In 2008, a new set of guidelines was introduced by Ashcroft’s successor, Michael Mukasey, that explicitly defined the FBI as “an intelligence agency as well as a law enforcement agency” and authorized the mass collection and circulation of surveillance data regardless of its connection to any unlawful conduct as conventionally understood.33 (More recently, Mukasey has appeared at a conservative conference spouting Islamophobic conspiracy theories.)34 From March 2009 to March 2011, FBI agents conducted 42,888 national security assessments—preliminary investigations of people or groups—following the new guidelines, which relax the requirement that suspicions have a factual basis.35 In carrying out “assessments” the FBI can use informants, informal interviews, and physical surveillance without any time limitation.36 By 2011, the bureau had introduced Field Intelligence Groups to all of its fifty-six field offices and reportedly raised the number of intelligence analysts from 1,100 in October 2001 to nearly 3,000.37 Of its $8.1 billion budget, $4.9 billion was allocated to intelligence and counterterrorism.38 Mark F. Giuliano, assistant director of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, boasted that they had successfully transformed it from an investigative agency into an intelligence agency—in other words, the bureau was now gathering vast amounts of information unconnected to specific criminal acts.39 Models of radicalization gave the illusion that collecting information this way was somehow still tethered to preventing crime. But the truth was that the FBI’s transformation had probably made it less effective at detecting actual terrorist plots, while the ones it was busily manufacturing with agents provocateurs gave the superficial appearance of an efficient counterterrorism program.
The use of agents provocateurs has a long history. In his account of the tsarist secret police, known as the Okhrana, Maurice Laporte described provocation tactics as “the foundation stone” of a police state.40 The Okhrana’s innovative filing system, in which cards were held on half a million Russians—with cross-referenced political friends, nonpolitical acquaintances, and persons in contact with friends of the suspect but not known to him personally—remains the basis of modern intelligence gathering—except today agencies use specialty software applications that are capable of far more efficient processing of much greater amounts of social network data than the paper-based techniques of a century ago.41 The model of the tsarist police state found its way to the US colonial regime in the Philippines when the constabulary’s Information Section was established there in 1901 by Henry Allen, who had earlier worked as an American military attaché in Russia in the 1890s.42 The section cultivated hundreds of paid Filipino agents across the country, making it “scarcely possible for seditionary measures of importance to be hatched without our knowledge,” as Allen wrote to President Theodore Roosevelt.43 The techniques of compiling dossiers on dissidents’ private lives, spreading disinformation in the media, and planting agents provocateurs among militants were applied to combating radical nationalist groups in Manila. Control over information proved as effective a tool of colonial power as physical force. During World War I, notes historian Alfred W. McCoy,
police methods that had been tested and perfected in the colonial Philippines migrated homeward to provide both precedents and personnel for the establishment of a US internal security apparatus … After years of pacifying an overseas empire where race was the frame for perception and action, colonial veterans came home to turn the same lens on America, seeing its ethnic communities not as fellow citizens but as internal colonies requiring coercive controls.44
On this basis, a domestic national security apparatus emerged. By the late 1950s the FBI’s COINTEL program had systematized these techniques, using provocateurs and informants to infiltrate the Left, Puerto Rican nationalists, the student movement, the civil rights movement, and some far Right groups. About 1,500 of the 8,500 American Communist Party members were likely FBI informants in the early 1960s. By the end of the decade, agents who had previously worked in US foreign intelligence were transferring to the burgeoning field of domestic intelligence to spy on radical movements. A key part of the strategy was the manipulation of political activists into committing criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them. Agents provocateurs initiated disruptions of meetings and demonstrations, fights between rival groups, attacks on police, and bombings.45 At least one provocation ended in death. On May 15, 1970, Seattle police shot and killed Larry Eugene Ward as he fled the scene of an attempted bombing at a real estate office that had been accused of maintaining racial segregation in the city. It emerged that Ward had been recruited to place the bomb by an FBI informant as part of a plan to undermine the Black Panthers.46
