Enemies Within (24 page)

Zazi and his parents lived in an apartment on the top floor of one of the many identical three-story buildings in Saddle Ridge Village, a gated community set in earthy greens and tans that, like the others nearby, had sprung up during the nationwide building boom in recent years. The apartment manager had given the FBI a remote control for the gate, making surveillance easy. Cars were always coming and going, winding through the maze of parking lots and access roads. Nobody noticed someone sitting in his car for a while. The agents took turns, in different cars from different vantage points. There was only one entrance to the apartment, and it was easy to keep watch.

With Saddle Ridge Village’s many buildings, no resident could have known all his neighbors. So when ATF agent Doug Lambert dressed in street clothes and walked Ostermann the black Lab around the Zazi family’s cars parked outside, anyone peeking out his window would have seen a man taking his dog for an evening stroll. He and Ostermann had never done a surreptitious search. The parking lot was nearly empty as Lambert worked his way around Mohammed Zazi’s white airport shuttle van and whispered to Ostermann, “Seek.”

Olson called Davis again. The cars at Saddle Ridge were clean. Ostermann didn’t smell a thing. The event at the art museum was winding down. It had gone off perfectly—except for the white chair. The security was tight but unobtrusive, and if there had ever been a threat, it didn’t materialize.

Thanks to Ostermann, the FBI was more convinced than ever that there was an al-Qaeda bomb maker at work. The art museum event had been their best guess as to the target. Now they had no idea.

8

MOSQUES

NEW YORK

While the NYPD and FBI worked together on the Joint Terrorism Task Force to figure out what Zazi was up to, Cohen and his team at the Intelligence Division were going their own way.

Early Thursday morning, September 10, hours before Zazi crossed the George Washington Bridge, Cohen and his top lieutenants gathered downtown in his office on the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza for their regular seven fifteen morning meeting. As the men took turns updating Cohen about operations and fresh intelligence, the conversation shifted to Zazi and what the division should do. The FBI led the investigation, but Intel had the kind of granular information about New York’s Muslims that the bureau hadn’t been able to collect, whether by choice or by regulation. The NYPD was going to work its sources and find out what it could.

Deputy Inspector Paul Ciorra, a balding, stout former soldier, asked whether one of his detectives could show pictures of Zazi and his friends to an informant in Queens. Cohen agreed.
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Nobody at the table, including Assistant Chief Thomas Galati or Cohen’s closest aides, raised objections. And nobody suggested checking with Borelli or even
with Jim Shea, the NYPD’s chief on the JTTF. It was understood that this was going to be a unilateral operation.

Daniel Sirakovsky, a former Bronx narcotics detective, had been moved to the Intelligence Division after 9/11 and had spent years developing sources in the Muslim community. He didn’t recognize any photographs of Zazi, Ahmedzay, Medunjanin, or Zazi’s cousin Amanullah, but he had an informant who might.

Sirakovsky knew an Afghan imam in Flushing named Ahmad Wais Afzali. A native of Kabul, Afzali had followed the familiar path of refugees from the Afghan capital to Queens, arriving in 1981 as a ten-year-old in flight from the Soviet invasion. He’d gotten his green card but never finished high school. Afzali had been married and then divorced after pleading guilty to attempted sexual abuse with an ex-girlfriend. He maintained that the sex was consensual and received probation, but the experience deepened his commitment to studying Islam. In 1993 he joined his parents in Virginia, where they had opened a pizzeria. Afzali enrolled in a Koranic Arabic course at an Islamic institute in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, and earned money as a housepainter and plasterer. Three years later, he returned to Flushing, where he continued his Islamic studies, and by 1999, he was an imam and an assistant to the president at Abu Bakr—the same mosque where Zazi and his friends had spent time; where they began plotting their transformation into terrorists.

Sirakovsky met Afzali in 2008 at 26 Federal Plaza, the Manhattan building that houses a federal immigration court. Afzali was embroiled in a five-year fight to avoid deportation after the sex charge. The US Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that Afzali could stay in the country, but officials hadn’t yet returned his confiscated Afghan passport and US green card.

