The Terror Factory (7 page)

In an attempt to keep the sting alive, the Bureau brought in another informant, Elie Assaad, an experienced snitch originally from Lebanon. How exactly Assaad came to work for the FBI is unclear. The story he tells seems incredulous, but it goes something like this: While he was living in Lebanon, a group of alleged terrorists asked him to bring a vial of some undetermined but reportedly dangerous substance into the United States. Assaad informed U.S. government officials of this while he was still in Lebanon, and they instructed him to board an airplane as planned and travel to Chicago with
the substance, where he'd meet with FBI agents and hand over the vial. If the vial did in fact contain something dangerous, the obvious question that follows is why would U.S. government officials instruct Assaad to board a plane with it? Nevertheless, Assaad claimed that he traveled to Chicago, provided the vial to government agents, and that the FBI then put him on their payroll, sending him back to Lebanon as an informant. While he was in Lebanon, a car Assaad was riding in exploded—a bombing purportedly committed by the terrorist group who had provided the mysterious vial—and Assaad was badly burned in the blast. For his safety, FBI agents supposedly spirited him away to the United States, where he worked criminal and drug cases in Chicago for several years.

While working in the Windy City, however, Assaad failed an FBI lie detector test—which, under Bureau policy, should have disqualified him from future operations.
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Informants who fail lie detector tests are disqualified for the obvious reason that they can no longer be trusted not to lie to their FBI handlers. The main difficulty in dealing with informants is that honest people don't make good ones. On the contrary, the best informants are professional liars who are able to develop personal relationships and then exploit those relationships, without remorse, for personal gain. U.S. Appeals Court Judge Stephen S. Trott, a Reagan appointee who was on the short list to be nominated as FBI director in 1987, is one of the nation's leading experts on criminal informants.
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His 1996 law review article, “Words of Warning for Prosecutors Using Criminals as Witnesses,” has become standard reading for criminal law students. Trott believes that the best informants are “sociopaths” whose negative social skills are necessary for effective criminal investigations. “They're sociopaths and one of the best things they can do is to lie. They're good at that,”
Trott told me.
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“The Sisters of the Poor, the Delta Sorority, they're not going to help you catch bad guys. You just can't walk up to them and say, ‘Hey, what's happening here?' You need your own bad guys to help you get subpoenas. You need your own bad guys to get information and help you build cases against other bad guys.”

But that creates a challenge for the FBI: How can agents task an informant with lying to others and then be certain the informant isn't lying to them? Polygraph examinations, used when FBI agents debrief informants, provide the best solution for this dilemma—which is why as a policy the FBI disqualifies informants who are believed to have lied during a polygraph. However, Elie Assaad, having been caught lying to the FBI, kept on working for federal law enforcement. To this day, the Bureau has refused to release any information about the failed polygraph, other than the vague acknowledgment that agents caught Assaad lying. FBI officials have also declined on several opportunities to give me an explanation for why Assaad was not cut from the informant ranks. The only possible explanation for this is that Assaad got results as an informant, and that those results were impressive enough for the FBI to make an exception and keep him as an informant.

In early March 2001, trying to salvage Gilbert's ambitious but badly listing sting operation, Assaad introduced himself to Mandhai as “Mohammed.” Gilbert made the introduction, and remained on the periphery as Assaad took charge of the operation. He was a terrorist with ties to Osama bin Laden, Assaad told the nineteen-year-old Mandhai, and his job was to establish a local training center for jihadists in Florida. Thinking he'd found his connection to Al Qaeda, Mandhai explained to Mohammed how he wanted to attack
the power stations and National Guard armory and then contact the U.S. government to demand it stop supporting Israel. Assaad agreed to provide financial assistance. Mandhai also confided in Assaad that he suspected Howard Gilbert might be an FBI informant.

