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

by Matt Apuzzo

  Sunnis followed Abu Bakr. The Shia followed Ali.

  At the NYPD, analysts were especially concerned with two strains of Sunni Islam that they saw as linked to terrorism: Wahhabism and Salafism. The mere existence of this analysis—trying to understand the complex theological and geopolitical underpinnings of terrorism—shows how rapidly Cohen and Sanchez had changed the NYPD to respond to the terrorist threat. Normally, such an inquiry would be left to scholars, think tanks, and, to some degree, analysts at the CIA and State Department.

  Wahhabism and Salafism are puritanical movements, meaning their followers strictly follow Muhammad’s word. True Islam, they believe, requires rigid adherence to the Koran, which is not subject to human interpretation. In post-9/11 America, the terms Wahhabism and Salafism are often used interchangeably, with Wahhabism used to describe Saudi Arabia’s brand of Salafism.

  Both Salafi and Wahhabi followers have launched terrorist attacks, including the 9/11 hijackings. And many scholars and politicians say the severe, unaccommodating, and intolerant strain of Islam actively inspires and encourages terrorists. But puritanical Islam is complicated. Scholars disagree, for instance, on whether Osama bin Laden really qualified as a Wahhabist, because he called for the overthrow of the Saudi government, which was backed by Wahhabist religious leaders.

  Further complicating the analysis, there are three factions of Salafism that, while essentially identical in religious beliefs, disagree fundamentally on how to live them. Some believe in using politics to advance Salafist goals. Others believe that politics encourages deviancy, and that the only way to purify Islam is through peaceful study and prayer. When these purists speak of jihad, it is in the historic sense of a peaceful struggle to promote Islam. A third group, the minority, embraces violence and revolution, a tactic that has given rise to the modern interpretation of the word jihad.25

  Mitchell Silber understood those distinctions, and in Radicalization in the West, he referred most often to the threat from the “jihadi-Salafi” ideology. In practice, however, the subtleties were often lost as police trawled for terrorists. Conversations overheard by undercover officers and paid informants, it turned out, were clumsy tools for determining the nuances of people’s religious beliefs.

  In public, Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared, “We don’t stop to think about the religion. We stop to think about the threats and focus our efforts there.” Whether he was in the dark about what was going on or whether he was lying, one thing is certain: He was wrong.

  In secret, the term Salafist had become synonymous with “suspicious” at the NYPD. In a police presentation in 2006, for instance, Captain Steven D’Ulisse listed factors that could get someone labeled a “person of interest.” Being involved in terrorism was one. A capacity for violence was another. And so was “ideological orientation (Salafi/Wahhabi).”26 By mid-2006, the NYPD had identified twenty-four mosques in New York as having “a Salafi influence.”27

  The NYPD was particularly afraid of what it saw as the increasing popularity of Salafism on college campuses. Analysts worried because student groups were discussing the book Kitab At-Tawheed by Muhammad bin Abdul Wahhab, the father of Wahhabist thought.28 The presence of Wahhab’s books on college campuses was hardly unusual. Any serious study of modern Islamic history or Saudi politics includes his works, which are available in most libraries. But zone defense meant that the police needed to pay attention to places from which terrorists might emerge.

  As they had done with political rhetoric, the NYPD investigated the many to find the few. The NYPD was looking for that tiny minority, and that meant looking at everyone in Muslim student groups. The police weren’t going to wait for one angry young man to decide to become a terrorist, and then cross their fingers and hope they could spot him before he attacked. As Cohen told his officers, “Take a big net, throw it out, catch as many fish as you can, and see what we get.”29

  By late 2006, the NYPD had identified and investigated thirty-one Muslim student groups. Of those, it concluded that seven were Salafi and labeled them “of concern.”30

  In a presentation prepared for Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, NYPD analysts explained that Brooklyn College and Baruch College in Manhattan had “Tier One” student groups. Brooklyn College made the list for its “regular Salafi speakers, militant paintball trips.” Baruch also was cited for having Salafi speakers, and the NYPD added that the “students are politically active and are radicalizing.”

  The Tier Two groups included Hunter College (“radicalization among students”), City College of New York (“Salafi website”), and St. John’s University (“fund raising and speeches”). Queens College made the list for having a link to a member of Al-Muhajiroun, a banned Islamic extremist group based in Britain. LaGuardia Community College was listed because police said the Islamic Thinkers Society, an ultraconservative group that hoped the United States would someday be governed by Islamic law, wanted to revive the student group there.

  The NYPD dispatched undercover officers and informants to spy on student groups.31 Soon after that presentation, in November 2006, police also started a daily routine of monitoring the websites of Muslim groups at schools across the Northeast, including Columbia, Yale University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Syracuse University. Kelly received weekly reports telling him which lectures Muslim scholars attended, which professors spoke, and what they discussed.

  “The talks elaborate on practical measures university students can take to ensure a balance and well rounded growth in both religious and academic matters in their time at school,” Mahmood Ahmad, a detective with the Cyber Intelligence Unit, wrote in one report.32

  Students who posted information about upcoming lectures were also documented.

