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It was December 2010, and 26-year-old Matthew Llaneza felt like the walls were closing in on him. He'd been discharged from the Marines after a month, for chronic asthma, and he was living with his grandparents in a one-floor stucco house in Mesa, Arizona. The city of just under a half million people sits 20 miles east of Phoenix and is surrounded by the Sonoran Desert, a vast swath of dry, rugged terrain whose towering cacti and craggy, sun-bleached rock formations stretch deep into Mexico. Although he'd grown up in the area, a working-class, largely immigrant community in the western corner of the city, he felt it had changed since he was last there: The neighborhood seemed less predictable, the streets more volatile, with young men like him increasingly under the sway of gangs and drug cartels. He found things so dangerous, in fact, that during that winter he never traveled anywhere without a gun.
Matthew attributed much of the violence and chaos that seemed to be swallowing up so much of the city to the federal government, which had for years been waging a large and costly drug war on Arizona's southern border. He'd already grown disillusioned with the country's politics in the aftermath of 9/11, seen how Muslims and other minorities in Arizona were persecuted. And the way his old neighborhood appeared to be cratering into lawlessness left him even more at odds with the American establishment.
Matthew wasn't just frustrated with the government's actions on the Mexican border, though. He also felt that the military had extended itself too far in the Middle East, with international detention facilities that seemed to be run with little to no accountability and Muslims who were incarcerated indefinitely on minimal evidence. The indignation had been roiling inside him for years. That December, he let it spill out online.
That month, Matthew typed out anti-American rants criticizing the country's foreign policy and expressing interest in waging jihad against the United States. Though these views had been taking shape inside him for a long time, he'd now planted a flag in public. The territory he staked out online was extreme, and his words stood out in an ocean of fleeting, frivolous chatter. Before long, someone took notice.
Shortly after Matthew posted his rants online, a stranger he'd never met read them and reached out. The man seemed to share a lot of the same resentments toward America's post-9/11 policies, and the two started hanging out. Matthew's new friend also shared a darker thought with him: He hoped to one day commit violent jihad against the United States. Matthew expressed his own hostility toward America, voicing an interest in joining the Taliban. During their conversations, Matthew shared a series of grandiose claims with his new acquaintance: He had extensive training in guerrilla warfare, could build unmanned drones and bombs, and had experience working with drug cartels.
Matthew had driven up to the Bay Area from Mesa in his Winnebago, and he was now living in it full-time in front of his father's property in San Jose, California, a small lot with a ranch home in the quiet suburban Berryessa neighborhood. His father had long ago left Arizona, married, and had three more children, and he was strict about when Matthew could go into the house: primarily to shower and use the bathroom, and only when his father was around. Matthew's half siblings were all under 10 years old, and his father was worried that his increasingly adrift older son might not be the best influence on them. So he mostly kept to himself in his RV, looking for work and burning time browsing the Internet.
Matthew's conversations with the friend who'd reached out to him online were abruptly interrupted when he had a disquieting mental-health episode that April. During a night of heavy drinking, he started acting and talking erratically, saying things that frightened his father. Concerned for his son, Steve Llaneza called 911, and a fire truck was dispatched to his address on Largo Drive.
When first responders entered Steve's home, Matthew was so out of control they had to place him in a four-point restraint before transporting him to Santa Clara Valley Medical Center. Once there, he thrashed on a gurney and screamed at medical staff. He slammed his head against the emergency-room hallway wall and pressed his neck against the gurney's side rail in an attempt to choke himself. When officers questioned him, his responses were either cryptic or fantastical. He pointed to one officer's belt and told him he could build everything that was on it. He also warned, "Someday you are going to find me dead in the desert."
Police officers decided to place him in a mental-health hold, a 72-hour involuntary psychiatric hospitalization for individuals deemed a danger to themselves or others. While Matthew was in the hospital, a police officer's concern spurred Steve to search the Winnebago. He found a semiautomatic weapon along with several large-capacity magazines, which he turned over to the police. Legal in Arizona, possession of the assault weapon was a felony in California. And with three loaded magazines also in his possession, Matthew faced up to six years in prison.
