The Terror Factory (24 page)

Just as the FBI and the Justice Department used sting operations and conviction numbers to demonstrate to Congress and the American public that federal law enforcement was winning the war on drugs in the 1980s and 1990s, agents and prosecutors today use terrorism stings to demonstrate the same about the war on terrorism. But the major difference—something that Holder and top officials at the Justice Department and FBI won't acknowledge—is that while decades of data suggests that someone interested in obtaining drugs will be able to buy drugs even if not caught in a government sting, no data supports the assumption that a
would-be terrorist would find the means to commit a terrorist act if not preempted by an FBI sting. To date, there has not been a single would-be terrorist in the United States who has become operational through a chance meeting with someone able to provide the means for a terrorist attack. In addition, no evidence suggests that Al Qaeda-affiliated operatives are within the United States today, willing and able to provide weapons to terrorist wannabes. In truth, the only people providing these means are undercover FBI agents and their informants, who help create the terrorists the Bureau is given more than $3 billion every year to catch.

Michael German, who spent sixteen years with the FBI infiltrating white supremacist groups, told me that funding is among the clearest predictors of results in the FBI. Simply put, if you spend more money in a specific area, you'll get more results in that area. But that doesn't necessarily mean that the area you're focusing on was a problem in the first place. Now a senior policy counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, German said the culture of the FBI is results-driven, so no matter the assignment, FBI agents can't come up empty. “You have an enormous amount of pressure to do something,” German told me. “If you are the terrorism agent in a benign Midwestern city, and there is no terrorism problem, you don't get to say, ‘There's no terrorism problem here.' You still have to have informants and produce some evidence you're doing something.” While FBI and Justice Department officials won't concede this point, some rank-and-file agents do. Several have told me off the record that chasing terrorists is like chasing ghosts—you'll only see them if you're willing to let your eyes play tricks on you. This is something that active agents won't talk about on the record for fear of retribution, while most retired agents, with German and James Wedick among the
few exceptions, remain silent due to a concern about burning bridges with former colleagues.

In the fall of 2011, however, we were offered a rare glimpse into an active agent's criticism of the FBI's focus on terrorism. A twenty-year Midwestern veteran of the Bureau retired, and on September 30, 2011, she sent an email to ten colleagues with the subject line “It'll never make the Investigator,” referring to the FBI's internal magazine for employees.
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The email itself was blank, but there was a Word document attached to it titled “Instigator.” The agent who sent the email asked me not to reveal her name or the names of the email's recipients, but in the Word document, she described how the FBI had become “reborn as the red-headed stepchild of the intelligence community”:

This email was forwarded around the Bureau. One agent wrote: “Gentleman, she said it better than I could/can/ will.” Inherent in the criticism is the belief that, as a result of focusing billions of dollars on terrorism, the FBI is missing other criminals who represent greater threats to the United
States than lone wolves with big mouths and inert bombs provided by informants. Just as the FBI's executives are under pressure from Congress and the White House to show that the Bureau is combating terrorism, field supervisors are under pressure from those executives, and in turn these supervisors pressure agents to develop sources and cases related to national security—not public corruption, money laundering, organized crime, and other traditional areas of investigation for the FBI.

This is a bureaucratic phenomenon more than anything. Since terrorism represents the FBI's best-funded area, agents bring in terrorism cases, as if on automatic pilot. Along these lines, if tomorrow the Bureau dedicated half of its resources to, say, Wyoming, the least populous state in the union would suddenly become a hotbed for crime and public corruption. Yet all the FBI agents stuck in Cheyenne and Casper would send out emails complaining about having to search for imaginary crooks in Wyoming when they're sitting on great tips about organized crime and public corruption in New York and Los Angeles.

But just as you'd expect FBI officials to have a sense of the level of crime and corruption in Wyoming—and realize that spending billions in the Cowboy State would be a colossal waste of federal law enforcement resources—you would think that the Bureau had at least preliminary information before 9/11 that suggested how supportive U.S. Muslim communities would be of foreign terrorist organizations and whether these communities were likely to harbor terrorists.

Retired FBI veteran Myron Fuller believes that none of the pre-9/11 intelligence suggested that Muslims in the United States were connected to international terrorist organizations or were supporting terrorists overseas, but that the Bureau chose to assume that that information was incorrect in
the wake of the devastating terrorist attacks. In the late 1990s, Fuller was in charge of 200 FBI employees in 46 countries in Asia, including in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where he and his team uncovered information about Islamic militants who, intelligence suggested, were planning attacks in Europe. But his reports to the FBI's Washington headquarters, like those from pre-9/11 counterterrorism section chief John O'Neill, fell on deaf ears, and nothing came of his investigations, which Fuller thinks might have led to the 9/11 attackers had the FBI and CIA been willing to support his efforts.

Fuller retired from the Bureau just before 9/11 and now lives in Honolulu, where he's watched with a critical eye the evolution of the FBI's counterterrorism program. He said that the billions of dollars allocated to terrorism have forced the FBI to assume that a danger exists in communities where intelligence indicates no threat is present, and sting cases are simply the Bureau's way of justifying how it's spending all the money it receives for counterterrorism. Fuller is certainly in a position to know about this, since one of his responsibilities for the FBI in Asia was researching links between U.S. Muslim communities and international terrorist organizations. “We've been observing Muslim communities in the United States for thirty, forty years,” Fuller told me when I talked to him a few months before the tenth anniversary of 9/11. “Until the '90s nothing developed from those operations that caused people to say we've got a threat here.” Then came the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. “Thereafter, we were taking a little bit stronger look at Muslim communities. Yet no one came out of that harder look. No match or link whatsoever from observing the people who lived in places like Dearborn, Michigan. Nothing ever came out of Dearborn or anywhere else that was remotely connected to the
people who did what they did in 1993, or any of the attacks up to and including 9/11.” Fuller added: “It's always been my argument that Muslim communities in the United States haven't been supporting terrorism or sheltering terrorists in any significant way. The response to 9/11 was to use a nuclear weapon to kill a gnat. People suddenly thought that if you're a Muslim, you're either a terrorist or a terrorist sympathizer.”

