Rita Katz

Rita Katz

Rita Katz (born 1963) is an Israeli-American terrorism expert formerly of the Investigative Project. She is co-founder of the SITE Institute with Josh Devon which she re-launched in 2008 as the SITE Intelligence Group.

Biography

Iraq

Katz was born in Basra, Iraq in 1963, one of four children of a wealthy Iraqi Jewish businessman called Fuad Gabbay. Her mother Salima was from a family who had been one of the wealthiest in Iraq for generations Growing up in Basra Katz she says she “lived in a huge mansion and went to a private school” and had “servants who took care of all [her] needs.”

In 1969, when she was six, her father was arrested by the Iraqi authorities, accused of being an Israeli spy. He was hanged along with eight other men after making a televised confession. Katz was not aware of her father’s death at the time and only discovered it later when she was 17. She says her father was, “hanged in broad daylight, in Baghdad's central square, to the cheers of a half a million spectators”. The family’s property was confiscated by the state after which she says they were placed under house arrest in Baghdad. Two years later they fled through Northern Iraqi to Iran (then under the Shah) and then to Israel.

Israel

In Israel the family settled in a small seaside town called Bat-Yam. Katz served in the Israel Defence Forces after high school, and studied politics and history at Tel Aviv University where she met her husband who was a Russian-Israeli medical student at the university. After graduating Katz joined her mother’s business, manufacturing and selling clothes to Orthodox Jews.

Washington

As a committed Zionist Katz was reluctant to ever leave Israel saying, “I believed that Jews belong in Israel”. Nevertheless in 1997 Katz’s husband was offered a research fellowship in endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health and they moved to Washington. Katz has acknowledged that at this time she worked in violation of the provisions of her visa. This was disclosed whilst she was acting as a witness against a defendant accused amongst other things of visa fraud.

Terrorism Research

The Investigative Project

Katz says she starting working in terrorism research by chance. She was bored in Washington and looking for a job and she responded to a newspaper advert placed by the Investigative Project which was looking for an Arabic speaking research assistant. At the Investigative Project Katz was initially told by Steve Emerson that her job would involve a lot of “administrative stuff and copying”. However, she soon became involved in undercover investigations of Arab-American organisations. According to the New York Times she “began going to pro-Palestinian rallies and fund-raisers disguised as a Muslim woman”. She would attend events “where non-Muslims would stand out” where she “pretended to be the wife of a radical Iraqi-American businessman”. She has said in an interview that she sometimes felt sympathy when “various people told sob stories about how they were abused because they were Muslims or Arabs”.

The purpose of these undercover operations was to expose radical jihadists posing as Muslim community organisations or rights groups. That is the main focus of Steve Emerson’s research and it is a view which Katz evidently shares. She told MSNBC in 2003 that “Islamic fundamentalism in the United States has been in this country for many, many, many years. They have been able to infiltrate this country from Hezbollah to al Qaeda, Palestinian Islamic Jihad in every corner of our cities of our great cities.”

Katz’s earliest exposé was of the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development (HLF). She said the investigation was “on [her] own initiative and quite accidentally”. She says she noticed differences between the Arabic and English translations of the group’s literature, and noted that the latter had omitted mentions of groups affiliated with Hamas. She says she “went to a fundraiser of theirs dressed as a Muslim woman. Soon thereafter I was attending conferences, visiting mosques, participating in rallies — and the more I did, the more I discovered the enormity of the problem of radicalism on U.S. soil.” In late 2001 President Bush announced he was freezing the charity’s assets saying that Hamas had “obtained much of the money it pays for murder abroad right here in the United States.” The government subsequently prosecuted the leaders of the Foundation but did not allege that it paid directly for terrorist attacks - rather that, to quote the New York Times, “it supported terrorism by sending more than $12 million to charitable groups, known as zakat committees, which build hospitals and feed the poor. The US government failed to bring a conviction when the case came to trial in 2007

In 2000 Katz recorded Muslim lobbyist Abdurahman al-Amoudi at a public rally stating his support for Hamas and Hezbollah. She released the recording to the media, ending Abdurahman al-Amoudi’s access to the Clinton White House.

