The story of the FBI’s transformation from a law enforcement organization that investigates crimes after they occur to one that tries to prevent them before they happen began with an agent whose life ended in the south tower of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.
John P. O’Neill was a handsome man who wore his black hair slicked back and every morning placed a pocket square in his custom-tailored suit jacket. He had moved up in the Bureau after investigating white-collar crime and abortion clinic bombings, and had a reputation for being unafraid to challenge superiors, high-level political appointees, and politicians. He was what most FBI agents weren’t—flamboyant and opinionated.
In 1995, following an assignment in Chicago, O’Neill received a promotion that brought him to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., where he was named chief of the counterterrorism section. Back then, counterterrorism was a small FBI branch that rarely attracted the notice of the Bureau’s leadership. However, his first day on the job, O’Neill received a tip that would begin an obsession with a terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda. Ramzi Yousef, mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and co-conspirator of the “Bojinka” bomb plot (a foiled 1995 attempt to hide explosives in dolls placed aboard airliners), had been spotted in Pakistan. O’Neill put together a team including Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence that captured Yousef in Islamabad and extradited him to New York, where he was found guilty at trial for his role in the World Trade Center bombing and sentenced to life in prison.
Following Yousef’s capture, O’Neill began to suspect that Al Qaeda, then an emerging Islamic terrorist network, would try to target the United States again. Al Qaeda was more sophisticated and farther-reaching than U.S. government officials had estimated, O’Neill believed. However, his obsession with Al Qaeda and his abrasive personal style chafed at FBI headquarters. Following a heated exchange with then FBI director Louis Freeh on a plane trip from Saudi Arabia—O’Neill told the director Saudi officials were “blowing smoke up your ass” about the Khobar Towers bombing investigation—O’Neill put in for a transfer to the New York office.1 When the Bureau granted his request, he moved the FBI’s counterterrorism section to Manhattan and set out to recruit agents for a reconfigured unit that would investigate an emerging enemy the FBI only barely understood.
Dedicating itself to researching Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, the counterterrorism section found evidence to support O’Neill’s belief that Al Qaeda was getting Muslim extremists throughout the Middle East and Asia to coalesce around a common philosophy that viewed the United States as a central force for evil in the world. But the Bureau’s top leaders weren’t interested in what O’Neill was finding, and his warnings about Al Qaeda’s increasing threat to the United States fell on deaf ears at headquarters. After being denied a promotion to head the FBI’s New York office, one of the Bureau’s most prestigious posts, O’Neill, then forty-nine years old, knew he’d reached the top rung of his ladder at the Bureau and submitted his retirement paperwork in August 2001.
O’Neill had lined up another job, however, as chief of security at the World Trade Center. He told Chris Isham about his new job. Isham was an ABC News producer who had interviewed Osama bin Laden in May 1998 and had leaned on O’Neill for information to prepare the interview questions. “Well, that’ll be an easy job,” Isham told him. “They’re not going to bomb that place again.”2
“No, actually, they’ve always wanted to finish that job,” O’Neill told him. “I think they’re going to try again.”
Nineteen days after O’Neill started at the World Trade Center, two commercial airliners crashed into the twin towers. O’Neill died in the attack from an enemy he had repeatedly told the FBI it should fear. Despite his death and the resistance to his warnings about Al Qaeda, O’Neill’s ideas and several agents he trained would ultimately reshape the Bureau’s counterterrorism section in the years following the attack.
