Shadows in Our Midst

Can buying a snowblower, a barbecue and a couple of lawn mowers in Canada make you a suspected link to al-Qaeda? Michael John Hamdani, 44, became just that after a shopping spree late last October in Brampton, a city west of Toronto. The owners of a shop that he and a friend had patronized believed they had received bogus U.S. traveler's checks and alerted the police. A raid on the homes of Hamdani and his pal turned up an array of big-screen TVs and other luxury goods, $600,000 in forged American Express and Thomas Cook checks, a state-of-the-art counterfeiting operation complete with silk-screen equipment, ink stamps like those used by consular officials, and stacks of high-grade fake passports and other identity documents. Hamdani was tagged as the suspected mastermind. A Pakistani emigre, he had a rap sheet stretching as far as Brunei and was on the lam from a 1996 U.S. indictment for dealing in phony passports in New York.

In other words, he was a skilled underworld artisan--just the kind of guy al-Qaeda likes to work with. Fearing the worst, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police gave the case national security status, called the FBI and started grilling Hamdani. Around Christmastime, the Pakistani spilled a tantalizing tale. He said he had been paid thousands of dollars to cook up travel documents for 19 men who had traveled from Pakistan through London to Toronto in early December. He thought they had reached the U.S. on Christmas Eve.

Hamdani never claimed his customers were terrorists, and there is no evidence he or they had any connection to al-Qaeda. But his story arrived in Washington as U.S. security officials were going on full holiday alert. Pakistani authorities came up with information about an alien-smuggling scheme that dovetailed with the forger's account. On Dec. 27, Islamabad gave the FBI photos and names or aliases of five men thought to be among the 19 smuggled aliens Hamdani had served. The U.S. quickly put out an unusually prominent all-points bulletin for the five. "We don't have any idea of what their intentions might be," President Bush told reporters on New Year's Eve, "but we are mindful that there are still some out there who would try to harm America and harm Americans, and so therefore we take every threat seriously, every piece of evidence seriously."