Enemies Within (34 page)

Medunjanin became confrontational when agents asked if he knew anything about a planned attack on the United States.

No, he replied, adding, “We don’t want this war.”

Medunjanin said that as a US citizen, he opposed the 9/11 attacks and killing civilians. It was up to Allah, however, to lead his heart the way it needed to go. And he said Americans hated Muslims. The hostility Muslims felt toward the US was because of its support for Israel, he said.

Medunjanin crossed his arms in front of him.

Why did you do that? the agents asked.

He was emulating the Prophet Muhammad, he said, crossing his arms to show strength in front of his enemies.

Medunjanin said he’d done nothing wrong and was willing to take a lie detector test to prove it. The agents said they could arrange one immediately. Medunjanin quickly changed his mind.

The scene was similar at Zarein Ahmedzay’s apartment. While agents searched his things, he sat in a parked car for hours, telling his life story and repeating the rehearsed lies about the trip to Pakistan.
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Ahmedzay and Zazi had returned home to see their wives, he said. Medunjanin went there hoping to marry.

Ahmedzay and Medunjanin had suspected the authorities might come for them. But Naiz Khan, Zazi’s old friend from the neighborhood who’d offered him a place to sleep Thursday night, had no warning before the SWAT team arrived.

The agents questioned all five people living there and a sixth who’d been visiting for two weeks, sleeping on the couch. Khan was honest with the agents. He told them that Zazi had approached him in the mosque, needing somewhere to stay. He recognized photos of Medunjanin and Ahmedzay but did not know their names. Khan, like Zazi, was an immigrant from Afghanistan by way of Pakistan. The agents asked about his trips to Pakistan. Khan explained that he’d left his wife and two children behind as he tried to make a life for himself, first as a coffee cart vendor and perhaps one day as a cabdriver.

“Please, help me bring my wife here,” Khan said. “And then I won’t need to go to Pakistan anymore.”
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When FBI agents searching the apartment found an electric scale and calculator in the closet, Khan was adamant: He’d never seen them. Then the agents opened a green suitcase. Inside were nine backpacks. There were enough for Zazi, Medunjanin, Ahmedzay, the five roommates, and the visitor on the couch.

Khan tried to explain. The backpacks belonged to his uncle, who also lived in the apartment. Khan’s mother got them from a friend in the Bronx, whose husband got them from a wholesaler that went out of business. What were they doing in the closet? Why do a coffee cart operator and his uncle need nine backpacks? Khan said they planned to send them to relatives in Pakistan.

The story was true. But it sounded unbelievable, like the lies that Ahmedzay and Medunjanin were spinning to FBI agents a few blocks away.

Monday, September 14, 2009

It would take time for the experts to analyze the computers and for the scientists to test for explosives, but as the sun came up on Monday the fourteenth, the FBI was no closer to proving that Zazi had come to New York to launch an attack. The agents still didn’t know what he and his friends had been plotting or how they fit into al-Qaeda’s plans.

Now the FBI faced a new wrinkle: The driver of the white van from the rest stop in Ohio five days earlier was speeding toward New York.

While Zazi and his friends had kept FBI agents in New York and Denver occupied, the white van had been the singular focus of the FBI’s Cleveland field office and its boss, Frank Figliuzzi.

Figliuzzi hadn’t paid attention the night of September 9, when his surveillance team was dispatched to follow Zazi across Ohio. Cleveland
was Ohio’s largest FBI office, and his team was often out of town helping on someone else’s case. Nobody had told Figliuzzi about the apparent predawn encounter between Zazi and the driver of the white van at the highway rest stop. So he was caught off guard when Mike Heimbach, the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, called from headquarters a few hours afterward.

“Frank, what the fuck is going on?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Figliuzzi said. “Calm down.”

Before Ohio, Figliuzzi worked at headquarters running the Inspections Division, the FBI equivalent of a police department’s internal affairs bureau. He knew Heimbach and could tell by the urgency in his voice that something big was going on. He promised to figure things out and call back with answers.