Because of the long-term institutional ignorance about the threat that Al Qaeda posed, most of the FBI’s top management knew little about the terrorist organization on September 11, 2001. Part of the reason for this problem was that counterterrorism before 9/11 was considered a career dead end within the Bureau. As a result, FBI training did not distinguish between Islamic terror tactics and those that had been employed in the past by European and domestic groups. “A bombing case is a bombing case,” said Dale Watson, who was the FBI’s assistant director for counterterrorism on September 11, 2001.3 During a 2004 deposition, a lawyer asked the former counterterrorism chief if he knew the difference between Shia and Sunni Muslims. “Not technically, no,” he answered. Watson’s attitude reflected a belief in the Bureau that agents didn’t need to understand Al Qaeda in order to investigate the terrorist network. “I don’t necessarily think you have to know everything about the Ku Klux Klan to investigate a church bombing,” Watson said in the same deposition as a way of explaining this thinking.4
The Bureau’s ignorance of Al Qaeda and Islamic terrorism in general was one of the reasons the FBI was caught flatfooted on September 11, 2001. But it wasn’t the only reason. Despite his unsophisticated view of Islam, Watson had lobbied to increase the counterterrorism budget. With the help of outside consultants, and with the approval of President Bill Clinton’s attorney general, Janet Reno, Watson had authored a plan codenamed MAX CAP 05, or Maximum Capacity by 2005, which called for a significant capacity increase in FBI counterterrorism operations. In the months before 9/11, as intelligence suggested a terrorist attack could be imminent, Watson pushed Attorney General John Ashcroft to approve MAX CAP 05. But Ashcroft and Robert Mueller—then the attorney general’s deputy at the Justice Department—rejected Watson’s requests for budgetary reasons.5 That left the FBI counterterrorism section poorly equipped to respond to the 9/11 attacks. As the U.S. government prepared for a feared second-wave attack, few agents were qualified to gather intelligence effectively and quickly on Islamic terrorism, in the United States or abroad. For example, on the day planes flew into the World Trade Center, the FBI had only eight agents who could speak Arabic and only one of those agents, Ali Soufan, an O’Neill protégé, was based in New York.6*
FBI director Robert Mueller had taken the top job at the Bureau only one week before 9/11. After the World Trade Center towers fell, President George W. Bush called the new director into the Oval Office. He had a simple message for him: never again. The White House began to exert enormous pressure on the FBI to disrupt or preempt the feared next attack, forcing the Bureau to transform overnight into an intelligence-gathering agency capable of doing what international peer groups such as Britain’s MI5 were able to achieve in terms of surveillance. To help accomplish this, the FBI recruited intelligence officers out of the National Security Agency and Central Intelligence Agency. Mueller’s stewardship of the FBI’s rapid transformation was among the reasons he received favorable reviews from the 9/11 Commission.7
To lead the transformation into a counterintelligence and counterterrorism organization, Mueller turned to Pat D’Amuro, who had researched Al Qaeda while working under John O’Neill. In D’Amuro, whose background was in investigating Russian organized crime, O’Neill had seen a talented manager who could help him run the counterterrorism section. “I can teach you the counterterrorism issues,” O’Neill told D’Amuro.8 Mueller knew that O’Neill’s former unit in New York was the most up to speed on Al Qaeda, and that D’Amuro, as O’Neill’s former deputy, was best qualified to lead an investigation of 9/11. “I was down in Washington and the director saw me in the hallway and wanted to speak to me,” D’Amuro remembered. “So I went into his office the next day and that’s when he asked me if I would come down to Washington as an inspector-in-place and run the events of 9/11 because of the involvement of New York into the investigations and the intelligence gathering into Al Qaeda.”9 That post led to D’Amuro’s quick promotion to executive assistant director for counterintelligence and counterterrorism.
In an effort to redesign the FBI’s counterterrorism program, D’Amuro called Arthur Cummings, a former Navy SEAL who spoke Mandarin and had investigated the first World Trade Center bombing, and asked him to take the position of counterterrorism section chief.10 Because counterterrorism still had a reputation at the Bureau for being a career-halting transfer, Cummings, who was based in Richmond, Virginia, was initially resistant. He wanted to move up in the Bureau, and he knew some paths made upward movement easier than others. Counterterrorism wasn’t one of those paths, Cummings and other FBI agents believed at the time. Cummings told D’Amuro he didn’t want the job, as he had put in to be assistant special agent in charge, or ASAC, of the FBI’s office in Richmond.
