by Matt Apuzzo
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INSIDE THE NYPD’S
SECRET SPYING UNIT
AND
BIN LADEN’S FINAL PLOT
AGAINST AMERICA
CONTENTS
Epigraph
Prologue
ONE The Marriage Is Ready
TWO A Spy in New York
THREE Heading East
FOUR Demographics
FIVE The Accidental Tourists
SIX Zone Defense
SEVEN Ostermann
EIGHT Mosques
NINE The American Who Brings Good News
TEN In the Wind
ELEVEN Flight
TWELVE People Die to Come Here
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
About Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman
Notes
Index
To our wives. Without you, nothing is possible.
Beware of the words internal security, for they are the eternal cry of the oppressor.
—VOLTAIRE
PROLOGUE
AURORA, COLORADO
Sunday, September 6, 2009
The bomber handled the chemicals carefully, just as they’d taught him. No need to rush anything and blow off his hand, or worse. A few years earlier, a curious college student in Texas had tried the same thing in his kitchen. A 911 dispatcher listened to him die howling, begging for help as flames engulfed his body.
Mix hydrogen peroxide and acetone, and nothing happens. The chemicals swirl around next to each other. In the presence of acid, though, they form the basis for a powerful explosion. The bomber’s acid of choice was muriatic acid, which he bought at a Lowe’s. Muriatic acid is used to treat swimming pools and clean concrete. But when it’s poured slowly into a mixture of hydrogen peroxide and acetone, clumps of white crystals appear. It looks like sugar, but it is as explosive as it is unstable.
The bomber used the Homestead Studio Suites kitchenette as his lab. He’d tried working in his aunt’s garage, but when she saw all the chemicals, she and her husband got suspicious and made him pour them down the drain. Nobody would bother him here. Unable to pay their rent, many residents had recently been kicked out of their apartments. Cats slept in windows. Children played in the parking lot alongside cars packed with furniture and clothes.
Forty dollars cash for a night in room 207. The bedspread was rough, and only the whir of the refrigerator drowned out the pulse of the highway. But he was not there to rest. He chose the motel because of its kitchen. It was a simple setup: builder-grade cabinets, a dingy white laminate countertop, and, most importantly, a stainless-steel, two-burner electric stove.
He had everything he needed. For weeks he’d been visiting beauty supply stores, filling his carts with hydrogen peroxide and nail polish remover. At the Beauty Supply Warehouse, among the rows of wigs, braids, and extensions, the manager knew him as Jerry. He said his girlfriend owned hair salons. There was no reason to doubt him.
On pharmacy shelves, in the little brown plastic bottles, hydrogen peroxide is a disinfectant, a sting-free way to clean scrapes. Beauty salons use a more concentrated version to bleach hair or activate hair dyes. At even higher concentrations, it burns the skin. It is not flammable on its own, but when it reacts with other chemicals, it quickly releases oxygen, creating an environment ripe for explosions. At its highest concentrations, hydrogen peroxide can be rocket fuel. Even with a cheap stove, it’s easy to simmer water out of hydrogen peroxide, leaving behind something more potent. It takes time, and he had plenty of that.
He added the muriatic acid and watched as the chemicals crystallized. The crystals are known as triacetone triperoxide, or TATP. A spark, electrical current, even a bit of friction can set off an explosion. If there’s too much acid, or the balance of acetone and hydrogen peroxide isn’t quite right, the reaction will speed out of control and trigger a chemical blast.
This was the moment when things often went wrong in basement laboratories, but he had done this before. A year earlier, he made his first batch under the watchful eye of his mentor. Then, a week ago, he made a practice sample in this same hotel. He took the finished product to an out-of-the-way spot, ignited it with a strand of Christmas tree lights and a battery, and watched it explode.
The white crystal compound had been popular among Palestinian terrorists. It was cheap and powerful, but its instability earned it the nickname “Mother of Satan.” Once, an amateur bomb maker in the Mojave Desert had walked under a stretch of power lines. The electrical charge in the air was enough to detonate his TATP blasting caps and send paramedics rushing to his aid. Now most professional terrorists preferred to use it in only the smallest of quantities as the detonator for a bigger bomb. Even the average suicide bomber didn’t want to carry around large amounts.
The volatile reaction was precisely the reason that all but the tiniest containers of liquids were banned on airplanes. A terrorist who boarded with a large shampoo bottle full of the right chemicals could conceivably create TATP in midair. It was unlikely, but the US government concluded that it was too risky to chance. One tablespoon of crystals was enough to blow through a cinder block. One cup could rip open the hull of an airplane.
The young bomber wanted to cook up two pounds.
When he was done mixing, he rinsed the crystals with baking soda and water to make his creation more stable. He placed the finished product in a wide-rimmed glass jar about the size of a coffee tin and inspected his work. There would be enough for three detonators. Three detonators inside three backpacks filled with a flammable mixture and ball bearings—the same type of weapon that left 52 dead in London in 2005.
