The Terror Factory (15 page)

Kohlmann is one of a cadre of self-appointed terrorism experts who today earn handsome paychecks pushing forward the idea that Islamic terrorism is a real and immediate threat in the United States. Among Kohlmann's peers is Rita Katz, an Iraqi-born Jewish woman who has helped the U.S. government investigate Islamic charities and mosques linked to radicals. One of Katz's critics alleged that, like Kohlmann, she could find a way to trace just about anything to Islamic terrorism, telling the
Boston Globe
that she “fits everything into a mold—that there is a Muslim terrorist under everybody's bed.”
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Many of these so-called terrorism experts, including Kohlmann and Katz, have worked under Steven Emerson, a former journalist who has earned millions of dollars while making such hyperbolic claims as that 80 percent of mosques in the United States are controlled by Islamic extremists. In 2009 and 2010, Emerson's nonprofit organization, Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation, raised $5.4 million in grants and individual contributions.
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The nonprofit then paid Emerson's corporation, SAE Productions, $3.4 million in management fees, allowing the tax-exempt Investigative Project on Terrorism Foundation to act as a pass-through for a for-profit company—a questionable but not illegal practice. Simply put, there's a lot of money to be made in stoking terrorism fears. For testifying in the trial of Hossain and Aref, for example, the U.S. government paid Evan Kohlmann $5,000.

To establish a terrorist connection, the prosecution played a conversation the FBI had recorded between Hossain and Hussain. “We are members of Jamaat-e-Islami,” Hossain told Hussain in the recording. The government had originally
claimed that Jamaat-e-Islami, a political party in Bangladesh, was linked to terrorism through a proxy organization, Jamaat-ul-Mujahideen. But when Kohlmann was named an expert witness in the case, replacing another government expert who was unable to testify at the trial, he submitted a report that seemed to confuse Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan with Jamaat-e-Islami of Bangladesh—two different organizations. In a deposition, Kevin A. Luibrand, a lawyer for Hossain, challenged not only Kohlmann's assertion, but also his general political knowledge of Bangladesh. Under questioning, Kohlmann admitted that he had never written about Jamaat-e-Islami of Bangladesh and could not say how many political parties existed in Bangladesh or even who the current prime minister of the country was.

“Can you name any of the major political parties in Bangladesh from the year 2000 to 2004?” Luibrand asked.

“Other than Jamaat-e-Islami?”

“Yes.”

“That's—I'm not familiar off the top of my head,” Kohlmann said.

“Have you ever heard of an organization known as the Bangladesh National Party?”

“Vaguely.”

“Do you know what it is?”

“I'm assuming it's a political party, but again—the name vaguely sounds familiar but—”

“Do you know what, if anything, it stands for politically within Bangladesh?”

“Sorry, can't tell ya.”

“You can't tell me because you don't know?”

“I don't know off the top of my head.”

Following this exchange, Luibrand petitioned the court
to have Kohlmann disqualified as an expert witness, writing in his motion: “Evan Kohlmann revealed that he has no basis to form any opinions with respect to JEI Bangladesh, or to explain JEI Bangladesh to the jury.”
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The presiding judge denied the request, and Kohlmann was allowed to testify not only about Jamaat-e-Islami but also about Ansar al Islam, a terrorist group formed by a man Yassin Aref had met a few times while living as a refugee in Syria. Of the damage Kohlmann's testimony did at trial, Hossain's lawyer said it “just kill[ed] us.”
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A jury ultimately found Hossain and Aref guilty of money laundering—but not of the more significant terrorism charges. At sentencing, both men were mystified about how they'd arrived in the position they were in—as accused terrorists about to be sentenced to federal prison.

“I never had any intention to harm anyone in this country,” Aref told the judge. “And I don't know why I'm guilty.”

“I am just a pizza man,” Hossain said. “I make good pizza.”

The public in Albany was largely supportive of Hossain and Aref, believing an injustice had occurred. Community members pressed into the courtroom, some holding copies of Aref's self-published autobiography,
Son of Mountains
. Fred LeBrun, the metro columnist for the
Albany Times Union
, compared the prosecution to U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy's witch hunts and the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But U.S. District Judge Thomas McAvoy, indifferent to the community support, sentenced the pair to fifteen years in prison.

