A metal desk was bolted to the floor with a bench seat. The cage door locked directly behind me, allowing perhaps two feet of standing space. A guard shoved a roll of bread with something like turkey and mayonnaise through a slot in the door, along with some potato chips and a can of soda. I took a bite, and couldn’t eat.
Locked inside such a claustrophobic space, my breathing got rapid, and I experienced a roller coaster of emotions. I kept thinking to myself how the media would react when they discovered that I had not exaggerated my involvement in anti-terrorism. I’d been active since 1993. And here the Justice Department had locked me up in a jail cell like some criminal! What incompetence that the Justice Department didn’t know who I am! Somebody didn’t do his homework!
Or maybe they did. A whisper nagged at the back of my brain. They obviously knew my second cousin on my father’s side was Andrew Card, Chief of Staff to President George W. Bush. And it struck me as highly improbable, extraordinary even, that the Justice Department would admit no prior knowledge of my extensive work in anti-terrorism, going back to the first World Trade Center attack in 1993.
What did my intelligence handler say, when I complained about heavy surveillance that sometimes got excessive or rough? “Don’t get all high and mighty on us, Susan! If they’re not tracking you—based on all of your contacts in the Middle East—they’re not doing their jobs.”
Oh, they understood what they were doing alright. This was a political hit. I knew first-hand where all the bodies were buried in a graveyard of national security initiatives that looked nothing at all like what Americans were told. Much later, KBOO Radio in Portland, Oregon—part of the vanguard media—wryly observed that I worked for the Company that made the shovels.
They had to take me out so they could reinvent the truth. It was that simple.
I looked more closely at the indictment—“Acting as an Unregistered Iraqi Agent” in “conspiracy with Iraq’s Intelligence Service.”8 Not espionage, I determined quickly.
That satisfied me somewhat. The Justice Department wasn’t so stupid as to accuse me of trading state secrets, which would be grossly inaccurate.
But $10,000 from the Iraqis?9 The Feds understood more than they pretended. Locked in that tiny holding cage, I got so angry that I shouted for a bailiff to protest. I wanted to tell the bailiff the indictment was loaded with excrement. There was no other way to describe it. I had yet to learn that filing criminal charges against an individual was relatively simple. Everybody said you could indict a ham sandwich in New York City. Getting charges dismissed proved infinitely more difficult, however. Federal prosecutors typically do not enjoy confessing publicly that they read the evidence wrong.
Oh but I would have a few things to say when we got to Court!
For starters, after 9/11, Israel was the only foreign government trolling to buy national security documents in Washington. Iraq didn’t need them. Baghdad already had the best. They had the most devastating access in the Middle East. Powerful stuff. Israel coveted that access hungrily for what their arch enemy in Baghdad could reveal. If Iraq didn’t have it already, Saddam’s government would know how to get it.
The real treasure hunt after 9/11 was for financial or banking documents that would expose the cash network for key figures tied to Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Iraqi officials boasted that they had financial documents of extraordinary value that would prove a Middle Eastern connection to the Oklahoma City Bombing and the first strike on the World Trade Center in 1993. If so, Baghdad had not overstated the value of its cache. They wanted to trade that intelligence as part of a comprehensive settlement to lift the sanctions.
By the summer of 2001, back channel talks with Iraqi diplomats in New York were far advanced, under the watchful eye of the CIA. The peace framework developed from November 2000 through March 200210 created an option that defined what future U.S.-Iraqi relations might look like in a post-sanctions world— without penalizing the United States for supporting brutal U.N. sanctions for 13 years. It asked critical questions of what Baghdad would give the United States to prove its commitment to behave like a responsible neighbor in the region.
After 9/11, Baghdad brought these papers to the table.11 Those papers potentially qualified as the most significant contribution to successful global anti-terrorism efforts by any nation in the world. Baghdad’s intelligence on terrorism was that good. Really, it was the best.
My U.S. Intelligence handlers had been informed immediately, which sort of explains how Israel would have heard the news.
