Stopping a Would-Be Terrorist

The 20-year-old Saudi Arabian man living in Lubbock, Texas was intent on waging jihad against Americans—possibly even a former U.S. president—and he was one ingredient away from being able to build a powerful bomb.
But Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari’s deadly plans began to unravel when a shipping company’s suspicions were raised—illustrating once again how the FBI relies on private industry and the general public in the fight against terror.

	Setting Tripwires The FBI depends on private industry and the general public to help fight terrorism. Weapons of mass destruction coordinators in each of the 56 FBI field offices, along with other agents, regularly meet with representatives from industry and academic institutions, public health officials, local law enforcement, and first responders to raise awareness about threats to our national security. These efforts are known as setting tripwires, and the intent is to establish an early-warning network where those closest to an emerging situation—such as the Lubbock shipping company in the Aldawsari case—are aware of potential risks and are prepared to inform the FBI when suspicions are raised. “If not for those established tripwires and the liaison with the local police department—and them making the right decision to notify the FBI—I shudder to think what might have happened in the Aldawsari case,” said Special Agent Frazier Thompson. “If Aldawsari was able to get the phenol, there is no doubt in my mind he would have manufactured a very potent explosive device.” Thompson added, “Establishing and maintaining tripwires is critical to our national security, and the cooperation we received across the board on the Aldawsari case proved it.”

In early February 2011, a Lubbock shipping firm received a package from a North Carolina chemical company containing 10 bottles of phenol intended for Aldawsari. Combined with just two other chemicals, phenol can be used to make a potent explosive. Delivering such poisonous chemicals to an individual’s home is not common, so the shipping company contacted the North Carolina firm. Both decided that the phenol should not be delivered and that local law enforcement should be alerted. A Lubbock Police Department officer was called to the scene.
“That officer and his supervisor—because of their relationship with the FBI (see sidebar)—decided that this was something we needed to know about,” said Special Agent Frazier Thompson, who works in our Dallas Division. “Our initial focus was to identify Aldawsari to see if he had a legitimate reason for purchasing phenol.”
In a matter of days, members of our North Texas Joint Terrorism Task Force learned that although Aldawsari had once been a chemical engineering student at Texas Tech, he was no longer enrolled there and had no affiliation with the university.
“He was trying to pass himself off as a Texas Tech student doing research on cleaning products,” said Special Agent Mike Orndorff, who worked the investigation. “Those credentials, if legitimate, would have allowed him to buy the phenol.”
Most alarming was that Aldawsari had already purchased the two other chemicals needed to make his bomb, along with test tubes, beakers, and protective gear. Through covert operations, investigators learned he had disassembled clocks and cell phones and stripped the wires off Christmas lights in apparent attempts to fashion timers and initiating devices.

Evidence of Aldawsari’s attempts to fashion timers and initiating devices.

“His apartment bedroom was basically a storage room where he kept his chemicals and equipment,” Thompson said. “He was sleeping in the living room on the couch or the floor.”
The investigation revealed troubling things about Aldawsari, who had come to the U.S. legally in 2008 on a student visa. “Based on evidence from the Internet and his journal entries,” Thompson said, “Aldawsari was radicalized before he ever came to the U.S. It appears he started planning this attack when he was a teenager and sought a scholarship to study specifically in America.”
By this point, surveillance teams were monitoring Aldawsari around the clock. “He was searching online for large targets such as dams and electrical plants,” Thompson said. He also searched for ways to conceal explosives in baby dolls and carriages and even sought the Texas address of former President George W. Bush.
On February 23, 2011, after agents were certain that Aldawsari was working alone, he was arrested and charged with attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction. In November, after being convicted by a jury, he was sentenced to life in prison.
“Aldawsari wanted to take out a lot of people,” Thompson said. “It scares me to think what might have happened if we hadn’t stopped him.”

