Hamas’s “Long Game” in America: Former FBI Agent Details Decades-Old Strategy to Win U.S. Hearts, Minds, and Money

By: Fern Sidman

For decades, Hamas has been waging not only a war of bullets and bombs in the Middle East but also a quieter, more insidious battle in the United States — a campaign of financial networks, propaganda fronts, and long-term ideological infiltration. According to Lara Burns, a former FBI Special Agent with more than two decades of counterterrorism experience, the Palestinian terrorist organization has spent years constructing an elaborate infrastructure on U.S. soil that helped finance its operations abroad and shape the narratives of generations of Americans at home.

Speaking to a small group of journalists in Israel earlier this month, Burns described Hamas’s American strategy in stark terms: “They plan hundreds of years in advance. They don’t think in election cycles, they don’t think in terms of decades. They have patience and determination that our society consistently underestimates.”

As The Jewish News Syndicate (JNS) reported on Monday, Burns’s warning comes at a moment when public opinion on U.S. college campuses has tilted dramatically against Israel. A recent poll showing that 60 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 now sympathize more with Hamas than with Israel underscores, in her view, the effectiveness of a campaign that began on U.S. soil decades ago.

Central to this story is Musa Abu Marzouk, one of Hamas’s most senior leaders and a man whom Israeli intelligence recently sought to eliminate in a strike in Qatar. Although the attempt apparently failed, Marzouk’s history reveals how Hamas’s American foothold was first established.

Marzouk arrived in the United States in 1982 on a student visa, renewing it several times before obtaining a green card in 1990. During those years, Hamas had not yet been formally designated a terrorist group by Washington — that designation came in 1997 — but Marzouk was already laying the foundations of a sophisticated network of front organizations.

According to Burns, who investigated Hamas’s financing operations extensively, Marzouk established three key U.S.-based groups that collectively enabled Hamas to operate freely despite its growing notoriety:

The Islamic Association for Palestine (IAP): serving as Hamas’s propaganda arm, it published pro-Hamas literature, organized conferences, and shaped public narratives.

The Occupied Land Fund (later renamed the Holy Land Foundation): functioning as Hamas’s financial pipeline, it funneled millions of dollars overseas under the guise of humanitarian aid.

The United Association for Studies and Research (UASR): presenting itself as a think tank, it offered Hamas an academic and political veneer, hosting conferences and engaging in lobbying.

As Burns explained, “These organizations were structured deliberately to mirror different elements of a state apparatus — a media outlet, a treasury, and a political office. Together, they allowed Hamas to operate in the open, even on U.S. soil.”

JNS noted in its own coverage that Hamas’s U.S. footprint, while officially shuttered after the Holy Land Foundation trial, has continued to reverberate in ways that were long ignored by policymakers.

In 2008, the federal government scored what seemed at the time to be a decisive victory. The Holy Land Foundation (HLF), once the largest Islamic charity in the United States, was convicted of funneling more than $12 million to Hamas. The convictions included several senior officials, cementing the case as the Department of Justice’s largest terrorism-financing trial in American history.

Burns, who helped lead the investigation, recalled the case as a personal and professional turning point. “It was the moment when we could say definitively: Hamas was not only raising money in the United States, it was using American charities to do it. And we proved it in court.”

But the victory, she emphasized, was short-lived. “After the HLF convictions, the FBI’s priorities shifted. Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Iran became the dominant focus. Hamas became what I would call a back-burner issue. That was a mistake.”

As JNS reported of Burns’s remarks, the consequences of that shift are visible today, particularly in the ideological battleground of American campuses.

Burns insists that Hamas’s propaganda strategy has always been as important as its financial one. Unlike ISIS, which relied on spectacular violence to capture global attention, Hamas adopted a subtler approach.

“When organizations like Hamas are quiet, that’s when they’re the most lethal,” she told reporters. “Their silence isn’t a sign of weakness, it’s a sign they’re embedding deeper. They know the long game is hearts and minds, especially of the young.”

She pointed to the pervasive slogan “From the river to the sea,” which has migrated from Palestinian rallies into mainstream American protest culture. “That didn’t happen overnight,” Burns said. “That is the result of decades of narrative building, campus organizing, and intellectual legitimization.”