And so a Mossad contact had phoned repeatedly while I was on a trip to Iraq, telling my housemate, Allison H— that they would deliver a “suitcase full of cash anywhere in the world to get those documents.”
“Susan’s traveling in Milan,” Allison told him.
“No. She’s not. She’s nowhere in Italy.”
“But how do you know that? Who are you? Why did she leave Italy?” Allison was floored.
“Tell her it’s Roy. If she calls, tell her we’ll meet her anywhere in the world. Any city at all. We will come to her. We’ll bring a suitcase full of cash.”
The truth of my travel itinerary to Baghdad had been concealed from all but a few of my friends in Washington. My CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz, received approximately 30 to 40 phone calls informing him of the dates of my trip, and nagging for payment for a series of outstanding debts, mostly connected to the Lockerbie Trial. Mind you, I was absolutely desperate to receive payment before my departure. I pushed hard to get it.
I also begged Dr. Fuisz to follow through on Congressional promises of payment for my extensive work on Lockerbie, tied to the hand over of the two Libyans. Leaders in Washington and London had made grand speeches at press conferences, promising spectacular rewards for my work. Unhappily for Assets, those promises were forgotten as soon as the TV cameras packed up. It was all an empty publicity stunt, a public fraud.
Only I was real flesh and blood, and I needed to get paid. I needed to buy groceries. It was Dr. Fuisz’s job as my handler to make that happen—which accounted for the high volume of phone calls before my trip to Baghdad. My urgency and desperation was so great that even the Israelis heard gossip about it. The Mossad acted to fill the gap, while the notorious Beltway Bandits in Washington poached off Black Budget earmarks for the 9/11 investigation.
And for good cause.
In Baghdad, I expected to meet top ranking Iraqi officials, in part to discuss the acquisition of those documents—which Iraq would only turn over to the FBI or Interpol—in other words, only credible law enforcement, no spooks. Still, I had the papers in my reach. That whet some appetites in the intelligence community. Just not appetites in the Bush Administration, unfortunately, though I did not understand that in March 2002.
And so an Israeli agent urged me to name my price. Any price.
I turned him down after my trip to Baghdad.
A suitcase full of cash… No matter how badly I needed that money— and I was hanging by a thread financially, at this point — I could never sell documents affecting national security to a foreign government. Cash transactions go on more frequently than anybody wants to admit. Not the sale of U.S. documents, which is strictly verboten and punishable by endless years in prison. Trafficking in foreign documents like those from Baghdad goes on all the time, however. To stay so pure requires a certain naiveté that clashes with the ruthless nature of intelligence-gathering. It reflected my own distaste for the Mossad, certainly. With regards to this indictment, however, it might have been my salvation.
In that holding cage I resolved that I would challenge the Court: If I would not accept a suitcase full of cash from a friendly ally like Israel—non traceable income with no taxes that might add up to a couple million dollars, if the Samsonite luggage was large enough – why oh why would I take $10,000 from the Iraqis—who were desperately cash poor under UN sanctions? Obviously I hadn’t, and no evidence suggested I had. Mercifully, Allison had no spook ties. Nob
ody could stop her from testifying.
Oh but pride goeth before the fall, doesn’t it? Israel would have taken the financial records on Al Qaeda. They would have paid any price for them. They would have shut down the financial pipeline to Osama’s network, and stopped the flow of funds used in other attacks today in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Mombai, the Philippines and the Anbar Province of Iraq. I was just so pure that I could not allow myself to be “corrupted.”
I had no idea when I turned down Israel’s generosity that America would refuse to accept such critical intelligence. I could not fathom that Washington would reject documents that would pinpoint the inner workings of Osama bin Laden’s financial network, and incidentally show a pattern of Middle Eastern involvement in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1993 World Trade Center attack. It left me baffled and bewildered, more so because it was never explained.
The White House was more interested in launching war in Iraq than protecting our country from terrorism. They would not accept those papers strictly because they came from Baghdad—even though sources in Baghdad promised to deliver those papers promptly to an FBI Task Force, as good faith for its other commitments in our back-channel talks. The United States left that money in circulation.
