theintercept--2020-12-29--FBI Counterterrorism Informant Spent a Decade Committing Fraud

living the Florida dream .
His three-bedroom , 2,126-square-foot home , with a palm tree-lined pool and hot tub in the backyard , was located near the tony town of Wellington : an equestrian-oriented playpen for the world ’ s richest people about 15 miles from President Donald Trump ’ s Mar-a-Lago resort .
Agbareia parked a Hummer and a Jeep Wrangler in the driveway .
His neighbors in the manicured gated community knew him as a charming , successful man who had studied physics in Canada and sold medical equipment for a company in Boca Raton .
But Agbareia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ successful image came to an end on May 30 , 2017 , when a couple of FBI agents arrived at his home .
Agbareia was just getting out of the shower .
He wrapped a towel around his body to answer the door .
Agbareia and the FBI weren ’ t strangers .
For more than a decade , Agbareia had been one of the FBI ’ s more than 15,000 informants — so valuable as a “ national security asset ” that FBI Special Agent Brian King told a federal judge in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that Agbareia , who had been extradited from Canada to face criminal charges in the United States , should not be turned over to immigration authorities for deportation .
The FBI needed him .
“ I looked at him as a brother , ” the 55-year-old Agbareia said of King in an interview with The Intercept .
King , whom the FBI declined to make available for comment , had been a frequent visitor at Agbareia ’ s house , according to Agbareia .
He ’ d come with assignments — people in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bureau wanted Agbareia to spy on — and sometimes with cash payments .
In all , the FBI paid Agbareia , an Arab Israeli citizen , $ 121,962 over nearly 10 years and kept him from the clutches of immigration authorities .
In return , Agbareia befriended Muslims the FBI was interested in knowing more about , and from April 2015 to July 2016 , he played a key role in an FBI sting that led to the arrest and conviction of three Black converts to Islam for supporting the Islamic State @ @ @ @ @ @ @ attempted to provide material support to ISIL and one of the defendants was arrested attempting to travel overseas to join and fight for the deadly terrorist organization , ” then-U.S. Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin said in a statement announcing the terrorism bust .
But when Agbareia answered the door in a towel almost a year after that Justice Department announcement , the FBI wasn ’ t there to discuss a new assignment .
They were there to arrest Agbareia on four counts of wire fraud .
Federal prosecutors charged Agbareia with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Colorado , New York , Ohio , and Germany .
Agbareia had looked up wealthy Muslims around the world and then contacted them as part of a scheme in which he would pretend to be a devout Muslim stranded on his way to their community .
He needed money , he ’ d tell them , and the cash would roll in hours later through Western Union .
“ It was all so easy , ” Agbareia said of his scams .
That ’ s how Agbareia funded his lifestyle in Florida @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the FBI were well aware that he was running scams for the decade he worked as an informant .
The bureau turned a blind eye to the crimes because Agbareia was valuable to them , he said .
While the FBI declined to comment about Agbareia , citing a policy of not discussing informants , the circumstances of Agbareia ’ s Florida life and his work for the FBI suggest that government agents should have known something was fishy about how he paid his bills .
The FBI paid him less than $ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ agents knew he couldn ’ t work legitimately , because they were the ones keeping him out of the custody of immigration authorities .
And yet all the while , Agbareia was living in a luxury home with expensive cars in the driveway .
Agbareia ’ s arrest was largely the result of his own sloppiness , which finally made it impossible for the FBI to cover for him .
A hidden camera , installed by the FBI in Agbareia ’ s home while he worked on a case , captured him talking @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ stranded traveler ” schemes ; a defense lawyer who stumbled on the incriminating recording notified federal prosecutors .
Lack of FBI oversight is a critical problem here .
For years , Rep. Stephen Lynch , a Massachusetts Democrat , has pushed the Justice Department to revise FBI guidelines to require the agency to tell Congress about crimes committed by informants .
But the Justice Department and the FBI have refused to be transparent about their informants ’ illegal activities .
For his part , Agbareia now feels burned by the FBI .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ much as he did , Agbareia alleged , because those scams allowed him to work full time as an informant for years .
Once the FBI could no longer keep the crimes secret , he said , they turned on him — resulting in criminal charges and his removal from the country .
“ This is like what they call the abused woman syndrome , ” Agbareia said from Israel , the country of his birth .
“ She ’ s being abused by her husband , but in the back of her @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s OK. And it ’ s OK. And it ’ s OK. And then it ’ s too late and he kills her .
This is what happened with me and the government.
” Agbareia ’ s frauds weren ’ t a surprise to the FBI .
They brought the con man and Special Agent King together in the first place .
In May 2005 , federal prosecutors in Alabama indicted Agbareia , who was then living in Canada , for running his “ stranded traveler ” scheme on 54 victims , including @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Canada , acting on a U.S. government request , extradited Agbareia to face the charges .
A little more than a year later , Agbareia pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served and ordered to pay more than $ 90,000 in restitution to his victims .
U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Butler Jr. also ordered Agbareia turned over to immigration authorities for deportation .
That ’ s when King , then an FBI agent in Alabama , stepped in , telling the judge in an affidavit that Agbareia should be spared @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an informant .
Shortly after , King moved to the FBI ’ s office in West Palm Beach , Florida , and he brought Agbareia with him .
Because Agbareia was on probation in Alabama , King successfully petitioned for his probation supervision to be moved to Florida , where he was needed as an informant on matters “ pertaining to national security investigations.
” Agbareia arrived in West Palm Beach in October 2007 .
“ They wanted me to keep this image of a person who ’ s doing so well in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
To help build that cover , King introduced him to a real estate agent .
That ’ s how Agbareia landed the home near Wellington .
The rent was $ 2,500 per month .
Agbareia ’ s wife and son then moved from Canada to join him in Florida .
But the money from the FBI , according to Agbareia , came sporadically and in small amounts .
There was no way he could live off what the FBI was paying him , so he continued the “ stranded traveler ” scams @ @ @ @ @ @ @ m living in a nice house .
It has a swimming pool .
It has all these things , ” Agbareia said .
“ The FBI , they ’ re not idiots .
They ’ re not dumbasses .
They know I can not afford this .
They know I don ’ t have a job .
They know I don ’ t have work .
They know what I ’ m doing.
” The most infamous example of an informant committing crimes while working for the FBI is Whitey Bulger .
A @ @ @ @ @ @ @ J. Connolly Jr. , his FBI handler , Bulger provided information to federal agents about his rivals in organized crime .
At the same time Bulger was providing information to the FBI , his Winter Hill Gang was involved in a host of violent crimes , including murders , and Connolly made sure that the FBI didn ’ t investigate Bulger and his crew .
The Bulger case was egregious , and the Justice Department prosecuted Connolly in 2002 for racketeering , obstruction of justice , and making false statements .
Bulger was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , until he was found in California in 2011 .
He was convicted in 2013 and later murdered in prison .
Informants are the backbone of the FBI : There are more registered informants working for the FBI today than there are agents .
Because FBI guidelines require agents to have probable cause before infiltrating groups or people ’ s private lives , informants are often on the front lines in the FBI ’ s undercover work .
The probable cause requirement doesn ’ t apply to informants — a policy loophole that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the bureau has suspicions but no evidence to suggest that a crime has occurred .
