The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

  Four days later, on August 5, Shnewer and Omar discussed tactics. “Maybe it’s easy to hit them at night,” Shnewer wondered. On August 11, Shnewer and Omar drove to Fort Dix to scope out the base. Shnewer liked what he saw. “This is exactly what we are looking for,” he said. “You hit four, five, six Humvees and light the whole place up and retreat completely without any losses.” Shnewer also told the informant he had a Serbian sniper from Kosovo—a man named Agron Abdullahu—who would help with the attack. While Shnewer and Omar were planning the attack, Bakalli, the second informant, was getting closer to the other members of the group.

  However, a few months later, on November 15, 2006, the entire sting almost unraveled when Tatar—the one who supposedly knew his way around Fort Dix—called the Philadelphia Police Department. He explained how he’d been approached by Omar, and was worried that he was being set up in a terrorist plot. But Tatar never followed up with the police, and in the end chose not to back out of the plot. Even as he feared Omar was an informant or law enforcement officer, Tatar told him, “I’m gonna do it. Whether or not you are FBI, I’m gonna do it. Know why? It doesn’t matter to me whether I get locked up, arrested . … I’m doing it in the name of Allah.” He then handed Omar a map of Fort Dix, which Omar promptly turned over to FBI agents.

  On January 19, 2007, the Dukas told Besnik Bakalli that they had a nine-millimeter handgun, an assault rifle, and a semiautomatic assault weapon, all of which they claimed to have gotten from Agron Abdullahu, the reported Serbian sniper. The group then made another trip to the Pennsylvania woods in February 2007 to fire semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. Later that month, Dritan Duka invited Omar to play paintball with them and asked if he knew how they could buy AK-47 assault rifles. On March 28, Omar provided a list of weapons and prices from his purported arms source. Shnewer said the pricing was “very good.” Dritan Duka suggested that the better armed they were, the lower their chances of being caught, saying: “All the AKs, the M16s, and all the handguns . . . . I just want to be safe, brother . . . . I got five kids, so I don’t wanna go down. People catch me, like, they think I’m a terrorist.”

  But if the Fort Dix Five, as the media would later dub them, were terrorists, they were coerced ones—pushed along by criminals who had personal interests in their prosecution. In several conversations, members of the group made comments that suggested they never intended to become violent. For example, one of the Duka cousins told Omar: “We are good the way we are. We are not going to kill anyone.” A few days after that comment, when Omar tried to goad the group on by bringing up the story of an Ohio man who had been training with terrorists, Dritan Duka responded by saying that in the hysteria following 9/11, Muslims could be arrested just for talking, even if they didn’t mean what they said. He likened it to their situation—how they were just bullshitting about an attack on Fort Dix. Similarly, following the paintball outing in February 2007, Bakalli asked the Duka cousins what they thought jihad meant. It didn’t mean violence, they told him; it was a personal struggle against one’s self and a struggle to live a good life. Less than a month after that statement, the FBI arrested the five men, charging them with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. All five pleaded not guilty and went to trial.

  In his opening remarks at the trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick told the jury: “Their inspiration was Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Their intention was to attack the U.S.” The prosecution then played undercover recordings and the jihadi videos the Fort Dix Five had watched, trying to portray the New Jersey men as dangerous terrorists. Evan Kohlmann, the young terrorism expert with questionable credentials, served as a witness for the prosecution, telling the jury that the videos the defendants had watched were “some of the classics put out by [Al Qaeda].”16

  The defense, in turn, attacked the credibility of the two paid informants—both of whom had money and freedom riding on a successful prosecution—and tried to minimize the videos by describing their viewing as nothing more than immature chest-thumping by the men. But the key to the whole case—and the key to other successful terrorism sting prosecutions since then—was the fact that the prosecution didn’t need to prove that the Fort Dix Five would have carried out their attack plans. The conspiracy—that the men so much as talked about it and planned for it—was all prosecutors needed to prove them guilty of conspiracy to murder U.S. officials. In his closing remarks, Fitzpatrick emphasized this to the jury: “We don’t even have to prove that they intended to kill [soldiers] in the United States . … As long as the conspiracy exists, and as long as within New Jersey at least one overt act occurs, it doesn’t matter if the object of the conspiracy was to kill a soldier in Delaware, or in Pennsylvania, or in Iraq, or in Afghanistan. The conspiracy is the charge. The conspiracy is the heart and soul.”17

