[Reader-list] A Muslim's Choice: Turn U.S. Informant Or Risk Losing Visa

[Avinash Kumar]

The Wall Street Journal

A Muslim's Choice: Turn U.S. Informant Or Risk Losing Visa

By Peter Waldman

July 11, 2006 Tuesday

Last November, when Yassine Ouassif crossed into Champlain, N.Y., from

Canada, border agents questioned him for several hours. Then they took

away his green card and sent him home to San Francisco by bus, with

strict instructions: As soon as he got there, he was to call a man

named Dan.

Dan, it turned out, was Daniel Fliflet, a counterterrorism agent for

the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Mr. Ouassif met the agent at an

Oakland subway station on Nov. 30, and the two men walked the streets

together for 90 minutes.

Mr. Fliflet told the 24-year-old Moroccan that he'd been monitoring

his friends and him for many months, Mr. Ouassif recalls. Mr. Fliflet

made him an offer: Become an informant and regularly report to the FBI

on what his Muslim friends in San Francisco were saying and doing. In

exchange, he would get back his green card. He could resume his

education, bring his Moroccan wife to America, and pursue his dream of

buying a car, moving to Sacramento and becoming an engineer.

If he refused? asked Mr. Ouassif. "I will work hard to deport you to

Morocco as soon as possible," Mr. Fliflet responded, according to an

account written by Mr. Ouassif soon after the meeting. "I want you to

know something important," the FBI agent added, according to Mr.

Ouassif. "America is just like a bus, and you have a choice to make:

Either you board the bus or you leave."

Mr. Ouassif's encounters with federal officials -- and with

intelligence agencies on two other continents -- came to a head in

April. His story provides a window into a largely covert front of the

war on terror: the FBI's aggressive pursuit of Muslim informants.

Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, the bureau has had the difficult

task of penetrating a culture that few agents know anything about. It

has responded with a forceful effort to conscript eyes and ears within

Muslim communities.

Some of the recruitment is public. FBI agents plead for community

assistance in meetings at mosques and other Muslim conclaves. Agents

are also under pressure to develop confidential sources. According to

FBI rules, supervisors review case files every 90 days to scrutinize

the nature and credibility of agents' contacts. "If an agent is

sitting there with nothing," one FBI official says, "their supervisor

will come down and ask, 'What are you doing?'"

Over the years, informants have been vital in developing criminal

cases against drug gangs, the Mafia and other organized crime. But

when agents resort to coercive tactics, it sometimes backfires, some

FBI agents say. In intelligence gathering, the so-called hammer -- the

threat of legal retaliation -- can alienate the "human assets" needed

most, experts say, and can raise legal and ethical questions.

"The best FBI man is really just a good salesman," says Patrick Webb,

a retired FBI supervisor who set up San Francisco's terrorism task

force in the 1990s. "Blackmail of any type is blackmail. That never

works."

Mr. Fliflet didn't respond to questions emailed to him about his

dealings with Mr. Ouassif. An FBI spokeswoman in San Francisco, LaRae

Quy, confirms Mr. Ouassif's account of his dealings with Mr. Fliflet.

"This was a serious investigation, though not necessarily of Mr.

Ouassif," she says. "We had really good reason to believe he could

give us good information about a lot of things."

After his meeting with Mr. Fliflet, Mr. Ouassif faced a dilemma

increasingly familiar to Muslims in America in recent years: whether

to inform on friends and relatives or risk alienating U.S.

authorities.

Walid Mustafa, a 53-year-old Palestinian American who teaches kung fu,

first encountered the FBI when a young agent knocked on his door in

Sacramento to ask about fund-raising at the local mosque. The FBI had

been questioning donors to Muslim charities nationwide. Several weeks

later, Mr. Mustafa contacted the agent for help: His brother's ex-wife

had sold their duplex and absconded with the proceeds to Malaysia, Mr.

Mustafa told the agent. They agreed to meet at Starbucks.

Mr. Mustafa says the FBI agent offered to pay him for providing

information about local Muslims. "What about helping my brother?" he

recalls asking. "You help us. We'll help you," he says the agent

responded.

"It was so insulting," says Mr. Mustafa. "As Muslims, we're obligated

to protect this country. We don't need to get paid. I told him,

'You're not going to solve the problem by hiring snitches in mosques.

Get involved. Get to know people. Become part of the community.'"

Karen Ernst, an FBI spokeswoman in Sacramento, says that Mr. Mustafa

"got very upset" when he was asked to become an informant. But she

says the agents who dealt with him never suggested trading favors in

any way.

