Enemies Within (22 page)

The public didn’t know about rakers. What it did know, however, was that nearly a decade had passed without another successful terrorist attack.

That was the yardstick by which Cohen wanted to be measured. In a 2005 deposition, a civil rights lawyer asked him how he knew his programs worked. Was he actually deterring terrorism? Was there some methodology to quantify that?

“I never bothered to look,” Cohen said. “It doesn’t exist as far as I could tell.”

So how did he know what he did worked?

“They haven’t attacked us.”

The absence of a terrorist attack has been the silver-bullet argument for national security professionals for years. It has been used to prove the success of secret prisons, Guantánamo Bay, waterboarding, drones, and warrantless wiretapping. It is a flawed argument, the logical fallacy
known as
post hoc ergo propter hoc
(“after this therefore because of this”). There have been no terrorist attacks since 9/11. Hence, whatever counterterrorism program being argued about must prevent terrorism.

From a political standpoint, though, it was nearly irrefutable.

Zazi and his friends jeopardized that argument. They’d become radically anti-American jihadists on the streets of Queens, within earshot of the NYPD’s listening posts. Medunjanin had even been a vocal and respected member of the Muslim student group at Queens College while an undercover officer was also a member. It hadn’t mattered. For all the files that the NYPD had on students, Salafists, protesters, and others with no ties to terrorism, these three men had slipped unnoticed through Cohen’s zone defense.

7

OSTERMANN

DENVER

Thursday, September 10, 2009

Jim Davis, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Denver field office, was still not sure he had his man. The email about the marriage—the one that started this whole case running—had been sent from inside Zazi’s parents’ apartment. That much he knew for certain. But who could say for sure that Zazi had sent it? It had been sent from a Yahoo account. If Zazi had left himself logged in, anyone could have sat down at the computer and sent the email. Zazi left town in a hurry, and the FBI was trying to figure out what he was rushing toward. But, Davis wondered, what if Zazi wasn’t running
to
something? What if he was fleeing something in Denver that he didn’t want any part of? Or, even supposing that Zazi were part of a terrorist plot, what would be a better alibi than being 1,800 miles away when something blew up?

Though Zazi was in New York, the investigation was still being run in Colorado, where it had begun. Zazi’s family blended in among the many Arabs and South Asians who’d settled in and around Denver. While Borelli and his team were chasing Zazi in New York, it was up
to Davis to figure out whether anybody in Colorado was involved. He had his hands full.

From the beginning, Davis was suspicious of Mohammed Wali Zazi, the patriarch. In one email that the FBI had uncovered, the al-Qaeda figure asked Zazi how to contact someone named Mohammed. That actually referred to the fake name Adis Medunjanin had used in Pakistan, but the FBI assumed it meant Zazi’s father. Mohammed Zazi was a limousine driver, which meant that he, too, had access to the Denver airport.

Separately, one of the detectives on the Denver Joint Terrorism Task Force, an Arapahoe County sheriff’s deputy named Jackie Gee, had an informant who knew the family. The informant raised suspicions about Zazi’s cousin Amanullah, a troubled young man with a history of drugs and anger. Amanullah was not happy in America, the informant said. Finally, when word spread from FBI headquarters that police had found no signs of explosives during their traffic stop on the George Washington Bridge, Davis became increasingly convinced that if something terrible were about to occur, it would be in Denver.

One event that very evening screamed target.

Two days earlier, Davis had scanned his appointments to figure out what he’d need to cancel as he focused on the Zazi investigation. That’s when he had noticed that Governor Bill Ritter was taking part in a discussion about terrorism at the Denver Art Museum that Thursday. His guest would be Husain Haqqani, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States. That raised alarm bells for Davis. Haqqani represented a government that allowed US drones to fire missiles on al-Qaeda targets deeper and deeper into Pakistani territory. The Pakistani Taliban were also furious over the government’s military crackdown on militants in northwest Pakistan. In 2008, Taliban snipers fired on Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani’s motorcade and pledged to keep attacking government leaders.

