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Ventura County Star
By John Mitchell
April 1, 2007

Chasing Terrorist Cash Hard, speaker says

After the most brazen terrorist attack in history, Osama bin Laden was asked if he was afraid the West would move to identify and seize al-Qaida's assets.

He was quoted as saying that attempts to find and freeze such assets “will not make a difference to al-Qaida or other jihad groups. Al-Qaida is comprised of modern, educated young people who are as aware of the cracks in the Western financial system as they are of the lines in their own hands. These are the very flaws in the Western financial systems which are becoming a noose for it."

On Friday night, bin Laden's words were repeated to members and guests at a dinner hosted in Oxnard by the California Central Coast chapter of the World Affairs Council of America.

The speaker was John Cassara, for 26 years a case officer for the Central Intelligence Agency and a Special agent for the U.S. Treasury Department.

Among his peers, Cassara, who has worked assignments from the Middle East to Italy, is considered an expert in the fields of terrorist financing and money laundering.

He has written a book, "Hide & Seek: Intelligence, Law Enforcement and the Stalled War on Terrorist Finance."

At the start of Friday's talk, Cassara emphasized that while he still does contract work for the government, what he says and what's in his book are his own opinion and not necessarily the government's.

Cassara says mistakes made by many agencies before September 11 were not isolated. The blunders were the result of bureaucratic cultures, misguided policies and entrenched ways of doing business. And, he said, those vulnerabilities still exist.

The "cracks" noted by bin Laden have been identified and are exploited by terrorists, Cassara said.

"Western agencies and policymakers cannot relate to sophisticated ways of moving money or transferring value that are not part of our traditional ways of doing business," he said.

"In the global contest of hide-and-seek, we have been spending an inordinate amount of time and resources looking in many of the wrong places."

"Using the government's own benchmarks, the numbers by themselves demonstrate the war specifically on terrorism finance has stalled.'

The Bank Secrecy Act of 1970, which set up financial reporting requirements, gave investigators a paper trail to watch, he said.

But he added, the Bank Secrecy Act was set up to fight narcotics, not terrorism. Going after large amounts of narcotics money is one thing; going after the smaller amounts of terrorist money is another. Terrorist money doesn't trigger the financial reporting requirements.

"The 9/11 hijackers evaded the BSA," he said.

A major financer of terrorism is the drug trade, Cassara said.

"Afghanistan provides 90 percent of the world's opium," he said. "Unfortunately, a lot of its proceeds fund our adversaries. The coalition partners have not been able to stop it."

A South Asian businessman with toes to the underworld told Cassara, "Don't you know that the terrorists are moving money and value right under your noses? But the West doesn't see it. Your enemies are laughing at you."

Western authorities are slowly making changes in the way they approach terrorist finance. "We still have a long way to go to learn to catch up with some of the systems the terrorists have created," he said.