But unlike agents , many informants have checkered pasts .
They are often criminals and scam artists like Agbareia , and to some extent , that ’ s by design .
Choirboys aren ’ t well suited for infiltrating criminal organizations or violent groups .
FBI agents acknowledge that the best informants are criminals who won ’ t lose sleep after betraying people .
So what does the FBI do when criminals in their employ commit crimes that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of investigations ?
With no oversight rules that require the FBI to disclose when informants break the law without authorization , it ’ s impossible to know how often this occurs — but there is an obvious incentive for the FBI to ignore the informants ’ crimes : An informant facing criminal charges won ’ t be a useful asset .
While the FBI spends $ 42 million per year on payments to informants , the bureau is not adequately reviewing long-term informants to ensure that their behavior , including possibly unauthorized illegal @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a November 2019 report by the Justice Department ’ s Office of the Inspector General found .
This has been a long-term problem for the FBI .
A related 2005 Office of the Inspector General report found that 87 percent of reviewed informant files contained documentation of actions violating policies on the handling of informants .
Of 120 informants analyzed , 12 committed crimes that the FBI had not authorized .
But that number was artificially low , because the inspector general also found that the FBI had engaged in a practice @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at least two cases in which the informants ’ criminal activity was not authorized , the FBI did not report the crimes to the U.S. attorney ’ s office , as required by policy .
That ’ s what appears to have occurred in Agbareia ’ s case .
The FBI declined to respond to a list of questions related to its handling of Agbareia as an informant .
“ The FBI ’ s use of informants — across all criminal and national security programs — is done in accordance with strict guidelines @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of Justice and the United States Attorney ’ s offices , ” James P. Marshall , an FBI spokesman in Miami , said in response to the questions .
“ Aside from what you may have learned from court proceedings or documents , the FBI does not discuss actions taken in the course of an investigation.
” In Agbareia ’ s view , the FBI had given him immunity as a con man .
King instructed Agbareia to become well known in South Florida ’ s Muslim communities and to spend time in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Beach — a mosque that for years has been the target of FBI investigation and surveillance because its congregants had once included Adnan El Shukrijumah , a senior Al Qaeda member before his death in 2014 , and José Padilla , who was convicted of plotting a dirty bomb attack in the United States for Al Qaeda .
Prior to Agbareia ’ s move to Florida , the FBI had been aggressively investigating people associated with the North Miami Beach mosque .
FBI agents approached the imam , Foad Farahi , in 2004 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
When he refused , U.S. authorities attempted to deport him and told him that the only way to stay in the country was to work as an informant .
The deportation case was based solely on a technicality : Farahi , a Sunni born in Kuwait with Iranian citizenship , was in the country on a student visa .
In one semester while finishing a master ’ s degree , he needed to take only two classes , which he did , making him a part-time student and as a result violating @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Farahi successfully fought off the FBI ’ s pressure campaign and has remained in Florida .
Agbareia said King told him that Farahi would be one of his first targets .
“ Farahi was a person of interest , ” Agbareia said .
“ They wanted to know a lot about him , about his ideology.
” According to a 2007 FBI memorandum obtained by The Intercept , federal agents believed that Farahi was an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood “ intelligence officer/recruiter.
” The memo — which does not provide information to support the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2003 , a man in Trinidad told agents that Farahi had been “ close friends ” with Shukrijumah , the Al Qaeda member .
The report provides no evidence for its claims and instead relies significantly on innuendo , such as an informant ’ s claim in 2004 that Farahi seemed “ pissed off at life.
” Farahi told The Intercept he ’ s spent 15 years assuming that FBI informants were all around him .
It ’ s been that way since federal agents associated him with Shukrijumah .
Farahi acknowledges having @ @ @ @ @ @ @ were not “ close friends , ” as the FBI memo stated .
Farahi remembered Agbareia , but since he rarely saw the man without his family in tow , he hadn ’ t suspected he was an FBI informant .
“ Usually when someone ’ s an informant , you don ’ t see their family , ” Farahi said .
“ He always brought his wife and son.
” That was part of what made Agbareia unique in his work for the FBI .
He was a family man , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Muslim causes — not what many would expect in an informant .
That ’ s how Fadi Kablawi remembered Agbareia as well .
A dentist in Miami , Kablawi met Agbareia as a patient who needed fillings .
Agbareia didn ’ t go to Kablawi ’ s dental practice on his own accord , though ; he said he went there at the FBI ’ s instruction .
According to Agbareia , FBI agents were suspicious of Kablawi because of his devout religious beliefs and suspected he might associate with violent extremists .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ and YouTube had attracted decent followings , and he regularly spoke at mosques throughout South Florida .
For years , Kablawi , a Palestinian born in Jordan , has suspected he ’ s been under FBI investigation , so he wasn ’ t surprised that federal agents sent in an informant as a patient .
“ It ’ s all about my rhetoric , my speech .
They feel that I have influence .
I ’ m changing people ’ s perception of things , ” Kablawi told The Intercept .
“ And @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a threat .
I criticize the government here , and I criticize governments in our countries .
I hate injustice .
I will risk everything to speak out for the truth.
” As a result of the FBI-ordered friendship , Agbareia arranged for Kablawi to give talks at mosques in West Palm Beach , and Kablawi in turn asked Agbareia to write for a local Muslim magazine that he published .
Writing under the name Mohammad Hassan , Agbareia wrote pedestrian articles about physics .
“ The strange world of quantum science and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ headline of one article .
“ Atoms , particles , and the forces moving them , ” read another .
As was the case with Farahi , Agbareia never saw Kablawi doing anything illegal .
The FBI ’ s interest in Kablawi has extended beyond Agbareia as well .
In September 2017 , a few months after the FBI arrested Agbareia for wire fraud , state prosecutors in Florida indicted Kablawi for Medicare fraud , alleging he overcharged Medicare $ 13,737 for patients ’ dentures .
He has denied those charges , explaining @ @ @ @ @ @ @ upcharge in order to purchase dentures that were of higher quality than those covered by Medicare and has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement .
Records show that the FBI played at least a supporting role in getting Kablawi indicted by state prosecutors .
In a court filing , a Miami-Dade police investigator disclosed that “ in accordance with provisions of the search warrant ” of the dental office , he had turned over Kablawi ’ s iPhone to an FBI agent .
In Palm Beach County ’ s Muslim community , Agbareia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ man in his late 40s who served in the Marines and then worked in a variety of jobs .
Before moving to South Florida , he ran a cheesecake shop in upstate New York .
In Florida , he scratched out a living making paintings and sculptures .
Agbareia told King that Hubbard had expressed support for the 2015 San Bernardino shooting and said that the war in Syria justified such attacks .
Agbareia also told King that he thought Hubbard was a man of talk , not action .
“ He was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , ” Agbareia said .
“ He thought that even the meat at McDonald ’ s was made out of kids .
It was insane.
” But King was still interested .
Agbareia said King told him to get to know Hubbard better and see what happens .
Hubbard introduced Agbareia to two friends , Dayne Christian and Darren Jackson .
