The Terror Factory

by Trevor Aaronson

  Based on these initial actions, it was clear that the FBI believed it was dealing with two dangerous potential terrorists. But in reality, what it had were two financially troubled men with histories of mental problems. Abdul-Latif, whose birth name was Joseph Anthony Davis, had spent his teenage years huffing gasoline and once told a psychologist he heard voices and saw things that weren’t there. When he was twenty-three, he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on pills intended to treat seizure disorders, later telling a psychologist that he “felt lonely and had no use to live.”26 His partner in the supposed terrorist plot, thirty-one-year-old Mujahidh, whose name was Frederick Domingue Jr. before his conversion to Islam, had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which causes mood swings and abnormal thoughts.27 Dorothy Howard, who met Mujahidh through her daughter when they lived in Pomona, California, remembered him as sweet-natured but gullible, someone who was trying hard to get a handle on his mental problems but wasn’t always successful. “Sometimes he would call me and say, ‘Mrs. Howard, I really need my medications. Can you take me to the clinic?’” Howard recalled. “Sometimes they would keep him three or four days.”28

  The FBI’s informant, whose name was not revealed, was the only source claiming that Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were terrorists on the make. And the informant came with an outrageous story of his own. In addition to being a convicted rapist and child molester, according to government records, he had stolen thousands of dollars from Abdul-Latif in the past and had tried, but failed, to steal Abdul-Latif’s wife as well.29 The state of Washington had also classified the informant as a high-risk sex offender, and while working for the FBI, he was caught sending sexual text messages in violation of his parole—something he attempted to hide from agents by trying to delete the messages.30 Despite what were obvious problems with the investigation from the start, the FBI gave the informant recording equipment and instructed him to move forward with the sting.

  As Abdul-Latif and the informant discussed possible targets—after growing concerned that attacking a military base would be too difficult, given the armed guards and fortification—it became clear that the Seattle man had no capacity to carry out a terrorist attack. In fact, Abdul-Latif had little capacity for anything, since he had only $800 to his name, and his only asset was a 1995 Honda Passport with 162,000 miles.31 In addition, his supposed accomplice, Mujahidh, was still in Southern California. But his friend, the informant, said he could provide everything they would need for the attack, including M13 assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and bulletproof vests.32 That Abdul-Latif didn’t have much money and didn’t know anyone who could provide him with weapons strongly suggested that the plot was nothing more than talk, and would have stayed that way had the FBI not gotten involved.

  After scuttling the idea to attack Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Abdul-Latif and the informant settled on a plan to attack a Seattle processing station for incoming troops, where most of the people would be unarmed. “Imagine how many young Muslims, if we’re successful, will try to hit these kinds of centers. Imagine how fearful America will be, and they’ll know they can’t push Muslims around,” Abdul-Latif said. On June 14, 2011, Abdul-Latif and the informant purchased a bus ticket for Mujahidh to travel to Seattle from Los Angeles. Needing to select a password that would allow Mujahidh to pick up the ticket at the station, Abdul-Latif initially suggested “jihad.” He and the informant laughed about the password choice before Abdul-Latif decided on “OBL,” for Osama bin Laden.

  A week later, Mujahidh arrived in Seattle, and the three men drove to a parking garage to inspect the weapons the informant had procured. Inside a duffel bag were three assault rifles. Mujahidh took hold of one of the guns, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Abdul-Latif inspected one of the other rifles. “This is an automatic?” he asked. The informant then showed him how to switch on the rifle’s setting for automatic firing. At that point, FBI agents rushed into the garage and arrested Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh. The two men were charged with conspiracy to murder officers and agents of the United States, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, and four firearms counts. The FBI paid the informant $90,000 for his work on the case.33

