THE SHADOWY WORLD OF INFORMERS

When the trial of six Muslim men charged with planning a massacre of soldiers at Fort Dix begins later this year a significant part of the prosecution case will rely on the controversial role played by what the FBI calls “CWs” – cooperating witnesses.
The term is a confusing one because “CWs” are mostly paid informers. Some of them offer their services to the intelligence community in return for money while others are coerced or blackmailed into betraying associates in return for immunity from prosecution, or in some cases an offer of US citizenship. They have steadily become a critical ingredient in the shadowy war on terror in which the FBI and CIA are often forced to rely on people with shady backgrounds to penetrate terror cells. In many instances informers, or informants as the FBI sometimes prefers to call them, find it easy to blend into a terror networks because they share religious, racial or social connections with those running the networks or individual terror cells.
In the Fort Dix investigation the FBI used two paid informers to infiltrate a group of young Muslim men. One of the informers presented himself as an Egyptian with a military pedigree. Defense lawyers will no doubt argue that both informers – “CW-1” and “CW-2” acted as agent provocateurs in their year-long relationship with the accused. In response, prosecutors will hope to show through detailed recordings and videos that the FBI informers merely played along with a plan that was already in the minds of the accused.
The FBI has already indicated that it had problems with one of its informers two months prior to him being inserted into the Fort Dix investigation, a fact defense lawyers will no doubt seek to exploit. The FBI made the following admission:
“CW-1 has had one instance of not fully reporting fully truthfully information. In January 2006, CW-1 reported to his/her handler that he/she misstated the identity of a friend with whom he/she had contact in an effort to protect that individual. CW-1 was informed by the handling agent that all information must be fully and completely reported. Since this incident, no new derogatory information concern CW-1 has been reported. In this case the FBI has been able to independently corroborate the information provided by CW-1 through consensual recordings and surveillance operations.”
Any time the FBI has had a problem with an informer it has not resulted in derailing a terror case, generally because secret recordings and videos taken by the informer confirmed central tenets of the prosecution case. A classic example of an informer who went off the rails was Mohammed Alanssi, 52, who set himself on fire in front of the White House in November 2004, claiming the FBI had shortchanged him. He survived his suicide attempt with severe burns to the upper part of his body and later refused to discuss his personal problems with the FBI.
Nevertheless, before setting himself alight he provided a glimpse into his history as an informer. He left a note for his FBI handler, Special Agent Robert Fuller, alleging the government wronged him and had refused to permit him to visit his ailing wife in his native country, Yemen. He also charged that some FBI agents promised him he would be a millionaire yet he only received $100,000. In his view that was a sum that hardly paid for a major operation he had to undergo.
Before attempting suicide, he also contacted the media and said he had feared at one stage he would be put in prison and tortured if he stopped being an FBI informer. There was, he claimed, a real risk if he gave evidence in court his family in Yemen would be killed. Many of his claims are hard to verify beyond the fact he was an important FBI “CW” in a terror case against a prominent Yemeni cleric, Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad whom the FBI believed was funneling millions of dollars to Al Qaeda and Hamas. To get their hands on the cleric who lived in Yemen, the FBI used two informers - Alanssi and a naturalized American who masqueraded as a Black Panther but did not speak Arabic. Alanssi was the FBI’s key informer in that particular operation.
But how did the FBI recruit Alanssi to go after the cleric? Well, if one is to believe the official story he was an employee at the US embassy in Yemen but fled to the US in 2000 after a financial deal fell through and a warrant was issued for his arrest. He then settled in Brooklyn where he acquired a reputation for borrowing money and not paying it back. It was said he was good at telling tall tales in order to crave sympathy. After 9/11, he came to the attention of the FBI after 9/11 which was desperately trying to recruit informers within Muslim community across the US, especially in the New York area.
While that is the official account of Alanssi’s road to becoming an informer, it is just as likely the CIA and FBI recruited him while he was at the US embassy in Yemen and provided him with a shady cover story before he fled to the US. But, whether he was an informer before he left Yemen or approached the FBI and offered to work for them for money when he got to America, we may never know. What is not in doubt is that he was on the FBI’s books as a paid informer in the Muslim community in Brooklyn in 2002. It was not long before his handlers found a bigger role for him, namely luring the prominent Yemeni cleric, al-Moayad out of Yemen to Frankfurt in Germany where the US could get its hands on him and have him extradited.
