by Matt Apuzzo
Davis picked up the telephone and dialed the center’s executive director, Melanie Pearlman. The two had met briefly but didn’t know each other well.
Davis was polite but got right to the point.
“You have the ambassador of Pakistan in there on the tenth?” he asked. “I need to understand the details of the ambassador’s security.”
There wasn’t much to understand, Pearlman said. Haqqani had a few events to attend before Thursday night’s discussion. A small Denver police contingent would be escorting him. Security at the event itself was going to be light.
“Who’s picking him up at the airport?”
It was the center’s regular limo driver. A good man, reliable. He’d driven other dignitaries.
“What’s his name?” Davis asked.
“Ahmed,” Perlman replied.
“Let me get back to you.”
Davis was soon sitting in the governor’s office on the first floor of the state capitol. Jim Carpenter, Ritter’s chief of staff, wasn’t told what the meeting was about, but when the head of the state’s FBI office says he needs a few minutes with the governor, you make time.
Ritter, a fifty-three-year-old Democrat, and Colorado’s top law enforcement officers sat around the table.2 Davis explained that there was someone in Aurora who’d been communicating with a known terrorist in Pakistan. The language suggested some kind of attack was in the works. Specifically, Davis said, a suicide bombing.
Though everyone in the room was cleared to receive classified information, Davis was circumspect. He didn’t reveal the contents of the email. He didn’t identify al-Somali, the al-Qaeda terrorist. He didn’t even say there was an email.
If Ritter was nervous at all, nobody in the room noticed. After twelve years as Denver’s district attorney, he was not easily unnerved. At the first reports of gunshots and explosions at Columbine High School in the Denver suburb of Littleton in 1999, he’d driven there and arrived while two teenage gunmen were still roaming the building, having slaughtered a dozen classmates and a teacher. He’d been through the difficult weeks of 1997, when skinheads unleashed a wave of shootings and beatings on Colorado’s immigrants, minorities, and police. In 2007, his first year as governor, a deranged man walked into his office suite with a .357 Smith & Wesson and declared that he was there to take over the state government. State troopers shot him to death while Ritter was in the next room, interviewing a job applicant.
Back in 1995, Ritter had personally taken over the prosecution of a sixteen-year-old cop killer, leading a colleague to call him “a trial animal.” Now the governor, clad in a suit and his trademark cowboy boots, was visibly trying to suppress his instincts to take over the briefing, to prod Davis for more information, and make sure they followed the right leads.
Davis assured the governor that the FBI had surveillance on the Zazi family. He was still concerned about the event with Haqqani, although, he added frankly, “I don’t have anything to base this on.” But somebody from Colorado emailing with al-Qaeda? With the Pakistani ambassador coming to town? On the eve of the 9/11 anniversary? It seemed too much to be coincidental.
They talked briefly about whether to cancel the event, but that seemed like an overreaction. Ritter had the same questions that Davis had asked Pearlman on the phone. Who was picking up Haqqani at the airport and who was in charge of his security? He didn’t like the answers. Ritter put the Colorado State Patrol in charge of picking up the ambassador and providing security. Over at the CELL, Melanie Pearlman’s phone soon began ringing with police wanting to discuss security plans. Investigators would need ten tickets to the speech for undercover officers. And Ahmed the limo driver was out.
• • •
The Denver Art Museum is a massive downtown complex stretching across two buildings connected by a footbridge. The newer of the two, a sleek, futuristic structure, cuts a jagged silhouette out of the city’s skyline. Its exterior walls run at odd angles, none parallel, in a style inspired by the Rocky Mountains and geometric rock crystals. Its most noticeable feature is the nearly two-hundred-foot triangle jutting out like a ship’s prow over three lanes of downtown traffic.
