Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America

by Matt Apuzzo

  One woman, Fatana Shirzad, a twenty-six-year-old who had left Afghanistan in 1993, told the New York Times how she felt: “When I saw this attack, I prayed, please make it not be Muslims. Because I knew. And I watched and I prayed, and I was very sorry.”5

  At Abu Bakr, ethnic tensions roiled the congregation. The mosque’s soft-spoken and friendly imam, Mohammad Sherzad, was an educated Pashtun who despised the Taliban and accused them of committing atrocities against the insurgent Northern Alliance. But a contingent led by Imam Saifur Rehman Halimi, the former head of the Mujahideen Information Bureau, backed the Taliban, whose representatives had opened their own office the year before above a Taiwanese dental clinic on Flushing’s Main Street. Halimi credited the Taliban with securing Afghanistan and ending the anarchy of the civil war. He wasn’t convinced that bin Laden was behind the 9/11 attacks, and he believed bombing Afghanistan was a mistake. After Sherzad denounced the al-Qaeda attacks during services at the mosque, Halimi and his allies walked out and began to hold prayers outside. The split spilled into the newspapers. Sherzad complained that Halimi and his followers harassed him when he spoke out against the Taliban and bin Laden. They believed that bin Laden was a good Muslim.6

  Mohammed Zazi backed Halimi. He and his son sided with the pro-Taliban faction praying in the parking lot. But, like others in the group, they appear to have been sympathetic to the Taliban, which was dominated by ethnic Pashtuns like them, not to al-Qaeda hijackers. “I don’t know how people could do things like this. I’d never do anything like that,” Najibullah Zazi told a friend later.7 Like many in the Afghan community, he realized that people who had never given them a second thought were suddenly very interested in what they were doing. The police became a visible presence. Reporters were often around. In October the US invaded Afghanistan; pundits talked about bombing the country back to the Stone Age. In Flushing, Afghan immigrants began to subtly alter their behavior in public. Veiled women were reluctant to walk the streets. Mothers told their children to speak English and not Dari, one of Afghanistan’s common dialects.

  But as months and then years passed without incident, Zazi and the other Afghans went back to their daily routines. Restive and doing poorly in school, Zazi dropped out of Flushing High in 2003, his junior year. College wasn’t in the cards, and he felt he could help his family most by earning money. He went to work stocking shelves in a Korean-owned grocery, packing a daily lunch of halal meat and rice. In 2005 Zazi decided to follow his older sister, Merwari, and her husband into the coffee cart business. Before the sun rose over New York, Zazi, now twenty, would trek to Brooklyn, load his cart with pastries, and tow it to Lower Manhattan, where he set up on Stone Street, eight blocks from ground zero. On his cart was a sign: “God Bless America.”8 His customers knew him, and he knew them, learning their tastes. When they approached, he had their morning favorites ready at hand.

  But as time passed, customers noticed a change in the friendly Afghan coffee man. He tried to sell one of his customers a Koran, Islam’s holy book. He lectured another about religion and happiness. He spoke less. The gentle, enterprising young immigrant seemed to be aging into a more severe and withdrawn adult.

  Zazi wasn’t alone. Already his friend Medunjanin had undergone a spiritual awakening in the ninth grade. He had prayed before a football game and scored a touchdown. The next game, he failed to pray and broke his arm. For Medunjanin, it was a sign that Allah was displeased with him, and he vowed not to fail again. He decided that he would teach his friends how to be good Muslims. Over the years, Medunjanin encouraged Zazi and Ahmedzay to dedicate their lives to Allah. By 2006, while Ahmedzay drove a cab and Zazi manned his coffee cart, Medunjanin worked as a security guard in Manhattan and studied economics at Queens College, where he became involved in the Muslim Student Association. Medunjanin was active at Abu Bakr, holding short classes between prayers for the younger men, teaching them lessons from the Koran and proper Arabic. He explained the difference between spiritual and violent jihads.

