We were putting it together, today's radio show and we came across this idea that totally changed how we saw the stories that you're gonna hear today. This idea was in a talk that George R.R. martin gave. He's the guy who wrote the series of fantasy books that Game of Thrones was based on back in the 1930s and 40s.
They were talking about a job on stage in front of some fans. And specifically he was Talking about how J.R.R. tolkien changed everything for people in his line of work, for people who write fantasy stories. And when I say change everything, I don't mean putting a double R in the middle of your name if you're a fantasy writer.
Tolkien, of course wrote Lord of the Rings and Hobbit. And one of the things he did that was extraordinary was create Middle Earth in such detail. If you look at some of the pre Tolkien fantasy, it's written more in the story of fairy tales. Once upon a time there was a king and the king had a beautiful daughter.
You won't know like who was the king's father or who was his grandfather, how the dynasty came to power or what the neighboring countries are, but Tolkien gave all that and more. He created whole histories and languages and genealogies. He created stuff that never even appeared in the books. And it seemed as real as England or France or Germany.
When you, when you read these things, maybe it just has more hatched, it gets you more, it feels like more the more detail there is to make the world and story feel real. Which when you think about, of course it's obvious whether you're telling a story or you're designing Grand Theft Auto or you're a spy needing to invent a cover, or you're a cheater or a con man of some kind making it a scam. But this idea was intriguing to us because today on our show we have two stories of make believe worlds. Act one is about an amazingly successful one.
Act two is about a fantastically unsuccessful one. And when we hear that quote from George R.R. martin, we realize right, these worlds live or die. Their success or their failure depends on these details, on how believable they are, how precisely chosen.
That's at the heart of both these stories. WBC Chicago is this American Life. I'm Ira Glass. How make belief works.
Stay with us. Head one overboard. So there are 12 kids in the Steinfeld's family and they grew up in the 1980 in a very unusual situation. They all worked on a ship.
Their dad Jim had been in the navy and he oversaw them they swapped the decks, they served food in the chow line. They wore uniforms, white sailor hats, black neckerchiefs. Nikki, Nik, tell some more. When Joe was in elementary school, his favorite part of working on the ship was night watch.
That's when the rest of the crew was asleep, you know, which I loved. I loved it. From midnight to 4 in the morning. That was one of my favorite watches.
Where it's quiet, you're listening to talk radio, coming out with, you know, the little weather alerts and stuff, and you're sitting there and every half hour you have to get up and walk around and make sure the ship's secure and all that colder. As the evening and morning hours approach, Jo is only 6 years old. Little Niecy bed and hearing over the side watching Bernie and coming through. I remember clearly, you know, there was raccoons one night that were over making noise near the garbage can area.
Yes, raccoons. I should clarify the he worked on it was not at sea, it was not moving. It was stationed in the driveway of her house in suburban Chicago. But Jo took his job seriously and kept a logbook that he updated almost every half hour.
And so I think I annotated something along those lines in the logbook, you know, 2:30 in the morning, raccoons such and such. So made rounds all his not secure raccoons. You know, it gave so much officialness to what we were doing that this wasn't just a game. This was life.
The idea of building ship in the driveway came from his sister Elizabeth. They shared a room, and one day, when their parents told him to clean it up, Elizabeth made a deal with Joe. If he'd take care of it, she'd build him a ship. She was five, he was four.
The big sister, Joe said yes. So Elizabeth dragged a couple boxes into their backyard and started to pull together materials. I think I asked my father if I could have some 2x4s to make, to make the deck with. And then of course, he got involved, deciding that he was going to, you know, take it up a level, you know, sing the flag being done up and portholes and doors and hand painted, you know, numbers.
And I had a gorgeous wood desk and I had like my own phone. And landlines were run from the house to the ship, like a real phone. I'm telling you, I had a really nice office there. And then.
Did the ship have a name? It was the USS Elizabeth City. As the months went on, the ship grew more and more elaborate. Their dad started using Masonite and plywood.
He Put in a wheelhouse in an engine room. Eventually, the ship was about 24ft long and painted battleship gray. A lot of the magic was in the accessories. He outfitted the ship with guns that shot ping pong balls, missiles made from spray painted deodorant sticks.
He pick up life jackets at Navy surplus store. He installed an intercom. It was a long hollow tube that let you talk from the wheelhouse to the engine room. In the back.
He attached the motor from a blender to a wall. Its purpose? Engine noise. The kids could hit different button speeds on it to make it sound like they were moving faster.
What made her dad so good at make believe is how real he made it. One of the girls, Marian, liked eating breakfast on a ship's deck. Her dad would bring out a little coffee for later and put in the smokestack. And then you would just see the scene kind of rising up out of that.
And then we had these little Kool aid mugs that had been remade into our coffee cups. And he really would let us have coffee, but he would just sit around in our work here getting ready for the day and admiring our ship with the real looking steam coming up. The kids would play on the USS Elizabeth City all summer long. Sometimes I'm 24 hour shifts.
Think about genius parenting, that is if you have a dozen kids when summer comes, you want to keep them busy, engage them. In any given summer, pretty much any kid who was a teenager yet would be on the ship again. Here's Marian. We didn't have many toys.
I mean, you know, they were at the end of it all. There were 12 of us. But like then in our backyard we had like the most elaborate and like amazing toy any child could ever have. You know, that wasn't just something, you know, it wasn't like a video game you played for a little bit.
