The Terror Factory (19 page)

At 2:05 p.m., dressed in a pressed suit and tie, Alanssi walked up to the White House's northwest guardhouse on Pennsylvania Avenue and asked to have a note delivered to President George W. Bush. The guards turned him away. Alanssi, who was soaked in gasoline, then pulled out a lighter and ignited his clothing. Secret Service agents wrestled him to the ground and put out the flames with an extinguisher. Alanssi wound up with burns over 30 percent of his body.

Alanssi's self-immolation made the front page of the
Washington Post
and received extensive coverage on cable news and in the world media. As a result of the publicity, prosecutors didn't want to call him as a witness in the trial of al-Moayad, forcing defense lawyers to bring him to court instead, where he wore a flesh-colored glove on his right hand to cover up the burn wounds.
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The sour ending to the government's relationship with Alanssi had no effect on the FBI's continued use of terrorism informants with questionable backgrounds. Following Alanssi's dramatic exit from its informant ranks, the Bureau began to bring in informants with even more checkered pasts. While Alanssi had left a trail of debts and unanswered questions about what he'd done to be fired twice from his job at the U.S. Embassy in Yemen, this new crop of terrorism informants included fraud artists, drug dealers, thieves, and gunmen. Shahed Hussain, an accused murderer and con man, was among them.

At the beginning of 2006, the FBI became so desperate to infiltrate what agents believed was a terrorist cell in the suburbs of Philadelphia that they freed one Muslim from probation and released another from jail just to use as informants.

The story of that case began in New Jersey on January 31, 2006, when Mohamed Shnewer dropped off a homemade video to a Circuit City store in Mount Laurel in order to have it converted to a DVD. The FBI had never heard of Shnewer, but that afternoon, Brian Morgenstern, a clerk at Circuit City, called federal authorities and explained that a video he was converting contained “disturbing” images.
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In the video, recorded on January 3, 2006, ten men in their twenties, wearing camouflage and fatigues, fired rifles in a wooded area in
Pennsylvania. As they fired, they shouted, “
Allahu Akbar!
” or “God is great!” In addition to Shnewer, the men in the video included Dritan, Shain, and Eljvir Duka—brothers and illegal immigrants—and Serdar Tatar. Shnewer was Eljvir's brother-in-law.

The video prompted the FBI to start an investigation through the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and the Bureau turned to two hardened criminals to infiltrate the group as informants. The primary informant, Mahmoud Omar, had entered the United States illegally and was on probation for bank fraud when the FBI approached him. The other informant, Besnik Bakalli, was in a Pennsylvania jail cell awaiting deportation to Albania, where he was wanted for a shooting.

In March 2006, Omar, who claimed to have served in the Egyptian military, befriended Shnewer, an overweight, socially awkward twenty-year-old with an interest in jihadi videos. At the same time, Bakalli began spending time with some of Shnewer's associates, including Eljvir Duka. Four months later, on July 28, 2006, the FBI got its first break in the case when Serdar Tatar, whose family owned a pizza shop near the Fort Dix army base in New Jersey, asked Omar if he could fix a problem with his car. The informant took the vehicle to law enforcement officials, who found a fifty-round box of nine-millimeter ammunition in the car. Following this, Omar began to wear a wire, and on August 1, 2006, Shnewer was recorded telling the informant that he, Tatar, and the three Duka brothers were part of a group planning to attack the Fort Dix army base. He explained that they wanted to gather as many as seven men to kill at least one hundred soldiers using rocket-propelled grenades. They'd been training for the attack, Shnewer told the informant, and had a good reason for choosing Fort Dix as their target. “Why
did I choose Fort Dix? Because I know that Serdar knows it like the palm of his hand,” Shnewer said—a reference to Tatar's familiarity with the base from delivering pizzas there.
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Shnewer asked Omar, the informant, to lead the attack, since he said he had military experience in Egypt.

Four days later, on August 5, Shnewer and Omar discussed tactics. “Maybe it's easy to hit them at night,” Shnewer wondered. On August 11, Shnewer and Omar drove to Fort Dix to scope out the base. Shnewer liked what he saw. “This is exactly what we are looking for,” he said. “You hit four, five, six Humvees and light the whole place up and retreat completely without any losses.” Shnewer also told the informant he had a Serbian sniper from Kosovo—a man named Agron Abdullahu—who would help with the attack. While Shnewer and Omar were planning the attack, Bakalli, the second informant, was getting closer to the other members of the group.

