Because so many of the informants that the FBI uses in terrorism stings are men with histories of crime, fraud, and deception—in short, not the most credible people to put on a witness stand during a trial—the Bureau relies heavily on secretly recording the conversations between its informants and the individuals they target. When an informant lacks credibility or has a financial interest in gaining a conviction, a taped conversation showing the target going along with the plot can often make up for those deficiencies with a jury. As a result, in the terrorism sting cases that have gone to trial since 9/11, prosecutors have played hours of taped conversations between informants and targets for juries.
However, in analyzing these cases, I noticed a disturbing pattern of conversations between informants and targets not being recorded at the most suspicious of times. These “missing recordings” seem to occur at either the beginning of a sting, when informants are establishing their relationships with targets—a period of time defense lawyers consider crucial to determining whether the government induced or entrapped the defendant—or when the target is thinking of backing out of the plot or otherwise doing something that has the potential to undermine the government’s case. No matter what part of a sting goes unrecorded, the government routinely blames “recorder malfunction” for the lapse.
The most egregious example of the mysterious and persistent FBI trend of recorder malfunction happened when two separate terrorism sting cases, located 2,800 miles apart from each other, converged in a most unexpected way in 2010. The first sting centered on an Oregon party boy who developed a peculiar hatred for the United States. Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a young Somali American, attended Oregon State University and lived in Corvallis, a college town about eighty-five miles south of Portland. He prayed at the Salman al-Farisi mosque, but many of his fellow congregants kept their distance from him, as Mohamud pushed an extreme, hundred-year-old Sunni brand of Islam known as Salafism—whose adherents, among them Osama bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, seek to emulate the ways of the Prophet Mohammed and the earliest days of Islam. Mohamud, however, led a life at odds withof his religion, drinking alcohol and engaging in premarital sex, two activities prohibited under most interpretations of the Koran.
It was Mohamud’s partying that first brought him to the attention of the FBI. On the day after Halloween 2009, a woman reported to the Oregon State Police that Mohamud had raped her after a party the night before. Other students at the party told police that Mohamud and the woman had been together, dancing, flirting, and drinking, and at the end of the night, they had left together. Nothing seemed to be wrong between them, the witnesses said. But the next morning, the woman told the police that she believed she had been drugged—a stranger, she said, had given her a beer at the party that might have been spiked with something—because she couldn’t remember the details of having sex with Mohamud. (A test for any type of date rape drugs later came back negative.)
That evening, Oregon State Police asked Mohamud, then eighteen years old, to come to the campus police station for questioning. At the station, Mohamud told police he hadn’t drugged or raped the woman, but said that they had gone to the party and then had consensual sex afterward. Police released Mohamud without charging him, but the next day, they called him back to the station to submit to a polygraph examination, which Mohamud agreed to. What he didn’t know as he took the test was that FBI agents were watching from another room, where they heard Mohamud discuss his personal background, educational plans, family, and opinions of Somalia. The agents discovered that Mohamud was nervous about the prospect that his family would find out about his partying as a result of the rape investigation. “Mohamud is very concerned that his parents will freak out if they find out about the investigation or his use of drugs and alcohol,” an FBI agent wrote in a report following the polygraph.1
During their questioning, police also asked Mohamud if an inspection of his laptop would reveal that he had researched date rape drugs. Mohamud said it wouldn’t, and offered to allow the officers to search the laptop and his mobile phone. He wrote the following on a piece of paper: “I, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, give the Oregon State Police permission to seize and search my HP laptop computer and my Vodafone cell phone. No promises or threats have been made, and I give this consent freely.” At the bottom of the page, below his signature and the signature of a witness, Mohamud wrote his laptop password: NorGrun. A state police computer analyst then copied the contents of the hard drive. What Mohamud didn’t know was that the Oregon State Police later gave a disk to the FBI containing four folders from his hard drive as well as three pages of information from his cell phone. The Oregon State Police did not charge Mohamud with a crime following the rape investigation.2
To this day, the FBI has not disclosed why it was interested in a date rape suspect at Oregon State University and what information was on Mohamud’s laptop and cell phone. The only fact the Bureau has revealed was that agents believed Mohamud was corresponding by email with a man in Northwest Pakistan, an area known for harboring terrorists, about a religious school in Yemen. In June 2010, more than six months after the rape investigation was closed, the FBI placed Mohamud on the federal no-fly list, at which time FBI agents interviewed him and he disclosed his intention to travel to Yemen. Later that month, on June 23, 2010, the FBI sting operation began in earnest.