Before Matthew was transferred to Santa Clara County Jail, clinicians at the hospital diagnosed him with bipolar disorder and paranoid psychosis. Although such diagnoses—especially in combination—spoke to a seriously ill young man, it was the first time Matthew had ever received them or any other mental-health assessments.
Because of a new punishment method in California known as split sentencing, Matthew would spend less than a year of his sentence in jail, while the rest would be served under a strict probationary period on the outside. When he was released, in November 2011, he quickly found himself staring down a gauntlet of money troubles: He owed thousands in restitution and attorney costs and had to pay a monthly probation fee, and he struggled to find work because of the newly minted felony on his record. As a result he mostly lived off food stamps and was forced to sell his Winnebago to pay his legal bills.
He moved in with his dad, scraping together whatever he could to pay rent and casting about for any job he could find. But even the temporary and under-the-table stuff he did before the arrest seemed to be drying up. There was no work out there, he realized, especially with a charge like mine. Eventually, though, he got a job at a local plumbing company, where he started flashing vents, installing pipes, and digging drainage ditches. Most importantly, he started earning a steady paycheck.
Over the next few months, Matthew grew close with his supervisor at the plumbing company. His boss picked Matthew up for work, gave him free food from a local restaurant, and found him side jobs to help him claw his way out of debt. While driving to and from plumbing jobs together, they talked about guns, and Matthew boasted that he could build a bomb "from scratch." The supervisor sometimes invited Matthew to join him at a local shooting range, but Matthew always declined, citing his probation. Matthew recalls his new supervisor often sharing his political views, too. The two men criticized America's role in the Middle East, and Matthew told him how he'd converted to Islam years earlier. They also occasionally spoke—in loose, vague generalities—about fighting overseas.
In late November, Matthew's supervisor set up an introduction between Matthew and an "adopted cousin" of his. This man claimed to have ties to the Taliban and mujahideen in Afghanistan. Matthew met the cousin for the first time at a mall near San Jose. There they began brainstorming how they might go about launching a terrorist attack.
Over the course of the next two months, Matthew and the man he'd just met clumsily deliberated over what that attack might look like. Matthew proposed bombing the Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. He eventually backed off that plan, though, because of the imposing level of security that would be protecting a federal building. He suggested that they instead target a Bank of America branch in northern California. Initially, the cousin disapproved of Matthew's ideas. Matthew recalls that he seemed to want them to plan an attack with a maximum number of civilian casualties—at one point he proposed they target a light-rail station during rush hour.
But the cousin eventually acquiesced to Matthew's plot. Matthew's motivation for bombing the bank was multilayered to the point of being overwrought. His plan was to make the attack look like the work of an "umbrella organization" of far-right, anti-government militia groups. This provocation, he felt, would trigger a harsh government crackdown, which would ultimately spark a civil war.
While Matthew's scheme didn't seem explicitly connected to Islamic fundamentalism—it more closely resembled the aspirations of a quasi-revolutionary looking to shake up the established American order—Matthew's Taliban contact nevertheless laid out a detailed escape for him following the attack: He would be spirited away by boat to Pakistan, where he would then decamp to Afghanistan and be lavished with a field full of weed. It was an alluring reward for someone who felt the vise tightening around his post-felony life, and who smoked to alleviate psychiatric symptoms. All he had to do was drive an SUV to a Bank of America branch, slip off to a remote location, and trigger an explosion that would turn the bank building into a heap of fiery rubble.
Over the nearly two decades since 9/11, the FBI has increasingly committed itself to protecting Americans against potential terrorist attacks. In the years directly following the collapse of the twin towers, the agency rapidly expanded its Counterterrorism Division, diverting resources and manpower once devoted to investigating corporate and organized crime to what had become a far more urgent business: preventing another devastating attack on the American citizenry. In addition to bolstering its Counterterrorism Division, then FBI director Robert Mueller increased the number of Joint Terrorism Task Forces throughout the country. First introduced in 1980, JTTFs work to ferret out terrorist plots through monitoring, surveillance, investigation, and, not least, the cultivation of sources on the ground. These sources, known as informants, work to get close to individuals or groups the task force believes may be capable of committing a terrorist crime.