  All three were still living with their parents. Zazi had married a cousin, Marzia, in an arranged wedding in Peshawar in 2006. Ahmedzay was married and had a daughter living with his family in Afghanistan. The trio would still play hoops as they had when they were in high school; increasingly, though, they spent their time studying the Koran and other religious texts. Medunjanin introduced his friends to the sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen from Yemen and an influential al-Qaeda figure in his native land. A charismatic cleric, Awlaki had returned to Yemen from America, where he had lived in New Mexico, Southern California, and Virginia. He delivered inspiring sermons in English exhorting his followers to attack the United States. His diatribes were easy to find on the internet, and, in the view of American intelligence agencies, uniquely appealing to impressionable young men. Some of Awlaki’s lectures dealt with becoming a martyr by fighting US forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Others addressed such subjects as “The Hereafter” and “The Lives of the Prophets.”

  Zazi alone had a hundred hours of footage on his laptop and iPod. He also devoured lectures by Sheik Abdullah al-Feisel, a Jamaican-born imam who taught lessons with titles such as “Jihad, Aim and Objectives.” Feisel said that suicide bombings were acceptable; they weren’t considered suicide. Medunjanin agreed that was a good “war tactic.”

  Zazi and his friends listened to Awlaki’s sermons almost every day. They also absorbed news about their parents’ homeland. The American war in Afghanistan had demonstrably failed to improve the country. The Taliban, bolstered by hardened mujahideen fighters, was waging a relentless insurgency against US troops. For many Afghans, including those who had supported the invasion, the United States was now viewed as no better than the Russians or the British before them. Innocent civilians were dying in drone attacks and night raids, while the American-sponsored government foundered under the leadership of President Hamid Karzai. Zazi made regular trips to visit his wife in Peshawar, which the Taliban used as a base to wage war on the Americans in Afghanistan, recruiting fighters and raising money while Pakistani authorities looked the other way. What the young Afghan-American saw there only confirmed what he heard people say at home: The Americans were the source of Afghanistan’s problems.

  Together Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin trawled the internet, collecting al-Qaeda videos of American forces being ambushed in Afghanistan and terrorists going on suicide missions. They grew beards. They kept up their American lives, but the propaganda was having its desired effect. The Taliban, they thought, were fighting for justice against American occupiers. It was up to them to do something about it.

  • • •

  In 2008 Medunjanin went on the hajj, the religious pilgrimage to Saudi Arabia. It was there that he learned, four years after they became public, about the photographs taken at the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad by American military police as they abused and sexually humiliated their Iraqi captives. It only reinforced the sense of righteous injustice growing inside Medunjanin, who was looking for a purpose greater than guarding a fancy building in New York. When he returned to Flushing from Mecca, he talked about waging violent jihad. He challenged his Muslim friends to do something about US oppression. He thought they “didn’t have the balls” to take on their adopted homeland. He imagined himself as a modern-day incarnation of rebel slave leader Nat Turner. Medunjanin refused to be a “house nigger.”9

  The three friends continued to pray at Abu Bakr, where Medunjanin wasn’t shy about voicing his frustrations or inflammatory beliefs. They were an unlikely group of plotters: Medunjanin, doughy and book smart, the intellectual leader, a Bosnian who aspired to be a general in the Taliban army; Zazi, a polite but headstrong young man with a solid build and a disarmingly gentle expression, whose difficulty in school had left him insecure about his capabilities; and Ahmedzay, an avid conspiracy theorist who believed that Jews controlled a shadow government in the United States. In the spring of 2008, they gathered in the parking lot of Abu Bakr, out of
earshot of anyone listening. After years of posturing, they had decided to turn their frustrations into action. “Allah doesn’t like when you only talk about something and don’t do it,” Ahmedzay said, citing what he said was a verse from the Koran.

  Standing outside the mosque, they made a pact: By summer’s end, they would go to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against American forces. Medunjanin reminded his friends to be careful. Law enforcement was everywhere. He told them to avoid talking about their plans with anyone or putting anything in emails.

