The Daily - ‘I’m Part of Something That’s Really Evil’

Episode Date: September 9, 2021

This episode contains strong language.Terry Albury joined the F.B.I. just before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, drawn in by the bureau’s work fighting child exploitation. His role quickly changed after 9/11 however, and he subsequently spent over a decade working in counterterrorism.Around 2015, he began to deeply question his work. “This is not what I joined the F.B.I. to do,” he recalled thinking.His doubts about the bureau’s workings led him to leak classified information to journalists. Today, we hear his story.Guest: Janet Reitman, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: Here’s Janet Reitman’s profile of Mr. Albury, the first F.B.I. special agent since Robert Hanssen in 2001 to be convicted under the Espionage Act.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

Do you remember when you first reached out to journalists? Yeah, I would say it was January of 2016. I told them essentially this, greetings. I'm an FBI counterterrorism agent who spent over a decade in the fight. who spent over a decade in the site, have serious and legitimate concerns about their tactics in the Muslim community as it pertains to entrapment, baseless investigations, intimidation of prospective informants, and institutional policies that turn a blind eye to the daily denial

of the most basic freedoms we all hold dear. It is my sincere hope that sharing this information with you will help protect a lot of very vulnerable, fearful, threatened people. From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Twenty years ago, in the days after September 11th, the United States announced a wide-ranging and unprecedented war on terror. Today, Janet Reitman tells the story of Terry Albury, an FBI agent so disillusioned by that war that he was willing to leak classified documents and go to prison for doing it. It's Thursday, September 9th. Jen, tell me about the first time you met Terry Albury.

So it was in November of 2018. It was about five days or so before he went to prison. We'll put that there. And then we can just talk. And I met Terry in Berkeley very, very early in the morning. It was about five in the morning. So, and I'm going to take some notes as well. And so we sat in actually my hotel room

and spent five hours having a really in-depth interview. And what does it mean when the case is open for 10 years? Like, what does that mean when it goes? I'm really trying to be careful right now because... Can you... Yeah. Real quick, I just want to say something. Sure.

I remember he seemed quite nervous. Nervous how, do you think? So the thing is, FBI agents never talk to reporters. And to do that would break with this very sacred code. And for me as a reporter who's covered the war on terror for, you know, at least 15 years now, what he told me, it was breathtaking. And that five-hour conversation was actually the first of probably 25 or more that we would have over the next three years. It was not just like, I didn't have a romantic, idealized vision of the FBI.

It wasn't like my childhood dream to be an agent. I learned essentially his entire life story. He comes from a very progressive background. He grew up in Berkeley in the late 80s and the early 90s. And was very much part of sort of the social justice movement. You know, my mom exposing me to these things like the suffering of groups that were targeted by this country, by this government. His mom is an Ethiopian political refugee, and his dad is African American. And his uncle was a very prominent leader of the Black Panthers in the Oakland East Bay area. How did you decide that you wanted to join the FBI?

At what age did you make that decision and how? I think it happened in college. that decision and like how? I think it happened in college. I recall researching the programs that they had to prevent exploitation of youth, you know, things of that nature and being very inspired by that because I've loved being around children and helping them. So, you know. So Terry goes to college in the mid and late 1990s when the FBI was doing a really good job of going after sex traffickers and child pornographers and finding missing children. You know, I looked at the FBI sort of being like the protector in that regard, you know. In the spring of 2001, he applied to the FBI and he was hired very quickly in an entry-level position as what they call an investigative specialist. And he was waiting to be called back east to go to his training class on the morning of September 11th. Watching the news and just really being pained by such tragic loss of life on a grand scale, it made no sense.

And so 9-11 sort of solidified my position and desire to be a part of that, knowing that I could help ensure that another plane didn't find a building. It's cliche as that sounds. And for Terry and the entire FBI, everything changed in an instant. And how did it change the FBI? Prior to 9-11, throughout the 1990s, the FBI was chasing drug hempens and breaking up organized crime rings and looking for missing and exploited children. It was a law enforcement agency, and it solved crime. After September 11, the FBI pivoted to become an intelligence agency. This was a mandate essentially coming from Robert Mueller, who was the new FBI director, and Attorney General John Ashcroft,

who was, like everyone else in the Bush administration, deeply concerned that there were sleeper al-Qaeda cells all over the United States. At one point, by the end of 2002, the FBI was estimating that up to 5,000 sleepers were burrowed into the ethnic enclaves of cities and small communities all across our country. So the FBI took what they called the gloves-off approach, which meant that they now had the power given to them by Congress through the Patriot Act and other pieces of legislation to go into these communities and use almost whatever means necessary to dig up these potential suspected terrorists. There was often a great deal of talk about the enemy is Islam, just radicals.

