Overseas Terrorism in Canada, drugs, smuggling, prostitution

"Nervos belli, pecuniam infinitam." Marcus Tullius Cicero’s observation on the need for endless money to conduct war also applies to terrorists. They need lots of money, and both the political front and the actual terrorist group know this.

Sometime in late 1980 or early 1981, Sean O’Callaghan, one of the most important informants ever to be in the IRA, sat in on an illuminating conference about the finances of the long-running terrorist group:

"The meeting was chaired by Gerry Adams, who baldly stated that the IRA was in serious financial difficulties. He described how it cost Ł2 million a year to keep the organization functioning at its present level, and that it currently fell to Belfast to provide the major part of the funds required, money raised from the IRA’s interest in its many drinking clubs [unlicensed bars] — some of which made over Ł150,000 a year — and gaming machines in West Belfast. The Falls Taxi Association’s two hundred or so black taxis … each yielded a weekly levy of Ł15, which also found its way into the IRA coffers. In addition, money came from other sources — extortion, tax swindles and social security fraud.

"The only self-financing region was South Armagh, and that was because of its position on the border and the smuggling opportunities that that afforded… the IRA were far more organized than individual operators. The local IRA dealt in anything that could be smuggled, from petrol to cattle. … [The meeting] discussed many possible means of raising finance: everything from rock concerts to providing outlets for gaming machines."

There is at once both a natural partnership between organized crime and terrorism, and yet it can be an evolutionary process too. For insurgents, defying authority costs money; for criminals, the authorities stand in the way of making money. Both parties have found co-operation (or fusion) to be exceptionally convenient in many instances over the years. The alliance has no real trap for organized criminals, but it holds mortal peril for a terrorist group.

While the individual motive to engage in terrorism is ultimately a selfish one and terrorism taints whatever ideology it attaches itself to, there have been causes that had some degree of righteousness behind them. Pity the cause that finds itself represented by terrorism, and pity it even more when the insurgents adopt organized crime to fund themselves, because they find themselves sliding into an inevitable conversion process.

At first the terrorist group heads into action, full of righteous zeal while its supporters proselytize with equal fervor. But guns cost money, even the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle normally sells for around US $150.00 per weapon — in places like Albania, Pakistan’s wild Northwest Frontier, or in an under-the-table deal in Russia or Ukraine. Moreover, even terrorists need to eat every day. The front organization will need office space, computer equipment, and nobody can work for free for too long. Soon, a reliable source of safe, and easy money is necessary and criminal activity seems like the easiest bet. However, once they engage in it, the trap kicks in and drags the erstwhile revolutionaries through a series of stages:

Stage 1	Exclusively Terrorist	Minor involvement in criminal fundraising (typically some ‘revolutionary’ bank-robbing and kidnapping for ransom)
Stage 2	Mainly Terrorist	Increasing use of crime to support core and front activities, ‘military’ causes are paramount over funding activities.
Stage 3	Increasingly Criminal	Terrorist resources are expended to protect and expand criminal activities. These are seen as increasingly vital.
Stage 4	Criminal Side Dominates	The original cause is used to validate criminal activities, which are becoming the main focus of the group.
Stage 5	Organized Crime Group	Almost all effort is expended on criminal enterprises, while the original ideology is all but forgotten.

As examples, some of the original terrorist groups of the 1970s such as the Red Army Faction, the Red Brigades or Action Direct stayed within the first stage for most of their existence. Al Qaeda, which apparently expects many of its cells to help support themselves through petty crime, could be considered as being at the second stage. The Provisional Wing of the IRA is well into the third stage and now threatens to cross over into the fourth stage, a point that the Colombian group FARC has definitely reached. The fifth stage is the preserve of ex-terrorist groups that have become wholly concerned with organized crime — such as the Triads or the Mafia.

The transition from start to finish can vary, it has taken the IRA generations to move forward, and the Basque ETA has taken decades to reach the third stage too. Other groups have taken much less time — the Mohawk Warriors Society took less than 20 years to go from start to finish, which is probably a record of some kind for a notional book of dubious achievements.

