Rachel Ehrenfeld, a prominent voice in the rightist discourse connecting terrorism and transnational crime, is the founder of the American Center for Democracy (ACD), a Manhattan-based policy center that describes itself as being "dedicated to exposing the enemies of Freedom and Democracy and their Modus Operandi and exploring pragmatic ways to defeat them while promoting standards of national and international integrity." As the ACD director, Ehrenfeld has won acclaim among neoconservatives and right-wing circles for her research on terrorism, yet some observers doubt the integrity of her research.
Typical of her writings was an April 20, 2007 article (cowritten with Alyssa Lappen) for the American Thinker in which Ehrenfeld criticized U.S. politicians for being "duped" by Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (MB) into believing that the Brotherhood was a "major player in Middle East politics." Ehrenfeld derided a meeting in Egypt between U.S. House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD) and the Muslim Brotherhood's parliamentarian leader, Mohammed Saad el-Katatni, which she said came immediately after a Brotherhood conference in Egypt at which one speaker declared that "the devil Bush and his allies were now the ones sowing terror and aggression worldwide." Ehrenfeld pointed to what she saw as a string of diplomatic miscues in the Mideast in arguing that trying to engage political actors like the Brotherhood was an extremely risky approach. She concluded: "Democrats and Republicans alike are only deluding themselves in believing that negotiations with the MB and their terrorist offspring will alter their drive to establish a global Caliphate."
In her 2003 book Funding Evil: How Terrorism is Financed and How to Stop It, Ehrenfeld argued that Sami Al-Arian, a professor at the University of South Florida who was fired after allegations arose that he was involved in supporting Palestinian terrorism groups, was "one of al-Qaida's most important U.S. operatives." This claim has been refuted, however, and when a reporter called to ask her about her charge, Ehrenfeld, who says it is based on confidential sources, declined to comment (Tampa Tribune, May 22, 2005).
Al-Arian was one of many U.S. Muslims who were arrested in the wake of 9/11. His trial on charges of supporting terrorist attacks against Israel, which according to the Guardian was "billed as the most important terrorism case in the United States since the 9/11 attacks," came to an inconclusive end last December. Al-Arian was acquitted of half the charges against him, and the jury deadlocked over the rest (Guardian Weekly, December 16, 2005). Ehrenfeld's accusation, which was not among the charges brought against Al-Arian, has never been substantiated, and many experts have dismissed outright any connection between al-Qaida terrorism, which is often directed at U.S. targets, and attacks that have been perpetrated by Palestinian extremists. As Mike Pheneger, a retired army intelligence officer, told the Tampa Tribune, after 9/11, "We suddenly just dumped everyone together in the same pot. These groups have different motives and different targets. What they share is tactics" (May 22, 2005).
Ehrenfeld has authored two other books on the international funding of terrorism: Evil Money (1992) and Narcoterrorism (1990). Her writings—which include numerous articles in outlets like the Washington Times, National Review, FrontPage.com, and the Jerusalem Post—typically make the case that the national security of the United States and its allies, particularly Israel, is threatened by non-state actors and states that rely on illicit business activities such as drug trafficking.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Ehrenfeld was one of the key figures promoting the term "narcoterrorism" to describe the purported merger of leftists and drug traffickers—particularly in Cuba, Nicaragua, and Colombia. Since 9/11, Ehrenfeld has focused mostly on Islamic groups like Hamas and Hezbollah that thrive, she says, on income from international crime.
Ehrenfeld authored a 1988 report, Narco-Terrorism and the Cuban Connection, for the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), a militant anti-Castro organization based in Miami. The report, which posited that Cuba and the Sandinista government in Nicaragua sponsored drug-trafficking operations, was used by policymakers and policy advocacy groups such as CANF to demonize the Cuban and Nicaraguan regimes and build congressional support for regime change strategies directed against the two nations.
Not only had narcotics trafficking funded leftist governments and insurgencies, argued Ehrenfeld, but it had the strategic objective of debilitating the United States as part of the Cold War. According to Ehrenfeld, the Kremlin directed the grand strategy, while Havana supervised the regional implementation of the narcoterrorism plan. Her view won the attention of Congress. In 1989, Rep. Robert Lagomarsino (R-CA) cited her paper for CANF in his remarks in the House and summarized: "The evidence is thus compelling that narcotics, more than 'simply' a plague spawned by festering forces in modern 'post-industrial' society, have been shaped into a powerful, 'strategic' weapons system. It is a weapons system which wreaks its direct damage in lethal and disabling addiction, and its 'collateral damage' in the corruption and other socially enervating criminal activities that flourish around the drug trade, as well as in the more general undermining of the target society" (Congressional Record, April 12, 1989).
