The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

  After a few more minutes of talking, Hussain pressed Cromitie to move forward. “Do you think you are a better recruiter or a better action man? I’m asking you a question on it,” Hussain said.49

  “I’m both,” Cromitie bragged.

  “My people would be very happy to know that, brother. Honestly,” Hussain said.

  “Who’s your people?” Cromitie asked.

  “Jaish-e-Mohammed.”

  That answer was supposed to make it clear that Hussain was a well-connected terrorist. But Cromitie had never heard of Jaish-e-Mohammed, which is among the world’s better-known Islamic terrorist organizations. “Who are they?” he asked. “What are, what are your people? What are they, Muslim?”

  “What do you think?” Hussain asked.

  “What are they, Muslim?” Cromitie repeated.

  “What do you think we are?”

  Cromitie had no clue. However, the fact that Cromitie had never heard of the terrorist organization the FBI was using for its cover was not enough to stop the Bureau from pushing forward with a sting built around a luckless man they inexplicably viewed as a would-be terrorist.

  After they returned from Philadelphia, Hussain and Cromitie discussed their proposed attack, with Hussain suggesting they target nearby Stewart International Airport, which includes an Air National Guard base, as well as a few synagogues. But after deciding on the specifics of their plot, Hussain had to leave the area for nearly two months—he told Cromitie he had to go to New York City to meet with other members of Jaish-e-Mohammed—and he asked Cromitie to spend their time apart recruiting people and doing reconnaissance on the targets for the attack.

  However, without the informant driving the action in Newburgh, the plot ran aground. While Hussain was gone, Cromitie spent his time working at Walmart, hanging around Newburgh, and watching a lot of television—mostly, in a wonderful irony, Hollywood action movies involving Islamic terrorists. When Hussain finally returned on February 23, 2009, Cromitie had accomplished nothing. “I been watching a lot of crazy pictures lately,” Cromitie told Hussain, as if to explain his inaction. “Well, terrorist movies. A whole bunch of them. And America makes these movies. That’s the shit that kill [sic] me. And then I look at all of these movies, and I say to myself, ‘Why is America trying to make the Arab brothers look like they the bad guys?’”

  The sting was going nowhere, and Hussain needed to get it back on track. He told Cromitie that Jaish-e-Mohammed was very happy with him, and that his superiors had given him authorization to carry out the attack with Cromitie and any men he could recruit. Hussain said the attack would teach people a lesson—but Cromitie was just as clueless as before about what they were doing, for whom, and why.

  “Who are we teaching a lesson to?” he asked.

  “The people who are killing innocent Muslims,” Hussain answered.

  With the FBI informant back in Newburgh to provoke the action, the plan became serious again. Hussain and Cromitie came up with code words—guns were mangoes, missiles noodles, phones eggs—and Hussain asked Cromitie to go with him to collect information about target sites. “Let’s speed up the process,” Hussain said, a reference to how Cromitie had accomplished so little while he was away.

  With Hussain’s encouragement, Cromitie recruited three members of his so-called sutra team. They were all small-time thugs and converts to Islam. David Williams was a twenty-eight-year-old who went by the name Daoud. He had spent time in prison for drugs and weapons possession charges and had been released from parole supervision in May 2008. Onta Williams (no relation to David Williams) was a thirty-two-year-old high school dropout who went by the name Hamza and had done three months in jail on a drug charge. Laguerre Payen, a twenty-seven-year-old who went by the name Amin, had served one year in prison for an assault charge for shooting two sixteen-year-olds in the head and eye with a BB gun.

  With three recruits now on board and targets selected, the FBI still wasn’t convinced the sting would work. If Cromitie backed out of the plot, the whole operation would fall apart. So Special Agent Fuller instructed Hussain to give Cromitie $1,800 and ask him to buy some guns. If the sting operation imploded, the FBI would at least have weapons charges to bring against Cromitie.

