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The Federal Bureau of Investigation is the largest collector of human intelligence in the United States.

On any given day, the FBI has a network of more than 15,000 informants collecting information. Many of the FBI’s informants work in US Muslim communities.

These informants are part of a post-9/11 mandate to stop potential attacks before they even begin — a preemptive counterterrorism policy.

To find suspects interested in committing violence in the United States, the FBI assigns informants to pose as members of al-Qaeda, or one of its affiliate groups, and then offer up the opportunity to get involved in a plot.

During the course of this investigation, Al Jazeera met some of the men who spied on US communities on orders from the FBI.

Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit tracked down three informants, all with different methods and motivations, and reveals new details about their undercover work for the US government.

Elie Assaad claims to have been working for the FBI and other federal agencies for 14 years. A violent criminal, Assaad sees himself as a secret agent, a man the government relied on to close cases that other informants had bungled.

After nearly a decade of tracing his movements, Al Jazeera’s Trevor Aaronson met Assaad in a café, and persuaded him to take part in a formal interview about his work for the FBI.

“The government lost, f***ed up many cases. I go there to fix it. That’s my job, The Closer,” says Assaad.

Others have a very different view of The Closer.

“Elie Assaad knows how to make a livelihood out of providing information to the government that the government wants to hear. Not necessarily truthful information. The truth is negotiable,” says Rory McMahon, a private investigator who worked on one of the cases closed by Assaad.

Craig Monteilh, a convicted conman, was recruited by the FBI to spy on mosques in Orange County, California.  He pretended to convert to Islam as part of an FBI undercover operation codenamed Flex.

Monteilh’s ruse was to get young men to train with him in the gym. He thought his targets would drop their guard once they were tired out.

“The name Flex came from me working out and drawing Muslim youth out of their comfort areas of the mosque into a gym to speak more freely while being recorded,” Monteilh said.

“The informant programme that’s so vast in the Muslim community today. It just multiplies. It’s completely just out of control.”

Darren Griffin served in Iraq for the US Army. When he left the military and returned to Toledo, Ohio, he became involved in drugs.

Following a bar fight with drug dealers, Griffin was recruited as a drug informant, earning $800 a week in government payments, according to court testimony. While working for the Drug Enforcement Administration, he continued to use and sell drugs.

After the 9/11 attacks, Griffin moved over to the FBI. He pretended to convert to Islam, and told the local Muslim community that he was trying to make amends for misdeeds in Iraq.

The FBI gave Griffin a codename: The Trainer. He offered to teach young Muslim men how to fire weapons.

“It’s basically my responsibility for the training. You are my brothers, so I’m going to protect you with every knowledge, every bone in my body,” he is heard saying on FBI footage obtained by Al Jazeera.

There is a saying within the FBI: “To catch the devil, you have to go to hell.”

As the FBI’s intelligence ranks swelled in the decade after the 9/11 attacks, hardened criminals made their way on to the government’s counterterrorism payroll.

Many of these informants have impressive rap sheets, including charges for major offences such as rape and murder.

Retired FBI Special Agent Peter Ahearn told Al Jazeera that informants can be difficult to handle.

“They’ll lie to you. They’ll misstate. They’ll misrepresent,” he said. “You know you have to dance with the devil, yeah. And it’s just not in the FBI — I’ve heard that too when you look at an agency like the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

One prolific FBI informant, Shahed Hussain, admitted under oath that he fled Pakistan on murder charges. Another, Besnik Bakalli, admitted in court testimony that he was wanted for shooting a man in Albania; the disposition of that case is unknown. A third informant, Robert Childs, had been convicted of rape and child molestation, according to court records.

Many more counterterrorism informants are working for the FBI to minimise charges ranging from drug dealing to domestic battery.

“You turn them. You get them to now work for you because you might have had a little something over their head like you could arrest them for drug trafficking,” said Ahearn.

Below is a rogues gallery of just some of the men who have worked undercover as informants for the FBI.