On March 13, Mandhai happened to mention an actual terrorist to Assaad—only Assaad and the U.S. government hadn't heard of him at the time. “Brother,” Mandhai said, “why don't you come with us to Adnan … Probably he will join with us.”
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Adnan was Adnan Gulshair El Shukrijumah, who attended the same Florida community college as Mandhai and scratched out a living as a freelance computer technician. Shukrijumah lived in the suburban town of Miramar, where his father was an imam. Just before 9/11, he left the country and has never returned. The FBI now believes he is among Al Qaeda's top officials, and the U.S. government is offering $5 million for information leading to his capture. But back in 2001, when the federal government first became aware of him, Shukrijumah had no interest in joining Mandhai's amateurish plot to attack power stations and the armory. (He also reportedly turned down offers to become an FBI informant himself.)
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In addition, Shukrijumah's brother thought it comical that the FBI considered Mandhai a potential terrorist. In an interview with the
Washington Post
, Nabil Shukrijumah said of Mandhai, “He's a naive … childish, very childish,” adding that, “It's very funny to me that he was supposed to be recruiting people.”
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Three days after mentioning Shukrijumah, and after having confessed to “Mohammed” that he believed Howard Gilbert was an FBI informant, Mandhai changed his story. He now told the FBI informants that he wasn't the leader of the bomb plot, and was in charge only of recruiting and
operations for an idea and plan that had originated with Gilbert. The next day, Mandhai told Assaad and Gilbert that he was unwilling to move forward in the bomb plot. The FBI quickly severed Gilbert from the investigation, paying him $6,000 for his undercover work, since it appeared that Mandhai couldn't get past his suspicion that Gilbert was a snitch for the feds.

But Mandhai's mistrust of “Mohammed” didn't last. Once the FBI cut Gilbert from the sting, Mandhai contacted Assaad and asked for help in freeing Aksoy—the friend indicted for immigration violations. Aksoy could help with the bomb plot, Mandhai told Assaad, and he'd recruit twenty-five to thirty people to be trained at the Al Qaeda training camp. Assaad in turn presented Mandhai with an assortment of weapons and explosives as examples of what he could provide. Assaad, Mandhai, and his friend Shueyb Mosaa Jokhan then moved forward in the plot, first attending a gun show where they tried—but failed—to buy a gun. (Jokhan's credit card was declined.)

However, the whole operation came to a halt on April 6, 2001 when Miami-Dade police arrested Assaad at his apartment after his pregnant girlfriend called 911. When officers arrived, Maria Granados told them Assaad had beaten and choked her, and she had called authorities when she became fearful for the safety of her unborn child.
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During questioning, Assaad told the police that he was unemployed. Granados ultimately spared Assaad by having prosecutors drop the felony aggravated battery charges against him.

One month after Assaad's arrest, FBI agents interviewed Imran Mandhai, and he admitted that he was planning to blow up electrical transformers and demand changes to U.S. foreign policy. One year later, after 9/11, federal prosecutors
finally indicted Mandhai on two charges—conspiring to damage and destroy electrical power stations and a National Guard armory by means of fire and explosives, and inducing Jokhan to damage the property of an energy facility. Mandhai pleaded guilty to the first charge and received a sentence of 140 months. He is scheduled to be released in December 2014. Mandhai was the nation's first successful terrorism-related prosecution after September 11, 2001.
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While Howard Gilbert deserves credit for pioneering the aggressive terrorism sting operations in the Mandhai case that the FBI would replicate over the next decade, you won't hear his name in Congressional testimony or in laudations from FBI executives, because he never got public credit for his ideas. As a matter of fact, his life went into a tailspin shortly after Mandhai's arrest. He was officially outed as an informant in June 2002 when an FBI agent said his name during a pretrial hearing for Mandhai and the South Florida
Sun-Sentinel
reported the news on its front page. At the time, Gilbert was working as a limousine driver in Miami. Upon seeing his name in the newspaper, he did what you wouldn't expect from an aspiring CIA agent—he freaked out. Gilbert bought a second handgun and began hiding in hotel rooms, fearful that terrorists would try to assassinate him. Keith Ringel, a friend from Rhode Island, flew to Florida, and together he and Gilbert drove to Providence, traveling straight through and stopping only for gas. When Gilbert arrived at his friend's apartment, he placed the two handguns in a safe. But two days after their arrival, Ringel told Gilbert he had to get the guns out of the safe—he was having a party that evening and some of the attendees knew the safe's combination. Gilbert collected the guns and, using a holster, placed one of the guns
on his hip. As Gilbert walked to his SUV, the gun visibly at his side, one of Ringel's neighbors called the cops to report an armed man in the apartment complex. Providence police arrived, and after admitting to officers that he did not have permits for the guns, Gilbert was arrested. State prosecutors charged him with two counts of carrying a pistol without a license—punishable by up to ten years in prison.

