Alice was still worried that Sonny would send paid accomplices to snatch his daughters. She was sure he was not courageous enough to do it himself. His brothers had told her numerous times that he was the “black sheep” of the family, to use their own phrase, a bully and a coward. After some discussion, she gave us permission to call Sonny and tell him that there was a federal warrant for his arrest for kidnapping. I told him personally and got a warm feeling of pleasure from the moment. He wanted to see the indictment, but we refused, deciding to let him sweat. This time we made no offers of leniency, no offers of any kind really except to lock him up for life. We also gave him no hint that anyone else had been indicted. Unfortunately, two of the relatives who had helped in the kidnapping ten years earlier were living in the northern U.S., and we could not charge them since they had done nothing since the new federal law was passed to restrain the girls from leaving Lebanon. We waited for the others to arrive in the U.S. and looked forward to seeing the handcuffs and leg irons on them.
A few months later, a U.S. Marshal called from Los Angeles. They had Mohamed El-Sarji, one of the brothers, and shipped him back to Oxford in custody. Our local U.S. magistrate set the case for a bond hearing. I put Sarah on the stand first. She testified eloquently how the family had kept her under constant surveillance. They were both definitely retained against their will. She had to admit that Mohamed was more encouraging and less openly hostile to them than the others but still had always kept an eye on her and Megan and told them not to try to leave. Under Islamic law, they could go nowhere without a male relative and were basically prisoners. Sarah also translated an audiotape of her father and one of her uncles discussing how they produced bogus American passports and visas and sold them to anyone who had the money. Fortunately for Mohamed, the bail hearing was held before September 11, 2001, and he was not a party to the discussions of bogus passports and visas. Since he was the brother who came to America most often, we felt he was involved, but could not solidly prove it.
When Mohamed El-Sarji took the stand, he was quite an actor. A smooth talker with excellent English, he soon had the Magistrate hanging on every word. He told of how he had been a diving instructor in Southern California. He produced a news article describing his underwater archeological explorations off the coast of Sidon, calling him the “Jacques Cousteau of Lebanon.” A local Lebanese businessman offered to put up a large cash bond for Mohamed. He later turned out to be a person of interest in the terrorism trial of Sami Al-Arian in Tampa. The most touching of Mohamed’s stories was of how he missed his wife. Seeing him kissing his long-time American girlfriend outside the courthouse that day made me considerably less sympathetic toward him, but I had to admit he had charm. If Sonny was anything like Mohamed, no wonder Alice was taken in by him.
At the end of the hearing, we decided to agree to dismissal of the charges against Mohammed without prejudice so we could rearrest him if he ever came back. In the meantime, he would be more useful to us in putting the family back in Lebanon on alert as to what American jails were like and what would happen to them if any of them ever tried to enter the United States and take the girls. To date we have never heard from him or any other El-Sarji again.
Sarah soon learned to drive, started dating, graduated from college, got married, and had two fine children. She tried to join a U.S. law enforcement or intelligence agency, but it would have required being away from her family and moving to a large city. She now teaches in a public school while her husband is in graduate school at Chapel Hill. Megan had a little more trouble adjusting, having left the United States when she was only four. But she and Sarah had kept up their American English, and Megan quickly became a popular actress in local dramatic productions. She came to visit me several times to ask about her father. She said she felt like half her life was missing. She wanted to understand her past. After Alice, I believe Megan suffered the most but also believe she will follow through on her plans to get a college degree. She now has a good job managing a restaurant and is returning to college. Her excellent intelligence and stunning beauty will take her a long way.
Alice retired from her job at Ole Miss, married a retired Coast Guard officer and lives near her parents. I see her sometimes on the Square in Oxford where we have warm little conversations, having shared a truly unique life experience. She is of course still wounded by her experience, but is doing well, as are her wonderful parents, who are so happy to see their family back together. The coda to the story was blurted out to us one day when I took Alice to the office of Bobbie Vance, an old friend and experienced Chancery Court attorney. She offered to help us get the girl’s names changed for free. We had not noticed that her son, a student at Ole Miss, was working in the library beside us with the door open. After Alice stepped out, I heard Bobbie say to her son: “Can you believe that? What an adventure story.” Her son, with the wisdom of youth, summed it all up for us. “It’s simple, Mom. It’s like my sociology professor told us: Never marry outside your culture.”
