Enemies Within (13 page)

Berdecia’s initial optimism and enthusiasm about the Demographics Unit gave way to a growing frustration. Nothing his team did ever led to an arrest or generated leads on terrorist plots. While the Debriefing Team was out talking to people, helping spot potential informants, and trying to glean information, the rakers were spending their days sipping tea in cafés. They never received specialized training, so their reports contained numerous errors. Dino’s European Hair Style was put in a file because police noted that the owner was Albanian. But in reality, owner Sammy Eirovic was from Montenegro. Similarly, Sephardic Jews and Lebanese Christians were mistaken for Syrians.
³⁵

And because nobody ever trained the rakers on what exactly qualified as suspicious, they reported anything they heard, even political
speech. One Muslim man made it into police files even though he
praised
President Bush’s State of the Union address and said that people who criticized the US government didn’t realize how good they have it. Two men of Pakistani ancestry were included for saying that the nation’s policies had become increasingly anti-Muslim since 9/11. Muslims who criticized the US use of drones to launch missiles in Pakistan were also documented.
³⁶

Over time, the reports all began to look the same to Berdecia. The rakers were never given a specific lead to check out, and, no matter how detailed their reports, they never became criminal cases. It felt like gathering information for its own sake.

Sometimes, it felt worse.

Berdecia began to notice on expense reports that his rakers frequently visited the same businesses, like the Kabul Kabob House in Flushing, Queens, which was owned by a soft-spoken blond Persian named Shorah Dorudi, who’d fled Iran after the Islamic revolution in 1979. When Berdecia asked whether there was a problem there, whether there was a threat that should be reported up the chain of command, he was told they were routine follow-up visits. But a look at the reports showed nothing worth following up on. That’s when Berdecia realized that, in the hunt for terrorists, his detectives gravitated toward the best food.
³⁷

Occasionally, Berdecia would see receipts for up to $40 at Middle Eastern sweetshops. The Demographics Unit had thousands of dollars to spend on meals and incidental expenses so police would look like ordinary customers—costs that are known as “cover concealment.” But Berdecia argued that you could eavesdrop just as well over a $2 cup of coffee. Sometimes, the receipts showed, detectives were buying a bunch of pastries late in the afternoon before heading home.

If there were terrorist cells operating in New York, Berdecia wondered, why weren’t they making cases? That’s how they’d dismantled drug gangs in the Bronx. Gang members, like terrorists, were secretive,
insular, and dangerous. Years earlier, when Berdecia’s wife and newborn son had arrived home from the hospital, five officers guarded them because of gang threats.

Berdecia had talented detectives with invaluable language skills. It nagged at him to see them sitting around eating kebabs and buying pastries, hoping to stumble onto something. If it was worth writing up a report, then it was worth conducting an investigation. He was paying overtime so detectives could march in parades and take pictures, but they never generated a single lead, never pursued anyone, or built cases.

•  •  •

So in the fall of 2009, as Intel scoured its records for information on Najibullah Zazi and his friends, Berdecia was not surprised to find that the Demographics files had offered no early warning about the three men and no hint about what they were planning. It was not for lack of trying. The NYPD had been in Zazi’s neighborhood restaurants, like the Kabul Kabob House. Police had a file on the YMCA near his old apartment because it doubled as a gym and a cheap place to stay. Detectives had visited his mosque, up the street from his family’s apartment. They’d even secretly visited American Best Travel & Tours, the travel agency where Zazi bought tickets to Pakistan. The rakers took note of the agency’s year-round travel packages for Muslims to make the holy pilgrimage to Mecca, Saudi Arabia. But that didn’t offer much help finding the suspected terrorist at the ticket counter.

After years of raking, the NYPD knew where New York’s Muslims were. They still didn’t know where the terrorists were.

And they didn’t know anything about Zazi, Medunjanin, or Ahmedzay. At this moment, when it mattered the most, the files told them nothing.

5

THE ACCIDENTAL TOURISTS

Late in the afternoon, Najibullah Zazi parked the red Impala in front of a run-down brick apartment building at 41-18 Parsons Boulevard in Flushing. The street was busy with cars and the sidewalks crowded with people, a typical day in Flushing. Zazi sat for a minute, peering through the windshield.

