The Terror Factory: Tenth Anniversary Edition

“Compelling, shocking, and gritty with intrigue.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A real eye-opener that questions how well the country’s security is being protected.”—Kirkus (starred review)

“In an analysis of five hundred terrorism-related cases brought since September 11th, the journalist Trevor Aaronson found that nearly half of them involved a confidential informant. In some cases, the threat posed by the target was remote.”—Evan Osnos, The New Yorker

“The Terror Factory is a well-researched and fast-paced exposé of the dubious tactics the FBI has used in targeting Muslim Americans with sting operations since 2001.”—Michael German, Reason

A groundbreaking work of investigative journalism into the FBI’s questionable counterterroism tactics, The Terror Factory exposes how the Bureau built a network of more than 15,000 informants after 9/11 whose primary purpose was to infiltrate Muslim communities to create and facilitate phony terrorist plots so that the Bureau could then claim it was winning the war on terror. 

This tenth anniversary edition of The Terror Factory further updates the activities of the FBI over the past decade, focusing on the Justice Department’s prosecution of hundreds of defendants on international terrorism charges that emerged from FBI stings. In many of these stings, informants or undercover agents provided all the money and weapons for the terrorist plot, and sometimes even the ideas — raising significant questions about whether any of these people would have committed crimes were it not for the FBI’s encouragement. This new edition of the book also examines how the FBI is assigning informants to infiltrate right-wing groups, in order to expand the Bureau’s counterrorism program beyond Muslim Americans.

Trevor Aaronson is a contributing writer for The Intercept and a 2020 ASU Future Security Fellow at New America. He is also author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism and creator and host of the documentary podcasts American ISIS and Chameleon: High Rollers. A two-time finalist for the Livingston Awards, Aaronson has won dozens of national and regional journalism awards for investigative reporting, feature writing and data journalism, including the Molly National Journalism Prize and the Data Journalism Award. Aaronson has discussed his reporting on national programs including CBS This Morning, NPR’s All Things Considered, This American Life and On the Media.