“He’s Not a Refugee, He’s al Qaeda”: The Untold Story of Spin Ghul’s Capture

I just got this crazy call from Italy,” said the man on the other end of the phone.

Dave Bitkower, assistant US attorney for the Eastern District of New York, had just been contacted by the FBI. It was a steamy Brooklyn summer day as Bitkower listened to Joint Terrorism Task Force Supervisor Ari Mahairas describe some wild scenes on a boat in the Mediterranean Sea. Just shy of thirty-six, wiry and intense, Bitkower was the type of attorney built for the extreme pressures of the Eastern District’s Violent Crimes and Terrorism Section—a runner, studious, even a former Jeopardy! champion. After graduating Harvard Law School, he had decided to serve his country, opting for downtown Brooklyn over a white-shoe law firm across the East River. It was a spartan life with long hours. And although he had a new wife and baby boy at home—a dumpy, unrenovated, third-floor walk-up in Brooklyn Heights—he rarely saw any of the three.

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Mahairas explained that the Italian authorities had a man in custody who claimed to be a member of al Qaeda who had killed American soldiers. The man had been detained immediately, in June 2011, for relatively minor infractions and couldn’t be held for very long. If they didn’t act soon, this potential deadly terrorist would be dispatched to a low-security camp among the general refugee population hoping to emigrate to Europe. And Bitkower and Mahairas knew all too well how easy it was to sneak out of one of these camps and slip into Europe without a trace.

“What’s the name?” Bitkower asked.

“Spin Ghul.”

Bitkower knew the name. Ten years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, al Qaeda and its affiliates were more active than ever in plotting against Americans, including on US soil. The FBI, CIA, NSA, military, and even assistant US attorneys had to be on top of their game 24 ⁄ 7.

Detainees at Gitmo were talking about Spin Ghul. His name had come up in an investigation into terrorism in Africa. Spin Ghul was one of the terrorists the nation’s counterterrorism investigators had been trying desperately to locate.

Despite the steady threat of terrorism since 9 ⁄ 11, President Barack Obama, in the third year of his first term, was busy trying to shift the tenor of US foreign policy. Giving a speech in Cairo, Obama had talked of “a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect, and one based upon the truth that America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition.” This stood in stark contrast to the uneasy reality on the ground—terrorists didn’t care about President Obama’s desire to reset America’s standing in the world. Extremists showed little interest in reconciliation.

If anything, the war on terror, including the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, had acted as a tool of recruitment. The new face of terrorism was not extremists coming from abroad, but Americans and green card holders who had become radicalized. In 2009, a Colorado man and two friends had plotted to blow themselves up on three New York City subways, packed during the rush hour, according to the New York Daily News. In 2010, an attempt to detonate a car bomb in Times Square was foiled only by chance and the alertness of a souvenir vendor. And earlier in 2011, the Michigan- born Colleen LaRose aka “Jihad Jane” pleaded guilty to terrorism-related charges for plotting to kill a Swedish artist who had drawn an image of the prophet Mohammed.

While law enforcement was supposed to maintain the public face of confidence and composure, the reality was that they, and the American public they protected, often got lucky. Pretty much everyone familiar with these cases admitted as much privately. Upon hearing this latest FBI tip, Bitkower immediately grasped the urgency of the situation. If Italian authorities were holding the real Spin Ghul and ultimately let him go, his intention to commit mass murder would be directed at American and other Western targets. In just the previous few weeks, a car bomb had detonated near two US consulate vehicles in Peshawar, Pakistan, killing one and wounding at least ten others; husband and wife suicide bombers had killed ten people at a Kolachi, Pakistan, police station; a bomber with al Qaeda–inspired Boko Haram had killed six in an attack on Nigerian police headquarters; and al Qaeda had announced that Ayman al-Zawahiri would lead al Qaeda, replacing Osama bin Laden, whom Navy SEALs had killed on May 2.

Bitkower walked down to the office of his fellow assistant US attorney Shreve Ariail. Shreve was a tousled-haired, friendly Virginian who had somehow remained buoyant even during what was a terrible year personally: a pipe explosion had destroyed his apartment, a basement walkout on Warren Street near the Brooklyn courthouse, and both his father and father-in-law had died within two months of each other. But Shreve’s generosity and diligent work ethic remained infectious. Bitkower told Shreve about the case. The men knew each other well. They had worked together in Washington, DC, on Obama’s Guantánamo Review Task Force, where they were charged with the seemingly impossible task of figuring out what to do with the 240 accused terrorists being kept in extralegal detention.

