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How Hezbollah funds terror through the global cocaine trade

In an exclusive extract from new book Chasing Shadows, a US narcotics agent’s attempts to smash a global drugs network leads him to the top of the terror group

September 7, 2023 12:44
Hezbollah fighters GettyImages-1256830000
Lebanese Hezbollah fighters take part in cross-border raids, part of large-scale military exercise, in Aaramta bordering Israel on May 21, 2023 ahead of the anniversary of Israel's withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 2000. (Photo by ANWAR AMRO / AFP) (Photo by ANWAR AMRO/AFP via Getty Images)
10 min read

It’s January 2014 and Jack Kelly, an agent with America’s Drugs Enforcement Administration (DEA), has recently been reassigned. For several years he has been coordinating investigations into the narcotics trade’s biggest networks: being “an eye in the sky”, as it was called. Divorced and in his forties, on weekends Kelly would wake up early, drink his morning coffee, and then hit the gym before spending hours working on open source research.

The project was codenamed “Cassandra”, named after the Trojan princess who was fated to never be believed but whose prophecies were eventually proved correct. The closer Kelly looked, the more wiretap transcripts he studied and the more reports he read, it became clear to him that something deeply troubling was happening. It was like being at the centre of a panopticon watching cash, drugs and guns moving across borders.

A drug cartel in Colombia could be shipping cocaine to mafias in Europe, who in turn laundered their money through Middle Eastern banks holding cash for rogue regimes.

Those sanctioned governments could then use the funds raised on the international black market to purchase bombs and weapons.

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Hezbollah