So I Married a Terrorist . . .
Saraah Olson's strange trip through the U.S. war on terror
NICK SCHOU | April 19, 2007
The first time Saraah Olson called the FBI about her husband was on Feb. 26, 1993. At 12:27 p.m. Eastern time, a truck bomb had exploded inside the garage of New York City's World Trade Center.
While working on a term paper at her Garden Grove apartment, Olson turned on her television and saw coverage of the explosion, which killed six and wounded 1,042 people. She immediately called her husband, Hisham Diab, an Egyptian immigrant and insurance salesman for MetLife whom she had married two years earlier. She reached Diab at his office in Carson, California.
"They blew up the Trade Center," Olson told him, her voice frantic with disbelief. "They keep saying, 'The Arabs did it; the Arabs did it. They are blaming Arabs.'" Olson recalls that her husband didn't seem the least bit surprised.
He uttered exactly two words. "They should," he said. Then he hung up the telephone.
Olson had been growing suspicious about her husband for several months, ever since Diab had invited a blind Egyptian cleric to stay in their apartment building for three days while he gave inspirational sermons at the local mosque. The cleric, Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, would later be charged in connection with the Trade Center bombing. But more than anything, it was Diab's apparent lack of surprise and cold reaction to the Trade Center bombing that led Saraah Olson to call the FBI.
"I was like, son of a bitch," Olson says. "What kind of person would say, 'they should' unless they know something they're not supposed to know?"
Immediately after calling Diab, Olson dialed the number of the Santa Ana office of the FBI. A nice-sounding woman answered the telephone and asked how she could help. "I need to give someone some information," Olson said. "I don't know who I should talk to. I married an Arab. He's Egyptian. He's a friend of the blind cleric. He has some extreme political beliefs, and I just told my husband they blew up the Trade Center and are blaming Arabs, and he said they should. I just think somebody should look into that."
As Olson recalls the conversation, the woman thanked her for calling and hung up.
"She didn't take my name or anything," Olson recalls.
So Olson called the FBI again. She demanded that the woman write down her name and telephone number. This time, the woman was less friendly.
"We're not interested in that," she said.
Nearly 12 years later—and after what she estimates were nearly three dozen fruitless telephone calls to the FBI—Saraah Olson visited New York's Ground Zero. It was September 2004, three years after the worst terrorist attack on U.S. soil. She took a brief detour on her trip from John F. Kennedy airport to the Manhattan offices of ABC News. She had just flown to New York to tape a segment of Primetime Live in which she would recount how her ex-husband recruited an Orange County teenager named Adam Yahiye Gadahn into Osama bin Laden's terrorist network, Al-Qaeda.
Olson would claim that Diab and his best friend and next-door neighbor, a Palestinian-American named Khalil Deek—both of whom, like Gadahn, disappeared in the Middle East shortly before 9/11—were members of an Orange County terrorist sleeper cell. At the time, the FBI had just identified Gadahn, a masked figure calling himself "Azzam the American" in videos aired on Al Jazeera, as an emerging voice of propaganda for Al-Qaeda.
In the tape, Gadahn warned Americans they should convert to Islam or risk terrorist attacks that will dwarf those of 9/11. "The streets of America will run red with blood," he predicted.
Olson remembers those words as something the blind cleric had said during his visit to her apartment. As she surveyed the gaping hole where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center had once stood, one phrase ran through her mind.
"All of this could have been stopped," she thought. "All of this could have been stopped if just one person had stopped talking and listened to me."
* * *
On a recent weekday morning, Saraah Olson sips a cup of coffee at Hof's Hut, a busy diner on Pacific Coast Highway in Long Beach. She's explaining how she unwittingly married a terrorist and provided cover to an Orange County sleeper cell, how she tried to stop 9/11, and why she now fears for her life. Arranging the interview has taken several months. Olson doesn't visit Long Beach, where she moved as a teenager from her hometown of Vancouver, Washington, very often. She refuses to say where she lives now, except that she divides her time between Texas, California and Hawaii.
Olson's bizarre journey through the U.S. war on terror began in 1991, when she first met Hisham Diab while a teaching assistant at Cal State Dominguez Hills in Carson. For the next several years, Olson says, she lived in fear of Diab as she gradually realized he was infiltrating Orange County's Muslim community in an effort to establish a terrorist network. She says she watched helplessly as her husband helped Sheik Rahman evade arrest after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and endured a beating when she accidentally foiled Diab's plot to provide Osama bin Laden with a phony U.S. passport.
She's sharing her story now because, she says, the FBI ignored her when she tried to warn them about Diab before 9/11—and that they refused to protect her from retaliation by Al-Qaeda once she went public with her story. Olson is also upset because the FBI still doesn't believe everything she's told them.
"The last time I talked to them was in December 2004," she says. "I cut off all contact with them because they misled me and lied to me and tried to make me think I'm crazy—that Hisham had nothing to do with bin Laden."
If so, the U.S. government—which has steadfastly refused to confirm key elements of her story—isn't alone in questioning her credibility. Many people familiar with her tale, including at least one of her biggest supporters, say Saraah Olson might be exaggerating.
Her relationship with Diab began blissfully, she says, but quickly degenerated into "hell." But to hear her describe it, Olson's life wasn't so easy long before she met Diab.
Born to a mother who worked as a nurse and a father she never knew—her stepfather inspected mining equipment but never seemed to work—she arrived in Long Beach in 1982, when her parents divorced at the age of 15.
Shortly thereafter, her mother became ill with cancer but didn't qualify for welfare because she wasn't officially a California resident. So both Olson and her sister started working full-time, flipping burgers at McDonald's and frying poultry at Kentucky Fried Chicken.
"I dropped out of school to support the family," Olson says. "It was minimum-wage, but back then, you could lie about your age."
Four years later, Olson gave birth to a son, Ryan, out of wedlock. Ryan's father, she says, was an alcoholic and "world-class" crack addict. They never married. Raising Ryan on her own wasn't easy, especially since his father typically sent her less than $100 per month in child-support payments.
While juggling her duties as a single mother, she began taking classes at Long Beach City College and, in 1990, enrolled at Cal State Dominguez Hills, where she majored in political science and psychology. To cover her tuition, Olson worked as a teaching assistant to an English professor at Long Beach City College and processed student visas for foreign-born students studying English as a second language at Cal State Dominguez Hills.
One day, Hisham Diab, a clean-cut Egyptian wearing an expensive suit, walked into her office. "His English wasn't that good, but he was clean-shaven, well-groomed and well-mannered," Olson recalls. Diab didn't shake her hand, which didn't surprise her: her sister had recently married a Jordanian, and she knew that observant Muslims frowned upon informal contact between the sexes.
"He just seemed like a normal guy," Olson says. "He left and came back five minutes later and said, 'Would you like to go to dinner?' And I said, 'No, but thanks for asking.' So he came back every day for the next three or four days and finally I said, 'Okay, how about lunch?'"
The first date was hardly the stuff of romance: a quick bite at El Torito in Buena Park, where Olson lived at the time. "I figured it was close to my house, so I could drive home if I needed to leave, but he was a nice guy."
Olson recalls being attracted to the fact that, like her—and unlike her ex-boyfriend—Diab didn't drink alcohol. So Olson agreed to extend the date with a stroll through the shops at Knotts Berry Farm.
The next day, Diab arrived at her office with a bouquet of flowers. When he asked if he could see her again, Olson said yes. Along with Diab's Mexican roommate and his girlfriend, the two went out for a series of dinners. "They seemed nice, and we went out a few more times with them," Olson says. "And from there, we just started dating."
At the time, Diab was in the process of divorcing his first wife, an American woman.
"Hisham and I had been dating for six months, and he said we should get married. By this time, he had been giving me $2,000 or $3,000 a month, and I had his ATM card, so if I ever needed anything, I could use it. He was really nice to Ryan at the time—helping him learn the alphabet in kindergarten."
Diab's divorce finally became official in July 1992; Olson married him the very next day. The crowd was evenly divided between Olson's family and people Diab had invited from the mosque. His only prenuptial condition was that Olson convert to Islam. The process was simple. Olson simply went to the mosque and stated three times that there is no god but Allah and Muhammad is his prophet. But the day before the wedding, Olson says, the imam who had agreed to perform the ceremony backed out. Diab had to spend the rest of the evening calling around to find a replacement.
"The guy who had agreed to do it never spoke to us again," Olson says. "And then one day, I see him at the mosque, and he tells me I have to be very careful of my husband and some of his friends. And I thought he was saying that because Hisham was pissed at him for not showing up for the wedding. But I found out later that he [the imam] found out what they were doing, what they were all about, and what kind of politics they had, and he didn't want to have anything to do with it."
While converting to Islam was easy, Olson says, keeping her husband happy was another matter entirely. Before they had married, she had agreed to raise her son Ryan as a Muslim and had begun teaching English classes at the Islamic Society of Orange County. But after the wedding, Olson says Diab revealed a dark side. Any perceived slight, such as incorrect pronunciation of Arabic words while reciting from the Koran or acknowledging the presence of men with a simple "hello," would earn her a vicious slap to the face—or worse.
By now, the couple had moved from Olson's condominium in Buena Park to an apartment building in Garden Grove, so they could be closer to the mosque. The building had narrow hallways and staircases. As they were leaving their unit one day, a man had to squeeze past them, and Olson was unable to move out of his way quickly enough to please her husband. "I leaned against the wall, and he brushed by me," Olson recalls. After the man had left the building, she claims, Hisham attacked her. "You have to pay attention," he yelled. "Hisham shoved me so hard I fell down the stairs."
Ryan, now a 21-year-old college student, says he doesn't remember anything but verbal and physical abuse at the hands of Diab. He recalls a typical incident that occurred when he was 6 years old. He had arrived at the apartment after school, only to realize he had left his key at home. "He locked me out of the apartment," Ryan says. "He was inside the apartment the whole time and let me sit out in the cold, banging on the door and crying. I remember my mom came home, found me outside, and was very angry with Hisham. I remember going to my room and hiding there."
According to Ryan, Diab also insisted he eat everything from his plate. He learned to stay hungry until dinner to make sure he could finish his dinner. "I didn't want to be beat by him for not having a completely clean plate," he says. "I still feel exceptionally guilty and sick to my stomach when I have to throw away food for any reason."
Diab's dietary dictums became particularly harsh during Ramadan, a month-long Islamic celebration that obligates all Muslims to fast from dusk to dawn each autumn. Ryan recalls waking up each day and eating as much food as possible, then spending the rest of the day fighting hunger pangs. "One day, I broke down and ate some food out of our cupboard with my friend Muhammed," he says. "Hisham discovered us, and I got the beating of a lifetime for it. I remember my ears hurting like they never had before and the pain in my face from all the times he hit me. I spent the rest of the day in my room."
Haitham "Danny" Bundajki, then the president of the Islamic Society of Orange County, where Diab and Olson prayed and where Olson taught English classes to children, recalls the first time he spoke to Olson. "I noticed that her fist was wrapped, and I asked her what was going on," he says. "She confessed to me that she was being beaten by her husband." On another occasion, he was driving down the street when he happened to pass by her apartment and saw Olson crying on the sidewalk. "I found out she had another fight with her husband, and this was an ongoing thing between them." Bundakji, who also worked as a chaplain for the Garden Grove Police Department, advised Olson to report Diab to the police. "I don't know whether she did," he says. "Usually, I try to bridge the gap between spouses when there is a problem, rather than get the law involved. But when there is visible evidence of abuse, that's when I get angry, and I told her to do something about it."
But Olson says she was too terrified of her husband to stand up to his abuse. On several occasions, she says, Diab threatened to kill her. "I already knew he was crazy," she says. "He said, 'If you try to leave me, I will kill you.'" Diab tried to control her every move, refusing to let her spend any time alone with her son. "He'd hit you for any misspoken word, for shaking someone's hand. You'd get slapped. It was terrifying."
* * *
According to Olson, her husband's strict interpretation of Islam—if not his abusive behavior—was aided and abetted by his best friend, a Palestinian-born U.S. citizen and software engineer named Khalil Deek who had moved to Anaheim from Texas, where he had a brief marriage to an American woman.
Deek, Olson recalls, always seemed to be traveling back and forth from California to the Middle East. He wore a beard and dressed in a dishdashah—a long tunic popular among conservative Muslims—and prayed five times per day. Diab wore Western business suits to work but, like Deek, attended mosque in a dishdashah. Both men rolled their pants up so they didn't touch the ground, a mark of piety inspired by an early Muslim cleric.
Olson says her husband's behavior changed when Deek returned from a trip to Jordan in August 1992, just a month after her wedding. They had moved to Anaheim from Garden Grove to stay in his apartment while he was gone, and when he returned, Deek moved into another unit in the same building. "Suddenly, everything is very strict," she says. "You can't speak to other men or even acknowledge their presence."
She says Diab and Deek spent every Friday night at the mosque leading a discussion circle for single men, many of whom would often drop by their apartment complex. But the biggest crowd, she recalls, arrived when Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman dropped by for a visit. At the time, she says, her husband simply told her that the cleric was a famous religious scholar from Egypt who had been charged—and cleared—with an assassination attempt against Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
At least 30 people gathered in Deek's apartment while she prepared food for the guests. "Khalil had no furniture," she says. "He just had a carpet on the floor and big pillows. I could see the whole thing through his window."
Ryan also remembers Rahman's visit. "I remember the great many people showing up, the huge amount of food that was made and how excited everyone in Hisham's circle seemed to be about it," he says. "I didn't understand. I was much too little to know anything about him. I just remember how excited everyone was."
Olson says she eavesdropped on the cleric while she sat in her bedroom or prepared food. Since she didn't speak Arabic, she wrote down phonetic approximations of the phrases he seemed to repeat—phrases that included the word "America." She called a friend who spoke fluent Arabic and asked what they meant. The woman told her to keep her mouth shut.
Three months later, the day that Islamic terrorists who were later tied to Rahman attempted to blow up the World Trade Center, Olson says she called the FBI and unsuccessfully tried to alert them to her husband's activities. The FBI didn't arrest Rahman in connection with the bombing until July 1993. In March of that year, Diab told Olson that Rahman was coming back to town.
"He comes here to our house, and it's all hush-hush," she recalls. "They put a big robe over him. Usually, he gives this big Billy Graham-type inspired sermon, but this time, he's quiet, and I'm like, 'Ooh. He's guilty. The guilty don't speak. If you're innocent, you say, it wasn't me.'"
According to Olson, Diab and Deek arranged to sneak Rahman from Anaheim to West Covina. "They figured out the FBI is going to start following people that have an association with him," she says. "They set it up to have all these people go to this house in Pomona in the same car."
In Pomona, she claims, several identical cars—white Chrysler four-doors—arrived at the house. "They put the blind sheik in the back seat of one of the cars and made him lie down," she says. "They were trying to make it hard for the FBI to follow him. They were trying to get him out of the country. Hisham told me about it when he came home, and they were laughing their heads off."
* * *
In August 1994, Diab traveled to Bosnia to help defend Muslims being subjected to ethnic cleansing at the hands of Serbian and Croatian militiamen during the brutal Balkan civil war. Deek had already gone there, and Diab joined him. It's unclear exactly what Diab and Deek were doing in Bosnia. Diab told Olson they were performing missionary work, helping set up sanctuaries for women who had been raped and providing food and clothing to refugees.