As of 2008 the FBI had a roster of at least fifteen thousand informants—the number was disclosed in a budget authorization request that year for the $12.7 million needed to pay for software to track and manage them. The proportion who are assigned to infiltrate Muslim communities in the United States is unknown but likely to be substantial, given the FBI’s prioritization of counterterrorism and its analysis of radicalization. There are also thought to be three times as many unofficial community sources of information, known as “hip pockets.”47 While many informants are motivated by financial reward, others do so under pressure to resolve immigration problems. In these cases, Muslims without permanent residence status in the US are threatened with deportation unless they work for the FBI. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) even has a special route to permanent residence, known as an S green card, which can be issued to immigrants working as informants for the FBI—it has been dubbed the “Snitch” green card. And, under the secret “Controlled Application Review and Resolution Program,” the DHS allows the FBI to delay or deny citizenship applications from persons who are Muslim or perceived to be so.48 Others are pushed into becoming informants by threats of criminal prosecution or the release of embarrassing personal information. Journalist Trevor Aaronson reports that a former top FBI counterterrorism official told him: “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.’ ”49
Another motivation for becoming an informant is to have oneself removed from the no-fly list. The case of Michael Migliore, a twenty-three-year-old convert to Islam, illustrates the kinds of pressure the FBI can bring to bear. He was placed on a no-fly list after he refused to meet with the FBI without a lawyer present. He believes federal agents wanted to question him because he had at one time been a casual acquaintance of Mohamed Osman Mohamud, who was charged with involvement in a bomb plot in Portland, Oregon, following an FBI agent provocateur operation. If the FBI wanted to recruit Migliore as an informant, it would explain why the presence of a lawyer would cause them consternation. When Migliore decided to relocate to Italy to live with his mother, he was forced to travel by ship to Europe, as he was barred from flying from the US. But as his liner approached Southampton, British police approached in a speedboat, boarded, and detained him for around nine hours of questioning, apparently at the behest of the FBI. British Special Branch officers confiscated his cell phone, a flash drive, and a book of Arabic grammar under Schedule 7 antiterrorist legislation, which allows for detentions and searches at ports of entry and makes it a criminal offense to refuse to answer questions.50
The use of a provocation strategy to secure terrorism convictions among American Muslims has had a number of far-reaching consequences beyond the impacts on the individuals prosecuted. Given the large numbers of informants operating in Muslim-American communities, mosque congregations and Muslim community organizations understand that there is the possibility of an informant jotting down names and conversations and passing the information to the government. With the prosecutors of the war on terror blurring the distinctions between First Amendment–protected speech and criminal activity, many feel it is safest to avoid discussing certain topics, such as Western foreign policy, except with one’s closest friends and family. Relationships of trust within Muslim communities are thereby eroded, as peop
le consider open discussions risky. Those who hold views critical of the government choose not to express themselves publicly. As fear takes hold, the traditional avenues of political activism, such as taking to the streets to protest, are less likely to occur. According to official theories of radicalization, an atmosphere in which political opposition to US imperialism cannot be freely expressed by Muslims helps prevent terrorism. But in reality, the more those angry at foreign policy see their community paralyzed by fear and reluctant to express itself openly, the more likely it becomes that some will end up supporting terrorism. A strong, active, and confident Muslim community enjoying its civil rights to the full and able to engage with young people on issues they feel strongly about is the best way of preventing violence.
A second consequence of the provocation strategy is the distorting effect on perceptions of the domestic terrorist threat. The FBI has generated a stream of terrorist convictions that are considered genuine by policy makers and analysts. That these cases would not have existed without FBI fabrication is ignored. This means that mainstream analysis of the scale and nature of the terrorist threat is in part a self-fulfilling prophecy, reflecting the FBI’s choices of whom to target. If the numbers of people arrested in a particular year go up, it is as likely to be because of a step-up in the number of agent provocateur operations the FBI is carrying out as the result of an independent increase in terrorist plotting. If Muslims constitute the majority of those indicted for terrorism in the US, this is in large part a product of whom the FBI is deciding to target in provocation operations rather than an objective measure of where the threat of terrorism comes from. In the two decades leading up to 2010, 348 people were killed in acts of political violence committed by the American far Right in the United States. Of course, a much larger number of people died in the 9/11 attacks, carried out by Muslims present in the US as foreign visitors. But the number of people killed in acts of political violence carried out by Muslim-American citizens or long-term residents of the US is much smaller: twenty people between 1990 and 2010.51 Yet because the FBI considers Muslim Americans a special risk, it targets them with agents provocateurs to a far greater degree than it does the far Right. The result is that every two months or so the FBI announces another high-profile arrest of a Muslim terrorist suspect, keeping the US on its war on terror footing and sustaining the multibillion-dollar homeland security industry, while the far Right threat is downplayed. In turn, the stereotype of Muslims as inherently prone to terrorism is perpetuated.
