Today, Explained - Operation Flex

Episode Date: December 14, 2021

A bodybuilder posing as a Muslim convert was welcomed into a California mosque. When he showed signs of extremism, members reported him to the FBI, only to learn that he was their informant. Now, their story is before the Supreme Court. Today’s show was produced by Haleema Shah, edited by Matt Collette, engineered by Cristian Ayala and Paul Mounsey, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and Will Reid and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit Superstore.ca to get started. We will hear argument first this morning in case 2828, the Federal Bureau of Investigation versus FASAGA. Mr. Needler. Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the court. The state secrets privilege is firmly grounded in the Constitution and the common law and is critical to safeguarding the national security. The Supreme Court of the United States is trying to decide whether a case involving

Muslims who were spied on by the FBI can move forward. At issue is whether the government can have the case dismissed without actually showing any of its top secret evidence to a court. Now, that might sound a little wonky, but trust me when I tell you that the case is absolutely bananas. It involves an FBI informant who was planted in a mosque to suss out terror plots and then tried to spin up a terror plot of his own. Sam Black reported on it for This American Life. The story starts in Irvine, California in the summer of 2006.

A very large and athletic man showed up to a mosque in Irvine, California in the summer of 2006, a very large and athletic man showed up to a mosque in Irvine, California for the first time and introduced himself as someone who wanted to convert to Islam and eventually stood in front of the congregation at the mosque and converted. And his interactions with that community over the next several years

would have huge repercussions for the community, would end up in he himself being reported to the FBI as a terrorist, would end up in the arrest of one man, and ultimately leads us to the situation today where this case has made its way to the Supreme Court. The man who showed up at the mosque is named Craig Monta. So Craig Monta, he looks like a linebacker for a football team. At the time, he spent all of his time at the gym. I'm 6'2", 260 pounds. It's not fat. It's lean body mass. I bench 500 pounds.

I have 21 and a half inch arms. Craig started off life as a petty criminal. He used to rob drug dealers for a living, in his words. This led him into a situation where he had a lot of conversations with law enforcement, and he ended up being recruited as an informant by the FBI. Now, he says he participated in numerous sting operations over the course of his career. When I interviewed Craig in 2012, he told me about all of these different aliases he had for different operations.

Italian drug dealer Vincent Donato, a Russian hitman by the name of Ivan Chernyanko, Colombian drug dealer Pedro Hernandez, a Bulgarian drug dealer by the name of Sergei Gerd. Also, I went by Polish names. One was Lek Vlesky. In my reporting on this story, we couldn't depend entirely on Craig's versions

of events because Craig is not always the most reliable narrator of his own story. So everything I reported in that story was checked against court documents and the FBI's own statements. And what's clear is that we know for a fact that the FBI created a mission for Craig, which it called Operation Flex. I was to lure Muslim males into the gym using my physique to see what actually is the real pulse of the Muslim community. They told me what I did was vital to America's national security and to do exactly what they said. Craig created a backstory for himself because he needed the story as to why

he was all of a sudden showing up to this mosque in Irvine, California, and announcing he wanted to convert to Islam. So his backstory was that he had Syrian ancestry, that he was rediscovering that ancestry, and that is why he had chosen to convert. And then upon converting, he needed a name, an Islamic name. And so Craig took the name Farouk al-Aziz. And so many of the people who Craig met over these years called him Farouk, and they knew him as Farouk. How does his entry into this new world go initially?

Do people take to him? Do they buy his identity? People were extremely welcoming to Craig. I spoke with people who really first reached out to him were a group of young men in their late 20s and early 30s, mostly Egyptian immigrants who were basically living in a bachelor pad. After Friday prayers, we'd hang out, have barbecues, play video games. I was engaged at the time, but I used to play more Xbox than spending time with my fiancée. It's like 80% Xbox and everything else comes second. FIFA soccer. That's the thing. We played a lot of FIFA. We still play a lot of FIFA. They one by one approached Farouk, aka Craig, and incorporate him into their community. Well, first of all, they make some Egyptian food, which is very good, delicious food. And we sit on the couch for about maybe a couple of hours, just have conversation.

And they would play their Xbox while we're having conversation in a very competitive way. Eventually, Craig starts to talk to these men about jihad and about politics and about what they think of the American role in the Middle East. And for these men, that's very strange because this, again, a guy who they thought was their gym buddy.