The FBI believed that Mohamud had tried, but failed, to contact terrorists in Pakistan by email. An FBI informant then emailed Mohamud, pretending to be part of the terrorist group he’d reportedly been trying to reach, claiming to have received Mohamud’s email address from the man he was trying to contact in Pakistan. The email read, in part and in all lowercase letters: “sorry for the delay in our communication, we’ve been on the move… are you still able to help the brothers?” In the “From” field was the name Bill Smith. Mohamud replied to the email, but was skeptical. Mohamud wanted “to make sure you are not a spy yourself,” he wrote, and asked how Smith knew the man he’d been emailing. The undercover agent said he’d heard about Mohamud and received his email address from a mutual acquaintance, explaining cryptically that “a brother from Oregon who is now far away vouched for you.” Mohamud agreed to meet with the man he believed was a terrorist in Portland on July 30, 2010.
At the meeting, Mohamud told an undercover agent that he had written some articles that had been published in Jihad Recollections, a seventy-page pro-Al Qaeda magazine that was run by Samir Khan, a then-twenty-two-year-old Pakistani American who lived in Charlotte, North Carolina.3 (Khan later went to Yemen, where he became editor and publisher of Al Qaeda’s Inspire magazine before being killed in a CIA drone strike on September 30, 2011, along with Al Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki.)4 The undercover FBI agent asked Mohamud what he was willing to do for the cause. Mohamud, who told the agent he “wanted to wage war in the U.S.,” said he had been dreaming since he was fifteen years old about training with Al Qaeda in Yemen. If he wanted to get involved, the undercover agent told Mohamud, he had several options. He could pray five times a day and spread the word about Islam. He could continue studying, obtain his medical degree, and assist Al Qaeda as a doctor. He could raise money for terrorists overseas. Or he could become operational today, becoming a shaheed, or martyr. Mohamud chose the last option, saying that he wanted to put together an explosive device. The FBI agent told Mohamud to research possible targets, and that they’d meet again soon.
You would think that this critical encounter, the first inperson meeting between Mohamud and an undercover agent, would have been recorded, but it wasn’t. The FBI did set up audio and video equipment, but due to a “malfunction,” they weren’t able to record the meeting. Therefore, all the information about what was said is based on the FBI agent’s memory. Three weeks after that first meeting, Mohamud and the undercover agent met in a hotel room, and this time the recording equipment worked. Joining the FBI agent on this occasion was a second undercover agent who was posing as a weapons expert. Mohamud had done what he’d been told to do during the first meeting and came with a target in mind. “Pioneer Square, like, Portland, is, like, the main meeting—they have a twenty-sixth of November Christmas lighting and some 250,000 people come,” Mohamud told the agents.5
The undercover agents asked Mohamud whether he was concerned that such a target could result in children being harmed or killed.
“That’s what I’m looking for—a huge mass,” he replied. “Attacked in their own element.”
He’d push the button to detonate the bomb, the agents asked, even with children in the blast zone?
“Yes, I will push the button,” he answered. “When I see the enemy of Allah, then you know their bodies are torn everywhere.”
The undercover agents then told Mohamud they needed to discuss his idea with their superiors, a group they referred to as “the council.”
The following month, September 2010, Mohamud met again with the two agents, who told him that the plan was moving forward and asked him to find a suitable area to plant the bomb near Pioneer Square and to purchase some components for the weapon, including two Nokia prepaid cell phones, a toggle switch, and a nine-volt battery connector. They explained to Mohamud how the bomb would work: he’d place it at the target, then dial a cell phone to detonate the weapon remotely. “When you dial that phone number, all of this is going to be gone,” the second undercover agent said, referring to the two blocks around Pioneer Square.
However, despite his supposed desire to “wage war in the U.S.,” without the FBI’s assistance, not only was Mohamud incapable of becoming a terrorist, since he lacked the skills necessary to build a bomb or the money and contacts to obtain weapons, he was on the verge of being thrown into the streets, as he was broke and running behind on the rent for his apartment. But the FBI didn’t let those details stall the sting operation, as the undercover agents gave Mohamud $2,700 to cover his rent and another $110 for the bomb components.
