Illustrations: Jeffrey Smith
James Cromitie was a man
of bluster and bigotry. He made up wild stories about his supposed
exploits, like the one about firing gas bombs into police precincts
using a flare gun, and he ranted about Jews. "The worst brother in the
whole Islamic world is better than 10 billion
Yahudi," he
once said.
A 45-year-old Walmart stocker who'd adopted the name Abdul Rahman
after converting to Islam during a prison stint for selling cocaine,
Cromitie had lots of worries—convincing his wife he wasn't sleeping
around, keeping up with the rent, finding a decent job despite his
felony record. But he dreamed of making his mark. He confided as much in
a middle-aged Pakistani he knew as Maqsood.
"I'm gonna run into something
real big," he'd say. "I just feel it, I'm telling you. I
feel it."
Maqsood and Cromitie had met at a mosque in Newburgh, a struggling
former Air Force town about an hour north of New York City. They struck
up a friendship, talking for hours about the world's problems and how
the Jews were to blame.
It was all talk until November 2008, when Maqsood pressed his new friend.
"Do you think you are a better recruiter or a better action man?"
Maqsood asked.
"I'm both," Cromitie bragged.
"My people would be very happy to know that, brother. Honestly."
"Who's your people?" Cromitie asked.
"Jaish-e-Mohammad."
Crunch the Numbers
We analyzed
the prosecutions of 508 alleged domestic terrorists. View them by
affiliation or state, or play with the full data set.
Maqsood said he was an agent for the Pakistani terror group, tasked
with assembling a team to wage jihad in the United States. He asked
Cromitie what he would attack if he had the means. A bridge, Cromitie
said.
"But bridges are too hard to be hit," Maqsood pleaded, "because they're made of steel."
"Of course they're made of steel," Cromitie replied. "But the same way they can be put up, they can be brought down."
Maqsood coaxed Cromitie toward a more realistic plan. The Mumbai
attacks were all over the news, and he pointed out how those gunmen
targeted hotels, cafés, and a Jewish community center.
"With your intelligence, I know you can manipulate someone," Cromitie told his friend. "But not me, because
I'm
intelligent." The pair settled on a plot to bomb synagogues in the
Bronx, and then fire Stinger missiles at airplanes taking off from
Stewart International Airport in the southern Hudson Valley. Maqsood
would provide all the explosives and weapons, even the vehicles. "We
have two missiles, okay?"
he offered. "Two Stingers, rocket missiles."
Maqsood was an undercover operative; that much was true. But not for Jaish-e-Mohammad. His real name was
Shahed Hussain, and he was a paid informant for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Ever since 9/11, counterterrorism has been the FBI's No. 1 priority,
consuming the lion's share of its budget—$3.3 billion, compared to $2.6
billion for organized crime—and much of the attention of field agents
and a massive, nationwide network of informants. After years of
emphasizing informant recruiting as a key task for its agents, the
bureau now maintains a roster of 15,000 spies—many of them tasked, as
Hussain was, with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States.
In addition, for every informant officially listed in the bureau's
records, there are as many as three unofficial ones, according to one
former high-level FBI official, known in bureau parlance as "hip
pockets."
The bureau now maintains a roster of 15,000
spies, some paid as much as $100,000 per case, many of them tasked with
infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States.
The informants could be doctors, clerks, imams. Some might not even
consider themselves informants. But the FBI regularly taps all of them
as part of a domestic intelligence apparatus whose only historical peer
might be
COINTELPRO,
the program the bureau ran from the '50s to the '70s to discredit and
marginalize organizations ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to civil-rights
and protest groups.
Throughout the FBI’s history, informant numbers have been closely
guarded secrets. Periodically, however, the bureau has released those
figures. A Senate oversight committee in 1975 found the FBI had
1,500 informants. In 1980, officials disclosed there were 2,800.
Six years later, following the FBI’s push into drugs and organized
crime, the number of bureau informants ballooned to 6,000, the Los Angeles Times reported in 1986. And according to the FBI, the number grew significantly
after 9/11. In its fiscal year 2008 budget authorization request, the FBI disclosed that it it had been been working under a November 2004 presidential directive demanding an increase in "human source development and management," and that it needed $12.7 million for a program to keep tabs on its spy network and create software to track and manage informants.
The bureau's strategy has changed significantly from the days when
officials feared another coordinated, internationally financed attack
from an Al Qaeda sleeper cell. Today, counterterrorism experts believe
groups like Al Qaeda, battered by the war in Afghanistan and the efforts
of the global intelligence community, have shifted to a franchise
model, using the internet to encourage sympathizers to carry out attacks
in their name. The main domestic threat, as the FBI sees it, is a lone
wolf.
The bureau's answer has been a strategy known variously as
"preemption," "prevention," and "disruption"—identifying and
neutralizing potential lone wolves before they move toward action. To
that end, FBI agents and informants target not just active jihadists,
but tens of thousands of law-abiding people, seeking to identify those
disgruntled few who might participate in a plot given the means and the
opportunity. And then, in case after case, the government provides the
plot, the means, and the opportunity.
Here's how it works: Informants report to their handlers on people
who have, say, made statements sympathizing with terrorists. Those names
are then cross-referenced with existing intelligence data, such as
immigration and criminal records. FBI agents may then assign an
undercover operative to approach the target by posing as a radical.
Sometimes the operative will propose a plot, provide explosives, even
lead the target in a fake oath to Al Qaeda. Once enough incriminating
information has been gathered, there's an arrest—and a
press conference announcing another foiled plot.
If this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because such sting operations are a fixture in the headlines. Remember the
Washington Metro bombing plot?
The New York subway plot? The guys who planned to blow up the
Sears Tower? The teenager seeking to bomb a
Portland Christmas tree lighting? Each of those plots, and dozens more across the nation, was led by an FBI asset.
Over the past year,
Mother Jones and the Investigative
Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkeley have examined
prosecutions of 508 defendants in terrorism-related cases, as defined
by the Department of Justice. Our investigation found:
- Nearly half the prosecutions involved the use of informants, many
of them incentivized by money (operatives can be paid as much as
$100,000 per assignment) or the need to work off criminal or immigration
violations. (For more on the details of those 508 cases, see our charts page and searchable database.)
- Sting operations resulted in prosecutions against 158 defendants.
Of that total, 49 defendants participated in plots led by an agent
provocateur—an FBI operative instigating terrorist action.
- With three exceptions, all of the high-profile domestic terror
plots of the last decade were actually FBI stings. (The exceptions are
Najibullah Zazi, who came close to bombing the New York City subway system in September 2009; Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian who opened fire on the El-Al ticket counter at the Los Angeles airport; and failed Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad.)
- In many sting cases, key encounters between the informant and the
target were not recorded—making it hard for defendants claiming
entrapment to prove their case.
- Terrorism-related charges are so difficult to beat in court, even
when the evidence is thin, that defendants often don't risk a trial.
"The
problem with the cases we're talking about is that defendants would not
have done anything if not kicked in the ass by government agents," says
Martin Stolar, a lawyer who represented a man caught in a 2004 sting
involving
subway station. "They're creating crimes to solve crimes so they can
claim a victory in the war on terror." In the FBI's defense, supporters
argue that the bureau will only pursue a case when the target clearly is
willing to participate in violent action. "If you're doing a sting
right, you're offering the target multiple chances to back out," says
Peter Ahearn, a retired FBI special agent who directed the Western New
York Joint Terrorism Task Force and oversaw the investigation of the
,
an alleged terror cell near Buffalo, New York. "Real people don't say,
'Yeah, let's go bomb that place.' Real people call the cops."
