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

by Matt Apuzzo

  Eventually Cohen got his bugs. Instead of hiding them inside walls, he hid them on people. Because the FBI wouldn’t play ball, he armed his undercover officers and informants with recording devices, careful to use them only at the mosques under investigation. The NYPD had a variety of devices available, with commercial names such as the F-Bird and the Eagle. They could hide a microphone inside a wristwatch or the small electronic key fob used to unlock car doors. The devices allowed NYPD informants to secretly record sermons and conversations.34

  And just as their investigation into Time’s Up and the Friends of Brad Will allowed the NYPD to collect information about other liberal groups that planned to protest the government, terrorism enterprise investigations allowed the police to collect information otherwise protected by the First Amendment.

  After a Danish newspaper published cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in late 2005 and early 2006, protests erupted around the globe. Scores died in Africa and the Middle East. In Denmark, a Somali man armed with an ax broke into the home of the cartoonist, who hid in a panic room and was unharmed.

  At the Bronx Muslim Center, however, Sheik Hamud al-Silwi gave a long sermon exhorting followers to use their American right to protest peacefully:

  We have to do something about it, but not what those people are doing back home. They are burning and destroying stuff, and they should know that the Prophet does not want something like that to happen. We should follow the Prophet in the best way we can, boycott anything that was made in Denmark, don’t buy or sell anything that has to do with them. We should send letters to our legal organizations and explain how we feel and demand that they do something about it.35

  Al-Silwi’s comments were reported, verbatim, in police files. Normally, a call to protest and boycott would be off-limits because it related to First Amendment activity, not a crime. But al-Silwi was the target of an investigation, which meant that the NYPD considered his sermons fair game, even when they were peaceful political comments.

  Responding to the Danish cartoon controversy, police prepared a report for Police Commissioner Kelly in February 2006, a document that provided a window into the NYPD’s collection efforts. Informants slipped into at least five mosques to listen to remarks about the cartoons.36 Nothing in the report pointed to any incipient violence in New York City.

  In some instances, the conversations catalogued had nothing to do with terrorism or violence at all. In October 2006, after New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed his single-engine plane into a residential tower on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during a flying lesson, investigators determined almost immediately that it was an accident.

  Yet the NYPD’s informant machine kept humming along. At the Brooklyn Islamic Center, a confidential informant “noted chatter among the regulars expressing relief and thanks to God that the crash was only an accident and not an act of terrorism.”37

  “The worshippers made remarks to the effect that ‘it better be an accident; we don’t need any more heat,’ ” an undercover officer reported from the Al-Tawheed Islamic Center in Jersey City, New Jersey.38

  “In summary,” the NYPD’s analysts concluded, “there is no known chatter indicating either happiness over the crash, regret that it was not a terrorist attack, or interest in carrying out an attack by similar method.”39

  • • •

  By 2006, the intelligence community had al-Qaeda on its heels. The CIA had rounded up dozens of its operatives and sent them to secret prisons around the world. There had been attacks in London and Madrid, but none in the United States. In New York, the NYPD regularly trumpeted its role in keeping America safe in a stream of news stories and television interviews. “We have brought on board some of the best young minds in this country to help us analyze intelligence,” Kelly told TV talk show host Charlie Rose. “We have a lot of, as I say, energetic young people who maybe want to have a career in the world of intelligence but have come to the NYPD because that‘s where the action is.”

  Cohen was happy to take credit. “Our job is to raise the bar and make it more difficult, if not impossible,” Cohen told the CBS news program 60 Minutes. “That’s what we certainly try to do. I like to think that we’ve had some success.”

  In a lengthy internal PowerPoint presentation entitled “Intelligence Division—Strategic Posture 2006,” the NYPD laid out its accomplishments. The department had catalogued more than 250 mosques as to their ethnic makeup, leadership, and group affiliations in the metro area. The presentation showed that the department had a source in many of them—either a confidential informant or an undercover officer. Though no investigation resulted in charges against a mosque for being a terrorist organization, the list of mosques of concern kept growing: from 40 to 53 in two years. Cohen could actually measure his success in the war on terror.

