In this episode, Mariah Yager is interviewing David Luna and Jack Gaines as they discuss how adversaries use criminality to achieve their foreign policy goals while removing U.S. influence and capability.
The interview is based on a presentation at SMA (Strategic Multilayer Assessment), an online Pentagon forum. Link to the show and resources: https://nsiteam.com/smaspeakerseries_22august2024/
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One CA is a product of the civil affairs association
and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on the ground with a partner nation's people and leadership.
We aim to inspire anyone interested in working in the "last three feet" of U.S. foreign relations.
To contact the show, email us at [email protected]
or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website at www civilaffairsassoc.org
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Special thanks to the Epidemic Blues channel for the sample of Peter Crosby - Jailhouse Blues. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuyc-bIjQ10
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Transcript
00:00:06 Introduction
Welcome to the 1CA Podcast, a product of the Civil Affairs Association and brings in people who are current or former military, diplomats, development officers, and field agents to discuss their experiences on ground with the partner nation's people and leadership. Our goal is to inspire anyone interested in working the last three feet of foreign relations. To contact the show, email us at capodcasting at gmail .com or look us up on the Civil Affairs Association website. at www .civilaffairsassos .org. I'll have those in the show notes.
00:00:39 MARIAH YAGER
Hi, everyone. I'm Mariah Yeager, and welcome to today's guest, David Luna, the founder of International Coalition Against Illicit Economies. Prior to ICAIE, David Luna was the Senior Director for International Security and Diplomacy at the State Department's Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement. He focused on strengthening international cooperation and fighting threat to illicit networks. And David also helped launch the Organization for Economic Coordination and Development Task Force on Countering Illicit Trade. But with that, Mr. Luna, I'd like to hand the floor over to you.
00:01:11 DAVID LUNA
Thank you very much Mariah and Jack. It is great to be here to participate about the radar warfare in grey zones related to China and Russia, manipulating instability through co -option and coercive economics, including by weaponizing corruption. including election interference, as Secretary Blinken has underscored in recent months, elicit financial flows to support pro -authoritarian candidates that advance malign influence and that exploit governance gaps to secure friendly policies, while harming our U .S. national interests. This also includes the leveraging of criminal networks, proxies, and professional enablers. to advance policies to construct a multipolar world, exploiting grey zones in the process from small islands in the Asia -Pacific region to fragile democracies in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Europe. The United States remains unprepared for irregular warfare. China, Iran, and Russia continue to seek to undercut U .S. influence. They degrade American relationships with key allies and partners. and to exploit the global environment to their advantage, including by exploiting instruments of competition, strategic corruption, blind influence operations, terrorism, sabotage, and subversion through asymmetrical and clandestine efforts. And so we can dictate the costs related to these hostile actions by effectively prosecuting the strategic use of corruption. and predatory criminality by adversaries across race zones to ensure that democracy reigns over authoritarianism. Greaterly the rule of law and international -based systems must outlive targeted chaos, abversion, and malign influence. I think that we must use such current and horizontal threats to repressive threat convergence so that we can develop actional responses to counter illegality. that is corroding the rule of law and interconnected with the threats networks. Through this framework, I firmly believe that we can better help DOD, the intelligence community, the interagency community, our combatant commanders, and our warfighters to understand the threat and to equip them with pragmatic resource sustain, irregular warfare tools, and anti -crime capabilities. The Department of Defense and our interagency partners to develop more dynamic NASA security military strategies and to get ahead of the game in planning for future irregular warfare campaigns, using these innovative capabilities to expand the competitive space to the U .S. advantage of their allies. A few months ago, I had the distinct pleasure of delivering the keynote address at a meeting hosted by the Department of Defense. Office for Special Operations, as well as the Cali Narcotics and Cali Transnational Organized Crime Program. At that time, I focused more on criminal networks, and I would like to expand on that discussion. I've been focusing more on the policy actions that I believe are needed and that must be integrated into greater warfare strategies. Last month, the Office of the Director for National Intelligence released a brief report. entitled Conflict and the Gray Zones, highlighting non -relations, will increasingly feature an array of hostile gray zones activities. As China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia seek to challenge the United States and to gain advantage over other countries through deliberate campaigns while also trying to avoid war. These gray zones are more often than unexploited in places where corruption thrives. Criminals finance chaos, impunity, and insecurity. So I will focus again on some of these reasons to give you a better understanding how some of these adversaries are leveraging illicit criminal activities, using climate grids, using organized criminals, and other proxies to promote authoritarianism and weaken democracies. erode institutions and undermine the rule of law and global order. Russia and Iran and China continually work to gain access and gain control over strategic locations, critical minerals, ports, and other infrastructure, with the aim of becoming board operating bases for their military forces and intelligence agencies. The islands in the Pacific Rim have become a challenge in recent years that has corroded American influence in these countries and, of course, more globally. We continue to work across sectors with cutting edge research to help map these threat networks, to help the United States and its allies to really understand today's threat environment, to see the interconnections of illicit vectors. to pinpoint nodes of crime convergence, identify those gray zones that are being exploited by some of these malign state actors, and to track illicit rude supply chains and illicit financial flows that enable authoritarians to weaken democracies. So we hope that these challenges or relays will drive further analyses and investigations to disrupt illicit threat networks and their...
00:07:10 MARIAH YAGER
Hey, David, thank you so much. The Criminality Index, how were those calculated? How did that data come together?
00:07:19 DAVID LUNA
This is the Organized Crime Index that was developed by the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. Without getting too much in the weeds of their methodology, they do look at various baskets of data sets from different international organizations. different governments to share more of their methodology.
