Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman Who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America (Hardcover)

~ Anonymous (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The author of this gripping account, whose identity, for obvious reasons, must remain secret, has some shocking revelations to make regarding innocuous-sounding Islamic groups that she says serve as fronts for Hamas, Palestine Islamic Jihad and even al-Qaeda; about FBI ineptitude in investigating these groups; and perhaps worst, about government suspicion of those, like herself, who are investigating this network. Some will dismiss as paranoid her claim that there is a Saudi-funded movement to gain "Muslim world domination," yet readers will follow along in fearful fascination as she slowly assembles the puzzle pieces of a complex, interlocking group of organizations and traces their links to terrorist groups and, ultimately, to a "Saudi connection." The author, a researcher at an unnamed research institute in New York City that focuses on the Middle East, has, through her work, become perhaps the leading authority on how these front organizations operate in the U.S.-government agencies come to her for information. Readers will share her nervousness as she attends a Muslim conference with a tape recorder attached to her eight-month-pregnant stomach under her burka or dives into a garbage-filled Dumpster in search of documents. Her personal story is equally dramatic: as a child, she and her Jewish family escaped imprisonment in Iraq after the regime executed her father as a spy for Israel. With her evidence of how reputedly moderate Islamic leaders speak in support of jihad, she will undoubtedly be accused of feeding anti-Muslim fears. Readers will have to absorb her tale and judge for themselves whether her evidence is credible; this should be headed for bestseller lists.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product Description

The remarkable memoir of an Iraqi woman who escaped from captivity in Baghdad and became America's leading undercover counter-terrorist expert.

Here is the story of an anonymous counter-terrorism expert, a young woman, who, in disguise, has penetrated front groups of anti-American terrorist organizations operating in this country. In this edge-of-the-seat memoir, she chronicles her escape from Iraq via Iran to Israel, following a great tragedy that befell her family at the hands of Saddam Hussein. She also details how she became involved in intelligence gathering for the United States, her adoptive country, while working for an antiterrorism group. With her unique insights into how terrorist groups veil their true operations by various means, she was able to infiltrate and identify dangerous terrorist organizations and entities working undetected in the United States.

Terrorist Hunter provides fascinating and shocking information on how federal agencies, chiefly the FBI and the State Depart-ment, repeatedly ignored or mishandled important information she provided. She reveals her role in exposing terrorist supporters who the White House considered to be friends, in preventing the government from funding terrorist activities, and in the deportation of terrorists and their supporters. She also reveals how she discovered a billion-dollar scheme that rich Saudi Arabians set up to filter money to terrorist groups, through charities and businesses in the United States -- information that the FBI sat on for years, until after 9-11.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Ecco; 1 edition (May 6, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060528192
• ISBN-13: 978-0060528195
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #109,069 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #53 in

  Books > Nonfiction > True Accounts > Espionage

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

53 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Bone chilling, heartbreaking, sinister tell-it-all, July 21, 2003

By	Matthew M. Yau "Voracious reader" (San Francisco, CA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

Terrorist Hunter, by Anonymous, is bone chilling, sinister, and disturbing to read. While I am gazing fish-mouthedly page after page the inside scoops of terrorist groups into which this brave undercover woman infiltrates, an inexplicable sadness penetrates me: why is it that the good guys have to hide behind notwithstanding the terrorists enjoy the freedom in a country against which they hold a grudge? How could these people express such rabid hatred toward a country that has provided them shelter and freedoms?

Anonymoyus is an Iraqi woman whose father had been arrested and executed for being a spy. She escaped to Israel from Iraq and eventually moved to the United States. A mother of three whom gave up her prolific garment business in Israel, anonymous and her husband Leo started fresh in the United States. Driven by poverty and desperately needed a job, fate has brought her to an underground research institute that specialized in investigating, researching and scrutinizing Islamic charities and non-profit organizations in the US that function as the terrorist group fronts and have allegedly fund these groups in their Middle Eastern headquarters.

The sensitive and clandestine nature of the job requires the author to remain anonymous and infiltrate into numerous Islamic briefings, meetings, conferences, and rabid rallies. In doing so, she not only is able to identify such dangerous terrorist organizations, she also becomes an antiterrorism expert in tracing to the root, trimming to the bone, and nailing to the core those who headed such organizations and the means with which they bring mujahideens into the United States and the cunning routes through which money is transferred to fund the groups in the Middle East.

The book fearlessly and unreservedly unravels fascinating and shocking information on how the lack of sharing information, the lack of communication between INS, FBI, and CIA provide a loophole for the burgeoning decoy of terrorism. The main trouble with such bureaucracy is that it contains too many checks and balances, whether to restrain leak of intelligence or protect confidentiality. It is somewhat surprising that anything is ever decided. The inflexibility has disastrous consequences (manifest in the 1993 World Trade bombing followed by the 9-11 all-out-war attack) as it becomes salient that security bureaus are incapable of responding adequately to the challenges and threats the country faces.

More shocking is the fact that INS is not aware of the terrorists (and their real identities) who might be entering the country, as the immigration agency does not gather intelligence information. To make matter worse, the FBI and CIA, while gather up a voluminous amount of documents and intelligence, do not share such information with the INS. Anonymous depicts the FBI (and its policy) as being imbecile as it refuses to act before the crime is committed. As far as six years prior to the 9-11 attack, mujahideens who were apprehended in both the United States and the Philippines (where the terrorists planned to assassinate the Pope and blow up several jetliners over the Pacific Oceans) brought manuals detailing in hijacking, bombing, and assassinating techniques. The FBI has failed to properly use the information that could have been used to stop the murderers before they embarked on their deadly mission. What is scarier is that Usama Bin Laden has long conceived the idea of hijacking planes and crash them into the buildings, why are such documents and information overlooked?