When Diab returned, he claimed he and Deek had worked for "some people from Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and Afghanistan," and that they lived in a well-furnished building complete with heat, a telephone and running water—luxuries unavailable to most residents of the war-ravaged country. Years later, after the FBI finally started taking her telephone calls, Olson claims she learned that both Diab and Deek actually set up a terrorist training camp in Bosnia.
Her first hint that her husband's trip to Bosnia was for less-than-humanitarian reasons came in a telephone call from her sister's brother-in-law several weeks after Diab went overseas. "He said, 'Do you know what kind of a fucking idiot your husband is?'" Olson recalls. Without going into details, the man told Olson he thought he was going to Bosnia for charity work, but that once he arrived, he was horrified by what Diab and Deek were doing there. He asked her not to tell Diab that he called her. "I did not come here to be a terrorist," he said. "I don't want anything to do with this shit."
Moazzam Begg is a British citizen who went to Bosnia in the winter of 1994, intending to join the Muslim militias. Begg later tried to fight against the Russians in Chechnya but never got inside the country. He ultimately traveled to Afghanistan to help establish a girl's school with cooperation from the Taliban; Begg was arrested in Pakistan and handed over to American authorities shortly after the U.S. ousted the Taliban from Afghanistan. He spent three years in detention, first at Bagram Air Force Base and then at Guantanamo Bay, before being released without charges.
In an interview last year, Begg told the Weekly he never saw any fighting in Bosnia—the weather was too cold—but would have fought if he had the opportunity. While there, he met Deek, whom he insists did a lot of talking but no fighting. "It seemed to me he wasn't involved in the foreign forces; he was just living there," Begg recalls. "He was talking politics, more of an analyst. It was vague to me. I wasn't fluent in Arabic. . . . He didn't seem physically active."
Whatever Diab and Deek were up to in Bosnia, Olson says she'll never forget what happened when her husband returned to Anaheim. It was, she says, the first time she heard the name or saw the face of Osama bin Laden. Both Diab and all of his belongings needed a good wash. "He smells awful," she recalls. "Everything in his bag smells bad. I throw it all in the wash to wash it, but I didn't realize there's a picture of Osama bin Laden in his pocket. And he freaks out because I accidentally washed it."
According to Olson, her husband panicked because he was supposed to use the photo to make a phony passport for bin Laden. "At this time, Hisham and Khalil had become perfectionists [in making] fake IDs, Social Security cards and passports," she says. "They were supposed to make a U.S. passport for Osama bin Laden. . . . Hisham told me he's a very important Saudi, he did very good work in Afghanistan and is very respected in Bosnia, and I don't love him because I washed this picture."
Olson claims she told Diab to call Deek in Bosnia and arrange for Deek to send another photograph of bin Laden. She listened as her husband called Deek long-distance. "Khalil says, 'Don't worry about it. I can send you another one. I'll e-mail it to you.'" Diab worried aloud they'd get in trouble if they used the Internet to send the photo, but Deek reassured him that he could send an encrypted copy of the file.
"I got the crap kicked out of me for days for that," Olson says.
In temperament if not in politics, Deek seems to have been the polar opposite of Diab. According to Ryan, Deek was as quiet as his stepfather was loud. "Khalil was a calm man, quite the contrast to Hisham," he recalls. "He spoke to me only when necessary, but mostly it was praise that Hisham was raising a great Muslim son. In his discussions with Hisham and others, he would speak about the 'Great Satan,' the usual mantra about American deviance and corruption, as well as what it meant to be a good Muslim by shunning these things."
Olson only recalls one occasion when Deek seemed angry. "He was very soft-spoken," she says. "I only heard him raise his voice once, when he was mad at someone in my living room who wouldn't renounce his Christian family. Hisham and Khalil were telling him you have to reject the fact that your family is Christian—they all should die." The person responded that his father had actually converted to Christianity from Judaism. "That just set them off even more," she says.
The person Diab and Deek were yelling at, she claims, was Adam Yahiye Gadahn.
* * *
The future propagandist for Al-Qaeda—the first American citizen to be charged with treason in five decades—was the son of peace-loving hippies. In the 1960s and 1970s, Gadahn's father, Phil Pearlman, had been a leader of several Southern California psychedelic rock groups that are still considered musically genius today: Beat of the Earth, the Electronic Hole and Relatively Clean Rivers. After becoming a born-again Christian, Pearlman changed his last name to Gadahn and gave Adam the middle name Yahiye, which is Arabic for John the Baptist; he raised his son on a goat farm with no indoor plumbing. Adam sought to escape his family's Luddite existence, first through death-metal music and later through Islam.
Olson says her husband and Deek befriended Gadahn in May or June of 1994, when Gadahn was still listening to death-metal and living with his grandparents in Santa Ana. She believes Diab and Deek were responsible for converting him to radical Islam. "They turned him into that little troll he is today," she says. "They set him up with an apartment across the street from the mosque so he had a place to live."
Olson often cooked food for him. Once, Diab and Deek brought Gadahn home for tea. "He said, 'Wow, thank you very much; that's really good,'" Olson recalls. "Khalil said, 'Don't ever speak to her again. Women are nothing.' . . . He was just this nice kid. He looked like he could be anybody's kid."
Ryan also remembers Gadahn as a gentle-seeming teenager. "He was different," he says. "Whereas others in Hisham's circle would treat me as a servant, he would treat me as a human being. He would say 'please' and 'thank you.' He didn't fit in. He shouldn't have tried to fit in with those people."
After Diab and Deek returned from Bosnia, they seemed to spend more time with Gadahn. In July 1995, they founded a nonprofit organization, Charity Without Borders, that received a grant from the state of California to recycle used motor oil. The ostensible purpose was to raise money for Muslim charities in the Middle East. Olson, who helped her husband file the paperwork, claims it was a fake charity designed to fund terrorist activities. At the time, Diab was working as a tax accountant for a company that had received a similar grant. Olson says he stole the idea from them.
After Diab finally received his start-up money, she says, her husband began printing fliers at the mosque. "On one side, in English, it talks about how America has to support Muslims everywhere and help Muslims here learn English," she says. "But on the back, in Arabic, it talks about how America is a terroristic state—and the checks start rolling in. They start slowly collecting money."
Meanwhile, Diab and Deek also included Gadahn in their Friday-evening prayer circles for single men at the Garden Grove mosque, which is run by the Islamic Society of Orange County. Those discussion circles quickly became critical of the society's leadership, particularly Bundakji, who they saw as too liberal and pro-Western in his views.
Led by Diab and Deek, the group began referring to Bundakji, who frequently met with Christian and Jewish leaders in Orange County, as "Danny the Jew" and even distributed fliers bearing that epithet inside the mosque. "They were supposedly sitting in circles discussing the Koran," Bundakji recalls. "So I never really paid any attention to them until they started becoming nosy and noisy. That's when Hisham Diab, Adam Gadahn and their circle started calling me 'Danny the Jew.' And that's when I started interrupting their circle and asking them to leave."
Bundajki first met Gadahn when he converted to Islam in a ceremony at the mosque. "I was happy to see a young man finding the right path," Bundakji says. "We had a really good discussion about how he came to accept Islam." Because Gadahn spent so much time at the mosque, Bundakji says he offered him a job as a security guard.
"He was there practically the whole day, so I thought he was the perfect guy," he explains. "It was only for a short time because I caught him sleeping at 2 a.m. and I gave him a piece of my mind." Bundakji told Gadahn that sleeping on the job was tantamount to stealing from the mosque. The confrontation provided Bundajki the first inkling that Gadahn didn't like him. "After that, he started mumbling and talking to people, and I started hearing from people that this guy is talking about me, criticizing me."
One day in 1997, Gadahn charged into Bundakji's office. "He was calling me a hypocrite, Jew, Jew-lover, things of that nature," Bundakji recalls. "And then he slapped me right across the face. I was shocked." Other security guards detained Gadahn at the mosque until police arrived, but Bundakji declined to press charges. "I felt sorry for him," he says.
* * *
After a particularly brutal fight in which her husband hit Ryan in the back and dragged her down the stairs by her hair, Saraah Olson divorced Hisham Diab in October 1996. She remarried the following month. Her new husband, she says, was a Muslim in name only and more interested in Armani suits and fast cars than jihad. Olson had a daughter, Ala, who is now 9 years old, before quickly divorcing again.
Adam Gadahn left the United States for Pakistan in 1997. He never spoke to his family again, except to say he was learning Arabic and had married a Muslim woman. The next time his family heard from him was in mid-2004, when Gadahn began appearing on Al-Qaeda propaganda videos under the nom de guerre "Azzam the American." In May of that year, the FBI announced it was seeking Gadahn for questioning in connection with an unspecified plot on U.S. soil.
Gadahn's evolution from confused teenager to alleged terrorist does not surprise observers who note his close relationship to Khalil Deek, who also left the U.S. permanently in 1997 or 1998. He wound up in Peshawar, Pakistan, just across the border from Afghanistan, and rapidly became friendly with Abu Zubaydah, an alleged top lieutenant of Osama bin Laden who was later captured and is now being held at Guantanamo Bay. The two shared a bank account together.
In January 1999, Pakistani police arrested Deek and flew him to Amman, Jordan, where he faced trial in connection with the so-called Millennium Plot against targets in the U.S.—most notably LAX airport—and the Middle East. Authorities found a computerized version of the terrorist training book Encyclopedia Jihad on Deek's computer. He spent several months behind bars, but in May 2000, Jordan freed Deek, citing his cooperation in decoding encrypted computers used by Al-Qaeda. He returned to Pakistan and promptly disappeared.
Deek's brother Tawfiq, who used to live in the same apartment building as Olson, Diab and Deek, has steadfastly maintained his brother was never a terrorist. He says Khalil moved to Pakistan because he wanted to live in an Islamic country and marry a Muslim woman, which by all accounts he did. The last time Tawfiq, who still lives in Anaheim, spoke to his brother was in May 2001, when Khalil told him he was having difficulty obtaining visas for his Syrian-born wife and their four children.
U.S. officials now believe Diab, who left the U.S. permanently in 2001, is alive somewhere in Pakistan or Egypt. They also believe Deek was murdered in Pakistan sometime in 2005. In April of that year, Tawfiq says he received a telephone call from his older brother, Adel, in Jordan, saying that Khalil's wife told him her husband was dead. He says he confirmed the news with Khalil's widow, but he never asked her how his brother died.
"To me, he is dead—murdered, killed, I don't know," Tawfiq told the Weekly last year. "This is what she says. If she says this, why do I not believe it? What do I say? She's a liar?"
Olson claims Tawfiq is wrong about his brother's death. "I know Khalil's still alive," she says. "The FBI thinks he's dead, but not the CIA. Maybe to Tawfiq, he's dead, but he's not." While she acknowledges that Tawfiq never shared her husband's extreme religious or political views, she doesn't buy his claim that he never had reason to suspect Khalil of harboring terrorist sympathies. "Tawfiq is playing the martyr and doing a really good job of it," she says. "But he did not separate himself from them."
Thanks to his brother, Tawfiq has been visited repeatedly by the FBI—first after Khalil's arrest in 1999 and once again on Sept. 11, 2001. Each time, he says, the agents asked him if he knew of any terrorist attacks against the U.S., and each time, he said no. In September 2004, Tawfiq received yet another visit from the FBI, this time because Olson had just appeared in "Al-Qaeda Wedding," an ABC News segment alleging that Diab, Deek and Gadahn were members of a terrorist cell in Anaheim. "I was just a stepping stone to a green card," Olson told viewers. "I married a terrorist."
Also appearing on that segment was Bundajki, who traveled to New York with Olson and vividly recounted the time Gadahn attacked him at the mosque. It was Bundajki who, in conversations with FBI officials and the media, first identified the mysterious "Azzam the American" as none other than Gadahn.
In an interview last year, Tawfiq told the Weekly his wife called him at work shortly before the "Al-Qaeda Wedding" segment aired, saying that a camera crew was in front of their building. He hadn't seen Olson or Diab in years but attended their wedding and says he never had any indication that his brother, Diab or Gadahn—whom he never remembers seeing in the building—were part of a secret terrorist cell.
"They were our neighbors," he said. "This lady [Olson] made up a lot of things. There is a problem with this lady." Asked to comment for this story, Tawfiq refused. "This has been going on for 10 years," he said. "I want to get out of this."
Much has been made of Diab, Deek and Gadahn's membership in Charity Without Borders, which only lost its charter with the state of California after 9/11. The FBI refused to comment for this story, citing its ongoing investigation of Gadahn, who is wanted for treason. Garreth Lacy, a spokesperson for the California Department of Justice, which investigated Charity Without Borders, was equally mum. "Charity Without Borders' registration has been revoked, and our office has closed its investigation," he says. "But I do not have further comments on this matter at this time."
One person who does have an opinion on the matter is Rafat Qahoush, listed on the charity's paperwork as its secretary. Qahoush is a nursing professor in Garden Grove. His training school provides battlefield medical training to the Jordanian government and other pro-Western clients in the Middle East—hardly the pursuit of someone seeking to undermine America's allies in the war on terror.
Qahoush says he wasn't that active in the charity and recalls that Khalil Deek was never around—he always seemed to be out of the country. He only knew Gadahn in passing, as an American who tended to stand out at the mosque. He says he doubts Charity Without Borders ever raised enough money to send overseas, much less support terrorist activities.
"Most of the costs went to print [literature] and distribute sunscreens for cars that said, 'Recycle Your Oil,'" he says. "I'm not sure they made more than $2,000 or $3,000 out of the project." Qahoush adds that he's never been questioned by the FBI or the California Department of Justice about the charity. He also believes Olson is simply a disgruntled ex-wife. "I think she wants to [say these things] because she wants revenge," he says.
Bundajki counters Olson's claim that Charity Without Borders distributed radical literature inside the mosque. "It was one of the organizations that was collecting medicine, clothing and whatever donations that would come to the mosque and would send it to Chechnya, Kosovo, these war-torn Muslim countries," he says. "I honestly do not think they had anything to do with Al-Qaeda whatsoever."
Bundakji argues that after 9/11, many Americans seem to believe that anyone who opposes the Israeli government or who sought to defend Muslims from attack in places like Bosnia or Chechnya were terrorists. "If that's what it means to be a terrorist, then I am one, although I am the most peaceful man on Earth," he says. He points out that since Olson does not read or write Arabic, she cannot say with certainty what the charity's literature said in that language.
"Maybe somebody misled her to believe that," he says. "I like Saraah. She is a good woman, an honest woman. But she gets too excited and exaggerates. Maybe not intentionally, but because of her bad experience, her sad story . . . maybe all these things lead her to daydream a little bit more than what really happened."
* * *
If, as Saraah Olson insists, it is true that she called the FBI to warn them about her husband and his involvement in a pre-9/11 Orange County sleeper cell, it's possible the FBI did find her story too strange to believe. One FBI agent who asked not to be identified said his office gets telephone calls from people who seem crazy all the time. "The trick is not to assume everyone's crazy," he said.
By her count, Olson claims she called the FBI about 30 times. She says she became increasingly worried about Diab shortly before 9/11 when she ran his credit and saw that all his credit cards were overdue. "Once, I didn't pay a Discover card bill and got 12 percent interest and the shit kicked out of me," she says. "Now he's got 14 cards overdue for 60 days—something bad is about to happen."
