The Last Patriot

CHAPTER 17

Andrew Salam was sick and tired of talking. Ozbek could see it in his face the minute he walked into the D.C. Metro interrogation room. The man had been repeatedly grilled since being arrested. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot. He looked tired, he looked angry, and he looked hungry. What he didn’t look like, though, was a killer.

He appeared to be of Pakistani descent, with dark skin, dark hair, and brown eyes. He was around five-foot-six, five-foot-seven, max. He had a thin scar that ran through his left eyebrow.

“Have you had anything to eat today?” asked Ozbek.

Salam shook his head. “Only some stale coffee.”

Ozbek waved Rasmussen over. “Tell us what you want and my partner will go get it for you.”

“Seriously?” asked Salam, his eyes brightening a bit.

Ozbek nodded. He learned a long time ago that the most productive way to start an interrogation was to build rapport by trying to give the prisoner something he wanted.

Once Rasmussen had left to get the food, Ozbek asked Salam how he had been recruited.

The man took a moment before replying. It was obvious that he was having trouble coming to terms with the fact that he had been duped. Finally, he replied, “It seemed so real to me. Just like out of a movie. Three years ago I was on my way to my internship at the Near Eastern section of the Library of Congress when this guy approached me, flashed his FBI credentials, and asked if I could be free for lunch.”

“And you said yes.”

Salam nodded.

“Then what happened?” asked Ozbek.

“We met later that day. I ate and he talked.”

“What was his name?”

“Sean Riley,” the man replied.

“So what did you and Sean Riley talk about?” asked Ozbek.

“Like I said, he did most of the talking. But the subject was the growing threat America faced from both Islamic extremist ideology and legal ‘Islamism.’ ”

“Meaning political Islam,” clarified Ozbek.

“Right,” replied Salam. “Riley described an active campaign by Muslim extremists to destroy Western civilization from within — quietly, peacefully; even legally. He explained how they were working to destabilize America and ultimately replace the U.S. Constitution with Islamic sharia law.”

“And that bothers you?”

“Of course it does. It should bother every American. And it’s already happening. They have brought about women-only classes and swimming times at taxpayer-funded universities and public pools. Christians, Jews, and Hindus have been banned from serving on juries where Muslim defendants are being judged. Piggy banks and Porky Pig tissue dispensers have been banned from workplaces because they offend Islamist sensibilities. Ice cream has been discontinued at certain Burger Kings because the picture on the wrapper looks like the Arabic script for Allah. Public schools have been pulling pork from their menus. Women have been beaten, strangled, and killed by their husbands, brothers, or fathers for ‘dishonoring’ their families. It’s death by a thousand cuts, or sharia inch-by-inch as some refer to it, and most Americans have no idea this battle is being waged every day across America.

“By not fighting back, by allowing groups in particular like FAIR to obfuscate what is really happening, and not insisting that the Islamists adapt to our culture, the United States is cutting its own throat with a politically correct knife and helping to further the Islamists’ agenda.”

“And that’s why this Sean Riley wanted to recruit you? To take the fight to the Islamists?” asked Ozbek.

“Exactly.”

Ozbek had seen a chilling collection of classified evidence before it was made public in a terrorism financing trial in Dallas which laid out the Islamist agenda to take over the United States. The evidence contained a detailed strategy memo from the Muslim Brotherhood — the oft-cited parent organization of Hamas and al-Qaeda which was intimately tied to FAIR — laying out steps for how the U.S. Constitution and Western civilization could be destroyed from within and replaced with sharia law.

Ozbek remembered the words of an audiotape he’d heard played that detailed the Brotherhood’s paranoia about “securing the group” from infiltration by “Zionism, Masonry … the CIA, FBI, etc.” so that they could detect any outside monitoring and get rid of any such enemies.

The FBI had already floated a cursory theory of theirs to Ozbek and Rasmussen that Salam’s job was just that — to discover where American Islamist organizations were vulnerable and to infiltrate them in order to shore them up. The only thing was that Salam didn’t know it. He’d been purposely kept in the dark.

“Why did they pick you for this assignment?” asked Ozbek.

“I asked Riley the same thing,” replied Salam. “He said my thesis caught his attention.”

“What was it about?”

“It was about how the Islamists were slowly creating a specialized victim status for themselves whereby discussion of Islam, as well as their motives for Islamic supremacism, were quickly becoming no-go topics. I entitled it The Quiet War and paid special attention to how the Islamists had realized that they could further their agenda by playing upon Americans’ natural distaste for racism. They did it by creating a label that smacked of bigotry and which could be applied to anyone who called into question their true loyalties, motivations, religious texts, or ultimate end game—Islamophobia.”

“And what were your conclusions?”

Salam looked at him. “They weren’t good. The United States is doing nothing but ceding ground to the Islamists. It would rather be politically correct than victorious, and as long as it refuses to engage its enemy on every single front it will never win.”

“That’s a pretty serious charge,” said Ozbek.

“Sure it is. But it’s right on the money,” the man responded. “For the majority of its adherents, Islam is a beautiful religion. We not only don’t want to commit acts of violence, we don’t want anyone else to either, especially not in the name of our religion. If it were up to us, we’d gladly see the violent passages the extremists use to justify their actions removed from the Koran.

“The majority of Muslims in America and around the world are moderate and peaceful. Islam brings comfort and provides a noble path for over a billion people on this planet. It is the source of incredible goodness. We want to live in harmony with our neighbors, regardless of what their beliefs are.

“Everyone wants us, the moderate Muslims, to reform Islam, but no one does anything to help. They don’t seem to understand that the moderates who are brave enough to stand up are constantly drowned out by the Islamists who are more media savvy, better organized, and considerably better financed.”

Ozbek referred to his notes. “So that’s where this Operation Glass Canyon that you told the FBI about came in?”

“Yes,” said Salam. “Operation Glass Canyon was supposed to take the fight directly to the fundamentalists.”

“This was headquartered out of your firm, McAllister & Associates?”

“My part of it was. I thought the rest was being handled by the FBI.”

“What is McAllister & Associates?” asked Ozbek.

“It’s a P.R. and lobbying firm that specializes in Muslim clients. It was my cover, which allowed me to infiltrate the Islamist movement in America.”

“And were you successful?”

“Very,” replied Salam. “I placed or turned people in almost every hardcore Islamist organization in the country.”

“Didn’t you ever get suspicious that you weren’t really working for the FBI?” asked Ozbek. “According to what I was told, you didn’t even train at the FBI Academy in Quantico.”

“Riley trained me at an Islamic compound in upstate New York called Islamaburg. He said it was for my protection because the FBI wanted to keep my identity a secret, even from other FBI agents.”

“But here you are,” pressed Ozbek, “feeding all of these reports to Riley and nothing is happening. Doesn’t that set off any alarm bells for you?”

“Are you asking if I got frustrated?” asked Salam. “Of course I did. But what did I know? Government is famous for being slow. In fact Riley always liked to calm me down by joking that the FBI put the ‘bureau’ in bureaucratic. No matter how hot a piece of intel was that I gave him, he always assured me that it was being passed up the chain of command and being acted upon.”

When Steve Rasmussen returned with the food, Ozbek gave the prisoner a few moments to begin eating before turning the conversation to the heart of why they were there.