  The NYPD had also expanded the number of people under investigation. Cohen’s analysts had identified 138 “persons of interest” in New York City. A person of interest was “an individual with threat potential based on their position at a particular location, links to an organization, overseas links, and/or criminal history.”

  Evidence of current criminal activity wasn’t listed as a factor.

  The list included imams who were prominent in civic activities. Some had decried terrorism. Others, such as Sheikh Reda Shata, had stood shoulder to shoulder with the NYPD and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to show support for the police in their counterterrorism efforts.

  Shata was the imam at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, one of the mosques that the NYPD had been investigating as a terrorism enterprise since 2003. It’s not clear what more Shata could have done to avoid suspicion. He invited NYPD officers from the local precinct for breakfast and threw going-away parties when they transferred. He had breakfast and dinner with Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, and he invited FBI agents into his mosque to speak with congregants.40

  “I have been impressed with his desire, as he’s expressed it to me, to do good and do right,” Charles Frahm, the FBI’s top counterterrorism agent in the city, told the New York Times for its Pulitzer Prize–winning series on Shata’s life in America.

  Born and raised in Egypt, Shata was educated at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, a center of Islamic learning. He taught Islamic law in Saudi Arabia and worked as an imam in Stuttgart, Germany. After 9/11, when someone defiled his mosque with feces and graffiti,41 he decided it was time to leave. When the job at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge opened, with its hundreds of worshippers, he jumped at the opportunity.

  Shata arrived in New York in 2002, about the same time that Cohen was hired to transform the NYPD Intelligence Division. It didn’t take long for the NYPD to hear about the new Egyptian imam at the mosque, which had a large Palestinian membership. He quickly fell under suspicion, and his name was among those the police considered part of the city’s “radical leadership.” The secret NYPD files noted his education at Al-Azhar and his birth date but wrongly described him as Palestinian.42

  The Special Services Unit assigned an undercover officer, and the Terrorist Interdiction Unit sent a confidential informant to spy on Shata and his mosque, even as he met with Kelly and conducted cultural-sensitivity training at the Sixty-eighth Precinct in Brooklyn in 2006.43

  The same year that the Times held up Shata as an example of how one imam learned to “find ways to reconcile Muslim tradition with American life,”44 hints of the NYPD’s extensive spying were trickling out.

  Shahawar Matin Siraj, the twenty-three-year-old Pakistani immigrant accused of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station, had gone to trial, forcing the NYPD to reveal some investigative methods. An informant testified that he’d attended 575 prayer services at the Bay Ridge mosque.45 His handler generated hundreds of reports, many of them based on daily visits there.46 An undercover officer, testifying under a fake name, said that his job was to be a “walking camera” among the Muslims.

  Covering the trial, the New Y
ork Times wrote that NYPD documents unearthed at trial “suggest that there could be as many as two dozen such investigations, but it could not be learned whether any others bore fruit.”47 What reporters didn’t realize was that the mosques themselves were the targets, and the NYPD had decided that houses of worship might be terrorism enterprises. In a city where routine police reports aren’t public and where NYPD press officers hand out summaries of cases they consider newsworthy, the police made it hard for journalists to dig deeper into the secret programs they’d glimpsed.

  “Beyond the detective’s testimony, police officials yesterday would not discuss the scope of the program and provided no details about its structure, its guidelines, or its successes or failures,” the Times wrote. “Several officials, however, suggested it was in its early stages.”48

  Through it all, Shata was unaware that he was under suspicion, though he thought the NYPD was shadowing a board member at his mosque.49 The surveillance continued after Shata left Bay Ridge to become the imam of Masjid Al-Aman, or “mosque of peace,” which was flourishing on six acres in Middletown, New Jersey.50 In December 2008, after Shata performed the hajj, the spiritual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, an NYPD informant drove him home from the airport. The informant told his Intelligence Division handlers that he had “nothing significant to report.”51 Years later, when Shata learned that the NYPD was spying on him, he was devastated, believing that he’d been targeted for no other reason than his religious affiliation.

