by Matt Apuzzo
Before Ohio, Figliuzzi worked at headquarters running the Inspections Division, the FBI equivalent of a police department’s internal affairs bureau. He knew Heimbach and could tell by the urgency in his voice that something big was going on. He promised to figure things out and call back with answers.
The license plate on the white Chevy van came back registered to a courier company located just off the grounds of Cleveland Hopkins International Airport. Like Zazi and his family, the man in the white van had easy access to an airport. If Zazi had passed him a bomb, it could be nearly anywhere by now. Figliuzzi sent an agent up to the airport to check out the company and find the white van. When the report came back, Figliuzzi’s heart sank. The parking lot was full of white vans, and it wasn’t clear whether they were assigned to specific drivers, meaning that the man from the rest stop might be driving a different van each day.
Since that moment, the Cleveland office, like Denver and New York, had been running a command center around the clock. Customs agents pulled all the shipping documents linked to the courier company, looking for international arrivals. Pay special attention to shipments from the Middle East, Figliuzzi told them. Anything biochemical, anything hazardous, find it immediately.
The FBI was looking for a bomb in New York, and now there was a missing courier driving around Ohio with who knew what. Until they found the driver, Figliuzzi wanted an FBI tail on every van that pulled out of that parking lot.
Figliuzzi listened again to his surveillance team’s story: Zazi had returned from the rest stop bathroom, and it looked as though he and the courier had chatted. The view had been poor, but it appeared as though the courier got into Zazi’s car and then disappeared from view.
Next, Figliuzzi consulted with the Ohio State Highway Patrol, which covered that stretch of I-70. By that Saturday, the FBI agents in Ohio were coalescing around a theory about what had happened in that rest stop before dawn.
This was not going to be an easy phone call.
“What’s your theory?” Mike Heimbach asked.7
Figliuzzi paused.
“You need to know. We’re hearing the area is a known spot for gay liaisons.”
Now it was Heimbach’s turn to pause.
“Do you want me to tell the director of the FBI that’s your best theory?”
Figliuzzi said they were still working on it.
By Sunday, while Borelli was preparing for the raids in New York, Figliuzzi’s agents had identified the courier. He was a young white man, and there was nothing in his background that made him an obvious threat. A surveillance team followed him as he sped around the state. Viewed as a potential terrorist, he appeared erratic and suspicious. Viewed as an innocent courier, he appeared in a rush to make deliveries.
The company was clean. None of the international shipments suggested any problems. Figliuzzi and his agents decided to approach the owner and set up a meeting with the driver. They made up a cover story and sent an agent into the office.
Sorry, the manager said. He won’t be around for a few days. He’s driving to New York on a delivery.
The surveillance team confirmed that, yes, the white van was heading east at high speed.
It was Zazi all over again. They could not let the van into the city without knowing whether it carried a bomb.
The FBI investigation had gone overt. After the tip-off from Afzali and the predawn raids, all the suspects knew they were being watched. There was no sense trying another ruse like the one that had failed on the George Washington Bridge.
Police stopped the white Chevy shortly before eight o’clock as it crawled toward the Lincoln Tunnel in Monday rush-hour traffic. This time, someone from the Joint Terrorism Task Force, someone with security clearances, was there to oversee it. The instructions from FBI headquarters in Washington had been explicit: Look for bottles, jugs, anything that could carry liquids. The driver allowed police and an explosives dog to search the van. Nothing.
The courier showed police his shipping documents. He was delivering an eight-by-three-foot sign to Macy’s department store at Herald Square in Manhattan, where the Thanksgiving parade ended each year. He showed them the package. Investigators photographed the van, its contents, and the thoroughly confused courier. Fifteen minutes after being stopped, he was on his way.
It was another dead end. The agents were getting frustrated and exhausted.
Borelli had gone home to shower and to catch an hour or two of sleep after the raids. When he returned, he met with one of the team leaders, who mentioned casually the backpacks seized from Khan’s apartment.
Backpacks? Nobody had told Borelli about backpacks.