At the time , Christian was working at a Dunkin ’ Donuts , having recently completed a one-year federal prison sentence for acting as a straw buyer for a friend ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ recently divorced , had been working as welder in nuclear power plants .
Agbareia started hanging out together with Hubbard , Christian , and Jackson — and together they discussed the possibility of moving to Syria to live under ISIS rule .
They also watched and commented on ISIS propaganda videos together .
Their conversations were captured by recording devices Agbareia wore and others hidden in his home .
The informant encouraged the conversations about ISIS but privately marveled at the men ’ s naivete .
“ They make out the conditions of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , or the dawla , like a Shangri-La , ” Agbareia remembered .
“ Everything ’ s going to be a gold coin .
Everybody gets a house , gets married .
They live such a peaceful life , and it ’ s like paradise .
That ’ s the picture they have .
It ’ s a bloody damn fantasy.
” Christian confirmed in an interview from prison that they talked about moving to Syria and about ISIS , but in his view , no one was serious .
“ What I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have interest to go to that region , whether it be Iraq or Syria , just for the purposes of seeing what it was like to live under Islamic law.
” But he said it was just talk .
“ It was just , excuse my language , like you ’ re shooting the shit with each other.
” Christian was suspicious of Agbareia .
While he appeared to be a successful businessman , something about him didn ’ t add up .
“ Mohammed was always available , ” Christian said .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ It doesn ’ t matter the day , the time — you ’ re always available .
Do you work ?
Things just started to seem strange about him , and every time we would meet up , all he would want to talk about is ISIS .
It was just the same thing over and over again.
” Christian and Jackson confronted Hubbard about Agbareia , and they argued .
“ He ’ s a good brother , ” Hubbard insisted .
Christian and Jackson agreed to trust Agbareia on Hubbard ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ few months they continued to talk about ISIS .
Christian , who owned guns despite being a felon , loaned them to Agbareia and Hubbard to use for shooting practice .
A few weeks before their arrest , Christian learned that Agbareia and Hubbard were planning to travel to Syria — but he stayed quiet .
Hubbard ’ s passport had expired , and at the time he was homeless , so Agbareia arranged for him to apply for a new passport and have it sent to his house .
When the day @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Agbareia asked Jackson to give them a ride — something Agbareia said the FBI encouraged him to do so that they could rope him into the conspiracy to support ISIS .
Hubbard and Jackson , who did not respond to requests to be interviewed from prison , were arrested at the airport .
FBI agents arrested Christian at a chemical company where he had recently started working .
All three men pleaded guilty to providing material support , and Christian pleaded to an additional charge of being a felon in possession of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ years in prison , and Christian and Jackson received a little more than five years .
In a letter to the judge , Hubbard wrote : “ There is no excuse for what I ’ ve done .
More than anything , I wish I would have taken a different path.
” Agbareia was the one who laid the path before Hubbard .
Christian doesn ’ t think any of them would be in prison today were it not for him .
“ A person may have it in them to commit murder @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the gun away from that person , the murder ’ s never committed , ” Christian said .
“ Hubbard may have had those intentions , but it took for Mohammed to be able to provide the passports and the knowledge of traveling abroad and whatever it was that convinced Hubbard to say , ‘ You know what ?
This is my opportunity.
’ ” Christian added : “ I don ’ t know what caused him , Mohammed , to get involved in this deal with the government .
That ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ thing is , if you ’ re going to set terrorists up or seek out to nab terrorists , do just that .
Go and find real terrorists.
” Before Hubbard pleaded guilty , his defense lawyers discovered the recording in which Agbareia was caught running his “ stranded traveler ” scheme .
They turned it over to federal prosecutors , who were then forced to file charges against the FBI ’ s informant .
In a court filing , Hubbard ’ s lawyers suggested that the FBI knew about Agbareia ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ bureau to “ conserve its financial resources ” and reduce the impact of potentially having to disclose to a jury large cash payments over a decade to a single informant .
Once Agbareia ’ s scamming was public , the FBI was no longer there for him .
He served two years in federal prison and then was deported in 2019 to Israel , where he ’ s living with his mother .
His wife was deported to Canada ; his son , now married to an American , still lives in Florida @ @ @ @ @ @ @ deported , Agbareia sent a series of text messages to his former FBI handler .
“ Mr .
King , ” he wrote in one , “ you have done a lot of harm to our family .
You must be proud of your achievements for the sake of an organization that lost its integrity.
” In another , he wrote : “ We put our lives on the line because of you , not the FBI .
GOD IS WATCHING.
” Agbareia now regrets what he did to Hubbard , Christian , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ spying on Farahi , Kablawi , and others in Florida .
But in his view , he ’ s a survivor who did what was necessary at the time for him and his family .
“ I ’ m a fuck-up because I did all these frauds , ” he said .
“ But I did it for a reason.
” Asked if he ’ s still running scams from Israel , Agbareia answered : “ I do what I have to do .
”

Mohammed Agbareia was living the Florida dream. His three-bedroom, 2,126-square-foot home, with a palm tree-lined pool and hot tub in the backyard, was located near the tony town of Wellington: an equestrian-oriented playpen for the world’s richest people about 15 miles from President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort. Agbareia parked a Hummer and a Jeep Wrangler in the driveway. His neighbors in the manicured gated community knew him as a charming, successful man who had studied physics in Canada and sold medical equipment for a company in Boca Raton.
But Agbareia’s life in Florida and his successful image came to an end on May 30, 2017, when a couple of FBI agents arrived at his home. Agbareia was just getting out of the shower. He wrapped a towel around his body to answer the door.
“Get dressed,” an FBI agent told him.
Agbareia and the FBI weren’t strangers. For more than a decade, Agbareia had been one of the FBI’s more than 15,000 informants — so valuable as a “national security asset” that FBI Special Agent Brian King told a federal judge in Alabama in 2006 and again in 2009 that Agbareia, who had been extradited from Canada to face criminal charges in the United States, should not be turned over to immigration authorities for deportation. The FBI needed him.
“I looked at him as a brother,” the 55-year-old Agbareia said of King in an interview with The Intercept.
King, whom the FBI declined to make available for comment, had been a frequent visitor at Agbareia’s house, according to Agbareia. He’d come with assignments — people in South Florida’s Muslim communities whom the bureau wanted Agbareia to spy on — and sometimes with cash payments. In all, the FBI paid Agbareia, an Arab Israeli citizen, $121,962 over nearly 10 years and kept him from the clutches of immigration authorities.
In return, Agbareia befriended Muslims the FBI was interested in knowing more about, and from April 2015 to July 2016, he played a key role in an FBI sting that led to the arrest and conviction of three Black converts to Islam for supporting the Islamic State group. “These defendants conspired and attempted to provide material support to ISIL and one of the defendants was arrested attempting to travel overseas to join and fight for the deadly terrorist organization,” then-U.S. Assistant Attorney General John P. Carlin said in a statement announcing the terrorism bust.
But when Agbareia answered the door in a towel almost a year after that Justice Department announcement, the FBI wasn’t there to discuss a new assignment. They were there to arrest Agbareia on four counts of wire fraud. Federal prosecutors charged Agbareia with running scams to defraud people in Texas, Colorado, New York, Ohio, and Germany. Agbareia had looked up wealthy Muslims around the world and then contacted them as part of a scheme in which he would pretend to be a devout Muslim stranded on his way to their community. He needed money, he’d tell them, and the cash would roll in hours later through Western Union. “It was all so easy,” Agbareia said of his scams.