Such calculated indifference, despite so much grandstanding after 9/11, broke my heart irrevocably. It qualified as massive public fraud, which endangers our country and the global community to this very day. In the end, that deception destroyed my relationship with the two men I loved and respected most in the world, Paul Hoven and Dr. Richard Fuisz, my “handlers” or “case officers,” who supervised my work with Libya and Iraq from 1993 to 2002. I would have done anything for either of those men. In the end, I could not understand why my successful efforts to win Iraq’s cooperation with the 9/11 investigation cost me their friendship. And they were prohibited from explaining. In my heart, I have clung to the hope that they were just as perplexed and baffled as I was.
For truly I was the last to know.
Israel had always known.
And so the Mossad tried to acquire the papers directly from me.
How could Washington have acted so irresponsibly to shun Iraq’s cooperation, with such high stakes in play? In that tiny holding cage, I wanted to shout at the bailiffs, like I’d shouted to myself many times, stupefied by the loss of it.
How could they do such a terrible thing to all of us? They hurt everybody.
I dared not examine those questions too long. Self pity would not free me from that cage. I would have to hold myself together, and stay focused and calm, if I wanted to wrestle control of the situation. I would have to get over my emotional shock. I could beat the Justice Department, if I kept my wits about me.
I brought my mind back to the terrible document in front of me—the federal indictment that carried a maximum 25 year prison sentence.12
“Acting as an Unregistered Iraqi Agent.”13
Fuck you, motherfuckers!
Straight off the top, I had a worthy and reliable rebuttal to that accusation. For close to a decade, I had performed as a U.S. Asset covering Iraq at the United Nations, with oversight by U.S. Intelligence. I’d been recruited as a back-channel in the early 1990s, because of my anti-sanctions activism. They sent me to the Libya House in May, 1995 and the Iraqi Embassy in August, 1996. They supervised everything I did, debriefing every conversation after my visits to the Embassies.
We specialized in anti-terrorism, and my bona fides were some of the best. Our work in the 1990s set the bar awfully high, as a matter of fact. It would be fairly simple to prove, because I had played a public role in identifying my CIA handler, Dr. Richard Fuisz as a crucial source of knowledge in the bombing of Pan Am 103. My efforts had been well documented during the trial of the two Libyans at Camp Zeist. Scottish attorneys for the Lockerbie Defense could testify to Dr. Fuisz’s intelligence background and our long-established working relationship together. My defense would be much simplified by that validation.
Wouldn’t it be fun to bust the Justice Department in court! I’d slam prosecutors to the wall for bringing such outrageous charges against me. “Foreign agent,” indeed. After all my contributions as an Asset, I would never be so generous as to accept a plea bargain in this case. We’d go to trial. I’d make the Prosecutor grovel with apologies to the Court and the media for daring to accuse me of criminal activity. They’d eat crow for this!
The whole thing struck me as foolish—except the holding cage felt awfully real.
And what was this accusation: “Conspiracy with Iraq’s Intelligence Service?”14
The indictment listed two co-defendants, Raed Noman Al-Anbuke and Wisam Noman Al-Anbuke. I’d never met either of them, nor heard their names spoken. Only later would I learn that the Anbuke brothers were also Assets covering the Iraqi Embassy at the United Nations in New York. The sons of an Iraqi diplomat, they agreed to help the FBI track visitors to the Embassy. Their cooperation had been fairly innocuous, videotaping guests at Embassy events, nothing terribly dramatic.
The Justice Department had exploited them with promises that the brothers could stay in America after the invasion. When the FBI had no more use for the boys, they got arrested as “Iraqi Agents”—along with another brother and sister accused of no crimes at all. The whole family got thrown in prison at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, in attempt to coerce confessions from the brothers. The tactic of arresting innocent family members on the Patriot Act smacked of Saddam Hussein’s own brutality. It was fairly disgusting.
