by Matt Apuzzo
To Cohen, it had been obvious that police should have eyes and ears wherever Muslims might be radicalized or where people might even be plotting terror. It was his job to know what the enemy was doing, and because Islamic terrorism presented the primary threat to New York, Muslim houses of worship were naturally the top targets.
As far as Cohen was concerned, churches, synagogues, and mosques were fair game. They were quasi-public spaces where any citizen could go. Why shouldn’t his officers or proxies be allowed to go inside too?
It wasn’t the first time that law enforcement officials had faced the thorny issue of criminals who also attended religious institutions. Mob bosses had been churchgoers. Members of the Irish Republican Army had occasionally gathered at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the Fifth Avenue seat of New York’s Catholic archdiocese. In those cases, the FBI hadn’t followed. It picked up the trail after the suspects had left the churches.
To run the NYPD’s intelligence operations as Cohen and Kelly believed necessary, Cohen needed a formal way to target mosques themselves. He told Judge Haight that in the war on terror, mosques and Islamic organizations would be used “to shield the work of terrorists from law enforcement scrutiny by taking advantage of restrictions on the investigation of First Amendment activity.” NYPD lawyers proposed a new case category called a terrorism enterprise investigation. It would allow officers to investigate political or religious organizations whenever the “facts or circumstances reasonably indicate” that the groups were made up of two or more people involved in plotting terrorism or other violent crime.14
“A mosque is different than a church or a temple,” a former senior NYPD official involved in the effort explained. “It plays a bigger role in society and its day-to-day activities. They pray five times a day. They’re there all the time. If something bad is going to happen, they’re going to hear about it in the mosques. It’s not as sinister as it sounds. We’re just going into mosques. We just want to know what they’re saying.”
To police, there are many benefits to investigating a mosque as a criminal enterprise. If you’re targeting only two people who pray there, the rules say you can collect intelligence related only to those two people. If the whole mosque is the target, however, then everyone who attends prayer services is a potential suspect. Sermons, ordinarily protected by the First Amendment, could be monitored and recorded.
The proposal was modeled on federal organized crime statutes and the lenient guidelines that US Attorney General John Ashcroft had written for the FBI after 9/11. Civil rights groups were furious, saying those rules would open the door to government spying on domestic groups when there was no suspicion of wrongdoing. The change to the NYPD’s rules attracted less attention.
In his April 2003 decision relaxing the Handschu guidelines, Judge Charles Haight wrote that the focus of a terrorism enterprise investigation “may be less precise than that directed against more conventional types of unlawful conduct.” The investigations themselves, he went on, might look different from traditional probes. “There may be no completed offense to provide a framework for the investigation,” the judge wrote. “It often requires the fitting together of bits and pieces of information, many meaningless by themselves, to determine whether a pattern of unlawful activity exists. For this reason, such investigations are broader and less discriminate than usual.”15
“As a consequence,” the judge added, “these investigations may continue for several years.”
Haight had seemingly given Cohen the same authority as the FBI to investigate mosques as terrorist organizations. Unlike the FBI, Cohen would actually do it.
The judge’s ruling gave Cohen wide latitude to interpret the new rules. What qualified as reasonable indication? Cohen, who was neither a lawyer nor a cop, retained the sole authority to decide. The only oversight came from within the NYPD, from people who weren’t going to buck Cohen or his boss, Kelly. The five district attorneys in the boroughs didn’t have the authority to tell Cohen or Kelly what they could or could not investigate. Neither did the federal government.
Even before Haight issued his decision, Cohen began lining up targets. As soon as he had the judge’s green light, he moved, opening investigations like an air traffic controller clearing jets off a stacked runway. In the first eight months under the new rules, the Intelligence Division opened at least fifteen secret terrorism enterprise investigations. At least ten targeted mosques.16
It was an unprecedented moment in the history of American law enforcement. The NYPD regarded houses of worship—and everyone who prayed there—as possible criminal organizations.