If the terrorist group takes another route and eschews criminal fundraising for state sponsorship, this limits the group’s growth, makes it vulnerable to the demands of the sponsor state, and can leave the group stranded when the sponsor departs. The short and sorry history of most of the Western European Marxist groups that appeared in the 1970s provides a case in point. Almost all of them dried up once their Soviet sponsors (usually through a variety of proxies) spiraled into financial collapse. The same would be true of some of the sad remnants of such Palestinian splinter groups as the Palestine Liberation Front.

Not withstanding the perils of turning to crime for fundraising, it is hard to think of any modern terrorist group that has refused to do so, and here is probably no aspect of organized crime that they neglect.

Canada is a rich environment for crime — we spend about $10 billion a year on law enforcement, but crime costs us about $46 billion a year. Our annual appetite for narcotics comes to around $18 billion, some $5 billion can be made from telemarketing and securities frauds, and consumers will buy about $1 billion in counterfeit documents. Then there are the other indirect costs of increased security that arise out of intimidation, and the massive expenses resulting from people smuggling. How could any terrorist group resist getting a seat at this feast?

One last point should be made — the partnership between organized crime and terrorism is an especially dangerous one, especially when each can bring their own unique talents and opportunities to the table. Trans-national crime groups like the Russian Mafiya, the Chinese Triads, or the Sicilian Mafia have a potential for political corruption and influence gathering that exceeds that of any terrorist group, and can command far greater resources. When they lend their support and talents to major terrorist groups, they garner the benefit of the attraction of the insurgents’ ideology and talent for generating murderous violence. The two in harness are the greatest threat to the modern system of nation states.

Narcotics and Terrorism

The global market for illicit narcotics is enormous, and this vast industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars in revenues every year.

The lucrative aspects of narcotics production have a strong appeal to both terrorists and criminal groups. Once opium and other narcotics became controlled substances in the Western world in the first decades of the 20^th century, they became attractive to organized crime. However, this was a minor activity until the 1960s and the explosion in consumer demand among the post-war generation. The demand continued to grow into the 1970s and the annual market for narcotics has remained in the hundreds of billions of dollars throughout the Western World since then.

Narcotics are easy money: Production costs are low and the high profits are a perennial incentive for those who would engage in narcotics smuggling and distribution. A farmer in Southeast Asia might receive US $1,500 for producing 10 kilos of opium (necessary to produce a kilo of heroin); street sales might bring $1,000,000 in the sale of 10,000 ‘points’ of end product to North American or European users. A Peruvian coca leaf grower could receive US $750 for 500 kilograms of leaves: The end product, 1,000 grams of pure cocaine-hydrochloride might command a street price of $130,000. A dollar’s worth of hashish in southern Lebanon could be worth 450 times as much to users in Europe and North America.

Refinement costs typically quadruple the costs of the base materials. The rest of the difference between source expenses and street costs reflect the enormous profitability of illegal narcotics. The money involved in narcotics is incredible, 21 tons of cocaine captured in a 1989 raid in Los Angeles had a street value of over $6 billion dollars — more than the entire gross domestic product of many of the nation states in the world. Money on this scale can corrupt a lot of officials and buy a lot of guns.

The narcotics industry is a conventional one in many ways. It needs raw resources, must refine them into its end product, must ship them to its market, must pass on the product to its distributors, who in turn must ensure that the sales people can do their work.

Terrorists (or their front groups) seldom have the time and inclination to work at the distribution and sales end of the narcotics industry. Pushing coke or heroin is time consuming, potentially risky and a little too sordid for men and women who fondly imagine themselves to be world-changing revolutionaries. It is far easier, in both the practical and psycho-political senses of the word, to be operating behind the scenes — by supplying services to the resource producers, refiners and shipping departments.

The relationship between narcotics traffickers and terrorism is common wherever insurgents have managed to create a sanctuary or "no-go" area where outside authority cannot or will not enter. Part of the growth of the cocaine industry in southern Colombia during the 1970s was based on the immigration of Chilean cocaine chemists and traders after the overthrow of the Allende government in 1973. These criminal entrepreneurs were attracted by the instability generated by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and Movimiento 19 de Abril (M19). Later in the 1970s and ‘80s, sharp vicious internal wars would erupt between the guerrillas and Colombia’s criminal factions, but in the end the insurgents have outlasted and overmastered the cartels.