On October 3, 2010, Mohamud dropped off the bomb components the undercover agents had requested. He also included a pack of gum with a handwritten note that read: “good luck with ur stereo system Sweetie. Enjoy the gum.” The undercover agents picked up Mohamud that same day and drove him to a hotel. He described Pioneer Square to them in detail and then laid out a plan, including where they should plant the bomb. “It’s gonna be a fireworks show,” Mohamud said, showing agents pictures on his laptop of specific parking spots near Pioneer Square. He handed one of the agents a thumb drive with the images. The undercover agents then demonstrated to Mohamud how to detonate the bomb once he had it in position. “Do you remember when 9/11 happened, when those people were jumping from skyscrapers? I thought that was awesome,” Mohamud told them. “I want to see that; that’s what I want for these people. I want whoever is attending that event to leave, to leave either dead or injured.” The undercover agents then recorded a video of Mohamud in which he threatened the United States, praised Allah, and read a poem.
On November 23, 2010, the undercover agents drove Mohamud to a storage unit they had rented to store the bomb materials, which included two barrels, a gasoline can, electrical wires, and a large box of screws. The three of them loaded the materials into the car, as well as reflective traffic markers, hard hats, safety glasses, vests, and gloves—all props for their cover.
Three days later, on November 26, the day of the Christmas tree lighting ceremony, the agents met Mohamud in a hotel room. The bomb was now assembled, though Mohamud didn’t know it was inert. “Beautiful,” he said of the weapon.
Mohamud and the undercover agents put the bomb in the car and drove to Pioneer Square, which was packed with people. They parked in one of the spots Mohamud had scouted out, then walked away from the vehicle, hard hats on so as not to raise suspicion. From a safe distance, Mohamud dialed the number that he believed would detonate the bomb. It failed. He dialed again. That’s when FBI agents rushed in and arrested him. He kicked and screamed as he was surrounded. “Allahu Akbar!” he yelled. “God is great! Allahu Akbar!”
Announcements of terrorism stings always make for big news in the cities in which they occur, but Mohamud’s arrest—involving a bomb plot in a crowded downtown area—drew more interest than most. It immediately made national news, splashing across the front pages of newspapers and getting covered by every broadcast and cable television news outlet in the country. The CBS Evening News, on November 27, 2010, showed footage of the Pioneer Square Christmas tree lighting ceremony. “Three, two, one,” the crowd chanted, and then the massive tree lit up with lights. “The plan was to kill as many people as possible,” CBS reporter Terry McCarthy said in the segment. “As thousands gathered for a tree lighting in Portland’s Pioneer Square, nineteen-year-old Mohamed Osman Mohamud allegedly parked a van at the corner and attempted to detonate what he thought was a bomb.”6
It is at this point that the Mohamud case converged with another FBI terrorism sting. Remember Antonio Martinez, the twenty-two-year-old who, with the help of an informant and an undercover FBI agent, tried to bomb a military recruiting center outside Baltimore? Nearly 3,000 miles away, Martinez was one of the millions of people who heard the news of Mohamud’s arrest in Oregon. At the time, he was the unknowing target of an FBI sting that seemed just like the one that had ensnared Mohamud. After seeing news of Mohamud’s arrest, Martinez became worried. Was he, too, being lured into a trap?
On November 27, 2010, the day after Mohamud’s arrest, Martinez called his supposed terrorist contact, explaining that he had seen a story on the news about a man in Portland who had tried to detonate a bomb. The whole thing was a setup, Martinez told his contact, and he needed to know what was going on with their operation in Baltimore. “I’m not falling for no BS,” he said.7 The informant told Martinez that they should meet in person. He agreed. In the entire sting, this meeting was the most important one, as Martinez had grown suspicious and was ready to back out of the plot. What would the FBI operative say to Martinez to keep him on board? We’ll never know because their conversation wasn’t recorded. In an affidavit, the FBI blamed this on a recorder malfunction. Whatever the informant said during this unrecorded meeting, his words were enough to calm down Martinez. The next day, Martinez told the informant by phone: “I’m just ready to move forward.” A week later, Martinez was arrested in a scene almost identical to Mohamud’s. He tried to detonate a car bomb remotely. It failed. When he tried a second time, FBI agents arrested him.
