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

by Matt Apuzzo

  Jim Davis started that morning with an earful from Mike Heimbach at FBI headquarters. Apparently the CIA analyst in the overflow room had sent a cable to his bosses in Langley. The CIA had put its own competing version of the Zazi interview in writing. The cable had reached Heimbach’s desk, and he was furious. He’d given Davis specific instructions not to let this happen.

  “Get control of this,” he ordered.

  Now it was Davis’s turn to be furious. The six-foot-ten FBI agent erupted in front of everyone, threatening to wring the analyst’s neck. The analyst tried to explain, but Davis had lost it.

  “Get him the fuck out of here!” he shouted. “I don’t want to see him anymore!”

  He meant only that he wanted the analyst out of his sight. But after his rare display of fury, his colleagues assumed he wanted the analyst tossed from the building. The CIA man received an escort to the door.

  In the interview room, Jergenson pressed Zazi anew for details about Medunjanin and Ahmedzay. Zazi had incriminated himself, but his cooperation was useful to the government only if it helped them make cases against others.

  Still, Zazi refused.

  Jergenson increased the pressure. Immigration officials on the Joint Terrorism Task Force had reviewed Zazi’s father’s immigration documents. He’d sworn to the government that his nephew Amanullah was his son. That was immigration fraud. The government could deport Zazi’s entire family.

  Still, Zazi refused.

  While he stonewalled, sixteen FBI agents and a pair of ATF agents with bomb dogs descended on the Homestead Studio Suites not far from Zazi’s apartment. With the manager’s permission, agents in white coveralls searched room 207. From the hood above the stove, the agents removed the filters. If anyone had been working with acetone, the scientists at the FBI’s laboratory would be able to detect it.

  Back in New York, word was spreading that Zazi had been tipped off to the FBI investigation. It would take a month before reporters figured out that the NYPD had approached Ahmad Afzali and that Paul Ciorra had been transferred, but it was already clear that the case had been a flashpoint in the historically strained relationship.

  “Not true,” Ray Kelly shot back at a Manhattan news conference when asked about the troubled partnership.

  After three days of interviews in Denver, Jergenson had made progress. The FBI finally felt it had a case. Zazi, however, still would not open up about his friends in New York.

  They agreed to meet again the next day, but the FBI was reaching the point of diminishing returns.

  Saturday, September 19, 2009

  Folsom knew that another day of questioning would mean more focus on Medunjanin and Ahmedzay. Zazi needed to decide what he was going to do. His proffer was most valuable to the government if he told the whole story, which meant that he could get a deal for himself in return. In a phone call Saturday morning, Zazi told his lawyer that he would not turn on his friends. His religion prohibited it.

  “I’d rather spend life in prison than eternity in hell,” he said.19

  Very well. Folsom would cancel their meeting with the FBI. He told Zazi to spend the next hours with his family. Hug them. He might never touch them again.

  “When the knock on the door comes,” Folsom added, “don’t resist.”

  At the FBI, the question now was whether to arrest Zazi or to wait. The government had a surefire case in Colorado against both Zazi and his father for lying to the FBI. On conference calls among officials in Denver, New York, and Washington, agents and prosecutors debated the merits of waiting. Federal lawyers in New York had begun work on terrorism charges against Zazi. The filters from the hotel room would be back from the lab soon. Police and FBI agents had a good lead on the beauty supply store where Zazi had bought his chemicals. It would take time to get Zazi’s emails and his bomb-making notes declassified for use in court. It might make sense to wait to arrest Zazi until that evidence could be revealed and the New York case was ready.

  By waiting, there was also the chance that Medunjanin and Ahmedzay would slip up. If Zazi appeared to have talked his way out of trouble, perhaps his friends would get on the telephone and incriminate themselves.

  Zazi continued to talk, but not to the FBI, which he seemed to be taunting. He gave an interview to the Denver Post that morning and denied news reports that he’d admitted being part of al-Qaeda.

  “If it was true, they wouldn’t allow me to leave,” Zazi said. “I don’t think the FBI or the police would allow anyone who admits being a terrorist to go free for one minute.”

