Enemies Within (8 page)

Inside the NYPD, the document was regarded as a masterwork, one that clearly spelled out Cohen’s view of the threat and what it would take to fight it. It was the foundation for everything the department would build. It was part autobiography, part history, and part ideology. One senior NYPD official took to calling it Cohen’s
Mein Kampf
.

In the federal courthouse blocks from ground zero, Cohen’s words carried great weight. When the new deputy commissioner for intelligence said that waiting for evidence of a crime made it impossible to fight terrorism effectively, Judge Charles Haight said he had no reason to doubt it. Cohen said that the NYPD sought only the same powers, with the same limitations, that the Justice Department had recently given the FBI. Haight had presided over the Handschu case for decades and was the one who approved the original rules. But he concluded that 9/11 required a new ruling for a new era. Again and again, Haight deferred to Cohen’s expertise. The old guidelines, the judge ruled, “addressed different perils in a different time.” The world had changed, and so, too, should the rules.

Haight did away with the requirement that the NYPD launch investigations only when it had specific evidence that a crime was being committed. And he eliminated the rule that police could use undercover officers in political investigations only when they were essential to the case. Now police could launch an investigation, including one with undercover officers, whenever there was the possibility that a crime could be committed.

The three-member panel—the one intended as a check on police authority—was stripped of its power. The board could now investigate allegations of wrongdoing after the fact but no longer had authority to decide what police could investigate. That power was placed in Cohen’s hands. He’d never been a cop, never made an arrest, never had to build a case or send someone to prison. But he was now the final word on how police collected intelligence in America’s biggest city.

Cohen had been clear about what he intended to do. But not even the Handschu lawyers could envision how Cohen’s new authority would alter the NYPD’s mission. He had been given lenient rules and the sole authority to enforce them, exactly what he’d said he needed for the NYPD to detect and disrupt a terrorist plot.

He didn’t yet know the name Najibullah Zazi, but he knew that was precisely the kind of person he needed to stop.

3

HEADING EAST

DENVER

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Zazi continued east on I-70, past grain elevators and tiny frontier towns toward the Kansas plains and miles of sunflowers. It was midmorning, and the top FBI officials in Colorado assembled in a glass-walled conference room known as the “fishbowl” in a downtown Denver federal building. The building, a relic of the 1960s, was overdue to be renovated. The wall-to-wall carpet, matted and worn in spots, was a leaf motif set in seafoam, khaki, and olive. It looked like something from a far-off-the-Strip Las Vegas casino. Depending on where you stood, the place smelled faintly of sewage.

Gathered were the field office’s senior agents, who met on every big case. But on the morning of September 9, they were joined by two unusual visitors: a case officer and an analyst from the CIA. The email address that had been traced back to Pakistan was, without question, an operational al-Qaeda address. There was no doubt about that. The CIA officials did not reveal that the NSA had been using a highly classified program called Prism to monitor the address, but such details didn’t matter to the FBI agents. Everyone in the room knew the government
monitored suspicious foreign emails—sometimes with specific warrants, sometimes without.

The CIA made clear that officials had been watching the [email protected] account for months. Five months earlier, the British Security Service, better known as MI5, arrested twelve people in the English cities of Manchester and Liverpool on suspicion of being part of a terrorist plot. The suspected ringleader had been cheerfully emailing with the supposed Sana Pakhtana about his search for a wife and plans for a
nikah
, the Arabic word for wedding.

“I met with Nadia family and we both parties have agreed to conduct the nikah after 15th and before 20th of this month,” read one email sent shortly before the arrests. “Anyways I wished you could be here as well to enjoy the party.”

The Brits were fairly sure that Sana Pakhtana was linked, either directly or indirectly, to al-Qaeda’s global operations chief, a man named Saleh al-Somali.
¹
The case against the dozen men arrested in Britain had fallen apart for lack of evidence. But that didn’t change the opinion, either in the United States or Britain, that one of al-Qaeda’s most senior operatives was behind that email account. And anyone sending chummy messages to that account represented a threat.