I'd say let's meet tomorrow afternoon at the gym. We'll work out together. I'll teach you some things on how to get your forearms shaped a little better, your biceps stronger, bigger. And at these workouts, I would ask very sensitive questions regarding Islam. For example... So what do you think about Osama bin Laden? So Craig starts doing absurd things.

I'm like, dude, you know, okay, you know, Osama bin Laden is a bad guy. He's a mother******, you know what I mean? All that we are suffering from right now is because of Osama bin Laden. Your question right now is because of Osama bin Laden. You know what I mean? All of these new laws that they start acting about, just searching, you know, and sticking their finger in your ***

is because of Osama bin Laden. So you tell him, hey, you know, Osama bin Laden is a bad guy. Was Craig wearing a mic when he was at the mosque? Was he wired? Yes, so it's very important to understand that the whole time Craig was at the mosque, at the houses of these different men he surveilled, in their cars. He was recording. He had a mic. He sometimes would make video recordings. He would attend their soccer games and take pictures of people's license plates, take sometimes videos to show who was talking to whom. He would do things like take objects from people's homes that he thought would have their DNA on them.

Like one of the men, Egyptian men, was a smoker and he would grab a cigarette butt and bring it back and give it to the FBI. Again, with no, according to him, no specific instructions of individuals to focus on, at least initially. He assembled hundreds of hours of recordings, which he would then pass on to the FBI. So where does this lead? I mean, how does Operation Flex continue?

The absurdity of Craig's mission and his approach to all of this becomes very, very serious all of a sudden one day. So Craig ended up becoming friends with a few married men who were a little more serious about their religion. One of them named Muhammad El-Sisi and another named Amin Niazi. He would record his interactions with them when he escalates his tactics. These are two men who he's driving to a mosque up in LA with. It's about a 45-minute drive, let's say. Niazi was sitting in the backseat, and Farouk was sitting in the passenger, and I was driving. And over the course of that drive, he starts talking to them about the political situation

in the Middle East, how as a Muslim, he feels his and their people are under attack by the US government, and that they need to do something about it. Little by little, starts amping up his rhetoric, and eventually... I say we should carry out a terrorist attack in this country. Because I'm tired of just staying around doing nothing. I've got access to weapons. I know how to do things. We should bomb something.

Silence was out there in the car. I didn't say a word until we arrived to the mosque. I refused to talk at all. The first thing that came into my mind that I thought that he's a straight shot terrorist. And at that point, you know, I felt kind of scared from him. He scared me. This is the FBI's informant who was sent in to infiltrate a mosque proposing a terrorist plot. Yes. We now know that this kind of thing is not that rare in many cases the fbi has had a vast network of informants in the muslim community as part of its domestic war on terror in dozens of

cases there were informants who proposed terrorist plots to the men that they were surveilling what happens with craig is very unique because he has completely misjudged the people he's targeting and as soon as he brings up that plot muhammad and and ahmed are horrified they don't say another word for the rest of the car ride and as soon as they get back home they talk to each other and they're like well there's only one thing to do we have to report this guy to the fbi he's clearly a terrorist the way this actually goes down is that they go to a man named Husam Alush, who's the head of the Council on American Islamic Relations, CARE, in Southern California. And Husam is the person who actually contacts the FBI bureau chief in Southern California, a man named Stephen Tidwell. And what's so odd about

that conversation, according to Husam, is that when he calls the FBI to tell them about this potential threat in their community, the reaction of the FBI is very strange. As soon as he says, this is a white convert who had come into our community, the response is, oh, that's what he said. Oh, okay. Thank you, Hossam. That's great information. And we'll let you know what happens. He said, wait, wait, wait, don't you need his name? Because I had his name and I have his address because they knew where he lived. He said, well, you know, don't worry about it. You know, we work closely with Irvine PD and we'll take care of it from here. Don't worry about it.

What's going on there? Does the FBI know exactly who he's talking about? Yes, they may have known as soon as, immediately as that phone call, the person who was being reported as a terrorist was their informant, Craig Monta. So what happens next? I mean, Craig proposes a terrorist attack.