Now they had another terrorist on their hands. They wondered about the circumstances under which Spin Ghul had been detained, why he would have admitted any wrongdoing. They would need to find that out. If they were successful in bringing Spin Ghul in, the job would only get more difficult. Bitkower and Shreve would have to expeditiously build a case tight enough to withstand the toughest New York City court- appointed US defense attorney. They would have to track down clues and evidence that cut across the most dangerous parts of the world, including war zones, and in the darkest corners of the terrorist underworld. They wouldn’t be just lawyers shuffling papers, filing motions and appealing to judges and juries. They would have to sleuth. They would have to become counterterrorism detectives.

Lampedusa, Italy

In reality, Bitkower and Shreve were already playing catch-up. The countdown to lock up Spin Ghul had truly started days before on the morning of June 24, when Francesco Morgese, an officer with a special Anti-Terrorism and Rapid Response Unit of the Italian police, boarded The Excelsior, a commandeered cruise ship en route from Lampedusa Island to Taranto, Italy.

Historically, Lampedusa, one of Italy’s southern Pelagie Islands, had been known as a gorgeous, roughly eight-square-mile haven of tourism and fishing. But the once-tranquil destination was becoming the focal point of an unprecedented refugee crisis. Closer to Tripoli than to Rome, Lampedusa had become a lifeline for tens of thousands of people fleeing the turmoil of the Arab Spring.

What had started in 2010 with one oppressed Tunisian street vendor setting himself on fire in protest had sparked revolution throughout North Africa and the Middle East. From Tunisia to Libya to Egypt to Syria to Bahrain, what came to be known as the Arab Spring constituted a series of antigovernment uprisings. Repressive regimes met these revolutionaries with force and slaughter. Among these conflicts was the bloody civil war in Libya, where Muammar Gaddafi, the flamboyant and narcissistic dictator of the country since 1969, was barely clinging to power. His forces had been committing horrific atrocities since February. By June, after just a few short months of chaos, hundreds of people fleeing Libya had drowned in the Mediterranean trying to escape the violence. Those who survived entered a different kind of crisis, as more than ten thousand refugees fleeing Libya and twenty thousand fleeing Tunisia arrived on Lampedusa, quickly overwhelming the small island, population just over six thousand.

Morgese, thirty-nine, had been on the island for just over two weeks. Along with other Green Berets, his task was to provide some kind of security framework for these migrants. He and his fellow soldiers also tried to cheer up the children with sweets and toys. One of the children’s favorite pastimes was playing with latex gloves, inflated to look like balloons. The highlight so far for Morgese, however, had been Angelina Jolie.

She had visited a few days before as a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador for refugees, thanking aid workers, hearing the stories of migrants at a refugee holding center, and participating in a ceremony memorializing refugees who had been lost at sea. Morgese had been impressed not just by her beauty, but by how genuinely interested she seemed to be in the conditions of the migrants, especially the children. Her emotional reaction, her teary eyes, stayed with him. It was, after all, how he felt as well.

Morgese and his team had been assigned to The Excelsior, a twelve-year-old, ten-deck ship capable of holding 2,250 tourists and commuters. On one side of the ship, in giant blue letters, was the name of the shipping company, Grimaldi Lines. On the other: Grandi Navi Veloci (Big Fast Ships). The Excelsior had been repurposed for the migrant crisis, and on board that day were roughly 1,180 migrants, along with forty or so law enforcement officers tasked with preserving order. Families and women were accommodated in a first section of the ship, while unaccompanied men were housed in a second section. They left Lampedusa and were due at their first stop, Taranto harbor—on the inner heel of Italy’s “boot”—the next day.

All was proceeding well. Morgese’s officers were on the case, and the migrants were behaving in an orderly manner. It was peaceful. A nice cruise in the Mediterranean. No signs of any of the Libyan fighters who Gaddafi threatened would arrive in Europe “like a swarm of locusts or bees.”

At around 11 a.m., a short, middle-aged man—from sub-Saharan Africa, Morgese guessed—approached the Italian Green Beret. Morgese looked like an obvious authority figure—muscular, tan, in camouflage combat fatigues with a green beret and a black holster with a gun.

