In 2006, five years after 9/11, the FBI needed someone who could get close to Muslim communities in Orange County, California without raising suspicion. They found him at a local gym. Craig Monteilh was a fitness trainer with a criminal record for fraud when the FBI recruited him as a paid informant. He began attending the Islamic Center of Irvine, one of the largest mosques in Southern California, and publicly converted to Islam in front of hundreds of worshippers during Ramadan. He took the name Farouk. Monteilh spent over a year building trust inside the community. Members invited him into their homes for meals and prayer. He joined study groups, attended dozens of early morning prayers, and became a familiar, welcomed face. The whole time, he was secretly recording almost everything. He carried a camera hidden inside a shirt button. He left a set of keys containing a hidden audio device in a mosque office lost and found, capturing private conversations between imams and congregants who believed they were speaking in confidence. The FBI paid Monteilh $177,000 for his work, with more money tied to how many prayer sessions and events he attended. His assignment, according to his later court testimony, was to help identify potential extremists within the mosque. Instead, something else happened. Monteilh began talking about violent jihad in ways that unsettled the people around him. Fellow congregants tried to correct him using Islamic teachings on peace. When that did not work, members of the mosque grew alarmed enough that they reported him, not to mosque leadership, but directly to the FBI, warning that he might be a radicalized threat. The Islamic Center of Irvine ultimately filed for and received a restraining order barring him from the property. It would be nearly two years before the community learned the truth: the man they had reported as a potential extremist was the government's own informant, sent to spy on them in the first place. The case became the basis for a major lawsuit against the FBI, which eventually reached the U.S. Supreme Court over questions of religious surveillance and civil rights.
In 2006, five years after 9/11, the FBI needed someone who could get close to Muslim communities in Orange County, California without raising suspicion. They found him at a local gym. Craig Monteilh was a fitness trainer with a criminal record for fraud when the FBI recruited him as a paid informant. He began attending the Islamic Center of Irvine, one of the largest mosques in Southern California, and publicly converted to Islam in front of hundreds of worshippers during Ramadan. He took the name Farouk. Monteilh spent over a year building trust inside the community. Members invited him into their homes for meals and prayer. He joined study groups, attended dozens of early morning prayers, and became a familiar, welcomed face. The whole time, he was secretly recording almost everything. He carried a camera hidden inside a shirt button. He left a set of keys containing a hidden audio device in a mosque office lost and found, capturing private conversations between imams and congre...