The Fort Dix Conspiracy

By Amanda Ripley

Mahmoud Omar is an informant. He plays the most important role in a terrorism case, yet one you never hear about. Like many informants, Omar worked against the government before he worked for it. In 2001, he pleaded guilty to three counts of bank fraud in Pennsylvania and went to jail for six months. In 2002, Omar, a legal immigrant from Egypt, declared bankruptcy. That same year, the U.S. government tried and failed to deport him. Two years later, Omar was arrested again -- this time after he got into a fight with a neighbor. In 2006, the government again tried to deport him.

But that same year, the very same government put Omar on its payroll, and the immigration case quietly went away. Under the direction of the FBI, he infiltrated a group of friends in Cherry Hill, N.J., whom the government suspected of harboring terrorist intentions. For 16 months, Omar earned thousands of dollars recording hundreds of conversations. He drove one man to do surveillance of possible targets, according to court documents, and he offered to help buy illegal weapons for the group. Finally, in 2007, Omar handed over the men, thereafter known as the Fort Dix Six.

In May, when U.S. Attorney Christopher J. Christie announced their arrests on the steps of the courthouse in Camden, N.J., he called the Fort Dix case "the model for the post-September 11 era." He meant that as a compliment. Eight different law-enforcement outfits had cooperated, all following up on the tip of a concerned citizen. Six suspects were in jail, five charged with conspiring to kill soldiers at the Fort Dix military base in southern New Jersey and the sixth facing weapons charges. No one had gotten hurt. "This," said Christie, "is what we've been talking about developing since [9/11]."

A TIME investigation of the Fort Dix case shows that it is indeed an important prototype. Six years after 9/11, the U.S. government has begun to settle on a strategy for finding and stopping potential homegrown terrorists before they strike. Fort Dix offers a case study of this new and sometimes precarious method. The model is called pre-emptive prosecution, and like other pre-emptive strikes of late, it is risky. It means relying on often unreliable informants to infiltrate insular communities, and it means making arrests before anything close to a terrorist attack actually happens. The process sometimes ends with a trial but not necessarily a conviction, and that may be beside the point. It is, in all, a messy and unsatisfying ordeal, and possibly the best available option.

Suspicion in the suburbs Cherry Hill is home to the first large indoor mall east of the Mississippi (built in 1961). Just four miles east of Philadelphia, the town is a crowded patch of box stores and neighborhoods. The parents of at least four of the defendants had moved to Cherry Hill from bigger cities to give their children a safe place to grow up in. Four of the six attended Cherry Hill High School West, and all are longtime friends. Three -- Dritan, Shain and Eljvir Duka -- are brothers.

In early 2006, the Duka brothers went to a local Circuit City to get an 8-mm video converted into a DVD. They were greeted by Brian Morgenstern, a clerk at the store who answered their questions about the cost of the service. "Everything was normal, really," says Morgenstern, a very serious 26-year-old with sideburns, bright blue eyes and two diamond stud earrings.

Dritan, Shain and Eljvir Duka are illegal immigrants from the former Yugoslavia, but they look and sound like Americans. They wear sports jerseys and speak with New York accents. The eldest, Dritan, arrived in the States when he was 5. He can't remember living anyplace else. When they were small, the Duka brothers worked as models in New York City. Eljvir appeared in a rock-music video, Dritan was an extra in Law & Order, and Shain was in a commercial for the World Wrestling Federation.

Several years ago, the three brothers, who had been raised Muslim but were not strictly observant, became much more religious, in part due to the influence of an uncle who has since been deported. They grew beards and stopped drinking alcohol. In religious, not legal proceedings, Dritan and Eljvir married 15-year-old Muslim girls. But they still played basketball, hung out at Dunkin' Donuts and, by all accounts, worked long hours at the roofing company they owned together. Dritan and his wife, Jennifer Marino, an Italian-American convert to Islam, had five children. (Eljvir's wife gave birth to a baby girl shortly after his arrest.)

