BY JACK STONE TRUITT
Throughout his 26 year career in counterterrorism at the FBI, John Anticev experienced some of the most significant failures and successes in American counterintelligence. He saw Islamic terrorism shift from a back-burner issue to the bureau’s number one priority and his unit double in size many times over. And he learned that no matter the manpower, resources, or technology, successful counterintelligence requires a personal, human component.
“And that technique is consistent throughout history, whether it’s 80 years ago trying to track down spies or German Nazi’s, it’s the same concept of developing human sources,” he said.
Anticev joined the New York City division of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in 1989, where he remained until his retirement in 2015.
In the beginning, he and his partner were responsible for monitoring almost all North African and Palestinian terrorist activity, an enormous portfolio for just two agents. The Cold War was ongoing, and Islamic terrorism still took a backseat to subjects like Soviet counterintelligence.
“It wasn’t even as big as working the five mafia families in New York, which had one squad of 30 guys for each family,” he said.
At the time, the Soviet-Afghan war was drawing to a close, and Anticev was monitoring Americans being recruited to fight for the Mujahideen. Many received firearms training in local ranges sponsored by a few mosques in Jersey City.
Many of these men that the FBI was tracking and photographing would eventually carry out the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
The most dangerous thing that these FBI targets were doing was going to Afghanistan and join the Mujahideen to fight the Soviets — which meant they were supporting U.S. interests at the time. So no alarms were sounded. That changed in 1990, when Meir Kahane, an orthodox rabbi and co-founder of the Jewish Defense League, was assassinated in Manhattan. The FBI began to investigate the suspected assassin, El Sayyid Nosair, and those surrounding him.
Eventually Anticev and his partner worked to penetrate terrorist cell Nosair belonged to, and developed a source inside who was tasked to make pipe bombs.
However, in June of 1992, while Anticev was on medical leave with a brain tumor, the source had a falling out with his FBI handlers over the wearing of a wire. The source left the cell and was replaced by a man named Ramzi Yousef, one of the foremost perpetrators of the 1993 bombing.
Hindsight always makes it easier to see the confluence of mistakes that led to a missed opportunity to stop the bombing. But it was a vital lesson for Anticev in the ways human error and misjudgment can make or break a case.
“I don’t think it was taken seriously at the time because they weren’t seeing the big picture,” he said.
“All of these little things came into play that made the source leave the group at the most crucial point in the operation. We lost the source, and another bombmaker came in and changed history,” he said.
Following the 1993 attacks, the size of the Joint Terrorism Task Force increased dramatically while the FBI diverted more resources into counterterrorism efforts. In its investigation, the FBI discovered that the renter of the van used in the bombing, Mohammed Salameh, was one of the people being monitored back in 1989 when Anticev first joined the task force.
“We knew it was all the guys we were looking at who were going to fight for the Mujahideen,” he said.
The familiarity with these men from previous investigations allowed the FBI to thwart an attack in June of 1993 meant to follow the World Trade Center Bombing, in which New York City landmarks and tunnels were targeted.
Five years later, Anticev relied on personal experience and human touch to extract intelligence that he believes could’ve prevented the 9/11 attacks.
Anticev was interrogating one of the surviving suicide bombers after 1998 US Embassy bombings in Nairobi, asking him if he had gotten a chance to pray—establishing a shared element of faith—and doing his best to build trust between the two of them and create an environment of conversation.
“I used that to my advantage a lot. To talk to them like I would be talking to a soldier, to get away from any kind of judgment or guilt, and once we got past that you’d be surprised how much information they’d be willing to give up when you speak to them like that,” he said.
It was a pivotal interrogation for the FBI, and later a climactic scene in Lawrence Wright’s The Looming Tower, as well as the Hulu show based on the book.
Ultimately the subject wrote down a phone number that became known as the ‘Al-Qaeda Switchboard,’ a vital piece of counterterrorism intelligence allowing the FBI to map out a global network of Al-Qaeda operatives. But the intel was eventually put under the control of the CIA, which failed to notify the FBI of the presence of al-Qaeda operatives in San Diego taking flying lessons.
“So we didn’t even get the fruits of our own labor,” he said. And a major opportunity to prevent 9/11 was missed due to poor decisions made by a handful of managers.
“Even a marginal group of agents would’ve figured out that something big was going to happen,” he said.
In the wake of 9/11, the FBI made sweeping changes in response to the failures that prevented the bureau from detecting the attacks; counterterrorism resources significantly increased, with the number of intelligence analysts and operations specialists increasing severalfold, intelligence sharing with other federal agencies and local law enforcement expanded, and the FBI prioritized terror prevention above all else.
For Anticev, it still comes down to those on the ground working the case.
Former FBI Special Agent John Anticev. Credit: USA Network.
“All this stuff about [intelligence] sharing and sharing and sharing, you can say that until you’re blue in the face. It’s all going to depend on the people on the ground and the middle managers to actually implement those rules to make it work,” he said.
By the time he retired in 2015, the counterterrorism environment in New York City was drastically different than the one he began in 26 years prior. The Joint Terrorism Task Force from was many times larger than it was in 1989. And the task force now had access to a dizzying number of cameras and collected more data to analyze than humanly possible.
It’s a logical evolution for the task force in a world where terrorist activity primarily takes place online in any one of thousands of websites, chatrooms, and other digital spaces to interact.
Anticev says this sea of activity only furthers the need for human judgment and developing relationships with real-world sources.
“How would you know where to zero in on to look for problem people without a human person telling you where these things are?” he said.
“It doesn’t really matter at the end of the day if they’re communicating online or at somebody’s house. You still have to be that type of agent who knows how to develop human assets and human sources, to be like that fly on the wall on the inside. That’s the whole goal.”