“Water,” the man said. Part request, part demand.

Morgese had noticed the man before. He had been isolating himself from the others, pacing nervously along a corridor, reading a liturgical book of some sort. He gave the man a bottle of water and a serious look.

The man was thin and short, maybe five feet six inches tall, with heavy-lidded eyes, nostrils that flared, full lips, and a scraggly beard. He had a scar on his arm, one that Morgese recognized as consistent with a gunshot entry wound. In 1998, during an antidrug operation, Morgese had engaged in a firefight with a suspect whose leg was struck by a round from another officer’s Beretta pistol. He was familiar with scars caused by bullets.

Morgese gently grabbed the man’s arm and looked at the other side of it, seeing what looked like a larger, scarred-up exit hole.

“What happened?” Morgese asked him. “How did you get that?” The man looked away, pretending he hadn’t heard him.

“What happened?” Morgese asked again.

Nervously, the man began uttering phrases in Arabic and shaking his book.

Morgese told him to calm down and take a seat. He called for Ismail, a Somali interpreter who spoke Arabic and Hausa, a language used in parts of West Africa.

“Why are you so agitated?” Morgese asked, through Ismail. “How did you get those wounds?”

The odd and vaguely threatening little man explained: his name was Ibrahim Adnan Harun. He was Nigerian. He had recently arrived at Lampedusa aboard a boat.

And the scar?

That was from a gunshot. “American soldiers,” he said.

“Do you have any other wounds?” Morgese asked. “Where did this happen?”

The man who called himself Ibrahim Adnan Harun motioned for Morgese to follow him through a door to another part of the ship. There he lifted his shirt and turned around, displaying even more bullet scars on his back. Harun and Ismail began conversing in Hausa as Morgese watched. With each sentence Harun uttered, Ismail’s face grew more shocked, even horrified.

“What is he saying?” Morgese asked Ismail.

“He says he’s not a refugee, he’s an al Qaeda fighter,” Ismail said. “He fought American soldiers.”

Morgese’s mind instantly went to the threats Gaddafi would make to export the war in Libya to Europe by sending jihadis there. (“Jihad” literally means fight, battle, or holy war. In Islam, the greater jihad is the battle within oneself, while lesser jihad is physical war against others. Contemporary Islamist extremists mean it as holy war against nonbelievers, which is how the term is used here.) “Hundreds of Libyans will martyr in Europe,” the dictator warned. “I told you it is eye for an eye and tooth for a tooth.”

Why was this man confessing to crimes? Perhaps out of pride, or fear, or for lack of ability to keep silent. Regardless, this little man had chosen this moment to come clean, to admit he fired upon American troops. And Harun’s story wasn’t far-fetched. For years, Gaddafi had been packing his prisons with jihadis, worried they would turn their fury from the West to him. And now, as Gaddafi’s regime crumbled, those prisons were being emptied—some intentionally, some by circumstance. Hundreds of guards had left their posts to help control the streets. Others simply fled for fear of reprisals by a population furious after four decades of oppression at the hands of a vicious dictator. It was certainly possible that Harun was one of those escapees.

Other passengers—migrants—began gathering and listening to the conversation. With the help of another officer, Morgese, wary of upsetting the peace, escorted Harun to a private room.

Harun sat down and began talking. He revealed that he had been arrested in Libya in 2005, six years before. He had been in prison up until the moment Libyan police came into his cell, hooded him, and delivered him to a large boat crammed with refugees bound for Lampedusa. But he insisted he was not a refugee and did not belong there among the refugees. He was an al Qaeda fighter, he said proudly, one who had fought against the American military. One who had killed American soldiers.

Morgese left the room and went to another part of the ship, to the makeshift office of state police officer Dr. Guglielmo Battisti. He brought Battisti up to speed, and they agreed to follow law enforcement protocol. They walked to the room where Harun was sitting and Battisti engaged with him.

“I’m not afraid of you,” Harun spat, which Ismail translated. “I’m not afraid of ending up in Guantánamo.”

Battisti and Morgese looked at each other, confused.

“I’m an important person!” Harun said. “I was in a prison!” “Where were you in prison?” Battisti asked.

“In Libya,” Harun said.

“Why?”

“Because I was in al Qaeda.”

“How did you get out?”

“One night the jailers came to my cell and took me out,” Harun said. There was so much chaos in Libya, so many competing strategies, that somehow the insanity of this explanation made sense.

