Terrorist Hunter
cbsnews.com
Bob Simon talks to Sarah, an Iraqi Jew whose father was killed by Saddam Hussein. (CBS)
(CBS) For a soldier in the war on terror, she’s rather small and carries no weapon.
But armed with a computer, she’s helped the U.S. government inflict severe blows on terrorists where it often hurts them most – in the pocketbook.
Sarah, who wishes to remain anonymous because she investigates U.S. links to Muslim terrorists, spoke to Bob Simon on 60 Minutes.
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Sarah has provided information to the FBI, the Treasury Department, Customs, the INS, even the White House. She works out of a small office where her tool is the Internet and her targets are terrorist Web sites, like al Qaeda's.
“This is the Web site where most of the time Osama bin Laden, his spokesperson and others will release their official statements,” says Sarah.
One of her areas of expertise is just finding the al Qaeda Web sites, which change their Internet addresses everyday.
“So within minutes after they upload the site, we track them down and we give the address to the government,” says Sarah.
Then the U.S. government shuts down the site. It's a game of cat and mouse. She can't tell us how to play it for reasons of national security. She did show us more examples of Web pages she has located and saved in her files.
“This is just one thing that you can find on the Internet today. ‘The Mujahadeen Explosive Handbook,’” says Sarah. “It’s al Qaeda Web site.”
And there's also a poison manual.
For years, Sarah has studied how some U.S.-based charities fund Muslim terrorist groups. This group, the Benevolence International Foundation -- BIF -- was recently shut down by the U.S. government. Its official Web site featured orphans and widows who need help.
“What you see is that they really tried to show their activities as legitimate as possible,” says Sarah.
Who does she think they are really funding?
“Oh, this is al Qaeda,” she says.
To make her point, she showed us a video put out by BIF that she had downloaded from an al Qaeda Web site. It's in Arabic, not English. And the pictures designed to elicit contributions are of military training camps. No orphans or widows here.
When they want to raise money from Americans they show you the orphans. When they want to raise money from the Arabs they show you Mujahadeen.
Sarah admits she's obsessed with rooting out terrorists, and to understand why, she says, you have to know what happened to her as a child. She was born in Iraq to a wealthy Jewish family. Life was good, until Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath party came into power.
“Suddenly the Iraqi government accused my father spying for the Israeli government. And so Saddam Hussein sent people to arrest him,” says Sarah, who never saw her father again.
Her father had been taken before one Saddam's kangaroo courts along with eight other Jews. They were all convicted of espionage and the show trial was broadcast on Iraqi TV. But Sarah didn't know that at the time. She was on her way to Israel. Her mother had known it was time to get the family out. Years later, Sarah decided to find out what had happened to her father.
“I started researching the conditions, the history, what really happened at that time in Iraq. Till the day when I found that picture,” says Sarah. “The picture of him being hanged in Baghdad Central Square. Half a million Iraqis celebrating.”
You can hardly make out the picture now. It's from an old Israeli newspaper and it shows a group of men, or, rather, bodies, strung up. One of them is Sarah's father.
“And I realized that that was the end of my dreams. My father will never come back. I know that what happened to me in Iraq probably changed me, made me into the person I am today,” she says.
And that person is quite simply a terrorist hunter.
Sarah began her career by helping expose as a terrorist front a Texas based charity called the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development. She dressed as an observant Muslim woman, and went undercover to its meetings where she says they were soliciting contributions for Hamas, the Palestinian organization that specializes in suicide bombers. To establish her credentials, Sarah offered to sponsor the child of a bomber -- in the language of Hamas, a martyr.
“They said we don't have any right now,” says Sarah. “They are all taken. I insisted.”
“I said, ‘But you know, since I am going to do a good deed as a Muslim, I want to have it the best deed.’ And that there is nothing better than funding the son of a martyr. The next day they had one for me.”
That donation got Sarah on their mailing list. One publication she received said that the charity had been approved to get money from the U.S. government, through the USAID program, “which means that for every dollar you fundraise, the U.S. government doubles it,” says Sarah. “I just couldn't believe what I was reading.”
She said she contacted the White House, and it wasn’t long before the whole operation was stopped.
Why was it so easy for these so-called charities to operate in the United States?
“There's nothing better than going to save hungry orphans somewhere,” says Sarah. “You collect the money. You even collect the money from people who don't want to fund jihad. And that's what's happened with many of these charities.”