At present, all of the World’s coca leaf production comes from Peru (where growing areas have come under the protection of what remains of the Sendero Luminoso), Bolivia, and Colombia. Some Canadians who have been in Kosovo in 1999-2000 have said that the Kosovar Albanians are now making attempts to expand the cultivation of coca there and in Albania. Most of the refining of cocaine from coca paste takes place inside southern Colombia in areas under the control of FARC.

It can be safely assumed that any cocaine consumed in Canada results in a net benefit to FARC and — to a lesser extent -- to other groups in Latin America. FARC is incredibly wealthy and has no lack of funding for ammunition, uniforms and other gear (often to the point where its members are often much better equipped and more heavily armed than their police/military counterparts). One of the most important intelligence hauls of the Colombian military were the radio logs for a high-level FARC headquarters, it holds records of the routine transfers of huge sums of money derived from narcotics and other criminal activities.

Likewise, the almost total lack of a central government in Afghanistan following the exodus of the Soviet Army in 1989 attracted individuals who had been involved in opium production in eastern Turkey in the 1970s and 80s. Afghan opium became a mainstay of the Taliban/al Qaeda economy and proved to be one of their primary sources of income. However, poppy plants grow well in a variety of places, including southern Mexico and in the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Southeast Asia (specifically in Burma, Laos and parts of Thailand). According to the RCMP’s November 2001 intelligence brief Narco-terrorism and Canada, relatively little Afghan heroin makes it into Canada as most of our supply comes from southeast Asia.

Much of the world’s hashish comes out of the Bekaa valley in Lebanon, an area that is under the control of Hizbollah (who supplanted a variety of Palestinian groups in the early 1980s). Most of the rest comes from Afghanistan and Pakistan, or out of Mexico. According to Narco-terrorism and Canada, a large portion of the $20 million dollars in hashish that is successfully smuggled into Canada every year comes from the Middle East and South Asia. The net effect is, again, that Canadian hashish consumption helps to feed terrorism.

Marijuana and meta-amphetamines are the other large money making products of the Drug World. Canadians can feel both appalled and patriotic as they learn we are a net exporter of marijuana, and that ours is a high-grade product that is much in demand among the discriminating consumers of California. Best of all, our production largely comes from a terrorist-free collaboration in the world of organized crime, in that outlaw Motorcycle club members (mostly Hell’s Angels) put up the money for hydroponics labs and guarantee their security, while letting Vietnamese take the risks of actually growing and packaging the stuff. Then the bikers move some of the product into the US and exchange it for cocaine to return to Canada — thus indirectly working terrorism back into the mix anyway.

Terrorist involvement in drugs can be quite extensive in other parts of the World. The annual reports of the US Depart of State’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement frequently cite the involvement of terrorist groups. For example, the PKK not only restricted itself to ‘taxing’ narcotics traffickers and refiners who ran through their controlled areas in southeastern Turkey, but they were also directly involved in transporting hashish and heroin themselves through the Balkans into Europe, and that their supporters were marketing drugs inside Western Europe. Police in Hamburg arrested a group of 11 year-old Kurdish children who had been smuggled into Germany from Turkey in order to sell drugs for the PKK. Children and teenagers who have been moving drugs for the Kurdish terrorists have been caught throughout Europe on numerous occasions in the 1990s and as recently as 2000. PKK couriers have also been arrested in transit from Latin America with significant quantities of cocaine on their persons.

A similar pattern emerged in Canada (on the West Coast during the mid-1990s), although it is not known if the importation of minors from Central America to move drugs is intended as a direct benefit for any existing terrorist group. Increasingly, narcotics distributors prefer to use children under the age of 12 -- thus usually below the age where any criminal action would be taken against them if caught -- as the point contacts between dealers and customers in urban areas. Behind them are 16-17 year-old minors who dispense the bags of drugs and receive the money handled by the youngsters who operate under their eye. Using minors in this role means lesser penalties in almost all Western nations. Thus the real dealers operate two levels removed from the point of sale, behind these two levels of children and teenagers (who are easy to catch and can be easily replaced) — which greatly increases their safety. In the Canadian case, there are no known connections to terrorist groups, but some observers suspect that FARC may be recruiting and training under-age pushers in Central America to work our streets.