D’Amuro asked FBI director Mueller to call Cummings himself. “He said that he understood that I wanted to be the ASAC in Richmond, and I said I did,” Cummings recalled. “I said that would be my preference because I needed to ensure my career progression, and the Bureau’s a little tight on checking the boxes. I just needed to be an ASAC, or I thought I did. He said, ‘It’s a different time. You’ve already displayed leadership traits. You don’t need to be an ASAC. Don’t worry about being an ASAC. I need you in this section chief job.’”11 D’Amuro added that Cummings was getting the terrorism post whether he wanted it or not. “He basically said, ‘I need you in this job. It’s very important right now in counterterrorism,’” Cummings said. “And I said, ‘It doesn’t make sense from a career progression standpoint. He said, ‘You can either put in for the job or I’m going to draft you for the job. But you’re going to do this job.’ The Bureau, after 9/11, stopped being an all-volunteer army. The director made it very clear that he needed the right people in the right jobs at the right time. He basically was making that happen. So I said OK. I’m not an idiot. I was going to be in the job. I was either going to go willingly or I was going to not, but I was going to be in the job.”12 While Cummings was rebuilding the counterterrorism section in Washington, D.C., FBI associate deputy director Thomas J. Harrington sent him to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in January 2003 to help set up the FBI’s operations on the island. Harrington saw it as an opportunity for Cummings and other counterterrorism agents and analysts to get “in the box” with terrorists and build their confidence in dealing one on one with Islamic extremists.13 When he returned from Cuba, Cummings had orders to devise the Department of Homeland Security’s new threat-level matrix—the now-famous red, orange, and blue color scheme.14 “They started off with the red, orange, green,” Cummings said. “I’ve got some great stories about that whole disaster. What are color-blind people going to do? I mean, the questions that came.”15
Among Cummings’s most important tasks at the Bureau was increasing intelligence gathering at home. As a result, he became one of the chief proponents of FBI terrorism stings, co-authoring the Bureau’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide, best known by the acronym DIOG. The 258-page document created the policy framework for the FBI’s domestic intelligence network in U.S. Muslim communities and elsewhere, and allowed the Bureau to open quick investigations, known as “threat assessments,” without having the criminal predicate, or probable cause, necessary to justify a full investigation.16 Before 9/11, investigating anyone without having credible information to support the belief that the target was involved in a crime was illegal—and unthinkable at the FBI. The DIOG changed all of that, and specifically allowed the consideration of religious affiliation for justifying threat assessments. If a known or suspected terrorist had attended a particular mosque, for example, the FBI had authority under the DIOG to investigate any of the mosque’s other attendees for up to forty-eight hours. Once forty-eight hours had passed, according to the DIOG, agents needed an established predicate to continue the investigation. The current version of the DIOG, adopted in October 2011, goes even further than the one Cummings co-wrote, allowing for, among other tactics, “trash covers,” which is Bureau parlance for when agents rifle through someone’s garbage to search for information that could be used to recruit informants.17
A well-built man with a strong jawline and light brown hair pulled back from a balding scalp, Cummings worked to change the culture of FBI investigations. Instead of arresting a would-be terrorist as soon as agents had sufficient evidence, as was the protocol before 9/11, FBI men and women under Cummings left targets in the wild longer to be monitored and tracked. This allowed agents to gather as much information as they could about possible terrorists and their associates.18 Cummings pressed FBI agents to find not only the suspected terrorist but also the web of people linked to the suspected terrorist.
But increasingly what Cummings and his agents discovered was that the threats weren’t coming from a network of people—the FBI, a few years after 9/11, had become less concerned about terrorist cells—but instead from young men acting alone. The threat had shifted from an organized group to a lone wolf, Cummings believed. With the intelligence apparatuses of several nations focused on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan, it had become nearly impossible for the organization to train a group of terrorists and then send them to the United States or Europe without being intercepted. Simply, a 9/11-style attack was no longer within Al Qaeda’s capability. The best the organization could do was inspire someone already in the West to carry out a terrorist attack—an attack Al Qaeda’s leadership would likely know nothing about until it happened—and then claim credit once the smoke had cleared. That’s why the FBI became so obsessed with the possibility of a lone-wolf attack; the Bureau now believed that at any time, in any community, someone could radicalize and become a terrorist, with a bomb, a gun, even with household chemicals.
In light of this new theory, the main concern at the Bureau became how to identify these lone wolves before they struck. To assist with this, the FBI came up with a kind of radicalization spectrum, running from sympathizer to operator. All operators were sympathizers at one point, the spectrum theory goes, but not all sympathizers become operators. “We’re looking for the sympathizer who wants to become an operator, and we want to catch them when they step over that line to operator,” Cummings said. “Sometimes, that step takes ten years. Other times, it takes ten minutes.” The FBI tries to identify those who might take this step by scrutinizing Muslims who are espousing radical beliefs, expressing hatred of the United States or its foreign policy, or associating with others who are doing one of those two things. The FBI obtains some of this information through tips or by monitoring radical forums and chat rooms online. But the majority of this information comes from the street level, from informants.
