The Terror Factory Page 5

  However, there’s a significant difference between Tidwell’s analogy and Domain Management. In Tidwell’s analogy, the birds provide an independent third-party analysis of sorts—their presence in the sky suggests that a body could be below, no matter what preconceived ideas FBI agents might have about the location of the reported murder victim. But with Domain Management, the data provides suggestions that bolster, rather than challenge, the FBI’s preconceived ideas. The program is able to say with certainty and exactness where Muslims live in a particular city, but the belief that a danger exists in that part of the city as a result of the Muslim population requires the preconceived belief that Muslim communities represent a threat to public safety and national security. This belief and a generalized Islamophobia pervade all levels of the Bureau. In recent years, FBI counterterrorism training has made little to no distinction between the Al Qaeda terrorist network—whose members are religious radicals—and Islam in general. FBI counterterrorism training documents in circulation in 2011 described Mohammed as a “cult leader” and labeled charity among Muslims as a “funding mechanism for combat.” The more devout a Muslim was, according to FBI training literature first made public by Wired magazine, the more likely he was to be violent.29

  Tidwell understands better than most at the FBI the repercussions of focusing investigative resources on Muslims—he is a named defendant in a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Council on American-Islamic Relations in 2011 alleging illegal spying on Muslim communities in California—but he doesn’t believe that knowing, for example, where Lebanese live in a city means that the FBI is necessarily spying on or targeting Lebanese Americans.30 “Anything we do is going to be interpreted as monitoring Muslims,” Tidwell said. “I would tell Muslim community leaders, ‘Do you really think I have the time and money to monitor all the mosques and Arab American organizations? We don’t, and I don’t want to. The flip side with what the Bureau does is that we’re also responsible nationally for protecting civil rights. That’s something I always said in dealing with the Muslim communities—my first responsibility is to protect you. If a mosque had stuff painted on it, just like with a synagogue, we’d help clean it up. Our first responsibility to you is civil rights. Our second responsibility is making sure someone isn’t hiding among you, taking advantage of what you represent.”

  Yet that second responsibility is the reason the FBI developed Domain Management, has agents who are assigned full-time to recruiting informants, and now needs sophisticated software to track its thousands of informants nationwide. The use of Domain Management and the explosive growth of the FBI informant ranks are the primary reasons why today we have so many terrorism sting cases. While the cases involve plots that sound dangerous—about bombing skyscrapers and synagogues and crowded public squares—if you dig deeper, you see that many of the government’s alleged terrorists seem hopeless; they are almost always young and down on their luck, penniless, without much promise in their lives, easily susceptible to a strong-willed informant’s influence. They’re often blustery punks, I told Tidwell, and I wondered if most would mature past their big-talking ways if left alone. “And if they don’t mature?” Tidwell countered. “Or if they hook up with someone of a like mind that has the capacity? You and I could sit here, go online, and by tonight have a decent bomb built. What do you do? Wait for him to figure it out himself?”

  The FBI uses informants and terrorism stings to create a hostile environment for terrorist recruiters and operators—by raising the risk of even the smallest step toward violent action. It’s a form of deterrence, an adaptation of the “broken windows” theory used to fight urban crime. Advocates such as Tidwell insist it has been effective, noting that there hasn’t been a successful large-scale attack against the United States since 9/11. But what can’t be answered—as many former and current FBI agents acknowledge—is how many of the Bureau’s targets would have taken the step over the line at all were it not for the pressure and coercion of an informant.

  *This ignorance of Islam and Islamic culture pervades the Bureau’s highest ranks to this day, as the FBI’s few Muslim agents have had trouble climbing the ranks. In one of several examples of alleged discrimination, the FBI denied the promotion of one Muslim agent, Bassem Youssef, due in part to confusing him with another Muslim agent, Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, who was fired, but later reinstated, after refusing to wear a wire during the controversial investigation of Sami Al-Arian, a computer engineering professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa who pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad following years of FBI scrutiny.

