The Terror Factory (6 page)

It was a cloudy winter's day in February 2011 when I arrived at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, a sandstone fortress of a building on a 385-acre Marine Corps base west of Interstate 95. I had asked J. Stephen Tidwell to help me understand how and why the FBI employs Domain Management and its thousands of informants. Now executive director of FBI National Academy Associates, a nonprofit that organizes training sessions at the FBI Academy for local law enforcement, Tidwell retired in 2010 as an executive assistant director of the FBI. While at Bureau headquarters, he authored the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide with Arthur Cummings, and before that oversaw a large and controversial intelligence-gathering operation that recruited informants from and spied on members of Muslim communities in Southern California.

Tidwell arguably knows as much about FBI counterterrorism operations as anyone, and on that February afternoon, he drove me in his black Ford F350 through Hogan's Alley, a ten-acre recreation of a town at the FBI Academy crowded with houses, bars, stores, and a hotel, which the Bureau uses as “a realistic training ground” for its new agents.
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The FBI jokingly refers to Hogan's Alley—which gets its name from a nineteenth-century comic strip—as “a hotbed of terrorist and criminal activity,” and agents who work sting operations learn their craft here. At one end of the town is the Biograph Theater, named for the Chicago movie house where FBI agents gunned down John Dillinger
in 1934. Tidwell pointed to the model cinema and laughed. “Dillinger, Biograph Theater, Chicago,” he said. “See, the FBI has a sense of humor.”

A former West Texas cop, Tidwell is a barrel-chested man with close-cropped brown hair that is slowly graying. Wearing khakis, a blue sweater, and an oxford shirt, he drove me back to the main FBI Academy building and continued the nickel tour. In one of the hallways, he stopped at and pointed to a plaque hanging on the wall, which commemorated John O'Neill. “John understood the threat Al Qaeda posed long before anyone else at the Bureau did,” Tidwell said. We then walked to the office of FBI National Academy Associates, which is tucked into a corner of the FBI Academy's main building. Not far from Tidwell's neatly kept, windowed office is a place where visitors can buy FBI Academy souvenirs such as T-shirts and coffee mugs.

Many current and former FBI agents I've spoken to have offered negative comments about Domain Management and its creator, Philip Mudd, drawing a caricature of the former CIA analyst as a soulless purveyor of the dark arts whose evils have infected the Bureau. Tidwell isn't one of them. In fact, he's one of Mudd's most vocal supporters. I asked him whether he believed Domain Management's obvious intrusion into minority communities, with maps created according to demographic and religious data, was worth whatever benefits could be achieved for criminal investigations and intelligence gathering. Tidwell leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, placing his left foot on top of his right knee, as he thought about how to answer the question. “I don't think it's useful to think of Domain Management strictly in the way you are,” he told me. “Let's imagine we're out in a field to investigate a report that there's been a murder. We're
looking for the body, and it's all woods and brush except for a large barn in the middle of the property. One person suggests that we divide up the property into sections and have agents walk it inch by inch until we find the body. Another suggests that we get up on the roof of the barn and look for the body from that vantage point. But a third person says neither of those plans is the most effective way to find the body. He instead points to the sky, where birds are circling. He says, ‘Let's search the ground those birds are flying over.' That's what Domain Management does.”

