MI6 is certain that the Islamabad Marriott Hotel atrocity that killed 53 and injured 250 in October, was bank rolled by a centuries-old money transfer system in the Muslim world, which leaves no paper trail.
The system, known as “Hawala”, has since 9/11 provided a continuous flow of funds from every Muslim who has answered Bin Laden’s call to support jihad. The London bombings, the Bali massacre, the Madrid train bombings – every major terrorist outrage was backed by Hawala finance to prepare suicide bombers and acquire the explosives like the thousand pounds in weight used in the hotel attack.
It is calculated by the CIA that since 9/11 Bin Laden has used Hawala money, which has not only led to thousands of deaths, but several hundred million dollars of destruction.
Originally created by Arab silk traders stretching from China to Europe, at its centre are the hawaldars. Every Muslim community in Britain has its number of these unique brokers. They range from corner-shop owners to taxi drivers, undertakers and even imams who operate from back rooms in their mosques. All are sworn to secrecy and no one can be admitted into the hawaladar’s closed circle until he has been vouched for by another hawaladar.
In Britain alone, MI5 believe there are over 500 of them. Worldwide they number at least ten thousand. Between them they handle several billion dollars a day. Hundreds of experts recruited by MI6 and other intelligence services are moving urgently along the Hawala global money trail which has led to the discovery “of a fund-raising machine whose operations extend into every place where there are Muslim communities”, former FBI director Robert Mueller warned on a recent visit to discuss Hawala with MI6 chief John Scarlett and MI5 director Jonathan Evans.
Richard Clarke, who was President George W Bush’s intelligence czar, said Hawala is “at the heart of Bin Laden’s operations. He has collected billions of dollars since 9/11. But it is only recently that we have come to learn the sheer scope of its activities. Its secrecy makes Swiss banks an ‘open sesame’ by comparison”.
But its secrecy has been traced by MI6, thanks to its own penetration of the Muslim communities in Pakistan, Indonesia, the Philippines and northern provinces of China and Muslim communities living in South America.
“Some run legitimate corporations, others are criminals dealing in human trafficking and drugs. Several are controlled Muslim charities and non-governmental organisations. All have one common link: they have either received a personal visit from an al-Qaeda fundraiser or have been reached by phone or fax. No political organisation in the West can match such a global money-gathering set up”, said Clarke.
MI5 chief Jonathan Evans, Britain’s intelligence expert on Bin Laden, asked his staff–experts in money laundering–to provide a report for the Security Service’s surveillance teams working within Muslim communities in Britain. The document reveals:
“Any transaction, which would end in the coffers of al-Qaeda, begins with the person wishing to make it visiting a hawaladar. He hands over the sum he wishes to donate and gives the name and location of the recipient. The hawaldar adds his fee, usually no more than 0.5 percent of the sum to be transferred. He then contacts a hawaladar in the destination country by either phone or fax using his personal code, which allows him to operate within the system. No money or paper trail leaves the hawaladar. The system operates on such a high level of trust, no formal banking system can equal it”.
So huge are the sums of currency al-Qaeda has acquired, MI6 believes the terror organisation has used the global banking system to its advantage by investing the Hawala money in stocks around the world.
On his visit to London, FBI former director Mueller told British intelligence chiefs the Hawala money was routed through financial houses in Cairo, Damascus, Paris, Madrid, Frankfurt, Johannesburg, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Rangoon, Tokyo, Minsk, Leningrad and Bucharest.
It was then invested in Wall Street stocks that would provide high profits on reselling. Brian McAdam, an expert on terrorist funding, said: “It is a very sophisticated form of money laundering. There is no way of any company knowing where the money that buys shares comes from.
But any major company is a tempting target for terrorists. Al-Qaeda invests, takes its profits and uses them to create the kind of massacre we saw in the Marriot Hotel in Islamabad last weekend”.
Rogue bankers
So great is the problem that Britain’s intelligence services have been told by financial analysts that al-Qaeda “almost certainly” has its own financial experts, “rogue bankers who have been bribed or coerced to weave and loop vast sums of money and make sure their electronic transfer ‘signature’ remains untraceable”.
A US Treasury bank security official explained: “A rogue banker would have devised special codes for all the transfers in the names of dozens, if not hundreds, of front companies, possibly even a thousand. Some of the codes would be active for no longer than the hours a bank opens for business on one side of the world. The particular code would authorise the transfer of a deposit minutes before close of business to some other front company in another part of the world that is about to open up for a day’s trading.
While it is possible to track electronic transfers through CHIPS, a banking system linked to thirty-six countries, it does not operate in countries in the former Soviet Union or Saudi Arabia. There is also every possibility that to further hide the Hawala money, al-Qaeda will have made deals with the Russian Mafia, Colombia drug cartels, Chinese Triads and the Japanese Yakuz. All have front companies around the world”.
America’s Department of Homeland Security, in a report to the White House, calculated that over 3,000 companies in the US have been penetrated since 9/11 by al-Qaeda through its investments. “The prime targets are top technology and defence corporations and major software traders like Microsoft and Siemens”, concluded the report.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown, when he was Chancellor of the Exchequer, told the International Money Fund Conference in Washington four years ago: “The financial threat al-Qaeda poses is one of the utmost seriousness. It is of prime importance to root out their financial penetration of the financial world”, he warned banking chiefs.
Gordon Thomas is the author of a new edition of Gideon’s Spies: The Inside Story of Israel’s Legendary Secret Service, The Mossad, by JR Books of London and available on Amazon Books.
(C) G-2 Bulletin, Washington D.C., USA, and Gordon Thomas.