It was like years and years and years of like playing on, you know, kind of learning on sleeping outside. It was just such a crazy, like amazing, you know, experience. There was a whole world their dad created around the USS Elizabeth City. A history, an admissions statement, an strict set of rules and responsibilities.
His wife Joan typed up a pamphlet just like the ones the Navy handed out when their ships were at port. In this case, the port was their neighborhood, Park Ridge. Joan, right up for me. USS Elizabeth City is one of the most modern classes of dragway gunboats.
Many of our officers and enlisted personnel make their homes in this community. Our ship's mission is to defend Park Ridge's strategic continental divide against surprise naval attack you guys will be good. This is your mission, right? Right.
Definitely, yes. And of course Park Ridge is totally surrounded by land. The last paragraph was a message for the crew. His 12 kids.
Elizabeth City is a small ship and we can get along best by looking out for each other. Glad to have you with us. We think you're going to like it here. Welcome aboard.
Her dad Jen, had been a needy for about a dec. In his 30s he married Joan. They eventually ran an architecture firm together out of their basement. They didn't make much money.
They spent most of their time designing new centers in low income neighborhoods throughout Chicago. But Jim didn't just design these. For more than 40 years, he also helped maintain them. Would deal with emergency calls in the middle of the night if the pipe broke.
And when he'd go to make repairs, he'd bring the kids to help. He was idealistic and also incredibly practical. He died in 2011 and never talked to his wife and kids about what he hoped they'd get out of the ship. But they do know that he enjoyed playing in that world just as much as they did.
Every kid I spoke to described his incredible imagination. Not just with the ship. There were the stories. He'd make up the Fisher Price city.
He built in the basement. A trading post he ran from window in his office. The kids trinkets exchanged for trash. They cleaned out their yard.
He couldn't fake money once and they paid the stock market for three months. He made stuff fun. They all talked about that. But he also had intense work ethic and thrived on discipline and teamwork.
He wanted his kids to be productive and constantly told them if you have time to lean, you have time clean. He wanted you to be working again. This is Marian. She told me her dad assigned you to them a specific job.
For example, she was a hospital horseman which meant she was responsible for any injuries on the ship. I had like a real first aid kit. I had like a location there. I mean it was full of like my fake shots and stuff, but I had like real alcohol, real band aids, realized bandage, you know, stuff like that.
What's the worst injury you had to treat? Like people always have splinters because it was wood. And all my siblings had a service record or a medical record or what, real medical records. And that was another job of mine, is that whenever the kids went to real medical appointments with the doctor, my mom would come back with, you know that you get a sheet from the doctor, you know, if you had a shot and stuff.
And my mom would give them to Me and my job was to hole punch them and to put them in their proper service jackets. And once in a while my dad would say, you know, will you check and see if anyone's behind on their appointments or whatever? And, you know, I mean, I took that very seriously. Like, I was, like, very proud that I had that job.
I had, like, this responsibility to make sure all the kids were going to the doctor on time. Other kids on the ship have positions like gunner's mate, radiomen, master at arms, and culinary specialists. Each of these involves some paperwork, real U.S. navy paperwork.
Forms that are dads safe from this time in the service were picked up from local recruitment offices. Elizabeth, who was a chief store keeper, says she spent many hours cleaning her signature on supply requisitions. If someone was supposed to be doing some sort of job and they needed specific tools or they were supposed to cook something and needed, you know, oatmeal or coriander. Or coriander, they would have to come to me.
Maybe the work order. It was a lot of, you know, a lot of initials. It's just more about routine and fake work. So what made this fun?
I think that's the thing I'm trying to figure out because it sounds like a lot of work. I don't know. I don't know that it always was fun. You know, when we were on there, my memory is it was somewhere between work and play.
I think I liked that. I had a defined character and everything. Grumpy old storekeeper. And, you know, through the drag coat, too, of course.
Of course. Just like a little snarly and not enough coffee. No, I'm not gonna get you that right now. You're going to have to wait until I write paperwork or, you know, I don't know, just because that's what my father.
He just remembered that every chief storekeeper that he had ever known had always had this, like, little, like, stub of a cigar hanging out of the corner of his mouth and, you know, as he snarled at you about something. And so he felt that it was very important that I always have this little ashtray on my desk with just a smoldering little cigar on it. She was six. Of course, with so many kids, there were arguments and discriminants on the ship.
And so to deal with that, their dad created a chain of command, an entire rank structure. He gave himself one of the lower positions, the bosun's knee. That way the kid would have to work out problems on their own. The highest ranking position, commanding officer that went to his oldest Child Jane, she was in charge of posting a plan of the day that included chores, meals, and watch times for her brothers and sisters.
If they all did their jobs, their dad would take them for doing it at the end of the week. Any kid who slacked off would ruin it for everyone. And if Jane caught them slacking off their jobs, as commanding officer, she had the power to punish. Like she could make you guard garbage cans as a timeout.
I was seen as bossy and as always, telling them what to do. And, you know, it didn't matter that that was my job, that that was what I had been assigned to do. Like we example that, you know, if I was in charge and I didn't think your breast belt buckle was shined adequately, you know, that might be a source of tension. But if you're gonna wear a uniform, then you better, you better wear it.