Throughout the FBI’s history, the numbers of informants the Bureau employs has been a closely guarded secret. Periodically, however, these figures have been made public. A Senate oversight committee in 1975 found the FBI had 1,500 informants. In 1980, officials disclosed there were 2,800. Six years later, following the FBI’s push into drugs and organized crime, the number of informants ballooned to 6,000, according to the Los Angeles Times.19 That number grew significantly after 9/11. For example, in its fiscal year 2008 budget authorization request, the FBI disclosed that it had been working under a secret November 2004 presidential directive demanding an increase in “human source development and management,” and that it needed $12.7 million for a program to keep tabs on its spy network and create software to track and manage 15,000 informants.
The FBI’s use of informants today is unprecedented. In addition to the roster of 15,000 informants that the Bureau maintains—many of them tasked with infiltrating Muslim communities in the United States—for every informant officially listed, there are as many as three unofficial ones, known in FBI parlance as “hip pockets.” Informants can be doctors, clerks, imams. Some might not even consider themselves informants. But the FBI regularly taps all of them as part of a domestic intelligence apparatus whose only historical peer might be Cointelpro, the program the Bureau ran from the 1950s to the 1970s to discredit and marginalize groups ranging from the Ku Klux Klan to the Communist Party to the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights organization.
To manage this comprehensive system, the FBI uses a computer program known as Delta, which allows agents to search the ranks of informants using specific parameters—among them age, ethnicity, nation of origin, and languages spoken. “The idea behind Delta was to make it more efficient not only to document information, but to manage information and incorporate elements of oversight,” Wayne Murphy, the FBI’s assistant director of intelligence, told the news media when Delta was first announced to the public in July 2007.20 Effective informants today move around the country doing the FBI’s bidding, and Delta has made this fluent movement possible. An FBI informant who can look and speak the terrorist part can move from case to case, jurisdiction to jurisdiction, state to state, earning tens of thousands of dollars at every stop. It’s not uncommon for informants to make $100,000 or more on a case, plus a “performance incentive” of potentially tens of thousands of dollars if the case results in convictions, and then move across the country to do it all over again in some other city. Delta streamlines the horse-trading of informants among FBI handlers by cataloging them and providing detailed information about their case histories. Using Delta, FBI agents who need an informant can search the database and find candidates—just as a corporate recruiter might use LinkedIn while searching for software engineers to hire.
In addition to dramatically changing the way the FBI tracks and uses informants, Delta also put a stop to an older, rampant practice of agents hoarding the best informants for job security. Peter Ahearn, the retired FBI special agent who oversaw the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Western New York, explained to me how after Delta was implemented, agents could no longer guard their informants—in the past, agents had treated informants like their personal pets, to be let out of their cages only when necessary and never to be shared with other agents—because there was now a digital clearinghouse of snitches. If agents in a particular city needed an informant for a certain task, all they had to do was load Delta and see which informants might be available for transfer. “I could sit down in front of a computer and type in ‘one-legged Somali,’ and I’d find we’ve got one in Kansas City, and I could call up the handler and ask if I could borrow the guy,” Ahearn told me, exaggerating for humor.21
The FBI’s extensive and better-organized use of informants represents one great change for the Bureau in the post–9/11 era. But another—and perhaps more jarring—change involves data mining. Before 9/11, due to security concerns and an antiquated computer system, most FBI agents couldn’t even search the Internet from their desks, let alone track terrorists. In fact, on September 11, 2001, FBI agents were forced to send photographs of the hijackers by express mail because the Bureau’s computer system didn’t allow them to email images. Former FBI director Louis Freeh, who retired in June 2001, was so technology averse that he refused to use email. U.S. Senator Charles E. Schumer has described the Bureau’s outdated computer system and Luddite culture as the FBI’s “greatest failure” under Freeh.22
That the FBI was behind the times technologically is an understatement, and so using data for intelligence purposes represented a giant leap forward for the Bureau. To assist in taking that leap, in 2005, FBI director Mueller tapped Philip Mudd, a former CIA analyst and top-level briefer under CIA director George Tennant. Mudd had risen to second-in-command of the CIA Counterterrorism Center, which oversees all clandestine operations involving Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. Mudd’s move to the FBI was a very unusual one for a CIA man. While interagency cooperation has increased significantly since 9/11, strong rivalries and prejudices still exist among federal law enforcement agencies. The CIA, FBI, DEA, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—each is suspicious of the other. The FBI views the CIA as a group of bluebloods whose job is made easy by not being bound by the U.S. Constitution. The CIA, in turn, views the FBI as a ragtag group of desk-jockeying accountants and lawyers who hate to get their hands dirty with fieldwork. The CIA and FBI view DEA and ATF agents as underachievers, and, in turn, DEA and ATF agents believe the CIA and FBI are filled