by Matt Apuzzo
He didn’t tell Lamb why, and Lamb didn’t expect him to. That was a routine practice, meant to keep local lawmen from inadvertently revealing the existence of a larger investigation.
For Lamb, finding probable cause to stop the car was easy. He figured that Zazi was going at least 90 miles per hour before he’d noticed the police cruiser in his rearview mirror and began slowing down. Still, the radar flashed 73 in a 65-mph zone, and Lamb flipped on his blue lights. Zazi eased the car to the shoulder of the road, alongside the tall grass and wilting brown wildflowers. Lamb approached the driver’s side window and recited the usual script.
“Good morning. I’m Corporal Lamb with the Colorado State Patrol. I contacted you today for your speed.”
Zazi handed over the rental paperwork, and Lamb was surprised to see that he was listed as a secondary driver. People rarely pay extra for that. Lamb asked the young man where he was headed.
“New York,” Zazi replied.
Where in New York?
“Queens.”
Zazi immediately started in on how he needed to meet the man who was running his coffee stand. The guy had been sending him $250 a month out of the profits, but business had been down, so Zazi was taking it back over himself. He figured he’d drive to the city rather than fly so he could run errands while he was there.
Lamb didn’t know what the FBI wanted with this guy, but there was definitely something off about him. He was overly friendly and talkative, almost nervously so. Nobody volunteered that level of detail by the side of the road. Plus, given the cost of gas, it didn’t make sense for Zazi to rent a car and drive to New York. On a normal day, Lamb would have kept Zazi talking to get to the bottom of it, but that wasn’t the assignment. Ask too many questions, and Zazi might suspect that he was being tailed. He told Zazi that he’d only be writing him a warning and asked him to sit tight.
Back in his cruiser, Lamb took notes on the cardboard backing from one of his empty citation books. He knew the FBI would want to know exactly what was said. He didn’t call Olson back, worrying that Zazi would glance in the rearview, see him on the phone, and speed off.
Lamb handed Zazi a written warning and decided to press the conversation ahead a little longer.
I know Queens, he said. Where in Queens?
He tried to make it sound casual. In his sixteen years with the state patrol, Lamb had worked his way up from a communications officer to the rank of corporal. He’d never been to New York, much less to Queens. He was raised in the central Colorado steel city of Pueblo. But he nodded knowingly when Zazi replied, “Flushing Meadows,” the home of the New York Mets and the US Open tennis championship.
As Zazi’s car pulled back into traffic, Lamb called the FBI again and relayed what he’d learned. Olson listened calmly. He didn’t say much and thanked the trooper for his help.
Until that moment, Najibullah Zazi had been a big deal for the FBI in Colorado. He immediately became a major concern for the bureau nationwide.
In New York, Borelli sat back, feeling a weight settle on his shoulders. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the FBI would have plucked Zazi off the road right then. It would have locked him up, like so many Muslim men, on ambiguous charges. Or the agency would have declared him a “material witness” and toss him in jail. Better that than letting a potential terrorist remain on the loose for one second more than necessary. But those days were over. First, internal investigators had eviscerated the FBI for detaining so many people indiscriminately. And second, there was a growing belief inside the bureau that such tactics only increased the terrorist threat.
Lock up Zazi, and they might never know what he was up to. In his email to the al-Qaeda operative, the young man had written, “All of us here r good and working fine.” Who else was involved? Was he planning something in New York or running from something already under way in Colorado? Assuming that he was a terrorist and working with others, arresting him could send everyone running into the shadows to regroup. The FBI knew nothing about Zazi and didn’t have nearly enough evidence to charge him with any real crime. Whoever this guy was, it looked as though he’d be pulling into New York in less than twenty-four hours. In that time, Borelli needed to learn everything about this man: who he was, whom he planned to meet, and, most importantly, what he was capable of doing.
