The Secrets of the FBI

by Ronald Kessler

  “A lot of these guys were tried and acquitted by an all-white jury back in the day, so they can’t be retried because it would be double jeopardy,” Deitle says. “Even if no prosecutions are possible, we still tell the family what we found.”

  Reactions have been mixed, ranging from gratitude to open hostility. Some question the thoroughness of the FBI’s investigation. Others cannot accept that a suicide or an auto accident was not a hit job by the Ku Klux Klan.

  “We’ve had everything from ‘We appreciate your work, thank you’ to family members who say they don’t want our letter explaining why the case was closed with no prosecution,” Deitle says.

  25

  TRIP WIRES

  TO HUNT DOWN TERRORISTS, THE FBI DEVISED WHAT ART Cummings calls “trip wires,” which might tip off the bureau to terrorist activity. For example, chemical supply companies are urged by the FBI to develop profiles that pinpoint large or suspicious purchases of chemicals that can be used to make explosives.

  To supplement that, Cummings initiated a $350,000 project to, in effect, reverse-engineer a terrorist operation. It looked at a potential terrorist incident and then worked backward to pinpoint all the elements a terrorist might require to achieve his goal, so that the FBI could be on the lookout for those clues.

  “We set these trip wires, and when people come across them, we have abilities to report that, wait a minute, someone is buying dual-use technology or the precursors to make nerve gas or industrial-strength peroxide,” Cummings says. “Someone does that, boom! We have an alert, either a HUMINT [human intelligence] alert from an individual or a technical alert.”

  To be a terrorist, “you need communications strategy, you need to be able to raise money, you need to be able to move money, you need an organizational structure that allows for that to happen, and you need communications that go back to the mother ship,” Cummings says.

  So, he says, the FBI looks at people caught by Customs with cash in excess of $10,000.

  “I’m going to correlate this person who is leaving the country with money with his communications,” Cummings says. “If he is raising money for Hamas and is communicating with the occupied territories, that is of interest.”

  Then, he says, “you get the personal transaction reports from the bank and find he is depositing or withdrawing funds just under the $10,000 reporting requirement. You find he is a guy who is Palestinian, goes to a mosque that is dominated by Hamas supporters and Palestinians, and is wiring money on a regular basis to the occupied territories. Right there, I’ve just built a picture of a Hamas fund-raiser.”

  In the same way, the FBI has asked beauty shops and beauty supply stores to contact an FBI office to report purchases of chemicals such as hydrogen peroxide in high concentrations.

  “They are asked if they have any suspicion of any kind whatsoever about people buying large quantities of such chemicals in industrial strength to make a phone call to the FBI,” Cummings says. “Our guidelines are such that we’re not going to violate anybody’s civil liberties simply because they bought a certain amount of hydrogen peroxide.”

  News outlets reported that the FBI got onto Najibullah Zazi, who had plotted to blow up New York City subways for al Qaeda, through such purchases. But the case actually began with a combination of intelligence from the CIA and the rest of the intelligence community, Cummings says.

  “You’ve got the people working overseas who did exactly what they were supposed to do, but we caught it at the tenth, eleventh hour,” Cummings says. “Zazi was already making explosives. That’s cutting it way too close.”

  On top of that, the New York City Police Department jumped the gun.

  “The intelligence division of the NYPD went out and asked some questions, showed some photographs, and that person told Zazi’s father and said, ‘Hey, they’re looking at your son,’ ” Cummings says. “The father called Zazi. But Zazi’s antenna was already up because he may have already detected some surveillance.”

  While Cummings did not think any malice on the part of the police was involved, “there was an agreement between the New York City Police Department and the FBI New York that any action based on the information we provide has to be coordinated,” Cummings says. “And in this case, that just didn’t happen.”

  The press got hold of the story and let Zazi’s family know about the investigation, requiring the FBI to make arrests sooner than Cummings desired.

  “The press blew us out of the water,” he says, and adds, “I’m a very strong believer in the free press. But I also believe it should be more responsible than it is. I hear all the time the public has a right to know. And I look at what they’re claiming the public has a right to know, and I just go, what does this do for the public? We regularly have to race the press on an operational strategy. We find out the press is on something and we have to completely change our strategy, because we know a story is going to break on something, and when it breaks we’ll lose collection. And when we talk to most of the mainstream press on this, some work with us a little bit but not that much. That makes our job tougher and could jeopardize lives.”

  The Zazi case involved more than a thousand FBI agents. That included running bomb-detecting dogs through storage facilities. As he did during other fast-breaking cases, Cummings slept on the black leather couch in his office, surrounded by photos of his wife and three kids.

  Trip wires led to the arrest of Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, a twenty-year-old college student from Saudi Arabia who allegedly was planning to blow up the Dallas home of former president George W. Bush. The FBI received a report from Carolina Biological Supply on February 1, 2011, that Aldawsari had tried to buy large quantities of concentrated phenol, which can be used to make a high explosive. The order was sent to a freight company, which called police in Lubbock, where Aldawsari lived, and the police also notified the FBI.