That’s how Agbareia funded his lifestyle in Florida, and he alleges that King and the FBI were well aware that he was running scams for the decade he worked as an informant. The bureau turned a blind eye to the crimes because Agbareia was valuable to them, he said. While the FBI declined to comment about Agbareia, citing a policy of not discussing informants, the circumstances of Agbareia’s Florida life and his work for the FBI suggest that government agents should have known something was fishy about how he paid his bills. The FBI paid him less than $20,000 per year on average. FBI agents knew he couldn’t work legitimately, because they were the ones keeping him out of the custody of immigration authorities. And yet all the while, Agbareia was living in a luxury home with expensive cars in the driveway.
Agbareia’s arrest was largely the result of his own sloppiness, which finally made it impossible for the FBI to cover for him. A hidden camera, installed by the FBI in Agbareia’s home while he worked on a case, captured him talking in Arabic and running one of his “stranded traveler” schemes; a defense lawyer who stumbled on the incriminating recording notified federal prosecutors.
Agbareia’s story is emblematic of a larger institutional problem at the FBI. Many of the bureau’s more than 15,000 informants commit crimes that go unpunished because the bureau views the informants’ work as valuable. The extent of this problem is largely unknown because the FBI is not required to report to Congress when informants violate the law without FBI authorization. According to policy, however, the bureau is supposed to notify the Justice Department of these violations. Documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act by USA Today, HuffPost, and the Daily Dot show that from 2010 to 2014, the FBI permitted informants to violate the law more than 20,000 times. The number of unauthorized crimes committed by informants like Agbareia that are ignored by the FBI has never been disclosed.
The number of unauthorized crimes committed by informants like Agbareia that are ignored by the FBI has never been disclosed.
Lack of FBI oversight is a critical problem here. For years, Rep. Stephen Lynch, a Massachusetts Democrat, has pushed the Justice Department to revise FBI guidelines to require the agency to tell Congress about crimes committed by informants. But the Justice Department and the FBI have refused to be transparent about their informants’ illegal activities.
For his part, Agbareia now feels burned by the FBI. The bureau benefited from his scams as much as he did, Agbareia alleged, because those scams allowed him to work full time as an informant for years. Once the FBI could no longer keep the crimes secret, he said, they turned on him — resulting in criminal charges and his removal from the country.
“This is like what they call the abused woman syndrome,” Agbareia said from Israel, the country of his birth. “She’s being abused by her husband, but in the back of her mind, she still thinks it’s OK. And it’s OK. And it’s OK. And then it’s too late and he kills her. This is what happened with me and the government.”
Agbareia’s frauds weren’t a surprise to the FBI. They brought the con man and Special Agent King together in the first place.
In May 2005, federal prosecutors in Alabama indicted Agbareia, who was then living in Canada, for running his “stranded traveler” scheme on 54 victims, including a mosque in Mobile, Alabama. Canada, acting on a U.S. government request, extradited Agbareia to face the charges. A little more than a year later, Agbareia pleaded guilty and was sentenced to time served and ordered to pay more than $90,000 in restitution to his victims. U.S. District Court Judge Charles R. Butler Jr. also ordered Agbareia turned over to immigration authorities for deportation.
That’s when King, then an FBI agent in Alabama, stepped in, telling the judge in an affidavit that Agbareia should be spared deportation because he had been enlisted as an informant. Shortly after, King moved to the FBI’s office in West Palm Beach, Florida, and he brought Agbareia with him. Because Agbareia was on probation in Alabama, King successfully petitioned for his probation supervision to be moved to Florida, where he was needed as an informant on matters “pertaining to national security investigations.”
“They wanted me to keep this image of a person who’s doing so well in the United States.”
Agbareia arrived in West Palm Beach in October 2007. “They wanted me to keep this image of a person who’s doing so well in the United States,” Agbareia said. To help build that cover, King introduced him to a real estate agent. That’s how Agbareia landed the home near Wellington. The rent was $2,500 per month. Agbareia’s wife and son then moved from Canada to join him in Florida.
But the money from the FBI, according to Agbareia, came sporadically and in small amounts. There was no way he could live off what the FBI was paying him, so he continued the “stranded traveler” scams, he said.
“I’m living in a nice house. It has a swimming pool. It has all these things,” Agbareia said. “The FBI, they’re not idiots. They’re not dumbasses. They know I cannot afford this. They know I don’t have a job. They know I don’t have work. They know what I’m doing.”
Illustration: Clay Rodery for The Intercept
A Convenient Loophole
The most infamous example of an informant committing crimes while working for the FBI is Whitey Bulger. A Boston mobster who was protected by John J. Connolly Jr., his FBI handler, Bulger provided information to federal agents about his rivals in organized crime. At the same time Bulger was providing information to the FBI, his Winter Hill Gang was involved in a host of violent crimes, including murders, and Connolly made sure that the FBI didn’t investigate Bulger and his crew.
The Bulger case was egregious, and the Justice Department prosecuted Connolly in 2002 for racketeering, obstruction of justice, and making false statements. Bulger was a fugitive for more than a decade, until he was found in California in 2011. He was convicted in 2013 and later murdered in prison.
Informants are the backbone of the FBI: There are more registered informants working for the FBI today than there are agents. Because FBI guidelines require agents to have probable cause before infiltrating groups or people’s private lives, informants are often on the front lines in the FBI’s undercover work. The probable cause requirement doesn’t apply to informants — a policy loophole that incentivizes FBI agents to use informants when the bureau has suspicions but no evidence to suggest that a crime has occurred.
There are more registered informants working for the FBI today than there are agents.
But unlike agents, many informants have checkered pasts. They are often criminals and scam artists like Agbareia, and to some extent, that’s by design. Choirboys aren’t well suited for infiltrating criminal organizations or violent groups. FBI agents acknowledge that the best informants are criminals who won’t lose sleep after betraying people.
So what does the FBI do when criminals in their employ commit crimes that agents didn’t authorize as part of investigations? With no oversight rules that require the FBI to disclose when informants break the law without authorization, it’s impossible to know how often this occurs — but there is an obvious incentive for the FBI to ignore the informants’ crimes: An informant facing criminal charges won’t be a useful asset.
While the FBI spends $42 million per year on payments to informants, the bureau is not adequately reviewing long-term informants to ensure that their behavior, including possibly unauthorized illegal activity, doesn’t disqualify them, a November 2019 report by the Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General found.
This has been a long-term problem for the FBI. A related 2005 Office of the Inspector General report found that 87 percent of reviewed informant files contained documentation of actions violating policies on the handling of informants. Of 120 informants analyzed, 12 committed crimes that the FBI had not authorized. But that number was artificially low, because the inspector general also found that the FBI had engaged in a practice of authorizing criminal activity retroactively. In at least two cases in which the informants’ criminal activity was not authorized, the FBI did not report the crimes to the U.S. attorney’s office, as required by policy. That’s what appears to have occurred in Agbareia’s case.
The FBI declined to respond to a list of questions related to its handling of Agbareia as an informant.
