“I'm afraid our desire to turn the FBI into a domestic intelligence collecting agency will turn out to be a mistake. As a criminal investigator I didn't concern myself with what a particular group thought or said, but rather I concerned myself with the criminal activity they were involved in, and focused my efforts on gathering evidence of criminal acts. COINTELPRO demonstrated how poorly the government restricts itself when it is sure no one will find out what it's doing.”

−Mike German

Washington Post interview
June 6, 2005

Position: FBI agent in counterterrorism
Tenure: 1986-2002 at FBI

Mike German joined the FBI directly out of law school and devoted 16 years to domestic counter-terrorism activities. His work on two major cases led to successful prosecutions. In the first case, he posed as a neo-Nazi skinhead to infiltrate a white supremacist group planning to blow up a synagogue and an African-American church. In the second, he infiltrated a militia group planning to harm federal agents. He was highly regarded by the agency.

In 2002, German learned of a botched FBI investigation of a meeting between a domestic terrorist group and an Islamist terrorist group. Their meeting to discuss money laundering was illegally recorded by FBI agents, which made their information useless for prosecutors. In addition, he discovered that the agents had falsified their records of the event. He reported this to his manager, who did not respond, and then up the chain of command to FBI director, Robert Mueller. The agency disputed his assertion but did acknowledge that "performance issues" among the agents involved would be addressed.

Retaliation against German began immediately. His security clearance was revoked. He was taken off terrorist investigations and removed from his role in training agents. Resigning in 2004, he then discussed these events in an editorial in the Washington Post and a letter to Congress.

German reported that, after 9/11, agents with anti-terrorist experience were sidelined. He noted that the Attorney General's Guidelines required the FBI to investigate domestic groups only where there was a reasonable indication of criminality. German felt that the agency spent too much time learning everything about suspected groups without focusing on their criminal activity; that they should have focused more on organizations that produced lone terrorists like Timothy McVeigh than on the lone extremists themselves. "It's like searching every haystack for a needle. Perhaps we'd have better luck if we paid more attention to the needle factories."

The Justice Department's inspector general investigated the FBI's treatment of German and concluded that they had retaliated against him for exposing the problems in the 2002 investigation. He testified about his experience at the 9/11 Commission hearings, and testified again at a hearing of the House Subcommittee on Terrorism and National Security in February 2006. He is currently a senior fellow at Globalsecurity.org, a Washington think tank.