So Olson called the FBI. "The FBI is like, 'You have no proof.' In September, when the World Trade Center was [attacked], I called the FBI that morning and said, 'My ex-husband has something to do with this. I cannot prove it, but I swear to you that I am not a vindictive ex-wife.'"
According to Olson, the FBI didn't return her telephone calls until December 2001—three months after 9/11. "They sent one agent out to meet with me for half an hour," she says. Olson told her the story about how Hisham Diab and Khalil Deek tried to evade the FBI with Sheik Rahman in tow. "I tell her about the car chase," Olson says, "and she says, 'I was one of the agents in the car. I've been chasing Hisham and Khalil for a long time.'"
The agent, Pauline Falk, recently retired from the FBI. She did not respond to interview requests. But according to Olson, the FBI removed Falk from the case and put her in contact with other agents who insisted she keep her mouth shut. Olson says the agents didn't believe her when she said Diab beat her up for dashing his effort to procure a phony U.S. passport for Osama bin Laden by washing the photo. "They said, 'Saraah, we believe you,'" she recalls. "'You don't have to pad your story.'"
That remark didn't anger Olson nearly as much as the fact that in late 2004, she discovered that, more than three years after 9/11, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security still hadn't placed Diab on its no-fly list. She says she called the FBI, and they confirmed they were using her as bait to lure Diab back to the United States, so they could arrest him. Shortly after that conversation, Olson agreed to appear on television, after which she never spoke to anyone in the FBI again.
"They hung me out to dry," she says. "They were using me as bait. They want him to come back." The prospect terrifies her. She never stays in one location longer than a week or so. "Hisham would never let anybody else kill me," she explains. "He would do it himself. He said that to me once."
Meanwhile, Olson says, it takes her at least an hour to board an airplane because, unlike her ex-husband, she and every member of her immediate family have been placed on the no-fly list. "Going on vacation is a nightmare," she says. "It takes me an hour and a half to board a 45-minute flight to Las Vegas. When I fly, I wear flip-flops, pull-on pants, no underwear or bra, and a T-shirt because I don't want to beep. It's better that way. If I get killed and they try to fly my body back to Washington, it's going to be hell."
nschou@ocweekly.com
Independent : American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all
Wednesday, April 29, 2009
American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all
Fine wines, lobster lunches and million-dollar salaries – life as a Wall Street shark was thrilling at first. But amid the extravagance, Philipp Meyer was sickened by a moral deficit at the heart of America’s financial system
April 27, 2009
I’d been working for the bank for about five weeks when I woke up on the balcony of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. It was midnight and I was drunk. One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the lobby below us; another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard.
Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel’s shoe-polishing machine and carried it into the room; there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this before the bank considered us properly trained.
I didn’t fit the typical profile of a trader. I was an English major working on a novel at night. Most everyone else was a maths or economics major, most everyone else had relatives or family in banking. I’d spent a year walking around studying flashcards with maths problems, multiplying random licence-plate numbers in my head, just to prepare for the interviews. I memorised The Wall Street Journal every morning. I didn’t care what I had to do. At Cornell University it was well known that after five years on Wall Street, you could expect to be making half a million a year in salary and bonus; after 10 years you could expect a million or more. I had 60 grand of university debt and my parents had no retirement. I needed that money.
UBS apparently thought pretty highly of me, because despite my lack of a financial background, they put me onto the derivatives trading desk. This was a coveted spot - the derivatives traders were viewed as the elite - the baddest of the bad-asses. Derivatives are financial contracts, the value of which is based on (derives from) something else, say the price of a stock or the price of a bushel of wheat. They were originally created to provide stability and allocate capital to industry, farmers, and the like, and, for a long time, derivatives allowed businesses to eliminate certain financial risks, say in currency, which provided stability to the business, its management, and its workers. If you were a factory worker back in the day, you benefited from your employer’s use of derivatives to smooth out their cash flows during the year, hedge against the risk of selling goods abroad. For about a hundred years, derivatives were a sort of lubricant in the world financial machine.
By the time I arrived on Wall Street in 1999, the link between derivatives and the real world had broken down. Instead of being used to reduce risk, 95 per cent of their use was speculation - a polite term for gambling. And leveraging - which means taking a large amount of risk for a small amount of money. So while derivatives, and the financial industry more broadly, had started out serving industry, by the late 1990s the situation had reversed. The Market had become a near-religious force in our culture; industry, society, and politicians all bowed down to it.
It was pretty clear what The Market didn’t like. It didn’t like being closely watched. It didn’t like rules that governed its behaviour. It didn’t like goods produced in First-World countries or workers who made high wages, with the notable exception of financial sector employees. This last point bothered me especially.
I’d grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding. My parents weren’t mill workers - they were recovering hippies - but we were always struggling for money and so my brother and I lived a sort of split existence. Inside the house, I read constantly and my brother listened to classical music. Outside the house, like all the other kids in the neighbourhood, we got into fights and caused trouble. At 16 I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university. I earned high marks at various local colleges and eventually, after three tries at applying to the Ivy League, I got into Cornell.
My first job out of Cornell was on the trading floor at UBS. So when news would hit the wire about an American company closing a domestic factory, I felt a good deal of conflict as I watched the company’s stock price go up as a result. Those sorts of factory closings had ruined my neighbourhood, my city, and many of the people I’d grown up with. I was not alone in this feeling, but there were not many of us, either. One of my British friends from the training programme, who later became a currency trader, once told me: “I mean Christ, mate, every time they close a factory in Wales the goddamn market goes up. The whole system’s a little fucked, don’t you think?” And of course it was. The question was how to deal with it.
The easiest thing was buy into the system, convince ourselves that there was no other way to live. A few semesters worth of economics classes certainly helped; the in-house economics classes taught by the bank helped even more. The financial markets operate on the principle that, at our core, we’re all basically shit: selfish, self-interested creatures. There’s a whole branch of economics devoted to proving that if you help someone, say, run in front of a speeding train to push another person out of the way, you are actually acting out of self-interest, not altruism; that what most of us would consider humankind’s cardinal virtues - love, honor, compassion - do not actually exist.
The idea that we’re nothing more than selfish animals is an attractive philosophy to a person pulling down a few million dollars a year. It is a philosophy that negates guilt. The guilty feeling a normal person gets while visiting a Third World country is the same feeling a senior investment banker gets when they see a working class neighborhood in Birmingham or Philadelphia. When your paycheck could cover the salaries of a few hundred nurses or teachers, you need some explanation for why that’s okay. The only one that really works is that life is a pure meritocracy. That whether rich or poor, we’re all getting what we deserve.
The fact is, I became pretty good at making this argument myself. Until a roommate of mine, a guy named Mark Brewin, asked me: “So is that really what you want to be? A selfish animal?” “It’s not like we have a choice,” I said. “No,” he said. “You always have a choice. It’s just easier to pretend that you don’t.” Ouch. The strangest thing was, this thing I’d wanted for so long, this chance to become wealthy, was causing me more internal conflict than anything I’d ever done. I began writing a second novel, about a kid from the provinces who comes to Wall Street and is both drawn in and horrified by the culture of excess.
I understood it well. I put on 45 pounds in my first year at the bank, and, as you might guess, it was not from eating McDonalds. Occasionally I ate stuff like sushi, but mostly it was steak. We went to the good places like Sparks, Peter Luger’s, and the Strip House. We tended to look down on chains like Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris-they were for car dealers or stock brokers, not traders. Regardless of where we ate, we ate in quantity. My standard strategy was to order half a dozen appetisers, plus a steak and lobster, plus a few desserts and much wine as I could drink, as long it was under a few hundred dollars a bottle. Followed by a digestif, typically a 30-year-old port. There’s not any way to justify this except to say I was trying to catch up to my colleagues. We would treat those restaurants like Roman vomitoriums. And it wasn’t the food so much as the wine. Being a junior employee, I couldn’t really order bottles that cost more than a few hundred dollars, but the senior guys could get nicer stuff - Opus One, Chateau Latour. As long as we were out with a client, the bank paid. I remember being stunned the first time I saw a dinner bill for ten grand. But that was just the beginning.
What it boiled down to was austerity for everyone else and rampant consumption for ourselves. I never saw anyone literally set fire to money, but I did drink most of a bottle of 1983 Margaux ($2,000).
The mornings after, with our thousand-dollar hangovers, my colleagues in corporate finance would set up deals and make a few hundred factory workers redundant. I helped build derivatives that funnelled income to offshore holding companies so rich people and big corporations didn’t have to pay taxes. We had lawyers on retainer in the Cayman Islands and Jersey – a quick phone call and it was all set, no more taxes. My guilt from doing this became so intense that on a whim I once went to a protest against the World Bank. I got sprayed with a little pepper gas and it felt good.
***
My conflicted feelings manifested themselves in a variety of other ways, most of which involved avoiding work - this seemed to make me less culpable. In addition to my trading duties, I’d got myself installed as head of recruiting for UBS at Cornell, a job my bosses were grateful to me for taking, because the last thing they wanted to do was worry about talking to kids at university. I loved it; it allowed me to return to the Cornell campus, the last place I’d really been happy with my life. I walked around Ithaca, worked on my novel in the library, interviewed undergraduates for jobs. Occasionally I’d spot one like me, liberal-arts with a type-A personality, the sort I knew would make it in banking. I’d give them interviews in which I tried to talk them into doing something else. But of course all they could see was the money, same as me.
Gradually, I was descending into the strange social isolation of my colleagues. I spent less and less time with normal people and more time with people from the bank. I could feel myself slowly detaching from reality as lived by the average citizen. Four nights a week I stayed home and wrote my novel but the other nights I went out with a vengance.
One evening, a close friend from the bank, an art history major from Princeton, took a bunch of recruits out with me. I did my normal trick of ordering nearly everything on the menu. There were piles of raw fish, shrimp, paté, sauces that had taken hours to prepare. It was far more food than anyone could eat and I could see some of the recruits were a little stunned at the quantities of uneaten shrimp and oysters being shovelled into the bin. I ate a big steak, put down a few bottles of red wine at $400-a-bottle and we hopped into a minibus we’d chartered for the night (gauche, but we couldn’t find a large enough limo). We stopped somewhere and bought a mixed case of Veuve Clicquot and Moet. Try the difference between these two, I demanded, but by then the recruits were all so drunk they barely touched it. I could tell they were getting a little scared. This stuff is bottom of the line, I told them. You ought to try the vintages. I downed at least two of the bottles in rapid succession. Some of the recruits would not look at me. They did not want to be there anymore. We stopped at a bar. I realised I was going to be sick, made sure my colleague had things under control, caught a cab, and promptly began vomiting out the window. Because of the quantity of wine and red meat I’d consumed, it looked like I was spitting up blood. The cab driver pulled over, certain I was about to die in his backseat. A finely dressed couple opened the door and I clambered out and vomited on their shoes. I don’t remember how I got home. The next morning I discovered a dozen cigars stuffed in my pockets, probably from the restaurant. I told my colleagues what had happened, looking for some moral bearing, secretly hoping to be chastised, but they all thought I was a hero. The vomiting on strangers was their favourite part. My boss, for fun, would sometimes throw cocktail olives, sushi, things of that nature, across the room in restaurants, always at people we didn’t know.
***
In addition to the physical effects - my ballooning waistline and cholesterol levels - I had become an extremely angry person. On the trading floor the best way to win an argument was with overpowering aggression. Right or wrong, you protected your PnL [profit and loss account] with the fury of the righteous. But of course this approach to problem-solving leaks into other parts of your life. I became a raving idiot when I got behind the wheel of the car, screaming at other drivers for the slightest infractions.
Meanwhile, I kept plugging away at the writing. Once every few months, when I really felt like treating myself, I’d take a sick day and stay home and write. Those were my best days. I was making good progress on the novel about the young trader with the lost soul. The bank had me on a management track, which meant I was being rotated in different areas, learning different skills. After a year of derivative structuring I was sent to the NASDAQ trading desk. I quickly discovered that NASDAQ traders worked much shorter days, 8 hours as opposed to 12, and I suddenly had an enormous amount of time to write. It was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me, because writing was one of the few things that kept my life in perspective.
Near the end of my second year at the bank, I decided to take a week of vacation and rebuild the engine in my Volkswagen. Naturally, I didn’t tell my colleagues what I was doing because they would have thought I was insane. I drove down to Baltimore to a friend’s repair shop and spent the week working in a spare bay. It was satisfying to use my hands again, to be around people who didn’t talk about the stock market and I began to feel very acutely exactly how much I hated my job. Everyone hates their job, I reminded myself. You’re getting paid a lot of money to complain. Looking around at my friends in the shop, it occurred to me that by the time I became a senior trader, I’d be making more money every year than they would make in their entire careers. And for what? Basically, for helping to break apart the lives of the sort of people I’d grown up with.
Which brings me to my earlier point. One of the reasons we allowed the financial industry so much control over our lives, starting in the 1990s and continuing until the meltdown of 2008, is the propaganda smokescreen of The Market. This idea of the God-like Market - all-seeing, all-knowing, and beyond question - is what allows CEOs to put a few thousand people out of work while giving themselves a $40m paycheck. It’s what allows certain hedge fund managers to take home half a billion (yes - billion) in a good year, while schools and bridges fall apart.
In reality, The Market is nothing more than the people who comprise it. Access to trading markets is very tightly controlled - it is not like a shopping mall. And it is certainly not magic. It’s just people. A very small number of people, in fact.
To give some perspective, even as a junior trader I might get an order to put on a two million share position - that’s shares, not dollars - and I’d do it several times a day. Advertisements for online trading companies try to imply that the market is made up of people like your Cousin Vinny, who buys a hundred shares here and there, but the truth is that Cousin Vinny is irrelevant.
Markets are driven by a very small number of very large investors - traders at banks, hedge funds, and mutual funds - who drive nice cars and drink expensive wine. We need them - the financial markets, that is. They are a necessary part of modern civilisation. What is unnecessary, and extremely unusual, is that the people who run them are paid so disproportionately to the rest of us.
It is crucial to realise that what motivates those people - collecting their million or hundred million dollar bonuses - has nothing to do with the job they actually perform. People used to do it for a lot less and it’s not like there’s a shortage of candidates - I turned away 10 good recruits at Cornell for every one we hired.
The reason we’ve ended up in the spot we’re in today is not so much our failure to understand economics as our failure to understand human nature.
Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they’re causing, and they will not stop until they’ve run the world economy off a cliff.
It’s not that people in the City or on Wall Street are necessarily bad people, it’s just that they, like almost anyone, will do anything to keep their million or ten million dollar paycheck. They’ll creatively interpret data, they’ll understate risks, they’ll put the best spin on things. Some will lie, cheat, and steal. But most of them, like most of us, will simply resist looking at the world from any perspective other than their own. And if we are intelligent, we will keep a careful watch on them - both now and into the distant future.
Like any big decision, my choice to leave the bank felt pretty easy once I’d made it. My girlfriend at the time was considering going to law school at Harvard; I asked my boss and some other senior people to ask around for hedge fund jobs in Boston. But the moment I began to consider leaving UBS, it was like a dam breaking. I did not want another job in finance. I did not care about money. I cared about people, I cared about their stories. I cared about what makes us who we are.
I left the bank in late 2001, with my second novel partially written. By 2004, things were not exactly going to plan. I was broke and the second novel had been rejected by every literary agent in America. The book I’d spent three years toiling over turned out to be an apprentice-level work. It was a hard blow but I kept writing. I moved back to the old neighbourhood in Baltimore and took jobs that allowed me to reconnect with the people I’d grown up with - working in construction and driving an ambulance.