An Honorable Terrorist: Abdel Ashqar Finances Hamas through Oxford Banks2
Abdelhaleem Ashqar began life, as he recalls it, as the serious son of the mayor of a small Palestinian village. When the United States and its European allies created a homeland for the remaining Jews not murdered by the Nazis, however, Ashqar’s peaceful life was gone forever. Palestine became Israel, and Ashqar and his family became foreigners in their own country. His father, a member of the Sufi sect of Sunni Islam, bore their displacement with philosophic calm. Abdel did not. He eventually joined the violent anti-Zionist group Hamas, an outgrowth of the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in Egypt to drive out its British occupiers.
Ashqar moved quickly up through the Hamas ranks, becoming the primary spokesman for the Islamic University of Gaza, a hotbed of the movement to oust Israel from Gaza and the West Bank of the Jordan River. Ashqar became the chief lieutenant of Mousa Abu Marzook, the best-known leader of Hamas. Quiet and literate and fluent in English, if left to his own devices, Abdel Ashqar would probably have become a happy professor of history or an accountant. Because of his accounting and P.R. skills, Ashqar was chosen to be Marzook’s chief treasurer and fund-raiser for the “Outside,” the term Hamas followers use to refer to the world beyond Palestine, which they called the “Inside.” A study of international financial patterns persuaded Marzook and other Hamas leaders that America was where the money was. Despite its long and steady support of Israel, both in money and arms, the United States also had large Arab and Muslim populations, many of whom had become affluent in the political and economic freedom of America. To harvest this financial crop, Hamas began sending fund-raisers to America to seek money for the Palestinian cause. Marzook chose as his chief fund-raiser the serious and studious Abdel Ashqar. Although he insists he be called the full “Abdelhaleem,” I’ve always shortened it American-style.
Like many Palestinian refugees, Ashqar had a passport from Jordan, the primary country to give asylum to Palestinians who did not wish to submit to Israeli authority. Because Islam forbids the charging of interest, considering it usury, Ashqar would have been out of place studying U.S. banking. Nor could he sign up as a student of political science, his preferred subject, because his militant anti-Israeli views and preference for violence would have gotten him ejected from any American university he chose. So he chose business administration, a vague and neutral subject close to money but far enough from politics that he could glide with relative anonymity through graduate school to his ultimate goal, an American Ph.D. He hoped to return to a new Palestinian state as a full professor.
Ashqar’s preferred university was Iowa State. Cold in the winter, Iowa seemed a strange choice. But Ashqar had friends there, important to an Arab living in a foreign land. He also had friends in Louisiana and Texas and applied there as well. In all, Ashqar applied to seventeen U.S. universities and was rejected by all but one: the University of Mississippi at Oxford. Ole Miss, with its history of racial troubles, was recruiting mino
rities to comply with court orders in the famed Ayers anti-discrimination case. To help Ole Miss comply with those orders, the federal government was showering the university with cash grants for minority students. Foreign graduate students in pharmacy and engineering were pouring into Ole Miss, rapidly changing its culture and the appearance of its student body.
From his paymaster Abu Marzook, who taught at Louisiana Tech in Ruston, Ashqar knew Oxford had a thriving mosque with two active congregations composed of Palestinians, Saudis, Lebanese, and Muslim students from a score of Islamic nations. The two congregations, interestingly, were not divided into Sunni and Shiite, as might be expected. One group was composed primarily of professors and their families, the other group primarily of students, although the line was informal.
