The comfortable world of AML was pottering along in a backwater of global public policy when 9/11 suddenly turned that world upside down. The attack on the World Trade Center in New York had clearly been planned for months if not years and it had been financed. It was clear to everyone that there was a link between the crime and the money, but what was it and what could be done about it?

Financial intelligence could have flagged up foreign nationals taking flying lessons. Financial links to previous known suspects and previous attacks could have been better harvested and passed to law enforcement agencies. But the attack, its precursors (in East Africa) and its suspects’ movements had been tracked all across the world from Malaysia to Yemen and from Pakistan to California. A global approach was needed to harness such information. A global system already existed to identify finances which were the proceeds of crime after the event, so identifying finances before a criminal event was sort of similar. The same players were involved: banks and financial investigators. The same techniques would be used: financial analysis to detect unusual transactions, the freezing of assets pending investigation. The same preventative methods could be deployed: compliance with Recommendations likely to assist with identifying suspect people and entities. It was just like AML, only in reverse, pre-facto not post-facto.

Of course, terrorism was not new, but the idea of addressing terrorism through finance was relatively new. Two years before, in 1999, the United Nations had agreed a ‘Convention for the suppression of the financing of terrorism’. The UN had failed to agree on a definition of terrorism, and we are not going to attempt to do so here. The Convention text referred to previously agreed conventions relating to terrorist-type crimes: bombings, hostage taking and the hijacking of aircraft and ships. For our purposes, in this book on dirty money, the key points are that terrorism is widespread around the world, some of the financing is dirty money derived from crime and the main technique to tackle it is closely linked to the war on dirty money.