The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

  The end of Ramadan in September 2009 signaled the five-year anniversary since the FBI had first approached Foad Farahi. Dressed in khaki pants and a white button-down shirt, Farahi walked barefoot through his mosque as members began to arrange food on folding banquet tables. After sundown, everyone would eat and drink together to break the fast. Farahi was distracted as he waved to attendees and hugged others entering the mosque. I asked him if his legal fight with the U.S. government had made him bitter. “I’m not bitter,” he answered. “I wouldn’t say I’m bitter at all. But I’m tired. I want to live my life in this country. I want to stay here. That’s all.”

  Farahi’s political asylum case has so far been unsuccessful, and in late 2012, he applied for residency based on his recent marriage to a U.Sc citizen.

  To coerce people into becoming informants, the FBI must exploit vulnerabilities, and the greatest vulnerability in U.S. Muslim communities today, as the Farahi case shows, is immigration. Sixty-three percent of Muslims in the United States are first-generation immigrants, and forty-five percent of all Muslims in the country have immigrated here since 1990.6 Through increased interagency coordination, the FBI has access to officials at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Therefore, when an agent has someone who is reluctant to become an informant, he or she can turn to colleagues at ICE and inquire about that person’s immigration status. Together, they can comb through the individual’s personal information as they search for any kind of immigration violation—such as, in the case of Foad Farahi, how he was three credit hours shy of being a full-time student when his visa required him to carry nine graduate credit hours per semester—and then use that violation as leverage to force cooperation. If the immigrant chooses to cooperate, the FBI will tell the court that he is a valuable asset, averting deportation; if the immigrant chooses not to work as an informant, as Farahi did, the FBI will not support him, and the person may face deportation.

  Officially, the FBI denies that it uses the threat of deportation as leverage against possible informants. “We are prohibited from using threats or coercion,” FBI spokesperson Kathleen Wright told me when I asked her about this form of pressure. But the FBI does acknowledge that it assists helpful informants when they appear in U.S. Immigration Court. “There have been instances when an individual with immigration issues has assisted in investigations and/or been willing to share information,” Wright said. “While we do not have the authority to make deportation or immigration decisions, we can advise immigration authorities of the level of cooperation for whatever use they deem appropriate.” In other words, work as an informant and the FBI will help stop you from being deported; refuse and the FBI won’t use its considerable influence in court to prevent the issuing of a one-way ticket out of the country.

  Immigration violations aren’t the only type of pressure that the FBI uses to coerce reluctant informants. Another tried-and-true method the Bureau uses to flip people is the threat of criminal charges. When the FBI aggressively pursued Italian American organized crime in the 1980s, informants were critical to infiltrating these sophisticated, hierarchal organizations. Often, agents were able to use a crime—such as car theft or fraud—to pressure lower-level Mafiosi to become informants. However, there is one key difference between organized crime soldiers and members of Muslim American communities, namely that the latter aren’t nearly as likely to break the law. Not only are devout Muslims religiously bound not to violate society’s laws, but U.S. Muslims are often of such affluence that they are an improbable group to be involved in serious crime, particularly in comparison to organized crime figures. In the year after 9/11, for example, 26 percent of Muslims in the United States earned more than $100,000 annually, according to a Cornell University study.7 Go to any mosque in this country, and you’re more likely to find an expensive Mercedes in the parking lot than a rusted-out Chevy.

  Yet another form of leverage that the FBI uses to recruit reluctant informants is “trash covers,” which is the practice of searching through someone’s garbage—without obtaining a warrant—in order to uncover incriminating or embarrassing information. Although the FBI has performed trash covers for decades, the Justice Department officially blessed the practice in approving the most recent Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, which specifically allows federal agents to go through people’s trash.8 The FBI’s search for incriminating or embarrassing information isn’t limited to people’s physical trash, however. More and more, agents are searching publicly accessible databases on social networks—Facebook, Google+, and Twitter, for example—to mine digital cast offs that could provide information about individuals who are reluctant to become informants.

  For agents working counterterrorism investigations, informants are critical, and applying leverage—from immigration violations to criminal charges to even something as personal as extramarital relationships—is the best, and sometimes only, way to recruit informants. “We could go to a source and say, ‘We know you’re having an affair. If you work with us, we won’t tell your wife,’” a former top FBI counterterrorism official told me, asking that he not be identified because he wasn’t authorized to discuss informant recruitment on the record. “Would we actually call the wife if the source doesn’t cooperate? Not always. You do get into ethics here—is this the right thing to do?—but the legality of this isn’t a question. If you obtained the information legally, then you can use it however you want.”

  It’s an oppressive prospect that the full power of a federal law enforcement agency could be directed at someone not even suspected of having committed a crime, but FBI agents are quick to defend the search for information that can be leveraged in the recruitment of snitches. Mike Rolince, a retired FBI agent who spent thirty-one years at the Bureau and specialized in counterterrorism, is among the defenders of this practice. I asked Rolince if he thought the Bureau was going too far today in trying to leverage cooperation from informants in Muslim American communities. He told me that he didn’t think the fact that the FBI applied pressure to informants was a problem by itself. Instead, he said, the problem was the perception that the FBI does so willy-nilly and frequently. “The reality at the end of the day is that these tactics are used sparingly,” Rolince told me. “Maybe Italian Americans felt offended we went after John Gotti and recruited informants in Italian communities. But we needed to do that then, just as we need to recruit informants in Muslim communities today.”

