Al Qaeda's Road Paved With Gold
Secret Shipments Traced Through a Lax System In United Arab Emirates
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, February 17, 2002
Dubai's links to suspected terrorist financing and money laundering have long been a point of contention between the United States and the United Arab Emirates. "There is no question the UAE was used by terrorists, the question is why," said a U.S. official. "It is no more lax and unregulated than many places. The answer is, Dubai is so damn convenient."
Three former Clinton administration officials said that two senior U.S. delegations went to the emirates, one in July 1999 and one in January 2000, to press for measures against terrorist financing. "We got exactly nowhere," said a participant in one of the meetings. A spokesman for the UAE Ministry of Information said the "visits and requests from the U.S. in 1999 and 2000 represented a part of the normal exchange of information . . . aimed at enhancing cooperation and tackling issues of mutual concern."
Since Sept. 11, U.S. officials said, the emirates have been much more cooperative on tracing suspect finances and last month enacted the most stringent money laundering laws in the region.
U.S. investigators acknowledge they have been slow to focus on the trail of gold and the hawala network. While a handful of investigators had been urging that more attention be paid to those areas, they were largely ignored because the concepts are so foreign to the Western way of doing business, current and former officials said.
Wechsler, the former National Security Council official, said that U.S. law enforcement and intelligence know "virtually nothing" about how the hawala system operates and its relationship to gold. "We don't know where the hawalas are, we don't even have an order of magnitude on how much money they move," Wechsler said. "We don't know how much it costs to be bin Laden. All I can say is, it costs millions and millions of dollars."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A22303-2002Feb16?language=printer