However, a few months later, on November 15, 2006, the entire sting almost unraveled when Tatar—the one who supposedly knew his way around Fort Dix—called the Philadelphia Police Department. He explained how he'd been approached by Omar, and was worried that he was being set up in a terrorist plot. But Tatar never followed up with the police, and in the end chose not to back out of the plot. Even as he feared Omar was an informant or law enforcement officer, Tatar told him, “I'm gonna do it. Whether or not you are FBI, I'm gonna do it. Know why? It doesn't matter to me whether I get locked up, arrested . … I'm doing it in the name of Allah.” He then handed Omar a map of Fort Dix, which Omar promptly turned over to FBI agents.

On January 19, 2007, the Dukas told Besnik Bakalli that they had a nine-millimeter handgun, an assault rifle, and a
semiautomatic assault weapon, all of which they claimed to have gotten from Agron Abdullahu, the reported Serbian sniper. The group then made another trip to the Pennsylvania woods in February 2007 to fire semiautomatic rifles and shotguns. Later that month, Dritan Duka invited Omar to play paintball with them and asked if he knew how they could buy AK-47 assault rifles. On March 28, Omar provided a list of weapons and prices from his purported arms source. Shnewer said the pricing was “very good.” Dritan Duka suggested that the better armed they were, the lower their chances of being caught, saying: “All the AKs, the M16s, and all the handguns . . . . I just want to be safe, brother . . . . I got five kids, so I don't wanna go down. People catch me, like, they think I'm a terrorist.”

But if the Fort Dix Five, as the media would later dub them, were terrorists, they were coerced ones—pushed along by criminals who had personal interests in their prosecution. In several conversations, members of the group made comments that suggested they never intended to become violent. For example, one of the Duka cousins told Omar: “We are good the way we are. We are not going to kill anyone.” A few days after that comment, when Omar tried to goad the group on by bringing up the story of an Ohio man who had been training with terrorists, Dritan Duka responded by saying that in the hysteria following 9/11, Muslims could be arrested just for talking, even if they didn't mean what they said. He likened it to their situation—how they were just bullshitting about an attack on Fort Dix. Similarly, following the paintball outing in February 2007, Bakalli asked the Duka cousins what they thought jihad meant. It didn't mean violence, they told him; it was a personal struggle against one's self and a struggle to live a good life. Less than a month after
that statement, the FBI arrested the five men, charging them with attempted murder and conspiracy to commit murder. All five pleaded not guilty and went to trial.

In his opening remarks at the trial, Assistant U.S. Attorney William Fitzpatrick told the jury: “Their inspiration was Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden. Their intention was to attack the U.S.” The prosecution then played undercover recordings and the jihadi videos the Fort Dix Five had watched, trying to portray the New Jersey men as dangerous terrorists. Evan Kohlmann, the young terrorism expert with questionable credentials, served as a witness for the prosecution, telling the jury that the videos the defendants had watched were “some of the classics put out by [Al Qaeda].”
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The defense, in turn, attacked the credibility of the two paid informants—both of whom had money and freedom riding on a successful prosecution—and tried to minimize the videos by describing their viewing as nothing more than immature chest-thumping by the men. But the key to the whole case—and the key to other successful terrorism sting prosecutions since then—was the fact that the prosecution didn't need to prove that the Fort Dix Five
would
have carried out their attack plans. The conspiracy—that the men so much as talked about it and planned for it—was all prosecutors needed to prove them guilty of conspiracy to murder U.S. officials. In his closing remarks, Fitzpatrick emphasized this to the jury: “We don't even have to prove that they intended to kill [soldiers] in the United States . … As long as the conspiracy exists, and as long as within New Jersey at least one overt act occurs, it doesn't matter if the object of the conspiracy was to kill a soldier in Delaware, or in Pennsylvania, or in Iraq, or in Afghanistan. The conspiracy is the charge. The conspiracy is the heart and soul.”
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The jury agreed, convicting the Fort Dix Five of conspiracy to commit murder, though it acquitted them of the charge of attempted murder. The three Duka cousins and Shnewer received life sentences, while Tatar received thirty-three years. Agron Abdullahu, the reported Serbian sniper who was only peripherally connected to the plot, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to provide firearms, for selling guns to the Dukas. He received twenty months in prison. For a successful prosecution, the two informants, Mahmoud Omar and Besnik Bakalli, freed from probation and jail respectively to serve the government, were paid performance incentives whose amounts have never been disclosed.