The first target of a terrorism enterprise investigation was a Brooklyn house of worship, the Masjid At-Taqwa in Brooklyn. The imam, Siraj Wahhaj, had been included on a three-and-a-half-page list of suspected accomplices in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. The NYPD determined that Wahhaj promoted a political ideology that was “moderately radical and anti-American.”17 But the department expanded the investigation to include an unassuming storefront in downtown Brooklyn, the Zam Zam Stop & Shop Store, which sold Islamic books alongside incense and shea-butter bath products. The shop’s Sudanese owner was involved with the mosque. He had no criminal history, but the NYPD put him on an internal watch list based on vague assertions that he had made anti-American statements and might have given charitable donations to a terrorist organization—assertions that never became criminal cases.
The Intelligence Division also began investigating the Masjid al-Falah mosque in Corona, Queens, which served as the US headquarters of the Tablighi Jamaat (Group for Preaching), an eighty-five-year-old movement that relies on missionaries to spread the word of the Prophet Muhammad. They were Islam’s version of evangelicals. Tablighi Jamaat is supposed to be apolitical, but its many converts include John Walker Lindh, the infamous American Taliban captured as an enemy combatant in 2001 by US troops in Afghanistan.18 The Intelligence Division opened its terrorism enterprise investigation into the group on April 18, 2003, two weeks after Judge Haight’s order came down. It was clear why Cohen’s team found Tablighi Jamaat worrisome: While the State Department had never declared it a terrorist organization, federal law enforcement believed that al-Qaeda used the group as a recruiting pool. According to the NYPD document authorizing the investigation, “al-Qaeda and affiliated groups are suspected of using Tablighi Jamaat membership as cover while traveling in order to appear as legitimate visitors.”
But as far as the FBI was concerned, being affiliated with Tablighi Jamaat didn’t necessarily mean a person was a terrorist. Investigators had nothing to indicate that the organization was a front for al-Qaeda in the way that the Mafia had once operated restaurants and social clubs in New York as wholly owned criminal subsidiaries. From the perspective of federal law enforcement, Tablighi Jamaat was more like the Ku Klux Klan, an organization formed to promote a set of beliefs—beliefs that, however distasteful, were protected by the US Constitution. The goal of the KKK wasn’t to enable or conceal the criminal activities of its members. FBI agents didn’t investigate the KKK. They’d tried that during the 1960s, and the Church Committee skewered them for it. Now agents investigated only those KKK members who put their hate into violent action.
Cohen interpreted the judge’s revised Handschu guidelines more broadly. As long as there was a reasonable indication that people associated with the mosque were part of a terrorist group, then he was free to send investigators to take a closer look at the institution as a whole.
Al Marwa Center, a nonprofit that operated a trio of New York mosques, was another early target. According to NYPD files, investigators suspected a link between Al Marwa and the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian Islamist group that long advocated violence in the name of establishing Sharia law. Rather than focusing solely on Al Marwa or on people suspected of advocating violence, Cohen’s investigators used undercover officers and informants to watch the organization’s mosques. The NYPD even had undercover officers with access to Al
Madinah, an Islamic grade school in Brooklyn that al Marwa had established.19
• • •
In August 2003 Cohen requested a meeting with top FBI officials at the Joint Terrorism Task Force, then housed in Lower Manhattan, not far from city hall and One Police Plaza. Cohen brought Michael Sheehan, the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for counterterrorism. Sheehan, a West Point graduate and a former Green Beret, had served on the National Security Council staff for both Presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. He retired from the army in 1997 as a colonel and later worked in the State Department and the United Nations, where he built an impressive résumé combating terrorism overseas. Like Cohen, he had little experience with domestic criminal prosecutions.
