American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us (2 page)

Suddenly thrust into the public eye, I encountered situations I had never dealt with before. One night I was taking a cab back to my apartment from Reagan National Airport in Washington. I glanced at the front seat and saw an Arabic-language newspaper. On the front page was my picture with a bull’s-eye superimposed on it. I realized my life was going to be very different from then on.

Once I found myself at a Muslim convention where a speaker started shouting, “Steven Emerson is the enemy of Islam! Are we going to let Steven Emerson tell us what to do?” “No,” the crowd roared in response. I sat there sweating. Thankfully, I had altered my appearance. Even so, I was exceptionally nervous. Fortunately, no one noticed me.

Over the years The Investigative Project’s acquisition of materials has become quite sophisticated. We subscribe to more than a hundred radical periodicals a month and acquire hundreds more documents from sources, conventions, rallies, and other venues. We sustain a rigorous effort to collect video- and audiotapes of radical Islamic groups and leaders in action. We have translators working full-time, and often send Arabic-speaking representatives to conventions and other gatherings, since this is the only way to understand fully what is going on. We have logged more than 6,000 hours of video- and audiotapes and our electronic library is probably the most comprehensive in the world. We have compiled a database of some thousands of individuals who are known or suspected terrorists, or direct supporters of terrorists, as well as dossiers on scores of militant groups.

The Investigative Project built on its own momentum. We became a collection point. People started calling up and asking, “What do you know?” or “Do you know this?” We received countless tips. Most of them turned out to be bogus, but a few were incredibly fruitful.

Then the death threats began. It started in South Africa. A public television station in that country announced it was going to show “Jihad in America.” Radical Islamic groups immediately went to court and tried to block it. Much to our satisfaction, a South African court ruled in our favor. The show ran, with a good deal of pre-publicity.

A short time later I got an urgent call from the U.S. law enforcement officials. I was working in my Washington apartment. They told me to get in a taxi and come downtown immediately, making sure no one was following me. They gave me an address in Foggy Bottom. When I got there it turned out to be the offices of the Bureau of Diplomatic Security (BDS), an arm of the State Department that deals largely with terrorism.

FBI and BDS officials quickly briefed me. After “Jihad in America” aired in South Africa, a militant Muslim group had taken offense. They had dispatched a team to assassinate me. The State Department and FBI had only found out recently; as far as they knew, which unfortunately was not a lot, the assassins had already entered the country. It was even possible they already had me under surveillance. The problem was that the FBI simply had no idea whether or not the militants had entered the country.

“What would you like to do?” they asked me.

“What can I do?” I asked.

Well, there wasn’t too much. One thing that was out of the question was round-the-clock police protection. That was too expensive. I was only a private citizen and it wasn’t in anybody’s budget. They would send a team of officers out to my apartment to discuss the options.

The next day a whole team came to my Connecticut Avenue condominium—FBI officials, federal counterterrorism experts, detectives from both the District of Columbia and Metropolitan Police Departments—the latter being the guards of the Capitol area.

Here were the possibilities:

I was amazed. For years I had thought of myself as an observer, taking note of events, writing down notes, making reports, storing information for future reference. Now I was an active participant in one of my stories, and I wasn’t sure that I liked it.

I told them none of this sounded very appealing. I would think it over. Meanwhile, I was given one prop. They presented me with a collapsible mirror that I could carry around with me and use every time I got into my car to check to make sure a car bomb had not been attached to the underside of the engine. As any rational person would do under the circumstances, I used it quite a bit.

After thinking it over for a day or so, I made up my mind. I wasn’t going to give up investigating. I wasn’t going to move to New York. I wasn’t going to assume a new identity. But I would have to move out of my apartment and live underground for a while. This was not an easy decision. I had bought my condominium six years before—the first time I had owned my own home. I couldn’t buy anything new. It would take too long to sell the old one and I might have to be moving regularly anyway. I had to develop new habits. The D.C. Police Department parked a cruiser outside my house for fifteen hours a day while I was making arrangements. Even then I had to sleep somewhere else to be safe. I had about a week before I was on my own again.

The police taught me some techniques about living underground. Stay away from the windows. Vary your routine. The important thing is not to leave the house at the same time or take the same route to and from the office every day. When driving a car, make sure no one is following you. Do a quick U-turn every once in a while just to make sure. I did that many times.

“Be careful when you jog,” they said. That was a big problem. I love to jog. It’s my only opportunity to get outdoors and get my mind off things for a while. But jogging through Rock Creek Park at night promised maximum exposure. Now I had to develop a hundred different ways of leaving my apartment and winding through different streets in inconspicuous clothing in order to maintain my daily exercise. If I didn’t my health—and sanity—would probably collapse. It was trying and unnerving.

Along the way I had to decide whether this was all worth it. Did I really want to live this way? Couldn’t I just move on to another subject and be just as effective as an investigator and reporter? I weighed the idea for a long time. But there was a stubborn resistance in me. I didn’t like the idea of being intimidated. I’d be giving up an extremely good story. I honestly believed this was an important concern for everyone in the nation. I could see the momentum toward domestic terror building. I decided to go on.

One incident that severely affected the course of my reporting was the Oklahoma City bombing of April 1995. That ended up being an albatross around my neck. Less than six hours after the bombing I was asked on television whether I thought militant Islamic groups were involved. There was good reason for thinking they might be. The bombing, after all, was in Oklahoma City, where I had first encountered such militant groups in 1992. Several Hamas operatives were known to be living in the Oklahoma City area. At first federal law-enforcement officials were suspicious themselves.

