Taliban’s Mouth, FBI’s Ears

As the voice of the Taliban on American television, Noorullah Zadran came to his calling with impeccable credentials. With a flowing black beard, Ivy League degree and sonorous command of English, he projected the cultured face of a true believer.

Zadran smiled serenely into a PBS camera in August 1998, hours after Cruise missiles rained on Osama bin Laden’s bases in Afghanistan in retaliation for the bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa.

“We would like to see hard evidence,” he said, “to convince us they were terrorist camps.” Bin Laden, he insisted, was “the guest of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, with the understanding that no act of terror would be initiated from our soil.”

Until the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks proved his assurances hollow, Zadran seemed to speak with authority. Appointed seven years ago as first secretary of the Taliban’s diplomatic mission to the United Nations, the Afghan-born, naturalized U.S. citizen had gone from cab driver to the regime’s second-highest ranking official in the U.S.

Behind his diplomatic pose, though, was a hidden pursuit. Zadran, 53, had avoided prison in a federal smuggling case by turning FBI informant. For three years, he offered intelligence on the Taliban’s hierarchy and terrorist operations in Afghanistan even as he served as the regime’s American representative.

Then in October, Zadran’s clandestine existence took another sharp turn: He was indicted on tax and bank fraud charges that stemmed from the massive Sept. 11 investigation.

The tangled course of Zadran’s secret life provides a glimpse into the murky realm of terrorism informants, where motives and loyalties often blur. The undercover ally who pledged in a sealed 1996 plea agreement that he would “provide to the FBI any and all information related to possible terrorist activity” is now the first Taliban official to face prosecution in a U.S. court.

Like scores of suspects swept up since the 2001 attacks, Zadran is not directly accused of terrorism. The charges against him reflect the Justice Department’s aggressive treatment of even the smallest fish in terrorism cases -- targeting them with tax, immigration and other technical counts when there is little clear evidence of terrorist crimes.

Zadran’s strange passage -- gleaned from sealed court files and interviews with federal officials, diplomats and Afghan emigres -- sheds new light on the government’s effort to learn whether Taliban figures played a role in terrorist activities inside the U.S. The now-shuttered Taliban mission where Zadran worked was a suspected nerve center.

“The focus on the Taliban mission was the raising of money for their government,” said Mary Jo White, a former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York who oversaw the embassy bombing prosecutions of Al Qaeda operatives. “Our belief was they were working in concert with Bin Laden’s group.”

Four months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Zadran was cited in terrorist watch lists and named in court papers as a target in the nationwide probe into the conspiracy’s origins. A federal prosecutor disclosed in a confidential 2002 court motion that FBI agents were investigating Zadran for “various crimes, including providing financial assistance to the Taliban” in violation of International Emergency Economic Powers Act sanctions against so-called rogue nations.

But in his indictment last year, Zadran was instead accused of hiding Taliban payments on his income tax and falsely listing his wife as a Taliban employee on a mortgage application.

“The sole results of this extensive government investigation,” Zadran’s lawyers bridled in court documents, were small-bore claims that he had “failed to report an undetermined amount of income.”

Zadran’s motion to dismiss the case on constitutional grounds was turned down in March by a federal judge. Soon afterward, his lawyers abruptly resigned. They were replaced by the third attorney Zadran had hired since his indictment, Jared J. Scharf, a tax attorney specializing in plea bargains.

When Zadran arrived for a court hearing in Lower Manhattan in early April, the trappings of his Taliban days were gone. He had shaved his ascetic’s beard and replaced the traditional Afghan kameez he once wore to Taliban functions with a taupe brown suit.

He had refashioned himself into a solid American citizen. In Huntington Station, the blue-collar Long Island town where he now works as a real estate agent and lives in a tidy frame house with his wife and four children, Zadran tells neighbors and clients to call him Ron.

Standing alone outside the courtroom, flicking lint off his suit, he smiled wearily when asked about his double life as a Taliban official and American informant.

“Now is not the time,” he said.

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Zadran was full of passionate talk when he first emerged in the mid-1980s as a player in the Afghan emigre political scene. When activists gathered for rallies in Queens and Manhattan against the Soviet occupation of his homeland, Zadran would bull his way to the front. Swaggering, loud, irrepressible, he waved anti-Russian banners, sang Afghan anthems and clamored to speak his mind, friends recalled.

“He would always be talking politics. He couldn’t get enough of it,” said Zaka Carvan, who runs a grocery on Main Street in Flushing, Queens, a busy artery of kabob stands and import shops near a medical complex where the Taliban installed its U.N. mission.

