Jihad, love & dinner
FBI agent tells terror trial of an unlikely road trip
Three years ago, on a flight from Houston to San Jose, an undercover U.S. agent posing as a wealthy Egyptian-American befriended a Montreal PhD student and suspected radical named Chiheb Esseghaier.
Six months later, in September 2012, the two men — now close friends — drove from Montreal to Toronto to meet a third man, whom Mr. Esseghaier called “the Palestinian brother.”
Unbeknownst to Mr. Esseghaier, though, the agent from the Federal Bureau of Investigations was recording the entire time.
In a Toronto courtroom this week, prosecutors played long excerpts from their conversation during the 5½-hour drive to the jury in his terrorism trial (the “Palestinian brother,” Raed Jaser, is also on trial).
The transcripts of those tapes, translated in some cases from Arabic, read like something between Samuel Beckett and a bad buddy comedy.
The two men talked at times in chilling detail about killing civilians and soldiers. But they also joked about bananas and ducks, and discussed with deep sincerity how to tell if a woman was in love or just playing around.
Late in the drive, in a moment of perfect dramatic irony, Mr. Esseghaier joked about how strange outside observers — a spy agency or police group, presumably — would find their conversation if they were somehow listening in.
“They were just talking about serious issue, very dangerous issue and now they are talking about marriage,” he imagined them saying.
“We’re talking about jihad and love and dinner,” the agent responded, laughing. “What the hell is going on with that?”
The transcript starts with the two men leaving Montreal. Early on, they discussed what time they expected to get to Toronto — “before 10 o’clock, God willing,” Mr. Esseghaier said. Then the agent started slowly steering him toward the topic of possible terrorist plots.
Because the two men speak different Arabic dialects, the transcript is littered with the small confusions that caused.
Early in the drive, for example, Mr. Esseghaier tried to tell a story about a boat, but got tripped up when the agent thought he meant a similar sounding, but different word.
“The bateau, do you know the bateau?” Mr. Esseghaier said. “The duck?” the agent replied. “No,” said Mr. Esseghaier. They both laughed loudly. “I love ducks,” the agent said. “Forget about the ducks!” Mr. Esseghaier countered.
“You are very dear to me, honestly,” the agent eventually said.
“God bless you, you too my dear, thank you,” Mr. Esseghaier replied.
Soon, they switched to religion and love in Canada, with Mr. Esseghaier expressing distaste for the habits of Canadian dating.
“They make a girlfriend and a boyfriend,” he said. “Why don’t you marry?”
“Why not, right?” the agent replied.
“Marriage is obtainable,” said Mr. Esseghaier.
“Of course, and it’s halal [permitted],” said the agent.
“And it’s halal,” agreed Mr. Esseghaier. “Why would you leave marriage and go get a girlfriend and a boyfriend. Why? Why this crookedness.”
It didn’t take long, though, for the agent to steer the conversation toward what Mr. Esseghaier called “subjects.” As part of his cover, he had told Mr. Esseghaier his uncle was financially supporting mujahedeen overseas.
“I want to do more than monetary,” he told Mr. Esseghaier. “I want to do actual work.”
Not long after, Mr. Esseghaier asked if anything in the car could be recording them.
“No, no, no,” the agent said. “I don’t have anything.”
And that’s when, according to the transcript, Mr. Esseghaier came out with it: “I was talking to my brother, the responsible ... mujahedeen. He gave me many ideas.”
He then outlined a plan to hire a cook to poison a military base in the U.S. or Canada. “It could be something very beautiful.”
In fact, the plan sounded near crazy. Find a Muslim cook, maybe one who works in a hotel, and see if he had any friends willing to poison several hundred soldiers. The agent, though, praised it.
Minutes later, Mr. Esseghaier, according to the transcript, revealed the details of another plan, this one already allegedly in the works with the Palestinian brother. “Keep it a secret,” he told the undercover FBI agent. “It’s very confidential.”
In this plan, he said, according to the transcript, he and the brother would cut a five-metre hole in a railway bridge. “He will go through the hole and it will be a big accident,” he said.
“I warned our brother from Palestine, I told him to be careful, be very careful that the bridge should not be over water. Because if it falls in the water, they’ll all survive.”
“No, doubt,” the agent replied. “It has to be over land.”
For a while, they discussed that plan. But eventually, they turned to more prosaic topics, like food. Mr. Esseghaier who had a bag of bananas offered the agent one. “I’ll peel,” he said. “I’ ll take half and you take the other half,” the agent replied.
“No, I have ... five bananas,” Mr. Esseg-hair said.
“I know, but don’t peel another one, eat this with me,” the agent said. With that settled, they ate. “We’re just like monkeys,” the agent said.
“From ducks to monkeys,” Mr. Esseghaier replied, and they laughed.
Throughout, the drive, the two men spoke to each other in glowing, affectionate terms.
Eventually, deep into the drive, Mr. Esseghaier broached what appeared to him to be a difficult subject. “It’s personal,” he told the agent.” Recently, he said, his supervisor had introduced him to a new fellow PhD student, an unmarried woman from Jordan.
“Sometimes, I feel I love her,” he said. “Sometimes, when she disobeys Allah, I hate her.”
Mr. Esseghaier found the woman perplexing. He told the agent he did not want to be distracted from his mission. But he also couldn’t tell if she loved him or not.
“What do you think about this girl?” he asked. “Is it playing girl, or she’s serious?”
“They call it in English, she’s playing hard to get,” the agent replied.
After the two talked it through for a while, the agent offered his advice.
“Go in straight and tell her, look,” he said, “I swear by Allah this is the story and I’ll say it to you straight, do you want me or not?”
“But I am afraid, afraid that she would refuse and I would be turned back,” Mr. Esseghaier said.
Mr. Esseghaier, whose voice was heard in court this week speaking in cold and calculated terms about killing civilians in mass numbers to send a political message, comes off as remarkably vulnerable in much of the drive transcripts.
He sounds lonely, almost, and profoundly grateful to have found a friend in the agent.
That might explain why he allegedly revealed so much so soon, why, despite an obsession with recordings and security and code words, he shared the intimate and allegedly incriminating details of his plans with a man he met on an airplane just months before.
The trial continues next week.