FBI Casts Wide Net to Battle Terrorism

Last month, on a farm in the Catskill Mountains in upstate New York, a group of Sufi Muslims marked the holy pilgrimage to Mecca with friends, prayers -- and a visit from the FBI.

For two hours, the uninvited guests, including a team from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, conducted interviews and checked green cards. State troopers and the county sheriff blocked the main road. Nobody was arrested, although the agents left behind their business cards, and told the Muslims to stay in touch.

“They are mixing us with the terrorists,” says Aydogan Fuat, the group’s leader, who bought the 50-acre farm in Sidney Center, N.Y., as a spiritual retreat for his followers. Fuat says the idea that he is a threat to America is ludicrous. The closest thing to a weapon in his house, he says, is a bread knife. But he does acknowledge making an inflammatory remark to a U.S. Embassy official -- the day before the Sept. 11 attacks.

Fuat is just one of the untold numbers of citizens being questioned by government agents looking to root out would-be terrorists. In testimony before Congress this month, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft said law enforcement officials have been tracking “hundreds and hundreds of suspected terrorists” in the United States in recent months. In some cases, the focus of the government’s attention has become clear -- from the conviction of shoe bomber Richard Reid in Boston last year to the arrests and pending trials of alleged cell leaders in cities from Buffalo, N.Y., to Portland, Ore.

But who are the others? Is the country really infiltrated by legions of terrorists? If so, why isn’t the government arresting more of them?

Interviews with law enforcement officials, federal prosecutors, defense lawyers and civil liberties groups reveal the breadth of the government’s efforts.

Some of those being monitored have particularly alarming pedigrees -- they have been to Osama bin Laden’s terrorist training camps and are back in the United States. Others are associated with Muslim charities that may have bankrolled Al Qaeda operatives. Still others constitute a vast assortment of sympathizers -- from taxi drivers to oncologists.

Separating those who pose a danger to the U.S. from the “underachievers” -- FBI parlance for militants who are not apt to resort to violence -- has turned out to be an enormously complex and time-consuming process.

Round-the-clock surveillance of a single suspect can tie up 12 to 20 agents “at a minimum,” an FBI supervisor said, and such “24-7 tails” are being conducted in every major city in the nation.

Prosecutors, often without direct evidence of terrorism-related crimes, are having to dig up novel theories of law, like their mob-busting brethren of the 1960s and ‘70s, employing wire and mail fraud statutes in some instances.

What is also clear is that in a post-Sept. 11 world, where the Justice Department and the FBI are focused on preventing future terrorist acts, and not just prosecuting past crimes, the government is adopting an unusually broad view of who should be monitored.

Historically, terrorists were considered people who engaged in politically motivated violence against civilians. Now, for every Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader recently arrested in Pakistan, there are scores of far less menacing figures who are being questioned, and in many instances deported or put on trial. Last year, federal prosecutors in New Jersey took credit for handling more than 60 “international terrorism” cases, although the majority involved allegations that Arab American students were cheating on a standardized English language test.

“There has been a fundamental shift in proving whether someone is involved in terrorism,” said Laura K. Donohue, an acting assistant political science professor at Stanford University and a visiting fellow at its Center for International Security and Cooperation. “We have started to name people as terrorists without them having to have engaged in terrorism or even conspired to have engaged in terrorism.”

On the surface, the war on terrorism seems hardly a fair fight. The FBI, which has about 11,500 agents worldwide, has deputized thousands of additional state and local law enforcement personnel to serve on new terrorism-fighting task forces across the country.

The investigators are using their powers like never before. Ashcroft disclosed recently that since Sept. 11 he had authorized more than 170 “emergency” warrants for electronic surveillance or physical searches without immediate court approval -- triple the number executed in the last 20 years. Hundreds of other covert terrorism surveillance operations have been launched since the attacks through the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

One such surveillance apparently unfolded in Lackawanna, N.Y., where some people couldn’t help but notice the new camera that was posted on a telephone pole outside the Islamic center attended by one of six Yemeni men arrested in the town last September. Authorities charged the six with attending an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. The FBI declined to comment on the camera, saying that as a general matter it does not disclose investigative techniques.

