The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

How the government became interested in Aref isn’t clear. What’s known is that in late 2002, FBI agents in Albany reported to their counterparts in Atlanta that they had an open investigation of him. In Aref’s heavily redacted FBI file, the basis of the government’s investigation is not disclosed.23 However, around the same time that FBI agents in Albany were investigating Aref, U.S. forces in Iraq found a notebook with his name, address, and phone number in it. In front of his name was the Kurdish word kak. U.S. authorities initially mistranslated the word to mean commander—likely giving them reason to believe Aref was a militant—only to realize much later that kak is the word for brother, a term of respect. Whatever information the FBI had on Aref, the actions of agents made it clear that the Bureau felt that it needed to draw him out. To do that, the FBI needed to find someone close to the imam.

  The candidate for that someone was Mohammed Hossain, who was on the board of directors of Masjid As-Salam. Hussain’s showing up at Hossain’s pizzeria, giving toy helicopters to his children, and offering to help his brother obtain a state identification card represented the FBI’s initial attempts to sidle up to someone close to Aref. That was the reason Hussain didn’t collect the money from Hossain’s wife when he dropped off Kyum and his new identification card. Hussain and the FBI wanted Hossain to come to a warehouse in Latham—a safe house where hidden cameras could record their conversation.

  It was November 20, 2003, a Thursday evening, and Hossain was irritated that he had to drive out to Latham. Thursdays were among the busiest nights of the week at the pizzeria, but since Hussain had helped Kyum obtain an identification card, Hossain felt obligated to go. Just before seven o’clock that evening, after having gotten lost for a short time while searching for the place, Hossain knocked on the warehouse door.

  “Where have you been?” Hussain asked in Urdu as he opened the door. Hossain could speak Urdu but was not as confident in the language as he was in his native Bengali.

  “That delivery,” Hossain answered in Urdu, frustrated. “Today’s Thursday. On Thursday there’s the delivery.”

  “So what’s the news?” Hussain asked.

  Baffled by the question since it was Hussain who had asked him to come to Latham, the pizzeria owner replied with some annoyance: “Nothing. You tell me.”

  Wearing a white button-down shirt and dress pants, Hussain took a seat behind a small desk. Hossain, wearing a taqiyah and a puffy jacket for the cold evening outside, sat in a chair on the other side of the desk.

  “Where have you reached in your life?” Hussain asked, attempting small talk.

  “There’s no praying or meditation or anything,” Hossain said.

  “Why?”

  “So much running around here and there! I’m forced to be so busy with the world’s business—there’s no worship.”

  “But we have to do something in this world,” Hussain said.

  “Well, I just say my prayers,” Hossain said.

  Hussain then brought up a conversation the two of them had had the last time they’d seen each other, about how serving God and making money weren’t mutually exclusive in Islam. “Do you remember the last time when we talked?” Hussain asked. “So I told you that there are two kinds of work to be done in the name of Allah—one is jihad and the other is that one can make money. So what if both are done? So you said that both actions are right. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, right, right,” Hossain replied.

  Hussain went on to explain that he was in the business of importing goods from China, pointing to different areas of the warehouse—a concrete room with bare, white walls and boxes piled in every corner. “All this that you are seeing comes from China, see,” he said, adding that among the items he imported were weapons and ammunition. Hussain then stood and pulled back a tarp covering something on the floor. “Do you know what this is?” Hussain asked, his hands on his knees, looking over at his guest. Hossain peered down at the floor, at what had been covered by the tarp. “Do you know what this is?” Hussain asked him again.

  “No,” he said.

  “This is for destroying airplanes,” Hussain said, hoisting a device off the floor and placing it on his right shoulder. It was a metal tube, about four feet long, with a shoulder strap hanging from the center. Hussain placed his hand on the front of the tube. “Sensor heat, you know?” he said, holding a shoulder-fired missile he said he had imported from China. “This comes for our mujahid brothers,” Hussain said. “I have been doing this work for about five years.”

  “I see.”

  “This is Muslim work. Understand?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “For all these Muslim countries. Today it’s going to New York. Today it came. This comes in our packaging, in our containers, see.”

