The Terror Factory (20 page)

On December 4, 2006, the undercover agent and Shareef talked on the phone and agreed to meet at a store parking lot on Walton Road in Rockford, where the deal went just as the informant said it would. Shareef handed over the speakers, and the undercover FBI agent gave him a box containing
four inert grenades and a nine-millimeter handgun. FBI agents immediately arrested Shareef, who pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. At the age of twenty-three, he was sentenced to thirty-five years in prison.

Since Shareef never went to trial, the identity of the informant and his motives for serving the government weren't revealed. But available court records suggest that the informant would have been a problematic one for the FBI had he needed to testify. In addition to the convictions for armed robbery and car theft, the informant owed $16,000 in child support—which was the exact amount the FBI paid him for his role in the terrorism sting—demonstrating his financial interest in seeing Shareef sent to prison. The conviction the criminal-turned-informant helped the FBI secure was Shareef's first; as a matter of fact, aside from a traffic violation for driving without insurance, it was the first time he had ever been charged with any kind of crime.
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In spite of their criminal pasts, no evidence indicates that the informants in the cases of either the Fort Dix Five or Derrick Shareef committed any crimes while working for the FBI. However, it is not unusual for informants with criminal backgrounds to revert to their illegal ways while employed by the Bureau. That's what happened in Decatur, Illinois, when an informant who had spent time in prison on drug charges met a man named Michael Finton.

Finton was a white man in his twenties who went by the name Talib Islam, which he adopted after converting to Islam while in prison for robbery. During his probation, Finton failed to notify his parole officer of an address change. The parole violation prompted a routine search of his home and
car, and during the search, probation officers found Islamic writings and letters Finton had sent to John Walker Lindh, the American who went to prison for joining the Taliban after 9/11. Finton's bank records showed an incoming wire transfer from a man in Saudi Arabia named Asala Hussein Abiba. The officers also discovered evidence that Finton had gone to Saudi Arabia for a month in April 2008.

The suspicious probation officers turned this information over to the FBI, whose agents brought in an informant to get closer to Finton. “To my knowledge, the motive of the CHS to assist in this investigation is solely hope for monetary payment,” FBI Special Agent Trevor S. Stalets wrote in an affidavit, using the acronym for “confidential human source,” the FBI's term of art for informant.
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The confidential human source and Finton became fast friends, with Finton telling the informant he wanted to receive military training so that he could fight against Israel. He also told the informant about his trip to Saudi Arabia, which had been paid for by a sheikh he met on the Internet whose daughter he was now engaged to marry. On December 29, 2008, Finton explained to the informant that he wanted to “secure his place in paradise by becoming a mujahid.” The informant in turn told Finton he knew someone who could help, and Finton sent an introductory email to the informant's contact. Finton didn't know that the contact was an undercover FBI agent.

At the same time he was targeting Finton, the FBI informant was involved in criminal activity of his own—real crimes in this case, not imaginary plots. Sources told the FBI that the informant was dealing drugs while working for the government—information the Bureau could not confirm independently but which it viewed as credible enough to report it to the court in an affidavit. Yet the informant's alleged drug
slinging while on the government payroll wasn't enough for the FBI to call off the terrorism sting against Finton.

On May 6, 2009, the undercover FBI agent met Finton in a hotel in Collinsville, Illinois, eighty miles south of Springfield. There, the agent told Finton he was an Al Qaeda operative recruiting terrorists in the United States. Finton expressed his desire “to receive military-type training.” Over the next few weeks, Finton and the undercover agent discussed possible targets before settling on the Paul Findley Federal Building in Springfield, a gray, three-story limestone building that houses the U.S. courthouse and is named after a former congressman from Illinois.

Finton explored the building for reconnaissance. Deciding that a backpack bomb would not be suitable, he told his supposed terrorist friend that a car bomb would work best. The undercover FBI agent said Al Qaeda could provide a car bomb to be parked in front of the building. Finton then recorded a video. “Muslims would fight back to stop America at any cost,” he said, explaining that he was not bombing the building for financial gain but in the hopes that “the big bully Israel would not be there anymore.”
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At the same time he was moving forward in the plot, Finton also began to wonder if he was being set up—but he quickly reasoned away that concern, telling the informant that he didn't think law enforcement authorities were that smart.