In 1991, Ehrenfeld told the news program Frontline that she believed Cuba was providing narcotics traffickers with "safe haven, with fuel, with radar, and everything else, and in return, the same boats will bring arms to the insurgencies, the communist insurgencies that the Cubans were supporting in Latin America."
According to Ehrenfeld, "The Sandinistas continue to use the drug-and-arms traffic not only to obtain badly needed foreign currency, but also to cut in-roads of undermining influence into neighboring Central American countries. Their principal method is that of providing cocaine at discount value as payment for support and services rendered to the Sandinistas."
Throughout the 1990s, Ehrenfeld promoted her narcoterrorism thesis—providing ammunition for those in Congress who wanted to integrate the U.S.-directed "drug war" with counterinsurgency efforts in Latin America and other U.S. government initiatives to isolate and undermine leftists. Long before the current "war on terror," Pentagon, State Department, and U.S. Treasury officials had integrated the concept of narcoterrorism into their policy outlooks.
Ehrenfeld has contended that U.S. policy should treat leftist challenges in Latin America—whether it be the Cuban or Nicaraguan governments or the M-19 guerrillas in Colombia—as primarily criminal enterprises, an argument that she is making currently about Hezbollah in Lebanon.
In an op-ed for the right-wing Washington Times, Ehrenfeld urged the Bush administration to be more supportive of Israel's military campaigns in Lebanon and the Gaza strip. "Israel is now fighting two of radical Islam's most virulent versions—the Shi'ite Hezbollah and the Sunni Hamas," she wrote. "Israel fights not only for its own survival. Its ability to defeat Hamas and Hezbollah will determine the survival of the United States and all Western-style democracies" (Washington Times, July 31, 2006).
In 2000, Ehrenfeld joined Gordon Sumner, Lewis Tambs, John Foster, and Sol Sanders as a contributor to Latin America Today: Santa Fe IV Report. The first Santa Fe report on Latin America, produced by the militantly anticommunist Council for Inter-American Security, became a central building block in the construction of the first-term Reagan administration's foreign policy in Central America. The document argued that the United States was "engaged in World War III" and proposed that "in war there is no substitute for victory." Describing Central America as "the soft underbelly of the United States," the report called for the restoration of the Monroe Doctrine as the underpinning of U.S. foreign policy in the region. Several of the authors of the first Santa Fe report went on to join the first Reagan administration, including Tambs, Sumner, Roger Farlane, and Patrick Buchanan. Sumner and Tambs were the editors of Santa Fe IV, which like the other reports railed against the threat of totalitarianism and the missteps of the Democrats, namely presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
The premise of all the Santa Fe reports, named after the New Mexico city where the experts first gathered in 1980, is that the main policy task should be the full implementation of the Monroe Doctrine, which asserts that the United States should be the only hegemonic power in the region. According to Santa Fe IV, narcoterrorists and communists directly threaten the United States by threatening the security of the U.S. backyard. The main external threat, according to Ehrenfeld and her co-contributors, is "Communist China," which, through its economic penetration is gaining control over Cuba, the Panama Canal, Venezuela, and other areas, "and in doing so has put at risk the solidarity of the entire southern flank of the United States."
In 2001, Ehrenfeld founded the Center for the Study of Corruption & the Rule of Law, a research and policy institute now known as the American Center for Democracy. Directed by the Israel-born Ehrenfeld, the ACD focuses on political Islam and its links to organized crime. The center is closely identified with Israel through its staff and board members.
Since 9/11 and the launch of the "war on terror," Ehrenfeld has been on a one-person campaign to have the "Triple Frontier," an isolated zone where Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina meet, be recognized as a center for terrorism financing and planning. (The Triple Frontier is sometimes called the tri-border area in English and triple frontera in Spanish.) In much the same way that the U.S. Southern Command (SouthCom) put narcoterrorism at the center of its national security assessments for Latin America and the Caribbean, the U.S. military and Bush administration officials use the "war on terrorism" to justify its operations in the region.
According to the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), groups such as Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaida, and al-Jihad "are becoming increasingly more active" in Latin America. JINSA organized a congressional briefing, "Looking in Our Own Backyard—Terrorists in Latin America," in November 2005 to draw "attention to off-the-radar issues" in U.S. national security. The JINSA hearing was sponsored by Rep. Dan Burton (R-IN), and Ehrenfeld was one of the three featured experts. According to Ehrenfeld, there is an increasingly close connection between narcotics trafficking and terrorism. She said that Islamists have issued fatwas through the internet instructing Muslims to use drug money to support Islamist terrorism. One solution to break the link between illegal narcotics and Islamic terrorism, Ehrenfeld told the JINSA briefing, would be spraying herbicides on poppy and coca production in South America.