Yassin Aref is incarcerated in a special Indiana prison that restricts outside communication. The ACLU is representing him in challenging his confinement there. If Aref's counter-part,
Mohammed Hossain, were ever a terrorist threat, you wouldn't know it today based on his assignment at the U.S. Bureau of Prisons: he is serving his sentence at Schuylkill Federal Correctional Institute, a medium-security facility located in a poor, rural part of Pennsylvania, between Allentown and Harrisburg.

The day I visited Hossain in March 2012, he was wearing a prison-issued, button-down blue shirt with gray pants. His name and prisoner number were embroidered on the left side of the shirt. Less than halfway through his sentence, he didn't have a lot of hope of being released early. His initial appeal had been denied, and he was now drafting a second appeal himself, enlisting other inmates to help him with the spelling and grammar.

We sat across from each other on plastic chairs in an empty concrete room. Toys filled a small adjacent room, for when inmates receive their families. A bank of vending machines lined one of the walls. Three guards stood in the corner talking about baseball. From having researched Hossain's case, I knew that Hussain, the informant, was a bad actor—a scam artist and an aggressive prevaricator who was, as FBI Special Agent Timothy Coll put it so well, “good at being deceptive.”
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But I found it hard to reason away Hossain's inaction during the sting operation. For example, on November 20, 2003, when Hossain came to Hussain's warehouse to drop off the seventy-five dollars for his brother Kyum's state identification card, the FBI informant showed him the shoulder-fired missile and said in Urdu, “This is for destroying airplanes.” Hossain didn't leave and report the missile to authorities. He just sat there, and then replied with a statement most Americans would think incriminating: “Holy is Allah.” I also could not understand why, even if
Hossain thought the money the informant gave him was for a loan, he'd accept cash from a man he'd seen shouldering a missile as he bragged about knowing mujahideen.

Stroking his beard, which is long and gray and hangs down to his waist, Hossain tried to explain himself. “You have to understand,” Hossain told me. “He hounded me. Everywhere I went, he was there.” From the day Hussain gave the toy helicopters to Hossain's children in front of the Little Italy Pizzeria, he said, the informant became a fixture in his life. Hussain said he wanted to become a better Muslim and admired Hossain for his faith. Despite being busy, Hossain said he felt a religious obligation to talk to Hussain about Islam. He'd walk into the pizza shop's kitchen, and Hussain would follow him, asking questions. “I told him once I have to go deliver pizzas, and he said, ‘No problem, I'll come with you.'”

During their conversations, Hussain would often talk about himself, describing how he ran an import business bringing in goods from China—the kind of cheap and small items you find in dollar stores—and bragging about having a relationship with the FBI. Once, when Hossain described some problems he was having with a tenant, Hussain offered to call his FBI friend and ask if he could assist. Hossain demurred. He had no reason to suspect Hussain was anything but a legitimate businessman with influential friends in law enforcement. That's what he said he was thinking when Hussain pulled back the tarp at the warehouse and lifted a missile launcher to his shoulder.

“It looked like a telescope or some plumbing equipment,” Hossain told me. “Then he said it was a missile. You have to understand what I was thinking. Do you remember when Iraq was at war with Iran? Who did America back? Iraq. They sent weapons to Iraq. In Afghanistan, America gave weapons to
the mujahideen to fight the Soviets. He said he had licenses to import from China and that he knew an FBI agent. I believed it was a legitimate business, that what he was doing was legal. I couldn't prove it wasn't legal. I ran a pizza shop, and every day, I would make sure the floors were clean and dry, and if they were slippery, I'd put up a sign. I knew that if I didn't and someone fell, they'd sue me. They'd hurt me and my family. So what if I went to the police and told them about Malik and the missile? I thought he could sue me for a false report, and he would take all my money and all my properties.” Hossain added that Hussain came to the pizza shop the day after showing him the missile and assured him that everything was legal and on the up and up.

