10.

A Strategy for Stemming Terrorists' Financing

DOUGLAS FARAH
Washington Post

In the spring of 2001, when David Aufhauser agreed to serve as the Treasury Department's
general counsel, he looked forward to trying to help reshape how U.S. foreign aid was delivered
around the world. Instead, immediately after the Sept. 11, 2001, al Qaeda attacks, President
Bush asked him to lead the efforts to choke off terrorist financing.

"I wanted to focus on putting our money to good account, but what happened was the mirror
image of that," Aufhauser recalled as he prepared to leave his job next week. "I found myself
deeply engaged in looking at bad accounts, whether it was bad accounts that helped Saddam
Hussein avoid economic sanctions and led us to war, or accounts that permit people to finance
terror by pushing a keystroke."

Then-Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill asked Aufhauser, a 54-year-old attorney who had
worked as part of Bush's legal team in the 2000 Florida recount, to lead the National Security
Council's policy coordinating committee on terrorist financing. The sometimes-fractious
interagency group was responsible for fashioning a strategy to shut down the money pipeline to
terrorist organizations. Until then, virtually no attention was paid to the flow of money to al Qaeda
and other terrorist groups, and there was no central database of suspected donors or front
organizations.

Aufhauser had no background in counterterrorism, but he earned high marks from officials
involved in the process for working across bureaucratic boundaries. They praised him for quickly
putting together intelligence and law enforcement data that allowed the U.S. government to
freeze more than $130 million in suspected terrorist assets.

Aufhauser also played a lead role in writing new laws that expanded the government's ability to
seize suspected terrorist assets. Despite the progress, he said, "we need someone to take
charge of the rather amorphous interagency group" trying to track and halt the flow of resources
*" terrorists. He said that person should be the recognized U.S. government spokesperson

§ •road. Foreign governments have often complained that there is no one office or agency with
lich they can deal on terrorist financing issues.

Through his leadership of the committee, Aufhauser became one of the main intermediaries with
the Saudi government, pushing the issue of terrorist financing to the forefront of bilateral relations
by focusing on Saudi charities and individuals believed to be responsible for tunneling millions of
dollars to Osama bin Laden and his allies. Aufhauser caused a minor uproar earlier this year
when during a congressional hearing he stated publicly that the desert kingdom was an
"epicenter" of terrorist financing.

Getting the Saudi government to take action against terrorist financiers proved to be one of his
biggest challenges, and one, he said, that will not go away, despite increased Saudi cooperation
after the May 12 bombing in Riyadh that left 35 people, including nine assailants, dead.

"Before May 12, there was cooperation from the Saudi government, but it was always responsive,
never pro-active," Aufhauser said in an interview in his office. "They conveniently focused on
changing the [financial] system rather than finding and holding people personally accountable,
with some exceptions. It seemed not to be a cooperation based on conviction, but necessity and
based on the evidence we presented them."

Saudi officials have repeatedly said their government was committed to cutting off terrorist
financing long before the Riyadh bombings.