The Turkish government insists, with much justification, that the proceeds from PKK narcotics activities pay for most of the group’s weaponry (some smugglers make shuttle trips — drugs into Europe and explosives back into Turkey). While the PKK has been using children to support its pusher/activists in Europe, no cases of this behavior appear to have surfaced in Canada, yet, and the community of their supporters appears to be small so far.

If the PKK isn’t flogging drugs in Canada, the same cannot be said for some erstwhile members of the Tamil Tigers. They have a history with narcotics that goes back to the late 1970s when Tamil smugglers (a group from which the LTTE leader and some of his key lieutenants originally emerged) started carrying heroin into Sri Lanka from India.

With the 1979 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the Fundamentalist revolution in Iran, the traditional smuggling routes used by many Afghan/Pakistani opium and heroin producers became severely disrupted, and the Sri Lankan Tamils soon provided a new way of getting their drugs to markets elsewhere in the world. Additionally, the insurgent trick of running drugs into the society they are fighting against also appeared — and Sri Lanka (despite fierce penalties — including execution — for drug trafficking) found that the number of heroin addicts on the Island was growing rapidly. Between 1983 and 1993, the number of addicts there grew to 50,000.

Tamils also began running heroin into Western Europe by 1984. Some significant incidents include the arrest of 204 Tamils in Italy during an investigation into a heroin smuggling ring — and some of the prisoners claimed special treatment as they were "political prisoners and revolutionary fighters", while several other prisoners had their tongues cut out to prevent them from talking to authorities. In 1984, Swiss police had found that Tamil refugees carried some 20 percent of the heroin brought into their country. By 1988, Italian police had broken up four rings of Tamil heroin smugglers. Another route for Tamil-related heroin smuggling was found in Poland in 1984, where authorities in the then Warsaw Pact nation (unlike those in Bulgaria) were unwilling to ignore narcotics smuggling just because the intended market was inside the capitalist West. One LTTE operative who was jailed in France for two years for heroin smuggling later became the chief of their international operations.

From 1985 until the early 1990s (when China White Heroin from southeast Asia’s Golden Triangle overtook heroin from Central Asia in Canadian consumer preference), the RCMP’s annual National Drug Intelligence Estimate indicated that heroin from Pakistan and Afghanistan had risen from 20 to 65% of the Canadian market. Tamil traffickers had a part of that market and one ring was mentioned in the 1991 edition of the RCMP’s report. One Tamil trafficker, Veeravagu Velmurugu, who entered Canada in 1984 as a refugee from the United States (where he had arrived in 1983 after fleeing Sri Lanka) had been jailed in Canada for life for heroin trafficking. While in Collins Bay penitentiary, he hatched a plan to escape that would have involved an aerial assault on the prison with helicopters armed with heavy machine-guns.

As the 1990s wore on and heroin from Southeast Asia picked up in volume again, the Tigers also positioned themselves to be able to take advantage of that source too. They have established a naval base for themselves on the Island of Twante, off Burma — the world’s leading source for heroin from that part of the world. The LTTE also owns its own shipping line, and have reportedly used their own merchant ships to smuggle heroin into Europe. The American government is also aware of LTTE involvement with heroin in and around southern Thailand and Burma, but in the absence of any direct threat to the US from the Tigers, the resources of their Drug Enforcement Agency are focused elsewhere.

However, there is an important point to make. While various Canadian police forces are convinced that the LTTE is making money inside Canada through a number of legal and illegal means, they have yet to make a positive connection between drug trafficking in Canada and the Tigers, although individual Tamils have been caught smuggling heroin into Canada. Another Tamil (Veluppillai Pushpanathan) was arrested with $10 million in heroin in 1987, attempted to sell heroin to an RCMP officer (three times), and managed to make a refugee claim while behind bars thanks to our Supreme Court. However, Pushpanathan is slated for extradition after the Federal Court of Canada ruled that there was "very strong evidence demonstrating the applicant’s involvement with the trafficking of heroin in a Tamil Controlled drug-dealing operation." While the direct link between the LTTE and Canadian addicts is not definite, as far as the IRB and the Federal Court are concerned, the proof in this case seems good enough.

