According to Treasury and Justice Department officials familiar
with the briefings their senior leadership undertook with editors
and reporters from the New York Times and Los Angeles
Times, the media outlets were told that their reports on the
SWIFT financial tracking system presented risks for three ongoing
terrorism financing investigations. Despite this information, both
papers chose to move forward with their stories.
“We didn’t give them specifics, just general information about
regions where the investigations were ongoing, terrorist
organizations that we believed were being assisted. These were off
the record meetings set up to dissuade them from reporting on
SWIFT, and we thought the pressing nature of the investigations
might sway them, but they didn’t,” says a Treasury official.
In fact, according to a Justice Department official, one of the
reporters involved with the story was caught attempting to gain
more details about one of the investigations through different
sources. “We believe it was to include it in their story,” says the
official.
In the briefings, Treasury and Justice Department officials laid
out the challenges law enforcement and intelligence agencies have
had with the traditional and still popular hawala Muslim “banking”
system, which is dependent more on interpersonal dealings than on
institutions and has been prevalent in parts of the world that
doesn’t understand the Islamic rules. “Since 9/11 we’ve gotten a
lot better at monitoring hawalas,” says a Justice Department
official. “That success has forced a lot of the money into the
institutional or more traditional banking systems. And that’s where
SWIFT has been particularly helpful.”
This is especially true in the regions of the world that cater
to large Muslim communities that require banking rules in line with
their faith. Increasingly in countries like Malaysia, large,
international banks are attracting billions in Muslim funds, trades
and transfers of which could be monitored by SWIFT.
According to the Treasury and Justice Department sources, the
reporters and editors appeared to have been told that the SWIFT
financial monitoring was somehow being undertaken without warrants
and without legal supervision. But from the initial briefings, the
Times papers were shown information that clearly outlined
the search warrant procedures undertaken by the federal government
to track some financial transactions.
In fact the SWIFT program released a statement once the
Times’ stories ran stating that it had negotiated terms of
the limited monitoring:
SWIFT negotiated with the U.S. Treasury over the scope
and oversight of the subpoenas. Through this process, SWIFT
received significant protections and assurances as to the purpose,
confidentiality, oversight and control of the limited sets of data
produced under the subpoenas. Independent audit controls provide
additional assurance that these protections are fully complied
with.
“We thought that once the reporters and editors understood that
one, these were not warrantless searches, and two, that this was a
successful program that had netted real bad guys, and three, that
it was a program that was helping us with current, ongoing cases,
they would agree to hold off or just not do a story,” says the U.S.
Treasury official. “But it became clear that nothing we said was
going sway them. Whomever they were talking to, whoever was leaking
the stuff, had them sold on this story.”
To that end, the Justice Department has quietly and unofficially
begun looking into possible sources for the leak. “We don’t think
it’s someone currently employed by the government or involved in
law enforcement or the intelligence community,” says another
Justice source. “That stuff about ‘current and former’ sources just
doesn’t wash. No one currently working on terrorism investigations
that use SWIFT data would want to leak this or see it leaked by
others. We think we’re looking at fairly high-ranking, former
officials who want to make life difficult for us and what we do for
whatever reasons.”
As for the ongoing investigations that the two Times
papers were told of, only time will tell if they have been damaged
by the reporting. “Let’s put it this way, some of these folks
probably aren’t using their banks anymore, so who knows,” says the
Treasury source. “Using banks for transfers was easier for them to
move funds faster, especially if it was in a part of the world that
was heavily Muslim and they thought the money wouldn’t draw as much
attention there. But groups like al Qaeda aren’t about to put
expediency before their goals of destroying us, so they will do
what they have to do to protect their financing and their
operatives. We know that, we just wish the New York Times
and Los Angeles Times cared, too.”
