Enemies Within (2 page)

Whether they are the size of an auditorium or a broom closet, everything about these rooms is governed by strict rules. The walls are three layers of drywall thick, stuffed with acoustic batting and coated with a sound-dampening sealant. Ceilings and walls are permanently joined together, eliminating tiny seams through which a spy might coax a microphone. Even hanging a picture is nearly always prohibited because it requires putting a hole in the wall. The heating and air-conditioning ductwork is soundproofed and guarded by steel, either by heavy grilles or half-inch-thick bars welded both vertically and horizontally in six-inch intervals. The plumbing is designed not to carry electric signals, lest someone use the pipes to detect conversations. Utility lines for the rest of the building are not allowed near these rooms. And every cable that serves them is threaded through a single opening. Cell phones are prohibited.

In Chelsea, the room was down the hall from Borelli’s office, protected by a numeric lock. The keypad looked like the numbers on a telephone, only with a digital display. When the keypad was activated, the numbers rearranged themselves randomly, so even if someone nearby were trying to sneak a peek, he wouldn’t be able to crack the code by memorizing the order.

New York’s secure room was cavernous. Roughly a hundred agents spent most of their working hours there, organized in cubicles, with supervisors seated in small offices around the windowless perimeter. For most, there was no point in having a work space in the main office. Just about everything they said or did each day was too sensitive to share with their spouses, friends, and even most of their coworkers on the other side of the locked door.

Borelli found an empty cubicle. Each workstation contained three computers: an unclassified system for everyday work and email, one that contained intelligence marked secret, and one that stored top-secret information. The systems were kept separate so a hacker or a tech-savvy employee with a low-level clearance couldn’t worm his way into the top-secret network. It was this last computer, the most secure of the three, that contained the Operation High Rise files. He logged in and began to read.

The High Rise files showed that, three days earlier, government eavesdroppers had intercepted emails sent from the United States to a Yahoo account in Pakistan linked to an al-Qaeda operative. U.S. intelligence officers had been monitoring the account as part of their own terrorism investigation.

The first email began innocuously but took a cryptic turn. The sender, using a computer in Aurora, was trying to get the measurements right for what seemed like a recipe involving flour and ghee, a thick, clarified butter used in Pakistani cooking. He included his phone number and asked for help. When there was no immediate reply, the sender asked again minutes later. The second email had set off alarm bells.

“All of us here r good and working fine. plez reply to what i asked u right away. the marriage is ready flour and oil.”

Marriage
and
wedding
were among al-Qaeda’s favorite code words for impending attacks. The 9/11 attacks had been code-named “the big wedding.” It referred to the day that a suicide bomber met his brides, the maidens of the hereafter. Shortly before the millennium celebration on January 1, 2000, authorities intercepted a phone call in which a terrorist said, “The grooms are ready for the big wedding.” That call helped disrupt a plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. It was a running joke in the counterterrorism world that the US was lucky al-Qaeda couldn’t come up with a better code word.

FBI analysts had traced the Aurora email address and phone number to a twenty-four-year-old Afghan immigrant named Najibullah Zazi. He had spent most of his young life in New York, where he’d lived in Queens and run a coffee cart in the Financial District. He had been living in Aurora, a suburb of Colorado’s capital, Denver, for only a few months. He’d followed his aunt and uncle out there, and his parents had recently arrived, too. Travel records already in the case file showed that last year Zazi had flown to Peshawar, a bustling city in northwest Pakistan on the border of Afghanistan with a long history of harboring al-Qaeda and Taliban operatives.

Using flight manifests and seating charts, FBI analysts in Washington had concluded that Zazi probably had not traveled alone. They were confident that two others joined him: Zarein Ahmedzay, a New York taxi driver, and Adis Medunjanin, a security guard in Manhattan.

Zazi had spent nearly five months in Pakistan. Now he was on the move again.

For nearly a decade, the FBI’s biggest fear had been the formation of a terrorist cell trained by al-Qaeda and operating inside the United States. The most recent close call was fresh in Borelli’s mind. A year earlier, the FBI had arrested a New Yorker named Bryant Neal Vinas, who had traveled to Pakistan and received al-Qaeda training. The US
government hunted him down before he could return to America, but it left Borelli with a nagging worry: What if someone like Vinas managed to get training and come back undetected? A US citizen, radicalized at home and trained abroad, could wave his US passport at the airport and return home with the skills to carry out an attack.

