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

by Matt Apuzzo

  By 2009, the FBI had tightened restrictions on national security letters. Exigent circumstances letters were out. If the FBI wanted something immediately, faster than the normal turnaround that came with a national security letter, a supervisor had to certify, with his name, that there was an imminent threat of death or serious physical injury.

  The national security letter scandal highlighted the difference between the NYPD and the FBI. Both inherited sweeping new powers after 9/11, and both pushed the boundaries of those powers. But the FBI had an inspector general and Congress looking over its shoulder. Cohen had freed himself from the shackles of oversight. Nobody outside the department was reviewing his operations.

  In the Zazi case, Don Borelli was signing “imminent threat of death” letters as fast as people could put them in front of him. Before then, he had signed one, maybe two. Everybody in the flophouse was a suspect, because in the morning, the inhabitants would probably scatter. The FBI already had twenty-four-hour surveillance on Zazi, Medunjanin, and Ahmedzay. Adding five more people to the surveillance plan would require more manpower than the FBI could handle. Cohen, however, had his own surveillance team, each decked out with $20,000 spy kits: GPS equipment, infrared flashlights, small digital video cameras, and still cameras that looked like what a tourist might carry. Intel’s surveillance team even had a real yellow cab, complete with an authentic taxi medallion registered under a fake name. Nobody gave a second look at a cabbie parked outside, waiting for his fare to arrive.

  When the sun rose on September 11, 2009, teams from the FBI and Intel would be on the streets working together.

  • • •

  At the FBI, Borelli settled in for his second-straight night on his office couch. Downstairs, supervisors kept vigil in the command center. His agents and analysts—all members of CT-4, the counterterrorism squad responsible for Afghanistan and Pakistan—kept working down the hall, behind the vault door.

  Borelli kept replaying in his head a similar case of a US citizen who had managed to get to Pakistan and somehow do the presumed impossible of making contact with al-Qaeda’s operational chief and training to be a bomber on American soil.

  In late 2007 and early 2008, the National Security Agency, which intercepts massive amounts of emails and phone conversations from around the world every day, began hearing chatter from Pakistan about an American jihadist. People were talking about an “Ameriki” from where the “Twin Towers” had fallen; a man who had lost a toe. The CIA began working its sources on the ground. The information was funneled to headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where analysts at the agency’s Counterterrorism Center began piecing together the fragments into a coherent story. Within a few weeks, the CIA had determined that an American had indeed joined the jihadist ranks in Pakistan. The challenge was to find him.8

  The intelligence was quickly passed to the task force in New York. Its analysts pored over travel records, using databases that show when people passed through customs. The Pakistani government helped by providing records on Americans who arrived there. The result was a massive set of data and other clues that analysts plumbed for weeks. By March, the FBI and CIA were certain they had their man: Bryant Neal Vinas, a former Catholic altar boy from Medford, Long Island. Travel records showed that he had flown to Pakistan. And he’d sent emails from Peshawar to a girlfriend in Cuba. In New York, detectives and agents started investigating associates of Vinas, including an Afghan American named Ahmad Zarinni, trying to figure out who might have helped him contact al-Qaeda.

  Scrawny and impressionable, Vinas was born in Queens to an Argentine mother and a Peruvian father, Juan, an engineer who moved his family to the middle-class suburbs on Long Island. At his father’s behest, Vinas took an active role in the church, and would read Scripture during Sunday Mass.9

  When he was fourteen, his father had an affair, and his parents split, upending his world. Vinas grew his hair long and started listening to rap music. At eighteen, his mother kicked him out of her house.10

  After the planes crashed into the Twin Towers in September 2001, Vinas, still living on his own, decided to join the US Army. But the marching and yelling of boot camp overwhelmed him, and he cracked. Three weeks after enlisting, he left Fort Jackson, South Carolina, with a general discharge. He had never even fired a weapon. Back home on Long Island, Vinas took up boxing with a Muslim friend, a turning point in his life. The friend loaned him an English translation of the Koran. Desperate to be part of something meaningful, Vinas devoured the book in two days.11

  By January 2004, he was reciting the shahada, the Muslim profession of faith, at the Masjid Al-Falah in Corona, Queens, one of the mosques that the NYPD was monitoring. The mosque was affiliated with Tablighi Jamaat.