Now Haqqani was coming to Denver to speak about the changes in the world since 9/11. Other dignitaries would be at the museum: diplomats
from consulates, representatives from the US military’s Northern Command in Colorado Springs, Denver’s mayor, and, of course, the governor.

The event was sponsored by the Center for Empowered Living and Learning,
¹
a downtown museum that was dedicated to educating people about the threat of terrorism. It was an offshoot of the Mizel Museum, a gallery focused on Jewish history and culture.

Davis picked up the telephone and dialed the center’s executive director, Melanie Pearlman. The two had met briefly but didn’t know each other well.

Davis was polite but got right to the point.

“You have the ambassador of Pakistan in there on the tenth?” he asked. “I need to understand the details of the ambassador’s security.”

There wasn’t much to understand, Pearlman said. Haqqani had a few events to attend before Thursday night’s discussion. A small Denver police contingent would be escorting him. Security at the event itself was going to be light.

“Who’s picking him up at the airport?”

It was the center’s regular limo driver. A good man, reliable. He’d driven other dignitaries.

“What’s his name?” Davis asked.

“Ahmed,” Perlman replied.

“Let me get back to you.”

Davis was soon sitting in the governor’s office on the first floor of the state capitol. Jim Carpenter, Ritter’s chief of staff, wasn’t told what the meeting was about, but when the head of the state’s FBI office says he needs a few minutes with the governor, you make time.

Ritter, a fifty-three-year-old Democrat, and Colorado’s top law enforcement officers sat around the table.
²
Davis explained that there was someone in Aurora who’d been communicating with a known terrorist in Pakistan. The language suggested some kind of attack was in the works. Specifically, Davis said, a suicide bombing.

Though everyone in the room was cleared to receive classified information,
Davis was circumspect. He didn’t reveal the contents of the email. He didn’t identify al-Somali, the al-Qaeda terrorist. He didn’t even say there was an email.

If Ritter was nervous at all, nobody in the room noticed. After twelve years as Denver’s district attorney, he was not easily unnerved. At the first reports of gunshots and explosions at Columbine High School in the Denver suburb of Littleton in 1999, he’d driven there and arrived while two teenage gunmen were still roaming the building, having slaughtered a dozen classmates and a teacher. He’d been through the difficult weeks of 1997, when skinheads unleashed a wave of shootings and beatings on Colorado’s immigrants, minorities, and police. In 2007, his first year as governor, a deranged man walked into his office suite with a .357 Smith & Wesson and declared that he was there to take over the state government. State troopers shot him to death while Ritter was in the next room, interviewing a job applicant.

Back in 1995, Ritter had personally taken over the prosecution of a sixteen-year-old cop killer, leading a colleague to call him “a trial animal.” Now the governor, clad in a suit and his trademark cowboy boots, was visibly trying to suppress his instincts to take over the briefing, to prod Davis for more information, and make sure they followed the right leads.

Davis assured the governor that the FBI had surveillance on the Zazi family. He was still concerned about the event with Haqqani, although, he added frankly, “I don’t have anything to base this on.” But somebody from Colorado emailing with al-Qaeda? With the Pakistani ambassador coming to town? On the eve of the 9/11 anniversary? It seemed too much to be coincidental.

They talked briefly about whether to cancel the event, but that seemed like an overreaction. Ritter had the same questions that Davis had asked Pearlman on the phone. Who was picking up Haqqani at the airport and who was in charge of his security? He didn’t like the answers. Ritter put the Colorado State Patrol in charge of picking up
the ambassador and providing security. Over at the CELL, Melanie Pearlman’s phone soon began ringing with police wanting to discuss security plans. Investigators would need ten tickets to the speech for undercover officers. And Ahmed the limo driver was out.

•  •  •

The Denver Art Museum is a massive downtown complex stretching across two buildings connected by a footbridge. The newer of the two, a sleek, futuristic structure, cuts a jagged silhouette out of the city’s skyline. Its exterior walls run at odd angles, none parallel, in a style inspired by the Rocky Mountains and geometric rock crystals. Its most noticeable feature is the nearly two-hundred-foot triangle jutting out like a ship’s prow over three lanes of downtown traffic.