CLICK ON ANY NAME

The FBI believes that informant-led stings are vital counterterrorism tools. But in many of these stings, there is a reoccurring question: Would the target of the sting have done anything at all were it not for the FBI informant helping him along?

“For many of these cases, they’re often individuals who are young, increasingly young, often have some history of mental problems,” Karen Greenberg of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School told Al Jazeera. “The real issue is, what about the real terrorists?”

The targets of FBI sting operations rarely have connections overseas or significant economic resources. In some cases, they are not only broke but also mentally ill. The target of a Seattle sting, Walli Mujahidh, had been diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder, according to court records. He had trouble distinguishing between reality and fantasy.

In a sting operation outside New York City, an FBI informant targeted James Cromitie, a poor Wal-Mart employee with a history of suicide attempts and hearing voices, according to court records. Cromitie did not have connections to international groups or access to any weapons. He agreed to join a plot concocted by the undercover informant to bomb synagogues only after the FBI informant offered him $250,000.

Responding to criticism that sting operations do not catch the truly dangerous threats, Peter Ahearn said: “What if on a bad day that they decided, ‘Yeah, I’ve had enough of this and really became to that point I’m going to do something about it.’ You have information that’s coming. Do you think the FBI should ignore it? I mean, should they? No.”

Informants are often used to work stings — undercover counterterrorism operations that rely heavily on the ability of an informant or undercover agent to build a rapport with his target.

In some cases, the FBI employs conmen as informants who have experience carrying out acts of fraud.

Each of the three men featured in Informants conducted their own sting operations, with varying degrees of success.

The Liberty City 7 refers to a group of men in Miami led by former Chicago street-preacher Narseal Batiste.

After the FBI struggled to develop a case against the group, they sent in a professional informant, The Closer — Elie Assaad.

To get the arrests, Assaad posed as a member of al-Qaeda. He ordered the group to take surveillance photographs of the FBI office in North Miami Beach and provided them with a large warehouse as their headquarters.

The primary evidence in the case was a video in which Assaad convinced Batiste and the others to pledge allegiance to al-Qaeda. He promised the group $50,000.

Rothschild Augustine, a member of the Liberty City 7, was sentenced to seven years in prison for conspiracy to provide material support and resources to al-Qaeda. In an exclusive interview with Al Jazeera, Augustine said the group had never planned to commit an attack.

“There was never no bombs, there was never no weapons, there was never no maps, there was never no plans,” he said. “You know, it was just a bunch of hogwash.

“We just wanted to get money from this guy, because we didn’t believe he was a terrorist. That was all our mind was on, you know, the money. It was messed up, it was a stupid idea with how everything turned out, but that was our mind frame at the time.”

Rory McMahon, an investigator for the defence, told Al Jazeera the Liberty City 7 case emboldened the FBI to continue its campaign of undercover counterterrorism stings.

“The Liberty City 7 case was the first historic one where it got a lot of national attention,” he said. “They [the FBI] were able to ultimately succeed so that emboldened them, now they can manufacture cases and then announce to the world, ‘We just saved you from this group.’ ”

In Orange County, California, Craig Monteilh, The Bodybuilder, was overzealous. He would consistently approach members of the California Muslim community and talk about conflicts in the Middle East.

Monteilh’s aggressive approach caused the FBI’s undercover operation to unravel. Hussam Ayloush, of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, received a number of complaints about Monteilh. Ayloush told Stephen Tidwell, the FBI assistant director, there was a man who was incessantly asking questions about violence and “jihad.”

“The minute I said it’s a convert in Irvine, he didn’t even wait for me to give him the name,” Ayloush said. “He said, “Oh, thank you, Hussam. That’s great. I’m glad you reported that. We’ll take care of it from now on.

“I could only imagine what’s in his mind at that moment that the same informant we’ve sent to entrap Muslims is being reported by these same Muslims that we suspected.”

In the video below informant Darren Griffin, The Trainer, is seen attempting to get an Ohio man, Mohammad Amawi, to send computers to people fighting in Iraq.