On September 23, 2009, the informant drove Finton from Decatur to Springfield, where Finton met with the undercover FBI agent and picked up a van with an inert bomb in the back. The undercover agent showed Finton how to detonate the supposed bomb once the vehicle was in position. Finton then drove the van to the Paul Findley Federal Building and parked it in front. He got out of the vehicle, walked to a safe
distance, and dialed on his cell phone the number that he believed would detonate the bomb. Nothing happened, and FBI agents arrested him. Finton pleaded guilty to attempted murder and attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to twenty-eight years in prison. The drug-dealing informant was never identified in court records.

The Finton sting was not the only instance in which an informant had problems with drugs and the FBI chose to ignore them. In the case of Rezwan Ferdaus, a twenty-six-year-old living in a suburb outside Boston, the informant had a problem with heroin to which the Bureau turned a blind eye. As part of an FBI sting, Ferdaus, a bright young man who had graduated from Northeastern University with a degree in physics, met two people—one an informant, the other an FBI agent—who he believed were Al Qaeda operatives. The disgruntled Ferdaus told the agent and the informant he wanted to launch an attack against the United States. However, the idea he came up with—destroying the gold dome of the U.S. Capitol Building by using a remote-controlled model airplane loaded with grenades—seemed so out of touch with reality as to raise significant questions about his mental state.
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The informant in the case, a man known as Khalil, had difficulties of his own, including a heroin habit he hadn't told the FBI about. Khalil inadvertently revealed his drug problem to the Bureau when he showed up on a secret recording of another, unrelated case, buying heroin. Despite catching him on tape, the FBI didn't terminate Khalil from its informant ranks.

Khalil's heroin problem carried over to the Ferdaus case, where he was overheard on an undercover recording saying
he was sick and needed drugs. (He was also caught shoplifting while wearing an FBI wire, despite being paid $50,000 and being given the use of an apartment for his work as an informant.) As a result of that recording, Khalil's drug habit came up as an issue in a November 2011 pretrial hearing for Ferdaus.

“What steps did you take to ensure he wasn't using heroin?” Ferdaus's public defender, Miriam Conrad, asked FBI Special Agent John Woudenberg.

“He was much scrutinized,” Woudenberg said. “He was under the microscope.”

“Did you give him a drug test?”

“No,” Woudenberg admitted.
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Ferdaus pleaded guilty to attempting to damage and destroy a federal building by means of an explosive, and attempting to provide material support to terrorists and a terrorist organization.
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He received seventeen years in prison.

The FBI's search for would-be terrorists is so all-consuming that agents are willing to partner with the most heinous of criminals if they appear able to deliver targets. That's what happened in Seattle, Washington, in the summer of 2011, when agents chose to put on the government payroll a convicted rapist and child molester.

The investigation began on June 3, 2011, when a man contacted the Seattle Police Department and told them that he had a friend named Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif who was interested in attacking Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Tacoma, Washington. The tipster told police that Abdul-Latif had already recruited an associate, a man named Walli Mujahidh. Seattle police referred the caller to the FBI, whose agents quickly enlisted him as an informant and launched a full investigation of Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh.

