NEW YORK—The hearing for a Maryland woman accused of acting as an unregistered agent for the Iraqi Intelligence Service began yesterday at the U.S. District Court in Manhattan. Ex-journalist and self-proclaimed anti-war activist Susan Lindauer, 48, was arrested in 2004 on charges of accepting $10,000 from the Iraqi government in 2002, according to the Center for Counterintelligence Web site.
A reporter and a professor who have known Lindauer since the early 90s testified at Lindauer's hearing today. They reported that she was close to individuals in intelligence circles.
She allegedly met with an undercover FBI agent who was posing as a representative of the Libyan intelligence service and was seeking to support resistance groups fighting U.S. forces in post-war Iraq, according to the Center for Counterintelligence Web site.
Lindauer worked as a press secretary for several Democratic senators and representatives before she became a reporter.
Parke Godfrey, an assistant professor at Toronto's York University, met Lindauer in the fall of 1990. He called her a "mercurial" character, at times highly enthusiastic about her work, at other times depressed.
Godfrey said that before 9/11, Lindauer warned him not to take a job in New York City because she had a "premonition" that the city would be "dangerous, that there would be a big attack in southern Manhattan." He also said that Lindauer predicted a "war went very badly," referring to a protracted war in the Middle East.
Eight psychiatrists and mental evaluations have found Lindauer to be mentally incompetent to stand trial. She was known to have been highly suspicious of being spied on. In 1998, she claimed that her house was bugged "with listening devices and cameras" and "little red laser lights in the shower vent."
Lindauer spoke to reporters after the hearing, saying she was "horrified to be left out to dry and scapegoated," and that the U.S. government "didn't want to acknowledge [her] work because it was damning to the White House."
The second part of her hearing, in which two experts will testify, will be held on July 7.
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