Chiheb was under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. We knew his friends. We knew his family. So, when a friend of Chiheb’s in Quebec City popped up on our radar, we were puzzled.
Who was this guy? How did he fit into the picture? Why hadn’t Chiheb brought him up?
The Canadians wouldn’t tell me his name. All they would tell me is that I should consider going to Quebec City and hinted that there may be something or someone of interest there. Nelly told me the friend’s name: Ahmed Abassi.
“Why are you going up to Quebec City?” Nelly said, as we strategized a reason to get me in front of Abassi.
“Ski rentals,” Doug said. “Tamer wants to invest in some ski houses.”
I liked it. It was October 2012 and Tamer wanted to see some properties before winter. Since we needed help for the train plot, I pushed Chiheb to get us in front of as many like-minded brothers as he could.
“Are there any brothers for us to meet with up there?” I said after he agreed to come with me to Quebec City.
Chiheb grimaced and looked away. He had someone, but didn’t want to say.
“What are you not telling me?” I asked.
“There is a brother,” Chiheb said. “He is the brother that got me on this path.”
That was something that had bothered me since Chiheb told me about his training. It was never clear why Chiheb chose radical Islam. Now I had the chance to meet the man who put him on the path. But something was wrong.
“Tell me,” I said.
“It is sort of complicated.”
“Come on, brother,” I said. “Talk to me. Let’s meet him.”
“I gave Ahmed two thousand dollars for one semester of his school and he never paid me back,” Chiheb said. “He can never go to his grave in debt.”
Chiheb didn’t care about the money. It was haram to not pay your debts.
“Clearly, money matters,” I said. “In the grand scheme of things, maybe it is time to forgive and forget. You’re telling me he is a like-minded brother. Not only that, he is the like-minded brother that started you on this path. I’d love to meet him.”
“He is Tunisian like me,” Chiheb said. “He is my age. Very smart. Very religious.”
“Is he like us?”
“He is a mujahideen brother,” Chiheb said.
Abassi was studying engineering at Laval University in Quebec City. He met Chiheb at a conference. Two Tunisians far from home. It was Abassi who taught Chiheb jihad was part of every Muslim’s duty.
“E-mail him,” I said. “Tell him you’re here with an Egyptian-American brother, a like-minded brother, and we’re traveling up to Quebec City because I have business there. Tell him I am a dear friend and you’d love him to meet us for dinner.”
Chiheb typed while I spoke. About an hour later, we got a response, which he shared with me.
“I’d love to host you, dear brother,” Abassi wrote. “Let me know when you’ll be here. I’ll make sure I am here so we can go to dinner.”
I was sure Chiheb was exaggerating Abassi’s intentions. But Abassi was the only person Chiheb ever described as a “mujahideen brother.”
I picked up Chiheb at his apartment around eleven thirty in the morning and we headed for Quebec City. We met Abassi for dinner after looking at rental properties all day.
Abassi was tall and thin with a neatly trimmed beard, no mustache, and close-cropped hair. There was a confidence, swagger even, like he knew he was good-looking. Both his English and his Arabic were flawless. He also spoke French fluently. I studied his face after he got into the back of the car. His glasses hid his eyes, but his eyebrows poked up above the lenses. They were shaped like devil horns.
We ate at a halal restaurant on a quiet cobblestone side street near Parliament Hill. We ordered at the counter and ate at one of the many wooden tables. I covered the table with hummus, tabouleh, bread, stuffed grape leaves. We each got an entrée. I got the kofta with rice and salad. Abassi and Chiheb had grilled kebobs.
Most of dinner was small talk about my work, ski houses, and properties in the area. Abassi was recently engaged and I bought him baklava to celebrate. After dinner, we went for coffee at a nearby shop. On the way, we passed the Parliament Building, the meeting place of Quebec’s National Assembly. The 125 elected representatives serve as the legislative body for the Province of Quebec. The Parliament Building—constructed between 1877 and 1886—reminded me of Philadelphia’s City Hall with its frontal clock tower.
“That would be a great place for an attack,” Chiheb said, looking at me.