Alanssi made several trips to Yemen to talk to the cleric and successfully lured him to Frankfurt. There, Alanssi and his co-informant, who was masquerading as a Black Panther, secretly videotaped and recorded conversations with the cleric. That evidence was later used to extradite the cleric to the US and charge him with financing terrorism. Before Alanssi was due to take the stand in the trial of the cleric, he set himself on fire and was never called to give evidence. His absence, however, did not derail the case and the cleric was sentenced to 75 years behind bars. Some observers concluded that it was just as well the prosecution did not rely on testimony from Alanssi because he was an unstable individual with a shady past.
Most terrorist cases now rely on paid informers or terrorists who have been coerced or encouraged to change allegiance. As a rule, these individuals are unsavory people with criminal backgrounds. Some have committed crimes ranging from assault to theft, burglary, rape and murder. But it is their criminality and immorality, allied to their proximity to organized crime or to terrorism that makes them special. They can be easily inserted into the Mob, Al Qaeda or any loosely organized bunch of people with dreams of planning attacks on the United States or its allies.
The vital tasks facing “handlers” - intelligence officers running informers – include exercising tight control and knowing when to rein in their informers. Unfortunately, it is not always a good thing to place too many constraints on informers or terrorists working for the state because they tend to function better and are more readily accepted by their peers when they are permitted to behave like the people they are targeting. In other words a terrorist employed by the FBI or CIA can better maintain his/her cover and credibility when he/she commits terror and establishes a reputation as a committed terrorist within a terrorist cell. For an agent handling such a terrorist there are serious moral issues and the same applies to handlers dealing with informers who may only be able to penetrate an organization when they have proved they can undertake criminal actions.
Terrorist recruited as agents of the state are vital to winning the war on terror. That was proven by British intelligence in its undercover war against the IRA for almost 30 years. The British learned that a terrorist informer was more effective than electronic surveillance because his roots were in the indigenous population enabling him to blend into that population. An outsider playing the role of an agent was too easily exposed by the IRA’s own informer hunters – its Internal Security Department.
Terrorist organizations are constantly aware of the risks they face from electronic counter insurgency measures, such as telephone and internet taps and eye in the sky photography and management of the majority of tele-communications across the globe. They are also conscious of the use of man-to-man surveillance by intelligence agencies and that can be difficult to mount in tight communities, in mountainous terrain like Afghanistan, in volatile parts of Baghdad or even in tight communities in Brooklyn or New Jersey. In contrast, a terrorist informer or paid informer like Alanssi can blend into his/her own community. If an informer is properly trained that informer can be a major asset. Once on the inside, an informer is the most lethal weapon an organization like the CIA or FBI can ever possess. He/she can alert a handler to planned operations, identify leading terrorist operatives and reveal the terrorists’ means of communication. The informer can also be used to plant listening devices in terrorist hideouts and to insert similar bugs or explosive devices in weapons’ caches. The inserting of explosive devices in weapons ensures terrorists are killed the moment they remove weapons from a “dump” or when they try to fire them. More importantly a terrorist informer can feed terrorists bogus information from his/her handler.
For all the above reasons, the FBI and CIA are constantly on the lookout for people they can recruit as paid informers or those they can easily coerce or blackmail into working for them. Terrorists are more difficult to recruit because of the ideological and anti-interrogation training they go through. They are therefore mostly recruited through special projects such as the one that has been running for several years at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay. There, detainees are broken down mentally and scrutinized for lengthy periods and some then become amenable to changing sides. Blackmail is a favoured technique of intelligence agencies to recruit paid informers like Alanssi or terrorists. A person’s sexual perversions or sexual indiscretions can be equally powerful tools to force people to inform.
The handling of terrorists as agents of the state can be a very nasty and controversial business. Often a handler must permit a terrorist informer to behave like a terrorist in order to maintain a cover within a terrorist organization. It can mean allowing a terrorist to kill innocent people. The argument often proffered - and one which will always remain classified – is that a terrorist informer by maintaining his/her cover will over time save the lives of many more people than he/she will need to kill in order to demonstrate his/her worth to fellow terrorists.
Many people see that as a specious dense for unlawful killing and it is an issue that will rarely find its way into the public domain. By its very nature, the handling of terrorist informers is so controversial in nature it will remain one of the most secretive and classified aspects of the war on terror. In contrast, the role of paid informants like Alanssi will become more common as terror cases wind their way through the courts.