The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

  One month after Assaad’s arrest, FBI agents interviewed Imran Mandhai, and he admitted that he was planning to blow up electrical transformers and demand changes to U.S. foreign policy. One year later, after 9/11, federal prosecutors finally indicted Mandhai on two charges—conspiring to damage and destroy electrical power stations and a National Guard armory by means of fire and explosives, and inducing Jokhan to damage the property of an energy facility. Mandhai pleaded guilty to the first charge and received a sentence of 140 months. He is scheduled to be released in December 2014. Mandhai was the nation’s first successful terrorism-related prosecution after September 11, 2001.10

  While Howard Gilbert deserves credit for pioneering the aggressive terrorism sting operations in the Mandhai case that the FBI would replicate over the next decade, you won’t hear his name in Congressional testimony or in laudations from FBI executives, because he never got public credit for his ideas. As a matter of fact, his life went into a tailspin shortly after Mandhai’s arrest. He was officially outed as an informant in June 2002 when an FBI agent said his name during a pretrial hearing for Mandhai and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported the news on its front page. At the time, Gilbert was working as a limousine driver in Miami. Upon seeing his name in the newspaper, he did what you wouldn’t expect from an aspiring CIA agent—he freaked out. Gilbert bought a second handgun and began hiding in hotel rooms, fearful that terrorists would try to assassinate him. Keith Ringel, a friend from Rhode Island, flew to Florida, and together he and Gilbert drove to Providence, traveling straight through and stopping only for gas. When Gilbert arrived at his friend’s apartment, he placed the two handguns in a safe. But two days after their arrival, Ringel told Gilbert he had to get the guns out of the safe—he was having a party that evening and some of the attendees knew the safe’s combination. Gilbert collected the guns and, using a holster, placed one of the guns on his hip. As Gilbert walked to his SUV, the gun visibly at his side, one of Ringel’s neighbors called the cops to report an armed man in the apartment complex. Providence police arrived, and after admitting to officers that he did not have permits for the guns, Gilbert was arrested. State prosecutors charged him with two counts of carrying a pistol without a license—punishable by up to ten years in prison.

  Broke and living out of his SUV in the parking lot of a Marriott Hotel, Gilbert was assigned public defenders Michael A. DiLauro and Anthony Capraro to help him fight the charges. Their defense was that Gilbert was under duress because he believed his life was in danger after being exposed as an FBI terrorism informant. DiLauro and Capraro subpoenaed records from the FBI—which failed to respond to the subpoenas. The Bureau’s stonewalling proved as much of a problem for the prosecution as it did for the defense. Without FBI cooperation, the prosecution couldn’t prove Gilbert wasn’t in danger—that he was overreacting. James Dube, the prosecutor in the case, wanted desperately to bring in FBI agents from Florida to undermine Gilbert’s claims of duress, and asked Superior Court Judge William A. Dimitri Jr. for more time, saying state officials needed to process the requests to allow Special Agents Keith Winter and Kevin O’Rourke to travel to Rhode Island.

  “Don’t give me that story,” Dimitri told Dube. “Am I supposed to hold this trial until they’re ready?”

  “I can’t be held accountable for what I don’t have and a federal agency might have in its possession,” Dube said.

  “I do not dance to the tune of the FBI or the U.S. attorney in Florida,” Dimitri said. “The FBI has been uncooperative since day one in this case.” 11

  The prosecutor sent a transcript of that conversation to the FBI in Miami, and on the day before the trial was to end, Winter and O’Rourke, as well as their boss, Supervisory Special Agent Mark Hastbacka, arrived in Providence to serve as rebuttal witnesses—to explain that Gilbert had never been in danger because the Mandhai prosecution didn’t involve any actual terrorists. But given their late arrival, Judge Dimitri would not allow them to testify and dismissed the charges against Gilbert. The informant hugged his lawyers and promised to name his children after them, declaring them, with a nod to the O.J. Simpson murder trial, “better than any million-dollar dream team.”12

