People betray their country for several different reasons, most
commonly money or ideology. While many traitors live deeply
troubled lives, and a touch of megalomania and messianic fervor
often motivates them, none of the traitors I am familiar with have
been certifiably crazy. Which makes sense, since an agent worth
recruiting by a foreign power needs to be lucid enough to avoid
detection, and stable enough to be entrusted with enough power or
responsibility to betray. That is what makes the case of Susan
Lindauer so unusual.
My first venture into punditry dealt with the arrest of Susan Lindauer
on various charges, amounting to her acting as a paid agent for
Saddam’s intelligence service. Lindauer worked for several
Democratic lawmakers, including Representatives Zoe Lofgren and
Peter DeFazio, and Senators Ron Wyden and Carol Moseley-Braun, and
also wrote for Fortune and U.S. News & World
Report. According to her indictment, Lindauer worked with Iraqi agents based in
New York starting in 1999, and even met them in Manhattan on
September 19, 2001. That’s right: eight days after the atrocity of
September 11, Lindauer was allegedly meeting with enemy
intelligence agents somewhere near the ruins of the World Trade
Center. (According to the New York Times, her
last job with Congress ceased in 2002, so she was allegedly working
for both the Iraqi government and ours at the same time.)
She is also charged with flying to Baghdad in 2002 to meet with
Iraqi intelligence agents (who dubbed her “Symbol Susan”),
accepting money from them, and then attempting to influence
American foreign policy. Apparently she contacted a distant
relative, then-White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card, about
mediating the crisis between President Bush and Saddam.
After her arrest, it emerged that Lindauer was…not all there.
Two court-appointed doctors found her mentally incompetent and
unfit to stand trial. She was committed to a Federal hospital in Texas last October.
The New York Times quotes one doctor as finding
that
Ms. Lindauer had a history of psychotic episodes going
back to her childhood, possibly at the age of 7, the judge said.
These include her contention that she had gifts of prophecy that
allowed her to report 11 bombings before they happened, that she
spoke with divine inspiration and that she was an
angel.
In retrospect, that probably shouldn’t have come as too much of a
surprise. In a 1998 statement asserting that Syria, not Libya, had
ordered the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, Lindauer
asserted that she had been the victim of some rather
unusual harassment:
“Someone put acid on the steering wheel of my car on a
day I was supposed to drive to NYC for a meeting at the Libya
House. I scrubbed my hands with a toilet brush, but my face was
burned so badly that 3 weeks later friends worried I might be badly
scarred,” Lindauer told MEIB. “Also, my house was bugged with
listening devices and cameras — little red laser lights in the
shower vent. And I survived several assassination
attempts.”
(Again: she said this publicly in 1998, when she also admitted to
working with Libyan officials since 1995. Her last job with a
Democratic congressman? 2002.)
What did come as a surprise, however, was that she was freed
from custody last month. She refused to take antipsychotic
medication. A judge refused to order her to be medicated forcibly,
and instead ordered her set free. Another judge will decide whether
and how she will stand trial.
If you read the Times account, it would seem like all
this fuss was just about Lindauer’s overtures to Andrew Card on
behalf of the Iraqi government. It wasn’t. To clarify Lindauer’s
intent, the FBI also ran a sting with an undercover agent posing as
a Libyan Intelligence operative. According to her indictment,
Lindauer met with him in June 2003 and discussed the need for
foreign nations to support the Iraqi resistance against United
States troops. Then, at this “Libyan agent’s” request, she
performed “dead drops” she thought were helping the Iraqi
resistance. The timing of these alleged dead drops was as damning
as that of her September 2001 meeting with Iraqi intelligence. As I
wrote back in 2004:
It has not yet emerged what was in the dead drops, but
the indictment alleges that she executed one of them “on or about
August 6, 2003.” That was one day after a “resistance group” which
Lindauer supported killed an American civilian mailman in Tikrit.
