Volume 52, Number 2 · February 10, 2005
Quartermasters of Terror
By Patrick Radden Keefe
Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror
by Douglas Farah
Broadway Books, 225 pp., $24.95
On November 7, 2001, agents from Customs, Immigration, the IRS, and the FBI burst into the Dorchester, Massachusetts, offices of al-Barakaat, a Somali conglomerate with branches in forty countries, and arrested Mo- hamed M. Hussein, treasurer of Barakaat North America, on charges of operating an unlicensed money transfer business, or, as it was known, a hawala. Al-Barakaat stood accused of raising, investing, laundering, and distributing money on behalf of al-Qaeda. Then–Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill announced that its various companies were 'the money movers, the quartermasters of terror.' Meanwhile, federal authorities were also conducting raids on suspected businesses in eight other American cities. It all had the appearance of a clean, efficient police sting.
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