  *The commercial data that the FBI feeds into Domain Management has been a matter of some debate. Congressional Quarterly reported that consumer data used in Domain Management once included grocery store sales of Middle Eastern food. The FBI denied that it was data mining falafel transactions, calling the report “too ridiculous to be true,” but Congressional Quarterly stood by its story.

  3. MOHAMMED AND HOWARD

  Informants have always been an integral part of the FBI, providing the eyes and ears on everything from the Prohibitionera Mafia, when informants furnished information about organized crime figures such as Al Capone, to the civil rights movement, when the FBI used, among other informants, African American freelance photographer Ernest Withers to infiltrate the organization of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.1 Under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, however, informants never played an active role in FBI investigations; instead, they just watched and listened, and then reported what they saw and heard to their handlers at the Bureau.

  This fly-on-the-wall approach metamorphosed during the war on drugs in the 1980s, when the FBI adopted a street-level approach to fighting crime. As part of this new approach, informants became active players in investigations, often posing as either drug dealers or buyers and saying and doing things that pushed plots forward or drew in additional targets. The terrorism informants of today are evolved versions of those drug war–era agents provocateurs.

  The very first of this new breed of informant sprung up in Miami just before 9/11, putting together the kind of sting that would be replicated dozens of times over the next decade: A target was identified—a disgruntled young Muslim man who said he wanted to launch an attack—and the informant then provided the means and opportunity for the attack, all the while secretly recording the target with hidden audio and video equipment. You might expect the informant who adapted the drug war–era “no-dope bust” for a new time and a new threat to be a grizzled, well-trained spy with a history of infiltrating dangerous, insular criminal organizations and bringing down high-profile crooks. But that wasn’t the case at all. Instead, the man who deserves the credit for the change in FBI informant tactics was an inept, underachieving security guard who dreamed of a bullet-dodging, enemy-killing career as a spook with the Central Intelligence Agency.

  The chief problem for Howard Gilbert—an overweight, middle-aged, Canadian-born Jewish man who had attended high school in Hollywood, Florida, and worked odd security jobs as an adult—was that he wasn’t much like the bluebloods of the CIA. A Florida newspaper in 2002 described him as “a 340-pound man with a fondness for firearms and strippers.”2 When he wasn’t working as a bodyguard or assassinating evil Latin American despots vicariously through Soldier of Fortune magazine, Gilbert could be found hanging around International Protective Services, a police and personal security store near downtown Hollywood, a few blocks from the train tracks Henry Flagler built from St. Augustine to Key West. International Protective Services garnered national attention after 9/11 for offering personal defense courses to American Airlines flight attendants—the wonderful irony being that terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta had partied at Shuckum’s Raw Bar & Grill, just a stone’s throw from the doors of International Protective Services, before the deadly terrorist attack.

  Gilbert had wanted in on the counterterrorism game before 9/11, as he saw it as a way of proving he was CIA mater
ial. In 2000, after attending the wedding of a Muslim friend, Gilbert hatched a plan to infiltrate the Darul Uloom mosque in the Miami suburb of Pembroke Pines. His idea was to pose as a Muslim convert named Saif Allah, meaning “sword of God” in Arabic. As one female congregant who asked not to be identified told me, everyone at the mosque was at first excited about Saif’s arrival. “We were thrilled,” she remembered. “The reaction was: ‘Yeah! We got a white guy!’” Gilbert told everyone he was a disgruntled ex-Marine who was now working as a security expert, but some of the congregants at the mosque began to grow wary of the newest worshipper when Gilbert gave an inflammatory speech in late 2000 chiding Israel for what he described as its mistreatment of Palestinians and its refusal to adhere to previously drawn borders in allowing Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “That was truly the night that launched me into the terrorist umbrella of South Florida,” Gilbert would later brag.

