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

by Matt Apuzzo

  By contrast, FBI agents traditionally acted more like Hector Berdecia at the NYPD, bringing White Castle hamburgers and building rapport in the years before he ran the Demographics Unit. The bureau had a long history of success with that strategy, but in the aftermath of 9/11, it struggled to find its place in the newly proclaimed war on terror. Prosecuting terrorists in federal courts seemed weak; a throwback to a time before America was at war. In the months after 9/11, when Don Borelli was dispatched to Islamabad, he and his government colleagues set up a system for fingerprinting and photographing suspected al-Qaeda operatives flushed out of eastern Afghanistan by the US invasion and captured. Borelli assumed that he was building a foundation for criminal trials in the United States someday.

  In February 2002 the CIA identified a Pakistani microbiologist named Dr. Rauf Ahmad, who was working with al-Qaeda.10 Ahmad had been working on biological weapons for al-Qaeda and had spelled out those efforts in letters to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian who served as Osama bin Laden’s deputy. Borelli and a pair of CIA officers met him at a suburban safe house, where Pakistani intelligence held him more as a houseguest than as a prisoner. In a second-floor sitting room, Ahmad rang a bell, and a servant fetched tea and cookies.

  “Would you like some?” Ahmad asked his visitors in English.

  The Americans listened as Ahmad, a midlevel government scientist, spun a story. He supported al-Qaeda, yes, but he would never hurt anybody. They talked amicably for two days as Ahmad dug himself deeper. On the third day, Borelli and the CIA officers confronted him with documents.

  Without warning, Ahmad sprang to his feet and yanked off his sweater. At first, the Americans thought he was going for a bomb or a gun. Then they sensed that he felt physically constricted by his own lies. He was trying to unburden himself.

  Once he regained his composure, he began answering questions, admitting what they already knew: He had been recruited to be al-Qaeda’s chief scientist in charge of weapons of mass destruction. He had been instructed to make anthrax. He pointed out the location of a laboratory he’d set up in Kandahar. He detailed everyone he had met in al-Qaeda and how he gained entrée into the organization. For Borelli, it was the biggest confession of his career. When it was over, he did what he’d been trained to do. He got Ahmad to sign a statement admitting everything he’d just said, for the court case.

  Court cases, however, were out of fashion. The most important terrorism suspects were dragged into the CIA’s secret prisons. Hundreds of terrorists and sympathizers—even some without any ties to terrorism—went to the military’s prison at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. The new judicial system there allowed hearsay and coerced statements, which supposedly would make prosecutions easier. Nearly a decade after the attacks, the Guantánamo military commissions had proven a morass. They had not produced significant victories. The 9/11 masterminds had yet to go to trial, their cases stalled from years of fighting over the government’s untested legal system. FBI agents believed that, had the plotters been sent to federal court, they would have already been tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed—all without treating them like the soldiers they believed they were.

  Once President Barack Obama came into office, with his promise to close Guantánamo and transfer detainees to the United States to stand trial, his Republican rivals portrayed federal court as a weak venue favored by a weak administration. Obama wanted to read terrorists their Miranda rights and give them attorneys, even if it meant missing out on information that could save lives.

  So Zazi’s case would be watched closely across Washington, not only among law enforcement but also at the White House and in Congress. If the case fizzled, it would provide more ammunition to those who argued that terrorism suspects—even those living inside the country—should be shipped to Guantánamo, where people could be held indefinitely without the rigorous evidentiary requirements of federal court.

  The FBI doubted it could prove Zazi was part of a bomb plot. The agents were certain they could not prove Medunjanin’s or Ahmedzay’s involvement. Still, Jim Davis never considered sending anyone besides Jergenson into the conference room with Zazi. Though Jergenson had only about seven years on the job, he’d stood out for deftly recruiting and handling a valuable counterterrorism informant.11 The Midwesterner was friendly, patient, and respectful. He never played the bad cop. Olson joked that Jergenson was everybody’s best friend.