It is, at this point, very hard to say how extreme the men had become in their beliefs. All the men charged in the conspiracy insist they are innocent. The trial is scheduled for March 2008, and the government has not yet made public its recordings of the defendants' conversations. But as Morgenstern remembers, if you saw the defendants at a strip mall in Jersey, you wouldn't look twice.

At Circuit City, Morgenstern copied the video out on the floor. He was paying no attention to the images flashing by until he glanced up and noticed bearded men in camouflage shooting guns and shouting in a foreign tongue. He took the tape to a back office and watched all 90 minutes of it. That night he went home and told his parents what he'd seen. Then he weighed what to do. What if this was nothing? he thought. What if I hurt people's lives when it was nothing?

The next day Morgenstern went back to Circuit City and called the police. They arrived within an hour. Two officers watched the video with Morgenstern, and when they heard the word jihad (which can refer to a holy war or a personal struggle of any kind), they said, "Stop it. That's enough." With that, the Fort Dix case file was opened. The officers made a copy of the video and left.

That afternoon the Duka brothers came back, picked up their DVD and left without incident. A week later the FBI showed up to get its copy. Morgenstern saw the Duka brothers only one more time. They came back shortly afterward with another tape to convert. But this one, Morgenstern says, was "everything I'm used to." It was a family video of kids and adults talking and laughing outside. And then Morgenstern heard nothing else for more than a year and a half.

Paintball interpreted Most terrorism cases begin with a tip, sometimes a tip that turns out to be misleading. In Lodi, Calif., a town known as the "Zinfandel Capital of the World," a man told police he had seen al-Qaeda's No. 2 official, Ayman al-Zawahiri, in the area in the late 1990s. That astonishing claim turned out to be false. But soon the very same tipster was working for the FBI and recording his conversations with a local ice cream-truck driver and his son to see if they were dangerous. The tipster was paid more than $225,000 for his trouble, and after an exhaustive interrogation, the son admitted to authorities that he had attended a terrorism training camp in Pakistan. He was sentenced to 24 years in prison despite his lawyer's claims that the confession was coerced.

In the Fort Dix case, the Circuit City clerk's suspicion was reasonable. He had no experience with guns and thought what he had seen were illegal, fully automatic weapons (they were not). It made sense to be cautious. The police, too, did everything right. They saw what might or might not have been a sign of terrorism, and they took the tip seriously.

But the Circuit City video is far from conclusive. It features a group of friends and relatives vacationing in the Poconos in Pennsylvania and speaking mostly English. It includes shots of the men skiing, hiking and joking around, according to multiple people who have seen it. "I know how to burn DVDs," says Burim Duka, the youngest Duka brother, who had gone on the first Circuit City errand but has not been charged in the case. "We dropped it off because it's easier. We didn't think anything of it. If it was [a terrorism training video], why would I do that?"

Because of the high stakes, terrorism investigations can move forward on the basis of a few seemingly innocuous acts or even a single phrase. In the Circuit City video, the words jihad and Allahu Akbar (which means "God is great") are indeed uttered, according to multiple people who have seen it. But many devout and law-abiding Muslims use those words like punctuation marks, the way Christians might say, "Praise God" or "God bless." Says Burim: "We say 'Allahu Akbar' all the time. We mean it in the religious way. We used to think it was bad luck if we didn't say it before shooting."

It's clear that the men in the video liked guns. But what they claim was a hobby the government has termed a "militia-like" training exercise, because the men were, in some cases, walking or kneeling while shooting. This may be a sign of paramilitary training -- or not. "We were going on our knees to get comfortable," says Burim, 16, who was also on the Poconos trip. "The guns are pretty heavy."

The critical question is, When does shooting guns or playing paintball (which the government has termed a "tactical training" exercise in this case) become nefarious? That is the subject of great debate among terrorism experts these days. "How do you decide when the line is crossed between a bunch of hotheads fantasizing and people actually planning attacks?" says Brian Michael Jenkins, a veteran terrorism expert at the Rand Corp. "The only way you can get at that is to have a good understanding of how this process works: What is the trajectory of self-identification, indoctrination, jihadization?"