As anonymous deepens her investigation, it doesn't surprise me that some of the largest charity organizations are working fronts and de facto financial arm for the Hamas in the United States. Leaders of such organizations are no freaks but university professors and scholars who had received an education outside of their homelands. These are supporters and preachers of barbaric suicide attacks and martyrdom. They invoke Allah's curse on the "tyrannical" Americans and who call for jihad and incite their worshippers to support the fight against the US and all Jews. Therefore, intelligence agencies make a huge mistake in disbelieving the Islamic fundamentalism is significant threat to the US and not following such leaders. Anonymous also makes a point that following Timothy McVeigh's indictment of the Oklahoma bombing, the FBI makes a bad move in dismissing the idea that the terrorists will strike home. What naivete.

Terrorist Hunter is a book that nobody should miss. The anonymous author has written an edge-of-the-seat, tell-it-all account of the surreptitious and deceitful functioning of the most dangerous organizations in the United States. Practices of such organizations are nothing but minatory and sinister. In writing this memoir, the author has not only risked her life but those of her children and family. In exposing the identities of the terrorists and their roots, the book also serves as a wake-up call to the intelligence agencies and call for a collaboration of these agencies to fight terrorism. 4.2 stars.

38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars VERY IMPORTANT READ!!!!!, May 14, 2003

By	Debbie Schlussel (Detroit, MI USA) - See all my reviews

This book is a must read for every American who wants to stop terrorism on our shores. I know for a fact that the information contained in this book is true. Some reviewers on this page have erroneously claimed the author is a fake or has stolen her info from Emerson and Loftus. On the contrary, she's very real--she's the source of their information and is an important intelligence source for several U.S. law enforcement agencies fighting the war on terror.
Two important, key points of information contained in the book are: 1) The Terrorist Hunter warned the U.S. government, at the highest levels, of the domestic terrorist threat and documented her infiltration of domestic Muslim "charities" that were really terrorist funding mechanisms, but the U.S. government ignored her until after 9-11; and 2) The Terrorist Hunter, to this day, encounters difficulty getting the FBI to pounce on her information and the villanous organizations funding terrorism. However, U.S. Customs, now the Customs Investigations portion of BICE (the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement), is a great organization, moving swiftly and effectively in response to the Terrorist Hunter's information, to squelch the domestic funders of terrorism.
Although meant as a biography, The Terrorist Hunter is an important read for those of us familiar with the inside scoop on the indictment of Islamic Jihad frontman Sami Al-Arian and why it took so long for our government to charge him--pro-Saudi politics which prolonged Al-Arian's life of freedom in the U.S., and which cost the lives of Alisa Flatow and Islamic Jihad's other American (and Israeli) victims.
The only question that remains is why the Saudi-funded charities (at 555 Grove Street, detailed in this book) which funded Al-Arian, Al-Quaida, Bush Advisor/NRA Board Member Grover Norquist's Islamic Institute, and other evil forces behind terror, remain open for business. When they are finally shut down, we will have the Terrorist Hunter to thank. That they are still open for business shows the Terrorist Hunter's advice is still not heeded by too much of our government.
Finally, the Terrorist Hunter's story of humiliation and the respective public execution and brutal murder of her father, grandmother, and other family members (merely because they were Jews) by the Iraqi government is not unique or past history. It is important to remember that this is regular practice for the remaining few Jews, Christians, and moderate Muslims in most Islamic and Arab states, today.

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very Interesting, September 7, 2005

By	H. Geschichtemann (Florida, USA) - See all my reviews

As with any work published anonymously, without verifiable citations, and using fictitious names, the options for determining the accuracy of this material are very limited. Besides cross-comparisons for consistency with other known sources and the exercise of good sense, there is not much available.

That said, I find the book credible. The objections expressed by some reviewers appear to be based on unsupported assumptions concerning the prescience of Islamist radicals in America. My observations suggest that -- while it is dangerous to underrate their malevolence -- their perspicacity may not be of the highest order.

The book has three main points, as follows:

First, that the organizations that use the United States to facilitate the funding of and recruitment for Islamist terror are real and that they wish us harm in every possible way. That shouldn't be news to anybody, although documentation of their ferocity is always sobering to encounter.

Second, that despite a history of sometimes bloody conflict among Muslim sects, the terror organizations Hamas, Hizb'allah, the various Islamic Jihads, etc. have no problem acting in concert against the common enemy -- namely us. The amount of ink spilled foolishly asserting the contrary is pitiful.

Third, that American intelligence -- and in particular the FBI -- is so mired in its bureaucratic culture of turf-protection that it sometimes spends more time contemplating its own navel than taking advantage of readily available resources to know more about the enemy. Although the author's stories are new, the concept is scarcely unfamiliar to anyone who keeps up with this stuff.

The author claims to have built most of her considerable store of knowledge about Islamist organizations in the United States from readily available public information such as documents of incorporation, lists of officers, addresses, etc., as well as Arabic-language publications. The recent revelations of the SOCOM project Able Danger do nothing but bear this out.

Certainly the author is not shy about proclaiming her own abilities, but that disproves nothing. This is a book that you should read and evaluate for yourself.