So, I mean, I guess some might create a little bit of separation between you and the rest of them. I mean, of course, it's only, it's only natural. I mean, but what's, what's actually kind of funny is that I was never allowed, not one single time to play because that was patternization. I was an officer, they were enlisted.
I was not allowed to have that relationship with them that I could sit around the table with him and play cards when he came back in the house. We loved play together. Yeah. Oh, yeah.
No, it was just, it was just, just on the ship, you know, that was kind of the cost I paid for the role that I had. I asked them all, why do they keep playing along with us? So many rules, so much cleaning. They said, you're a little kid, so it is fun, like a treehouse and a fort and dress up all rolled into one.
And they said, when you're a little kid, you want to do. The older kids are doing whatever it is, and then you have your dad there always adding these extra details to keep them excited, like some deployment orders. The USS Elizabeth City was on wheels and went on trips. Joe remembers being called on a mission to a church parking lot down a street.
And we would push this 24 foot long ship out into a relatively busy street, Cumberland Avenue, and we would make corners and one of us would be in the wheelhouse, actually steering the wheel of the ship. And we'd do drills, we'd do target practice, if you will, with a little submarine. It's back in the 80s, the Cold War was a threat. So we have a little Soviet era submari that would be out there, you know, moving around and we'd have man overboard drills and everybody throw on their life preservers.
And, I mean, even though I can clearly see asphalts in there, somewhere in my mind, you know, it seemed like it was real. They lived civilianly in the world of the ship. Their lives were so devoted to it that the kids never really stopped to think about how someone from the outside world might view it. Marian says she was 8 before she first invited a friend aboard the USS Elizabeth City.
I was out there with my brothers and sisters, and she just, like, kept kind of rolling her eyes, being like, what are we doing? And she wanted to go outside and play Barbies. And this was kind of, like, weird. I think, like, that was when I first realized, like, not everyone, like, had ships in their backyards.
And so, I mean, you just not acknowledge you had ships in your backyard after that. Yeah, I think for the rest of grammar school, I just. It was like, they just don't need to know. It doesn't need to know basis.
All of Seinfeld's kids, they eventually reach an age, usually around middle school, when they start wanting to spend more time off the ship than on it. And their dad, he created a system to deal with that, too. Here's David, the 11th of the Seinfeld's 12 kids. If you want to take liberty, you have to fill out slip and then put where you're going.
You'd put the time and date of when you're leaving and when you're coming back. And then you had to put who you're going to see, what you're doing and where to reach you at, like, your Social Security number. And then you'd have to get it signed off by the supervisor of the day. So the supervisor would be whoever was appointed.
Then it would get posted. And I don't think my father really ever had to step in, or I think that's one of the beauties of the system is, like, use the other siblings to keep everything in order. As the kids got older, they just stopped showing up on the ship to play. Only one kid I spoke with formally requested discharge.
She was 12. I went to my dad and, you know, acting very seriously, told him that, you know, I thought about it, and I had decided that it just wasn't for me anymore. This is Marian. He was just like, you know, okay, that's interesting.
And I remember getting in the mail not too long after that, a big middle envelope, and, you know, the hospital corpsman, third class, Marion, Kate. And inside there was a letter that said, you know, unfortunately, because we had just entered the first Gulf War. That president had said that, you know, no one can leave right now, that everyone's automatically reenlisted. This was an actual, real order that came down for actual sailors during Operation Desert Storm, probably unintended for middle school kids in Illinois.
And so I wasn't going to be able to leave then. And I mean, I was just like, you know, just kind of like, okay, like he got me, I guess. I mean, there's just no getting out of it. Jane, the oldest, is 41 now.
The youngest, Samuel, is 20. And you can't help but notice how much the Steinfeld's kids lives seem to be shaped by their time on the ship. Elizabeth, the master chief store keeper, she now runs her own clothing store. John, the culinary specialist, he manages the kitchen at Chicago restaurant.
Samuel's training to be an officer at the Naval Academy right now. Jane went there too. Four of the other boys, they ended up in the Marine Corps. David enlisted right for high school.
He's been deployed to Asia and Yemen. I think the ship was a very big part because the one thing that I was good at, I knew it because we did his job, was the military. And when I went there, it was pretty easy for me. I mean, all these other people were like, struggling.
Especially for Marine boot camp. It's a. It's a legendary zone of like, horror and pain and whatnot. But I was.
I was pretty used to it. I mean, I was. It wasn't obviously as intense at home as it was there, but a lot of the rules and everything, like organization, attention to detail, it was all pretty much mirrored when you actually got on a real ship. How similar was it to your playship?
A lot of it was surprisingly the same. I mean, I could still, from my bed, reach out and touch three different people, and you could hear people breathing in their beds. Jim Steinfeld was 71 when he died from cancer four years ago. He wanted his kids to be competent and industrious and serve something bigger than themselves.
Lessons they say they learned on the ship. Right after he died, Marion said they couldn't stop thinking about how he would have hated him. When we seen a good day of work, my mom, one thing that she kind of struggled with was having a funeral during the day. She thought that he would be mortified that people had stopped working to go to his funeral.
So she thought about having it in the evening. And my dad actually built his own coffin. I mean, he always made it. You know, he made the ship.
He was really good at making things. I just miss being on the ship. I mean, and I think that we all wouldn't have the relationships we have. I mean, I really think it was kind of the basis for our closeness and our kind of like camaraderie.