Zadran’s family had come with the early waves of Afghan clans who crowded into tenements and row houses in Queens and Long Island in the late 1970s. Zadran became a citizen in 1980; in 1984, he received a bachelor of arts degree in general studies from Columbia University after several years of evening classes.

But his education and enthusiasm failed to bring the power broker’s role he craved. “The leaders of all these movements never gave him a chance,” Carvan said.

Tireless, Zadran shifted his energy into business. He translated in courtrooms and drove cabs all night. He hawked coins, rugs and gems, and invested $50,000 into an Afghan-themed cable program, reading news bulletins and hosting dance troupes.

He made money rapidly and lost it just as quickly. A $115,000 investment in a rug company evaporated. A taxi collision led to a personal injury lawsuit. In a deposition, Zadran admitted neglecting his businesses to fight in the Afghan civil wars that raged after the 1989 Soviet pullout.

“I would do well,” he testified, “and then the fever of the country comes and then you leave everything, just go back there to fight.”

The visits home to Paktia, a mountain province along the Pakistan border, had one sidelight. Zadran flew back to the U.S. with animal pelts smuggled in suitcases. He boasted to one customer that he had access to “as much as you can handle.”

They haggled for 15 months until the client agreed to buy two endangered snow-leopard hides. At $15,000 per pelt, Zadran promised far more, “two, three hundred pieces.”

The two men clinched the deal in July 1995 at a highway rest stop near Darien, Conn. Days later, Zadran was arrested. His customer was a federal wildlife agent.

Bartering for his freedom, Zadran turned informant. By May 1996, he had met with FBI agents 15 times, relaying intelligence he had picked up during trips to his homeland. “He has attempted to assist the government in any way possible,” Zadran’s lawyers wrote in a confidential plea-bargain request sealed by judicial order and obtained by The Times.

According to the lawyers, Zadran had given New Haven FBI Agent Kenneth Grey “background information concerning terrorism and narcotics transportation routes.”

Zadran identified Afghan-based groups that “illegally obtained U.S. military hardware, including Stinger antiaircraft missiles.” And he offered “deep intelligence concerning the composition of the new [Taliban] government in Afghanistan and the situation of its opposition forces.”

Zadran’s timing was fortuitous. The political scene in Afghanistan had grown chaotic and dangerous. The Taliban’s militant Islamic troops were on the verge of seizing power from the teetering government of Berhanuddin Rabbani. And two years after expulsion from Sudan, Bin Laden had just found sanctuary with his Al Qaeda loyalists in the Taliban stronghold of Kandahar.

Grey and Richard Ware Levitt, then Zadran’s lawyer, would not confirm whether Zadran’s revelations had aided the U.S. But cooperation paid off. Zadran was allowed to plead guilty to a single felony count in the pelt-smuggling case and avoid prison. In return, according to Zadran’s secret plea bargain agreement with the government, he agreed to update the FBI on “terrorist activity” every two months until 2001 -- the end of his five-year probation.

Counter-terrorism experts said Zadran was probably pressed by the federal agents for information and documents about the Taliban’s internal plans, relationship with Al Qaeda and funding sources.

“The holy grail would be to compromise their cables,” said Jack Cloonan, a retired FBI expert on Al Qaeda who ran intelligence-gathering operations against the Queens mission in the late 1990s. “The aim was to get anything we could about what they were communicating back home and vice versa.”

The FBI’s New York office also used electronic wiretaps to monitor the Queens mission’s phone lines and “there were agents assigned to know who each [Taliban official] was and where they were 24 hours a day,” Cloonan said.

Zadran kept his informer’s role well-hidden. He still attended rallies around Queens but seemed more somber, friends recalled. He gave up drinking at parties and began showing up for prayers at Sayed Jamaluddin, a creaking wood-frame mosque that was spiritual home for New York’s Pushtun Afghans -- and a hotbed of Taliban sympathizers, according to authorities.

“We welcomed him,” said Dr. Esmat Nawabi, a retired hematologist who heads the mosque board. Sayed Jamaluddin, Nawabi insisted, “has no ties to any organization or source of income.”

Like the old men kneeling beside him every Friday, Zadran grew a full beard. On his cable show, he dropped music for the stern edicts of Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

“It was a spiritual awakening, it was good for him,” said Carvan.

Zadran’s newly devout image impressed visiting Taliban diplomats. According to Sharif Ghalib, a former Rabbani official, Zadran won over members of a touring Taliban delegation in 1996 by helping with logistics while they were in town to meet with the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“He gave them legitimacy,” said Ghalib, now charge d’affaires for the Afghan Embassy in Toronto. “He hobnobbed with their leaders and he connected them with influential Afghan people in the U.S.”