  While the speech made many of the congregants suspicious, even frightened, of Gilbert, Imran Mandhai, a nineteen-year-old Broward Community College student, became enamored with him. Stirred by the oration, Mandhai approached Gilbert and asked if Gilbert could provide him with weapons and training. Since Gilbert had previously provided information to the FBI, primarily related to cases involving cargo theft, he already had contacts at the Bureau. He called his handlers at the North Miami Beach office and told them he wanted the assignment—and the paycheck—to work Mandhai as part of a counterterrorism case. The FBI agreed to put Gilbert on the books as an informant to see what might happen.

  Mandhai told the newly minted FBI terrorism informant that he was angry with the U.S. government for having indicted his friend, a Turk named Hakki Cemal Aksoy, for immigration violations. While searching Aksoy’s apartment, federal authorities had discovered bomb-making manuals; it’s never been clear from available evidence whether Aksoy was on his way to becoming a terrorist or was just another immature young man fascinated with bombs and explosives. Gilbert told Mandhai he could help him take revenge against the government for indicting Aksoy, and he sold the young man a copy of The Anarchist’s Cookbook for twenty dollars. Mandhai and a friend, Shueyb Mosaa Jokhan, then told Gilbert they wanted to bomb electrical transformers and a National Guard armory in South Florida as part of their quest for revenge. However, to build a terrorism conspiracy case, prosecutors needed more than just angry words about aspirational attacks: they needed the targets to do something—buy guns or bomb-making materials, take pictures of possible locations, transfer money. But because Gilbert was overeager, and a little awkward in the role of a terrorist, Mandhai began to suspect that Gilbert was an FBI mole, and he quickly closed up, putting the entire operation at risk.

  In an attempt to keep the sting alive, the Bureau brought in another informant, Elie Assaad, an experienced snitch originally from Lebanon. How exactly Assaad came to work for the FBI is unclear. The story he tells seems incredulous, but it goes something like this: While he was living in Lebanon, a group of alleged terrorists asked him to bring a vial of some undetermined but reportedly dangerous substance into the United States. Assaad informed U.S. government officials of this while he was still in Lebanon, and they instructed him to board an airplane as planned and travel to Chicago with the substance, where he’d meet with FBI agents and hand over the vial. If the vial did in fact contain something dangerous, the obvious question that follows is why would U.S. government officials instruct Assaad to board a plane with it? Nevertheless, Assaad claimed that he traveled to Chicago, provided the vial to government agents, and that the FBI then put him on their payroll, sending him back to Lebanon as an informant. While he was in Lebanon, a car Assaad was riding in exploded—a bombing purportedly committed by the terrorist group who had provided the mysterious vial—and Assaad was badly burned in the blast. For his safety, FBI agents supposedly spirited him away to the United States, where he worked criminal and drug cases in Chicago for several years.

  While working in the Windy City, however, Assaad failed an FBI lie detector test—which, under Bureau policy, should have disqualified him from future operations.3 Informants who fail lie detector tests are disqualified for the obvious reason that they can no longer be trusted not to lie to their FBI handlers. The main difficulty in dealing with informants is that honest people don’t make good ones. On the contrary, the best informants are professional liars who are able to develop personal relationships and then exploit those relationships, without remorse, for personal gain. U.S. Appeals Court Judge Stephen S. Trott, a Reagan appointee who was on the short list to be nominated as FBI director in 1987, is one of the nation’s leading experts on criminal informants.4 His 1996 law review article, “Words of Warning for Prosecutors Using Criminals as Witnesses,” has become standard reading for criminal law students. Trott believes that the best informants are “sociopaths” whose negative social skills are necessary for effective criminal investigations. “They’re sociopaths and one of the best things they can do is to lie. They’re good at that,” Trott told me.5 “The Sisters of the Poor, the Delta Sorority, they’re not going to help you catch bad guys. You just can’t walk up to them and say, ‘Hey, what’s happening here?’ You need your own bad guys to help you get subpoenas. You need your own bad guys to get information and help you build cases against other bad guys.”