The ship their dad built still around, but in the garage at their mom's house. And every once in a while when the kids are home visiting, they'll pull it back in their yard. Sometimes they'll climb back on it. It's tough to get the poor poles and doors.
Now and then they'll stand on the deck and watch their own children play on it. Mickey Meek is one of the producers of our show. If you're curious, Pictures of the USS Elizabeth City are at our website, this americanlife.org and they'll jerk from their beds and think they're dreaming, but they'll pinch themselves in square and they'll know that it's for real. They are that.
The ship comes in and they'll raise their hand so we'll meet all your demands. They'll be a shout from the bow, decent number. And like Pharaoh's tribe, they'll be drowned in the tide. And like Goliath, they'll be conquered.
Coming up, pretending to be a normal person can be the most difficult make believe of all. That's a minute from Chicago Public Radio when our program continues. This is American Life in our class. Each of our program course reaches a theme bringing different kinds of stories on that theme.
Today's show, the Land of make believe. We have stories of people constructing worlds that are not real, some more convincingly and charmingly than others. We've arrived at two of our program, Act Two, the Lion Kings. So this next story is about a bunch of people who are building an elaborate world of make believe for their jobs and they fail.
They totally fail. This is not a spoiler. They don't come close to getting this right. I'm telling you up front.
Jonathan, man Tibar explains what happened. A warning. If you're listening to the podcast or online version of our program, there's cursing. This story that we beep out on radio, but on the Internet we have unbeeped it.
If you're listening with kids, would you prefer a beep show? As always, you can find that at our website. Okay, here's Jonathan. The story starts with a lie between friends.
One of those friends was a young woman named Lyric Ar Cabral. She lived in Harlem and had this neighbor, a guy in the 50s named Saeed Torres. Lyric's apartment was on the third floor of Brownstone said lived on the first, and they hung out together all the time. They're both black and Muslim.
And Lyric found Said intriguing in part because he was an actual Black Panther. Liric had grown up interested in the Black Panther Party, but had never actually met a member before. She was a student at the time, learning to do documentary work. Said had told Lirik that he was going to be moving to the Bronx soon.
And then one day she came home from school. I usually stopped in his apartment to say hello, just because it was before I went upstairs. I would pass his apartment, and when I looked in the apartment there, all of his things were gone. There was no furniture.
There was no indication that anyone had ever lived there. And I assumed that he had probably just moved to the Bronx. But I thought it weird because I was, you know, it was too hasty. He would have told me.
And while I'm staring at the empty apartment, I get a call from him. He sounds incredibly frantic. I never heard that tone in his voice. He sounded like someone was on the other end of the phone with a gun to his head.
And he said, if anyone comes looking for me, if anyone asks you any information about me, don't give it to them, and you find out who they are for me. And I said, well, you know, I was pretty petrified based on the way he sounded. He sounded incredibly nervous. And so I said, well, where are you?
What's wrong? And he said, well, I can't really tell you, but I'm in South Carolina right now. I have something to tell you. You should come down here and visit.
Which she did. And Saeed told her that all these years she'd known him, all these years she'd seen him getting dressed in nice suits and going to work. That was all a cover because Saeed was actually an informant for the FBI. She says at the time, she didn't know much about how FBI investigations work.
So it was a very naive back and forth, but it was very braggadocious on his part. He outlined all that he had done, sort of for the FBI. And when I asked him, why are you telling me this? He goes, well, because you don't have to fact check me.
We're there, there in that first floor apartment in Harlem. Syed told Lyric that the FBI had paid his rent while he investigated a man named Tariq Shah. And Lyric knew exactly who that was because Said he had introduced her to Tariq. He'd come to Saeed's apartment several times when she was there.
Said also told Lyric that his whole apartment was wired I was pissed, you know, I mean, definitely. This was not Like I didn't receive this information with a smile. I definitely felt betrayed because to me, that meant that I had an FBI file. I mean, that was a question I had for him.
I was like, well, since I was in the apartment with Tariq, I was on camera, correct? And today I have not gotten a good answer, both from FBI, sort of. I foiled that material. FBI told me they do not have anything in their possession.
And Said himself says, oh, no, I would never record you. I would never press play when you were there. I would never press record. But I'm not quite too confident in that.
Lyric says that there in South Carolina. Said handed her a folder full of newspaper articles about cases he worked on. He'd actually highlighted the parts in the articles that talked about his role, places where he's identified justice government informant. And Lyric believed him, believed that he'd been an informant, that he'd fled to South Carolina because he was afraid for his safety.
After the FBI arrested Tariq Shah, Lyric didn't know exactly why Said he was telling her all this, but he mentioned he'd seen other people turning the work they've done with the FI in the bestselling books. Why couldn't he do something similar? And that's where things stood for nearly a decade. Lyric kept in touch with Said and started pursuing a career as a documentary filmmaker.
She met another filmmaker named David Felix Sutcliffe. And David told her that he'd been fantasizing about making a film that would follow it beyond Formed. And she said, funny to say, because I know one. That's David, by the way.
He and Lyric reached out to Saeed, and he told them that he was just starting to work on a new case in Pittsburgh. And, you know, for reasons that weren't totally clear to us at the time, he said, yeah, sure, let's do this. Let's see how you guys can film me. So what's going on?