Jim Davis, the FBI special agent in charge, was already convinced that the Pakistani email address was serious business. He’d understood that since Steve Olson from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force first called him during a Labor Day cookout and told him about the suspicious email exchange. Davis was less certain about the Colorado email. And that’s what he wanted to know more about. Could there have been some mix-up? Email routes can be faked. Was it possible the Yahoo computer server was located in Colorado but the sender was somewhere else? The FBI had a team of agents chasing a man across the country, all because of that email. How sure was everyone about the trace?

The CIA said it was certain. The email tracked back to a computer
in an apartment in a gated town house community in Aurora, a diverse suburb that had ballooned into a city of three hundred thousand, making it equal in population to Saint Louis and Pittsburgh. A man named Mohammed Wali Zazi was renting the apartment, and the email address was registered in the name of Najib Zazi, the nickname of Mohammed’s son, Najibullah. There was no mistake.

For their part, the FBI agents at the table had seen cases like this before, and they didn’t always pan out. A surprising number of stupid but ultimately innocent people send emails to al-Qaeda addresses that they find online. Then there are the fantasists who trawl jihadist websites and talk tough in emails but who the FBI quickly determines are all talk. Everyone at the table agreed this was different.

Davis leaned forward in his chair. At nearly six foot ten, he cut an imposing figure. He had dark hair, a baritone voice, and the build of a basketball power forward. Though friends joked that he couldn’t string a noun and a verb together without some variation on the word
fuck
, he was even-keeled and easygoing.

“I need you to tell me if you have any reason to believe this isn’t what it appears to be,” he said, looking around the table. Olson from the task force was there. So were two assistant special agents in charge, Mike Rankin and Lisa Rehak. And, of course, the two CIA men. They all shook their heads. Nobody could offer an alternative explanation. And Zazi was closing in on New York.

“Okay,” Davis said. “We’re all in.”

The Denver office oversaw ten satellite FBI locations in smaller, far-flung Colorado cities such Pueblo, Grand Junction, and Glenwood Springs. Call them in, Davis said. Open up the command center. Until further notice, this was the most important FBI case in Colorado. Two time zones away, at the FBI in New York, Don Borelli was giving the same command to his team.

For both men, it was an order that carried risk. Like all large organizations, the FBI operates by the numbers. An agent is judged by the
quantity and quality of his cases. His supervisor is judged by his squad’s numbers. Redirecting people, even temporarily, inevitably meant putting other investigations on hold. In some instances, the delay would mean that agents missed their window of opportunity, and investigations would wither and die. If too many cases don’t pan out, the supervisor might be passed over for a promotion.

The first order of business in Denver was finding someone to relieve the surveillance team that had been on Zazi’s tail since early that morning. On prairie highways, truck drivers and road trippers can activate cruise control, flip on the radio, and zone out for a few hundred miles. Surveillance, however, is exhausting. An agent hiding in plain sight on an empty interstate can never shut off his brain. The team of four to eight cars following Zazi had to choreograph everything but appear entirely unscripted. They had to keep pace with the speeding car without looking like they were trying to keep up. If Zazi slowed down abruptly, the agents couldn’t slow down with him. They had to be part of the anonymous flow of traffic zipping by. But they couldn’t let him fall too far behind and slip away.

Sometimes, like when the FBI is following a suspected spy, surveillance teams can keep a close tail because the target already assumes he’s being watched. In Zazi’s case, the agents didn’t want to be spotted. If he realized he was being followed, he might abandon his plan, and the FBI wouldn’t know who else was involved. So they needed to tail him, but not too closely. Even day-trippers with nothing to hide notice the car in the rearview mirror that won’t pass.

