A Michigan Man Sat in Jail 10 Days Before Feds Revealed He Was an Alleged Saddam Spy

Federal agents say Raad Alanbagi lived quietly in Michigan for more than a decade until his past finally caught up with him. Homeland Security Investigations confirmed on September 13 that agents from its Detroit office had arrested the 70-year-old after an investigation turned up information tying him to prior service as a high-ranking Iraqi intelligence officer under Saddam Hussein.The government did not say so right away. Records show Mr. Alanbagi was booked into the Calhoun County Correctional Facility at Battle Creek on September 3, roughly 10 days before HSI made the arrest public. He was transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.So, how does a man once tied to one of the most feared intelligence services in the modern Middle East settle into American life for over 10 years without drawing notice? And what, precisely, did he do inside Saddam’s regime?More than a month later, the public record on Mr. Alanbagi is still thin.Homeland Security has not disclosed his exact rank, his specific role within Saddam’s intelligence services, his current immigration status or the charges against him, and no federal indictment is listed against him on a government database for Michigan.The Department of Homeland Security has said only that Mr. Alanbagi entered the country legally through New York in 2014 but “violated the terms of that lawful admission.”Mr. Alanbagi has not spoken publicly, and it is not clear whether he has retained an attorney. No record shows an appearance filed on his behalf in Michigan’s federal court.The Law Behind the ArrestImmigration statutes give federal authorities a direct route in cases like this one. Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, anyone who is or has been a member of a totalitarian party is generally inadmissible, and false statements on a visa or citizenship application can lead to revoked status, deportation and a lifetime entry ban.There is more than one way such a case can surface years later.“Identities may be uncovered when documents linking them to abuses in the source country are turned over to the U.S. government by a friendly government; through documents seized by the U.S. government after an invasion and then analyzed; or through sources in the United States, such as immigrants to this country with knowledge of foreign government activities abroad,” a resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies, Andrew Arthur, tells The New York Sun.Screening gaps can help someone like Mr. Alanbagi avoid detection for years.“The State Department and CBP screen aliens before they are issued visas and before they are admitted, but if intelligence is scarce and the applicant lies about past abuses, it can be difficult to identify them in real time, and it may take years before they are uncovered,” Mr. Arthur explains, pointing to former Nazi war criminals whose abuses went undetected for decades after they settled in America.Inside Saddam’s Security StateHomeland Security has not said which of Saddam’s intelligence agencies Mr. Alanbagi allegedly worked for. The regime ran several of them on purpose, so their jobs overlapped and no single agency knew everything.But Mr. Alanbagi most likely served in an agency that was central to how the dictatorship survived as long as it did, an associate professor of strategy and policy in the Naval War College’s program at the Naval Postgraduate School, Samuel Helfont, tells the Sun. He spoke in a personal capacity rather than on behalf of the Navy or any part of the American government.“It is not exactly clear to me which Alanbagi belonged to, but I am assuming the mukhabarat/Iraqi Intelligence Service,” Mr. Helfont says. “The mukhabarat worked around the world collecting intelligence and silencing dissidents. They often targeted and assassinated members of the Iraqi opposition. They even had special schools for assassins.”The agency also policed Iraqis at home.“It had a number of duties, primarily surveilling the Iraqi population, responding in any manner it deemed necessary to any real or perceived threats to Saddam and/or to the then-ruling Ba’ath Party,” Mr. Arthur tells the Sun. “It was akin to the East German Stasi or the Soviet KGB and was linked to several assassinations and human rights abuses. The closer to the top of the organization any individual was, the closer they were to ordering those abuses.”The apparatus also reached into America.“There were dozens, possibly hundreds of Iraqi intelligence officers and Iraqi Baathist operatives working in the U.S. in the 1990s and early 2000s,” Mr. Helfont tells the Sun, describing a branch of the Baath Party that “attempted to influence U.S. politics, silence dissidents, plant stories in the press, and control the Iraqi and Arab diasporas,” often through front groups aimed at members of Congress and celebrities.“A few were arrested after 2003, but I imagine there are dozens of them still living here,” Mr. Helfont says.The Colonel Who Rewrote His PastMr. Alanbagi is not the first Saddam-era figure that federal authorities have found living quietly in America. The most detailed precedent involves Saad Taha Ahmed Yousif al-Qaysy, a former Iraqi army officer who resettled in Alabama.Mr. al-Qaysy was born in Baghdad in 1958, conscripted during the Iran-Iraq war, and later joined the al-Quds Reconnaissance Brigade as a first lieutenant, according to the Justice Department.After his brother and nephew were killed in sectarian violence in 2006, he fled to Egypt, where prosecutors say he and other former senior Iraqi officers discussed concealing the true scope of their military careers to qualify for resettlement in America.His 2009 refugee application claimed he had served only briefly as a wartime conscript. It was approved in January 2010, and he was resettled in Mobile. In 2020, he was sentenced to three years of probation and stripped of his citizenship after being convicted of lying to obtain it.Hunting the Old GuardThe search for individuals like Mr. al-Qaysy runs through a small HSI unit that tracks suspected war criminals and human rights abusers.Since 2003, ICE has arrested more than 480 people for human rights-related violations, deported 1,100 known or suspected violators, and facilitated the departure of 186 others; the agency says it has more than 170 active investigations and is pursuing over 1,700 leads involving suspects from 95 countries.The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to the Sun’s request for comment.Baghdad has pursued its own reckoning with the old regime. Iraq’s National Security Service announced earlier this year the hanging of Saadoun Sabri al-Qaisi, a former major general convicted for the 1980 killing of the Shiite cleric Mohammed Baqir al-Sadr and members of his family.Investigators are almost certainly not finished.“If the charges against Mr. Alanbagi are true, he’s likely not the only one and probably won’t be the last,” Mr. Arthur notes. “The fact that ICE HSI has arrested him suggests that there are other investigations ongoing, and that this is a priority for our intelligence and immigration-enforcement agencies.”What happens next depends on how Mr. Alanbagi entered the United States.“Depending on how he entered, he will either be deported to Iraq to face justice there or will be charged with visa fraud, and possibly with other crimes,” Mr. Arthur says. “If convicted, he could spend a decade or more in federal prison and then be deported.”

A Michigan Man Sat in Jail 10 Days Before Feds Revealed He Was an Alleged Saddam Spy

A Michigan Man Sat in Jail 10 Days Before Feds Revealed He Was an Alleged Saddam Spy

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