You didn't come down here with no cameras on. I asked you that earlier. Sure, they could film, but Said often got annoyed when they showed up. It was unpredictable, and he'd be okay with it.
I said, don't come down here with no goddamn cameras and stuff. Hello. I told you I didn't put my face on this shit. You'd be surprised who knows me.
Everybody in Brooklyn know me. And they know me in Harlem, too. They know my face. I might not make no fucking independence if motherfuckers come after me.
Like clips from the documentary Larry And David ended up making it's called terror and follows Sayyid. Is he working this investigation in Pittsburgh? And in case isn't clear, I want to point out how incredibly rare this footage is because normally when you hear a story about an FBI counterterrorism investigation, it's pieced together after the fact using court records and whatever interviews reporters can get with people who will talk. Here.
Lyric and David were following someone who usually doesn't talk in the first place, an FBI informant. They were following him in real time while he was actively working a case, so they didn't have to rely on Said's memory to document what happened. They were there. They hung out with him in his FBI safe house.
He showed them pictures he'd been on the wall of targets he said the FBI was interested in. As best as anyone can tell, the FBI never agreed to this. And apparently they never noticed that Lyric and David were filming all this time. I mean, why would they have let the investigation continue if they knew?
Said's primary target, the POI person of interest in Pittsburgh, was a man named Khalifa Ali Al Akili. Khalifa is a white guy, a convert to Islam. Here's a video he posted to YouTube. He's got a beard, a white turban.
My name is Khalif Al Aqili and I am from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America. Darukuf, the belly of the beast. La Ilaha Illallah. Muhammad Rasulullah.
He would engage in sort of not inflammatory, but I would say controversial First Amendment protective speech lyrics. Khalil did a lot of this on Facebook. He would post things such as, you know, 2,000 people died on 9 11. However, X number of Muslims had been killed in the war on Iraq and Afghanistan.
Like, you know, who is the real enemy here? Things like this. He would also post videos like, here's Osama bin Laden reading the Quran. There's many Quran recitations you could post on your public Facebook profile.
After 9 11, you know, he also had another post that said the Taliban are the perfect wearers of the turban. Saeed's job was to get close to Khalifa, see if he was doing more than just talking. And the FBI gave him a cover. They told him to say he was working for the Red Cross.
They set him up in a safe house, an apartment one block from Khalifa, and he went by a different name. And just so this doesn't get confusing, from this point on in the story, we're going to refer to Saeed by that name, that English Sharif. So Sharif again That's saved undercover. He started wearing the same mask as Khalifa.
Then he actually met him. Sharif bumped into Khalifa on the street one day and introduced himself. Here's how he described Khalifa in the film. When I see him running around here now, it would make any more fucking suspicious.
He'd walk around looking like a Taliban. Khalifa had grown up Protestant and converted to Islam when he was 14. In 2001, he went to prison for selling drugs and was a felony. Over the years, Khalifa had other charges for having a gun without a license and assault.
And Khalifa was public about his conversion. He proselytized neighbors in his apartment building say that he'd slip Islamic brochures under their doors and take down Christmas cards they'd hung up. Khalifa married a smally woman. They had a kid.
And they were gained by unwelfear and money Khalifa made selling books. Some of them were books on Islam that he got from a sheikh in South Africa. And he even started some kind of religious school. In 2006, he started holding classes in his apartment for local Somali children.
Again, here's David. And they called it Al Shabaab, which in Arabic means the youth. But it's also the name of the Al Qaeda affiliated terrorist organization in Somalia. He wasn't aware of at the time.
When he named the school he was not. He did not know the dazzle name of terroristorization. People mentioned to it to him pretty quickly afterwards and saying that the best name for your school and it's probably not a good idea for business cards. It's like Khalifa Al Shabaab.
But he was kind of defined and simple. It means what it means. And if things interpretive they think it means something else, then that's their problem. Yeah.
He wasn't trying to hide anything. No. I mean he drove around town in a car that said Al Shabaab Islamic Institute. Like he picked up students in this vehicle, like on the side.
What do you mean? I will send you on my space picture. He literally, like there's a picture of him posing by the vehicle with the child inside and says such a big magnetic sign that he kind of got made into it slapped inside the minivan. Is it the way like a real estate agent does?
Yes. Over the seven months David and Marek were following Sharif through his investigation of Khalifa, they checked in with him every other day or so, filming whenever they could in a safe house on the street while he was on the phone with FBI handlers. Yeah. What's up to him?
Exactly. I don't have biyat to this monster. I Don't have biyat to imam either. And most people, you have bayat to imam.
That way you can move around with them. I don't have it. It's such an intimate view of an informant's job. And what we see is how much of a counterterrorism investigation, at least this case is really just someone trying very hard to make friends with a total stranger.
So Sharif goes to the mosque, hoping to bump into Khalifa. He asks Khalifa after coffee, offers him rides, and most of the time, Khalifa just ignores him. Shrieks over eagerness and, oh, this is a little hard to watch. He's like the Ned Flanders of FBI stings.
He's constantly texting Khalifa. For example, months into the investigation, Sharif sent Khalifa this text. Asalamu alaikum, Brother K. What's up?
Can you assist me in setting up laptop Facebook? Inshallah. Here's Lyric. He's not supposed to know how to use Facebook at his age.
