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

by Matt Apuzzo

  “We need to extend and develop our operations in America and not keep it limited to only blowing up airplanes,” he wrote in one missive.17

  In nearly a decade, bin Laden had been unable to orchestrate a follow-up to his terrorist masterwork. With three young men from New York, al-Somali might finally be able to give bin Laden what he wanted most.

  Medunjanin had gone to Pakistan expecting to join a low-level Taliban brigade. Instead, he had touched what seemed to him like greatness. He had spent only a brief time with al-Somali but had developed intense feelings, a warmth he could describe only as love. He was devoted to al-Somali the way a soldier revered a beloved general. And he had no intention of letting him down.18

  Zazi also told Medunjanin that he had decided to leave New York. His plan was move to a suburb of Denver, where his aunt and other relatives lived. Zazi was convinced that American law enforcement officials would eventually find out the trio had traveled to Pakistan on the same flight and then returned to the same neighborhood. If the friends split up, Zazi reasoned, it would appear as if they were going on with their lives. As the two parted, Zazi said they would see each other soon.

  Zazi returned to New York in August 2009 to check on his coffee cart and to scout locations to buy hydrogen peroxide and acetone. While there, he met Ahmedzay, and the two spent a weekend at Bear Mountain State Park in upstate New York. Zazi said he was confident he could make three suicide vests. Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin would die on the busy 3, 4, and 5 trains. The trio would strike during Ramadan next month.

  The initial blast from a backpack bomb would kill anyone standing nearby, but the worst damage would come milliseconds later. The train would be permeated by speeding shrapnel: ball bearings, shards of metal from the subway car, plastic from shredded seats. Survivors would have to grope toward safety through billows of toxic smoke, past mangled bodies, and jagged debris in darkened tunnels.

  The final step was for Ahmedzay and Medunjanin to tape their martyrdom videos. They would protest the presence of American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Medunjanin would look into the camera and tell viewers that he loved death more than they love life.

  With the planning done, Zazi returned to Colorado for the last time.

  • • •

  A few weeks later, Zazi was back in his old neighborhood, exhausted after more than thirty hours on the road. He was also panicked from having been stopped on the bridge. When the police brought out the dog, Zazi had decided he’d jump off the George Washington if the cops found his explosives in the trunk.19

  Sitting in the car, waiting for Ahmedzay to return from the apartment, Zazi felt he was being watched. But he had made it this far. Maybe he could still pull off the attack.

  The jar he had instructed Ahmedzay to take and put somewhere safe was filled with acetone peroxide, the highly unstable chemical compound known as TATP. Even though TATP’s instability was widely known, it remained an explosive of choice for al-Qaeda operatives because of its readily available ingredients. The kitchen-sink bomb had been used against subways and a bus in London in 2005. Hundreds died in those devastating attacks, a reminder that al-Qaeda still had the wherewithal to strike at the West.

  The mixture was undetectable to most bomb-sniffing dogs, which sense powder explosives. Only dogs that undergo specialized training can recognize TATP. The dog on the bridge had not, so the explosives had been invisible. Maybe the cop on the bridge could have detected it if he’d been able to swab Zazi’s trunk—as everyone at the FBI believed he’d done. But it was too late now. The FBI’s plan of keeping a bomb out of New York had failed, and nobody knew it.

  6

  ZONE DEFENSE

  Don Borelli arrived at the FBI’s New York office in fall of 2005, a transfer from Dallas by way of Amman, Jordan. After a few months on a squad investigating a grab bag of cases, mostly civil rights abuses and child porn, he moved to CT-9: the Joint Terrorism Task Force squad dedicated to Iran and Hezbollah. It was a natural fit. As assistant legal attaché in Jordan, he’d frequently traveled to Syria and Lebanon. It was also a timely move. Borelli arrived on CT-9—a team of FBI agents, NYPD detectives, immigration agents, and more—months before war broke out between Israel and Hezbollah.

  The assignment put Borelli in charge of one investigation that would color his view of Cohen. And though he didn’t know it at the time, it provided a glimpse of a new strategy taking shape across the street at the NYPD Intelligence Division, one that secretly redefined policing and intelligence gathering in New York.