Cohen and Sheehan sat across from Joseph Billy Jr., the FBI’s special agent in charge for terrorism in the New York field office, and Amy Jo Lyons, his deputy. Billy had been the on-scene commander after al-Qaeda attacked the US Embassy in Tanzania in 1998. Lyons, who started her career working organized crime, had been in New York when al-Qaeda struck in 2001 and, in the aftermath, had been in charge of the 9/11 command center. She’d also spent six months managing the investigation of Zacharias Moussaoui, the so-called twentieth hijacker in the 9/11 attacks. Both Billy and Lyons were dedicated to making sure that terrorists didn’t succeed in hitting New York again, not only because it was where they worked but also because they would be the ones hauled before Congress if anything happened.
Cohen and Sheehan explained to Billy and Lyons that they were concerned about Masjid Al-Farooq, one of the most infamous mosques in New York. It occupied a converted six-story factory on a stretch of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn lined with Middle Eastern restaurants, bakeries, and spice stores. To Cohen, it was a potential terrorist breeding ground, where invited preachers raged against the United States, the Bush administration’s war on terror, and against Israel. It had a long history of extremist connections. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind Egyptian sheik who was convicted of plotting to blow up New York City landmarks, once preached briefly at Al-Farooq.20 Congregants there blamed the Jews for 9/11.21
Cohen’s team had opened a terrorism enterprise investigation into Al-Farooq in 2003 and begun sending informants to monitor activities there. The NYPD believed that the mosque’s imam, Abdul Zindani, was recruiting young men for jihad. Zindani had no criminal history, but police believed that he had al-Qaeda ties. Informants reported that both the mosque’s treasurer and his wife had solicited money for weapons for jihad in Iraq. In total, the NYPD placed seven people associated with Al-Farooq on an internal watch list.22 The list included Zindani, the treasurer, and the treasurer’s wife.
The FBI knew Al-Farooq well. Prosecutors had mentioned the mosque that same year in their case against a Yemeni cleric and his aide accused of raising more than $20 million for al-Qaeda and Hamas, a US-designated Palestinian terrorist organization. According to the Justice Department, the cleric, Sheik Mohammed Ali Hassan al-Moayad, had confided to an FBI informant that he had friends in New York who’d raised money for jihad at Al-Farooq.23 The details were sketchy. It wasn’t clear how much had been raised or when, or whether the donors knew where the money was going. Mosque members told reporters later that they thought the money was to help the poor. But the indictment put Al-Farooq on the map in the worst possible way. Police Commissioner Kelly told reporters that al-Qaeda operatives “did their fund-raising right here in our own backyard in Brooklyn.”24
Now an informant had recently told the NYPD about a secret meeting in which an imam at another mosque delivered $30,000 to one of Al-Farooq’s leaders. The source of the money was believed to be Masjid al-Ikhwa, the mosque that the NYPD later suspected of harboring jihadists in the basement.25
Cohen and Sheehan wanted the FBI to bug Al-Farooq.26
It was imperative, the NYPD men said, that they be able to listen to conversations. Cohen and Sheehan wanted all the rooms, including the prayer hall, wired. That would mean eavesdropping on everybody in the mosque. Sheehan asked whether they could get a classified warrant from the intelligence court in Washington, which authorizes the government to monitor Americans believed to be working for terrorist groups or foreign governments.
FBI agent Lyons said that was impossible. Even considering the case against the Yemeni cleric, the FBI didn’t have probable cause to bug the mosque. The evidence was too murky, and they couldn’t go to a judge without specifics. They had no hard evidence tying anyone in the mosque to a terrorist group. Even if they did, they wouldn’t be able to use that to justify listening to everyone. There were rules, the FBI said.
We don’t go into mosques and wire them up, Lyons told them.