The FBI agents who tracked the Impala across Manhattan from the bridge had no idea what to expect next. One of the agents watching Zazi from inside an unmarked sedan radioed in on an encrypted frequency and made a note in the log. It was 4:32 p.m.

The agents saw Zarein Ahmedzay, whom they’d been watching for the past twenty-four hours, approach the car from the apartment building. Zazi got out, leaned into Ahmedzay, and said something out of earshot of the watching FBI agents. He motioned to Ahmedzay to follow him to the back of the car and popped open the trunk.

Ahmedzay looked around, picked something out of the trunk, and ran back inside the building with it.

•  •  •

Zazi and Ahmedzay were the sons of refugees, children who arrived in the United States in the great wave of Afghan migration during the
1980s and 1990s, precipitated by the Soviet war. They were born in different countries—Pakistan and Afghanistan—but ended up in the same neighborhood when their parents found comfort in the close-knit Afghan community of Queens. Originally settled by the Dutch, the borough has always been a patchwork of immigrant areas: German, Irish, Greek, and Italian. In the past three decades, Queens had become a kaleidoscope of nations, with immigrants from mainland China, the former Soviet Union, Latin America, and, increasingly, Central and Southeast Asia. Detach Queens from the four other boroughs that compose New York City, and it would rank among the largest city in the country, with a population of more than 2.2 million.

Along with the habits and folkways of their former homes, Queens residents have imported their likes and dislikes. In Astoria, across the East River from Manhattan, an Egyptian chef built a restaurant around his recipe for cow brains with caper sauce, making a delicacy of the offal usually discarded in American cooking. Hookah joints dot neighborhoods, drawing older Middle Eastern men and their American-reared sons to smoke flavored tobacco, or
shisha
. They watched the news on Al Jazeera or music videos from overseas, just as their European counterparts in adjacent neighborhoods might gather to watch satellite soccer broadcasts and drink Czech beer at a century-old Bohemian beer hall. At scattered cafés, they sip tea and play backgammon, chatting in their native tongues about their children, their jobs, or about politics and the corrupt governments that made a future in their homelands untenable.

The thread binding these diverse neighborhoods is the subway’s No. 7 train, its elevated tracks making an elbow bend through northern Queens, tracing the rooftops of brownstones and bodegas marked with colorful graffiti. Among Middle Easterners and South Asians, the No. 7 is known as the “Orient Express,” though it winds through considerably less romantic places than the legendary Paris-to-Istanbul train: Astoria, Woodside, Jackson Heights, Elmhurst, Corona. The last stop on the line
is Flushing, a forty-five-minute trip from Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan, and the place where Zazi’s family made its home.

The Zazis came to the United States because it offered something better than what they had in Afghanistan, one of the poorest countries in the world. Born in 1955, Najibullah Zazi’s father, Mohammed Wali Zazi, endured a marginal early life in the capital, Kabul, a dusty city ringed by mountains. Soviet-style architecture, drab and gray, dominated the landscape.

The eldest of eleven brothers and sisters, Mohammed Zazi dropped out of school at sixteen to provide for the family. He found work driving a truck, an unforgiving job in a country where the roads were mostly unpaved and deadly. The trucking business offered few prospects for Mohammed. After an accident in which his truck was badly wrecked, he decided to look for opportunities beyond Afghanistan’s fractious borders. Like thousands of his countrymen, Mohammed chose to go to what, in the oil-shock era of the 1970s, seemed like a Muslim promised land: Saudi Arabia. He left Kabul on the pretext of making the religious pilgrimage known as the hajj, and tried to make a living in construction. Over the next six years, he moved from city to city as the Saudi infrastructure grew, and sent what money he could back to his family. Conditions in his home country grew steadily worse. In 1979 the Soviets invaded Afghanistan to prop up the teetering Marxist government. The Red Army laid waste to the country as it battled the freedom fighters known as the mujahideen.

