost him his life. Another source says his murder was arranged by Carlo Gambino as part of his takeover of the Anastasia crime family (Anthony DeStefano, King of the Godfathers [New York: Pinnacle, 2007], 35); yet another says he was hit on orders of Vito Genovese for “selling memberships in the Cosa Nostra for $50,000 apiece” (Time, August 16, 1963). 65. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 164; “Omar Makkouk,” Appendix Exhibit 2, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 948–49 (see note 11 of this chapter). 66. Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Annual Report, 1957, 20; Sean O’Callaghan, The Drug Traffic (London: Anthony Blond, 1967), 17; “Examples of Significant Cases in the Illicit Traffic,” undated memo, 1957, box 160, FBN records. 67. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 164. The ringleader was Harry Stromberg, a.k.a. Nig Rosen; for the second circuit appeals court ruling upholding Stromberg’s conviction, 268 F.2d 256, see http://cases.justia.com/us-court-of-appeals/F2/268/256/52977/ (accessed July 9, 2011). 68. Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection, 112. 202 notes to Chapter 2

69. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 125. 70. Paul Knight memorandum, May 20, 1959, box 160, FBN records. 71. Interpol memo, August 12, 1959, box 160, FBN records; “Samil Khoury,” Appen- dix Exhibit 2, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 948 (see note 11 of this chapter); Jaubert, Dossier D, 135; Wighton, Dope International, 63, 81. Makkouk eventually retired to Syria “with his own private army” (NYT, Feb. 18, 1970). In 1960 Lebanese police helped Knight grab a key French-Armenian drug smuggler and top money launderer for the Corsican syndicates, Antranik Paroutian, whose brother was a Lebanese police official (Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 202, 277). Paroutian handled Swiss bank accounts for the organization of Paul Mondoloni, a Corsican heroin trafficker based in Mexico, who enjoyed protection from senior Mexican security officials. He was also a partner of Canadian Corsican crime boss Giuseppe Cotroni and a supplier of New York Mafia boss Carmine Galante (Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 883–84, 949, 958–59). At Paroutian’s sentencing the judge held him responsible for 40 percent of the heroin entering the United States (NYT, Nov. 5, 1960). 72. L’Orient, Sept. 14, 1961. 73. Paul Knight to Henry Giordano, Acting Commissioner of Narcotics, memo, Oct. 3, 1960, box 160, FBN records. 74. John Cusack to Commissioner Anslinger, report, June 27, 1961, box 160, FBN records. 75. O’Callaghan, The Drug Traffic, 17, 22–23; Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 325, 330. Lebanon was an important importer of cocaine for consumption in the Middle East. Paul Knight reported in 1960 that “Lebanese gangsters engaged in the opium and opiates traffic and/or the hashish traffic purchase cocaine principally from Bolivian, Peruvian and Cuban criminal colleagues.” See Paul Knight to Henry Giordano, memo, Oct. 3, 1960, box 160, FBN records. 76. Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection, 98. “Samil Khoury,” Appendix Exhib- it 2, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 948 (see note 11 of this chapter). 77. Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection, 108n. 78. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 406. 79. Sefton Von Delmer, “Des Königs Onkel Schmuggelt Waffen,” Der Spiegel, Oct. 31, 1966; Avi Shlaim, Lion of Jordan: The Life of King Hussein in War and Peace (New York: Random House, 2008), 63, 241, 308–9. On al-Nasser’s alleged purchases of “large amounts of opium” in the mid-1960s, see report by FBN agent Arthur Doll, “George ZATTAR, Beirut, Lebanon,” Nov. 4, 1966, box 160, FBN records. 80. Vernay, Les paradis fiscaux, 98. 81. The former partners were Antoine Araman, Antoine Harrouk, and Agop Kevork ian. See Paul Knight memorandum, Jan. 26, 1959, box 4, The Douglas Valentine U.S. Gov- ernment Drug Enforcement Collection, National Security Archive, George Washington NOTES to Chapter 2 203

University, Washington, D.C. (hereafter “Valentine mss.”); Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 197; and Jaubert, Dossier D, 108. In 1956 Araman met with Corsican gangsters Jean- Baptiste Croce, Ansan Albert Bistoni, and Giuseppe Cotroni in Havana, where the Cor- sicans owned several nightclubs as fronts for drug and arms trafficking, presumably to discuss international narcotics smuggling operations. See Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection, 103–6. Harrouk, like Khoury, was a Catholic from Zahle. See Jacques Chan- geux memo, April 9, 1959, box 160, FBN records. 82. FBN records indicate that Harrouk was sentenced to just fifteen days in prison and a fine of about sixty-three thousand Lebanese pounds. Appendix Exhibit 2, Orga- nized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 947 (see note 11 of this chapter). On Araman and Kevorkian see ibid., 945, 948. 83. James Mills, The Underground Empire (New York: Dell, 1986), 70; Dayle, interview, March 14, 1991. See also McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 499n76. Indicative of Khoury’s status as a protected informant was the fact that Siragusa made no mention of him in his book The Trail of the Poppy, published in 1966. 84. Dennis Dayle, “The Present Trend in the Flow of Illicit Narcotics from the Near and Middle East,” report, March 3, 1964, box 161, FBN records. Paul Knight reported a similar claim from Khoury five years earlier; see Paul Knight memorandum, Jan. 26, 1959, box 4, Valentine mss. I am grateful to Matthew Pembleton, a graduate student at American University, for sending me this document. 85. When Azizeh made the same implausible claim about Khoury’s inactivity back in 1961, senior FBN agent John Cusack remarked, “This may be some indication that Azizi is protecting Khoury.” See Cusack to Anslinger, “Operational Liaison—Lebanon,” report, June 27, 1961, box 160, FBN records. 86. Rome embassy to Department of State, telegram 3307, June 10, 1964, box 3228, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–66, DS records. It is possible, however, that Khoury was named as a defendant to disguise his involvement as an informant. This case, of a Latin heroin ring involving Mohammed Ramadan Kredieh and Antonio Prado, is mentioned in Sean O’Callaghan, Damaged Baggage: The White Slave Trade and Narcotics Trafficking in the Americas (London: Hale, 1969), 78. 87. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 325. 88. The officer was Robert Blémant. See Valentine,The Strength of the Wolf, 197; and Jay Robert Nash, World Encyclopedia of Organized Crime (New York: Da Capo, 1993), 467. There are strong indications that one of Blémant’s lieutenants, Maurice Castellani, was in turn protected by the CIA (Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 363). 89. Tom Tripodi, Crusade (Washington: Brassey’s, 1993), 182; cf. Staff and editors of Newsday, The Heroin Trail (New York: New American Library, 1973), 99, 105, 110. Doug- las Valentine takes issue with the significance of the SDECE connection; see his The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues That Shaped the DEA (Walterville, OR: Trine Day, 2009), 142–44. 204 notes to Chapter 2

90. Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 888, 956 (see note 11 of this chapter). 91. “The Milieu,” Time, Sept. 4, 1972; Jaubert, Dossier D, 137; Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection, 98. 92. Liberation, Jan. 17, 1982; LM, Jan. 18, 1982; Jaubert, Dossier D, 125. 93. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 110. 94. Newsday, The Heroin Trail, 82–86; Jaubert, Dossier D, 123, 140–45. 95. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 371, 375. 96. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 65–67. No doubt reflecting his supremacy in the French Connection, Francisci met with representatives of New York’s Lucchese Mafia family at his Le Fouquet restaurant in 1967. See Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 415. 97. Newsday, The Heroin Trail, 137, 141; LM, Jan. 18, 1982. 98. “U.S. in Strange Partnership,” WP, July 8, 1975. 99. “Casino du Liban—History,” www.cdl.com.lb/companyinfo.asp?id=2 (accessed July 10, 2011); Mackey, Lebanon, 8. 100. Dayle, interview, March 15, 1991. 101. Gerdan, Dossier A, 66–67. 102. Jim Hougan, Spooks: The Haunting of America—The Private Use of Secret Agents (New York: William Morrow, 1978), 213. 103. Victor Cherkashin and Gregory Feifer, Spy Handler: Memoir of a KGB Officer: The True Story of the Man Who Recruited Robert Hanssen and Aldrich Ames (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 82. Cherkashin recounts an attempt by the CIA to recruit a Beirut- based correspondent for Izvestiya, who was also the son-in-law of a Soviet minister, by paying off his imprudent gambling debts at the Casino du Liban (92–94). 104. Jaubert, Dossier D, 133. Time magazine reported in this regard: “It is said that the SDECE, France’s CIA, has quietly engaged Paris- and Marseille-based smugglers to move arms to a number of Middle East countries. These secret arms shipments are said to enable France to bolster its export arms industry and its influence in the Middle East, while it continues to adhere publicly to its 1968 total embargo on weapons sales to the belligerent nations of the region. The theory goes that arms and ammunition are turned over to established smugglers and shipped in compartments concealed in specially fitted vehicles. The underworld then takes advantage of the arrangement: on the return trip, the same compartments are filled with drugs” (“Narcotics: Search and Destroy—The War on Drugs,” Time, Sept. 4, 1972). 105. Jaubert, Dossier D, 136 [Khoury], 177–83 [Labay]; UNITED STATES of America, Appellee, v. Louis CIRILLO, Defendant-Appellant, 468 F.2d 1233, United States Court of Appeals, Second Circuit, available at http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/F2/468/468 .F2d.1233.72-1618.298.html (accessed July 9, 2011). 106. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 121. 107. Newsday, The Heroin Trail, 137. NOTES to Chapter 3 205

Chapter 3 1. W. B. Fisher, ed., The Middle East and North Africa, 1980–81 (London: Europa, 1980), 522. 2. Catherine Lamour and Michel Lamberti, The International Connection: Opium from Growers to Pushers (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 24. 3. Hougan, Spooks, 213–14. 4. Jaubert, Dossier D, 132. 5. “Plot! Plot!” Fortune, Dec. 1966, 93; George de Carvalho, “Fall of the ‘Genius from Jerusalem,’” Life, Jan. 27, 1967, 88; Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 106–7. 6. Newsday, The Heroin Trail, 141; Hougan, Spooks, 213. Ownership of Casino du Liban shares was actually quite complicated, involving Intra with two speculators, Adrian Geday and Victor Moussa. See Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 5271, Dec. 12, 1966, FN6 Lebanon, box 885, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–66, DS records; and Bei- rut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-593, Jan. 10, 1967, FN6 Lebanon, box 789, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69, DS records. Veteran crime reporter Hank Messick describes Geday (or Jedai) as a partner in London’s Park Lane Casino with an associate of two major Cleveland racketeers. See Hank Messick, Lansky (New York: Putnam, 1971), 240. 7. George Thayer, The War Business: The International Trade in Armaments (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 149. 8. Chadia El Meouchi and Jihad Rizkallah, “Banking Sector Regulation,” www.iflr 1000.com/pdfs/Directories/3/Lebanon.pdf (accessed July 9, 2011). 9. “Sell Off Planned for Intra Investment Company in Lebanon,” Business Intelligence Middle East, Sept. 7, 2006, www.bi-me.com/main.php?id=4797&t=1 (accessed Nov. 5, 2010). 10. Carvalho, “Fall of the ‘Genius from Jerusalem,’” 87. 11. “Who’s Who in Foreign Business,” Fortune, April 1963, 66. 12. Unsigned memorandum, April 12, 1954, attached with letter from Commis- sioner Anslinger to Charles Malik, ambassador to Lebanon, June 18, 1954, box 160, FBN records; “The New Mideast Money Man,” Time, April 27, 1962; Mackey, Lebanon, 131. 13. Davie, “Demarcation Lines in Contemporary Beirut,” 40. 14. Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 103, 109. 15. Vernay, Les paradis fiscaux, 100–103; see also O’Callaghan, The Drug Traffic, 163– 64. Before the Communist takeover of China in 1949, much of India’s gold was imported instead through Hong Kong. By 1951 nearly a third of the world’s gold traffic transited Lebanon. See Khalaf, Civil and Uncivil Violence in Lebanon, 160. 16. Gerdan, Dossier A, 75. 17. “The New Mideast Money Man,” Time, April 27, 1962. 18. Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 100–101, 110. 19. The name of the business partner was Antoine Kamouh, a Lebanese arms dealer and shareholder in a cabaret along with leaders of the Service d’action civique. Gerdan, 206 notes to Chapter 3

Dossier A, 78, 84–85. Lahoud fled to Spain in1970 after a purge of his intelligence service. See Farid El-Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 1967–1976 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 192–93. 20. Fawwaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon (London: Pluto, 2007), 150. 21. Philip Louis Gabriel, In the Ashes: A Story of Lebanon (Ardmore, PA: Whitmore, 1978), 68, quoting Col. Antoine Dahdah. 22. Eveland, Ropes of Sand, 217. 23. Ibid., 218–19. 24. Henrik Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence and International Fascism (Boston: South End Press, 1980). 25. Cherkashin and Feifer, Spy Handler, 88. 26. Newsday, The Heroin Trail, 141–42. Also in this period Air France acquired 30 percent of the Intra-controlled Middle East Airlines. See Nadine Picaudou, La déchirure libanaise (Brussels: Editions Complexe, 1989), 102; “Notes on the History of Air Travel in Lebanon,” http://almashriq.hiof.no/lebanon/300/380/387/airtravel/index.html (accessed July 9, 2011). 27. Jaubert, Dossier D, 138, 163–64; Gerdan, Dossier A, 84. These connections did not prevent the French government from awarding Bedas the Legion of Honor in 1965. See Vernay, Les paradis fiscaux, 100. 28. Dennis Dayle memo re: undercover meeting with suspect Jon Simone, July 25, 1963, box 160, FBN records. Two other employees of Intra were also flagged by Lebanese authorities as suspected heroin traffickers to the United States. See Beirut embassy to FBN [Harry Anslinger and John Cusack], telegram 478, Nov. 19, 1960, 883a.53/11-1960, DS records. 29. Newsday, The Heroin Trail, 141. The former finance minister was Sheik Suleiman Bey al-Hamad. 30. Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin, False Profits: The Inside Story of BCCI, the World’s Most Corrupt Financial Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin,1992 ), 118–19; Eveland, Ropes of Sand, 332n; New Statesman, March 23, 1979; Forward, July 12, 1991; WSJ, Sept. 30, 1991. 31. Carvalho, “Fall of the ‘Genius from Jerusalem,’” 87. 32. Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 110. 33. Ibid., 107. 34. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 201. 35. Winslow, Lebanon, 152–53. 36. Carvalho, “Fall of the ‘Genius from Jerusalem,’” 88. 37. “How They Broke the Bank,” Time, Nov. 25, 1966. For a thinly disguised fictional account, see Morris West, The Tower of Babel (New York: William Morrow, 1968), 49, 104. According to Anwar Ali, governor of the Saudi Arab Monetary Agency, rumors of Saudi involvement in the bank’s collapse were unfounded, although one Saudi merchant did withdraw several million Lebanese pounds from Intra. Ali blamed instead Kuwait, NOTES to Chapter 3 207 which withdrew deposits of $53 million, and Intra’s own chairman, Najib Salha, who supposedly withdrew one hundred million Lebanese pounds when things started going bad. See Jidda embassy to Department of State, telegram 1499, Oct. 20, 1966, box 885, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–66, DS records. 38. Vernay, Les paradis fiscaux, 96–97; Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 115–16. 39. Hougan, Spooks, 213–14. 40. See “The Day the Doors Closed,” Time, Oct. 28, 1966; and “Reopening at Intra,” Time, Jan. 5, 1968. The latter article notes that at the time of its collapse Intra had “$217 million in gilt-edged investments, including majority ownership in prospering Middle East Airlines and a hunk of choice real estate on Paris’ Champs Elysees.” An audit by Coopers Brothers indicated only a small net deficit of assets over liabilities. See Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-757, Feb. 20, 1967, FN6 Lebanon, box 789, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69, DS records. 41. The bank was Sogex-Liban. See Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-475, Dec. 21, 1965, FN6 Lebanon, box 885, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–66, DS records. 42. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 201; Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 114–15; Car valho, “Fall of the ‘Genius from Jerusalem,’” 88; Michael C. Jensen, The Financiers (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1976), 89–90. 43. R. T. Naylor, Hot Money and the Politics of Debt (Montreal: McGill-Queens Press, 2004), 35. 44. “Plot! Plot!” Fortune, 94. 45. See Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-558, Dec. 30, 1966, box 885, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1964–66, DS records. 46. Carvalho, “Fall of the ‘Genius from Jerusalem,’” 89; see also NYT, Nov. 29, 1968. 47. R. T. Naylor, Economic Warfare, 111; Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-582, Jan. 6, 1967, FN6 Lebanon, box 789, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69, DS records. 48. Paul Parker, cited in Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-593, Jan. 10, 1967, FN6 Lebanon, box 789, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69, DS records. 49. Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 122. In the wake of Intra’s failure the number of Lebanese banks fell from fifty-five to thirty-eight, and the portion of financial assets controlled by Lebanese firms dropped to only 20 percent within six years (Tabitha Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon [New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987], 64). In their place major new investments came from American First National Bank of Chicago, Continen- tal Illinois National Bank and Trust, First National Bank of Boston, International Bank of Washington, and United California Bank. A State Department officer observed, “This fresh evidence of expanding American influence in this key Lebanese service industry is expected to generate even more political flak than before, especially from leftist elements associated with Kamal Jumblatt. The question is raised, therefore, whether it might be 208 notes to Chapters 3 and 4 desirable for the [U.S. government] to take measures to slow down the pace of these new participations before they create opposition which might be hard to overcome” (“Growing Foreign Presence in Lebanese Banking,” Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-1412, enclosed memo, Oct. 17, 1968, FN6-1 Lebanon, box 789, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69, DS records. 50. Diab, Beirut, 51. 51. Quoted in “Sell Off Planned for Intra Investment Company in Lebanon” (see note 9 of this chapter). 52. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 202. 53. Salam, quoted in Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-598, Jan. 13, 1967, SOC 12-1 Lebanon, box 3081, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69, DS records. The same cable, from the embassy’s political officer D. S. Mak, noted that Chehabist elements in the country “tend to view Meouchi’s attempts to polarize the Christian and Moslem communities as a potential threat to Lebanon’s stability.” It also quoted a well- placed Phalangist source on Meouchi’s secret meetings to stir up Christian unity “to counter the efforts of the Moslems to amend the constitution or otherwise strengthen their position in the country.” On Salam’s efforts to reconcile Palestinians and Maronites see El-Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 298. He was also an adviser to President Amin Gemayel in the 1980s. See Marius Deeb, Syria’s Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 132. 54. Winslow, Lebanon, 148, 154–55.