In a suite in an office park south of the city, Major Brenda Leffler and Captain Steve Garcia of the Colorado State Patrol stared at images of the museum. There was not much to say. The pictures, part of a blast analysis the state had previously conducted on the museum, spoke for themselves. A suicide bomb outside the museum would send a shock wave against the building, creating pockets of devastating pressure beneath its overhangs. The sharp angles would magnify the blast and accentuate the damage. One of the blast models reminded Garcia of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, gutted and sagging after the 1995 bombing by Timothy McVeigh, a homegrown terrorist who opposed the US government.
The nine-hundred-square-foot office suite where Leffler and Garcia sat was called the Colorado Information Analysis Center, known in law enforcement circles by its acronym, pronounced “kayak.” The CIAC was one of many analytical task forces, dubbed fusion centers, that sprang up around the country after 9/11. Backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money and much more from state governments, the centers were intended to be clearinghouses for threats and terrorist intelligence. Members of Congress loved fusion centers because they meant money for their states. But it didn’t take long to realize that, in most cities, the threat was not nearly enough to justify all the manpower, money, and equipment.
So in many states, the fusion center mission crept toward something broader. Like the NYPD, some centers began keeping tabs on rhetoric. In Missouri, the fusion center circulated a report warning authorities to be on the lookout for people espousing antigovernment, anti-immigration, or antiabortion views. In Texas, the center encouraged police to monitor Muslim lobbyists. No fusion center had lived up to the original mission to connect the dots and detect an actual terrorist plot. Still, the money flowed, as did warnings about Americans who protested against the war, favored gun rights, or supported Libertarian candidates. And those were only the reports that leaked out. Many more fusion center documents were shielded from public scrutiny on the grounds that they were too sensitive to release. And because Congress created a Byzantine system to pay for it all, nobody in Washington was sure how much was being spent on the centers or where the money went.3
Colorado went in a different direction. Leffler and Garcia wanted the CIAC to become a clearinghouse for information, but beyond terrorism. There were car-theft rings, meth labs, strings of robberies, and gangs to investigate—the kinds of problems that local sheriffs faced every day. Colorado has a substantial Muslim population, including large Libyan and Somali communities. CIAC never considered putting informants or plainclothes officers in mosques or student groups to find terrorists.
“I don’t think that’s a viable tactic,” Leffler would say later. “Who’s to say they’re not meeting at a library? Or a child’s school? Or a local community center? I think it’s a flawed approach toward gathering information.”
The CIAC took in information, ran it through its databases, and passed it to others. If a tip came in about terrorism, it would work it up and hand over the information to Steve Olson at the FBI. The relationship between the two agencies was rocky at first. FBI agents tended to talk down to the state troopers. And Garcia generated some angst at the bureau for saying that the Joint Terrorism Task Force was the investigative arm of the CIAC. But by 2009, Olson could count on the CIAC to quickly deliver leads that had been thoroughly analyzed. Things had improved so much that Garcia was among the first people outside the FBI that Olson told about Najibullah Zazi.
Leffler and Garcia looked through their databases. They had nothing suspicious on Zazi or his family.
• • •
As Jim Davis drove to the art museum Thursday night, he was struck by a morbid thought: “If something happens here, I hope I’m a casualty so I don’t have to deal with what comes next.”
T
here would be hearings, an investigation, finger-pointing. People would ask why the event was allowed to go on. It would be another intelligence failure, and on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary. Back then, in 2001, they hadn’t pieced together enough details to see the complete picture of the imminent attack. Now everyone recognized the possibility—no, the growing likelihood. They’d shared the information, they’d responded correctly. None of that would matter if something happened.
Davis never wanted to fight terrorists. He grew up in Detroit, the son of a cop, and he wanted to be like his dad. His father knew that police work entailed patrol shifts, traffic duty, the midnight-to-eight. “Don’t be a cop,” he told his son. “Be an FBI agent.” And that was that.
When Davis was about fourteen, he called the FBI field office in Detroit. He reached the complaints agent, the guy who takes cold calls. He wasn’t interested in making chitchat with a teenager who said he wanted to be an FBI agent when he grew up. But before hanging up, the agent told Davis, “If you wanna be in the FBI, you gotta be an accountant or a lawyer.” So Davis majored in accounting at Michigan State University. He got his CPA license. He didn’t care at all about being an accountant. He wanted to join the FBI, and he did.
