The ‘third man’: Anatomy of an FBI sting operation
Ahmed Abassi has been watching closely from his parents’ home in Tunisia — following online through the dead of the night, as the trial of a fellow Tunisian and an alleged co- conspirator unfolds in Toronto, some 7,400 kilometres away. Abassi’s name was not mentioned during four weeks of testimony that detailed just how the would- be terrorists planned to sabotage a railway bridge or even trigger a volcano, to inflict maximum human damage.
He says he barely knew Chiheb Esseghaier, a fellow Tunisian scientist arrested in Montreal, and had never even met Raed Jaser, Esseghaier’s alleged Toronto- based partner.
But as the jury begins to delib- erate on the fate of the two co- accused, Abassi says he does know the Third Man — the driving force behind the plot — and despite Abassi’s dramatic takedown in New York on April 23, 2013, on the same day as Esseghaier and Jaser, and the 17 months he spent in jail, the Third Man is not him.
“They talk of this ‘ third person,’ ” Abassi says bitterly, in an interview via Skype. “( Prime Minister Stephen) Harper talks about Person Number Three. But it is me that is the victim, home after 17 months in jail. And where is the person who radicalized them?”
I was a student and they put me in jail. Seventeen months of my life.
From Quebec to Tunisia to New York then to jail. There is an alternative narrative to which the jury was not privy.
The story — reconstructed largely in a series of recent interviews with Abassi and through sentencing reports presented at his trial in the U. S. — begins in Quebec City, where Abassi, now 28, was a promising chemical engineering student at Université Laval.
Abassi arrived in Canada in 2010 as a student at Université de Sherbrooke, but after six months he transferred to Université Laval. That’s where he fell in love with another Tunisian student from his hometown of Sibikha — population of 6,776.
Abassi and his new wife flew to Tunisia in December 2012 to celebrate their marriage with friends and family.
But on Jan. 21, 2013, just nine days before Abassi was to return to Quebec to finish his master’s degree, he received an email from Citizenship and Immigration Canada in Ottawa: A mistake had been made in granting his student visa and it had been cancelled.
Abassi spent the next nine weeks trying to get an explanation from Canadian immigration authorities in Tunis and Ottawa, and re- applying for a visa, all to no avail. The answer was always the same: “Dear Client, your request is being processed ...” Then with no further explanation, his passport, which had been submitted with the new application, was returned.
With his wife already back in Quebec City, it was beginning to look hopeless for Abassi. Enter the undercover agent. Just months after Esseghaier and Jaser were filmed allegedly scouting locations to derail a Via train in east- end Toronto and the Niagara region — their most advanced plot was to cut out six metres of railway line, ideally on a bridge — an undercover FBI agent, who was also caught on the film, began courting Abassi in Tunisia.
Abassi first met the agent, known only by the alias Tamer el- Noury, in Quebec City through Esseghaier, who was an acquaintance. ElNoury was posing as an Egyptian businessman based in New York who was looking for real estate opportunities in Quebec.
According to Abassi, in October 2012, the three men shared a meal at a restaurant in Quebec City. One month later, el- Noury returned to Quebec City, supposedly to figure out how to avoid paying both U. S. and Canadian taxes on his transactions. He met with Abassi again.
But it wasn’t until Abassi was inexplicably stranded in Tunisia that el- Noury re- appeared as his saviour.
He urged Abassi to come to New York, where he would be closer to his destination, and where elNoury could find him a job and a lawyer to intervene with Canadian immigration. When Abassi resisted, el- Noury appealed to Abassi’s wife then his parents, telling them he looked upon Ahmed as if he were his own son, and wanting to help him — as any good Muslim would.
Abassi’s sentencing memorandum, submitted by his lawyers, is eloquent on just how hard elNoury worked to convince Abassi before he finally agreed to relocate to New York on March 18, 2013:
“Tamer was relentless in his efforts to get Ahmed to apply for an American visa. He called, he emailed, and, at one point, he even made several airline bookings from Tunisia to New York, and offered Ahmed the option of choosing a flight at the last minute. Finally, to ensure he was trusted, and to make sure the Abassi family felt indebted to him, Tamer wired $ 800 to the Abassi family. ... Along with the money came the continued refrain: I am a friend to the entire Abassi family. I am like your son, your brother, I am one of your family. Send your son Ahmed to me, and I will take care of him.”