With Zazi, that threat appeared to be unfolding.

“This is a no-shit real deal,” Borelli thought.

If this really were an al-Qaeda cell, a single misstep could send the terrorists scurrying underground. Or worse, they might be spooked into carrying out their attack ahead of schedule, before the FBI even had a chance to stop it. Borelli didn’t know who was involved or what they were planning.

What he did know from looking at the case file was that the Denver field office of the FBI had full surveillance on Zazi and his family. Agents watched the night before as Zazi’s father, Mohammed, drove his son to a Hertz franchise not far from their house. Mohammed put down his credit card and rented a car for his son. Surveillance teams were in pursuit that morning when Zazi awoke early, got into the red Chevrolet Impala with Arizona plates, and pulled out of the town house subdivision where he lived with his parents.

Aurora is east of Denver, and it’s the last area of traffic in and out of the city. From there Interstate 70 turns into a high-speed straightaway through farmland and empty Colorado grassland. Zazi gave the Impala some gas and pushed it upward of ninety miles per hour. The surveillance agents called back to the Joint Terrorism Task Force in Denver, warning that they risked losing him. And if they kept pace, Zazi might figure out he was being tailed.

Borelli’s counterpart in Denver, a man named Steve Olson, asked the Colorado State Patrol to arrange for Zazi’s car to be stopped. The be-on-the-lookout call went out on the radio and was picked up by Corporal Gerald Lamb, on patrol in the tiny town of Limon—more than an hour east of Denver—directly in Zazi’s path. It wasn’t unusual
for a federal agency to ask for a stop like this, and Lamb, a trooper with sixteen years’ experience, didn’t think much of it. It might be a drug dealer or a fugitive. It didn’t really matter.

Shortly after seven o’clock in the morning, Lamb spotted the red Impala and called the dispatcher. He asked to be put through to the FBI and was soon talking directly to Olson. “We just need to know where he’s headed,” the FBI agent explained.

He didn’t tell Lamb why, and Lamb didn’t expect him to. That was a routine practice, meant to keep local lawmen from inadvertently revealing the existence of a larger investigation.

For Lamb, finding probable cause to stop the car was easy. He figured that Zazi was going at least 90 miles per hour before he’d noticed the police cruiser in his rearview mirror and began slowing down. Still, the radar flashed 73 in a 65-mph zone, and Lamb flipped on his blue lights. Zazi eased the car to the shoulder of the road, alongside the tall grass and wilting brown wildflowers. Lamb approached the driver’s side window and recited the usual script.

“Good morning. I’m Corporal Lamb with the Colorado State Patrol. I contacted you today for your speed.”

Zazi handed over the rental paperwork, and Lamb was surprised to see that he was listed as a secondary driver. People rarely pay extra for that. Lamb asked the young man where he was headed.

“New York,” Zazi replied.

Where in New York?

“Queens.”

Zazi immediately started in on how he needed to meet the man who was running his coffee stand. The guy had been sending him $250 a month out of the profits, but business had been down, so Zazi was taking it back over himself. He figured he’d drive to the city rather than fly so he could run errands while he was there.

Lamb didn’t know what the FBI wanted with this guy, but there was definitely something off about him. He was overly friendly and
talkative, almost nervously so. Nobody volunteered that level of detail by the side of the road. Plus, given the cost of gas, it didn’t make sense for Zazi to rent a car and drive to New York. On a normal day, Lamb would have kept Zazi talking to get to the bottom of it, but that wasn’t the assignment. Ask too many questions, and Zazi might suspect that he was being tailed. He told Zazi that he’d only be writing him a warning and asked him to sit tight.

Back in his cruiser, Lamb took notes on the cardboard backing from one of his empty citation books. He knew the FBI would want to know exactly what was said. He didn’t call Olson back, worrying that Zazi would glance in the rearview, see him on the phone, and speed off.

Lamb handed Zazi a written warning and decided to press the conversation ahead a little longer.

I know Queens, he said. Where in Queens?