  But that creates a challenge for the FBI: How can agents task an informant with lying to others and then be certain the informant isn’t lying to them? Polygraph examinations, used when FBI agents debrief informants, provide the best solution for this dilemma—which is why as a policy the FBI disqualifies informants who are believed to have lied during a polygraph. However, Elie Assaad, having been caught lying to the FBI, kept on working for federal law enforcement. To this day, the Bureau has refused to release any information about the failed polygraph, other than the vague acknowledgment that agents caught Assaad lying. FBI officials have also declined on several opportunities to give me an explanation for why Assaad was not cut from the informant ranks. The only possible explanation for this is that Assaad got results as an informant, and that those results were impressive enough for the FBI to make an exception and keep him as an informant.

  In early March 2001, trying to salvage Gilbert’s ambitious but badly listing sting operation, Assaad introduced himself to Mandhai as “Mohammed.” Gilbert made the introduction, and remained on the periphery as Assaad took charge of the operation. He was a terrorist with ties to Osama bin Laden, Assaad told the nineteen-year-old Mandhai, and his job was to establish a local training center for jihadists in Florida. Thinking he’d found his connection to Al Qaeda, Mandhai explained to Mohammed how he wanted to attack the power stations and National Guard armory and then contact the U.S. government to demand it stop supporting Israel. Assaad agreed to provide financial assistance. Mandhai also confided in Assaad that he suspected Howard Gilbert might be an FBI informant.

  On March 13, Mandhai happened to mention an actual terrorist to Assaad—only Assaad and the U.S. government hadn’t heard of him at the time. “Brother,” Mandhai said, “why don’t you come with us to Adnan … Probably he will join with us.”6 Adnan was Adnan Gulshair El Shukrijumah, who attended the same Florida community college as Mandhai and scratched out a living as a freelance computer technician. Shukrijumah lived in the suburban town of Miramar, where his father was an imam. Just before 9/11, he left the country and has never returned. The FBI now believes he is among Al Qaeda’s top officials, and the U.S. government is offering $5 million for information leading to his capture. But back in 2001, when the federal government first became aware of him, Shukrijumah had no interest in joining Mandhai’s amateurish plot to attack power stations and the armory. (He also reportedly turned down offers to become an FBI informant himself.)7 In addition, Shukrijumah’s brother thought it comical that the FBI considered Mandhai a potential terrorist. In an interview with the Washington Post, Nabil Shukrijumah said of Mandhai, “He’s a naive … childish, very childish,” adding that, �
�It’s very funny to me that he was supposed to be recruiting people.”8

  Three days after mentioning Shukrijumah, and after having confessed to “Mohammed” that he believed Howard Gilbert was an FBI informant, Mandhai changed his story. He now told the FBI informants that he wasn’t the leader of the bomb plot, and was in charge only of recruiting and operations for an idea and plan that had originated with Gilbert. The next day, Mandhai told Assaad and Gilbert that he was unwilling to move forward in the bomb plot. The FBI quickly severed Gilbert from the investigation, paying him $6,000 for his undercover work, since it appeared that Mandhai couldn’t get past his suspicion that Gilbert was a snitch for the feds.

  But Mandhai’s mistrust of “Mohammed” didn’t last. Once the FBI cut Gilbert from the sting, Mandhai contacted Assaad and asked for help in freeing Aksoy—the friend indicted for immigration violations. Aksoy could help with the bomb plot, Mandhai told Assaad, and he’d recruit twenty-five to thirty people to be trained at the Al Qaeda training camp. Assaad in turn presented Mandhai with an assortment of weapons and explosives as examples of what he could provide. Assaad, Mandhai, and his friend Shueyb Mosaa Jokhan then moved forward in the plot, first attending a gun show where they tried—but failed—to buy a gun. (Jokhan’s credit card was declined.)

  However, the whole operation came to a halt on April 6, 2001 when Miami-Dade police arrested Assaad at his apartment after his pregnant girlfriend called 911. When officers arrived, Maria Granados told them Assaad had beaten and choked her, and she had called authorities when she became fearful for the safety of her unborn child.9 During questioning, Assaad told the police that he was unemployed. Granados ultimately spared Assaad by having prosecutors drop the felony aggravated battery charges against him.