  Michele Shaw was the public defender appointed to Mujahidh. When she first met him inside a jail in Seattle, she couldn’t believe he was the man the government had portrayed as a dangerous terrorist. “He is the most compliant client I have ever worked with in my twenty-two years of practicing law and so appreciative of our weekly visits,” Shaw said. From the start, Shaw knew she had a mental health case on her hands, not a terrorist case. Mujahidh was easily susceptible to the informant, she believed, because he had a history of relying on others to help him separate fantasy from reality. But the judge in the case didn’t agree. “Walli’s mental health issues in my opinion are huge and looming large, but the court stated this week on the record that my client’s mental health issues are a very tiny part of this case,” Shaw told me in October 2011. Unable to use mental health in an entrapment defense, Shaw reluctantly recommended that Mujahidh plead guilty. He agreed, and was sentenced to twenty-seven to thirty-two years in prison. For his part, Abdul-Latif pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Had it not been for a rapist and child molester fishing for a payday, Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh would likely be today where they were in June 2011—two Americans you’d never hear about, trapped on the margins of a society to which they posed no threat.

  Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh became terrorists because the FBI and one of its informants had incentives for making the pair into terrorists. The informant’s incentive was monetary, while the FBI agents who supervised the sting were under intense pressure from their higher-ups to build a terrorism case. At no point during the sting operation did anyone question whether someone like Abdul-Latif was more despondent loser than scary mass murderer. That is a problem inherent in today’s terrorism sting operations: the FBI and its informants are under pressure—albeit for different reasons—to see terrorists, even where none exist.

  Since informants have vested interests in seeing their targets convicted—with criminal informants often having their own personal freedom on the line—it’s the FBI’s responsibility to ensure that these interests do not influence investigations. If the Bureau is following “the book” during an investigation, agents will give an informant tasking orders before each meeting between the informant and the targets. These orders will include what the informant should discuss and how he should behave during the meeting. Ideally, the meeting with the targets should be taped, giving the FBI an indisputable record of what was said. At regular intervals, FBI agents should also subject their informant to a polygraph test to make sure he isn’t lying or withholding information. If the informant fails the polygraph, or engages in criminal behavior not authorized by the FBI, agents are supposed to cut him from the ranks.

  However, the FBI doesn’t always work by the book. We know this because the Bureau has documented many occasions when it doesn’t play by its own rules. Elie Assaad, the informant in the Florida stings involving Imran Mandhai and the Liberty City Seven, lied during a polygraph examination in Chicago yet continued to work as an FBI informant. In the Michael Finton case, the FBI had credible information that its informant was dealing drugs yet continued to use him until the final day of the sting operation. The informant in the Rezwan Ferdaus case was caught on an FBI video purchasing heroin and still the Bureau continued to pay him for his work. These informants were allowed to lead terrorism stings because the pressure to find would-be terrorists is so great that it’s created a precarious situation in which FBI agents identify loudmouths on the fringes of society and through, elaborate sting operations involving informants, many with criminal backgrounds, transform these powerless braggarts into dangerous terrorists engaged in horrifying plots to bomb buildings, public squares, and subway stations.

  7. NOT CAUGHT ON TAPE

  Because so many of the informants that the FBI uses in terrorism stings are me
n with histories of crime, fraud, and deception—in short, not the most credible people to put on a witness stand during a trial—the Bureau relies heavily on secretly recording the conversations between its informants and the individuals they target. When an informant lacks credibility or has a financial interest in gaining a conviction, a taped conversation showing the target going along with the plot can often make up for those deficiencies with a jury. As a result, in the terrorism sting cases that have gone to trial since 9/11, prosecutors have played hours of taped conversations between informants and targets for juries.

  However, in analyzing these cases, I noticed a disturbing pattern of conversations between informants and targets not being recorded at the most suspicious of times. These “missing recordings” seem to occur at either the beginning of a sting, when informants are establishing their relationships with targets—a period of time defense lawyers consider crucial to determining whether the government induced or entrapped the defendant—or when the target is thinking of backing out of the plot or otherwise doing something that has the potential to undermine the government’s case. No matter what part of a sting goes unrecorded, the government routinely blames “recorder malfunction” for the lapse.