He tried to make it sound casual. In his sixteen years with the state patrol, Lamb had worked his way up from a communications officer to the rank of corporal. He’d never been to New York, much less to Queens. He was raised in the central Colorado steel city of Pueblo. But he nodded knowingly when Zazi replied, “Flushing Meadows,” the home of the New York Mets and the US Open tennis championship.

As Zazi’s car pulled back into traffic, Lamb called the FBI again and relayed what he’d learned. Olson listened calmly. He didn’t say much and thanked the trooper for his help.

Until that moment, Najibullah Zazi had been a big deal for the FBI in Colorado. He immediately became a major concern for the bureau nationwide.

In New York, Borelli sat back, feeling a weight settle on his shoulders. In the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the FBI would have plucked Zazi off the road right then. It would have locked him up, like so many Muslim men, on ambiguous charges. Or the agency would have declared him a “material witness” and toss him in jail. Better that than letting a potential terrorist remain on the loose for one second more
than necessary. But those days were over. First, internal investigators had eviscerated the FBI for detaining so many people indiscriminately. And second, there was a growing belief inside the bureau that such tactics only increased the terrorist threat.

Lock up Zazi, and they might never know what he was up to. In his email to the al-Qaeda operative, the young man had written, “All of us here r good and working fine.” Who else was involved? Was he planning something in New York or running from something already under way in Colorado? Assuming that he was a terrorist and working with others, arresting him could send everyone running into the shadows to regroup. The FBI knew nothing about Zazi and didn’t have nearly enough evidence to charge him with any real crime. Whoever this guy was, it looked as though he’d be pulling into New York in less than twenty-four hours. In that time, Borelli needed to learn everything about this man: who he was, whom he planned to meet, and, most importantly, what he was capable of doing.

In forty-eight hours, it would be the eighth anniversary of 9/11. On that day, hijackers from the fanatical Islamic terrorist group al-Qaeda, based in Afghanistan, steered airplanes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. Al-Qaeda, Arabic for “the Base,” formed in 1988. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, declared war on the United States in 1996 for stationing soldiers in Muslim countries, but it would take a strike in the heart of Manhattan five years later for the public to take notice. Almost three thousand people died that day, prompting the invasion of Afghanistan and planting the seeds of fear that grew into a call for war with Iraq. The attacks changed how people voted, how they traveled, and how they looked at Muslims in their neighborhoods. Americans accepted a more powerful, secretive government that kept an intrusive watch on its citizens.

Some of these changes occurred in the open. Six weeks after the attacks, Congress overwhelmingly passed the USA Patriot Act, which expanded the government’s ability to monitor phone calls, emails, even
library transactions. New warrants, called “sneak and peeks,” allowed federal agents to secretly enter people’s homes without immediately notifying them. City police installed cameras on street corners.

Other changes, the government made in secret. The president authorized the National Security Agency to turn its wiretapping powers on Americans. The government kept tabs on bank transactions. It built classified watch lists that, once on, were nearly impossible to escape.

As this power grew, Americans could do little but trust that the counterterrorism programs were effective. They accepted the changes, both seen and unseen.

In exchange, they expected security.

•  •  •

Despite Borelli’s growing sense of urgency, the office around him was quiet and calm. Many FBI agents were out working cases. When Borelli made it across the room, already reading the file was Jim Shea, the deputy chief with the New York Police Department. He was assigned to supervise the NYPD detectives who worked alongside the FBI on the Joint Terrorism Task Force each day. The task force is designed so federal agents are in the same room as state and local departments, allowing information to be shared quickly. The FBI runs the show, but everybody has a seat at the table, from the CIA to transit police. Everybody has access to the same files.

The JTTF was created in New York in 1980, when ten FBI agents and ten city detectives teamed up to investigate the Armed Forces of National Liberation, better known as FALN, a terrorist group seeking Puerto Rican independence. The group claimed responsibility for deadly bombings in New York, at the landmark Fraunces Tavern restaurant in 1975, and the headquarters of Mobil Oil two years later. Before the task force was formed, the FBI and the NYPD ran independent investigations. Witnesses were sometimes interviewed twice, and detectives
and agents competed for access to evidence and to be the first to execute search warrants or make arrests. It was not only a logistical mess but also jeopardized investigations and made it easier for defense attorneys to punch holes in cases.