  The jury agreed, convicting the Fort Dix Five of conspiracy to commit murder, though it acquitted them of the charge of attempted murder. The three Duka cousins and Shnewer received life sentences, while Tatar received thirty-three years. Agron Abdullahu, the reported Serbian sniper who was only peripherally connected to the plot, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide firearms, for selling guns to the Dukas. He received twenty months in prison. For a successful prosecution, the two informants, Mahmoud Omar and Besnik Bakalli, freed from probation and jail respectively to serve the government, were paid performance incentives whose amounts have never been disclosed.

  By training and firing weapons in the woods of Pennsylvania, the Fort Dix Five demonstrated capacity for violence—even if the evidence made public at their trial suggested they were just a bunch of young guys full of bluster—thus making the FBI’s infiltration of the group by informants at least somewhat understandable. In many other terrorism stings, however, while the target hasn’t demonstrated the slightest inclination toward criminal behavior, the informant who leads the plot has a long and violent criminal history.

  A good example of this occurred in Rockford, Illinois. Working at a video game store, Derrick Shareef was twenty-two years old, broke, and didn’t have a place to live when an FBI informant approached him in September 2006, offering the use of a car, a place to live, and free meals. It was the day before Ramadan, and Shareef, who’d been ostracized by his family since converting to Islam at the age of fifteen, saw the offer as an act of God. The informant, whose name has never been revealed, had been convicted of armed robbery in 1991 and possession of a stolen vehicle in 1997, as well as being a former member of the Four Corner Hustlers, a mostly black street gang known for its brutality on Chicago’s West Side.18

  While they lived together, the informant and Shareef discussed what they believed were injustices in the Muslim community. Their conversations turned to conspiracy and violence, with the two deciding to plot an attack in the United States—a demonstration, they told each other, that would shake the American people. On November 26, 2006, Shareef told the informant he wanted to attack “some type of City Hall type stuff right now, federal courthouses.” The informant asked Shareef how he intended to pull off such an attack. “You go in there and you clock the first three niggers at the door—everything else is gonna have to be tactical,” Shareef said, as if he had experience in combat tactics, adding: “I just want to smoke a judge.”19

  The informant told Shareef that he knew an arms dealer, and if Shareef was interested in purchasing weapons for an attack, he could arrange a meeting. The informant also recommended that they target a shopping mall. “We gotta look at it this way,” he told Shareef. “We want to disrupt Christmas.” This idea excited Shareef, and the informant said that they should purchase grenades for the attack. Shareef agreed. The informant then stressed that he was “down” for the attack. “I swear by Allah, man, I’m down for it too,” Shareef told the informant. “I’m down to live for the cause and die for the cause, man.”

  Later, the informant told Shareef that he had ordered eleven “pineapples”—their code word for grenades—“at fifty bucks a pop.”
Since Shareef had no idea how to use a grenade, the informant had to give him a tutorial, explaining how to detonate one and how the timing mechanism worked. They then prepared for the shopping mall attack, creating video statements on December 2, 2006. While Shareef was so eager for the attack that he kept assuring the informant of his commitment, he also made it clear that he couldn’t have hatched the plot without the informant’s help. “I’m ready, man,” he said. “I probably would have eventually ended up just stabbing the shit outta some Jews or something. Just stabbing them niggers with a steak knife.”