His erstwhile friends report him to the FBI. What do they do? So this is where the FBI backed off, admit sort of their mission had gone totally awry. But instead, they used the opportunity to further question people in this community. Amin Niazi was one of the men who was in the car with Craig when Craig proposed the terror plot. Niazi was one of the men who reported Craig to the FBI as a terrorist. And Niazi was one of the men who the FBI then went around and interviewed in the wake of that report and asked him many questions, many of those questions unrelated to Craig. And why was the FBI so interested in this one guy, Ahmed Niasi? Ahmed Niasi is an immigrant from Afghanistan. At a certain point, Craig's FBI handlers became focused on Niasi as a potential target. And it seems that the reason for this is because

one of Niasi's sisters was married to a man who had been a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan. And Niazi himself had lived in the U.S. for many years, had no direct ties to any militant group or any evidence that he himself was violent or criminal in any way. But because of this tangential relationship, the FBI asked Craig to focus on Niazi. And ultimately, when the FBI went around asking questions about Craig, they used that as an opportunity to get Niazi on the record, talking about his immigration history, talking about his family, and more generally, just talking about his life. And not long after that interview, he was approached by an FBI agent who told Niazi

that he had lied to them in his interview. They accused him of a few things. One, not disclosing two trips he had taken to Pakistan. Two, not disclosing that his sister had been married to someone who was affiliated with Osama bin Laden. Lastly, he was charged with using inconsistent versions of his full name. So what seems clear in retrospect is that the FBI was trying to use small infractions that Niazi may have committed, like immigration violations, to tell him, we can ruin your life over this, but if you cooperate with us, we won't. And what cooperation means is that we're going to turn you into a more effective version of Craig Montaigne. We're going to turn you into someone who actually can help us surveil this

community. Does that work? Does Niazi become an informant? Niazi declined to talk to me for this story because his life had really been completely disrupted by this experience. He did release a statement to me where he talked about how the FBI had ruined his life. But what happens is that Amin Yazzie refuses to go along with it. He says, I'm the one who reported the terrorist to you. What are you talking about? I don't need to work for the FBI and surveil my friends and family in this community. And a year later or less, his home is raided. They take his computers, they take many documents, and they ultimately arrest him and charge him with a series of minor immigration violations. The government ends up dropping all of the charges. And it's not clear why, but they must have realized they didn't actually have much of

a case. So what do they do to Craig? Craig? Or should I say, what do they do with Craig? Craig effectively has to lay low during this time because he's been outed. He's useless to them. At the same time that Craig was surveilling this community and being employed, being paid a lot of money by the FBI, he was also engaged in kind of a scheme to sell human growth hormone to some women who he had also met at the gym. He ends up being prosecuted for this. And without going into the whole story,

basically, Craig says this was another FBI sting operation he had been asked to do. And when he became useless to the FBI because he got reported by these men, that they threw him under the bus and they effectively arrested him for something he was being asked to do as an informant. Craig, in many ways, ends up on the sidelines

of the heart of this story as soon as he becomes useless to the FBI. Does Craig face any consequences for spying on this community, for engineering a fake terrorist plot? Craig himself never faces consequences for his behavior in the Muslim community. Craig has since apologized to many of the men who he surveilled. I definitely appreciate the fact that he called, right, and that he apologized for it. But the damage is done. I, you know, I don't know what to do. I really don't.

I now have a fear that I'm being monitored all the time. I don't know how you can change that. Neither Craig nor the FBI has been held accountable for Operation Flex and its many failures. Muslims in Southern California are trying to hold the FBI accountable with the help of the ACLU and, plot twist, Craig Monta himself. That's in a minute on Today Explained. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Thank you. share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura Frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura Frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10

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As you heard, Operation Flex started in 2006 and ended about 18 months later. But as Operation Flex started winding down, two things went very, very wrong. The first was a big problem for the FBI. Craig is on orders from the FBI, kind of speaking to Muslims in Southern California, you know, talking to them about more extremist ideas and even getting involved in violence or terrorist plots. And that became so concerning to one mosque that they reported him to the FBI as a possible security threat

and also filed a restraining order. The second was a problem for Craig. Craig got involved in a plot where he told two women that if they fronted him money, he would be able to purchase human growth hormone, resell it, and then they would profit and he would provide the money back.