“The FBI’s use of informants — across all criminal and national security programs — is done in accordance with strict guidelines and in close coordination with the Department of Justice and the United States Attorney’s offices,” James P. Marshall, an FBI spokesman in Miami, said in response to the questions. “Aside from what you may have learned from court proceedings or documents, the FBI does not discuss actions taken in the course of an investigation.”
A Person of Interest
In Agbareia’s view, the FBI had given him immunity as a con man. King instructed Agbareia to become well known in South Florida’s Muslim communities and to spend time in the Shamsuddin Islamic Center in North Miami Beach — a mosque that for years has been the target of FBI investigation and surveillance because its congregants had once included Adnan El Shukrijumah, a senior Al Qaeda member before his death in 2014, and José Padilla, who was convicted of plotting a dirty bomb attack in the United States for Al Qaeda.
Prior to Agbareia’s move to Florida, the FBI had been aggressively investigating people associated with the North Miami Beach mosque. FBI agents approached the imam, Foad Farahi, in 2004 and demanded that he become an informant. When he refused, U.S. authorities attempted to deport him and told him that the only way to stay in the country was to work as an informant. The deportation case was based solely on a technicality: Farahi, a Sunni born in Kuwait with Iranian citizenship, was in the country on a student visa. In one semester while finishing a master’s degree, he needed to take only two classes, which he did, making him a part-time student and as a result violating visa terms that required full-time study. Farahi successfully fought off the FBI’s pressure campaign and has remained in Florida.
Photo: Trevor Aaronson
Agbareia said King told him that Farahi would be one of his first targets. “Farahi was a person of interest,” Agbareia said. “They wanted to know a lot about him, about his ideology.” According to a 2007 FBI memorandum obtained by The Intercept, federal agents believed that Farahi was an Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood “intelligence officer/recruiter.” The memo — which does not provide information to support the Muslim Brotherhood claim — states that in 2003, a man in Trinidad told agents that Farahi had been “close friends” with Shukrijumah, the Al Qaeda member. The report provides no evidence for its claims and instead relies significantly on innuendo, such as an informant’s claim in 2004 that Farahi seemed “pissed off at life.”
Farahi told The Intercept he’s spent 15 years assuming that FBI informants were all around him. It’s been that way since federal agents associated him with Shukrijumah. Farahi acknowledges having met Shukrimjah in Florida but says they were not “close friends,” as the FBI memo stated.
Farahi remembered Agbareia, but since he rarely saw the man without his family in tow, he hadn’t suspected he was an FBI informant. “Usually when someone’s an informant, you don’t see their family,” Farahi said. “He always brought his wife and son.”
That was part of what made Agbareia unique in his work for the FBI. He was a family man, a professional, a generous donor to local Muslim causes — not what many would expect in an informant.
That’s how Fadi Kablawi remembered Agbareia as well. A dentist in Miami, Kablawi met Agbareia as a patient who needed fillings. Agbareia didn’t go to Kablawi’s dental practice on his own accord, though; he said he went there at the FBI’s instruction.
Photo: Trevor Aaronson
According to Agbareia, FBI agents were suspicious of Kablawi because of his devout religious beliefs and suspected he might associate with violent extremists. Kablawi’s video sermons on Facebook and YouTube had attracted decent followings, and he regularly spoke at mosques throughout South Florida. For years, Kablawi, a Palestinian born in Jordan, has suspected he’s been under FBI investigation, so he wasn’t surprised that federal agents sent in an informant as a patient. “It’s all about my rhetoric, my speech. They feel that I have influence. I’m changing people’s perception of things,” Kablawi told The Intercept. “And that’s what they view as a threat. I criticize the government here, and I criticize governments in our countries. I hate injustice. I will risk everything to speak out for the truth.”
As a result of the FBI-ordered friendship, Agbareia arranged for Kablawi to give talks at mosques in West Palm Beach, and Kablawi in turn asked Agbareia to write for a local Muslim magazine that he published. Writing under the name Mohammad Hassan, Agbareia wrote pedestrian articles about physics. “The strange world of quantum science and its phantom-like nature,” read the headline of one article. “Atoms, particles, and the forces moving them,” read another.
As was the case with Farahi, Agbareia never saw Kablawi doing anything illegal.
The FBI’s interest in Kablawi has extended beyond Agbareia as well. In September 2017, a few months after the FBI arrested Agbareia for wire fraud, state prosecutors in Florida indicted Kablawi for Medicare fraud, alleging he overcharged Medicare $13,737 for patients’ dentures. He has denied those charges, explaining that he allowed patients to pay an upcharge in order to purchase dentures that were of higher quality than those covered by Medicare and has entered into a deferred prosecution agreement. Records show that the FBI played at least a supporting role in getting Kablawi indicted by state prosecutors. In a court filing, a Miami-Dade police investigator disclosed that “in accordance with provisions of the search warrant” of the dental office, he had turned over Kablawi’s iPhone to an FBI agent.
Illustration: Clay Rodery for The Intercept
A Bloody Damn Fantasy
In Palm Beach County’s Muslim community, Agbareia had met Gregory Hubbard, a Black man in his late 40s who served in the Marines and then worked in a variety of jobs. Before moving to South Florida, he ran a cheesecake shop in upstate New York. In Florida, he scratched out a living making paintings and sculptures.
Agbareia told King that Hubbard had expressed support for the 2015 San Bernardino shooting and said that the war in Syria justified such attacks. Agbareia also told King that he thought Hubbard was a man of talk, not action. “He was a person who believed in conspiracy theories,” Agbareia said. “He thought that even the meat at McDonald’s was made out of kids. It was insane.” But King was still interested. Agbareia said King told him to get to know Hubbard better and see what happens.
Hubbard introduced Agbareia to two friends, Dayne Christian and Darren Jackson. At the time, Christian was working at a Dunkin’ Donuts, having recently completed a one-year federal prison sentence for acting as a straw buyer for a friend’s gun purchase. Jackson, who was recently divorced, had been working as welder in nuclear power plants.
Agbareia started hanging out together with Hubbard, Christian, and Jackson — and together they discussed the possibility of moving to Syria to live under ISIS rule. They also watched and commented on ISIS propaganda videos together. Their conversations were captured by recording devices Agbareia wore and others hidden in his home. The informant encouraged the conversations about ISIS but privately marveled at the men’s naivete.
“They make out the conditions of living in the [Islamic] State, or the dawla, like a Shangri-La,” Agbareia remembered. “Everything’s going to be a gold coin. Everybody gets a house, gets married. They live such a peaceful life, and it’s like paradise. That’s the picture they have. It’s a bloody damn fantasy.”
Christian confirmed in an interview from prison that they talked about moving to Syria and about ISIS, but in his view, no one was serious. “What I can say honestly is, I did have interest to go to that region, whether it be Iraq or Syria, just for the purposes of seeing what it was like to live under Islamic law.” But he said it was just talk. “It was just, excuse my language, like you’re shooting the shit with each other.”
Christian was suspicious of Agbareia. While he appeared to be a successful businessman, something about him didn’t add up. “Mohammed was always available,” Christian said. “How are you always available? It doesn’t matter the day, the time — you’re always available. Do you work? Things just started to seem strange about him, and every time we would meet up, all he would want to talk about is ISIS. It was just the same thing over and over again.”