  “This is very sad,” he said, looking at his name in the NYPD files. “What is your feeling if you see this about people you trusted?”52

  Shata’s case wasn’t the only one in which the NYPD and FBI diverged in thinking and tactics. Both agencies were interested in a twenty-six-year-old Islamic teacher named Mohammad Elshinawy. He taught at several New York mosques, including the Al-Ansar Center, a windowless Sunni center that opened in 2008 in southern Brooklyn and was attended by young Arabs and South Asians.

  The FBI learned that Elshinawy might have been involved in recruiting people to wage violent jihad overseas, prompting agents to investigate him. The case remained open for many months but was eventually closed without charges being brought against Elshinawy. Federal investigators never bothered trying to get permission to infiltrate Al-Ansar. “Nobody had any information the mosque was engaged in terrorism activities,” a former law enforcement official recalled.

  Cohen and his commanding officer, Assistant Chief Thomas Galati, were not convinced. As one former law enforcement official recalled, Cohen and Galati thought that Al-Ansar could be the next Finsbury Park Mosque in London. The imam there was convicted of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, and was widely believed to be encouraging his followers to wage violent jihad.53

  Short, bearded, bespectacled, and fluent in Arabic, Elshinawy was a Salafist whose father was an unindicted coconspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center attacks.54

  “Elshinawy is a young spiritual leader that lectures and gives speeches at dozens of venues, mostly in the NY area. His views are hardcore Salafi ones. His following is generally young (10 years to 25 yrs),” a 2008 surveillance request stated. “He has orchestrated camping trips and paintball trips in the past.”

  According to the document, detectives in the Terrorist Interdiction Unit considered the imam a threat because “he is so highly regarded by so many young and impressionable individuals.”

  In other words, Elshinawy was a puritanical Muslim with a platform. He had the oratorical power to radicalize other Muslims, even if he had never been involved with terrorism. Other Muslims who had been radicalized had attended his lectures, reinforcing the NYPD’s suspicion.

  “There have been clusters of individuals who are being investigated by other units of this division who have made overt attempts to go and get Jihadi type of training from overseas,” police wrote. “Some of the members of these clusters have stated that they regard Elshinawy as their spiritual leader.”55

  Meanwhile, Cohen’s informants were keeping tabs on the mosque’s members. One report noted that members of Al-Ansar were fixing up the basement and turning it into a gym. “They also want to start Jiujitsu classes in Al-Ansar,” according to the report.56

  As far as the NYPD was concerned, no part of Elshinawy’s life was out of bounds. In March 2008 a police informant attended a gathering for the imam before he left for Egypt on a six-week trip to find a bride. When Elshinawy returned, US immigration officers stopped him at the airport. According to NYPD documents, Elshinawy refused to answer questions beyond saying that he had been visiting family. He wouldn’t even empty his pockets. In addition, the report noted, “he was clean shaven upon his arrival. Very unusual for him, and we don’t know why at this point.”57

  Cohen’s people wasted no time following up. Within days of Elshinawy’s arrival, two NYPD informants monitored his lecture at the Brooklyn Islamic Center. It turned out that the airport story was a false alarm. In a follow-up report from one of the informants, an NYPD lieutenant reported to Cohen, “He is not clean shaven, so that info we got was wrong . . . but everything seems normal with him.”58

  By October, as Elshinawy prepared for his wedding to the woman he’d found in Egypt, the NYPD prepared a full-scale surveillance operation for the ceremony at the center, which was the target of its own terrorism enterprise investigation.59 The plan included wiring up an informant to record the wedding and placing a camera in a parked car nearby and pointing it at the mosque entrance. The NYPD could record everyone who came and went. Before the wedding, a lieutenant with the Terrorist Interdiction Unit submitted the details to Cohen as part of the written daily summary of Intelligence Division activities.