Sarah says that for years many American corporations, as part of matching funds programs, innocently and unknowingly donated money to Islamic charities that supported terrorism.
“How much can they use us? They know the West so good that they know all their weakness, all our weaknesses. And they use them all,” says Sarah. “I still freak out every time I see this.”
And she really loses her mind when sponsors of terrorism take advantage of America's basic freedoms. Freedom of speech, for example.
In April 2001, Sarah arranged for the videotaping of al-Qaeda sympathizers chanting their support for bin Laden in front of the United Nations. She told the U.S. government about the tape, but no one was interested. But that changed after 9/11. Suddenly, Sarah says, the FBI was interested not only in the tape but all of her work. And the government began cracking down on the charities she'd been investigating.
But Sarah was getting deeper underground. She donned her Muslim garb, hid a tape recorder underneath and went to mosques to record imams who were calling for jihad -- Holy War against Jews, against the United States.
What was it like going to a mosque undercover?
“I was scared,” says Sarah. But soon she began to enjoy the adrenaline rush.
“The question is if you want the real answer or not,” she says. “Yes, I love it!”
The mosques started Sarah on a trail that ended in her biggest investigation. The most radical mosques, she says were all owned by a single organization, whose founders now have offices in a Washington suburb. The address was 555 Grove Street, Herndon, Va.
“It's my biggest lead to the government,” says Sarah.
Because, Sarah discovered, this one building, 555 Grove housed nearly a hundred organizations owned by Muslims. Most of them owned and run by the same small group of people. Sarah was convinced she had stumbled upon the heart of a terrorist-financing ring.
Late one night, Sarah came to 555 with some colleagues, and collected the trash from the dumpsters.
“I found one important letter that actually gave me the lead to understand that the money comes from Saudi Arabia,” says Sarah.
Came from members of an extremely wealthy Saudi family, the al-Rajhi's, who Sarah claims, funded many of the organizations in 555 Grove.
“So we have here just a very simple chart of how the money flows from Saudi Arabia,” says Sarah.
But in fact, it's not simple at all. Sarah mapped out how, she says, the money flowed from Saudi Arabia to a web of charities, think tanks, and businesses at 555 Grove -- then to offshore banks and ultimately, she says, to terrorist groups. It's not simple because, Sarah says, it's not meant to be. It's designed to make it difficult to follow the money. And one especially inventive idea the Saudis came up with, according to Sarah, was chickens. They bought a chicken farm in Georgia.
“I see it as the best cover for money laundering,” says Sarah. “Because chicken is one the things that no one can really track it down. If you say in one year that you lost 10 million chickens, no one can prove it. They just died. You can't trace money with chickens.”
Does the money lost go down the line to Hamas, Islamic Jihad or al Qaeda?
“That's what we're trying to find out,” says Sarah.
With Sarah's help, U.S. officials had found out enough to get a Customs Department task force to raid 555 Grove and 28 other locations in March of 2002, carting away seven truckloads of evidence. It was one of the biggest terrorism related raids in U.S. history. And, yes, they raided the chicken farm, too.
We paid a visit to 555 Grove. Sarah says her efforts stopped the flow of funds from here to terrorists but the Muslims who work here say there never was a flow. And they point out that today, more than a year after the raids, no criminal charges have been brought against anyone. They are so incensed about the raids, that they kicked us out of their offices minutes after we got there.
A Muslim center across the street called the cops. And then, a young man who identified himself as Suhaib Jamal came by to express his outrage. His father office and home had been raided.
“You don't go around attacking innocent Americans, you know, just because they have a Muslim or an Arab background,” says Jamal. “And these are people, some of the most law abiding, you know, patriotic Americans you'll ever meet. The people who were raided. And it's such a shame.”
Did some of the money that was given to legitimate charities here wind up in the hands of the families of martyrs on the West Bank? Apparently, there is suspicion that it did.
“Whose suspicion though,” asks Jamal. “Who is tipping off the federal government? Who are these people in the shadows, in the backgrounds, you know, what is their agenda?”
“I'm not after Muslims, I'm after hunting terrorist Muslims. Muslim terrorists,” says Sarah. “I'm not after Islam, I'm after Islamic terrorism. It's just a small group of people that are trying to destroy our life. Are doing all this damage, and we must stop it.”
But does she think it can happen? That they can be stopped?
“I know I stopped them, I know I stopped them,” says Sarah.
She stopped them for a day, but she says, “I'm only one person. Give me the credit.” |