  The most egregious example of the mysterious and persistent FBI trend of recorder malfunction happened when two separate terrorism sting cases, located 2,800 miles apart from each other, converged in a most unexpected way in 2010. The first sting centered on an Oregon party boy who developed a peculiar hatred for the United States. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a young Somali American, attended Oregon State University and lived in Corvallis, a college town about eighty-five miles south of Portland. He prayed at the Salman al-Farisi mosque, but many of his fellow congregants kept their distance from him, as Mohamud pushed an extreme, hundred-year-old Sunni brand of Islam known as Salafism—whose adherents, among them Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, seek to emulate the ways of the Prophet Mohammed and the earliest days of Islam. Mohamud, however, led a life at odds withof his religion, drinking alcohol and engaging in premarital sex, two activities prohibited under most interpretations of the Koran.

  It was Mohamud’s partying that first brought him to the attention of the FBI. On the day after Halloween 2009, a woman reported to the Oregon State Police that Mohamud had raped her after a party the night before. Other students at the party told police that Mohamud and the woman had been together, dancing, flirting, and drinking, and at the end of the night, they had left together. Nothing seemed to be wrong between them, the witnesses said. But the next morning, the woman told the police that she believed she had been drugged—a stranger, she said, had given her a beer at the party that might have been spiked with something—because she couldn’t remember the details of having sex with Mohamud. (A test for any type of date rape drugs later came back negative.)

  That evening, Oregon State Police asked Mohamud, then eighteen years old, to come to the campus police station for questioning. At the station, Mohamud told police he hadn’t drugged or raped the woman, but said that they had gone to the party and then had consensual sex afterward. Police released Mohamud without charging him, but the next day, they called him back to the station to submit to a polygraph examination, which Mohamud agreed to. What he didn’t know as he took the test was that FBI agents were watching from another room, where they heard Mohamud discuss his personal background, educational plans, family, and opinions of Somalia. The agents discovered that Mohamud was nervous about the prospect that his family would find out about his partying as a result of the rape investigation. “Mohamud is very concerned that his parents will freak out if they find out about the investigation or his use of drugs and alcohol,” an FBI agent wrote in a report following the polygraph.1

  During their questioning, police also asked Mohamud if an inspection of his laptop would reveal that he had researched date rape drugs. Mohamud said it wouldn’t, and offered to allow the officers to search the laptop and his mobile phone. He wrote the following on a piece of paper: “I, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, give the Oregon State Police permission to seize and search my HP laptop computer and my Vodafone cell phone. No promises or threats have been made, and I give this consent freely.” At the bottom of the page, below his signature and the signature of a witness, Mohamud wrote his laptop password: NorGrun. A state police computer analyst then copied the contents of the hard drive. What Mohamud didn’t know was that the Oregon State Police later gave a disk to the FBI containing four folders from his hard drive as well as three pages of information from his cell phone. The Oregon State Police did not charge Mohamud with a crime following the rape investigation.2

  To this day, the FBI has not disclosed why it was interested in a date rape suspect at Oregon State University and what information was on Mohamud’s laptop and cell phone. The only fact the Bureau has revealed was that agents believed Mohamud was corresponding by email with a man in Northwest Pakistan, an area known for harboring terrorists, about a religious school in Yemen. In June 2010, more than six months after the rape investigation was closed, the FBI placed Mohamud on the federal no-fly list, at which time FBI agents interviewed him and he disclosed his intention to travel to Yemen. Later that month, on June 23, 2010, the FBI sting operation began in earnest.