If you take a close look at all the terrorism stings the FBI has engaged in since 9/11, you’ll find missing recordings in nearly every one. While some are like the Martinez case—an important meeting going unrecorded due to what is reported to be recorder malfunction—more often, it is the initial encounters between the informant and the target, a critical time in a sting operation, that aren’t recorded. In the Oregon case, Mohamud’s first meeting with an undercover agent was not recorded—a problem the FBI attributed to the malfunctioning of its recording equipment. However, the same thing happened in the case of the Newburgh Four, in which Shahed Hussain spent four months with James Cromitie before the FBI decided to start recording their conversations. And even after recordings began in the Newburgh sting, the FBI elected not to tape some meetings, including vital ones such as when Hussain took the four men to dinner at a T.G.I. Friday’s the night before the planned bombing and offered them money to carry forward with the plot.
Without recordings of these meetings, federal prosecutors must ask jurors to believe without question the recounting of events from an FBI informant—a man who usually has a past that includes some combination of violent crime, fraud, and deceit, and who has credibility only because he’s been given the FBI’s imprimatur. Defense lawyers then must convince the jury that the informant, despite his FBI association, is an untrustworthy, unsavory, and unfit witness. Halfway through the Newburgh trial, for example, defense lawyer Vincent L. Briccetti attempted in cross-examination to emphasize to the jury that without recordings, the government’s informant, Shahed Hussain, couldn’t be trusted to tell the truth.
“Now is it fair to say, sir, that a lot of what you testified to on direct in response to [the prosecutor’s] questions related to tape recordings that were played for the jury?” Briccetti asked.
“Yes, sir,” Hussain answered.
“But not everything that you testified to related to tape recordings, correct?”
“There was some that was testified that was not taped.”
“Well, there were several months’ worth of meetings between June and October of 2008 with my client, Mr. Cromitie, which were not taped, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And so you wanted the jury to trust you when you tell them what happened on those occasions, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And you’re hoping they’re going to believe what you have to say about all that, correct?”
“Yes, sir.”8
In researching terrorism stings, the more I noticed missing recordings, the more I questioned current and former FBI agents about why some conversations are not recorded. Sometimes the recording equipment just doesn’t work, they told me, or it’s too dangerous to risk having the sting target discover that an informant or undercover agent is wearing a wire. “Every time you’re doing an undercover, you have to factor in the level of danger to the informant or to the agent,” J. Stephen Tidwell, the FBI’s former executive assistant director, told me. “If you think there’s a high risk, you’re not going to use recording equipment.”
Frances Townsend, President George W. Bush’s national security advisor for terrorism, agrees with Tidwell’s assessment. I met with Townsend, now a terrorism analyst for CNN, at her posh Manhattan office in early 2011, and asked her about the terrorism sting cases I’d reviewed in which meetings with targets were not recorded either intentionally or due to what appeared to be a suspiciously high rate of recorder malfunction. She couldn’t address the specific cases I asked her about, since she hadn’t reviewed them herself, but given her experience as federal prosecutor for organized crime in New York, she said she wasn’t surprised by the missing recordings. “I can’t tell you how many times I had FBI agents in front of me and I yelled, ‘You have hundreds of hours of recordings, but you didn’t record this meeting,’” she said. “But the reason isn’t always nefarious. Sometimes, I admit, they might not record something intentionally. But more often than not, it’s a technical issue. The equipment malfunctioned or the recording was inaudible.”
I’ve never been satisfied with these kinds of explanations for missing recordings. As a journalist, I’ve recorded hundreds of interviews and meetings, using basic store-bought recording equipment. I’ve only experienced one recorder malfunction, and it was due to human error—I accidentally stopped the recorder. However, the FBI, with its sophisticated equipment, seems to experience these types of malfunctions regularly in terrorism stings.
In addition, the FBI’s fear that informants or agents will be put in danger if the target discovers they’re wearing recording equipment seems disingenuous since terrorism sting targets are dangerous only because the FBI says they are. Unlike in organized crime investigations, the FBI doesn’t need to fear that terrorism sting targets, upon discovering that they are being set up, will pull out guns and start putting holes in informants and undercover agents. Terrorism sting targets rarely have weapons of their own, and most are scrawny young guys incapable of physically overpowering the average FBI agent.
One reason why missing recordings are so suspicious can be found in clues in the meetings between informants and targets that are recorded during FBI terrorism stings. It’s not uncommon for informants to be caught on tape goading sting targets into moving forward with terrorist plots. “Do you want to call it off? You know, I’m not going to hold it against you,” said the Seattle informant in the case involving the mentally ill men Abu Khalid Abdul-Latif and Walli Mujahidh, not so subtly trying to shame his targets.9 If informants are willing to resort to taunts and bullying while wearing a wire, what do they say when the conversations aren’t being recorded?