  “The message advertising this event was posted by a member of the Muslim Student Association at Buffalo who identifies herself as Adeela Khan,” Ahmad wrote.

  From time to time, the police would identify someone speaking to students whom they considered extremist, but they didn’t find evidence that student groups were supporting or recruiting for terrorists.33 The NYPD says it stopped its regular monitoring of student websites in May 2007.

  The focus on student groups was a good example of Cohen’s big-net strategy. Under the Handschu rules, the NYPD was allowed to gather intelligence from public websites. Inside Intel, the effort was seen as a logical and necessary preventative measure, even though the work—by informants, undercovers, the Demographics Unit, and cyber detectives—meant that many students who had no connection to terrorism were put into files.

  The presence of police on college campuses listening in on religious and academic conversations may have harked back to surveillance during the 1960s, but to Cohen and his analysts, the only other option was to never know whether Salafist scholars might turn young men into suicide bombers. If the Handschu guidelines allowed it, and there was a chance that it could keep the city safe, the NYPD was going to try it.

  • • •

  At the federal level, these kinds of investigations are subject to a series of checks. The FBI and CIA have internal reviews to make sure that cases and covert-action programs are run correctly. Both are subject to inspector generals who investigate problems and see to it that the government is following the rules and the law. And everything is subject to scrutiny by the House of Representatives and the Senate, which control the budgets and can make every day a headache for the nation’s agents and spies.

  Once Cohen got the Handschu rules changed, the only real check on the NYPD’s investigative authority was Cohen himself and a cadre of senior officers and lawyers that met monthly to authorize investigations involving political or religious activity. There was no inspector general, and the city council had shown no interest in demanding information from the Intelligence Division. The division had never undergone a city audit, and, while there were processes by which citizens and whistle-blowers could report police corruption, that didn’t include a review of Intel’s files and wheth
er Cohen was using his authority appropriately. Kelly reassured the public that the internal Handschu review was more than enough.

  The truth was, the standard for opening an investigation was so low that approval was easy. The whole process amounted to what a participant in the Handschu meetings called “a rubber stamp.” And once an investigation was open, it could last for years, while its tentacles reached well outside terrorism and into the world of lawful activism, protest, and politics.

  It was easy to open an investigation of political groups. Before dawn on March 6, 2008, security cameras captured the images of someone in a dark hooded sweatshirt riding a bicycle toward a military recruiting station in Times Square and then walking to the front door. Moments later, a bomb went off, damaging the front of the building. The attack, which didn’t injure anyone, bore striking similarities to a bombing a year earlier at the Mexican Consulate and another three years earlier at the British Consulate. All three took place before sunrise, and, after each, a man was seen on his bike.

  The Times Square bombing was immediately big news. Despite the hour, journalists were quick to report details as police cordoned off the scene and halted traffic. Everyone immediately noted the similarities among the three bicycle bombings. Within a few hours, police discovered a bike, a blue ten-speed made in the 1980s, abandoned not far from Times Square.

  Within days, though, the case had gone cold. The prints on the bike had proven useless, and the bicycle was so old that there was no way to track its owner. Police released pictures of the bike, figuring that it might have been bought recently at a garage sale and hoping somebody might recognize it.

  On March 27, Silber, who was now the director of intelligence analysis, and Captain Donald Powers filed a request with Cohen to open a preliminary investigation into an activist named Dennis Christopher Burke.34 Because Burke was a member of political protest groups, the Handschu rules required Cohen to sign off on any investigation.

  The evidence tying Burke to the bombing, though, was slim. It centered on a blog called Bombs and Shields, which posted news about protests around the world. The site was filled with what activists called protest porn: photos of burning buildings, overturned cars, and rioters clashing with police. The protests themselves involved a mishmash of causes. Some opposed police brutality, urban sprawl, or the military. Others were simply anarchist.

  Bombs and Shields had been around for years, and an informant told police that—back in 2005, at least—Burke had been in charge of updating it. At 6:03 a.m. the day of the Times Square blast, Bombs and Shields posted an item about the explosion. It caught the attention of the NYPD.

  “The less than 3 hour period between the bombing and Bombs and Shields posting on the bombing raises the possibility that Burke or someone else associated with Bombs and Shields had information concerning the Times Square Recruiting Station bombing prior to its occurrence,” Silber and Powers wrote.

  Police couldn’t say for sure whether Burke was still updating the site. And the item that made police suspicious was merely a link to a Fox News article, a story that had been all over every news channel for hours. Yet it was enough for the NYPD.

  Nothing else connected Burke to the recruiting center explosion. He had been arrested several times for protest-related crimes, but never for making bombs. Still, police linked him to two protest groups. The first was Time’s Up, a New York nonprofit group that participates in monthly “Critical Mass” bike rides, loosely organized events in which hundreds of riders regularly clog the streets in what the NYPD considers an illegal form of protest. The second group was the Friends of Brad Will, a network of human rights advocates who opposed the war on drugs and sought to unearth the truth about the 2006 killing of independent journalist Bradley Will, who was shot dead by police in Mexico, where Will was covering a labor protest.

  Based on those facts, Cohen approved an investigation not only into Burke but also his associates in Time’s Up and the Friends of Brad Will. Under the new Handschu rules, police needed to show only that there was a “possibility of unlawful activity.”