Based on these initial actions, it was clear that the FBI believed it was dealing with two dangerous potential terrorists. But in reality, what it had were two financially troubled men with histories of mental problems. Abdul-Latif, whose birth name was Joseph Anthony Davis, had spent his teenage years huffing gasoline and once told a psychologist he heard voices and saw things that weren't there. When he was twenty-three, he tried to commit suicide by overdosing on pills intended to treat seizure disorders, later telling a psychologist that he “felt lonely and had no use to live.”
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His partner in the supposed terrorist plot, thirty-one-year-old Mujahidh, whose name was Frederick Domingue Jr. before his conversion to Islam, had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, which causes mood swings and abnormal thoughts.
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Dorothy Howard, who met Mujahidh through her daughter when they lived in Pomona, California, remembered him as sweet-natured but gullible, someone who was trying hard to get a handle on his mental problems but wasn't always successful. “Sometimes he would call me and say, ‘Mrs. Howard, I really need my medications. Can you take me to the clinic?'” Howard recalled. “Sometimes they would keep him three or four days.”
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The FBI's informant, whose name was not revealed, was the only source claiming that Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh were terrorists on the make. And the informant came with an outrageous story of his own. In addition to being a convicted rapist and child molester, according to government records, he had stolen thousands of dollars from Abdul-Latif in the past and had tried, but failed, to steal Abdul-Latif's wife as well.
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The state of Washington had also classified the informant as a high-risk sex offender, and while working for the FBI, he was caught sending sexual text messages in violation
of his parole—something he attempted to hide from agents by trying to delete the messages.
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Despite what were obvious problems with the investigation from the start, the FBI gave the informant recording equipment and instructed him to move forward with the sting.

As Abdul-Latif and the informant discussed possible targets—after growing concerned that attacking a military base would be too difficult, given the armed guards and fortification—it became clear that the Seattle man had no capacity to carry out a terrorist attack. In fact, Abdul-Latif had little capacity for anything, since he had only $800 to his name, and his only asset was a 1995 Honda Passport with 162,000 miles.
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In addition, his supposed accomplice, Mujahidh, was still in Southern California. But his friend, the informant, said he could provide everything they would need for the attack, including M13 assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades, and bulletproof vests.
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That Abdul-Latif didn't have much money and didn't know anyone who could provide him with weapons strongly suggested that the plot was nothing more than talk, and would have stayed that way had the FBI not gotten involved.

After scuttling the idea to attack Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Abdul-Latif and the informant settled on a plan to attack a Seattle processing station for incoming troops, where most of the people would be unarmed. “Imagine how many young Muslims, if we're successful, will try to hit these kinds of centers. Imagine how fearful America will be, and they'll know they can't push Muslims around,” Abdul-Latif said. On June 14, 2011, Abdul-Latif and the informant purchased a bus ticket for Mujahidh to travel to Seattle from Los Angeles. Needing to select a password that would allow Mujahidh
to pick up the ticket at the station, Abdul-Latif initially suggested “jihad.” He and the informant laughed about the password choice before Abdul-Latif decided on “OBL,” for Osama bin Laden.

A week later, Mujahidh arrived in Seattle, and the three men drove to a parking garage to inspect the weapons the informant had procured. Inside a duffel bag were three assault rifles. Mujahidh took hold of one of the guns, aimed, and pulled the trigger. Abdul-Latif inspected one of the other rifles. “This is an automatic?” he asked. The informant then showed him how to switch on the rifle's setting for automatic firing. At that point, FBI agents rushed into the garage and arrested Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh. The two men were charged with conspiracy to murder officers and agents of the United States, conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, and four firearms counts. The FBI paid the informant $90,000 for his work on the case.
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Michele Shaw was the public defender appointed to Mujahidh. When she first met him inside a jail in Seattle, she couldn't believe he was the man the government had portrayed as a dangerous terrorist. “He is the most compliant client I have ever worked with in my twenty-two years of practicing law and so appreciative of our weekly visits,” Shaw said. From the start, Shaw knew she had a mental health case on her hands, not a terrorist case. Mujahidh was easily susceptible to the informant, she believed, because he had a history of relying on others to help him separate fantasy from reality. But the judge in the case didn't agree. “Walli's mental health issues in my opinion are huge and looming large, but the court stated this week on the record that my client's mental health issues are a very tiny part of this case,” Shaw told me in October 2011. Unable to use mental health
in an entrapment defense, Shaw reluctantly recommended that Mujahidh plead guilty. He agreed, and was sentenced to twenty-seven to thirty-two years in prison. For his part, Abdul-Latif pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial. Had it not been for a rapist and child molester fishing for a payday, Abdul-Latif and Mujahidh would likely be today where they were in June 2011—two Americans you'd never hear about, trapped on the margins of a society to which they posed no threat.