According to Lara Burns, a former FBI agent who spent years tracking Hamas in the United States, the terror organization has for decades had a detailed strategy for both fundraising and winning the propaganda war, especially on American campuses.
One of the targets of the recent Israeli strike on Hamas leaders in Qatar, which apparently failed, was Musa Abu Marzouk, who served as the first chairman of the Hamas political bureau from 1992 to 1996 and then as deputy chairman from 1996 until 2013, when he was succeeded by Ismail Haniyeh.
Abu Marzouk first arrived in the United States in 1982 on a student visa, which he renewed several times, until he was given a green card in 1990. The U.S. designated Hamas a terrorist organization in 1997, making it illegal for Hamas to raise funds or operate openly.
Burns told a group of select journalists in Tel Aviv during a visit to Israel in early September that Abu Marzouk had created three organizations in the U.S. to get around this terrorist designation: the Islamic Association for Palestine, which became Hamas’s propaganda arm; the Occupied Land Fund, later renamed the Holy Land Foundation, which became Hamas’s financial arm; and the United Association for Studies and Research, which served as the political/academic arm.
She said then, as now, Hamas has a long-term strategy that seems to have succeeded. A recent poll found that 60 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 24 support Hamas over Israel in the current conflict.
Burns, who interviewed hundreds of Hamas officials during her time in the FBI, said Hamas had made no secret of the fact that it was playing the long game.
“American society and the U.S. government, in my opinion, failed to understand the strategy of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas and that they plan hundreds of years in advance. And nothing deters them from pursuing that ultimate goal,” Burns said. “I think because they weren’t conducting overt military operations on U.S. soil, they were deemed to be less of a threat [than other organizations such as Islamic State or countries like Iran].”
“They took a back seat,” she said. “But to me, when organizations like Hamas are quiet, that’s when they’re the most lethal.”
Burns, an attorney by profession, has more than 23 years of experience leading teams in complex international terrorism investigations. At the outset of her career as an FBI Special Agent, she led the Department of Justice’s largest terrorism financing investigation and prosecution, “United States v. Holy Land Foundation, et al,” which led to the conviction of some of Hamas’s top fundraisers in America.
She was later appointed an FBI Supervisory Special Agent and the International Terrorism Program Coordinator for the FBI Dallas office’s counterterrorism program in 2015. In that capacity, she led investigations and prosecutions in various terrorism matters that spanned the globe.
She was also an FBI instructor for the majority of her career, teaching federal, state, local and foreign governments about terrorism financing, money-laundering and interview techniques. She retired from the FBI in April 2023 and worked as a Cyber Security researcher in the private sector until she a faculty member in The George Washington University’s Program on Extremism in May 2024.
Burns joined the FBI in 1999, just months before the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon. She said that even after 9/11, the FBI focused on shutting down these organizations that functioned as a funnel for Hamas.
In 2008, the Holy Land Foundation was convicted of funneling more than $12 million dollars to Hamas, a conviction she saw as a victory. But after that conviction, the U.S. government seemed to lose interest in Hamas.
“FBI priorities changed and we stopped looking at Hamas,” she said. “When Oct. 7 happened and when I woke up to hear the news of the attack, I was devastated, because I had always known how evil the terrorist organization was and then immediately turned on the television and checked social media and saw individuals who were part of that original U.S.-based infrastructure driving false narratives and hate and praising the attacks.”
Burns said Hamas has continued to operate in the US through various fronts, often underground.
“If you’re at the beach and your kids are in the water and you see that dorsal fin, most people can recognize that it is dangerous and get out of the water,” she said. “But where is the real heart and soul? Where is this danger? It’s underneath the water. It’s what you can’t see. It’s the heart and mind that drive that beast.”
She added, “That is Hamas’s radicalization model. That is the propaganda piece they use to garner support, co-opt groups and magnify their numbers so that false narratives like Oct. 7, a resistance operation, start resonating with people.”
