Undercover agent had to ‘shut down true feelings’
FBI operative co-authors book about infiltrating terror plot to derail Toronto-bound Via train
Days after befriending a suspected terrorist living in Quebec, an undercover agent from the United States’ Federal Bureau of Investigation used colourful language to describe the intense, loquacious and deeply religious young man.
“Better tell the Canadians they have a s--- storm on their hands,” the agent, known as Tamer Elnoury, recalls telling his colleagues in June 2012 while debriefing them about a burgeoning undercover operation.
“This f----- is for real and they can’t take their eyes off him.”
The young Tunisian student scaring Elnoury was Chiheb Esseghaier, three years later convicted of multiple terrorism-related offences, including conspiring to derail a Via Rail passenger train heading from New York to Toronto.
Esseghaier’s conviction, alongside that of his co-conspirator Raed Jaser, was clinched thanks to the highly orchestrated undercover operation that unfolded after Elnoury’s first encounter with Esseghaier.
That strategic meeting on a flight had been arranged to test out whether the University of Sherbrooke student was “a very bad man,” as suspected by FBI officials.
Arabic-speaking undercover agent won the trust of man later convicted for multiple terrorism-related offences
The FBI first noticed Esseghaier when he made contact with Al Qaeda operatives online, according to an account in American Radical, a new book co-authored by Elnoury.
Still an active undercover agent, Elnoury provides a behind-the-scenes account of how he came to be the key actor in the terrorism case that played out in a Toronto courtroom. The agent is among the few Arabicspeaking Muslim undercover agents working in the FBI’s covert counterterrorism unit, and Elnoury is a pseudonym to protect his identity.
Posing as a radical Muslim and a rich Egyptian-born real estate agent working in the U.S., Elnoury quickly gained the trust of Esseghaier then, later, Jaser.
For whole days during the duo’s trial, the jury heard audio surreptitiously recorded by Elnoury as Esseghaier and Jaser discussed terrorist attacks as punishment for Canada’s military actions in Muslim countries. That included the plot to derail a Via Rail train heading from the U.S. to Toronto.
“Many people, they will die,” Es- seghaier told Elnoury in a recorded conversation in 2012.
In a telephone interview from New York on Wednesday, his voice distorted to a baritone pitch, Elnoury said he resorted to his tactic of “flipping a switch” to control his response to murderous talk twisting his Muslim faith.
“When I take on this other persona I have to shut down my true feelings or else obviously it would seep in — my micro-expressions, my body language, my pure and total disgust would eventually just come out,” he said. “Does it wear on me? Absolutely. But the end always justifies the means.”
Throughout his testimony during the trial, extreme measures had to be taken to protect Elnoury’s identity. Reporters and the public had to be moved to another courtroom where an audio and video feed of the pro- ceedings was piped in, without depicting the witness. During the trial, he lived in a safe house overlooking Lake Ontario, he writes in the book.
After 10 days of deliberation, the jury found Esseghaier and Jaser guilty on a total of eight terror-related charges. They were sentenced to life in prison, with no chance of parole until 2023.
Both are appealing their convictions. In a notice of appeal filed this summer with Ontario’s top court, Esseghaier argues he was too mentally ill to make rational decisions throughout the trial, during which he regularly demanded to be tried according to the Qur’an.
He also alleges Elnoury incited him to plan the attack by feeding him money and meals. His parents, too, allege Elnoury played a central role in “changing” their son, telling the Star in an interview in their home in Tunisia that he was never an extremist.
Asked if he entrapped Esseghaier or anyone else, Elnoury said he would never become involved in a case where he and his colleagues did not have “plenty of evidence to suggest that they are a threat already.”
In Esseghaier’s case, Elnoury said there was a time when he deliberately tested Esseghaier by acting as if he was having second thoughts about killing women and children.
“He went on to scold me and went on to a 22-minute soliloquy to all the rationalizations and justifications, religiously and scientifically, why we were obliged to commit these atrocities. So he has no leg to stand on in that arena,” Elnoury said.
The FBI agent was also accused of entrapping Ahmed Abassi, a third, lesser-known man connected to the Via terror trial.
A Tunisian national like Esseghaier, Abassi became connected to the case after Esseghaier and Jaser had a falling out. Looking for another jihadist recruit, Elnoury and Esseghaier met up with Abassi shortly thereafter in Quebec City, where Abassi was a student. Elnoury quickly established Abassi was “the real deal,” he writes in the book.
On the same April 2013 day when Esseghaier and Jaser were arrested, Abassi was apprehended in New York, where he spent the next 17 months in jail.
But prosecutors later offered a plea deal dropping terrorism from the charges. Abassi pleaded guilty to minor immigration offences and was deported in 2014. Both Abassi and his lawyer, Sabrina Shroff, argued Elnoury entrapped Abassi.
“You can get yourself into some really serious trouble just thinking and talking about things when you have no intention of following them up with any act,” she told reporters, calling Abassi nothing more than “opinionated and stupid.”
But Elnoury says he has no doubt that Abassi was a serious threat to national security.
“We weren’t able to gauge his true intentions in time, before the case ran out,” Elnoury said.
Elnoury says he wrote the book now to offer an unusual opportunity to showcase a deep cover, international terrorism operation while shedding light on a complex topic.
“I have a very unique perspective on a socially relevant topic that’s talked about a lot but often misunderstood,” he said. “So, it’s a rare window into a world that most Americans and Canadians don’t know much about.”