Posted on 11/17/2004 9:28:42 PM PST by neverdem
The ruins of the World Trade Center were still burning when federal agents arrested two men at Kennedy Airport who were found with more than $140,000 hidden in cardboard boxes with honey jars bound for Yemen. For the agents, aware that terrorists were said to use honey shipments to hide money, that slender lead could not be ignored.
If the world was suddenly different for everybody back then, in October 2001, with federal agents and prosecutors both properly alarmed and also under sudden pressure to make terrorism cases, they still relied on old techniques developed in generations of Mafia and gang cases. They needed a rat. An informer.
With such help, law enforcement officials after 9/11 felt they might be able to better achieve their urgent goal - to disrupt, to prevent, to make what cases they could.
Out of public view, then, they applied the tested techniques to the new challenges. They soon had a witness, a native of Yemen, who helped in what the agents began calling the Black Bear investigation - a droll reference to the honey jars that started it. From that relationship with an informer, prosecutors made cases, investigations that on their face often seemed to have little to do explicitly with terrorism.
But then, as a result of those cases - they involved such charges as unlicensed money transmission and making false statements to investigators - an F.B.I. agent at the center of the investigation soon had found another seemingly invaluable Yemeni living in this country who was willing to help.
In time, with the new informant, the Black Bear investigation centered in Brooklyn led to a case prosecutors say may be the biggest terrorism financing case in the country, against a Yemeni sheik charged with raising money in Brooklyn for Al Qaeda. This week that case was rocked by the startling public unraveling of that central informer, Mohamed Alanssi, when he set himself on fire outside the White House. For now, the case against the sheik will go forward, damaged or not.
The little-known story of the investigators' path to Mr. Alanssi and the extensive use they made of him in prosecuting more than 20 people on various charges in Brooklyn, including the sheik, was assembled through interviews, court filings and testimony. It provides a snapshot of one of the government's most aggressive antiterrorism efforts since the Trade Center attacks and of the risks involved - perils illustrated best, perhaps, by the use of informers who by definition operate in a hardball, sometimes covert law-enforcement world they know little about.
Defense lawyers have routinely complained that the Brooklyn federal prosecutors were simply rounding up Arab men on technical charges, hoping that the dragnet would reduce the pressure on the agents to get results in the domestic war on terror.
But this week, Mr. Alanssi's bizarre actions also put on full display another vulnerability in high-pressure investigations: The strained relationships that are often the foundation of investigators' dealings with their informants can suddenly careen out of control. In a letter to the F.B.I. shortly before he lighted his clothes on fire on Monday, Mr. Alanssi rambled that the agents handling his case had been breaking promises and not caring about his fate.
The Black Bear narrative, then, is partly about the many cases the now-troubled Mr. Alanssi helped make. His work included his participation in a classic undercover operation as he helped gather evidence against the Yemeni sheik, Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, who Attorney General John Ashcroft said had admitted providing financing for Osama bin Laden. Mr. Moayad's lawyer has fiercely denied the charges. A trial for the sheik and one of his assistants, who were extradited here from Germany months ago, is scheduled for January.
But what came of the Black Bear investigation is also the story of an F.B.I. agent, now serving as a reservist in Iraq, who was centrally involved in the web of Brooklyn cases and who was a point man in the effort to apply traditional law enforcement techniques in the fledgling fight on terror. In testimony last winter, the agent, Brian Murphy, described those efforts for Kelly Moore, the federal prosecutor who has supervised the Brooklyn cases.
Like many other agents at the time of the terror attacks, he said, he had been reassigned to investigate terror full time. He said that he had been investigating narcotics and gang cases before 2001.
Agent Murphy, a fit man with close-cropped brown hair, testified that he and other investigators focused on the flow of money, partly to try to starve terrorists of support.