with ineffectual snobs. In short, the agencies don’t trust each other, and any agent switching teams is received with intense suspicion. “There’s always been this competition and distrust,” Dale Watson, the FBI’s former assistant director for counterterrorism, who did a detail assignment at the CIA in the mid-1990s, told me. “No one at the FBI trusted the CIA enough to share a lot of information, and vice versa.”23 Because of this mistrust, there were significant misgivings about Mudd when he arrived as deputy director of the FBI’s new National Security Branch, whose creation President George W. Bush ordered in 2005 to consolidate the Bureau’s counterterrorism, counterintelligence, and intelligence capabilities under one department. Among seasoned FBI agents, there was a belief that Mudd would try to remake the Bureau into a domestic CIA. In many ways this has come true, as Mudd has altered the way the Bureau operates, pushing agents to increase their intelligence-gathering capability, in particular by increasing the number of informants they have on the streets providing them with information.
To coordinate intelligence gathering and informant recruitment, Mudd took over a program called Domain Management, which the FBI had created to track immigrants from China and other countries who were suspected of being involved in industrial espionage—mainly the theft of intellectual property from corporations and universities. Mudd expanded Domain Management to use commercially available data, as well as government data from I-9 “Employment Eligibility Verification” immigration forms, to pinpoint the demographics of specific ethnic and religious communities—say, for example, Iraqis in central Los Angeles or Pakistanis in the Washington, D.C., suburbs.* In February 2006, shortly after taking his position at the FBI, Mudd demonstrated Domain Management to high-ranking agents. He displayed a map of the San Francisco Bay area, which highlighted the places where Iranian immigrants were living. That was where, Mudd said, the FBI was “hunting.” 24 Domain Management could tell FBI agents with precision where Muslims lived in San Francisco—as well as nationwide—allowing them to direct resources and informant recruitment to specific neighborhoods.
The FBI officially denies that Domain Management works this way. Its purpose, Bureau spokespeople have said, is simply to help allocate resources according to threats. But FBI agents have told me that with counterterrorism as the Bureau’s top priority, agents often look for those threats in Muslim communities—and Domain Management allows agents to understand those communities’ locations and demographics. One former FBI official jokingly referred to Domain Management as “Battlefield Management.”
Some FBI veterans have criticized Domain Management as unproductive and intrusive—one agent told Mudd during a high-level meeting that the program pushed the Bureau to “the dark side.” This tension has its roots in the stark difference between the FBI and the CIA. While the latter is free to operate internationally without regard to constitutional rights, the FBI must respect those rights in domestic investigations. Mudd’s critics inside the Bureau saw the targeting of Americans based on their ethnicity and religion as going a step too far. For his part, Mudd brushed off the criticism as coming from old-school agents unwilling to adapt to a rapidly changing world. “There’s 31,000 employees in this organization and we’re undergoing a sea-change,” he told the New York Times during his first year at the FBI. “It’s going to take a while for what is a high-end national security program to sink down to every officer.”25
But internal FBI documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in December 2011 suggest that Mudd’s critics had reason to be concerned. The documents show that since 2005, the FBI has used its community outreach programs—which had previously been operated out of the FBI’s Office of Public Affairs—to gather intelligence on people not suspected of having committed crimes. In other words, no criminal predicate existed to justify an investigation. Many of the activities documented through this intelligence gathering were religious ones protected by the First Amendment, such as where and when Muslims worshipped. The FBI then fed the information collected into Domain Management for future analysis. In a March 2008 memorandum, for example, FBI agents wrote about an outreach effort to a Pakistani American community organization in San Francisco.26 In the memorandum, the FBI agents documented religious activity and the identities of the organization’s officers and directors. The year before, in 2007, agents were present at a mosque outreach meeting in San Jose, California, that was attended by fifty people representing twenty-seven local Muslim communities. A resulting FBI memorandum, which was included in three case files, identified each of the fifty participants by name and affiliation and then analyzed the demographics of the attendees.27
Historically, the FBI’s community outreach programs were designed to build trust between federal law enforcement and local communities—to make it easier for the FBI to investigate crimes by having a public more willing to volunteer tips and information. But under Domain Management, community outreach programs now serve as Trojan horses for intelligence-gathering agents, giving them cover as they harvest information under the guise of community engagement. The FBI then uses this information to determine where to assign informants and agents and what screws to turn when trying to win cooperation from would-be informants in Muslim communities. Some FBI agents under Domain Management are assigned full-time to recruiting informants, and these agents often use immigration violations, evidence of crimes, and embarrassing information, such as about extramarital relationships, to coerce Muslims into becoming informants, who in turn tell the FBI under duress about other Muslims they should consider targeting for scrutiny.