  While the threat of deportation is the prime weapon the FBI uses to coerce would-be informants, that tactic has its limitations, as it cannot be used against people who are already U.S. citizens. In those situations, the Bureau relies on other pressure points, the most prominent of which is putting someone on the government’s no-fly list. Maintained by the Terrorist Screening Center, an FBI group charged with identifying suspected or potential terrorists, the no-fly list prevents an individual from boarding a flight in the United States. Created after 9/11, the list has an infamous history of false positives—the late Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts was repeatedly stopped at airports, for example, because the vague name “T. Kennedy” was on the list—and at one point even Nobel Peace Prize winner and former South African president Nelson Mandela made the list, a problem then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described to a 2008 Senate committee as “frankly a rather embarrassing matter.”9

  In spite of these high-profile incidents, since at least 2010, the FBI has used the no-fly list as a tool for coercing cooperation from would-be Muslim informants who are American citizens. As an example, one of the FBI’s informant recruitment efforts focused on Ibraheim “Abe” Mashal, a thirty-one-year-old living in St. Charles, Illinois, with his wife and three children. Mashal, who was honorably discharged from the U.S. Marine Corps in 2003, was working as a dog trainer with clients in twenty-three states when he received a call from a woman in Spokane, Washington, asking him to come work with her dog. The woman agreed to pay for an airplane ticket, hotel, and fee for Mashal—a typ
ical arrangement for him. On April 20, 2010, Mashal arrived at Chicago’s Midway Airport for a flight to Spokane, only to be turned away by the ticketing agent, who told him he was on the no-fly list.

  FBI agents later arranged to interview Mashal, and he assumed the embarrassing affair was a mix-up that the agents would sort out. But that didn’t happen. Instead, on June 23, 2010, Mashal received a call from an FBI agent. “We’ve got good news,” Mashal remembered being told.10 “Meet us at Embassy Suites.” The hotel wasn’t far from his home, and when he arrived at the room, Mashal found two FBI agents sitting in chairs, with a spread of cold cuts and cheese on the table. The agents explained to Mashal that he’d come to their attention after sending emails to a religious cleric in the Middle East whom they were monitoring.

  “So you guys were in my email?” Mashal asked the agents.

  “We cannot confirm or deny,” one of them responded.

  Mashal told the agents he knew exactly what they were referring to and was up front about what he had written in the emails. Mashal, whose wife is Christian, had sought an imam’s advice on raising children in an interfaith home. “You obviously read the emails,” he told the agents. “It was about stuff that has nothing to do with terrorism at all.”

  The agents didn’t respond to the fact that the emails were innocuous, Mashal said. Instead, they asked him if he would like to help them out by providing information about a large suburban Chicago mosque. If he would work as a paid informant for the FBI, the agents told him, the government would remove his name from the no-fly list. “We have informants in your mosque. We have informants in Ann Arbor mosques. We have informants all over the Midwest,” Mashal remembered one of the FBI agents telling him.

  “Even if I wanted a position like that, I don’t have the time. I don’t even speak Arabic,” Mashal told the agents in response. He then asked to have a lawyer present, and the FBI agents ended the meeting.

  Mashal, who to his knowledge is still on the no-fly list, is now one of fifteen plaintiffs in an ACLU lawsuit filed in Oregon against Attorney General Eric Holder and the directors of the FBI and the Terrorist Screening Center for misuse of the no-fly list. “Thousands of people have been barred altogether from commercial air travel without any opportunity to confront or rebut the basis for their inclusion, or apparent inclusion, on a government watch list,” the ACLU complaint alleges.11 “Some of them may be on the list as a result of mistaken identity, but for others, there seems to be this McCarthy-era naming of names going on,” Nusrat Choudhury, one of the ACLU lawyers working on the case, told me. “The problem is that there is no way to stand up for yourself, to petition to have your name removed from the list. For that reason, it’s the perfect bargaining chip in FBI and law enforcement investigations.”12

  In addition to the no-fly list, another way that the FBI coerces U.S. citizens to become informants is the threat of criminal prosecution. In what has become an embarrassing case for the FBI, the Justice Department in February 2009 charged Ahmadullah Sais Niazi, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Afghanistan who was living in Orange County, California, with lying in order to obtain citizenship. Niazi, whose estranged brother-in-law was at one time Osama bin Laden’s bodyguard in Afghanistan, came to the FBI’s attention as part of an undercover operation code-named Operation Flex, the purpose of which was to gather intelligence and recruit informants in Orange and Los Angeles counties. The main actor in the operation was a well-muscled forty-nine-year-old informant with a shaved scalp named Craig Monteilh, a convicted felon who had made his money ripping off cocaine dealers before becoming an asset for the DEA and later the FBI, for which he had posed in previous investigations as a white supremacist, a Russian hit man, and a Sicilian drug trafficker.13

  In Operation Flex, the FBI asked Monteilh to pose as a French-Syrian Muslim named Farouk al-Aziz and search for information—such as immigration problems, extramarital relationships, criminal activities, and drug use—that might help the Bureau pressure local Muslims into becoming informants. “They wanted information that they could use to blackmail people,” Monteilh told me in 2011.14 Monteilh also claimed that the FBI encouraged him to use any means necessary—including engaging in sexual relationships with women—to engender trust in the communities he was tasked with infiltrating.