Chapter 4 1. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 202. 2. Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 138. 3. Steve Posner, Undercover: Secret Warfare and Hidden Diplomacy in the Middle East (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987), 238; Samuel Katz, Soldier Spies: Israeli Military Intelligence (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1992), 267. 4. Picard, Lebanon, a Shattered Country, 86; LAT, Dec. 14, 1969. 5. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 206. 6. Winslow, Lebanon, 164; NYT, March 26, 1970. 7. Mackey, Lebanon, 150. 8. Rashid Khalidi, Under Siege: P.L.O. Decisionmaking During the 1982 War (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 23–24; Winslow, Lebanon, 173. 9. Picard, Lebanon, a Shattered Country, 83. 10. Posner, Undercover, 41–48; Winslow, Lebanon, 173. 11. Former BNDD agent Allan McClain, interview by the author, Feb. 20, 2011. 12. Salmon, “Militia Politics,” 54. 13. Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 204–5; Mackey, Lebanon, 48, 53; Edgar O’Ballance, Civil War in Lebanon, 1975–92 (New York: Macmillan, 1998), 15–16, 9. For a thorough NOTES to Chapter 4 209 rundown of the various groups see Tony Badran, “Lebanon’s Militia Wars,” Middle East Review of International Affairs 12 (June 2008); and Jürgen Endres, “Economic Ambi- tions in War: Lebanese Militias as Entrepreneurs,” Copenhagen Peace Research Institute, Sept. 2000, 10–11. 14. McClain, interview, Feb. 20, 2011. 15. CSM, June 2, 1970. 16. Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 9756, Nov. 5, 1971, INCO- Drugs Lebanon, box 1216, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. See also Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 9814, Sept. 14, 1972, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 17. “The first [opium production] area of importance for the United States is in the Near East where opium produced in Turkey for legitimate medical requirements is diverted to illegal channels. The opium is smuggled to Syria and Lebanon where it is processed into morphine base. . . . The bulk of the heroin entering the United States is grown in Turkey and processed in Marseille” (U.S. House of Representatives, Commit- tee on Foreign Affairs, The World Heroin Problem: Report of Special Study Mission, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 1971, 4). Ironically, the report dismissed warnings that a crackdown on Turkish opium would simply shift supply sources to countries like Afghanistan, noting that “heroin obtained from poppies grown in Afghanistan is low quality and cannot be produced in the quantities needed by the international heroin dealer” (17). 18. Department of State to Beirut embassy, cable 22654, drafted Feb. 9, 1972, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 19. Report by Hon. Lou Frey, Jr., 35-36. Morphine labs were also rumored to exist in Baalbek and Zgorta. See Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 1580, Feb. 9, 1973, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 20. Allan McClain, Feb. 20 and 28, 2011, interviews by the author; and Jeff Kildow, Feb. 17 and 28, 2011, interviews by the author. 21. Kildow, interview, Feb. 28, 2011. According to one report, however, Makkouk was convinced by an undercover agent to accept an advance payment of as little as $5,500 for delivering five kilos of heroin to Mexico City via diplomatic courier (Paris embassy to Department of State, telegram 13592, Oct. 6, 1970, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records). And according to another report, Makkouk was arrested in Damascus in early 1970, but it would appear that he was never extradited to Lebanon (Paris embassy to Department of State, telegram (no number), March 14, 1970, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records). 22. McClain, interview, Feb. 28, 2011; Department of State to BNDD, Beirut, telegram 46735, drafted March 18, 1971, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. The case was also mentioned by Rep. Seymour Halpern (R-NY), who reported that Makkouk’s son Suhayl had been discovered operating a large heroin laboratory (WP, July 10, 1971). 210 notes to Chapter 4

23. McClain, interview, Feb. 28, 2011. The police commander and the head of the narcotics section were both reassigned as a result of pushing the case. Neither of their replacements was as aggressive in pursuing narcotics investigations, McClain recalled. 24. McClain, interviews, Feb. 20 and 28, 2011. Makkouk’s Venezuela (Aruba) connection is mentioned in BNDD dispatch, April 2, 1970, telegram 46735 from Department of State, drafted March 18, 1971, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 25. Hank Messick, Of Grass and Snow: The Secret Criminal Elite (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1979), 6; Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 82–84; Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup, 39–40; Miami News, June 22 and 25, 1970; NYT, June 22, 1970; St. Petersburg Times, Dec. 29, 1980. 26. Claire Sterling, Octopus: The Long Reach of the International Sicilian Mafia (New York: Norton, 1990), 131–37; see also Tom Blickman, The Rothschilds of the Mafia on Aruba (Amsterdam: Transnational Institute, 1997), 9, 47–55. The importance of Venezuela was clear to some drug agents even at the time. The FBN knew that Guidi Orsini, a Montreal- born heroin trafficker and close associate of the Cotroni brothers, who were kingpins in the French Connection, was in Caracas in 1967. One FBN supervisor noted at the time that “when I last was down in Venezuela, we were able to turn up a number of important traffickers of international status in the area.” See William Durkin to Carlos Jiminez, chief, Narcotic Brigade, Technical Judicial Police, June 19, 1967; Henry Manfredi, Acting District Supervisor, to Lt. Col. Guido Barrecchia, chief, Bureau “I,” Comando Generale, Guardia di Finanza, May 18, 1967; and Reynaldo Maduro, Acting District Supervisor, to John Longan, chief, Public Safety Division, USAID, Caracas, May 22, 1967, box 53, FBN records. 27. Mexico saw explosive growth as a supplier of heroin to the U.S. market after the dismantling of the French Connection. By late 1973, DEA estimated that Mexico accounted for anywhere between 38 percent and 50 percent of heroin seized in the United States, up from 8 percent a year earlier. See Minutes of the Working Group of the Cabi- net Committee on International Narcotics Control, Sept. 26, 1973, DS records, http:// history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve03/d149 (accessed Nov. 11, 2011) and Minutes of a Joint Meeting of the Cabinet Committees on Drug Abuse, Washington, Nov. 27, 1973, DS records, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve03/ d151 (accessed Nov. 1, 2011). 28. CSM, June 2, 1970; LAT, July 1, 1971; statement of Rep. James Scheuer (NY), Sen- ate Committee on Foreign Relations, hearing, International Traffic in Narcotics, 92nd Cong., 1st sess., 1971, 37–38; NYT, June 15, 1972; NYT, Oct. 10, 1972; WP, Nov. 2, 1978; WP, Jan. 17, 1978; TGM, Nov. 15, 1979; NYT, Jan. 14, 1980; WP, August 16, 1980; NYT, May 11, 1980; Donna Krimski, “A Resumption of the Traffic in Lebanon,” Drug Enforcement 8 (summer 1981): 13; Lamour and Lamberti, The International Connection, 25–26, 36–37; John Finlator, The Drugged Nation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973), 319. 29. Although opium production in Southeast Asia dwarfed that of Turkey, in the NOTES to Chapter 4 211 early 1970s most U.S. officials still believed that the drug was mainly consumed “by the hill tribesmen who cultivate it,” and not turned into heroin for export. See Cabinet Committee on International Narcotics Control, “Drug Situation in Southeast Asia,” Aug. 1972, in Department of State to All Diplomatic and Consular Posts, Airgram A-8787, Aug. 28, 1972, DS records, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve01/ d225 (accessed Nov. 11, 2011). Some classified intelligence studies from the same period, however, reportedly blamed senior U.S. allies in Southeast Asia for a major share of the world’s heroin trade (WP, Oct. 13, 1972). As far back as 1965 one news story based on United Nations opium board estimates noted that “the main source [of opium] is the Burma-Thailand-Laos-China border area. It is believed some may still come from Turkey, Mexico, Iran and Afghanistan. . . . The seizure of large quantities of heroin and morphine in France in the last few years does not necessarily mean France’s drug traffic is increasing, it was said. Nor does it mean police work is improving or suggest that Western Europe, rather than the Far East, is the main source of American supply” (CT, March 15, 1965). What was clear by 1972 was that heroin exports from Southeast Asia would grow to fill the vacuum left by the French Connection. See Department of State to the Embassy in Burma, telegram 191974, Nov. 14, 1969, DS records, http://history .state. gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve01/d152 (accessed Nov. 11, 2011). 30. Edward Jay Epstein, Agency of Fear: Opiates and Political Power in America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 86–89; see also Valentine, The Strength of the Pack, 79. For a critique of Epstein’s claims about the exaggeration of Turkey’s importance see Myles Ambrose, former Commissioner of Customs, letter to the editor, WP, Jan. 11, 1975. The Nixon administration clearly believed its public estimates. A joint memorandum from the Departments of Justice and State to President Nixon stated that “Of the approximate[ly] 3,000 kilograms (3 tons) of heroin entering the United States annually, 80% is smuggled from France where it is clandestinely produced from opiates originating in Turkey.” (Memorandum From Acting Secretary of State Richardson and Attor- ney General Mitchell to President Nixon, Washington, Oct. 20, 1969. DS records, http:// history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve01/d146, accessed Nov. 11, 2011. 31. Henry Kissinger to President Nixon, memorandum, January 5, 1970, in DS records, http://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve01/d159 (accessed Nov. 11, 2011); Paris embassy to Department of State, telegram 1682, Feb. 13, 1970, DS records, http://his tory.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76ve01/d162 (accessed Nov. 11, 2011); David Abshire, assistant secretary of state for congressional relations, to Rep. William Minshall, June 14, 1972, INCO Drugs 17 US-France, box 1220, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 32. Allan McClain, interview, Feb. 20, 2011. 33. Kruger, The Great Heroin Coup, 115. 34. Cusack, “Response of the Government of France to the International Heroin Problem,” 255. 212 notes to Chapter 4

35. Le Figaro, June 3, 1990. 36. By 1975 Makkouk was dead, and his son was in hiding. (See Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 10448, August 18, 1975, electronic DS records.) Seizures of opium fell from 267 kilos in 1972 to 7 kilos in 1974; seizures of morphine dropped from 41 kilos to zero in the same period; and seizures of heroin were a mere 3.5 kilos in 1974. (See Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegram 1777, Feb. 6, 1975, electronic DS records.) 37. McClain, interview, Feb. 20, 2011. 38. Kildow, interview, Feb. 17, 2011. 39. Kamal Salibi, Crossroads to Civil War: Lebanon 1958–1976 (Delmar, NY: Caravan, 1976), 80–81, 83, 90; Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestin- ian National Movement, 1949–1993 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 359. By 1973 Christians made up only about 40 percent of the population, slightly more than the largest Muslim group, the Shiites (Mackey, Lebanon, 154). 40. Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 135. 41. Ralph Cwerman, “Lebanon’s Valley of Drugs: Dealing with the Bekaa Harvest That Fueled a War,” WP, Nov. 18, 1990. 42. R. T. Naylor, Economic Warfare, 114. 43. El Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 267–81; O’Ballance, Civil War in Lebanon, 4–5. 44. Mackey, Lebanon, 156. 45. Michael Johnson, All Honorable Men: The Social Origins of War in Lebanon (I. B. Tauris, 2001), 96–97 (Sidon); Salibi, Crossroads to Civil War, 94–96; Winslow, Lebanon, 181. 46. Salibi, Crossroads to Civil War, 86–87; Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 203–5. 47. El Khazen, The Breakdown of the State in Lebanon, 286–87. 48. Salmon, “Militia Politics,” 56, 81. On the role of these local toughs, or qabaday, as hashish smugglers, see L’Orient-Le Jour, June 20, 1971. 49. Mackey, Lebanon, 162. 50. SFC, June 5, 1975. 51. Patrick Brogan and Albert Zarca, Deadly Business (New York: Norton, 1983), 153. 52. NYT, June 17, 1980. 53. Abraham, The Lebanon War, 23–24; see also NYT, Nov. 18, 1975. 54. NYT, Nov. 18, 1975. 55. DEA report in U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, 61 (see above, Chap. 1n97). 56. Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 18, 21; NYT, Nov. 18, 1975; WP, Nov. 24, 1975. 57. Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 20. 58. Ibid., 20. 59. WP, July 21, 1976; Anthony Sampson, The Arms Bazaar: From Lebanon to Lock- heed (New York: Viking, 1977), 17; Badran, “Lebanon’s Militia Wars,” note 13, citing the Phalangist official Joseph Abu Khalil. Colby testimony cited in Randal, Going All the NOTES to Chapter 4 213

Way, 160. The shah of Iran’s SAVAK also bankrolled both the Kataeb (Phalangists) and Chamoun in 1958; see Chehabi, Distant Relations, 171. 60. WP, Nov. 24, 1975. 61. LM, June 17–18, 1973. 62. Sunday Times (London), July 27, 1975; International Bulletin, August 1, 1975. 63. WP, Nov. 24, 1975. 64. William Kistner, “The Cold War’s Largest Arms Merchant,” Frontline/World, www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/sierraleone/soghanalian.html (accessed July 9, 2011); Ann Reilly Dowd, “How U.S. Arms Dealers Are Making a Killing,” Fortune, Feb. 16, 1987. 65. Kistner, “The Cold War’s Largest Arms Merchant.” 66. NYT, Dec. 29, 1999; Joseph Trento, Prelude to Terror: The Rogue CIA and the Leg- acy of America’s Private Intelligence Network (New York: Basic Books, 2005), 54–55, 103. 67. WP, Nov. 24, 1975. 68. Brogan and Zarca, Deadly Business, 153–54. 69. Eveland, Ropes of Sand, 341; Barbara Newman, The Covenant: Love and Death in Beirut (New York: Crown, 1989), 4, 5, 100; Ted Swedenburg, coordinator, Middle East Resource Center, letter to the editor, WP, August 19, 1976. The December 1975 murder of Richard Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was linked by U.S. intelligence whistle- blower Winslow Peck to Welch’s coordination of covert U.S. support for the Phalangists through American banks in Greece. See SFC, April 19, 1976. Randal, Going All the Way, 173–74, notes the ambiguity of the evidence regarding the extent of CIA intervention in this period. 70. WP, Nov. 24, 1975. 71. WP, Sept. 16, 1975. 72. WP, July 21, 1976; see also Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 21–22. 73. Katz, Soldier Spies, 274–75; Ian Black and Benny Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), 365–66, 553; WP, July 21, 1976; Zeev Schiff and Ehud Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), 13–19; Randal, Going All the Way, 193; Kirsten Schulze, “Perceptions and Misperceptions: Influences on Israeli Intel- ligence Estimates During the 1982 Lebanon War,” Journal of Conflict Studies 16 (spring 1996): 134–52. 74. Black and Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars, 554; Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 18; NYT, June 17, 1980. 75. Katz, Soldier Spies, 277. Hobeika would find safe haven in Syria in the late 1980s after a feud within the Christian ranks, raising the question of whether Israel ever managed to buy his, or any other Phalangist leader’s, ultimate loyalties. See Posner, Under- cover, 262. 76. Ibid., 19; WP, Nov. 24, 1975. “At the Maronite Church of Our Lady of Mount Lebanon in Beverly Hills,” Sampson notes, “the priest asked his congregation to contribute to the Lebanese Christian cause.” 214 notes to Chapters 4 and 5

77. Some Phalangist allies apparently stole on their behalf outside of Lebanon. In 1976 French mercenary Jean Kay, who had served as an instructor to the Phalangist militia, befriended the crooked chief accountant of the arms and aerospace manufacturer Dassault, then stole $1.6 million in funds that the accountant had embezzled from the company. Kay reportedly returned to Lebanon, where he turned over at least some of his loot to Gemayel’s forces. Only a month later, the Corsican Albert Spaggiari, like Kay a veteran of the Secret Army Organization, a right-wing French terrorist group, partnered with a leader of the Marseille underworld to pull off the biggest bank robbery in French history. Police believed that some of Spaggiari’s $8 million take from that heist also made its way into the coffers of the Phalangists. (Spaggiari referred to Kay as his “comrade,” suggesting that the two cases were likely connected.) NYT, Sept. 4, 1976; Le Point, Sept. 13, 1976; Wilfred Burchett and Derek Roebuck, The Whores of War: Mercenaries Today (London: Penguin, 1977), 156; Fréderic Laurent, L’Orchestre noir (Paris: Stock, 1978), 400; “Jean Kay,” Wikipedia, http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Kay, citing Paris-Match, Jan. 8, 1982 (accessed July 10, 2011). 78. Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 18; Randal, Going All the Way, 99; James Ring Ad- ams, The Financing of Terror, 93; Neil C. Livingstone and David Halevy, Inside the PLO: Covert Units, Secret Funds, and the War Against Israel and the United States (New York: William Morrow, 1990), 192; Centre of Excellence Defence Against Terrorism, Organi- zational and Psychological Aspects of Terrorism (Amsterdam: IOS, 2008), 104; Daily Mail, June 2, 2007. 79. Randal, Going All the Way, 105.

Chapter 5 1. Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 18, 1988. 2. Micheal Hurley to the author, March 28, 2011; Victor Maria, interview by the author, April 10, 2011. On the detention of special agent John McKay see also Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegrams 5001 (April 18, 1975) and 5007 (April 19, 1975), electronic DS records. On the redeployment of DEA personnel see Beirut embassy to Department of State, telegrams 6645 (May 24, 1975), 15477 (Dec. 23, 1975), and 15709 (Dec. 31, 1975), electronic DS records. 3. LT, May 14, 1975; “Funde am Strom,” Der Spiegel, May 19, 1975. 4. WP, Feb. 20, 1976; André Cedilot and André Noël, Mafia Inc.: The Long, Bloody Reign of Canada’s Sicilian Clan (Toronto: Random House Canada, 2011), 157. 5. CSM, Jan. 13, 1977; WP, Jan. 22, 1977. 6. LT, Oct. 19, 1977; LT, Nov. 16, 1978; Time, Dec. 3, 1979; “Freie Hand,” Der Spiegel, Jan. 29, 1979. 7. The restaurant owner was Michel Saikaly. TGM, Dec. 18, 1979; TGM, Nov. 26, 1980. Another Ottawa man of Lebanese descent and similar surname, Nabil Saikaily, was convicted of conspiring to distribute multikilo loads of heroin in the United States in NOTES to Chapter 5 215

1987. Also accused were his brother Samir and cousin Joseph. Nabil also faced charges of conspiring to import nearly half a metric ton of Lebanese hashish into Edmonton airport. See the Ottawa Citizen, Feb. 4, 1987. 8. Booth, Cannabis, 238. The following year, the U.S. Coast Guard seized twenty-one tons of Lebanese hashish from a boat off Sandy Hook, New Jersey, its largest seizure to that time. Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 3, 1983. 9. Petran, The Struggle over Lebanon, 231, citing Al-Safir, Jan. 21, 1982. 10. LT, Sept. 5, 1977. 11. Palo Alto Times, Sept. 6, 1977. For another account see “Grüner Rausch,” Der Spie- gel, Oct. 24, 1977. 12. DEA, Weekly Digest of Narcotics Intelligence, March 28, 1980. One reporter estimated the value of the crop at $3 billion. LAT, April 1, 1979. 13. Tannenbaum, “Untroubled by the War.” Hassane Makhlouf names the Turk who introduced opium cultivation to Lebanon as Mohammed Mohli. See Makhlouf, Culture et trafic de drogue au Liban, 58. Some sources mistakenly cite 1982 as the year when Turk- ish experts came to the Bekaa to teach local farmers how to grow opium poppies. See, e.g., Schumer report, 6. Jürgen Endres writes, “Poppy is said to have been introduced to Lebanon by Kurdish experts in 1984” (“Profiting from War,” 130). Elizabeth Picard also cites 1984 as the year opium was introduced to Lebanon “by Kurdish experts protected by Syrian officers” (“Liban: La matrice historique,” in Économie des guerres civiles, ed. François Jean and Jean-Christophe Rufin [Paris: Hachette, 1996], 82). 14. LT, Sept. 5, 1977; LAT, July 13, 1977; IHT, July 15, 1977. 15. NYT, Feb. 8, 1978; LAT, May 26, 1978. For another mention of Lebanon’s growing production of opium see “Weißes Pulver aus der Turkish Connection,” Der Spiegel, August 27, 1979. 16. Seattle Times, July 15, 1990. 17. Evans, “Evolution of a Drug Economy,” 13, 20. 18. “For those that choose to travel on the roads, violence, intimidation and extortion from state, anti-state and non-state actors have been the rule not the exception. Under these circumstances, opium poppy has become the preferred crop—a low risk crop in an exceptionally high-risk environment. It is a high-value, low-weight, non- perishable crop. The crop allows farmers to remain in their villages and sell at the farm rather than risking travel to the district, provincial or regional markets to sell, potentially at a price that does not meet the costs of production” (“Challenging the Rheto- ric: Supporting an Evidence Based Counter Narcotics Policy in Afghanistan,” testimony of David Mansfield, Independent Consultant and Fellow on the Afghanistan/Pakistan State Building and Human Rights Programme, Carr Center, Kennedy School, Harvard University, before the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs, Commit- tee on Oversight and Government Reform, Oct. 1, 2009). 19. “Opium production is also labour intensive requiring 350 person days per hect- 216 notes to Chapter 5 are and 200 person days during the harvest period compared to a total of only 54 days for wheat, and 75 days for onion” (ibid.). 20. Al-Hayah (London), Oct. 16, 1991. 21. Ghada Karmi and Eugene Cotran, eds., The Palestinian Exodus, 1948–1998 (Read- ing, UK: Garnet, 1999), 20; for general background on the camp see United Nations Relief and Work Agency (UNRWA), “Wavel Refugee Camp,” www.unrwa.org/etemplate.php ?id=143 (accessed July 9, 2011). 22. Le Figaro, June 3, 1990; Seattle Times, July 15, 1990. One prominent example was the chemist Philippe Wiesgril, who visited Lebanon frequently between 1979 and 1984 with his protégé, François Scapula. See Gilles Delafon, “Les neiges de la Békaa,” Nouvel Observateur, May 11, 1989, 18; Newsweek, April 13, 1987. 23. Makhlouf, Culture et trafic de drogue au Liban, 59, 69. 24. Delafon, “Les neiges de la Békaa.” 25. DEA, El Paso Information Center Weekly Brief, WB-09-80, March 3, 1980; DEA, Weekly Digest of Narcotics Intelligence, March 28, 1980. 26. WP, May 13, 1975, cites the DEA as reporting that “Lebanon is exporting an increasing amount of heroin to the United States, often through the Caribbean and Cen- tral America.” 27. Miami Herald, Oct. 17, 1975; Miami Herald, Dec. 13, 1977; Department of State to Beirut embassy, telegram 46735, drafted March 18, 1971, SOC 11-5 Lebanon, box 3076, Subject Numeric Files, 1970–73, DS records. 28. TGM, Jan. 27, 1978. French police arrested another Lebanese trafficker at Orly Airport on heroin charges in February 1980. At about the same time, confidential informants were telling DEA about a Lebanese trafficker who was moving large quantities of heroin from Beirut to Vienna with the help of a European airline employee; about a Lebanese expatriate responsible for major heroin shipments into Boston from Lebanon and Syria; and about a former Lebanese customs official, based in Beirut, who was using his son, an employee of a Middle Eastern airline, as his courier. See DEA, Weekly Digest of Narcotics Intelligence, Feb. 29, 1980. 29. NYT, June 28, 1981; Nicholas Pileggi, “Drug Business,” New York, Dec. 13, 1982, 42 [conviction]. The Syrian was Mohamad Dallal. 30. Randal, Going All the Way, 12, 88–89. 31. Ibid., 12, 90; Posner, Undercover, 1; Aburish, A Brutal Friendship, 207; Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 20. 32. Badran, “Lebanon’s Militia Wars.” 33. Independent, June 26, 1994. 34. SFC, June 9, 1976. 35. SFC, July 1, 1976; AP, July 11, 1976. 36. Posner, Undercover, 239–41. NOTES to Chapter 5 217

37. Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (London: I. B. Tauris, 1989), 284–86. 38. Nicholas Blanford, Killing Mr. Lebanon: The Assassination of Rafik Hariri and Its Impact on the Middle East (London: I. B. Taurus, 2006), 20. 39. WP, August 9, 1977; NYT, Sept. 26, 1977. 40. SFC, Sept. 24, 1977, Oct. 9, 1977, Nov. 10, 1977, April 16, 1978. 41. WP, March 25, 1978; SFC, August 30, 1979. 42. WP, April 17, 1978. 43. Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, 22; Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 148, 160. 44. Collin Knox [pseudonym for Lester Coleman], “The Lebanese Connection: Bekaa Drugs Fuel Endless Conflict,”Soldier of Fortune, May 1988, 85. 45. Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 246; also 207. 46. Le Vif (Brussels), Nov. 23, 1990. 47. David Gordon, The Republic of Lebanon: Nation in Jeopardy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1983), 73. 48. Winslow, Lebanon, 217, 226. 49. Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 20, 25. 50. Randal, Going All the Way, 118–21, 136; Mackey, Lebanon, 99, 267n; TGM, Nov. 22, 1986. The hashish trafficker Tony Franjieh was said to be a close friend of President Assad’s brother, Major Rifaat Assad, who commanded Syrian troops in the Baalbek district of the Bekaa Valley. See LT, Sept. 14, 1977. On the Franjieh clan’s refusal “to accept the growing Phalangist relationship with Israel in 1977,” see Fisk, Pity the Nation, 76. 51. SFC, Oct. 7 and 10, 1978; CSM, Nov. 2, 1978. 52. Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 25–26, 28. 53. Barbara Newman, who was close to the Gemayel family, writes that “Pierre had bitterly opposed the attack on Danny Chamoun’s militia, which pave[d] the way to unification. Bashir gave his father no warning about the operation, which was actually carried out while Pierre Gemayel was lunching with Danny’s father, Camille Chamoun” (Newman, The Covenant, 130). 54. Randal, Going All the Way, 136–37; Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1989), 137–38. 55. Posner, Undercover, 242; Randal, Going All the Way, 138. 56. Schiff and Yaari, Israel’s Lebanon War, 29. 57. Ibid., 32–35; Katz, Soldier Spies, 288–89; Black and Morris, Israel’s Secret Wars, 368–69. 58. Newman, The Covenant, 130–31. 59. Lester Wolff, chair of the House Select Committee on Narcotics Abuse and Con- trol, said there was “hard evidence” of involvement by the Gemayel family and the Pha- langists in the hashish trade. See San Jose Mercury News, May 18, 1983. 60. L’Europeo, Dec. 20, 1982. 218 notes to Chapter 5

61. Sunday Times (London), July 27, 1980; Thomas Land, “The Milan Connection,” New Leader, Jan. 26, 1981, 3; Dallas Morning News, Nov. 29, 1981; McCoy, The Politics of Heroin, 70–71. 62. Philippe Bernert, “Quand les petits traffiquants cachent les ‘gros bonnets,’”VSD , March 1981, 12. On the shift of production to Southwest Asia see NYT, Oct. 12, 1981. 63. Nation, June 19, 1982. 64. Kwitny, Endless Enemies, 3n. Ralph Cwerman makes the same charge: “Christian complicity in the drug trade has been well-documented by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and other monitoring groups. But because the United States was supporting the Christian cause in Lebanon at the time of the documentation, efforts were made to prevent such disclosures” (Cwerman, “Lebanon’s Valley of Drugs”). 65. David Kennedy and Leslie Brunetta, “Lebanon and the Intelligence Communi- ty,” Central Intelligence Agency, Center for the Study of Intelligence, posted May 8, 2007, https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol37no2/ html/v37i2a05p_0001.htm (accessed July 9, 2011). Steve Posner notes another factor explaining the Reagan administration’s friendly relations with the Phalangist camp: “The Lebanese lobby had been busy during the 1980 presidential race, with several prominent conservative Lebanese-American Christians donating money and their good offices in the Reagan campaign. Their staunch anti-communist views and pro-Israeli sympathies fell on receptive ears.” Bashir, he notes, had been inspired by the American-Israel Pub- lic Affairs Committee to form his own lobbying organization, the American Lebanese League (see Posner, Undercover, 244–45). 66. Bob Woodward, Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 1981–1987 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 185–86. 67. Posner, Undercover, 243–45. 68. Woodward, Veil, 185–86; Posner, Undercover, 242 (Dean). 69. Posner, Undercover, 248–53; Steve Emerson, Secret Warriors: Inside the Covert Military Operations of the Reagan Era (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988), 53. 70. Katz notes, however, that Bashir remained his own man and maintained back- channel communications with the PLO, warning them of Israeli plans to conquer Leba- non (Soldier Spies, 294). Black and Morris add that Gemayel refused to attack Muslim positions in West Beirut or open the port of Jounieh to Israeli troops (Israel’s Secret Wars, 377). 71. NYT, August 29, 1982. 72. Katz, Soldier Spies, 306; NYT, August 29, 1983. 73. Woodward, Veil, 233. 74. Al-Hawadith (Beirut), Dec. 26, 1986, quotes a leading drug dealer from a southern suburb of Beirut, who said he sold narcotics to U.S. troops in exchange for dollars, weapons, ammunition, uniforms, and other items. He claimed to have made a particularly large sale to the Americans just before the suicide bombing of the marines’ bar- NOTES to Chapter 5 219 racks. Newsweek quoted an NCO who estimated that 30 to 40 percent of his fellow soldiers smoked hashish. See Mark Starr, “Marines in Lebanon Going to Pot?” Newsweek, Feb. 21, 1983. 75. Magnus Ranstorp, Hizballah in Lebanon: The Politics of the Western Hostage Crisis (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997), 92. 76. San Jose Mercury News, May 18, 1983 (repr. from New York Daily News). 77. Krimski, “A Resumption of the Traffic in Lebanon,” 13. 78. WP, Sept. 2, 1982, citing CIA narcotics intelligence estimate; CDS, August 25, 1982. 79. NYT, Oct. 5, 1981. 80. NYT, Dec. 6, 1981. 81. Christopher Wenner, producer and director, “The Hashish Connection” (Testa- ment Films, 1988), www.tuppashare.com/store?p=3744. 82. NYT, Oct. 5, 1981. 83. Al-Hawadith (Beirut), Dec. 26, 1986. 84. NYT, Dec. 6, 1981. 85. NYT, May 8, 1982. 86. NYT, June 17, 1980. 87. NYT, Dec. 6, 1981. 88. NYT, July 24, 1983. 89. Didier Bigo and Annie Laurent, “Guerre et drogue au Liban: Entretien avec An- toine Boustany,” Cultures & Conflits 3 (autumn 1991); NYT, June 17, 1980; LAT, March 9, 1980; Mackey, Lebanon, 229–30. 90. NYT, August 21, 1980. 91. CT, Sept. 14, 1986. Shortly thereafter U.S. Customs agents in the New York area also seized 1,546 pounds of Lebanese hashish and arrested four men—three of Lebanese descent and one Lebanese national—on charges of smuggling hashish and heroin. See NYT, Sept. 26, 1981. 92. WP, Nov. 6, 1981. In 1983 the Coast Guard seized eleven tons of Lebanese hashish from a boat bound from Port Said, Egypt, to Philadelphia. Philadelphia Inquirer, Nov. 3, 1983. 93. Richard Stratton, Altered States of America: Outlaws and Icons, Hitmakers and Hitmen (New York: Nation Books, 2005), xiv, xxxi. 94. Colin Nickerson, “Drug Smuggler or Budding Author?” Boston Globe, Dec. 19, 1982. 95. Stratton, Altered States of America, 143. 96. TGM, Dec. 17, 1982. Saba was later arrested in France and was implicated in a case involving a huge heroin laboratory run by French Connection veterans in Paccots, Switzerland. 97. Hashish seizures by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1982 totaled thirteen metric tons, most of it from Lebanon, despite disruptions in hashish production 220 notes to Chapter 5 caused by Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. In Feb. 1984 a police raid on a garage in Montreal’s east end netted more than seventeen hundred kilos of hashish, with a claimed street value of $34 million (TGM, Feb. 8, 1983; Jan. 7, 1984; Feb. 10, 1984). Two months later, a trial began in Toronto of four men accused of importing ten metric tons of hashish and marijuana from Lebanon through the United States (TGM, Nov. 29, 1984). In 1985 the Canadian Navy stopped a freighter off the coast of Nova Scotia and seized thirteen metric tons of Lebanese hashish—equal to the entire annual volume seized by the RCMP just three years earlier—valued on the street at $238 million (TGM, May 28, 1985; Gazette [Montreal], May 28, 1985). A year later, Canadian authorities seized sixteen tons of hashish from a boat docked at Halifax. Its captain admitted paying off Christian Phalangist militia leaders in Lebanon before exporting his massive drug shipment. See Stephen Schneider, Iced: The Story of Organized Crime in Canada (Missis- sauga, Ontario: John Wiley and Sons, 2009), 534. 98. Toronto Star, March 22, 1988; Canadian Press, August 17, 2004; Charbonneau, The Canadian Connection; Schneider, Iced, 250–66 (Cotroni family), 280–81, 534 (Rizzu to); Gazette (Montreal), Sept. 6, 1989 (Rizzuto); Cedilot and Noël, Mafia Inc., 157 (Cotroni), 154–63 (Rizzuto). Rizzuto was also implicated, though not formally charged by U.S. officials, in the seizure of three tons of hashish from a ship in Boston Harbor in 1991. See Boston Herald, Sept. 5, 1981. 99. Gazette (Montreal), Feb. 5, 1989; Cedilot and Noël, Mafia Inc., 157. 100. Gazette (Montreal), Feb. 5, 1989; Schneider, Iced, 534; Daniel Creusot, “Pour un ‘X’ de trop: Une enquête de la GRC,” radio documentary, Radio-Canada, 1989 (excerpts available at www.avanticinevideo.com/fr/television/6/348/Pour_un_&171x&187_de_trop _une_enquete_de_la_GRC.html [accessed Oct. 13, 2011]; and www.radio-canada.ca/docu mentaires/play-video/index.asp?idContenu=4025 [accessed Oct. 13, 2011]). 101. Kai Bird and Max Holland, “Egypt,” Nation, Dec. 24, 1983, 655; Gamal Essam El-Din, “Entrepreneurs Run Both Ways,” Al-Ahram Weekly, Sept. 28–Oct. 4, 1995; Marie- Christine Aulas, “Sadat’s Egypt: A Balance Sheet,” MERIP Reports, July-August 1982, 7; Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal, Autumn of Fury: The Assassination of Sadat (New York: Random House, 1983), 12, 19. The Egyptian hashish importer was Rashad Osman, a friend of construction magnate Osman Ahmed Osman. 102. WP, March 24, 1983; UPI, Oct. 13, 1984; NYT, July 24, 1983. 103. UPI, Oct. 13, 1984. 104. DEA graphic, “Southwest Asian Heroin,” Schumer report. 105. Al-Hayah (London), Oct. 16, 1991. 106. Newsweek, Feb. 17, 1986. 107. Al-Hawadith (Beirut), Dec. 26, 1986. 108. “Intelligence Survey,” 8 (see below, Chap. 6n16). 109. NYT, Feb. 15, 1984; Newsweek, Oct. 15, 1984. One major Lebanese heroin importer who hailed from nearby Dearborn, Michigan, was convicted in Nov. 1984 and NOTES to Chapter 5 221 later sentenced to twenty years in prison. He supplied distribution rings in Detroit, Houston and major cities in the Northeast. See Bergen Record, Jan. 10, 1985. 110. TGM, April 18, 1984. 111. NYT, Dec. 11, 1984. The alleged ringleader was Joseph Maurice Droubi. 112. Quoted in John Laffin, “Narco-terrorism—Islam’s New Weapon Against the West,” Bulletin (Australia), Sept. 16, 1986, 102. 113. Micheal T. Hurley and Kenton V. Smith, I Solemnly Swear: Conmen, DEA, the Media and Pan Am 103 (Lincoln, NE: iUniverse, 2004), 33. 114. Labrousse, La droga, el dinero y las armas, 144, citing Favret’s article in Actuel. The minister was Abdallah Racy. 115. TGM, Nov. 22, 1986. See also Hurley and Smith, I Solemnly Swear, 99. 116. Micheal T. Hurley, interview by the author, March 9, 2011. 117. Ibid. 118. Ibid. Hurley noted, however, that he did not appreciate it when the Lebanese Forces, thinking they were helping the DEA, began killing suspected drug traffickers in the streets of Beirut. 119. LAT, July 3, 1986; AP, July 3, 1986; Seattle Times, July 3, 1986; San Diego Union Tri- bune, July 3, 1986 and Oct. 4, 1985; San Francisco Examiner, July 2, 1986; TGM, Nov. 22, 1986; WP, July 21, 1988; Delafon, “Les neiges de la Békaa”; Hurley and Smith, I Solemnly Swear, 248–49, 264. On the Jean Rahmé case see Labrousse, La droga, el dinero y las armas, 136–37. The noted British writer Anthony Haden-Guest said he was collaborating with Donahue on a book about the drug trade in Lebanon when both were kidnapped. Haden-Guest was released after only a day. See AP, Oct. 5, 1985; and NYT, July 3, 1986. Haden-Guest reportedly agreed to withdraw his book, which was scheduled for publication by Prentice-Hall, “because of [CIA] fears that sources would be fatally compromised” (Charlie Finch, “The Royal Flush,” ArtNet, www.artnet.com/magazine_pre2000/news/cfinch/cfinch6-10-98.asp [accessed July 10, 2011]). 120. Portions of this section are adapted from Jonathan Marshall, “Persian Drugs,” City Paper, Sept. 11, 1987, 12–16. 121. All through the 1950s and 1960s, FBN agents stationed overseas doubled as CIA agents, passing along sensitive information from police and underworld contacts (Jona- than Marshall, Drug Wars: Corruption, Counterinsurgency and Covert Operations in the Third World [Forrestville, CA: Cohan and Cohen, 1991], 58). As FBN agent Bob DeFauw said, “All our best informants were arms merchants, often quite wealthy and very influential, and dealing in gold and diamonds as well. Some were bankers too. They had tremendous political clout, and this is why narcotics agents were so valuable to the CIA: our sources were often their principal means of evaluating and corroborating information” (Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 377). Tom Tripodi, a senior U.S. narcotics officer, added, “With much of the CIA’s cover talent coming from the FBN by way of the OSS, a strong affinity naturally existed between the two agencies—or, at least, between the FBN 222 notes to Chapter 5 and the DDP [the CIA’s Deputy Directorate of Plans]” (Tripodi, Crusade, 82). Charles Siragusa, who opened the FBN’s operations in the Middle East, was a career intelligence officer with experience in the CIA’s forerunner agencies (Office of Strategic Services and Central Intelligence Group); be became the CIA’s chief recruiter within the drug agency. Paul Knight, who opened the first FBN office in Beirut in 1954, formally joined the CIA in 1962 (Siragusa, Trail of the Poppy, 58, 130–42; Tripodi, Crusade, 57–58; Valen- tine, The Strength of the Wolf, 222, 270). Sal Vizzini, assigned by the FBN to Beirut in the early 1960s, found his day job “relatively quiet,” despite the country’s central role in the worldwide drug trade; instead of pursuing Khoury & Co., he spent much of his time on undercover CIA assignments, like infiltrating Arab groups suspected of receiving Soviet arms (Sal Vizzini, Vizzini [New York: Pinnacle, 1972], 167). 122. SFC, August 27, 1987. 123. Testimony of Ambassador Oakley, Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate For- eign Relations Committee, joint hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency, and Drug Trafficking, 290. 124. John Warner, “The Relationship Between Terrorism and Drug Trafficking,” Police Chief, March 1984, 94. 125. NYT, May 31, 1987. 126. David C. Martin and John Walcott, Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 217–19; Ben Bradlee Jr., Guts and Glory: The Rise and Fall of Oliver North (New York: Donald Fine, 1988), 394–400; U.S. Congress, Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaraguan Opposition and House Select Committee to Investigate Covert Arms Trans- actions with Iran, Report of the Congressional Committees Investigating the Iran-Contra Affair, 100th Cong., 1st sess., 1987, 361 (hereafter Iran-Contra Report); testimony of Wil- liam Dwyer, Iran-Contra Report, Appendix B, vol. 8, 324, 332. 127. New York Post, Dec. 23, 1986. 128. Giora Shamis, “A Desperate Quest in Beirut,” U.S. News and World Report, June 29, 1987. 129. Iran-Contra Report, 362–63. 130. Ibid., 363. 131. North to McFarlane, memo, May 24, 1985, National Security Archives, doc. 1167. 132. Clair George testimony, August 5 and 6, 1987; Iran-Contra Report, 363. 133. North to McFarlane, June 7, 1985, in The Tower Commission Report (New York: Bantam, 1987), 125. 134. SFC, Sept. 11, 1987. 135. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, hearing, March 5, 1987. 136. Secord testimony before Iran-Contra committees, May 5, 1987. 137. Iran-Contra Report, 364. The DEA agents believed the hijacking of a TWA jet in Beirut that June by Shiite terrorists disrupted whatever real deals the source may have NOTES to Chapter 5 223 been arranging. See deposition of DEA Agent 1 [William Dwyer], Iran-Contra Report, Appendix B, vol. 8, 546; deposition of DEA Agent 2 [Frank Tarallo], ibid., 733. 138. Observer, April 12, 1987. 139. Mark Perry, “The Secret Life of an American Spy,” Regardie’s, Feb. 1989. 140. San Francisco Examiner, May 7, 1987. 141. Bradlee, Guts and Glory, 229–31. 142. NYT, May 1, 1987; Iran-Contra Report, 110–11. 143. Martin and Walcott, Best Laid Plans, 219, 359. For details of later operations by the two DEA agents, see Bradlee, Guts and Glory, 399–400. 144. CT, Sept. 21, 1987. 145. Steven Emerson, “Taking on Terrorists,” U.S. News and World Report, Sept. 12, 1988, 26–35; Hurley, interview. For a more critical account see “Relying on RUMINT,” Newsweek, Feb. 27, 1989. 146. LAT, Sept. 24, 1987. 147. LAT, March 15, 1989, March 17, 1989, and Oct. 5, 1989; CT, March 7, 1989; WP, March 30, 2005. 148. NYT, May 31, 1987. 149. WP, May 7, 1987. 150. House Judiciary Committee, Subcommittee on Crime, hearing, March 5, 1987. 151. Iran-Contra Report, 416. 152. WP, March 18, 1988. 153. WP, Feb. 24, 1980. 154. Director of Central Intelligence, “Lebanon: Economy Down but Not Out,” National Intelligence Daily, Oct. 8, 1985, 7. Released under Freedom of Information Act, June 1999, www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000259017/DOC_0000259017.pdf (accessed July 9, 2011). 155. INCSR, 1985, 5, 201. 156. CSM, Oct. 8, 1985. The story noted that the hashish was being exported through “militia-run ports in Tripoli, Jounieh, and Beirut.” Tripoli was controlled by Syria, Jounieh by Christian forces, and Beirut by a variety of militia, including Christians. 157. INCSR, 1986, 244. 158. U.S. Congress, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. Narcotics Control Programs Overseas: A Continuing Assessment. Report of a Staff Study Mission to South America, the Mediterranean and Middle East, and South West Asia, March 1986–January 1987, 100th Cong., 1st sess., 1987, 22. 159. DEA report, repr. in “Agribusiness, Lebanese Style,” Soldier of Fortune, May 1988, 59. On the Amhaz and Taouk clans see also Dalal Saoud, “Lebanon Clans, State Within a State, End Deadly Feud Vendetta,” UPI, June 2, 1991. 160. TGM, Nov. 22, 1986; Knox [Lester Coleman], “The Lebanese Connection,” 54. Walid Jumblatt was alleged to be an avid user of cocaine; see Rémi Favret, “Visitate la 224 notes to Chapter 5

Bekaa, è stupefacente,” L’Europeo, Dec. 13, 1986. For an overview of the Contras and U.S.-sanctioned drug trafficking see Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the CIA in Central America (Berkeley: University of Califor- nia Press, 1991). 161. Rede Globo Television (Rio de Janeiro), July 3, 1990; INCSR, 1991, 302. 162. INCSR, 1986, 244. 163. Rémi Favret, “Deadly Harvest: Lebanon Has the Perfect Cash Crop to Finance Its Perpetual State of War,” TGM, Nov. 22, 1986. Versions of his story were published in the London Observer, L’Europeo, Actuel, and other outlets. 164. Ibid. 165. Ibid. 166. See, e.g., TGM, July 26, 1984; TGM, August 22, 1984; Dallas Morning News, August 23, 1984. For background on the Islamic Unification Movement see A. Nizar Hamzeh, “Islamism in Lebanon: A Guide,” MERIA Journal 1 (Sept. 1997). 167. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 22, 1984. Edgar O’Ballance observed that “control of the port meant control of maritime customs duties, now estimated to amount to some $80,000 a month” (Civil War in Lebanon, 147). 168. Seattle Times, Oct. 28, 1985. Elizabeth Picard notes of Jumblatt’s partisans: “Af- ter the Israeli withdrawal and the defeat of the [Lebanese Forces] in the Chouf, the PSP discarded the trappings of legality—notwithstanding Walid Jumblatt’s participation in the national conferences of Geneva and Lausanne and his continuous presence as a cabinet minister in Lebanese governments. The militia established the ‘Mountain administration,’ the PSP’s public service operation, which gave Jumblatt and a few of his close associates control over the region’s main economic activities. . . . Its main resources came from taxes levied at the domestic customs houses of Jiyeh, Bater, and Monteverde” (Elizabeth Picard, “The Political Economy of Civil War in Lebanon,” 313–14). 169. AP, Nov. 28, 1985. Earlier that year, in May, police in Cyprus impounded a Leba- nese cargo vessel, apparently bound for Belgium, carrying 1,050 kilos of hashish hidden inside thirty barrels containing scrap iron and rubber tires. (See “Cyprus Police Have Found 1,050 Kilos of Hashish,” PR Newswire, May 31, 1985.) 170. I Vradyni (Athens), July 15, 1987. 171. In 1988 Spanish authorities arrested two Corsican drug smugglers and four Span- ish accomplices in connection with the discovery of about seventeen tons of Lebanese hashish (Reuters, July 26, 1988). In 1989 Egyptian police busted a major Lebanese drug ring and seized 7.5 tons of hashish aboard another Greek ship, but the government’s top drug official warned in1990 of “an immense hashish crop in Lebanon awaiting the opportunity to attack Egypt” (see Interview with Maj. General Muhammad Fathi ‘Id, chairman of the General Drug Control Directorate, in Akhir Saah [Cairo], Jan. 10, 1990). In 1990 the U.S. Coast Guard made one of its largest seizures of hashish—12,700 pounds of bricks from Lebanon—on an ocean-going tug off the coast of Florida (LAT, March 1, 1990). NOTES to Chapter 5 225