Preying on the Weak

It was a despicable scheme—stealing identities of terminally ill individuals to fraudulently obtain millions of dollars from insurance companies and bond issuers.
Attorney Joseph Caramadre, president and CEO of his own estate planning company in Rhode Island—along with Raymour Radhakrishnan, an employee—pled guilty earlier this month in federal court to conspiracy to commit identity theft and wire fraud.
Caramadre’s investment strategies depended on lying to terminally ill individuals and their loved ones to obtain identity information. He abused two financial instruments—variable annuities and death put bonds (see sidebar)—to carry out these strategies. In addition to buying annuities from insurance companies listing terminally ill individuals as annuitants, he also purchased bonds of distressed companies for significantly below face value listing terminally ill individuals as “co-owners.” When the terminally ill person died days or weeks later, he would exercise the death benefits associated with the investments.
Caramadre recruited investors by falsely telling them he found a loophole which permitted the use of terminally ill patients as annuitants on annuities and co-owners on brokerage accounts used to purchase death put bonds. He then entered into profit-sharing agreements with them, but received a significant percentage of the profits himself.

	Financial Instruments Misused in the Scam - Variable annuities: Investments akin to mutual funds with death benefits. These death benefits include a guaranteed return of all money invested plus a guaranteed profit—even if the market went down—and various other bonuses and enhancements upon the death of the person named as the annuitant. - Death put bonds: Corporate bonds with survivor options purchased through a brokerage account. Under the terms of these bonds, the owner of a bond is able to redeem it at face value years or even decades prior to the bond’s maturity date upon the death of the bond’s co-owner. The financial success of Caramadre’s schemes depended entirely on the imminent death of the person named as the annuitant or co-owner.

In recruiting terminally ill individuals for his scheme, Caramadre was only interested in those with a life expectancy of six months or less. He looked for victims in several ways: visiting AIDS facilities, putting ads in a local religious newspaper offering cash to terminally ill individuals, and even looking through his own company files.
The ads purchased by Caramadre were especially fruitful…in them, he claimed to be a philanthropist and offered the terminally ill a few thousand dollars to assist with their funeral expenses. The ads also got him access to hospice care facilities, nurses, and social workers who could spread the word about his offer.
Radhakrishnan would visit patients and their families to supposedly determine whether they qualified for the donation, but he was actually assessing their life expectancies…the shorter the time, the better for the scheme.
Patients who accepted Caramadre’s cash offer were asked to sign a document, ostensibly because the philanthropist needed it for tax records, but in reality it was so their signatures could be forged later on. Sometimes, they were asked to sign signature pages from actual annuity and brokerage account applications that were disguised as something else. Sometimes, they were told that actual accounts would be open, but that all profits would go to other terminally ill people. And they were always asked for personal information, like Social Security number, birthdates, driver’s license numbers, etc.
Once armed with the fraudulently obtained identity information, Caramadre purchased annuities and death put bonds. And both he and Radhakrishnan took numerous steps to deceive the insurance companies and brokerage houses to hide Caramadre’s true ownership interest.
Caramadre’s scheme went on for about 15 years—from 1995 to 2010—until some of the insurance companies and brokerage houses he defrauded filed complaints, and investigators with the FBI, U.S. Postal Inspection Service, Internal Revenue Service, and U.S. Attorney’s Office began looking into the matter.
Lesson to be learned. If you or a family member is suffering, physically or financially, don’t make quick business decisions….you still need to do your due diligence.