At one point, the FBI informant asked Hossain if he'd be interested in donating money to a school in Pakistan. “I told him that even if I had money, I wouldn't be interested,” Hossain said. “But I also told him that I didn't have money then. I told him that I purchased two homes from the city auction, and I needed $3,000 to $4,000 to buy new boilers.” Hussain said he could help and offered to loan him $50,000. “I didn't need his money. I could have gotten the money from other people,” Hossain told me. “But I wanted him to go away. I thought if I agreed to do something with him, he'd leave me alone. People are like that—they bother you until you do what they want and then they leave. I thought that would happen.” As a result, Hossain agreed to accept the loan, and to this day maintains that he did not know that what he was doing could be considered money laundering or that the money was supposed to have come from a terrorist organization. “Why would I be a terrorist? I had a family, a business, nearly $1 million in properties,” Hossain said. “If someone did a terrorist attack in Albany, it would have
hurt me just like everyone else. My family would have been in danger. My business would have been hurt. I have never had anything to do with terrorism.”

Hossain suffers from diabetes and hypertension, and incarceration has been hard for him. But it's been even harder for his family, he said. He was the sole breadwinner, and in the wake of his trial and incarceration, he and his family lost the pizza shop. But he lost much more in the following years. “Children need a father. My children, they are lost to the world now,” he said.

I asked him what he meant by that.

“They fall into the wrong crowd,” he said. “I do not know them anymore.”

He then pointed to the appeal he is drafting—a thick stack of paper with amateur copyediting notes on the pages correcting typos and grammatical errors. The appeal described the FBI informant's aggressive behavior and particular instances in which Hossain alleged his Urdu statements were mistranslated to sound more incriminating than they actually were. He has already lost one appeal that his lawyers filed, so this jailhouse petition doesn't offer him much promise. But it's all he has now—a final effort to reverse a decision by a jury he believes was overwhelmed by the government's claims and biased by his appearance.

“Look at me,” Hossain said. “My beard, my face, my taqiyah—I look like Osama bin Laden.”

Hossain paused.

“I hate Osama bin Laden.”

Since 9/11, Shahed Hussain and informants like him have become one of the Bureau's most valuable commodities in the war on terrorism—aggressive men indentured to the FBI who
are willing to do anything to take down their targets and who also have the ability to “play the part” of terrorists in front of hidden cameras and microphones. This ability to betray others for personal gain, however, reveals a dark aspect to the FBI's use of informants; namely, that the best informants are also those who tend toward criminal behavior themselves. Hussain is a classic example of this. While working for the FBI, he filed for Chapter 13 bankruptcy protection in 2003, claiming $145,075 in personal assets, including his $125,000 home, and reporting $177,766.72 in debts. According to the filing, Hussain owed, among other debts, $18,377.72 to the Albany County Treasurer and $30,000 to HSBC Bank. Through the bankruptcy court, Hussain delayed payment to his creditors and negotiated lower settlement amounts for some of the debts.

But the FBI informant never told the bankruptcy court about some substantial assets he had, including an expensive Mercedes he said his family had been given by an old friend, former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and $500,000 in a trust fund in Pakistan.
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While in bankruptcy reorganization, Hussain transferred the money from Pakistan to the United States and, in an apparent effort to hide his connection to the money, deposited the cash in a bank account in his son's name.
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Hussain then used some of that money to purchase and fix up a run-down hotel near Saratoga Springs, New York. He listed the hotel—originally called the Hideaway Motel but renamed the Crest Inn Suites and Cottages—in his wife's name.
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Hussain's actions as a hotelier were reportedly as dishonest as his dealings as an FBI snitch, as three would-be guests sued him for fraudulent misrepresentation after they prepaid for hotel rooms that were not available upon arrival.
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In addition, the reviews the hotel
has received on TripAdvisor are poor, with two guests claiming to have been cheated while staying there.

But none of this crooked activity seemed to matter to the FBI, which made Hussain a paid informant after the Aref case. In all, Hussain spent four and a half years serving FBI agents in and around Albany, receiving $60,000 in expenses and working off his criminal charges related to the DMV scam. Staying on with the Bureau was Hussain's preference, as well. “I liked to work with the FBI,” he said.
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