The backpacks were noted in a summary of the raids that was sent to headquarters. As happened with the water jug and the white van, everyone up the chain of command got agitated. They wanted to know why the backpacks weren’t on their way to the FBI laboratory in Quantico.
“There was a closetful of backpacks and nobody thought they mattered?” Heimbach barked.
The blame fell first on Joe Demarest, the top agent in New York, who promised to take care of it. Borelli was next. Though Demarest had led the raids out in Queens, Borelli had been in charge of logistics. Demarest said he should’ve had a plan to react to the backpacks.
“You got twenty-five years in the FBI!” Demarest shouted in a room off the command center. “I can’t believe you fucked this up!”
Borelli apologized.
An al-Qaeda-trained bomber was slipping through the FBI’s grasp. Borelli was demoralized. In Denver, FBI agents watched and eavesdropped on Zazi to no good end. The top FBI agent there, Jim Davis, wondered if they’d ever catch a break.
12
PEOPLE DIE TO COME HERE
DENVER
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Zazi saw reports about the raids on television. Every news channel carried the story. His friend Naiz Khan described FBI agents storming his apartment with guns. Reporters said the investigation focused on a man from the Midwest who’d driven to New York for the weekend.
Soon after returning to Denver, Zazi had opened his laptop and noticed something odd. The battery was fully charged. It hadn’t been when he used it before putting it in the rental car.1 The mysterious car thief had charged his computer. He took the laptop to the garage, unscrewed the base, and removed the hard drive. He destroyed the drive with a knife and threw it away.
Things had been quiet in Denver since then. The television made clear, however, that his problems had not gone away. Reporters said that the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security had issued a bulletin warning police nationwide about homemade bombs, specifically TATP. New York newspapers said the FBI was asking about someone named Najibullah from Colorado.
Zazi needed a lawyer.
From a shared office across from a strip mall on the outskirts of Denver, Arthur Folsom defended drunken drivers and handled divorces and minor drug cases. In fact, the thirty-seven-year-old with wispy brown hair was in the middle of fighting his own marijuana possession charge. Since graduating from the University of Denver College of Law, Folsom had never tried a federal criminal case. His law firm’s website featured five links dedicated to lawyer jokes.
Zazi arrived early that morning without an appointment, hoping to speak with one of the other lawyers in the office, who’d helped a friend incorporate a business. That lawyer was in court, so Folsom ushered Zazi into a conference room and listened to his story. Zazi said his friends in New York were up to something. He suspected that the FBI had searched his car. They may have found some old chemistry notes that looked suspicious but were harmless.2 Folsom gave his new client a stack of business cards to hand out to anyone who asked questions. He told Zazi to keep quiet.
• • •
Zazi’s uncle Naqib Jaji had worried about the chemicals in his garage for months. He and his wife had taken in their nephew when he first arrived in Colorado looking for work in January 2009. Zazi had grown a beard and was qui
cker to steer the conversation toward religion than the boy Naqib had known growing up. Naqib would occasionally see his nephew on the computer looking at videos. One appeared to be about the Taliban. Another showed tanks exploding.3
One night in July, Zazi entered the modest suburban house through the garage rather than through the front door as he normally did. Suspicious, Naqib went to the garage and looked around. Inside the refrigerator there, he found lab goggles, a scale, a mask, nail polish remover, and what looked like bleach.
Naqib called his nephew downstairs.
“What the hell is this?” he asked.
Zazi explained that he and his wife had been unable to have a baby. The last time he visited her in Pakistan, he said, a doctor gave him a recipe for a medicine that would help. Zazi waved a piece of white paper as proof. He swore that’s what the chemicals were for.
Naqib remained suspicious. Fertility medicine from bleach and nail polish remover? His nephew had been adamant, though. He decided to pray, asking God to deliver the young man and his bride the baby they wanted so badly.4
Zazi had moved in with his parents when they arrived in Aurora a few weeks later, leaving the chemicals behind. Now he was back from an unusual trip to New York, and an imam had called saying that the FBI was asking questions. The raids in Queens were big news. Naqib remembered the chemicals in his garage. He feared his nephew had been trying to cook up a bomb.