Mr. Ouassif, the young Moroccan whose green card was taken at the

border, immigrated to the U.S. in 2001 at the age of 18, after winning

the green card in a State Department lottery. He says he immediately

began to look for a wife. He asked other U.S. Muslims to fix him up,

"but the only thing people cared about was how much money I had," says

Mr. Ouassif, who works as a laborer and security guard.

The solution, he says, came to him in a dream: He would marry Khadija

El Fahri, a first cousin whom he hadn't seen since 2001, when she was

14. His mother and aunt arranged it, and in 2003, the couple married

in Casablanca. After a brief honeymoon, Mr. Ouassif returned alone to

San Francisco, enrolled in community college and hunkered down for

what he expected would be a long, agonizing wait for a visa for his

16-year-old bride.

Mr. Ouassif's troubles began last September after he visited his wife

in Morocco. He took off from Paris on a flight back to San Francisco.

Three hours later, the pilot announced the flight was returning to

Paris. Two French policemen escorted Mr. Ouassif off the plane. French

authorities told him that the U.S. would not permit the plane to land

with him onboard, he says. They told him they didn't know why, he

says. They put him on the next flight to Casablanca.

Moroccan security officials met Mr. Ouassif at the airport and grilled

him all night and for much of the next day, he says. At one point they

told him he'd "never see the sun again" if he didn't tell them why the

U.S. would turn back a French jet just because he was aboard, he says.

Through tears, he pleaded innocence. Moroccan authorities allowed him

to stay with his family while they investigated.

Paul Bresson, a spokesman for the FBI in Washington, declined to

discuss any aspect of the so-called no-fly list maintained by the

government. A spokeswoman for the Moroccan embassy in Washington did

not respond to requests for comment.

One month later, a Moroccan agent informed Mr. Ouassif that he'd been

cleared of suspicion by Moroccan intelligence, Mr. Ouassif says. The

agent warned him not to return to the U.S., but didn't elaborate.

Nearly broke from the extended stay, Mr. Ouassif bought a plane ticket

to Montreal. His plan was to return to the U.S. by bus and to resolve

his problem with U.S. authorities at the border.

When he arrived there, an inspector wondered why he had flown through

Montreal. Concerned about arousing further suspicion, Mr. Ouassif said

nothing about the incident in Paris. He told the inspector he'd heard

the road from Canada was beautiful, he recalls. He was handcuffed and

placed in a holding cell for several hours, he says. An immigration

officer interviewed him at length about his life and religious views.

Then, he says, he was introduced to Special Agent Michael Lonergan of

the FBI's office in Plattsburgh, N.Y. They were left alone to talk, he

says.

Immigration officers had taken his green card. Under normal

circumstances, Mr. Lonergan told him, he would have been sent to a

Buffalo detention center to await deportation proceedings, according

to Mr. Ouassif. He'd been spared, Mr. Lonergan told him, by a call

from Dan, his FBI colleague in San Francisco. Special Agent Dan

Fliflet wanted Mr. Ouassif to come to San Francisco, but not by plane,

and to call him as soon as he arrived. According to Mr. Ouassif, Mr.

Lonergan told him that Mr. Fliflet would decide whether he would get

back his green card or be deported. Mr. Ouassif was ordered to report

to an immigration interview in San Francisco three weeks later, on

Dec. 14.

Mr. Lonergan referred questions about the matter to the FBI's

spokesman in Albany, N.Y., who declined to comment.

One week later, as Mr. Ouassif and Mr. Fliflet walked the streets of

Oakland, the FBI agent accused him and his friends of having "jihadi"

beliefs, according to Mr. Ouassif's written account. Mr. Ouassif

responded that they were observant Muslims interested in peace and

personal betterment, not jihad and politics. Mr. Fliflet said he

didn't believe that, and asked Mr. Ouassif if he had any information

to share, according to Mr. Ouassif.

Mr. Ouassif says he told the agent about the only suspicious character

he knew, an Afghani man who prayed on Fridays at a San Francisco

mosque and claimed to have fought with the Afghan mujahedeen against

the Soviets. The man supported Muslim insurgents in Iraq, Mr. Ouassif

said, and once asked Mr. Ouassif to wire $5,000 for him from Morocco

to Iraq. Mr. Ouassif told the agent he had refused, and had told the

Afghani that he didn't believe the Iraq conflict was a true jihad.

Mr. Fliflet gave Mr. Ouassif one week to consider the FBI's offer to

become an informant in exchange for his green card, according to Mr.

Ouassif. If he didn't hear from him, the FBI agent said, he'd assume

Mr. Ouassif "prefers to help extremists" instead of America, according

to Mr. Ouassif. Mr. Fliflet warned him the FBI had ample evidence to

prove he was an extremist, Mr. Ouassif says. Mr. Fliflet told him not

to tell anyone about their meeting, including any lawyer.