However, there's a significant difference between Tidwell's analogy and Domain Management. In Tidwell's analogy, the birds provide an independent third-party analysis of sorts—their presence in the sky suggests that a body could be below, no matter what preconceived ideas FBI agents might have about the location of the reported murder victim. But with Domain Management, the data provides suggestions that bolster, rather than challenge, the FBI's preconceived ideas. The program is able to say with certainty and exactness where Muslims live in a particular city, but the belief that a danger exists in that part of the city as a result of the Muslim population requires the preconceived belief that Muslim communities represent a threat to public safety and national security. This belief and a generalized Islamophobia pervade all levels of the Bureau. In recent years, FBI counterterrorism training has made little to no distinction between the Al Qaeda terrorist network—whose members are religious radicals—and Islam in general. FBI counterterrorism training documents in circulation in 2011 described Mohammed as a “cult leader” and labeled charity among Muslims as a “funding mechanism for combat.” The more devout a Muslim was, according to FBI training literature first made public by
Wired
magazine, the more likely he was to be violent.
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Tidwell understands better than most at the FBI the repercussions of focusing investigative resources on Muslims—he is a named defendant in a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Council on American-Islamic Relations in 2011 alleging illegal spying on Muslim communities in California—but he doesn't believe that knowing, for example, where Lebanese live in a city means that the FBI is necessarily spying on or targeting Lebanese Americans.
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“Anything we do is going to be interpreted as monitoring Muslims,” Tidwell said. “I would tell Muslim community leaders, ‘Do you really think I have the time and money to monitor all the mosques and Arab American organizations? We don't, and I don't want to. The flip side with what the Bureau does is that we're also responsible nationally for protecting civil rights. That's something I always said in dealing with the Muslim communities—my first responsibility is to protect you. If a mosque had stuff painted on it, just like with a synagogue, we'd help clean it up. Our first responsibility to you is civil rights. Our second responsibility is making sure someone isn't hiding among you, taking advantage of what you represent.”

Yet that second responsibility is the reason the FBI developed Domain Management, has agents who are assigned full-time to recruiting informants, and now needs sophisticated software to track its thousands of informants nationwide. The use of Domain Management and the explosive growth of the FBI informant ranks are the primary reasons why today we have so many terrorism sting cases. While the cases involve plots that sound dangerous—about bombing skyscrapers and synagogues and crowded public squares—if you dig deeper, you see that
many of the government's alleged terrorists seem hopeless; they are almost always young and down on their luck, penniless, without much promise in their lives, easily susceptible to a strong-willed informant's influence. They're often blustery punks, I told Tidwell, and I wondered if most would mature past their big-talking ways if left alone. “And if they don't mature?” Tidwell countered. “Or if they hook up with someone of a like mind that has the capacity? You and I could sit here, go online, and by tonight have a decent bomb built. What do you do? Wait for him to figure it out himself?”

The FBI uses informants and terrorism stings to create a hostile environment for terrorist recruiters and operators—by raising the risk of even the smallest step toward violent action. It's a form of deterrence, an adaptation of the “broken windows” theory used to fight urban crime. Advocates such as Tidwell insist it has been effective, noting that there hasn't been a successful large-scale attack against the United States since 9/11. But what can't be answered—as many former and current FBI agents acknowledge—is how many of the Bureau's targets would have taken the step over the line at all were it not for the pressure and coercion of an informant.

 

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This ignorance of Islam and Islamic culture pervades the Bureau's highest ranks to this day, as the FBI's few Muslim agents have had trouble climbing the ranks. In one of several examples of alleged discrimination, the FBI denied the promotion of one Muslim agent, Bassem Youssef, due in part to confusing him with another Muslim agent, Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, who was fired, but later reinstated, after refusing to wear a wire during the controversial investigation of Sami Al-Arian, a computer engineering professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa who pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad following years of FBI scrutiny.

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The commercial data that the FBI feeds into Domain Management has been a matter of some debate.
Congressional Quarterly
reported that consumer data used in Domain Management once included grocery store sales of Middle Eastern food. The FBI denied that it was data mining falafel transactions, calling the report “too ridiculous to be true,” but
Congressional Quarterly
stood by its story.

Informants have always been an integral part of the FBI, providing the eyes and ears on everything from the Prohibitionera Mafia, when informants furnished information about organized crime figures such as Al Capone, to the civil rights movement, when the FBI used, among other informants, African American freelance photographer Ernest Withers to infiltrate the organization of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
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Under longtime director J. Edgar Hoover, however, informants never played an active role in FBI investigations; instead, they just watched and listened, and then reported what they saw and heard to their handlers at the Bureau.

This fly-on-the-wall approach metamorphosed during the war on drugs in the 1980s, when the FBI adopted a street-level approach to fighting crime. As part of this new approach, informants became active players in investigations, often posing as either drug dealers or buyers and saying and doing things that pushed plots forward or drew in additional targets. The terrorism informants of today are evolved versions of those drug war–era agents provocateurs.