JTTFs zero in on their potential targets for a range of reasons that fall on a broad spectrum—with unpatriotic political views on one end and explicit support for terrorism on the other. A person may find themselves in a task force's crosshairs for making preliminary arrangements to travel to Iraq to join the Islamic State, sending money to an overseas terrorist group, or acquiring materials for building a bomb. In many cases, however, surveillance begins long before any of these plans are even articulated, let alone set in motion. What often sends a JTTF's antenna in the air are remarks made online—on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, or in private chat rooms—expressing sympathy for a terrorist group or voicing an interest in joining its ranks. These types of social-media posts establish individuals as potential threats to be surveyed and, often, later approached by confidential informants.
The way most Americans picture how the FBI foils terrorist plots is to a large extent influenced by the agency itself. After arresting an alleged terrorist, the FBI and the Department of Justice issue press releases that frequently feature a radicalized Muslim or Muslims hell-bent on carrying out a violent attack and the agents who led a painstaking investigation culminating in their final gutsy maneuver. Parse the press releases carefully enough, though, and you'll find tacit acknowledgements that the FBI fabricated much of the crime itself, deploying undercover agents to help plan the attacks with suspects and ensuring that car bombs and IEDs are rendered inoperable. But these subtle details are often missed in the days following these arrests, as media outlets publish stories mirroring only the alleged crimes' broader strokes. While the press has grown far more skeptical over the past few years, a certain shorthand for how the FBI stops purported terrorists still persists among parts of the American public, one that has proven very difficult to dislodge.
But highly publicized plots represent only a small percentage of the total terrorist arrests made and tell only part of the story. According to Trevor Aaronson's database, the U.S. government has prosecuted over 860 individuals for terrorism-related offenses since 9/11. Of those cases, over one third have involved a sting: an undercover operation in which an FBI agent or a confidential informant poses as a member of a terrorist organization and reaches out to an individual. But unlike when J. Edgar Hoover presided over the FBI and his infamous COINTELPRO initiative was spying on everyone from communists and feminists to members of the Black Panther Party and Vietnam protesters, today's informants aren't just there to quietly observe persons of interest and report back to their agent handlers. The FBI's legion of 15,000 informants throughout the country are now often expected to actively participate in planning and coming to the brink of committing acts of terrorist violence. In many cases, it's the informant's job to mold vague, quixotic, inept, or outright impossible plans into reality by spending months or years with an individual and leveraging the full financial, logistical, and material resources at their disposal at the FBI.
Critics of the agency argue that the aggressive, highly participatory role informants and undercover agents now play in terrorism investigations may qualify as entrapment. An ongoing debate has arisen between defense attorneys, civil rights experts, and journalists on one hand, and special agents and JTTFs and the federal prosecutors who shepherd their arrests into convictions on the other. Do the FBI's tactics when investigating potential terrorists indeed clear the bar for entrapment, or do they simply represent a strong pre-emption model that also serves as a fierce deterrent against anyone considering a terrorist crime? As Karen Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham Law School, pointed out to me, "Entrapment defenses are hard, and in a terrorism case they're even harder." Defense attorneys, she explained, must clear a high burden of proof by demonstrating that federal agents induced the defendant to commit a crime he otherwise had no predisposition to commit. To date, the entrapment defense has not succeeded a single time in a terrorist case.
Although these opposing viewpoints have only drifted farther apart in recent years—news organizations continue to call attention to the FBI's probes, while FBI director Christopher Wray announced in May that the agency is currently pursuing 1,000 investigations into "lone wolf" terrorists—the debate has helped bring to light the sprawling role of informants in the counterterrorism world. This street-level army, many young men of Middle Eastern descent, disarms its targets with friendship, favors, and seemingly boundless generosity, only to later carefully tease out its members' ugliest and most misanthropic fantasies and introduce the means to convert those fantasies into an otherwise improbable reality.
