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Sarah is a pseudonym for the author of a book that details her account as a spy infiltrating terrorist networks.
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Sarah, her mother and brother walked for three weeks through the mountains to flee Iraq.
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Later in Israel, she found a newspaper photograph of her father, who was hanged in Baghdad.
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ADVERTISEMENTOne of the enduring myths about the spy trade is that espionage agents are James Bond types, dashing men of worldly intrigue who turn heads whenever they enter a room. The truth is the best spy is someone nobody notices. Their tool is their ordinariness. They blend into the scene and do not attract attention. They are people nobody would suspect of spying, people like "Sarah."
Sarah is a diminutive, middle-aged Iraqi-born mother of three who lives in the suburbs of America. She is also one of the most successful freelance terrorist hunters in the United States. Her undercover operations into radical Islamic groups have led U.S. authorities to raid companies, shut down charities and pull the plug on Internet sites supporting terror.
Agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Treasury Department all work closely with Sarah. She is on contract at several federal agencies and also feeds information to the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service. At a luncheon in Toronto last year, an acquaintance of Sarah's described how he had been at the White House and seen her lecturing two men who were listening intently. The men were John Ashcroft, the U.S. Attorney-General, and his top advisor.
It is not easy to find Sarah. Even if you know who she is, when you call her office number and ask for her, the receptionist responds with: "Who is this?" Her address is a closely guarded secret. In an interview, Sarah said she would love to go public and take credit for her work, but she can't. That would only put her life at risk and end her undercover work. That is why her new book, Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Infiltrated the Islamic Terror Network, was published under the name Anonymous. Sarah is a pseudonym; one of many.
Terrorist Hunter is the third major book since Sept. 11, 2001, to focus on the Islamic extremists active within the United States, the others being American Jihad by Steven Emerson, and Militant Islam Reaches America by Daniel Pipes. Sarah's book differs in that it is intensely personal, wavering between diary and investigation, biography and analysis. Another difference: Terrorist Hunter is not available in Canada. Although it is in bookstores in the United States, Japan, Germany, Spain, Israel, France, the Netherlands and Belgium, Sarah said the publishers are afraid to sell it here because of this country's more stringent libel laws.
"We are at war, whether we want it or not," writes Sarah, who was featured last week on the CBS current affairs show 60 Minutes, her face hidden behind a black burqa. "It's my honour to be on the front lines of this war. It's the right thing to do, and this is who I am. This is what my father would have wanted me to be."
Following the Israeli victory in the 1967 Six Day War, Arab nations such as Iraq were looking to save face. As a wealthy Iraqi Jew, her father was the perfect scapegoat. He was accused of being a spy and one day Sarah came home from school in Basra to find he had been dragged off to prison in Baghdad.
"It ruined my life, but it made me the person I am today. I now know that together with some hundred other Iraqi Jews, my father was apprehended and accused of spying for Israel. At the time, however, all I understood was that something terrible must have occurred. Because Baba was taken away, and Mama never talked to us about it."
When her father did not confess to the Iraqi authorities, Sarah's pregnant mother was "beaten, tortured and violated" in front of him. "My tormented father was present, behind a thin wall, every time when she was given the 'special treatment.' They made sure he was there, and they told him that she was there. Sometimes, she heard the moan behind that screen."
Sarah and her mother and brother escaped north disguised as Arabs and walked for three weeks through mountains with the help of Kurdish smugglers before reaching Iran and boarding a ship for Israel. Years later, Sarah was browsing through a stack of old newspapers at the library in Tel Aviv when she saw a photo of her father and realized the horror of his fate. He had been hanged in Baghdad's central square.
Like all Israelis, Sarah served in the armed forces. She married and had children, but in 1991, after Iraq fired dozens of Scud missiles at Tel Aviv during the Gulf War, she and her family moved to the United States hoping for a fresh start. The terror of her past, the terror of the Middle East, continued to haunt her, however. She was working at a non-profit group when she read a pamphlet for the Holy Land Foundation, the largest Muslim charity in the United States. Troubled by differences between the Arabic and English texts (the English listed 30 Palestinian aid projects it supported, while the Arabic listed 39) she set out to discover where the money had really gone.
It had gone, it turned out, to the families of Hamas terrorists, safe houses for terrorists and hiding places for their weapons, an organization headed by the spiritual leader of Hamas and another outlawed by the Israelis. To confirm her suspicions, Sarah donned the modest dress of an observant Muslim and went undercover to Holy Land meetings. "To me, an Israeli, the idea that Muslim charities were operating as fronts for terrorism wasn't a surprise. This was an accepted fact back in Israel. What was amazing to me was how these groups operated with such ease, with such nerve, on U.S. soil."
She passed her findings to the FBI. At first the agency did nothing, which she attributes to the pre-Sept. 11 malaise in the United States, which did not take seriously the terrorist support networks active within the country. But weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, dozens of officers raided the Texas-based charity. The White House shut it down, alleging it was a fundraising front for Hamas. The U.S. indictment of the charity borrowed heavily from the report Sarah had given the authorities years earlier.
Before Sept. 11, religious institutions were a no-go zone for federal agents, and so radical Islamists were able to operate with remarkable freedom, inciting hatred against the United States and Western society. But they were not off-limits to Sarah. She continued her undercover work, attending rallies, visiting mosques and monitoring conferences with recording equipment strapped to her body, documenting the calls to jihad and martyrdom that were being preached out of sight of authorities, in a language few of them understood anyway.
In New York, she secretly recorded a pro-Palestinian rally where an official from the American Muslim Council, which was considered moderate, led the same kind of call-and-response exchanges heard in the Middle East. "Anybody support Hamas here?" the official said in Arabic. The crowd cheered. "Hear that Bill Clinton? We are all supporters of Hamas. Allahu Akhbar!" He continued: "Anybody supports Hezbollah here?" The crowd cheered again.
As she hunted down the terror mongers, Sarah became adept at using public records, such as tax files and corporate statements. But the best material was not so easy to find. While investigating a Virginia-based charity called the SAAR Foundation, she resorted to diving into garbage bins. It paid off, turning up a crucial financial link to Saudi Arabia. The foundation and dozens of related companies were later raided by FBI agents probing alleged financial ties to terrorism.
And then on Sept. 11, the clash that had killed her father, the one between radical Muslims and the "infidels," followed her to the United States. Her father was killed because he was a Jew, and now she was a double target because she was not only a Jew but also an American. "I'm fighting the same war that he was fighting," she said.
Sarah regularly comes across Canadian connections during her research, and advises authorities in Ottawa. But her dealings with Canadian officials have left her unimpressed. The Canadian chapters of extremist front groups have gone mostly untouched even after their U.S. offices have been investigated, charged and shut.
"The Canadians do not understand yet what Islamic terrorism is about," she said. "The war on terrorism has to be fought in our own backyards, in our own countries, because this is where they are."
Sarah fears that while she has won some battles, the West is losing the war. In the time it takes to catch a terrorist, a dozen more have been trained to take his place. Winning requires not only greater effort on the homefront, but also more fundamental international strategies to stop the flow of blood money and pressure state sponsors to cut their ties to the likes of Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah. Until then, Sarah has to live in anonymity, an irony that does not escape her. "We, the good people, have to hide while terrorists enjoy all the freedoms of the West." <A HREF="MAILTO:SBELL@NATIONALPOST.COM>sbell@nationalpost.com</A>