The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  If no covert entry is involved, local field office technical agents perform jobs on their own. For example, in Cincinnati, local technical agents began installing a Global Positioning System tracking device in the Mercedes-Benz owned by Gerardo Mulato on April 26, 2007. An illegal immigrant from Mexico, he was a suspected member of a gang that shipped black-tar heroin from Mexico to Cincinnati. Since the GPS device was being installed on the exterior of the car under its floor, it was not technically a covert entry.

  Mulato parked his car in a lot at his apartment house at 1995 Waycross Road. To guard against theft, he had installed a surveillance camera with a microphone in a window overlooking the parking lot. It beamed images and sound back to the bedroom in his apartment at the rear of the building.

  Awake at 4:20 a.m., Mulato saw men crouching around his car. He grabbed his 9-millimeter Ruger pistol and rushed outside. Wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shorts, he confronted the strangers, who were FBI tech agents from the local field office.

  “He saw these guys messing around with his car,” Price says. “He pulls out his huge revolver, walks down there to see what the problem is. He points his gun at an agent. The agent says, ‘FBI! Drop the gun!’ He did not drop the gun, and the agent killed him.”

  Because of that tragic outcome, the FBI has changed its policies for what it calls “slap-on” installations.

  “We now require notification of local law enforcement, unless a compelling reason is cited,” Grever says. “The tech agents are required to wear body armor and have readily available official identification. There must be a documented operations plan that addresses contingencies. Interdiction teams must be at the ready and close enough to keep a subject from confronting exposed and vulnerable agents.”

  Now, instead of taking place on a street or in a parking lot, such operations are conducted in what Grever euphemistically calls a “controlled environment.” For example, if the bureau is wiretapping a target’s calls under a court order, agents will hear when he is planning to bring his car in for servicing. If they trust the auto repair company, they may enlist its cooperation and install a GPS tracking device when the car comes in.

  “Another option is to steal the car,” Grever says. “Of course, we are not technically stealing the car, as we will obtain a court order authorizing the FBI to seize the vehicle long enough to implant any device that we have lawful authority to install.” On second thought, Grever says, “Maybe a better word is ‘borrow.’ When we borrow a car, we will usually park an exact duplicate of the car in the same spot for the brief time we have the vehicle, should the subject or an associate happen to check on the car.”

  In one case in New York City, the target showed up and looked in what he thought was his car, then drove off in his wife’s car. His car was actually down the street in the bay of a fire station having a tracking device installed. But to allay suspicion in such a case, “as part of our tradecraft, we always remove visible items from the subject’s car, such as bags or briefcases, and place them in our look-alike car,” Grever says.

  TacOps has considered rekeying the locks and ignition in the substitute car to match the target car, but drivers would probably notice that the substitute car had a different telltale squeak or smell. Luckily, says Grever, “no one so far has tried to take one of our look-alike cars for a joy ride.”

  21

  THE HUNT

  AFTER 9/11, THE REFLEXIVE CRITICISM BECAME THAT THE FBI and the CIA had not connected the dots. The implication was that the two agencies could uncover plots simply by moving a cursor around on a computer screen. But in no way would that have uncovered the kind of carefully compartmented scheme devised by Osama bin Laden and a few of his top lieutenants.

  To be sure, collating all the existing data and analyzing it properly likely would have led to more aggressive investigations that could have uncovered more leads. Whether those investigations would have stopped the plots is anybody’s guess. But it is a certainty that such investigations are necessary to uncover future plots.

  The problem before 9/11 was that the information that would uncover the plots was not there in the first place. There were few dots to connect.

  Art Cummings’ job was to develop intelligence that would uncover those dots. In Cummings’ mind, counterterrorism came down to a hunt.

  “I know he’s there, I know he’s trying to kill somebody. How do I find him?” he would say. “It’s about understanding the behavior and the activity, what the bad guy looks like and smells like and breathes like, and then actually putting a system together to go hunt for that.”

  Early on, Cummings set up the FBI’s interrogation operations at Guantánamo and learned firsthand how to get terrorists to cooperate without using coercive methods. When Cummings first showed up at Guantánamo, the American general in charge said, “I don’t know why you are here. You’re not going to arrest any of these guys.”

  “General, you have a fundamental lack of understanding of what the FBI does for a living,” Cummings told him. “We’re not going to come here with handcuffs. My job is intel collection. I need to get what’s in their head out of their head.”

  When Cummings and other agents observed egregious conduct during interrogations at Guantánamo, they reported it back to FBI headquarters. In October 2002, a Marine captain squatted over a copy of the Koran during intensive questioning of a Muslim prisoner. That same month, interrogators wrapped a bearded prisoner’s head in duct tape because he would not stop quoting the Koran. One interrogator bragged to an FBI agent that he had forced a prisoner to listen to Satanic black metal music for hours, then dressed as a Catholic priest before “baptizing” him. Such conduct was not condoned by military policies.

  Coercive techniques were nothing new to Cummings. During training as a Navy SEAL, Cummings had been subjected to such techniques, including waterboarding, that might be used on him if he were captured. But he argued that coercive and degrading techniques likely wouldn’t work on hardened Islamic militants.