  In two covert entries of his Lubbock apartment, a TacOps team found a hazmat suit, chemicals for making explosives, and bomb-making paraphernalia. In his journal, the team found this entry: “And now, after mastering the English language, learning how to build explosives and continuous planning to target the infidel Americans, it is time for Jihad.” The journal said he obtained a scholarship and came to the United States with the intention of carrying out jihad.

  The subject line of one email message Aldawsari allegedly sent to himself said “Tyrant’s House” and included Bush’s Dallas address. Other emails listed “nice targets,” including reservoir dams, nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric plants. In addition, he emailed himself ways to construct an explosive device and convert a cellular phone to detonate an explosive device. The suspect posted jihadist sentiments on an extremist blog he created and made it clear he had been inspired by Osama bin Laden.

  Besides pinging in on trip wires, the bureau changed the paradigm for declaring that a lead or tip was not valid. Now if a lead turns out to be useless, the FBI requires agents to conclude that “information has been developed to indicate they’re not a threat, as opposed to we couldn’t verify the information,” Cummings says.

  Whenever an agent closes a case, he or she is asked the reason.

  “The answer better not be ‘I didn’t find anything to show they were a terrorist,’ ” Cummings says. “Instead, the answer better be ‘I made an informed judgment, based on my collection, that they’re not a terrorist. No phone links to terrorists, no finance links, no family links, and I’ve explained the contacts specifically.’ ” That, Cummings says, is quite different from saying, “I can’t find it, so therefore it’s not there.”

  With the new paradigm, “the labor involved goes up by a factor of five or ten,” Cummings says. “To have to continue collecting until you make your own judgment that they’re not a terrorist? When basically there’s no CIA records, there’s no NSA records, there’s no FBI records. He doesn’t appear to be in a position to be a terrorist. He looks like a regular guy. He’s a life insurance salesman, and he’s never bee
n out of the country.”

  In one example of the new approach, when the FBI investigated a report of a man buying chemicals that could be used for explosives, it could have dismissed the purchases as innocent because the man was buying the supplies from a swimming pool company, and his business shipped pool supplies.

  “That explanation wasn’t good enough,” Cummings says. “It’s not okay to say, ‘It looks like pool supplies, we’re done.’ You don’t finish there. Who at the pool company, specifically, did he buy them from? What specifically was the transaction, and what happened from there? Is it a friend, is it an associate, is it somebody who wants to do us harm? There was a day we would have said, ‘It’s a commercial transaction, don’t worry about it.’ Each and every lead is followed all the way down to the most minute detail.”

  Taking those extra precautions—which never would have been followed prior to 9/11—frustrates agents.

  “They say, ‘Come on, it’s a pool supply company—the guy ships pool parts,’ ” Cummings says. “We say, ‘Great. Go see the company records, find out who bought what, where it was shipped, what was the item exactly, does it have dual-use possibilities? And when you’ve finished all that, then we can make an informed judgment.’ ”

  Before 9/11, “it’s unlikely the Aldawsari arrest would have happened,” Cummings says flatly.

  Cummings credits new Justice Department guidelines developed under Attorney General Michael Mukasey in 2008 with giving the FBI the freedom needed to look for potential terrorists before they strike. The FBI must have a proper purpose before conducting surveillance, but suspicion of wrongdoing is not required.

  “As they were written before, the guidelines did not allow FBI agents to look for that which in effect hadn’t been seen yet,” says Cummings, who pushed for the changes. “Sure, investigations spider out significantly, and leads take you in many different directions. But they start with a lead, they start with tangible information—be it from financial or operational planning or from a telephone call or a source or an informant—telling you this person is involved in terrorism.”

  The guidelines, in turn, bolstered the new paradigm of prevention, “allowing us to collect before we see the problem,” Cummings says.

  As FBI general counsel Val Caproni puts it, “The guidelines allow us to look to see if we have a problem, rather than waiting for someone to tell us about it, before bodies start falling.”

  As with the Zazi case, Cummings says, “The whole mission is complemented by a suite of tools. We could not function as a prevention organization on terrorism without NSA on collection. Could not. Absent that, we’d be blind in what constitutes everything but the United States.”

  When an arrest occurs, “what you don’t see is the CIA and the broader community hand,” Cummings says. “When you see a terrorist plot disrupted in Germany, or you see a terrorist plot disrupted in Austria or Switzerland or Norway or Italy, name it, the CIA’s hand is on most of those.”

  Before 9/11, “I used to battle NSA,” Cummings says. “If there was an American’s name attached to any of it, and he was going overseas, they wouldn’t give it to us.”

  President Bush’s NSA intercept program changed that, giving NSA more flexibility to intercept calls from overseas to Americans. However, the initial program was so broad that it uncovered nothing of value, FBI officials say. As time went on, the program was refined and became more focused on potential terrorists, uncovering useful leads. Congress incorporated that program into the existing FISA statute.

