In 2008, DEA investigators launched Project Cassandra, a top-secret effort to prove that Hezbollah had grown from a militia into a global crime syndicate funding itself through drug trafficking, arms deals, and money laundering. This first part traces the investigation's roots to the still-smoldering wreckage of the World Trade Center and follows the handful of agents who began pulling at threads connecting cocaine profits in Latin America to Hezbollah's operations. Interviews with DEA agents and other people involved lay out how the group, founded in 1982 as a resistance movement against Israeli occupation and backed by Iran from the start, embedded itself into every level of the Lebanese state over four decades. The film also revisits the 2020 Beirut port explosion and Hezbollah's refusal to allow independent investigation, using it as a present-day marker of the group's power. DW's reporting moves between testimony, archival footage, and geopolitical context to show how a organization built on resistance rhetoric became, by the agents' account, a financial empire.