https://www.thejc.com/news/world/ho...aine-to-fund-its-terror-yyzvQqGf2VnWNVPIZiINU
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.
The DEA had picked up numerous leads about Iran and Hezbollah exploiting these networks to circumvent US sanctions. Governments such as Iran’s still needed to procure hard currency and arms as before, but now increasingly had to turn to criminal schemes to source them. To do this they used procurement agents or “super facilitators” — cells that operated in the shadow dimension of international arms and drugs trafficking….
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.
The DEA had picked up numerous leads about Iran and Hezbollah exploiting these networks to circumvent US sanctions. Governments such as Iran’s still needed to procure hard currency and arms as before, but now increasingly had to turn to criminal schemes to source them. To do this they used procurement agents or “super facilitators” — cells that operated in the shadow dimension of international arms and drugs trafficking….
