As teenagers, my sister, mosque friends, and I would giggle about a particular mosque attendee who didn’t seem to know how to dress or act in order to blend in. She wore hats and caps instead of a headscarf or shawl and was very aggressive in attitude. At first, we called her “Hat Lady”, but later, someone decided that she was obviously a bad government plant and called her “CIA”; the jest stuck. I remember remarking that if the government did indeed have plants, I’d think that they would be a little better at blending in than CIA was. After I left Islam, I used to joke that I ought to go work for the FBI as a plant, since I could very easily pass as Muslim and was in definite need of the dough.

Both jokes turned out to be oddly prophetic. As it turns out, there was indeed a well-paid sore-thumb plant at our local mosque.

The tale of failed FBI Informant Craig Monteilh gets more and more revolting the more is known about it. The latest information makes it sound like the FBI wanted Monteilh to act like some kind of heterosexist capitalist pig, with how much they paid him and what they wanted him to do with female congregants.

It sounds like a paranoid conspiracy: A convict is hired by the FBI to incite terrorism at a mosque that had promised to work with them and to whose congregation they had promised transparency. The latest from Monteilh tells us that the FBI encouraged him to obtain information by any means necessary, including and up to having sex with women from the mosque. That thankfully seemed to have never happened, but the fact remains that the man my hometown mosque had filed a restraining order against was earning over $11k a month. He was being paid exorbitant sums to try to stir up the attendees of one of the most liberal mosques in the area into committing terrorist acts — the same mosque where the FBI had promised to never monitor, let alone infiltrate.

If this sounds familiar, not only have I alluded to it before, the story was turned into a This American Life segment entitled The Convert, complete with update.

From the transcript:

That was June 5, 2006. As best as we can determine from people at the mosque and from testimony in court, two months after [FBI Los Angeles head Stephen] Tidwell reassured them that the FBI would not monitor them without telling them, the FBI placed an undercover informant in the mosque.

If the FBI’s strategy truly is to pay men like Monteilh to convince Muslims to become terrorists using sex, I feel rather unsafe as an American.

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