  “We have nothing on the lucky bride at this time but hopefully will learn about her at the service,” the lieutenant wrote.60

  The NYPD continued to keep an eye on Elshinawy and his students for years, sometimes using an informant named Shamiur Rahman, a nineteen-year-old American of Bangladeshi descent who grew up in Queens. He had been arrested on marijuana possession and cut a deal to work as an informant. The NYPD Intel detectives also submitted a separate request to the surveillance specialists in the Technical Operations Unit, known for its distinctive logo depicting a pair of eyes peeking out of a garbage can with a camera.

  Rahman took pictures of the sign-up sheet listing those who attended Elshinawy’s classes, and then sent them to his NYPD contact, a detective named Stephen Hoban. Rahman communicated with Hoban by text message. He’d send the detective his daily plans, including which mosque he planned to visit or if he was going to attend a prayer session, a class, or a rally.

  “Okay, let me know who is there,” Hoban would respond.

  Wherever Rahman went, Hoban was especially interested in names and pictures.61 Rahman would send photos of people who led prayers at the mosques—including, in one case, a Muslim NYPD officer.62 He even took pictures of the bags of rice, canned beans, and boxes of Cheerios being delivered to needy Muslims.

  “I need pictures from the rally,” Hoban wrote. “And I need to know who is there.”

  “Can you text me the names of who was at the rally today?”

  “Did you take pictures?”

  “Get pictures.”

  For all his success in blanketing the community, by 2009, Cohen had little to show in the way of arrests or prosecutions other than the Herald Square case. What mattered, though, was that there had been no terrorist attacks. In the same way that the NYPD’s CompStat computer system of mapping crimes had prioritized reducing crime rates over arrests or convictions during the late 1990s, the Intelligence Division prioritized a 100 percent success rate in avoiding attacks.

  When investigations don’t have to lead to arrests and prosecution, they can linger for years. There was little incentive to close investigations on mosques, because without the investigations, collecting information about sermons, boycotts, and protests would be against the rules. Shutting down a case would shut
off one of the major intelligence pipelines flowing out of Muslim neighborhoods. By Cohen’s reading of the new Handschu rules, the standard for renewing an investigation was low. And because Cohen didn’t have to make arrests, he didn’t have to justify keeping cases open with no end in sight.

  As a former colleague observed, “Who was going to tell Cohen no?”

  On May 12, 2009, four months before Zazi set off alarms, Cohen and his top deputies and lawyers gathered to approve and renew investigations. Larry Sanchez was there, as were Deputy Inspector Paul Ciorra, analytics chief Mitch Silber, and Stu Parker, the Intelligence Division’s attorney. Two lawyers working for the city, Thomas Doepfner and Andrew Schaffer, were also in the room. The agenda included a slew of requests to renew some of the terrorism enterprise investigations that had been going on since 2003.

  The Brooklyn Islamic Center, Al-Farooq, the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, and Masjid Al-Falah had all been under investigation for six years. All were approved for another extension.

  There was nothing on the agenda about a trio of angry young men from Queens and a plot to bomb the subways during Ramadan.

  9

  THE AMERICAN WHO BRINGS GOOD NEWS

  Zazi and Ahmedzay didn’t stick around long at the Muslim Center of New York. Zazi was infecting Ahmedzay with anxiety, escalating his paranoia about who might be watching. Neither knew that Borelli’s agents were outside, waiting for them to emerge, but before they left the mosque, they ditched Zazi’s bomb-making components that he had carried in his bag. They dumped the hydrochloric acid down the toilet and threw Zazi’s goggles and Christmas tree lights in the bathroom trash. A scale and a calculator, needed to measure the bomb-making ingredients, remained in his suitcase in the car. He’d need to discard those later.

  The plan was off, at least for now. Their goal was staying out of prison.

  Zazi dropped off his friend at his apartment. By that time, Flushing was dotted with task force surveillance cars. Ahmedzay went upstairs. Fear washed over him. He couldn’t shake it. Damn being a martyr. If the FBI was really onto them, he was the one who had the most to lose. He had the jar of explosives in his closet. He’d look like the mastermind.