  They decided to join the Taliban because the group seemed to offer the easiest route to the battlefield. Ahmedzay had heard there was a town called Zormat in eastern Afghanistan where a foreign fighter could find the Taliban at the madrassa, or religious school. The town was only thirty minutes from his wife’s home. Both Zazi and Ahmedzay spoke fluent Pashto, and they could translate for Medunjanin, their Bosnian brother in arms. If anyone asked why they were planning to go to the region, Zazi and Ahmedzay had perfect cover stories: They both had family in Afghanistan, and wives whom they were going to visit. Medunjanin, they would say, was going to marry a cousin of Zazi’s. To their minds, it was foolproof.

  To finance their trip, Zazi turned to credit cards. He opened nearly twenty accounts in a space of months, with no intention of paying them back, and burned through about $50,000 on computers, cameras, batteries, and cash advances. Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin went to a travel agency in Jackson Heights to buy their tickets, but instead of using Najib’s credit cards, they paid in cash. They booked round-trip flights on Qatar Airways, changing in Doha, Qatar, even though it was more expensive. They didn’t want the additional scrutiny that came with traveling on one-way tickets, but they had no intention of ever returning to America. Zazi and Ahmedzay got long-stay visas to Pakistan, but Balkan-born Medunjanin was granted only a monthlong stay. They decided to split responsibilities. Medunjanin was going to be in charge until they got to Pakistan. Then Zazi, after visiting his family there, would take over, and Ahmedzay would lead them through Afghanistan.

  About two weeks before they were scheduled to fly to Pakistan, they told one person about their plan: another young Afghan born in New York named Zakir Khan, whom they knew at Abu Bakr. Khan had spent many hours with Medunjanin and the others. He had listened to their thoughts on jihad and expressed similar views. Medunjanin put Awlaki lectures on Khan’s iPod. At the mosque, they cornered him and asked if he would be interested in joining them to fight in Afghanistan. Khan said he’d think about it. Rather than worrying he’d spill their secret, the trio encouraged Khan to talk to his family and friends about the idea.

  Khan went home, where he helped take care of a little brother with physical and mental disabilities. When he returned to the mosque that same evening to talk to Zazi and Medunjanin, it was with disappointing news. He couldn’t make the trip. The two responded angrily. Zazi showed Khan a verse from the Koran saying that it was his duty. Khan said he’d reconsider, and did discuss it with a family friend. But the next day, he ran into Medunjanin, Zazi, and Ahmedzay outside the mosque. Khan informed them of his decision. No.

  • • •

  On August 28 Zazi’s father gave them a lift to Newark International Airport. There was nothing suspicious for security screeners to find in their bags, just some laptops. Customs officials asked all three separately why they were going to Pakistan They used the cover stories they had discussed. Medunjanin was carrying $3,000, money that he told customs agents would be the dowry in his marriage to Zazi’s cousin. The trio made it through security, boarded, and settled in for the long flight to Doha and then on to Peshawar.

  Peshawar is a sprawling frontier city, centuries old, that sits in a valley outside Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, the far-flung districts where tribal elders hold sway and remain somewhat autonomous from the Pakistani government. For decades, Peshawar has attracted Afghan refugees and Islamist radicals involved in pushing foreign troops—whether Soviet or American—out of nearby Afghanistan. Some 3.5 million people are believed to live in the city and the surrounding district, amid the constant noise of car horns and calls to prayer from numerous mosques. For the three American-raised Muslims, Peshawar’s clogged maze of avenues, streets, and alleys, full of children dodging cars and donkeys, was alive in a way that Flushing had never been.

  Zazi’s family greeted them at the airport in Peshawar, trading hugs and kisses with Najib and his new friends. Then they drove their guests to the rented house of Zazi’s uncle Lal Muhammad, fifteen minutes away, where the travelers spent the night. The next day, they split up, partly because Zazi wanted to spend time with his wife and family before heading on to Afghanistan. He urged Medunjanin and Ahmedzay to go ahead to Afghanistan without him.

