For all that investigators have learned about the San Bernardino terrorist attack, a mystery persists: How did Syed Rizwan Farook and his wife, Tashfeen Malik—a couple with an infant, an American family, and, in the father’s case, a reputation as an easygoing colleague—maintain a hidden life as terrorists-to-be? Who did they deceive and how?
In the annals of terrorism, the clichés about attackers—the quiet neighbors, the silent coworkers, the last ones you’d expect—are unsatisfying but often true. In May, a man named Nadir Soofi attacked a Mohammed-cartoon contest in Texas; he had a nine-year-old son, a carpet-cleaning business, and a seemingly ordinary life. “He loved spending time with his son,” the gunman’s mother, Sharon Soofi, told the press. “For him to do this sort of thing and leave him behind, you know, I still can’t figure it out. And never will, probably.” After Seifeddine Rezgui opened fire on a Tunisian beach resort, in June, his mother described her son as temperamentally incapable of the crimes he was accused of: “Once there was mouse in the house and I asked Seifeddine to kill it and he refused saying, ‘I can’t kill anything.’ ” When a couple is involved, as in San Bernardino, it’s even more difficult to know from outside who led and who followed, what they hid from each other and when. After Germaine Lindsay and three other suicide bombers killed fifty-six people in London, in 2005, Lindsay’s British wife, Samantha Lewthwaite, initially told reporters that she was “horrified” by the crime and “abhorred” her husband’s role in it. But eventually Lewthwaite, a mother of three, disappeared, and she has since been accused of plotting the Westgate Mall attacks in Nairobi, making her one of the world’s most-wanted suspected terrorists.
The mystery of double lives persists partly because extremists are rarely available, after the fact, to explain the mechanics of their deception. But, by approaching the question from a slightly different angle, two researchers have illuminated the psychology of how extremists hide their tendencies from relatives and co-workers. Over nearly a decade, Pete Simi, at the University of Nebraska Omaha, and Robert Futrell, of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, interviewed eighty-nine white supremacists—skinheads, Klansmen, neo-Nazis—with the goal of understanding what the researchers call “strategies of calculated concealment and revelation.”
They noticed patterns. In many cases, newly converted zealots do not understand the level of resentment and fear that their new views will engender. Occasionally, they try to explain to parents and friends their changed view of the world, only to discover, as one white supremacist put it, that “when I did they ranted and raved about me being an evil Nazi and racist.” So, they learn to cope–to hide tattoos from employers; to listen to White Power music on headphones at work, as a form of private rebellion; to lie low at family gatherings, and avoid inflaming the people whom new friends describe as “normals.” Mack, a member of the Aryan Front, said, “My philosophy on the family front is to just keep the preaching down to a minimum. I hide my white pride stuff, do the typical suck up crap.” An activist whom the researchers call Charlie recalled, “I finally said screw it and ordered a basic swastika flag and they hated it. So I just keep the flags in my room in a box with some other stuff I collect and that way it doesn’t cause any problems.”
One of the particular cruelties of the San Bernardino attacks was that Farook and his wife assaulted his colleagues at the county Department of Public Health, many of whom he had known for years. They had thrown him a baby shower. On the day of the assault, he had spent the morning with them. It’s not clear how long he was living a deception, presenting a portrait at odds with his views. Richard, an Aryan Nationalist interviewed by Simi and Futrell, explained that living a calculated deception fortified his sense of grievance and victimhood: “I know that I’d be unemployable in my field if colleagues learned about me being white power . . . but it is galling to have to concede even that much to the racial enemy. I’ve found that life involves trade-offs.”
In their paper “Negotiating White Power Activist Stigma,” published in the journal Social Problems, in 2009, Simi and Futrell quoted a white supremacist in Southern California who had rationalized the banal necessity of making a living: “A pure white homeland is not going to happen in a big shoot-out tomorrow afternoon. We’ve got to deal with what we have in front of us. For many white nationalists that means blacks at work, Jew bosses, you name it . . . If you’re going to be a racialist you have to know who you are, in your mind, and what you believe but that doesn’t mean you can’t at the same time live in the world and deal with it.”
On the American racist fringe, there is a divide: some activists shave their heads and greet each other with Hitler salutes; others share similar beliefs but choose to conceal their identities and mock their counterparts as “costume Nazis.” (In return, skinheads deride their understated peers, who express themselves mostly online, as the “chairborne division.”) At its horrific extremes, concealed in the hidden life is a sense of menace that can be hard to grasp. Terry, a member of the neo-Nazi American Front, described to Simi and Futrell the way he makes peace with the diversity in his wife’s workplace. “She works with a couple of black girls. They’re not her friends, so to speak, but they are very close, as everybody is,” he said. “The black workers are work associates that she will talk to and never be rude to. But I help her understand that, in the time of war, we are to cut their heads off.”
The lengths that people go to hide hideous thoughts—and the concurrent sense that we do not know those among us—is an unnerving phenomenon. It is also ripe for political manipulation. The bigot in search of a rationale can explain his suspicions of Muslim neighbors and co-workers by imagining a hidden world. (The statistics should undermine those particular suspicions: In the years since 9/11, Americans have been attacked more than twice as many times by homegrown far-right terrorists as by Islamic terrorists.) We study the mechanics of crime not to fan our paranoias, but, rather, to defuse them—to tether our imaginations to facts. To keep ourselves truly safe, we have to acknowledge that some of the worst among us hide in plain sight, but also recognize the difference between the hidden and the unfamiliar. It is comforting to assume the latter is the threat. That would be a mistake.