  Hezbollah was infamous for truck bombings at the US Embassy and a US Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing hundreds. It is heavily funded by Iran, does not recognize the right of Israel to exist, and opposes the influence of the United States and Israel on Lebanese affairs. Hezbollah is also a political party, a member of Lebanon’s majority ruling coalition. It runs schools and health clinics and is extremely popular in Shiite-dominated southern Lebanon.

  There are Hezbollah supporters and members in New York. Whether Hezbollah is using them to plan acts of terrorism, however, has been a subject of debate among policy makers and academics. Few people inside the US government knew more about the domestic Hezbollah threat than two CT-9 investigators, NYPD detective Wayne Parola and his partner, FBI agent John Sorge. Colleagues said the duo had a knack for making sources and “turning threats into friends.” When analysts at CIA headquarters had questions about Hezbollah, they knew to call Parola or Sorge.

  Based in no small part on that deep knowledge, many in the federal government had concluded that although Hezbollah was still a US-designated terrorist group, its presence in New York posed little immediate danger. And if one arose, Parola and Sorge would know. It wasn’t a conclusion that the government liked to advertise, but investigators believed that Hezbollah members in New York functioned more as a criminal organization producing knockoff designer clothes and selling black market cigarettes. Some of that money got sent to Lebanon for families and the organization. But in the scheme of things, when compared with the funding from Iran’s oil coffers, the money from counterfeit Nikes was a drop in the bucket. The FBI occasionally brought terror-financing cases against Hezbollah members. But for the most part, the government figured there was more to be gained by letting these Lebanese guys do their thing and letting Parola and Sorge do theirs.

  When Borelli joined CT-9, investigators had their eye on a Lebanese man who’d entered the country a few years earlier from Brazil.1 It appeared that he’d used a fake name and, thus, probably phony immigration papers. He’d settled in an apartment in the Bronx, selling counterfeit goods. The Joint Terrorism Task Force and Brazilian intelligence officials were working together trying to figure out the mystery man’s identity. The Brazilians learned that he had ties to Hezbollah, having once helped the group buy equipment such as night-vision goggles.

  Working with federal prosecutors, CT-9 began building a case against the man. They could probably get him on document fraud and supporting a terrorist group. But the plan was to turn him into a source and learn what he knew about Hezbollah. That intelligence was more valuable than a prison term. The FBI interviewed the Lebanese stranger several times, but delicately. Agents never mentioned terrorism or Hezbollah.

  Across the street at Intel, Cohen, too, focused on Hezbollah. He had been interested since his CIA days and the string of deadly attacks in the 1980s. With Hezbollah and the Israel Defense Forces fighting in southern Lebanon, Cohen’s focus intensified. Though some NYPD analysts shared the FBI’s benign assessment of Hezbollah in New York, Cohen did not. In fact, one of his senior officers described him as fixated, a view that filtered through the ranks. Investigators were asked repeatedly what they had on Hezbollah. Supervisors told NYPD analysts to rewrite papers to punch up the militant group’s significance, even when the analysts believed the importance was being overstated.2

  In the NYPD’s eyes, anyone from southern Lebanon could be a Hezbollah sympathizer.3 The department’
s analytical documents made no distinction between Hezbollah supporters and Hezbollah members, a conflation that ignored the complexities of Lebanon and the difference between Hezbollah’s political and militant roles. In 2006, with tensions between the United States and Iran mounting over Iranian nuclear enrichment, Cohen wanted his detectives to dig harder on Hezbollah activities. NYPD analysts believed that, if war broke out between the countries, Hezbollah supporters might stage an attack in New York.4

  Cohen’s distaste for the FBI’s laissez-faire approach to Hezbollah was not new. In one tense meeting in 2003, members of the task force gathered in a fourteenth-floor conference room at One Police Plaza to update Cohen on a Hezbollah case. Agitated over the plodding investigation, Cohen quipped that his guys could do more in three weeks than the FBI could in years.5 Parola, who’d helped investigate al-Qaeda’s 1998 bombings at US embassies in Africa, piped up. As far as national security went, he said, the targets had done nothing wrong.