  “I see, I see.”

  “From China, this will go straight to New York. It will be shipped.”

  “I see, I see,” Hossain said, repeating himself again and showing little interest.

  “So, yes, I was thinking I’ll show this to my brother as well, that I also do this business for my brothers, my Muslim brothers … This is easily about $4,000, $5,000 worth of merchandise easily.”

  “Then from New York, it’ll be transferred to another place?” Hossain asked.

  “I don’t have anything to do with that. My job is to get it to New York. You’ve heard the term ‘stinger,’ right? This is a SAM, right? This hits planes.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “It’s used for hitting the planes. All the mujahideen brothers, right?”

  “I’ve seen it on television,” Hossain said.

  “They use these. This comes from China—it’s a Chinese product.”

  “I had never seen it.”

  “What?”

  “I had never seen it,” Hossain said. “I have—but on television.”

  “On television,” Hussain responded. “Did you like this business? So this is one of my other businesses.”

  “Hmm,” Hossain said. “Good money can be made in this?”

  “A lot,” Hussain interjected.

  “But it’s not legal,” Hossain said.

  “What is legal in the world?” Hussain answered, laughing loudly. “There is nothing that is legal in this world—everything has to be illegal. There is a lot of money in this. In this, see, who’s going to support our Muslim brothers? People like you, people like me, who have the resources to support, who have the power to support them. Until and unless we support, then we are not Muslims! If you are eating and you don’t support your brother, then you are not Muslim.”

  Hussain kept on talking in this manner. This was one of the informant’s regular tactics in the case, talking about things that could be construed as related to terrorism but dominating the conversation to such an extent that Hossain said very little.

  Over the next few weeks, Hussain regularly dropped by the Little Italy Pizzeria. He said he admired Hossain’s faith, and the two of them often talked about Islam. During those conversations, Hossain mentioned several times that he was short on money. One day, Hussain made him an offer: he’d give him $50,000 in cash, and Hossain could keep $5,000 and pay back the remaining $45,000 in installments over the following year. Hossain agreed, no questions asked. The government would later call this money laundering; Hossain would call it a loan, because his pizza shop was struggling and he needed money to fix up two run-down houses he’d purchased at a city auction. Either way, the transaction would allow the government to inch closer to their target—Yassin Aref, the local imam from Iraq. Hussain and the FBI knew that Hossain would want a religious leader to oversee the financial transaction—a customary request for any devout Muslim—and they also knew how to narrow the candidates down to ensure that the religious leader he chose was Aref.

  “I don’t want any Pakistani or Bangladeshi or Indian as witness. I don’t want these people to know my business,” Hussain said when Hossain asked for someone to oversee the transaction.

  In Albany, that left only
one Muslim as a possible candidate. “How about Brother Yassin as witness?” Hossain asked.

  Hussain agreed excitedly. “Holy is Allah,” he said.

  Hussain arranged to give the first installment of money to Hossain on January 2, 2004. Hussain’s FBI handlers told him to make it clear that the money was ill-gotten. “I told him to explain that the money came from—make sure you explain the money came from illegal proceeds,” FBI Special Agent Timothy Coll said. “Malik told me the general term used is ‘blacken the money,’ so I said tell them in your words that the money came from illegal proceeds, that the money is black money, that the money came from under the table, under the tax—to be hidden from taxes.”24 Coll also instructed Hussain to give the money to Hossain and Aref while holding up in plain view the trigger mechanism for a surface-to-air missile.25 The trigger mechanism is about the size of a large handgun and attaches to the body of the missile launcher. It looks like an oversized label maker when separated from the missile.

  Just after two thirty in the afternoon on January 2, Hossain and Aref arrived at the informant’s warehouse. They took seats in plastic chairs in front of Hussain’s desk. Just as with the previous meeting between Hossain and Hussain, a camera in the corner recorded the conversation. This time, they all spoke in English, since Aref did not speak Urdu.

  “Okay, let’s do some business, okay? Let’s make some money, okay?” Hussain said as he pulled a wad of cash from the desk drawer. “This is $5,000, okay? I want you to count it, okay?”