  But Gilbert would never have any children. In the winter of 2003, he returned to South Florida, working as bodyguard and a limousine driver and hanging around International Protective Services, just as he had before he became a terrorism informant. He was in a rut, and certainly not on a road leading to a future with the CIA, as he had once dreamed. In 2004, Gilbert was found dead. He had killed himself in the middle of the night, a silencer-equipped handgun to the head. Gilbert would never see how the FBI ultimately adopted the terrorism sting techniques he had developed in the Mandhai investigation, and how Elie Assaad, his fellow informant in that case, became a star snitch by refining those tactics in the case of the Liberty City Seven.

  I was living in Miami on June 22, 2006, when the NBC affiliate interrupted regular television programming for a breaking news story. “We have some video that is just arriving from the scene,” reporter Patricia Andreu told viewers. The video showed federal law enforcement officers wearing green uniforms and black boots as they walked in front of a ramshackle warehouse. “We’re told that a terrorism-related investigation is under way,” Andreu continued. “We’re told that armed federal and local officials—there you see them right there—have set up a perimeter in the area. … As you can see in this video that we just got into the NBC6 newsroom, several federal and local officials are on scene there, including the FBI. They’re armed, as you can tell.” The CBS affiliate quickly followed suit, posting a video on its website whose headline read, “Terror Suspects Detained by Agents in Projects.”

  That afternoon, federal agents had arrested seven alleged Al Qaeda operatives—Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Phanor, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Augustin, Lyglenson Lemorin, and Rotschild Augustine—who had supposedly plotted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the North Miami Beach office of the FBI. Though the media in Florida and around the country quickly portrayed the seven men as dangerous terrorists, immediate questions arose among people familiar with terrorism cases as to whether the charges were trumped up. “I firmly believe there are public relations aspects to this case and other cases like it,” Khurrum Wahid, a Miami lawyer who has represented accused terrorists, told me the day after the arrests were announced. “It’s clear to me that the federal government used this case to try and send a message about the threat of terrorism in Miami and the rest of the country.”

  The timing of the raid was suspicious as well, as the New York Times had just revealed on its website a secret Bush administration program that permitted, under the guise of counterterrorism, the CIA and the Treasury Department to review, without warrants or subpoenas, the financial transactions of U.S. citizens and others living in the United States—yet another program that raised questions about whether the Bush administration was overstepping its legal authority in the hunt for terrorists after 9/11.13 The Times story had been in the works for months, and the Bush administration knew it was coming, so the announcement of a terrorist cell bust in Florida pushed that important story below the fold in most major newspapers the following day.

  Max Rameau, a Haitian-born activist who led a project to monitor local police and another to seize vacant lots in Miami and build a shantytown for the homeless, and who knew personally the men the federal government charged as terrorists in the Liberty City case, believed that the arrests were specifically timed to coincide with the story in the New York Times. “I think the government’s immediate intention in announcing the Liberty City Seven case was to draw attention away from the New York Times story coming out the next day,” Rameau told me at his office on Northwest Fifteenth Avenue, in the heart of Liberty City, when I met with him in 2009. “The arrests happened on a Thursday. That Friday was the long-awaited New York Times story about how the Bush administration was spying on people’s ATM transactions. But the day th
at story came out, it was downplayed because what became big news was the fact that these seven terrorists, black terrorists, reportedly Muslim terrorists, were arrested. I think the initial intention of it was to divert attention away from this story related to terrorism that was very damaging to the Bush administration and they wanted to trump that by showing there was some terrorism actually happening. Of course, they couldn’t find any terrorism happening, so they had to manufacture this instead.”14

  Finally, the area of Miami where the alleged terrorists were arrested—Liberty City—seemed like a peculiar place for them to hide. The poorest section of Miami, Liberty City—which gets its name from the Liberty Square public housing project built in the mid-1930s under the New Deal—is a largely African American and Haitian American neighborhood that Miami’s leaders would just as soon pretend didn’t exist. The police presence in Liberty City is obvious at all hours of the day and night, and a number of nonprofit community organizations have feet on the ground there. In short, it’s not a neighborhood where anyone—terrorists in particular—would likely go unnoticed.