Most homegrown terrorism plots are the work of "unremarkable" men, as a 2007 report on radicalization by the New York Police Department (NYPD) puts it, or "a group of guys," as U.S. intelligence officials call them. That's the best they can do, since the profile of a would-be terrorist is becoming less and less obvious. In that kind of fog, small behaviors necessarily loom large. In Australia, the NYPD report noted, before 17 men were arrested with bombmaking materials and maps of government buildings, some had traveled to the outback for a group bonding and hunting adventure. One month before the July 7, 2005, London transit bombings, two of the suicide bombers went white-water rafting together. Given these flickerings of a pattern, the Circuit City tape, which might have been ignored 10 years ago, set off a cascading series of actions. Each step led inexorably to the next, adding up to a multimillion-dollar case, which may have saved people's lives -- or not. "That's the problem," says Michael N. Huff, attorney for Dritan. "The government does not have to wait. So you'll never know what would've happened."

Introducing the informant After 9/11, it was painfully clear that the FBI lacked human intelligence. As agents began to develop Muslim informants, or "assets," as they are called, things changed. The number of informants used in terrorism investigations has "increased exponentially," says Art Cummings, deputy assistant director of counterterrorism at the FBI. That is a big improvement. But informants are not what most people think they are. They are not undercover FBI agents; they are untrained civilians who need something -- badly. Usually, they need money or a way to reduce their prison sentences or avoid deportation. Many have criminal records, and the Justice Department's Inspector General reported in 2005 that 10% of a sampling of informants had committed new, unauthorized crimes while working for the FBI.

"Almost the first thing taught to agents is 'Never trust an informant,'" says Dennis G. Fitzgerald, a former agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and the author of a 2007 book, Informants and Undercover Investigations: A Practical Guide to Law, Policy and Practice. But out of necessity, informants are now foot soldiers in the government's fight against terrorism. The FBI has nowhere near enough agents who can pass as young Muslim extremists. "They need informants. Two FBI agents from Duluth are not going to make it," says Jenkins of Rand. So agents delegate the job to laypeople with strong and sometimes perverse incentives. "The only way to find out what's going on inside rather closed or private communities is to get people in there to infiltrate them," U.S. Attorney Christie tells TIME. "Would I rather have a trained law-enforcement officer as a witness? Yes. That's not always possible."

Mahmoud Omar was hired by the FBI to ingratiate himself with the men from the Circuit City video, and he did his job persistently if not always gracefully. In early 2006, Omar first visited a grocery store in southern New Jersey owned by Ibrahim Shnewer. The Shnewer family had immigrated to the U.S. from Jordan. Like Omar, they were Muslim. They were polite to Omar, who seemed needy for companionship and sometimes for money, according to members of the Shnewer and Duka families. He was a car dealer and a mechanic in his late 30s, and he claimed to have been a member of the Egyptian military. (Efforts to reach Omar, whose home number has been disconnected, were not successful.)

Omar went back to the Shnewer shop again and again. He made small talk with everyone, but especially with Mohamed, 22, a U.S. citizen and the Shnewers' only son. "Mohamed was like a baby," his mother Faten Shnewer says. He had dropped out of community college, and he lived at home. He liked to watch the Nickelodeon show Drake & Josh; play Madden, the football video game; and hang out with his five sisters. He worked long hours, often all night, driving a taxi owned by his father and talking by cell phone to his mother and his friends, the Duka brothers.

Soon Mohamed and Omar were playing billiards together and talking about politics, sports and religion. "He acted like a young guy, like he was cool and everything," says Hnan Shnewer, 16, who was Mohamed's sister and the wife of Eljvir. Through Mohamed, Omar met the Duka brothers and Serdar Tatar, another friend, who would be charged in the case.

At the time, Omar was on probation. In 2001, he had been charged with opening bank accounts, depositing bogus checks and then trying to draw down the account, according to the indictment. He had pleaded guilty to three counts of bank fraud and was sentenced to six months in prison and five years' probation and ordered to pay Patriot Bank $9,550 in restitution. Soon afterward, the Federal Government began removal proceedings against Omar, citing his conviction. He successfully fought the attempt. Then, in October 2004, Omar was arrested again, this time for fighting with a neighbor. After both men declined to testify, the charges were reduced to disorderly conduct.