But tracking terrorists remains a daunting task. The FBI believes that between 14,000 and 20,000 Islamic militants from around the world received some kind of training in Al Qaeda camps in Afghanistan over the last decade or so. Many hundreds of those men are living somewhere in the United States, authorities believe. They also believe many hundreds of other sympathizers and potential terrorists are here who never attended the camps but who pose a threat nevertheless.

Confirming who those people are, even which ones attended the camps, has proved nearly impossible, authorities say, since many took great pains to cover their tracks on the way into Afghanistan. For more than a decade, no one could travel directly from the United States to Afghanistan, and many militants traveled through several countries to “launder” their footprints and passports on the way in.

Even more confounding is predicting which of those men trained in the camps will go “operational,” and which have returned to the United States even more radicalized than before, but who may never lift a hand to commit a terrorist act.

A senior FBI official compares Al Qaeda followers in the U.S. to athletes who perform at different levels. Many of them play the sport in college, far fewer make it to the pros, and an even smaller number become Hall of Famers. Many are thought to be part of an underground network of people who may support terrorism, providing financing, recruiting help and logistical aid to a few handfuls of men who form the hard core. Others may simply be biding their time until they receive some specific instruction to strike, or some pre-arranged signal that the time to launch an attack has come, such as the onset of war with Iraq or the capture or killing of Bin Laden.

And the vast majority may do nothing at all. “They may have the wherewithal but for whatever reason they are not inclined to follow through. Sometimes it is just a lack of commitment, or a lack of motivation,” the FBI official said. “But which ones are they? How do you distinguish them from the others? You have to assume they have the potential to be [a Sept. 11 hijacker Mohammed] Atta or even a Richard Reid.”

The weeding-out process has stretched the bureau in some cases. Some agents are struggling to keep on top of the people they already have identified, and are not opening new cases. “We just don’t have the bodies,” said one longtime FBI counter-terrorism agent. “The fear is not the ones we know. It is the ones we don’t know.”

Current policy at the FBI and the Justice Department dictates that having attended an Al Qaeda camp isn’t itself sufficient grounds to bring criminal charges. Only a handful of defendants -- shoe-bomber Reid and the Lackawanna Six, for instance -- have faced such charges.

Consequently, much of the terrorism war in the courts has been fought on the legal margins. Last month, University of Idaho graduate student Sami Omar Al-Hussayen, who had been raising money and designing Web sites for a Michigan group known as the Islamic Assembly of North America, was indicted on charges of visa fraud for failing to disclose his connection to the group. Prosecutors contend that the group promoted violence, although they have yet to bring any charges against it. Four men were indicted in Syracuse, N.Y., federal court last month for helping a group called Help the Needy send money into Iraq without a license. The defendants assert that all the money was for humanitarian purposes; the government says that even if that is true, the men still violated the law.

The indictment doesn’t allege that Help the Needy or any of the defendants supported terrorism. Some e-mail found on their computers came from groups with suspected terrorist links. But James McGraw, a lawyer representing Help the Needy’s executive director, says even mainstream groups get mail from the radical fringes on occasion. “If you are a registered Republican,” he said, as one example, “you are liable to get e-mail from the John Birch Society.”

Law enforcement officials say they often have more intelligence about defendants than they publicly reveal. An FBI agent subsequently testified in the Idaho case that he unearthed thousands of disaster photos, including shots of the World Trade Center, before and after Sept. 11, on Al Hussayen’s computer hard drive. In the Syracuse case, some officials believe there is a link between Help the Needy and the Islamic Assembly, and that its activities are much less benign than they appear.

The government has been even more aggressive in deporting suspected terrorists than in prosecuting them. In his recent testimony, Ashcroft said there had been 478 people deported in connection with the Sept. 11 investigation, more than double the 211 criminal charges brought to date.

