Intel Wars (28 page)

A former FBI special agent who specialized in counterterrorism work, who is now an attorney in private practice in New York City, said of this episode, “I lie awake at night thinking about the hundreds of guys I got tossed out of this country. I honestly don't know if I did the right thing … At the time I did. I thought I was protecting America. Now I'm not so sure.”

Many Muslim Americans still ruminate on this episode. An official with a Muslim American political advocacy organization in Washington who wishes to remain anonymous said, “We were sleepwalking before 9/11. The way we were treated after 9/11 led some of my brothers to think that they would always be treated as second-class citizens in their own country, feared and watched. We had become ‘the usual suspects.'”

What few Americans realize is that the discovery of so few al Qaeda sleeper cells in the U.S. after 9/11 led to a split within the U.S. intelligence community that still has not resolved itself. The intelligence analysts in Washington concluded that the discovery of no sleeper cells meant that the nearly 3 million Muslim Americans had rejected al Qaeda's extremist political and religious views. With few modifications, this has remained the consensus opinion of the intelligence community ever since.
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But officials with America's lead agency responsible for investigating domestic terrorist acts and threats, the FBI, disagreed with this view and concluded that the internal threat was potentially more dire than what the intelligence professionals believed, taking the position that America's Muslim population represented a huge potential recruiting base for al Qaeda and other Muslim terrorist organizations that needed close scrutiny.

So since early 2002, the FBI, with the concurrence of the Department of Justice, has been engaged in a large-scale effort to monitor those Muslim American groups or individuals the bureau believes might be inclined to give aid or comfort to al Qaeda or other foreign terrorist groups.

To get a sense of how extensive the FBI's counterterrorism efforts are, consider that an estimated 10,000 FBI special agents, intelligence analysts and reporters, and technical surveillance operators are doing nothing else but working on active counterterrorism investigations, accounting for almost 40 percent of the bureau's annual budget.

Virtually every one of the FBI's fifty-six field offices and fifty resident offices across the United States has been involved in these counterterrorism operations to one degree or another. Every FBI office has its own Joint Terrorism Task Force, which coordinates all bureau counterterrorism operations in its jurisdiction. Even the FBI's tiny field office in Helena, Montana, population 29,000, has its own terrorism task force despite the fact that virtually no Muslims live in the state and there has not been a serious terrorism-related incident in the state in almost forty years, with the exception of Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, the so-called Unabomber, who killed three people and wounded twenty-three others with mail bombs sent between 1978 and 1995 from his cabin outside Lincoln.

The FBI has also brought to bear a vast array of technical surveillance assets to covertly monitor those groups or individuals the bureau suspected of having some involvement with terrorism. The FBI's Operational Technology Division at Quantico, Virginia, intercepts targets' telephone calls, e-mails, and text messages; the National Security Agency monitors their international e-mails and phone calls.

Twenty-five miles southwest of downtown Washington, D.C., is the city of Manassas, Virginia, best known for being the site of the first and second Battles of Bull Run during the Civil War. Three miles south of the city is the Manassas Regional Airport, where on the north end of the field the FBI secretly operates a hangar complex. The sign outside identifies the occupant as a company which according to FAA data is the owner of record of ten Huey helicopters. Research at the Delaware Corporations Division revealed that the company is, in fact, an FBI front company, incorporated in Delaware in September 2000 for the purpose of providing operational cover for the FBI's surveillance flight operations at the Manassas Regional Airport.

According to flight data provided in 2010 by two amateur ham radio operators who live in the Washington metropolitan area, Manassas is the principal staging point for all FBI aerial surveillance missions over the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Since 2009, the ham radio operators have noted ten different FBI Cessna surveillance aircraft flying operational surveillance missions over Washington from Manassas. FBI helicopter surveillance flights over D.C. are flown from Davison Army Airfield at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. The flight-tracking logs of the amateur radio monitors show that twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, weather permitting, FBI aircraft and helicopters equipped with the latest electro-optical, infrared, and video imaging cameras, and some of the most modern electronic surveillance equipment available, are in the air over Washington, D.C., and its surrounding suburbs.