Chiheb let out an uncomfortable giggle looking for affirmation, but I didn’t say anything. My focus was on Abassi. He didn’t flinch. Didn’t smile. Didn’t turn his head to even look at the building.
“No, no, no,” Abassi said. “Don’t talk that way.”
All through dinner Abassi was very guarded, especially when talk veered toward the war in the Middle East or some of Chiheb’s extreme interpretations of the Quran. He was savvier and more disciplined than Chiheb. This guy had the right rhetoric, but he stopped short every time. He knew how to run to the line and stop.
Usually I make the target earn my point of radicalization, but I didn’t have time for the slow play. I wanted him to know he had an audience ready to listen. We were talking about the war in Syria over tea when I brought up my uncle.
“I have an uncle in Egypt that put me back on the path,” I said. “I wanted to go home. I was done with America, but he told me to stay. To live amongst them, as them, to defeat them.”
Chiheb had a big smile as I talked.
“Oh, God bless him,” Chiheb said. “If you only knew the things he did.”
I knew Chiheb would echo my legend and give me the bona fides to be believable to Abassi. I watched Abassi closely. He had a look. A twinkle of recognition in his eye. It was like I hit a chord with him. He looked at Chiheb and then at me. There was no doubt he got the gist. And he liked it. But he said nothing. Then, as we walked back to the car, my phone buzzed. It was Joey.
“Wrap it up. Everything is okay.”
My mind jumped to all the worst-case scenarios. Was my father sick? My sister? I had trouble concentrating on the mission. Abassi asked if we’d like to stay up late, but I declined.
“You know what, if we’re getting up early to leave, we’re going to get going,” I said.
I exchanged e-mail addresses and phone numbers with Abassi and promised to call next time I was in town. I dropped off Chiheb at his hotel room and joined the team at the safe house. I was barely through the door when I confronted Joey.
“What’s wrong?”
“We need to get a flight back,” he said. “There is a hurricane coming.”
“We live in New York, bro,” I said. “There are no hurricanes there.”
“There is one coming,” Joey said.
Fox News was on the TV. A reporter was standing on the Jersey Shore talking about how Superstorm Sandy was bearing down on the East Coast.
I texted Chiheb and told him we had to go early because I had to get back to New York to check on my properties before the storm. He agreed to meet at eight for the drive back to Montreal.
“Another dead end?” Nelly said as we sat down to debrief the Abassi meeting.
“No, actually, there is something there,” I said. “I can’t put my finger on it. He is very good. Not good enough. But very good at disguising things. Something is in those eyes. In that head. It was on the tip of his tongue.”
I explained to the team how I dropped my uncle into the conversation.
“Let him chew on that shit,” I said. “He’ll be thinking about my uncle until we meet again.”
“Yeah, exactly,” Joey said. “Let’s see where it takes us. Let him come to you.”
We finished the debrief after midnight and I got a few hours of sleep before meeting Chiheb. We were on the road back to Montreal when Chiheb brought up the project again. He still wanted to derail the train on Christmas, but he needed help.
“Your job is to get back and continue on with your work and do what you are doing,” he told me, meaning raising money for the brothers.
“Look, you got the hardest part of your job out of the way,” I said. “The funding and access to America, you have it. You have that done.”
“You’re absolutely right. Now I just have to get the true believers with us, and I will find them,” Chiheb said. “Even if this means I have to go to where the munafiqeen are, I will go to all the mosques in Montreal to find the true believers.”
“Did you hear from the brothers overseas?” I said, anxious to get the American sleeper meeting set.
Chiheb shook his head no.
“Sometimes it takes a week,” he said. “I told them it was urgent.”
“Good,” I said. “God willing, they will contact you soon.”
“God willing,” Chiheb said.
I took a sip of my coffee.
“I got an e-mail about the apartment in Toronto,” I said. “Do we want to let it go?”
“Could we hold it for a little bit longer?” Chiheb asked.
He was holding out hope that he could recruit another like-minded brother in time.
“Yeah, listen, I could call him back and tell him to hold it for a month. I can probably hold it to the end of November, early December,” I said.