  Even as a goon, though, Cromitie was hopeless. He couldn’t find anyone to sell him a gun, resorting at one point to throwing stones at a drug dealer’s second-story window in the hopes of waking him and asking if he had any firearms to sell. But the drug dealer wasn’t home, and in the end, Cromitie returned the money to Hussain. The target of a months-long FBI terrorism sting wasn’t even capable of obtaining a Saturday Night Special with $1,800 in his pocket.

  With the sting now progressing in waves, a flurry of action pushed by Hussain followed by long periods of inaction, it was becoming clear that Cromitie wasn’t the die-hard jihadi the U.S. government would ultimately portray him as to the news media. Within weeks of Hussain’s return to Newburgh, for example, Cromitie traveled to North Carolina to pick up extra work stocking a new Walmart location. He then went several weeks without even talking to Hussain until calling him on April 5, 2009. By that time, the FBI informant had left Newburgh for New Jersey.

  “I have to try to make some money, brother,” Cromitie told Hussain, explaining why he had gone to North Carolina.

  “I told you I can make you $250,000, but you don’t want it, brother,” Hussain said. “What can I tell you?”

  “Okay, come see me, brother. Come see me.”

  How much Cromitie, in finally moving forward in the plot with Hussain, was acting out of ideological commitment or financial interest is questionable. Hussain would later admit at trial that he created the—in his word—“impression” that Cromitie would make a lot of money by participating in the bombing plot.50 When asked about the phone conversation in which he offered Cromitie $250,000, Hussain said the phrase “$250,000” was simply code for the plot—code, he admitted, that only he knew.51

  This also wasn’t the only time Hussain used financial inducements when Cromitie was reluctant to become a terrorist. At various times during the sting operation, Hussain gave Cromitie money to pay his rent—money that had come from the FBI.52 He also at one point offered to buy him a barbershop.53 “What will it cost—$60,000, $70,000 to build it?” Hussain asked.54 Indeed, Cromitie and the three men he recruited all ultimately believed there would be a financial reward for participating in the terrorist plot, which had now evolved into a plan to plant bombs inside parked cars in front of synagogues in the Bronx and then return to Newburgh, where they’d fire Stinger missiles at planes. Hussain told Cromitie his organization could provide everything they’d need—the transportation, the bombs, the missiles.

  On April 7, 2009, at two forty-five in the afternoon, Cromitie went to Hussain’s home on Shipp Street in Newburgh—which was an FBI safe house.55 A hidden camera recorded everything that happened in the living room, and FBI agents in a van around the corner watched the action live. It took this meeting for Hussain to make Cromitie comfortable with the prospect that their attack would kill and maim, but to do so, he had to fuel once again Cromitie’s hatred of the U.S. military and Jews.

  “I don’t want anyone to get hurt,” Cromitie told Hussain. “You understand what I’m saying?”

  “If there is American soldiers, I don’t care,” Hussain said, egging on Cromitie.

  “Hold up,” he answered. “If it’s American soldiers, I don’t even care.”

  “If it’s kids, I care,” Hussain said. “If it’s women, I care.”

  “I care. That’s what I’m worried about. And I’m going to tell you, I don’t care if it’s a whole synagogue of men.”

  “Yep.”

  “I would take ’em down, I don’t even care. ’Cause I know they are the ones.”

  “We have the equipment to do it,” Hussain said.

  “See, see, I’m not worried about nothing. Ya know? What I’m worried about is my safety,” Cromitie said.

  “O
h, yeah, safety comes first.”

  “I want to get in and I want to get out.”

  “Trust me,” Hussain assured.56

  Three days later, Hussain, Cromitie, and David Williams went to Walmart and purchased a digital camera, which they used to take photographs of Stewart International Airport and synagogues in Riverdale, a heavily Jewish area of the Bronx.

  On April 23, 2009, Cromitie returned to the Shipp Street house, this time with David Williams. On the living room coffee table was a bomb—the type they would place in parked cars in front of the synagogues. Cromitie stared at the weapon. “What’s the distance?” he asked Hussain.57

  “It’s, like, a hundred, hundred miles’ range,” Hussain answered. “So, it’s with a cell phone, so if you put it up there, you come out back here. You can sit down here, and it blows up.”