Christian and Jackson confronted Hubbard about Agbareia, and they argued. “He’s a good brother,” Hubbard insisted. Christian and Jackson agreed to trust Agbareia on Hubbard’s word, and over the next few months they continued to talk about ISIS. Christian, who owned guns despite being a felon, loaned them to Agbareia and Hubbard to use for shooting practice. A few weeks before their arrest, Christian learned that Agbareia and Hubbard were planning to travel to Syria — but he stayed quiet. Hubbard’s passport had expired, and at the time he was homeless, so Agbareia arranged for him to apply for a new passport and have it sent to his house. When the day came to travel to the airport, Agbareia asked Jackson to give them a ride — something Agbareia said the FBI encouraged him to do so that they could rope him into the conspiracy to support ISIS.
Hubbard and Jackson, who did not respond to requests to be interviewed from prison, were arrested at the airport. FBI agents arrested Christian at a chemical company where he had recently started working.
All three men pleaded guilty to providing material support, and Christian pleaded to an additional charge of being a felon in possession of a firearm. Hubbard was sentenced to 12 years in prison, and Christian and Jackson received a little more than five years. In a letter to the judge, Hubbard wrote: “There is no excuse for what I’ve done. More than anything, I wish I would have taken a different path.”
Agbareia was the one who laid the path before Hubbard. Christian doesn’t think any of them would be in prison today were it not for him. “A person may have it in them to commit murder, but as long as you keep the gun away from that person, the murder’s never committed,” Christian said. “Hubbard may have had those intentions, but it took for Mohammed to be able to provide the passports and the knowledge of traveling abroad and whatever it was that convinced Hubbard to say, ‘You know what? This is my opportunity.’”
Christian added: “I don’t know what caused him, Mohammed, to get involved in this deal with the government. That’s none of my business. But my thing is, if you’re going to set terrorists up or seek out to nab terrorists, do just that. Go and find real terrorists.”
Photo: USA Today Network
Before Hubbard pleaded guilty, his defense lawyers discovered the recording in which Agbareia was caught running his “stranded traveler” scheme. They turned it over to federal prosecutors, who were then forced to file charges against the FBI’s informant. In a court filing, Hubbard’s lawyers suggested that the FBI knew about Agbareia’s scams and that his thefts allowed the bureau to “conserve its financial resources” and reduce the impact of potentially having to disclose to a jury large cash payments over a decade to a single informant.
Once Agbareia’s scamming was public, the FBI was no longer there for him. He served two years in federal prison and then was deported in 2019 to Israel, where he’s living with his mother. His wife was deported to Canada; his son, now married to an American, still lives in Florida.
In September 2019, after being deported, Agbareia sent a series of text messages to his former FBI handler. “Mr. King,” he wrote in one, “you have done a lot of harm to our family. You must be proud of your achievements for the sake of an organization that lost its integrity.” In another, he wrote: “We put our lives on the line because of you, not the FBI. GOD IS WATCHING.”
Agbareia now regrets what he did to Hubbard, Christian, and Jackson, as well as his spying on Farahi, Kablawi, and others in Florida. But in his view, he’s a survivor who did what was necessary at the time for him and his family. “I’m a fuck-up because I did all these frauds,” he said. “But I did it for a reason.”
Asked if he’s still running scams from Israel, Agbareia answered: “I do what I have to do.”


theintercept--2020-12-29--Deb Haaland's Tough Road Ahead at the Interior Department

a difficult road ahead at the Department of Interior , if her nomination by President-elect Joe Biden is confirmed .
A tribal citizen of the Laguna Pueblo and a Democratic member of Congress from New Mexico , Haaland will be stepping into a minefield : a mixture of various aims imposed by her party ’ s centrist leadership , tribal interests , progressive causes , and the energy industry .
For an Indigenous woman from New Mexico , it will be all the more fraught .
Take something as simple as Smokey Bear , the friendly cartoon character known for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fires .
“ Smokey Bear is a white racist pig , ” New Mexico Chicano activist Jerry Fuentes once said .
For Fuentes , the cartoon represented Big Brother of the Forest Service , which had criminalized small-scale timber harvests and helped sever centuries-old ties Indigenous people and Mexican Americans had with New Mexico ’ s forests .
It was part of a huge legacy of the U.S. in the region : an annexation following a bloody war of aggression , the creation of public lands carved from Indigenous territories and Spanish land @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and other nonwhite people , and extractive plunder , which continues today , pushing us further into climate crisis .
That legacy is inextricably tied to the Department of Interior and its present-day role .
Interior describes its sacred duties as protecting the “ natural and cultural heritage ” of the U.S. , including a vast wellspring of natural resources such as coal , uranium , natural gas , and oil located on federal and public lands .
In New Mexico , the nation ’ s third-largest oil producer , and also home @ @ @ @ @ @ @ than a third of the land is owned by the federal government , Interior played a major role in the state ’ s recent fracking boom .
Billions of dollars in oil revenue have filled state coffers from lease sales and investment .
In a state that consistently ranks among the poorest and has the highest numbers of murdered and missing Indigenous women , the boom has also threatened the most vulnerable : Indigenous nations and their sacred sites , as well as a desert landscape ’ s precious freshwater .
appointment is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ not only in Indian affairs but also as a Standing Rock water protector , a supporter of Abolish ICE and Medicare for All , a Green New Deal backer , and an opponent of fracking and drilling on federal lands .
Those positions may put her at odds with Republicans and many Democrats — including her future boss .
Though Biden shares some relevant goals with Haaland — calling , for instance , for an end to fossil fuel extraction on federal lands — he has disavowed some of the more progressive positions @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last year that “ nothing will fundamentally change ” with his administration and doesn ’ t support the Green New Deal , specifically the calls for universal jobs and health care .
Haaland ’ s true test will be whether or not she toes her party ’ s centrist , corporate line — positions that have grown increasingly hostile toward reforms like Medicare for All , even during a deadly pandemic .
If the Senate approves her nomination , Haaland will make history not once but three times .
In 2018 , she @ @ @ @ @ @ @ became the first American Indian women elected to Congress .
Biden ’ s nomination will make Haaland the first American Indian woman to hold a Cabinet-level position and the first American Indian person selected as secretary of the Interior .
Representation matters , especially for Indigenous people who have been categorically excluded from top leadership at Interior , the very institution that governs many facets of their lives .
Haaland ’ s nomination comes during a year of racial reckoning .
After losing a decadeslong battle with Indigenous activists , two major sports @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Cleveland baseball team — committed to retiring their racist Native mascots and team names this year .
But the historic challenges that face Indigenous nations and the necessity to massively decarbonize the world ’ s largest per capita polluter are monumental tasks that go beyond identity and a single administration .
Indigenous and environmental movements will have to apply a special kind of pressure to one of their own as head of Interior , to not allow Haaland to become mere window dressing for a party that has relied on rhetorical acts @ @ @ @ @ @ @ while suppressing or co-opting demands for radical change .