But before informants and undercover agents can launch these cunning charm offensives, JTTFs trawl the Internet for comments expressing hostility toward the American government and enthusiasm for extremism—exactly the kinds of comments, in fact, that Matthew Llaneza posted online in December 2010. These sorts of online statements set the whole JTTF apparatus in motion, as informants, undercover agents, and FBI expertise are all brought to bear in an effort to catch their suspect in a terrorist crime.
By December 2012, Matthew and his Taliban contact were scouting possible Bank of America branches. A few weeks before Christmas, they decided that the bombing would take place in Oakland. Matthew felt the city's notoriety as a hub for protests and demonstrations—Occupy Oakland had raged through the streets a year earlier—made it the perfect platform for his own florid scheme to strike a match to revolution. Matthew eventually decided on the branch at 303 Hegenberger Road, a four-story building situated a mile and a half south of Oracle Arena, next to San Leandro Bay.
Over the next eight weeks, the two men continued to refine their plan. Matthew would park the SUV near one of the bank's concrete support columns, meet up with his contact at a nearby location, and then detonate the bomb with a cell-phone trigger device. Matthew felt strongly, however, that they carry out the attack in the middle of the night so as to avoid any casualties. He may have wanted to roil civil unrest, but he didn't want to take any lives in the process.
By late January, the cousin Matthew had only met two months prior had obtained the liquid explosives and rented a storage unit in the city of Hayward. The two of them later drove 20 miles south, to Milpitas, where Matthew was instructed to buy two cell phones: one for the bomb's trigger device, and the other to call the trigger device, detonating the bomb. Having gathered all the chief materials, they now had one final task: build the car bomb.
On February 2, Matthew and his partner met at the Hayward storage unit. Using 12 five-gallon buckets of liquid explosives and an assortment of household items, they assembled the bomb. They also tested the trigger device to make sure it would set off the bomb when called. By the end of the day, all that was left to do was attach the completed trigger device and a blasting cap. Everything was now in place to blow up the Bank of America building on Hegenberger Road—an act Matthew believed would set the stage for a much larger conflict. Before the two men parted ways, he expressed his commitment to the cause, telling his partner that he had jihad in his heart and was willing to lay down his life for it.
Five days later, Matthew's contact rented him a room for the day at a hotel near the storage facility. Thinking about the task that lay before him—an irrevocable act that would culminate in permanent exile from the only country he'd ever known—he tried to keep his cool as best he could. In the hours leading up to the attack, the contact offered Matthew one final out. It was not too late to turn back, he told him; they could disassemble the bomb and both skip town. Matthew replied that he was ready, adding that he only hoped that the plot achieved its goal. After all, he now had a lot riding on its successful execution: not only the fulfillment of his gambit for revolution, but also a clandestine escape that would allow him to leave behind a life increasingly riven by financial and psychological instability. This was his ticket out.
Sometime around 10 p.m. that night, Matthew and his partner rendezvoused at the storage unit one final time. They planned to carry out the bombing late that evening, shortly after midnight. Matthew drove a Mazda SUV to a parking lot in Union City. His partner followed him there and oversaw Matthew putting the finishing touches on the bomb. Matthew then drove the SUV to the Bank of America building, parked it beneath an overhang, and fled on foot to meet his partner at a nearby location.
It was now well after midnight. The streets were dark and mostly vacant. Sitting in his partner's car, Matthew called the cell phone in the trigger device—the final step that was supposed to detonate the bomb.
He waited, and—nothing. No deafening clap, no black plumes, no shredded, blazing concrete.
The bomb hadn't gone off. For a moment Matthew was confused, unsure of what their next move was going to be. Then, as he was looking out the car window, he suddenly caught sight of a handful of law-enforcement officers. They were rapidly descending on the vehicle. Frantic, Matthew urged his partner to hit the gas and make for a narrow escape. "Let's get out of here," he shouted. But instead, his partner acted startled and confused, and seemed to ignore Matthew's pleas. JTTF officers soon had the vehicle surrounded.