  A month later, an undercover officer assigned to the case flew to Louisiana to attend the People’s Summit New Orleans, a gathering of groups that shared an opposition to US economic policies and the trade agreements among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The officer came to investigate the Friends of Brad Will. But while he was there, he gathered information about coming demonstrations in support of organized labor and prisoner rights. He took note of groups that opposed US immigration policy, labor laws, and racial profiling. All of this was summarized in a memo for Cohen dated April 25, 2008:35

  “One workshop was led by Jordan Flaherty, former member of the International Solidarity Movement Chapter in New York City. Mr. Flaherty is an editor and journalist of the Left Turn Magazine and was one of the main organizers of the conference. Mr. Flaherty held a discussion calling for the increase of the divestment campaign of Israel and mentioned two events related to Palestine.”

  In a matter of weeks, an investigation that had started with a blog linked to a Fox News article had metastasized to include broad intelligence gathering on liberal groups with no connection to Burke or the Times Square bombing.

  Police similarly infiltrated demonstrations and collected information about antiwar groups planning protests and those who marched against police brutality. Cyber detectives monitored activist websites and copied the contents into police files, including one memo in 2008 for Kelly that reported the contents of a website about a group of women organizing a boycott to protest the police shooting of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man killed the morning before his wedding:

  This boycott was set for May 11, 2008 (Mother’s Day) there will be NO shopping for cards, flowers, clothing, shoes or dining out. Spend time with Mom at home, serve her dinner, or buy her flowers from a black-owned business. We can be effective if we unite in the name of our children.36

  Police collected the phone numbers and email addresses from the website. One was for Agnes Johnson, a longtime activist based in the Bronx.

  “We were women and mothers who said, ‘We’re going to hold our money in our pocketbooks,’ ” Johnson recalled years later. “That’s all we called for.”

  At the NYPD, officials knew such programs would be controversial if they became public. But there was no suggestion that they were improper. Cohen had made it clear to Judge Haight back in 2002 what he intended to do, and Haight had approved. Activists and libertarians could argue that standards for opening an investigation and building police files on people were too low, but that matter had been settled.

  It was like keeping track of people who spoke “anti-Shia rhetoric.” Maybe they were professing their views on Islam. But maybe they were Salafists or, worse, jihadists. At the NYPD, the options were either to keep tabs on people or ignore them and take your chances.

  One of those people, according to the NYPD, was a sixty-one-year-old Islamic scholar named Shabbir Hussain. In December 2008 the leaders of the Thayba Islamic Center in Brooklyn announced that Hussain would be one of several guest speakers at its annual conference commemorating the death of the seventh-century martyr Hussein ibn Ali. The NYPD took note because, according to its documents, the Thayba mosque had been “identified as Wahhabi.”

  So a few weeks before the conference, Detective Joseph Niebo filed paperwork to place Shabbir Hussain under ten-hours-a-day surveillance. Niebo knew a little about Hussain because, a year earlier, cops had stopped him in the Bronx to figure out his identity. At Intel, pulling over people to get their names was so common that Cohen actually had a unit, dubbed the “X Team,” dedicated to that task.37 On that particular Sunday, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit stopped Hussain. He cooperated and handed over his Pakistani passport, which the detectives photographed.

  To get a surveillance team assigned, investigators had to justify the request, which meant including a synopsis of the case and the reason for suspicion. The justification Niebo filed fo
r following Hussain was minimal. It said only that Hussain was speaking at the conference and added, “Subject speaks anti-Shia rhetoric.”38

  It should have been obvious that something didn’t make sense. Hussein ibn Ali was the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (not the nephew, as the NYPD documents said), and he’s among the holiest martyrs in Shiite Islam. Shiites mourn his death each year on the holiday of Ashura. Wahhabists don’t mourn on that day. Far from it. In addition to banning such ceremonies in Saudi Arabia, they’ve attacked Shiites who commemorate it

  For all the investment the NYPD had made in trying to understand puritanical Islam, the obvious question went unasked: Why would a Wahhabist mosque hold a ceremony mourning Hussein ibn Ali?

  As it turned out, Thayba Islamic Center was not Wahhabist. It was Barelvi, a Sunni sect known for its moderation and for speaking out against the ultraconservative policies of the Taliban. Far from being ideological allies, the Wahhabists have branded the Barelvis as heretics and, in Pakistan, have attacked their holy sites.

  To a Muslim, mistaking a Barelvi mosque for a Wahhabist mosque would be like going to Northern Ireland and confusing a Protestant church with a Catholic church. Or like rummaging through the NYPD’s spy files from the 1960s and finding that police mixed up Republican Barry Goldwater’s campaign headquarters with a meeting spot for New Left radicals.

  Such errors—and police confused Sunnis and Shiites more than once—mirrored those made by Demographics Unit detectives who mistook Montenegrins for Albanians, and Lebanese Christians for Syrian Muslims. And they raised a worrisome question about both programs: If there was ever a credible threat against New York, if al-Qaeda set a suicide bomb plot in motion inside the city, could the NYPD even rely on the information it had?