I think it was the FBI made that suggestion for Sharif to ask Khalifa to help him set up his Facebook page as a way for Sharif to endear himself to Khalifa in the sense of, like, oh, you know, I'm not knowledgeable in this area, Brother, can you please help me? Khalifa did not help his Muslim brother. In fact, after Sharif tried to friend Khalifa several times over months, Khalifa blocked him. Dref then sent Khalifa a text that said, why didn't you answer my request?
Since you blocked me, you have to request it from me. Khalifa texted back, it's not that serious, bro. Lol. It's hard to see how the FBI thought this was ever supposed to work.
Sharif was a lot older than Klipha. His days as a revolutionary was. The Black Panthers were decades ago. Not exactly relevant to a much younger white convert.
Dhrif smoked pot, dressed in street clothes. Khalifa proselytized and wore traditional Islamic art. Lyric and David said Sharif was angry that the FBI hadn't done enough to make him seem believable. He was really frustrated that the FBI didn't have a cover for him.
You know, he said, if I've been a businessman, I could have, you know, used that as an entryway and say, oh, Khalifa, you want to set up a shop? And Kleefa did want to set up a shopping, I think a breakfast cafe for people to go to after morning prayer. And Sharif would say, like, if I had a businessman covering, I could use that as a way to kind of, like, keep the conversation going and eventually get to a point where we're talking about money and what are you gonna do for money. If I do this for you, what would you do for me?
There just wasn't like a specific foothold. There wasn't like anything specifically related to Shariff's cover that would initiate an organic conversation about these issues. From what I can tell, seems to come out of left field every single time. For example, one day, as Sharif explains in the film, he was talking with Khalifa and the classic holy war conversation started.
Camping came up. That was my key opening right there. The door opened up for me to make a suggestion now. I said, yo, that's cool, man.
We can all go camping. I said, you know, why don't we just go a little further? We could train, man, like we do in the military. I said, brother, you want to go and fight for the Muslim state?
He said, I said, that's what's going on with you brother. You brother always talk that you hard stuff, but when somebody give you the opportunity to make a move, to fight for this man, you are not going to fight for this man. You ought to talk that talk, but you won't walk the walk. Sharif was supposed to gather evidence, record his conversation for FBI analysis.
But when he did manage to speak to Khalifa, he couldn't get Khalifa say anything that Khalifa hadn't already revealed himself on his Facebook page. So he tried other methods that are familiar if you've ever followed these kinds of cases. He asked Khalifa to buy him a gun. Sharif said that he needed protection for neighborhood kids who were selling drugs in front of his house.
Khalifa didn't buy on that either. But the FBI wanted Sharif to keep going. He would text the FBI to tell them what he was up to. Heading to Friday Prior at El Noor mosque.
No word from Poi. The FBI would text back, Poi just walked in. Turn recorder on before you go in. Talk to him a little, get a feel.
One Sunday night, three months into the investigation, something happened that shows just how hard it is to appear authentic in a situation that's completely fake. They're getting David for filming Sharif in his apartment watching TV. And Sharif sent this text. Asa.
That's sh for Asan William. Asa, brother K. Check this movie on channel 370, Showtime. And then in parentheses, Sharif adds Homeland.
Khalifa texts back. Hmm. On Netflix. Sharif responds.
No. Showtime. It's called Homeland Taliban warrior. This 63 year old former black Panther with decades of experience as a government informant.
And the thing he does is text his target about homeland. By late January 2012, four months into Sharif's involvement in the investigation, Khalifa still hadn't said or done anything that the FBI could use to charge him. No support for terrorism, no plans to engage in any illegal activity. And then one day, Lyric and David saw something on Khalifa's Facebook page that made it clear that this whole game of make believe, this idea that Sharif was some terrorist recruiter, was crumbling.
I believe his first sort of public inkling that something was wrong, he wrote, the feds must think I'm Willy Lumpl. They think they can send anyone to me. And we knew that that was an indirect reference to Sharif on the ground in Pittsburgh. And then on March 9, 2012, Khalifa posted the following, which he also sent out via email to a bunch of.
Sometime in September or October of 2011, I met Syed as Torres, who introduced himself to me as Sharif. And from there, he goes on to make a detailed discovery that Saidres is in fact an FBI informant. And the last line of his sort of lengthy discovery is, and I encourage journalists to come and speak to me about these issues because I would like to sue the FBI for the harassment of me. All right, ready?
Yeah. My name is Khalif Al Akili from Pittsburgh. In 1991, I accepted Islam. They went to his apartment, set up their cameras, and never mentioned that they'd been filming Sharif for months.
Even as Khalifa went on and on about him, he was always talking about the cause, the cause, the cause, you know, and, you know, some guys pray, other guys fight. Khalifa tells him about the first time he met Sharif. He shows him text on his phone, trying to see if there's anything of relevance. Oh, wow.
Subhanallah on December 18th. Now dig this. On December 18th, ASA, which means as salam alaikum, Brother K. Check this movie on channel 370, Showtime.
It's a series called Homeland about terrorists, right? Which I actually did. I actually enjoyed it. But so, but, yeah, yeah, but.
But it was like it was to help him talk about that topic then, then, like the next. Like, he kept talking about this even though this was on 18th on the 20th. Now, who talks about the show that much on the 20th? He says, how you doing?