“That would be great, and tell him I promise I will have an answer by then,” Chiheb said. “Listen, the only place we can do this project, and this project has to happen, is in Toronto. There’s no other place to have a possible location as far as this particular project.”
“No worries, no problem,” I said. “We’ll hold it for another month, and we’ll go that route. Keep me posted on the brothers.”
“Yes, brother,” Chiheb said. “You’ll be with me every step of the way.”
I dropped off Chiheb at his apartment in Montreal before lunch and raced to the airport. The team was waiting for me at the terminal. Every flight was canceled.
“What do we do?” I said to Nelly.
“Shit, we’ve got to go,” he said, looking at his phone. “The storm is hitting tonight. Fuck it. Let’s rent a car.”
Nelly got a minivan and I jumped in the back. Nelly drove with Joey in the front. Kenny was in the back with me. Joey gathered up our passports as we approached the border.
The Border Patrol agent leaned into the window and took our stack of passports. He shuffled through them like they were a deck of cards. Nelly, Joey, and Kenny all had diplomatic passports with brown covers. Mine was a tourist passport with a blue cover. The border agent looked at Nelly and then into the back of the van at me with my long jihadi beard.
“You know what?” he said. “I don’t want to know. Welcome home, guys. Have a safe trip.”
“Thanks, bro,” Nelly said, smiling at him.
Nelly took the passports and crossed the border. We all waited until the window was up before everyone started laughing.
“That dude had no idea what he was looking at,” Joey said. “For all he knew, we just snatched your ass.”
We stopped at McDonald’s just over the border and I jumped behind the wheel. Fueled on cheap hamburgers and snuff, I drove south like my hair was on fire. We arrived in New York in five hours. I got to my house an hour before the storm hit. Rain was lashing my windshield as I drove the last mile. Three hours later, the power went out for three weeks.
Back in Canada, both Chiheb and Abassi watched the coverage of the storm and flooded my phone with text messages of encouragement. Abassi seemed especially anxious to develop a relationship with me.
The Canadians decided to fly me back to Quebec City in mid-November 2012. This time they didn’t want Chiheb there. They wanted me to take Abassi’s temperature alone. But without Chiheb, I couldn’t record the conversation. Under Canadian law, we could record only when a target of the investigation—Chiheb or Jaser—was present.
I sent Chiheb and Abassi an e-mail telling them I was coming up to Canada. Chiheb volunteered to catch the bus to Quebec City, but I waved him off. I told him I had business and I’d come down to Montreal after I was done.
Abassi responded right away to my e-mail.
“I look forward to hosting you,” he said.
We agreed to meet for dinner. Before I left the hotel, I met with the team to go over a game plan.
“My intention tonight is to simply develop my relationship,” I said. “We can eventually draw out what his true intentions are.”
Joey agreed.
“Don’t go down any roads unless he does,” he said. “Let him guide the discussion. The Canadians just want you to gauge his religious ideology and his beliefs.”
Back at my hotel, I called Abassi’s cell phone but got a recording. I fired up my MacBook and sent him an e-mail.
“Are you still free for dinner tonight?” I wrote. “I tried your cell phone but it was out of service.”
He responded four minutes later. “Where? How are you?”
I was about to click “reply” when my phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number.
“Tamer, Ahmed,” Abassi said. “I am so sorry. My cell phone ran out of minutes.”
“No problem, brother,” I said.
“What are your plans? What are you doing up here?”
I closed my laptop and sat back in my chair.
“Still looking at the ski houses,” I said. “But I’m free for dinner. Say around seven or eight?”
“That is great,” Abassi said.
“I’d like to take you out,” I said. “Think of a good restaurant that we’d both enjoy.”
“No problem,” Abassi said. “I’ll be ready. You just let me know when you’re ready.”
“E-mail me your address and I’ll pick you up.”
His e-mail arrived a minute after we hung up. A short while later, he called me from his cell phone to let me know he got more minutes. He called me again at six thirty.
“Dinner’s getting cold,” he said, chuckling. “What’s going on? Are you ready? What’s up?”
He sounded anxious.
