Syrian arms dealer convicted in New York

NBC News:

A notorious international arms dealer was convicted in federal court in Manhattan Thursday, in what's likely to be the end of the colorful career of the so-called "Prince of Marbella," a man who sold weapons to rogue regimes around the world. The conviction of the flamboyant 63-year-old Syrian, Monzer Al Kassar, was a victory for the Justice Department and the Drug Enforcement Administration, whose agents had pursued him for more than 15 years.

Al Kassar's lavish lifestyle and his dealings with unsavory terrorists made him seem like the villain in a James Bond movie. A federal jury convicted him of conspiring to kill U.S. nationals and conspiring to acquire and ship anti-aircraft missiles. He had been caught in a sting operation, in which DEA informants posed as representatives of the Colombia FARC insurgent group. FARC is designated a terrorist group.

I met Al Kassar at his 15-room palace overlooking the Mediterranean in 2006, well before he was indicted in the current case. In an exclusive interview, shortly after he was accused of supporting insurgent groups in Iraq in a separate case, Al Kassar showed off his palace - with its spiral staircases, glass-domed ceiling and lavish carpets. He swore loudly to me that he was simply a "legal arms dealer."

In the recent case, Al Kassar's defense lawyers revealed that he had been an asset or informant for the Spanish police, and had even contacted an inspector the very day he was arrested. Defense lawyers argued Al Kassar kept the Spanish police informed of the illegal deal, and that he thought it was legal. "He was on his way with the briefcase filled with evidence in the case to give over to this very, very high-ranking Spanish intelligence official, who he had been working with as an intelligence asset for many, many years," a defense lawyer said.

Oddly, during his interview with me, he denied being an informant for any government, although he admitted he had friends in Spanish intelligence.

Federal prosecutors in New York acknowledged that Al Kassar worked with the Spanish police, but said he had been playing both sides, and had not revealed the true nature of the illegal weapons deal. Assistant U.S. Attorney Boyd Johnson told a jury in his closing arguments that "the defendants agreed with each other to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons and to sell them to men they thought were going to use them to kill Americans."

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This is an aspect of the war on terror that has received little notoriety, but Kassar is not the only merchant of death caught in sting operations by the US. Thailand is currently holding a Russian arms merchant who also thought he was selling to FARC.

Nor do I find it odd that an arms merchant would present a story in court that was inconsistent with what he told reporters. It is a business where lying has to come easy.

The Bush administration rarely gets credits for things that have worked during the war on terror but locking up the arms merchants is a good thing.