The possibilities for achieving such aims are as much determined by the colonial nature of the Interior — and its history of Indigenous genocide and land theft — as they are by a willingness to organize within and against a state institution that has long served powerful corporate interests from both parties .
not only manages public lands and national forests but also human life : 578 federally recognized tribal nations , Alaskan Natives , and Native Hawaiians .
That history to us , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ been one of colonial paternalism that puts our lands , resources , and livelihoods into a federal trust relationship .
But a lack of “ trust ” runs deep , and for good reason .
A recent Indigenous Futures Survey found that 95 percent of Indigenous people distrust the federal government .
Centuries of federal Indian case law have defined that legal relationship as one between a guardian and its wards .
The Supreme Court ’ s 1903 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock decision , which upheld the allotment of Indian reservation lands , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ have no title to their land at all .
What we possess are mere occupancy rights .
The consequences have been devastating .
By the end of allotment in 1934 , 100 million acres of Native land — two-thirds of what remained following dispossession up to 1887 — went into the hands of white settlers .
The court upheld that Congress authorizes the Bureau of Indian Affairs , under the authority of the Interior , to dictate the conditions of American Indian life and land .
The Interior and the Bureau of Indian @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sense of morality and justice when it comes to Indigenous people , which has historically worked to the advantage of a land-hungry empire .
Indian affairs were once the charge of the Department of War , prior to being moved to the Interior in 1849 .
Despite the change , the military waged extermination campaigns against Indigenous nations who stood in the way of Western expansion well into the late 19th century , forcing survivors onto reservations .
There , survivors became Interior ’ s responsibility and faced conditions no less harsh than @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — upheld by the Bible and the gun — outlawed Indigenous dancing , religion , and culture .
The Court of Indian Offenses prosecuted the defiant , and Indian police carried out the sentences and enforced the law , sometimes with lethal violence .
Indian agents removed children from their families and recalcitrant leaders who refused to cede land , sending them to Bureau of Indian Affairs-run boarding schools that stripped them of their language and culture .
By 1900 , three-quarters of Native children had been enrolled in boarding schools , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many never survived long enough to return to their families .
Child removal continued even as boarding schools declined in the 20th century .
In the early 1970s , an Association on American Indian Affairs report found that more than a quarter of Native children nationwide had been removed from their families ; many were adopted out to white families .
In the 1960s , Red Power activists called for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a new era of tribal sovereignty .
What they got instead was an expansion @ @ @ @ @ @ @ activists pushed for and won important policy gains , such as the Indian Self-Determination Act in 1975 , the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978 , the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978 , and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990 ; the laws attempted to reverse child removal policies and religious prohibitions , as well as restore tribal autonomy and protections to cultural patrimony .
Yet Indigenous people themselves were still largely excluded from executive decision-making power .
policy reforms have been mixed under recent Democratic and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s FBI infiltrated the Standing Rock camps against the Dakota Access pipeline .
Obama also signed a 2015 law that lifted a four-decade limit on exporting crude oil from the U.S. , which , combined with a fracking revolution , greatly increased domestic oil pipelines and production .
In 2018 , Obama bragged to a group of oil industry elites in Texas about why the United States “ suddenly ” became the world ’ s largest oil producer : “ That was me , people , ” he said .
“ Just say @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s successor , President Donald Trump , advanced industry-friendly policy while also rolling back Obama-era environmental regulations .
He appointed Tara Sweeney as the assistant secretary of Indian affairs , a former oil lobbyist and the second Native woman to hold the position .
Trump ’ s Interior leadership , including Sweeney , was the first administration to take land out of trust since President Harry Truman .
Trump also rolled back protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante , two national monuments and sacred Native sites in southern Utah .
While Deb @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ be fierce ” by addressing the Interior ’ s violent colonial history , reversing Trump-era environmental rollbacks , and empowering Indigenous nations , Black descendants of people enslaved by the Five Civilized Tribes have asked Haaland whether she will be fierce for them too .
The harrowing accounts of how tribes from what is now known as the southeastern U.S. were pushed into Oklahoma reservations is well known ; less considered is the history of the enslaved Africans these tribes , collectively known as the Five Civilized Tribes , brought with them @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in bondage even after formal emancipation or until the tribes signed treaties with the Union after the civil war .
Their descendants are called Freedmen .
In 2019 , Haaland co-sponsored legislation that removed housing protections for the Freedmen in Oklahoma reservations .
In recent history , the Five Civilized Tribes have variously implemented a de facto Jim Crow policy of disenfranchising Freedmen .
Haaland is in a unique position to confront that history head on and correct her past mistakes .
The question is whether she can radically change Interior ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many is a face of white , colonial repression .
Regardless of what Haaland is capable of doing , one truth will remain the same : Whether under Obama , Trump , or Biden , Indigenous people are the most advanced and confrontational arm of the climate justice movement .
Although Haaland allegedly wasn ’ t Biden ’ s first pick for Interior , her nomination was only possible because of relentless grassroots Indigenous organizing .
It ’ s up to her to listen to those movements — who will move forward with @ @ @ @

Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Getty Images
Deb Haaland faces a difficult road ahead at the Department of the Interior, if her nomination by President-elect Joe Biden is confirmed. A tribal citizen of the Laguna Pueblo and a Democratic member of Congress from New Mexico, Haaland will be stepping into a minefield: a mixture of various aims imposed by her party’s centrist leadership, tribal interests, progressive causes, and the energy industry. For an Indigenous woman from New Mexico, it will be all the more fraught.
Take something as simple as Smokey Bear, the friendly cartoon character known for instructing children on how to prevent forest fires. “Smokey Bear is a white racist pig,” New Mexico Chicano activist Jerry Fuentes once said. For Fuentes, the cartoon represented Big Brother of the Forest Service, which had criminalized small-scale timber harvests and helped sever centuries-old ties Indigenous people and Mexican Americans had with New Mexico’s forests. While the Forest Service is part of the Department of Agriculture, Smokey appears on signs and placards in a number of federal lands, including holdings of the Interior Department’s Bureau of Indian Affairs and the vast tracts overseen by the Bureau of Land Management.
Smokey was part of a huge legacy of the U.S. in the region: an annexation following a bloody war of aggression, the creation of public lands carved from Indigenous territories and Spanish land grants that saw the removal of Indigenous and other nonwhite people, and extractive plunder, all of which continue today, pushing us further into climate crisis.
That legacy is inextricably tied to the Department of the Interior and its present-day role. The Interior describes its sacred duties as protecting the “natural and cultural heritage” of the U.S., including a vast wellspring of natural resources such as coal, uranium, natural gas, and oil located on federal and public lands.
In New Mexico, the nation’s third-largest oil producer, and also home to 23 tribal nations, where more than a third of the land is owned by the federal government, the Interior played a major role in the state’s recent fracking boom. Billions of dollars in oil revenue have filled state coffers from lease sales and investment. In a state that consistently ranks among the poorest and has the highest numbers of murdered and missing Indigenous women, the boom has also threatened the most vulnerable: Indigenous nations and their sacred sites, as well as a desert landscape’s precious freshwater.
That’s why Haaland’s appointment is so important. She has gained notoriety not only in Indian affairs, but also as a Standing Rock water protector, a supporter of Abolish ICE and Medicare for All, a Green New Deal backer, and an opponent of fracking and drilling on federal lands.
