RNA – An FBI spy sent to infiltrate a California mosque shared his story and discussed how he went from a criminal to an FBI spy to a witness in a case against the Feds.
Craig Monteilh was known to members of the Irvine Islamic Center in Orange County as Farouk al-Aziz, a French Syrian who was a devout and, at times, radical Muslim.
However he was really a petty criminal with forgery convictions who was hired by the FBI to go undercover as part of an intelligence surveillance operation after 9/11.
Monteilh went public with the operation after his cover was blown in 2007, which exposed some of the government's little-known methods of anti-terrorism policing.
Speaking with HuffPost Live on Monday, Monteilh said he was paid to seek out potential threats and gain 'personal information' about such people.
Agents sought him out after he spent some time in prison for using fraudulent checks.
His mission was to obtain email address and phone numbers of anyone suspicious and get the names of any of their associates, which he would then feed back to his FBI handlers.
Although he realized he is "spying on innocent people" who he says "were not involved in criminal activities" he also planted some recording devices and had an intense training process, during which he learned to "pretend to be Muslim."
"The FBI trained me in the tenets of Islam, in the elementary principles of Arabic, and just to blend into the community and to slowly integrate myself as a Muslim male," he said.
The operation included even more extreme breaches of privacy, with Monteilh going as far as dating and having sex with Muslim women to extract intelligence.
"I portrayed myself as a unmarried male, although I was married," he said. "Within the Muslim community, they would help me to get a bride, so they would introduce me to single Muslim women. I would go out on dates and things like that. … [My FBI handlers] instructed me, if I was getting good intel, to allow it to go into sexual relations."
The undercover plot eventually took an ironic turn when his extreme jihadist rhetoric alienated his targets, who reported him to the FBI. In 2007, the Islamic Center of Irvine filed a restraining order against him, effectively blowing his cover.
As Monteilh remembers, very few of his targets actually used similar jihadist rhetoric. The only time he heard extremist language was after some prodding and "inciting" on his part.
"They'd follow my lead," he said.
Looking back on his undercover operation now, Monteilh said the monthly $11,200 compensation he received "clouded his judgement," making it tough for him to question the practice. Although he originally felt it was his "patriotic duty" to help the FBI operation, he had a change of heart.
"I began to be conflicted because I was spying on innocent people. They were not involved in criminal activity," he said. "They were not espousing terrorist rhetoric, but I was still spying on them and giving the FBI the information they wanted."
Monteilh has since spoken out against the FBI's controversial informant program and even planned to testify in a class action suit against the FBI. The case was dismissed because it would risk exposing "state secrets."
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