The Terror Factory Read online

  The Liberty City Seven case, however, proved to be quite lucrative for the informants involved in it. Elie Assaad earned $85,000 for his work on the case, while Abbas al-Saidi received $21,000.31

  Several years later, Elie Assaad resurfaced in El Paso, Texas, where he was running a low-rent modeling agency on the Mexico border. In March 2011, El Paso police attempted to pull over Assaad’s black SUV on the interstate. Instead of stopping, Assaad led the police on a high-speed chase through the city and onto the campus of the University of Texas at El Paso, where he drove into a dead end, reversed, and backed into a police officer whose gun was drawn. The officer fired several times. Assaad later rolled his SUV on a nearby street as he tried to get away. 32

  I called Assaad shortly after his arrest and asked if I could meet with him in El Paso. He told me his incredulous story about how he came to serve as an FBI informant and bragged on the phone about how his work as an informant saved the United States from another terrorist attack—but he wouldn’t agree to meet with me. He’s saving his story, he said, for his own book. He’s still looking for a publisher.

  Since the 9/11 hijackers spent the days before their attack in hot and balmy Florida, it’s fitting that terrorism sting operations were born in the Sunshine State. Starting as an idea from a security guard named Howard Gilbert with big dreams, these stings would have their greatest test in court with the Liberty City Seven case, which proved to the government that it could win terrorism prosecutions even when no evidence linked the defendants to actual terrorists.

  J. Stephen Tidwell, the FBI’s executive assistant director who supports the use of terrorism sting operations, and James J. Wedick, the former FBI supervisory agent who is opposed to them, both told me that the FBI and the Justice Department viewed the Liberty City Seven case as a test of what the law and juries would allow in terrorism cases in a post-9/11 United States. Winning the case, even if it did take three trials, strengthened the government’s position in using terrorism sting operations. It also sent a message to defense lawyers that the Justice Department can win these cases at trial, and this likely has played a role in the high rate of guilty pleas we see today following terrorism stings.

  But that doesn’t mean that the government treated the members of the Liberty City Seven like dangerous terrorists after their trial and conviction. One of the convicted men, Burson Augustin, has already been released from prison, and he’s back in Florida. While the government portrayed him as a dangerous killer who wanted to bomb buildings in June 2006, when authorities released him in September 2012, they never even bothered to warn the community that a convicted terrorist was living among them, suggesting either that the U.S. government believes terrorists can be fully rehabilitated after short prison sentences, or that those convicted as terrorists weren’t really dangerous in the first place.

  Augustin is the first man convicted in a post-9/11 terrorism sting operation to be released from prison. During the six years he was incarcerated, the FBI has dramatically stepped up its use of terrorism sting operations. To do that, the Bureau has had to recruit thousands of informants to perform the job of agent provocateur that Howard Gilbert and Elie Assaad helped pioneer. But not every informant has hooked up with the FBI in the hopes of becoming a secret agent man, as Howard Gilbert did, or of becoming a federal snitch for the money, as Elie Assaad did. Many spy for the government because FBI agents have coerced them into doing so. Just as agents have targeted Muslim communities to find terrorists, they have also targeted those same communities to recruit informants, using any means necessary.

  *Lemorin, who had left the group before it engaged in an alleged terrorist plot with an FBI informant, was acquitted in the first trial due to lack of evidence and later deported to Haiti. Herrera was unexplainably acquitted in the third trial when the evidence against him was similar to the evidence against the five men in the plot who were convicted. Herrera’s not guilty verdict was an anomaly—something none of the jurors has come forward to explain—since his actions weren’t significantly different from those of the other defendants.

  4. LEVERAGE

  Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards campaign signs littered the lawns in his North Miami Beach neighborhood as Imam Foad Farahi walked from his mosque to his apartment a few blocks away. It was five o’clock in the afternoon on November 1, 2004, the day before George W. Bush would win a second term in office, but Farahi, an influential South Florida Islamic religious leader, had been too busy fasting and praying Ramadan to pay much attention to the presidential election.