  They didn’t get far. Zazi drove them to the bus station, where they rented a car. Ahmedzay was dressed in a traditional Pakistani garb called a shalwar kameez, which consists of a long shirt and pajama-like pants, while Medunjanin had on Western-style clothes. On their way out of town, they ran into a Pakistani police checkpoint, where they faced questions: Who are you? Where are you going? Ahmedzay replied in fluent Pashto that they were going to Khyber Agency, an area technically off-limits to foreigners, to see his family. Then Ahmedzay and Medunjanin pulled out their US passports. The police immediately suspected that the fair-skinned Medunjanin worked for the CIA and assumed that Ahmedzay was his translator. The officers ordered them into the back of a pickup. As the truck pulled away, Medunjanin started to chant from the Koran in Arabic. One officer grew curious, and asked Ahmedzay if Medunjanin was a Muslim. Ahmedzay answered yes. The sympathetic officer told Ahmedzay to tell the police chief they were visiting the area. At the station, they repeated what the officer told them to say, and the chief set them free. Ahmedzay called Zazi, who sent his uncle to fetch them.

  The three were going to need help navigating their way across the border. Luckily, Zazi’s cousin Amanullah had connections—and he owed Zazi’s family a favor. In 1999 Mohammed Zazi had filled out paperwork claiming Amanullah as his own son, a lie that could have jeopardized the entire family’s immigration status. He was close to Najibullah in age, and the two were like brothers during the years that Amanullah had spent with the Zazis in Flushing. But Amanullah struggled to adjust. He began smoking pot, his grades suffered, and he started getting into fights. In 2003 his uncle sent him back to Pakistan for six months to pull himself together. But Amanullah kept up his drug habit, and when he returned to Queens, he began drinking heavily and experimenting with cocaine. Fed up, Mohammed Zazi shipped him back to Pakistan in 2004. When Najibullah Zazi and his friends arrived in Peshawar, Amanullah was still doing drugs, but he knew an imam—someone with whom he’d once studied—who was the sort of person the young Americans were looking to meet.

  The imam, it turned out, didn’t know anyone from the Taliban. But he told Zazi and his friends that he had contacts with another anti-American mujahideen group. On Amanullah’s reference, the imam introduced the three men to a Pakistani who was in his midtwenties and went by the name Ahmad. On the imam’s recommendation, Ahmad agreed to take Zazi and his friends to a training compound in Waziristan, the tribal region in northwest Pakistan along the Afghan border that is a beehive of jihadist groups, including the only one with global brand recognition: al-Qaeda. Waziristan was nearly two hundred miles from Peshawar, and the trip would take two days on less-traveled roads. Medunjanin took the battery out of his BlackBerry, believing that the device contained a Global Positioning System that would allow him to be tracked.

  It sounded even more thrilling than anything that the three could have imagined back in Queens. Zazi cut short his time with his family, and Ahmedzay postponed visiting his wife in Afghanistan. As they started their journey in a four-door gray Toyota, Ahmad instructed the three friends to begin using aliases. At the first police checkpoint they encountered, Zazi and the other Americans fell silent, fearing a repeat of what had happened to M
edunjanin and Ahmedzay a few days earlier. Now, though, they had Ahmad to provide cover. He got out of the car and approached the checkpoint, speaking briefly with the police as Zazi watched nervously. The police walked toward to the car, moved to the back, and opened the trunk. Satisfied with their cursory search, the officers waved them on.

  The hours passed. Zazi and Ahmedzay spoke in Urdu with Ahmad, leaving Medunjanin, usually the ringleader, frozen out of the conversation. Ahmad explained that there were many foreign fighters in his group. They believed in global jihad, he explained, not just fighting the Americans in Afghanistan.

  Ahmedzay realized that Ahmad was not from any mujahideen outfit. They had landed themselves with a bona fide al-Qaeda operative. Every year, a new crop of American would-be jihadis flies to Pakistan or Afghanistan to try to join al-Qaeda. The organization, wary of infiltration by Western intelligence, maintained networks of screeners whose jobs were to weed through the eager young recruits, looking for moles. Ahmad, apparently, had decided that this motley little group—two Afghans, one by way of Peshawar, and a Bosnian, all thoroughly Americanized in Queens—were for real. For him, it meant bringing his superiors the prize that al-Qaeda most valued: assets who could move freely in the West, especially in America, without attracting the notice of intelligence and security services.