North to Alaska Part 3: A Domestic Terrorist With a Deadly Plan

By the time he moved to Alaska in 2006, Paul Rockwood, Jr. was an ardent follower of the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who he met at a Virginia mosque in late 2001.
Shortly after he settled with his family in the small fishing village of King Salmon to work for the National Weather Service, our agents in Anchorage were aware that Rockwood had begun compiling a list of targets in the U.S. military he might assassinate in the name of jihad.
“If you were wearing a U.S. military uniform,” said Special Agent Doug Klein, who worked the case from Anchorage, “as far as Rockwood was concerned, you were a target.”
A military veteran himself, Rockwood believed it was his religious duty to kill those who desecrated Islam. In 2009, he began sharing his deadly plans with an individual he thought held similar views. But that person was actually an undercover operative employed by our Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Anchorage.
For a time, JTTF personnel wondered how determined Rockwood was about his plans. “But one day when he was with our undercover in Anchorage he identified the building of a cleared defense contractor and said, ‘This is the kind of building I want to blow up,’ ” Klein said. “That’s when we knew he was a serious threat.”
Keeping track of Rockwood was difficult, however, because King Salmon is some 300 miles from Anchorage and only accessible by airplane. And with only a few hundred residents, outsiders would be immediately spotted, so attempts at surveillance were impractical. “We couldn’t use 90 percent of the traditional investigative techniques we use in the Lower 48,” Klein explained.
In addition, small, regional airlines in Alaska are not regulated by the Transportation Security Administration, so anyone can fly with weapons. On Rockwood’s frequent trips from King Salmon to Anchorage, Klein said, “he could have had a gun or a bomb and we never would have known.”
During those Anchorage visits, Rockwood met the undercover operative and discussed buying electronics and downloading schematics of cell phones to make bomb detonators. At one meeting, he said he was getting ready to relocate to the mainland and had plans to steal a cache of explosives in Boston—where he grew up—that would help him go operational.
By early 2010, Rockwood had formalized his hit list to include 15 specific targets—all outside Alaska—and he gave the list to his wife, Nadia, who was aware of his intentions.
Even with no overt acts of terrorism to charge him with, it was decided that for the sake of public safety, Rockwood and his wife could not be allowed to leave Alaska. In May 2010, JTTF agents questioned Rockwood and his wife as they attempted to fly out of Anchorage. Both denied any involvement with a hit list or terrorist plot.
The couple was charged with making false statements to the FBI in a domestic terrorism investigation, and in July, Rockwood was found guilty and sentenced to eight years in prison—the maximum sentence under the law. His wife was also found guilty and received five years of probation.
“We can never be sure if he would have acted,” Klein said, “but Rockwood was clearly a threat, not only to the individuals on his list but to the entire community.”

Living a Lie Identity Theft That Lasted Decades

When Florida Highway Patrol Trooper Richard Blanco—a member of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) in Jacksonville—interviewed an individual suspected of driver’s license fraud in 2011, he wasn’t initially sure if the man was the victim or the perpetrator of identity theft.
That’s because the man—now imprisoned and officially known as John Doe—had a stack of government-issued identification acquired during the 22 years he had been using a living victim’s identity. That included a passport, driver’s license, birth certificate, Social Security card, and identification allowing him unescorted access to a port and military installation.

	Podcast: John Doe Sentenced

“He was extremely convincing that he was the victim,” said Blanco, a veteran trooper with more than 30 years on the force. “When you have 20 forms of identification and it’s in your possession,” Blanco explained, “it’s hard to not believe you are the person you say you are.”
But John Doe was indeed an imposter, and while he was living under another man’s name, the real victim was living a nightmare. It all started in 1989 when the victim’s car was broken into and his wallet was stolen. His identity had been compromised.
John Doe began using the victim’s name, even when he went to prison for aggravated battery. As a result, Blanco said, “if you run John Doe’s fingerprints, even today, they will come back with the victim’s name.”
When the victim, a Miami resident, applied to become a corrections officer, he had to explain why his records showed a felony conviction. He urged officials to compare his fingerprints to those of John Doe’s. When the victim applied for a passport, he was denied because the passport office claimed he already had one—the one that John Doe had applied for and received.
When Blanco was able to talk with the real victim, he heard two decades worth of frustration. The victim had filed a police report years before, but John Doe had never been caught or stopped. Blanco remembers the victim telling him, “This guy has been living my identity. He’s gotten my license suspended and he’s had kids in my name.”
When Blanco realized that he was dealing with a massive and long-running case of identity fraud, John Doe was arrested. The JTTF opened an investigation, and John Doe was eventually indicted federally on numerous counts of aggravated identity theft and fraud.
JTTF investigators had to rule out any threat to national security, because John Doe had access to the Mayport Naval Station as well as JaxPort, the Jacksonville Port Authority. Although he was just working at those locations, Special Agent Paxton Stelly, who supervises Jacksonville’s JTTF, pointed out that John Doe had passed the background checks required to gain access there. “He appears to have manipulated the system with ease,” Stelly said.
Last month a jury convicted John Doe—who continues to insist he is the real victim in the case—and sentenced him to 10 years in prison. Despite DNA testing and a thorough investigation, his real identity remains a mystery.
“It will continue to be a mystery unless he makes an admission to us,” Blanco said, adding, “I don’t know what he’s going to do when he gets out of prison, because the man doesn’t have an identity.”