  As he neared his apartment, he saw two men standing outside. “We’re from the FBI,” one of the men said. They wanted to know about José Padilla and Adnan El Shukrijumah, two men linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist network. Padilla, the so-called Dirty Bomber, had been arrested in May 2002 and given enemy combatant status. He stood trial in Miami and was convicted in 2008 on terrorism charges and sentenced to seventeen years in prison. Currently on the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list, Shukrijumah is a senior Al Qaeda member who came to the Bureau’s attention in the Imran Mandhai case.

  “I know José Padilla, but I don’t know Adnan,” Farahi told the agents.1 As imam of the Shamsuddin Islamic Center in North Miami Beach, Farahi was in a unique position to know about local Muslims. While he had met Shukrijumah, the son of a local Islamic religious leader, on one occasion in 2000, he had had no contact with him since then. “I don’t know anything about his activities,” Farahi said. Padilla had prayed at Farahi’s mosque and had once been among his Arabic students. However, Farahi told the agents that he had had “no contact with Padilla since 1998, when he left the country.”

  “We want you to work with us,” one of the agents then said to Farahi.

  “I have no problem working with you guys or helping you out,” Farahi told the agents. He could keep them informed about the local Muslim community, or translate Arabic. But the relationship, he insisted, would need to be made public; others would have to know he was working with the government. But that wasn’t what the FBI had in mind: the agents wanted him to become a secret informant. And they knew Farahi was in a vulnerable position as his student visa had expired and he had asked the government for a renewal. He had also applied for political asylum, hoping one of those legal tracks would offer a way for him to stay in the United States indefinitely.

  “We’ll give you residency,” the agents promised. “We’ll give you money to go to school.”

  Farahi considered the offer for a moment, then shook his head. “I can’t,” he told them.

  The slender, bearded Farahi frowned as he recounted this to me while sitting on a white folding chair in the Shamsuddin Islamic Center in May 2009. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you’re trying to kind of deceive them,” he said, remembering the choice he faced. “That’s where the problem is.”

  Farahi soon discovered that the FBI’s offer wasn’t optional, as the federal government began using strong-arm tactics—including trying to have him deported and falsely claiming it had information linking him to terrorism—in an effort to force him to become an informant. The imam resisted the government at every step of the way and took his political asylum case to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta. “As long as you’re not a citizen, there are lots of things [the government] can do,” Ira Kurzban, Farahi’s lawyer, told me.2 “They can allege you’re a terrorist and try to bring terrorist charges against you, or they can get you deported.”

  Farahi’s was among the first cases to become public of the FBI using leverage to recruit informants from within U.S. Muslim communities, an aggressive program that has netted thousands of informants since 9/11. And the only reason his case became public was because Farahi chose to fight, risking deportation. “People have two choices,” Farahi told me. “Either they end up working with the FBI or they leave the country on their own. It’s just sometimes when you’re in that situation, not many people are strong enough to stand up and resist and fight—to reject their
offers.”

  Two days after Farahi told the FBI he couldn’t spy on members of his mosque in good conscience, the two agents phoned him and requested he come to their office to take a polygraph. “I had nothing to hide,” Farahi said of the test. “They asked the same questions over and over, to see if my answer would change, and it didn’t.” The agents were focused primarily on Adnan El Shukrijumah, Farahi recalled. “What is your relationship with him?” they asked. “When was the last time you were in contact with him? Where is he now?”

  Following the polygraph, Farahi didn’t hear from the FBI for two and a half years. Then, in the summer of 2007, he received a call from an agent who asked to meet with him. In Cooper City, a suburb northwest of Miami, two FBI agents—a man and a woman—again asked Farahi if he would work with the government. He again declined, and the meeting ended amicably.

  Farahi didn’t know the push back would come later on.

