The Terror Factory (16 page)

In 2007, FBI agents in Albany called their counterparts in White Plains, New York, and offered them the use of Hussain as an informant. FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, who was involved in the extraordinary rendition of Maher Arar, a dual Canadian Syrian citizen detained at John F. Kennedy International Airport and then deported to Syria and tortured, accepted the offer.
⁴¹
He sent Hussain to Pakistan to investigate a possible terrorist camp and then to London to check out a mosque that was allegedly raising money for Palestinians in Gaza. Each time Hussain returned to the United States, Fuller met him at Kennedy Airport to make sure immigration officials allowed him back into the country. As we saw in the case of Foad Farahi, the FBI often uses shaky immigration status as a means of keeping informants, even paid ones, on a leash.

Despite his international travels, Hussain's most ambitious assignment under Fuller would come closer to home. In September 2007, the informant began praying regularly in Newburgh, a struggling former Air Force town with few decent jobs about an hour north of New York City. It was a fishing expedition. “I was not looking for targets,” Hussain said in court testimony. “I was finding people who would be
harmful, who can do harm, and radicals, and identify them for the FBI.”
⁴²
As in the Albany case, Hussain's cover story was that he imported goods from China, and Fuller instructed him to tell people that he was an agent for the Pakistani terrorist group Jaish-e-Mohammed. Most of Newburgh's Muslim residents were poor, and Hussain, who posed as a wealthy businessman and wore expensive clothing and drove high-end cars, easily made plenty of friends. But after more than a year of trawling the local Muslim community, he had not identified a single target.
⁴³

Then he met James Cromitie, a forty-five-year-old stocker at the local Walmart. A former drug addict with a history of mental instability—he once admitted to a psychiatrist that he heard and saw things that weren't there—Cromitie had adopted the name Abdul Rahman after converting to Islam while serving two years in prison for selling crack cocaine in 1987.
⁴⁴
However, by 2008, he had seemingly turned his life around. He had a job, a girlfriend, and a room he rented, and he prayed regularly at Masjid Al-Ikhlas, a large, tan-colored mosque. Below the surface, though, Cromitie was an angry, bigoted man, believing others discriminated against him because of his religion, and openly hating Jews.

In June 2008, Cromitie met a man from Pakistan at Masjid Al-Ikhlas who said his name was Maqsood. Everyone at the mosque had seen or knew of Maqsood. It was impossible not to know about him, because in poor Newburgh, Maqsood made an impression. He was always driving one of four expensive cars—a Hummer, a Mercedes or one of two different BMWs—and had been coming to the mosque so frequently that he had been invited to become a board member.
⁴⁴
Of course, the man's name wasn't really Maqsood—it was Shahed Hussain.

It was in the parking lot of Masjid Al-Ikhlas that Cromitie first approached Hussain. The two men began talking, and Hussain told Cromitie that he was destined for much more in this life. “Allah didn't bring you here to work for Walmart,” he said.
⁴⁶
What exactly happened between the pair in the weeks following that initial encounter in the parking lot isn't known, because from June to October 2008, Special Agent Fuller chose not to have Hussain record these conversations. But whatever happened and whatever was said, it allowed Hussain and Cromitie to become close.

By the time the FBI began recording their conversations on October 12, 2008, Hussain was already an experienced hand at fueling Cromitie's bigotry and bolstering his personal narrative of persecution as a misunderstood Muslim.

“A lot of Jews up here. They look at me like they would like to kill me when they see me inside my jalabiya, everything they say. I don't salaam them either,” Cromitie told Hussain.

“Does that make you angry, brother?” Hussain asked, clearly knowing the answer he was soliciting.

“It doesn't make me angry. It just make [
sic
] me want to jump up and kill one of them,” Cromitie said.

“Wow,” Hussain replied.

Cromitie then talked about the Jews he met while working at Walmart. They looked at him strangely, he said, and the Jewish women refused to allow him to carry their bags to the car.

During the course of their conversations, Hussain would seize on any opportunity to amplify Cromitie's paranoia and hatred of Jews. “I was reading in one of the newspapers, in the
New York Times
, that every second advisor in the White House, they
yahuds
,” Hussain told Cromitie during one meeting.
⁴⁷

“Every who?” Cromitie asked.