The license plate on the white Chevy van came back registered to a courier company located just off the grounds of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Like Zazi and his family, the man in the white van had easy access to an airport. If Zazi had passed him a bomb, it could be nearly anywhere by now. Figliuzzi sent an agent up to the airport to check out the company and find the white van. When the report came back, Figliuzzi’s heart sank. The parking lot was full of white vans, and it wasn’t clear whether they were assigned to specific drivers, meaning that the man from the rest stop might be driving a different van each day.

Since that moment, the Cleveland office, like Denver and New York, had been running a command center around the clock. Customs agents pulled all the shipping documents linked to the courier company, looking for international arrivals. Pay special attention to shipments from the Middle East, Figliuzzi told them. Anything biochemical, anything hazardous, find it immediately.

The FBI was looking for a bomb in New York, and now there was a missing courier driving around Ohio with who knew what. Until they
found the driver, Figliuzzi wanted an FBI tail on every van that pulled out of that parking lot.

Figliuzzi listened again to his surveillance team’s story: Zazi had returned from the rest stop bathroom, and it looked as though he and the courier had chatted. The view had been poor, but it appeared as though the courier got into Zazi’s car and then disappeared from view.

Next, Figliuzzi consulted with the Ohio State Highway Patrol, which covered that stretch of I-70. By that Saturday, the FBI agents in Ohio were coalescing around a theory about what had happened in that rest stop before dawn.

This was not going to be an easy phone call.

“What’s your theory?” Mike Heimbach asked.
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Figliuzzi paused.

“You need to know. We’re hearing the area is a known spot for gay liaisons.”

Now it was Heimbach’s turn to pause.

“Do you want me to tell the director of the FBI that’s your best theory?”

Figliuzzi said they were still working on it.

By Sunday, while Borelli was preparing for the raids in New York, Figliuzzi’s agents had identified the courier. He was a young white man, and there was nothing in his background that made him an obvious threat. A surveillance team followed him as he sped around the state. Viewed as a potential terrorist, he appeared erratic and suspicious. Viewed as an innocent courier, he appeared in a rush to make deliveries.

The company was clean. None of the international shipments suggested any problems. Figliuzzi and his agents decided to approach the owner and set up a meeting with the driver. They made up a cover story and sent an agent into the office.

Sorry, the manager said. He won’t be around for a few days. He’s driving to New York on a delivery.

The surveillance team confirmed that, yes, the white van was heading east at high speed.

It was Zazi all over again. They could not let the van into the city without knowing whether it carried a bomb.

The FBI investigation had gone overt. After the tip-off from Afzali and the predawn raids, all the suspects knew they were being watched. There was no sense trying another ruse like the one that had failed on the George Washington Bridge.

Police stopped the white Chevy shortly before eight o’clock as it crawled toward the Lincoln Tunnel in Monday rush-hour traffic. This time, someone from the Joint Terrorism Task Force, someone with security clearances, was there to oversee it. The instructions from FBI headquarters in Washington had been explicit: Look for bottles, jugs, anything that could carry liquids. The driver allowed police and an explosives dog to search the van. Nothing.

The courier showed police his shipping documents. He was delivering an eight-by-three-foot sign to Macy’s department store at Herald Square in Manhattan, where the Thanksgiving parade ended each year. He showed them the package. Investigators photographed the van, its contents, and the thoroughly confused courier. Fifteen minutes after being stopped, he was on his way.

It was another dead end. The agents were getting frustrated and exhausted.

Borelli had gone home to shower and to catch an hour or two of sleep after the raids. When he returned, he met with one of the team leaders, who mentioned casually the backpacks seized from Khan’s apartment.

Backpacks? Nobody had told Borelli about backpacks.

The backpacks were noted in a summary of the raids that was sent to headquarters. As happened with the water jug and the white van, everyone up the chain of command got agitated. They wanted to know why the backpacks weren’t on their way to the FBI laboratory in Quantico.

“There was a closetful of backpacks and nobody thought they mattered?” Heimbach barked.