“Yeah, I’m good, brother,” I said. “I’m wrapping up with the Realtor now and I should be leaving here in about half an hour.”
“Great, call me when you leave.”
I arrived at his house around seven. He was standing outside waiting. It looked like he was holding a parking spot. When he saw me, he waved me over. I rolled down my window.
“Park here,” he said.
“Come on, brother, let’s not waste time parking and getting out of the car,” I said. “Let’s get to the restaurant.”
“We’re at the restaurant,” Abassi said. “You’re coming to my home. I prepared dinner for us.”
This wasn’t a social dinner. He wanted privacy.
I locked the car and followed him into the lobby. He lived on the second floor in a small but quaint apartment. I stepped into the foyer. The kitchen was to the left. It was small with a little table in the middle of the laminate floor. A bedroom was to the right of the front door, and the bathroom was straight back. Unlike Chiheb’s place, Abassi had a 52-inch LCD screen TV hooked up to a laptop. Nearby, I saw two other laptops. Al Jazeera news was streaming on the television, and the table in the kitchen was crowded with Middle Eastern dishes.
“My wife cooked,” he said. “She teaches Mondays. She is usually out late.”
“Okay,” I said.
There were pictures of her and her family on the wall. We sat down at the kitchen table and started to eat. Abassi told me about his family. He was the youngest of seven children. His mother and father still lived in Tunisia. Talk soon turned to my meetings in Quebec City. I told him about some condos I was considering and how I hoped to make money renting them out as vacation properties. Abassi seemed impressed. I was setting the stage for another glimpse up my skirt.
“Everything I do is to make money for the brothers and the cause,” I said.
Abassi let that go, but it was clear he understood what I was saying. He wanted to talk. The meal. The private setting. It felt like I was being recruited.
“I wasn’t as religious as I should have been until my mother died,” I said. “My uncle changed my life.”
“This Dunya doesn’t matter,” Abassi said.
They were the exact words Chiheb said on the flight to San Jose. But I almost laughed when Abassi said them. Muslims are encouraged to not focus on earthly concerns and possessions. A Muslim’s focus should be on the afterlife and earning a place in paradise, which is why Chiheb shared a small, cramped apartment, slept on a used mattress, and never wasted anything. Abassi didn’t take it as far as Chiheb.
“Chiheb speaks very, very highly of you, more than anyone,” Abassi said. “He said that he loves you more than anybody.”
“That’s very nice,” I said. “I appreciate that.”
“Everything happens for a reason; look what’s happening in today’s day and age. Allah has turned everything against the evildoers in America. Climate, the weather, other governments, politics, every single thing in this world hates America. Look at all that’s happened with the natural disasters; it’s a sign from God that their time is coming. Look at all the wars that they’re starting in our lands. It wasn’t just with the Muslim people. Look at what they did in Vietnam. And we’re defeating them. We are going to defeat them. Their defeat is imminent.”
Abassi was starting to sound like Chiheb. I wished I was recording his rant.
“Look what nine-eleven did to that country. It literally destroyed their economy. They’ve yet to recover and they’re not going to recover. It’s only going to get worse for them. The big, bad, evil person, the United States, was toppled by one man: Osama bin Laden.”
Abassi’s eyes changed with the mention of bin Laden. There was a reverence as he spoke. He told me a story about how in Tunisia they chanted his name to remind President Obama that one man could topple the United States.
I sat in stunned silence. On the surface he looked and acted like a mainstream Muslim, but he was of the same mind as Chiheb. But Abassi was more cunning. He was doing the same thing I was doing. Giving a little, testing the waters, and then going a little further.
Unlike Chiheb, who hated all infidels, Abassi’s hatred was centered on the United States. At this point, he couldn’t say one sentence that wasn’t damning the United States or revering bin Laden. His wife called shortly after dinner and interrupted his rant. He took the call right in front of me. I’d invited him to New York earlier in the evening to reciprocate his hospitality, and he was excited to tell her. They were traveling to Tunisia in January for about four to five weeks, but maybe when they returned we could meet in New York, he told her.
After he hung up, Abassi started to talk about studying nuclear engineering. He was close to completing his master’s degree.