  None of this skepticism, however, was evident in the news media’s initial coverage of the arrests. In one report, Rad Berky, a journalist for the Miami ABC affiliate, stood outside the group’s warehouse in Liberty City as the phrases “Terror Raid” and “Terror Arrests” flashed across the screen. Berky reported the government’s allegations in full, telling viewers that the seven men were preparing to launch attacks in Miami and Chicago. “There is also said to be audio- or videotape of the group members pledging support for violent holy war,” he said. Berky’s unquestioning, overhyped reporting of the government’s claims is emblematic of the lapdog approach the media has taken in covering federal terrorism cases since September 11, 2001.

  The main reason for this is cultural. After 9/11, there was a nearly unanimous belief at the FBI that terrorists were hiding in the United States, preparing to launch a second wave of attacks. Every current and former FBI agent I interviewed in researching this book told me they were certain that terrorist cells were embedded in the United States after September 11, 2001, and that the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks were just the beginning. “We were bracing for the next attack,” Dale Watson, the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism on 9/11, told me. This was a popular belief nationwide in the first few years after 9/11; the Showtime television series Sleeper Cell, about a Muslim FBI agent who infiltrates a terrorist cell in Los Angeles, exemplified this national assumption that deadly terrorists were out there and we needed to find them before time ran out and innocent people were killed. The government’s story of seven guys plotting to blow up a skyscraper and an FBI office fit perfectly with this widespread public assumption. If the media and the public believe terrorists are out there, they aren’t likely to question the government about whether the men trotted out for the cameras are actual terrorists.

  This attitude, which is still prevalent today, provides the government with a public suspension of disbelief whenever officials announce terrorism-related arrests. During the first few days of any crime story, even those unrelated to terrorism, law enforcement has a unique ability to control the narrative. Whenever local, state, or federal police announce a highprofile indictment, they do so with the luxury of operating in an information vacuum, as most, if not all, of the initial information comes from the police or prosecutors—details of the crimes and the defendants’ backgrounds and motivations. It can take weeks, even months, before journalists are able to interview people related to the defendants or uncover information that provides a more nuanced view than the one law enforcement hand-fed to the media. By then, the story is off the front pages of newspapers and no longer the lead on the broadcast news. In the Liberty City Seven case, for example, four months passed from the day of the indictment before the Miami media were able to interview the primary defendant’s wife, who described a very different man from the one presented by the FBI and the Justice Department.15

  This lack of any immediate doubt on behalf of the media was clear when the Justice Department held a news conference in the U.S. attorney’s office in downtown Miami the day after the arrests of the Liberty City Seven. More than two dozen cameras were trained on a lectern crowded with microphones as media liaisons for the Justice Department passed out to reporters copies of a disc with photos of the accused terrorists. At 11:30 a.m.—about thirty minutes after then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had finished a news conference in Washington, D.C., in which he said the accused terrorists wanted to wage “a full ground war against the United States”—U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta stood behind the lectern. “We believe that these defendants sought the support of Al Qaeda to, in their own words, wage jihad and war against the United States. To ‘kill all the devils that we can,’” Acosta told the gathered reporters. “They hoped that their attacks would be, in their own words, ‘just as good or greater than 9/11.’”

  Despite the statements of Acosta and Gonzales, reporters didn’t have to look hard for information that suggested the Justice Department might be overselling their case. According to the eleven-page indictment, the seven men who supposedly wanted to wage war against the United States didn’t have any weapons or explosives, and their only alleged Al Qaeda connection was an FBI informant posing as a terrorist. Even the management company of the Sears Tower, one of the alleged targets, knew the building was never in danger. “This group never got beyond talking about a workable plot,” Barbara A. Carley, managing director of the Sears Tower, told the New York Times on the day of the press conference. “Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they’ve never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that’s ever gone beyond just talk.”16 Yet the reporters at the Miami news conference accepted unchallenged the government’s claims that this was an active terrorist group that had sought support from Al Qaeda, which prompted several follow-up questions that the U.S. attorney struggled to answer.