00:07:41 MARIAH YAGER
And on that, I did post your white paper that you mentioned, and then these slides and your remarks, so everyone can look through the different sources. I mean, there's just some great resources there, from ACLED to some of the track stuff, so I will get those available.
00:07:57 DAVID LUNA
And we also emphasize that despite many successes within the law enforcement community, Global criminality and corruption has expanded greatly today compared to even a decade ago. Illicit entrepreneurial networks collectively continue to exploit the lucrative illicit economies, which, according to some estimates, are between 7 % to 15 % of the world's economy, or up to $20 trillion a year. They really go towards criminal networks. and they contribute to expanding these illicit economies. $20 trillion a year, that is staggering. Equally concerning, adversaries such as Russia, China, Iran, underwrite armed conflicts and malign operations against Western democracies and free markets. Among the reason local conflicts no longer end is that they are supported by illicit threat networks. For example, paramilitary groups supported by criminal opportunists, profit -driven, illicit companies who exploit conflict, and instability to expand criminal economies. In fact, rampant corruption and the violence wrought by organized criminals and terrorist networks help to soften the conditions for insecurity that are exploited to weaken other fragile governments. The state capture aided by criminality and strategic use of corruption results in democracies sliding into optocracies and through proxies helped to start and expand conflicts of regional insecurity. For example, if we look at Russia's Wagner group, who had assisted in a series of coups in Africa that had brought some lundas to power or enabled further optocracies to raid. In exchange, Proxies now rod global high -value commodities in those countries and allow for autocrats to remain in power. In the Central African Republic, Wagner's successors continue to employ active measures to disrupt African efforts to move their countries from violent conflict to stability by moving money and weapons around the continent through an intricate web of shell companies and through criminal networks that specialize in illicit trafficking and legal trading. and sanctions busting. What results is chaos, furthering the corruptive influence of extremist insurgencies in many cases, or regime protection of authoritarians who have faced sanctions and condemnations, including for their human rights abuses. Some of the dirty money that is derived by Russian mercenaries in Africa have helped Russia bypass global sanctions to fund its war in Ukraine, or to support political upheavals. paramilitary misadventures in the Middle East, the Balkans, and forward Soviet republics. Inland America, Russian proxies are selling some of the more advanced surveillance technologies to state and non -state actors across the hemisphere, greatly enhancing their ability to monitor and attack political enemies, law enforcement, officials, anyone else that they perceive as a threat. And as many experts correctly pointed out, Russia remains a criminalized state, led by a ruthless and thugish godfather. In fact, the Russian mafia is an extension of the Putin regime in advancing Russia's national interests overseas, and as an instrument of power operating in the shadows, elicit facilitators, super -fixers to other criminal networks. Russian cybercriminals not only penetrate businesses, it steals. trade secrets and bonds, but also to launch cyberattacks against enemies of the Gremlin. The Siloviki, too, may be asked to engage in kidnappings or assassinations on behalf of their masters in Moscow. Finally, one last point related to Russia. While annexation of Crimea and the recent invasion of Ukraine have significantly affected regionalized economies, Russian criminal networks continue to aid Russian intelligence and special forces in smuggling needed weapons and technology. Obviously, this undermines Western sanctions and transport bans for highly sought consumer goods and helps to londer the assets of Russian countergrants and oligarchs in places like Dubai, London, New York, and Western capitals. Now let me focus for a few minutes on the bigger threat. China. According to FBI Director Christopher Wray, China has become the biggest threat to our national security and to the homeland. This is not because of the global ambitions and active involvement of transnational crimes, but also through political interference operations. China's involvement in expanding illicit economies around the world has a triple whammy effect. Yet, first of all, it increases tremendous illicit wealth. hurts U .S. national security, American competitiveness, and innovation. Finances showing this ambition to become the predominant superpower by 2049. President Xi has openly stated, he would like China to become that predominant power. Through our research and through other institutions like the Terrorism Transnational Crime and Corruption Center, the CCP has leveraged corruption, illicit markets, Predatory crime to become the world's largest player in almost every sector of transnational crime, including counterfeits, trafficking of weapons, humans, wildlife, illegally harvest timber, fish, natural resources, the theft of IP, and trade secrets, illicit tobacco, organ harvesting, and other crimes. Several trillion U .S. dollars in the list of proceeds every year are generated from productive fences for money laundering that touch China's jurisdictions and markets and are often used to finance China's authoritarian regime. According to our ICAO research, China may very well be the biggest money laundering hub in the world. So, on so many fronts, China poses a serious geopolitical and organized criminal threat. Given its proximity to make money on crime and laundering dirty monies for drug cartels or other counterparts, terrorists, sanctioned rogue states, and other pariahs, China has also helped Russia, Iran, and others evade international sanctions, including on oil exports. threats will continue to garner more attention across different illicit industries driven by China as they continue to expand across the developing world. In Latin America and in Panama, for example, China is leveraging bribery of government officials to win concessions to control the port and other critical infrastructure along the Panama Canal. Alarmingly, China already controls or operates in more than 40 ports across Latin America. In many of these ports, the Chinese triads are also quite active. As the former Salcom commander testified a few years ago, China continues to be the number one underwriter for the Mexican drug cartels and other criminal networks. In Venezuela, China is firmly supported to corrupt the Jura regime. not only because of its access and investment in the oil sector, but because it truly is a strategic partner to counter American influence. If we look at Canada in recen