Consider, for example, the case of James Cummings, a neo-Nazi from Maine. After inheriting $2 million, he managed to acquire a supply of radiological materials, and may have been planning to build a dirty bomb—before his wife killed him in 2008 after she had suffered years of domestic abuse.52 The case was barely reported in the media. Likewise, white supremacist William Krar, of Noonday, Texas, maintained a weapons cache containing automatic machine guns, remote-controlled explosive devices, sixty pipe bombs, and a hydrogen cyanide bomb capable of destroying a thirty-thousand-square-foot building. No press release was published by the Department of Justice when he was arrested in 2003, as is standard practice in terrorism-related cases involving Muslims, and no press conference was called to announce the discovery of chemical weapons. Indeed, Krar would not have been arrested had he not sent a package containing counterfeit documents to the wrong address by mistake.53 When the US Department of Homeland Security produced an intelligence report on the far Right four months after President Obama took office in 2009, the reaction from conservatives was so vitriolic that the report was repudiated and the unit that produced it effectively blocked from doing any further monitoring work.54 In the 1990s, the FBI used sting operations to target violent far Right activists, but most of the more recent arrests were not the result of undercover work—the discovery of Cummings’s and Krar’s weapons caches were both accidental. On the other hand, in recent years the FBI has infiltrated groups of peace campaigners, pro-Palestinian activists, environmental protesters, and nonviolent anarchists.55
As well as distorting the overall perception of threat, agent provocateur operations can also have serious disruptive effects in particular localities. In October 2010, Farooque Ahmed was arrested in northern Virginia after an operation involving an FBI agent provocateur. He appears to have been planning to travel to Afghanistan to fight against the US military presence there, but as part of a sting operation, the FBI hatched a plan for him to bomb subway stations on the DC Metro.56 Though the idea to attack the Metro originated with the FBI, the arrest caused officials to become concerned that the DC subway network was indeed vulnerable to terrorism. Security was beefed up in response to the imagined plot, and physical and mechanical bag searches were introduced. Officials argued that even if the idea to bomb the Metro had come from the FBI, now that it was public, it had to be taken seriously as a plot that might be emulated by others.57 Another hidden cost was the disbanding of a local women’s group that called itself Hip Muslim Moms, of which Ahmed’s wife happened to be a member. The group was tarred by association after the media coverage of his high-profile arrest and ended its activities, though his wife was not accused of any crime. It had been involved in such radical activities as coupon clipping, exchanging recipes, and watching Sex and the City.58
Centers of Influence
In May 2010, FBI agents in Houston, Texas, hurriedly organized a lunch meeting with about thirty leaders of the city’s Muslim community. Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-born US citizen from Connecticut, had just attempted to set off a car bomb in Times Square. The agents informed the leaders who gathered at an Indian restaurant that, in the wake of the attempted attack in New York, the FBI would be visiting Muslims in the Houston area to gain more information on the potential radicalization of young people in the community. The meeting had been coordinated by Ghulam Bombaywala, a local Pakistani-American businessman and close associate of the FBI. Those present were shown FBI slides purporting to explain the process of radicalization and the warning signs to look out for. The meeting was typical of attempts by FBI field offices across the US to cultivate relationships with people they describe as centers of influence in Muslim communities. Such community partnerships are seen by the government as central to countering radicalization among American Muslims.
Bombaywala is a strong supporter of this approach and, over the last few years, has built up close friendships with local FBI agents working on counterterrorism. He was known for having run a successful chain of restaurants in the 1990s. After 9/11 he got involved in community activities, believing Muslim leaders and the FBI had a shared interest in preventing the radicalization of the young. Using his influence as a key source of private funding for mosques, he encourages imams to look out for unfamiliar young people who join the congregations, for those who stop attending and appear to drop out of their social network, and for those who change their appearance. He says:
The FBI is really helping us to know what to look for … If you see someone changing overnight, growing a big beard and starting to wear different clothes, we need to find out what is happening. Maybe that kid needs some help … You never know if somebody is giving him bad advice.59
The idea that growing a beard or starting to wear traditional Islamic clothing are signs that someone is drifting into terrorism has been absorbed from the FBI’s four-stage radicalization model. Bombaywala also gives occasional sermons in mosques on the responsibilities Muslims have in post-9/11 America.
I tell people that, after 9/11, freedom of speech, freedom of press, freedom of religion, take an empty shoe box, put all of them in it, and put them in the closet. America is no longer the same as before 9/11. Just be a responsible citizen.
He says that Muslims should avoid “loose talk,” which he defines as
anti-American sentiment or anything to do with 9/11, or anything to do with Iraq or Afghanistan. Why make these kinds of statements when you really don’t need to?
Every Thursday the thir
ty or so mosques in Bombaywala’s network get an e-mail outlining the main bullet points that should be mentioned in that week’s sermon.
Whatever the message we want to give to the common man, through the imams, every Friday there is 500 to 1,000 people in front of these guys, and in their sermon, they can talk about all this stuff.60
In one case, says Bombaywala, his community network played a role in providing actionable intelligence to an FBI counterterrorist investigation. One of those convicted, Pakistani student Adnan Mirza, was sentenced to fifteen years in prison in part for conspiring to provide material support to the Taliban in the form of a $550 donation. He says he was sending the money to a government-approved hospital in Pakistan and that, in the end, the funds were used on local charity projects in Houston. A friend of Mirza’s turned out to be an FBI informant; he had also been befriended by an undercover agent. After arriving in the US in August 2001, Mirza had enrolled at Houston Community College and become active in a project to help the homeless. He also started a local radio program designed to educate Americans about Islam. At the time of writing, he has filed a motion alleging he was provided with ineffective legal counsel.61
Steve Gentry, the executive manager of the FBI’s counterterrorism program in Houston, estimates that a quarter of its investigations are initiated as a result of information from Muslim community partners. Agents in his office say that as well as providing intelligence, community relationships are also crucial as a way to convey a counterradicalization narrative to the Muslim community. One example occurred in 2011, when NATO forces began bombing operations in Libya, and the FBI drew up lists of Libyan residents in the US to be interviewed—eventually, more than eight hundred across the US.62 In the past, such broad-based interviewing provoked allegations of ethnic profiling. Nowadays the FBI preempts potential opposition by informing its community partners in advance of what it is doing and they work together to manage any ensuing anger.63
The Muslims Are Coming! Page 24