That’s a question that James J. Wedick, the retired agent, often asks himself. During his thirty-four-year career with the FBI, Wedick went undercover in sting operations and later supervised agents working deep cover in sensitive criminal and drug cases. A thin, silver-haired man with a neatly groomed beard and round glasses, Wedick became interested in terrorism sting operations after he retired as a federal lawman and was hired as a consultant for the defense in a case in Lodi, California, in which an informant was caught on tape browbeating the target. In that case, a man in Oregon named Naseem Khan, who was working at a McDonald’s and a convenience store, claimed that Al Qaeda second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri had been seen in Lodi, an agricultural town whose conservative Pakistani American community dates back to the early twentieth century—a claim the FBI later determined to be false. But based on that tip, the FBI recruited Khan to be an informant and paid him $300,000 over time to infiltrate mosques in Lodi.10
As he ingratiated himself into the city’s Muslim community, Khan settled on two targets—ice cream truck driver Umer Hayat and his son Hamid. FBI recordings suggested that Khan, whose informant code name was Wildcat, tricked Hamid into making incriminating statements and badgered him to attend a terrorist training camp. In 2003, Hamid traveled to Pakistan to meet his bride—it is not uncommon for Pakistani American families in Lodi to arrange marriages with families in Pakistan—but the girl in Pakistan rejected him. While his father and mother hustled around Rawalpindi, near Islamabad, to find a new bride for him, Hamid spent two months hanging out and doing nothing. Khan, frustrated that Hamid wasn’t doing anything that could be used to build a prosecutable case, called him in Pakistan to intimidate him.
“When I God willing, when I come to Pakistan and I see you, I’m going to fucking force you—get you from your throat and fucking throw you in the madrassa,” Khan said.
“I’m not going to go with that,” Hamid replied.
“Oh, yeah, you will go. Yeah, you will go. You know what? Maybe I can’t fight with you in America, but I can beat your ass in Pakistan so nobody’s going to come to your rescue.”11
Upon Hamid’s return to the United States, FBI agents interrogated him. After initially denying during a five-hour grilling that he had attended a terrorist training camp, Hamid, worn down, eventually confessed, saying that he had attended a remote, forested camp in Pakistan. His father, Umer, later confessed to attending the same terrorist camp—but described a fantastical place where trainees wore masks “like ninja turtles” and attacked with swords dummies made to look like President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, and Secretary of State Colin Powell.12 Umer later recanted his confession—saying he made it up after FBI agents refused to believe he didn’t attend the camp, basing his fanciful descriptions on scenes from the movie Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which he and his family had watched several times—and pleaded guilty to making a false statement to the FBI. Hamid Hayat went to trial and was found guilty of providing material support to terrorists and making false statements to the FBI. The government’s case centered on Hamid’s confession, which, in Wedick’s view, came as a result of an illegal interrogation that involved intimidation and leading questions from an FBI agent. At the age of twenty-five, Hamid Hayat was sentenced to twenty-four years in prison.
After the Lodi case, Wedick was hired as a defense consultant for the Liberty City Seven in Miami. He’s developed a keen interest in terrorism stings as a result, and is among the leading critics of the FBI’s tactics and use of informants in these cases. He believes most of the targets of these stings lack the capacity to commit serious crimes on their own, let alone disastrous acts of terrorism. Mohamed Osman Mohamud in Portland was a perfect example. “This is a kid who, it can be reasonably inferred, barely had the capacity to put his shoes on in the morning,” Wedick said.
Wedick doesn’t believe that certain meetings aren’t recorded in terrorism stings because the undercover activities are dangerous or the FBI’s recording equipment has a high failure rate. There’s another, more troubling explanation, he said. “With the technology the FBI now has access to—these small devices that no one would ever suspect are recorders or transmitters—there’s no excuse not to tape interactions between the informant and the target,” he said. “So why in many of these terrorism stings are meetings not recorded? Because it’s convenient for the FBI not to record. They are paying informants huge sums of money and not monitoring them correctly. With some or many conversations not being recorded, I think it’s apparent that the Bureau understands and is aware of the problem, but is decidedly more interested in not being caught flatfooted again about would-be and/or suspected terrorists and/or pathetic individuals doing whatever, so we see rather aggressive informants suggesting or proposing things J. Edgar Hoover never would have permitted, even though he had informants reportedly under every nook and cranny.”