The enemy is Islam, just radicals. So how does all of this change within the FBI affect Terry as an investigative specialist who went into this role thinking he was going to find pedophiles and child abusers? The primary focus was that you guys will be the foot soldiers in the war on terrorism, and you'll be our eyes and ears on the street watching suspected terrorists. So at the end of 2001, Terry winds up back home in the Bay Area, spending about half of his time sitting in his car and spying on Muslim targets. Half of his time sitting in his car and spying on Muslim targets. And you're following someone and you know everything about them from what time they go to work on Monday, where they go for lunch and what they do at 5.30 on their way home and their groceries.

They go to the mosque, you know, their associates are there. This is handing all of this information to the investigating case agents. And whatever they do with it after that is none of his concern. And he doesn't ask questions. And he quickly comes to the attention of these two very seasoned agents in the San Francisco division who seem to recognize that this is a kid who's very diligent, very good at his job, really smart, really quick study. And he also happens to be African-American. And at the time, and still, there are very few Black agents and investigative specialists in the FBI. So as a Black guy, he'll be able to go into mosques or into any environment where Muslims are going to be hanging out.

It was one of those always understandings, like, you know, even though I didn't have the authorities necessarily at that time to do undercover type work, I was well positioned as a person of color, as someone who could play the role to be in that position. Because at the time, the FBI is under the belief that anywhere that groups of Muslims are gathering, particularly in these kinds of environments, in Islamic schools and cultural centers, that this could be potentially terrorist hotbeds. Did you like it? I didn't dislike it, so I'll say that. I think, you know, in my desire to sort of, I don't know, how do I put this, but just

kind of play the role and be part of the team, so to speak. He was given all these great opportunities. These agents took him under their wing. They mentored him. They encouraged him to do this stuff because it would help his career. And they were correct. In 2005, he becomes an agent. And this is his dream.

And he is posted on the Joint Terrorism Task Force in San Jose. And he is now privy to the whole sort of 360 view of a counterterrorism case. When he was an investigative specialist, he saw it from a very narrow window. But now he sees what really goes into a counterterrorism case from all sides. And one of the things that he begins to see is that the information that he himself was providing as an investigative specialist

was fueling cases that may or may not have been necessarily valid or predicated on anything really factual or hard, but nonetheless were going on for months and years. And that was a revelation to him. What's an example of a case that's not made on very much that he encounters as a full agent? So...

When I was in San Jose and we had the Hezbollah initiative... In 2007, the San Jose office had an informant. He was a Lebanese Christian. He had been a longtime sort of source for that office. And he came to his handler and said, there is a Hezbollah cell in Silicon Valley, these engineers. And so this informant said, these guys are buying supplies and equipment that they're using to send to Hezbollah. So we opened 20 plus cases on people.

And so based on that, Terry is given a target. He spends about a year investigating this guy, going through his garbage, following him around, taking notes of who they talk to, I mean, spying on them. But he concludes fairly quickly that he doesn't see anything. Here I am at three in the morning gathering this guy's garbage to put in the back of my car when I'm not going to find a receipt to Hezbollah, right? I'm not going to find the smoking gun. It's so clear. We've been sitting here doing all this, really applying our resources 24 resources 24 7 and there's nothing to be found

so why are we wasting our time and he tells his boss this yeah i mean to my boss and amongst my colleagues i mean like i don't see anything to factually back up this level of intrusiveness this is this is not okay. This is problematic. This is potentially illegal, right? You know that we have these investigations open on this entire group of men based on singular source reporting from a guy who is not even a Muslim.

He's a Lebanese Christian. We have the word of a single informant who may or may not have a political agenda. And it's not right under our guidelines to investigate somebody when there is no factual basis for the investigation. And he actually even pulls out the rule and reads it to his boss who tells him. He's like, well, you let me worry about the predication and sort of the policy concerns along those lines. You're way above your pay grade and just do your damn job, okay? I said, okay. You know what? My conscience is clear. I said what I had to say. And obviously it didn't resonate. So

I went forward and did my job. Huh. At this time, at the end of the Bush era, half the budget of the FBI is going to counterterrorism. And what he begins to understand is that the FBI is all about statistics. But it all makes sense because all that 11 happens and everyone's turned into a terrorism squad. And you've got to justify the personnel. And the way you justify the personnel is by initiating more cases, more informants, you know, more supervisors, more analysts. And so you can't pull it back

because then what do you tell Congress who gives you your budget every year? Will you solve the terrorism problem? It's no longer an issue. Take the money back. The FBI will never do that. They're not measuring success by prosecutions. They're measuring their success by open investigations.