  Vinas’s focus moved toward becoming a serious boxer, and he spent the next few years evading US travel restrictions to Cuba, famous for churning out great fighters. When boxing didn’t work out, he turned again to Islam, with a renewed purpose. He embraced the religion with such unusual intensity that his friends began to notice. He began learning Arabic and visiting Islamic websites while attending a mosque in Selden, Long Island, near his mother’s house in Medford. There, he befriended Zarinni, who observed a strict interpretation of Islam.

  For Vinas, Zarinni was a bridge to another world: a darker one warped by anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. Zarinni introduced him to a group called the Islamic Thinkers Society, which was based in Queens and had ties to a militant group in Britain. In 2005 it posted on the internet a video of a demonstration it held in New York, with its members ripping apart an American flag after what turned out to be a false story about a Koran having been desecrated at the Guantánamo Bay prison. The video, according to the group, was intended to “expose the agenda of the Crusaders and Zionists and their war on Islam which many still do not see today.”12 The following year, the society held a rally outside the Israeli Consulate in Manhattan to proclaim that Islam would “dominate the world” and to call for the destruction of Israel. The protesters taunted authorities: “We know many government services are watching us, such as the FBI, CIA, Mossad, Homeland Security.”13

  They were close. Somebody was watching them, but it was the NYPD. Well before Vinas appeared in this hotbed of radicalism, the Islamic Thinkers Society had come to the attention of the Intelligence Division. Cohen and others around him believed that the society was the next platform for jihad for disaffected Muslims. “In a sense, they’re almost bug lights for aspiring jihadists,” Mitchell Silber, the Intelligence Division’s top analyst, would say later about the group. “They’ve got an anti-Western, antidemocratic, anti-US, pro-al-Qaeda message.”14 In 2003 Cohen used his authority under the Handschu guidelines to target the organization with a terrorism enterprise investigation that dragged on for years. As part of the probe, Cohen’s Intelligence Division fanned out wherever society members gathered, publicly or privately, to eavesdrop and take clandestine pictures. When the group held its weekly meetings or proselytized in Queens, the NYPD was observing. Cohen’s detectives and analysts kept intelligence files and noted that Zarinni and others had attended the Selden mosque and society-run lectures at Stony Brook University in 2006.15

  Under the influence of his new friends, Vinas started dressing in Arab-style garb, and his sentiments became more bellicose.16 He told a friend that he loved Osama bin Laden and hated Israel. The US occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq enraged him, and he told people he yearned to go to Pakistan to train and then head across the border to Afghanistan, where he could kill American soldiers. It didn’t seem so far-fetched: Vinas had managed to sneak into Cuba twice; surely he could make it to Pakistan’s lawless borderlands. A way was out there, and eventually he found it.

  He read a book titled Inside the Jihad: My Life with Al Qaeda, by Omar Nasiri, a Belgian man of Moroccan descent who claimed he had been a spy for Western intelligence services and described infiltrating Afghanistan’s training camps after traveling to Pakistan. The book captivated Vinas,
who saw it as a road map to a great adventure. He soaked up the details, and by March 2007, he had come to the conclusion that he would do the same. He was going to be part of something important.

  On September 10, 2007, Vinas boarded a plane to Pakistan, buying a round-trip ticket to cloak his intentions. He told his family he was going to study Islam and Arabic. Before he left, his best friend asked, “When are you coming back?”

  “I’m not coming back,” Vinas responded. “I will call you in your dreams.”17

  The day after Vinas flew to Pakistan, on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Police Commissioner Kelly published an op-ed in the New York Post boasting about the “groundbreaking analysis” that Cohen’s team had developed to enable the NYPD to spot homegrown terrorists.18 Fran Townsend, President Bush’s homeland security advisor, told NBC News on that evening’s broadcast that the NYPD set the “gold standard” and was “incredibly effective” in fighting domestic terrorism.19 But Cohen and the rest of the NYPD’s new intelligence apparatus didn’t have a clue about the skinny kid from Long Island named Vinas, despite his conversation at Al-Falah Mosque and his involvement with the Islamic Thinkers Society, which were both still under surveillance. For all the NYPD’s efforts, it was no better off than anyone else in the American intelligence community.