  Cromitie laughed and fist-bumped David Williams.

  The next day, Hussain, Cromitie, and David Williams drove to the airport to scout for an ideal area from which to fire the Stinger missiles. They purchased four cell phones for use during the attack, and all four men—Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen—then met Hussain at a storage facility in Newburgh, where the FBI informant showed them the C-4 explosives to be used and demonstrated how to operate the Stinger missile system. They set a date for the attack: May 20, 2009.

  By this time, it was clear that none of the men was doing the attack for ideological reasons; they were doing it for cash. How much money they believed they were doing it for remains a mystery; officially, the FBI authorized Hussain to offer $5,000 to each man. The night before the attack, the informant took the four men to a T.G.I. Friday’s for dinner—“a last supper,” as Hussain called it. Over dinner they purportedly discussed money. But the FBI did not record the meeting. Special Agent Fuller gave Hussain his instructions, as he always did before meetings with Cromitie and his group, but unlike for the dozens of earlier meetings, the agent didn’t give the informant a recording device. Whatever Hussain said over the meal, it was enough to ensure that Cromitie and his three associates carried forward with the plot.

  On the evening of May 20, 2009, the four men piled into Hussain’s car and headed south toward New York City. Though Hussain had previously shown Cromitie how to activate the bombs—which were, in fact, inert—Cromitie couldn’t figure out how to activate them himself once they were on the road. Hussain, who was driving, had to pull over and activate the bombs from the side of the highway. Upon their arrival in the Bronx, the four men got out of the car while Hussain stayed behind the wheel. Cromitie wanted to deliver the bombs himself, and he asked David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen to serve as lookouts. Hussain was to remain in the car as the getaway driver.

  As the informant promised, there were three cars parked in front of the Riverdale Temple and Riverdale Jewish Center, which are located less than a quarter of a mile from each other on Independence Avenue. Cromitie placed a bomb in the trunks of each of the cars as instructed and then ran to the getaway car. While he believed he was placing deadly and destructive bombs in cars parked there by other Jaish-e-Mohammed operatives, in reality he was putting props into the trunks of rental cars that had been parked there by FBI agents.

  Cromitie opened the door to Hussain’s car and climbed into the passenger seat. Just then, a SWAT team consisting of local and federal law enforcement officers surrounded the car and shattered the windows. Glass rained in as Hussain lifted his hands to shield his face. The FBI informant then looked down; his hands were bleeding from the broken glass. But Hussain’s job was done. He would receive $96,000 for his work in the case.58

  The FBI charged James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen—whom the media would dub the Newburgh Four—with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, attempted use of weapons of mass destruction, conspiracy to acquire and use anti-aircraft missiles, and conspiracy to kill officers of the United States.

  The Bureau held a news conference following the arrests.

  “Did you believe they were a genuine threat?” a reporter asked Joseph Demarest, the head of the FBI’s New York office.

  “Yes, based on what they intended to do and based on their actions,” Demarest said. “They planted the satchels, or bags, with what they believed to contain explosives, in front of two Jewish temples.”

  “Did they have any experience in knowing if what they had was real?” the reporter followed.

  “No, not that we’re aware of,” Demarest answered.59

  The four men pleaded not guilty to the charges, and their defense lawyers attempted to show at trial that Shahed Hussain had baited the desperate and susceptible men with money and lies. But the jury was unsympathetic to the argument and found all four guilty following a one-month trial.

  At James Cromitie’s sentencing hearing, U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon appeared to agree with many of the arguments the Newburgh Four’s lawyers had made. “The essence of what occurred here is that a government, understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism, came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own,” McMahon said. “It created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true . . . . I suspect that real terrorists would not have bothered themselves with a person who was so utterly inept.” McMahon continued, “Only the government could have made a terrorist out of Mr. Cromitie, whose buffoonery is positively Shakespearean in scope.” The judge then sentenced each of the four men to twenty-five years in prison, the minimum sentence available to her under federal sentencing guidelines.