He worked violent Ku Klux Klan cases in Virginia. He worked fraud and corruption cases in Chicago with code names such as Sourmash, Hedgeclipper, and Silver Shovel. Before 9/11, the criminal investigative division was the bureau’s premier assignment, the way toward promotions and great cases. But in the year following the attacks, one out of every four agents was pulled out of the criminal division. Davis was at headquarters in Washington then, as an assistant section chief in the fraud unit. But he felt like an executioner. He’d walk through the office, tap guys on the shoulder, and watch them walk out the door and into the war on terrorism.
Davis understood the realignment, but he wondered whether the surge outpaced the actual threat. There were crimes that weren’t being investigated in the new FBI. A year after the attacks, when Davis got to Indiana as the assistant special agent in charge, he thought, “I don’t know if there are terrorists here. But I know there are criminals.” It didn’t matter. Terrorism overshadowed everything.
It was ironic, then, that a tour in Baghdad, not a criminal case, had defined his career. It was 2003, and Davis had left Indianapolis to become the FBI’s second-in-command in Iraq. Agents fingerprinted and photographed Iraqi detainees. They questioned prisoners and passed whatever they learned back to headquarters. Late one Saturday afternoon, word began spreading in the Baghdad Operations Center that the military had snatched someone important. Davis grabbed an FBI fingerprint specialist named David Shepard and headed out to meet a team of commandos from Delta Force, which led them to a house on a compound near the Baghdad airport.
The Delta guys allowed Davis and Shepard to talk to the prisoner. He spoke English, the soldier said. But no chitchat. Get in and get out. They opened a door to a large, tiled room. There were more soldiers inside, seated around a small table on a raised platform. The room was otherwise empty except for a small bed, which is where Davis first saw Saddam Hussein.
Shepard could usually fingerprint and photograph a prisoner in about five minutes. He’d done thousands. But the Iraqi dictator’s hands were slathered in moisturizing lotion to cure the dry, cracked skin that came from his time on the run, hiding in a camouflaged hole. Shepard couldn’t get a good print. He tried baby wipes and alcohol swabs—even special wipes with cayenne pepper on them. Finally, Shepard began rubbing Saddam’s fingers, trying to get more blood to his hands and improve the clarity of the fingerprints. It was a surreal scene: the young FBI agent massaging Saddam Hussein’s hands.4
When the prints were done, they swabbed Saddam’s cheek for DNA and took his mug shot. Davis then told him to face the wall for a profile shot. Saddam seemed genuinely upset.
“This is how you treat criminals,” he protested.
“That’s right,” Shepard said. “Face the wall.”
Davis took it all in. He was processing an infamous dictator in a war zone half a world away from home. And he thought, “All I ever wanted to do was work bank robberies.”
• • •
As the hour for the Haqqani event drew near, and with the FBI still uncertain what, if anything, was being planned, police descended upon downtown Denver. Cops shut down roads around the museum. Snipers hid on rooftops. An FBI surveillance team camped outside Zazi’s house in Aurora, and SWAT team members waited up the road. Garcia stationed a state trooper on the highway. Anybody who left Zazi’s house and started toward Denver would quickly see blue lights in the rearview.
Despite those precautions, as Brenda Leffler and Steve Garcia from the Colorado State Patrol stood on the footbridge connecting the art museum’s two buildings, they wondered privately whether that night would be the first time they’d have to use their guns.
The police kept Haqqani off the street as much as possible. He’d given interviews earlier in the night, and his security detail, rather than walk him around the corner to his next event, ushered him through a series of back rooms, up an elevator, across a rooftop garden, and down another elevator. Now he and the governor were at the footbridge, about to walk to the speech.
“Is everybody ready?” Ritter asked.
Leffler was surprised to detect a hint of nervousness in the governor’s voice.