172. Al-Alam (Rabat), Dec. 23, 1987. The article also notes the presence of German experts who trained local chemists in heroin production. 173. Economist, Sept. 30, 1989 (Lebanon); Forbes, August 8, 1988 (Afghanistan). 174. Rep. Larry Smith (D-FL), in U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Com- mittee on Foreign Affairs, hearings, Review of the 1989 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 101st Cong., 1st sess., 1989, 293; see also INCSR, 1988, 15, 17. 175. AP, Nov. 20, 1990; Blade (Toledo), Nov. 21, 1990. For the record of their conviction, sustained by the court of appeals, see http://bulk.resource.org/courts.gov/c/ F2/966/966.F2d.1444.91-5840.91-5839.html (accessed July 9, 2011). 176. Atlanta Journal and Constitution, Oct. 16, 1988; see also Ann Wrobleski testimony in Review of the 1989 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 295 (Cyprus) (see note 174 above). 177. Krimski, “A Resumption of the Traffic in Lebanon,” 13. 178. AP, April 3, 1988. 179. SMH, Jan. 28, 1988. 180. SMH, Nov. 19, 1987, Feb. 20, 1988. 181. U.S. Department of Justice, Annual Report of the Organized Crime Drug Enforce- ment Task Force Program, March 1985, 63. 182. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Evil Money: The Inside Story of Money Laundering & Corrup- tion in Government, Banks & Business (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), 225; United States v. Elias Farah, U.S. Court of Appeals Docket 89-1477, 89-1533, http://ftp.resource.org/ courts.gov/c/F2/991/991.F2d.1065.89-1533.89-1477.1016.1017.html (accessed July 9, 2011). 183. AP, Dec. 15, 1988; Newsday, Dec. 16, 1988. 184. Fawwaz Traboulsi, “The Role of War in State and Society Transformation—the Lebanese Case,” paper presented at the “War as a Source of State and Social Transforma- tion in the Middle East” workshop, Social Science Research Council, Paris, Nov. 2–4, 1994. See also Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, 232; and Endres, “Profiting from War,” 124. 185. CIA Directorate of Intelligence, “Lebanon: The Rise of the Militias as Political Actors,” Feb. 1988 [declassified June1999 ], 4–5, www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000258641/ DOC_0000258641.pdf (accessed July 9, 2011). 186. NYT, Jan. 14, 1986; NYT, Jan. 17, 1986. On the economic sources of conflict between Geagea and Hobeika see Picard, “Liban: La matrice historique,” 90. 187. NYT, Jan. 8, 1987; CIA Directorate of Intelligence, “Lebanon: Fundamentalist- Christian Cooperation?” Near East and South Asia Review, June 5, 1987, 5–7 [declassified June 1999], www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000258631/DOC_0000258631.pdf (accessed July 9, 2011). 188. LAT, June 2, 1987. 189. LAT, June 3, 1987. 190. Knox [Lester Coleman], “The Lebanese Connection,” 54. Coleman apparently 226 notes to Chapter 5 used secret DEA intelligence as background for the story (Hurley and Smith, I Solemnly Swear, 12, 97). 191. BBC News, July 18, 2005. CIA analysts were convinced of Geagea’s guilt; see CIA Directorate of Intelligence, “Lebanon: The Rise of the Militias as Political Actors,” 4. 192. NYT, Jan. 30, 1989. 193. CIA Directorate of Intelligence, “Lebanese Forces: Preparing the Military Base for an Election Showdown,” Near East and South Asia Review, March 11, 1988, 43 [declassified June 1999], www.foia.cia.gov/docs/DOC_0000258649/DOC_0000258649.pdf (accessed July 9, 2011). 194. NYT, Jan. 30, 1989. 195. LM, April 5, 1989; Labrousse, La droga, el dinero y las armas, 136. 196. Winslow, Lebanon, 272–73. 197. Reuters, Feb. 26, 1989; SFC, May 3, 1989; Economist, Sept. 30, 1989. 198. NYT, March 12, 1991. 199. St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 23, 1989. 200. LM, May 19, 1990; Labrousse, La droga, el dinero y las armas, 136–37. Other documented cases of trafficking by Geagea’s Lebanese Forces included the arrest in Par- is in December 1987 of one of his agents with three kilos of heroin, and the seizure in Cyprus of a Lebanese Forces passenger ship, The Empress, in 1989 also with three kilos of heroin (Dr. Jihad Rene Albani, “History of the Drug Traffic in Lebanon and Syria,” Feb. 2, 2001, www.gotc-se.org/statements/Albani/Drug_trafficking.html [accessed July 9, 2011]). Another case in France, in January 1991, implicated a Lebanese captain in drug trafficking on Geagea’s behalf (Labrousse,La droga, el dinero y las armas, 137). The Syr- ians and their allies in the Lebanese government eventually got rid of Geagea: he was arrested by the Lebanese government in March 1994 on suspicion of masterminding a church bombing and, though not convicted of that crime, he was given four life sentences for committing several murders, including the assassination of former premier Kashid Karami, as noted above. See Blanford, Killing Mr. Lebanon, 59. Geagea was also convicted of ordering the car bombing of Dany Chamoun on October 21, 1990. See Independent, June 25, 1995. 201. UPI, Feb. 13, 1990; Reuters, Feb. 13, 1990. 202. AFP, June 13, 1990. 203. CSM, March 7, 1990. 204. Reuters, Oct. 25, 1990; AP, Nov. 11, 1990. 205. AP, Nov. 11, 1990. 206. NYT, March 12, 1991. 207. Cedilot and Noël, Mafia Inc., 164. The fate of illegal ports remained an issue after the civil war, as former militia leader Elie Hobeika sought to extend the private concession at the Port of Beirut granted to the Compagnie d’exploitation et de gestion du port de Beyrouth, which expired at the end of 1990. The port remained NOTES to Chapter 5 227 a lucrative gateway to drug traffic well into the 1990s. According to Reinoud Leen- ders, “When other former warlords sensed Hubayqa’s strategy, the future of the port of Beirut’s became linked to the closure of five to six illegal ports along Lebanon’s 200 kilometre coast-line, all operated by militias. If the Compagnie (and thus indirectly Hubayqa and his supporters) would be granted another concession, other former militia-leaders would have been justified in demanding the legalisation of their ports, for which they already argued on grounds of ‘promoting regional development’ and ‘economic decentralisation.’” To prevent that outcome, various political factions settled on a clumsy “commission” to run the port. See Reinoud Leenders, “In Search of the State: The Politics of Corruption in Post-War Lebanon” (2004), http://home .medewerker.uva.nl/r.e.c.leenders/bestanden/Leenders%20revised%20May%202004 .doc (accessed July 9, 2011). 208. SFC, August 31, 1991. 209. CID #94605, Sept. 10, 1944, in OSS records, citing Yusuf Harawi. 210. Albani, “History of the Drug Traffic in Lebanon and Syria.” The Bekaa deputy he names was Albert Mansour. Albani was a “spokesman for the Guardians of the Cedars in France.” The group has been described as “ultranationalist” and strongly pro-Israeli (Badran, “Lebanon’s Militia Wars”). Albani is, however, ecumenical in his indictment of “all the Lebanese militias and politicians” for profiting from the drug trade. And in an interview on January 26, 1990, Khaled al-Hassan, chairman of the Palestine National Council’s Committee on Foreign Affairs, told me that President Hrawi owned hashish farms in the Bekaa Valley. 211. AFP, Nov. 24, 1994; Reuters, Nov. 30, 1994; Reuters, Nov. 30, 1994; Middle East Economic Digest, Dec. 5, 1994; Reuters, Dec. 9, 1994; Reuters, Dec. 16, 1994, “MP Shamass Held on Drug Charges, Accusing Top Syrians and Hrawi’s Son,” APS Diplomatic Reporter, Nov. 26, 1994 (Roy Hrawi); AFP, June 12, 1996. For Israeli-inspired claims that Roy Hrawi (garbled as “Rawi Hariri”) was a “prominent supply dealer” see Yedidya Atlas, “A Desert Storm of Drugs,” Insight on the News, Sept. 1, 1997, 21. 212. William Harris, Faces of Lebanon: Sects, Wars, and Global Extensions (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 1997), 285. 213. Endres, “Economic Ambitions in War,” 23; Leenders, “In Search of the State”; Harris, Faces of Lebanon, 279, 285. On the challenges of postconflict peace-building in a high-crime environment see Achim Wennmann, “Resourcing the Recurrence of Intrastate Conflict: Parallel Economies and Their Implications for Peacebuilding,” Security Dialogue 36 (fall 2005): 479–94; Wennmann, The Political Economy of Peace- making (London: Routledge, 2011); and James Cockayne, “Crime, Corruption and Vio- lent Economies,” in Ending Wars, Consolidating Peace: Economic Perspectives, ed. Mats Berdal and Achim Wennmann (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2010), 189–218. 228 notes to Chapter 6

Chapter 6 1. Syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, a frequent purveyor of intelligence leaks, reported in January 1984 that numerous Syrian military leaders were taking a cut of the action (SFC, Jan. 30, 1984). See also Yonah Alexander testimony, Senate Judiciary Com- mittee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joint hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency, and Drug Trafficking, 188–89; and sources below in note 15. 2. WP, Nov. 18, 1990. 3. Raphael F. Perl, “Narcotics Certification of Drug Producing and Trafficking Na- tions: Questions and Answers,” Congressional Research Service report 98-159, updated March 27, 2000; statement of Ann Wrobleski, assistant secretary of state for International Narcotics Matters, before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, March 14, 1988, repr. in Department of State Bulletin, June 1988. Syria was also designated as a country supporting international terrorism and thus after 1979 was subject to trade controls under Section 6(j) of the Export Administration Act of 1979. See Alfred B. Prados, “Syrian- U.S. Relations,” Issue Brief 92-075, Congressional Research Service, updated Dec. 24, 1996. 4. INCSR, 1989, 171. 5. U.S. Congress, House Foreign Affairs Committee, Europe and Middle East Sub- committee, hearing, Developments in the Middle East, 101st Cong., 1st sess., 1989. 6. Testimony of Thomas Byrne, Deputy Assistant Administrator, DEA, March 22, 1989, in House Committee on Foreign Affairs, hearings, Review of the 1989 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 332 (see above, Chap. 5n174). 7. Quoted in Abdel Darwish, “Syria’s Strongman,” The Middle East, Dec. 1999, 5. 8. WP, Nov. 18, 1990. 9. Seattle Times, March 21, 1991. 10. Ibid. 11. LAT, Jan. 26, 1992. 12. Reuters, May 1, 1990. Muslim sources in Beirut told Robert Fisk that the decision to free the hostages “was taken after President Bush sent a message to President Assad of Syria earlier this week praising Damascus for its efforts ‘to eliminate world terrorism.’ President Bush’s message, sent on the 44th anniversary of Syria’s independence, signalled the start of a new relationship with the Syrians, who have been seeking Iranian support for the release of Western hostages in Lebanon” (Independent, April 20, 1990). 13. Hadashot, Nov. 30, 1992. 14. Prados, “Syrian-U.S. Relations.” 15. See, e.g., David Twersky, “Bush Welcomes Syrian Generals,” Forward, Oct. 11, 1991; “Sununu Ouster Spotlights Syria,” Forward, Dec. 6, 1991; Steven Emerson, “Is Syria Still Supporting Terrorism? The U.S. Romancing of Assad May Be Legitimizing a Bru- tal Regime,” WP, Jan. 26, 1992; Michael Widlanski, “Assad Case,” New Republic, Feb. 3, 1992; Michael Widlanski, “Syrian Drugs Seem to Make George Bush Partially Blind,” SMH, Feb. 6, 1992; Michael Widlanski, “Lessons from President Assad,” JP, April 5, 1992; NOTES to Chapter 6 229

David Twersky, “The Risks of Cozying Up to Syria,” NYT, July 29, 1992; Frank Gaffney Jr., “Syria’s Not-So-Hidden Heroin Hands,” WT, Sept. 8, 1992. Widlanski, one of the most prolific writers in this genre, was at one point “strategic affairs adviser” to the Israeli Ministry of Public Security. 16. “Intelligence Survey: Syrian Involvement in Drug-Related Activities in Lebanon” (ca. 1990). I am grateful to Rachel Ehrenfeld for supplying me with a copy of this typescript report. For direct mentions of it see Maariv, Sept. 27, 1991, and May 27, 1994; and L’Evènement du Jeudi, March 11, 1993. It was also clearly the basis of an indictment of Syria prepared by the Guardians of the Cedars, an ultranationalist and strongly pro- Israeli organization (see Albani, “History of the Drug Traffic in Lebanon and Syria”). 17. Maariv, May 27, 1994. 18. See, e.g., Ben Smith, “Schumer: Obama’s ‘counter-productive’ Israel policy ‘has to stop,’” Politico, April 22, 2010 www.politico.com/blogs/bensmith/0410/Schumer_Obamas _Counterproductive_Israel_policy_has_to_stop.html?showall (accessed July 10, 2011). 19. Schumer report, 1 (emphasis in original). The report was issued by Rep. Schumer and not approved by other members of the subcommittee. 20. Ibid., 18. 21. Ibid., 14. The plant, to be built by medial supply manufacturer Baxter Interna- tional, was canceled after American Jewish groups complained that Baxter had violated federal antiboycott laws (NYT, June 11, 1991). There was no substantiation for the report’s inflammatory claim (CT, Dec. 23, 1992). 22. Schumer report, 2–3. 23. Spain’s National High Court reportedly determined that a major gang of Leba- nese heroin smugglers arrested in Madrid had received visas, issued by Spain’s consulate in Damascus, thanks to endorsements from Tlass (Talas). The gang was led by Hasan Muhammad Suhl. ABC (Madrid), Dec. 6 and 7, 1991. 24. An Israeli exposé claimed that “in Nov. 1990, for the first time, [Kanaan’s] name was directly implicated in drug dealings. His car, which was loaded with hashish, was detained at a Lebanese military checkpoint and the Syrian general refused to be inspected. The verbal incident developed into a shooting battle, during whose course the driver (accompanying) Kanaan was killed. A week thereafter, the Lebanese officer who was involved in the incident was executed” (Hadashot, Nov. 30, 1992). 25. Schumer report, 16. 26. Ibid. The report cites Ehrenfeld, Narco-Terrorism, 67, as the source. 27. Schumer report, 16. 28. In Nov. 1988 French Customs officers seized the Cleopatra Sky, a cargo boat, expecting to seize four tons of Lebanese hashish. Instead, they found only twenty-five kilos of cannabis resin in a locker; the rest had been thrown overboard. Under interrogation, the ringleader admitted loading the drugs at Tripoli harbor after paying off Syrian soldiers $250,000 (Liberation, Dec. 12, 1989; France-2 television, Oct. 22, 1992). The Is- 230 notes to Chapter 6 raeli police intelligence report cited above claims “this gang was connected to Brig.-Gen. [Mohammed] Hassan ‘Ali, a Syrian intelligence officer serving as the Military Attache in the Syrian Embassy in France” (31). 29. Schumer report, 15–16. 30. Palo Alto Times, Sept. 6, 1977. 31. Ibid. 32. AP, June 4, 1983. 33. Delafon, “Les neiges de la Békaa” (see above, Chap. 5n22). 34. Wenner, “The Hashish Connection.” 35. Among the innumerable sources supporting these assertions see Gretchen Peters, Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and Al Qaeda (New York: St. Martin’s, 2009), 21, 106–7, 133–37, 186, 208–9; U.S. Congress, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, report, Afghanistan’s Narco War: Breaking the Link Between Drug Traffick- ers and Insurgents, 111th Cong., 1st sess., 2009, 5–6; United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Addiction, Crime and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium (Vienna: UNODC, 2009), 106; NYT, June 8, 2010; The Times (London), May 7, 2010; Canadian Press, Nov. 28, 2009; NYT, August 27, 2010; McClatchy Newspapers, May 10, 2009; NYT, Oct. 5, 2008; NYT, July 27, 2008; TGM, April 21, 2008. Fred Weir, writing for the May 19, 2010, Christian Science Monitor, notes Moscow’s unhappiness with the vast flow of narcotics from Afghanistan to Russia’s two million addicts: “Russian analysts allege that NATO turns a blind eye to Afghan poppy production as part of a strategy to keep the loyalty of local warlords and win over peasants who depend on the crop for income. ‘We have sent requests to the US, asking them to intensify the struggle against drug production, but they respond that they are still analyzing their options and worry about driving the peasants into the arms of the Taliban,’ says Viktor Ilyukhin, deputy chair of the State Duma’s security commission. ‘Their excuses are very slim indeed.’” On the role of American soldiers as consumers see Gerald Posner, “The Taliban’s Heroin Ploy,” Daily Beast, Oct. 19, 2009, www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-10-19/ the-heroin-bomb/full/ (accessed July 10, 2011). 36. Hurley, interview. 37. Picard, Lebanon, a Shattered Country, 147. 38. DEA, Weekly Digest of Narcotics Intelligence, March 28, 1980. 39. Wenner, “The Hashish Connection.” 40. AP, June 4, 1983. 41. Al-Dustur (London), Dec. 15, 1986, names Lt. Col. Muhammad al-Shaar as commander of the port of Tripoli. 42. Claude Moniquet, “Armes, drogues, voitures: Le trafic syrien,” L’Express, May 1987. 43. Hurley, interview. NOTES to Chapter 6 231

44. Patrick Seale, Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 421–39. 45. NYT, Sept. 12, 1984; Baltimore Sun, Nov. 25, 1982. 46. L’Express, May 1987; L’Evènement du Jeudi, March 11–17, 1993. 47. Danielle Pletka, “Assad the Younger Pockets Power by Hook or by Crook,” Insight, Oct. 9, 1989, 28–29; L’Evènement du Jeudi, March 11–17, 1993. 48. L’Evènement du Jeudi, March 11–17, 1993. 49. SFC, August 1, 1991. 50. Schumer report, 10. 51. John Loftus and Mark Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 384, 602n. 52. Ibid., 384; La Nacion (Chile), Oct. 8, 2006; TGM, Jan. 27, 1978; Manfred Morstein [pseud.], Der Pate des Terrors (Munich: Piper Verlag, 1989). 53. NYT, May 15, 2008. 54. Loftus and Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 384–86; James Adams, En- gines of War: Merchants of Death and the New Arms Race (Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1990), 88–89; Independent, Oct. 28, 1994. Patrick Radden Keefe, “The Trafficker,” New Yorker, Feb. 8, 2010, describes a more serious scheme involving guns-for-drugs deals between Lebanon and Western Europe. Al-Kassar continued to deny that he had really been convicted of drug charges. See Aram Roston, “Meet the ‘Prince of Marbella,’” Ob- server, Oct. 1, 1986. 55. Adams, Engines of War, 90. 56. Antonius Johannes Gerhardus Tijhuis, “Transnational Crime and the Interface Between Legal and Illegal Actors: The Case of the Illicit Art and Antiquities Trade” (diss., University of Leiden, 1976), 45. 57. The allegation about one-hundred-kilo drug deals may have originated with an article in Reader’s Digest, August 1986, whose credibility must be judged uncertain. 58. Morstein [pseud.], Der Pate des Terrors, 227. 59. Reuters, July 24, 1987; El Pais, August 23, 1987. 60. See, e.g., Somos, May 18, 1982; and Clarin, May 7, 1992. 61. Keefe, “The Trafficker.” 62. Adams, Engines of War, 93. 63. NYT, May 15, 2008. Al-Kassar allegedly flew Abbas from Yugoslavia to South Yemen. However, he was acquitted by a Spanish court in 1995 on charges of providing guns and explosives used in the hijacking, apparently after the death or intimidation of several witnesses. See JP, June 15, 2008; and Matthew Brunwasser, “Monzer Al Kassar— the Prince of Marbella: Arms to All Sides,” Frontline, www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/ sierraleone/alkassar.html (accessed July 10, 2011). 64. Forward, Dec. 6, 1991. 65. Schumer report, 10. 232 notes to Chapter 6