There was more work to be done. He had to finish the main charge, a mixture of flour and cooking oil. Concealed in a backpack and ignited by the TATP, these household ingredients would create a massive dust explosion and fireball. That could come later. The hardest part was complete.
He was ready for New York.
1
THE MARRIAGE IS READY
NEW YORK
Wednesday, September 9, 2009
The address of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, the hub for all law enforcement intelligence in America’s most populous city, is not advertised. The office is in a block-long brick–and–terra-cotta building at the western edge of Manhattan’s gentrified Chelsea neighborhood. A half century ago, it was part of a Nabisco factory complex producing Oreo cookies and saltine crackers. Today the giant rows of industrial ovens on the tenth floor have been replaced by a sterile government office suite, unadvertised and unremarkable.
From that floor, Assistant Special Agent in Charge Don Borelli had one of the most spectacular views in the city. Sitting at his desk, he could see the Hudson River, Lower Manhattan, and the construction cranes clustered around ground zero, where terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. On a clear day, he could see the Statue of Liberty in the distance.
At forty-eight, Borelli retained the laid-back cool of his Southern California childhood. He had a strong jaw and a full head of dark hair. His office was decorated with mementos of a nearly twenty-
four-year FBI career. Plaques noted his tenure as one of the FBI’s top agents in Jordan. Souvenir rugs commemorated his time in Pakistan. There he interrogated and won a confession from a scientist working to obtain anthrax for the terrorist group al-Qaeda. And he had fingerprinted and photographed senior al-Qaeda member Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a would-be hijacker who was whisked off to a CIA secret prison. On his desk, Borelli kept a prescription bottle labeled “Prozac.” He’d gotten the container from a pharmacist friend and filled it with M&M’s, a bit of dark humor aimed at newcomers who dropped in and saw the boss hard at work, apparently crunching away on antidepressants.
It was an unremarkable late-summer Wednesday, a bit cloudy with a gentle breeze. Borelli occupied the morning by looking at intelligence reports indicating that a terrorist named Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan might soon emerge from hiding in Africa. The FBI had been looking for Nabhan since 1998, when Borelli was sent to Kenya as part of the team that responded to al-Qaeda’s twin bomb attacks on the US embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. The attacks left hundreds of local civilians dead, along with the targeted Americans. More than a decade later, he didn’t see anything in the new reports to suggest that a break in the case was imminent. Rumors circulated all the time. Everyone would get spun up, but leads like this one almost always turned out to be nothing.
The phone on his desk rang.
It was Bill Sweeney, calling from the Counterterrorism Division at FBI headquarters in Washington.
“You up to speed on High Rise?” Sweeney asked.
Borelli had the highest level of security clearance and was privy to intelligence from across the globe that had anything to do with New York. As a supervisor of the country’s largest counterterrorism task force, the one designated to protect America’s number one target, Borelli was expected to know about problems before headquarters called. But there were thousands of open cases, and he’d never heard of this one.
“What’s High Rise?” he said.
Sweeney paused. They were talking on the general line, not the secure, encrypted phone.
“You better get up to speed,” Sweeney advised. “It’s coming at you, ninety miles per hour.”
Even as one of the office’s most senior people, Borelli could not access top-secret intelligence at his desk. Though everyone in the FBI office suite had passed background checks and polygraphs, federal regulations require that the nation’s most highly classified information be stored in special rooms accessible only to those with the right clearances and a need to know.
The rooms are called Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities, or SCIFs. They can’t be found on any public blueprint or building schematic. But there are thousands around the country, in federal buildings, on military bases, and in the offices of private security contractors. The White House Situation Room is one, as is the Joint Chiefs of Staff conference room known as “the tank.”
Whether they are the size of an auditorium or a broom closet, everything about these rooms is governed by strict rules. The walls are three layers of drywall thick, stuffed with acoustic batting and coated with a sound-dampening sealant. Ceilings and walls are permanently joined together, eliminating tiny seams through which a spy might coax a microphone. Even hanging a picture is nearly always prohibited because it requires putting a hole in the wall. The heating and air-conditioning ductwork is soundproofed and guarded by steel, either by heavy grilles or half-inch-thick bars welded both vertically and horizontally in six-inch intervals. The plumbing is designed not to carry electric signals, lest someone use the pipes to detect conversations. Utility lines for the rest of the building are not allowed near these rooms. And every cable that serves them is threaded through a single opening. Cell phones are prohibited.
In Chelsea, the room was down the hall from Borelli’s office, protected by a numeric lock. The keypad looked like the numbers on a telephone, only with a digital display. When the keypad was activated, the numbers rearranged themselves randomly, so even if someone nearby were trying to sneak a peek, he wouldn’t be able to crack the code by memorizing the order.
New York’s secure room was cavernous. Roughly a hundred agents spent most of their working hours there, organized in cubicles, with supervisors seated in small offices around the windowless perimeter. For most, there was no point in having a work space in the main office. Just about everything they said or did each day was too sensitive to share with their spouses, friends, and even most of their coworkers on the other side of the locked door.