Broke and living out of his SUV in the parking lot of a Marriott Hotel, Gilbert was assigned public defenders Michael A. DiLauro and Anthony Capraro to help him fight the charges. Their defense was that Gilbert was under duress because he believed his life was in danger after being exposed as an FBI terrorism informant. DiLauro and Capraro subpoenaed records from the FBI—which failed to respond to the subpoenas. The Bureau's stonewalling proved as much of a problem for the prosecution as it did for the defense. Without FBI cooperation, the prosecution couldn't prove Gilbert
wasn't
in danger—that he was overreacting. James Dube, the prosecutor in the case, wanted desperately to bring in FBI agents from Florida to undermine Gilbert's claims of duress, and asked Superior Court Judge William A. Dimitri Jr. for more time, saying state officials needed to process the requests to allow Special Agents Keith Winter and Kevin O'Rourke to travel to Rhode Island.

“Don't give me that story,” Dimitri told Dube. “Am I supposed to hold this trial until they're ready?”

“I can't be held accountable for what I don't have and a federal agency might have in its possession,” Dube said.

“I do not dance to the tune of the FBI or the U.S. attorney in Florida,” Dimitri said. “The FBI has been uncooperative since day one in this case.”
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The prosecutor sent a transcript of that conversation to
the FBI in Miami, and on the day before the trial was to end, Winter and O'Rourke, as well as their boss, Supervisory Special Agent Mark Hastbacka, arrived in Providence to serve as rebuttal witnesses—to explain that Gilbert had never been in danger because the Mandhai prosecution didn't involve any actual terrorists. But given their late arrival, Judge Dimitri would not allow them to testify and dismissed the charges against Gilbert. The informant hugged his lawyers and promised to name his children after them, declaring them, with a nod to the O.J. Simpson murder trial, “better than any million-dollar dream team.”
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But Gilbert would never have any children. In the winter of 2003, he returned to South Florida, working as bodyguard and a limousine driver and hanging around International Protective Services, just as he had before he became a terrorism informant. He was in a rut, and certainly not on a road leading to a future with the CIA, as he had once dreamed. In 2004, Gilbert was found dead. He had killed himself in the middle of the night, a silencer-equipped handgun to the head. Gilbert would never see how the FBI ultimately adopted the terrorism sting techniques he had developed in the Mandhai investigation, and how Elie Assaad, his fellow informant in that case, became a star snitch by refining those tactics in the case of the Liberty City Seven.

I was living in Miami on June 22, 2006, when the NBC affiliate interrupted regular television programming for a breaking news story. “We have some video that is just arriving from the scene,” reporter Patricia Andreu told viewers. The video showed federal law enforcement officers wearing green uniforms and black boots as they walked in front of a ramshackle warehouse. “We're told that a terrorism-related investigation
is under way,” Andreu continued. “We're told that armed federal and local officials—there you see them right there—have set up a perimeter in the area. … As you can see in this video that we just got into the NBC6 newsroom, several federal and local officials are on scene there, including the FBI. They're armed, as you can tell.” The CBS affiliate quickly followed suit, posting a video on its website whose headline read, “Terror Suspects Detained by Agents in Projects.”

That afternoon, federal agents had arrested seven alleged Al Qaeda operatives—Narseal Batiste, Patrick Abraham, Stanley Phanor, Naudimar Herrera, Burson Augustin, Lyglenson Lemorin, and Rotschild Augustine—who had supposedly plotted to blow up the Sears Tower in Chicago and the North Miami Beach office of the FBI. Though the media in Florida and around the country quickly portrayed the seven men as dangerous terrorists, immediate questions arose among people familiar with terrorism cases as to whether the charges were trumped up. “I firmly believe there are public relations aspects to this case and other cases like it,” Khurrum Wahid, a Miami lawyer who has represented accused terrorists, told me the day after the arrests were announced. “It's clear to me that the federal government used this case to try and send a message about the threat of terrorism in Miami and the rest of the country.”