With $3 billion directed at counterterrorism, the FBI can't come back to Congress and say, “We spent all the money, and the good news is that we didn't find any terrorists.” Having a well-financed counterterrorism program means that the FBI must find terrorists to justify the program's existence, and terrorism sting operations provide a convenient and efficient means to show that a threat exists. However, the fact that there haven't been any terrorists who have been active members of U.S. Muslim communities, outside of those lured into stings, supports the assumption of former FBI agents like Myron Fuller that there aren't capable terrorists in those communities.

In using sting operations to pin up a “Mission Accomplished” banner in the war on terrorism, the FBI has had a powerful, if naïve, ally—the news media. Whenever the FBI announces a new terrorism sting, the media turns up the fear dial a notch, making it easy for the Bureau to demonstrate how it is ferreting out terrorists within the United States. For example, on September 25, 2009, ABC's
Good Morning America
woke up Americans with news that the FBI had apprehended a man who tried to set off a car bomb in the garage of Fountain Place, a sixty-story late modernist skyscraper in downtown Dallas. “The thousands of people inside the sixty-story skyscraper in downtown Dallas did not know it yesterday, but the
FBI says a man was outside, trying to kill as many of them as he could,” reporter Pierre Thomas told television viewers that morning. “According to authorities, Hosam Smadi, an illegal immigrant from Jordan who had declared his love for Osama bin Laden, parked what he thought was a powerful car bomb in the tower's basement, his goal to, quote, ‘bring down the building.' The FBI says Smadi eagerly dialed a cell phone to trigger the blast by remote.”

The program then cut to a woman identified as Smadi's friend. “He babysat our kids. He, you know, if anybody needed anything, he was always there,” she said. The show then went back to Thomas, who continued: “It was a sting. The explosives were fake. Smadi had been set up by the FBI, who learned of his alleged call for jihad on the Internet last March. The Bureau then laid a trap, introducing Smadi to a cell of operatives who were actually working for the FBI. His friends don't believe it.”
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As with most reporting on FBI terrorism sting operations, everything in the Smadi story was front-loaded, with the media distributing unchallenged the government's narrative that Smadi was a dangerous terrorist, reinforcing the perception that a threat is out there and a terrorist could strike at any time. But what came out later in the Smadi case, well after the story was off the national broadcasts, was that the so-called terrorist was a twenty-year-old kid whom the FBI had discovered mouthing off on an online chat room for Muslim extremists. When Smadi first met with an undercover FBI agent as part of the sting, he wasn't interested in attacking the United States at all, but instead wanted to fight with the Taliban in Pakistan. Bombing a local target was actually the undercover agent's idea, and the FBI provided the fake bomb, the cell phone that was supposed to
trigger that bomb, and everything else Smadi needed for the attack.
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Viewers of
Good Morning America
on September 25, 2009, were left with the thought that the FBI had saved them from a would-be terrorist, when the truth was that the FBI had turned an angry young man caught ranting online into someone seemingly capable of causing mass destruction.

Nearly a year later, the media again offered unchallenged the government's view when the FBI and the Justice Department announced the arrest of Farooque Ahmed, a thirty-four-year-old Pakistani-born computer engineer who had plotted with undercover FBI agents to bomb the Metro system in Washington, D.C. Ahmed had provided drawings and information about Metro stations to people he believed were Al Qaeda operatives.
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The bust made national news, once again fueling the perception that there were dangerous and capable terrorists in the United States. However, authorities were forced to admit that the public was never in any actual danger during the Ahmed sting. In a press conference for the Washington, D.C., news media, Michael Tabor, chief of the Metro Transit Police Department, explained that the would-be terrorist never had any opportunity to terrorize anyone. “Now I want to make myself perfectly clear that at no time were any patrons, employees, facilities associated with the Washington Area Metropolitan Transit System in jeopardy,” Tabor said.
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Even when it comes to in-depth reporting, the traditional news media have been unwilling to cast a critical eye at terrorism sting operations. For an example of this, let's turn back again to the case of Antonio Martinez, the twenty-two-year-old Baltimore man who tried to bomb a military recruiting center. In January 2011,
Frontline
on PBS aired a collaborative story with the
Washington Post
documenting the enormous growth since 9/11 in the number of government contractors
involved in the surveillance of U.S. citizens for counterterrorism purposes and how this industry is kept largely secret from the general public. Toward the end of the twenty-one-minute segment,
Frontline
attempted to show that despite our growing surveillance state, the terrorism cases we've heard about weren't thwarted by privacy-invading technology. One of the examples the program used was Martinez, who initially came to the government's attention after a private citizen reported his Facebook rants to the FBI.
Frontline
used the Martinez case to show that, despite all the investments in surveillance technology, none of it was used to catch this apparent terrorist.

“I'm trying to think of any other technology that would have helped in this case,” reporter Dana Priest said in an interview with FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Richard McFeeley.

“This was good, old-fashioned police work by a lot of different police agencies coming together,” McFeeley responded.