The blame fell first on Joe Demarest, the top agent in New York, who promised to take care of it. Borelli was next. Though Demarest had led the raids out in Queens, Borelli had been in charge of logistics. Demarest said he should’ve had a plan to react to the backpacks.

“You got twenty-five years in the FBI!” Demarest shouted in a room off the command center. “I can’t believe you fucked this up!”

Borelli apologized.

An al-Qaeda-trained bomber was slipping through the FBI’s grasp. Borelli was demoralized. In Denver, FBI agents watched and eavesdropped on Zazi to no good end. The top FBI agent there, Jim Davis, wondered if they’d ever catch a break.

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PEOPLE DIE TO COME HERE

DENVER

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Zazi saw reports about the raids on television. Every news channel carried the story. His friend Naiz Khan described FBI agents storming his apartment with guns. Reporters said the investigation focused on a man from the Midwest who’d driven to New York for the weekend.

Soon after returning to Denver, Zazi had opened his laptop and noticed something odd. The battery was fully charged. It hadn’t been when he used it before putting it in the rental car.
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The mysterious car thief had charged his computer. He took the laptop to the garage, unscrewed the base, and removed the hard drive. He destroyed the drive with a knife and threw it away.

Things had been quiet in Denver since then. The television made clear, however, that his problems had not gone away. Reporters said that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had issued a bulletin warning police nationwide about homemade bombs, specifically TATP. New York newspapers said the FBI was asking about someone named Najibullah from Colorado.

Zazi needed a lawyer.

From a shared office across from a strip mall on the outskirts of Denver, Arthur Folsom defended drunken drivers and handled divorces and minor drug cases. In fact, the thirty-seven-year-old with wispy brown hair was in the middle of fighting his own marijuana possession charge. Since graduating from the University of Denver College of Law, Folsom had never tried a federal criminal case. His law firm’s website featured five links dedicated to lawyer jokes.

Zazi arrived early that morning without an appointment, hoping to speak with one of the other lawyers in the office, who’d helped a friend incorporate a business. That lawyer was in court, so Folsom ushered Zazi into a conference room and listened to his story. Zazi said his friends in New York were up to something. He suspected that the FBI had searched his car. They may have found some old chemistry notes that looked suspicious but were harmless.
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Folsom gave his new client a stack of business cards to hand out to anyone who asked questions. He told Zazi to keep quiet.

•  •  •

Zazi’s uncle Naqib Jaji had worried about the chemicals in his garage for months. He and his wife had taken in their nephew when he first arrived in Colorado looking for work in January 2009. Zazi had grown a beard and was quicker to steer the conversation toward religion than the boy Naqib had known growing up. Naqib would occasionally see his nephew on the computer looking at videos. One appeared to be about the Taliban. Another showed tanks exploding.
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One night in July, Zazi entered the modest suburban house through the garage rather than through the front door as he normally did. Suspicious, Naqib went to the garage and looked around. Inside the refrigerator there, he found lab goggles, a scale, a mask, nail polish remover, and what looked like bleach.

Naqib called his nephew downstairs.

“What the hell is this?” he asked.

Zazi explained that he and his wife had been unable to have a baby. The last time he visited her in Pakistan, he said, a doctor gave him a recipe for a medicine that would help. Zazi waved a piece of white paper as proof. He swore that’s what the chemicals were for.

Naqib remained suspicious. Fertility medicine from bleach and nail polish remover? His nephew had been adamant, though. He decided to pray, asking God to deliver the young man and his bride the baby they wanted so badly.
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Zazi had moved in with his parents when they arrived in Aurora a few weeks later, leaving the chemicals behind. Now he was back from an unusual trip to New York, and an imam had called saying that the FBI was asking questions. The raids in Queens were big news. Naqib remembered the chemicals in his garage. He feared his nephew had been trying to cook up a bomb.

His wife, Rabia, delivered the message to her brother, Mohammed Zazi: There were chemicals in the garage. If anything happened, if the government came looking for them, Rabia said, she and her husband weren’t responsible.
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