Sirakovsky began meeting Afzali at a mortuary in Woodside, Queens, where he was now working as a funeral director. Soon Afzali invited the detective to his home on Parsons Avenue not far from Flushing. He lived there with his wife, Fatimah Rahim, in a three-story
building that his parents had bought with the money they’d made selling their pizza parlor. Afzali was at ease around cops. He’d gone out of his way to establish a relationship with patrol officers in the nearby 109th Precinct.

Afzali was happy to tell Sirakovsky what he knew about the local Muslim community. He wanted to be a peacemaker and saw his work with the NYPD as a way of bridging the gap between his immigrant community and his adopted American home.
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He answered questions about people who attended Abu Bakr and other mosques. His work at the funeral parlor made him especially valuable because he visited more than a dozen mosques regularly and talked to leaders and congregants. He knew the personalities and conflicts that animated the community.

In NYPD jargon, Afzali was labeled a “cooperative,” rather than an informant, because he didn’t take money. Unlike many informants with whom the Intelligence Division’s detectives worked, Afzali maintained a comfortable lifestyle, thanks to his parents’ success. He leased a new cream-colored Jaguar XF and decorated his apartment with expensive mirrors, marble floors, and off-white leather couches that matched the color of the car.
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On a glass wall in the living room was a sticker with a quote from the Koran: “Enter here in peace and contentment.”

Afzali’s wife was a linguistics student at nearby Queens College. When Sirakovsky stopped by—sometimes as often as once or twice a week—she would make the men tea and disappear to do her schoolwork in the bedroom. Rahim was American born, from a mixed Puerto Rican and African American background, and she was deeply suspicious of Afzali’s arrangement with Sirakovsky. Her father was an imam, and she had grown up in a rough part of Brooklyn, where the NYPD was the enemy. She worried that her husband was naive. “You don’t know their motives,” she would tell him. Afzali said not to worry. Sirakovsky wanted to know only about people in the mosques. Afzali thought he was the one with the leverage in the relationship. He had the information. And he didn’t need the NYPD’s money.
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That changed when Afzali asked Sirakovsky for help in getting back
his green card and passport. When the documents arrived, the dynamic shifted: Afzali now owed the NYPD a favor.

With orders coming directly from Cohen for the Intelligence Division to pump sources for information—any information—on Zazi, Sirakovsky called in this favor. Thursday, September 10, 2009, was Afzali’s thirty-eighth birthday. Sirakovsky asked Afzali about Zazi and his friends over the phone, but Afzali wasn’t sure he knew them.
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He said he needed to see the faces. Later that day, at Afzali’s home, Sirakovsky showed the imam three printed photographs and another on his cell phone. Afzali immediately recognized Zazi, Medunjanin, and Ahmedzay. He told the detective a little about their families and childhoods, where they worked, where they hung out. He had known them from his time working at Abu Bakr, when the three were still in high school. He also remembered running into Medunjanin and Zazi a few years later, maybe in 2007. By then, he told the detective, they had full beards and were praying in the front row. He didn’t have much more to offer.
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The detective thanked him and asked Afzali to find out as much as possible about Zazi and his friends. Where were they praying? When? And most importantly, what were they up to?
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Afzali said he understood and showed Sirakovky to the door.

•  •  •

A few miles away, the surveillance team watched Zarein Ahmedzay reappear from his apartment, where his friend Zazi waited in the late-afternoon sunlight. He had been out of sight for only a few minutes when he slipped into the red Impala with Zazi. The JTTF radios burst to life: He’s rolling. There were six cars, driven by members of the task force’s surveillance squad, all in civilian clothes, ready to follow. They didn’t know if the pair in the car were about to attempt mass terror or drive around the block.

In the car, Zazi told Ahmedzay about the police stop in Denver and
the car search on the George Washington Bridge. It was like the police were waiting for him there. And he had a feeling he was being followed. Every time he turned, it seemed, the same cars were behind him. But he couldn’t be sure. He was wiped out from the cross-country drive; maybe he was seeing things. How could anyone know what he was up to? He’d been careful. Zazi drove aimlessly around his old neighborhood, peering anxiously into his mirrors.