  At the same hearing, Cromitie told Judge McMahon: “I am not a violent person. I’ve never been a terrorist, and I never will be. I got myself into this stupid mess. I know I said a lot of stupid stuff.”60

  With the convictions of the Newburgh Four, Shahed Hussain was now an all-star FBI informant, having been at the center of two successful terrorism stings. FBI agents told me that even after the Newburgh trial, during which defense lawyers provided evidence showing that Hussain had lied or withheld information from criminal and bankruptcy courts, Hussain continued to be used as an informant and was considered among the Bureau’s top terrorism snitches. Hussain liked working for the FBI—he said so himself during court testimony—but what makes his work as an informant so troubling is that he, like other snitches, was motivated purely by self-interest.

  In addition to payments during the course of an investigation, informants receive what the FBI terms “performance incentives” when sting operations result in convictions. The amounts of these payments are never disclosed, though one former agent told me that six-figure paydays are not unusual for high-profile cases. Performance incentives serve two purposes for the FBI. The first, and most obvious, is that they keep informants hungry; they know that if they can bring home a conviction with their testimony, they’ll be in line for a handsome payday. But the second, and more important, reason for withholding an informant’s full payment until after conviction has to do with the fear of coloring a jury’s opinion. A paid informant is always a problem for prosecutors, as defense lawyers will use the payments to suggest that the informant has motivation to lie on the witness stand because the government is paying him. The more he’s paid, the more motivation he has to deceive, the logic goes. For that reason, the fact that Hussain received $96,000 for his work during the Newburgh Four investigation presented a challenge for prosecutors, since defense lawyers during the trial made references to the payments in clear attempts to bias the jury against the FBI’s informant. What the jury never learned, however, was that Hussain would receive even more money if Cromitie and his three co-defendants were convicted. Even Hussain himself didn’t know exactly how much money he’d receive, as FBI agents never tell informants the amount of their performance incentive and never guarantee that they will receive a performance incentive at all, since not knowing this informati
on safeguards informants from having to testify about it at trial, which would give defense lawyers even more fodder to use when trying to undermine the informant’s credibility. “They have an expectation that there’s a performance incentive waiting for them at the end of the trial,” an FBI agent told me, asking that his name not be used because he was not authorized to talk about the subject. “But all we tell them is, ‘Hey, we’ll take care of you at the end of it.’”

  Because payments to informants come out only at trial, and the trial is over by the time the FBI pays performance incentives, the amount of incentive money Hussain received after the Newburgh Four trial has never been revealed and is exempted from disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act. But it’s safe to assume that the payment was substantial, since Hussain continues to work for the FBI. In fact, the money paid to informants such as Hussain underpins a fundamental injustice present in all informant-led terrorism sting operations: that it’s against the financial interest of informants not to help make people into terrorists. That’s why FBI informants are so aggressive in pushing forward terrorist plots. Finding terrorists, even ones led by the nose into plots, pays substantial dividends.

  In the months after the trial of the Newburgh Four, I made several attempts to meet with Shahed Hussain. However, he never responded to any of the messages I left or the letters I sent. In February 2011, I drove to the Crest Inn Suites and Cottages, the hotel he’d purchased with some of the hundreds of thousands of dollars he had stashed away in an account in Pakistan. The hotel is about forty-five minutes north of Albany. A storm had come through New York two days before I arrived, and the snowbanks along the roads were piled several feet high.

  Hussain’s hotel was dumpy and in the middle of nowhere, the only nearby attraction the horse racing track in Saratoga Springs. The green and yellow sign had been freshly painted. A Mercedes Benz and a BMW were parked outside near the office. Every time I’d tried to call Hussain, his son, who told me his name was Haris, had blocked me. He acts as a kind of gatekeeper to his father. So I wasn’t surprised to see Haris behind the reception desk of the hotel. I told him I was looking for his father.