  Hussain handed the money to Aref, who began to count the bills. As he counted, Hussain reached behind and grabbed the trigger mechanism. “When I have to send this in, they will give me $45,000, $50,000, okay?” he said, holding the mechanism aloft. “This is part of the missile that I showed you.” Hussain pronounced the word missile as mee-zile, as if he were attempting a Russian accent. None of this seemed to register with Aref, who never looked up from counting the money. (Aref, whose English is poor, would later maintain he never heard the word mee-zile and that he didn’t realize the trigger mechanism was part of a weapon.26) “So as soon as [the money] comes, I’ll give you—this is $5,000, so next couple of weeks, or less, I’ll get you more money,” Hussain continued.

  “Insha’Allah,” Hossain said. “It’s no problem, see, actually, I didn’t need all that. I just need to keep going, just so I can pay the bills.”27 Hossain, as the line suggested, believed the money was for a personal loan, not for weapons.

  The FBI and Hussain stayed close to Hossain and Aref for the next several months, presumably in the hopes of documenting some type of criminal behavior. There were dozens of conversations during this time, and in some between Hussain and Hossain, the informant used a code word for the missile, chaudry. According to the government, this was evidence that Hossain knew about the missile, but from the transcripts, it isn’t clear whether Hossain knew the informant’s meaning of chaudry. Hossain also began to pay back Hussain with regular checks, as he had agreed, suggesting that the pizzeria owner truly believed their arrangement constituted a loan, not money laundering. In fact, on the memo line of one check, he wrote that it was for a loan repayment.

  Finally, after seven months without criminal activity by either Hossain or Aref, the FBI arrested the pair in August 2004, charging them with conspiring to aid a terrorist group, providing support for a weapon of mass destruction, money laundering, and supporting a foreign terrorist organization. They went to trial together in September and October 2006. Because Hossain and Aref had not encountered a real terrorist during the entire FBI operation—only an informant posing as an arms importer for terrorists—the prosecution needed to find a way to link Hossain’s and Aref’s recorded statements to terrorism. For that, the U.S. government turned to Evan Kohlmann, a then-twenty-seven-year-old self-described terrorism expert whom an FBI agent once dubbed “the Doogie Howser of terrorism.”

  A Florida native whose Manhattan apartment walls are covered with pictures of terrorists, Kohlmann is the government’s most prolific terrorism expert, having served as an expert witness in seventeen terrorism trials in the United States and in nine others abroad since 2002. With most of his knowledge gleaned from the Internet—the type of information the CIA describes as “open source intelligence”—Kohlmann has testified to juries about the history of Islamic terrorism, how terrorist organizations finance themselves, and how they spread propaganda and recruit others for terrorist acts. Since 9/11, Kohlmann has made a living testifying for the prosecution in terrorism trials as well as appearing on cable news as a terrorism expert. Jonathan Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University, described Kohlmann to New York magazine as having been “grown hydroponically in the basement of the Bush Justice Department.”28 Several defense lawyers, including those in the cases of “dirty bomber” Jośe Padilla and the so-called Virginia jihad group, have tried to have Kohlmann disqualified as an expert witness, arguing that his only qualifications as a terrorism expert are self-fashioned.29 However, because few experts with university credentials and social science backgrounds are willing to testify about terrorism, the Justice Department has had little trouble persuading judges to allow Kohlmann to take the stand, where, as one of his critics put it, he spews “junk science” by suggesting that anyone who watches jihadi videos has self-radicalized.30