  “So, here we are, I guess,” Jergenson said, casually kicking off his interview. He wore a short-sleeve button-down shirt with neither a jacket nor a tie, and he leaned back slightly in his chair.

  “There’s been a lot on the news, everything else,” he continued. He chuckled a bit, and Zazi did too. “What I think we can do today, if it’s possible, with all of us here, is that we just have an open discussion, if that’s possible. Maybe we can clear the air a little bit. I mean, nothing to hide here.”

  Zazi nodded, liking the direction of the conversation. Jergenson wanted to sort out this misunderstanding.

  Folsom said he didn’t know why Zazi was under suspicion:

  “Quite honestly, we’re not sure, other than the fact that Mr. Zazi stayed at the house of one of his friends that was somebody that apparently was being under investigation in New York.”

  Jergenson nodded reassuringly, as if that sounded reasonable. He ignored Folsom’s query and began questioning Zazi.

  Nobody knew how long Folsom would let his client talk. So Jergenson’s goal was to catch Zazi in a lie. If nothing else panned out, at least they could charge him with a crime. That was the priority. Just catch him lying.

  • • •

  SWAT team members stormed Zazi’s apartment, followed by bomb technicians in white plastic coveralls. Zazi’s mother, sister, and cousin Amanullah were there. The FBI escorted them to separate cars to wait. The apartment was barely furnished and hardly decorated. There were no couches or chairs, only pillows and rugs. Dinner preparations had begun, and the house smelled of meats and spices.

  Evidence teams worked slowly. In one bedroom, they found a Hewlett-Packard desktop computer resting on the beige carpet. There was no desk. The area was a jumble of wires, and the monitor was perched atop the computer tower. Anyone who used it would need to sit on the floor. The keyboard rested upon a small cardboard box to make typing easier.

  Steve Olson was standing on the landing one floor below Zazi’s apartment when Agent Chris Skillman approached him. As they had done inside Afzali’s apartment in Queens days earlier, FBI agents were swabbing for traces of bomb-making materials.

  “There’s a five-gallon Igloo cooler in the closet. It’s full to the brim,” Skillman said.12 “It looks like TATP.”

  Olson hurried downstairs to the FBI cars where Zazi’s family members waited. In Islamic culture, it would be considered inappropriate for him, a man, to question Zazi’s mother or sister alone. He knocked on the window where Amanullah sat.

  What’s in the cooler?

  “I don’t know, but you’d better test it,” Amanullah replied. His response had an ominous tone.

  Everyone back! Olson ordered. Widen the perimeter. Push the journalists and curious onlookers back another hundred yards. Evacuate all the apartments in the building and those nearby.

  While agents hurried people out of their homes, Olson heard a sound. A school bell was signaling the end of classes at Canyon Creek Elementary a hundred yards or so up the road. Olson himself had once lived in this apartment complex. He knew that many of the children about to pour out of the school doors would head for these apartments.

  The bomb team would have to move fast. The cooler, the kind used to dispense water or juice on the sidelines at sporting events, was made of heavy yellow plastic, with a red top and a spigot at the bottom. The bomb technicians knew they were looking for TATP, so when they’d first unscrewed the cooler and spotted enough white powder to blow up the entire apartment, they’d wasted no time emptying the building. Looking more closely, though, they saw t
hat the powder didn’t contain crystals. It was smoother and lighter. The bomb technicians tested it.

  It was all-purpose flour. Zazi’s mother used it for making bread.

  • • •

  Zazi couldn’t keep his story straight. Most defense attorneys would take that as a sign to call off the interview. But Folsom was too caught up in the moment. One colleague who would later see the hours of video taken from a camera hidden in the conference room remarked that the attorney looked as though he’d been invited to celebrate a Super Bowl victory with the Denver Broncos. The FBI saw it too. However, instead of ending the interview when Zazi’s story became too contradictory, Folsom would ask for a moment alone with his client. He and Zazi would speak privately and the interview would resume.