  “Was Al Qaeda on its way to responding?” one reporter asked during the press conference. “What kind of feedback did they get?”

  “I’m sorry—I don’t understand,” Acosta replied.

  “They asked for money. They asked for weapons. What kind of feedback did they get from Al Qaeda?”

  Acosta had to admit reluctantly that the group had never made contact with Al Qaeda. They were in contact with an FBI informant posing as Al Qaeda—that was their crime.

  “How did they get the $50,000?” another reporter asked.

  “I’m sorry?” Acosta replied.

  “You mentioned $50,000,” the reporter said, clarifying.

  Acosta conceded that while the group did ask for $50,000, they had asked the FBI informant for it, not Al Qaeda, and in the end, they never received any money. The only terrorist involved in the case was an imaginary one on the FBI payroll, a man who called himself Mohammed, and whose real name was Elie Assaad.

  The story of how Elie Assaad, Howard Gilbert’s fellow informant in the Imran Mandhai case, came to pose once more as an Al Qaeda operative named Mohammed begins with another untrustworthy informant—a five-foot-seven, 190-pound, twenty-one-year-old Yemeni man named Abbas al-Saidi. In 2006, al-Saidi ran a convenience store in North Miami, and one of his frequent customers was Narseal Batiste, a thirty-two-year-old former preacher at a nondenominational Christian church, a father of four, and a one-time Guardian Angel. Growing up, Batiste had split his time between Chicago and Marksville, a small town in Louisiana. He attended a Catholic high school and his father, Narcisse, a preacher himself, had raised his son to be a Christian. Batiste met his wife, Minerva Vasquez, who was born in Estancia de Animas, a small town in Zacatecas, Mexico, in high school, and Narcisse married them shortly after Vasquez gave birth to her and Batiste’s second child, a little girl named Narcassia. Batiste had moved to South Florida following a failed attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps as a preacher in Chicago. He also saw Miami as a place to start a new life af
ter his mother, Audrey Batiste, died in 2000 from surgery complications. The youngest of five boys and one girl, Batiste took his mother’s sudden death hard. “All my kids took it so hard,” remembered Narcisse.17

  As an adult, Batiste wasn’t content in limiting his religious studies to Christian texts, and Islam and the Koran intrigued him particularly—something his father tried to dissuade. “I didn’t agree with it, but he was a man by then and I didn’t think I could argue with him about it,” Narcisse Batiste said.18 Despite this, Batiste never identified himself as a Muslim. By the time he and his family moved to Miami in 2001, Batiste considered himself a member of the Moorish Science Temple, a religious sect that blends Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. He’d preach to anyone who’d listen and offered martial arts training to disadvantaged, mostly black, kids in Liberty City. He wanted to help clean up Liberty City, and six men—Haitians and African Americans—joined him to form something of a group. Batiste also ran a drywall business, Azteca Stucco and Masonry, out of a run-down warehouse, and his followers were also his employees.

  Above all, however, Batiste was a natural-born bullshitter and hustler. That’s how he came to strike up a friendship with the young al-Saidi at the convenience store in North Miami. Batiste, who was trying to keep his drywall business solvent while he and his family were living in a cramped one-bedroom apartment, told al-Saidi he was looking for ways to make money. Al-Saidi said he knew people who could help. “You’re always looking for money, and I have some people in Yemen I can introduce you to who would fund your organization, but you gotta spin it the right way, and I’ll help you do that,” al-Saidi said, according to the story Batiste told his lawyers.

  What happened next isn’t entirely clear. What is known is that al-Saidi left the United States to visit his wife and family in Yemen and returned on a ticket paid for by the FBI. His task: to infiltrate a terrorist cell in Miami.