Based on his good academic record, USAID gave Ashqar a full academic scholarship and a living stipend as well. With his wife Asmaa, a pale-skinned young woman who was even more militantly Islamist than Abdel (nearly all her course work had been in Fiq, or Islamic religious studies), they moved into a nice brick duplex on Harris Drive in west Oxford near the Ole Miss campus. Ashqar did well in his studies, which were supervised very lightly by a respected Ole Miss professor who was dying a lingering death from cancer caused by frequent sprayings of Agent Orange while serving in combat in Vietnam.
At first all went well. Classes were easy and the childless couple had lots of time to enjoy an active university-town social life, avoiding only the famed pep rallies in the Grove on football Saturdays because alcohol was such a prominent feature there. By pure chance, the Ashqars rented a duplex just one block behind the offices of the FBI and IRS. Despite that proximity, the Ashqar duplex faced away from FBI’s windows so no one noticed at first all the cars carrying robed, bearded figures who visited the Ashqar home.
After a couple of years, things began to go wrong. Ashqar could not contain his militancy and began haranguing students at the mosque, encouraging them to join the armed struggle to expel by violence the “Zionist occupiers of our Arab lands.” The leaders of the mosque quietly expelled him. They also told the university and the FBI of his statements favoring violence. At the time, my older daughter was spending a year “abroad” in Oxford living in the home of her best friend, the daughter of a Saudi professor who taught at Ole Miss. His wife kept telling me that all her Arab friends thought their phones were tapped because whenever they used their phones all sorts of clicks and buzzes were heard. I told her they were paranoid. If their phone was tapped, I would know.
Then one day I got a call from an Oxford banker. In small towns like Oxford, where everyone knows everyone and informality prevails, it is hard to stay anonymous for long. “John, there is something weird happening here. This Arab graduate student is receiving and sending tens of thousands of dollars every week by wire transfers. I know their system is different, but this doesn’t look right.” The banker told me he didn’t want to violate any laws, but that he’d talked to other bankers in town and they had noticed the same thing. I told him we couldn’t just subpoena records to the grand jury with no basis, but I’d get back to him. I called the local IRS. A quick check revealed Ashqar not mentioning anything about possessing such sums on his tax returns.
The idea of a terrorist connection did not occur to me at first. Although I had been the office’s international security officer since the program was founded in the 1970s, most of our international cases involved drugs or financial scams, never terrorism. Then I got a call from a detective at the Oxford P.D. At the request of a local Arab professor, they had run a wiretap check on the professor’s phone and got a hit suggesting Ashqar’s phone was tapped, but it was professional and untraceable, causing them to suspect it was ours. I called Rich Calcagno, the FBI agent supervising the Northern District. He said, “John, I want to work with you. You know I do. But I’ll have to get back to you on this one.”
The next day Rich called back and apologized, saying Washington said they should have gotten in touch with our office earlier. He asked if I had a top-secret security clearance. I told him I did, but was the only one in the office who did, although I had never needed it. “Well you’re going to need it now.” We met at his office that afternoon. Agent Steve Taylor joined us. Steve had been in Oxford a couple of years but had never brought us a single case. We used to joke about whether he even worked there. We should have known of course that he was the full-time FCI (foreign counterintelligence officer) for our district, and we didn’t even know it. That is just how uncoordinated our intelligence gathering was before 9/11.
Rich and Steve explained that for the past several months, they had been running FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) wiretaps on Ashqar’s phone and fax machine. They had hundreds of hours of audiotapes and boxes of fax copies with lots of large numbers, which appeared to be bank and other financial records. They were frustrated, however, and stymied from using it because the FBI had too few Arabic translators to cover any cases outside of obvious targets like New York and L.A. The local FBI had a lot of stuff but didn’t know what it was or how to evaluate it.
They had, however, not been passive. From the numbers on the documents, and a few translated phone calls and a handful of calls in English, they’d compiled enough probable cause to get a national security enter-and-search warrant, sometimes called a “sneak and peek.” One weekend when the Ashqars were out of town, a team of agents had surreptitiously entered, searched, and photographed the entire apartment. Again they were stuck with a lot of untranslated documents in Arabic. Under the circumstances they could not just hire some Arab graduate student off the street to translate them. The agents had better luck with a different strategy, however. Feeling they were onto something major, they rented the vacant apartment next door and installed a video camera and recorded every visitor to the Ashqar apartment. When they sent copies to FBI HQ in Washington, the response was immediate: “Holy shit! You’ve got big-time terrorists coming and going there every month.”
