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TwitThisHezbollah's Tentacles
Supported by Iran and Syria, Hezbollah has tentacles that reach distant corners of the globe. The group is thought to have hundreds of dedicated operatives embedded in Western Europe, South America, and the United States. The primary goal of these true believers is making money for the cause and sending it back to Lebanon. But analysts fear they could be summoned to violent service at any time -- including suicide bombings, which Hezbollah pioneered. There's no question Hezbollah has the capability of launching attacks on American targets, says Steve Emerson of the Investigative Project, a terrorism research group in Washington, D.C. "Hezbollah's agenda," adds Emerson, "is very close to al Qaeda's."Bell was determined to nail the smugglers' ties to Hezbollah.
He poured his energies into the case, spending 80 hours a week in his office, surrounded by stacks of evidence. More and more, he found himself skipping dinner instead of sharing a meal at home with his wife, Gayle, and two young boys. He had been coaching his younger son's Little League team, and had decided to sit out this season, but soon he couldn't even go to games. The kids began to ask Gayle why he was never around anymore. "Dad's doing something important," she told them.
From FBI surveillance, wiretaps and undercover informants, a full picture of the terrorist cell emerged. The organizers had been a core group of eight Lebanese-born men. All had entered the United States in the early 1990s, most as teenagers, with the help of phony visas. Of these, four applied for political asylum, skipped their hearings, and then wed American women in bogus "green card marriages" to escape deportation. At least four of the group had not met their wives until their wedding day.
The leader of the cell was Mohamad Hammoud, a soft-spoken Beirut native in his mid-20s. After being repeatedly denied a U.S. visa in Syria, Hammoud and two cousins traveled to Venezuela and purchased fake visas for $200. In America he joined his two brothers and another cousin, as well as two Muslim friends from the same impoverished Beirut suburb. All of them, the FBI believed, had been sent to America by Hezbollah.
Hammoud and his associates chose to settle in the Charlotte area, with its close-knit Arab-American community, where they rented modest apartments and took menial jobs, several of them working at Domino's Pizza. They blended in well, with their tank tops and blue jeans and Charlotte Hornets gear. On Sundays they played pickup soccer in a local park.
But they also got busy building an empire of financial fraud that went beyond cigarette smuggling. A favorite tactic was called "busting out": They signed up for credit cards with false identities, maxed them out, and then tossed them away. Many of the purchased goods were resold for cash. One cell member bribed a bank clerk to give him access to the account of a woman who had recently left the country. There was no way of knowing how much money these scams raised, but one of the men bragged that he had personally made more than $500,000. In any case, they kept enough for themselves to buy homes in pleasant middle-class areas. None of them lived with their "wives," except for Hammoud. But their ordinary lifestyles drew no unwanted attention.
To keep focused, the cell members gathered every Thursday night, usually at Hammoud's house, for propaganda videos and prayers. Typically, they'd listen to a speech by the Ayatollah Khomeini and watch films glorifying martyrs preparing for suicide attacks against Israel. One tape later found in the house had graphic footage of the bombed Marine barracks. Informants said Hammoud would lead the meetings, shedding his natural shyness to deliver fiery speeches. Neighbors couldn't help noticing the cars, drawn shades, and people filing in and out of the house, but they assumed Hammoud was holding harmless meetings. "The women I saw usually wore veils," one neighbor recalls. "We thought it was a religious group."
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