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 19 A Secret, Double Life The days that Turkish graduate student Mehmet Aydinbelge had left in the United States were running out. It had been almost a decade since he arrived in Columbus, and his student status had long since expired. A week after Faris pleaded guilty, an immigration judge ordered Aydinbelge deported to Turkey. Before that happened, the government wanted one last word with him. In early June 2003, as the FBI sifted through the reams of information Faris had provided, Aydinbelge told agents that Faris, Nuradin Abdi, and Christopher Paul were close associates affiliated with a radical branch of Islam. That the three were friends was true, as was the fact both Abdi and Paul were religious conservatives. (It’s hard to know what Faris believed in.) Whether friendship and heated conversation rose to the level of “associates” was another question. But shortly afterward, on June 5, agents opened an official investigation into Abdi. On June 6, Aydinbelge, the onetime Ohio State graduate student and Faris roommate, left the United States permanently, flying home out of New York’s JFK Airport on Delta Flight No. 72.1 Prosecutors could hardly be faulted for congratulating themselves on a job well done with Faris. His was a textbook example of how such cases were meant to proceed. Acting on information gained from sources including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, the government had interrupted a potentially deadly attack on U.S. soil involving another New York landmark, the iconic Brooklyn Bridge. Furthermore, Faris represented a valuable source of continuing information. Thanks to him, the government was now aware of at least two other conspirators in Columbus. Faris’s interrogation had gone smoothly, relatively speaking, and the final plea negotiations, while bumpy, had been concluded without undue complications. And then, as sometimes happens, everything went to hell. A Secret, Double Life  Up until now, Faris’s arrest and conviction had been well-kept secrets. Brinkema, the federal judge, had made it clear she wanted it to stay that way. “I don’t expect to see anything about this in the press,” she warned Hammerstrom during the plea hearing on May 1. “It certainly won’t come from our office, your honor,” Hammerstrom replied. “I hope not,” Brinkema said. “We’ve had too many of these problems, all right?”2 On June 13, however, someone in the government leaked word of the investigation into Faris and his subsequent disappearance. This leak was still unknown to Faris and in all likelihood, to the FBI and government prosecutors—who were not likely the source of the information—when agents and Sinclair visited Faris in the Alexandria jail for a follow-up interview on June 14. Suddenly, an hour into the questioning, Faris announced that he had been wrongly accused and that everything he’d told the government was a lie. Among other things, he said, he was frustrated by agents’ inability to tell him how much of a break he might get on his sentence under the Rule 35 provisions. This was a big headache, but nothing compared to what came next. Newsweek broke the news about the investigation with an online story, followed by a June 19 report by MSNBC Online that Faris had disappeared without being publicly charged with a crime.3 The government scrambled to repair the damage and assess its options. Faris had always feared that his cooperation might endanger his family back home. Shortly after midnight on June 19, Vanderstoep got one of Faris’s close relatives in Pakistan on the line to explain the situation. The relative, who spoke excellent English, was taken aback at the news, but after discussion said he didn’t feel as though word of Faris’s arrest was going to put anyone in Pakistan in danger. One reason may have been that Faris had few direct relatives left: his father had died, he didn’t have any full siblings, and the rest of his relations were stepbrothers and stepsisters.4 Still, in light of the leaks and unwelcome publicity—some of it inaccurate—the government decided it was time to unseal the record and make the case against Faris public. “The whole story really hasn’t been told, and I think the Department would like to try to get ahead of the story and avoid any erroneous reporting,” Hammerstrom told Brinkema and Sinclair during a teleconference on June 19, the day the MSNBC story appeared. Sinclair wasn’t...

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