In 2005 I began a third novel, American Rust, about the way that our circumstances, whether poor or wealthy, can so completely shape our morality and our way of looking at things. I was fascinated by the lost generation in America - the people whose towns and hopes have been wiped out by outsourcing - people for whom the American Dream has ceased to be relevant. As Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath, I wanted to show the inner lives, for better and worse, of the new lost generation. I wanted readers to think about exactly what it means to be human. What is at the core of us? Where do our morals come from? What differentiates us from the other animals on earth? What measures do we use to define our friends and family and how far are we willing to go to protect them?
Of course these are questions for broader society, not just literature. Maybe it’s only in crises like this that we get shaken up enough to ask ourselves those larger questions - who are we, what is important to us, how should we define our humanity. The answers we choose will determine the sort of world we live in for the coming decades.
‘American Rust’ by Philipp Meyer (£12.99) is published by Simon & Schuster. To order a copy for the special price of £11.69 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk
Fine wines, lobster lunches and million-dollar salaries – life as a Wall Street shark was thrilling at first. But amid the extravagance, Philipp Meyer was sickened by a moral deficit at the heart of America’s financial system
April 27, 2009
I’d been working for the bank for about five weeks when I woke up on the balcony of a ski resort in the Swiss Alps. It was midnight and I was drunk. One of my fellow management trainees was urinating onto the skylight of the lobby below us; another was hurling wine glasses into the courtyard.
Behind us, someone had stolen the hotel’s shoe-polishing machine and carried it into the room; there were a line of drunken bankers waiting to use it. Half of them were dripping wet, having gone swimming in all their clothes and been too drunk to remember to take them off. It took several more weeks of this before the bank considered us properly trained.
I didn’t fit the typical profile of a trader. I was an English major working on a novel at night. Most everyone else was a maths or economics major, most everyone else had relatives or family in banking. I’d spent a year walking around studying flashcards with maths problems, multiplying random licence-plate numbers in my head, just to prepare for the interviews. I memorised The Wall Street Journal every morning. I didn’t care what I had to do. At Cornell University it was well known that after five years on Wall Street, you could expect to be making half a million a year in salary and bonus; after 10 years you could expect a million or more. I had 60 grand of university debt and my parents had no retirement. I needed that money.
UBS apparently thought pretty highly of me, because despite my lack of a financial background, they put me onto the derivatives trading desk. This was a coveted spot - the derivatives traders were viewed as the elite - the baddest of the bad-asses. Derivatives are financial contracts, the value of which is based on (derives from) something else, say the price of a stock or the price of a bushel of wheat. They were originally created to provide stability and allocate capital to industry, farmers, and the like, and, for a long time, derivatives allowed businesses to eliminate certain financial risks, say in currency, which provided stability to the business, its management, and its workers. If you were a factory worker back in the day, you benefited from your employer’s use of derivatives to smooth out their cash flows during the year, hedge against the risk of selling goods abroad. For about a hundred years, derivatives were a sort of lubricant in the world financial machine.
By the time I arrived on Wall Street in 1999, the link between derivatives and the real world had broken down. Instead of being used to reduce risk, 95 per cent of their use was speculation - a polite term for gambling. And leveraging - which means taking a large amount of risk for a small amount of money. So while derivatives, and the financial industry more broadly, had started out serving industry, by the late 1990s the situation had reversed. The Market had become a near-religious force in our culture; industry, society, and politicians all bowed down to it.
It was pretty clear what The Market didn’t like. It didn’t like being closely watched. It didn’t like rules that governed its behaviour. It didn’t like goods produced in First-World countries or workers who made high wages, with the notable exception of financial sector employees. This last point bothered me especially.
I’d grown up in a working class neighborhood in Baltimore, a place hard hit by the offshoring of numerous heavy industries - steel, textile, shipbuilding. My parents weren’t mill workers - they were recovering hippies - but we were always struggling for money and so my brother and I lived a sort of split existence. Inside the house, I read constantly and my brother listened to classical music. Outside the house, like all the other kids in the neighbourhood, we got into fights and caused trouble. At 16 I dropped out of school and spent five years working as a bicycle mechanic and volunteering in a Trauma Centre before ultimately deciding to go to university. I earned high marks at various local colleges and eventually, after three tries at applying to the Ivy League, I got into Cornell.
My first job out of Cornell was on the trading floor at UBS. So when news would hit the wire about an American company closing a domestic factory, I felt a good deal of conflict as I watched the company’s stock price go up as a result. Those sorts of factory closings had ruined my neighbourhood, my city, and many of the people I’d grown up with. I was not alone in this feeling, but there were not many of us, either. One of my British friends from the training programme, who later became a currency trader, once told me: “I mean Christ, mate, every time they close a factory in Wales the goddamn market goes up. The whole system’s a little fucked, don’t you think?” And of course it was. The question was how to deal with it.
The easiest thing was buy into the system, convince ourselves that there was no other way to live. A few semesters worth of economics classes certainly helped; the in-house economics classes taught by the bank helped even more. The financial markets operate on the principle that, at our core, we’re all basically shit: selfish, self-interested creatures. There’s a whole branch of economics devoted to proving that if you help someone, say, run in front of a speeding train to push another person out of the way, you are actually acting out of self-interest, not altruism; that what most of us would consider humankind’s cardinal virtues - love, honor, compassion - do not actually exist.
The idea that we’re nothing more than selfish animals is an attractive philosophy to a person pulling down a few million dollars a year. It is a philosophy that negates guilt. The guilty feeling a normal person gets while visiting a Third World country is the same feeling a senior investment banker gets when they see a working class neighborhood in Birmingham or Philadelphia. When your paycheck could cover the salaries of a few hundred nurses or teachers, you need some explanation for why that’s okay. The only one that really works is that life is a pure meritocracy. That whether rich or poor, we’re all getting what we deserve.
The fact is, I became pretty good at making this argument myself. Until a roommate of mine, a guy named Mark Brewin, asked me: “So is that really what you want to be? A selfish animal?” “It’s not like we have a choice,” I said. “No,” he said. “You always have a choice. It’s just easier to pretend that you don’t.” Ouch. The strangest thing was, this thing I’d wanted for so long, this chance to become wealthy, was causing me more internal conflict than anything I’d ever done. I began writing a second novel, about a kid from the provinces who comes to Wall Street and is both drawn in and horrified by the culture of excess.
I understood it well. I put on 45 pounds in my first year at the bank, and, as you might guess, it was not from eating McDonalds. Occasionally I ate stuff like sushi, but mostly it was steak. We went to the good places like Sparks, Peter Luger’s, and the Strip House. We tended to look down on chains like Morton’s and Ruth’s Chris-they were for car dealers or stock brokers, not traders. Regardless of where we ate, we ate in quantity. My standard strategy was to order half a dozen appetisers, plus a steak and lobster, plus a few desserts and much wine as I could drink, as long it was under a few hundred dollars a bottle. Followed by a digestif, typically a 30-year-old port. There’s not any way to justify this except to say I was trying to catch up to my colleagues. We would treat those restaurants like Roman vomitoriums. And it wasn’t the food so much as the wine. Being a junior employee, I couldn’t really order bottles that cost more than a few hundred dollars, but the senior guys could get nicer stuff - Opus One, Chateau Latour. As long as we were out with a client, the bank paid. I remember being stunned the first time I saw a dinner bill for ten grand. But that was just the beginning.
What it boiled down to was austerity for everyone else and rampant consumption for ourselves. I never saw anyone literally set fire to money, but I did drink most of a bottle of 1983 Margaux ($2,000).
The mornings after, with our thousand-dollar hangovers, my colleagues in corporate finance would set up deals and make a few hundred factory workers redundant. I helped build derivatives that funnelled income to offshore holding companies so rich people and big corporations didn’t have to pay taxes. We had lawyers on retainer in the Cayman Islands and Jersey – a quick phone call and it was all set, no more taxes. My guilt from doing this became so intense that on a whim I once went to a protest against the World Bank. I got sprayed with a little pepper gas and it felt good.
***
My conflicted feelings manifested themselves in a variety of other ways, most of which involved avoiding work - this seemed to make me less culpable. In addition to my trading duties, I’d got myself installed as head of recruiting for UBS at Cornell, a job my bosses were grateful to me for taking, because the last thing they wanted to do was worry about talking to kids at university. I loved it; it allowed me to return to the Cornell campus, the last place I’d really been happy with my life. I walked around Ithaca, worked on my novel in the library, interviewed undergraduates for jobs. Occasionally I’d spot one like me, liberal-arts with a type-A personality, the sort I knew would make it in banking. I’d give them interviews in which I tried to talk them into doing something else. But of course all they could see was the money, same as me.
Gradually, I was descending into the strange social isolation of my colleagues. I spent less and less time with normal people and more time with people from the bank. I could feel myself slowly detaching from reality as lived by the average citizen. Four nights a week I stayed home and wrote my novel but the other nights I went out with a vengance.
One evening, a close friend from the bank, an art history major from Princeton, took a bunch of recruits out with me. I did my normal trick of ordering nearly everything on the menu. There were piles of raw fish, shrimp, paté, sauces that had taken hours to prepare. It was far more food than anyone could eat and I could see some of the recruits were a little stunned at the quantities of uneaten shrimp and oysters being shovelled into the bin. I ate a big steak, put down a few bottles of red wine at $400-a-bottle and we hopped into a minibus we’d chartered for the night (gauche, but we couldn’t find a large enough limo). We stopped somewhere and bought a mixed case of Veuve Clicquot and Moet. Try the difference between these two, I demanded, but by then the recruits were all so drunk they barely touched it. I could tell they were getting a little scared. This stuff is bottom of the line, I told them. You ought to try the vintages. I downed at least two of the bottles in rapid succession. Some of the recruits would not look at me. They did not want to be there anymore. We stopped at a bar. I realised I was going to be sick, made sure my colleague had things under control, caught a cab, and promptly began vomiting out the window. Because of the quantity of wine and red meat I’d consumed, it looked like I was spitting up blood. The cab driver pulled over, certain I was about to die in his backseat. A finely dressed couple opened the door and I clambered out and vomited on their shoes. I don’t remember how I got home. The next morning I discovered a dozen cigars stuffed in my pockets, probably from the restaurant. I told my colleagues what had happened, looking for some moral bearing, secretly hoping to be chastised, but they all thought I was a hero. The vomiting on strangers was their favourite part. My boss, for fun, would sometimes throw cocktail olives, sushi, things of that nature, across the room in restaurants, always at people we didn’t know.
***
In addition to the physical effects - my ballooning waistline and cholesterol levels - I had become an extremely angry person. On the trading floor the best way to win an argument was with overpowering aggression. Right or wrong, you protected your PnL [profit and loss account] with the fury of the righteous. But of course this approach to problem-solving leaks into other parts of your life. I became a raving idiot when I got behind the wheel of the car, screaming at other drivers for the slightest infractions.
Meanwhile, I kept plugging away at the writing. Once every few months, when I really felt like treating myself, I’d take a sick day and stay home and write. Those were my best days. I was making good progress on the novel about the young trader with the lost soul. The bank had me on a management track, which meant I was being rotated in different areas, learning different skills. After a year of derivative structuring I was sent to the NASDAQ trading desk. I quickly discovered that NASDAQ traders worked much shorter days, 8 hours as opposed to 12, and I suddenly had an enormous amount of time to write. It was one of the luckiest things that ever happened to me, because writing was one of the few things that kept my life in perspective.
Near the end of my second year at the bank, I decided to take a week of vacation and rebuild the engine in my Volkswagen. Naturally, I didn’t tell my colleagues what I was doing because they would have thought I was insane. I drove down to Baltimore to a friend’s repair shop and spent the week working in a spare bay. It was satisfying to use my hands again, to be around people who didn’t talk about the stock market and I began to feel very acutely exactly how much I hated my job. Everyone hates their job, I reminded myself. You’re getting paid a lot of money to complain. Looking around at my friends in the shop, it occurred to me that by the time I became a senior trader, I’d be making more money every year than they would make in their entire careers. And for what? Basically, for helping to break apart the lives of the sort of people I’d grown up with.
Which brings me to my earlier point. One of the reasons we allowed the financial industry so much control over our lives, starting in the 1990s and continuing until the meltdown of 2008, is the propaganda smokescreen of The Market. This idea of the God-like Market - all-seeing, all-knowing, and beyond question - is what allows CEOs to put a few thousand people out of work while giving themselves a $40m paycheck. It’s what allows certain hedge fund managers to take home half a billion (yes - billion) in a good year, while schools and bridges fall apart.
In reality, The Market is nothing more than the people who comprise it. Access to trading markets is very tightly controlled - it is not like a shopping mall. And it is certainly not magic. It’s just people. A very small number of people, in fact.
To give some perspective, even as a junior trader I might get an order to put on a two million share position - that’s shares, not dollars - and I’d do it several times a day. Advertisements for online trading companies try to imply that the market is made up of people like your Cousin Vinny, who buys a hundred shares here and there, but the truth is that Cousin Vinny is irrelevant.
Markets are driven by a very small number of very large investors - traders at banks, hedge funds, and mutual funds - who drive nice cars and drink expensive wine. We need them - the financial markets, that is. They are a necessary part of modern civilisation. What is unnecessary, and extremely unusual, is that the people who run them are paid so disproportionately to the rest of us.
It is crucial to realise that what motivates those people - collecting their million or hundred million dollar bonuses - has nothing to do with the job they actually perform. People used to do it for a lot less and it’s not like there’s a shortage of candidates - I turned away 10 good recruits at Cornell for every one we hired.
The reason we’ve ended up in the spot we’re in today is not so much our failure to understand economics as our failure to understand human nature.
Give a small number of people the power to enrich themselves beyond everyone’s wildest dreams, a philosophical rationale to explain all the damage they’re causing, and they will not stop until they’ve run the world economy off a cliff.
It’s not that people in the City or on Wall Street are necessarily bad people, it’s just that they, like almost anyone, will do anything to keep their million or ten million dollar paycheck. They’ll creatively interpret data, they’ll understate risks, they’ll put the best spin on things. Some will lie, cheat, and steal. But most of them, like most of us, will simply resist looking at the world from any perspective other than their own. And if we are intelligent, we will keep a careful watch on them - both now and into the distant future.
Like any big decision, my choice to leave the bank felt pretty easy once I’d made it. My girlfriend at the time was considering going to law school at Harvard; I asked my boss and some other senior people to ask around for hedge fund jobs in Boston. But the moment I began to consider leaving UBS, it was like a dam breaking. I did not want another job in finance. I did not care about money. I cared about people, I cared about their stories. I cared about what makes us who we are.
I left the bank in late 2001, with my second novel partially written. By 2004, things were not exactly going to plan. I was broke and the second novel had been rejected by every literary agent in America. The book I’d spent three years toiling over turned out to be an apprentice-level work. It was a hard blow but I kept writing. I moved back to the old neighbourhood in Baltimore and took jobs that allowed me to reconnect with the people I’d grown up with - working in construction and driving an ambulance.
In 2005 I began a third novel, American Rust, about the way that our circumstances, whether poor or wealthy, can so completely shape our morality and our way of looking at things. I was fascinated by the lost generation in America - the people whose towns and hopes have been wiped out by outsourcing - people for whom the American Dream has ceased to be relevant. As Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath, I wanted to show the inner lives, for better and worse, of the new lost generation. I wanted readers to think about exactly what it means to be human. What is at the core of us? Where do our morals come from? What differentiates us from the other animals on earth? What measures do we use to define our friends and family and how far are we willing to go to protect them?