  “Okay, let me understand this,” he would say. “You are going to somehow coerce a young jihadist who has just traveled a thousand miles through desert and unfamiliar territory to go put his ass on the line to die in really austere, dirty, nasty, rocky conditions, wholly untrained. And you think you’re going to somehow make this guy uncomfortable? You found this guy in a cave starving and drinking only water, and what are you going to do to this guy that will compel him to do anything except hate you more?”

  On the other hand, “if you’re going against Johnny down the street, who was brought up in middle-class America, yeah, it would probably work,” Cummings says. “When talking about a jihadist, maybe it would work, maybe it wouldn’t.”

  Cummings concedes that coercive techniques may elicit information faster. But he says, “You may actually encourage deception. So whatever it takes to get my head out of that bucket of water, I’m going to tell you something that’s going to make that happen.”

  Cummings knew what does work. Maybe others couldn’t understand how FBI agents turned murderers into cooperative sources without using aggressive tactics. But the fact is, says Cummings, “we’ve had case after case after 9/11 of genuine, real, true-to-life bad guys who have sat down in hotel rooms with us, for weeks on end, just pouring it out.”

  While the FBI likes to think it takes the moral high ground, “that’s not really the driving reason,” Cummings says. “The driving reason’s, frankly, because we think we as an organization are much more effective working that way. And it doesn’t take that much time. It’s something you learn as you go. You work with somebody, you see what resonates with him. Is it family that drives him? Is it children that drives him? Is it career that drives him? Is it freedom that drives him? What is it that motivates him and keeps him motivated?”

  The approach is the same as in working a criminal case.

  “You have a drunk driver, you work everything from rationalization to all kinds of different themes,” Cummings s
ays. “You say, ‘I know you didn’t mean it. Of course you didn’t. You left the scene, it was kind of stupid, we’ve all done that,’ when really it’s not the case. When you see a little sparkle, then you work that theme.”

  On the other hand, the CIA could point to plots that were rolled up because of leads to individual terrorists developed through coercive interrogation techniques. CIA officials say that, regardless of what techniques are used, they try to corroborate any information gleaned from a terrorist. Even intercepts of conversations are not infallible, they note. A conversation could be a setup, so the CIA has to try to verify any information it obtains.

  In seeking cooperation from a terrorist at Guantánamo, Cummings would try out different themes.

  “You try to understand the kid, whoever he is,” he says. “Most of them are very young. You try to find out what’s driving him, what’s important to him based on his culture. It could be marriage and children.”

  Cummings would say something like: “You’re never going to see your mother again.” He explains, “Kids will be tough, but one of the values that should never be lost is compassion. You’re never unkind for the sole purpose of being unkind. Not because we’re just a bunch of great people, but because compassion actually works. We will sit down in front of a bank robber and tell him his life is completely off track, and if he ever wants to live the life of a normal human again, he needs to get it back on track. It’s a compelling argument.”

  Cummings found that what drives terrorists to respond most is a look into their future.

  “You understand, you’re going to die in this steel box,” Cummings would say. “And when you’re dead, your life is nothing. You will die, and you will be nothing to anyone. When you die, you will be in an unmarked grave, and no one will know how you died, when you died, or where you’re buried.”

  Cummings would look for body language that would tip him off to whether his approach was working. If not, he might take another tack.

  “I saw one kid who was sitting there, not moving,” Cummings says. “The tears were coming down by the gallons when I started talking to him about never having a child,” he recalls. “He wasn’t blubbering, but I knew I had him. Maybe it takes a couple days. But I’m not going to slap him on the side of the head. All that does is steel him—steel his courage. It reinforces why he hates me so much.”

  Instead, Cummings would offer hope: “If you ever want me to make the argument for you, I’m the conduit that gets you out of here,” he would say. “I’m it. Look at me directly in the eyes. I’m it! No one else in the world. That’s it. You’ll have to help me out, and I’ll help you out.”

  Most are susceptible to creature comforts as well.

  “That’s the one thing plenty of time will always give you,” Cummings says. “Eventually, these guys just get tired of living in austere conditions, and the government offers them different accommodations based on different levels of cooperation. I got this guy who was in Guantánamo Bay and had tried to go on a jihad. He saw a little snuff on my lip—I don’t dip anymore. He asked for some, so I said, ‘Sure.’ I gave him some.”

  The doctors at the base “went nuts because I was giving him snuff,” Cummings says. “I said, ‘Okay, enlighten me here. What’s the problem?’ ‘Well, it’s not healthy.’ ”

  “The only reason he’s talking to me is because I’m supplying him with snuff,” Cummings told the doctors. “So I’m going to be bringing a tin of Copenhagen every time I interrogate this guy,” Cummings said. “And I guarantee you that every time before he starts talking, he’s going to put a big ol’ mighty healthy dip in his lip.”

  The terrorist wound up talking to Cummings.

  When Cummings returned from Cuba, Mueller asked what he had learned.

  “What we got was a general understanding of this whole mind-set,” Cummings told him.

  “Are we getting any tactical answers?” the director asked.