For the FBI, missing recordings—whether intentional or the result of a recorder malfunction—come without consequences. The Bureau can justify to the public that intentionally not recording a meeting was due to circumstances that made audio equipment too dangerous—something that can be debated but not wholly proved or disproved. Without a whistleblower, it’s impossible to prove that the FBI uses recorder malfunction as an excuse when it’s convenient for agents not to record a particular meeting, such as when the target might be backing out of the plot or when an informant’s words, if recorded, could be construed at trial as inducement.
The only possible consequence for the FBI comes in court, when defense lawyers put informants on the witness stand, bare to the jury in excruciating detail the informants’ past misdeeds, and then ask the jury to question whether certain meetings weren’t recorded so they wouldn’t hear the lies the informants told to keep their targets engaged in a terrorist plot made possible by federal law enforcement in the first place. Defense lawyers have repeatedly used unrecorded conversations in trying to sell juries on entrapment defenses, arguing that these meetings, if taped, would have contained statements that proved the FBI’s informant came up with the idea for the plot and induced the targets into moving forward with it. But juries so far haven’t bought that argument. Since 9/11, approximately fifty terrorism defendants have been involved in plots in which the informant could fairly be described as an agent provocateur, someone who provided not only the plan but also the means and opportunity for the terrorist plot. Ten of these defendants have formally argued entrapment during their trials.13 Yet none of these defendants—and only a minority risk trial in the first place with the government’s nearly perfect conviction rate and mandatory minimum sentences of twenty-five years in prison—were successful in convincing a jury that they’d been entrapped, that is, that they wouldn’t have committed their crimes were it not for the FBI informant instigating them in the first place.
In talking about FBI terrorism stings among journalists, academics and the public, I am frequently asked why entrapment has never been an effective defense in the terrorism cases. I’ve struggled with the answer to this question. It’s true that entrapment is a very risky legal strategy; after all, it requires the defendants to admit that they committed the crimes they are charged with and then hope that the jury will be sympathetic to their claim that the government induced them. It also requires the defense to disprove predisposition—the contention that the actions of the defendants prior to the introduction of the government informant suggested they would commit such a crime—and here the government has had little trouble in terrorism cases because so much today can be used to suggest predisposition. Watching jihadi videos, for example, as the Fort Dix Five did in New Jersey, or ranting about a hatred of Jews, as James Cromitie did in Newburgh, have both been viewed as evidence of predisposition. Of course, this is something of a simplification of a complicated legal subject. But with the entrapment defense, there’s something unique to terrorism sting cases. Why, after all, has there never been an effective entrapment defense in a terrorism sting case?
David D. Cole has considered that question. A Georgetown University law professor who specializes in constitutional law and national security, Cole has paid close attention to the terrorism sting cases that have gone before juries. In early 2011, I asked him why terrorism defendants are unable to succeed with entrapment defenses when the evidence is clear that the informant provided the means and opportunity for the crime. “I think prosecutors overwhelm juries with evidence in these cases,” Cole told me. “Jurors hear about a horrific plot to bomb the subway or a building, and they think, ‘I ride the subway,’ or, ‘My brother works in that building.’ Because the plot is so horrific, and people have memories of 9/11, the prosecution is able to overwhelm juries in such a way that prevents them from being sympathetic to an entrapment defense.”
The FBI’s success in terrorism trials has further emboldened the Bureau’s use of sting operations. As with any organization, the FBI duplicates programs that are effective, and terrorism sting operations have a near-flawless record in court. If the government’s terrorism stings were laid out on a time line, you’d see a slow start from 2002 to 2004 and then an explosion in 2005 and 2006. “Agents everywhere said, ‘Hey, this worked in New York. Let’s try it over here,’” Peter Ahearn, the former FBI agent, told me when I explained to him how the data showed that the terrorism stings spread nationwide from a modest start in Florida and New York. “That’s nothing new in the FBI. You always look at what other agents are doing. What are they doing there that we can do here?”
If the only effective measure is based on court verdicts, then terrorism sting operations have become a proven product for the Bureau. And this product carries another benefit: a terrorism sting gives the FBI, under pressure to show results, something to hold up—a dangerous terrorist caught on tape, convicted at trial, sentenced to decades in prison—as evidence to the public that it is doing its job to safeguard the United States from another attack.