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Portrait of a Spy

Portrait of a Spy

Titel: Portrait of a Spy
Autoren: Daniel Silva
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at the site. “Those working with bricks and mortar,” the Lebanese-born media artist Walid Raad said in a statement, “deserve the same kind of respect as those working with cameras and brushes.”
    Financial intelligence, or “finint,” has been an important weapon in the war on terror for many years now. The Treasury Department’s Office of Terrorism and Financial Intelligence collects and analyzes transactional data, as does the FBI’s Terrorist Financing Operations Section. In addition, the CIA and numerous private companies connected to the vast American national-security complex all routinely track the flow of money through the bloodstream of the global jihadist movement.
    Regrettably, a decade after the attacks of 9/11, much of this money still comes from the citizens of Saudi Arabia and, to a lesser extent, the Sunni Muslim emirates of the Persian Gulf. In a secret cable made public in December 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton wrote, “It has been an ongoing challenge to persuade Saudi officials to treat terrorist financing emanating from Saudi Arabia as a strategic priority.” In conclusion, Clinton’s memo declares that “donors in Saudi Arabia constitute the most significant source of funding to Sunni terrorist groups worldwide.”
    One would think that Saudi Arabia, the country that produced Osama Bin Laden and fifteen of the nineteen 9/11 hijackers, would do more to clamp down on terrorist fund-raising on its soil. But other diplomatic cables have revealed the House of Saud has been unable or unwilling to shut down the flow of money to al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Militant groups operate front charities inside Saudi Arabia with impunity or simply solicit cash donations openly during the annual Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca. Prince Mohammad Bin Nayef, leader of Saudi Arabia’s counterterrorism efforts, told a senior American official that “we are trying to do our best” to stem the flow of cash to extremists and murderers. But, he added, “if money wants to go” to terrorists, there is little Saudi authorities can do to stop it.
    Which begs the question: Does the House of Saud, which owes its power to a covenant formed two centuries ago with Muhammad Abdul Wahhab, truly wish to sever financial ties to a Sunni extremist movement it helped to create and nurture? A tense meeting in 2007 might provide an important clue. According to leaked government cables, Frances Fragos Townsend, a senior counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush, asked Saudi officials to explain why the Kingdom’s ambassador to the Philippines was associating with suspected terrorist financiers. The Saudi foreign minister, Prince Saud al-Faisal, dismissed Townsend’s concerns, stating the ambassador was guilty of “bad judgment rather than intentional support for terrorism.” He then went on to criticize an American bank for raising “inappropriate and aggressive questions” about accounts maintained by the Saudi Embassy in Washington, D.C.
    While the global terror threat has evolved since the morning of September 11, 2001, one thing remains unchanged: al-Qaeda and its affiliates and imitators are actively plotting to murder and maim on a mass scale in Western Europe and the United States. Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, the former head of MI5, predicted in 2006 that the struggle against Islamic terror would “be with us for a generation,” while other security officials have warned of a “forever war” that will force the West to maintain aggressive counterterrorism programs for decades, if not longer. It is likely that the ultimate length of the global war on terror will be determined, in part, by the seismic events shaking the Arab world at the time of this writing. Much will depend upon which side emerges victorious. If the forces of moderation and modernity prevail, it is possible the threat of terrorism will gradually recede. But if radical Muslim clerics and their adherents manage to seize power in countries such as Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, we might very well look back fondly on the turbulent early years of the twenty-first century as a golden age of relations between Islam and the West.

Acknowledgments

    T HIS NOVEL, LIKE THE PREVIOUS books in the Gabriel Allon series, could not have been written without the assistance of David Bull, who truly is among the finest art restorers in the world. Each year, David gives up many hours of his valuable time to advise me on technical matters related
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