66. Ibid., 11. 67. Lawrence Walsh, “The Enterprise and Its Finances,” in Final Report of the Inde- pendent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters, vol. 1, chap. 8, www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/ chap_08.htm (accessed July 10, 2011); Adams, Engines of War, 97–98. An earlier arms shipment to the Contras was reportedly brokered by North’s network through al-Kassar in August 1985 at a cost of $1 million (Newsday, July 11, 1987; LAT, July 17, 1987). Al-Kassar reportedly also partnered with Hall and Watts (Defence Sales) in another shipment of arms to the Contras worth $1.9 million (Observer, April 12, 1987). 68. Schumer report, 11. 69. Loftus and Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 416–17. Former CIA official Vincent Cannistraro denies that the agency ever took information (Keefe, “The Traf- ficker”). 70. Loftus and Aarons, The Secret War Against the Jews, 398. 71. This scenario, which originated with Israeli investigator Juval Aviv, has been widely reported and just as widely refuted. See, e.g., Roy Rowan, “Pan Am 103: Why Did They Die?” Time, April 27, 1992; Toronto Star, Nov. 12, 1989. For detailed critiques see Steven Emerson, “Pan Am Scam,” American Journalism Review, Sept. 1992; Hurley and Smith, I Solemnly Swear; and Observer, Nov. 26, 1989. 72. WP, Nov. 2, 1990. DEA contract employee Lester Coleman was a major source for the story; for his account see Donald Goddard with Lester Coleman, Trail of the Octopus: From Beirut to Lockerbie—Inside the DIA (London: Bloomsbury, 1993). The book was withdrawn from circulation after a successful libel action but can be found at www.american-buddha.com/trail.toc.htm (accessed Oct. 3, 2011). Coleman later admitted perjuring himself about the alleged DEA sting operation (Newsday, May 16, 1998). 73. WP, June 9, 2007; Drug Enforcement Administration, “DEA Investigation Nets International Arms Dealer with Ties to Terrorist Organizations,” press release, June 8, 2007, www.justice.gov/dea/pubs/states/newsrel/nyc060807.html (accessed July 10, 2011). 74. Reuters, Nov. 5, 2008, and Feb. 24, 2009. A Lebanese arms dealer arrested with him, Tareq Mousa al Ghazi, was also convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years (Reuters, July 2, 2009; for background see NYT, May 15, 2008). Israeli reporter Calev Ben-David (JP, June 15, 2008) commented after his arrest that “some informed sources” believe al-Kassar directly or indirectly supplied explosives used in the bombings of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires in 1992 and a Jewish center there in 1994. 75. Al-Dustur (London), Dec. 6, 1985; and L’Express, May 1987. The Syrian consul general, Ibrahim al-Ibrahim, later married Amira Yoma, appointments secretary to Ar- gentine president Carlos Menem, and became a codirector of customs officer at Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires in 1989. Yoma and Ibrahim, both closely connected with Monzer al-Kassar, were accused of major drug money laundering. For more on “Yomagate” see Buenos Aires Herald, March 7, 1991; Cambio 16, March 11, 1991; Noti- cias Argentinas, April 13, 1991; WSJ (Europe), April 26, 1991; NYT, Dec. 18, 1991; Somos, NOTES to Chapter 6 233

May 18, 1992; and Alain Labrousse and Laurent Laniel, eds., The World Geopolitics of Drugs, 1998/1999 (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 195–96. 76. LAT, Oct. 25, 1986. 77. NYT, Nov. 19, 1986. 78. Al-Akhbar (Cairo), March 11, 1987. 79. Economist, Sept. 30, 1989. 80. Nouvel Observateur, May 11, 1989, 18. 81. Le Matin, March 25, 1998 (Wiesgril, Scapula, and Paccots affair); Geopolitical Drug Dispatch, no. 23 (Sept. 1993): www.antifascistencyclopedia.com/allposts/al-kassar -adnan-khashoggi-princess-caroline-barclays-bank-marc-rich-pan-am-103-etc-etc (accessed July 10, 2011). 82. CNN broadcast, Nov. 6, 1989; The New Lebanese American Journal, Nov. 23, 1989; Hurley, interview. The unreliable Lester Coleman, who edited videotapes for the DEA in Cyprus, claimed more plausibly that a “member of the Pablo Escabar [sic] family” was videotaped by Cypriot police meeting with a member of the Keyrouz family, “a Leba- nese clan with a long history of international drug trafficking, according to DEA files.” The Keyrouz family was from the Maronite town of Deir Al Ahmar in the Bekaa Valley, where fellow traffickers allegedly included members of the Geagea, Habchi, and Rahme families (Knox [Lester Coleman], “The Lebanese Connection,” 58). 83. TGM, Nov. 22, 1986; CSM, April 16, 1987. 84. Le Figaro (magazine), May 23, 1987, 90–91. 85. CSM, March 9, 1988. Labrousse characterizes the Syrian crop substitution program as a fraud in all respects (La droga, el dinero y las armas, 147–48). 86. Charles van der Leeuw, “Saddlebag Fortunes Cross the Beka’a,” South, August 1988, 45. 87. INCSR, 1989, 171. 88. UPI, Nov. 20, 1988. 89. Schumer report, 19. 90. Toronto Star, April 13, 1989. 91. Reuters, June 29, 1989. 92. INCSR, 1991, 302, 304. 93. Presidential Determination No. 88-10, Feb. 29, 1988, in INCSR, 1988, i. 94. San Francisco Examiner, March 10, 1991. 95. Forward, Dec. 6, 1991. 96. Reuters, Sept. 1, 1991. One of the two signers for Syria was Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Mustafa Tlass, who was accused in the Spanish press of providing visa references for members of a Lebanese heroin smuggling gang arrested in Madrid. See ABC (Ma- drid), Dec. 6, 1991. 97. AFP, Sept. 10, 1991. 98. Reuters, Sept. 8, 1991. 234 notes to Chapters 6 and 7

99. Financial Times, July 12, 1992. 100. “Cleaning Up Their Act,” The Middle East, Sept. 1993, 16. The story claimed that “beginning in May, Damascus has waged a merciless war on all forms of smuggling, putting an end to the once booming narcotics trade,” and reported that “among those imprisoned are Fayez Assad, son of the president’s brother, Jamil.” 101. “Interview with Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad,” Journal of Palestine Studies 22 (summer 1993): 120. 102. Leenders, “In Search of the State.” 103. INCSR, 1996. As Alain Labrousse confirmed in 1997, “Lebanon is the only country whose role as producer of [drug] raw materials has decreased considerably since the early ’90s with the virtual eradication of the crops in the Bekaa Valley (which nevertheless continues to house heroin and cocaine laboratories)” (“L’économie de la drogue: Marché et politiques publiques,” Futuribles, July 1, 1997). 104. WP, Nov. 11, 1997; JP, Nov. 20, 1997. Syrian compliance was reconfirmed four years later by the George W. Bush administration. See “Text of a Letter from the Pres- ident to the Chairmen and Ranking Members of the House and Senate Committees on Appropriations, the House Committee on International Relations, and the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations,” Nov. 1, 2001, www.state.gov/p/inl/rls/rpt/5922.htm (accessed July 10, 2011).

Chapter 7 1. NYT, Nov. 28, 1948. Corrupt British soldiers had assisted with the widespread smuggling of hashish through Palestine before the creation of the state of Israel. See Chaim Even-Zohar, “Drugs in Israel: A Study of Political Implications for Society and Foreign Policy,” in Drugs, Politics, and Diplomacy: The International Connection, ed. Luiz R. S. Simmons and Abdul A. Said (Beverly Hills: Sage, 1974), 190. 2. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 121. 3. Al-Sayad, June 14, 1956, reproduced in translation in box 160, FBN records. 4. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 125–26, 159, 293–94. 5. Dayle report, March 3, 1964, box 161, FBN records. 6. Eveland, Ropes of Sand, 174. 7. Qubain, Crisis in Lebanon, 139–40. 8. Jacques L. Changeux memo, April 9, 1959, box 160, FBN records. The next year, a major FBN report out of Lebanon confirmed that “the most extensive smuggling [of hashish] is overland through Israel and frequently across the Egyptian desert in camel caravans” to major Egyptian cities. See Paul Knight to Henry Giordano, Acting Com- missioner of Narcotics, “Lebanon,” report, Oct. 3, 1960, box 160, FBN records. 9. “The Precedent and Background to AMAN’s ‘Drug Convoys,’” Israel & Palestine, Sept. 1978, 7. 10. CSM, May 29, 1970. NOTES to Chapter 7 235

11. R. T. Naylor, Economic Warfare: Sanctions, Embargo Busting, and Their Human Cost (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001), 116. 12. Yigal Laviv, “Israeli Military Intelligence as Drug Peddlers,” Israel & Palestine, Sept. 1978, 6–7. 13. Sunday Times (London), Dec. 22, 1996; see also “Israeli Army Sold Drugs to Egyptian Soldiers,” APS Diplomat Recorder, Dec. 31, 1996; Booth, Cannabis, 288. 14. Katz, Soldier Spies, 272; Naylor, Economic Warfare, 122; Mackey, Lebanon, 173. 15. Israeli journalists reported that to avoid the necessity of paying bribes to the South Lebanon Army, Israel built a harbor in South Lebanon at Nakura and ran ship- loads of goods in, usually in foreign flag vessels, to bypass Lebanese customs. See Israel Shahak, “The Real Israeli Interests in Lebanon,” Washington Report on Middle East Af- fairs, July 1996, 19. 16. Naylor, Economic Warfare, 122. Elizabeth Picard writes that “Israeli soldiers were not to be outdone in the business of looting and smuggling” (Lebanon, a Shattered Coun- try, 147). 17. NYT, June 14, 1983. Members of the Druze community remained major players in the Lebanon-Israel drug trade. See Monitin (Tel Aviv), June 1992. 18. Haaretz, Feb. 10, 1984, translated in Journal of Palestine Studies 13 (summer 1984): 169. 19. AP, March 24, 1986. 20. Maariv, Feb. 16, 1990. 21. Ibid.; JP, Dec. 15, 1989. 22. Financial Times, Feb. 23, 1987. The article refers to Theodorus I, but the patriarch from 1981 to 2000 was Diodoros I. 23. WP, May 17, 1970; LAT, Dec. 17, 1970. 24. Joseph Harrison, “Illegal Drug Use by Israeli Youth,” British Journal of Addiction 70 (1975): 335–37. 25. Jacques Derogy, Israel Connection: La Mafia en Israël (Paris: Plon, 1980), 79. 26. Maariv, Feb. 16, 1990. 27. Davar, March 2, 1990. 28. Yediot Aharonot, Sept. 3, 1990. Israeli police estimated that in 1990 some three metric tons of heroin were imported into the country, while seizures amounted to only one hundred kg. Radio Kol Israel, June 16, 1991. 29. Independent, March 3, 1993. 30. JP, March 17, 1989. 31. SFC, August 8, 1989. 32. Reuters, Feb. 22, 1990. 33. AP, April 11, 1988. 34. Yediot Aharonot, Sept. 3, 1990. 35. JP, August 13, 1989. 236 notes to Chapter 7

36. From prison Biro reportedly recruited Obeid’s son Kais to a conspiracy by Hez bollah to kidnap Israelis—most notably Reserve Colonel Elhanan Tennenbaum—for intelligence and bargaining purposes. (According to some reports, Tennenbaum was himself deeply implicated in the drug trade. He may have been kidnapped to help secure the release of Mohammed Biro.) Shin Bet for many years demanded strict censorship of this fact, possibly to prevent embarrassment over the Israeli drug connection. Kais Obeid and Biro’s youngest son, Kaid, were named in an Israeli indictment for plotting to smuggle cocaine into Israel from Gaza and automatic rifles and rocket launchers across the Lebanon-Israeli border. See JP, Oct. 23, 2003; Haaretz, Dec. 14, 2009. See also note below on Lebanese trafficker Ramzi Nahara. 37. Haaretz, Dec. 14, 2009. 38. Nahara (Nohra) worked variously as an agent for Iraq, Syria, Israel, and Hez bollah—but above all for himself. He apparently began working for Shin Bet as an informer after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in 1982. In return, according to Nicholas Blanford, “Israeli police turned a blind eye to his own smuggling activities.” He was eventually arrested by Israeli police in Haifa when he literally created a stink by trying to truck three tons of hashish through Israel. Although sentenced to three years in prison, Blanford continues, Nahara “escaped serving his term in jail and was instead detained at the Tiberias police station. He was allowed to wander around the town and was often seen enjoying meals with his friends in the police.” His fate changed for the worse after Lebanese military intelligence pressured him in 1996 into helping abduct the Israeli-backed assassin of Fouad Mughnieh, brother of Hezbollah’s security chief. Nahara was subsequently killed by a roadside bomb in 2002, an assassination widely attributed to Israeli intelligence. See Daily Star, Dec. 9, 2002; see also Gary C. Gambill, “More Unsolved Mysteries in Lebanon,” Middle East Intelligence Bulletin 5 (Jan. 2003): 1; Haaretz, July 23, 2006. 39. Quoted in Shahak, “The Real Israeli Interests in Lebanon.” See also Haaretz, April 1, 2008. 40. JP, Oct. 11, 1991. For more allegations of involvement in the drug trade by senior IDF officers see Al-Hayah (London), Feb. 24, 1993. All evidence suggests this binational trade continued for many years. Noting the arrest of twenty-four IDF soldiers and civilians as well as members of the police for drug trafficking from Lebanon, Israeli crime reporter Yossi Melman commented in 1998 that “the willingness of IDF officers . . . and of some officers in the Israeli police to cooperate directly with drug traffickers . . . has blown up in our faces” (Haaretz, April 1, 2008; see also Yemen Times, April 21, 2008). Israeli police chief superintendent Kobi Bacher, who headed a task force on drug trafficking in Israel’s northern district, told Haaretz in 1999 that the phenomenon of Israeli soldiers based in southern Lebanon smuggling heroin back to their home country was “widespread” and “spreading.” Despite the implication of officers with rank as high as major in the criminal trade, he added, senior army commanders took no action (SMH, Nov. 10, 1999). NOTES to Chapter 7 237

41. Derogy, Israel Connection, 81. 42. Ibid., 178. 43. Ibid., 141; SFC, April 30, 1991. 44. AP, Jan. 8, 1988; JP, Jan. 8, 1988; Guardian (London), Jan. 9, 1988; SFC, Jan. 9, 1988; Sun Herald, Jan. 10, 1988; Jane Hunter, “Cocaine and Cutouts: Israel’s Unseen Di- plomacy,” Link, Jan.–March 1989. 45. Jane Hunter, “Cocaine and Cutouts”; WP, August 29, 1989; and Seattle Times, August 30, 1989 (Yair Klein and military training). Klein said that after he left the IDF in 1983, he got his first military contracts selling nonlethal equipment to the Christian Phalangist militia in Beirut. See NYT, Sept. 1, 1989. 46. JP, April 29, 1991. 47. Xinhua News, June 21, 1991. For a report on the involvement of Israeli and Turk- ish drug smugglers in the New York drug market see New York Observer, Nov. 11, 1991. Israeli involvement in the New York drug trade reportedly dated back to the 1970s. 48. In a story filed from Lebanon about clashes in the drug-rich Bekaa Valley, AP reporter Terry Anderson (later kidnapped by Hezbollah guerrillas), wrote, “Lebanese police said a rebellious PLO faction that began a mutiny last month against Yasser Arafat battled guerrillas loyal to the PLO chairman with artillery and rocket-propelled grenades. Eight people were killed and 17 wounded in the hour-long fight, police said” (AP, June4 , 1983). 49. The Cairo daily Al-Ahram cited the case of a pro-Syrian rival to Arafat who was arrested by Egyptian police in Cairo’s international airport in Feb. 1984 with a kilo of Lebanese hashish (cited in The Nation, March 31, 1984). 50. See, e.g., Claire Sterling’s claim (attributed to three unnamed members of the Italian Mafia) that “Palestinians in Lebanon were selling the Mafia morphine base and Kalashnikovs ‘to finance their war in the Middle East.’” Why Palestinians were selling their rifles to support their armed struggle, and just which Palestinians were allegedly involved, doesn’t seem to have concerned her. See Sterling, Octopus, 208. 51. Randal, Going All the Way, 248. Nidal’s organization was said by journalist Mor- gan Strong to support the cultivation and smuggling of opiates from the Bekaa Valley (“Exclusive Portrait of Terrorist Leader Abu Nidal,” PR Newswire, Sept. 4, 1990). 52. For a profile of Ehrenfeld see www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Ehrenfeld _Rachel (accessed July 10, 2011). 53. Rachel Ehrenfeld, “Arafat’s Legacy: A Case Study in Terror Funding,” Israel Re- port, Oct. 30, 2002. 54. Northern California Jewish Bulletin, Oct. 12, 1990. 55. Ehrenfeld, Narco-Terrorism, 68–69. A search on Google will find this allegation repeated on numerous web pages. 56. Cwerman, “Lebanon’s Valley of Drugs.” Cwerman told me he in turn saw the Dabbagh quote in a column in the New York Post by Eric Breindel, a pugnacious supporter of Israel. 238 notes to Chapter 7

57. Dennis Eisenberg, “The World’s Largest Drug Field,” The World and I, June 1990; repr. in Congressional Record, July 27, 1990, E2519–20. 58. Nathan Adams, “Drugs for Guns: The Bulgarian Connection,” Reader’s Digest, Nov. 1983, 97. 59. Sterling, Octopus, 163. 60. Testimony of Yonah Alexander, Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joint hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency, and Drug Traf- ficking, 190. 61. Ibid., 187; WP, Nov. 24, 1975, identifies those “Christian factions” as the Pha- langists. Lester Coleman cites a “former intelligence officer for the Christian Lebanese Forces,” who noted, apparently from personal experience, that in Sofia it was possible to barter heroin for military equipment—presumably through Kintex. See Knox [Lester Coleman], “The Lebanese Connection,” 54. 62. Testimony of John Lawn, acting deputy administrator of the DEA, in U.S. Con- gress, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on Europe and the Middle East, hearing, Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection: United States–Bulgarian Relations and International Drug Trafficking, 98th Cong., 2nd sess., 1984, 4. 63. Livingstone and Halevy, Inside the PLO, 190-191. 64. “Intelligence Survey,” 43 (see above, Chap. 6n16). 65. On Ledeen, see Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott and Jane Hunter, The Iran- Contra Connection: Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Era (Boston: South End Press, 1987), 174-181, 212-215; “Michael Ledeen,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Michael_Ledeen (accessed July 10, 2011). 66. James Adams, The Financing of Terror, 231. 67. WP, Sept. 21, 1972. Anderson’s column may have been an elliptical reference to the testimony of Marine Corps Gen. Lewis Walt, who claimed, “There is good reason to believe that part of the proceeds from the sales of narcotics goes to financing guerrilla activities against the State of Israel.” Walt also endorsed the (now discredited) view that Communist China was responsible for the flood of Asian heroin in the1960 s and 1970s. See Senate Judiciary Committee, World Drug Traffic and Its Impact on U.S. Security, Part 4, 138 (see above, Chap. 1n81). 68. Houston Chronicle, March 6, 1983. 69. Creusot, “Pour un ‘X’ de trop.” 70. Hearings before the U.S. Congress, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Re- view of the 1989 International Narcotics Control Strategy Report, 438, 422 (see above, Chap. 5n174). In 1984, however, DEA administrator Francis Mullen testified, “The PLO, in part, finances its activities from drug trafficking. That organization has been involved to some degree in drug trafficking, but so have other terrorist or insurgent groups in Lebanon” (Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, 53 [see above, Chap. 1n97]). NOTES to Chapter 7 239

71. Maria, interview, March 29, 2011. 72. Zagorin, “A House Divided,” 115; “Palestinians: The Well-Heeled Guerrillas,” Time, July 18, 1977. 73. On this point see testimony of Hon. Edwin G. Corr, former U.S. ambassador to Peru, before U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Governmental Affairs, Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, hearings, International Narcotics Trafficking, 97th Cong., 1st sess., 1981, 199. 74. Testimony of Marine Corps Gen. (Rtd.) Lewis W. Walt, The Global Context: Report of General Walt, 138; “Funde am Strom,” Der Spiegel, May 19, 1975. 75. CSM, June 21, 1977. 76. Baltimore Sun, July 10, 1982. 77. Adams, The Financing of Terrorism, 233. In 1987 an Australian politician claimed that a drug dealer imprisoned for peddling heroin, hashish, and amphetamines to prisoners at Long Bay Jail, where he served as a guard, was actually a cousin of Yasir Arafat who used the profits of his criminal enterprise to “finance terrorists.” Whatever the veracity of the charge, it was apparently leveled as part of the politician’s promised campaign to “blow the lid off the festering cesspit of corruption, violence and venom that is the NSW [New South Wales] prison system (Courier-Mail [Brisbane], Nov. 24, 1977). 78. AP, Sept. 8, 1987; WP, Sept. 8, 1987; SFC, Sept. 9, 1987; Financial Times, Sept. 12, 1987; CDS, Sept. 11, 1987; AFP, Sept. 15, 1987; JP, Sept. 16, 1987. 79. St. Petersburg Times, Oct. 24, 1988. 80. L’Europeo, Nov. 21, 1987 (interview with Aldo Anghessa); Robert H. Evans, “Italy and International Terrorism,” in The Deadly Sin of Terrorism: Its Effect on Democracy and Civil Liberty in Six Countries, ed. David Charter (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1994), 75. 81. St. Petersburg Times, Oct. 24, 1988. Anghessa reportedly was also an informant for the DEA, though U.S. authorities denied he worked for any American agencies. See CDS, Sept. 28, 1987; and NYT, Oct. 25, 1988. 82. Yezid Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State: The Palestinian National Movement, 1949–1993 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 559. For a general discussion of the complaints by reformers see Khalidi, PLO Decisionmaking, 32. 83. Sayigh, Armed Struggle and the Search for State, 458–59. 84. Augustus Richard Norton, Hezbollah: A Short History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 23, 33; Joseph Elie Alagha, The Shifts in Hizbullah’s Ideology: Reli- gious Ideology, Political Ideology, and Political Program (Amsterdam: Amsterdam Univer- sity Press, 2006), 32; Justin L. Miller, “From Holy Wars to Drugs Wars: Islam, Insurgency, and Post-Conflict Drug Trade” (PhD diss., Baylor University, Dec. 2004), 139–40. 85. Endres, “Economic Ambitions in War,” 16. 86. Wenner, “The Hashish Connection.” 87. “You can trace the drugs that are pouring into America from Hizbullah, Lebanon, and Syria,” Deputy Commander Shmuel Narkis, head of special operations in the Internal 240 notes to Chapter 7

