Imam Foad Farahi says he turned down the FBI's invitation to be an informant.

By Trevor Aaronson

Bush-Cheney and Kerry-Edwards signs littered the lawns of North Miami Beach as Imam Foad Farahi walked from a mosque to his apartment a few blocks away. It was November 1, 2004, the day before George W. Bush would win a second term in office. But the Muslim holy man had been too busy fasting and praying to pay much attention to the presidential election.

For Farahi, an Iranian citizen who had lived in the United States for more than a decade, it was simply another month of Ramadan in South Florida. Then, around 5 p.m., as he neared his apartment, he saw two men standing outside. They were waiting for him.

“We’re from the FBI,” one of the men said.

“OK,” he responded.

They wanted to know about José Padilla and Adnan El Shukrijumah, two South Florida men linked to the Al-Qaeda terrorist network. Padilla, the so-called Dirty Bomber, was arrested in May 2002 and initially given enemy combatant status. He eventually stood trial in Miami, was convicted on terrorism charges, and sentenced to 17 years in prison. Shukrijumah is a Saudi Arabian and an alleged Al-Qaeda member whose last known address was in Miramar. The FBI is offering up to $5 million for information leading directly to his capture.

“I know José Padilla, but I don’t know Adnan,” Farahi told the agents.

Of course, Farahi knew of Shukrijumah. As imam of the Shamsuddin Islamic Center in North Miami Beach, Farahi was in a unique position to know about local Muslims, including Padilla and Shukrijumah. Padilla had prayed at Farahi’s mosque and was once among his Arabic students. Shukrijumah was the son of a local Islamic religious leader.

“I have had no contact with Padilla since 1998, when he left the country,” Farahi told the government agents. He had once met Shukrijumah but had no contact with him after that. “I don’t know anything about his activities.”

“We want you to work with us,” Farahi remembers the agents telling him.

And this is when the imam’s five-year battle with the federal government began.

“I have no problem working with you guys or helping you out,” Farahi said. He could keep them informed about the local Muslim community or translate Arabic. But the relationship, he insisted, would need to be public; others would have to know he was helping the government.

But that wasn’t what the FBI had in mind, Farahi says. The agents wanted him to become a secret informant who would investigate specific people. And they knew Farahi was in a vulnerable position. His student visa had expired, and he had asked the government for a renewal. He had also applied for political asylum, hoping one of those legal tracks would offer a way for him to stay in the United States indefinitely.

“We’ll give you residency,” the agents promised. “We’ll give you money to go to school.”

Farahi considered the offer for a moment and then shook his head.

“I can’t,” he told them.

The slender, bearded 34-year-old Farahi frowns as he recalls all of this while sitting on a white folding chair in the Shamsuddin Islamic Center on a recent afternoon. “People trust you as a religious figure, and you’re trying to kind of deceive them,” he says, remembering the choice he faced. “That’s where the problem is.”

Farahi soon discovered the FBI’s offer wasn’t optional. The federal government used strong-arm tactics — including trying to have him deported and falsely claiming it had information linking him to terrorism — in an effort to force him to become an informant, he says.

The imam has resisted the government at every step, having most recently taken his political asylum case to the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

“As long as you’re not a citizen, there are lots of things [the government] can do,” says Ira Kurzban, Farahi’s attorney. “They can allege you’re a terrorist and try to bring terrorist charges against you, or they can get you deported.” Terrorism, he explains, can even be defined as giving “money to a hospital in the West Bank that turns out to be run by Hamas.”

Now the local Muslim leader and his attorney, Ira Kurzban (shown), are fighting the government's efforts to deport him to Iran.

Farahi asserts unequivocally he is innocent of any terrorism charges the government could bring against him. In fact, he says, he would report anyone in the Muslim community supporting terrorism. “From the Islamic perspective, it’s your duty to respect the law, and if there’s anything going on, any crime about to be committed, or any kind of harm to be caused to people or property, it should be reported to the police,” he says.