Her second alleged dead drop occurred “on or about August 21,
2003,” two days after these “resistance groups” killed U.N. envoy
Sergio Vieira de Mello and 21 others with a horrific truck bomb at
U.N. headquarters in Baghdad. How could Lindauer not have known the
malignant character of the terrorists that continue to murder
Coalition forces and pro-democracy Iraqis every day? The rubble,
after all, was still smoking when Lindauer made her
drop.
If these charges are true they utterly destroy Lindauer’s pretense
of wanting peace in the Middle East. A charge of active support for
Iraqi terrorist groups ought to ensure Lindauer is ostracized from
political life until she can refute the charges. But this charge is
not the focus of the coverage.
An essay about Lindauer’s release at the left-wing
website TPM Cafe quoted from my piece, but neglected to discuss the
allegations of espionage for the Iraqi resistance. When I saw that,
I began to wonder whether there was a groundswell to rehabilitate
Lindauer’s reputation as a left-wing activist. Soon another
journalist for a Takoma Park, Maryland paper contacted me for an
upcoming retrospective on the Lindauer case. And recently I saw an
article in the Detroit News about an FBI raidlast month on the Michigan headquarters
of Focus on American and Arab Interests and Relations, an anti-war
advocacy group. Who should be quoted defending the charity,
but…
Susan Lindauer, a Takona [sic] Park, Md., woman who has
worked with [FAAIR founder Muthanna] Al-Hanooti on Muslim causes in
Washington, said he met monthly with the local FBI task force in
Detroit on anti-terrorism and was a liaison between Arab-Americans
and the community. He’s spent considerable time in Iraq since the
start of the recent war acting as a bridge between the U.S. troops
and Iraqi citizens, she said.
“I’m amazed, given all the excellent work he’s done, that they
would come after him,” Lindauer said.
With a character reference like “Symbol Susan,” the raid on FAAIR
and a related raid the same day on Life for Relief and Development,
a major Islamic charity headquartered in Southfield, actually begin
to look
more ominous. The reason for the raid is sealed,
but the legal director for LR&D noted that the investigation
was “tax-related, not terror related” — although he told
another paper that the agents “were interested in
whether its aid to Iraq violated U.S. sanctions in place before the
war.” Why, then, does the reason for the raid remained sealed, and
why was the FBI assisted by the Joint Terrorism Task Force?
LR&D has a checkered history itself, as it was supported by
someone else uncomfortably close to Saddam’s regime: Iraqi-American
businessman and Oil-for-Food beneficiary Shakir al-Khafaji. They were the group who, with
al-Khafaji, sponsored a September 2002 trip to Baghdad for
(Democratic) Congressmen David Bonior, Jim McDermott, and Mike
Thompson.
These connections between Saddam’s stooges, Lindauer, and
al-Khafaji, and this investigation suggest that an Iraqi connection
may lie behind last month’s FBI raids.
One hopes FAAIR and Life for Relief and Development are wise to
Lindauer. On October 6 one of LR&D’s humanitarian workers in
Iraq, Abdel-Sattar Abdullah al-Mashhadani, was murdered (along with
his driver) by “sectarian militias.” Al-Mashhadani, a husband and
father who directed several charity projects including a water
development plant in Southern Iraq, was pulled out of his taxi at a
checkpoint in Huriya, Baghdad, and executed by a “sectarian
militia.”
Recent clashes in Huriya between the Sunni
Al-Mashhadani clan and Moqtada al-Sadr’s Shiite militias provide
some context for the murder. Sadr’s goons may have been attempting
to rid the neighborhood of everyone named Mashhadani, in
retaliation for a failed raid on Sadr’s headquarters a week
earlier. In a press release, LR&D called the murdered
Al-Mashhadani “another victim of the senseless violence in
Iraq.”
Was this senseless violence what Susan Lindauer envisioned in
her machinations on behalf of the Iraqi “resistance”? At best
Lindauer is, as the court found, a deeply disturbed fantasist; at
worst, she is a traitor who tried to support terrorists like Abu
Musab al-Zarqawi in their attempts to kill American soldiers in
Iraq. Either way, it will be instructive to see which groups offer
her an opportunity to continue her poisonous activism.