  Jim Davis felt the same way.

  “He walks into my office, tells my guys he’s a fucking al-Qaeda operative, and he gets to go home?” Davis said repeatedly to whoever would listen. “We can’t have that.”

  Besides, Zazi was the ringleader and they weren’t going to get anything more out of him. It was time to act. In New York, Borelli and his bosses agreed. So did FBI headquarters. While Denver was taking down Zazi, New York would arrest Ahmad Wais Afzali, the NYPD Intel informant who had seemingly wrecked the investigation and lied about it.

  That night, under a moonless sky, Denver FBI agents gathered outside Cherokee Trail High School in a sunken parking lot set back from the main road. An unseasonably warm day had given way to a cool night. As they waited for a federal judge to sign Zazi’s arrest warrant, Davis briefed his team.

  “Take the dad first,” he said. “I want him to see his dad handcuffed.”

  Davis wanted a spectacle for the throng of reporters outside the house. He wanted Zazi to know what he’d caused with his plotting and lying.

  “He needs to recognize that we are done with the ‘Come on in when you have time and we’ll buy you cheeseburgers,’ ” Davis said. “I want him to feel the pain of this.”

  As they prepared to leave, Steve Olson told the agents, “Let’s be visible, very loud. Lights and sirens.”

  The journalists didn’t need a light show to know the FBI was coming. The leaks from the investigation had already alerted them. Just as Davis was pulling out of the parking lot, he got a call from Denver’s NBC affiliate. The reporter wanted confirmation that the FBI was on its way to arrest Zazi. Another called Zazi at home and, with the FBI listening in, told him he was about to be arrested and asked for comment.

  Davis opted against battering the door off its hinges. His agents, wearing blue FBI windbreakers, not riot gear, knocked instead. Once his team was inside, Davis scaled the three flights of outdoor stairs leading toward Zazi’s apartment. When he got to the second floor, agents going down passed him, escorting Mohammed Zazi, who wore a gray T-shirt, black wind pants, and silver handcuffs.

  Najibullah Zazi had been waiting for the FBI, standing in the middle of his empty living room, trying not to look threatening. He was still there when Davis entered the apartment, only now he was handcuffed behind his back. He wore jeans, a short-sleeve, checked button-down shirt, and a look of resignation. Davis saw neither anger nor defeat. The men did not speak.

  Jergenson led him down the stairs, into the bursts of flashbulbs. Zazi did not respond as reporters shouted questions at him.

  As the SUV rolled away with Zazi, the agents left the window down so that the nation could get a good view of a terrorist on his way to jail.

  • • •

  Amanullah Zazi, who introduced his cousin to al-Qaeda and had returned to Denver soon after, surprised the government by calling the FBI in November 2009. He said he was bored and needed money, a conversation that grew into a cooperation agreement with the government. He filled the gaps in his cousin’s story. Amanullah pleaded guilty to conspiring to obstruct justice and helping others get terrorism training. He was sentenced to forty months in prison and then faces possible deportation.

  Months later, on January 7, 2010, FBI agent Farbod Azad and Detective Angel Maysonet returned to Adis Medunjanin’s apartment in Queens. This time they did not bring a SWAT team. They respectfully removed their shoes and showed him a warrant to s
eize his passports. His sister fetched them from a closet, and Medunjanin signed a receipt acknowledging that the FBI was taking them.

  Maysonet looked at the form.

  You didn’t sign it “Mohammed?”

  Mohammed was the nom de guerre Medunjanin had chosen in Pakistan for his al-Qaeda training.

  Medunjanin, startled, didn’t say a word. The FBI knew.

  After Azad and Maysonet left, Medunjanin began pacing. He called Robert Gottlieb, the lawyer his family had hired. His sister could tell something was wrong, but Medunjanin told her to go back to bed.

  Two hours later, Medunjanin cracked. He got in his car and sped up the Whitestone Expressway, taking the car over ninety miles per hour and swerving between lanes. He called 911.