In a suite in an office park south of the city, Major Brenda Leffler and Captain Steve Garcia of the Colorado State Patrol stared at images of the museum. There was not much to say. The pictures, part of a blast analysis the state had previously conducted on the museum, spoke for themselves. A suicide bomb outside the museum would send a shock wave against the building, creating pockets of devastating pressure beneath its overhangs. The sharp angles would magnify the blast and accentuate the damage. One of the blast models reminded Garcia of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, gutted and sagging after the 1995 bombing by Timothy McVeigh, a homegrown terrorist who opposed the US government.

The nine-hundred-square-foot office suite where Leffler and Garcia sat was called the Colorado Information Analysis Center, known in law enforcement circles by its acronym, pronounced “kayak.” The CIAC was one of many analytical task forces, dubbed fusion centers, that sprang up around the country after 9/11. Backed by hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money and much more from state governments, the centers were intended to be clearinghouses for threats and terrorist
intelligence. Members of Congress loved fusion centers because they meant money for their states. But it didn’t take long to realize that, in most cities, the threat was not nearly enough to justify all the manpower, money, and equipment.

So in many states, the fusion center mission crept toward something broader. Like the NYPD, some centers began keeping tabs on rhetoric. In Missouri, the fusion center circulated a report warning authorities to be on the lookout for people espousing antigovernment, anti-immigration, or antiabortion views. In Texas, the center encouraged police to monitor Muslim lobbyists. No fusion center had lived up to the original mission to connect the dots and detect an actual terrorist plot. Still, the money flowed, as did warnings about Americans who protested against the war, favored gun rights, or supported Libertarian candidates. And those were only the reports that leaked out. Many more fusion center documents were shielded from public scrutiny on the grounds that they were too sensitive to release. And because Congress created a Byzantine system to pay for it all, nobody in Washington was sure how much was being spent on the centers or where the money went.
³

Colorado went in a different direction. Leffler and Garcia wanted the CIAC to become a clearinghouse for information, but beyond terrorism. There were car-theft rings, meth labs, strings of robberies, and gangs to investigate—the kinds of problems that local sheriffs faced every day. Colorado has a substantial Muslim population, including large Libyan and Somali communities. CIAC never considered putting informants or plainclothes officers in mosques or student groups to find terrorists.

“I don’t think that’s a viable tactic,” Leffler would say later. “Who’s to say they’re not meeting at a library? Or a child’s school? Or a local community center? I think it’s a flawed approach toward gathering information.”

The CIAC took in information, ran it through its databases, and
passed it to others. If a tip came in about terrorism, it would work it up and hand over the information to Steve Olson at the FBI. The relationship between the two agencies was rocky at first. FBI agents tended to talk down to the state troopers. And Garcia generated some angst at the bureau for saying that the Joint Terrorism Task Force was the investigative arm of the CIAC. But by 2009, Olson could count on the CIAC to quickly deliver leads that had been thoroughly analyzed. Things had improved so much that Garcia was among the first people outside the FBI that Olson told about Najibullah Zazi.

Leffler and Garcia looked through their databases. They had nothing suspicious on Zazi or his family.

•  •  •

As Jim Davis drove to the art museum Thursday night, he was struck by a morbid thought: “If something happens here, I hope I’m a casualty so I don’t have to deal with what comes next.”

There would be hearings, an investigation, finger-pointing. People would ask why the event was allowed to go on. It would be another intelligence failure, and on the eve of the 9/11 anniversary. Back then, in 2001, they hadn’t pieced together enough details to see the complete picture of the imminent attack. Now everyone recognized the possibility—no, the growing likelihood. They’d shared the information, they’d responded correctly. None of that would matter if something happened.

Davis never wanted to fight terrorists. He grew up in Detroit, the son of a cop, and he wanted to be like his dad. His father knew that police work entailed patrol shifts, traffic duty, the midnight-to-eight. “Don’t be a cop,” he told his son. “Be an FBI agent.” And that was that.