But another goal, as he explained it from the witness stand, was to follow the money. "It's going to lead you to the terrorist that may or may not attack us," Mr. Murphy told a Brooklyn jury in the case of a New Jersey man charged with making a false statement to investigators about his role in helping yet another Yemeni sheik visit mosques in Brooklyn.
From Mr. Murphy's testimony, scores of publicly filed court documents, interviews and court exhibits, it is possible to assemble a rough chronology of the investigation that displays the use the agents made of informers - or tried to make.
The Yemeni honey transmitters were charged first with violating currency-exporting laws. But in the heated atmosphere after the terror attacks, there were soon news accounts about the arrests. That obviously complicated the agents' goal of trying to turn one of the men who had been arrested into an informer.
A solution: The charges were publicly dropped and then reinstated in a closed proceeding, so that the man's Yemeni neighbors wouldn't know he had any further dealings with prosecutors. In time, court testimony later showed, one of the honey transmitters began working with the agents as they turned their attention to a group of Yemeni businessmen in downtown Brooklyn near Atlantic Avenue. The men, they knew from studying bank records and other financial documents, regularly shipped large amounts of money abroad, in the Arab handshake money transfer system known as hawala.
"I recruit people to infiltrate the organizations," Mr. Murphy said in his testimony last winter.
That first cooperator helped federal prosecutors in Brooklyn make 16 cases, court records show. It is illegal to transmit money without a license. One man was convicted after a trial; the others pleaded guilty. No charges alleged that the men were part of any terrorist network.
The defense lawyers railed, again arguing that prosecutors were using fears of terrorism to attack basically harmless businessmen. The prosecutors and the federal agents - Mr. Murphy especially - kept working, court filings make clear. Inside the F.B.I., he is sometimes called "T-1000," for a robot-like persistence, people who know him say.
In his testimony, he said that the hawala case led directly to the next informer, the man who is now known to be Mr. Alanssi. Mr. Murphy never mentioned his name at the time and provided no details about how he signed on to help the government. Few details are available from public documents.
But the hawala cases were a cause of outrage among Yemenis in Brooklyn and it was no secret that well-financed federal agents were looking for help. Law enforcement officials said this week that they had paid Mr. Alanssi about $100,000 for his work.
Because of the incident at the White House, it is now possible to examine in some detail Mr. Alanssi's activities after he became an informer. Under the cloak of a law enforcement label of anonymity, "CI1" for confidential informant 1, court filings tell a good part of the story.
According to an affidavit filed by another F.B.I. agent, Robert Fuller, Mr. Alanssi has lived in this country since 2001. Married, with a wife who did not join him in this country, he used to live in Sana, Yemen, where he was a neighbor of Sheik al-Moayad. In Yemen, the affidavit says, he "regularly prayed at al-Moayad's mosque."
The affidavit describes a role Mr. Alanssi played in the Hawala cases. But that was only a prelude.
Soon, according to Agent Murphy's testimony, the man who is now known to be Mr. Alanssi was sent to Yemen to begin talking with his old neighbor Mr. al-Moayad.
Federal prosecutors claim in court filings that Mr. Alanssi soon drew out Mr. al-Moayad. They say Mr. al-Moayad discussed secret codes the two could use and described close ties with Hamas and Osama bin Laden. Prosecutors say Mr. al Moayad allowed him access to invoices showing purchases of such items as surveillance devices and a "wristwatch transmitter." Defense lawyers say Mr. Alanssi's accounts were exaggerated and embellished.
According to the prosecution's court filings, the two men grew close. In Yemen in 2002, the prosecutors say, Mr. Moayad invited Mr. Alanssi to a mass wedding that prosecutors suggest was a preparation for martyrdom of the men being married. The prosecutors say it appeared the gathered group had advance notice of a terrorist attack that occurred virtually simultaneously in Israel.
Next, according to testimony, Mr. Alanssi reported back to Mr. Murphy. A plan was spawned to get Mr. Moayad and an assistant to Germany, where they could be the targets of a classic law-enforcement sting.