  “Police operator sixteen-seventy-three.”

  “This is Adis!” he screamed. “We love death more than you love life!”20

  “Hello? Do you need the police, fire department, or the ambulance?” the bewildered operator asked.

  Then in Arabic, Medunjanin shouted the Muslim declaration of faith four times: “La ilaha illallah, Muhammad-ur-Rasulullah!” There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is His messenger.

  The line went dead. Medunjanin tried to kill himself, slamming head-on into another car. He didn’t die. He jumped out of the car and hopped the median before FBI surveillance agents caught him. In the hospital, he spoke to the FBI for four hours, admitting that he’d been trained as a suicide bomber. He seemed both proud and relieved. He implicated Zarein Ahmedzay, who was arrested driving a cab in Manhattan.

  A month later, Najibullah Zazi, facing a potential life sentence on charges of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, pleaded guilty to terrorism charges. He admitted plotting to bomb New York’s subway system.

  “This was one of the most serious terrorist threats to our nation since September 11, 2001,” Attorney General Eric Holder announced. “This attempted attack on our homeland was real, it was in motion, and it would have been deadly.”

  Ahmedzay pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in April 2010. He and Zazi testified at trial against Medunjanin, who, despite his confession, tested his luck in court. Jurors deliberated about a day before convicting him. A judge sentenced him to life in prison. Medunjanin told the judge, “I had nothing to do with any subway plot or bombing plot whatsoever. I ask Allah to release me from prison.”

  As this book went to print, Zazi and Ahmedzay awaited sentencing.

  Amanullah Zazi testified against his uncle Mohammed, who was convicted of obstruction and sentenced to four and a half years. He went to prison convinced his son was innocent.

  “You have a delusion about your son,” the judge told him. “He and his coconspirators were going to commit horrific crimes.”21

  Ahmad Afzali, the Queens imam who tipped off Zazi to the investigation, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and was deported. He was last living in Qatar after fleeing violence in revolutionary Syria.

  The hapless courier driving the white van in Ohio took a polygraph and passed. He was not involved in the plot. FBI agents still don’t know what, if anything, happened in the rest stop parking lot.

  In Pakistan, Saleh al-Somali and Rashid Rauf, two of the senior al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan who’d hatched the plan, were killed in CIA drone strikes. Adnan Shukrijumah, who persuaded Zazi and his friends to accept the suicide mission, was indicted but remains at large, presumably in northwest Pakistan. The New York attack was one of three that al-Somali and his cohorts had planned. The others targeted England and Norway. Authorities thwarted those too.

  The drone strikes, which inspired Zazi and his friends to become suicide bombers, continue.

  EPILOGUE

  Osama bin Laden was killed in a CIA-led raid in 2011. Al-Qaeda’s core no longer has the ability to mount sophisticated terror attacks on the scale of 9/11. Small cells of Americans like Zazi, however, represent a persistent concern.

  On April 15, 2013, two brothers with homemade backpack bombs attacked the Boston Marathon, killing four and injuring hundreds. The young Muslims were born in the Caucasus region in the southernmost part of Eastern Europe and emigrated to the United States as children. Angered by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and fueled by the same radical internet sermons that inspired Zazi, they built the sort of pressure cooker bombs that al-Qaeda’s online propagandists have encouraged.

  Almost immediately, the NYPD’s proxies suggested that the attack might have been prevented had Boston police used Cohen’s clandestine tactics. In New York, officials reinforced the idea that being safe required Americans to change their views on privacy and civil liberties.

  “We live in a complex world where you’re going to have to have a level of security greater than you did back in the olden days, if you will,” Mayor Michael Bloomberg said. “And our laws and our interpretation of the Constitution, I think, have to change.”

  Completely ignored during these debates was the fact that New York’s spying programs had already faced their test.

  Spotting homegrown terrorists before they strike is the reason that NYPD Commissioner Raymond Kelly revamped the Intelligence Division and hired David Cohen. The hunt justified the Demographics Unit, the use of informants, secret recordings of sermons, surveillance of religious leaders, and infiltration of advocacy groups.