And so there is this tremendous pressure to open counterterrorism investigations and to recruit informants and to, you know, meet these benchmarks, which shows that you are aggressively fighting the war on terror. And that in turn will justify their budget. Even though the FBI itself admitted in an internal memo that all of those sleeper cells that they identified at the beginning, there was really no evidence they ever existed. It's a Ponzi scheme that this whole national security apparatus is built on. Because we're going to perpetuate this mythology.

We're going to maintain this idea that the problem is much larger and comprehensive than anyone can understand. And so everyone just keeps putting their money into that pot. All of these investigations look good on the outside and appear that the FBI is doing a terrific job in hunting down or at least investigating terrorists. So what Terry is saying is, look, that's kind of bogus. And actually, I can tell you from working on a lot of these investigations, they're not based on very much. Honestly, yeah. I mean, my bosses, I think on some level, they knew the cases were bullshit. But if they confirmed that their jobs were bullshit, right, their squad was bullshit. And why would you kill the golden goose? We'll be right back.

So Janet, at this point, Terry is very much doubting the tactics that he and his colleagues at the FBI are using in the war on terror. So what does he do next? So Terry, by this point in his career, has been in the FBI since he was about 22. It's now about a decade later. And he's had, in many ways, a great career in California, despite all of his misgivings. But he wants a change. He's married and has a little girl now. And he's really wanting to settle down somewhere and sort of put down roots. And so in 2012, he and his family decide to move to Minneapolis, to Minnesota, where he will be an agent with the Minneapolis field office. And what happens once Terry gets there? Well, so as he starts, the first thing he notices is that he's pretty much the only Black person in the office.

And the Terrorism Task Force is focused primarily on this large Somali immigrant community, Somali Muslims. And what Terry finds is that... They come back to the office and just say the most vile things to each other, just say the most vile things to each other, to their squad mates about Somalis, about Muslims, about, you know, these radical ragheads and, you know, these Somalis living on welfare, you know, like milking the system. You know, they come to our country and have a balls. His office is just filled with this profound Islamophobia towards the Somali immigrant community.

profound Islamophobia towards the Somali immigrant community. There's a secretary who, you know, on one of his very first days says, She says to me very openly, we should just blow up the Somali towers. You know what I think we should do with the Somalis? We should just bomb their housing project. I just kind of like, I looked at her like, no, you don't really mean that. It's like, yeah, yeah, they don't do anything. They're a drain on society.

They smell. I mean, just all the things that you would expect to hear. And, you know, everybody else around him kind of rolls their eyes and chuckled. I remember hearing all this, just this vitriol and being just so angry. I just wanted to scream, right? Like, you jackasses, right? Like, who the hell do you think you are?

Of course, you know, I just, Mr., you know, FBI. I just bite my tongue and I don't show my cards and I'm being silent and I start breathing. And what Terry recognizes is that this is way beyond the kind of typical Islamophobia that you've gotten used to within law enforcement circles. The worst thing that you can be in this nation is black, Muslim, today, immigrant. And in Minnesota, you've got that. They're Somalis. It's different with're Somalis.

It's different with the Somalis because they're Black. The moment when you start engaging in these type of, just this collective hatred, that's a problem. And it translates into action. It translates into... And he really thinks that this is impacting their investigations where there's a kind of almost a presumption that these guys are guilty, whether the evidence proves it or not. I remember knocking on this woman's door and she couldn't have been more than 50 and

she barely opens the door and I'm asking her questions about what she knows tell him here I know your name I know this about you and I had done my research and she's petrified I mean she is literally like shaking with fear she had done nothing wrong but I had the power and the ability to go to her home or save some and threaten her with my mere presence. And she knew that. And I knew that people from that. And what gets lost in all of this is that if you are the subject of one of these investigations, you know, even if these investigations wind up with nothing, this does not go away. It can impact you for your whole life. Now you're sort of on this watch list, you know, this naughty list. And it's going to be difficult for you. You won't be able to travel