  Well, get them to do something, Cohen shot back.

  There are rules, Parola said. As part of the federal task force, he was bound by the attorney general’s guidelines.

  Your rules don’t apply to us, Cohen replied.

  There’s a Constitution, Parola said.

  The comment hung over the room. Detectives didn’t talk to a deputy commissioner like that. Cohen waved his hand in the air, dismissing Parola’s barb. The briefing continued.

  Nevertheless, Borelli’s boss, Joe Demarest, the special agent in charge for counterterrorism, made clear that his agents were to share information with Cohen and the Intelligence Division. That was fine by Borelli. Back in Dallas, he’d enjoyed good relationships with the locals. He was one of the first field office coordinators dedicated to planning responses to attacks by nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. The job required him to work with police, firefighters, and hospitals. And in Jordan, he’d worked closely with the CIA station chief, Charlie Seidel, one of the agency’s most respected officers, who had also served as Cohen’s deputy in New York and took a major role in running operations.6 Borelli didn’t think twice about sending an investigator to brief the Intelligence Division on the mysterious stranger who’d arrived from Brazil.

  The day after the briefing, Cohen’s detectives drove to the Bronx and knocked on the Lebanese man’s door. The cops pitched him: You should become an informant for the NYPD. Less than two days later, the man boarded a flight to São Paulo, Brazil, taking with him whatever information he had about Hezbollah. The FBI agent heading the investigation for the task force hit the roof. The NYPD had blown his case. Borelli had never seen anything like it. To this day, he won’t discuss details of the case. But Borelli took it as a lesson: Cohen could not be trusted. To the FBI’s top officials in New York, Cohen seemed more interested in making the big score than in keeping the city safe.

  The bureau didn’t understand the philosophical change that had occurred across the footbridge in NYPD Intel. Cohen wasn’t preoccupied with outmaneuvering the FBI—although if that happened, too, then all the better. Rather, he had engineered a fundamental shift in strategy, one that in no way involved falling in line behind the FBI. Cohen would gladly take the FBI’s intelligence, but that didn’t mean he had to accept the bureau’s conclusions about who was a threat and who wasn’t. That’s groupthink, the kind of blind allegiance to conventional wisdom that had created the biggest intelligence blind spot since Pearl Harbor.

  Cohen rejected several offers by the FBI to put his people on the task force. Dustups like the one over Hezbollah happened, but he saw them as the natural result of a healthy tension between two intelligence agencies.

  Emboldened by the new, lax Handschu rules, Cohen charted a new course. The FBI focused on spotting terrorists, and then putting agents on them to make cases. He hatched a bolder plan, one that preemptively investigated neighborhoods, ethnic groups, organizations, mosques, and businesses. The NYPD named it “zone defense,”7 after the sports strategy in which a player guards a portion of the field rather than a specific man. To pull it off, the NYPD wanted to identify terrorists early. Not just before they launched an attack; that was a given. Cohen wanted to spot them before they picked targets, before they bought weapons, and, ideally, before a toxic ideology took root.

  Cohen wanted to know whether you were going to be a terrorist before you knew yourself.

  • • •

  In 2007 the NYPD published Radicalization in the West: The Homegrown Threat, a ninety-page primer on how Muslims became terrorists. Drawing on case studies of terrorist plots in Madrid, London, Amsterdam, and elsewhere, it was a guide to spotting would-be terrorists. For the first time, here was a document that told authorities what warning signs to watch for.

  The authors were two senior intelligence analysts, Mitchell Silber and Arvin Bhatt. Silber, an Ivy League–educated financial analyst and investment banker, became the public face of the report and would go on to lead Cohen’s analytical unit. After the corporation Thomson Financial bought his company, Silber headed to Columbia University and earned his master’s degree in international affairs in 2005. The NYPD was his first job in national security, and the breakout Radicalization in the West got noticed by the national media, scholars, and Congress.

