CHAPTER 1
Shortly before lunchtime on July 30, 2010, an eighteen-year-old college student named Mohamed Osman Mohamud walked to a bookstore in downtown Portland, Oregon, to meet a terrorist.
Outside Borders Books, Mohamud phoned the man he knew only as Youssef to let him know he had arrived. The two men had never met, but Youssef instructed him to pretend they knew each other. Mohamud, wearing black pants, a white T-shirt, and a blue fleece vest, stood and waited. Moments later, he spotted a man, in maybe his thirties, crossing the street. In his dark slacks and white button-down shirt, Youssef didn’t look like an al-Qaeda recruiter. He could have been any businessman on his lunch break on that warm summer Friday.
The two men had traded encrypted emails for about a week and talked briefly on the phone. Now they were meeting face-to-face for the first time. They greeted each other in English and Arabic, wishing each other peace. Then they walked down the street side by side, making small talk. Mohamud told Youssef he had been born in Mogadishu, Somalia, and was now a student at Oregon State University.
Ten minutes after they shook hands, the two men walked into the Embassy Suites hotel. They found a private alcove off the main lobby and settled into a pair of high-back leather chairs. Youssef got right down to business.
“What have you been doing to be a good Muslim?” he asked.
Mohamud told him he had written articles and poems for a U.S.-based online magazine called Jihad Recollections. The publication, read worldwide, encouraged Muslims to rise up against America and the Western world. Mohamud wanted to wage jihad against those who did not follow the word of Islam. Jihad is a word used by Muslims to describe their daily struggle against sin. But Mohamud and those who produced Jihad Recollections used the word to describe holy war against people who rejected Allah (the Arabic word for God). They branded those disbelievers as infidels.
On July 30, 2010, Mohamed Mohamud and a man he thought was an al-Qaeda recruiter chatted privately in the lobby of the Embassy Suites by Hilton in downtown Portland, Oregon. Mohamud said he wanted to take part in a car bombing—perhaps in Washington, D.C. (FBI)
Mohamud posed a question.
“How did you get my email address?”
Youssef calmly explained that a religious council of brothers had passed his name to him. The council, Youssef said, had asked him to reach out to Mohamud and arrange a meeting. Then Youssef asked him a question.
“Can you travel overseas for the cause?”
Mohamud replied that he had once planned to wage jihad in America. But later he had read a Muslim religious text known as a hadith and had a dream. In this dream he had traveled to the mountains of Yemen, a country on the Arabian Peninsula, and trained as a soldier. The dream ended in glory, he said, when al-Qaeda sent him to Afghanistan to lead an army against the infidels.
“That’s a very good dream to have,” Youssef told him, but “you should probably keep that dream to yourself. We don’t know where the kufar—the infidels—are. So, we don’t want that to get out.”
“You know,” Mohamud said, “I have some trusted brothers I’d really like you to meet with.”
“No,” Youssef said, cutting him off. “You know, you shouldn’t tell anyone about this meeting. It’s for your safety. It’s for my safety. You know, the council only sent me to talk to you. It didn’t send me to talk to anyone else at this point.”
Youssef posed a new question to Mohamud.
“What do you want to do for the cause?”
“I could do anything,” he said.
“Look,” Youssef said. “I can’t put ideas in your mind. It’s got to come from your heart. It’s got to come from Allah. So you need to figure out what you want to do.”
Youssef offered Mohamud five ways to support the cause. The first was to pray five times a day. This is something that faithful Muslims do every day all over the world. Another way he could help his brothers and sisters overseas, Youssef said, was to earn a college degree, perhaps as an engineer or doctor. He also could raise money for the brothers waging war overseas. Yet another way was to go “operational,” meaning attack the infidels. Or, Youssef said, he could become a martyr—someone willing to die in such an attack.
Mohamud spoke right up. He wanted to be operational.
“Well,” Youssef said, “when you say ‘operational,’ what do you actually mean?”
Mohamud said he had heard stories of brothers putting explosives into cars, parking them somewhere, then setting them off remotely. That’s what he wanted to do.
Youssef said he might know a bomb expert who could help. He asked Mohamud if he had any targets in mind, and the young man suggested Washington, D.C.
“Well,” Youssef said, “have you ever been to Washington? Do you know how to get in and out of Washington? There’s a lot of security around all the monuments and all the places that you would want to target.”
Mohamud agreed. He said the towns he knew best were Portland, the biggest city in Oregon, and Corvallis, the town where he attended college.
“Let’s finish up this meeting,” Youssef said. He suggested that Mohamud think about what he wanted to do. They would have time to discuss his decision in three or four weeks when, if Allah willed it, they would meet again. The two men stood and walked to the hotel entrance, where they said goodbye.
Three hours later, Youssef received an email.
“I have [come] up with a decision about what you asked me to go over and think about,” Mohamud wrote. He suggested they talk about it when they met again. Attached to his email were stories he had written for Jihad Recollections. The articles were published under his pen name, Ibn al-Mubarak. He had borrowed the name from an Islamic scholar who had lived many centuries before.
Youssef replied two days later.
“Brother,” he wrote, “you are talented and [praise be to Allah] I’m very pleased to have met you. [If Allah wills it], we will see each other again very soon.” He asked Mohamud if he could count on him to buy a prepaid, disposable cell phone. Criminals often use such phones, known as “burners,” so police have a hard time tracing their calls. Youssef wrote that he hoped to get back to Portland soon. And he closed with thanks and his hope that Allah would reward Mohamud’s goodness.
Youssef thought Mohamud was probably all talk. Many of the Muslim extremists he came across talked a good game, but their hearts were not cold enough for murder. But Youssef’s job demanded that he find out for sure whether Mohamud was serious about carrying out a bombing, because Youssef wasn’t really an al-Qaeda terrorist. He was an American citizen born, like Mohamud, in a Muslim nation and raised in the United States.