And of course, Craig took the money and then never provided it back. And the local police arrested never provided it back. And the local police arrested him for this scam. Craig alleges that the FBI told him to plead guilty and they'll take care of it. And so he did that. And the FBI didn't take care of it. They let him go to jail and he spent time in prison and he gets out. And at that point, his relationship with the FBI doesn't exist. And so Craig at at that point, has a score to settle. And he decides to go public. Trevor Aronson has been covering the fallout from Operation Flex for The Intercept.

And so he calls journalists in Southern California, invites them to his home in Orange County, and holds this makeshift press conference in his living room where he basically says, I think it's very important that I come out as an informant working for the FBI Joint Terrorism Task Force. And the FBI is spying on Muslims simply because they are Muslims. When Craig went public with what had happened in Operation Flex, you know, this was the beginning of the time that journalists like me were trying to understand what the FBI was doing in investigating terrorism in the first decade after 9-11. No one denies that the bulky, bald Monte was an FBI informant. However, the FBI does deny that its informants target Muslim mosques, as Montaig alleges.

In the beginnings of my research, I flew to Southern California and met with him. And what's interesting about Craig, and I've gotten to know Craig now for over 10 years, we've been in regular touch since I first met him, I can say that just about everything Craig said was true, and just about everything Craig said benefited Craig. Craig Montaig went to court to get ammunition in a $10 million lawsuit against the FBI. And of course, among the people who see this press conference and read the news reports are lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union.

What our lawsuit alleges is that that kind of targeting of surveillance on the basis of religion violates the U.S. Constitution's protections for religious freedom. And they come up with this idea to say, hey, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Why don't we call up Craig Montae and see if he'll work with us? And Craig agreed. Craig submitted as part of the ACLU's litigation a sworn affidavit where he lays out exactly what he did and makes clear that his activity for the

FBI was based on targeting people solely for the fact that they were practicing their religion, solely for the fact that they were Muslim. So a guy who voluntarily becomes an FBI informant and then infiltrates a mosque in Southern California and actually proposes some terror plots to genuine Muslims, ends up suing the FBI for infiltrating a mosque in Southern California. Essentially. I mean, Craig isn't the one suing. He's basically a witness for the lawsuit. And so the lawsuit involves three plaintiffs, three named plaintiffs who were, you know, people that Craig specifically spied on. One, a man named Yasser Fazega,

who was the imam at the time of one of the larger mosques in Orange County. President Obama gave a speech this morning. And in the speech, he was going to be addressing the NSA. You know, they've been going around spying on people. And by people here, he was going to be addressing the NSA, you know, the being going around spying on people. And by people here, I mean Muslim people. And those three plaintiffs represent essentially the class of Muslims in Southern California who Craig spied on, which, you know, is a number doing is essentially acting as the witness, you know, the one who's saying, I did this for the government and here's what I did and here's why it's essentially

illegal. And what's interesting as well is that the government has acknowledged that Craig Monta did this. They've acknowledged that he was the informant. And so it's not a question of whether Craig Monta really was working for the FBI. It's a question of whether Craig Monta infilt was working for the FBI. It's a question of whether Craig Monta infiltrating Southern California Muslim communities was a violation of the civil rights

of these various Muslims he met. Okay, so how does this lawsuit go? They go to court and the government basically says, okay, okay, you know, this happened. Craig Monta was an FBI informant and he spied on these people. But it's not true that the reason he spied on them was because they're Muslim. We have other reasons to spy on these people. These were predicated investigation, which means that they had reason to believe that they were committing some sort of crime. But, you know, what the government says is, Judge, ACLU, we're going to tell you that

this was, you know, on the up and up, but we had predicated investigations. But we can't show you why, because this is all in documents that are under state secrets privilege, that if we show them to you, we're exposing the government to all sorts of national security threats, and we just can't do that. So take our word for it. This is all legal. We didn't spy on people because they're Muslim. You know, let's drop this case. And so the judge who initially hears the case agreed to that and said, OK, I trust the government. The government says they didn't do anything wrong. I'm going to drop this case. But that's not the end of it. That's when the ACLU then appeals the case