Security Ministry, told the Knesset War on Drugs Committee in 1997. “There is no doubt of Hizbullah involvement in drug production. Everybody familiar with Lebanon knows this.” Clarifying the purpose of this testimony, Col. Reuven Erlich, deputy government coordinator for Lebanon, told the same committee: “It is important to recruit the West and the US in this war [against Hizbullah]” (JP, June 17, 1997). Similarly, the Israel Intel- ligence Heritage and Commemoration Center charged in 2003 that Hezbollah is “engaged in large-scale criminal activities,” including “heavy involvement in illegal drug deals,” with the aim of financing terrorism and “weakening the social and economic fabric of Israel and Western countries, in particular the United States, as part of the global war waged by Iran and Hezbollah against the Western world” (Intelligence and Terrorism Informa- tion Center, “Hezbollah (Part 2): Profile of the Lebanese Shiite Terrorist Organization of Global Reach Sponsored by Iran and Supported by Syria,” June 2003, www.terrorism-info .org.il/malam_multimedia//english/iran/pdf/july_03.pdf (accessed July 10, 2011). For the purposes of this book I focus on evidence mainly through the early 1990s, not later. 88. Schumer report, 14. 89. Rachel Ehrenfeld, Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed—and How to Stop It (Chicago: Bonus Books, 2005), 143. For more in this vein see Rachel Ehrenfeld, “A ‘Political Party’ Unveiled,” WT, August 10, 2006; and Steven Emerson, “Blood Money: Hezbollah’s Revenue Stream Flows Through the Americas,” American Legion Magazine, March 2007. 90. Yosef Bodansky, Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America (Roseville, CA: Random House, 2001), 322. A number of other journalists have also mentioned the fatwa, citing unnamed “Western intelligence sources”; see, e.g., CSM, March 9, 1988; WSJ, March 24, 1988; and SFC, April 4, 1988. (The latter source cites the hardly unbiased findings of reporter Barbara Newman, the close confidant of Bashir Gemayel.) The Israeli police intelligence report, “Intelligence Survey” (see above, Chap. 6n16), also cites the fatwa, which it attributes directly to the Ayatollah Khomeini—again without evidence. 91. Radio Kol Israel, Jerusalem, Sept. 3, 1991; “Intelligence Survey,” 42 (see above, Chap. 6n16). 92. WSJ, March 19, 1992. 93. Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 18, 1988. One drug case dating back to the mid-1980s illustrates the murkiness of these connections. In 1990 French authorities convicted a thirty-one-year-old Tunisian, Fouad Ali Saleh, of heading the logistics network for terrorists responsible for a series of bombings in Paris in 1986. Their goal was apparently to punish France for selling chemical weapons to Iraq during the Iran-Iraq War. Iran allegedly farmed out the operation to Hezbollah members, who in turn recruited North Af- ricans to do the job. Saleh was charged with possession of 6.5 kilos of heroin along with explosives. Police investigators theorized that he intended to sell the drugs to fund the cell’s operations rather than consume them himself. See Independent (London), Jan. 28, 1990; Reuters, Feb. 2, Feb. 9, and March 9, 1990; and The Economist, Feb. 3, 1990. NOTES to Chapter 7 241

94. WSJ, March 24, 1988. 95. WT, Nov. 10, 1988. 96. Ahmad Nizar Hamzeh, In the Path of Hizbullah (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse Univer- sity Press, 2004), 101. 97. Bergen (NJ) Record, Nov. 20, 1989. 98. Ibid. 99. Norton, Hezbollah; Hussein A. Amery, “Irrigation Planning in Lebanon: Chal- lenges and Opportunities,” in Modern and Traditional Irrigation Technologies in the East- ern Mediterranean, ed. Özay Mehmet and Hasan Ali Biçak (Ottawa: International Devel- opment Research Centre, 2002), 120. 100. Yemen Times, April 21, 2008. 101. Federal Research Division, Library of Congress, A Global Overview of Narcotics- Funded Terrorist and Other Extremist Groups (Washington: Library of Congress, 2002), 12. In recent years critics have continued to allege that Hezbollah traffics in drugs. See, e.g., David Lev, “Report: Hizbulla Earning Millions Off European Drug Trade,” Israel National News, Jan. 9, 2010, www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/135433 (accessed July 10, 2011; Dalila Mahdawi, “Hizbulla Denies Profiting from German Drug Trade,” Daily Star, Jan. 11, 2010. For critical background on the Der Spiegel author who leveled the charges see Franklin Lamb, “‘Hezbollah Did It!’ Der Spiegel Tries Again,” Counterpunch, May 25, 2009, www.counterpunch.org/lamb05252009.html (accessed July 10, 2011). Other coverage of the issue includes AP, Dec. 24, 2009; UPI, Nov. 25, 2009; AP, June 20, 2009; and NYT, Dec. 13 and 15, 2011. Israeli antidrug authorities, who say Hezbollah facilitates the drug trade mainly to gain military intelligence, have played up the narco-terrorist threat as part of a domestic campaign to curb drug abuse. An adver- tising campaign launched in 2008 featured billboards that showed an image of Hezbol- lah’s leader with a smoking pipe and the words “At the end of every joint sits Nasrallah” (AP, Dec. 24, 2009). 102. Library of Congress, A Global Overview of Narcotics-Funded Terrorist and Other Extremist Groups, 77–78. 103. See, e.g., Phil Williams, “The Nature of Drug-Trafficking Networks,” Current History (April 1998): 154–59. 104. Mackey, Lebanon, 266n, 154; Michael Davie, “Demarcation Lines in Contem- porary Beirut,” 38–39. 105. Ionnis Michaletos, “Organized Crime in the Caucasus,” International Analyst Network, Nov. 28, 2009, www.analyst-network.com/article.php?art_id=3237 (accessed July 10, 2011). 106. Labrousse and Laniel, The World Geopolitics of Drugs, 1998/1999, 36. 107. Somer, “Armenian Terrorism and the Narcotic Traffic,” 22; Andrew Purvis, “Marseille’s Ethnic Bouillabaisse,” Smithsonian, Dec. 2007. 108. Charles Siragusa to Commissioner Anslinger, report, Sept. 2, 1950, FBN records. 242 notes to Chapter 7

109. FBN biographies in Appendix Exhibit 2, Organized Crime and Illicit Traffic in Narcotics, Part 4, 948–49 (see above, Chap. 2n11). 110. L’Express, Jan. 28, 1983, and April 15, 1983. 111. Alvin Moscow, Merchants of Heroin: An In-Depth Portrayal of Business in the Underworld (New York: Dial Press, 1968), 85. The name of the trafficker he profiles, Levon Levonian, is a pseudonym. 112. Michael C. Hudson, The Precarious Republic: Political Modernization in Leba- non (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985), 140, 165n; NYT, May 26, 2009. 113. Edward Djerejian, “The Political Structure of the Armenian Community in Lebanon,” in Beirut embassy to Department of State, airgram A-628, Jan. 20, 1967, SOC 12-1 Lebanon, box 3081, Central Foreign Policy Files, 1967–69, DS records. 114. “The Armenian Revolutionary Federation,” Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Armenian_Revolutionary_Federation (accessed July 10, 2011); NYT, May 26, 2009. 115. Djerejian, “The Political Structure of the Armenian Community in Lebanon.” 116. Randal, Going All the Way, 134, 160; Chehabi, Distant Relations, 171. 117. Hudson, The Precarious Republic, 140. 118. Randal, Going All the Way, 134; “The Armenian Revolutionary Federation.” Randal notes, however, that one of the main commanders of Phalangist troops in Beirut in the 1970s was Nazir Najarian, a Lebanese Armenian (104). 119. Michael Gunter, “Contemporary Aspects of Armenian Terrorism,” Symposium on International Terrorism (Ankara: Ankara University, 1984), 112. 120. Gunter, “Contemporary Aspects of Armenian Terrorism,” 112–13; Andrew Corsun, “Armenian Terrorism: A Profile,” Department of State Bulletin, August 1982, 31–35; Judith Perera, “An End to Armed Propaganda?” The Middle East, Sept. 1983, 18– 20; WSJ, August 16, 1983; Armenian Reporter, Jan. 17, 1985, and Feb. 7, 1985. The French daily Le Matin claimed that ASALA leader Hagop Hagopian had been part of the Black September group that kidnapped members of the Israeli Olympic team at the 1972 Munich games. 121. Adams, “Lessons and Links of Anti-Turk Terrorism”; Gunter, “Contemporary Aspects of Armenian Terrorism,” 111–13, 121–22; Corsun, “Armenian Terrorism: A Profile.” 122. Warner, “The Relationship Between Terrorism and Drug Trafficking.” 123. Testimony of Nathan Adams, Senate Committee on Labor and Human Re- sources, Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, 107 (see above, Chap. 1n97). 124. Tarik Somer, “Armenian Terrorism and the Narcotic Traffic,” Symposium on International Terrorism (Ankara: Ankara University, 1984), 23–24. 125. Mark Steinitz, “Insurgents, Terrorists and the Drug Trade,” Washington Quar- terly 8 (fall 1985): 145. This report, however, surfaced in the Turkish press and thus should be taken with appropriate caution. 126. Turkish Daily News (Ankara), Jan. 17, 1994; Somer, “Armenian Terrorism and the Narcotic Traffic,”26 –27; “Susurluk Report by the Prime Ministry Inspection Board,” NOTES to Chapter 7 243

Annex I, and “The Third MIT Report,” Annex II, Human Rights Foundation of Turkey, 1998 Turkey Human Rights Report (Ankara: The Foundation, 2000). 127. Çatli’s death in 1996 in a car crash along with the head of the former deputy police chief of Istanbul and a Kurdish member of parliament caused a national furor, known as the Susurluk scandal. For Çatli’s criminal history see Kendal Nezan, “In the Shadow of Generals, Hired Killers and Drug Traffickers,” Le Monde Diplomatique, July 1998; Philip Robins, “Back from the Brink: Turkey’s Ambivalent Approaches to the Hard Drugs Issue,” Middle East Journal 62 (autumn 2008): 639; Today’s Zaman, August 19, 2008. Çatli is widely reputed to have arranged the prison escape of Mehmet Ali Agca, and some suspect Çatli and his backers of supporting Agca’s attempt to assassinate Pope John Paul II in 1982. 128. Somer, “Armenian Terrorism and the Narcotic Traffic,”25 ; Steinitz, “Insurgents, Terrorists and the Drug Trade”; statements of DEA director Francis Mullen and Nathan Adams, Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Drugs and Terrorism, 1984 19, 107–8 (see above, Chap. 1n97); statement of David Westrate, deputy assistant administrator, DEA, in Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Committee, joint hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency, and Drug Trafficking, 148. 129. LAT, July 5, 1995; U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, “Armenia: Profile of Asylum Claims and Country Conditions,” May 1996. For allegations of Tashnaq drug trafficking in Azerbaijan see Alain Labrousse, “Conflict, Drugs and Mafia Activities: Contribution to the Preparatory Work for the Hague Peace Conference,” May 11–16, 1999 (March 1999), www.parl.gc.ca/37/1/parlbus/ commbus/senate/com-e/ille-e/presentation-e/labrousse2-e.htm (accessed July 10, 2011); and Alain Labrousse, ed., Dictionnaire géopolitique des drogues: La drogue dans 134 pays (Brussels: De Boeck & Larcier, 2003), 67. 130. CDS, Feb. 17, 1983. 131. Somer, “Armenian Terrorism and the Narcotic Traffic,” 22–23. Arsan’s two ethnic Armenian partners were Samir Arisian and Marcel Makarian. 132. Le Matin, June 22, 1984; CDS, Dec. 16, 1982. Another source claims that Arsan was “a key morphine-base supplier to the former French Connection. In April 1973 Arsan attempted to sell 200 kilos of morphine base to a U.S. undercover agent in Italy. Caught red-handed, he agreed to become an informant for both the United States and the Italian government. But he managed to mask his continuing trafficking in arms and drugs; in the meantime, he simply turned in competitors.” See Nathan Adams, “Drugs for Guns: The Bulgarian Connection,” Reader’s Digest, Nov. 1983, 95. 133. Le Matin, June 22, 1984. 134. CDS, Feb. 17, 1983, notes the mysterious escapes of Herbert Oberhofer, a major heroin trafficker and informant for the Guardia di Finanza, and Massimiliano Staffler, who was reputedly well connected politically. 135. Le Matin, June 22, 1984; La Repubblica, March 3, 1983. On the Israeli connection 244 notes to Chapter 7 to the drug-linked Swiss financiers Hans and Albert Kunz and to Lebanese arms intermediaries see CDS, Sept. 8, 1987; La Repubblica, Nov. 26, 1982. 136. Le Matin, June 22, 1984; CDS, Feb. 26, 1983 (Cantas). 137. Labrousse, La droga, el dinero y las armas, 150. 138. John Rees, “How the Communists Are Using Narcotics in the War on America,” American Opinion, June 1985, 74. 139. Sterling, Octopus, 159–60; Newsday, The Heroin Trail, 53–57; Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf, 469; Henry Kamm, “Plot on Pope Aside, Bulgaria’s Notoriety Rests on Smuggling,” NYT, Jan. 28, 1983. For much more background on Kintex and allegations of Bulgarian complicity in the drug trade see House Foreign Affairs Commit- tee, Subcommittee on Europe and Middle East, hearings, Bulgarian-Turkish Narcotics Connection: United States–Bulgarian Relations and International Drug Trafficking, 98th Cong., 2nd sess., 1984; Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate Foreign Relations Com- mittee, joint hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency, and Drug Trafficking, 106–7, 135, 163; Misha Glenny, McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Underworld (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008), 6; Nathan Adams, “Drugs for Guns: The Bulgarian Connec- tion,” 86–98; Peter Furhman, “The Bulgarian Connection,” Forbes, April 17, 1989, 40–44; New Orleans Times-Picayune, May 1, 1984; CT, July 29, 1984; NYT, Feb. 7, 1985; Hurriyet (Istanbul), May 16, 1989; BTA (Sofia), August 14, 1991. 140. LT, Feb. 20, 1983 (South Africa); Senate Judiciary Committee and Senate For- eign Relations Committee, joint hearings, International Terrorism, Insurgency, and Drug Trafficking, 61 (Christian militias), 118 (Nathan Adams on PLO), and 116 (Henze and South Africa). The same hearings (107) noted that Bulgarian authorities were reining Kintex in. Jonathan Randal reported that “this communist state, evidently embarrassed by allegations of participation in the 1981 papal shooting and a variety of other illicit activities, has started cracking down on international drug and arms traffickers who have operated here for more than a decade. In the new antismuggling campaign, Bulgaria in recent months has tightened spot checks at airports, land frontiers and seaports. The state-controlled press has trumpeted a series of arrests. The effort appears to constitute direct acknowledgment of past laxity in dealing with international criminal circles” (WP, May 15, 1983). 141. “The Heroin Trail and Grey Wolves Guns,” Searchlight, Nov. 1980, 7; NYT, Oct. 10, 1972; Edward Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection (New York: Sheridan Square, 1986), 57–58. 142. Adams testimony, Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, 109 (see above, Chap. 1n97); La Repubblica, Dec. 9, 1982. The latter story notes that when a Turkish journalist tracked Celenk down in Sofia, Celenk’s bodyguards stabbed him without police intervention. The director of Celenk’s residence, the Hotel Vitosha, was a former colonel in the Bulgarian army. 143. NYT, July 13, 1985, and July 30, 1985. However, a confidential DEA memo (Mi- NOTES to Chapter 7 245 chael Meyrick, “Sharkarchi Trading Company,” Jan. 3, 1989) alleges that Celenk died in Turkish police custody before any interrogation could take place. 144. La Repubblica, March 3, 1983. 145. Sterling, Octopus, 165, 167; CDS, Dec. 31, 1982. 146. Panorama, Sept. 8, 1990. 147. Nathan Adams testimony, Senate Committee on Labor and Human Resources, Drugs and Terrorism, 1984, 109 (see above, Chap. 1n97). Wakkas was arrested in Athens after returning from a trip to Sofia. See CDS, Dec. 23, 1982. 148. Armi & droga: L’atto d’accusa del giudice Carlo Palermo (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1988), 49. 149. Armi & droga, 59–60, 162–63. 150. Sterling, Octopus, 159. As just one example, Palermo’s investigation kept running across connections to Roberto Calvi, a member of the powerful and shadowy ma- sonic lodge Propaganda Due, and to his Banco Ambrosiano, whose largest shareholder was the Vatican Bank. Calvi’s fraudulent bank collapsed in 1982, and Calvi turned up hanged underneath Blackfriar’s Bridge in London, making his death a source of endless investigation and speculation. For some of the connections between Arsan’s company Stibam and Calvi see L’Espresso, Dec. 12, 1982. 151. Ralph Blumenthal, Last Days of the Sicilians (New York: Crown, 1988), 101; and DEA report by Michael Meyrick, “Sharkarchi Trading Company,” Jan. 3, 1989. Despite outstanding Interpol warrants, Musullulu was not captured by Turkish police until 1998. See Milliyet, Nov. 6, 1998. 152. Makhlouf, Culture et trafic de drogue au Liban, 96–99; CDS, Sept. 13, 1997 (Musullulu and Bulgaria); La Repubblica, Nov. 8 and Nov. 9, 1988 (Musullulu in Bul- garia and Shakarco AG); Naylor, Wages of Crime, 224 (Shakarchi and Zurich police); Reuters, Nov. 9, 1988 (Shakarchi denial); DEA report by Michael Meyrick, “Sharkarchi Trading Company,” Jan. 3, 1989; Newsday, April 2, 1989 (DEA assessment and Koyome- jian); Robert Friedman, “The Money Pit,” New York, Jan. 22, 1996, 33; Ehrenfeld, Evil Money, 139 (nothing proven against Shakarchi) and 142 (CIA); L’Espresso, July 2, 1989 (Turkish trafficker and Shakarchi); Newsweek, March 13 and April 10, 1989 (CIA); TGM, Dec. 26, 1988; and WSJ, Feb. 27, 1989 (Kopp resignation); Gazetta Ticinese, March 7, 1989 (Chief Prosecutor Rudolf Gerber); Swiss Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry, Evé- nements survenus au DFJP: Rapport de la commission d’enquête parlementaire (CEP), Nov. 22, 1989, 724 (Musullulu) and 736 (Shakarchi). Ehrenfeld notes that a subpoena to Sharkarchi issued by the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York was dismissed within weeks because of obviously faulty claims. She writes: “The only possible conclusion is that the information in the subpoena was falsified by someone in the Unit- ed States to ensure Shakarchi’s exoneration” (152). 153. WSJ, Dec. 2, 1988. 154. CDS, Sept. 13, 1997; Peter Furhman, “The Bulgarian Connection,” Forbes, April 17, 246 notes to Chapters 7 and 8

1989; Makhlouf, Culture et trafic de drogue au Liban, 99–100; Ehrenfeld, Dirty Money, 149 (Ticino bust and Mirza arrest); Reuters, March 13, 1989 (indictment). 155. WSJ, Dec. 2, 1988; Newsday, April 2, 1989. 156. Observer, Dec. 4, 1988. 157. Independent on Sunday, March 18, 1990. 158. Reuters, August 28, 1990; Neue Zuercher Zeitung, Sept. 15, 1990; Ehrenfeld, Evil Money, 154.