  Though the informant had brought Shareef along in the plot, the case was still weak. While the FBI had the makings of a conspiracy charge, since Shareef and the informant had discussed an attack, Shareef still hadn’t participated in a overt act to further the conspiracy. He hadn’t done any surveillance, and nothing he had done suggested he was ready to take the plot beyond talk. To get things moving, the FBI instructed the informant to suggest to Shareef that he purchase some grenades. However, Shareef didn’t have any money. In fact, the only thing he had of value was a set of stereo speakers worth about one hundred dollars. The informant told Shareef that he could broker a trade with the arms dealer—the speakers in exchange for grenades and a nine-millimeter handgun. “I think what he gonna do is just take the speakers and say, ‘Even,’” the informant said. While the claim was ridiculous—no arms dealer would accept used stereo speakers in exchange for black-market weapons—Shareef, evidencing his gullibility, never questioned it. The informant then put Shareef in touch with his arms dealer friend, who was an undercover FBI agent.

  On December 4, 2006, the undercover agent and Shareef talked on the phone and agreed to meet at a store parking lot on Walton Road in Rockford, where the deal went just as the informant said it would. Shareef handed over the speakers, and the undercover FBI agent gave him a box containing four inert grenades and a nine-millimeter handgun. FBI agents immediately arrested Shareef, who pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. At the age of twenty-three, he was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

  Since Shareef never went to trial, the identity of the informant and his motives for serving the government weren’t revealed. But available court records suggest that the informant would have been a problematic one for the FBI had he needed to testify. In addition to the convictions for armed robbery and car theft, the informant owed $16,000 in child support—which was the exact amount the FBI paid him for his role in the terrorism sting—demonstrating his financial interest in seeing Shareef sent to prison. The conviction the criminal-turned-informant helped the FBI secure was Shareef’s first; as a matter of fact, aside from a traffic violation for driving without insurance, it was the first time he had ever been charged with any kind of crime.20

  In spite of their criminal pasts, no evidence indicates that the informants in the cases of either the Fort Dix Five or Derrick Shareef committed any crimes while working for the FBI. However, it is not unusual for informants with criminal backgrounds to revert to their illegal ways while employed by the Bureau. That’s what happened in Decatur, Illinois, when an informant who had spent time in prison on drug charges met a man named Michael Finton.

  Finton was a white man in his twenties who went by the name Talib Islam, which he adopted after converting to Islam while in prison for robbery. During his probation, Finton failed to notify his parole officer of an address change. The parole violation prompted a routine search of his home and car, and during the search, probation officers found Islamic writings and letters Finton had sent to John Walker Lindh, the American who went to prison for joining the Taliban after 9/11. Finton’s bank records showed an incoming wire transfer from a man in Saudi Arabia named Asala Hussein Abiba. The officers also discovered evidence that Finton had gone to Saudi Arabia for a month in April 2008.

  The suspicious probation officers turned this information over to the FBI, whose agents brought in an informant to get closer to Finton. “To my knowledge, the motive of the CHS to assist in this investigation is solely hope for monetary payment,” FBI Special Agent Trevor S. Stalets wrote in an affidavit, using the acronym for “confidential human source,” the FBI’s term of art for informant.21 The confidential human source and Finton became fast friends, with Finton telling the informant he wanted to receive military training so that he could fight against Israel. He also told the informant about his trip to Saudi Arabia, which had been paid for by a sheikh he met on the Internet whose daughter he was now engaged to marry. On December 29, 2008, Finton explained to the informant that he wanted to “secure his place in paradise by becoming a mujahid.” The informant in turn told Finton he knew someone who could help, and Finton sent an introductory email to the informant’s contact. Finton didn’t know that the contact was an undercover FBI agent.

  At the same time he was targeting Finton, the FBI informant was involved in criminal activity of his own—real crimes in this case, not imaginary plots. Sources told the FBI that the informant was dealing drugs while working for the government—information the Bureau could not confirm independently but which it viewed as credible enough to report it to the court in an affidavit. Yet the informant’s alleged drug slinging while on the government payroll wasn’t enough for the FBI to call off the terrorism sting against Finton.