His wife, Rabia, delivered the message to her brother, Mohammed Zazi: There were chemicals in the garage. If anything happened, if the government came looking for them, Rabia said, she and her husband weren’t responsible.5
“If you can do anything,” she said, “do something about it.”
Mohammed Zazi was furious. Why was he hearing about this only now?
“What kind of sister are you?” he protested.
Mohammed said his wife, Bibi, and his nephew Amanullah would take care of it.
The morning that Najibullah Zazi went to the lawyer’s office, Bibi and Amanullah made the short drive to his aunt and uncle’s house. Zazi’s mother and aunt poured the bleach down the toilet of the upstairs bathroom, filling the house with fumes. They ran the fan and opened the windows, but it did little to lessen the sharp odor.
Downstairs, Amanullah cut the mask and goggles to pieces with a knife. The women did the same with the now-empty plastic bottles. They stuffed the debris into a plastic bag. They realized they couldn’t leave it on the curb with the trash. The FBI was probably watching. They had to get rid of the bag discreetly.
Amanullah had an idea. They stuffed the bag into Bibi’s eight-year-old son Osman’s backpack. When the family returned to its third-floor apartment, Bibi opened the backpack and handed her boy the plastic bag. Here, she said. I’ll give you five dollars if you throw this in the trash outside.6
If the FBI were watching, perhaps agents would merely see a boy taking out the garbage after school.
• • •
Reporters began showing up that afternoon, knocking on the apartment door and asking questions. Najibullah Zazi did not keep quiet as his lawyer had instructed.
“This looks like it’s going toward me, which is more shocking every hour,” he told the New York Times over the phone.
“I live here, I work here,” he told the Denver Post, standing in the doorway of his apartment. “Why would I have an issue with America? This is the only country that gives you freedom—freedom of religion, freedom of choice. You don’t get that elsewhere. Nobody wants to leave America. People die to come here.”
Folsom told reporters it was a misunderstanding.
“If the feds are that interested in him,” he explained to Denver’s ABC affiliate that afternoon, “why is it they haven’t served a search warrant?”
As Folsom spoke, Jim Davis and Steve Olson at the FBI in Denver were, in fact, preparing those documents. Now that Zazi had a lawyer and the attention of the national media, the agents realized there was little chance they would catch him doing something incriminating. They would raid Zazi’s apartment and his uncle’s house the following day.
Davis watched and read the interviews with a mixture of bewilderment and worry. He was stunned that Zazi was talking to reporters. Zazi’s demeanor, however, worried him. He didn’t have the cold stare of Mohamed Atta, the hijacker who piloted a jet into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. He appeared nervous but earnest. Standing on the balcony outside his apartment, wearing a blue striped button-down shirt and denying any link to al-Qaeda, Zazi was believable.
He reminded Davis of Richard Jewell, the security guard who for a time was under investigation for a bombing in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics. Investigators leaked his name to reporters, making him a public suspect in a blast that killed one person and injured more than a hundred. Jewell maintained his innocence, and, when the FBI finally exonerated him two months later, the Justice Department had to apologize.
Zazi was a terrorist, but if the FBI couldn’t build a case, he could end up looking like a post-9/11 Richard Jewell, a Muslim man forced into the spotlight by the bureau and a victim of calumny.
The night before the raids, Davis and Olson shared the same fear. What if they didn’t find anything?
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Zazi was on the national news again Wednesday morning, September 16, as reporters camped outside his apartment and staked out Folsom’s law office. Neither could leave without facing a barricade of microphones and tape recorders.
In New York, Ray Kelly reassured people that the city had never been safer thanks to the police.
“We’re the best protected city in world,” he said. “There are no guarantees, as we live in a dangerous world. Certainly 9/11 showed that to us, and we can see developments throughout the world that underscore that. But we are doing more than anyplace else, and we’ll continue to do that.”