Of course these are questions for broader society, not just literature. Maybe it’s only in crises like this that we get shaken up enough to ask ourselves those larger questions - who are we, what is important to us, how should we define our humanity. The answers we choose will determine the sort of world we live in for the coming decades.
‘American Rust’ by Philipp Meyer (£12.99) is published by Simon & Schuster. To order a copy for the special price of £11.69 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08700 798 897, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk
Daily News (Pakistan) : ‘Do More’ mantra
Friday, April 24, 2009
‘Do More’ mantra
Khalid Khokhar | April 24, 2009
THE linking of most recently alleged terrorist plot with Pakistan unearthed in UK, is the manifestation of old-aged archetypal apprehension that “the imprints of every major act of international terrorism invariably passes through Pakistan”. The westerners believe that virtually all the participants of 9/11 tragedy had been trained, resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from or through Pakistani seminaries called as “Madaris”. The spat started with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown accusing Pakistan of not doing enough to control terrorist acts. The Britain police arrested 11 Pakistani-born nationals on student visas in UK on the alleged planning to attack shopping centres and a nightclub in Manchester. However, after the examination of computers recovered from raids in Manchester, Liverpool and Clithere and their hard drives, MI6 cautiously admitted that there is no evidence of ‘Pakistan connection’ with the actual plot, thus causing a deepening sense of embarrassment to the worthy PM of a most technologically advanced country. It forced the Britain police to deport the arrested Pakistanis rather than charging them in a court. The father of one accused (Abid Naseer) in the alleged plot, attributed the charges to Western Islamophobia, saying his only crime is to have a beard and pray five times a day. As perceived by many in Britain and other Western countries, youth having long and untrimmed beards are viewed with suspicion as potential terrorists and extremists. To be sure, such labialization is unfair and uncalled for.
In 2005, Pakistani seminaries came under severe scrutiny when possible links of these religious Madaris have been alleged in 7/7 London bombings. During the course of investigation, it was revealed that at least two of the bombers had visited Pakistan in the months before the attacks. In the aftermath of the deadly attacks, the then, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called on Pakistan to crack down on extremist madrassas. There are lots of attack threats and signals rumbling all round the western circles from time to time. Again in 2009, Pakistan has been accused of not doing enough, whereas it is doing enough despite limited resources. What is the myth of al Qaeda “sleeper cells” in European countries? Are these alarms emanating from jihadist propaganda videos, coded message to al Qaeda cells, or just hoax? The Government is well set on its course to ascribe a more meaningful role to the madrassas and developing the madrassa students congruent to cultural norms of Pakistani society. After reviewing the veracity of these alarms, one is left with many unanswered questions. A global dragnet has tightened around al-Qaida, made possible by a broad coalition of 84 nations, all focused on the common goal of eradicating the terrorist threat that endangers all civilized nations. Since September 11, 2001, 70 percent of al-Qaeda senior leadership and more than 3,400 lower-level al-Qaeda operatives have been detained or killed in over 100 countries. The al-Qaeda organization has been gravely wounded and is on the run. Pakistan has deployed up to 120,000 military and paramilitary forces in FATA and killed/captured hundreds of suspected al Qaeda operatives. Pakistan has made “significant” progress toward eliminating the safe haven for foreign fighters in the FATA over the past seven and a half years, capturing scores of key leaders. Pakistan, being the frontline state in the war on terror, is committed to weed out terrorism of all sorts from its soil. The objective was to deny a safe haven to al Qaeda and Taliban elements inside Pakistan. Despite substantial sacrifices rendered by Pakistan, still US counter-Terrorism department believes that “Washington rarely gets all of the help it wants from allies like Pakistan in efforts to hunt down violent extremists”.
In assessing al Qaeda and its cohort’s capabilities, many believe that US counter efforts have weakened al Qaeda’s central leadership structure and capabilities to the point where al Qaeda can not coordinate attack of 9/11 magnitude. Therefore, counter-efforts should focus more intently on homeland security, stressing such measures as improving airline security, establishing enhanced security measures for passenger train travel, and expanding security of western ports. The Britain’s Terrorism Act-2000, which authorizes indefinite detentions of immigrants; search a home or business without the owner’s or the occupant’s permission or knowledge; allows to search telephone, email and financial records without a court order; and the expanded access of law enforcement agencies to business records, can auger well with the objective of combating the scourge of terrorism. However, the Britain’s student visa system has some bugs. It is appropriate to mention here that more than 2,100 universities, independent schools and colleges normally apply to accept international students. Each institution was supposed to be assessed or visited by UK Border Agency officers as part of the vetting process. Foreign students bring with them 10 billion pound boast to the economy which the Government is keen to encourage. This leads to soft visa policy and thousands of bogus students were free to enter Britain despite new laws aimed at tightening controls on immigration. The British government issues around 10,000 student visas a year to Pakistanis, and over 50, 000 Pakistani students are presently in Britain, ostensibly studying. It was revealed that hundreds of colleges approved by the Home Office to accept nonEuropean Union (EU) students have not been inspected by it’s officers. It has also emerged that the vast majority of non-EU students would not be interviewed by the Home Office but admitted on the basis of written applications and evidence of sponsorship, educational qualifications and bank statements. They then register at the college or university that originally gave them admissions to enable them to apply for visas. However, the reality is that in a large number of cases, these institutions are little more than fronts that function only to make money from these young men and women who are seeking jobs for a better life in Britain. Another reason may be that the Europeans allow “rogue element” to seek shelter in foreign countries on the pretext of “political asylum”. The European countries, being the staunchest ally in the US-led war on terror, are unwittingly protecting and harbouring such dangerous terrorists wanted in many terrorist acts in Pakistan. Today, the continuation of militancy is a devastating outcome of western’s “human rights” policies.
The International terrorism, no matter when, by whom, where, and in what form, is a dangerous threat to the world peace. This requires mutual cooperation from all peace-loving countries. Every country should adopt “uniform strategy” in condemning and fighting terrorism resolutely. Since 2005, UK took into account how terrorism in Pakistan may affect Britain and its Muslim population. The British Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command arrested some UK nationals of Pakistani origin on the charges of “commissioning, preparing or instigating acts of terrorism”. Consequently, most of the terrorist organizations closed their offices in UK and fled away to some soft destinations, like Sweden, Italy, Norway, etc. Now, there is a strong need to take appropriate programmes and initiatives to reach out to people/organizations harbouring terrorism. All the foreign-based organizations should be taken to the task by the counterterrorism authorities of the respective country. All the websites operating in western countries responsible for fanning extremist sentiments should also be banned. The western democracies have to set aside their soft policy and should be more aggressive to conduct covert operations against masquerade terrorists exploiting the western doctrine on human rights to their benefit. International terrorism has jolted the whole world which is faceless and has no territory and is fighting its own war against terror. Pakistan itself has suffered from terrorism. Pakistan condemns terrorism in its all forms and manifestations. The public blame game only sours relations. The UK officials are equally irritated by High Commission’s statement as Islamabad is not happy with the statement of Prime Minister Gordon Brown because despite providing full co-operation in the war against terrorism, his attitude was not fair. Nevertheless, it calls for collective efforts by the international community against terrorism, instead of seeking scapegoats and blaming each other. UK and Pakistan should not worry about who is to blame, and more about how to rectify the emergent problem.
Khalid Khokhar | April 24, 2009
THE linking of most recently alleged terrorist plot with Pakistan unearthed in UK, is the manifestation of old-aged archetypal apprehension that “the imprints of every major act of international terrorism invariably passes through Pakistan”. The westerners believe that virtually all the participants of 9/11 tragedy had been trained, resided or met in, coordinated with, or received funding from or through Pakistani seminaries called as “Madaris”. The spat started with British Prime Minister Gordon Brown accusing Pakistan of not doing enough to control terrorist acts. The Britain police arrested 11 Pakistani-born nationals on student visas in UK on the alleged planning to attack shopping centres and a nightclub in Manchester. However, after the examination of computers recovered from raids in Manchester, Liverpool and Clithere and their hard drives, MI6 cautiously admitted that there is no evidence of ‘Pakistan connection’ with the actual plot, thus causing a deepening sense of embarrassment to the worthy PM of a most technologically advanced country. It forced the Britain police to deport the arrested Pakistanis rather than charging them in a court. The father of one accused (Abid Naseer) in the alleged plot, attributed the charges to Western Islamophobia, saying his only crime is to have a beard and pray five times a day. As perceived by many in Britain and other Western countries, youth having long and untrimmed beards are viewed with suspicion as potential terrorists and extremists. To be sure, such labialization is unfair and uncalled for.
In 2005, Pakistani seminaries came under severe scrutiny when possible links of these religious Madaris have been alleged in 7/7 London bombings. During the course of investigation, it was revealed that at least two of the bombers had visited Pakistan in the months before the attacks. In the aftermath of the deadly attacks, the then, British Prime Minister Tony Blair called on Pakistan to crack down on extremist madrassas. There are lots of attack threats and signals rumbling all round the western circles from time to time. Again in 2009, Pakistan has been accused of not doing enough, whereas it is doing enough despite limited resources. What is the myth of al Qaeda “sleeper cells” in European countries? Are these alarms emanating from jihadist propaganda videos, coded message to al Qaeda cells, or just hoax? The Government is well set on its course to ascribe a more meaningful role to the madrassas and developing the madrassa students congruent to cultural norms of Pakistani society. After reviewing the veracity of these alarms, one is left with many unanswered questions. A global dragnet has tightened around al-Qaida, made possible by a broad coalition of 84 nations, all focused on the common goal of eradicating the terrorist threat that endangers all civilized nations. Since September 11, 2001, 70 percent of al-Qaeda senior leadership and more than 3,400 lower-level al-Qaeda operatives have been detained or killed in over 100 countries. The al-Qaeda organization has been gravely wounded and is on the run. Pakistan has deployed up to 120,000 military and paramilitary forces in FATA and killed/captured hundreds of suspected al Qaeda operatives. Pakistan has made “significant” progress toward eliminating the safe haven for foreign fighters in the FATA over the past seven and a half years, capturing scores of key leaders. Pakistan, being the frontline state in the war on terror, is committed to weed out terrorism of all sorts from its soil. The objective was to deny a safe haven to al Qaeda and Taliban elements inside Pakistan. Despite substantial sacrifices rendered by Pakistan, still US counter-Terrorism department believes that “Washington rarely gets all of the help it wants from allies like Pakistan in efforts to hunt down violent extremists”.
In assessing al Qaeda and its cohort’s capabilities, many believe that US counter efforts have weakened al Qaeda’s central leadership structure and capabilities to the point where al Qaeda can not coordinate attack of 9/11 magnitude. Therefore, counter-efforts should focus more intently on homeland security, stressing such measures as improving airline security, establishing enhanced security measures for passenger train travel, and expanding security of western ports. The Britain’s Terrorism Act-2000, which authorizes indefinite detentions of immigrants; search a home or business without the owner’s or the occupant’s permission or knowledge; allows to search telephone, email and financial records without a court order; and the expanded access of law enforcement agencies to business records, can auger well with the objective of combating the scourge of terrorism. However, the Britain’s student visa system has some bugs. It is appropriate to mention here that more than 2,100 universities, independent schools and colleges normally apply to accept international students. Each institution was supposed to be assessed or visited by UK Border Agency officers as part of the vetting process. Foreign students bring with them 10 billion pound boast to the economy which the Government is keen to encourage. This leads to soft visa policy and thousands of bogus students were free to enter Britain despite new laws aimed at tightening controls on immigration. The British government issues around 10,000 student visas a year to Pakistanis, and over 50, 000 Pakistani students are presently in Britain, ostensibly studying. It was revealed that hundreds of colleges approved by the Home Office to accept nonEuropean Union (EU) students have not been inspected by it’s officers. It has also emerged that the vast majority of non-EU students would not be interviewed by the Home Office but admitted on the basis of written applications and evidence of sponsorship, educational qualifications and bank statements. They then register at the college or university that originally gave them admissions to enable them to apply for visas. However, the reality is that in a large number of cases, these institutions are little more than fronts that function only to make money from these young men and women who are seeking jobs for a better life in Britain. Another reason may be that the Europeans allow “rogue element” to seek shelter in foreign countries on the pretext of “political asylum”. The European countries, being the staunchest ally in the US-led war on terror, are unwittingly protecting and harbouring such dangerous terrorists wanted in many terrorist acts in Pakistan. Today, the continuation of militancy is a devastating outcome of western’s “human rights” policies.
The International terrorism, no matter when, by whom, where, and in what form, is a dangerous threat to the world peace. This requires mutual cooperation from all peace-loving countries. Every country should adopt “uniform strategy” in condemning and fighting terrorism resolutely. Since 2005, UK took into account how terrorism in Pakistan may affect Britain and its Muslim population. The British Metropolitan Police Counter-Terrorism Command arrested some UK nationals of Pakistani origin on the charges of “commissioning, preparing or instigating acts of terrorism”. Consequently, most of the terrorist organizations closed their offices in UK and fled away to some soft destinations, like Sweden, Italy, Norway, etc. Now, there is a strong need to take appropriate programmes and initiatives to reach out to people/organizations harbouring terrorism. All the foreign-based organizations should be taken to the task by the counterterrorism authorities of the respective country. All the websites operating in western countries responsible for fanning extremist sentiments should also be banned. The western democracies have to set aside their soft policy and should be more aggressive to conduct covert operations against masquerade terrorists exploiting the western doctrine on human rights to their benefit. International terrorism has jolted the whole world which is faceless and has no territory and is fighting its own war against terror. Pakistan itself has suffered from terrorism. Pakistan condemns terrorism in its all forms and manifestations. The public blame game only sours relations. The UK officials are equally irritated by High Commission’s statement as Islamabad is not happy with the statement of Prime Minister Gordon Brown because despite providing full co-operation in the war against terrorism, his attitude was not fair. Nevertheless, it calls for collective efforts by the international community against terrorism, instead of seeking scapegoats and blaming each other. UK and Pakistan should not worry about who is to blame, and more about how to rectify the emergent problem.
Filed under
al Qaeda,
Gordon Brown,
MI6,
Pakistan,
UK
by Winter Patriot
on Friday, April 24, 2009
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Times : All suspects in 'student terror plot' released
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
All suspects in 'student terror plot' released
Nico Hines and Russell Jenkins | April 22, 2009
All 12 suspects arrested in a security operation to thwart what the Prime Minister called “a very big terrorist plot” have been released without charge.
Eleven of the men - all Pakistani nationals - face being deported after they were transferred into the custody of the UK Borders Agency.
The failure to bring charges against any of the men came after police released the final two suspects they had in custody this morning.
Last night they freed nine men, aged between 22 and 38, after 13 days detention. An 18-year-old student was transferred to the custody of the UK Border Agency after three days in detention.
Mohammed Ayub, a lawyer for three of the men, called for an independent inquiry into Operation Pathway and said their deportation orders would be challenged.
“Our clients have no criminal history, they were here lawfully on student visas and all were pursuing their studies and working part-time,” he said.
“They are neither extremists nor terrorists. Their arrest and detention has been a serious breach of their human rights. As a minimum they are entitled to an unreserved apology.”