  The interrogation stopped intermittently. After sundown, when Zazi was allowed to break the Ramadan fast, the FBI brought him a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich.13 The agents were shocked that the interview was still going on. Zazi seemed to want to confess. The more they kept him talking, the better the chance he would. Despite the perception that suspects clam up under questioning, the truth was that roughly 80 percent of them agree to talk to police, even after having been told they have the right to remain silent.14 The FBI knew that terrorism suspects were even more likely to confess. Once a plot was foiled, confessing was their only chance at glory.

  After nearly six hours, as Jergenson’s questioning had become more pointed, Zazi’s responses veered toward the preposterous. He viewed lying to the FBI as part of his jihad, but he wasn’t very good at it.

  When Jergenson asked whether he owned a scale, Zazi said no. He said his family had one that his mother and sister used to weigh ingredients for cakes and biscuits.

  “Have you ever used the scale?” Jergenson asked.

  “No, I haven’t,” Zazi replied. “I don’t need to use scales.”

  “While in New York, did you see a scale?”

  “Yes, I did,” Zazi said.

  “Where did you see a scale?”

  “In my luggage.”

  Zazi laughed a bit, nervously. He explained that, while packing for New York, he’d asked his little brother to zip up his suitcase for him. His brother must have packed the scale.

  Jergenson listened, nodded, let Zazi tie himself in knots. Finally, he reached for copies of Zazi’s handwritten bomb-making notes. He handed the nine pages to Zazi as Borelli had done years earlier with the al-Qaeda scientist in Pakistan.

  Where are these from? Zazi wanted to know.

  Jergenson explained that the FBI had searched his family’s home and discovered the notes on his computer.

  Zazi knew Jergenson was lying. He had destroyed his hard drive.

  Zazi’s posture changed. He crossed his arms. He tried to explain the drawings, saying that he’d once downloaded a religious book from the internet. These drawings had automatically arrived too, he said.

  “As soon as I see it, I say, ‘This is not something that I need to see or has to be in my computer.’ ” Zazi explained. “Right away, I delete it.”

  Zazi’s father was not faring much better. An FBI agent had begun chatting with Mohammed Zazi in the reception area. Over the hours, the conversation had migrated into one of the conference rooms, where an FBI agent and an Aurora police detective assigned to the Joint Terrorism Task Force took over. The elder Zazi told them about his family and identified photos of his son’s friends. When shown a photo of Ahmad Wais Afzali, the New York imam who’d called him days earlier, Mohammed Zazi was adamant: “No, I don’t know that person.” He said he never got a phone call from New York about his son.

  About ten o’clock, Folsom and the Zazis called it a night. Najibullah Zazi let the FBI take his fingerprints and samples of his handwriting and DNA. Agents gave the men a ride, saving them a trip through the gantlet of reporters who’d been waiting outside the office all day.

  They agreed to return the next day and pick up where they’d left off.

  Thursday, September 17, 2009

  Najibullah Zazi was now the biggest story in the US intelligence community. FBI agents reconfigured the conference room’s hidden camera to send a video feed into an adjacent room. Everyone wanted a seat. The Justice Department sent prosecutors from Washington and New York. FBI agents arrived from New York. The CIA sent an analyst. They crammed into the room, many of them forced to stand and watch the feed on a small monitor.

  Mike Heimbach, the FBI’s counterterrorism chief, knew that Washington’s post-9/11 briefing culture would work against him. The people in the room would spend the day emailing their bosses blow-by-blow accounts of Zazi’s interview. If the FBI brought charges against Zazi, all those emails and reports could be used as evidence at trial. Defense attorneys would pick apart inconsistencies, weakening a case that for the first time seemed within the FBI’s reach.

  “Whoever you let in that room, make sure that they understand that there is singular reporting,” Heimbach told Davis that morning. “We’re not creating records anywhere else.”

  Chauffeured by the FBI, Folsom and Zazi returned to the federal building around noon.

  By now Folsom knew that his client had not been in the wrong place at the wrong time, as he’d been telling reporters. In one of their private conversations during an interview break the day before, Zazi had confessed to training in Pakistan to fire weapons, build bombs, and carry out suicide missions.15

  Folsom’s new strategy: Cut a deal.