  After a brief layover in Abu Dhabi, Vinas landed on September 12 and passed through customs in Lahore, the second-largest city in Pakistan and a commercial center. He chose his destination carefully, avoiding landing in Peshawar, a known hive of jihadist activity. Authorities, he surmised, wouldn’t think much about his going to Lahore. With the aid of a friend’s family, he quickly found a place to stay and got to work trying to make contact with militants. His first couple attempts failed, but then Vinas got lucky. He asked members of an Afghan family living on the same street if they could help him find someone willing to take him across the border to fight the Americans, and it turned out they had a cousin who knew people. Like Zazi a year later, Vinas had managed to do with no training and no real connections what most of the American intelligence community assumed took special relationships.

  From Lahore, his neighbors’ cousin drove Vinas to Peshawar, where he met a man named Shah Sahb. Vinas traveled with Shah’s jihadist group to the Mohmand Agency, a district along the Afghan border north of Peshawar. From there Vinas crossed the border with Shah and about twenty others to attack a US base. The men split into two teams. One conducted a small-weapons attack on the installation. The other, Vinas’s group, climbed a mountain and waited to strike with mortars. But circling US warplanes made the operation too risky, and they aborted the attack. Disappointed, Vinas returned to Pakistan, but he was promptly offered another opportunity by Shah’s gang: Would he become a suicide bomber? Vinas agreed, mainly because blowing himself up seemed like the easiest path to glory. He was told to go to Peshawar and await further instructions—time during which his doubts began to crowd in. He decided he didn’t know enough about Islam to become a martyr for it.

  Vinas stayed in Peshawar into the early months of 2008, recovering from frostbite that required the little toe on his right foot to be amputated. From there he sent the emails from a cybercafe that attracted the notice of the NSA. But in March Vinas stopped emailing, confusing CIA and FBI analysts. What happened? Why did he disappear? Had he been killed? Or had he gone dark for operational reasons?

  Vinas had met a Kuwaiti who introduced him to an old Tunisian man named Haji Sabir. In turn, Sabir referred him to al-Qaeda, and he was quickly taken to Waziristan, where he was assigned to a camp outside Miram Shah for basic training. Just as he’d disliked the many rules and restrictions of boot camp in South Carolina, Vinas found the terrorist lifestyle didn’t suit him. Trainers were strict and yelled at the rookie jihadist like Fort Jackson’s drill sergeants. They routinely meted out punishments, forcing Vinas and his comrades to do extra push-ups or to pull guard duty. The day was regimented: Morning prayer. Exercise. Wash. Breakfast. Class. Prayer. Lunch. Break. Class. Prayer. Break. Class. Prayer. Dinner. Free time. Prayer. Bedtime or guard duty.

  Far away from home, though, he managed to stick it out. In training courses, Vinas familiarized himself with a variety of weapons and learned how to strip and clean an AK-47. There was a basic explosives course that covered wiring and fuses. Another one delved into the art of the suicide vest. Vinas learned how to assemble the components of the bomb using ball bearings, explosive material, and some glue. The instructors demonstrated how to detonate C-3 and C-4 plastic explosive. On the last day of class, the students got to fire the weapons and throw grenades.20

  An al-Qaeda leader, Sheikh Nasrulah, visited the class to talk about suicide operations. He told the students they could volunteer but warned that those who signed up would need to be patient. The sheik explained that patience was the most important quality al-Qaeda looked for in a volunteer. He said the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania had taken approximately nine months to plan and execute.