When asked on a news program, I responded that “federal law enforcement officials” were investigating the possibility that militant Islamic groups were involved. This was true. I also said that “this [was] done with the attempt to inflict as many casualties as possible”
¹
and that “this is not the same type of bomb that has been traditionally used by other terrorist groups in the United States other than the Islamic militant ones.”
²
All this was interpreted as my saying point-blank that militant Muslim groups were involved.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American Muslim Council (AMC), and other organizations immediately took offense. Then when Timothy McVeigh was arrested and it turned out domestic terrorists were responsible, Muslim groups claimed they were the real victims. “Surge in hate crimes against Muslims,” was the story on the front page of
The New York Times
—based, I believe, entirely on unsubstantiated information fed to them by CAIR.
The Boston Globe, The New York Times,
ABCTV, National Public Radio—even news outlets that had themselves originally reported that Muslims were among the suspects now took the position that I was the only one who had suggested this. I became persona non grata in many places, including at CBS, which had hired me less than twenty-four hours after the bombing to be a consultant. They ended up blacklisting me for five years. Dan Rather contended, “It was Emerson who misled us.”

Still, the news media didn’t give up the story themselves. At one point
Newsweek
called up and said, “We’ll give you $10,000 to help write our cover story.” They were looking for a militant Muslim connection. “Save your money,” I told them. “They didn’t do it.” As soon as the details of the McVeigh arrest emerged, it was obvious that he was responsible and had probably acted nearly alone. Up to that point I had suspected that Islamic radicals were involved. Now I realized I was wrong. I’ve never wavered from that since then, and I have refused to support the conspiracy theorists who insist that McVeigh himself was actually involved with Muslim groups. But to this day I regret my hasty comments.

Meanwhile, I continued to discover more information at the Investigative Project. People in law enforcement would regularly come to me with new data, records, and documents. The most disturbing were the calls I would get from federal law-enforcement agents who had information and wanted to follow up, but were being prevented by their superiors who weren’t interested in these things. More and more, these disgruntled agents turned to us with information that they weren’t allowed to pursue themselves.

Our operations became more sophisticated and far reaching. One of the unexplored mountains of evidence we inherited, for example, was the trial exhibits from the first World Trade Center bombing. Included were the records of thousands of phone calls made by the suspects to the Middle East and other parts of the world. We knew the individuals who were placing the calls, but we couldn’t tell who had received them. Yet it was obvious that this was the key to investigating how far the network of international terrorism had extended.

We divided the list of calls up country by country. Then, we engaged a number of Arabic speakers and started making cold calls. Every night at midnight—when the tolls were low and it was daylight on the other side of the world—we would begin dialing numbers in the Middle East. When someone picked up we would engage him in random, nondescript conversation. “How are you? How are things going? I’m calling from the U.S. Do you want to know what’s happening here?” One way or another we tried to get them to talk to us.

More than 49 out of 50 calls would be a dead end. The person answering would hang up or wouldn’t have any idea of what we were talking about. But that one in fifty proved to be a treasure trove of information. At one point we ended up talking to the son of blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the infamous Jersey City imam who plotted a day of terror for Manhattan. Another time we reached the spiritual leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Little by little it became obvious that all these groups were coordinating their effort in a worldwide network.

Then one day the phone rang, and we hit an absolute gold mine. The caller was a brave Sudanese who was a member of the Republican Brotherhood, a group opposed to Dr. Hassan al-Turabi’s fundamentalist regime in Sudan. He was now working as a plumber in Brooklyn. He was in the basement of a building and had just come across scores of boxes of old records that appeared to be the property of Alkhifa Refugee Center, also known as the Office of Services for the Mujahideen, the predecessor to Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda international network. The records had apparently been moved there after the World Trade Center bombing from Alkhifa headquarters at the Al-Farooq Mosque on Atlantic Avenue. He wondered if we would be interested.

We immediately contacted the FBI in New York and Washington. To our utter amazement, they said they couldn’t do anything about it. The field agents were very interested but when they ran it up to their superiors, they were told it wouldn’t fly. We even smuggled out a few pages to pique their interest but the superiors would not budge. Then we got word that the documents were about to be moved or perhaps even destroyed in about five days.

So we decided to pull off our own covert operation. Our Sudanese contact went into the building at midnight to do his job carrying several large toolboxes. He then immediately emptied the toolboxes and filled them with documents. We met him at the rear of the building in a rented van. We grabbed the toolboxes, each containing about 4,000–5,000 documents, and raced off to a Kinko’s in Manhattan where we spent all night feverishly photocopying the material. Then we would race back to the building by 6:00
A.M.
and return them to the plumber so he could put them back before the building owners showed up for work. We did this for three straight nights.

The papers contained financial records, address books, information about the fabrication of passports, and countless other materials showing the Alkhifa Refugee Center’s involvement in the worldwide jihad movement. When we returned to the building the fourth night, however, our contact didn’t show up. We waited and waited but by 7:00
A.M.
we were very fearful that something had happened to him. We left and found out later that something had triggered the building owners’ suspicion and they had caught him. While we were waiting outside he was being questioned and threatened in the basement. He is a tough guy, however, and somehow got out of it. We ended up keeping the original records instead of copies. Altogether, we only retrieved about one-quarter of the information that was there, but it was great material. We got thousands of leads. Nonetheless, I still think it would have been much better had the FBI gone in.