  During the course of the investigation, Monteilh met Niazi, and once the FBI realized that the Orange County man had a distant connection to Osama bin Laden, they asked Monteilh to get close to him. Monteilh became so aggressive in talking about terrorism, however, that Niazi told the Los Angeles chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations about the conversations. A representative from the organization, in turn, reported Monteilh to the FBI as a possible terrorist. Just as Monteilh was being exposed, police in Irvine, California, charged him with bilking two women out of $157,000 as part of an alleged scam. He had asked the women to front him money for human growth hormone, with the promise that he could double their money. But there were no drugs, and the women lost their cash to Monteilh, who pleaded guilty to a grandtheft charge and served eight months in prison. Monteilh claimed the human growth hormone transaction was part of an FBI investigation, and after the FBI failed to have the charges removed, as Monteilh said he had been promised, the informant went public and exposed Operation Flex. He also filed a lawsuit against the FBI and began cooperating with the ACLU in a civil rights complaint against the U.S. government.

  After Monteilh was sidelined, the FBI tried to recruit Niazi as an informant, threatening to charge him with lying in answers to a host of questions on his naturalization application, including, among other things, about whether he’d used other names or had connections to terrorist organizations. Once Niazi refused to be an informant, the Justice Department filed the charges. Ultimately, though, just as Operation Flex had, the prosecution against Niazi imploded—primarily due to Monteilh’s poisoning of the case through comments he made to the press—and in October 2010, prosecutors dropped the charges against the Orange County man. Niazi has stated publicly that he believes his prosecution was in retaliation for his refusal to work with the government.

  Others who have refused to cooperate with the FBI haven’t been so fortunate. Tarek Mehanna is one of them. A resident of Sudbury, Massachusetts, Mehanna has a doctorate from the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences, and no criminal record. After FBI agents failed to persuade Mehanna to become an informant, however, the government charged him with making a false statement, alleging that Mehanna told FBI agents that his friend Daniel Maldonado was in Egypt when Mehanna knew he was in Somalia attending a terrorist training camp. Evidence collected during the FBI investigation found that Mehanna had traveled to Yemen when he was twenty-one years old in an unsuccessful attempt to find a terrorist training camp. Mehanna, who never came into contact with terrorists in Yemen or in the United States, seemed fascinated with extremist texts and jihadi videos. He translated “Thirty-Nine Ways to Serve and Participate in Jihad” and posted it online through Al-Tibyan Publications, a company which has not been linked to Al Qaeda or any of its affiliates. (The text is widely available online in Arabic and English, including on the Internet Archive.) Mehanna also distributed a video online showing the mutilation of the remains of two U.S. soldiers, which may have been done in retaliation for the rape of a young Iraqi girl. When asked by a friend if the legal system could have been used instead to bring justice to the raped girl, Mehanna answered: “Who cares? Texas BBQ is the way to go.”15

  In November 2008, the FBI arrested Mehanna in Massachusetts, where prosecutors charged him with lying to the FBI, for allegedly providing false information about Maldonado’s travels. He was also charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. While Mehanna awaited trial, authorities kept him in solitary confinement and limited his communications. I therefore had to correspond with him through letters. In one dated October 19, 2010, Mehanna described to me how federal authorities tried to coerce him into becoming an inform
ant:

  There were explicit threats that if I refused to work as a confidential informant, I would be charged with material support for terrorism. Essentially, everything I am going through now is an implementation of the threats they directed towards me that day. Their exact words were: ‘We can do this the easy way’—i.e., I work for them—‘or we can see you in court. You have a lot to think about.’ Then they left. A few months later, I was arrested and charged not with terrorism, but with the false statement regarding Maldonado. I was allowed out on bail for that charge for the majority of 2009. Towards the middle of September ’09, they approached me one more time through a friend, sending me the message that I had ‘one last chance,’ or things would get worse. A month later, October 21, 2009, you know what happened. And here I am today.

  During his trial in late 2011, which included thirty-one days of testimony, federal prosecutors told the jury that Mehanna had traveled to Yemen in 2004 to train with terrorists but failed to locate a training camp. After returning home, prosecutors said, Mehanna conspired with Al Qaeda to promote jihad on the Internet. He was, they said, part of Al Qaeda’s “media wing”—in spite of the fact that the government did not provide any evidence directly linking Mehanna to the terrorist organization. Following ten hours of deliberation, a jury found him guilty of conspiring to support Al Qaeda, never specifying whether the jurors found him guilty of supporting terrorists by traveling to Yemen—where he never located any terrorists—or by posting extremist literature on the Internet, material which wasn’t even written by terrorists.