Former SouthCom commander Gen. James Hill postulated that the terrorist threat "is a weed that is planted in the fertile ground of ungoverned spaces such as coastlines, rivers, and unpopulated border areas." Hill said in 2003 that "this threat is watered with money from drugs, illegal arms sales, and human trafficking" and "respects neither geographical boundaries nor moral boundaries." Hill's successor, Gen. Bantz Craddock, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that his first responsibility was to "prosecute the war on terrorism in the SouthCom's Area of Responsibility."
SouthCom, like Ehrenfeld, asserts that Latin America must be considered a national security threat for two main reasons: one, that narcotics trafficking and other illegal crime, especially in "ungoverned spaces," creates a terrorism breeding ground; and, two, that the Muslim population and illicit businesses of the Triple Frontier zone offer Islamic groups financial and other kinds of support.
The tri-border zone does have a large Lebanese population, many of whom fled Israel during its occupation of Lebanon in the 1980s and 1990s, and they, like Muslims elsewhere in the world, are generally supportive of Hezbollah, donating to Hezbollah's political wing and its social services programs. But according to Ehrenfeld, Hezbollah "extorts 'donations' from Shi'ite Lebanese immigrants in South and North America under the threat of physical harm or death" (Washington Times, August 11, 2006).
Without offering supporting evidence, Ehrenfeld told Bloomberg News that Hezbollah is involved in drug trafficking through an agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia and makes counterfeit goods, including DVDs, in the tri-border area. In the same interview, Ehrenfeld maintained that Hezbollah receives a large part of its funding from Latin America. Neither Hezbollah nor the Palestinian group Hamas would be able to launch missiles, train people, or provide "the so-called social security to buy the loyalty of the population if they didn't have money," said Ehrenfeld. "If we were able to stop that money, this wouldn't happen" (Bloomberg News, August 4, 2006).
For its part, SouthCom also cites unnamed sources for its contention that the Triple Frontier should be one of the fronts in the Bush administration's war on terror. Unable to provide any hard evidence of the existence of Islamist terrorist cells or any direct link between the zone's illicit business activity and terrorist operations, SouthCom says that it has, however, "detected a number of Islamic Radical Group facilitators that continue to participate in fundraising and logistical support activities such as money laundering, document forgery, and illicit trafficking" (Americas Program, July 2005).
But the evidence that the Triple Frontier is directly linked to international terrorism is circumstantial and indirect at best. When asked to provide some measure of proof for her assertions that the Arab, largely Lebanese, community in the Triple Frontier zone funds terrorist networks, Ehrenfeld has cited the "confidentiality" of her sources, saying that even her typist has requested to remain anonymous because of possible retaliation from terrorists. Her failure to document her charges resulted in a libel judgment against her in a London court and in favor of a Saudi plutocrat, Khalid Bin Mahfouz, who charged that Ehrenfeld slandered him and members of his family in Funding Evil.
In an exchange with Ehrenfeld in the New York Review of Books in March 1993, Michael Massing, who had reviewed her book in 1992, wrote that she preferred "to take cover behind the claim of confidentiality—a lame excuse in any language" (NYRB, March 4, 1993). Over the years, Ehrenfeld has also been accused of focusing her research only on groups and states that are regarded as enemies of the United States and Israel, while never looking at the links that exist between U.S. and Israeli government officials and drug traffickers.
In its own 2005 investigation of the Brazilian sector of the Triple Frontier, the International Monetary Fund found plenty of evidence of cash smuggling and illicit enterprises but no "terrorist financing."
Ehrenfeld is a member of the Committee on the Present Danger and has a doctorate in criminology from the Hebrew University School of Law. Born in Israel, Ehrenfeld is a U.S. citizen. She serves on the International Advisory Council of the International Intelligence Summit, which provides a forum for intelligence and military officials interested in "fighting terrorism" and is a program of the Intelligence and Homeland Education Center, which before 9/11 was known as the International Holocaust Education Center. The Intelligence Summit brings together right-wing intelligence experts and former military officials. Many of the speakers and advisers of the summit are either frequent guests on Fox News or Fox commentators, including Walid Phares, Richard Perle, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, and Maj. Gen. Paul Vallely.
The Advisory Board of Ehrenfeld's American Center for Democracy includes such neoconservative luminaries as Perle, James Woolsey, and William R. Van Cleave, as well as retired generals McInerney and Vallely. Board member Nina Rosenwald is chairwoman of Middle East Media Research Institute and vice president of JINSA.
The ACD links to various other institutes, organizations, and sites from its website, including the Ariel Center for Policy Research, the Center for Advanced Middle East Studies, the Islam Quest Blog, and One Jerusalem.