By training and firing weapons in the woods of Pennsylvania, the Fort Dix Five demonstrated capacity for violence—even if the evidence made public at their trial suggested they were just a bunch of young guys full of bluster—thus making the FBI's infiltration of the group by informants at least somewhat understandable. In many other terrorism stings, however, while the target hasn't demonstrated the slightest inclination toward criminal behavior, the informant who leads the plot has a long and violent criminal history.

A good example of this occurred in Rockford, Illinois. Working at a video game store, Derrick Shareef was twenty-two years old, broke, and didn't have a place to live when an FBI informant approached him in September 2006, offering the use of a car, a place to live, and free meals. It was the day before Ramadan, and Shareef, who'd been ostracized by his family since converting to Islam at the age of fifteen, saw the offer as an act of God. The informant, whose name has never been revealed, had been convicted of armed robbery in 1991 and possession of a stolen vehicle in 1997, as well as being a
former member of the Four Corner Hustlers, a mostly black street gang known for its brutality on Chicago's West Side.
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While they lived together, the informant and Shareef discussed what they believed were injustices in the Muslim community. Their conversations turned to conspiracy and violence, with the two deciding to plot an attack in the United States—a demonstration, they told each other, that would shake the American people. On November 26, 2006, Shareef told the informant he wanted to attack “some type of City Hall type stuff right now, federal courthouses.” The informant asked Shareef how he intended to pull off such an attack. “You go in there and you clock the first three niggers at the door—everything else is gonna have to be tactical,” Shareef said, as if he had experience in combat tactics, adding: “I just want to smoke a judge.”
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The informant told Shareef that he knew an arms dealer, and if Shareef was interested in purchasing weapons for an attack, he could arrange a meeting. The informant also recommended that they target a shopping mall. “We gotta look at it this way,” he told Shareef. “We want to disrupt Christmas.” This idea excited Shareef, and the informant said that they should purchase grenades for the attack. Shareef agreed. The informant then stressed that he was “down” for the attack. “I swear by Allah, man, I'm down for it too,” Shareef told the informant. “I'm down to live for the cause and die for the cause, man.”

Later, the informant told Shareef that he had ordered eleven “pineapples”—their code word for grenades—“at fifty bucks a pop.” Since Shareef had no idea how to use a grenade, the informant had to give him a tutorial, explaining how to detonate one and how the timing mechanism worked. They then prepared for the shopping mall attack, creating video
statements on December 2, 2006. While Shareef was so eager for the attack that he kept assuring the informant of his commitment, he also made it clear that he couldn't have hatched the plot without the informant's help. “I'm ready, man,” he said. “I probably would have eventually ended up just stabbing the shit outta some Jews or something. Just stabbing them niggers with a steak knife.”

Though the informant had brought Shareef along in the plot, the case was still weak. While the FBI had the makings of a conspiracy charge, since Shareef and the informant had discussed an attack, Shareef still hadn't participated in a overt act to further the conspiracy. He hadn't done any surveillance, and nothing he had done suggested he was ready to take the plot beyond talk. To get things moving, the FBI instructed the informant to suggest to Shareef that he purchase some grenades. However, Shareef didn't have any money. In fact, the only thing he had of value was a set of stereo speakers worth about one hundred dollars. The informant told Shareef that he could broker a trade with the arms dealer—the speakers in exchange for grenades and a nine-millimeter handgun. “I think what he gonna do is just take the speakers and say, ‘Even,'” the informant said. While the claim was ridiculous—no arms dealer would accept used stereo speakers in exchange for black-market weapons—Shareef, evidencing his gullibility, never questioned it. The informant then put Shareef in touch with his arms dealer friend, who was an undercover FBI agent.