Suspect in Dallas terror plot makes first court appearance

By BILL MILLER

wmiller@star-telegram.com

DALLAS — As a Jordanian teenager was arraigned Friday in connection with a plot to blow up a downtown skyscraper, workers at the 60-story tower said they couldn’t help thinking about what-ifs.

"I will admit, I was crying at home last night," said Jennifer Wingfield of Forney, who has worked for two years at an insurance company in Fountain Place, a signature building in the Dallas skyline.

She had heard about something happening downtown Thursday afternoon but didn’t know until later that it involved her building.

"I was really scared," Wingfield said. "I have 4-year-old triplets. To hear about that and then to think, 'Oh, I could’ve died today.’ "

Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, 19, was arrested Thursday after he planted a device in the basement of Fountain Place, according to FBI documents. Agents posing as members of a sleeper terrorist cell had tricked Smadi into believing the device was a bomb, but it was inert, and they arrested him when he tried to detonate it with a cellphone, they said.

Smadi made a brief appearance Friday morning before U.S. Magistrate Irma C. Ramirez. The short, slightly-built defendant was dressed all in black for the hearing at the Earle Cabell Federal Building in downtown Dallas. At one point, he bowed to the judge and nodded yes when she asked him to speak up.

Speaking in heavily accented English, he said he understood that he was being charged with attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. He waived his right to a detention hearing, although he has the right to request one later, and was returned to the custody of U.S. marshals. He will not be required to enter a plea until a later hearing.

The FBI has said that he is in the country illegally and has been placed under an immigration hold by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He is scheduled to return to court Oct. 5.

Attorney Richard Anderson of Dallas, who was appointed to represent Smadi, said he had just been assigned the case and knew little more than what he had read in the news. Anderson represented one of the defendants in the 2004 trial of a Richardson family accused of illegally shipping computer equipment to Libya and Syria, deemed state sponsors of terrorism, through their company, Infocom Corp.

Anderson described Smadi as a frightened 19-year-old who has almost no family in the country. Anderson also said Smadi faced a language barrier. Smadi spoke with an obvious accent in court, and his communications with undercover FBI agents were all in Arabic, according to the arrest warrant affidavit. Anderson told the judge that lawyers had summarized the contents of the complaint for Smadi.

However, co-workers and friends in the small town of Italy, south of Dallas, where Smadi lived, said he spoke English without trouble.

An FBI affidavit states that Smadi hatched a plot to commit jihad and chose Fountain Place after considering the "Dallas" airport and the National Guard Armory.

The FBI documents said Smadi wanted to bring down the building, which he saw as a symbol of America’s credit-card economy, just as hijacked airplanes crumpled the World Trade Center’s twin towers on 9-11.

A car bomb would be "a wonderful thing," agents quoted him as saying.

"I will plant it in the foundations . . . exactly under the building," he is quoted as saying in a federal arrest warrant affidavit.

"When it explodes, it will shake the foundations so that the building . . . all that will come down."

Fountain Place, designed by the famed architect I.M. Pei, is the fifth-tallest building in Dallas. It sits on the northern edge of the city’s central business district and houses businesses such as Wells Fargo bank — described by the FBI as Smadi’s main target — a regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency, a post office and Avanti restaurant.

The building was portrayed as the headquarters of Ewing Oil in the later years of the 1980s television series Dallas.

The 1.2 million-square-foot office tower is owned by Fort Worth-based Crescent Real Estate Equities, a subsidiary of New York-based Morgan Stanley. Crescent also owns the Carter & Burgess tower in downtown Fort Worth.

A pedestrian tunnel connects Fountain Place to the Fairmont Hotel, and a YMCA is across the street.

Morgan Stanley spokeswoman Alyson Barnes said the property owner cooperated with authorities, but she declined to comment further.

Dana Reynolds of North Richland Hills works for Tenet Healthcare, which moved its corporate headquarters into the building from far north Dallas this week.

"It’s just bizarre that it happened the week that we moved," Reynolds said. She said several co-workers didn’t immediately know that anything had happened.

"I was shocked," Reynolds said about hearing details of the alleged plot. "And then I thought, 'God bless the FBI.’ "

Smadi’s father, Maher Hussein Smadi, who is from the northern Jordanian city of Ajloun, told The Associated Press that Smadi and his brother, Hussein, entered the United States on student visas received in 2007. He insisted that his son is innocent. He also said Hussein had been arrested in California, apparently in connection with the case in Dallas.

Official Jordanian state records show that Hosam Smadi left Jordan for the U.S. in 2007 without giving any reason for his departure, Jordan’s Minister of State Nabil al-Sharif told the AP.

It’s unclear when Smadi came to Texas.

Federal agents said they discovered Smadi within a group of online terrorists, but they said he was acting alone.

Undercover agents met with him at least 10 times while he hatched the plot, the FBI said. The agents spoke with him in Arabic.

Danny Defenbaugh, a former Dallas FBI special agent in charge who retired from the bureau in 2002, said Thursday’s arrest illustrates that a diverse staff of agents, not just linguists and translators, are vital to the agency’s counterterrorism efforts.

Immediately after 9-11, the agency pushed to hire more linguists and agents prolific in foreign languages like Arabic as part of its refocused mission to prevent, not just react to, terrorism. As of July 2008, the FBI’s Web site boasted that it has increased its language capability in Arabic by 310 percent among linguists and 90 percent among agents.

"To have native speakers in any one of the different minority communities is always a positive for any law enforcement agency," Defenbaugh said.

"Especially, if for nothing else than the general safety of the operation," he said. "You don’t want a support employee to be in that type of role. If you’ve got an individual talking about making bombs and killing people, you want to have someone who is not only trained but is also able to handle themselves, for the overall objective is to protect life and property."

U.S. Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, the ranking Republican on the House Homeland Security intelligence subcommittee, said lone operators present another challenge to terror investigators. McCaul said he has been briefed on the Smadi case.

"We may be seeing more and more of these independent agents that are carrying out jihad on their own," he said. "We’re seeing a more decentralized terrorist threat."

McCaul said the agents tried "to soften his political jihad views." But "he was a true believer," he said. "He had a hatred for Jews and allegiance to Osama bin Laden."

Local and state officials were quick to praise the FBI. Dallas Mayor Tom Leppert said city officials were kept in the loop on the FBI sting.

"We have a strong working relationship with FBI officials, and they have kept us informed of their investigation," Leppert said in a statement. "Thanks to their efforts, no one was ever in any danger."

Allison Castle, spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, said the incident highlights the dangers that still face the country.

"The governor wants to remind Texans [that] they play a very important role in reporting suspicious activities to their law-enforcement professionals," Castle said. "The state has contingency plans in place . . . but our priority remains preventing these incidents before they occur."

Staff writers Sandra Baker, Deanna Boyd, Alex Branch and Maria Recio contributed to this report.