Katzs also began writing articles on terrorism. Her first publication appeared in late 1999 in The Journal of Counterterrorism & Security International. It was called ‘Trends in Anti-American Terrorism’ and was co-authored with Evan Kohlmann, then a politics undergraduate at Georgetown University and interning at the Investigative Project. The article sought to address what it called three misconceptions about the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah. These were (1) That Hezballah is merely a Lebanese “resistance group, solely interested in ending the Israeli occupation of Lebanese soil” (2) That “enmity of Hezballah is restricted to the state of Israel” and (3) “That Hizballah's tactics and activities are within the scope of what a legitimate resistance group, rather than a terrorist organization, would undertake”. The article argued that Hezbollah was in fact pursuing an aggressive war against the existence of Israel and the Western world more generally, and that in pursuit of that goal they had established a “Terror University” from Iranian funds to “to increase terrorism against the West, Israel, and secular Arab governments.”

Site Institute

The New Yorker implies that Katz and Steve Emerson had some sort of falling out, writing that by June 2002 “Katz and Emerson, both combative personalities, had parted ways”. That year Katz left the Investigative Project and established her own organisation SITE with fellow Investigative Project employee Josh Devon. The New Yorker states that Evan Kohlmann also left the Investigative Project with Katz and Devon but this seems to be contradicted by continued references to Kohlmann's role at the Investigative Project as well as testimony Kohlmann has given in court. SITE’s stated purpose was to “educate and aid the public, media and government as to the existence and dangers of international terrorism”. It monitored postings on Islamic websites and emailed information to subscribers. It was re-launched in 2008 as the SITE Intelligence Group.

Terrorist Hunter

In May 2003 Katz published an anonymous semi-autobiography entitled Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America. She appeared in disguise on the American television show 60 Minutes to promote her book using the pseudonym Sarah, and wearing a wig and a fake nose.

In her book Katz accused The Heritage Education Trust and the Safa Foundation, two north Virginia-based charities, of being sponsors of Al Qaeda. She also accused a Georgia based poultry company Mar-Jac of laundering money for al Qaeda, Hamas and Islamic Jihad. These accusations were repeated on 60 Minutes. Following the broadcast the two charities brought a lawsuit against Katz and CBS as well as its correspondent Bob Simon for slander and libel. The poultry company Mar-Jac bought a separate case in the district court in Gainesville. Katz then broke her anonymity saying that most people who might pose a threat to her as a result of the book knew who she was anyway. Nancy Luque, the Washington based attorney for the two charities claimed that Katz had a personal interest in making the claims, noting that she is a paid consultant for Motley-Rice which filed a $1 trillion lawsuit on behalf of families of the victims of the September 11 attacks.

Criticism of Katz

There is evidence that Katz’s Terrorist Hunter is unreliable. The Jewish newspaper Forward quoted two anonymous sources “privy to the investigations” into the Virginia-based charities. They were quoted as saying that “Katz had exaggerated her role in the Virginia investigation, drawn some reckless conclusions and lost the trust of some investigators from the FBI and Justice Department”. After Katz’s mother read the book, Katz says she would call from time and correct some of the details. Katz said these small inaccuracies didn’t matter because they were her memories.

Legal testimony

Al Rajhi-v-Wall Street Journal

In Al Rajhi-v-Wall Street Journal the Saudi bank Al-Rajhi bought a libel case against The Wall Street Journal for its front page article headed ‘Saudi Officials Monitor Certain Bank Accounts: Focus Is On Those With Potential Terrorist Ties’. In that article the paper had stated that accounts at the bank “belong to legitimate entities and businessmen who may in the past have had an association with institutions suspected of terrorism”. The case was bought in England because of the libel laws are unusually favourable to claimants in comparison with the United States and other European countries. The Wall Street Journal applied for permission to plead justification (i.e. that the libellous claims they made were true), and called Katz, as well as fellow terror expert Jean-Charles Brisard, to testify that their accusations were true.