The war in Afghanistan created a humanitarian disaster, even for urban dwellers like the Zazis. No family was left unscathed. In a country of roughly fifteen million,
¹
more than a million Afghans died. Many millions more became refugees as they fled the destruction wrought over nine years of conflict. Many headed two hundred miles east to Peshawar, a bustling city across the Pakistani border. It was a city of sprawling refugee camps, a place where the mujahideen bought weapons. Mohammed’s parents and siblings joined the flood. Mohammed
left Saudi Arabia and reunited with his family in one of Peshawar’s camps, bringing with him enough money to find a wife. He married Sultan Bibi, his cousin, who had also fled Afghanistan’s dangers and poverty.

Bibi gave birth to two children in the squalid conditions of their refugee camp. A daughter, Merwari, came first, followed by Najibullah, born August 10, 1985, a son to make a father proud.

•  •  •

Mohammed sought a path to North America, as so many other Afghans had done. Following an unsuccessful attempt to find a smuggler to sneak him to Canada, he went back to Saudi Arabia and applied for a visa to the United States. In 1990, after the weary and battered Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, Mohammed, now thirty-five, flew to New York.

Flushing had an insulated and proud Afghan community numbering in the thousands long before Mohammed arrived. The neighborhood was a reflection of Afghanistan itself. There were Uzbeks, Tajiks, Hazaras—descendants of the fearsome Mongols—and Pashtuns like himself, members of the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Like most of the Afghans in Flushing, Mohammed prayed at Abu Bakr, a house that had been converted into a mosque. Established in 1987, the mosque was a central fixture of Flushing’s “Little Afghanistan.” It sat on a quiet street lined with leafy oaks and prosperous homes, and it was named after the Prophet Muhammad’s father-in-law, who ruled after the Prophet’s death in AD 632. While Abu Bakr anchored the Afghans to their faith, it was more than a place to pray the five times a day required by Islam. It was the focal point of the community, where immigrants could trade neighborhood gossip, mourn their dead, and discuss whatever recent disaster had swept over Afghanistan.

In the years before Mohammed came to the United States, the Afghans
at Abu Bakr had rallied to the cause of the mujahideen fighting a holy war to oust the Soviets. Many of these men were deeply religious and believed that it was their duty as Muslims to expel the godless Soviets. With the Cold War still on, the mujahideen, considered guerrillas by the Red Army, were seen in America as allies in the battle against Communism. Television reporters trekked to the front lines in Pakistan to interview the men they glamorized. Members of Congress championed their cause, and the CIA secretly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to them and supplied missiles to shoot down the Soviet helicopter gunships that strafed villages.

A sticker on the wall inside the popular Flushing Afghan-owned Kennedy Fried Chicken restaurant proclaimed, “I Love Afghanistan.”
²
The owner, Abdul Karim, spoke openly in favor of the Islamic fighters and sent money home. “We are mujahideen,” Karim said in 1988. “We wish to return, but it has to be a Muslim country and a new-fashioned government.”
³
Around the corner, not far from Abu Bakr, a man named Imam Saifur Rehman Halimi, a member of an Islamic anti-Soviet organization called Hezb-i-Islami, opened the Afghan Mujahideen Information Bureau. At the time, Hezb-i-Islami’s leader, Hekmatyar Gulbuddin, was an ally of the United States and on the CIA payroll. More than a decade later, the word
mujahideen
would take on a very different context in New York. And America would want former allies like Gulbuddin dead.

In 1989, with the war finally over, many in Flushing hoped their country would return to the relative prosperity it enjoyed in the decades prior. But some approached the future with wariness. They were concerned that the victorious Islamist factions would curtail freedoms and institute a harsh interpretation of Muslim law known as Sharia in a nation once known for its relative liberalism. “There will be no room for artists if the fundamentalists take over,” Amanullah Haiderzad, the former dean of the College of Fine Arts at Kabul University, predicted at the time.
⁴

The skeptics were right to be worried. In the vacuum left behind by the retreating Soviets, a ruinous civil war consumed the country. Warlords from the many tribes fought to take Kabul, which was still controlled by a pro-Soviet regime in 1992, leaving Uzbeks and Tajiks battling Pashtuns for power. Afghans were now dying at the hands of Afghans. The internecine fighting continued until Kabul had been destroyed. The schisms found their way to Flushing, where the growing community began replicating what was happening at home, fragmenting and splitting along tribal lines.