As the JNS report highlighted, Hamas has successfully exploited the language of social justice and anti-colonialism, recasting its violent campaign as a liberation struggle. Burns warned that this rebranding is no accident but the result of calculated investments in academic discourse, student movements, and alliances with U.S.-based activist groups.

The massacre of October 7, 2023, in which Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 Israelis and abducted over 250, was for Burns both vindication and heartbreak. “I was devastated,” she said. “But what shocked me even more than the attack itself was the reaction online. Within hours, I saw individuals tied to that old U.S.-based Hamas infrastructure spreading false narratives, praising the killings, and reframing the atrocities as resistance.”

The former FBI agent likened Hamas’s radicalization model to a shark beneath the waves. “If you’re at the beach and you see a dorsal fin, you know to get out of the water. But the real danger is below the surface. That’s Hamas: invisible, patient, lethal. And October 7 showed us how their propaganda model works in real time.”

The JNS report noted that Hamas-affiliated accounts on U.S. campuses quickly framed the attack as a strike against “occupation,” drawing support from students who had internalized the narratives promoted by Hamas-linked groups over decades.

Burns joined the FBI in 1999, just two years before the 9/11 attacks. For the first decade of her career, she recalls, the Bureau treated Hamas as a serious concern. But after the Holy Land Foundation case concluded in 2008, priorities shifted.

“The attitude became: they’re not blowing up buildings in New York, so let’s focus on the guys who are,” she said. “But that completely missed the point. Hamas doesn’t need to blow up buildings here to change America. They just need to change the way America thinks about Israel.”

Her critique echoes what JNS has repeatedly argued: that the U.S. national security establishment has often underestimated the long-term dangers posed by Islamist groups that focus on ideological subversion rather than immediate violence.

One of the most alarming consequences of Hamas’s long-term propaganda efforts, Burns contended, has been its success on American college campuses. Organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), while not officially linked to Hamas, consistently echo its messaging and adopt its tactics.

JNS has tracked the spread of SJP chapters nationwide, documenting their role in normalizing antisemitic chants, rallies, and campaigns to boycott Israel. Burns sees these groups as the downstream effect of the infrastructure Marzouk and others planted decades ago.

“The poll showing 60 percent of young Americans siding with Hamas over Israel — that didn’t just happen. That is the fruit of a strategy that began in the 1980s. And unless we confront it head-on, it will only grow,” she warned.

Few are as qualified as Lara Burns to make such assessments. With over 23 years in the FBI, she led global investigations into terrorism financing, served as International Terrorism Program Coordinator in Dallas, and became a respected instructor on terrorism, money laundering, and counter-radicalization.

After retiring in 2023, she briefly worked in cybersecurity before joining the faculty of George Washington University’s Program on Extremism in 2024. Her firsthand experience interviewing hundreds of Hamas operatives, combined with her legal training as an attorney, gives her a unique vantage point on the organization’s strategies.

As the JNS report emphasized, her analysis is not theoretical but rooted in decades of investigative fieldwork, prosecutions, and classified intelligence assessments.

Burns’s central message is that Hamas thrives in the shadows of complacency. While policymakers and the public fixate on the immediate threats of ISIS or Iran, Hamas steadily builds its influence through soft power — propaganda, cultural infiltration, and funding networks hidden under the banner of charity.

“Hamas doesn’t need to win militarily. They just need to wait until the next generation of Americans believes their narrative. And they’re already halfway there,” she said.

The United States must reassess its approach to groups like Hamas, treating propaganda and financial networks as seriously as rocket launchers and tunnels.

For Lara Burns, the lesson is clear: Hamas has been preparing for the long war, and America has barely begun to wake up to it. The failed Israeli strike on Musa Abu Marzouk in Qatar underscored that Hamas’s senior leaders remain alive, active, and invested in both battlefield and ideological victories.

The evidence on U.S. soil — from the Holy Land Foundation’s financial crimes to the rising tide of antisemitism on campuses — suggests that Hamas’s “long game” is working.

As the JNS report indicated, the war for Israel’s survival is not confined to Gaza or Lebanon. It is playing out in lecture halls, student unions, and political debates across America. And unless U.S. leaders take seriously the threat that Burns has spent her career tracking, Hamas’s most enduring victory may come not through violence but through persuasion.

“Hamas told us exactly what they were going to do,” Burns said in Tel Aviv. “They’ve never hidden it. The only question is whether we are willing to listen.”