  “Well, tactical stuff is only good for a week or two weeks after they’re captured,” Cummings said. “These guys have been in for months. But they can teach us everything about how the organization moves its money, moves its people, where did they get their education, when did they get radicalized, when did that happen, at what age?”

  Cummings found that religious fanaticism was not necessarily the driving force among all terrorists.

  “Islamic extremism was a factor,” he says. “But a lot of these guys were young and adventure-seeking. A lot of them were pressured by their families to go check that box: they wanted the jihadi badge of honor. But believing that when they died they would have seventy-two virgins waiting for them and that this was just a wonderful thing to die in the service of Allah was not the driver.”

  As with detainees, Cummings looked at suspects as collection platforms. That approach worked well back in 2002 with Iyman Faris, who had been tasked to take down the Brooklyn Bridge by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (known as KSM), the architect of the 9/11 plot. The Pakistanis were about to arrest a relative of Mohammed’s, but Cummings asked the CIA to get the Pakistanis to hold off until surveillance could be put in place on others who could be expected to react to the man’s arrest.

  The Pakistanis “gave us four hours, total,” Cummings says. “We basically identified that guy’s associates in the U.S. in four hours—we knew about some of them—and basically put collection [electronic surveillance] in place, leading to Faris.”

  After a FISA application was approved, the FBI began wiretapping Faris.

  “Faris was someone who had gone overseas and reached out for al Qaeda,” Cummings says. “He had some connections in Pakistan. He met KSM, who tasked him to come back into the U.S. and study how to drop the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  Faris “actually was looking at some cutting devices for cutting the cable,” Cummings says. “You can imagine some idiot sitting up there straddling an eighteen-inch cable with a cutting torch, trying to cut the cable,” Cummings says. “He would have been tackled and probably beaten to death by the New Yorkers before he got very far. But he was looking at a number of other things at the same time. The problem was, he was a research conduit for al Qaeda central, directly. So eventually he probably would have gotten to a point where they would have given him something useful. He also knew a lot of people.”

  Before 9/11, Cummings says, “we would have indicted him, taken him to jail, and worked with his lawyers to see if he wants to cooperate. Absolutely. After 9/11? No way. We approach him, using smart agents with lots of experience to convince him that it’s in his best interest to work with us.”

  Faris quickly agreed to cooperate.

  “We worked him for over a month—worked him and worked him and then worked him some more,” Cummings says. “We had the agency and military and everybody on board with us.”

  In June 2003, Faris pleaded guilty to providing material support and resources to al Qaeda and to conspiracy for providing the terrorist organization with information about possible U.S. targets. In October, he was sentenced to twenty years in prison.

  Cummings applied the same approach to Mohammed Junaid Babar, an American citizen who was based in London but traveled periodically to the United States and Pakistan. The FBI became suspicious of him when NSA found he was emailing al Qaeda operatives from a New York City library. Attorney General Ashcroft later cited the Babar case as an example of why the FBI needed to be able to monitor computers in libraries. Meanwhile, the Brits picked up intelligence on a plot to blow up locations in London. Clues from that cell led to Babar.

  “We were working with them, and they gave us intel about the cell that they had in the U.K. and the ties to Babar,” Cummings says. “We took all of that, and we began to run it through all of our systems—CIA, FBI, NSA. We then tracked him. He was flying into the U.S. There was an initial impulse on the part of the community at large to react directly to him coming to the U.S. They said, ‘Okay, what are we going to do about this guy right now? We can’t let him come in.’ ”r />
  Cummings argued that the FBI should use him as a collection platform.

  “Everybody stay back, stay away from this guy,” Cummings would say. “We got his picture, we know when he’s coming in, what flight he’s coming on, we’ve got all of that. It does the U.S. government and the counterterrorism mission no good to take him off the street. It does nothing for us. I don’t know why he’s coming here, I don’t know what his connections are. But I need the opportunity to spend as long as I need to spend collecting against him.”

  Working with the other agencies, the FBI did just that.

  “New York had the case, and headquarters micromanaged the daylights out of it,” Cummings says. “We worked everything we could possibly work against Babar. We surrounded him with everything—a full net of collection. Technical, physical, airplanes, surveillance teams, everybody.” He points out, “A lot of it seems like overkill, but it’s not. Babar was an operator. He had sent some guys through training, and they were now going to murder some people.”

  Cummings needed to give the attorney general and the director confidence that the FBI had this under control and could work Babar on the street while agents collected against him.

  “It was that balance that’s weighed every single day on an operation like this,” Cummings says. “The daily discussion was: ‘What’s the current intel on Babar? What’s the current threat? And can we tell the attorney general and director that we have 100 percent confidence that he’s not going to get away and kill somebody?’ We could only assure a confidence level of 99.9 percent. There’s always a chance that something is going to happen.”

  Once the FBI knew everything about Babar, agents moved in. In April 2004, the FBI, working with the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force, arrested him on Long Island. Facing the possibility of life in jail, he quickly flipped and agreed to cooperate.

  “Babar just wanted to save his ass,” Cummings says. “Babar plainly and simply knew that he was going to die in an American prison. And a deal is what we have to offer, right? You have to offer an incentive to talk.”