Chapter 8 1 On the link between one-party systems and corruption, see Louise Shelley, “Cor- ruption and Organized Crime in Mexico in the Post-PRI Transition,” Journal of Contem- porary Criminal Justice 17 (2001): 215. 2. Paul Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict,” World Bank, June15 , 2000, www .globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/182/33884.html (accessed July 10, 2011); and Paul Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy,” in Leashing the Dogs of War: Conflict Management in a Divided World (Washington: USIP Press, 2007). For a more empirical paper see Paul Collier and Anke Hoeffler, “Greed and Grievance in Civil War,” CSAE Working Paper Series 2002, no. 1, March 13, 2002. Paul Collier, “Rebellion as a Quasi-Criminal Activity,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 44 (Dec. 2000): 839–53, models rebellion as a form of organized crime “in which the rebel objective is to loot natural resource rents on a continuing basis” (840–41). His references to organized crime suggest a misunderstanding of the phenomenon. Most organized criminal groups, if successful, work in collusion with the state rather than making war against it. Examples include the Yakuza, which supported the Japanese Liberal Democratic Party; Mexican drug cartels that thrived with support from the ruling Institutional Revolu- tionary Party; and American Mafia groups, whose strong show of patriotism and anti- communism earned them a hands-off stance from J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Italian crime expert Alison Jamieson has underscored the notion that organized crime and terrorism are quite distinct phenomena. Essentially, says Jamieson, “the terrorist is a revolutionary, with clear political objectives involving the overthrow of a government, and a set of articulated strategies to achieve them. Organized crime actors are inherently conservative: they tend to resist political upheaval and seek conditions of order and stability that are more conducive to their ultimate goals of financial accumulation” (Alison Jamieson, “The Use of Terrorism by Organized Crime: An Italian Case Study,” in Root Causes of Ter- rorism: Myths, Reality and Ways Forward, ed. Tore Bjørgo [New York: Routledge, 2005], 165). The U.S. National Intelligence Center reached similar conclusions in a study of forces reshaping international conflicts and state relationships over the next few decades: “Organized crime groups usually do not want to see governments toppled but thrive in countries where governments are weak, vulnerable to corruption, and unable or unwill- ing to consistently enforce the rule of law. . . . Organized criminal groups . . . are unlikely NOTES to Chapter 8 247 to form long-term strategic alliances with terrorists. Organized crime is motivated by the desire to make money and tends to regard any activity beyond that required to effect profit as bad for business. For their part, terrorist leaders are concerned that ties to non-ideological partners will increase the chance of successful police penetration or that profits will seduce the faithful” (National Intelligence Center,Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council’s 2020 Project—NIC 2004–13 [Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office,2004 ], 96). 3. Collier, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict,” 2000. 4. See especially Syed Mansoob Murshed and Mohammad Zulfan Tadjoeddin, “Reappraising the Greed and Grievance Explanations for Violent Internal Conflict,” MICROCON Research Working Paper 2, Sept. 2007 (Brighton: MICROCON, 2007); and Syed Mansoob Murshed and Mohammad Zulfan Tadjoeddin, “Revisiting the Greed and Grievance Explanations for Violent Internal Conflict,” in Journal of International De- velopment 21 (2009): 87–111; Karen Ballentine and Heiko Nitzschke, “Beyond Greed and Grievance: Policy Lessons from Studies in the Political Economy of Armed Conflict,” IPA Policy Report Program on Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (International Peace Academy, Oct. 2003); Laurie Nathan, “‘The Frightful Inadequacy of Most of the Statis- tics’: A Critique of Collier and Hoeffler on Causes of Civil War,” Crisis States Discussion Paper 11 (London: Crisis States Development Research Centre, LSE, Sept. 2005); and Ro- land Marchal and Christine Messiant, “De l’avidité des rebelles: L’analyse économique de la guerre civile selon Paul Collier,” Critique Internationale 16 (July 2002). 5. Murshed and Tadjoeddin, in “Reappraising,” argue that “for the forces behind either greed or grievance to take the form of large-scale violence there must be other factors at work, specifically a weakening of what Addison and Murshed (2001) call the ‘social contract’. . . . Therefore, even if rents from capturable resources do constitute a sizeable prize, violent conflict is unlikely to take hold if a country has a framework of widely-agreed rules, both formal and informal, that govern the allocation of resources, including resource rents, and the peaceful settlement of grievances. Such a viable social contract can be sufficient to restrain, if not eliminate, opportunistic behaviour such as large-scale theft of resource rents, and the violent expression of grievance.” The better histories of modern Lebanon do an excellent job of detailing just how its social contract broke down under internal and external pressure. 6. See especially Picard’s typically incisive and nuanced essay “Trafficking, Rents, and Diaspora in the Lebanese War” (see above, Introduction, n16). 7. See, e.g., Philippe Le Billon, Fuelling War: Natural Resources and Armed Conflict, Adelphi Paper 373 (London: Routledge, 2005); Mats Berdal and David M. Malone, eds., Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000). Syed Murshed and Mohammad Tadjoeddin take Collier and Hoeffler to task for not including illicit gemstones and drugs in their analysis of the link between primary commodity exports and civil conflict (“Revisiting the Greed and Grievance Explanations 248 notes to Chapter 8 for Violent Internal Conflict”). For examples of explicit consideration of drugs in this literature see Michael L. Ross, “Oil, Drugs, and Diamonds: The Varying Roles of Natu- ral Resources in Civil War,” in The Political Economy of Armed Conflict: Beyond Greed and Grievance, ed. Karen Ballentine and Jake Sherman (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2003), 47–72; and, in the same volume, Alexandra Guáqueta, “The Colombian Conflict: Politi- cal and Economic Dimensions,” 73–106; as well as Picard’s “Trafficking, Rents, and Di- aspora in the Lebanese War” (see above, Introduction, n16). For a review of some other works that focus on smuggling and corruption as a part of war, see Patrick A. Mello, “In Search of New Wars: The Debate About a Transformation of War,” European Journal of International Relations 16 (March 2010): 297–309. 8. Paul Collier et al., Breaking the Conflict Trap: Civil War and Development Policy (Washington: World Bank, 2003), 42, 44. At about the same time, Michael Ross reported that his own study of seventeen conflicts linked to natural resources found drugs implicated in five. See Michael Ross, “Natural Resources and Civil War: An Overview,” UCLA Department of Political Science, August 15, 2003, www.polisci.ucla.edu/faculty/ ross/WBpaper.pdf (accessed Nov. 12, 2011); see also Michael Ross, “How Does Natural Resource Wealth Influence Civil War? Evidence from 13 Cases,” International Organiza- tion 58 (2004): 35–67; and Michael Ross, “What Do We Know About Natural Resources and Civil War?” Journal of Peace Research 41 (2004): 337–56. 9. Richard Snyder, “Does Lootable Wealth Breed Disorder? A Political Economy of Extraction Framework,” Comparative Political Studies 39 (Oct. 2006): 944. 10. Picard, “The Political Economy of Civil War in Lebanon,” 295. 11. See, e.g., Picard, “Trafficking, Rents, and Diaspora in the Lebanese War,” 30; and Salmon, “Militia Politics”: “In Lebanon, there are no natural resources to speak of, and whilst drugs, particularly hashish and poppies, became an important source of profit for the armed groups this occurred only after the outbreak of the war in 1976” (31). 12. Evans, “Evolution of a Drug Economy,” 4. 13. Mark Bowden, Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (New York: Penguin, 2002). 14. Kamal Dib estimates that militia revenues totaled $40 billion from 1975 to 1990, of which nearly one-third ($12.5 billion) came from drugs. Of course, these figures, like others cited above, must be treated as educated guesses (Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 157). 15. Endres, “Economic Ambitions in War,” 5. 16. Jürgen Endres, “Profiting from War,” 120, 134. In a similar vein Elizabeth Picard argues that although “primordial identities and group solidarities” drove many of the wedges that divided Lebanese society and politics, in time these factors were “super- seded by the crude and growing greed of the antagonist parties,” fed by easy profits from drugs, land speculation, and foreign remittances. “Because drugs (and oil) were rapidly produced, easily moved and immediately consumed goods, the enormous profits they generated were threatened by the return of the state and its concomitant imposition of NOTES to Chapter 8 249 legality and regulations. As these short-term activities became more and more intense, profit became the main driving force behind the fighting, at the expense of political and ideological rationales” (Picard, “Trafficking, Rents, and Diaspora in the Lebanese War,” 24, 28–29). On “greed” as a factor in extending the civil war see also Samir Makdisi, The Lessons of Lebanon, 41; Samir Makdisi and Richard Sadaka, “The Lebanese Civil War, 1975–1990,” American University of Beirut, Lecture and Working Paper Series, no. 3 (2003), 32; and Samir Makdisi and Richard Sadaka, “The Lebanese Civil War, 1975–1990,” in Un- derstanding Civil War: Evidence and Analysis, vol. 2, Europe, Central Asia, and Other Re- gions, ed. Paul Collier and Nicholas Sambanis (Washington: World Bank, 2005), esp. 73. 17. David Keen, The Economic Functions of Violence in Civil Wars, Adelphi Paper 320 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 1998), 11–12. For a general treatment of the role of criminal interests in preventing peace see James Cockayne, “Crime, Corruption and Violent Economies” (see above, Chap. 5n213). Looking at a broad range of factors in recent conflicts, James Fearon argues briefly that the availability of contraband, including illicit drugs, is an important explanatory factor in the duration of some civil wars: “It may be that the business synergies between rebel groups and drug traffickers are so strong that any rebel group that can avoid destruction long enough will eventually move into this area.” See James D. Fearon, “Why Do Some Civil Wars Last So Much Longer Than Others?” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 3 (May 2004): 284, 297. Paul Collier, Anke Hoeffler, and Måns Söderbom, “On the Duration of Civil War,” Journal of Peace Research 41, no. 3 (May 2004): 253–73, find evidence that duration is linked to the profits that can be reaped during a conflict from drugs. Svante Cornell emphasizes the effect that drug profits can have on the motivations of insurgents; see Svante Cornell, “Narcotics and Armed Conflict: Interaction and Implications,”Studies in Conflict & Ter- rorism 30 (2007): 207–27. 18. Snyder, “Does Lootable Wealth Breed Disorder? 959. 19. For a general treatment of this phenomenon see Željko Branović and Sven Chojnacki, “The Logic of Security Markets: Governance by Violent Groups in Areas of Limited Statehood,” paper presented at the International Studies Association in New York, Feb. 17, 2009. 20. Picard, “Trafficking, Rents, and Diaspora in the Lebanese War,” 33. Collabora- tion among rival ethnic groups was also the norm among criminals in the war-torn Bal- kans. See, e.g., Dejan Anastasijevic, “Organized Crime in the Western Balkans,” Trends in Organized Crime 11 (2008): 430. 21. For a slightly dated but still relevant discussion and typology see Labrousse, “Con- flict, Drugs and Mafia Activities.” Club de Madrid, “Links Between Terrorism and Drug Trafficking: A Case of ‘Narcoterrorism’?” (Jan. 27, 2005), http://summit.clubmadrid.org/ causes/links-between-terrorism-and-drug-trafficking-a-case-of-narcoterrorism.html (accessed Nov. 15, 2011), reports “a link between armed conflicts and illicit drug production and trafficking” in about thirty countries. 250 notes to Chapter 8

22. Jonathan Marshall, “Opium and the Politics of Gangsterism in National- ist China,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars 8 (July–Sept. 1976): 19–48; Edward R. Slack, Opium, State and Society: China’s Narco-Economy and the Guomindang, 1924– 1937 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001); Alan Baumler, The Chinese and Opium Under the Republic: Worse Than Floods and Wild Beasts (Albany: State Univer- sity of New York Press, 2007). For a more urban perspective see Brian G. Martin, The Shanghai Green Gang: Politics and Organized Crime, 1919–1937 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 23. Peter Andreas, “The Clandestine Political Economy of War and Peace in Bosnia,” International Studies Quarterly 48, no. 1 (March 2004): 32. For a tiny sampling of other reports on the Balkans conflict and drugs see the Independent, Dec. 10, 1993; IHT, June 6, 1994; SFC, June 10, 1994; CSM, Oct. 20, 1994; IHT, June 6, 1994; and Marko Milvojevic, “The ‘Balkan Medellin,’” Jane’s Intelligence Review 7 (Feb. 1, 1995): 68. 24. Věra Stojarová, “Organized Crime in the Western Balkans,” HUMSEC Journal, no. 1 (2007): 96. See also note 20 above. 25. Nik Steinberg, “The Monster and Monterrey: The Politics and Cartels of Mexi- co’s Drug War,” Nation, June 13, 2011; see also Luis Astorga, “Drug Trafficking in Mexico: A First General Assessment,” UNESCO Discussion Paper No. 36, www.unesco.org/most/ astorga.htm (accessed July 10, 2011); and Shelley, “Corruption and Organized Crime in Mexico in the Post-PRI Transition,” 215. 26. Richard Snyder and Angelica Duran-Martinez, “Does Illegality Breed Violence? Drug Trafficking and State-Sponsored Protection Rackets,” Crime, Law and Social Change 52 (2009): 253–73. This article has insightful observations on the breakdown of this orderly system in Mexico. 27. Washington Post, Jan. 2, 2012. 28. Marshall, Drug Wars, 49–53. 29. Allan Dodds Frank, “Unwelcome Side Effects from Peace in Afghanistan,” Forbes, August 8, 1988. The article added, “Many observers suspect that associates of Pakistan’s president, General Zia el-Haq, are involved in financing and protecting drug deals. . . . But Pakistan, which received more than $640 million in overt American aid last year, is an important ally, and drug enforcement officials find little enthusiasm elsewhere in the U.S. government for pursuing leads.” 30. William A. Byrd and Doris Buddenberg, “Introduction and Overview,” in Af- ghanistan’s Drug Industry: Structure, Functioning, Dynamics, and Implications for Coun- ter-Narcotics Policy, ed. William A. Byrd and Doris Buddenberg (Kabul: United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, 2006), 7. 31. UNODC, Addiction, Crime and Insurgency: The Transnational Threat of Afghan Opium (Vienna: UNODC, 2009), 22. 32. Byrd and Buddenberg, Afghanistan’s Drug Industry, 1. 33. Peter Dale Scott, “Afghanistan: Heroin-Ravaged State,” Global Research, May 8, NOTES to Chapter 8 and Appendix 251

2009, www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=13524 (accessed July 10, 2011). The term ravaged state has also been applied to Somalia; see Kawsar Nuur, “Ravaged State of Somalia,” Warkamaanta, July 22, 2010, http://warkamaanta.com/index.php?option=com _content&view=article&id=1626:ravaged-state-of-somalia&catid=70&Itemid=123 (accessed July 10, 2011).

Appendix 1. Francisco E. Thoumi, “The Numbers Game: Let’s All Guess the Size of the Illegal Drug Industry!” Journal of Drug Issues 35, no. 1 (winter 2005): 185–200; LaMond Tullis, Unintended Consequences: Illegal Drugs and Drug Policies in Nine Countries (Boul- der: Lynne Rienner, 1995), 36–39; Douglas W. Payne, “Drugs into Money into Power: A Global Challenge,” Freedom Review 27 (July-August 1996): 9. Economist and noted drug analyst Peter Reuter complained in 1996 of the “essentially madcap series of federal figures on international production and prices that make a mockery of the whole enterprise. These estimates and their components are so inconsistent and erratic that they demonstrate what might reasonably be called a ‘reckless disregard’ for the truth” (Peter Reuter, “The Mismeasurement of Illegal Drug Markets,” in Exploring the Under- ground Economy: Studies of Illegal and Unreported Activity, ed. Susan Pozo (Kalamazoo, MI: W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research, 1996), 63. For methodological considerations of estimating the size of drug markets in a period and place of relative calm, quite unlike Lebanon, see Byrd and Buddenberg, Afghanistan’s Drug Industry, 2–4. 2. Jonathan Marshall, “CIA Assets and the Rise of the Guadalajara Connection,” Crime, Law and Social Change 16 (1991): 90. 3. Statement of Joseph E. Kelley, Associate Director, National Security and Interna- tional Affairs Division, U.S. General Accounting Office, to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, hearing, Status Report on GAO’s Worldwide Review of Narcotics Control Programs, 100th Cong., 1st sess., 1987, 4. On the politicization of Boliv- ian drug estimates see also Tullis, Unintended Consequences, 36. 4. Atlanta Constitution, Oct. 18, 1988. 5. INCSR, 1985, 17. 6. INCSR, 1988, 16. 7. INCSR, 1991, 7–8 (emphasis in original). 8. INCSR, 1985, 201. Of great relevance to Lebanon, it also noted, “the figures for hashish production are not based upon empirical assessment” (INCSR, 1986, 16). 9. INCSR, 1985, 202; INCSR, 1986, 244. 10. INCSR, 1991, 303. 11. Makhlouf, Culture et trafic de drogue au Liban, 24. 12. Eisenberg, “The World’s Largest Drug Field,” E2519–20. 13. Traboulsi, “The Role of War in State and Society Transformation—the Lebanese Case.” 252 notes to Appendix

14. Widlanski, “Lessons from President Assad.” 15. Cwerman, “Lebanon’s Valley of Drugs.” 16. George Krimsky, “One of Lebanon’s Last Bastions Trembles,” LAT, April 1, 1979. 17. Makhlouf, Culture et trafic de drogue au Liban, 129. 18. Dib, Warlords and Merchants, 135. 19. Endres, “Profiting from War,” 130. 20. Picard, “Trafficking, Rents, and Diaspora in the Lebanese War,” 32, and n27. 21. Georges Corm, “Militia Hegemony and Reestablishment of the State,” in Peace for Lebanon? From War to Reconstruction, ed. Deirdre Collings (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 1994), 218. 22. William W. Harris, The New Face of Lebanon, 207. 23. Mackey, Lebanon, 228–29. 24. NYT, Dec. 6, 1981. 25. Israeli police commander Rafi Peled, cited in Maariv, Sept. 27, 1991. 26. Schumer report, 8. 27. Philadelphia Inquirer, Feb. 7, 1991. 28. Rémi Favret, “Deadly Harvest.” Index

Abizeid, Joseph, 93 Arab Red Knights, 104 Abraham, Antoine, 70 Arafat, Yasir, 10, 79, 142, 144–145 Abu Abbas, 126, 147 Araman, Antoine, 202n81 Abu Nidal, 122, 126, 142, 154, 237n51 Arens, Moshe, 139 Aburish, Said, 54, 57 Argentina, 44, 119, 125, 151, 232n75 Adams, James, 145, 146 Armado, Harvey, 52–53 Adams, Nathan, 144 Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation Adham, Kamal, 54, 72, 73, 199n40 of Armenia (ASALA), 154–155 Afghanistan, 29, 121, 160, 169, 172–173 Armenians, 14, 62, 72, 147, 152–162 Alamuddin, Najib, 58 Arms dealing and smuggling, 11, 12, 31, 44, Alaouie, Mounir, 42, 44, 200n51, 201n62 47, 50, 54, 70–74, 76, 85, 92, 103, 109, 116, Alberti, Gerlando, 159 167; al-Kassar family, 124–128 Albertini, Dominique, 43, 44, 201n62 Arsan, Henri, 156–157, 243n132 Alexander, Yonah, 144 Aslan, Yekheskiel, 138 Amal, 62, 94, 95, 101, 107, 108, 109, 111, 149, Aspin, Les, 102 170 Assad, Firaas, 122–123 Amhaz, Abdel Mawla, 103 Assad, Hafez, 79, 114, 116, 117, 126, 132 Anderson, Jack, 124, 145 Assad, Reiss, 129 Anderson, Terry, 120, 122 Assad, Rifaat, 116, 119, 122–124 Andreas, Peter, 12, 170 Association of Lebanese Bankers, 54 Anghessa, Aldo, 147 Astorga, Luis, 171 Angioletti, Thomas, 156–157 Attie, James, 42, 134, 200n56 Anslinger, Harry, 36–38, 40 Australia, 31, 106, 146–147 Aoun, Michel, 108–111 Aviv, Juval, 232n71 Arab Communist Organization, 69 Azizeh, Edmond, 40–41, 42, 43, 199n42, Arab Liberation Front, 69, 142 200n56

253 254 index

Azzam, Abraham, 99, 101 Cali Cartel, 125 Calvi, Roberto, 245n150 Baalbek, 15, 18, 25, 27, 28, 94, 116, 132, 150 Cammarata, Sam, 145 Badran, Tony, 79 Canada, 64, 75, 78, 92–93, 95, 111, 125, 153, Baker, James, 131 219n97; Montreal, 28, 64, 92–93 Balkans, 1, 12, 164, 170–171 Cantas, Mehmet, 157, 158 Banna, Mahmoud, 23 Cantürk, Behçet, 155 Barberot, Roger, 54 Carbone, Paul, 35 Beaujolin, Gilbert, 54 Casino du Liban, 46–47, 49, 53, 205n6 Bedas, Yousef, 50–58 Castellani, Maurice, 203n88 Bedouins, 134–135 Çatli, Abdulla, 155 Begin, Menachem, 80 Celenk, Bekir, 158, 160 Beirut Harbor Corporation, 49 CEMA, 53 Bekaa Valley, 15–16, 18–19, 22–24, 27–28, Chabatay, Mayer, 134 62, 164; crop destruction, 19, 20–21, 67; Chamoun, Camille, 20, 21, 25, 39, 47, 72, hashish cultivation during civil war, 86, 154; 1958 crisis, 8, 21, 73, 154; CIA, 52– 89–92; Hezbollah, 150; opium culti- 53, 154; defeated by Phalangists, 83–84, vation, 76–7, 93–95; PLO, 144; Syria, 86; Fishermen’s Dispute, 68; smuggling, 113–114, 130–132 68; Tiger militia, 62, 68, 79, 83, 147 Benyamin, Meir, 139–140 Chamoun, Dany, 62, 71; exiled to France, Berri, Nabih, 95, 149 84 Biro, Ali, 139 Chantiers navals de La Ciotat, 49, 53 Biro, Mohammed, 139, 236n36 Chase Manhattan Bank, 56 Bistoni, Albert, 201n63, 203n81 Chehab, Farid, 21, 38, 42 Blémant, Robert, 203n88 Chehab, Fuad, 8–9, 20, 44, 54, 153, 154 BNDD, 29, 63–64; breakup of French China, 170 Connection, 65–66; Operation Eagle, CIA, 32, 38, 53, 54; alleged protection of 2, 64 arms and drug traffickers, 92; arms Bodansky, Yosef, 149 supply to Christians, 70, 72–73; Bekir Borletti, Ferdinando, 147 Celenk, 158; bombing of its Beirut Bousquet, André, 159 station in 1983, 88; and Chamoun, British Bank of the Middle East, 74 52–53, 154; Corsican mafia, 35, 203n88; Brooks, David, 149 Cuban-American drug smugglers, Brotherhood of Eternal Love, 29–30 64; Intra Bank, 52–53; kidnapping of Buchalter, Louis, 197n11 William Buckley, 88, 98–99; Lebanon Bulgaria, 71, 125, 144, 158–159, 161 intervention in 1950s, 8, 52–53; Monser Bumpers, Dale, 101 al-Kassar, 127; Rifaat Assad, 124; Sha- Burma, 168 karchi Trading, 161; support for Bashir Bush, George H. W., and Syria, 114, 115, Gemayel, 86–87 118, 119, 131 Cil, Ismet, 157 INDEX 255

