Muslim FBI Agent Reinstated
Thu, Feb 26, 2004 at 5:13:55 pm PST
Gamal Abdel-Hafiz, the Egyptian-born FBI agent fired for (among other things) refusing to eavesdrop on fellow Muslims, has been reinstated. (Thanks to all who emailed about this.)
Abdel-Hafiz’s career turned sour in the fall of 2002, when a fellow FBI agent in Chicago, Robert Wright, accused him of refusing to cooperate in an earlier 1999 case targeting fundraising by the militant Palestinian group Hamas. Wright claimed that Abdel-Hafiz, who was then assigned to the bureau’s Dallas field office, had refused his request that he wear a hidden wire in a meeting with a suspect in the case on the grounds that “a Muslim does not record another Muslim.” Abdel-Hafiz has insisted that his comment was misunderstood and that his reluctance to wear the wire stemmed from his concerns that it could undermine his effectiveness in the Muslim community and jeopardize his family if word got out that he had done so. In any case, Abdel-Hafiz pointed out that his supervisor at the time, Danny Defenbaugh, then the special agent in charge of the Dallas office, made the final decision that Abdel-Hafiz should not wear a wire in the Hamas investigation.
Wright’s allegations, first made at a Washington press conference and later repeated in his December 2002 interview with the ABC News show “Primetime Live,” led to increased scrutiny of Abdel-Hafiz’s work in Riyadh. By then, Abdel-Hafiz’s chief supervisor, Wilfred Rattigan, had converted to Islam. When both Abdel-Hafiz and Rattigan flew off to Mecca for the hajj, a top FBI official in Washington complained and an auditing team was dispatched to review the office’s work. During the course of the audit, Abdel-Hafiz told NEWSWEEK, the chief inspector from headquarters concluded that there was too much “clutter” in the office and ordered the “shredding” of over 2,000 documents related to the September 11 terror investigations. Although most of the documents were duplicated in the FBI’s computers, a small number were not, according to Abdel-Hafiz. These consisted of between 50 and 100 letters written by Saudi security officials responding to FBI requests for information about terror suspects. When the FBI was forced to ask the Saudis for new copies of the letters, the Saudis—who were being severely criticized in Congress for failure to cooperate on terrorism cases—complained to senior U.S. officials.
I noted this story when it first broke, in December 2002.
Frank says:
