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“Following the Money,” Government Executive magazine:
Marty Ficke, former special agent in charge at the New York field division for Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau, says, “My experience is you learn a lot about how an organization works by how they deal with money.” Ficke, who ran the El Dorado Task Force, the government’s largest multiagency money laundering investigation team, before retiring in January 2007, says the documents show a disciplined organization obsessed with paperwork and the flow of money.
The first executive order President Bush issued following the attacks directed the Treasury Department to designate and freeze the assets of al Qaeda and the Taliban. Since then, tracking terrorist financing has been a central component of the administration’s efforts to combat terrorism, involving law enforcement and intelligence agencies, international partners and the private sector.