A Counterterrorism Informant’s Drama of Trust and Betrayal

In 2017, an F.B.I. field agent named Terry Albury leaked several of the organization’s confidential policy documents to the online news site the Intercept. Albury, who was later convicted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to four years in prison, had worked for the Bureau for sixteen years—nearly half his life. Within the many pages of documents he exposed was a section saying that the F.B.I. would, as a matter of policy, refer some of its undocumented informants to ICE for deportation if it felt they were no longer of any use.

The filmmaker Julian Joslin read about this policy in 2017, not long after Albury leaked the documents. Joslin had worked as a paralegal for public defenders in New York for eight years, and had served on the defense team in eleven terrorism cases. One of his jobs was to look into the informants and determine what they had to gain, or lose, from testifying. Some had criminal charges hanging over them; others were facing immigration issues. They occupied a curious space; they were useful to—even necessary for—the law-enforcement apparatus, but not a part of it. “Investigating these informants was like a character study,” Joslin told me, in a recent interview. He dug into their motivations and their lives. “Most informants don’t just raise their hand and say, ‘I’m dying to work for the government,’ ” he said. “They often have other vulnerabilities and other incentives.”

During 2017 and 2018, Joslin wrote the short film “No Longer Suitable for Use,” a dramatic imagining of the dynamics of trust and betrayal between informants and those they turn in. In it, a fictional counterterrorism informant, Samir, must deliver the F.B.I. more suspects or else be deported. His target is a man named Hugh Gregory, a seemingly extremist convert to Islam. The two men share a meal together; Samir, nervous, worries at a ring of prayer beads. Gregory eats noisily and licks his fingers. Samir sits unhappily, wearing a suit the F.B.I. gave him, pretending to be rich and powerful. Joslin structures his film around these one-on-one interactions, in small rooms, where one person believes the other. Power switches easily. Only the F.B.I. agents, with their unblinking eyes and slow, calm voices, are immune to anxiety. The sets for their offices are based on Joslin’s conversations with a former agent, Michael German, as well as Joslin’s own firsthand experiences. “It’s in a room that looks exactly like that,” Joslin said. “They can sit there quietly, never raise their voice, but there’s this kind of quiet power to everything they say.”

Samir, too, has power over Gregory. The dynamic between the two men was inspired by real-world cases—ones in which the F.B.I. used the testimony of Middle Eastern informants to convict non-Middle Eastern converts. “The Middle Eastern informant is almost being asked to play the character of a terrorist,” Joslin said. “It’s like there’s an exoticism. Through that, you can see these non-Middle Eastern targets, looking at this informant.” Gregory is sad and angry, and he thinks Samir can help him. Samir is mournfully aware of this, and of the fact that every time he prods the other man toward real violence it benefits him.

More than anything, the word “policy” recurs; Samir’s placid F.B.I. agents invoke the term often as they force people down winding paths within the justice system. Joslin said his fictional film reflects an American attitude toward immigration that values people solely based on whether they can be useful to Americans—and, even if they are, frequently lets them down. “I think it’s how we treat interpreters in Afghanistan,” he said. In an early scene, Samir, pleading with the agents to help him get a green card, tells them he has followed their instructions for years. His F.B.I. agents respond, serenely, “We have thousands of you.”