As Matthew would eventually surmise, his partner—the person with whom he planned the entire bombing—was not really an extremist with ties to the Taliban. He was an undercover FBI agent.
Matthew first drew the attention of the FBI in December 2010, after he'd posted comments online railing against American foreign policy and indicating an interest in engaging in violent jihad. Acting on this intelligence, the FBI dispatched an informant posing as someone considering committing an act of extremist violence against the United States. When the informant approached Matthew to further investigate his leanings, Matthew allegedly expressed a willingness to join the Taliban. And when Matthew got out of jail in late 2011, the job he landed at the plumbing company wasn't the stroke of good fortune it appeared to be. His supervisor there was also on the FBI's payroll, another confidential informant, and he would eventually lay the groundwork for the meeting between Matthew and his "adopted cousin," the undercover FBI agent.
It seems that even after Matthew's hospitalization in 2011 revealed a young man with severe mental illness, as well as an informant's opinion a year later that Matthew was "harmless," the FBI continued pursuing their sting on the 28-year-old. At some point in 2012, the agency conducted a threat assessment on him and subsequently accelerated its investigation. After the assessment, it seemed no longer satisfied with facilitating his hazy aspirations of traveling overseas and joining the Taliban. The FBI seems to have felt that in order to truly neutralize the threat, it needed Matthew to become embroiled in something deeper, something far more dangerous.
To do this, the FBI needed to accommodate Matthew's revolutionary pipe dreams. Because he lacked the experience, technical acumen, or financial means to pull off the costly, logistically complex attack he outlined to the agent, the FBI handled almost everything: It purchased the requisite materials and brewed the simulated explosive mixture for the car bomb, constructed the bomb's trigger device, rented a storage unit near the bank, and provided Matthew with the vehicle that he used in the attack, a 2012 Mazda CX7.
Shortly before 1 a.m., on a quiet, lamplit street a few blocks from the San Francisco Bay, JTTF officers stormed the vehicle to arrest Matthew. When the officers opened the car door, he managed to scramble away, making a mad dash down the empty street. Then he blacked out. When he came to, a large officer was on top of him, wrestling him to the ground. He was transported to Santa Rita Jail, where he would remain for another year while his case wended through pretrial proceedings.
Although Matthew's anti-American rants and possession of an assault weapon might have made FBI agents uneasy, court documents recounting the events leading up to the staged bombing clearly demonstrate that prosecutors did not find him guilty of committing a single terrorist crime on his own. As with hundreds of terrorist cases since 9/11, the key distinguishing features in Matthew's story are the agent and informants who massaged into reality the quixotic ambitions that could just as easily have fizzled out in the back of Matthew's addled mind. It's a tricky paradox, one that's steeped in moral ambiguity: These men and women's participation in terrorist acts may prove some degree of culpability, but their terrorist activities only ever existed within the FBI's elaborate schemes. What should the real punishment be for a simulated crime?
In his 2013 book, The Terror Factory, Trevor Aaronson writes that, while working as an investigative reporter for various newspapers, "I couldn't help but notice how the U.S. government was putting forward to the public people who seemed to have become terrorists only as a result of the prodding and inducements of FBI informants and undercover agents." Of the 508 individuals prosecuted on terrorism-related charges when he created a database for the defendants in 2011, Aaronson argues that he could "count on one hand" the number that posed an actual imminent threat to the country. Instead, he notes, many were underemployed, cash-strapped, and marginalized figures, misfits with histories of delusional thinking and petty crime who simply did not have the conviction or wherewithal to carry out any kind of terrorist attack on their own.