The FBI’s intense efforts to pressure Farahi into becoming an informant reveal the bureau’s desperation to infiltrate local Muslim communities. The hard-line tactics have become so widespread in the United States that the San Francisco-based civil rights group Muslim Advocates distributes a video advising how to respond if FBI agents approach.

In fact, relations between the FBI and U.S. Islamic communities are so strained that a coalition of Muslim-American groups in March accused the government of using “McCarthy-era tactics” and threatened to sever communication with the FBI unless it “reassessed its use of agent provocateurs in Muslim communities.”

Despite this public conflict, few specific cases of Muslims being recruited as informants have become public. Farahi’s battle with the government is not only daring but also unusual.

“People have two choices,” Farahi says. “Either they end up working with the FBI, or they leave the country on their own. It’s just sometimes when you’re in that situation, not many people are strong enough to stand up and resist and fight — to reject their offers.”

But by every other measure, the North Miami Beach imam is something else. In his 34 years, he has never set foot in Iran. He speaks Arabic, not Farsi, and while the majority of Iranians are members of the Shia sect of Islam, Farahi is a Sunni. He is an Iranian only because he inherited his father’s citizenship.

But Farahi grew up in Kuwait. His father was an Iranian businessman who operated a currency exchange business in Kuwait City. His mother, a Syrian, raised him and his younger sister to speak Arabic and worship as Sunnis. But he knew his future would never be secure in Kuwait. “Even if I married a Kuwaiti woman, I wouldn’t become a citizen,” he says. “Kuwait could deport me to Iran at any time for any reason.”

At age 19, he applied for and received a student visa from the United States. He chose to come to South Florida, where his family once vacationed when he was a teenager, and enrolled in Miami Dade College. He received an associate’s degree there and transferred to Barry University, the private Catholic school in Miami Shores, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in chemistry.

While at Barry, he served on the university’s interfaith committee, several faculty members recall. This continued even after he graduated. He helped put together interfaith dinners and talked about Islam. In addition, he participated as a teacher in a Barry University peace forum attended by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim children. “He has had a positive influence at this university,” says Edward R. Sunshine, a theology professor at Barry. No one who knows Farahi, Sunshine says, would suspect he is radical or militant in any way.

Farahi went on to obtain a master’s degree in public health from Florida International University. He also began an intensive, three-year imam’s training course administered by the director of Islamic studies at a mosque in Miramar. In 2000, the Shamsuddin Islamic Center opened near his home in North Miami Beach. Six months later, its imam returned home to Egypt, and Farahi was a logical successor.

In Islam, an imam is among the designated leaders in a community or mosque. The imam leads prayers during gatherings and helps others understand the teachings of Islam. Farahi earns a modest salary funded by donations to the mosque.

It was through this position that he met several South Floridians who have been linked to terrorism. In addition to Padilla and Shukrijumah, he encountered Imran Mandhai, a 19-year-old Pakistani man living in Hollywood who was arrested in 2002 for an alleged plot to bomb power plants.

“Imran came here once years ago during Ramadan,” Farahi recalls as he sits in a corner of the mosque. “It was a big event for him at the time. He memorized and recited the Koran.”

When Farahi met with the FBI agents November 1, 2004, he said he couldn’t spy on members of his mosque in good conscience. Two days later, FBI agents phoned him. They requested he come to their office to take a polygraph. “I had nothing to hide,” Farahi recalls. “They asked the same questions over and over, to see if my answer would change, and it didn’t.”

The agents were still focused on Shukrijumah.

“What is your relationship with him?”

“When was the last time you were in contact with him?”

“Where is he now?”

For two and a half years after the polygraph, Farahi didn’t hear from the FBI. Then, in summer 2007, he received another call from the bureau. An agent asked to meet with him immediately. In Cooper City, two FBI agents — a man and a woman — again asked Farahi if he would work with the government. He again declined, and the meeting ended amicably.

Farahi didn’t know the pushback would come later.

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Tags: FBI, informant, Iran, Miami, Muslim Community, Ramadan

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