and the appellate court comes back and says, no, no, no, you can't just say this didn't happen without providing evidence and just expect us to drop the case. And what the appellate court suggested, and this is a process that has taken years, a decade in all, what the appellate court recommended was that under the FISA law, which is the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which allows prosecutors to provide in camera privately to a judge evidence that is relevant to cases, but if released, would present some sort of national security concern. This FISA procedure allows the government to go to the judge and say, here's the evidence. Only you can view it, and you can make a ruling based on what you're viewing here. And, you know, this has happened in cases, you know, throughout the country. And what the appellate court said was, why don't you

guys just do that? You know, if you have this document that shows that the activity of Craig Montaigne and the FBI was not illegal, then show it to a judge. You don't have to show it to the ACLU. Show it to a judge and let the judge decide whether this case can move forward or not. And really, that's the issue that's before the Supreme Court now. We will hear argument first this morning in case 2828, the Federal Bureau of Investigation versus Fasaga. You know, the Supreme Court isn't going to rule on whether the FBI and Craig Monta violated the civil rights of Muslims throughout Southern California. All they're going to rule on is whether the government

is allowed to assert state secrets privilege and just have this case go away, or if there's another protocol that needs to happen in order for a judge, for example, to review the evidence and decide at that point whether the case can go forward or not. So the Supreme Court held oral arguments in November. How was this question of whether the FBI can invoke the state secrets privilege received? My sense of the oral arguments was that the Supreme Court was highly skeptical of the government's position that, yeah, we didn't do this, but we can't show you why. In a world in which the national security state is growing larger every day, that's quite a power. At the same time, they weren't entirely comfortable with the appellate court's solution. This kind of information, depending on what it is,

is not the kind of information you want floating around, even in the White House, to people, much less floating around the country. And I'm wondering if they're going to try to come up with a kind of middle road that requires the government to somehow pass some sort of hurdle to show that the documents it says it has really do show it is not negligent and did not violate these people's civil rights, but at the same time doesn't go as far as what the appellate court had suggested. And if the Supreme Court goes further and rules against the government here? If the Supreme Court rules against the government, there's really two possibilities.

The government could choose to go with whatever solution the Supreme Court comes up with to show this evidence that it apparently has. However, if the government isn't comfortable with that, it can still say, no, no, no, we're not going to show you these documents, but we're just going to go for it with the litigation anyway and defend ourselves based on whatever evidence we have aside from these documents. And that's really what the ACLU is saying as well. They're saying, if you want to use these documents, you have to show them. If you don't want to use these documents, that's fine too. Argue on whatever your other evidence is. And if the Supreme Court does rule against the government and this case is actually litigated,

what would that mean for all these people who were surveilled? In the post-9-11 era, the FBI recruited more than 15,000 informants, an unprecedented number in its history. And many, if not most of those informants were assigned to Muslim communities to find would-be terrorists, to go into mosques and other areas where Muslims congregated. And the basis is largely believed that there was no criminal predicate, that the FBI was targeting these people simply because they are Muslim. If this case moves forward, the reason it is so significant is that it really would be a challenge to the legality, not only of what happened in Southern California, but what we've seen in the entire post-9-11 era and which continues today. That isn't necessarily going to stop as a result of this litigation, but I think it's going to allow us to kind of peel back the curtain and provide some level of accountability

to say to the government that, you know, you can't just target people based on their religious faith or their religious observances and do it without any sort of accountability. Trevor Aronson is a reporter at The Intercept and the author of The Terror Factory, Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism. Earlier in the show you heard from documentarian Sam Black. He reported on Operation Flex for This American Life back in 2012.

Thanks to This American Life for letting us use tape from their original story. It's called The Convert. You can find it at thisamericanlife.org. We reached out to Craig Montae for comment on our story today. Craig says, there's a quote, misconception that the Muslim community notified the FBI out of a patriotic duty while I was undercover during Operation Flex." Instead, Craig said, a member of Irvine's local police department had learned he was an informant identity to the Muslim community. As Craig sees it, Muslims in Irvine did not report him because they thought he was a terrorist, but because an officer told the community he was an informant. We also reached out to the FBI for comment, but they said they usually don't talk about pending litigation.

We can expect a decision from the Supreme Court in FBI vs. Fasega sometime in the new year. Our episode today was produced by Halima Shah, edited by Matthew Collette, fact checked by Laura Bullard and Will Reed, and engineered by Christian Ayala and Paul Mounsey. I'm Sean Ramos-Verm. This is Today Explained.