Battisti asked him to formally write, in his own hand, in Arabic, all that he had told them about who he was and where he’d come from, thinking that the process might calm him. The policeman also wanted a clean record, fearing an oral history translated from the several languages being spoken might not be effective evidence. He also wanted to buy precious time.

Harun began, using a ballpoint pen on a blank piece of copy paper, his Arabic handwriting loose: “I, the so called, Adnan Ibrahim Harun Adam.”

He revealed his nom de guerre, the only word he wrote using the English alphabet: Espingol, or “Spin Ghul.” A bastardization of the Pashto for “the White Rose.”

In writing, Harun, a.k.a. Spin Ghul, acknowledged being “a member of al Qaeda organization in West Africa.” And then came a frantic outline of his background and preposterous demands of the Italian authorities.

“I am demanding to be either handed over to the INTERPOL, or to the International Court of Justice in Scotland, or to call the Embassy of Niger or the Niger Intelligence to do what is appropriate,” Spin Ghul wrote. “I didn’t voluntarily come to Italy; I was forced to be on the Italian soil in an illegal way. The procedures governing the illegal immigrants do not apply to me because I am not an illegal immigrant. I have been detained for 6 years, from 2005 to 2011.

“I entered Libya with an official passport and an official visa through Jagboub/Katroun land port of entry under the name of ADNAN IBRAHIM HARUN ADAM.”

Harun stopped writing. Something clicked inside him, though it was difficult for Morgese to figure out what it was. A bizarre combination of pride and mania seemed to overwhelm him.

“Now I’m done and now I’m getting off,” he said. He stood defiantly. Morgese and Battisti stood too.

“I’m getting off no matter what,” Harun said. “I’m jumping off the ship and I will swim back to Libya.”

Harun scowled.

“I want to speak to the ambassador from Niger,” Harun said. “I want to speak to Ban Ki-moon! I want to speak to President Obama! I’m not a refugee, I’m a fighter. I want to go back to Libya to fight. I will swim back if I need to,” he shouted at the officers.

Things escalated quickly. Harun rushed to the exit door, having apparently meant literally that he was intending on jumping ship. But before he could escape, Morgese put himself between Harun and the door, trying to block his exit. Two other Italian soldiers in the room also tried to restrain him. Harun panicked, elbowing the officers and trying to grab a painting off the wall to use as a weapon. He used a handrail on the wall for balance and began kicking the officers working to subdue him.

Harun managed to force his way out of the room. Morgese called for back-up and ultimately applied a special maneuver on Harun, a Krav Maga technique. He pinned the suspect to the deck with control of one arm and both legs, blocking his shoulder blades with a knee and then, keeping his arm in hyperextension, bending one arm to be handcuffed behind his back. Then he cuffed the other arm. Harun continued to fight back, violently.

“Allahu Akbar!” Harun shouted, an Islamic expression praising God as the greatest, one that Islamist terrorists have co-opted to justify religious violence. “Allahu Akbar! Allahu Akbar!” And then, as if his purpose were not already clear: “Osama bin Laden Akbar!” Osama bin Laden is the greatest, he said.

A soldier was dispatched to retrieve the doctor on board, Pellegrini Valentino, to help get Harun under control. Morgese knew that the mood was combustible among the hundreds of refugees on board. He worried that this wild little desperate man might provoke a riot if not contained. Moments later, Valentino arrived with his kit.

“Sedate this man!” Morgese said.

Harun was injected with a sedative and quickly passed out.

Guards then carried Harun to the infirmary, where he was shackled to a bed and monitored. Battisti set up watch shifts. They wouldn’t reach port until late the next morning.

Morgese went to the wheelhouse and asked the captain to check their current coordinates. He needed to know precisely which jurisdiction they were in at that moment—Harun had committed assault and resisted arrest. The coordinates dictated that Harun would need to be brought to the public prosecutor’s office of the city of Agrigento, in Sicily.

Harun would need to be tried for his disorderly conduct on The Excelsior. But those would be minor violations in Italy, and detention would be relatively short, maybe a month or two. It seemed clear to Morgese that Harun was likely guilty of far worse. For all Morgese knew, this little man was one of the most dangerous terrorists in the world. They would do what they could to make sure he was tried, imprisoned, and put somewhere he couldn’t hurt any innocents.

They would need to call the Americans.