Civil wars, 12–13, 165–168 Dondola, Carlo, 199n41 Cocaine, 21, 103, 112, 116, 129, 160, 202n75 Druze forces, 62, 69, 104, 108, 110, 235n17 Colby, William, 154 Duba, Ali, 115, 119, 126 Coleman, Lester, 232n72 Dwyer, Willaim, 99 Collier, Paul, 165–166 Cotroni family, 92–93, 202n71, 203n81 Eddé, Pierre, 54 Crédit Suisse, 161, 162 Eddé, Raymond, 17, 31 Croce, Jean Baptiste, 201n63, 203n81 Egypt, 16, 17, 26, 41, 43, 135–136, 224n171; Cuba, 201n63 complaints about hashish trade, 19–20, Cummings, Samuel, 73 22, 24, 133 Cuntrera family, 64 Ehrenfeld, Rachel, 142–143, 149 Currency, counterfeit, 28 Eisenberg, Dennis, 143 Cusack, John, 66 El Asad, Ahmed, 15 Cwerman, Ralph, 67, 113, 143 El Etir, Youssef, 39, 43 Cyprus 25, 75, 81, 93, 95, 96, 97, 101, Eliopoulos brothers, 35, 197n12 105–106, 128, 129, 155, 224n169 Elkhamri, Mounir, 6 Endres, Jürgen, 167 Dabbagh, Sallah, 143 Erdem, Tegmen, 157 Dallal, Mohammed, 216n29 Escobar, Pablo, 129, 167 Darwish, Ismail, 147–148 Evans, Brian, 27 Davie, Michael, 51 Eveland, Wilbur Crane, 31, 62–63, 134 Dayle, Dennis, 45, 47, 134 Eytan, Rafael, 136 De Gaulle, Charles, 46 DEA, 89, 95; and Armenians, 155, 156–157; Fadel, Mounir Abou, 51 close ties to Samir Geagea, 97; counter- Faisal, King, 54, 55 terrorism operations, 95–102; departure Favret, Rémi, 103–104 from Lebanon, 75, 96; and Hezbollah, FBN, 2, 14, 19, 21, 22, 23, 29, 34, 37–38, 47, 150; and PLO, 145–146, 238n70g; and 153; and CIA, 102, 221n121; collaboration Syria, 114, 121, 125, 127, 131 with Lebanese, 39–41; French Connec- Dean, John Gunther, 86 tion, 35–36; on Lebanon’s importance DeFauw, Robert, 95 as a drug center, 38, 44; Sami Khoury, Delouette, Roger, 54 42–45, 134. See also BNDD; DEA Democratic Front for the Liberation of Fishermen’s Dispute, 67 Palestine (DFLP), 69, 126 Flugenheimer, Arthur, 197n11 Deuxième Bureau (military intelligence), Ford, Gerald, 31 9, 52, 53, 55, 153 Ford Foundation, 23 Diamond, Jack, 197n11 France, 2, 6, 8, 17, 23, 120, 123, 126, 129, 132, Dib, Kamal, 52, 54, 81 153, 155, 156, 158, 197n5; Mandate, 6, 16, Djerejian, Edward, 121 17, 34. See also French Connection Donahue, Steven John, 97 Francisci, Marcel, 46–48, 49, 53, 204n96 256 index

Franjieh, Paul, 93 Golden Triangle, 65, 164, 210n29 Franjieh, Suleiman, 26, 69, 79, 96, 104, Greco, Salvatore, 64 106; crushed by Phalangist assault in Greece, 25, 73, 75–76, 97, 152, 156, 213n69 1978, 83; election as president, 60; hash- Greek Orthodox, 6, 50, 51, 62, 137, 188n40 ish deal with Montreal mafia, 93; New Green Line, 70, 96 York Customs search, 31–32; Zgharta Guardians of the Cedars, 73, 79, 227n210 militia, 62 Guedikian, Artin, 14–15, 153 Franjieh, Tony, 32, 103, 217n50; killed by Guerini, Antoine, 45, 46 Phalangist attack, 83 French Connection, 33–48, 53, 64, 152; Habash, George, 126 demise, 65–66; heroin chemists in Leba- Haddad, Saad, 80, 136 non, 77, 129; Rosal case, 2, 36, 44 Haden-Guest, Anthony, 221n119 French Mandate, 34 Haidar, Ibrahim, 15, 17, 18, 190n18 Frey, Roger, 53 Haidar, Mustapha, 18 Halevy, David, 144 Galante, Carmine, 202n71 Hamadeh, Sabri, 15, 18, 25, 26 Gambino, Carlo, 201n64 Hammoud, Mahmoud, 140 Gazit, Shlomo, 136 Harris, William, 12 Geagea, Samir, 107; assassination of Harrouk, Antoine, 202n81, 202n82 Rashid Karami, 108; attack on Fran- Hashish, 14–32, 43; consumption by jieh family in 1978, 83; DEA, 97; drug Americans, 21; crop destruction, 19, finances, 97, 102, 104, 110, 226n200; 20–21, 67; “hippie trail,” 28; Israel, hashish deal with Montreal mafia, 92 133–141; oil, 29, 30, 125; origin of, 16; Geday, Adrian, 205n6 processing, 16–17; production and Gemayel, Amin, 87–88, 107, 108 smuggling during civil war, 75–76, Gemayel, Bashir, 60, 218n70; attacks on 89–92, 102, 110–111, 120 rival Maronite forces in 1978 and 1980, Hassid, Etty, 140 83; drugs, 84–85, 102, 217n59; elected Hawatmeh, Naif, 126 president, then assassinated, in 1982, Hawkins, Paula, 144 87; recruited by CIA, 86; support from Hazi, Ahmed, 128 Washington and Israel, 87–88, 218n65 Hekmatyar, Gulbeddin, 173 Gemayel, Jean Michel, 85 Helou, Charles, 9, 22–23, 26, 56 Gemayel, Pierre, 10, 40, 61, 69, 217; toler- Hermel, 20 ance for drug smuggling, 85 Heroin, 34–37, 41–45, 46; smuggling dur- Genovese, Vito, 201n64 ing civil war, 77–78, 85, 94–95, 102, 114, George, Clair, 98, 99 125, 128 Germany, 70, 75, 76, 96, 123, 127, 141, 146, Hezbollah, 107, 108; drugs, 148–152, 170 147, 159 Hindawi, Nezar, 128 Ghafari, Abdallah, 25 Hobeika, Elie, 74, 87, 107, 213n75, 226n207 Golden Crescent, 65, 164 Hoss, Selim, 108 INDEX 257

Hotel Phoenicia, 49 Jounieh, 29, 75, 80, 81, 91, 105, 137 Howeidi, Amin, 136 Jumblatt, Kamal, 25, 28, 62, 70, 79, 80; Hrawi, Elias, 110–112 207n49 Hughes, William, 101 Jumblatt, Walid, 80, 81, 88, 108, 109, 154, Hunchaq Party, 153–154 224n168; drugs, 116, 223n160 Hurley, Micheal, 96–97, 121, 123, 129 Justice Commandos Against Armenian Hussein, King, 44–45, 47 Genocide, 155

Ibrahim, Bardia, 106 Kamouh, Antoine, 205n19 Ibrahim, Ibrahim al-, 232n75 Kanaan, Ghazi, 115, 116, 129, 229n24 Independent Nasserite Movement, 62 Karami, Rashid, 107–108 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), Kassar, Ghassan al-, 78, 124–125 171 Kassar, Mohammed al-, 124 International Armament Corp., 73 Kassar, Monser al-, 124–128 Intra Bank, 49–58; arms trafficking, 50; Kay, Jean, 214n77 CIA, 53; collapse, 55–57; drug money Kechichian, Robert, 153 laundering, 51, 53; Palestinians, 56–57 Keen, David, 168 Iran, 126–127, 149, 154 Kelly, John, 113 Iran-Contra affair, 98–101, 126 Kevorkian, Hagop, 153, 202n81 Iraq, 107, 119 Keyrouz family, 233n82 Ireland, 29 Khalidi, Walid, 6 Irish Republican Army, 29, 143 Khashoggi, Adnan, 47, 73 Islamic Unification Movement, 104, 107 Khoury, Bechara, 16, 19; Intra Bank, 51 Israel: arms supply to Christians, 70, 73–74, Khoury, Emil and Habib, 198n22 81; attacked from Lebanon, 59, 61, 69, 80; Khoury, Khalil, 20 attacks on Lebanon, 59, 61, 69, 80, 87, 136, Khoury, Sami, 40–48, 134, 203 138–139; implicated in drug trade, 133– Kifner, John, 89, 90, 91, 108 141; police report on Syria and drugs, Kildow, Jeffrey, 66–67 115–117; Six-Day War, 9, 59; support for Kintex, 144, 158, 159, 161 Maronites during civil war, 83–84 Knight, Paul, 38, 39, 44, 45, 222n121 Italy, 28, 30, 35, 37, 42, 70, 71, 85, 95, 86, 120, Kopp, Elizabeth, 160, 161 123, 128, 147, 156, 157, 159, 198n23, 243n132 Kredieh, Mohammed Ramadan, 203n86 Kruger, Henrik, 65 Jafaar, Khalid, 127 Kunz brothers, 244n135 Jafar clan, 119, 122, 129 Kurds, 156, 157, 160 Jamil, Sharif Nasser Ben, 44–45 Jibril, Ahmed, 126, 127, 147 Labay, André, 47, 53 Johnson, Michael, 18 Lahoud, Gaby, 52, 53, 206n19 Jordan, 10, 44–45, 47, 51, 60, 72, 117, 128, Laviv, Yigal, 135 135, 146 Leary, Timothy, 30 258 index

Lebanese Customs, 14, 22, 25, 39–43, 112, Makkouk, Omar, 19, 39, 42, 43, 44, 63–64, 139, 193n69, 193n71 209, 212n36 Lebanese Forces, 80, 83, 110; support from Maria, Victor, 32, 146 Washington, 86 Marks, Dennis Howard, 29 Lebanese Front, 80 Maronites, 6, 54, 86; antagonism toward Lebanese National Movement, 79 Muslims and Palestinians, 9, 10, 57, 58, Lebanese Sûreté (Public Security), 17, 21, 60, 67; drug traffickers,20 , 28, 34, 40, 41, 26, 38–40, 42 70, 93, 103, 108, 112, 140, 190n19, 233n82; Lebanon: 1958 crisis, 8, 21; Arab-Israeli Israel, 57, 73–74, 83–84, 140; leaders, 10, 16, conflict, 59–61, 69; causes of conflict, 58, 61, 106; Syria, 83; ties to France, 6, 34 5–11, 68–69, 168–169; civil war deaths, Marrouri, Habib, 93 1; civil war violence, 69, 78–79, 84, 104, Marseille, 35, 43, 66, 153 108–111; corruption, 14–16, 38–40, pas- Masri, Niaf, 26 sim; diaspora, 74, 106; economic and Masri, Samih, 78 social disparities, 10–11; failed state, McClain, Allan, 61, 66 3, 12; French Mandate, 6, 17; Green McFarlane, Robert, 99 Plan, 22–24, 26, 110–111; Maronite McKay, John, 214n2 advantages, 6; militia groups, 61–62, Medellin Cartel, 129 70–74, 81, 91, 104, 107, 109 and pas- Meese, Edwin, 100, 101 sim; narco-state, 2, 38; National Pact Meouchi, Boulos Boutros, 58, 208n53 (or National Covenant), 7, 67, 167; Mexico, 3, 44, 63, 145, 171, 209n21, 210n27 Palestinian refugees, 10, 59, 66; political MI6 (British intelligence service), 29, 38, 73 bosses (zuama), 7; social and economic Middle East Airlines, 29, 55, 159, 206n26 disparities, 10–11; war economy, 13; Mirza, Ramazan, 160, 161 and passim Mondoloni, Paul, 201n63 Ledeen, Michael, 144 Moscow Narodny Bank, 55 Levitsky, Melvyn, 114 Moussa, Victor, 205n6 Livingstone, Neil, 144 Mubarak, Hosni, 93 LSD, 30 Mughnieh, Fouad, 236n38 Luciano, Charles, 200n52 Musullulu, Yasr Avni, 159–161 Ludwig, Daniel, 55–56 Lyon, Louis, 35 Nahara, Ramzi, 140, 236n38 Narco-terrorism, 4 Mackey, Sandra, 70 Nasser, Gamel Abdel, 8, 22 Mafia: Canadian, 92–93, 111; Corsican, National Liberation Party, 62 34–36, 43, 46–48, 53, 153; Italian, 64, 78, National Narcotics Intelligence Consum- 120, 123, 125, 147, 153, 158–160; U.S., 29, ers Committee, 179 43, 47, 64 Naylor, R.T., 56, 68, 135 Magharian, Barkev and Jean, 161–162 North, Oliver, 98–101, 126 Makhlouf, Georges, 155 Nugan, Frank, 31 INDEX 259

Nugan Hand Bank, 31 Poindexter, John, 99 Nujaim, Abdallah, 28 Popular Front for the Liberation of Pales- tine (PFLP), 59, 60, 69, 126, 127, 142, 147 Oakley, Robert, 98 Ports and smuggling, 81, 83–84, 85, 90, Obeid, Hassan, 139 107, 109–111, 165 Oberhofer, Herbert, 243n134 Prado, Antonio, 203n86 Ochoa, Jorge, 125 Progressive Socialist Party, 28, 62, 109, Opel, Christina von, 76 154, 170 Operation Eagle, 64 Operation Lahav, 136 Rahman, Nasser Abdul, 201n62 Operation Litani, 136 Rahmé family, 97 Opium, 34, 37, 39, 41–45, 76–77, 94–95, Republic Bank, 160 102, 103–104, 110 Rizzuto, Nick, 65, 92 Oren, David, 137 Rizzuto, Vito, 92, 220n97 Organization of Revolutionary Socialist Rockefeller Foundation, 23 Action, 69 Rosal, Mauricio, 36 Rudd-Marrero, Allen Eric, 64 Palermo, Carlo, 156–157 Rumaniyeh incident, 69 Palestine Liberation Front, 126 Palestinians: Cairo Accord, 10, 60; drugs, Saba, Elias, 91 66–67, 142–148; flight in 1948, 8; influx Saba, Joseph, 92, 129, 219n96 after 1970, 10, 59–60 SAC (Service d’Action Civique), 46, 53, Paroutian, Antranik, 153, 202n71 65, 205n19 Parti Populaire Syrien, 62 Sadat, Anwar, 93 Pavlick, Michael, 75 Saikaily, Nabil, 214n7 Peled, Rafi, 138, 149 Salam, Hani, 58 Perot, H. Ross, 100 Salam, Saeb, 22, 44, 54 Phalangists, 69, 70, 72; bank robbery and Salameh, Farouk, 128 looting of Port of Beirut, 74; connec- Saleh, Fouad Ali, 240n93 tions to Armenians, 154, 156; crushing Salha, Najib, 207n37 of Franjieh clan in 1978, 83; exploita- Salibi, Kamal, 69 tion of Port of Beirut, 83; hashish trade, Salmon, Jago, 69 88, 159; massacre of Palestinians at Sampson, Anthony, 71 Sabra and Shatilla, 87; Party (Kataeb), Sarkis, Elias, 79, 93, 106, 149 10, 61–62; support from Canadian Saudi Arabia, 54, 73, 117, 206n37 mafia, 93; support from Israel, 73, 80, Sayigh, Yezid, 148 83–84 Scalise, Frank, 201n64 Picard, Elizabeth, 170 Scapula, François, 129, 216n22 Pizza Connection, 160 Schumer, Charles, 118 PLO, 31, 59, 142–148, 154; Intra Bank, 56 Scott, Peter Dale, 173 260 index

SDECE (Service de Documentation Exté- into Lebanon, 79; helps bring war to rieure et de Contre-Espionnage), 45, 47, an end, 110–112; Israel and drug allega- 53, 54, 65, 201n61, 204n104 tions, 5, 114–120; smugglers in, 37, 48, Shakarchi, Mohammed, 160–161 113–129 Shakarchi Trading, 160–161 Syril, Mustafa, 157 Shamas, Yahya, 112 Shaw, George, 31 Taif Accord, 110, 112 Shining Path, 118 Taouk, Habib, 103 Sidon, 16, 79, 108, 109, 148; Fishermen’s Tarallo, Frank, 99 Dispute, 68–69 Tashnaq Party, 62, 153–156 Siragusa, Charles, 14–16, 18, 36, 39, 42, Tenenbaum, Elhanan, 236n36 222n121 Thabet, Maurice, 198n22 SISDE (Servizio per le Informazioni e la Tlass, Mustafa, 115, 119, 120, 126, 233n96 Sicurezza Democratica), 147 Tohmeh, Michel, 25 Snyder, Richard, 168 Traboulsi, Fawwaz, 107 Soghanalian, Sarkis, 73 Trafficante, Santo, 64 Soufian, Noubar, 155–156, 157 Trible, Paul, 99 South Lebanon Army, 87, 109, 235n15 Tripoli, 69, 70, 79, 83, 203, 104, 107, 116, Spaggiari, Albert, 214n77 129, 170, 229n28 Spain, 71, 119, 125, 128, 224n171 Turkey, 141, 155–162; changing transit Staffler, Massimiliano, 243n134 routes, 65; major source of opium, Stark, Ronald H., 30 37, 65, 209n17, 211n30; suppression of State Department, Bureau of Interna- opium cultivation, 65, 76, 164 tional Narcotics Matters, 179–180 Tyre, 15 State failure, 3, 12–13, 170–173 Sterling, Claire, 144 Ugurlu, Abuzer, 157–159 Stojarová, Vera, 171 Union de Banques Suisse, 161, 162 Stratton, Richard, 91 United Kingdom, 8, 17, 18, 29, 55, 74, 87, Stromberg, Harry, 201n67 121, 125, 128, 140, 141, 146 Sulh, Riad, 16, 19, 20 United Nations, 26, 41, 43, 131, 172 Sulh, Sami, 20, 21 United States: counterterrorism, 95–102; Sweden, 146 Customs, 29, 31, 91, 106, 219n91; Green Switzerland, 160–162 Plan, 23–24; intervention in 1958, 8–9; Syria, 33, 34; attempts to broker cease- support for Christians, 86–88; Syria, fire, 70, 79–80, 107; break with 113–115, 131–132; and passim on drugs Maronites, 83; Bush administration, 114, 115, 118, 119, 131; crackdown on Venezuela, 64, 210n26 Palestinians, 79, 81; drug crop eradi- Vizzini, Sal, 222n121 cation, 130–132; drug smuggling in occupied areas, 89, 103, 116–122; entry Wakkas, Salah al Din, 159 INDEX 261

Warner, John, 4, 98, 155 Yafi, Abdallah, 19, 20; Intra Bank, 51, 54 Wenner, Christopher, 121, 122 Yazbek, Hannah, 40, 199n40 West Africa, 71, 106, 168, 170 Yoma, Amira, 232n75 Wiesgril, Philippe, 129, 216n22 Younis, Fawaz, 101 Williams, Nick Jr., 114 Winslow, Charles, 55, 58, 109 Zahle, 41, 64, 84, 94, 112, 122, 193n71, Wolff, Lester, 144 199n48, 203n81 Wrobleski, Ann, 179 Ziv, Meir, 139

Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and Islamic Societies and Cultures Joel Beinin, Stanford University Juan R. I. Cole, University of Michigan

Editorial Board Asef Bayat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Marilyn Booth, University of Edinburgh Laurie Brand, University of Southern California Saba Mahmood, University of California, Berkeley Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University Karen Pfeifer, Smith College Rebecca L. Stein, Duke University

Bassam Haddad, Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience 2011

Noah Coburn, Bazaar Politics: Power and Pottery in an Afghan Market Town 2011

Laura Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt 2011

Joel Beinin and Frédéric Vairel, editors, Social Movements, Mobilization, and Contestation in the Middle East and North Africa 2011

Samer Soliman, The Autumn of Dictatorship: Fiscal Crisis and Political Change in Egypt under Mubarak 2011

Rochelle A. Davis, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced 2010

Haggai Ram, Iranophobia: The Logic of an Israeli Obsession 2009

John Chalcraft, The Invisible Cage: Syrian Migrant Workers in Lebanon 2008 Rhoda Kanaaneh, Surrounded: Palestinian Soldiers in the Israeli Military 2008

Asef Bayat, Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post- Islamist Turn 2007

Robert Vitalis, America’s Kingdom: Mythmaking on the Saudi Oil Frontier 2006

Jessica Winegar, Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt 2006

Joel Beinin and Rebecca L. Stein, editors, The Struggle for Sovereignty: Palestine and Israel, 1993–2005 2006