Borelli found an empty cubicle. Each workstation contained three computers: an unclassified system for everyday work and email, one that contained intelligence marked secret, and one that stored top-secret information. The systems were kept separate so a hacker or a tech-savvy employee with a low-level clearance couldn’t worm his way into the top-secret network. It was this last computer, the most secure of the three, that contained the Operation High Rise files. He logged in and began to read.
The High Rise files showed that, three days earlier, government eavesdroppers had intercepted emails sent from the United States to a Yahoo account in Pakistan linked to an al-Qaeda operative. U.S. intelligence officers had been monitoring the account as part of their own terrorism investigation.
The first email began innocuously but took a cryptic turn. The sender, using a computer in Aurora, was trying to get the measurements right for what seemed like a recipe involving flour and ghee, a thick, clarified butter used in Pakistani cooking. He included his phone number and asked for help. When there was no immediate reply, the sender asked again minutes later. The second email had set off alarm bells.
“All of us here r good and working fine. plez reply to what i asked u right away. the marriage is ready flour and oil.”
Marriage and wedding were among al-Qaeda’s favorite code words for impending attacks. The 9/11 attacks had been code-named “the big wedding.” It referred to the day that a suicide bomber met his brides, the maidens of the hereafter. Shortly before the millennium celebration on January 1, 2000, authorities intercepted a phone call in which a terrorist said, “The grooms are ready for the big wedding.” That call helped disrupt a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. It was a running joke in the counterterrorism world that the US was lucky al-Qaeda couldn’t come up with a better code word.
FBI analysts had traced the Aurora email address and phone number to a twenty-four-year-old Afghan immigrant named Najibullah Zazi. He had spent most of his young life in New York, where he’d lived in Queens and run a coffee cart in the Financial District. He had been living in Aurora, a suburb of Colorado’s capital, Denver, for only a few months. He’d followed his aunt and uncle out there, and his parents had recently arrived, too. Travel records already in the case file showed that last year Zazi had flown to Peshawar, a bustling city in northwest Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan with a long history of harboring al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives.
Using flight manifests and seating charts, FBI analysts in Washington had concluded that Zazi probably had not traveled alone. They were confident that two others joined him: Zarein Ahmedzay, a New York taxi driver, and Adis Medunjanin, a security guard in Manhattan.
Zazi had spent nearly five months in Pakistan. Now he was on the move again.
For nearly a decade, the FBI’s biggest fear had been the formation of a terrorist cell trained by al-Qaeda and operating inside the United States. The most recent close call was fresh in Borelli’s mind. A year earlier, the FBI had arrested a New Yorker named Bryant Neal Vinas, who had traveled to Pakistan and received al-Qaeda training. The US government hunted him down before he could return to America, but it left Borelli with a nagging worry: What if someone like Vinas managed to get training and come back undetected? A US citizen, radicalized at home and trained abroad, could wave his US passport at the airport and return home with the skills to carry out an attack.
With Zazi, that threat appeared to be unfolding.
“This is a no
-shit real deal,” Borelli thought.
If this really were an al-Qaeda cell, a single misstep could send the terrorists scurrying underground. Or worse, they might be spooked into carrying out their attack ahead of schedule, before the FBI even had a chance to stop it. Borelli didn’t know who was involved or what they were planning.
What he did know from looking at the case file was that the Denver field office of the FBI had full surveillance on Zazi and his family. Agents watched the night before as Zazi’s father, Mohammed, drove his son to a Hertz franchise not far from their house. Mohammed put down his credit card and rented a car for his son. Surveillance teams were in pursuit that morning when Zazi awoke early, got into the red Chevrolet Impala with Arizona plates, and pulled out of the town house subdivision where he lived with his parents.
Aurora is east of Denver, and it’s the last area of traffic in and out of the city. From there Interstate 70 turns into a high-speed straightaway through farmland and empty Colorado grassland. Zazi gave the Impala some gas and pushed it upward of ninety miles per hour. The surveillance agents called back to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Denver, warning that they risked losing him. And if they kept pace, Zazi might figure out he was being tailed.
Borelli’s counterpart in Denver, a man named Steve Olson, asked the Colorado State Patrol to arrange for Zazi’s car to be stopped. The be-on-the-lookout call went out on the radio and was picked up by Corporal Gerald Lamb, on patrol in the tiny town of Limon—more than an hour east of Denver—directly in Zazi’s path. It wasn’t unusual for a federal agency to ask for a stop like this, and Lamb, a trooper with sixteen years’ experience, didn’t think much of it. It might be a drug dealer or a fugitive. It didn’t really matter.
Shortly after seven o’clock in the morning, Lamb spotted the red Impala and called the dispatcher. He asked to be put through to the FBI and was soon talking directly to Olson. “We just need to know where he’s headed,” the FBI agent explained.