Human Trafficking and People Smuggling

One of the fastest growing criminal enterprises of the 1990s concerns the twinned activities of human trafficking and people smuggling. This is a field of activity that might rival narcotics as the top money-earner for the insurgent and criminal cartels of the world.

People smuggling is the more common activity and essentially consists of circumventing or bypassing conventional controls on immigration and international movement. A typical example might involve a paid agent, perhaps making $40,000 per head, arranging for a dozen would-be immigrants boarding an international air flight with fraudulent documents, so that they might make carefully coached refugee claims upon landing in a Western nation.

Human trafficking is a similar activity except that smuggled people will be deprived of their liberty by the traffickers (or his real customers) on arriving in a new jurisdiction, and will be coerced into an unexpected fate. Examples could include a Russian woman who finds herself working as a prostitute after the "model agency" that promised her employment turns out to be a brothel, or where Chinese boat people are diverted to a sweatshop to work off their ‘debt’ to the smuggler as illegal aliens who are paid less than minimum wage. Approximately 700,000 — 900,000 people a year are subjected to this fate.

According to the US Department of State, Canada plays a role in the trafficking of people, and police in Toronto alone laid some 700 charges for offences related to trafficking during 2000. While Canada is sometimes a destination for trafficked people from China, Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe, Korea, Russia, and Central America, the greater part of the flow consisted of people being smuggled through Canada in transit for the United States. Terrorist involvement in this activity in Canada is minimal, but the same cannot be said for people smuggling.

The problem of people smuggling is an enormous one, and many organized crime groups are involved. It is not in the scope of this study, however, to discuss the purely criminally motivated aspects of people smuggling — such as attends that run by Asian or Eastern European criminal societies.

According to one of Canada’s more prominent critics of our current immigration policies, Martin Collacott, we have essentially developed two parallel immigration systems — the conventional system and the ‘refugee’ system. Few of the people who traveled here through the conventional system should be regarded with suspicion (although this system is in desperate need of sweeping reforms), while the refugee system is subjected to considerable abuse.

Before the immigration system is dismissed altogether, it should be pointed out that the system is swamped. There has been the strong whiff of corruption sometimes from among frontline workers in Ukraine and Hong Kong, and Canadian officials are seldom able to query the medical documentation of applicants, or investigate anomalies in their applications. There might be cursory checks on the backgrounds of some applicants, but it would still be easy for potential terrorists or their supporters to beat this casual scrutiny —- particularly if local authorities in the source country have been coerced into assisting a doctored application or are sympathetic to a particular cause. Student visas are another area where considerable work needs to be undertaken to ensure the safety of Canadians, and of our national reputation. It should be pointed out that many of the al Qaeda terrorists who entered Western Europe and the United States did so as "students", and that Canada is no better than our closest allies in both screening applicants or tracking down those who have outlasted their permitted stays here.

Canada currently has a generous refugee system, but it was designed in the 1980s with the expectation that very few refugees would actually make it to Canada. Refugee applications had little to do with previous Canadian immigration policies, most of which were concerned with the demographic and economic growth of the country. While Canadians played leading roles in the formation of the United Nations High Commission on Refugees and the establishment of the UN Refugee Convention of 1951, this had little effect on our own policies. Moreover, these UN measures were intended to deal with the leftover refugees of the Second World War (of whom there were still a great many), and Canadian immigration officers were already avidly combing this population for conventional immigrants anyway and some regulations were relaxed out of humanitarian considerations.

The 1951 UN Refugee Convention essentially defined a refugee claimant is someone who is supposed to have a well-founded fear that they will be persecuted for their beliefs if they are returned to their original home. The 1951 Convention was expanded in a 1967 Protocol, but Canada did not start to implement a coherent refugee policy until 1969. This did not mean that we refused all refugees: An average of 3,002 were allowed into Canada every year from 1960 to 1978. All of them were Convention refugees. However, in the 20 years between 1979 and 1998 an average of 24,956 claims have been accepted every year.