  Though he has never set foot in the country, Foad Farahi is technically an Iranian. He was born in Kuwait, but under Middle Eastern law, he is considered an Iranian citizen because his father was from there. Farahi grew up in Kuwait City, where his father operated a currency exchange business. His mother, a Syrian, raised him and his younger sister to speak Arabic and worship as Sunnis, an Islamic sect that is persecuted in Iran. But he knew his future would never be secure in Kuwait. “Even if I married a Kuwaiti woman, I wouldn’t become a citizen,” Farahi said. “Kuwait could deport me to Iran at any time for any reason.”

  At the age of nineteen, Farahi applied for and received a student visa to study in the United States. He chose to go to South Florida, where his family had once vacationed when he was a teenager. He enrolled at Miami Dade College and received an associate’s degree before transferring to Barry University, a private Catholic school in Miami Shores, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry. While at Barry, he served on the university’s interfaith committee as well as participating as a teacher in a university peace forum attended by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim children. “He has had a positive influence at this university,” said Edward R. Sunshine, a theology professor at Barry.3 No one who knows Farahi, Sunshine told me, would suspect he is radical or militant.

  Farahi went on to obtain a master’s degree in public health from Florida International University. At the same time, he began an intensive, three-year imam training course at a mosque in Miramar, Florida. In 2000, the Shamsuddin Islamic Center opened near his home in North Miami Beach. Six months later, its imam returned to Egypt, and Farahi became his successor. It was through this position that he came into contact with several South Floridians who have been linked to terrorism, including Padilla, Shukrijumah, and Imran Mandhai, the nineteen-year-old Pakistani American man who conspired with FBI informants Howard Gilbert and Elie Assaad. “Imran came here once years ago during Ramadan,” Farahi said. “It was a big event for him at the time. He memorized and recited the Koran.”

  On a November day in 2007, Farahi arrived at Miami Immigration Court for what he thought was a routine hearing on his political asylum case. The imam had requested asylum because he is a Sunni, a persecuted religious minority in Iran. As Farahi entered the courthouse, he saw four men from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They were wearing body armor and had guns holstered at their sides. All four followed Farahi from the security checkpoint on the ground level to the third-floor courtroom of U.S. Immigration Judge Carey Holliday.

  Farahi’s lawyer at the time, Mildred Morgado, spoke with the ICE agents, then asked to talk to her client in private. “They have a file with evidence that you’re supporting or are involved in terrorist groups,” Farahi recalled Morgado telling him. Farahi was then given an ultimatum: drop the asylum case and leave the United States voluntarily, or be charged as a terrorist.

  Unfortunately, luck wasn’t on Farahi’s side when drawing a judge for his asylum claim. Appointed to the immigration court in October 2006, Carey Holliday was a Louisiana Republican who had quickly earned a reputation for being tough on immigrants. In one case, he declined to hear arguments from an Ecuadorian couple who alleged they were targeted for deportation because their daughter, Miami Dade College student Gabby Pacheco, was a well-known activist for immigration reform. “People who live in glass houses should not throw stones,” Holliday wrote in his ruling.4 (Holliday resigned in January 2009 after the Justice Department found that Bush administration officials had illegally selected immigration judges based on their political affiliation.)

  After the ICE agents threatened Farahi with terrorism charges, he told Holliday he would voluntarily leave the country within thirty days. Although his Iranian passport was expired—a bureaucratic problem that should have given him more time to consider the government’s threat—Holliday granted the order of voluntary departure. The agents let Farahi go free after he promised to leave the country. However, Farahi later changed his mind and decided to appeal the government’s action, as he believed that the claim that Justice Department lawyers would prosecute him as a terrorist was a bluff—nothing more than leverage to coerce him into becoming an informant. To this day, the government has never shared with Farahi or his lawyer any information about the professed evidence that he is a terrorist, and he has never been charged with a crime. “If they have something on Foad, they should make it public. They haven’t done that,” said Sunshine, the Barry University theology professor. “They are intimidating and bullying, and I resent that type of behavior being paid for by my tax dollars.”