Al-Hussayen

In 2004, Katz spent several months helping the Department of Justice prepare a case against Sami Omar al-Hussayen a doctoral student at the University of Idaho in Moscow, Idaho. Al-Hussayen was charged with supplying material support to a terrorist group because he volunteered to setup and maintain a website for the Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA), a group that has been investigated by the Federal Government, but never charged. Al-Hussayen was detained for 1 1/2 years before his trial in which the jury acquitted him on all terrorist-related charges, two of the immigration charges and hung on the immigration charges. The government alleged that he was guilty of immigration violations because he had worked as a volunteer as IANA webmaster, and may have received $300 for this work spread out over multiple years.

It would appear that following her assistance in the case, the prosecution had intended to use Katz as an expert witness. It was originally intended that Katz would testify about Islamic websites, but the Judge barred her from doing so on the basis that the prosecution had not established any link between the websites and the defendant. Katz appeared at the trial again several weeks later and was allowed to read the jury portions of four fatwas on suicide attacks that had been posted on a Web site that Al-Hussayen helped maintain. A spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney's office in Idaho confirmed that Katz was a fact witness and added that “Fact witnesses may have expertise in certain areas, like Arabic language, how to get around on the Internet.” After al-Hussayen was acquitted, Assistant U.S. Attorney Terry Derden, the prosecutor in the case, admitted that the charges were weak, but said that what mattered was that they'd disrupted Al-Hussayen from engaging in actions for which they were unable to secure a conviction.

Publications

Books

• Rita Katz, Terrorist Hunter: The Extraordinary Story of a Woman who Went Undercover to Infiltrate the Radical Islamic Groups Operating in America (New York: HarperCollins, 2003) ISBN: 0060528192 9780060528195

Articles

• Rita Katz and Josh Devon, ‘Franchising Al Qaeda’, The Boston Globe, 22 June 2007

• Rita Katz and Josh Devon, ‘Web Of Terror’, Forbes, 7 May 2007

• Rita Katz and Josh Devon, ‘Osama’s Olive Branch to Shi'ites’, ‘‘The Boston Globe’’, 26 July 2006

• Rita Katz and Michael Kern, ‘Online jihadist captured, but 007's legacy lives on’, Wayne Journal-Gazette (Indiana), 2 April 2006

• Rita Katz and Michael Kern, ‘Terrorist 007, Exposed’, The Washington Post, 26 March 2006

• Rita Katz, ‘The Coming New Wave of Jihad’, ‘‘The Boston Globe’’, 13 March 2006

• Rita Katz and Michael Kern, ‘Center of the Jihadist World’, National Review Online, 11 July 2005

• Rita Katz and Josh Devon, ‘Al Qaeda’s Fitna’, National Review Online, 6 February 2004

• Rita Katz and Josh Devon, ‘WWW.JIHAD.COM’, National Review Online, 14 July 2003

• Rita Katz and Josh Devon, ‘Terror Tools’, National Review Online, 11 March 2003

• Rita Katz and James Mitre, ‘Collaborating Financiers of Terror’, Monday, National Review Online, 16 December 2002.

• Rita Katz and Josh Devon, ‘The Weakness of the West’, National Review Online, 18 September 2002

• Rita Katz and Josh Devon, ‘Getting at the Whole Network’, 20 August 2002

• Rita Katz & Evan Kohlmann, ‘Pandering to Terrorists’, The Journal of Counterterrorism & Security International, Winter 1999, Vol. 6, No. 2

Affiliations

Organisations

• SITE Institute
• SITE Intelligence Group
• Investigative Project

Friends and Associates

• Steve Emerson
• Evan Kohlmann
• Josh Devon
• Michael Kern
• James Mitre

Resources

• Video of Testimony to the US House Committee on Homeland Security
• 'PRIVATE JIHAD: How Rita Katz got into the spying business', The New Yorker, 29 May 2006