No one seems to know for sure what the FBI is looking for on the streets and rooftops of the nation's capital every day of the week. Congressional sources confirm that these aircraft are being paid for with money appropriated by Congress specifically for counterterrorism purposes, but no official interviewed knew of any domestic terrorist threat lurking among the townhouses and upscale apartment buildings of downtown Washington that warranted this kind of 24/7 surveillance coverage by the bureau. As is so often the case, nobody on Capitol Hill seems to have performed any oversight of these surveillance activities, much less asked whether there were indeed al Qaeda terrorists walking the sidewalks of Connecticut Avenue or sitting on park benches in downtown Washington that could only be monitored by the FBI from the air.

All across America, over the past decade the FBI joint terrorism task forces have quietly been keeping close tabs on a number of Muslim political and religious organizations looking for the slightest sign of trouble. Since 9/11, the FBI has narrowed its domestic terrorism watch lists down to a relatively small number of individuals who remain under full-time surveillance to this day. According to two former FBI intelligence analysts, as of early 2009 the FBI had active case files open on several hundred individuals in the United States, including almost two dozen imams and Muslim American community leaders, all of whom were under near fulltime surveillance by the bureau.

The FBI's domestic surveillance efforts were quietly stepped up after Faisal Shahzad's failed attempt to detonate a bomb in Times Square on May 1, 2010. The abortive Times Square bombing led a number of senior FBI officials to conclude that the next terrorist threat was not al Qaeda but rather Muslim Americans like Shahzad, who were already living here in America, working normal nine-to-five jobs, biding their time, waiting for someone or something to trigger them into action. New names were added to the FBI's domestic terrorism watch lists, and investigative efforts were intensified on those individuals already suspected of ties to terrorism.

The number of these watch lists and the names on them has continued to increase in recent years. Today, nobody seems to know for certain how many of these watch lists actually exist, whose names are on them, or, more important, how these names got put on the lists in the first place. In short, there is no way of knowing who is being monitored or why.

Take for example the case of Yasir Afifi, a twenty-year-old marketing major at a community college in San Jose, California, who in October 2010 discovered while getting an oil change at a local garage that someone had hidden a GPS tracking device behind the rear exhaust of his car. One of Afifi's friends posted photographs of the device on the Web site Reddit. Two days later armed FBI agents wearing full body armor turned up at his apartment in San Jose and demanded the device back.

From the evidence available, it would appear that Afifi had done nothing wrong. Rather, the whole matter seems to be a case of guilt by association. In a lawsuit filed on March 2, 2011, by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Afifi's lawyers alleged that he was placed under surveillance by the FBI because he traveled frequently to the Middle East and made numerous phone calls to Egypt, where two of his brothers and other family members still lived. In other words, he may have been put on an FBI watch list for no other reason than that his travel and telephone calls to Egypt led someone at the bureau to conclude that he fit the profile of a potential terrorist. Not surprisingly, the FBI refused to comment on the case.

Once someone ends up on one of the FBI's terrorism or counterintelligence watch lists, it is nearly impossible to get the person's name removed. According to a former FBI intelligence official, “Getting on a watch list is easy. All it takes is a single report, and a file is instantly opened and your name goes on one of these lists. But getting off the list is impossible. It's like proving a negative … There is no way that the bureau can prove that the individual is not a bad guy!”

A personal example will suffice to explain the nature of the problem. Shortly after 9/11, I gave a speech at a historical conference. After the speech was over, a man came over and asked a few pointed questions about the book I was writing at the time about the history of the National Security Agency, then gave me his business card before disappearing just as quickly as he had come. The business card identified him as a researcher with a conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), giving both a telephone and fax number for him at AEI's Washington, D.C., headquarters. Only later did I learn from a fellow intelligence historian that he was, in fact, a counterintelligence officer with the National Security Agency. And his office was not at AEI in Washington, but rather at NSA's headquarters at Fort George G. Meade, Maryland, forty miles north of Washington, D.C.

