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© The Washington Post
Craig Monteilh: 'It is all about entrapment.'
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The ex-FBI informant with a change of heart: 'There is no real hunt. It's fixed' by Paul Harris
Craig Monteilh describes how he pretended to be a radical Muslim in
order to root out potential threats, shining a light on some of the
bureau's more ethically murky practices.
Craig Monteilh says he did not balk when his FBI handlers gave him the
OK to have sex with the Muslim women his undercover operation was
targeting. Nor, at the time, did he shy away from recording their pillow
talk.
"They said, if it would enhance the intelligence, go ahead and have sex. So I did," Monteilh told the
Guardian as he described his year as a confidential FBI informant sent on a secret mission to infiltrate southern Californian mosques.
It is an astonishing admission that goes that goes to the heart of the
intelligence surveillance of Muslim communities in America in the years
after 9/11. While police and FBI leaders have insisted they are acting
to defend America from a terrorist attack, civil liberties groups have
insisted they have repeatedly gone too far and treated an entire
religious group as suspicious.
Monteilh was involved in one of the most controversial
tactics: the use of "confidential informants" in so-called entrapment
cases. This is when suspects carry out or plot fake terrorist "attacks"
at the request or under the close supervision of an FBI undercover
operation using secret informants. Often those informants have serious
criminal records or are supplied with a financial motivation to net
suspects.
In the case of the Newburgh Four - where four men were convicted for a
fake terror attack on Jewish targets in the Bronx - a confidential
informant offered $250,000, a free holiday and a car to one suspect for
help with the attack.
In the case of the Fort Dix Five, which involved a fake plan to attack a
New Jersey military base, one informant's criminal past included
attempted murder, while another admitted in court at least two of the
suspects later jailed for life had not known of any plot.
Such actions have led Muslim civil rights groups to wonder if their
communities are being unfairly targeted in a spying game that is rigged
against them. Monteilh says that is exactly what happens.
"The
way the FBI conducts their operations, It is all about entrapment ... I
know the game, I know the dynamics of it. It's such a joke, a real joke.
There is no real hunt. It's fixed," he said.
But Monteilh has regrets now about his involvement in a scheme called
Operation Flex. Sitting in the kitchen of his modest home in Irvine,
near Los Angeles, Monteilh said the FBI should publicly apologise for
his fruitless quest to root out Islamic radicals in Orange County,
though he does not hold out much hope that will happen. "They don't have
the humility to admit a mistake," he said.
Monteilh's story sounds like something out of a pulp thriller. Under the
supervision of two FBI agents the muscle-bound fitness instructor
created a fictitious French-Syrian altar ego, called Farouk Aziz. In
this disguise in 2006 Monteilh started hanging around mosques in Orange
County - the long stretch of suburbia south of LA - and pretended to
convert to Islam.
He was tasked with befriending Muslims and blanket recording their
conversations. All this information was then fed back to the FBI who
told Monteilh to act like a radical himself to lure out Islamist
sympathizers.
Yet, far from succeeding, Monteilh eventually so unnerved Orange
County's Muslim community that that they got a restraining order against
him. In an ironic twist, they also reported Monteilh to the FBI:
unaware he was in fact working undercover for the agency.
Monteilh does not look like a spy. He is massively well built, but
soft-spoken and friendly. He is 49 but looks younger. He lives in a
small rented home in Irvine that blends into the suburban sprawl of
southern California. Yet Monteilh knows the spying game intimately well.
By his own account Monteilh got into undercover work after meeting a
group of off-duty cops working out in a gym. Monteilh told them he had
spent time in prison in Chino, serving time for passing fraudulent
checks.
It is a criminal past he explains by saying he was traumatised by a
nasty divorce. "It was a bad time in my life," he said. He and the cops
got to talking about the criminals Monteilh had met while in Chino. The
information was so useful that Monteilh says he began to work on
undercover drug and organised crime cases.
Eventually he asked to work on counter-terrorism and was passed on to
two FBI handlers, called Kevin Armstrong and Paul Allen. These two
agents had a mission and an alias ready-made for him.
Posing as Farouk Aziz he would infiltrate local mosques and Islamic
groups around Orange County. "Paul Allen said: 'Craig, you are going to
be our computer worm. Our guy that gives us the real pulse of the Muslim
community in America'," Monteilh said.
The operation began simply enough. Monteilh started hanging out at
mosques, posing as Aziz, and explaining he wanted to learn more about
religion. In July, 2006, at the Islamic Center of Irvine, he converted
to Islam.
Monteilh also began attending other mosques, including the Orange County
Islamic Foundation. Monteilh began circulating endlessly from mosque to
mosque, spending long days in prayer or reading books or just hanging
out in order to get as many people as possible to talk to him.
"Slowly I began to wear the robes, the hat, the scarf and they saw me
slowly transform and growing a beard. At that point, about three or four
months later, [my FBI handlers] said: 'OK, now start to ask
questions'."
Those questions were aimed at rooting out radicals. Monteilh would talk
of his curiosity over the concepts of jihad and what Muslims should do
about injustices in the world, especially where it pertained to American
foreign policy.