In forty-eight hours, it would be the eighth anniversary of 9/11. On that day, hijackers from the fanatical Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, steered airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. Al-Qaeda, Arabic for “the Base,” formed in 1988. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, declared war on the United States in 1996 for stationing soldiers in Muslim countries, but it would take a strike in the heart of Manhattan five years later for the public to take notice. Almost three thousand people died that day, prompting the invasion of Afghanistan and planting the seeds of fear that grew into a call for war with Iraq. The attacks changed how people voted, how they traveled, and how they looked at Muslims in their neighborhoods. Americans accepted a more powerful, secretive government that kept an intrusive watch on its citizens.
Some of these changes occurred in the open. Six weeks after the attacks, Congress overwhelmingly passed the USA Patriot Act, which expanded the government’s ability to monitor phone calls, emails, even library transactions. New warrants, called “sneak and peeks,” allowed federal agents to secretly enter people’s homes without immediately notifying them. City police installed cameras on street corners.
Other changes, the government made in secret. The president authorized the National Security Agency to turn its wiretapping powers on Americans. The government kept tabs on bank transactions. It built classified watch lists that, once on, were nearly impossible to escape.
As this power grew, Americans could do little but trust that the counterterrorism programs were effective. They accepted the changes, both seen and unseen.
In exchange, they expected security.
• • •
Despite Borelli’s growing sense of urgency, the office around him was quiet and calm. Many FBI agents were out working cases. When Borelli made it across the room, already reading the file was Jim Shea, the deputy chief with the New York Police Department. He was assigned to supervise the NYPD detectives who worked alongside the FBI on the Joint Terrorism Task Force each day. The task force is designed so federal agents are in the same room as state and local departments, allowing information to be shared quickly. The FBI runs the show, but everybody has a seat at the table, from the CIA to transit police. Everybody has access to the same files.
The JTTF was created in New York in 1980, when ten FBI agents and ten city detectives teamed up to investigate the Armed Forces of National Liberation, better known as FALN, a terrorist group seeking Puerto Rican independence. The group claimed responsibility for deadly bombings in New York, at the landmark Fraunces Tavern restaurant in 1975, and the headquarters of Mobil Oil two years later. Before the task force was formed, the FBI and the NYPD ran independent investigations. Witnesses were sometimes interviewed twice, and detectives and agents competed for access to evidence and to be the first to execute search warrants or make arrests. It was not only a logistical mess but also jeopardized investigations and made it easier for defense attorneys to punch holes in cases.
The formation of the task force was an attempt to solve all that. The NYPD detectives assigned to it had top security clearances and were deputized as federal marshals, which meant they could investigate outside the city’s borders, where NYPD jurisdiction normally ended.
After 9/11, city task forces became the centerpiece of the nation’s law enforcement response to terrorism. There were now roughly one hundred task forces, big and small, in cities around the country. But there was nothing like the New York JTTF. In any other major city, the municipal police department contributed maybe a handful of officers to the effort. In New York, more than one hundred NYPD officers participated. Shea oversaw all of them. He’d b
een there six or seven months and already had a reputation as all business, which the agents appreciated. A former US Marine, he was tall and lean, with a short haircut to match his temper.
“Have you heard about this case?” Borelli asked.
“Yeah, I know,” Shea said.
By now there were signs of movement. Phones were starting to ring in the secure room. Emails were coming in. Through official channels and interoffice chatter, word spread that something was going on.
Borelli and Shea began assembling their teams, ordering investigators on the streets to get back to Chelsea. Zazi, in order to drive into New York, would need to take a state highway and either a bridge or a tunnel. Those were the purview of the New York State Police and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, two other agencies represented on the task force. The situation as they knew it was that an Afghan-American had spent five months in Pakistan, was in contact with a known al-Qaeda email address, used an al-Qaeda code word for an attack, and was speeding toward New York.
“This thing is going to unravel so fucking fast,” Borelli said.
“Put out the warning order,” he told his team. Nothing else mattered. Postpone all plans. “Christmas is canceled.”
Bill Sweeney and officials at headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue had scheduled a video teleconference in about an hour to coordinate the operation. Agents from Denver were following Zazi across the country, and headquarters wanted to make sure that the responsibility passed seamlessly from one field office to the next as he approached New York. Denver had already tapped Zazi’s cell phone, and agents were listening to his calls in real time. By the time the teleconference began, Borelli would be expected to have started surveillance on the men who’d traveled with Zazi to Pakistan: Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin. He’d need taps for their phones, too.
Dozens of FBI agents would soon be on the streets. Borelli needed someone who could keep track of them, plus the information coming from Denver and Washington. Running a command center was a thankless, stressful job. Borelli approached Ari Papadacos, a supervisor on the terrorism financing squad whose expertise predated 9/11. At the time, Papadacos was running an investigation into the Alavi Foundation, an organization that promoted Islamic and Persian culture. The FBI believed it was a front for the Iranian government. Based on that casework, the US Justice Department was preparing to confiscate Alavi’s $600 million building on Fifth Avenue, which would be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in US history.
“Hey, buddy,” Borelli said, all smiles as he strolled up to Papadacos. “Whatcha workin’ on this week?”
Borelli took the elevator to the eighth floor and entered the large conference room known as the Joint Operations Center. It looked a bit like the sales floor in some boiler-room call center, with flat-screen televisions on the walls and computers set up on long tables. A row of digital clocks displayed the time in every US time zone. This was the room that the FBI used to oversee massive operations such as manhunts and the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. It was now open for business.
There was one more organization to call. Besides the many city police officers assigned to the federal task force, the NYPD had its own intelligence unit, a separate squad that operated in near secrecy and fancied itself a miniature CIA for New York’s five boroughs. Unlike Shea’s cops on the task force, the detectives from the intelligence unit were not federal marshals. Most did not have security clearances. Often the task force was in the dark about the NYPD Intelligence Division’s activities. That was by design. While Borelli and Shea favored a single, collaborative investigation led by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Intelligence Division went its own way. That occasionally enraged both the FBI agents and the NYPD officers assigned to the task force. The competitive, often adversarial relationship had bruised plenty of egos and even undermined investigations.
• • •
The division was the brainchild of the city’s sixty-eight-year-old police commissioner, Ray Kelly, and his top intelligence official, David Cohen. There was a mythology surrounding the division, the result of Kelly and Cohen’s eagerness to boast about its capabilities while simultaneously refusing to say how exactly it carried out its business. Even its organizational chart was a secret. And the secrets held, thanks to a city council that never asked questions and a New York media that spared the Intelligence Division much serious scrutiny.
Everyone knew, however, that Kelly and Cohen had built a deep roster of undercover officers, a web of informants, and teams of linguists and analysts that were unrivaled by any police department in the country. It was clear where Cohen saw his four-hundred-person division, with a budget of $43 million, in the city’s law enforcement hierarchy.
“We’ve got the feds working for us now,” Cohen had boasted in a fawning 2005 New Yorker profile of the new, post-9/11 NYPD.
NYPD Intelligence, or simply Intel, as both the FBI and NYPD often called it, was across the street from the FBI’s office in Chelsea, above the upscale food court of Chelsea Market and near the New York offices of the Food Network and ESPN. There was even a footbridge connecting the FBI and Intel offices. But it was locked at both ends. The two organizations never quite seemed to be on the same team.
A year earlier, NYPD Intel had been keeping tabs on a Staten Island man named Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, whose anti-American views were taking an increasingly violent tone. He confided in a close friend that he hoped to wage violent jihad, or holy war in defense of Islam, and dreamed of dying a martyr. He said he wanted to fly to Pakistan and find his way to a terrorist training camp.
Shehadeh’s friend was an NYPD informant, yet Cohen’s detectives never crossed the footbridge to tell the FBI what they knew. They worked the case in secret for months, until Shehadeh was headed to the airport, his bags packed for an al-Qaeda camp. Only then did the FBI get a phone call. Cohen wanted to let Shehadeh into Pakistan and send an undercover NYPD detective there too. On the seventh floor of FBI headquarters, top counterterrorism agents were stunned. They knew nothing about this case and, with the clock ticking, they were being asked to help arrange an international covert operation for a municipal police department. Absolutely not. People could get killed.