  Vinas listened and kept training. In July, after more than four months in the mountains, he started his final course, on projectile weapons theory. He learned how to set up and fire rockets and mortars, and two weeks later he completed al-Qaeda’s basic training. Vinas, the US Army dropout, had become an al-Qaeda soldier. He was told to move to another town and wait for deployment orders. He and a friend, a Belgian citizen, listened to BBC broadcasts of the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics to pass the time. In September Vinas was among a group of fighters who received instructions from Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaeda’s top military commander in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They departed for a town near the border of Afghanistan and linked up with another outfit led by Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan who eventually rose to the number two spot in al-Qaeda. The fighters prepared to mount an attack against US Forward Operating Base Tillman, in Afghanistan. The outpost was named after Pat Tillman, the former football safety for the Arizona Cardinals who joined the US Army and was killed by friendly fire near the base in 2004.

  Using a spotter, the fighters climbed the side of a mountain and launched four missiles at the base from the Pakistani side of the border. They missed their mark, but if al-Qaeda had any doubts remaining about Vinas, that day erased them. He wasn’t a spy. He was an eager infantryman.

  A world away, in Vinas’s hometown, New Yorkers were preparing to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Kelly told the Associated Press that his department’s counterterrorism operations had been transformed. “We can put in a lot of measures, a lot of procedures, and brag about what we’re doing,” he said. “But preventing another attack—that’s the ultimate standard. So far, so good.”21 The investigators on CT-4, the squad handling the Vinas case, had no idea where he was. Borelli thought he might have been killed in a training accident or drone strike. There were plenty of ways to die in Waziristan.

  The Vinas case could have been the NYPD’s moment to shine. Cohen had been keeping tabs on the Islamic Thinkers Society since 2003, yet he hadn’t been able to spot Vinas. But he knew plenty about the Islamic Thinkers. So while the FBI worked desperately to figure out whether someone in New York had helped Vinas gain entrée to al-Qaeda, Cohen was running a secret parallel investigation. The case, dubbed Operation Witches Brew, targeted Vinas’s friend Zarinni.22 Cohen had an informant in the inner circle of the Islamic Thinkers Society. But he didn’t tell the FBI, which was separately investigating one of the group’s top members.

  Neither the FBI nor the NYPD knew at that time that Vinas was connected to Islamic Thinkers. But, as usual, the dueling investigations caused intense friction. That came to a head in March, when the society member whom the FBI was investigating threw his computer hard drive into the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. One of the NYPD’s informants was in the car at the time, but Cohen didn’t tell the FBI for weeks. When the bureau’s dive team recovered the drive, it was useless.

  On April 18 Lauren Anderson, the acting special agent in cha
rge of terrorism in New York, went to Cohen’s office to smooth over the tensions and learn more about the NYPD’s informant. Cohen told her it was the “policy of the NYPD not to reveal asset information to any outside law enforcement agency.”23 In this case, Cohen went on, he had decided to make an exception because of the national security concerns. He then lectured Anderson, who had spent most of her career investigating terrorism and handling sensitive espionage cases, about how to handle sources. He said he would agree to share information about the Witches Brew investigation, but that “any such possible disclosure of a highly sensitive NYPD Intelligence Division asset must be treated with the utmost discretion.”24 He then demanded that Anderson create a subgroup of agents—“a very small internal compartment”—who would be the only ones privy to whatever information he agreed to share from his Intelligence Division. After Anderson had agreed to all Cohen’s conditions, he handed her a file with the latest intelligence that his team had collected on Zarinni. There was nothing in the file that helped the hunt for Vinas.

  Vinas, sitting in Pakistan, never imagined that he was the target of a major US manhunt. Neither, apparently, did his al-Qaeda commanders, who, freshly convinced of his commitment to their cause after the attempted raid on the Tillman base, tapped him as a kind of operations consultant. He was, after all, an American passport holder intimately familiar with their targets in New York. Vinas, it turned out, had a lot to tell his al-Qaeda bosses. He had a near photographic memory and an eye for detail. He told al-Qaeda’s operatives about a choke point on the Long Island Rail Road, which connects the suburbs of Long Island to New York City and carries nearly three hundred thousand commuters daily. He drew a diagram so his commanders could understand what he meant when he explained where he thought a well-placed bomb could inflict maximum casualties on passengers.