  As lone wolves become an increasing threat, trip wires have become especially important. Lone wolves have no ties to existing terrorist organizations or networks. With lone wolves, “you don’t have financial networks that if you look really, really closely you see a thousand dollars going to an operator somewhere,” Cummings notes. “We don’t see it, because there isn’t someone sending that lone wolf a thousand dollars. This is very difficult, so we rely heavily on trip wires and HUMINT. These are the eyes and ears on the street. And we rely heavily on the lone wolves’ breaking out of that complete and absolute isolation. Human nature being what it is, they do. We’ve caught several recently who were pretty isolated, but they still wanted to talk and share their ideology with people.”

  That was what led to the arrest in October 2010 of Farooque Ahmed, thirty-four, of Ashburn, Virginia, for conspiring with people he thought were al-Qaeda operatives to carry out terrorist bombings at stations in the Washington Metro subway system. Agents posing as Islamic radicals began meeting in April with Ahmed, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Pakistan. At the meetings, held in northern Virginia hotels, he allegedly agreed to conduct video surveillance of the stations and suggested the best time to attack and the best locations to place explosives to maximize casualties.

  Still, problems remain. The FBI would have targeted Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army major who shot to death thirteen people at Fort Hood, if it had known everything the Army knew about his activities and sympathies, Cummings says.

  For example, Hasan told colleagues that sharia law trumps U.S. law and lectured other doctors that nonbelievers should be beheaded and have boiling oil poured down their throats. The FBI was in the dark about that, while the Army was fully aware of Hasan’s threatening comments and extremist beliefs. In fact, despite his statements in meetings, the Army gave him good performance ratings.

  “People say, ‘Why didn’t you stop him when he was talking to radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki? Clearly he’s a terrorist,’ ” Cummings says. “Well, no, it’s not clear he’s a terrorist. There’s a continuum between having sympathies and being a militant.”

  On the surface, it appeared that Hasan was in contact with al-Awlaki, the radical imam in Yemen, to conduct research on Muslims in the military within the context of the war on terrorism, Cummings says.

  “His contacts with al-Awlaki to ask him for certain advice appeared to anyone looking at it to be research consistent with the paper he was writing on behalf of, and funded by, the U.S. military,” Cummings says. “His questions were probing: ‘Well, what about this, and how do you justify that?’ So where was the snapping point?” he asks. “Where was it when he moved to being a militant?”

  What apparently pushed Hasan over the edge were his orders to deploy to Afghanistan, where he would be fighting fellow Muslims.

  To this day, Cummings says, because the Army is conducting the prosecution of Hasan, it has not turned over to the FBI records that would have raised red flags about his beliefs and sympathies.

  26

  YACHT PARTY

  ON A CRISP FALL DAY, A HALF DOZEN GORGEOUS YOUNG women showed up for a champagne party on board a yacht cruising the Eastern Seaboard. The men at the party were the bad guys in an organized crime case; the female guests, all undercover FBI agents.

  The men were on board at the invitation of another undercover agent who had befriended them. The idea was to divert the men while TacOps performed a covert entry at two organized crime businesses. In this case, the yacht belonged to the FBI, which had confiscated it in a drug operation and transferred it to the bureau’s Stagehand program.

  For the yacht party, the female agents flew in from a field office on the West Coast to lessen the chance they would be recognized. If any of the men tried to leave the party by boat, the agents were to send a prearranged coded electronic message to a command center, which would warn TacOps agents conducting the covert entries to leave immediately.

  Both covert entries, to plant bugging devices and copy hard drives, went off flawlessly. But there was one hitch: the men were so smitten with the friendly female agents that they insisted on partying long after the TacOps agents had finished their work for the night.

  “To keep our subjects comfortable and unsuspecting, the party had to go on for several more hours, even after the TacOps teams had cleared the two targets,” says Louis Grever, who participated in one of the entries. “This episode ended up being one of the rare instances where th
e entry crew was able to get to bed in our hotel rooms before all the surveillance and undercover teams were able to head home.”

  Given the explosion in ways people communicate, bugging a room would seem less important than in years past. But the growth in communication methods and the availability of encryption software has made it harder for the FBI to ping in on conversations. As a result, bugging devices have become even more essential.

  “One of the by-products of this connected world is sometimes we can’t collect intelligence on the outside even if we have the authority to do so,” Grever says during an interview at FBI headquarters. “The data is encrypted, we’re hard pressed to find out what kind of communications path they’re using, they hide in the noise and the clutter of modern-day communications. So consequently we have to go to you and install a microphone to catch your communications.”

  Grever walks over to his desk and returns with a state-of-the-art FBI bug, which he places in my hand. It’s a circuit board that is the size of a postage stamp and the thickness of two stacked quarters.

  “It’s a transmitter and a stereo recorder,” Grever says. “It records for about twenty-one hours, and it will transmit to a local receiver in encrypted form. Lots of times the transmit function would not be enabled. Why transmit when it’s just another thing that could potentially expose the penetration? This is actually big in comparison to some of our bugs.”

  Grever shows how the bug can be concealed inside the rechargeable battery of a cell phone. Alternatively, the FBI could program a cell phone to record and transmit conversations.