This vast increase originally resulted from two major crises — one being the huge numbers of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees out of the continuing wars in Southeast Asia, and the destabilization of Lebanon after the outbreak of the civil war there. To help with the problem, Canadian authorities (like those in many other Western nations) relaxed their understanding of the UN Convention’s definition. We have had little reason to regret the decision to allow so many of those displaced by these conflicts from entering — the great majority of them have become fine citizens. However, once the Convention guidelines were relaxed, a precedent had been established and it has subsequently proven difficult to shut the floodgate again.

If an opportunity presents itself, there are opportunists who will take advantage of it, and Canada’s entry points were soon jammed with people who were using the relaxed guidelines (and some broad interpretations about the ‘persecution’ they faced) to bypass the immigration system. Worse still, the Supreme Court made one of its worst rulings ever in the 1985 Regina vs Singh decision (a case concerning a Sikh militant who had arrived in Canada and faced deportation); when it determined that anyone who arrived in Canada was entitled to the same full legal rights as any Canadian citizen. First off, this meant that every case —- no matter how flimsy — had to be heard and, since most refugees could claim indigence, they would be able to call on public funding to meet their legal costs. Almost overnight, a new legal industry was born — one that probably costs taxpayers at least $1 billion a year.

One other consequence of the decision that should be considered is that Canadian citizenship has taken on far less value: Some 2,265,000 immigrants and refugees landed in Canada between 1990 and1998, but only about 1,00,040 ‘new Canadians’ have bothered to become citizens. This questions the commitment of many of the people who have arrived here.

Now that the gates were wide open, there has only really been one attempt to partly close them again. According to James Bisset, who helped to design it, a generous new system of benefits was created for refugees in 1988 by Immigration Canada, with the expectation that we would return to earlier principles and would only accept claims where Canada was the first county of asylum. In short, anybody who made it directly to Canada from their homeland could claim status, anybody coming by way of another country (particularly a liberal-democratic one) would have to be diverted into the immigration system. As it happens, the decision was partly over-ruled by the Mulroney Government; we would keep the benefits system, but the First Asylum principle would not be recognized… the rest is history.

Canada does attempt to scrutinize the backgrounds of some of the refugees that arrive here (with often poor results — the case load is enormous and CSIS has often faced enormous backlogs), but national security requirements are one of the few grounds for which a refugee can be refused. Although, the Refugee Review Board still refuses about 40-45% of all claims, thousands of deportation orders could not be executed as the subjects of them cannot be located. Moreover, the first priority for Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration officers charged with hunting down refused cases tends to be violent criminals — a priority that only shifted (somewhat) after September 2001.

Although thousands upon thousands of refugee claimants arrive normally and are honest enough in their declarations, people smuggling taints the whole system.

In the case of the Tamil community, it is often not always clear that the Tigers directly benefit from people smuggling into Canada — except that the Tamil community in Canada can be milked to their indirect benefit. Normally, it costs somewhere between $10,000 and $40,000 for a Sri Lankan Tamil to be brought to Canada illegally, with the usual cost running around $20-25,000 dollars. Most of the smugglers tend to be known to their clients, or come from the same community, but in many cases, the ‘agency’ making the arrangements will be operating with the permission of the LTTE.

Also, for those who are leaving Sri Lanka from areas controlled by the Tigers, a few hundred dollars will be necessary for an "exit visa" from the LTTE. In some cases, people with special skills or a greater wealth than ordinary Tamils may have to pay thousands of dollars to be entitled to leave.

It is not known, and seems unlikely, if Babbar Khalsa or al Qaeda demands similar ‘exit visas’ from people living under their thumbs, nor that they directly profit from encouraging the smuggling of anyone else other than their own members and key supporters. No doubt they would if it was possible.