Folsom believed his client when he said he was merely a shuttle driver swept up in a terrorism investigation. Folsom professed Zazi’s innocence at every opportunity, but until he knew what evidence the FBI had, he was defending Zazi against whispers and rumors.
The attorney called the FBI. Zazi, he said, wanted to clear up things. If the FBI was interested, Folsom would bring Zazi downtown that day.
The FBI was interested.
Nobody knew what to make of the divorce lawyer who fell into a terrorism case and now promised to offer up his client to the FBI. It went against every rule in the cat-and-mouse game that agents and defense attorneys usually played. Jim Davis was convinced that Zazi wouldn’t show. His lawyer might not have a clue, but Zazi did. Maybe Folsom had some inkling that the FBI was planning a raid, and this was an attempt to buy time. Surely he would think better of it and cancel the meeting.
Davis and Steve Olson led two FBI teams to Aurora, one for Zazi’s apartment, the other for his uncle’s house. Whether or not Zazi showed up for the meeting, the raids would go as planned.
Shortly before two o’clock, Folsom and a colleague arrived at the federal building in downtown Denver with Najibullah Zazi and his father. They checked in at the reception desk and were told to leave their cell phones in a storage locker. Security rules, the FBI explained. No outside cell phones allowed.
It was a lie. The FBI didn’t want anyone to tell Zazi that his house was being searched. Once the phones were locked up, Davis and Olson got the word: Hit the houses.
Zazi left his father in the reception area and followed his lawyers toward a conference room, where they sat across from an agent named Eric Jergenson. He had a shaved head and the build of a farmhand. A native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he kept miniature Green Bay Packers and University of Wisconsin Badgers football helmets on his desk. Jergenson had entered the FBI Academy in 2002, inspired like so many of his peers to join the fight against terrorism.7
Every FBI investigation has a case agent who drives it and makes decisions. When the Zazi affair began, Jergenson was the case agent, but th
at was on a piece of paper. The investigation was so high profile that Olson and Davis ran things in Colorado, with all of FBI headquarters in Washington weighing in. That changed when Zazi walked into the building. Top FBI officials don’t conduct interviews. Jergenson was up.
The FBI was certain that Zazi was a terrorist. Yet the bureau had no idea with whom or for whom he was working. Zazi’s arrival at the FBI was an all-too-real variation on the philosopher’s ticking-time-bomb scenario, which first appeared in Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 French novel The Centurions, in which a soldier beats an Arab dissident into confessing.
For decades, scholars have used the ticking bomb as a thought experiment. One prisoner knows the location of the hidden device. How far is the jailer willing to go to extract the information? Who would allow the innocent to die to protect the rights of a terrorist? Doesn’t the jailer have an ethical obligation to do everything in his power?
The fictional scenario presaged a post-9/11 principle: “To protect our people, we need more than retaliation, we need more than a reaction to the last attack,” President George W. Bush said in 2006. “We need to do everything in our power to stop the next attack.”
“Everything” meant tactics that previously would have been off-limits, such as eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, holding people in offshore prisons without charges, and, in New York, spying on Muslim college students and taping sermons.
The ticking-time-bomb scenario assumes that the jailer must go to extreme lengths. Since 9/11, the word interrogation has conjured images of hooded men being whisked to secret CIA prisons in Asia or Eastern Europe. There the CIA shaved their heads and faces, stripped them, and stood them for photographs. Subjected to constant light and noise, the naked prisoners were shackled in uncomfortable positions to keep them from sleeping. They were slapped, doused with water, thrown against the wall, and locked in small boxes. Most notoriously, CIA contractors strapped three prisoners to boards and poured water over their cloth-covered faces. Waterboarding simulates drowning and is so terrifying and agonizing that the United States prosecuted and executed Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American prisoners during World War II.8 When the International Committee of the Red Cross interviewed the detainees about the CIA’s tactics, the humanitarian group—responsible under international law for protecting prisoners—declared them to be torture.9