I could see now the Justice Department had made a clean sweep, arresting all three of us who covered Iraq at the United Nations before the War. It struck me as awfully convenient that those of us with birds-eye views inside the Embassy should all be gagged and silenced by phony indictments. Meanwhile, Washington officials would be liberated to bombard the air waves with false reports about the mediocrity of our Pre-War Intelligence reporting.
Such rubbish!
For my part, I had been a vocal anti-war activist, campaigning aggressively against the invasion on Capitol Hill and at the United Nations, with a trove of documents and FBI wire taps to prove it. For heaven’s sakes, I stood formally accused of telling U.S. officials that war would be disastrous. And yet in this New World Order, my indictment on the Patriot Act effectively gagged me from publicly disclosing any part of my warnings to White House officials and members of Congress. While I faced prosecution, those same leaders on Capitol Hill vigorously complained to the public that Assets like me had not come forward. Their verdict was unanimous. My failure to speak was responsible for the war-time catastrophe facing our nation. A very clever strategy! And totally dishonest.
My eye stuck on the first “overt act” of conspiracy. “On or about October 14, 1999, Susan Lindauer aka “Symbol Susan,” met with an officer of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Manhattan.”15
“Symbol Susan?” I rolled my eyes. Somebody at the Justice Department had a sense of humor. I was a “symbol” alright. The Justice Department intended to scare the Intelligence Community out of criticizing the Republican leadership about its war policy. They made a bold example of me, flaunting the brutality that could crush anybody who dissented from Republicans on national security policy. Fine, then. Let them call me “Symbol Susan.” I’m made of tougher stuff than that. While they’re at it, I thought, let them explain in front of a jury how they scapegoated me for accurately forecasting the horrific consequences of this War. Let them show the world how they mistreated those of us who got it right.
Now that first “overt act of conspiracy” on October 14, 1999 intrigued me very much. It was so long ago, yet so definite and precise. For the first time that morning of my arrest, I smiled. Yes, I was still shell-shocked, but I began to see how easily the indictment could be torn apart. Shredded, really.
October 14, 1999. Those bastards got that date from me! I reported it to Paul Hoven, one of my intelligence handlers, when I warned him that Iraqi diploma
ts in New York had requested my help in locating a top Republican official to receive major financial campaign contributions for the 2000 Presidential election. Those poor bastards in Baghdad wanted to shower George Bush with campaign cash, in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, in the hope that once victorious, he would reciprocate by lifting the sanctions.16
The sincerity of Iraq’s good will towards the Republican leadership poignantly illustrated the greatest tragedy of the War: Saddam’s government urgently desired to reconcile with the United States, and prove its loyalty as an ally to Washington. Baghdad yearned for days past, when Iraq had been strategically positioned as a buttress to Islamic radicalism in Iran. Then, Baghdad’s progressive views towards women and moderate Islamic attitudes had been highly prized. Alas, in October, 1999, U.S. Intelligence demanded that I block them. My DIA handler, Paul Hoven threatened to bomb Baghdad himself if Iraqi officials gave money to the Republican Party.17 I described Iraq’s desire to contribute to Republican coffers in two letters to my second cousin, Andrew Card, Chief of Staff to President Bush, on March 1, 2001 and December 2, 2001. That explains how Republican leaders learned of Iraq’s attempt.
In my holding cage, I scorned them all. See you in court, Mr. Prosecutor! (Not likely!)
I scanned the indictment a little further—“On or about September 19, 2001, Susan Lindauer met with an officer of the Iraqi Intelligence Service in Manhattan.”18
That would be my part in the 9/11 investigation— and me a first-responder, like the fire fighters at Ground Zero, taking appropriate steps to secure Iraq’s cooperation with global anti-terrorism objectives.
Yet now the Justice Department declared it a crime to contribute to a terrorist investigation? And they dared to cite the U.S. Patriot Act in order to do it? Tell it to a jury, Mr. Prosecutor! While you’re at it, explain that to Congress!
EXTREME PREJUDICE: The Terrifying Story of the Patriot Act and the Cover Ups of 9/11 and Iraq Page 2