Once Rich and Steve cut us in on their investigation, we moved quickly to subpoena secretly Ashqar’s bank records, telephone toll records, credit card receipts, and, by court order, his tax returns. When the Hamas connection became clear, Rich and I flew to Washington to meet with the FBI antiterrorism unit. They immediately sent us a native Arab speaker from Yemen to work full time translating our tapes. He was great, but it unnerved us a little when he informed us that under no circumstances would he ever testify in a trial involving Hamas. “Those guys would kill me and all my family too.” It was a sobering thought. We were in a new world.
The translator immediately found us a gem. Hidden amongst the Arabic conversations were two extremely clear tapes in English in Ashqar’s deep voice and unmistakable accent. Speaking to a man he called “Constantine,” Ashqar ordered two men killed. Members of Hamas, they had disobeyed orders to wait and had gone ahead and killed two Palestinians suspected of being informers for the Israelis. Hamas later determined that the men were innocent, so those who killed them, against explicit Hamas orders, were themselves to be executed. We passed on the names, places, and dates to the investigators at Shin Bet, the Israeli version of the FBI. They confirmed the facts for us and invited us to Israel to gather evidence for a prosecution of Ashqar in Oxford.
We consulted frequently with the Terrorism Section of DOJ in Washington. My partner there was Mark Bonner, the brilliant, wisecracking son of a retired Navy admiral. Working with Mark was alone worth all the trouble the case eventually caused me. It appeared that the best statute to use was RICO, which at the time was just about the only law which fit our facts. Later, after 9/11, Congress passed stacks of statutes dramatically expanding U.S. jurisdiction to reach anti-U.S. terrorist acts around the world.
Then our problems began. The Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, legally named the Southern District of New York, but because of their power were known across DOJ as the “Sovereign” District of New York, learned about our case and demanded to take it over, tr
eating us like country cousins. One day, by accident, I ran into Mary Jo White, the fabled U.S. Attorney for the Sovereign District at Main Justice. I went up to introduce myself. I didn’t need to. She said, “I know you. You’re that guy from Mississippi who is trying to steal my case on Ashqar and Marzook.” It was true they had jurisdiction over Marzook and that most of Ashqar’s transfers went through big New York banks, but I still thought there was plenty of case to go around for everyone. “No way. They are all ours, and you’re out of it.” She stomped off, a short, stocky, combative woman wobbling on her high heels. I had to admit she was not wishy-washy. Fortunately, from long associations with her assistants, Pat Fitzgerald, Ken Karras, and Baruch Weiss, I knew we would cooperate and work together even if the trial portion went to them. After all, they needed us and our agents and our insider knowledge of Ashqar.
From the outset we had consulted with Ashqar’s student adviser, Nancy Rogers, who had entertained the idea that Ashqar might one day help us. It sounded crazy, but Nancy loved the Ashqars and said they were honest and honorable people. One day Nancy called me out of the blue. “John, if you ever want to talk to Ashqar, this is the moment. They’ve rented and packed a U-Haul truck and are leaving school and moving to New York to teach in a militant mosque.” She said the last straw was when agent Steve Taylor, who had an impish sense of humor and hated Ashqar and his self-righteous ways, had decided to harass him where it hurt Ashqar most. Knowing Ashqar’s puritanical wife Asmaa often handled the family banking, Steve had used Ashqar’s credit card to charge a batch of X-rated sex videos and had them sent to their apartment. Ashqar had intercepted the videos, but not the bill. It was late morning on a Saturday. Nancy said, “I’ve told Ashqar you’re a man of honor and will not lie to him. He’s not sure he wants to go but doesn’t know what to do. I can keep him here for an hour or so if you’ll agree to meet with him.”
From Midnight to Guntown Page 44