Youssef was also an undercover FBI agent.
CHAPTER 2
FBI Special Agent Ryan A. Dwyer had listened to the conversation between Youssef and Mohamud through an earpiece. The thirty-six-year-old agent, a kind-faced man with a goatee and the lean build of a long-distance runner, sat in room 426 at the Embassy Suites. The L-shaped room was alive with the activities of other agents who also had listened in on the action three floors below.
Dwyer and another agent, both members of the FBI Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) team, would rescue Youssef if Mohamud became violent. They had carried their weapons into the hotel inside normal-looking luggage and now wore military-green body armor that read “FBI.” Dwyer carried a .45-caliber pistol and an M4 military carbine.
Since the deadly terrorist strikes of 9/11, Dwyer and hundreds of other FBI agents had kept tabs on Muslim extremists who spoke of holy war. Few posed any real threat to America. But every so often, the FBI identified and confronted a true believer. Someone like Mohamud. The young man from Beaverton, Oregon, had gone from writing and dreaming about jihad to telling a man he had just met that he wanted to set off a bomb.
“That’s pretty extreme,” Dwyer recalled. At first the agent figured Mohamud was just another poseur—all talk, and thankfully no action. But later, Dwyer would get the chance to look directly into the young man’s eyes. There, he would see a fanatic inspired by al-Qaeda—the terrorist group that had stirred Dwyer to join the FBI.
* * *
Dwyer graduated from college in 1996 with no clear view of his future. He joined the Marine Corps and served for four years during a time of peace. When Dwyer’s duty drew to a close, he applied to work with the FBI. He thought being an agent would set him at the pinnacle of public service.
Unfortunately, the FBI wasn’t hiring.
Dwyer took a job with a high-tech company in California’s Silicon Valley, a region in northern California that is the home of tech giants including Google, Apple, and Hewlett-Packard. He earned a good living, but he felt no passion for his work. He missed the Marine Corps. He missed serving his country.
He was getting ready for work on the second Tuesday in September in 2001 when he heard the first reports out of New York. Al-Qaeda terrorists had hijacked four airliners. They had flown two into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. The buildings were ablaze. Dozens of people who were trapped in the inferno above where the planes struck chose to leap to their deaths from windows rather than be burned to death. Nearly three thousand people died on that dreadful day.
In the days after 9/11, Dwyer was deeply moved by the story of Father Mychal Judge, a chaplain for the New York City Fire Department. Judge had raced to the Twin Towers to assist victims and pray over the bodies of the dead. After he dashed into the lobby of the North Tower, he was heard praying, “Jesus, please end this right now! God, please end this!” The chaplain was still beseeching God at 9:59 A.M., when he and many others were struck and killed by debris from the adjacent South Tower collapsing in a monstrous gray wall.
“It was the picture of him being carried out of the North Tower that got me,” Dwyer recalled. “I was raised Catholic and had seen the selfless dedication of chaplains in the military. Running into harm’s way and staying in that chaos in order to deliver last rites and pray for rescuers was an amazing act of courage from Father Mychal.”
The 9/11 attack left Dwyer furious and wanting to serve his country again. Al-Qaeda having brought the war to American soil pushed him to reapply for a job with the FBI. The bureau, which historically had served primarily as a police agency, would now focus on protecting national security, and it hired thousands of new employees.
One of them was Ryan Dwyer.
In July 2002, at age twenty-eight, Dwyer began basic training at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. In a way, it was a bit like going home. The academy and its training ground, some five hundred acres along the Potomac River, sits on a massive Marine Corps base. He had taken officer training at Quantico and been on the base many times.
After Dwyer completed his FBI training there, he spent his first seven years in the bureau’s San Francisco division. There, he sharpened his skills as an investigator. He helped convict a gangland killer named Anh The Duong, who had organized a deadly chain of robberies in California and Nevada from 1997 to 2001 in which he shot and killed four people. (Today he resides on California’s death row at San Quentin State Prison.)
In July 2009, the FBI reassigned Dwyer to its satellite office in Eugene, Oregon, a town about 110 miles south of Portland. His new boss, FBI supervisor Nancy Savage, put him on the team investigating Mohamud in early 2010. Dwyer had a good reputation, Savage recalled. He had worked well with prosecutors to put criminals such as Duong on trial. He was well organized, she said, and was good on the witness stand when called to testify against the accused at trial.
* * *
The FBI had always paid close attention to violent extremist groups. But after 9/11, agents took a special interest in the online talk of Islamic radicals. The bureau paid close attention to their words in hopes of stopping another such disaster.
Agents did not want to prevent people from speaking their minds. The U.S. Constitution protects Americans’ right to free speech. But the FBI sought out people who preached violent jihad or spoke of killing Americans at home or abroad.
Dwyer and many other FBI employees studied the backgrounds of those they thought might pose a threat to public safety. They pored over public records to find out where these potentially dangerous people lived, what kinds of vehicles they drove, what they did for a living, who they associated with, and whether they had ever been in trouble with the law. They read news articles, blogs, and social media sites to see what their subjects were saying in public. When agents identified people who seemed bent on acts of terrorism, they would take action. Using fake names, the agents posed as fellow extremists and reached out to their targets online.
How did they find these people?
Sometimes as they studied social media sites, agents uncovered terrorists behind some of the worrisome content. Other times, the FBI’s pool of informants reported possible extremists to agents. Now and again, ordinary people heeded the government’s post-9/11 slogan—“If you see something, say something”—and phoned the FBI.
Text copyright © 2020 by Bryan Denson
