The Islamic State, for instance, has become perhaps the wealthiest militant group in history by wringing cash from the people it rules, looting bank vaults and smuggling oil. Yet its success appears to have left it vulnerable: It has taken in so much money that it has had to resort to physically stockpiling cash in warehouses, 10 of which have been struck by American warplanes since the summer.
The Haqqani network, a Taliban faction that is especially close to Al Qaeda, is believed to have poured money into real estate in Afghanistan, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates. A European official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence, said the Haqqanis are believed to have been hit hard by the real estate crash in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, a few years ago.
Still, despite the occasional bursting bubble, real estate appears to have been a relatively safe investment, particularly in South Asia, where there is little regulation.
Osama bin Laden Orders an Investment in Gold
In a letter to Al Qaeda’s general manager, declassified by the Central Intelligence Agency, Osama bin Laden discussed what to do with a ransom that had been paid for an Afghan diplomat that it had held captive.
“You can show up with a suitcase full of cash and buy a house,” said Gretchen Peters, who runs the Satao Project, a consulting firm that focuses on organized crime and terrorism. “It’s not like there is an I.R.S. money-laundering unit that’s going to come for you.”
At the time Bin Laden wrote the letter to his general manager, the two had been discussing the $5 million ransom, which was paid by the office of President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan to free an Afghan diplomat that Al Qaeda had been holding. Unknown to the Qaeda bosses, about a fifth of the ransom was inadvertently provided by the C.I.A., which bankrolled a secret fund for the Afghan leader with monthly cash deliveries to the presidential palace in Kabul.
Al Qaeda had the money in hand by the time Bin Laden sat down to write his general manager in December 2010. Bin Laden clearly wanted nothing to do with United States dollars, which many Islamist militants fear could expose them to the long reach of American justice.
“As for the ransom money for the Afghan prisoner, I think you should use one-third of the money to buy gold and another third to buy euros,” he wrote.
The remainder, Bin Laden said, should be used to buy Kuwaiti dinars and Chinese renminbi, also known as yuan, with about a third kept in local currencies to cover day-to-day expenses. “When you do spend this money, use the euros first, then the dinars, the yuan, and then the gold,” he wrote.
Bin Laden had specific instructions for how to acquire the gold. It should be bought in coins or bars, which he referred to as “10 tolas,” a common denomination for gold bars in South Asia. Coins “are minted in several countries,” he wrote, naming Switzerland, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.
But Bin Laden was nothing if not paranoid by then — at one point, he feared that an Iranian dentist had implanted a tracking device in one of his wife’s teeth — and he stressed in the letter that “the broker you deal with should be trustworthy.”
He also suggested buying a small amount of gold and reselling it to make sure the broker was honest.
Bin Laden appears to have believed that done right, investing in gold was nearly a sure thing.
“Right now it is $1,390 an ounce, but before the events in New York and Washington it was $280 an ounce,” he wrote.
He added, “If the price of gold reaches $1,500 or a little over before you get this message, it’s still all right to buy it.”
If Al Qaeda bought gold when Bin Laden advised, it was a bad bet. The day his letter was dated, Dec. 3, 2010, gold closed at $1,414.08 an ounce. Today, the price is hovering around $1,230 an ounce.