For most of this decade, the FBI's Counterterrorism Division has been focused primarily on "lone wolf" terrorists: actors without any direct link to a terrorist organization but committed to the same extreme religious ends and violent methods for achieving them. According to Aaronson, the FBI is specifically looking for young Muslims between the ages of 16 and 35 who have expressed radical beliefs, hostility toward U.S. interventions in the Middle East, and sympathy for overseas terrorist groups. (Matthew checked every box.) After the agency's surveillance dragnet pulls up someone who fits that description, the FBI relies on its deep network of informants to gauge just how ready that individual is to act on his loose talk and social-media screeds.
To better understand exactly how the FBI's Counterterrorism Division was operating differently today than it had in the past, I reached out to Michael German, a former undercover FBI agent who is now among the most outspoken whistleblowers on the agency's counterterrorism tactics. German explained to me that during his 12 years working for the FBI prior to 9/11, in order to launch an investigation agents needed to clearly demonstrate that the individuals they were targeting were either connected to a specific terrorist organization or explicitly planning criminal activity. Since then, the bar for initiating a sting has gotten much lower. "So many of these cases, there's no direct association between subject and any actual terrorist group," he said. Their only hypothetical tie to extremists is the FBI, which "portrays itself as the terrorist group." Further, German expressed concern about how reliant the FBI has become on undercover operations, which by their very nature present individuals with opportunities they might otherwise have never had to carry out heinous crimes. The agency largely targets what he called "low-hanging fruit": young men who are poor, asocial, and often mentally ill. "That they would prey on those kinds of individuals to make a terrorism case out of it," he noted, wincingly, "it doesn't provide any security benefit to the country."
For its part, the FBI, which did not respond to interview requests for this story, has long argued that it simply can't afford to wait for aspiring extremists to fine-tune their plans or hook up with recruiters; the exigency of keeping America safe requires them to embrace an aggressively pre-emptive model. And if the men they arrest were willing to carry out a terrorist attack with an informant or undercover agent, the logic goes, what's stopping them from doing the very same thing with a real member of ISIS, Al-Qaeda, or the Taliban? German and another expert I spoke to, however, articulated a few other reasons the FBI could be motivated to "manufacture" terrorism cases—that is, to use informants and undercover agents to facilitate terrorist activity where none existed before.
Counterterrorism is now the FBI's number one priority. The agency has over 100 Joint Terrorism Task Forces throughout the country, which employ thousands of special agents and police officers working for the Counterterrorism Division. In order to keep an operation of this size going, German told me, agents and task-force officers must "prove statistical accomplishments." They do this by making arrests, bringing terrorism charges, and winning convictions in federal courts. The more experts I spoke to, the clearer it became that a certain culture of careerism was at least partly responsible for perpetuating a Counterterrorism Division that demands substantial FBI resources.
New York University counterterrorism expert Arun Kundnani explained that the structure of incentives at the FBI is set up in such a way that special agents "make their careers on these convictions." German echoed this view, adding that agents and supervisors not only burnish their reputations on high-profile terrorism convictions but also may reap bonuses and promotions for enough splashy arrests. Even confidential informants appear to profit from the business of nabbing perpetrators of terrorist crimes: Aaronson writes that informants can earn "performance incentives" of tens of thousands of dollars if the cases they work lead to successful convictions.
The question of entrapment continues to loom over many of these cases. Of the 800-plus defendants charged with terrorist crimes since 9/11, how many would have actually carried out an attack if not nudged along by the FBI? In many instances, it can be difficult to parse the nuances of who initially proposed the crime, how much pressure the agent or informant may have put on the individual, and what mixture of incentives the FBI put into play, including cash, employment, housing, and other rewards (like an imaginary field verdant with marijuana). A lack of transparency often pervades these sting operations, which primarily come to those outside the agency in snippets and flashes—glimpses of the months, weeks, and days leading up to the decisive criminal act, which is itself often rendered in court filings in careful, vivid detail. It's a climax that's meticulously choreographed by the FBI, an intricate simulacrum that mimics a real terrorist attack through all the sets, props, and supporting players a satisfying production requires. That the central actor is not aware he is participating in an extravagant yarn seems to matter only at the very end, when the fiction takes a sudden and irreversible swerve back into the reality hiding underneath all along.
