Rita Katz

Early life

Katz, a fluent Arabic speaker, was born in Basra in Southern Iraq in 1963 to a wealthy Iraqi Jewish family. After the Six Day War and shortly after Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party seized power in Iraq in 1968, her father was arrested on charges of spying for Israel. The family's property was confiscated by the state, and the rest of the family put under house arrest in a stone hut. The following year, after having been tortured, Katz's father was convicted and executed in a public hanging in the central square of Baghdad, witnessed by more than half a million Iraqis; the government offered free transportation to people from the provinces, and belly dancers performed for the crowd. Katz' mother managed to escape with her three children to Iran, from where they made their way to Israel.

The family settled in the seaside town of Bat Yam. While in Israel, Katz served in the Israeli Defense Forces and studied politics, history, and Middle Eastern studies at Tel Aviv University. As a committed Zionist, Katz was reluctant to ever leave Israel, saying, “I believed that Jews belong in Israel”. Nevertheless, in 1997 Katz’ husband was offered a research fellowship in endocrinology at the National Institutes of Health and they moved to Washington with their three children. 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.

Career

1998 Katz began working for a research institute called the ″Investigative Project", run by the former journalist Steven Emerson. She worked there on counterterrorism investigations. As a result of one of her first researchs she realized that the, then known as a charity project, Holy Land Foundation was a front group for Hamas. Wanting to examine it more closely, she attended a fundraiser of theirs dressed as a Muslim woman. Soon thereafter, again disguised as a Muslim woman, wearing a burqa and wearing recording equipment, Katz began attending Islamic conferences and fundraisers, visiting mosques, and participating in pro-Palestinian rallies in the U.S. as an undercover investigator in order to expose links of American Islamic groups to foreign terrorist groups.

Katz' SITE Institute, co-founded with Josh Devon in July 2002, was funded by various federal agencies and private groups. It analyzes "corporate records, tax forms, credit reports, video tapes, internet news group postings and owned websites, among other resources, for indicators of illicit activity". It provided information on radical Muslim groups operating in the United States, and led to closures of organizations, deportations, and ongoing investigations. She spends hours every day monitoring password-protected online chat rooms in which Islamic terrorists discuss politics, exchange tips, and announce their plans and accomplishments. Katz and her staff research online sources for intelligence, which her staff translates and sends out by e-mail to about 100 subscribers. Among her subscribers are people in government, in corporate security, and in the media. Katz has worked with prosecutors on more than one dozen terrorism investigations, and many American officers in Iraq rely on her e-mails to, for example, brief troops on the designs for explosives that are passed around terrorist Web sites.

With the SITE Institute, which she co-founded to monitor Islamic extremist websites and to expose terrorist front groups, Katz worked with federal investigators in terrorism cases. She was cited in Richard Clarke's book, "Against All Enemies", as having helped to provide information to the government on the Al Qaeda network. Clarke wrote that she and Steven Emerson, for whom she formerly worked, regularly provided the White House with a stream of information about possible Al Qaeda activity inside the U.S. that was apparently largely unknown to the FBI before the 9/11 attacks. They gave Clarke and his staff the names of Islamic radical Web sites, the identities of possible terrorist front groups, and the phone numbers and addresses of possible terror suspects—data Clarke was unable to get from elsewhere in the government. Katz also served as a consultant in a $1 trillion wrongful-death suit seeking to hold Saudi government and business interests accountable for the 9/11 attacks.

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 CBS newsmagazine, "60 Minutes", to promote her book using the pseudonym "Sarah", and wearing a wig and a fake nose, to protect herself and her family from retaliation from groups that she said were linked to al-Qaeda, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah. In the book she tries to reveal what she sees as the gravity and extent of the presence of Islamic fundamentalism in America, and that government agencies still do not work together as one to fight terrorism, instead concealing information from each other, attempting to take over investigations, and even deliberately slowing down terrorism investigations.

SITE's work was cited in The New York Times and the Washington Post about twice a month as of 2006. In January 2007, Al Jazeera reported that the National Association of Muslim American Women filed a formal complaint with the U.S. Department of Justice Civil Rights Division, Criminal Section, and with the Executive Office for the United States Attorneys at the U.S. Department of Justice, alleging that as a result of misleading and false information provided to U.S. law enforcement agencies, the media, and various governmental bodies, various Jewish organizations and individuals including Katz had sought to create an environment in the U.S. that is hostile towards U.S. Muslims, resulting in the deprivation and violation of Muslim civil liberties and civil rights.

In October 2007, it was revealed that Katz had discovered and issued to the Bush administration a copy of an Osama bin Laden video which had yet to be released by al-Qaeda. Katz issued the video via a private link to a SITE web page to White House counsel Fred F. Fielding and Joel Bagnal, deputy assistant to the President for Homeland Security. Within 20 minutes, computers registered to various parts of the Executive Branch began downloading the video, and within hours a transcript referencing SITE had appeared on Fox News. Katz had requested that the web page remain confidential, and has reported that dissemination of this information tipped off her Al-Qaeda supporters who had since eliminated the ability of SITE to gather such information.

"Rita really knows what she's talking about—who's responsible for attacks, what's a legitimate terrorist organization, and what's not", said Robert Worth, a New York Times reporter.

Controversies

In July 2003 two of the groups she discussed in her book and on television (the Heritage Education Trust and the Safa Trust) sued her and revealed her name and identity. The number of lawsuits she was named in rose to three, all in connection with her work helping the government investigate Islamic charities in northern Virginia. In two of the suits, targets of the investigation said they were defamed in the 60 Minutes television broadcast. Katz said she has been the victim of a smear campaign, and attempts to intimidate her, adding:

"As they were never able to challenge the accuracy of my research, and as they were upset by the ramifications of it in terms of arrests, indictments, and raids, a few Muslim activist organizations have on occasion tried to portray me as a Muslim-basher. I have no quarrel with Islam or Muslims, and I only target terrorists and their supporters."

In one case, in 2005 federal Judge Leonie Brinkema dismissed Katz from the lawsuit by a leader of the International Institute of Islamic Thought, Iqbal Unus, and Katz's dismissal was upheld on appeal unanimously by a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2009. The court also ordered Unus to pay Katz $41,000 in legal fees.

Critics of Katz claim she is giving terrorists a larger platform than they would otherwise have, and is too eager to find plots where they don't exist. Some people also do not think a private group with limited resources can do as good a job as government agencies can. Katz maintains professionals missed many signals about al-Qaeda before 9/11, and she is simply filling a gap. A 2004 audit showed that the FBI alone had thousands of hours of untranslated intercepts.

In 2015, Katz described an apparent Australian online supporter of ISIS who used the online handle "Australi Witness" as holding a "prestige" position in online jihadi circles and as being "part of the hard core of a group of individuals who constantly look for targets for other people to attack". It later transpired that "Australi Witness" was a Jewish American called Joshua Ryne Goldberg who was arrested by the FBI.

Book

Select articles

Testimony