It was a cloudy winter’s day in February 2011 when I arrived at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, a sandstone fortress of a building on a 385-acre Marine Corps base west of Interstate 95. I had asked J. Stephen Tidwell to help me understand how and why the FBI employs Domain Management and its thousands of informants. Now executive director of FBI National Academy Associates, a nonprofit that organizes training sessions at the FBI Academy for local law enforcement, Tidwell retired in 2010 as an executive assistant director of the FBI. While at Bureau headquarters, he authored the Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide with Arthur Cummings, and before that oversaw a large and controversial intelligence-gathering operation that recruited informants from and spied on members of Muslim communities in Southern California.
Tidwell arguably knows as much about FBI counterterrorism operations as anyone, and on that February afternoon, he drove me in his black Ford F350 through Hogan’s Alley, a ten-acre recreation of a town at the FBI Academy crowded with houses, bars, stores, and a hotel, which the Bureau uses as “a realistic training ground” for its new agents.28 The FBI jokingly refers to Hogan’s Alley—which gets its name from a nineteenth-century comic strip—as “a hotbed of terrorist and criminal activity,” and agents who work sting operations learn their craft here. At one end of the town is the Biograph Theater, named for the Chicago movie house where FBI agents gunned down John Dillinger in 1934. Tidwell pointed to the model cinema and laughed. “Dillinger, Biograph Theater, Chicago,” he said. “See, the FBI has a sense of humor.”
A former West Texas cop, Tidwell is a barrel-chested man with close-cropped brown hair that is slowly graying. Wearing khakis, a blue sweater, and an oxford shirt, he drove me back to the main FBI Academy building and continued the nickel tour. In one of the hallways, he stopped at and pointed to a plaque hanging on the wall, which commemorated John O’Neill. “John understood the threat Al Qaeda posed long before anyone else at the Bureau did,” Tidwell said. We then walked to the office of FBI National Academy Associates, which is tucked into a corner of the FBI Academy’s main building. Not far from Tidwell’s neatly kept, windowed office is a place where visitors can buy FBI Academy souvenirs such as T-shirts and coffee mugs.
Many current and former FBI agents I’ve spoken to have offered negative comments about Domain Management and its creator, Philip Mudd, drawing a caricature of the former CIA analyst as a soulless purveyor of the dark arts whose evils have infected the Bureau. Tidwell isn’t one of them. In fact, he’s one of Mudd’s most vocal supporters. I asked him whether he believed Domain Management’s obvious intrusion into minority communities, with maps created according to demographic and religious data, was worth whatever benefits could be achieved for criminal investigations and intelligence gathering. Tidwell leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs, placing his left foot on top of his right knee, as he thought about how to answer the question. “I don’t think it’s useful to think of Domain Management strictly in the way you are,” he told me. “Let’s imagine we’re out in a field to investigate a report that there’s been a murder. We’re looking for the body, and it’s all woods and brush except for a large barn in the middle of the property. One person suggests that we divide up the property into sections and have agents walk it inch by inch until we find the body. Another suggests that we get up on the roof of the barn and look for the body from that vantage point. But a third person says neither of those plans is the most effective way to find the body. He instead points to the sky, where birds are circling. He says, ‘Let’s search the ground those birds are flying over.’ That’s what Domain Management does.”