The essential act in people smuggling is to bring the would-be refugee claimant onto the national territory of Canada. An applicant for refugee status at an overseas Canadian embassy or consulate might be considered; but in this case, the applicant would really have to be a bona fide Convention refugee. Anyone else would be shunted into the immigration pipeline. Hence, the demand for smuggling services.

People smuggling and human trafficking often rests upon the creation or alteration of travel documents. These are necessary to be able to transit other countries on the way to Canada, and to board aircraft bound here. Usually, a group of 5-7 people will be escorted by a ‘minder’, though many people travel on their own after having bought false or doctored documents. The usual passports and visas are necessary to board an aircraft bound for Canada, but once on board the aircraft, it is necessary to get rid of them. Usually, the aspiring refugees will transfer their documents back to the smuggler (who will re-use them later) during the flight, and declare themselves to be undocumented refugees on arrival in Canada.

Others will seek to arrive in Canada with a false identity and might only declare themselves as refugees if the document is discovered while passing through Customs or Immigration. A number of terrorists have been caught entering Canada with false passports -- Mokhtar Haouari and Ahmed Ressam both did so in February 1994 (Ressam had arrived in France with a fake Moroccan passport to the name of Nasser Resam in 1993, arrived in Montreal with an altered French passport to the name of Tahar Mejadi, and traveled to Afghanistan for terrorist training under a Canadian passport to the name of Benni Noris). Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub, a Toronto area convenience store clerk who is also suspected of being a senior ‘fixer’ for Islamic Jihad came to Canada with a doctored passport. Aynur Saygili, a PKK member, who came here to take over a Kurdish cultural organization also had a doctored passport when entering Canada. BKI member Iqbal Singh arrived in Canada in 1991 as an undocumented refugee (after hopping through several countries with false documentation).

Passports and travel documents are so valuable, that smugglers often re-use them again and again. One Tamil ring cracked by the RCMP in 1996 took about five years to be uncovered, and was producing hundreds of forged "counterfoil" pages with which to alter Canadian passports. (The counterfoil page is the one containing a person’s biographical information, and would have to be slipped into a real passport — blank counterfoil page go for about $100 each). Another ring was broken in 1994 with a series of six arrests, but not before the Tamil smugglers had brought thousands of people to Canada — netting a profit of about $10,000 per head on some 50 people a month. Besides acquiring 20 forged Canadian passports, the RCMP also recovered blank OHIP and Citizenship cards and phony exit and entry stamps from a number of countries.

A 1990 case of passport forgery was the first one ever to result in a Canadian conviction. Again, the perpetrators were Canadian Tamils, operating out of an apartment in Toronto. They had produced something like 1,000 doctored travel documents before being caught. Another forger, whose lab for doctoring passports was uncovered in 1991, was found to have the World Tamil Movement of Ontario’s phone number listed under ‘LTTE’ in his date book.

An alternative to flying into Canada or the US and making an undocumented refugee claim is to come by ship. The first mass wave of 155 Tamil refugees arrived this way in 1986, in two lifeboats off Nova Scotia. At first they tried to imply that they had come directly from Sri Lanka, but it turned out they had done so via India, the USSR, East Germany and Hamburg, West Germany, before taking ship across the Atlantic. Curiously, as Canadian authorities started to investigate their claims, a fire in a Hamburg police station destroyed much of the documentation associated with their earlier travels and entry into Germany. In 1987, another 174 "Sikhs" arrived in much the same way; their Dravidian faces and general lack of knowledge about the Sikh religion raised some suspicions, but most of this group of Tamils was also given refugee status anyway.

By and large, shipping oneself to North America is cheaper than flying, but it is much more uncomfortable and hazardous. In 1998, a group of 190 Tamils surrendered — most in poor health — off Senegal after paying $14,000 each to be smuggled to North America.

One interesting datum about refugee claimants from Sri Lanka. In 1992 — a time when all parties in the Sri Lankan conflict were committing atrocities -- some 8,452 Tamil refugee claimants showed up at the Sri Lankan High Commission in Ottawa to apply for travel documents for a return visit to Sri Lanka, the nation they claimed to have fled because of a well-founded fear of persecution by a supposedly genocidal government. Business remains brisk at the High Commission, and the Sri Lankan government opened a consular office in Toronto in 2000 to help handle the continuing high volume of requests for visas.

