The Real Secrets of Our Terrorism Financing Tracking Program Remain Secret

By Victor Comras

Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey’s testimony today before the House Financial Services Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations made a strong case that the terrorism financing tracking program developed by Treasury and other US agencies is, indeed, a vital tool in finding and tracking terrorism financing from its sources to its recipients. And being able to trace transactions through SWIFT, and to obtain access to SWIFT records of previous transactions is a key element of this program. But, in my view, he was off track when he exaggerated the damage caused to this program by the recent press disclosures. These disclosures, Levey said,

>“compromised one of our most valuable programs and will only make our efforts to track terrorist financing - and to prevent terrorist attacks - harder. Tracking terrorist money trails is difficult enough without having our sources and methods reported on the front page of newspapers.”

I don’t believe that the mere revelation that we have access to SWIFT transaction records really “spills the beans” on this program. As I wrote in my June 23rd Blog, that news came as no real surprise to those who closely follow what has been going on to combat terrorism financing. And I strongly doubt that the press revelations came as any real surprise to the terrorist groups or their financiers. The real trick here is knowing how to identify and target the suspicious accounts and transactions that need to be monitored. And it is that methodology, and the sources and methods associated therewith, that constitute the real heart, and the real secrets, of this program. Happily none of this information has been compromised.

I think it is very exciting that our terrorism financing tracking program has had some real successes. But, I certainly wouldn’t attribute these successes, as some seem to do, to any ignorance on the part of the terrorist groups or their financial sources that SWIFT has been cooperating with US authorities. These are pretty savvy guys. They have long known that the US and other governments would pull no stops in trying to identify and track their financial transactions. They use false names, shell banks and shell trusts and companies, and use every other money laundering trick in the book to hide their transactions. I’m sure that each of our successes was the result of a lot of hard work and some damn good intelligence, analysis and detective work. I doubt that the outcome in these cases would have been any different if the NY Times story had appeared in 2003 or even before.

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