However, there’s a significant difference between Tidwell’s analogy and Domain Management. In Tidwell’s analogy, the birds provide an independent third-party analysis of sorts—their presence in the sky suggests that a body could be below, no matter what preconceived ideas FBI agents might have about the location of the reported murder victim. But with Domain Management, the data provides suggestions that bolster, rather than challenge, the FBI’s preconceived ideas. The program is able to say with certainty and exactness where Muslims live in a particular city, but the belief that a danger exists in that part of the city as a result of the Muslim population requires the preconceived belief that Muslim communities represent a threat to public safety and national security. This belief and a generalized Islamophobia pervade all levels of the Bureau. In recent years, FBI counterterrorism training has made little to no distinction between the Al Qaeda terrorist network—whose members are religious radicals—and Islam in general. FBI counterterrorism training documents in circulation in 2011 described Mohammed as a “cult leader” and labeled charity among Muslims as a “funding mechanism for combat.” The more devout a Muslim was, according to FBI training literature first made public by Wired magazine, the more likely he was to be violent.29
Tidwell understands better than most at the FBI the repercussions of focusing investigative resources on Muslims—he is a named defendant in a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU and Council on American-Islamic Relations in 2011 alleging illegal spying on Muslim communities in California—but he doesn’t believe that knowing, for example, where Lebanese live in a city means that the FBI is necessarily spying on or targeting Lebanese Americans.30 “Anything we do is going to be interpreted as monitoring Muslims,” Tidwell said. “I would tell Muslim community leaders, ‘Do you really think I have the time and money to monitor all the mosques and Arab American organizations? We don’t, and I don’t want to. The flip side with what the Bureau does is that we’re also responsible nationally for protecting civil rights. That’s something I always said in dealing with the Muslim communities—my first responsibility is to protect you. If a mosque had stuff painted on it, just like with a synagogue, we’d help clean it up. Our first responsibility to you is civil rights. Our second responsibility is making sure someone isn’t hiding among you, taking advantage of what you represent.”
Yet that second responsibility is the reason the FBI developed Domain Management, has agents who are assigned full-time to recruiting informants, and now needs sophisticated software to track its thousands of informants nationwide. The use of Domain Management and the explosive growth of the FBI informant ranks are the primary reasons why today we have so many terrorism sting cases. While the cases involve plots that sound dangerous—about bombing skyscrapers and synagogues and crowded public squares—if you dig deeper, you see that many of the government’s alleged terrorists seem hopeless; they are almost always young and down on their luck, penniless, without much promise in their lives, easily susceptible to a strong-willed informant’s influence. They’re often blustery punks, I told Tidwell, and I wondered if most would mature past their big-talking ways if left alone. “And if they don’t mature?” Tidwell countered. “Or if they hook up with someone of a like mind that has the capacity? You and I could sit here, go online, and by tonight have a decent bomb built. What do you do? Wait for him to figure it out himself?”
The FBI uses informants and terrorism stings to create a hostile environment for terrorist recruiters and operators—by raising the risk of even the smallest step toward violent action. It’s a form of deterrence, an adaptation of the “broken windows” theory used to fight urban crime. Advocates such as Tidwell insist it has been effective, noting that there hasn’t been a successful large-scale attack against the United States since 9/11. But what can’t be answered—as many former and current FBI agents acknowledge—is how many of the Bureau’s targets would have taken the step over the line at all were it not for the pressure and coercion of an informant.
*This ignorance of Islam and Islamic culture pervades the Bureau’s highest ranks to this day, as the FBI’s few Muslim agents have had trouble climbing the ranks. In one of several examples of alleged discrimination, the FBI denied the promotion of one Muslim agent, Bassem Youssef, due in part to confusing him with another Muslim agent, Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, who was fired, but later reinstated, after refusing to wear a wire during the controversial investigation of Sami Al-Arian, a computer engineering professor at the University of South Florida in Tampa who pleaded guilty to conspiring to provide services to the Palestinian Islamic Jihad following years of FBI scrutiny.
*The commercial data that the FBI feeds into Domain Management has been a matter of some debate. Congressional Quarterly reported that consumer data used in Domain Management once included grocery store sales of Middle Eastern food. The FBI denied that it was data mining falafel transactions, calling the report “too ridiculous to be true,” but Congressional Quarterly stood by its story.