For the next month, courtesy of the FBI, Abassi lived in a furnished one- bedroom apartment near the Ritz- Carlton in New York, equipped with a television in every room and a special Qu’ran, wired for the prayer call five times a day — and wired to record every conversation.
During that time, Abassi and elNoury travelled to Las Vegas together, so Abassi could introduce el- Noury to a Tunisian man he used to know. The three men talked about Syrian president Bashar alAssad, and the plight of Muslims everywhere, while Abassi took pictures of the scrumptious desserts.
Also during that time, Esseghaier came to visit him in New York.
“I didn’t come to the U. S. to speak to Chiheb, but to get back to Canada! It was like a movie,” Abassi says now.
But mostly, over 35 days, Abassi and el- Noury spent hours and hours in conversation, some of them conference calls with Esseghaier.
“Although each conversation was different, each one follows a general pattern,” reads the sentencing report. “At some point during each conversation, Tamer inserts into the dialogue ( 1) the western world’s mistreatment of Muslims; ( 2) the need for the “brothers,” whether i n Syria, Jordan, Tunisia or some other Arab country, to be supported by money, weapons or other means; ( 3) each Muslim brother’s duty to do jihad; ( 4) Tamer’s past willingness to donate money to support jihad; and/ or ( 5) coaxing Ahmed into making terror plans ( small and big ) as that is the way to be a good Muslim. For every statement made by Ahmed that the government may quote in its sentencing submission, there is a precursor conversation, comment, or other impetus from undercover agent Tamer i nviting and encouraging that quoted response from Ahmed.”
According to Abassi, el- Noury, the undercover agent posing as the real- estate mogul, had told both him and Esseghaier he had $ 20 million to play with.
Still, after more than a month of daily conversations about jihad, with and without Esseghaier, Abassi failed to take the bait. At one point, he is recorded saying “I wish America would disappear” but immediately adds that he’s discussing a general principle, nothing else.
Asked to come up with a plan for a terrorist attack, he says he’s not ready. Provided with one, he says it’s too big. Or too small. When Esseghaier urges Abassi to go to training in Iran he refuses, and tells Esseghaier, who had been doing research on nano- technology in Montreal, to “focus on the studies and not fight.”
Esseghaier was frustrated, to say the least. In wiretapped evidence submitted in New York, Esseghaier tells the undercover agent that Abassi is “useless to the cause,” “not a true Muslim” and that he should be kicked out of the apartment, and kicked back to Tunisia with no warning. Abassi just wants the money for his studies and his wife, Esseghaier tells el- Noury, while he says Jaser, who eventually backed out of the terrorist plot, just wanted the money for his restaurant business.
While Esseghaier is giving elNoury money with instructions to send it to jihadis in Syria or Mali, Abassi is emailing government agencies and individuals from his Université Laval email account, asking for help in resolving his visa situation.
Between February and April 2013, he sends 50 such emails, and even does a phone interview with Alcoa for a job in Trois- Rivières.
At 7 a. m. on April 22, 2013, the same day Esseghaier and Jaser were arrested in Canada — and a week after the Boston Marathon bombing — a half- dozen FBI agents and NYPD officers surrounded Abassi at JFK Airport in New York. He was there with el- Noury for a business meeting.
NO EVIDENCE IN ‘TERROR ENHANCEMENT’
Abassi spent the first five months of his detention in jail in isolation, with no access to other inmates, newspapers or other media. He was entitled to one 15- minute phone call per month.
The worst part, he says now, was not being able to sleep.
“Every 30 minutes, they would knock on the door. Stand up! Stand up! And you can’t turn the light off. I just wanted to sleep and to know why I was there.”
For nine months, Abassi was told he was arrested for immigration fraud and misuse of a visa “to facilitate an act of international terrorism” — which carries a sentence of up to 25 years in jail. But his jailers would not allow him to see any of the discovery materials, he said — the information used to back up the charges.
The United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara, told reporters that Abassi had come to the United States with “an evil purpose” to develop a terrorist network in the U. S., and had proposed to poison the water or air to kill 100,000 people, or derail a passenger train. Abassi was also said to have entered the U. S. “to use this country as a base to support the efforts of terrorists internationally,” Bharara said, claiming it was Abassi who radicalized the others.