Responding to criticism of the police operation, Gordon Brown’s spokesman said: “Both the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister believe they are doing an excellent job in continuing to protect the public from terrorist threats.
"The Government’s highest priority is to protect public safety. Where a foreign national poses a threat to the country, we will seek to exclude or deport them where appropriate.”
The investigation into alleged al-Qaeda activity in the North West involved 14 properties in Manchester, Liverpool and Clitheroe, Lancashire, being searched by specialist teams.
Four uniformed police officers stood guard outside 36, Galsworthy Avenue, in Cheetham Hill where two of the terror suspects were arrested in an armed swoop two weeks ago.
The sunlit street was deserted apart from a few pressmen and one passer-by who shouted aggressively: "Go home - [it's] all over now."
There is, however, deep disquiet about the arrests in the neighbourhood among residents who say that the police has a record of making dramatic terror swoops, disrupting and upsetting the local community but subsequently releasing the suspects for lack of evidence.
Locals cited the the behaviour of Lancashire Police in February when nine men from Burnley and Blackburn on a humanitarian convoy were arrested on the M65 near Preston and later released without charge.
GMP distributed a letter to local residents in an attempt to explain their position.
Afzal Khan, the Labour councillor for Cheetham Hill, said: "I am deeply concerned. On the same day of the arrests people on the streets were saying straight away that they will find nothing and that is is all political. This has only reinforced that view".
The arrests were brought forward by 12 hours after Bob Quick, Scotland Yard’s head of counter-terrorism, accidentally disclosed details of the raids to Downing Street photographers while on his way to brief Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary.
Mr Quick, Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations, resigned, admitting that he had compromised a high-level security operation. Ms Smith told the House of Commons this week that the error had not damaged the operation and that the only impact had been that the raids had been brought forward “by a matter of hours”.
However, The Times understands that even before Mr Quick quit there were furious disagreements between Scotland Yard, which is supposed to have national responsibility for counter-terrorism, the North West Counter-Terrorism Unit, led by Greater Manchester Police, and MI5.
Security sources said that the arrests were premature and complained that police had panicked after picking up intelligence “chatter” that appeared to discuss timings and targets. Some of the suspects were allegedly under surveillance while photographing and filming at Manchester shopping centres and a nightclub.
It was hoped that the arrests and searches would produce evidence of bomb-making activity or components.
At one point a block of flats in Liverpool was evacuated but no explosive material was found. Attention later turned to the forensic examination of the suspects’ computers, but sources say that nothing has been found which can incriminate the men.
The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, Peter Fahy, said this morning:
“I do not feel embarrassed or humiliated by what we have done because we have carried out our duty. There’s been no disagreement between us and the security services.
“This has been an extremely complex investigation that has involved officers working closely with other agencies to gather and examine large amounts of evidence.
“We had a duty to act on 9 April to protect the public and a subsequent duty to investigate what lay before us."
Nico Hines and Russell Jenkins | April 22, 2009
All 12 suspects arrested in a security operation to thwart what the Prime Minister called “a very big terrorist plot” have been released without charge.
Eleven of the men - all Pakistani nationals - face being deported after they were transferred into the custody of the UK Borders Agency.
The failure to bring charges against any of the men came after police released the final two suspects they had in custody this morning.
Last night they freed nine men, aged between 22 and 38, after 13 days detention. An 18-year-old student was transferred to the custody of the UK Border Agency after three days in detention.
Mohammed Ayub, a lawyer for three of the men, called for an independent inquiry into Operation Pathway and said their deportation orders would be challenged.
“Our clients have no criminal history, they were here lawfully on student visas and all were pursuing their studies and working part-time,” he said.
“They are neither extremists nor terrorists. Their arrest and detention has been a serious breach of their human rights. As a minimum they are entitled to an unreserved apology.”
Responding to criticism of the police operation, Gordon Brown’s spokesman said: “Both the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister believe they are doing an excellent job in continuing to protect the public from terrorist threats.
"The Government’s highest priority is to protect public safety. Where a foreign national poses a threat to the country, we will seek to exclude or deport them where appropriate.”
The investigation into alleged al-Qaeda activity in the North West involved 14 properties in Manchester, Liverpool and Clitheroe, Lancashire, being searched by specialist teams.
Four uniformed police officers stood guard outside 36, Galsworthy Avenue, in Cheetham Hill where two of the terror suspects were arrested in an armed swoop two weeks ago.
The sunlit street was deserted apart from a few pressmen and one passer-by who shouted aggressively: "Go home - [it's] all over now."
There is, however, deep disquiet about the arrests in the neighbourhood among residents who say that the police has a record of making dramatic terror swoops, disrupting and upsetting the local community but subsequently releasing the suspects for lack of evidence.
Locals cited the the behaviour of Lancashire Police in February when nine men from Burnley and Blackburn on a humanitarian convoy were arrested on the M65 near Preston and later released without charge.
GMP distributed a letter to local residents in an attempt to explain their position.
Afzal Khan, the Labour councillor for Cheetham Hill, said: "I am deeply concerned. On the same day of the arrests people on the streets were saying straight away that they will find nothing and that is is all political. This has only reinforced that view".
The arrests were brought forward by 12 hours after Bob Quick, Scotland Yard’s head of counter-terrorism, accidentally disclosed details of the raids to Downing Street photographers while on his way to brief Gordon Brown and Jacqui Smith, the Home Secretary.
Mr Quick, Assistant Commissioner for Specialist Operations, resigned, admitting that he had compromised a high-level security operation. Ms Smith told the House of Commons this week that the error had not damaged the operation and that the only impact had been that the raids had been brought forward “by a matter of hours”.
However, The Times understands that even before Mr Quick quit there were furious disagreements between Scotland Yard, which is supposed to have national responsibility for counter-terrorism, the North West Counter-Terrorism Unit, led by Greater Manchester Police, and MI5.
Security sources said that the arrests were premature and complained that police had panicked after picking up intelligence “chatter” that appeared to discuss timings and targets. Some of the suspects were allegedly under surveillance while photographing and filming at Manchester shopping centres and a nightclub.
It was hoped that the arrests and searches would produce evidence of bomb-making activity or components.
At one point a block of flats in Liverpool was evacuated but no explosive material was found. Attention later turned to the forensic examination of the suspects’ computers, but sources say that nothing has been found which can incriminate the men.
The Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, Peter Fahy, said this morning:
“I do not feel embarrassed or humiliated by what we have done because we have carried out our duty. There’s been no disagreement between us and the security services.
“This has been an extremely complex investigation that has involved officers working closely with other agencies to gather and examine large amounts of evidence.
“We had a duty to act on 9 April to protect the public and a subsequent duty to investigate what lay before us."
Daily Times : Dead men plotting terror?
Thursday, April 16, 2009
Dead men plotting terror?
UK officials believe foiled attack was planned by Rashid Rauf
Daily Times Monitor | April 13, 2009
WASHINGTON: How could Rashid Rauf, a “high value” Al Qaeda target, be plotting terrorist attacks in Britain in April 2009 – as claimed by the British authorities – if he was killed months ago in a famous drone strike in Waziristan, as US officials claimed, in November 2008, the Nesweek magazine is asking.
According to one UK expert, some British investigators as well as Rauf’s family think that he may have survived.
Rauf, a former British resident, was allegedly a central figure in an August 2006 plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners. The plot was foiled after Rauf was arrested in Pakistan. But in December 2007, he escaped from custody. US officials suspected ‘inside’ help and the White House was delighted when a Predator operation supposedly took him out. Soon afterwards, however, Rauf’s Pakistani lawyer asked authorities to produce the body which they were apparently unable to do.
US officials talking to the Newsweek said US agencies still believed Rauf was killed in the strike.
“While it is not 100 percent confirmed,” said one of the officials, “there are good reasons to believe Rashid Rauf is dead.”
“And even if he’s dead,” the magazine says, “US and UK officials said it’s possible the Easter plot was hatched prior to November 2008 — meaning that Rauf’s reach may extend beyond the grave.”
UK officials believe foiled attack was planned by Rashid Rauf
Daily Times Monitor | April 13, 2009
WASHINGTON: How could Rashid Rauf, a “high value” Al Qaeda target, be plotting terrorist attacks in Britain in April 2009 – as claimed by the British authorities – if he was killed months ago in a famous drone strike in Waziristan, as US officials claimed, in November 2008, the Nesweek magazine is asking.
According to one UK expert, some British investigators as well as Rauf’s family think that he may have survived.
Rauf, a former British resident, was allegedly a central figure in an August 2006 plot to blow up trans-Atlantic airliners. The plot was foiled after Rauf was arrested in Pakistan. But in December 2007, he escaped from custody. US officials suspected ‘inside’ help and the White House was delighted when a Predator operation supposedly took him out. Soon afterwards, however, Rauf’s Pakistani lawyer asked authorities to produce the body which they were apparently unable to do.
US officials talking to the Newsweek said US agencies still believed Rauf was killed in the strike.
“While it is not 100 percent confirmed,” said one of the officials, “there are good reasons to believe Rashid Rauf is dead.”
“And even if he’s dead,” the magazine says, “US and UK officials said it’s possible the Easter plot was hatched prior to November 2008 — meaning that Rauf’s reach may extend beyond the grave.”
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Telegraph : UK should distance itself from US drone attacks in Pakistan, says minister
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
UK should distance itself from US drone attacks in Pakistan, says minister
Britain should distance itself from US missile attacks on al-Qaeda strongholds in the tribal areas of Pakistan, a Government minister has said.
By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent | April 12, 2009
Sadiq Khan, the minister for community cohesion, said Britain needed to rebuild its reputation in Pakistan where anger is mounting over the attacks launched by unmanned drones.
Mr Khan, who was in Pakistan on an official visit when counter-terrrorism raids took place in Manchester and Liverpool last week, said many young men there were angry with the attacks which have been blamed for killing innocent people as well as terrorists.
Rashid Rauf, the man said to be behind the alleged plot to target shopping centres in Manchester, was reported by the US as being killed in one such attack last year.
The attacks, which have been stepped up in recent months, are highly controversial in Pakistan, partly because they are seen as an American incursion on Pakistani sovereignty.
Mr Khan said the Government needed to make clear that Britain's foreign policy was different from Washington's.
The minister said: "In Islamabad, I spoke to university students about being British and Muslim, the values we share in the UK and the freedom to practise faith freely, be treated equally, protected against discrimination, and be active citizens with the freedom to voice our concerns and disagree without fear.
"In return, I listened to the anger and pain over the challenges that young Pakistanis growing up in Pakistan face, including the anger and frustration over US drone attacks.
"It is clear, in many Pakistanis' eyes, the UK is considered in the same terms as the US.
"One of the lessons of the Iraq war is that we need to ensure we are better at explaining our foreign policy, especially when it is distinct and different from [policy in] the US."
Mr Khan was later forced to clarify that he believed Britain needed to “stand shoulder to shoulder with those who are fighting terrorism” including both the US and Pakistan.
Britain should distance itself from US missile attacks on al-Qaeda strongholds in the tribal areas of Pakistan, a Government minister has said.
By Duncan Gardham, Security Correspondent | April 12, 2009
Sadiq Khan, the minister for community cohesion, said Britain needed to rebuild its reputation in Pakistan where anger is mounting over the attacks launched by unmanned drones.
Mr Khan, who was in Pakistan on an official visit when counter-terrrorism raids took place in Manchester and Liverpool last week, said many young men there were angry with the attacks which have been blamed for killing innocent people as well as terrorists.
Rashid Rauf, the man said to be behind the alleged plot to target shopping centres in Manchester, was reported by the US as being killed in one such attack last year.
The attacks, which have been stepped up in recent months, are highly controversial in Pakistan, partly because they are seen as an American incursion on Pakistani sovereignty.
Mr Khan said the Government needed to make clear that Britain's foreign policy was different from Washington's.
The minister said: "In Islamabad, I spoke to university students about being British and Muslim, the values we share in the UK and the freedom to practise faith freely, be treated equally, protected against discrimination, and be active citizens with the freedom to voice our concerns and disagree without fear.
"In return, I listened to the anger and pain over the challenges that young Pakistanis growing up in Pakistan face, including the anger and frustration over US drone attacks.
"It is clear, in many Pakistanis' eyes, the UK is considered in the same terms as the US.
"One of the lessons of the Iraq war is that we need to ensure we are better at explaining our foreign policy, especially when it is distinct and different from [policy in] the US."
Mr Khan was later forced to clarify that he believed Britain needed to “stand shoulder to shoulder with those who are fighting terrorism” including both the US and Pakistan.
Filed under
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Sadiq Khan,
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The Times : Ghost in the terror machine
Tuesday, April 14, 2009
Ghost in the terror machine
Last week's raids were the result of a long investigation into a wider campaign plotted by an Al-Qaeda chief before his apparent death
David Leppard | From The Sunday Times | April 12, 2009
Early last Wednesday evening, Phil Harrow, a blood service courier from Toxteth, Liverpool, was sitting in front of his computer in his living room, his attention occasionally distracted by the sounds of the local children playing football on the street outside his front window on Cedar Grove.
At about 5.30pm, the peace was shattered and the children scattered in terror. “Eight armed officers, dressed in black from head to toe and wearing body armour and ski masks, jumped from an unmarked white van, screamed at the children to get out of the street and battered their way into the house two doors down from mine,” recalled Harrow.
Within minutes three unmarked police cars and four large yellow police vans had cordoned off the street and about 30 more officers were shouting at residents to stay indoors with their doors and windows shut.
Three Asian men were arrested and quickly driven off. The officers also took away a blue Nissan Micra and a black Vauxhall Corsa after neighbours told them the vehicles belonged to the men.
It was a pattern repeated across the city and the northwest of England as police swooped simultaneously as part of Operation Pathway, which was targeting an alleged Al-Qaeda-driven terror plot aimed at unspecified targets in Britain.
Elsewhere in Liverpool, a man was hauled out of a flat above an off-licence on Earle Road, Wavertree, about half a mile from Cedar Grove. At Liverpool John Moores University across the city, a student was dragged from the library and arrested.
In Manchester two men were picked up in a flat in the Cheetham Hill area, another couple were seized in a cybercafe and a fifth man was arrested on the M602 motorway. Two other men were held in Clitheroe, Lancashire, where they had been staying at a local B&B.
The arrest of the 12 men — 11 Pakistanis and one Briton — had been rushed forward because of a career-ending blunder earlier that day by Bob Quick, the Metropolitan police assistant commissioner who was Britain’s chief anti-terror officer.
Quick had been running late for a morning meeting with Gordon Brown at No 10, at which he was to tell the prime minister about the raids which had been planned for 6am the next day. In the taxi on the way, he was reading a document headed Secret: Briefing Note Operation Pathway. Quick was in such a rush that he forgot to put the document back in its buff folder before he got out of the cab.
A photographer snatched a picture of the document which was then transmitted to media outlets around the world. The operation had to be hastily brought forward by 12 hours.
Thankfully, Quick’s error had serious consequences only for himself — he resigned on Thursday morning — but it added unnecessary drama and danger to an operation that had already been a close-run thing — and which security sources fear is part of a much bigger threat.
THE trail to the Manchester raids is thought to have begun last December with the arrest of 14 suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists by Belgian police.
Officials believed a suicide bombing aimed at a two-day summit of European leaders, including Brown, was imminent after learning that one of the suspects had received a green light from his paymasters abroad.