How did you like the show Homeland? I'll talk tomorrow at Fajr, Inshallah. So he, like, kept wanting to talk to me. Even, like, when I, you know, we got together, whatever you wanted to.
So how did you like? What do you think about it? What do you think about it? What do you know, bonus stuff in it.
Just talking crazy. Let's take a moment here and just count up all the lies that are being told. Lyric and David are lying to Khalifa pretending they've never met Sharif. But now they're also lying to Sharif because they don't tell him that they're interviewing Khalifa.
And of course, this whole story began with a lie. Sharif hid from Lyric that he was working for the FBI, and he hid from the FBI that he let Lyric and David film the investigation. And Sharif lied to Khalifa about who he really was. It's turned into this giant knot of lies.
Once Lyric and David had done their interviews with Khalifa and got away without him figuring out who they really were, they had to keep the lies up because lawyers had told them when they started making this film that they had to be careful to never do anything that got in the way of the investigation. If they did, they could be charged with tampering with an active investigation. And tampering would include actions such as telling Sharif that we were in contact with Khalifa and telling Khalifa that we had been filming with Sharif. FBI could say, but for the presence of these filmmakers, our case would have been successful.
But for the presence of these filmmakers, we would have secured this counter and terrorism arrest. In the end, what messed up the investigation wasn't the filmmakers or Sharif. It was a mistake. The FBI made a mistake that proved to Khalifa without a doubt that the FBI was spying on him.
While Sharif was floundering with Khalifa, the FBI sent in this other informant, Muhammad, to be the closer. Here's a section of the film that explains all this. It alternates between Sharif and Khalifa telling what happened with Muhammad. Here's Sharif.
All I was supposed to do was introduce him to Khalifa. Just let him know, yo, have individual Muslims come in. He's a recruiter for the Taliban or he's a recruiter for the Al Qaeda. You know, he's a good brother.
You know, maybe y' all should meet. Short and simple. Before I could even introduce the fucking dude to the fucking poi, the motherfucker was jumping out my car already just to meet him. I'm like, what the fuck?
The guy got out and he came up to me, gave me the greeting, kissed me on both cheeks. And I swear to you, when I walked away from that situation, I walked away feeling like I just played a part in some Hollywood terrorist movie. I just met, like, a leader from some terrorist organization actually right there on the spot. He wanted to go have some coffee or sit down with me.
And I told him, no, you know, I still have to go visit my mother. And I'm actually on my way there, getting ready to catch a bus to go there, and I walked away. He Got back in the truck. It was so clear that I didn't want to meet these guys.
Like, seriously, like, I literally made up excuse after excuse after excuse. The next morning, this guy Muhammad, he was back in Khalifa's neighborhood and he wanted to know if Khalifa would go to McDonald's with him, have a cup of coffee. Khalifa took the filmmakers to McDonald's. The morning that we all came in here, we actually sat at this first booth right here.
And that's whenever he began to talk about his people being involved in jihad and whatnot and fighting him. This was the location that we sat down and had a coffee with. So we exchanged numbers. And actually that morning he drove me home.
After that, I didn't hear anything wrong with him. Now, Khalifa had Mohammed's phone number again, David Lyric. It was written on receipt and he kind of tossed it on a drawer in a closet and didn't kind of think about it until a few weeks later when he would actually clean his house and saw the receipt and the number and was like, oh yeah, let me follow up on this. It was beginning with Aethel 518, which is associated with Albany, New York.
And he googled the number. And what came back to him, I believe the first result was a court transcript. When he clicked on that court transcript, it said FBI informant right next to the number. And that number was listed in the U.S.
southern District Court transcript from a terrorism trial that happened in 2010. And Khalifa googled this number in 2012. And so he's looking at a two year old transcript that is part of the public record that lists the cell phone number from a Muhammad as belonging to FBI informant Shahid Hussain. Once Khalifa figured out that Muhammad was an informant, he started looking for proof that Sharif was too.
And he found it, as he explains in the film. Yeah, very, very easy. He left me alone in his truck one time. He went into the store and I'm getting ready to show you the picture.
When he did that, there was alert sitting on the dashboard from the welfare office. So I picked it up and I snapped a picture of it because I knew he was FBI. That's him right there with his real name and his address. I was trying to cross my T's and dot my I's wanting to know who this guy was.
His real name is sayed as Torres. After Lyric and David filmed Khalifa telling the story, they had to go back to Sharif or Pussy back to Bin Zayed. Now, whatever the case, they couldn't tell him what they knew. You know, we could not say anything about Khalifa's Saeed.
You know, when sort of, Saeed would make these theories about him and say things about his personality. Often, you know, we couldn't respond even though we knew. And Sharif often asked us, which is information that we knew, how Khalifa found out his identity. Because Sharif was not checking Khalifa's Facebook.
He was not privy to this whole discovery. The FBI did not tell him. The FBI did not tell him that Khalifa had posted this? No, they did not.
They just told the FBI to response to Khalifa's discovery. The FBI told Sharif, you need to get out of town now. They did not tell him why y' all exposed me. Y' all put me on the goddamn line and left me out there hanging dry.
This is Sharif, who's now clearly been outed as an informant, talking on the phone with one of his FBI handlers. He's just found out that Muhammad blew their cover. He's not happy about it. Initially, when I did this contract with y', all, if I didn't feel right about something, I wouldn't go through it.