  It suggested that becoming a terrorist was a four-step process, from preradicalization and self-identification to indoctrination and, finally, “jihadization.” Nascent terrorists are typically in an identity crisis, the NYPD said. Some might be angry over discrimination or racism. Others might be angered by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or the plight of Muslims in war-torn countries. As they become more politically active and embrace fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, they are more likely to engage in what the NYPD called “extremist-like discussions” in cafés, gyms, halal butcher shops, student associations, and study groups.

  Silber and Bhatt argued such troubling talk eventually leads to a spiritual mentor and a coterie of like-minded extremists. The budding terrorist withdraws from the mosque. His views harden and simplify: You are either a believer or a nonbeliever, and it is acceptable to use violence on nonbelievers. He and his friends discuss putting their views into action. Maybe they go overseas for terrorist training or try their hands at outdoor activities such as camping, paintball, or target shooting. They might make a suicide video or draft a will. At this stage, they can pick a target anytime.

  Perhaps most frightening was what the NYPD described as the “candidates” for terrorism.

  “Middle-class families and students appear to provide the most fertile ground for the seeds of radicalization,” Silber and Bhatt wrote. “A range of socioeconomic and psychological factors have been associated with those who have chosen to radicalize to include the bored and/or frustrated, successful college students, the unemployed, the second and third generation, new immigrants, petty criminals, and prison parolees.”

  In short, the NYPD saw terrorists everywhere. The middle class and the unemployed. The aimless and the ambitious. Criminals and college students. Longtime American citizens and new arrivals. Anyone.

  To Larry Sanchez, the analyst who came to the NYPD on loan from the CIA and stayed, Radicalization in the West was not merely an academic treatise. It was a map for law enforcement, one that the NYPD was already following. Zone defense was intended to spot would-be terrorists early in the four-step process. That meant police had to be in coffee shops, halal delis, gyms, bookstores, mosques, and student groups. They needed to know who was getting more religious and more politically active. They had to find the young men who felt that Muslims were discriminated against and those angered over the plight of the Palestinians.

  They needed to think differently about activities protected by the Constitution.

  “Let me try to answer it this way,” Sanchez told Congress in 2007, when Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut asked how the NYPD identified terrorists before they attacked. “The key to it was first to understand it and to start appreciating what most peo
ple would say would be noncriminal, would be innocuous, looking at behaviors that could easily be argued in a Western democracy, particularly in the United States, to be protected by First and Fourth Amendment rights, but not to look at them in a vacuum, but to look across to them as potential precursors to terrorism.”

  • • •

  In the 1970s, Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy made a similar argument as he tried to fend off Martin Stolar and his lefty lawyer friends in court. New York had endured bombings, kidnappings, shootings, and assassinations, all politically motivated. It would be foolish, Murphy said, for police to ignore the views that underpinned those attacks. It was the NYPD’s responsibility, he continued, to keep close surveillance on “groups that because of their conduct or rhetoric may pose a threat to life, property, or government administration.”8

  The Handschu case curtailed the NYPD’s ability to carry out such investigations. As soon as the new, post-9/11 rules took effect in 2003, the Intelligence Division again made political rhetoric a central motivator of its investigations.

  The Demographics Unit was a start. The rakers catalogued places that the analysts believed could be “radicalization incubators.” But knowing which coffee shops catered to devout Muslims wasn’t enough. Cohen needed people living in the neighborhoods, checking in at the bookstores and buying goat meat at the butcher counter. What he needed was a roster of informants, people who could be what he called “listening posts.”9

  Recruiting informants became a priority for the Intelligence Division. Analysts scrutinized the city’s long list of taxi-license holders, looking for Pakistanis and Afghans with criminal records or paperwork violations. Anything they could use as leverage. Detectives trawled central booking, identifying men from their countries of interest. Maybe they were there for drugs, maybe for drunken driving or jumping turnstiles. The detective would ask, “How’d you like to turn your life around?”10 He’d get the charges reduced or dismissed, provide some walking-around money, and sign up a recruit for the war on terrorism.