Those positions may put her at odds with Republicans and many Democrats — including her future boss. Though Biden shares some relevant goals with Haaland — calling, for instance, for an end to fossil fuel extraction on federal lands — he has disavowed some of the more progressive positions she holds. He assuaged rich donors last year that “nothing will fundamentally change” with his administration and doesn’t support the Green New Deal, specifically the calls for universal jobs and health care.
Haaland’s true test will be whether or not she toes her party’s centrist, corporate line — positions that have grown increasingly hostile toward reforms like Medicare for All, even during a deadly pandemic.
If the Senate approves her nomination, Haaland will make history not once but three times. In 2018, she and Sharice Davids from the Ho-Chunk Nation became the first American Indian women elected to Congress. Biden’s nomination will make Haaland the first American Indian woman to hold a Cabinet-level position and the first American Indian person selected as secretary of the Interior.
Representation matters, especially for Indigenous people who have been categorically excluded from top leadership at the Interior, the very institution that governs many facets of their lives. Haaland’s nomination comes during a year of racial reckoning. After losing a decadeslong battle with Indigenous activists, two major sports franchises — the Washington Football Team and the Cleveland baseball team — committed to retiring their racist Native mascots and team names this year. But the historic challenges that face Indigenous nations and the necessity to massively decarbonize the world’s largest per capita polluter are monumental tasks that go beyond identity and a single administration.
Indigenous and environmental movements will have to apply a special kind of pressure to one of their own as head of the Interior.
Indigenous and environmental movements will have to apply a special kind of pressure to one of their own as head of the Interior, to not allow Haaland to become mere window dressing for a party that has relied on rhetorical acts of inclusion as a source of legitimacy while suppressing or co-opting demands for radical change. The possibilities for achieving such aims are as much determined by the colonial nature of the Interior — and its history of Indigenous genocide and land theft — as they are by a willingness to organize within and against a state institution that has long served powerful corporate interests from both parties.
The Interior Department not only manages public lands and national forests but also human life: 578 federally recognized tribal nations, Alaskan Natives, and Native Hawaiians. That history to us, as citizens of these nations, has been one of colonial paternalism that puts our lands, resources, and livelihoods into a federal trust relationship. But a lack of “trust” runs deep, and for good reason. A recent Indigenous Futures Survey found that 95 percent of Indigenous people distrust the federal government.
Centuries of federal Indian case law have defined that legal relationship as one between a guardian and its wards. The Supreme Court’s 1903 Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock decision, which upheld the allotment of Indian reservation lands, laid down the legal principle that tribes have no title to their land at all. What we possess are mere occupancy rights. The consequences have been devastating. By the end of allotment in 1934, 100 million acres of Native land — two-thirds of what remained following dispossession up to 1887 — went into the hands of white settlers. The court upheld that Congress authorizes the Bureau of Indian Affairs, under the authority of the Interior, to dictate the conditions of American Indian life and land. The Interior and the Bureau of Indian Affairs are beholden only to their own sense of morality and justice when it comes to Indigenous people, which has historically worked to the advantage of a land-hungry empire.
Indian affairs were once the charge of the Department of War, prior to being moved to the Interior in 1849. Despite the change, the military waged extermination campaigns against Indigenous nations who stood in the way of Western expansion well into the late 19th century, forcing survivors onto reservations. There, survivors became the Interior’s responsibility and faced conditions no less harsh than open warfare. “Civilization regulations” — upheld by the Bible and the gun — outlawed Indigenous dancing, religion, and culture. The Court of Indian Offenses prosecuted the defiant, and Indian police carried out the sentences and enforced the law, sometimes with lethal violence.
Indian agents removed children from their families and recalcitrant leaders who refused to cede land, sending them to Bureau of Indian Affairs-run boarding schools that stripped them of their language and culture. By 1900, three-quarters of Native children had been enrolled in boarding schools, a third of whom were sent off-reservation; many never survived long enough to return to their families. Child removal continued even as boarding schools declined in the 20th century. In the early 1970s, an Association on American Indian Affairs report found that more than a quarter of Native children nationwide had been removed from their families; many were adopted out to white families.
In the 1960s, Red Power activists called for the abolition of the Bureau of Indian Affairs and a new era of tribal sovereignty. What they got instead was an expansion of Interior powers and protections. The activists pushed for and won important policy gains, such as the Indian Self-Determination Act in 1975, the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978, and the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act in 1990; the laws attempted to reverse child removal policies and religious prohibitions, as well as restore tribal autonomy and protections to cultural patrimony. Yet Indigenous people themselves were still largely excluded from executive decision-making power.
The results of policy reforms have been mixed under recent Democratic and Republican administrations. President Barack Obama’s FBI infiltrated the Standing Rock camps against the Dakota Access pipeline. Obama also signed a 2015 law that lifted a four-decade limit on exporting crude oil from the U.S., which, combined with a fracking revolution, greatly increased domestic oil pipelines and production. In 2018, Obama bragged to a group of oil industry elites in Texas about why the United States “suddenly” became the world’s largest oil producer: “That was me, people,” he said. “Just say thank you, please.”
Obama’s successor, President Donald Trump, advanced industry-friendly policy while also rolling back Obama-era environmental regulations. He appointed Tara Sweeney as the assistant secretary of Indian Affairs, a former oil lobbyist and the second Native woman to hold the position. Trump’s Interior leadership, including Sweeney, was the first administration to take land out of trust since President Harry Truman. Trump also rolled back protections for Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante, two national monuments and sacred Native sites in southern Utah.
Haaland is in a unique position to confront that history head-on and correct her past mistakes.
While Deb Haaland has stated that she intends to “be fierce” by addressing the Interior’s violent colonial history, reversing Trump-era environmental rollbacks, and empowering Indigenous nations, Black descendants of people enslaved by the Five Civilized Tribes have asked Haaland whether she will be fierce for them too. The harrowing accounts of how tribes from what is now known as the southeastern U.S. were pushed into Oklahoma reservations is well known; less considered is the history of the enslaved Africans these tribes, collectively known as the Five Civilized Tribes, brought with them to Indian territory. Some were kept in bondage even after formal emancipation or until the tribes signed treaties with the Union after the Civil War. Their descendants are called Freedmen. In 2019, Haaland co-sponsored legislation that removed housing protections for the Freedmen in Oklahoma reservations. In recent history, the Five Civilized Tribes have variously implemented a de facto Jim Crow policy of disenfranchising Freedmen.
Haaland is in a unique position to confront that history head-on and correct her past mistakes. The question is whether she can radically change the Interior’s Smokey Bear image, which for so many is a face of white, colonial repression. Regardless of what Haaland is capable of doing, one truth will remain the same: Whether under Obama, Trump, or Biden, Indigenous people are the most advanced and confrontational arm of the climate justice movement. Although Haaland allegedly wasn’t Biden’s first pick for the Interior, her nomination was only possible because of relentless grassroots Indigenous organizing. It’s up to her to listen to those movements — who will move forward with or without her.
Update: December 29, 2020, 6:15 p.m.
This post has been updated to include that Smokey Bear is a symbol of the Department of Agriculture that appears in some of the Interior Department’s land holdings.