  When it mattered most, those programs failed.

  In August 2011 we were finishing a story for our employer, the Associated Press, timed to coincide with the ten-year anniversary of 9/11. It focused on the transformation of the NYPD Intelligence Division since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Its expansion had been well documented in the media, but we uncovered new details, such as the existence of the Demographics Unit and its use of mosque crawlers and rakers. We had hoped to interview Cohen and Kelly, but the NYPD refused. Instead, Paul Browne, the deputy commissioner for public information, said he’d address our questions if we provided a list of topics. The telephone interview with Browne took place on August 18. We asked about the Demographics Unit.

  “There is no such unit,” Browne said. “There is nothing called the Demographics Unit.”

  We asked whether any unit by that name had ever existed, even informally.

  “No,” Browne said.

  We turned to each other in surprise. Then we asked about mosque crawlers.

  “Somebody has a great imagination,” Browne said. “There is no such thing as mosque crawlers.”

  After the call, we wondered why Browne denied what we knew to be true. Sources with firsthand information of the secret programs had discussed them in detail with us. We’d expected the department spokesman to simply decline to comment or defend them. Browne chose differently. That fueled our curiosity. We kept investigating and began publishing stories.

  Browne called the stories “fiction.” Kelly said his investigators “simply follow leads.”

  “We’re going to follow those leads wherever they take us,” he said. “We’re not going to be deterred, but we’re certainly not singling out any particular group.”

  Mayor Bloomberg said religion played no part in the city’s counterterrorism efforts.

  We learned that these comments were untrue.

  The Demographics Unit, for instance, neither followed leads nor generated any. It mapped Muslim businesses, mosques, and people.

  Was any of it illegal? We don’t know. As this book shows, the NYPD and its lawyers interpreted the Handschu guidelines as allowing them to investigate entire mosques as terrorist organizations and to monitor people’s political views if they spoke Pashto. The fact that some terrorists had been members of Muslim student organizations was enough to justify monitoring entire groups.

  The NYPD says it’s all been legal. And it might be right.

  The Justice Department declined to open a civil rights investigation, privately telling the FBI that there were no obvious victims. White House Homeland Security advisor John Brennan visited NYPD headquarters and said the department w
asn’t doing anything illegal and had struck the right balance to keep the city safe.

  “It’s not a trade-off between our security and our freedoms and our rights as citizens,” Brennan said. The Handschu lawyers have gone back to court to get the NYPD’s tactics declared improper. Muslims in New York and New Jersey have sued. Regardless of the outcome, the NYPD’s programs are likely to join waterboarding, secret prisons, and warrantless wiretapping as tactics of our time that will be debated for years.

  • • •

  Zazi’s plot failed because of good partnerships, good intelligence, and good luck. NSA officials intercepted the “marriage is ready” email and passed it to the CIA, which shared it with the FBI. Before 9/11, there was no guarantee that would have happened. It certainly wouldn’t have happened as quickly as it did. The Joint Terrorism Task Force model in Denver and New York worked, building criminal cases and generating intelligence. The investigation was bolstered by partnerships with the Colorado State Patrol and the NYPD detectives assigned to the task force, relationships that have grown stronger over the years.

  Going alone, as Cohen favored, didn’t work. For all the information that Cohen gathered on Americans—where they ate and prayed, what they thought of drones, where they watched sports, and which barber cut their hair—the NYPD Intelligence Division was a nonfactor in the investigation.

  Somehow, though, the Zazi plot contributed to Intel’s growing mythology. In May 2012, before he left the NYPD’s analytical ranks for a consulting job, Mitchell Silber wrote an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal: “How the NYPD Foiled a Plot to Bomb the Subways.”1

  The NYPD added Zazi to a list of schemes it claimed to have thwarted since 9/11. By the time we started writing about the Intel Division, that tally had swelled to fourteen.

  “We have the best police department in the world, and I think they show that every single day, and we have stopped fourteen attacks since 9/11, fortunately without anybody dying,” Bloomberg declared.2