  The FBI believed that Mohamud had tried, but failed, to contact terrorists in Pakistan by email. An FBI informant then emailed Mohamud, pretending to be part of the terrorist group he’d reportedly been trying to reach, claiming to have received Mohamud’s email address from the man he was trying to contact in Pakistan. The email read, in part and in all lowercase letters: “sorry for the delay in our communication, we’ve been on the move… are you still able to help the brothers?” In the “From” field was the name Bill Smith. Mohamud replied to the email, but was skeptical. Mohamud wanted “to make sure you are not a spy yourself,” he wrote, and asked how Smith knew the man he’d been emailing. The undercover agent said he’d heard about Mohamud and received his email address from a mutual acquaintance, explaining cryptically that “a brother from Oregon who is now far away vouched for you.” Mohamud agreed to meet with the man he believed was a terrorist in Portland on July 30, 2010.

  At the meeting, Mohamud told an undercover agent that he had written some articles that had been published in Jihad Recollections, a seventy-page pro-Al Qaeda magazine that was run by Samir Khan, a then-twenty-two-year-old Pakistani American who lived in Charlotte, North Carolina.3 (Khan later went to Yemen, where he became editor and publisher of Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine before being killed in a CIA drone strike on September 30, 2011, along with Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki.)4 The undercover FBI agent asked Mohamud what he was willing to do for the cause. Mohamud, who told the agent he “wanted to wage war in the U.S.,” said he had been dreaming since he was fifteen years old about training with Al Qaeda in Yemen. If he wanted to get involved, the undercover agent told Mohamud, he had several options. He could pray five times a day and spread the word about Islam. He could continue studying, obtain his medical degree, and assist Al Qaeda as a doctor. He could raise money for terrorists overseas. Or he could become operational today, becoming a shaheed, or martyr. Mohamud chose the last option, saying that he wanted to put together an explosive device. The FBI agent told Mohamud to research possible targets, and that they’d meet again soon.

  You would think that this critical encounter, the first inperson meeting between Mohamud and an undercover agent, would have been recorded, but it wasn’t. The FBI did set up audio and video equipment, but due to a “malfunction,” they weren’t able to record the meeting. Therefore, all the information about what was said is based on the FBI agent’s memory. Three weeks after that first meeting, Mohamud and the undercover agent met in a hotel room, and this time the recording equipment worked. Joining the FBI agent on this occasion was a second undercover agent who was posing as a weapons expert. Mohamud had done what he’d been told to do during the first meeting and came with a target in mind. “Pioneer
Square, like, Portland, is, like, the main meeting—they have a twenty-sixth of November Christmas lighting and some 250,000 people come,” Mohamud told the agents.5

  The undercover agents asked Mohamud whether he was concerned that such a target could result in children being harmed or killed.

  “That’s what I’m looking for—a huge mass,” he replied. “Attacked in their own element.”

  He’d push the button to detonate the bomb, the agents asked, even with children in the blast zone?

  “Yes, I will push the button,” he answered. “When I see the enemy of Allah, then you know their bodies are torn everywhere.”

  The undercover agents then told Mohamud they needed to discuss his idea with their superiors, a group they referred to as “the council.”

  The following month, September 2010, Mohamud met again with the two agents, who told him that the plan was moving forward and asked him to find a suitable area to plant the bomb near Pioneer Square and to purchase some components for the weapon, including two Nokia prepaid cell phones, a toggle switch, and a nine-volt battery connector. They explained to Mohamud how the bomb would work: he’d place it at the target, then dial a cell phone to detonate the weapon remotely. “When you dial that phone number, all of this is going to be gone,” the second undercover agent said, referring to the two blocks around Pioneer Square.

  However, despite his supposed desire to “wage war in the U.S.,” without the FBI’s assistance, not only was Mohamud incapable of becoming a terrorist, since he lacked the skills necessary to build a bomb or the money and contacts to obtain weapons, he was on the verge of being thrown into the streets, as he was broke and running behind on the rent for his apartment. But the FBI didn’t let those details stall the sting operation, as the undercover agents gave Mohamud $2,700 to cover his rent and another $110 for the bomb components.