more to Al Qaeda as a political weapon, a threat, than it is as a device they would actually detonate. Above all, terrorists want an audience. Corpses are no good as an audience.”
***
By the time of Kate’s return from Pakistan, Claire Stoppard had worked for the Office of Terrorist Finance and Financial Crimes (TFFC) at the Treasury Department for almost four years. A tall, elegant blonde who enjoyed working in the rarefied world of high finance and banking, Claire’s brief was to uncover and combat money laundering, terrorist financing, and WMD proliferation using the power of the Treasury to force banks, suspect charities, and the informal underground Islamic banking networks known as ‘hawalas,’ to divulge information about money transfers by terrorist groups—information they often went to great lengths to conceal.
For the past three years, she had focussed on cash transfers out of Kabul International Airport. The amounts involved were staggering. In the most recent 12-month period, $14 billion in cash had been shipped out of Afghanistan, an amount larger than the declared tax receipts for the entire nation. Packed onto cargo pallets like boxed refrigerators or washer/dryers, the cash was largely legal and declared. Some of it was diverted aid—U.S. tax dollars stolen by corrupt Afghan officials. The rest was proceeds from opium sales.
In the week after her dinner with Kate, Claire Stoppard got word of a shipment of cash that was unusual, even by the standards of Afghanistan.
“Here we’ve got a transfer of $11 million in hundred dollar bills that is undeclared,” one of Claire’s colleagues told her. “That’s weird. When the hawalas are moving all this money legally with nobody batting an eye, why the secrecy?”
“Where is the cash being shipped?” Stoppard asked.
“Paris, via Dubai, to a hawaladar in the Champs Élysées, a guy who routinely works close to the legal line and probably crosses it. We got wind of this through an informant in the VIP section of the airport. The courier was not searched and was driven straight to his plane.”
“So how did the informant see the cash?”
“The courier forgot to add the appropriate diplomatic stickers and do the paperwork to go through customs in France without inspection. When they worked through the red tape at the airport in Kabul, the informant saw the contents of the cargo pallet.”
The analyst, a man named Mike Hill, pointed to a monitor that showed the name of a well-known Kabul hawala , the sum of $11 million, the intermediary in Dubai, and the final destination, the hawaladar in Paris.
“I guess I didn’t realize you’d need a pallet for $11 million.” Moving money for Claire usually meant making entries with a computer.
“In $100 bills, one million dollars weighs about 10 kilograms, so $11 million is 110 kilograms or 242 pounds. It’s more than you could carry in a suitcase.”
“So we’re talking about a large container here.”
“Exactly, about the size of two extra large Samsonite suitcases. The couriers are supposed to record their own names and the origin of the money,” Hill said, “but they usually just write down the names of the Afghan hawala initiating the trade and the Dubai hawala that is accepting the cash.”
Claire quickly realized that there was something about the transaction that did not make sense.
“Isn’t the beauty of the hawala system that you never have to actually transfer cash?”
“Yeah, that’s right. Usually it’s all just a question of inked notes in a ledger based on the honor system. The routine works sort of like this: The guy who wants to transfer money in City A goes to his local hawala broker or hawaladar and says he wants to send money to his friend in City B and the hawaladar in City A simply contacts his correspondent hawaladar in City B with instructions. Often it’s just done with a text message by