After discovering Matthew's story, I reached out to him at the Oregon federal prison, where he's now incarcerated. Matthew and I exchanged e-mails and eventually began talking on the phone. It was the first time Matthew had spoken to a journalist since he was arrested in 2013. In a dozen or so phone conversations this past summer, I spoke to Matthew about his boyhood in Arizona, his struggle with mental illness, and the circumstances surrounding his decision in 2013 to carry out the crime he's now in prison for. From the very first phone call, it was clear Matthew regarded the world with a frenzied, nail-biting paranoia. His sightlines were pitted with danger, the southern Arizona of his youth laced with invisible threats. The only magazines he'd ever read, he told me, he'd flipped through quickly and cagily at a mall before "going back to the mountains, where it's a lot safer."
He depicted the part of Arizona where he was from and the surrounding desert as a "police state" and a "Wild West," full of cartel executions, human trafficking, underground silos, and caravans of army trucks hauling warheads. His baroque descriptions sounded like a depraved post-apocalyptic wasteland, one almost cinematic in its gratuitous perils. Listening, I often had no idea where reality ended and grim fantasy began. Hints at just how long his paranoia stretched back effloresced around our conversations. When I asked him when he thought the government first began tracking him, he replied that his best guess was that he'd been monitored "since I was a little kid."
Early on in his childhood, Matthew began exhibiting unusual behavior that some family members worryingly read as signs he might not be developing in a typical way. His kindergarten teacher observed that he was restless and disruptive, and she recommended that he repeat the grade.
As he got older, feelings of paranoia took root. When his dad planned a fishing trip, Matthew obsessively fretted over the possibility of drowning. At the sound of a helicopter flying overhead, he'd lunge to the ground and curl up into a fetal position.
Strange fixations also blossomed in his mind. One day Matthew noticed a frayed American flag flying on a shopping-center flagpole. He proceeded to walk four miles to the shopping center and then shimmy up the flagpole and pull the flag down. Questioned later, he explained matter-of-factly that the flag should not be flying in that condition. But while evidence abounded of Matthew's aberrant behavior and unusual thought patterns, he never received a psychiatric diagnosis of any kind during his childhood.
A few weeks after Matthew was arrested, public defender Jerome Matthews ordered a full psychological evaluation to determine whether his client was competent to stand trial. If the mental-health professional, a Berkeley-based psychologist named Scott Lines, found that he was not, it would potentially open the door for an insanity defense. It wasn't an unreasonable legal path: Matthew had bipolar disorder and an extensively documented history of delusional thinking, and may have been in a manic state in the weeks leading up to and during the offense. After administering a psychological evaluation and interviewing Matthew at Santa Rita Jail, though, Lines concluded that Matthew cleared the bar for competence.
That summer, Jerome Matthews asked Lines to conduct a second evaluation. This time, Lines would not only be seeking to determine Matthew’s legal competence. He was also asked to explore whether Matthew’s mental illness affected his suggestibility leading up to the crime.
The report that Lines submitted—which later became an exhibit in the sentencing memorandum the defense put forth leading up to the court's decision—speaks to a young man riddled with delusions, often crazed by mania, and grasping for ballast amid a fluctuating cocktail of psychotropic medication. At the time Lines visited the prison, in July 2013, Matthew had been put in solitary confinement for some time. (A defense attorney who's represented two dozen men accused of terrorist crimes told me that subjecting them to solitary confinement for long stretches during pretrial proceedings is typical, though few people know about it.) He couldn't tell the psychologist what day of the week it was. While he was still on antipsychotic and antidepressant drugs at the time of the interview, he'd recently been taken off Depakote, a mood stabilizer, because of the tremors it caused him. As a result, he described careering toward a manic state: laughing for no reason, banging on cell doors, agreeing to mischief at the behest of other inmates. He told Lines he'd heard whispers coming from the prison's speaker system. It was clear evidence, he felt, of a psy-ops campaign to break him.