Some cities with large Arab American populations that were under the microscope after Sept. 11 are getting attention again.

In San Diego, where FBI agents conducted a relentless sweep after Sept. 11 because three of the 19 hijackers lived in the area, several dozen immigrants working for security or transportation companies were arrested just days before the Super Bowl was played there this January. Sources in the Muslim community say the government’s focus recently shifted to Afghan men, and that the FBI has been asking people for names of supporters of Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, whom the U.S. government has identified as an ally of Bin Laden.

Malina Amiri said FBI agents questioned her husband, a San Diego taxi driver, for 45 minutes in November, using a list of prepared questions that she translated for him. “They told us that an anonymous person told them he had a connection to Al Qaeda,” she said. The couple agreed to talk to the FBI without a lawyer, she said, because agents told them “they merely wanted to clear his name and move on to the real terrorists.” Two months later, the agents returned with an arrest warrant.

The government decided to initiate deportation proceedings against her husband based on a misdemeanor domestic violence count he pleaded guilty to in 2000. Amiri said her husband attended an anger management course without ever going to jail. She bailed him out of INS custody with $10,000, and he is now fighting to remain in the U.S. The couple own a home in a middle-class San Diego neighborhood and have three U.S.-born children under 5 years of age.

Amiri said her husband does not have any ties to Al Qaeda. She said that he served in the Afghan army when the country was run by a Communist government, and that when the Taliban overthrew the government, her husband fled to Pakistan. She said he was trained as a civil engineer at a Moscow university.

FBI officials in San Diego declined to comment on the case. A spokeswoman for the San Diego office denied that the agency is using misdemeanor domestic violence convictions as a weapon to justify the deportation of Afghan men who are here legally.

It is unclear what prompted the government’s interest in Fuat, the Sufi, who is known to his followers as Sheik Abdul Kerim. The FBI arrived at his farm while he was running an errand, and as his visitors were getting ready to leave. That left his wife, an IBM consultant, to deal with the agents, who said they had received reports from other citizens of suspicious people wearing turbans.

The agents visited the kitchen and prayer room, and asked questions, such as whether any of the 15 people present knew of anyone who could be of help to the government, Fuat said. They checked the green cards of his friends from Singapore and Afghanistan and the identification of several others who, like him, are naturalized Americans.

A spokeswoman for the FBI field office in Albany, N.Y., declined to comment. As a general matter, she said, “we do receive a lot of information. It is all assessed and prioritized and worked through to its logical conclusion to where it is substantiated or not.” She also said the FBI makes “outreach” to Muslim communities so they will know where to turn in case they ever become victims of ethnic violence.

Fuat acknowledged an incident that, at the very least, was poorly timed. The Cypriot-born Fuat still maintains an apartment in Turkey, where he visits with friends and followers. While visiting Turkey 18 months ago, he was arrested on charges that he was violating state laws restricting the practice of religion. After sitting in prison for a few months, he said he grew frustrated that the U.S. government wasn’t taking his case seriously.

His feelings boiled over the day he was due in court, when he received a visit from a U.S. Embassy official, who said her hands were tied and urged him to be patient. He said he told her that he felt like a hostage, and that the U.S. was becoming tyrannical like his Turkish captors. “God will punish America!” he declared to the official.

That was Sept. 10, 2001.

The next day, he heard his guards screaming, watching the carnage in America unfold on television. “Before you know it, they are coming and questioning me,” he said. Fuat said he was later acquitted of the Turkish charges, after serving six months.

He said he has no way of knowing whether the blowup with the embassy official triggered the visit by the FBI. “I don’t think so, but I don’t know,” he said, adding that he understands why the government needs to vigorously pursue possible terrorists, but resents the timing and manner of the probe in his case.

“So many people are labeling us because we are Muslim,” he said. “If the FBI thinks they have hundreds of terrorists in this country, they must know where they are. Why are they not doing that?”

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This article was reported by Times staff writers Richard B. Schmitt, Greg Krikorian, Josh Meyer and H.G. Reza.