How is DOGE Like a Beirut Bank Heist?

A Guest Essay by Anti-Corruption Expert Jodi Vittori

In the midst of the worst days of the Lebanese civil war in 1976, one of the world’s most daring bank robberies took place along the so-called Green Line in Beirut. The Green Line ran north to south and split the city into East and West Beirut; it also went through the city’s financial center. Taking advantage of the chaos brought about by this division, the British Bank of the Middle East (BBME) was robbed. The thieves gained entry by punching a hole through a local Catholic church that shared a wall with the bank and explosives were used to blow open the bank vault. The thieves got away with between $50 million to $300 million (up to $2 billion adjusted to today’s value) worth of cash, gold, jewels, stocks, and gold bars. Neither the perpetrators nor the loot was ever found.

The identities of the bank robbers is a source of continued controversy. An account by British Sunday Times defense correspondent James Adams in his 1986 book The Financing of Terror asserted that two rivals--the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and the Christian Phalange (along with some Italian safe cracking experts reputed to be mafia-connected) conducted the robbery. The money was supposedly split three ways with the PLO investing some of their cut in their business empire and the remainder being spent at casinos in Monte Carlo. For decades this was listed as the biggest bank robbery ever by the Guinness Book of World Records.

However, the money was not where the long-term profit of that bank heist resided. The loot seized in the heist included bank records and with those records came the potential for blackmail. When the civil war broke out, Lebanon had been one of the world’s leading financial capitals as well as one of its leading “hot money” locales, notorious for its role in laundering the money from the trade of drugs, gold, arms, and the various middleman commissions that facilitated these transactions. As Adams put it, “Even without the cash, the financial records taken from the BBME , which must have detailed the hidden dealings of some of the most prominent men in the Middle East, gave the terrorists a useful source of blackmail for many years.”

As media reports and lawsuits continue to roll in regarding Elon Musk and his DOGE acolytes’ opaque and extraordinary access to Americans’ personal data, I thought of this historical vignette. In 1976, getting lucrative financial records required the use of explosives. Today, Elon Musk does not need to go through nearly so much trouble.

Americans—and the world—should be rightly concerned that Elon Musk and his minions have access to key IT systems and with it, Americans’ most important personal information including social security numbers, home addresses, birth dates, and bank account information, plus at least some ability to rewrite at least some of the code behind those databases. While DOGE’s access to the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service databases is currently blocked, the replacement for the Treasury civil servant responsible for this particular set of databases David Lebryk—who resigned rather than undertake illegal orders to stop foreign aid payments—is being replaced by Tom Krause, an ally of Elon Musk. He replaces 25-year-old Marko Elez who resigned (and was then rehired) after it was revealed that an account linked to him had recently posted racist and pro-eugenics comments. It is not just sensitive financial information with the Treasury as DOGE is now trying to access: IRS taxpayer information is reportedly in the organization’s crosshairs as well.

This is terrifying enough. However, the lesson from the PLO bank robbery is that financial records and other personal information—once stolen—is “already out there” as goes a famous line from the movie When Harry Met Sally. No one knows what DOGE has been doing with this unprecedented level of data access. (Elon Musk has claimed in a tweet that he does not have any personal data of Americans.) Even if DOGE is immediately forced to give up this access, there are now clear potential security vulnerabilities.

It is not just ordinary citizens that should be worried. Many countries and criminal organizations alike use America’s financial systems. Just as Lebanon was a money laundering hub back in the 1970s, the United States is the world’s easiest place to launder money today. The American government’s financial databases - including those of the IRS - hold immense potential secrets.

The potential for these records falling into the wrong hands and being used for blackmail and other nefarious activities should be a concern for ordinary Americans, as well as any countries with commercial activities in the United States. The implications of a potential leak are enormous and could shake economic and political foundations of the world economy for decades to come. This all begins to sound like a plot line from a James Bond movie, except that it is rapidly becoming all too plausible unless the American government immediately grabs back the reins.

But as the Economist noted earlier this month: “...DOGE is already moving into new agencies. Nobody is stopping him.”

Jodi Vittori is the Global Politics and Security Concentration Co-Chair at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service and a non-resident fellow with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. She is a retired US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and also formerly worked for the anti-corruption civil society organizations Transparency International and Global Witness.