Al Qaeda members are also keenly interested in acquiring and doctoring false passports and documentation. One of the reasons why Canada started to pay attention to Ahmed Ressam and the Montreal Salafist cell was because of a French investigation into the provision of black market Moroccan passports to a group of Turkish Islamic Fundamentalists who were planning to assassinate the Turkish President on a trip to Belgium. A French court determined that Adel Boumezbeur, Karim Said Atmani, Mustapha Labsi and a Canadian citizen, Fateh Kamel (all from Ressam’s cell) had provided these documents. Once a thread from a carpet of deception becomes unraveled, it is interesting to see where it leads… all the more reason why any instance where fabricated passports or travel documents appear should be closely investigated.

Prostitution and War

Prostitution and related sexual enterprises probably rival narcotics as the leading revenue earners in the World’s underground economies; but the sex industry is shy when it comes to filing reports about its annual revenues. Prostitution, as an industry, has considerable overhead expenses too -- it requires a lot of workers, most of whom have living expenses to meet, there may be advertising costs and the need to maintain commercial premises. As a result, the sex industry may be less attractive to the supporters of terrorism than many other criminal activities. This does not mean that they ignore the field completely.

For most terrorist or insurgent organizations, aspects of the groups’ popularity and ethno-cultural background play key roles in determining the role of prostitution as a fundraising mechanism. For example, the limited number of supporters available to conventional Marxist groups inside Western nations largely debarred them from making use of prostitution. Likewise, Islamic groups, or those with a strongly nationalistic ethos are also likely to refrain from using prostitutes to raise money for the cause (although many reports from Afghanistan and Algeria have demonstrated that Islamic Fundamentalists have offered every possible sexual abuse to Muslim women whenever it suited them to do so).

It is possible that some Ulster-based groups have linkages to prostitution, and at least two British Army officers with recent experience there believe this may be the case. Ulster’s underground economy — betting shops, unlicensed bars and smuggling activities already provide the bulk of the income for the Protestant Paramilitaries and the Provos, so it is not too much of a stretch for them to believe that both groups dabble in prostitution as well.

Sometime in the mid-1980s (according to unsubstantiated gossip in the Intelligence community) a senior IRA man was discovered in Toronto after one of the two call-girls who had accompanied him to take care of the terrorists’ living expenses was arrested by the local police. This led to an expedited deportation of the IRA member back to waiting authorities in Great Britain.

Most prostitutes have to advertise and this makes the industry easy to monitor at times. Most Canadian phone books carry advertisements from escort agencies, and advertisements for prostitutes can be found in many community papers. In Toronto, most such advertisements can be found in two weekly papers, Now Magazine and Eye Magazine. Starting in mid 1995, some of the advertisers offering negotiable affection began to describe themselves as East Indians, Sri Lankans, Tamils, or as having freshly arrived from Jaffna (the main Tamil city in Sri Lanka). These ads can still be found, but in all fairness they were only a few in a sea of similar ones for women of many different backgrounds.

In 1998, a pair of sources in the Tamil Community told one of the authors about "Camilla", a madam for a Tamil hooker ring in Toronto. The story was that most of the clientele were Tamils, but the thinking about Camilla’s organization was that a man who could afford a few hundred bucks for an hour or two of pleasure could also then be fingered as someone who could afford to increase his donations to the Tigers’ cause. The story was impossible to confirm for several reasons, but Camilla does still advertise in the ‘Adult Personal’ section of Now Magazine.

One additional datum about prostitution and the Tigers arises out of people smuggling activities (another key industry for the LTTE). In the mid 1990s, it was not unknown for some Sri Lankan women to be abused or raped while being smuggled towards Canada, and some were deliberately stranded in Thailand and forced into prostitution there. In all fairness, the risks of this happening to Tamil women are much lower than they are for women being handled by human traffickers from Eastern Europe and the Far East.

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John Thompson is President of the Mackenzie Institute which studies political instability and terrorism. He can be reached at: mackenzieinstitute@bellnet.ca

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