After listening to more than 100 hours of wiretapped conversations, however, prosecutors in the justice department found no evidence to support the “terror enhancement” allegations.
In June, 2014 Abassi pleaded guilty to one charge of making a false statement to immigration authorities at JFK Airport, and a separate misdemeanour charge — for falsely representing on a Green Card application that he was going to work at a real estate company. After 15 months in jail he was sentenced to time served, and was deported back to Tunisia two months later.
According to Karen Greenberg, the director of the Centre on National Security at Fordham Law School in New York, it is the first and only time that the defence of entrapment was successfully used to have terrorism- related charges dropped from an indictment.
SEEKING A PUBLIC APOLOGY FROM CANADA
Abassi now alternates between his old room at his parents home in Sibikha and his sister’s house in Tunis. He spends a lot of time online. The “Free Ahmed Abassi” page on Facebook has more than 3,400 likes. Off- line, too, he says he has become somewhat of a hero in Tunisia.
“Every day, neighbours, family, strangers, they all ask me: ‘ Now you are free. But where are your rights?’ I say, I try, I try to find a lawyer. But I am alone. I thank God I am home. But what about my rights?”
The ordeal has taken its toll. Abassi’s father is still suffering the health effects of all the stress — Abassi’s brother was in a serious car accident and was in a hospital for eight months around the same time that Abassi was in jail. Though he learned English in jail, Abassi has not been able to continue his studies toward his PhD. He has not been able to get a job. Alcoa and Rio Tinto had offered him jobs, he said. But that was before he was arrested.
“I was a student and they put me in jail. Seventeen months of my life. My mother can’t see, she has cried so much. My father has had three operations. My name — Google my name and you’ll see. All my prop- erty is in Canada and my wife is divorcing me.”
After five months of married life and more than a year of being physically apart, Abassi’s wife filed for divorce in February 2014, while he was still in jail.
First and foremost, he holds Canada responsible. He gave his mind and his time to Canada, he says, and Canada cancelled his visa.
He wants Canada to publicly apologize — to him and his entire family, as well as to the Université Laval and even Tunisia, for branding it a source country for terrorists. And he wants Canada to pay for its part in putting him in jail for 17 months.
A spokesperson for Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney declined to comment on Abassi’s case and his call for an apology, referring the Montreal Gazette to Citizenship and Immigration Canada.
A CIC spokesperson said it could not comment on individual cases, citing privacy concerns, which also preclude the CIC from providing any information relating to an investigation.
“Visa applications are considered on a case- by- case basis on the specific facts presented by the applicant in each case,” Johanne Nadeau wrote in an email. “The onus is on the applicant to show that they meet the requirements for a temporary resident visa.”
Asked whether Abassi could return to Canada, she wrote: “A foreign national may be found inadmissible to Canada for criminality if they have been convicted outside Canada, or have committed an act outside of Canada, that if committed in Canada would constitute a Canadian offence.”
Who’s to blame? As he waits for a verdict in the Via Rail case in Toronto, Abassi says he has his own ideas about the three protagonists. He says Esseghaier, whom he first met in 2010 while living in Sherbrooke, is “messed up.” Even back then, Esseghaier was unkempt, with a scraggly beard, and had problems with everyone from his professors and fellow students to his father and his neighbours in Montreal, Sherbrooke and Quebec City.
“For me, Chiheb is messed up. I kept asking ( el- Noury) what happened to him, he is sick! But every time he would say: ‘ Don’t worry about him. He is just enthusiastic. Chiheb will go back to Canada and I will help you.’”
As for Jaser, Abassi says he has never met him. He followed his case from jail — once he was out of isolation. “Is he a victim, too? He said stupid things. First he said yes ( to the plot), then no. But can we judge him the same ( as Esseghaier?)”
He reserves the deepest contempt for el- Noury, however.
“Who is the person who radicalized them? It was the FBI agent who tried to radicalize me. He is a radical. When you listen to talk between Chiheb and the undercover agent it’s clear it’s the agent who radicalizes Chiheb. He has the money, he hates Canada, he hates America and he says if we don’t act, who will? ... They say it’s ‘ conspiracy by intention’ but whose intention? This agent manufactured everything. Without him, nothing would have happened.”