“Would he have strapped a bomb to himself and went and blown himself up?” Darren Griffin told Al Jazeera. “No, because he didn’t have that intestinal fortitude. But to get a sniper rifle or use a remote detonation, I think he would do for sure.”

Throughout the course of his sting, Griffin befriended Amawi, even going so far as to pay his rent with money provided by the FBI.

“That was the first of many financial favours that the government through Darren Griffin used with Mohammad Amawi, basically to keep him interested and to keep him talking,” Edward Bryan, lawyer for Mohammad Amawi, told Al Jazeera.

The two men spent hours together watching violent videos on the Internet.

Griffin’s sting consisted of two parts. The first was teaching Amawi how to fire guns, and the second was persuading him to deliver laptops to militants in Iraq or Syria.

In 2005, the pair went to Jordan to see Amawi’s family. The FBI funded the entire trip. In Jordan, Amawi’s family questioned their son over whether he thought his new friend might be a government agent.

“He said, ‘You know, it doesn’t matter if I do or not. I’m not doing anything wrong,’” Amr Amawi, Mohammad’s brother, told Al Jazeera.

Amawi was brought back to the United States in 2006. He was convicted of trying to kill or maim people outside the United States, and is now serving 20 years in prison.

His brother and others in Toledo believe that nothing would have happened without the FBI informant, Darren Griffin.

“To me, personally, he was framed. Without Griffin, there wouldn’t be no case. I want to make sure that nobody falls in the same situation like my brother did,” said Amr Amawi.

Under US law, a criminal defendant could be acquitted at trial if he can prove that the government induced him to commit the crime.

Entrapment has not been a winnable defence for those charged with terrorism in US courts. While most of the nearly 200 defendants caught in counterterrorism stings plead guilty in order to obtain reduced prison sentences, 13 individuals charged with terrorism have gone to trial and argued entrapment. None has been successful.

Criminal defence lawyer Martin Stolar told Al Jazeera that while those lured by informants to commit crimes or take part in plots were often vulnerable and easily manipulated, entrapment was still a very difficult defence to use because of the prejudices of juries.

“The problem with entrapment, of course, is that you basically are admitting that you were going to commit the crime.  That doesn’t make you a good friend of the jury,” Stolar said.

“In the post-9/11 era, Muslims accused of terrorism start out with three strikes against them and maybe four strikes, so, it’s extraordinarily difficult.”

The FBI regularly uses leverage to coerce people to work as informants. Not many do it willingly.

It can be a dirty game, and agents often offer lenience on criminal charges if an individual is willing to work for the government. In some instances, FBI agents offer help with immigration issues if an individual is willing to provide information.

The former special agent-in-charge for the FBI in Northern Ohio, Ted Wasky, told Al Jazeera that “the use of informants and witnesses that proactively work to investigate crimes is the foundation of the FBI.”

“Informants do not always come to the FBI voluntarily,” Wasky said. “They often are trying to help themselves out of a criminal problem of their own.  After they get arrested, they agree to cooperate many times for a lighter sentence, or at least to let a judge at sentencing know that he was remorseful for their crimes.”

In Al Jazeera’s investigation, Craig Monteilh, The Bodybuilder, outlines the method the FBI uses to coerce people to work for the government.

“The FBI uses a method to turn a person to become an informant. That method is called MICE,” he said.

“M stands for Money — using money to bribe them to become an informant. I — use their ideology to turn them. Meaning, in this case, it would be religion. C — compromise. Meaning some kind of information that makes that person vulnerable. E is ego.”

Most recently, the FBI has begun to use the no-fly list to turn the screws on people who refuse to work as spies for the government.

RETURN TO TOP

Executive Producer

Keith Bowers

Reporter

Trevor Aaronson

Senior Producer

Jeremy Young

Camera

Snorre Wik

Manny Panaretos

Colin McIntyre

Nick Porter

Craig Pennington

Editor

Nic Dove

Producer

Josh Bernstein

Khody Akhavi

Associate Producer

Katie Lannigan

Web designers

Konstantinos Antonopoulos

(english version)

Mustafa Mohamad Abuein

(arabic version)