In April 2006, just after Omar began working with the FBI on the Fort Dix case, the government tried to deport him yet again, according to the Department of Justice. Immigration officials declined to reveal any details about what led to that proceeding. But the record reflects that the case was closed in September 2006, which happened to be just after Omar recorded Shnewer saying some very provocative things about Fort Dix. The prosecutor has not yet confirmed Omar's name, let alone whether he received any kind of deal in exchange for his help. But it is clear that he was paid for his efforts -- and that he needed the money. Omar filed for bankruptcy in New Jersey in 2002, at which point he owed about $38,000 to more than two dozen creditors. The prosecutor has not yet revealed how much Omar was paid, but it is probably well above $10,000.

Overheard at Dunkin' Donuts There is an old saying among cops. "Good informant, good case; bad informant, bad case; no informant, no case," as Ronald Brooks, president of the National Narcotic Officers' Associations' Coalition, testified before the House Judiciary Committee in July. Informants are an excellent tool when they are meticulously supervised.

In the Fort Dix case, Omar was watched closely. "We felt fairly confident that we knew what was going on with these guys all the time," says U.S. Attorney Christie. There are more than 100 hours of recordings of Omar's conversations with the defendants. The month after Omar met Mohamed Shnewer, according to the complaint, Shnewer shared a DVD with Omar that allegedly contains jihadist recruitment messages. The next month Shnewer loaned Omar his laptop and told him to check out a file that appears to be the wills of at least two of the hijackers involved in 9/11, the complaint alleges.

Still, most of the recordings capture the normal, sometimes tedious chatter of young men. They drink coffee at Dunkin' Donuts and debate the merits of Ford vs. Chevy; they drink coffee and talk about their dismay over the war in Iraq; they drink coffee and talk about fishing. They play paintball and fire guns at snowballs lofted into the air. "I like to joke with these guys that they're like Albanian rednecks," says Michael Riley, attorney for Shain. There is something about the men's behavior that seems like that of kids at play. "It's like they were pretending," says Dritan's attorney, Huff. "The challenge will be to convince a jury they weren't serious."

The most damning statements seem to have come from Mohamed Shnewer when he was alone with the informant. On Aug. 1, he allegedly told Omar, "If you want to do anything here, there is Fort Dix and I don't want to exaggerate, and I assure you that you can hit an American base very easily ... When you go to a military base, you need mortars and RPGs." Under the law, an informant must be a witness to the crime -- not the instigator. Shnewer's use of the second person, you, suggests that he may have viewed the informant as the initiator. "I am at your services as you have more experience than me in military bases and in life," Shnewer says at one point. At other times, however, Shnewer sounds more assertive. Later, he and Omar traveled to Fort Dix and other military bases to conduct surveillance, the complaint says. "My intent is to hit a heavy concentration of soldiers," Shnewer says.

On the group's second trip to the Poconos, in February 2007, the FBI was watching. When the Duka brothers went to a public firearms range, undercover agents and video cameras monitored their activities. By then, the FBI had also introduced a second paid informant -- a good way to double-check on the first informant. The recordings made by this man, an ethnic Albanian like the Dukas, have not been made public, but he seems to have played a less significant role than Omar.

Tape-recorder malfunction The government admits that Omar once gave his handler false information in order to protect a friend, according to the complaint. It was a one-time lapse, the complaint says, and Omar "has proven to be credible and reliable." But there are other red flags. "Clearly the informant had the opportunity to activate and deactivate the recording device," says Rocco Cipparone Jr., defense attorney for Mohamed Shnewer, according to his knowledge of the evidence so far. If that is true, it raises questions about how closely the informant was supervised. (The U.S. Attorney's office declined to comment on the claim, citing the impending trial.) In addition, the informants' recording devices -- which may have been embedded in cell phones or some other nondescript location -- malfunctioned multiple times during the investigation, according to defense attorneys who have seen transcripts of the conversations. While some malfunctions are understandable, they can be a sign that the informant was censoring his conversations.