With an FBI plane still circling out of sight, Zazi and Ahmedzay pulled into the Muslim Center of New York, a large mosque and school not far from Zazi’s old apartment. The mosque had a dome decorated with the Muslim declaration of faith: “There is no deity except Allah. Muhammad is the messenger of Allah.” It was about five o’clock during Ramadan, and the mosque was busy with worshippers convening for the third of five daily prayers. Zazi parked in the back, out of view of the FBI agents, and got out carrying a plastic shopping bag. He and Ahmedzay then entered the mosque, disappearing into the crowd. Like that, they were gone.

The surveillance radios crackled. Nobody had eyes on the targets. Back in Chelsea at the Joint Terrorism Task Force, a supervisor told Don Borelli that Zazi and Ahmedzay had entered a mosque. Like churches and synagogues, mosques were protected by the First Amendment. Things had gotten complicated for the FBI.

“Okay,” Borelli said. “Do what you can do.”

He knew the FBI’s tortured history with mosques since 9/11. After the attacks, the bureau realized it had no relationship with Muslim communities, and agents struggled to figure out what they wanted it to be. The FBI’s first response—rounding up Muslims and holding them in secret without charges or access to lawyers—did not get the relationship off to a good start.

Agents showed up at mosques, handed out business cards, and tried to build relationships with worshippers. But all trust would be lost when there’d be a raid like the one in Queens in 2002, when FBI
agents stormed a mosque looking for guns and rocket launchers but left empty-handed. In 2006 they marched into a building in Pittsburgh to arrest a felon on an outstanding warrant. The agents were surprised to discover it was a mosque.

“Our place of worship was ransacked,” its director complained. “Doors were kicked in, and a storage closet turned upside down. The FBI left no list of what was taken.”
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And then there were sting operations, in which the FBI used agents or informants to pose as terrorists and offer to sell plastic explosives or some other deadly weapon to Muslims. Agents said the targets had put themselves in that situation, and that the FBI had no choice but to see whether the men were talking tough or really wanted to commit terrorism. Muslims saw it as entrapment. Inside the mosques, worshippers sensed that the FBI wasn’t interested in being friends so much as it wanted to gather intelligence, make you an informant, maybe offer to sell you a Stinger missile.

The FBI can send informants into a mosque to follow suspects and report criminal activity but not when it’s simply speech protected under the Constitution. In training sessions, FBI agents were asked whether they could sit outside a mosque as part of an investigation and collect license plate numbers of people in attendance. The answer was no.

If an FBI office wants to investigate an entire mosque, church, or synagogue, agents are required to inform their superiors at headquarters and the Justice Department.
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Approval requires clearing a high legal bar, designed in part to make sure that prosecutors can bring charges without facing constitutional objections from defense lawyers. FBI guidelines demand that agents seeking to target houses of worship for investigation be able to explain clearly how the religious institution itself poses a serious criminal or national security threat.
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The FBI could conceivably investigate a mosque as a possible terrorist organization, but the rules were designed to make it difficult.

Since 9/11, the FBI hadn’t opened a single investigation targeting a mosque as a terrorist enterprise—not even in New York.
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“We don’t target mosques,” said Brad Deardorff, a supervisory special agent of the FBI in Houston. “We do collect domestic intelligence. But mosques are buildings. Mosques don’t conspire. Mosques don’t blow things up.”
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The FBI’s rocky relationship with American Muslims and their mosques had been the subject of congressional inquiry. Reporters and civil rights groups had used public-records requests to unearth training materials that offended Muslims, and documents that showed the FBI blurring the lines between outreach and spying. And the Justice Department’s inspector general had weighed in. Luckily for Cohen, Intel was not burdened by such problems. He didn’t have to worry about an angry lawmaker or a nosy inspector demanding he reveal his secrets. And the NYPD had made it unwritten policy to deny requests for public information.
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