CHICAGO, 11 July 2003 — The federal government has accused the owner of an Arabic newspaper published in Chicago of using his position to spy on Iraqi opposition leaders for Saddam Hussein’s intelligence service.
Khaled Dumeisi, 60, even provided Iraqi intelligence agents with bogus press credentials that could help them evade travel restrictions, federal prosecutors said Wednesday in announcing Dumeisi’s arrest.
“He wrote provocative stories to sort of goad people into responding to him and then he took the tapes and sent them over to the Iraqi government,” US Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said.
Dumeisi was charged based partly on a dossier seized in a Baghdad safehouse in April as US troops moved in and Saddam’s regime was crumbling, prosecutors said.
Finding the dossier capped an FBI investigation of Dumeisi going back at least four years that drew on interviews with informants, including a former Iraqi intelligence officer, federal officials said.
The dossier detailed the activities of an agent code-named “Sirhan,” which prosecutors allege was Dumeisi’s code name.
Papers filed in US District Court in Chicago said Dumeisi had even boasted to one of the FBI’s informants that he had traveled to Baghdad in 1997 or 1998 for training on how to gather information.
After returning, he interviewed an Iraqi opposition leader using a pen that contained a hidden camera and microphone, according to an FBI affidavit filed with the complaint.
It said an acquaintance told Dumeisi she was romantically involved with a man who someday might become the president of Iraq.
The woman, an international long distance operator, provided Dumeisi with phone numbers her friend had called, the affidavit said.
It said Dumeisi forwarded the phone numbers along with bank records to agents in the Iraqi mission to the United Nations.
Dumeisi maintained contact with a number of Iraqi intelligence agents in the UN mission, one of whom was expelled as a spy, officials said.
They quoted an unnamed former Iraqi intelligence officer as saying Dumeisi produced bogus press credentials for a man who was posing as a diplomat but was really the station chief of Iraq’s intelligence service.
Fitzgerald suggested that could come in handy for intelligence gathering because Iraqi diplomats assigned to the UN were restricted to travel within the five boroughs of New York City and could not go farther.
The FBI’s affidavit indicated Dumeisi was the focus of an investigation as early as 1999. Agents asked him about his contact with the UN mission and intelligence agents.
Fitzgerald emphasized Dumeisi was charged only with failing to register as a foreign agent and conspiring to serve as the agent of a foreign government without registering. Such agents by law must register with the Justice Department.
The charges carry a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine.
Dumeisi was not charged with espionage because he targeted Iraqi nationals and not classified US defense materials, Fitzgerald said.
Dumeisi appeared at mid-afternoon before US Magistrate Judge Edward A. Bobrick who scheduled a July 17 bond hearing. Until then Dumeisi will be held in the government’s Metropolitan Correctional Center two blocks from the courthouse in downtown Chicago.
Defense attorney James Fennerty told reporters afterward that neither he nor Dumeisi had read the complaint but added: “He doesn’t believe that he has done anything wrong.”
Dumeisi, head of a company that publishes the Arabic Al-Majhar newspaper, has been in the country for a decade as an unregistered alien and lives in the Chicago suburb of Oak Lawn.
Immigration records show he applied for citizenship but was denied after failing to provide the required documents. Officials said he identifies himself as a Palestine-born Jordanian citizen.