The Clinton administration had refused to recognize the Taliban. But the regime was allowed to dispatch a senior official, Abdul Hakim Mujahid, to New York. In June 1998, Zadran was appointed Mujahid’s “first secretary,” even as he continued to meet with the FBI.

Zadran’s diplomatic arrangement was unusual but legal in the U.S., where Americans routinely worked for other nations as consular officials. Both Mujahid and Zadran were “limited to a liaison function” -- allowed to interact with U.N. and U.S. diplomats, but not permitted the full range of consular and diplomatic activities accorded typical embassy officials, said Karl Inderfurth, then assistant secretary of State for South Asian affairs.

Still, Zadran was soon acting like a diplomat. He spoke up for the Taliban on television news shows. And despite his federal conviction, Zadran began traveling for the Taliban after the judge overseeing his case returned his impounded passport, with no objection from prosecutors.

He went at least twice to Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, according to Afghan intelligence reports cited by Ghalib. Zadran flew to Kabul in the late 1990s, Ghalib said. And on a month-long trip to Kandahar in 2000, Ghalib said, Zadran “was supposed to meet” with Mullah Omar, who has been a fugitive since the October 2001 U.S. invasion.

There are no verified accounts of that meeting, and federal officials would neither confirm nor deny the reported contacts. But Ghalib said Zadran “made no secret of these meetings,” and said he even described them on his own cable-TV show.

Fluent, unruffled, Zadran was in demand as a media spokesman, appearing on CNN, PBS and the Voice of America. He joined Mujahid on visits to mosques and campuses and attended meetings with State Department officials. One Taliban delegation was left stranded when Zadran’s balky sedan broke down on the New Jersey Turnpike.

“He was the Taliban’s Mr. Fix-it,” said a State Department official. “If you had a relative dying at home or you needed to get money from Kandahar, you had to go through him.”

Officials of the exiled Rabbani government, which also had an accredited diplomatic mission to the U.N. at the time, complained that the Taliban mission illegally operated as a full consular office, churning out passports and visas. The State Department responded swiftly, warning Mujahid and Zadran that “no mission can issue travel documents,” the State official said.

Ravan Farhadi, Afghanistan’s current U.N. ambassador, contends that hundreds of “Arabs and jihadis” may have obtained false documents. “Zadran is answerable to this,” Farhadi said.

In February 2001, the U.S. ordered the Flushing mission to close, citing U.N. sanctions that had been tightened two months earlier against the Afghan regime for harboring Bin Laden and Al Qaeda. In his last official comment as first secretary, Zadran told CNN he was turning out the lights in the Flushing office. “We’re just trying to wrap up.”

He was less guarded in a final meeting with U.S. diplomats. According to a State Department cable obtained by the National Security Archive at George Washington University, he grumbled that Bin Laden had worn out his Taliban welcome.

“I wish your missiles had hit him,” Zadran said.

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Zadran went silent in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. By January 2002, he was a criminal target. His sudden transition from informant to defendant remains unexplained.

But there are hints that Zadran was denounced by another informant.

In court papers, Stephen Miller, the federal prosecutor handling Zadran’s case, disclosed that Zadran “recruited a co-conspirator” who “fraudulently verified the employment of Zadran’s wife at the Taliban mission.” The co-conspirator has not been charged in Zadran’s case, a sign of cooperation with the government.

FBI agents scanned Zadran’s probation files, examining monthly payments he declared from the Taliban and travel requests he filed with his probation officer. They pored through his bank accounts. They interviewed Zadran several times at his Long Island home. In a backyard shed, they seized a stack of correspondence with senior Taliban officials.

Federal authorities are continuing to investigate the Taliban’s fundraising channels inside the U.S. Officials suspect that revenues were raised in mosques and at Afghan gatherings around the country.

These days, no one in Queens’ Afghan community admits to affiliating with the Taliban. Few have seen Noorullah Zadran in the last four years, and fewer care to remember him. At Sayed Jamaluddin, the old men arriving for Friday prayers shook their heads at the mention of his name. The regulars on Main Street sighed and threw up their hands.

Zaka Carvan paused to recall his ghost of a friend before returning to grind hamburger meat behind his market counter. Like the others, he took the news of Zadran’s legal troubles in silence, careful not to venture an opinion. But when Carvan heard that Zadran had shaved his mullah’s beard, he had to stifle a bitter laugh.

“If that,” Carvan said, “was only the worst of his punishments.”

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Times researcher John Beckham contributed to this report.