  On May 6, 2009, the undercover FBI agent met Finton in a hotel in Collinsville, Illinois, eighty miles south of Springfield. There, the agent told Finton he was an Al Qaeda operative recruiting terrorists in the United States. Finton expressed his desire “to receive military-type training.” Over the next few weeks, Finton and the undercover agent discussed possible targets before settling on the Paul Findley Federal Building in Springfield, a gray, three-story limestone building that houses the U.S. courthouse and is named after a former congressman from Illinois.

  Finton explored the building for reconnaissance. Deciding that a backpack bomb would not be suitable, he told his supposed terrorist friend that a car bomb would work best. The undercover FBI agent said Al Qaeda could provide a car bomb to be parked in front of the building. Finton then recorded a video. “Muslims would fight back to stop America at any cost,” he said, explaining that he was not bombing the building for financial gain but in the hopes that “the big bully Israel would not be there anymore.”22 At the same time he was moving forward in the plot, Finton also began to wonder if he was being set up—but he quickly reasoned away that concern, telling the informant that he didn’t think law enforcement authorities were that smart.

  On September 23, 2009, the informant drove Finton from Decatur to Springfield, where Finton met with the undercover FBI agent and picked up a van with an inert bomb in the back. The undercover agent showed Finton how to detonate the supposed bomb once the vehicle was in position. Finton then drove the van to the Paul Findley Federal Building and parked it in front. He got out of the vehicle, walked to a safe distance, and dialed on his cell phone the number that he believed would detonate the bomb. Nothing happened, and FBI agents arrested him. Finton pleaded guilty to attempted murder and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison. The drug-dealing informant was never identified in court records.

  The Finton sting was not the only instance in which an informant had problems with drugs and the FBI chose to ignore them. In the case of Rezwan Ferdaus, a twenty-six-year-old living in a suburb outside Boston, the informant had a problem with heroin to which the Bureau turned a blind eye. As part of an FBI sting, Ferdaus, a bright young man who had graduated from Northeastern University with a degree in physics, met two people—one an informant, the other an FBI agent—who he believed were Al Qaeda operatives. The disgruntled Ferdaus told the agent and the informant he wanted to launch an attack against the United States. However, the idea he came up with—destroying the gold dome of the U.S. Capitol Building by using a remote-controlled model airplane loaded with grenades—seemed so out of touch with reality as to raise
significant questions about his mental state.23

  The informant in the case, a man known as Khalil, had difficulties of his own, including a heroin habit he hadn’t told the FBI about. Khalil inadvertently revealed his drug problem to the Bureau when he showed up on a secret recording of another, unrelated case, buying heroin. Despite catching him on tape, the FBI didn’t terminate Khalil from its informant ranks.

  Khalil’s heroin problem carried over to the Ferdaus case, where he was overheard on an undercover recording saying he was sick and needed drugs. (He was also caught shoplifting while wearing an FBI wire, despite being paid $50,000 and being given the use of an apartment for his work as an informant.) As a result of that recording, Khalil’s drug habit came up as an issue in a November 2011 pretrial hearing for Ferdaus.

  “What steps did you take to ensure he wasn’t using heroin?” Ferdaus’s public defender, Miriam Conrad, asked FBI Special Agent John Woudenberg.

  “He was much scrutinized,” Woudenberg said. “He was under the microscope.”

  “Did you give him a drug test?”

  “No,” Woudenberg admitted.24

  Ferdaus pleaded guilty to attempting to damage and destroy a federal building by means of an explosive, and attempting to provide material support to terrorists and a terrorist organization.25 He received seventeen years in prison.

  The FBI’s search for would-be terrorists is so all-consuming that agents are willing to partner with the most heinous of criminals if they appear able to deliver targets. That’s what happened in Seattle, Washington, in the summer of 2011, when agents chose to put on the government payroll a convicted rapist and child molester.

  The investigation began on June 3, 2011, when a man contacted the Seattle Police Department and told them that he had a friend named Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif who was interested in attacking Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Washington. The tipster told police that Abdul-Latif had already recruited an associate, a man named Walli Mujahidh. Seattle police referred the caller to the FBI, whose agents quickly enlisted him as an informant and launched a full investigation of Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh.