by Matt Apuzzo
But getting that look would have to be done in a way that didn’t arouse his suspicion. He’d already been stopped once, and the FBI didn’t want to press its luck and signal to Zazi that he was being followed. If it turned out that there was nothing in the car, the agents wanted him unsuspecting and relaxed, or at least as relaxed as anyone can be after driving for more than a full day.
All signs were that Zazi was headed for Queens. He used to live there. He’d told Corporal Lamb by the side of the road in Colorado that he was going there. And he’d text-messaged his friend Zarein Ahmedzay, who lived in Queens, that he would arrive Thursday.
The easiest, most logical route to Queens was to pass through the island of Manhattan. a fact that worked in the FBI’s favor. Everyone agreed that the two most likely ways for Zazi to enter New York were through the Holland Tunnel, connecting New Jersey and Lower Manhattan, or the Lincoln Tunnel, which feeds traffic into Midtown. Since 9/11, police had occasionally set up checkpoints at bridges and tunnels. They could do it again and make Zazi’s stop look random. Nothing could look out of the ordinary.
That meant the FBI could definitely not make the stop. Black unmarked cars outside the tunnel and men in dark suits would advertise that something serious was afoot. A curious driver, delayed by the inevitable traffic backup, might call in a tip to a reporter, and before Borelli knew it, he’d be watching the whole thing live from the TVs on the wall of the command center. Nearly a decade had passed since 9/11, but even a whiff of a security issue in New York was still big news.
The police contingent on the task force, led by Jim Shea, wanted the NYPD to make the stop. It could post task force officers in blue uniforms on the bridge, and nobody would suspect this was a counterterrorism operation. The detectives on the task force had top-secret clearances, meaning they knew exactly what the stakes were and what they were looking for.
But bridges and tunnels belonged to the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, an agency that controls much of the region’s transportation infrastructure. Its technological wizards and fearless construction workers were behind some of city’s great engineering feats of the early twentieth century. They burrowed tunnels beneath the Hudson River, working in caverns so deep that they had to enter through a series of airlocks to survive the high pressure. And they balanced precariously hundreds of feet in the air, building bridges the likes of which the world had never seen.
Now those bridges and tunnels fell under the jurisdiction of the Port Authority’s police department. Though the force was constantly overshadowed by the NYPD, the Port Authority boasted 1,700 cops, as many as the Atlanta Police Department. Nobody had more experience making stops at bridges and tunnels. In a conference call, George Albin, an assistant chief with the Port Authority, assured the FBI that his officers could make the stop. They’d walk a bomb dog around the car and, just like at airports, use cotton swabs to check for trace amounts of explosives. They would do it quietly, without raising suspicion.
At FBI headquarters, Michael Heimbach, the head of counterterrorism, wanted to know more about what was allowed legally. He would need to brief Cummings, who would then need to tell the director that everything was being done by the book. If Zazi were stopped and police found a bomb, that would be the key evidence in the case against him, meaning that someday a prosecutor would need to get it admitted at trial. Heimbach was an affable twenty-year veteran agent who, even after moving into senior management, retained his reputation as a dogged investigator. That was no easy task in the FBI, where the bosses at headquarters are often labeled paper pushers by investigators in the field. Heimbach wanted to make sure that there was nothing out of the ordinary about a traffic stop like this. As for the Port Authority, it was business as usual. A few months earlier, its police were stationed outside the tunnels looking for drunken drivers. Convinced that they were on solid legal ground, headquarters gave its approval. The Port Authority would stop the car.
By the afternoon, a surveillance team from New Jersey had picked up Zazi’s tail on Interstate 78, headed east toward Newark, Jersey City, and Lower Manhattan, north of the World Trade Center site. The team was backed up by an FBI airplane above. In an area that is crisscrossed by airplanes to and from Newark, LaGuardia, and Kennedy airports, spotting the FBI plane as suspicious would be next to impossible. There was no video feed of the pursuit, just audio. All the radio traffic was fed into the FBI office in Newark and to the command center in New York.
Holland Tunnel traffic was reduced to one lane in anticipation of Zazi’s arrival. It was three o’clock. Tens of thousands of commuters would soon converge on the tunnel.
But Zazi turned onto I-95 and headed north toward the Lincoln Tunnel, a route that would drop him off a few blocks from Times Square. The Port Authority told its cops at the tunnel to be ready.
Minutes later, the radios in the surveillance cars crackled again. Zazi had passed the Lincoln Tunnel exit. The FBI command center was buzzing.
“Oh, shit.”
“He’s going to the bridge! He’s going to the bridge!”
Port Authority officers in the room dialed their colleagues on the George Washington Bridge. It was a more roundabout route to Queens, but it was the last move that made sense. If Zazi didn’t take the bridge, then he wasn’t going to Queens, and the FBI would have no idea what was going on.
Spanning the Hudson River, the George Washington has two levels, each with twelve lanes. When it opened in 1931, it became the longest suspension bridge in the world, nearly doubling the span of the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, the longest at the time. At almost a mile long, it is a marvel of engineering. And with more than 280,000 cars and trucks crossing in and out of northern Manhattan each day, it is also a surveillance nightmare.
Thomas McHale was in the FBI field office in Newark, listening as Zazi moved closer to the bridge. McHale, a Port Authority detective, had survived the 1993 World Trade Center bombing despite being in the parking garage when the truck bomb went off inside. On 9/11 he helped evacuate the North Tower, narrowly escaping its collapse. He later spent months in Pakistan and Afghanistan with Borelli, hunting terrorists with the JTTF.2
The plan was for the Port Authority to start randomly stopping cars, to put on a bit of a show, and then politely ask Zazi to pull over too. As Zazi worked his way through traffic and toward the tollbooth on the New Jersey side of the bridge, the surveillance cars behind him signaled to the Port Authority cops waiting on the bridge.
“Red Impala. Arizona plates, DX 4015.”
The bridge cops could not find Zazi among the sea of cars. The surveillance team called out his position, counting out traffic lanes from the right. Again, there was no confirmation from the bridge. The voice on the radio became more urgent. “Red Impala.” More lane counting. He was getting closer. Still nothing.
The officers on the bridge were counting lanes from their right, facing oncoming traffic. The surveillance team, however, was counting from its right, headed toward the tolls.
They were looking at opposite sides of the highway.
The surveillance airplane’s radios had died out, leaving the FBI agents and the Port Authority officers alone to find Zazi. McHale listened to the confused radio traffic, and with Zazi nearly at the tolls, he barked into his phone, “Kill the tolls! Kill the tolls!” The gates on the bridge came down, and traffic halted.
So much for the carefully crafted ruse.
The Port Authority pulled over a car or two, trying to salvage the deception, but it looked anything but random. It looked as though the police were waiting for Zazi.
Officers waved Zazi toward the right side of road, after the toll, near the Port Authority building and its inspection area. The officer asked him to step out of the car and began asking him many of the same questions he was asked a day earlier in Colorado. Where was he going? How long was he staying? He said he was going to Queens. He’d either be staying with a friend or at his mosque.
While Zazi waited, a Port Auth
ority officer walked around the rented car, peering in the windows. The cop did not have top-secret security clearances, which meant that FBI agents could not tell him why they were investigating Zazi. But nothing seemed out of the ordinary. It looked like any car nearing the end of a road trip. There was some trash, a warning for speeding, a jug of water, a rental contract. The officer called for a police dog.
The dog circled the car. It sniffed at the passenger door and the trunk but detected nothing. The police let Zazi go.
Nobody swabbed the car and checked it for explosives residue. Despite Albin’s assurances, the Port Authority did not have the equipment to conduct such a test. As far as the FBI knew, though, everything went according to plan. The message was passed to Borelli and through the ranks, to McJunkin and Heimbach, all the way up to Cummings on the seventh floor: Zazi was clean.
A few minutes before four o’clock, Zazi pulled back into traffic and onto the bridge. Edwin Anes, a fifteen-year NYPD veteran who’d been assigned to the FBI task force for five years, was waiting a few hundred feet up the road. Anes was “on the eye,” meaning that, of the six New York surveillance officers assigned to follow Zazi from there, he was the one responsible for keeping the target in his sights, regardless of what happened. They would rotate this responsibility every hour, allowing other cars to pull ahead, catch up, or fade back into traffic and look inconspicuous. Anes made a note in his log and eased his car back onto the highway in time to catch Zazi entering the Bronx, on the way to his adopted hometown of Queens.
Queens is one of the most diverse spots on the globe, a place where half the population was born in another country. Before 9/11, New York boroughs were a wilderness of ethnic neighborhoods. Sure, the cops in the Sixtieth Precinct needed some familiarity with Russian culture to patrol Brooklyn’s Brighton Beach. And the men and women of the Sixty-seventh knew about that borough’s growing Guyanese population in Flatbush. But as long as crime rates stayed low, ethnic neighborhoods could remain sealed off from the outside. In many ways, such insularity was part of the American story. The Irish once had Bay Ridge in Brooklyn. The Jews once had Manhattan’s Lower East Side. A young man could get a job, find a place to live, and disappear, sheltered by language and culture.
At the NYPD after 9/11, this fact of life became a terrifying problem.
4
DEMOGRAPHICS
As a young analyst at Langley, David Cohen had cut his teeth in the CIA’s Office of Economic Research. He was surrounded by hundreds of smart, creative economists at a time when Washington decision makers wanted to know more about foreign economies. When he oversaw domestic collection, he had by his side Gustav Avrakotos, the veteran of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. When Cohen led the analytical branch, he had access to intelligence from officers at stations around the world, satellite imagery, and a battery of expert analysts to interpret it. Even during his term in the Directorate of Operations, as dysfunctional as that was, he had access to highly trained spies and unmatched technological capabilities.
At the NYPD, intelligence expertise was scarce. Analysis was built around solving crimes, not about recognizing patterns or predicting the next emerging threat. And the analysts were all cops, not the social scientists or foreign-nation experts who filled the CIA. The Police Academy churned out some of the best officers in the country, ready to patrol one of the most dynamic, complex cities in the world. But they didn’t learn anything like the espionage training that young CIA operatives received at the Farm, the agency’s spy school near Williamsburg, Virginia.
Cohen knew that he would need to remake the NYPD and, in many ways, remake it in the CIA’s image. He would need to hire civilian analysts from top-flight schools and change the mission from fighting crime to preventing terrorism. But those changes would come slowly. In the meantime, if he relied on his officers, he’d be in the dark. He’d sit in the morning meetings with Ray Kelly and have nothing. Meanwhile, his counterpart in counterterrorism, former marine lieutenant general Frank Libutti, would have access to the latest intelligence from the federal government thanks to the officers working beneath him on the Joint Terrorism Task Force. That might be fine in other cities. But Cohen was building something different. And he wasn’t about to rely on the FBI, which was notoriously stingy when it came to sharing information, to decide what he needed to know. He needed to find someone who could take a hands-on role in the daily operations and, most importantly, had access to the latest raw federal intelligence. The man he found was Larry Sanchez.
Like Cohen, Sanchez was a CIA veteran; an analyst who’d come up through the ranks. Unlike Cohen, however, Sanchez was still on the job. That meant he had a blue CIA badge and the security clearances that came with it.
Cohen and Sanchez had met during their days at Langley. When Cohen was deputy director of operations, Sanchez was the top assistant—essentially the chief of staff—to Cohen’s immediate boss, CIA executive director Nora Slatkin. But the two really got to know each other in 1997, when Cohen became CIA station chief in New York and the CIA detailed Sanchez to the staff of United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson.
When Richardson left the United Nations in 1998 to become President Bill Clinton’s energy secretary, he took Sanchez with him, appointing him the department’s chief intelligence officer. Again, he was on loan from the CIA, this time to help protect the nation’s nuclear secrets and research.
When Cohen called in early 2002, Sanchez was in limbo. Though he’d been working for the CIA, he’d been answering to someone else for a long time. Now he was back under the CIA’s roof and was looking for a new assignment. Cohen pitched him on another out-of-town job. And he pitched Sanchez’s boss, CIA Director George Tenet, who gave his consent.
Cohen’s idea, putting a CIA officer inside a municipal police department, had never been tried. The NYPD was a pure law enforcement agency, one whose primary function was keeping the city secure. The CIA, by its very charter, was prohibited from having any “police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions.” But this was months after 9/11. The finger-pointing over who’d missed the warning signs had begun, and the only question that mattered was how the federal government could make the country—and particularly New York—more secure. New York could have asked for anything, and Washington would have had a hard time refusing.
Normally, when a CIA officer takes a temporary assignment inside another agency, the arrangements are spelled out in great, lawyerly detail. Who’s going to pay the bills? Who exactly is in charge of the assignment? What are the job duties? Will the officer temporarily sever ties to the agency? The rules of Sanchez’s unprecedented assignment were never committed to writing, much less submitted for review.1
Twenty-seven years after the Church Committee and the beginning of congressional oversight, nobody on Capitol Hill, in either of the intelligence committees, approved Sanchez’s appointment. The authority for the move was murky. Under a presidential order signed by Ronald Reagan, the CIA was allowed to provide “specialized equipment, technical knowledge, or assistance of expert personnel” to local law enforcement, but only when the details were approved by CIA lawyers. Instead, Tenet sent Sanchez to New York solely on his say-so. As director of central intelligence, Tenet asserted the authority to move his people from station to station as he saw fit to protect the country. At a time when the CIA was immersed in plans to carry out a covert war against al-Qaeda and create a network of secret prisons to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists, the decision to send Sanchez to New York generated little discussion and no controversy.
To the extent that Sanchez had an official title, it was the CIA director’s counterterrorism liaison to the state of New York. In reality, he was Cohen’s personal liaison to the CIA. The agency was paying the bills, but it was not at all clear what his job duties were or to whom he answered. He had an office at the CIA station in Manhattan and another at NYPD. At both places, nobody was quite sure what he did. He’d start many mornings at his C
IA office, reading the latest intelligence reports. Then he’d head for One Police Plaza to give Cohen a personal briefing that was far more expansive than the updates he could get from the FBI or CIA.
At the NYPD, the word was that Sanchez was a consultant. John Cutter, a veteran cop who served as one of Cohen’s top uniformed officers, remembers his introduction. “This is Larry Sanchez. Larry’s a consultant. Larry knows things that can help us, and Larry knows people who can help us.” The fact that he was CIA spread quickly through the ranks. Whether he was retired or active was unclear.
Sanchez was easy to talk to and easy to like. He was a former amateur power lifter and boxer, and though he was nearly bald, with patches of hair above each ear, he still had thick biceps and a broad chest. Sanchez wore a diamond stud earring, and he told great stories about scuba and skydiving, about working overseas. He recalled parachuting into Iraq with army commandos from Delta Force. If you left a conversation believing that Sanchez was a covert officer, not a career analyst, he wasn’t going to do anything to disabuse you of that impression.
In contrast to Cohen’s aloof, sometimes combative personality, Sanchez was outgoing and friendly. One retired officer remembers Cohen making a rare appearance at an Intelligence Division Christmas party at a Chelsea steak house and awkwardly approaching two officers sitting at the bar. He congratulated them on a good, successful year and thanked them for their hard work. They looked at him, confused. They weren’t members of the Intelligence Division. They worked for a different unit and happened to be having their party there too. Sanchez, by comparison, was a regular at police events. He knew the officers and was good at both mentoring and socializing.
In the early days, Sanchez and Cohen would meet at Cohen’s high-rise apartment building on the Upper West Side, off Central Park, and discuss their vision for the NYPD. The pockets of cloistered Middle Eastern and South Asian neighborhoods were a particular concern for the two CIA veterans. The 9/11 attacks had been planned in communities walled off from the police by language, religion, and culture. New York was dotted with similar enclaves, places where someone could rent a cheap room and remain inconspicuous.2