He talked of access to weapons, a possible desire to be a martyr and inquired after like-minded souls.
It
was all aimed at trapping people in condemning statements. "The skill
is that I am going to get you to say something. I am cornering you to
say "jihad"," he said.
Of course, the chats were recorded.
In scenes out of a James Bond movie, Monteilh said he sometimes wore a
secret video recorder sewn into his shirt. At other times he activated
an audio recorder on his key rings.
Monteilh left his keys in offices and rooms in the mosques that he
attended in the hope of recording conversations that took place when he
was not here. He did it so often that he earned a reputation with other
worshippers for being careless with his keys. The recordings were passed
back to his FBI handlers at least once a week.
He also met with them every two months at a hotel room in nearby Anaheim
for a more intense debriefing. Monteilh says he was grilled on specific
individuals and asked to view charts showing networks of relationships
among Orange County's Muslim population.
He said the FBI had two basic aims. Firstly, they aimed to uncover
potential militants. Secondly, they could also use any information
Monteilh discovered - like an affair or someone being gay - to turn
targeted people into becoming FBI informants themselves.
None of it seemed to unnerve his FBI bosses, not even when he carried
out a suggestion to begin seducing Muslim women and recording them.
At one hotel meeting, agent Kevin Armstrong explained the FBI attitude
towards the immense breadth of Operation Flex - and any concerns over
civil rights - by saying simply: "Kevin is God."
Monteilh's own attitude evolved into something very similar. "I was
untouchable. I am a felon, I am on probation and the police cannot
arrest me. How empowering is that? It is very empowering. You began to
have a certain arrogance about it. It is almost taunting. They told me:
'You are an untouchable'," he said.
But it was not always easy. "I started at 4am. I ended at 9.30pm.
Really, it was a lot of work ... Farouk took over. Craig did not exist,"
he said. But it was also well paid: at the peak of Operation Flex,
Monteilh was earning more than $11,000 a month.
But he was wrong about being untouchable.
Far from uncovering radical terror networks, Monteilh ended up
traumatising the community he was sent into. Instead of embracing calls
for jihad or his questions about suicide bombers or his claims to have
access to weapons, Monteilh was instead reported to the FBI as a
potentially dangerous extremist.
A restraining order was also taken out against him in June 2007, asking
him to stay away from the Islamic Center of Irvine. Operation Flex was a
bust and Monteilh had to kill off his life as Farouk Aziz.
But the story did not end there. In circumstances that remain murky
Monteilh then sued the FBI over his treatment, claiming that they
abandoned him once the operation was over.
He also ended up in jail after Irvine police prosecuted him for
defrauding two women, including a former girlfriend, as part of an
illegal trade in human growth hormone at fitness clubs. (Monteilh claims
those actions were carried out as part of another secret string
operation for which he was forced to carry the can.)
What is not in doubt is that Monteilh's identity later became public. In
2009 the FBI brought a case against Ahmad Niazi, an Afghan immigrant in
Orange County.
The evidence included secret recordings and even calling Osama bin Laden
"an angel". That was Monteilh's work and he outed himself to the press
to the shock of the very Muslims he had been spying on who now realised
that Farouk Aziz - the radical they had reported to the FBI two years
earlier - had in fact been an undercover FBI operative.
Now Monteilh says he set Niazi up and the FBI was trying to blackmail
the Afghani into being an informant. "I built the whole relationship
with Niazi. Through my coercion we talked about jihad a lot," he said.
The FBI's charges against Niazi were indeed later dropped.
Now Monteilh has joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit
against the FBI. Amazingly, after first befriending Muslim leaders in
Orange County as Farouk Aziz, then betraying them as Craig Monteilh, he
has now joined forces with them again to campaign for their civil
liberties.
That has now put Monteilh's testimony about his year undercover is at
the heart of a fresh legal effort to prove that the FBI operation in
Orange County unfairly targeted a vulnerable Muslim community, trampling
on civil rights in the name of national security.
The FBI did not respond to a request from the
Guardian for comment.
It is not the first time Monteilh has shifted his stance. In the ACLU
case Monteilh is now posing as the sorrowful informant who saw the error
of his ways.
But in previous court papers filed against the Irvine Police and the
FBI, Monteilh's lawyers portrayed him as the loyal intelligence asset
who did sterling work tackling the forces of Islamic radicalism and was
let down by his superiors.
In those papers Monteilh complained that FBI agents did not act speedily
enough on a tip he gave them about a possible sighting of bomb-making
materials. Now Monteilh says that tip was not credible.
Either way it does add up to a story that shifts with the telling. But
that fact alone goes to the heart of the FBI's use of such confidential
informants in investigating Muslim communities.
FBI operatives with profiles similar to Monteilh's - of a
lengthy criminal record, desire for cash and a flexibility with the
truth - have led to high profile cases of alleged entrapment that have
shocked civil rights groups across America.
In most cases the informants have won their prosecutions and simply
disappeared. Monteilh is the only one speaking out. But whatever the
reality of his year undercover, Monteilh is almost certainly right about
one impact of Operation Flex and the exposure of his undercover
activities: "Because of this the Muslim community will never trust the
FBI again."