During their detention, few of the men were prepared to co-operate with the Belgian authorities but one — whose identity remains a closely guarded secret — was willing to talk. In a series of interviews he described how he had been personally “tasked” to carry out a suicide attack in Belgium. His instructor was Rashid Rauf, a fugitive on the run from British police in Pakistan.
The would-be suicide bomber said that the Belgian plot was just one of a number of large-scale attacks that Rauf had planned across Europe. The targets were unidentified cities in Belgium, France, Holland and the UK.
Interviewed later by a member of MI5, the supergrass said that all he knew was that Rauf had dispatched a mastermind — whose pseudonym he gave — to a British city to make preparations for an attack. His tip-off was vague but it sparked one of the largest manhunts in MI5’s recent history.
Rauf, who was born in Pakistan but was brought up in the Midlands, has already been linked to a series of alleged high-profile Islamist terror plots, including the failed July 21 suicide bomb plot that targeted London in 2005.
Despite this known track record, Rauf’s real importance had been underestimated. About four years ago he became Al-Qaeda’s director of European operations.
Last November Rauf was reportedly killed when three American Hellfire missiles from a CIA predator drone destroyed a mud-built bungalow in a village in North Waziristan, in the lawless tribal lands that span the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Aerial photographs taken by the Americans after the missile strike show a body, originally thought to be Rauf’s, covered in a shroud being carried from the rubble. But original assessments that he is dead have been revised. “There is nothing definitely to say he’s actually dead,” said a senior western intelligence official last week.
“It may take a long time to find out. We honestly don’t know.”
Pakistani intelligence officials remain convinced that he was killed in the strike.
A few months earlier Rauf had sent several cells to Europe to carry out a series of linked attacks which were driven by Al-Qaeda’s hatred for Barack Obama — “a house negro” as Osama Bin Laden’s deputy has called him. Informed sources said it is now believed that the alleged northwest cell was part of this Europe-wide network.
The suspected members of the northwest cell had first came to the attention of MI5 about two months after the thwarted Brussels attack in December.
At any given time MI5 monitors about 2,000 people in Britain who form an estimated 230 networks suspected of links to violent extremism. Each individual is subject to a sliding scale of monitoring depending on the agency’s assessment of the threat they pose and how close they are thought to be to “attack planning”.
Each week a committee of senior MI5 officials meet at the agency’s headquarters in Westminster to review the status of each operation, upgrading and downgrading different investigations as appropriate.
Well placed officials say the alleged northwest cell had been the subject of investigation for several weeks since January. About a month ago that was suddenly stepped up after fresh information indicated that the members of the cell might be serious about attack planning. Operation Pathway was moved to the top of MI5’s priority list. Hundreds of police and MI5 officers were assigned to the investigation.
A number of suspects, many of them Pakistanis on student visas, were put under full-time surveillance. Their homes were bugged, their telephone calls were intercepted and they were followed night and day by officers from MI5’s A4 surveillance division.
This department specialises in covert surveillance. At terror camps in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, Al-Qaeda terrorist recruits are routinely trained in counter-surveillance tactics. This can include switching back on their route, stopping suddenly in the street and generally being aware of everybody around them.
To circumvent this, MI5 employs people who look the opposite of the stereotypical spy. The agency has at its disposal an army of elderly women — many in their sixties and seventies — and young mothers with babies in prams.
There is also a range of James Bond-style devices which are the agency’s most closely guarded secrets. It is rumoured, for example, that MI5 has developed a colourless chemical which is “painted” on a suspect’s clothing or shoes during a covert entry of the suspect’s home while he or she is out. The suspect will then leave a trace of the chemical wherever he goes, allowing a trained MI5 dog to follow his trail.
It is not known whether any of these tactics were used in Operation Pathway. But about a fortnight ago surveillance officers reported that the suspects had been taking photographs of four locations in Manchester. These included the Arndale shopping centre, the smart shopping area of St Ann’s Square, the Trafford shopping centre and the Birdcage nightclub.
Critically, their e-mails were monitored — a highly sensitive task usually assigned in such operations to technical experts at GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping agency at Cheltenham.
The turning point came about a week ago when a series of e-mails thought to have been received by at least one of the suspects indicated a specific timeframe for the alleged plot. The e-mails suggested that the cell had moved into the stage of attack planning. They showed a “window” for a possible attack of about five or six days from Good Friday. “Dates around the Easter holiday were mentioned,” one senior police source said this weekend.
Yet there remained serious gaps in the Pathway investigation. Despite the photographs, police say they had no definite evidence of the planned target. Neither had Pathway uncovered any evidence that the suspects had acquired explosives, arms or ammunition.
There was no indication, either, as to whether the planned operation was a suicide attack, or how many of those arrested would be directly involved and which of them were simply supplying logistical support such as purchasing materials or acting as drivers and reconnaissance scouts.
For MI5 officers running Pathway from the agency’s Northern Operations Centre (opened amid great secrecy last year in a northern city), these were good reasons to watch and wait. But the risks of letting the suspects run overrode that.
“There is always a challenge to balance the need to gather more intelligence with the need to protect the public. There was clear intent and signs of organisation, very clearly something was going on, so we acted to protect the public,” said a security source.
Early last week senior police and MI5 officers met at Scotland Yard and agreed that the suspected members of the cell should be arrested. The date for “executive action” was set for 6am last Thursday when the suspects would almost certainly be at home and asleep. But then came Quick’s unwitting intervention.
AS the police questioning of the arrested men continues at three separate locations, few details have emerged of their lives in Britain. Neighbours in Liverpool spoke last week of cars coming and going from addresses late at night and the playing of loud Islamic music from a flat occupied by one of the men, but the suspects appear to have had little interaction with people other than at work.
Two of the men worked as security guards at the Homebase DIY store in Clitheroe, but had been there for only two weeks. Two more were believed to have worked as contractors for Cargo2go, a delivery firm based at Manchester airport, because one of the men was driving one of the company’s vans when he was arrested.
However, Ian Southworth, a director, said yesterday that he was mystified at the suggestion. “All our drivers are owner-drivers. It could be a driver that used to work for us that’s left and sold the vehicle and the logo’s still on it, or it could have been a lost or stolen vehicle,” he said.
A number of the 11 Pakistanis arrested were from the tribal areas and had been admitted to Britain on student visas.
This has stoked up a political row, with Islamabad and Downing Street trading blows over who was responsible for lax checks on immigrants, especially those entering Britain on student visas which are notoriously abused.
Gordon Brown said Pakistan “has to do more to root out terrorist elements in its country”. The prime minister had said previously that two out of three terror plots uncovered by MI5 and police were hatched in Pakistan. But Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the Pakistan high commissioner, retaliated by saying the problem was “at your end”.
This weekend a senior immigration judge dismissed as “bluster” claims by Phil Woolas, the Home Officer minister, that the system for checking student visas had been recently tightened up and was “one of the best in the world”.
The judge pointed to the six-month closure, on security grounds, of the main visa office at the British high commission in Islamabad, which meant that cases were being channelled through an outpost in Abu Dhabi, 1,300 miles away. He said that at 50% of the appeals, by those on student visas refused entry to Britain, there was no Home Office representation. In many cases the only documentation produced as evidence was that provided by the appellant, “which can often be forged or inadequate”, said the judge.
His comments were echoed by John Tincey, chairman of the Immigration Service Union which represents border staff, who said that the proposed introduction of the e-borders system involving automated checks on visitors was fraught with danger.
“Foreign nationals could be allowed into Britain without being interviewed by an immigration officer,” he said.
“There is real danger that our immigration controls will be able to catch only those who are already known to the authorities and will be helpless to detect first-time terrorists and illegal immigrants.”
Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: “This is a completely shambolic system.”
THE arguments about the immigration system will continue for some time but this weekend the police priority was the continuing search of 10 properties in Manchester and Liverpool.
Yesterday police released an 18-year-old, the youngest of the suspects, into the custody of the UK Border Agency. They have 28 days to hold the 11 other men, who are aged between 22 and 41, before either charging them or releasing them.
The fate of Operation Pathway will hinge on whether they can gather enough evidence from the interviews and seized property for prosecutors to press charges.
Rauf’s plans for Europe-wide attacks leave intelligence agencies rushing to locate and defuse a group of ticking timebombs. Whether he is dead or alive, those ticking bombs are his real legacy.
Additional reporting: Kevin Dowling, Philip Cardy, Daud Khattak in Peshawar
Last week's raids were the result of a long investigation into a wider campaign plotted by an Al-Qaeda chief before his apparent death
David Leppard | From The Sunday Times | April 12, 2009
Early last Wednesday evening, Phil Harrow, a blood service courier from Toxteth, Liverpool, was sitting in front of his computer in his living room, his attention occasionally distracted by the sounds of the local children playing football on the street outside his front window on Cedar Grove.
At about 5.30pm, the peace was shattered and the children scattered in terror. “Eight armed officers, dressed in black from head to toe and wearing body armour and ski masks, jumped from an unmarked white van, screamed at the children to get out of the street and battered their way into the house two doors down from mine,” recalled Harrow.
Within minutes three unmarked police cars and four large yellow police vans had cordoned off the street and about 30 more officers were shouting at residents to stay indoors with their doors and windows shut.
Three Asian men were arrested and quickly driven off. The officers also took away a blue Nissan Micra and a black Vauxhall Corsa after neighbours told them the vehicles belonged to the men.
It was a pattern repeated across the city and the northwest of England as police swooped simultaneously as part of Operation Pathway, which was targeting an alleged Al-Qaeda-driven terror plot aimed at unspecified targets in Britain.
Elsewhere in Liverpool, a man was hauled out of a flat above an off-licence on Earle Road, Wavertree, about half a mile from Cedar Grove. At Liverpool John Moores University across the city, a student was dragged from the library and arrested.
In Manchester two men were picked up in a flat in the Cheetham Hill area, another couple were seized in a cybercafe and a fifth man was arrested on the M602 motorway. Two other men were held in Clitheroe, Lancashire, where they had been staying at a local B&B.
The arrest of the 12 men — 11 Pakistanis and one Briton — had been rushed forward because of a career-ending blunder earlier that day by Bob Quick, the Metropolitan police assistant commissioner who was Britain’s chief anti-terror officer.
Quick had been running late for a morning meeting with Gordon Brown at No 10, at which he was to tell the prime minister about the raids which had been planned for 6am the next day. In the taxi on the way, he was reading a document headed Secret: Briefing Note Operation Pathway. Quick was in such a rush that he forgot to put the document back in its buff folder before he got out of the cab.
A photographer snatched a picture of the document which was then transmitted to media outlets around the world. The operation had to be hastily brought forward by 12 hours.
Thankfully, Quick’s error had serious consequences only for himself — he resigned on Thursday morning — but it added unnecessary drama and danger to an operation that had already been a close-run thing — and which security sources fear is part of a much bigger threat.
THE trail to the Manchester raids is thought to have begun last December with the arrest of 14 suspected Al-Qaeda terrorists by Belgian police.
Officials believed a suicide bombing aimed at a two-day summit of European leaders, including Brown, was imminent after learning that one of the suspects had received a green light from his paymasters abroad.
During their detention, few of the men were prepared to co-operate with the Belgian authorities but one — whose identity remains a closely guarded secret — was willing to talk. In a series of interviews he described how he had been personally “tasked” to carry out a suicide attack in Belgium. His instructor was Rashid Rauf, a fugitive on the run from British police in Pakistan.
The would-be suicide bomber said that the Belgian plot was just one of a number of large-scale attacks that Rauf had planned across Europe. The targets were unidentified cities in Belgium, France, Holland and the UK.
Interviewed later by a member of MI5, the supergrass said that all he knew was that Rauf had dispatched a mastermind — whose pseudonym he gave — to a British city to make preparations for an attack. His tip-off was vague but it sparked one of the largest manhunts in MI5’s recent history.
Rauf, who was born in Pakistan but was brought up in the Midlands, has already been linked to a series of alleged high-profile Islamist terror plots, including the failed July 21 suicide bomb plot that targeted London in 2005.
Despite this known track record, Rauf’s real importance had been underestimated. About four years ago he became Al-Qaeda’s director of European operations.
Last November Rauf was reportedly killed when three American Hellfire missiles from a CIA predator drone destroyed a mud-built bungalow in a village in North Waziristan, in the lawless tribal lands that span the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
Aerial photographs taken by the Americans after the missile strike show a body, originally thought to be Rauf’s, covered in a shroud being carried from the rubble. But original assessments that he is dead have been revised. “There is nothing definitely to say he’s actually dead,” said a senior western intelligence official last week.
“It may take a long time to find out. We honestly don’t know.”
Pakistani intelligence officials remain convinced that he was killed in the strike.
A few months earlier Rauf had sent several cells to Europe to carry out a series of linked attacks which were driven by Al-Qaeda’s hatred for Barack Obama — “a house negro” as Osama Bin Laden’s deputy has called him. Informed sources said it is now believed that the alleged northwest cell was part of this Europe-wide network.
The suspected members of the northwest cell had first came to the attention of MI5 about two months after the thwarted Brussels attack in December.
At any given time MI5 monitors about 2,000 people in Britain who form an estimated 230 networks suspected of links to violent extremism. Each individual is subject to a sliding scale of monitoring depending on the agency’s assessment of the threat they pose and how close they are thought to be to “attack planning”.
Each week a committee of senior MI5 officials meet at the agency’s headquarters in Westminster to review the status of each operation, upgrading and downgrading different investigations as appropriate.
Well placed officials say the alleged northwest cell had been the subject of investigation for several weeks since January. About a month ago that was suddenly stepped up after fresh information indicated that the members of the cell might be serious about attack planning. Operation Pathway was moved to the top of MI5’s priority list. Hundreds of police and MI5 officers were assigned to the investigation.
A number of suspects, many of them Pakistanis on student visas, were put under full-time surveillance. Their homes were bugged, their telephone calls were intercepted and they were followed night and day by officers from MI5’s A4 surveillance division.
This department specialises in covert surveillance. At terror camps in Afghanistan and the tribal areas of northwest Pakistan, Al-Qaeda terrorist recruits are routinely trained in counter-surveillance tactics. This can include switching back on their route, stopping suddenly in the street and generally being aware of everybody around them.
To circumvent this, MI5 employs people who look the opposite of the stereotypical spy. The agency has at its disposal an army of elderly women — many in their sixties and seventies — and young mothers with babies in prams.
There is also a range of James Bond-style devices which are the agency’s most closely guarded secrets. It is rumoured, for example, that MI5 has developed a colourless chemical which is “painted” on a suspect’s clothing or shoes during a covert entry of the suspect’s home while he or she is out. The suspect will then leave a trace of the chemical wherever he goes, allowing a trained MI5 dog to follow his trail.
It is not known whether any of these tactics were used in Operation Pathway. But about a fortnight ago surveillance officers reported that the suspects had been taking photographs of four locations in Manchester. These included the Arndale shopping centre, the smart shopping area of St Ann’s Square, the Trafford shopping centre and the Birdcage nightclub.
Critically, their e-mails were monitored — a highly sensitive task usually assigned in such operations to technical experts at GCHQ, the government’s eavesdropping agency at Cheltenham.
The turning point came about a week ago when a series of e-mails thought to have been received by at least one of the suspects indicated a specific timeframe for the alleged plot. The e-mails suggested that the cell had moved into the stage of attack planning. They showed a “window” for a possible attack of about five or six days from Good Friday. “Dates around the Easter holiday were mentioned,” one senior police source said this weekend.
