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Prisoner of His Own Lie

Ellis Henican: June 2, 2002

It's easy to blame the hotel security guard.

What Ronald Ferry did was wrong, making up that lie about an Egyptian graduate student and a high-powered pilot's radio.

Because of Ferry's false claim, an innocent man spent 31 days in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, branded an international terrorist, threatened with spending the rest of his life behind bars.

So I am shedding no tears today for the lying security guard, Ronald Ferry, as he begins to pass his weekends in jail.

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But the record makes clear that Ferry did not act alone.

He was aided and abetted in his recklessness by FBI agents and federal prosecutors - sloppy at best, incompetent or uncaring at worst. And just plain wrong.

In the weeks after Sept. 11, they were so eager to make a high-profile terror arrest, they didn't only accept the lie of a hotel security guard. They embellished it. They confirmed it. They carried it into court. And they did all of this in your name and in mine, piling the weight of the U.S. government on a man who'd done nothing wrong.

On Thursday, at U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Ferry was sentenced to six months of weekends for his part in this fiasco.

What about the feds?

When are they going to be punished, too?

Thursday was a cautionary day in America's war on terror.

John Ashcroft, the attorney general of the United States, had just announced he was giving federal agents a far freer hand. He said they can now infiltrate houses of worship, investigate legal gatherings and spy in assorted other ways on Americans not suspected of breaking any laws. All this is being done, like so much else these days, in the name of fighting terror.

Civil liberties? What civil liberties?

But just as Ashcroft was chilling long-standing American rights, the stories of Ronald Ferry and Abdallah Higazy were being laid out in federal court in Manhattan.

Higazy is a 31-year-old graduate student. He enrolled in the computer-engineering program at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. He's the son of an Egyptian diplomat. He spent half his childhood in Washington. He came to New York to study on a scholarship from the U.S. Agency for International Development. He had a security clearance from the State Department. He was dating an American-born woman.

And to hear the feds tell it, he sure looked guilty of something big.

On the morning of Sept. 11, he was staying in a room on the 51st floor of the Millenium Hilton Hotel. Luckily, he was out when the towers came down.

A month later, the hotel security guard told his bosses - and then the FBI - that he'd found an air-to-ground radio in a safe in Higazy's room, along with a passport and a copy of the Koran.

Could the Brooklyn computer student have been sitting in his hotel, talking into his powerful radio and guiding the evil hijackers in?

The image is chilling, you'll have to admit.

On the strength of such imaginings and the security guard's startling claim, Higazy was promptly arrested and hauled off to the federal lockup in lower Manhattan. He was interrogated over several days.

And pretty soon, federal agents were whispering to reporters that Higazy had confessed.

At first, they'd said, he'd tried to weasel. He'd contradicted himself, the way that criminals often do. But then, thanks to the brilliant interrogation tactics of the FBI, the radio man had come clean.

"A very strong case," U.S. Magistrate Judge Frank Maas agreed when the allegations were brought to him.

There was only one problem here. It was all a big lie.

Higazy was no terrorist. He really was what he'd claimed to be - a graduate student in Brooklyn. The pilot radio wasn't his. It belonged to a real pilot who'd been staying on the hotel's 50th floor. That became hard to deny when the true owner showed up at the hotel to claim his radio.

Soon enough, the security guard admitted that he'd made the story up. He said he was swept up in a patriotic desire to aid the terror war.

So what is the FBI's excuse?

What's the U.S. attorney's?

What about the supposed confession? What about the claims to the judge?

Ronald Ferry has been punished now. When do the feds begin their terms?

Abdallah Higazy didn't have an answer for that when I tracked him down at week's end.

"I'm just waiting now," he said. "I want to see what the court does next."