at three airports the same. You know, you won't be able to go and make certain financial transactions it's just this great power that is able to be weaponized against people with really no true accountability and no expectation that well why are you guys doing that? Is it justifiable? Is it legal? So eventually, Terry decides the only thing he can do is to use all the facts at his disposal to try to shut these cases down. He becomes quite good at this, actually. He kind of throws himself into studying every single rule in the rulebook and then writing up these reports, citing the FBI's rules around various aspects of an investigation to kind of show why it should be closed. He's closing cases, but there is so much pushback. The agents don't want to close them down. The bosses don't seem to want to close them down. It's very frustrating. It was hard. It was very, very hard burden. I was, you know, like the old cunning Greek and story of, uh, since the first, you know, pushing that boulder,

you know what I mean? Like I, that was me, you know, I don't know if I was really pushing it. So it's starting to feel like he's reaching a breaking point because everything he's seeing in his mind, it's excessive, it's cruel, it's racist, and he can't fix it. Right. And compounding all of that, it's 2015, and we're just coming off of a year punctuated by police violence against Black men. And it's created a crisis within the law enforcement community. And Terry has already been feeling as if his role is to terrorize non-white members of the community. And all of this is really beginning to swirl around him and weigh on him and question, what's his job? What's his role? Is he a good guy? I came home one day and looked in the mirror. I'm like, who are you? This is not what I joined

the FBI to do. I'm not proud of myself. I'm not doing something that's honorable. I'm not proud of myself. I'm not doing something that's honorable. And I'm part of something that's really evil. And I can't be a part of that anymore. So what does he do? So Terry had been very, very impacted over the years by the stories of Chelsea Manning and particularly of Edward

Snowden. And Snowden's leaks to the Washington Post and The Guardian had led to the creation of a new site, a website, investigative website called The Intercept. And one day he goes on The Intercept's site and he follows the instructions for how to send them a message securely. And he does. And this begins a conversation. I sort of started to frame what I wanted them to know, which was, again, the source program, the counterterrorism program itself, and then just the overall policy that governed all that. Is he nervous about having these conversations?

Very. I was freaked the hell out. I was like, holy crap, I'm really doing this, you know? And I knew at that point, like I crossed the line, you know like, there was, there really was no going back at that point. And so what comes of all this? What does his contact with The Intercept accomplish? So in 2017, The Intercept published a really big series of articles detailing various techniques the FBI used to recruit informants, to spy on journalists, to spy on members of specific Islamic groups like Yemeni students. It was essentially the architecture of the whole post-9-11 FBI.

And what was the reaction, the public reaction, to this reporting? Not much. Not much. There was no collective outrage. And Terry was really surprised by this because, you know, he was hoping that this would spur a conversation and ideally spur change, you know, in the FBI. I mean, he thought that agents and officials would be hauled in front of Congress to answer questions and put under the microscope and nothing, none of that happened. The world just kind of moved on.

You know, what got out, got out, you know, and I have to be okay with that. I wish more got out. I wish, you know, more questions were raised through these disclosures, but they weren't. So that's just where it is. through these disclosures, but they weren't, so that's just where it is. What about the reaction within the FBI? They were tremendously freaked out that this was going on. What I've been told is that there was a form of messaging that went out to the FBI telling everybody to not read this article, and there was a big investigation about what happened there.

An effort to understand how all this information got leaked. How did they get all this information? Yeah, who gave it to them? And how long did it take the FBI to figure out that Terry disclosed documents? So it took about a year and a half. disclosed documents. So it took about a year and a half. There were surveillance cameras in his office that captured some of what he was doing,

which was taking some photographs of his computer screen and loading that seemingly onto a memory card. And they caught him in some ways in the act. I was in such a weird place where it was just like, you're trying to balance all of these identities and personalities and it just became very difficult. And, you know, my tradecraft, obviously, you know, I'm not a trained spy, right? Like I didn't, I didn't come in here with a plan to like sort of do this. It was just like, well, this bothers me. And here's corroboration of that. Well, this bothers me. Here's another one, you know. So he's ultimately charged under the Espionage Act. And in April of 2018, he pled guilty to two counts of leaking

documents. And he was sentenced to four years. And I met him just a few days before he was to report to prison in November. And then he was officially released on a kind of probationary status in April of 2021. Jenna, it strikes me that despite the fact that Terry Albury was very much inspired by the Edward Snowdens and the Chelsea Mannings of the world, what he did did not have the same impact as what they did. He took the same risks, and he paid a very significant price, but it didn't draw the kind of attention and change reform that those leaks did. Does that feel like a fair characterization? Yeah, and why is that, right? I think one reason has to do with who this impacted, who have been the targets of this behavior. It has been non-white, immigrant, Muslim Americans for the most part.