Context is everything in these recordings. For example, the complaint says Omar once asked Shain if he was "with them." In response, Shain said, "God willing, we will see." We don't yet know what was said before or after that. At another point, Dritan seemed stunned by a list of available weapons provided by Omar, saying "There was some stuff on the list that was heavy s___." The broader context will come out during the trial, and the defense attorneys are combing through the transcripts. "I get more confident the more stuff I read," says Troy Archie, attorney for Eljvir. "To me, it looks like they're using informants to rile these guys up."

Informants -- and the baggage that often comes with them -- are not new. They have become downright pedestrian in drug cases. For many convicts, cooperating is the best -- and sometimes only -- way to reduce a prison sentence. But the rise of informants has led to accusations that the government is outsourcing detective work to thugs. "The government's use of criminal informants is largely secretive, unregulated and unaccountable," Alexandra Natapoff, a professor at Loyola Law School, told the House Judiciary Committee last July. "Informants breed fabrication."

What is new is the heavy reliance on informants in terrorism cases. In drug cases, after all, no one usually gets arrested until someone actually has some drugs. Terrorism cases are harder. "If you send a source in, and he comes back with a kilo of cocaine, you're in pretty good shape," says the FBI's Cummings. "If I send a source into a terrorism operation, and he comes back and says, 'O.K., here's what these guys are planning,' then what do I have? Just the source's word. There's still plenty of work left to do to validate the source's reporting." Through recordings and the use of multiple informants, many agents carefully monitor their informants, but it's a constant challenge.

Again and again, accused terrorists have argued that they were entrapped. So far, this strategy has not worked very well. Legally, entrapment is difficult to prove. But in the Fort Dix case, the families of the defendants still insist they were tricked by Omar. Burim, the youngest Duka brother, says the first time he heard of any plot was from the informant. He says Omar asked him and his brother Eljvir if they wanted to participate, and they said no. Burim believes that Omar "brainwashed" Mohamed. A sixth defendant, Agron Abdullahu, pleaded guilty in October to conspiring to aid and abet the other men by loaning them guns. But he was never charged in the plan against Fort Dix, and he faces less than five years in prison. His attorney says he will not testify against the other men, since he was not aware of any plot.

Eleven months into the investigation, the complaint says, one of the defendants began to suspect Omar. Serdar Tatar, a legal resident from Turkey who worked at a 7-Eleven store and knew the Dukas and Shnewer from high school, asked Omar outright if he was a "fed." Three days later, Tatar contacted a Philadelphia police sergeant to report that someone was pressuring him to acquire maps of Fort Dix -- and that he was afraid it might be terrorism-related. (Tatar's father owned a pizzeria and had a map of the base and clearance to deliver there.) The sergeant called the FBI.

Three weeks later, the FBI interviewed Tatar. At that point, he backtracked, the complaint says, denying any knowledge of a plot. It is not clear why the FBI waited three weeks to follow up with Tatar. By then, coincidentally or not, Tatar had succumbed to requests from Shnewer and the informant to hand over a map of Fort Dix, the complaint alleges. Tatar continues to deny giving him a map.

It's worth mentioning, of course, that it's not at all clear that the alleged plot would have succeeded. The base, which trains soldiers before they are deployed to Iraq, is heavily protected. Delivery vehicles are thoroughly searched before entry. But history shows that determined men don't need ingenious plans to be lethal. "Unfortunately, it's just not that hard to kill people," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff tells TIME. "People misunderstand what makes someone dangerous."

The map is important to the government's case since it could represent what is legally termed an "overt act." To prove a conspiracy, the prosecutor has to show that the defendants took concrete steps toward realizing the crime. A map might suggest tactical planning. And the government points to the alleged firearms and paintball training, as well as surveillance of targets, as overt acts.