But yet y' all forced my hand to go through it. Sharif complained to the filmmakers. He's not even sped up with the fi in this entire investigation. And I told him, I'm not here to entrap nobody.
They trying to make me force this dude into saying something to support terrorism. I said, the dude is not a fucking terrorist, man. He's not even a pseudo terrorist. He's nothing but an oxymoron.
I said, what y' all been doing for last three years? Y' all ain't seen nothing. If y' all ain't seen it, what y' all expect me to see? Still the FBI continue to tell Sharif, but you got the ruse.
First Safe message received March 9 at 4:50pm hey, it's Jay. This is one of Sharif's FBI handlers. He wants Sharif to send one last text, and here's what he wants to say. I don't know who you've been talking to or exactly what you've been saying about me, but God around.
People came to my work today, talk to me, and I can't have that. He tells them not to mention the feds and the police. Then something like, you know, inshallah, I'll see you around. And your number, that's what we want.
That's only your question. But you see what I'm saying, I'm heading home. You see what they still asking me. In other words, they're trying to figure out that Muhammad and Sharif were both Fake identities, both working for the FBI.
But Sharif was still being asked by the FBI to pretend like nothing had gone wrong. Sharif told Lyrics that he's no longer an FBI informant, that they don't respond to his calls or texts. They've gone completely silent. And Khalifa, well, Khalifa had planned to go public with everything, everything he'd written in that Facebook post, everything he told David and Lyric.
And he'd been in touch with lawyers at an advocacy group called Project Salaam that provides legal help for Muslims. Khalifa was going to go down to D.C. and be part of a press conference where he'd lay out the whole story. The day before the press conference, David was supposed to meet him early to film him going morning prayer.
And I showed up outside of his house at Pillow around the corner. I noticed all these black SUVs up front. And you know, it's probably about 5:30 in the morning. I knew exactly what was going on.
I haven't done anything to anybody. Prophet Muhammad said, beware of the supplication of the person who was unjustly treated. This is wrong. I haven't done anything to anyone.
Khalifa was in handcuffs being arrested by the FBI. Khalifa met with his lawyer a few days earlier who had said, you know, if they're gonna come to you, it's gonna be there late at night or early in the morning. And so fortunately I had the camera set up. I just grabbed it and jumped out of the car.
Can you please try to get a hold of someone to help my wife, please, man. The FBI arrested Khalifa not for terrorism charges, but on a gun charge. Khalifa, remember, was a felon. He'd done time for a narcotics charge, so he wasn't legally supposed to possess a firearm.
But one day, years before, he went to a public firing range, borrowed a friend's gun and shot at a target. His friend took a seven second video and he emailed it to Khalifa. And basically that friend was called into the grand jury. Basically the friend had to admit, yes, I emailed this photo to Khalifa.
Yes, this photo was taken at a shooting range wherein Khalifa was holding a gun. And that's all the information they needed in combination with that photo led to confirmation that Khalifa was indeed a felon in possess of the firearm. And he received a sentence of eight years. And yet his public defender, who said she's handled thousands of gun cases throughout her career, she said she's never once seen someone being prosecuted based on a photograph of them in gun range.
The vestige at the time and someone was caught in criminal activity Khalifa had gone to the gun Range in 2010, and he hadn't tried to hide it for a while. A picture of him holding the gun had been his Facebook profile picture, which means the FBI could have made this arrest almost two years earlier, long before they'd gradually refund their investigation. The FBI did not comment for Lyric and David's film, and when we approached them, they provided this the FBI's use of undercover operations and 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. The person I really wanted to talk to about this whole experience is Sharif.
Siri thinks now that he's seen Larry David's film and he knows the truth on all sides. And it seemed like he began to talk, but at the last minute he turned me down. Lyric says it's because I called him an informant in an email. He considers himself to be a civilian operative.
Lyric told me he knows that some people look down on informants, and he was offended that I used the word. Lyric says that when she finally had a chance to watch the movie, he had one critique. I look fucking depressed all the time, he said. For 23 years, Saeed Sharif Torres had been doing informant work, coming up with a new version of himself each time for each new target.
He's a shell of what he once was there told me. Lying to people for a living can take a toll on you. Now you can finally see it. Jonathan is one of the producers of our program.
The documentary Terror will be released in theaters on October 7th. You can find out more at terror documentary dot. Com and we're not done. Come here man.
Reed was Joe Level Julie Senator consultant Lily Sullivan set Linder operations director Emily Condon the production manager Elise Ferguson our business operations manager and the Baker Scout story to our show Henderson as a rocket's coordinator Research help take from Michelle Harris and Cava music help today from Damien Greg from Rob Geddes, George R.R. martin Coffee that you heard a little bit of the top of the program took place at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. They have a video that online special thanks to Christopher St. John to Charlotte Street Films to Trevor Aronson, Brad Togerson and Craig Zobel.
This American Life is delivered to public radio stations by prx the public radio exchange thanks as always shows co founders Torrenti who this week took the management of Rhode Island Public Radio in Providence. No kidding. They were lucky to have him. I really truly want to make a big deal out of here at the end of the program and congratulate him, but he would not let me.
Not that serious, bro. Lol. I'm all right. Glass back.
Next week, more stories of this American Life. We're trying to come down here on people.