By Aram Roston, NBC News Producer
Today, long-time international arms dealer Monzer al Kassar will appear before federal judge Jed Rakoff in a hearing in Manhattan. Al Kassar already was arraigned on Friday, shortly after his extradition to the U.S., and he pleaded not guilty to charges of selling millions of dollars worth of machine guns, rocket-propelled grenade launchers and surface to air missiles to the FARC, the Colombian rebel group designated as a terrorist organization. Al Kassar's current accommodations, the federal correctional system, are a far cry from what he was used to when NBC News producer Aram Roston met him in 2006, in a palace in the south of Spain.
I don’t think Monzer Al Kassar even imagined back then, when I met him in 2006 in his palace, that he was the target of a nascent U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration sting investigation. I was surprised at the time that he’d agreed to meet me. His name was ubiquitous in international arms scandals and his reputation was grim: allegations of drugs, guns, arms to all sorts of terror groups.
And yet when I met him he acted calm as could be, a bit dramatic and a bit pompous, occasionally pretending the allegations against him were political conspiracies against an aggrieved activist. And he would stoop to pet his small white poodle, named Yoqui. Investigations seemed to be quite far from his mind. The DEA had investigated him in the past, and a DEA agent had even testified against him in a Spanish court years ago. But it seemed, back in September 2006, that he had eluded all the investigators and the cases around the world, and was enjoying his ill-gotten gains.
But if he was not worried about the DEA, he had other concerns. Back in September 2006 the Iraqi government accused him of assisting the insurgents. I flew to Southern Spain and checked into a hotel in Marbella. Al Kassar sent an aide to chauffeur me to the hotel, in a big black BMW. The man’s name was Felipe Moreno, a Chilean. He was gray-haired and short and apparently he was al Kassar’s personal assistant. He spoke of traveling to Syrian with Al Kassar.
(Felipe, like Al Kassar, is now in custody in federal prison. With Al Kassar, in 2006, he was about to be drawn, allegedly, into the web DEA investigators and undercover informants were weaving around Al Kassar.)
The palace was set off in the small neighboring area of Puerto Banus, up on a hill overlooking the harbor. It was a beautiful, white marble estate, surrounded by high walls. Watchmen pulled back gates to let us in, and there were small guard shacks to the right and left. Felipe told me that at night three Spanish Mastiffs prowled the grounds to keep intruders away.
It was a lavish interior, with sweeping staircases, a grand piano and various bronze sculptures. I was led into a grand salon, and there Monzer Al Kassar kept me waiting, until he finally made an appearance, waving me to sit and settling himself down too. He wore a well-tailored suit of some heavy fabric, and a salmon shirt with a matching kerchief in his pocket.
He was guarded in the interview at first. When I took out my digital recorder he told one of his aides to bring in a big black tape recorder and he ostentatiously insisted on recording our interview as well. Later on, he relaxed.
He denied funding the Iraqi insurgency. “I’m answering you frankly,” he said. “I have nothing to hide. I have to tell you the truth; if they connect me with money or laundering money this is nonsense. To start with, where’s the money? Where’s the money?
But he insisted he would have been proud if he had supported the insurgency.
“What they have accused me with, if it’s true, it’s an honor for me, if it’s true.” He postured as a freedom fighter a bit. “It’s an honor for every honest people in this world to be against the occupation of Iraq and against what is going on there.”
Connections to Saddam’s son
While he denied having known Saddam Hussein, he admitted having met Uday Hussein, Saddam’s notoriously sadistic son, and on his wall near the fireplace were two photos of him with Uday, in fact.
His photo collection, of which he was quite proud, was a rogue’s gallery. There on a coffee table, in an ostentatious frame, was a portrait of the famous Palestinian terrorist Abu Abbas, the head of the Palestine Liberation Front, and mastermind of one of the most notorious terror incidents of the 1980s – the hijacking of the Achille Lauro cruiseliner, where tourist Leon Klinghoffer, a wheelchair-bound and elderly Jewish American, was killed.
In one photo, the portly Abu Abbas and Monzer Al Kassar, dressed in 70’s clothes, hugged. Monzer Al Kassar was tried, and acquitted, by Spanish authorities in the 1990s, for alleged involvement in the Achille Lauro atrocity. He beat the case.
“You cannot call him a terrorist!” Al Kassar insisted to me. “He’s a hero. Put it down. Write it down.” Al Kassar portrayed himself as an ardent supporter of Palestinian rights. “If you’re on the side of the Israelis, then he’s a terrorist of course. You call him a terrorist, but I don’t allow you to call him a terrorist.”
But in spite of all this, Al Kassar would not admit to supporting Abu Abbas. “He never asked any help. He doesn’t need any help. He has his own people. He did not ask and I did not send any weapons to him.”
Another photo on his wall was Hassan Aideed, the son of Farah Aideed, the notorious Somali warlord portrayed in the movie Black Hawk Down. Al Kassar has been named in UN reports as shipping weapons to Somalia in violation of UN arms embargoes.
Al Kassar told me he became an arms dealer back in the 1970s, when the government of Communist Yemen, a Soviet client state, gave him a diplomatic passport. He shrugged, as if it was all no big deal. “I’m not here now to remember, of course,” he said. “I’ve worked more that 20 years in the arms business. I have never seen a gun. Believe or not. You go to the ministry, on the catalog, they give us the code or the name: ‘We want ak47’ and we go and sign the ministry.”
He also denied almost everything. He says he never dealt drugs and never acted as an intelligence informant.
He invited me to lunch, too, where he had some visitors. We ate around a huge circular table, serving ourselves off big platters, while Monzer Al Kassar’s little lapdog, the poodle, begged for scraps.
“I’ve met interesting people,” he said. “Good people, bad people. How do I know who’s good and who’s bad? And this is a matter of opinion. Who is bad? The bad people for you may be the good people for me and the good people for me may be the bad people for you.”
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