But so far, court documents do not contain evidence of a specific date or detailed plan. Perhaps the most dire charges are that Shnewer and Dritan and Shain Duka wanted to buy fully automatic guns.

On May 7, 2007, Dritan and Shain went to Omar's apartment to buy the guns, the indictment alleges, including three AK-47 fully automatic machine guns, four M-16 fully automatic machine guns and four handguns. It's not clear from the evidence so far made public that they meant to use the weapons in an attack, but it is clear that those are some seriously frightening weapons.

When the brothers arrived at the informant's apartment complex, the police moved in. Minutes later, Eljvir was arrested when he came back from taking Dritan's kids to get ice cream. Shnewer was arrested while waiting for customers in the taxi line at Philadelphia International Airport. When he saw the police approaching, he joked to his fellow drivers, "See, when I hang out with you guys, you get me in trouble." Tatar was arrested at his Philadelphia apartment, where he lived with his wife. The informant, Omar, has vanished.

A cultural revolution Since 9/11, the FBI and prosecutors say, they are more interested in gathering intelligence than in compiling the perfect prosecution. That attitude goes against their culture, which has always rewarded agents and lawyers for locking people up. "We have to run everything down. Everything is pursued, either preliminarily or we actually will open an investigation and throw a source in the middle of it," says Cummings, the FBI official. If the investigation comes up empty, it is closed, he says. "I don't have time to spend on garbage."

Sometimes, though, it seems as if the government is trying to do everything: gather intelligence, pre-empt a terrorist attack and send people to prison, even if the evidence is thin. Investigations seem to grow into case files, which lead to press conferences. "From the perspective of the investigators," says Jenkins, the Rand expert, "the more you invest in an investigation, you create your own momentum. You become convinced you've got a case."

Pre-emptive prosecutions come with secondary risks. When they work, they may be more likely to put innocent people in jail -- because they are built not around what men do but around what's in their hearts. When they don't work, when the jury won't buy the legitimate claims of a dodgy informant, dangerous people can go free. In San Francisco, the DEA lost a felony drug-trafficking case in October after the informant admitted to smoking crack during the investigation and then, on the witness stand, fell asleep -- seven times.

The gravest consequence may be the long-term one: if the rumors of entrapment become so corrosive that no one in the Muslim-American community feels safe talking to the FBI, then the government has lost its best potential ally. While reporting this story, I met with a couple who had helped found the Sunni mosque attended by the Duka brothers. The couple had immigrated from India decades ago. We sat in their upscale suburban home and talked about the Dukas, whom they didn't know very well, and their fears. They were convinced that their phones were being tapped. They had stopped watching mainstream TV news and were even thinking of leaving the country. "This is a country which was great," the woman said. "That's why we all came -- freedom of speech, justice, things that were not even to be found in Muslim countries. But it is vanishing every day."

In September, Mohamed Shnewer's 12-year-old sister was punched in the face and choked by a boy at her Cherry Hill middle school who called her a terrorist, her family says. Local police are investigating, and the girl has gone to Jordan with her mother. The family's store, along with the Tatars' pizzeria, has closed down because of lack of business, and the Shnewers have put their house up for sale. The Duka brothers' father was detained on immigration charges the day his sons were arrested; now he faces deportation.

In fact, the government could have just deported the Duka brothers at the beginning, dramatically reducing the expense and complications of the case. Since none of the men were known to have ties to any international terrorist organizations, they might have been a relatively low threat once deposited thousands of miles away. The NYPD is trying to pursue that alternative solution more often. (The NYPD intelligence unit also promotes officers for work that doesn't necessarily lead to arrests.)

But the pursuit of a traditional prosecution remains a powerful force at the Justice Department. It is hard to reward agents for walking away from cases. For now, terrorism expert Jenkins is comforted by one fact. "You do have an ultimate auditor against abuse or error, which is a judge and jury. It is up to them to look into the eyes of the informant and the defendants and decide who is telling the truth." Early next year, the Fort Dix defendants will have their chance. It will be as much a trial of their intent as it is of the government's new model -- and of the informant Omar, who is expected to testify in depth.