“Yes, Governor,” she said. “Everybody’s ready.”
While Haqqani and Ritter spoke, Olson and Davis of the FBI decided to send the informant—the one that Jackie Gee from the sheriff’s office had cultivated—into Zazi’s apartment. It would be a social call. He’d talk to the family, get a sense of whether anyone was on edge, and have a look around. Short of having a video camera in the apartment, it was the next best thing.
Before arriving at the complex, the informant stopped up the street and met FBI agents and an ATF agent named Doug Lambert. He sat on the curb as Lambert walked his dog, Ostermann, around the informant. Like all bomb dogs, Ostermann, a four-year-old black Labrador retriever, was certified to detect bulk explosives. But Ostermann, named after famed NYPD bomb squad detective Glenn Ostermann, could also sniff out trace amounts of bomb-making materials and residue, including chemicals used to make peroxide explosives such as TATP. Ostermann’s job was to make sure the informant was clean when he went into Zazi’s apartment.
Olson called Davis at the art museum. The informant was in the apartment.
The art museum auditorium was packed with perhaps six hundred people. From a balcony, Davis and Garcia watched as the audience, bathed in blue houselights, settled in for a short film before the speech. It had been three days of nearly nonstop work, and both men were tired and edgy. Garcia reached for a white wooden chair nearby and sat down.
Just then an alarm went off. Police radios came to life. Garcia saw officers running. Something was going on. He sprang up. This was it.
But the officers weren’t running to the stage or toward the governor. They weren’t running down toward the crowd at all. They were running toward him.
The white chair was part of an exhibit, one that used chairs as a study of design trends over the years. When Garcia sat down, he’d triggered the museum’s alarm. Security guards and jumpy police were heading his way.
“Stand down! Stand down!” he called out a bit sheepishly. “My bad.”
The clamor on the balcony was lost on most of the crowd, drowned out by the film. Ritter took the stage to introduce Haqqani, who sat in a canvas director’s chair to make remarks and field questions from a moderator. Haqqani told the audience that the United States and Pakistan were making progress in defeating al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.
“There has been no major attack in the United States since 9/11,” he said. “We are able to find out about more planned attacks ahead of their execution than in the past.”
Back on the balcony, by a small couch underneath a stairwell, Davis grabbed his cell phone, getting an update from
Olson.
The informant had made it into and out of Zazi’s apartment. He’d greeted Mohammed Wali Zazi with a hug. The apartment was nearly bare, with cushions and mats on the floor rather than couches and furniture. He’d sat and made small talk with the family. Nobody seemed jittery. No hint of anything sinister.
Once the informant left the apartment, the FBI put him back on the curb for Lambert and his dog to inspect. Lambert had never tried anything like this, using an informant as a human swab for bomb residue. He’d never even heard of it being done. But he’d seen dogs detect gunpowder on the sleeves of FBI agents long after they’d been to the firing range. In theory, this wasn’t that different. “It’s not a hundred percent,” he’d told Davis and Olson. “But it’s an indicator.” To be cautious, he sat some FBI administrative employees on the curb next to the informant. If a dog is told to search one area alone, he’s more likely to generate a false positive.
Ostermann circled the informant and smelled something for sure. The dog was drawn to the man’s chest.5 Perhaps he had picked up chemicals from hugging Mohammed Zazi, Olson and Davis surmised.
As Olson relayed the story, Davis couldn’t help but respond with a rueful laugh. Then he turned to Garcia.
“This ain’t good.”
• • •
At FBI headquarters in Washington, Mike Heimbach, the FBI’s top counterterrorism agent, wanted to know exactly what happened with the dog. He or his boss, Art Cummings, would have to brief the director.
Robert Mueller III, the sixth director in the history of the FBI, could be a fearsome man to brief. Everybody who’s done it has a story, and it’s always some variation of the red car:
An FBI briefer tells Mueller that agents are following a car.
“What color is it?” the director asks.
“Red,” the agent replies. He’d seen that one coming.