Accepting the offer, says Mr. Ouassif, would have fulfilled his dream

to bring his wife to America. But he feared that doing so would be

sinful. According to the Quran, he says, the lowest depths of hell are

reserved for munafiqun -- hypocrites who act as Muslims while plotting

against them. Mr. Ouassif says he also worried that working with the

FBI was a lifelong commitment -- easy to start, impossible to stop.

Mr. Ouassif immediately told his roommate, Noureddin Moussawi, what

had happened. Mr. Moussawi, a Moroccan-American cabdriver who had

worked for 10 years as a United Airlines flight attendant, says he

told Mr. Ouassif that the FBI wouldn't hurt him because he'd done

nothing wrong. "Tell the truth. You have nothing to hide," Mr.

Moussawi recalls telling him.

Two weeks later, Mr. Ouassif reported for his scheduled immigration

interview. Ignoring Mr. Fliflet's instruction, he brought a lawyer,

Banafsheh Aklaghi, founder of a San Francisco nonprofit group,

National Legal Sanctuary for Community Advancement. Mr. Fliflet was

there. An immigration agent peppered Mr. Ouassif with questions. Clues

emerged as to why the authorities had taken such an interest in him.

Much of the interview focused on one of his former roommates, a San

Francisco cabdriver who had returned home to Baghdad shortly after Mr.

Ouassif moved in with him in 2003. Mr. Ouassif says he inferred from

the questions that his ex-roommate had been arrested or killed in

Iraq. Mr. Ouassif's cellphone number had been on the man's phone, the

immigration agent said. Mr. Ouassif told the agent they hadn't been

close friends, and that he hadn't thought the man was dangerous or he

wouldn't have lived with him.

The agents told Mr. Ouassif they intended to detain him for

deportation. His lawyer asked why. Mr. Ouassif says the agents didn't

answer. He was handcuffed and put in a holding cell. Through a cell

window, his lawyer told him he was slated for detention in Eloy,

Ariz., one of the highest-security facilities in the federal system.

Mr. Ouassif cried.

About three hours later, he says, the immigration agent took him aside

without his attorney and asked if he still wanted to fight

deportation. He said he did. Within minutes, he says, another

immigration officer gave him surprising news: he was free to go. The

Homeland Security lawyer on duty had refused to sign his detention

order, citing a lack of evidence, his attorney, Ms. Aklaghi, was told.

(FBI and immigration agents can recommend detention and deportation,

but it is up to Homeland Security lawyers to review the legality of

the decisions.) Mr. Ouassif was given another immigration appointment.

On April 6, Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement

branch gave Mr. Ouassif his green card back. Ms. Aklaghi says she

learned more at that point about why federal authorities were so

interested in him. Mr. Ouassif had been secretly recorded by an FBI

informant talking to friends in a San Francisco mosque. A Homeland

Security lawyer, she says, did not specify what Mr. Ouassif had said,

but told her that his statements did not indicate criminal intent and

were fully protected by the First Amendment. Nevertheless, his

statements had landed him on the no-fly list, Ms. Aklaghi says, and

led to all his subsequent travails.

Mr. Bresson, the FBI spokesman in Washington, said the bureau won't

discuss "any specific individuals who are purportedly on the list or

the mechanics involved with how they allegedly got there."

Another federal official familiar with Mr. Ouassif's case says

government lawyers have become much more discerning about the

treatment of Muslim immigrants since the years immediately following

9/11. "We know the FBI is desperate for human assets, for feet on the

ground, but the worst thing we could possibly do is threaten and

blackmail people and treat them with disrespect," this official says.

Ms. Quy, the FBI spokeswoman in San Francisco, says that Mr. Fliflet

thought he could help Mr. Ouassif with a visa problem and did not set

out to threaten him. "We're learning, too," she says. "We need to

understand where the boundaries are for them, as well as us." She says

the suspicions about Mr. Ouassif and his acquaintances are

"diminishing all the time, because our questions are getting

answered."

Mr. Ouassif says he plans to resume his studies, which he had dropped

in January due to stress. He's desperate to visit his wife in Morocco,

he says, but worries he's still on the no-fly list. A spokeswoman for

the U.S. Terrorism Screening Center, which keeps the list, declined to

comment.

Mr. Ouassif says his next goal is to save $25,000 to buy his mother an

apartment in Casablanca. After the requisite FBI background check,

California recently renewed his security-guard registration. He's now

working double shifts guarding electric-power plants.

"It's OK to ask me or anyone else, 'If you see a dangerous person, an

extremist, will you call us?'" he says. "Of course I will. But I don't

want to live a secret life."
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