Yet there remained serious gaps in the Pathway investigation. Despite the photographs, police say they had no definite evidence of the planned target. Neither had Pathway uncovered any evidence that the suspects had acquired explosives, arms or ammunition.
There was no indication, either, as to whether the planned operation was a suicide attack, or how many of those arrested would be directly involved and which of them were simply supplying logistical support such as purchasing materials or acting as drivers and reconnaissance scouts.
For MI5 officers running Pathway from the agency’s Northern Operations Centre (opened amid great secrecy last year in a northern city), these were good reasons to watch and wait. But the risks of letting the suspects run overrode that.
“There is always a challenge to balance the need to gather more intelligence with the need to protect the public. There was clear intent and signs of organisation, very clearly something was going on, so we acted to protect the public,” said a security source.
Early last week senior police and MI5 officers met at Scotland Yard and agreed that the suspected members of the cell should be arrested. The date for “executive action” was set for 6am last Thursday when the suspects would almost certainly be at home and asleep. But then came Quick’s unwitting intervention.
AS the police questioning of the arrested men continues at three separate locations, few details have emerged of their lives in Britain. Neighbours in Liverpool spoke last week of cars coming and going from addresses late at night and the playing of loud Islamic music from a flat occupied by one of the men, but the suspects appear to have had little interaction with people other than at work.
Two of the men worked as security guards at the Homebase DIY store in Clitheroe, but had been there for only two weeks. Two more were believed to have worked as contractors for Cargo2go, a delivery firm based at Manchester airport, because one of the men was driving one of the company’s vans when he was arrested.
However, Ian Southworth, a director, said yesterday that he was mystified at the suggestion. “All our drivers are owner-drivers. It could be a driver that used to work for us that’s left and sold the vehicle and the logo’s still on it, or it could have been a lost or stolen vehicle,” he said.
A number of the 11 Pakistanis arrested were from the tribal areas and had been admitted to Britain on student visas.
This has stoked up a political row, with Islamabad and Downing Street trading blows over who was responsible for lax checks on immigrants, especially those entering Britain on student visas which are notoriously abused.
Gordon Brown said Pakistan “has to do more to root out terrorist elements in its country”. The prime minister had said previously that two out of three terror plots uncovered by MI5 and police were hatched in Pakistan. But Wajid Shamsul Hasan, the Pakistan high commissioner, retaliated by saying the problem was “at your end”.
This weekend a senior immigration judge dismissed as “bluster” claims by Phil Woolas, the Home Officer minister, that the system for checking student visas had been recently tightened up and was “one of the best in the world”.
The judge pointed to the six-month closure, on security grounds, of the main visa office at the British high commission in Islamabad, which meant that cases were being channelled through an outpost in Abu Dhabi, 1,300 miles away. He said that at 50% of the appeals, by those on student visas refused entry to Britain, there was no Home Office representation. In many cases the only documentation produced as evidence was that provided by the appellant, “which can often be forged or inadequate”, said the judge.
His comments were echoed by John Tincey, chairman of the Immigration Service Union which represents border staff, who said that the proposed introduction of the e-borders system involving automated checks on visitors was fraught with danger.
“Foreign nationals could be allowed into Britain without being interviewed by an immigration officer,” he said.
“There is real danger that our immigration controls will be able to catch only those who are already known to the authorities and will be helpless to detect first-time terrorists and illegal immigrants.”
Chris Grayling, the shadow home secretary, said: “This is a completely shambolic system.”
THE arguments about the immigration system will continue for some time but this weekend the police priority was the continuing search of 10 properties in Manchester and Liverpool.
Yesterday police released an 18-year-old, the youngest of the suspects, into the custody of the UK Border Agency. They have 28 days to hold the 11 other men, who are aged between 22 and 41, before either charging them or releasing them.
The fate of Operation Pathway will hinge on whether they can gather enough evidence from the interviews and seized property for prosecutors to press charges.
Rauf’s plans for Europe-wide attacks leave intelligence agencies rushing to locate and defuse a group of ticking timebombs. Whether he is dead or alive, those ticking bombs are his real legacy.
Additional reporting: Kevin Dowling, Philip Cardy, Daud Khattak in Peshawar
Filed under
drones,
Easter,
MI5,
Operation Pathway,
Rashid Rauf
by Winter Patriot
on Tuesday, April 14, 2009
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The Times : Pakistani 'terror plot suspects' to be deported rather than charged
Monday, April 13, 2009
Pakistani 'terror plot suspects' to be deported rather than charged
Sean O’Neill, Zahid Hussain and Michael Evans | From The Times | April 13, 2009
Most of the Pakistani men arrested last week in an anti-terrorist operation will be deported rather than charged, senior counter-terrorism sources told The Times last night.
Officials in London and Islamabad said that Britain had begun seeking assurances about how the men would be treated if they were returned to Pakistan. “The British wanted to be reassured that if some of these men were deported they would not face torture,” an informed source in Pakistan said.
One of the 12 men detained, an 18-year-old, has been freed from anti-terrorist detention and is in the custody of immigration officials.
Investigators are concerned that they have not found any firm evidence linking the men to terrorist attack plans. A source close to the inquiry said: “There is already talk of coming up empty-handed and there is terrible infighting between the different forces involved.”
Operation Pathway, the codename for the inquiry, has already led to the resignation of Britain’s most senior anti-terrorist officer, Bob Quick, after he accidentally revealed details of the arrest plans to photographers in Downing Street. If it results in deportations rather than charges, it will also embarrass the Prime Minister, who said that the police were dealing with “a very big terrorist plot” and had criticised Pakistan for not doing more to tackle Islamist terrorism.
The latest discussions between London and Islamabad were disclosed as news emerged from Pakistan that its anti-terrorist agencies had been holding a British convert to Islam for two weeks. James McLintock, 44, was detained in Peshawar, from where many of the men arrested in Britain come, and is being questioned about helping British Muslim militants to make contacts in Pakistan.
Pakistani and British officials said that the arrest of Mr McLintock, from Dundee, was not linked to the continuing terrorism investigation in Britain. The last time he came to the attention of the British authorities, however, was in late 2003 when he was questioned by anti-terrorist police in Manchester, the city at the heart of the plot allegations.
The family of a man studying at Liverpool John Moores University said they believed that their son had been arrested and appealed for his release. Relatives of Mohammad Ramzan, from Dera in Pakistan, said that they had been unable to contact him since last week. Haji Hazrat Ali, his father, told Associated Press that Mr Ramzan, 25, travelled to Britain in 2006 and was studying for an MBA. Mr Ali said: “He is a very humble, gentle boy and always concentrates on his studies. I firmly believe he simply cannot be involved in any negative activity.”
The operation in Britain has been running covertly for several weeks and went public last Wednesday, within hours of Mr Quick’s blunder, with dramatic daylight raids in Manchester, Liverpool and Clitheroe, Lancashire. The remaining 11 detainees, 10 of whom are believed to be Pakistani nationals visiting Britain on student visas, are being questioned at police stations across the North of England.
Detectives have been granted a further seven days to detain the suspects, who range in age from 22 to 41. They can be questioned for a maximum of 28 days before they have to be charged or released.
The investigation is a joint operation between the North-West Counter-terrorism Unit, Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command and MI5, and involved Merseyside and Lancashire constabularies. The involvement of so many forces is said to have led to infighting and confusion over the command and direction of the inquiry.
Sean O’Neill, Zahid Hussain and Michael Evans | From The Times | April 13, 2009
Most of the Pakistani men arrested last week in an anti-terrorist operation will be deported rather than charged, senior counter-terrorism sources told The Times last night.
Officials in London and Islamabad said that Britain had begun seeking assurances about how the men would be treated if they were returned to Pakistan. “The British wanted to be reassured that if some of these men were deported they would not face torture,” an informed source in Pakistan said.
One of the 12 men detained, an 18-year-old, has been freed from anti-terrorist detention and is in the custody of immigration officials.
Investigators are concerned that they have not found any firm evidence linking the men to terrorist attack plans. A source close to the inquiry said: “There is already talk of coming up empty-handed and there is terrible infighting between the different forces involved.”
Operation Pathway, the codename for the inquiry, has already led to the resignation of Britain’s most senior anti-terrorist officer, Bob Quick, after he accidentally revealed details of the arrest plans to photographers in Downing Street. If it results in deportations rather than charges, it will also embarrass the Prime Minister, who said that the police were dealing with “a very big terrorist plot” and had criticised Pakistan for not doing more to tackle Islamist terrorism.
The latest discussions between London and Islamabad were disclosed as news emerged from Pakistan that its anti-terrorist agencies had been holding a British convert to Islam for two weeks. James McLintock, 44, was detained in Peshawar, from where many of the men arrested in Britain come, and is being questioned about helping British Muslim militants to make contacts in Pakistan.
Pakistani and British officials said that the arrest of Mr McLintock, from Dundee, was not linked to the continuing terrorism investigation in Britain. The last time he came to the attention of the British authorities, however, was in late 2003 when he was questioned by anti-terrorist police in Manchester, the city at the heart of the plot allegations.
The family of a man studying at Liverpool John Moores University said they believed that their son had been arrested and appealed for his release. Relatives of Mohammad Ramzan, from Dera in Pakistan, said that they had been unable to contact him since last week. Haji Hazrat Ali, his father, told Associated Press that Mr Ramzan, 25, travelled to Britain in 2006 and was studying for an MBA. Mr Ali said: “He is a very humble, gentle boy and always concentrates on his studies. I firmly believe he simply cannot be involved in any negative activity.”
The operation in Britain has been running covertly for several weeks and went public last Wednesday, within hours of Mr Quick’s blunder, with dramatic daylight raids in Manchester, Liverpool and Clitheroe, Lancashire. The remaining 11 detainees, 10 of whom are believed to be Pakistani nationals visiting Britain on student visas, are being questioned at police stations across the North of England.
Detectives have been granted a further seven days to detain the suspects, who range in age from 22 to 41. They can be questioned for a maximum of 28 days before they have to be charged or released.
The investigation is a joint operation between the North-West Counter-terrorism Unit, Scotland Yard’s counter-terrorism command and MI5, and involved Merseyside and Lancashire constabularies. The involvement of so many forces is said to have led to infighting and confusion over the command and direction of the inquiry.
Filed under
Easter,
James McLintock,
MI5,
Operation Pathway,
Robert Quick
by Winter Patriot
on Monday, April 13, 2009
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Newsweek : A Dead Man Scheming?
Sunday, April 12, 2009
A Dead Man Scheming?
By Mark Hosenball | NEWSWEEK | Published Apr 11, 2009 | From the magazine issue dated Apr 20, 2009
It's a mystery what the head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism squad was thinking when he walked into the U.K. prime minister's office at 10 Downing Street carrying in plain view a "secret" report about Al Qaeda's attack planning. News photos of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick's careless move compromised a police crackdown, forcing U.K. officials to swoop in and arrest 12 suspects—all but one of them Pakistani nationals—in connection with an alleged Easter holiday plot to attack shopping centers and a nightclub in northern England. Quick resigned the next day. Another mystery remains unsolved: whether Rashid Rauf, a "high value" Qaeda target during the Bush administration and one of the Easter plot's alleged masterminds, is alive or dead. U.S. officials believe that Rauf was killed just before last Thanksgiving by a CIA-operated Predator drone strike in Pakistan's lawless North Waziristan. But according to one U.K. expert who's been briefed on the case, some British investigators— and Rauf's own family—think he may have survived. (A U.K. spokesperson had no comment on the matter.)
Rauf, a former British resident, was allegedly a central figure in an August 2006 plot by U.K.-based terrorists to blow up transatlantic airliners. The plot was broken up after authorities in Pakistan arrested Rauf. But in December 2007, he escaped from custody as he was being transferred back to prison from a court hearing in Islamabad. (He allegedly fled via a bathroom window after his guards allowed him to stop for a prayer break; U.S. officials suspected an "inside job.") The White House was delighted when the Predator operation supposedly took him out. But soon after the missile strike, which U.S. officials said killed five men, including Rauf, his Pakistani lawyer claimed he was still alive and dared authorities to produce the body—which they were apparently unable to do.
Three current and former U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter, told NEWSWEEK that U.S. agencies still believe Rauf was killed in the strike. "While it is not 100 percent confirmed," said one of the officials, "there are good reasons to believe Rashid Rauf is dead." In most Predator operations, officials in Washington have overhead video feeds that enable them to follow targets prior to a missile firing and to see bodies following the attack. But sometimes, another of the officials said, the evidence is more ambiguous. "If he is alive," the official added, "we should regard this guy as a serious threat to U.S. interests." And even if he's dead, U.S. and U.K. officials said it's possible the Easter plot was hatched prior to November 2008—meaning that Rauf's reach may extend beyond the grave.
© 2009
By Mark Hosenball | NEWSWEEK | Published Apr 11, 2009 | From the magazine issue dated Apr 20, 2009
It's a mystery what the head of Scotland Yard's anti-terrorism squad was thinking when he walked into the U.K. prime minister's office at 10 Downing Street carrying in plain view a "secret" report about Al Qaeda's attack planning. News photos of Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick's careless move compromised a police crackdown, forcing U.K. officials to swoop in and arrest 12 suspects—all but one of them Pakistani nationals—in connection with an alleged Easter holiday plot to attack shopping centers and a nightclub in northern England. Quick resigned the next day. Another mystery remains unsolved: whether Rashid Rauf, a "high value" Qaeda target during the Bush administration and one of the Easter plot's alleged masterminds, is alive or dead. U.S. officials believe that Rauf was killed just before last Thanksgiving by a CIA-operated Predator drone strike in Pakistan's lawless North Waziristan. But according to one U.K. expert who's been briefed on the case, some British investigators— and Rauf's own family—think he may have survived. (A U.K. spokesperson had no comment on the matter.)
Rauf, a former British resident, was allegedly a central figure in an August 2006 plot by U.K.-based terrorists to blow up transatlantic airliners. The plot was broken up after authorities in Pakistan arrested Rauf. But in December 2007, he escaped from custody as he was being transferred back to prison from a court hearing in Islamabad. (He allegedly fled via a bathroom window after his guards allowed him to stop for a prayer break; U.S. officials suspected an "inside job.") The White House was delighted when the Predator operation supposedly took him out. But soon after the missile strike, which U.S. officials said killed five men, including Rauf, his Pakistani lawyer claimed he was still alive and dared authorities to produce the body—which they were apparently unable to do.
Three current and former U.S. officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing a sensitive matter, told NEWSWEEK that U.S. agencies still believe Rauf was killed in the strike. "While it is not 100 percent confirmed," said one of the officials, "there are good reasons to believe Rashid Rauf is dead." In most Predator operations, officials in Washington have overhead video feeds that enable them to follow targets prior to a missile firing and to see bodies following the attack. But sometimes, another of the officials said, the evidence is more ambiguous. "If he is alive," the official added, "we should regard this guy as a serious threat to U.S. interests." And even if he's dead, U.S. and U.K. officials said it's possible the Easter plot was hatched prior to November 2008—meaning that Rauf's reach may extend beyond the grave.
© 2009
Filed under
drones,
Operation Pathway,
Rashid Rauf,
Robert Quick,
UK
by Winter Patriot
on Sunday, April 12, 2009
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