Yet FBI agents had no probable cause to keep him off an airplane. They hadn’t been involved in the investigation and hadn’t developed evidence against Shehadeh. So the agents pulled strings with their Pakistani counterparts and had him turned back at the airport in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. That bought them time to build a case, but a much weaker one. The incident enraged the FBI and contributed to the perception that Cohen was more interested in making sure that his guys got the credit than in preventing another attack. On the other side of the footbridge, the Intel brass believed that the FBI wouldn’t be happy until it was in charge of everyone.
Despite camaraderie with the NYPD detectives who worked under Shea, many in the FBI, including Borelli, did not trust Cohen. But the truth was, if anyone would have insights into Zazi and his accomplices, if anyone would have a neatly organized dossier or a well-placed informant, it would be NYPD Intel. Like it or not, Cohen and his team were going to be involved in the Zazi case.
NYPD Intel was emblematic of a post-9/11 mind-set. In the aftermath of the attacks, the government persuaded Americans that keeping them safe required new rules and a new way of thinking. To some US officials, the FBI seemed a relic. The bureau was designed to investigate crimes after the fact, but terrorists needed to be stopped before they attacked. Defeating them, Vice President Dick Cheney said days after 9/11, required going to the “dark side.” That meant imprisoning people indefinitely without charges, locking them in secret jails and using interrogation tactics that the United States once considered torture. The FBI did not participate in such efforts and fended off arguments that it was not cut out to fight terrorism.
“FBI officials want arrests and convictions,” William E. Odom, for
mer head of the National Security Agency, wrote in a 2005 Washington Post opinion piece calling for the creation of a domestic CIA. “FBI operatives want to make arrests, to ‘put the cuffs on’ wrongdoers. They have little patience for sustained surveillance of a suspect to gain more intelligence.”
The military instituted a new legal system for suspected terrorists captured abroad and held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Hearsay evidence and coerced confessions were admissible and, even if you won your case, there was no guarantee that you’d go free. In an America where the government could eavesdrop without warrants and lock citizens in a military prison without charges, the FBI’s reliance on indictments, respect for the accused’s right to remain silent, and adherence to the rules of evidence seemed anachronistic.
Kelly and Cohen were in the vanguard of the new security elite. They recast the Intelligence Division’s role, didn’t concern themselves with arrests and convictions, and focused instead on disrupting terrorist attacks.
The FBI and NYPD had spent eight years and billions of dollars preparing for this moment. Their strategies differed, but, thanks to nearly a decade without a successful al-Qaeda attack in the United States, the debate over what worked in the fight against terrorism was largely academic. For all the money spent, for all the informants recruited, and for all the emails and phone calls intercepted, most terrorism cases in the US since 9/11 followed a similar script: An undercover agent sold a fake bomb to a dim-witted, angry young man and then arrested him. Press releases followed. From the early hours of the investigation, it was clear that Zazi and his friends were different. They were going to test the government’s programs and its philosophies.
Like most FBI agents of his generation, Borelli hadn’t signed up to fight terrorism. Armed with a business degree from the University of Southern California in 1983, he’d landed a promising job at Arthur Andersen, one of the Big Five accounting firms. But he’d quickly grown bored of the minutiae of ledger entries, and he dreaded the certified public accountant exam. Borelli didn’t want a life behind a desk, staring at numbers. He wanted excitement, and the FBI seemed like a good place to start. When he arrived at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, he was twenty-five years old—the third youngest in his class. He imagined that life as a G-man would mean kicking in doors, gun drawn. But as a young agent in Dallas, Borelli’s first assignment was to investigate the savings and loan crisis that was wiping out hundreds of banks. There he was, sitting behind a desk, staring at numbers. He considered quitting but stuck it out. He learned to investigate real estate fraud and other financial crimes.