The very first of this new breed of informant sprung up in Miami just before 9/11, putting together the kind of sting that would be replicated dozens of times over the next decade:
A target was identified—a disgruntled young Muslim man who said he wanted to launch an attack—and the informant then provided the means and opportunity for the attack, all the while secretly recording the target with hidden audio and video equipment. You might expect the informant who adapted the drug war–era “no-dope bust” for a new time and a new threat to be a grizzled, well-trained spy with a history of infiltrating dangerous, insular criminal organizations and bringing down high-profile crooks. But that wasn't the case at all. Instead, the man who deserves the credit for the change in FBI informant tactics was an inept, underachieving security guard who dreamed of a bullet-dodging, enemy-killing career as a spook with the Central Intelligence Agency.

The chief problem for Howard Gilbert—an overweight, middle-aged, Canadian-born Jewish man who had attended high school in Hollywood, Florida, and worked odd security jobs as an adult—was that he wasn't much like the bluebloods of the CIA. A Florida newspaper in 2002 described him as “a 340-pound man with a fondness for firearms and strippers.”
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When he wasn't working as a bodyguard or assassinating evil Latin American despots vicariously through
Soldier of Fortune
magazine, Gilbert could be found hanging around International Protective Services, a police and personal security store near downtown Hollywood, a few blocks from the train tracks Henry Flagler built from St. Augustine to Key West. International Protective Services garnered national attention after 9/11 for offering personal defense courses to American Airlines flight attendants—the wonderful irony being that terrorist ringleader Mohamed Atta had partied at Shuckum's Raw Bar & Grill, just a stone's throw from the doors of International Protective Services, before the deadly terrorist attack.

Gilbert had wanted in on the counterterrorism game before 9/11, as he saw it as a way of proving he was CIA material. In 2000, after attending the wedding of a Muslim friend, Gilbert hatched a plan to infiltrate the Darul Uloom mosque in the Miami suburb of Pembroke Pines. His idea was to pose as a Muslim convert named Saif Allah, meaning “sword of God” in Arabic. As one female congregant who asked not to be identified told me, everyone at the mosque was at first excited about Saif's arrival. “We were thrilled,” she remembered. “The reaction was: ‘Yeah! We got a white guy!'” Gilbert told everyone he was a disgruntled ex-Marine who was now working as a security expert, but some of the congregants at the mosque began to grow wary of the newest worshipper when Gilbert gave an inflammatory speech in late 2000 chiding Israel for what he described as its mistreatment of Palestinians and its refusal to adhere to previously drawn borders in allowing Israeli settlements in the West Bank. “That was truly the night that launched me into the terrorist umbrella of South Florida,” Gilbert would later brag.

While the speech made many of the congregants suspicious, even frightened, of Gilbert, Imran Mandhai, a nineteen-year-old Broward Community College student, became enamored with him. Stirred by the oration, Mandhai approached Gilbert and asked if Gilbert could provide him with weapons and training. Since Gilbert had previously provided information to the FBI, primarily related to cases involving cargo theft, he already had contacts at the Bureau. He called his handlers at the North Miami Beach office and told them he wanted the assignment—and the paycheck—to work Mandhai as part of a counterterrorism case. The FBI agreed to put Gilbert on the books as an informant to see what might happen.

Mandhai told the newly minted FBI terrorism informant that he was angry with the U.S. government for having indicted his friend, a Turk named Hakki Cemal Aksoy, for immigration violations. While searching Aksoy's apartment, federal authorities had discovered bomb-making manuals; it's never been clear from available evidence whether Aksoy was on his way to becoming a terrorist or was just another immature young man fascinated with bombs and explosives. Gilbert told Mandhai he could help him take revenge against the government for indicting Aksoy, and he sold the young man a copy of
The Anarchist's Cookbook
for twenty dollars. Mandhai and a friend, Shueyb Mosaa Jokhan, then told Gilbert they wanted to bomb electrical transformers and a National Guard armory in South Florida as part of their quest for revenge. However, to build a terrorism conspiracy case, prosecutors needed more than just angry words about aspirational attacks: they needed the targets to do something—buy guns or bomb-making materials, take pictures of possible locations, transfer money. But because Gilbert was overeager, and a little awkward in the role of a terrorist, Mandhai began to suspect that Gilbert was an FBI mole, and he quickly closed up, putting the entire operation at risk.