Outside the door, as agents prepared for a retirement party, they could hear raised voices from inside the meeting. At one point, Cohen stormed out of the room. He returned after his temper cooled, but the meeting was over.27
In the end, despite the allegations and concerns about Al-Farooq, the Justice Department’s case against the Yemeni cleric al-Moayad fell apart. At trial, prosecutors never even tried to establish that Al-Farooq had played a role in financing terrorism.28 When the FBI’s informant testified, he didn’t mention Al-Farooq. The mosque never came up in secret videotapes with the cleric, either. Prosecutors won a conviction and seventy-five-year sentence but an appeals court threw out the case three years later. The court cited a number of problems with the informant’s story.29 For example, it turned out that the informant had written his notes for the FBI only after agents agreed to pay him—“a significant motive to fabricate,” in the view of the appellate court.
The Justice Department salvaged its case by cutting a deal in which al-Moayad and his aide were allowed to go free if they admitted helping Hamas—not al-Qaeda. Though Attorney General John Ashcroft once publicly accused Al-Farooq of raising money for al-Qaeda, the government could never establish that Al-Farooq or its members were involved in terrorism.
And nobody in the NYPD’s secret files on Al-Farooq was ever charged in connection with Cohen’s lengthy investigation.
• • •
The FBI’s refusal to bug Al-Farooq was a minor setback. Cohen turned instead to his legions of informants and undercovers. To manage the monumental task of infiltrating the mosques, Cohen tapped Larry Sanchez, his terrorism consultant on loan from the CIA. Just as the NYPD borrowed the original idea of listening posts from the FBI’s 1960s playbook, Sanchez borrowed freely from the CIA.
Early in the Bush administration’s war on terror, the CIA had tried a number of tactics to infiltrate al-Qaeda and give America an early warning on terrorism. One approach involved paying informants to visit mosques overseas and report on what they heard. Was the imam preaching violence? Was the ideology radical? Were fanatical factions of the congregation breaking away? The informants became informally known as “mosque crawlers.”
It didn’t take long for CIA officials to realize the effort was a waste of time and money. The mosque crawlers never produced valuable intelligence. The CIA scrapped the idea and focused its efforts elsewhere. But Cohen and Sanchez picked up where the CIA left off and duplicated the effort in New York.
A good crawler was one who made the rounds, visiting several mosques and listening closely to what people were saying. The best crawlers filed hundreds of reports, and not just on radical or violent talk. Cohen wanted his network of informants and undercover officers to take note of what Muslims in the tristate area were saying or doing, no matter how innocuous.
The NYPD’s web of cops and crawlers slowly amassed a great deal of information, not only in the city but also on Long Island, in suburban Westchester County, and across the state line in New Jersey. They reported on the ethnicities and national origins of those who prayed. They wrote down the names of those who sat on the governing councils, or shuras. Informants snapped pictures and collected license plate numbers of congregants as they arrived. Police mounted cameras on light poles and aimed them at mosques. When a new imam was hired, the NYPD
used a pole camera to identify him.30 Plainclothes detectives working for the Demographics Unit mapped and photographed mosques for their files. The NYPD had its informants go into the mosques and collect lists of people attending classes, including cell phone numbers and email addresses.31
Still, Cohen wasn’t content with the information from the field. He had the analyst’s instinct to gather as much data as he could to understand where his enemy lurked. He launched an initiative to exploit I-94s, the immigration forms that foreign nationals filled out when they visited the United States, to find people for questioning. Through contacts at US Customs and Border Protection, officers in the Intel Division obtained the forms and then tracked down the people who filled them out. These foreigners and their families were asked a series of questions, including, “What mosques might a visitor attend if he wanted to lie low during his time New York?” The detectives would pass the answers to the informant builders at the Terrorism Interdiction Unit.32
All this information went into the police reports that were supposed to help Cohen’s analysts figure out which mosques and imams needed closer monitoring. By 2004, approximately two years after Sanchez came aboard, the division had produced an intelligence packet identifying eight former and current imams as radical religious leaders. Another list catalogued forty “mosques of concern”—including several with congregations composed largely of African American converts, many of whom had petty criminal records but no demonstrable connections to terrorism.33
“Just about any mosque can be a mosque of concern,” said a former official involved in the program.