“If Iran had a truly Islamic regime, I would go over there in a heartbeat and study and learn with their nuclear program,” Abassi said. “That would be the best way to help the brothers in the long term with jihad.”
I’d sat in front of a lot of wannabe terrorists, but this was different. Abassi wasn’t just talk. He was selling his knowledge to me because Tamer was the jihad lottery. Win him over and he’ll throw money at your plots.
“You know, you can buy anything on the black market,” he said. “You can buy bombs, you can buy chemicals cheaply and very easily. Anything you want, right? And you need the brains to operate behind that. But none of that matters if you don’t have money. You need money for jihad. The brothers overseas need money for their jihad. You think they could fight the Israelis without money? No. Money is needed for all jihad. Jihad is fard [obligatory]. It is Islam’s sixth pillar, even though all of the fake Muslims won’t acknowledge it. There are a million brothers out there. You could put a gun in their hands, they can go wage jihad. But without money, you don’t have jihad. That’s what’s rare.”
Abassi was painting a picture for me. It was almost comical because it was the same technique we use in the FBI. We paint a picture for the bad guy and let him connect the dots. It’s extremely cunning. He was preying on my emotions. He was putting it all out there without specifically saying, “I need your money to buy chemicals to build a bomb.”
It was time for me to go. I wasn’t recording this conversation. I didn’t want to go down this road unless I could record it.
“Brother, I don’t want to hold you up, I know your wife will be home soon,” I said. “I’m getting up early and I’m leaving tomorrow to go to Montreal. I have some business there and I want to meet with brother Chiheb before I fly back to New York. Brother, it was so great to see you, I look forward to seeing you again.”
He insisted I stay longer, but I resisted. As I got into the car, I let out a sigh of relief. I’d met many people who claimed to be mujahideen, but this guy scared the shit out of me. It was more of a gut reaction. He didn’t say anything overt. He just painted pictures in my head. Bomb making. Exploding nuclear reactors. I knew it wouldn’t take long to tease out his full intentions.
Back at the safe house, I was fired up. Joey told me to take my time with my notes so I could capture the conversation. Abassi was dangerous and he wanted to make sure the Canadians understood.
But I had doubts about my decision to cut the meeting short. I pulled Joey aside.
“I made the right call there, right?” I said.
“You absolutely made the right call,” Joey said. “You walking away at that point only makes him more eager to tell you the next time.”
“There is no doubt this guy is bad,” I said. “We need to record our next meeting.”
I told Doug and his bosses Abassi was the real deal. The Canadians promised to file a warrant with the court so I could record my next meeting with Abassi. With Abassi done, Doug and the Canadians wanted to talk about a new development.
Chiheb had signed up for a conference in Singapore the week before Christmas, and the Canadian government was going to arrest him at the airport.
The case was over.
We couldn’t stop them from locking him up. The Canadians couldn’t afford to let him out of the country. Plus, the case was eating up their manpower. They had enough evidence to convict. It was time to wrap it up.
But we had more work to do.
Doug wouldn’t look me in the eye as his bosses delivered the news. I did the math. We had three weeks to get something on the American sleeper.
Joey started to pace after the Canadian bosses left. Suddenly, he stopped.
“What is the only thing that will stop him from going to Singapore?”
“Jihad,” I said. “Helping the brothers.”
Joey shook his head.
“Helping you help the brothers.”
“I’m not tracking,” I said.
“Follow me on this,” Joey said, starting to pace again.
“Your uncle needs you,” he said. “The banks are all fucked up after the Arab Spring. They can’t get money and he needs cash.”
I looked at Nelly. He had a smile on his face.
“Yeah,” I said. “So I’m putting a delivery of cash together for the brothers . . .”
“Pitch it to him tomorrow in Montreal,” Joey said. “Tell him you need him in New York at the same time as the conference. The Canadians can’t arrest him in New York, and we’ll invite them down to watch the operation.”
“That is brilliant,” I said.
“You need Chiheb’s help with the delivery,” Joey said.
“He’ll do whatever you need, especially since you’re helping the brothers.”