“Every second advisor to the president is a yahud,” Hussain repeated.

“In the White House?”

“Yeah,” Hussain said.

“The worst brother in the whole Islamic world is better than 10 billion yahudi,” Cromitie answered.

Hussain told Cromitie that if he was angry for the way the world was, he could change it. But he needed to change it through jihad. “I always think about going for a cause, you know? For a cause of Islam. Have you ever thought about that, brother?” Hussain asked.

“Have I ever thought about going for the cause?” Cromitie asked.

“Cause of Islam,” Hussain clarified.

In November 2008, Hussain invited Cromitie to attend the Muslim Alliance in North America conference in Philadelphia. The local imam from Masjid Al-Ikhlas would be there, as would one of Cromitie's idols, Imam Siraj Wahhaj, an African American convert to Islam whose mosque is in Brooklyn. Hussain offered to cover all of Cromitie's expenses, which of course were covered by the FBI. By this time, Hussain had told Cromitie about his import business and said he could bring in weapons and missiles from China. Not to be outdone by Hussain's peacocking, Cromitie portrayed himself in conversations with the informant as something of a badass, claiming to have firebombed a police precinct, to have a brother who stole $126 million in merchandise from Tiffany & Co., to have formed a small militia, and to have stolen guns from Walmart.
⁴⁸
These claims were all untrue. Whether the FBI knew at the time that Cromitie was
nothing but talk is unclear, but the conference in Philadelphia would prove to be a turning point for Hussain and the Bureau.

It was late at night on Friday, November 28, 2008, and Hussain and Cromitie were driving to Philadelphia in the FBI informant's Hummer. The vehicle had been wired for sound, and all of their conversations during the nearly four-hour trip were recorded. About halfway through the drive Cromitie went silent.

“What are you thinking, brother?” Hussain asked.

“I'm just thinking that I'm gonna try to put a plan together. What type of plan? I don't know yet. I'm gonna put a good plan together,” Cromitie answered.

“May Allah be with you and Allah find you the way,” Hussain said.

The next day, Hussain and Cromitie attended the conference in Philadelphia, where they saw the imam from Newburgh and listened to an inflammatory speech Siraj Wahhaj gave during a dinner. In their private conversations, Hussain kept asking about a security group Cromitie claimed to have formed to protect Newburgh-area Muslims—Cromitie called the group his “sutra team”—and what type of actions they had done in the past.

“We couldn't get hold of a bomb like we wanted to, but we was doing all type of stuff,” Cromitie said. “You probably heard. We was blowing police cars up. We was throwing gas bombs inside.” Cromitie was lying about all of it, of course. But he did know a few thugs-for-hire, Newburgh men who he said would be willing to join an attack for the right price. “They would do it for the money,” Cromitie told Hussain. “They're not even thinking about the cause.”

Later that same day, Hussain asked Cromitie what
he thought would be the best target for a terrorist attack. Cromitie's response was a bridge. “But bridges are too hard to be hit, because of they're, they're made of steel,” Hussain told him.

“Of course they're made of steel,” Cromitie said. “But the same way they can be put up, they can be brought down.”

If Hussain and the FBI were going to bring Cromitie into a terrorist plot, they needed to guide him toward a more manageable idea than bombing a bridge. A few days before the Philadelphia conference, the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba had killed 364 people in a coordinated attack in Mumbai, India, that targeted hotels, a café, a railway station, and a Jewish community center. Special Agent Fuller instructed Hussain to bring up the Mumbai attacks, which he believed would help dissuade Cromitie from his ambition to bomb a bridge.

“Eight spots were hit at the same time,” Hussain told Cromitie, referring to the terrorist attack in India.

“Yeah, yeah, eight, I saw it,” Cromitie replied.

“You saw it. The railroad station. Hotels, the Jews—”

“Yeah,” Cromitie interrupted.

“The Jew center, the main Jew center,” Hussain continued.

“Yahudi,” Cromitie said.

“Yahudi center. Uh, the cafés where the Americans, and there's this, uh—”

“That too,” Cromitie interjected. “The cafés and shit like that. Sometime the biggest people be in these places and you don't know, but shit happens. You understand?”

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.