  Kohlmann is one of a cadre of self-appointed terrorism experts who today earn handsome paychecks pushing forward the idea that Islamic terrorism is a real and immediate threat in the United States. Among Kohlmann’s peers is Rita Katz, an Iraqi-born Jewish woman who has helped the U.S. government investigate Islamic charities and mosques linked to radicals. One of Katz’s critics alleged that, like Kohlmann, she could find a way to trace just about anything to Islamic terrorism, telling the Boston Globe that she “fits everything into a mold—that there is a Muslim terrorist under everybody’s bed.”31 Many of these so-called terrorism experts, including Kohlmann and Katz, have worked under Steven Emerson, a former journalist who has earned millions of dollars while making such hyperbolic claims as that 80 percent of mosques in the United States are controlled by Islamic extremists. In 2009 and 2010, Emerson’s nonprofit organization, Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, raised $5.4 million in grants and individual contributions.32 The nonprofit then paid Emerson’s corporation, SAE Productions, $3.4 million in management fees, allowing the tax-exempt Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation to act as a pass-through for a for-profit company—a questionable but not illegal practice. Simply put, there’s a lot of money to be made in stoking terrorism fears. For testifying in the trial of Hossain and Aref, for example, the U.S. government paid Evan Kohlmann $5,000.

  To establish a terrorist connection, the prosecution played a conversation the FBI had recorded between Hossain and Hussain. “We are members of Jamaat-e-Islami,” Hossain told Hussain in the recording. The government had originally claimed that Jamaat-e-Islami, a political party in Bangladesh, was linked to terrorism through a proxy organization, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen. But when Kohlmann was named an expert witness in the case, replacing another government expert who was unable to testify at the trial, he submitted a report that seemed to confuse Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan with Jamaat-e-Islami of Bangladesh—two different organizations. In a deposition, Kevin A. Luibrand, a lawyer for Hossain, challenged not only Kohlmann’s assertion, but also his general political knowledge of Bangladesh. Under questioning, Kohlmann admitted that he had never written about Jamaat-e-Islami of Bangladesh and could not say how many political parties existed in Bangladesh or even who the current prime minister of the country was.

  “Can you name any of the major political parties in Bangladesh from the year 2000 to 2004?” Luibrand asked.

  “Other than Jamaat-e-Islami?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s—I’m not familiar off the top of my head,” Kohlmann said.

  “Have you ever heard of an organization known as the Bangladesh National Party?�
�

  “Vaguely.”

  “Do you know what it is?”

  “I’m assuming it’s a political party, but again—the name vaguely sounds familiar but—”

  “Do you know what, if anything, it stands for politically within Bangladesh?”

  “Sorry, can’t tell ya.”

  “You can’t tell me because you don’t know?”

  “I don’t know off the top of my head.”

  Following this exchange, Luibrand petitioned the court to have Kohlmann disqualified as an expert witness, writing in his motion: “Evan Kohlmann revealed that he has no basis to form any opinions with respect to JEI Bangladesh, or to explain JEI Bangladesh to the jury.”33 The presiding judge denied the request, and Kohlmann was allowed to testify not only about Jamaat-e-Islami but also about Ansar al Islam, a terrorist group formed by a man Yassin Aref had met a few times while living as a refugee in Syria. Of the damage Kohlmann’s testimony did at trial, Hossain’s lawyer said it “just kill[ed] us.”34

  A jury ultimately found Hossain and Aref guilty of money laundering—but not of the more significant terrorism charges. At sentencing, both men were mystified about how they’d arrived in the position they were in—as accused terrorists about to be sentenced to federal prison.

  “I never had any intention to harm anyone in this country,” Aref told the judge. “And I don’t know why I’m guilty.”

  “I am just a pizza man,” Hossain said. “I make good pizza.”

  The public in Albany was largely supportive of Hossain and Aref, believing an injustice had occurred. Community members pressed into the courtroom, some holding copies of Aref’s self-published autobiography, Son of Mountains. Fred LeBrun, the metro columnist for the Albany Times Union, compared the prosecution to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy’s witch hunts and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But U.S. District Judge Thomas McAvoy, indifferent to the community support, sentenced the pair to fifteen years in prison.

  Yassin Aref is incarcerated in a special Indiana prison that restricts outside communication. The ACLU is representing him in challenging his confinement there. If Aref’s counter-part, Mohammed Hossain, were ever a terrorist threat, you wouldn’t know it today based on his assignment at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons: he is serving his sentence at Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institute, a medium-security facility located in a poor, rural part of Pennsylvania, between Allentown and Harrisburg.