Radicalized Overseas and Coming Home: Mitchell Silber
http://online.wsj.com/articles/mitchell-silber-radicalized-overseas-and-coming-home-1404776894#printMode
How to combat the threat of domestic terrorism waged by Americans trained amid Middle Eastern conflict.
Mr. Silber is an executive managing director of K2 Intelligence, and former director of intelligence analysis for the New York Police Department.
‘I’ll see you in New York.” Those were Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi’s parting words to his U.S. captors in 2009 when he was handed over to the Iraqi government, which subsequently released him. Now, as the extremist group he leads, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, expands the territory it controls in Syria and Iraq, concerns have grown that he intends to launch attacks on U.S. soil. Local and federal counterterrorism officials would be wise to take this threat seriously.
Even before ISIS’s recent territorial gains, Jeh Johnson, the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, pointed out in his first policy address in February how individuals from North America and Europe were heading to war-torn Syria where “they will encounter radical, extremist influences” and “possibly return to their home countries with the intent to do harm.”
Like it or not, local law enforcement is on the front lines of this counterterrorism fight. While I was the director of intelligence analysis at the New York Police Department from 2007-12, we identified and thwarted a number of individuals from the greater metropolitan area who sought to train and fight in Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen and elsewhere. Our fear was that if we missed outbound aspiring jihadists they would return home to carry out attacks—like the ones that hit London when two waves of homegrown British suicide bombers were launched in July 2005, one of which killed 52 people.
The primary and most effective counterterrorist tool we had was collecting “humint” or human-derived intelligence. As opposed to electronic surveillance, this involved utilizing undercover officers and confidential informants, when certain legal thresholds were met, to penetrate budding terrorist conspiracies and to gather evidence of unlawful and violent intentions and plans, sometimes recording conversations. Humint was absolutely vital in detecting New Yorkers who aspired to join terrorist groups abroad and subsequently thwarting them.
The NYPD operates under the authority of a federal consent decree, known as the Handschu Guidelines, which specifically authorizes the department to utilize humint as an investigative technique when certain legal thresholds are met. This capability was often paired with federal antiterrorism statute 18 U.S. Code 2339B, which barred the provision of material support to proscribed terrorist groups.
When sufficient evidence of an individual’s intention to join a group like the Taliban or al Qaeda was collected, often by humint, it provided law enforcement and intelligence the ability to thwart plans to travel overseas from the U.S. Or, if the individual had already left this country, foreign authorities could at least be tipped off in advance of an aspiring jihadist’s arrival and deny him entry.
In 2008, for example, the NYPD identified a young Staten Island man who admired Osama bin Laden and American-born terrorist leader Anwar al-Awlaki and sought to travel to Pakistan to join the Pakistani Taliban. Fortunately, an NYPD undercover officer managed to penetrate the cluster of radicalized men around him and learned of his plans. This police work allowed U.S. intelligence agencies to alert Pakistani authorities.
As a result, 18-year-old Abdel Hameed Shehadeh would be denied entry to Pakistan and sent back to the U.S., where he was later arrested for making false statements related to the reasons he gave for his travel. After Pakistani officials denied him entry, Shehadeh had told investigators from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force that he had traveled to Pakistan to visit a university. But he later admitted that his true purpose was to wage violent jihad against U.S. forces; he was convicted in 2013 for lying about his attempt to join the Taliban and sentenced to 13 years in prison.
In June 2010, two men from New Jersey, 24-year-old Carlos Almonte and 20-year-old Mohamed Alessa, were seized at New York’s John F. Kennedy airport while trying to leave the country on separate flights for Cairo, en route to Somalia to join the Somalia-based al Qaeda affiliate, al-Shabaab. The men had stated that their goal was to train to kill Americans overseas—or when they returned. Once again, a NYPD undercover officer detected and penetrated their conspiracy, allowing the FBI and NYPD to work together to thwart their travel plans. In 2011, Almonte and Alessa pleaded guilty to conspiring to murder people outside the U.S. and were sentenced to 20 and 22 years in prison, respectively.
In January 2013, counterterrorism agents and NYPD officers intercepted 18-year-old Justin Kaliebe as he tried to board a flight to Oman at JFK airport on his way to Yemen. Prosecutors alleged that Kaliebe began plotting to join al Qaeda’s Yemen-based affiliate, al Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, in 2011. An undercover NYPD officer with whom Kaliebe was in contact was able to record their conversations and alert the authorities before Kaliebe attempted to leave for Yemen and jihad. He was arrested at the airport by members of the NYPD’s Intelligence Division and the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force and charged with attempting to provide material support to an al Qaeda affiliate, to which he pleaded guilty and was sentenced to 30 years in prison.
The problem is not only in New York. On May 2, FBI Director James Comey told reporters that the flow of American fighters into Syria and Iraq was “getting worse,” and the prospect that they’ll return home to strike the U.S. represents one of his biggest day-to-day concerns. European jihadists leaving Syria are also a threat. “If someone flows out of Syria,” he said, “they can flow in here very easily.”
We have seen the implications, most clearly on 9/11, of trying and failing to detect individuals trained and radicalized to launch terrorist attacks once they have arrived on U.S. soil. As for homegrown terrorists, it is not easy to detect when thoughts and intentions turn to action unless covert sources are in place to observe these sometimes subtle changes. As the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings showed, missing the signs can be deadly.
One can only hope that local and federal counterterrorism officials have learned from their successes and failures. Government at all levels must continue to invest in detecting and thwarting aspiring jihadists through robust and legally sanctioned humint capabilities at home.
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