Under instructions, Mr. Alanssi told Mr. al-Moayad he knew of an American Muslim who wanted to make contributions to Muslim causes. The second man, too, was part of the sting operation. German law enforcement officials said this week that the second man was actually an American intelligence agent.
In Germany, Mr. al-Moayad and his assistant, Mohammed Mohsen Yahya Zayed, were surreptitiously recorded in conversations with Mr. Alanssi and the supposed contributor. It was those conversations that Attorney General Ashcroft referred to when he announced the charges in March 2003. He said Mr. al-Moayad bragged that he had supplied $20 million to Osama bin Laden.
But, court documents show, the career of "CI1" - Mr. Alanssi - was far from over.
Back in Brooklyn he helped agents with a series of new cases. Prosecutors say they found in Mr. al-Moayad's address book the name of a Yemeni-born man who owned a Park Slope ice cream store and deli, Carnival French Ice Cream. Soon the ice cream store owner, Abad Elfgeeh, and a nephew were facing charges of illegal money transmitting. Prosecutors said they sent some $20 million overseas between 1996 and 2003, at a time when the store's reported annual receipts did not exceed $200,000.
Yesterday in federal district court in Brooklyn, where he is fighting the charges, Mr. Elfgeeh recalled that before he was arrested in January 2003, Mr. Alanssi came into his store twice, under the watchful eyes, it is now clear, of federal agents. Mr. Alanssi, he said, talked about wanting to send money to shady organizations in Yemen.
Mr. Elfgeeh said he refused. But he was bitter yesterday about Mr. Alanssi, suggesting that his apparent suicide attempt might have been motivated by guilt. "I think when you hurt somebody," he said, "you feel you did something wrong."
Back in Brooklyn, as Mr. al-Moayad's case moved along, Mr. Murphy and other agents were busy pursuing other leads that also tied back to Yemen and, according to the prosecutors, Carnival French Ice Cream. Among those was a lead to a New Jersey gas station owner, Numan Maflahi, 31, a Yemeni-born United States citizen.
Two years before the terror attacks, Mr. Murphy said in court, federal agents had watched another Yemeni sheik, Abdullah Satar, a former member of parliament in Yemen who also made a trip to Brooklyn. In 1999, he went from mosque to mosque, apparently raising money, prosecutors said. Mr. Maflahi, prosecutors charged later, was his driver, and the two were watched as they made at least one stop at Carnival French Ice Cream.
The legal filings are sketchy about how extensive a role Mr. Alanssi played in that case, if any. But there were several important areas where the investigations overlapped, according to Mr. Murphy's testimony.
After the terror attacks, the federal agents got access to the old surveillance from the 1999 visit of Sheik Satar. In 2003, Mr. Murphy went to visit Mr. Maflahi.
That case exposed the traditional and tough law enforcement techniques that have been rolled out in the terrorism investigations. Mr. Murphy, in a search either for information or, perhaps, for a new informer, asked Mr. Maflahi about Sheik Satar's visit.
Apparently without knowing he had been watched in 1999, Mr. Maflahi denied that he had been the driver, Mr. Murphy testified. Federal prosecutors charged him with making a false statement.
Mr. Maflahi did not become an informer. He fought the case.
Last February, he was convicted. In July, he was sentenced to five years in prison. He is still fighting the case.
The final resolution of the case against Mr. al-Moayad - a high-stakes prosecution begun with the harmless-enough honey shipments three years ago - remains to be seen. Mr. Alanssi is recovering in a Washington hospital - isolated, under guard, not publicly identified by name as a patient.
hell, the Times should just "out" everybody
Hmmm. I wonder if this man's family was threatened if he didn't try to do something public that would harm the case on which he was an informant?
Could the Times be any more traitorous? Could they have given al Queda any greater "heads up" warnings? Is not the Times not as dangerous an enemy as al Queda?
old time’s sake Yemen bttt
Thanks for the ping.
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