If a target pulls into a rest stop, someone on the surveillance team has to be close behind. Two minutes alone can be enough to meet a contact, get instructions, pick up someone, or drop off a package. If a target uses a pay phone, one of the agents has to be the next person to use that phone. She’ll call an FBI number, introduce herself, and tell the voice on the other end that she’s “marking this phone.” The FBI can then trace the call and subpoena the phone company to find out what number was dialed moments earlier. Meanwhile, someone else has to
pick up the tail when the target pulls back onto the highway. There are times when an agent needs to race ahead, maybe to get gas or use the bathroom, and then catch up with his team and let someone else do the same. Other times, when stopping is impossible, surveillance agents—both men and women—turn to their empty coffee cups for relief and press on.

It was a bad day, though, for Davis to be asking for surveillance backup. The FBI was preoccupied with another terrorism case, code-named Black Medallion. Agents were closing in on two men from Chicago who’d plotted attacks overseas and helped scout locations for a systematic shooting and bombing spree in Mumbai, India. Around the country, field offices were chasing leads and conducting surveillance on potential accomplices. At FBI headquarters, the bosses told Denver that they simply had no backup team to pick up Zazi in the Midwest.

Davis had a solution. He had a team in Denver to spare, but they were many hours behind. Thanks to the traffic stop, though, they knew where Zazi was headed. There were only a few routes from Colorado to New York that made sense. He’d stay on I-70 for sure through Kansas and Missouri. The drive across those two states alone was ten hours, maybe a little less, given how fast Zazi was driving. If Davis could get his surveillance team to Missouri, it could pick up the tail as Zazi cruised by. As it happened, the Denver field office owned an old ten-seat Beechcraft King Air turboprop plane that agents used to respond quickly to remote areas of the state. Four Denver surveillance agents packed their radios and gear onto the plane, and, a few minutes after noon, they were bound for Saint Louis. Like tourists, they would rent cars at the airport. When Zazi finished crossing Missouri, they would be ready to pick up the chase.

It was well past midnight when Zazi pulled into the first rest stop in Ohio, east of the Indiana line, about forty-five minutes outside Dayton. It had been a grueling full day of driving both for him and his pursuers. There was no gas or fast food at the rest stop, just a building with bathrooms, vending machines, and tourist brochures. There were two
small parking lots, and, in the predawn quiet, the surveillance agents had to be extra careful to work unnoticed. If a bunch of cars pulled into the lot at the same time, the whole operation could be blown. One of the drivers, an FBI agent from Cleveland, steered his car to the far end of the lot, where he could observe Zazi inconspicuously. He watched as Zazi pulled the Impala into a parking spot next to a large white van. Zazi got out and went to the bathroom, and, from the agent’s vantage point, it looked like Zazi talked to the driver briefly. And though he couldn’t be sure, the agent believed he saw the van driver slip into Zazi’s car. It was a bad vantage point. He couldn’t tell if Zazi and the van driver, a white man, exchanged anything. When the van pulled away, the surveillance team was faced with a choice: split up to follow the van or have everyone stay on Zazi.

Zazi was the priority. That much had been made clear from the top levels of the FBI. Art Cummings, the bureau’s top national security agent, who sits a few doors down from the FBI director in Washington, was getting regular updates on the pursuit. Across the Potomac River, in a building known as One Liberty Crossing, Jim McJunkin oversaw the FBI’s worldwide international terrorism operations. More than once, Cummings had told McJunkin, “Don’t lose him, Jimmy.” Cummings was asleep on the leather couch in his office. Nobody wanted him to wake up to a call that Zazi was gone because half the team had followed a white van.

As the white van disappeared onto the highway, the FBI stayed put.

Zazi was observed sleeping in his car, but the bearded young man was up a short time later to continue toward New York City.

Thursday, September 10, 2009

At a morning videoconference with FBI agents from New York, New Jersey, Washington, DC, and Denver, there were more questions than answers. They still did not know what Zazi was planning or why he was
in such a hurry to get to New York that he would drive 1,800 miles in two nearly sleepless days. Certainly, on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary, the calendar was all but screaming at them. If Zazi was being directed by al-Qaeda and coordinating with a cell inside the United States, the FBI had no idea who was involved. And Cummings was ticked that the surveillance team had let the white van, maybe its best lead so far, vanish into the night.