It's been disempowered groups of people. And so there has been a bit of a collective shrug. It's a shrug that did not happen when it came to NSA spying on all of us, but it is a shrug when it comes to Muslims who have been, let's not forget, suspect for 20 years. Most of us who are around and conscious beings on 9-11 were in one way or another encouraged in an almost sort of a Pavlovian way to suspect Muslims, to see a Muslim person getting on your airplane and to feel a little bit of a thing, a thing, a little, a little fear, just a little tiny fear, that reaction, that little doubt of like, well, maybe you never know, you know, that's why, that's why.

It seems like what you're saying is that at the end of the day, a lot of Americans are ultimately comfortable or comfortable enough with the approach by law enforcement, by the FBI, that Terry was so horrified with and risked his entire career to try to reveal, even though it may not be all that effective. Because they're afraid. Yeah. all that effective because they're afraid. Yeah. Because 9-11 was so traumatic that people made peace with the idea that the response was going to be what it has been, which is unfair, cruel. I mean, fear has been the subtext

of two decades in American life. Some of that fear is completely justified, and some of that fear is unjustified. And the unjustified fear has never been addressed and rectified. And it's just been encouraged. And so, you know, when you have a friendly FBI guy that says to you, look, we can't tell you what we're doing, but you just have to trust us. We're taking care of you. We've prevented terrorism. You have no idea.

You have no idea what could have happened had we not stopped it. But we can't tell you any details. And you're supposed to trust them. And we do trust them. And what Terry is saying is don't trust them. They're lying. They're lying. They're lying. I lied.

I'm a liar. I'm one of the liars. I'm now telling you the truth. Those lies ate me up for 17 years. I went to prison because I couldn't live with the lies. How much of what Terry diagnoses wrong within the FBI still occurs. The policies that were put in place at the end of the Bush administration that expanded the FBI's powers, investigative powers, they remain. They remain the guidelines.

I mean, Muslims are still being harassed in various ways. being harassed in various ways. They were very aggressive investigating Black Lives Matter activists and other sort of anti-police violence activists during the Black Lives Matter protests last year. You know, the Bureau has turned its attention in some ways to white supremacists. So that kind of mass confusion

and hysteria and paranoia and the belief that there were sleeper cells hiding, you know hiding in every city, that's over. But the more enduring policies of how do we recruit informants, what kinds of information can we access on a person, how invasive can we get if we believe somebody is guilty of something or may in the future even be guilty of something. Those remain. That remains.

So what is Terry's life like now? Terry is kind of in a transition point. His former career as an FBI agent is over. for my professional actions. His former career as an FBI agent is over. You know, he did his time in prison, and now he's going to embark on a new life, and he's trying to figure out what that is and kind of put this chapter of his life to bed. Does he have any doubts about what he did?

Does he have any regrets? Especially given the lack of impact? The regrets, I believe, really have to do with his family. It took a really big toll on his family. But in terms of the actions, I don't think he has any regrets. I really don't. Ultimately, I'm at peace with how things played out, you know, and even being in prison, like, I mean, yeah, it was a challenge, and, you know, and even being in prison, like I, I mean, yeah, it was a challenge

and, you know, I lost my career and I, my family had to do without me for a couple of years. But, you know, in the truest sense of civil disobedience, which is what this was, you know, I see the value and nothing and no one can take that away from me, you know. the value and nothing and no one can take that away from me you know ultimately what it was was me finally coming to terms with being who i should have always been and for that i'm grateful Well, Janet, thank you very much. We really appreciate it. Thank you so much. We'll be right back.

Here's what else you need to know today. In an urgent letter to Congress on Wednesday, the Treasury Secretary, Janet Yellen, warned that the United States was at risk of defaulting on its debt for the first time in the country's history because of spending on the pandemic. Yellen said that the U.S. was expected to run out of money next month and recommended immediate action by Congress. Look, let me just say this. I cannot believe the Republicans will let the country default. Let me just say this. I cannot believe the Republicans will let the country default. To avert a crisis, Democratic lawmakers have called for raising or suspending the debt ceiling.

But they have met with resistance from Republicans, who say Democrats must first scale back a plan to spend $3.5 trillion expanding the country's social safety net. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said he believes both parties will reach a deal. It has always been bipartisan to deal with the debt ceiling. When Trump was president, I believe the Democrats joined with him to raise it three times. Again, I cannot believe Republicans will let us default. Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Dan Powell. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansford of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you tomorrow.