  Farahi’s assertion that the government tried to coerce him to become an informant could not be verified independently because the FBI won’t comment on his case. “It is a matter of policy that we do not confirm or deny who we have asked to be a source,” Miami FBI Special Agent Judy Orihuela told me. However, other individuals whom the FBI wanted to use as informants have been targeted in a similar manner as Farahi. In November 2005, for example, immigration officials questioned Yassine Ouassif, a twenty-four-year-old Moroccan, as he crossed into New York State from Canada. The officials confiscated his green card and instructed him to meet an FBI agent in Oakland, California. The Bureau’s offer: become an informant or be deported. Ouassif refused to spy and won his deportation case with the help of the National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement, a nonprofit that advocates for civil rights on behalf of Muslims and immigrants from the Middle East and South Asia.

  Another case involves Brooklyn religious leader Sheikh Tarek Saleh, who has been fighting deportation since refusing to become an informant against his estranged cousin, Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, the Egyptian-born man the 9/11 Commission identified as Al Qaeda’s “chief financial manager.” Even after al-Yazid was killed in a Predator drone strike in Pakistan in early 2010, the government continued to press for Saleh’s deportation, alleging that the religious leader had lied on his visa application about never having been part of a terrorist group.5 Saleh had once been a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad—but his membership had been years before the U.S. government had designated the group as a terrorist organization. Saleh has alleged in court documents that the government is retaliating against him for refusing to be an informant. The Council on American-Islamic Relations suspects there are hundreds of similar cases in which the government has used deportation or criminal charges to force cooperation from informants. Unlike Farahi’s, Ouassif’s, and Saleh’s, most of these cases will never be made public.

  For his part, Foad Farahi continues to maintain that he is not affiliated with any terrorist groups, and that he would report any Muslim who was supporting terrorism to the authorities. “From the Islamic perspective, it’s your duty to respect the law, and if there’s anything going on, any crime about to be committed, or any kind of harm to be caused to people or property, it should be reported to the police,” he said.

  Ira Kurzban’s law office is a mile from the alfresco restaurants of Miami’s Coconut Grove. It was a hot day in late August 2009 when I met with him, and h
e was wearing a white guayabera and looking disheveled gray hairs. Kurzban is a well-known advocate for immigrants’ rights, having argued three immigration-related cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. He is also on the board of directors of Immigrants’ List, the first political action committee in Washington, D.C., established to support candidates who endorse immigration reform. Foad Farahi, desperate not to leave the country but frightened after government agents threatened to charge him as a terrorist, hired Kurzban in 2007 to take his case on appeal. “He’s an imam in his mosque,” Kurzban said of Farahi as he threw his hands in the air in a sort of protest. “He’s basically, you know, the rabbi.”

  In November 2007, Kurzban asked the Board of Immigration Appeals to throw out Farahi’s voluntary departure order and reopen his political asylum case, arguing that the imam had been illegally intimidated by the government. The board denied the request, so Kurzban petitioned the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta, which agreed that Farahi’s case should be reopened. “The government has many weapons in its arsenal in terms of seeking to remove somebody from the country, and in his case, they were using it, in my view, as leverage to try to get him to cooperate with them or be an informant for them, and when he wouldn’t do it, they applied the penalty,” Kurzban said. “When it looked like, well, even if he doesn’t cooperate with us, he may be able to get away with seeking political asylum, they show up at the hearing and say, ‘If you do that, we’re going to arrest you now. We just want you out of the country.’ I think the real issue is, does the government have the right to do that, to pressure people in that way to make them informants? But I think that’s what’s going on,” Kurzban continued. “It’s clearly the modus operandi of the FBI to (a) recruit people who are going to be informants and (b) to use whatever leverage they can to get them to be informants.”