At the time, it did not bother me that someone from NSA's Counterintelligence Division was checking up on what I was saying about the agency or the status of my book. I may have even found the encounter somewhat humorous, and the use of AEI as an operational cover by an NSA counterintelligence operative a bit over the top. But over time, I have often found myself wondering if the encounter was not as innocent as it sounds; if somehow I had ended up on somebody's computerized watch list. And if so, why?

Since 9/11, most of the FBI's counterterrorism surveillance efforts have centered on those major urban areas with large Muslim populations, such as New York City, Los Angeles, Detroit, Chicago, Miami, Dallas, Houston, and northern Virginia. The huge Joint Terrorism Task Force in the FBI's New York field office in downtown Manhattan has been quietly keeping tabs on a number of mosques, Muslim American political and community activist groups, and charitable organizations in New York City to ensure that they are not being used as recruiting grounds or logistical support centers for terrorists. The bureau's Detroit field office has been quietly monitoring a small number of community and religious leaders in the huge 600,000-person Muslim community in Dearborn, Michigan.

The FBI's Minneapolis–St. Paul field office has since 2007 been closely monitoring the large community of Somalis living in the area after it was discovered that twenty young Somali Americans had secretly gone to Somalia to fight with the al Qaeda–affiliated terrorist group al Shabaab. According to a senior Minnesota law enforcement official, the Abubakar as-Saddique Mosque in Minneapolis has been under surveillance by the FBI since 2009 because some of its members facilitated the travel of the Somali American teenagers to Somalia.

The bureau's Washington field office is still keeping close tabs on the activities of a number of Muslim national political activist organizations and charities based in the nation's capital. One long-standing target has been the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the leading Muslim American political activist organization, because of allegations that it has been a front organization for the Palestinian terrorist organization Hamas.

One senior official with a D.C.-based Muslim American charitable organization recalled that in the months after 9/11, a black panel van with Virginia license plates was permanently parked near his suburban Washington home, even on holidays. None of his neighbors ever saw anyone get in or out of the vehicle, and the van's windows were tinted so that no one could see inside. When he woke up in the morning, he often found that overnight the van had changed its parking place but was still located within shouting distance of his home.

The FBI has tacitly admitted that its agents are currently conducting surveillance inside a number of mosques in the United States. However, according to an FBI spokesman, these surveillance operations only target specific individuals who are members of the mosque congregation, not the mosques as a whole. A play on words perhaps, but an important distinction since the FBI's senior leadership knows that this issue is politically explosive, as evidenced by the huge political battle taking place in New York City over plans to build a mosque near Ground Zero in Lower Manhattan.

When it comes to trying to find al Qaeda adherents hiding among the congregations at the more than 1,200 mosques in the United States, the FBI has focused its surveillance efforts on a relatively small number of mosques whose imams were known to have advocated at one time or another a more militant or extremist interpretation of the Koran than their more mainstream counterparts.

One of the radical imams that the FBI closely monitored in the months after 9/11 was Anwar al-Awlaki, then the thirty-one-year-old imam of the Dar al-Hijrah Mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, which two of the 9/11 hijackers briefly attended before the terrorist attacks.

Born in Las Cruces, New Mexico, in April 1971, al-Awlaki has a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from Colorado State University and a graduate degree in educational leadership from San Diego State University. According to law enforcement officials, al-Awlaki became radicalized after graduating from San Diego State. While preaching at the Masjid Ar-Ribat al-Islami Mosque in San Diego, California, from 1996 to 2000, he quickly attracted the attention of the FBI for his fiery sermons that came perilously close to calling for jihad.