In his report, Lines stood by his earlier determination that Matthew was competent to stand trial. He did note, however, that Matthew's mental illness, combined with his dire financial straits, led to impaired judgment and diminished mental capacity at the time of the crime. The psychologist drew a direct line from the defendant's illness to the terrorist plot. "An idea occurs to him, or in the case of his alleged offense conduct, is offered to him," Lines explained, "and when he is manic the irrational idea conforms to the desire to stimulate chaos and disorder, reflective of the chaos and disorder he feels while under the sway of his mental disorder." If Matthew was in a manic state for part or all of the sting operation, then the FBI had catered to its most gonzo, adrenaline-starved, self-detonating whims.
By the time Lines conducted the second psychological evaluation in midsummer, the defense was in the early stages of negotiating a plea bargain. Although Jerome Matthews (whose office told me it was against their policy to speak with the press about cases) raised the issue of entrapment several times in his sentencing memorandum, the stakes were simply too high to take the case to trial. The single count against Matthew—attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction against property used in interstate commerce—carried a sentencing range of 30 years to life in prison.
Court documents filed after the arrest revealed Matthew to be an almost shockingly vulnerable young man—perhaps the very lowest of the "low-hanging fruit." The informant at the plumbing company described him as having "the mind of a little child." He remarked how Matthew was "slow and drooled, while his body often shook uncontrollably"—no doubt a result of the powerful psychiatric medication he was still adjusting to. His medication interfered with his daily functionality to the point where he could not hold a shovel at work. In the year or so following his release from his first stint in jail in 2011, Matthew was treated with an assortment of potent psychotropic drugs, including Risperdal, Zyprexa, Haldol, Depakote, and Zoloft.
Though Matthew struggled to remain clear-minded under the drugs' intense side effects and his psychiatric disorders, his supervisor at the plumbing company also noted his continued focus on adhering to the conditions of his supervised release. According to a Confidential Human Source (CHS) reporting document, Matthew was "'very responsible' when checking in with his probation officer," and his "main concern is doing everything he can to stay out of jail." The informant added that the 28-year-old, who was applying for both disability and Section 8 housing while working at the plumbing company, seemed harmless and likely "lacks the capability to live on his own."
Despite the sense among journalists and civil rights experts that the FBI has in recent years been deploying methods that look an awful lot like entrapment, the entrapment defense has yet to be successfully used a single time in a terrorist case. In fact, entrapment defenses are rarely even attempted, in large part because federal prosecutors have so much leverage in bringing attorneys and their clients to the bargaining table. In addition to staggeringly long sentences, the common practice of putting terrorism defendants in solitary confinement while they await trial pushes their psyches to the brink, making a plea the only escape from their punishing circumstances. Like the vast majority of other defendants accused of terrorist crimes in this country, Matthew took a plea. He's now serving a 15-year sentence in federal prison.
During one of my phone conversations with Matthew, he recalled the months leading up to the staged car bombing and the immense stress imposed by legal fees, debilitating psychiatric medication, and the fear of violating his probation and returning to prison. "I was just almost, like, looking for any way out," he told me. He described feeling like a chess piece forced into the corner of the board, his possible moves suddenly and severely limited by a ruthlessly efficient opponent.
The way he saw it, the legal system had him up against the wall, forcing him to meet demands that he couldn't sustain. Meanwhile, the FBI was dangling an escape in front of him that became increasingly tempting as the pressures mounted. He was a pawn in overlapping systems of control, he felt, the luxury of true choice beyond his grasp. Perhaps the reality of his circumstances had finally caught up to his lifelong paranoia, the "operations" against him suddenly real in a way that only he could have fathomed. It was an irony that offered cold comfort.
Now, he said, he was finally on a mental-health treatment plan that kept the worst aspects of his disorders in check without exchanging them for equally disabling side effects. "I guess I've gotten a lot better," he said, adding that now, "I'm just kind of hanging out for another eight years."
Mike Mariani is a writer based in Washington, D.C., whose work has appeared in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair, Mother Jones, The Atavist, and Newsweek, among other publications.