  That was fine by the Justice Department. The FBI had a solid case against Zazi for lying. It had few details about the plot, however, and nothing against his friends Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay. Most important, officials in Washington worried that Zazi had an al-Qaeda contact inside the country. Arresting him might leave the bulk of a US terrorist cell intact.

  The government presented Zazi with what’s known as a proffer letter. It was a promise: If Zazi told the FBI about his plot, prosecutors wouldn’t use his statements against him. It was similar to an immunity deal, except for one important distinction: FBI agents could use Zazi’s words as tips, confirm them independently, and use that evidence against him. Proffer agreements are often a first step toward plea deals and agreements to testify against others. Suspects use their proffers to preview the story they’d tell. Lawyers called it “Queen for a Day,” after a 1950s–1960s TV game show in which women received prizes after confessing their life’s sorrows.

  Zazi’s time on the throne was marked by fits and starts. To Jergenson’s most pressing question—whether an attack against the United States was imminent—Zazi insisted itwasn’t. He admitted to receiving terrorism training in Pakistan. And as the day went on, he identified locations on maps, showing the FBI where he’d been. He told Jergenson about buying acetone and hydrogen peroxide at beauty supply stores. He admitted spending days at the Homestead Studio Suites in Aurora, cooking TATP on the stove.

  He said he had come to New York to finish his bomb and carry out an attack.

  Nearly two weeks after seeing the cryptic “the marriage is ready” email, the FBI had cracked the code. Zazi was a suicide bomber trained and directed by al-Qaeda to strike inside the United States.

  Zazi refused to discuss Medunjanin or Ahmedzay. And for reasons the FBI could not figure out, he would not talk about what happened to his computer’s hard drive.

  At one point during the session, Robert Mueller called Jim Davis for an update. The FBI director and the special agent in charge of the Denver office had rarely spoken before this investigation. Mueller was not one for idle chatter. In 2008, after Mueller called to promote him to special agent in charge of the Denver office, Davis looked at his cell phone. The call had lasted seventeen seconds, including, “Please hold for the director.” Since the Zazi case began, the two men talked regularly. Mueller called Davis for unscheduled updates. Once, he’d called after Davis had sneaked home to walk his dogs, a beagle and a Labrador mix. He hoped all through the call that the hound would not start h
owling.

  Davis told Mueller that the proffer session was going well. His agents would try to confirm the beauty supply purchases and the hotel visits. Davis joked about Zazi’s refusal to discuss the hard drive. The young man had admitted being an al-Qaeda terrorist, Davis said, “but he draws the line at obstruction of justice.”

  “Why is he talking to us?” the director asked. “Is there any chance that he’s drawing our attention away from something?”

  Davis thought that was a good question, but he didn’t have a good answer.

  Zazi did have a strategy. After the first interview, he knew he was in trouble. Jergenson had his bomb notes. He knew about Medunjanin and Ahmedzay and the Pakistan trip. They’d found the scale. It was only a matter of time until they pieced together the whole plot. Zazi decided to take the blame for everything.16

  In Queens, Borelli’s agents visited Medunjanin and Ahmedzay. The two men stuck to their stories about their trip to Pakistan. Medunjanin told the FBI that he had been in Peshawar the entire time. But when agents showed him a map of the city, he struggled to point out landmarks or say for sure where he’d stayed. He was adamant that neither he nor his friends had attended a terrorist training camp.17

  Friday, September 18, 2009

  By the third day of Zazi’s interview, his admission was all over television. Too many people knew, and the news of an al-Qaeda-trained terrorist operating inside the United States was too big to contain. The leaks had become streams. Journalists learned about Zazi’s comments almost as soon as he made them. Folsom fumed. He was getting threats, and he feared for his client’s safety.

  In a post-9/11 era of information sharing in which four million people hold security clearances, the US government has more secrets than ever.18 It is harder than ever to keep them.