Enemies Within (26 page)

The Justice Department salvaged its case by cutting a deal in which al-Moayad and his aide were allowed to go free if they admitted helping Hamas—not al-Qaeda. Though Attorney General John Ashcroft once publicly accused Al-Farooq of raising money for al-Qaeda, the government could never establish that Al-Farooq or its members were involved in terrorism.

And nobody in the NYPD’s secret files on Al-Farooq was ever charged in connection with Cohen’s lengthy investigation.

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The FBI’s refusal to bug Al-Farooq was a minor setback. Cohen turned instead to his legions of informants and undercovers. To manage the monumental task of infiltrating the mosques, Cohen tapped Larry Sanchez, his terrorism consultant on loan from the CIA. Just as the NYPD borrowed the original idea of listening posts from the FBI’s 1960s playbook, Sanchez borrowed freely from the CIA.

Early in the Bush administration’s war on terror, the CIA had tried a number of tactics to infiltrate al-Qaeda and give America an early
warning on terrorism. One approach involved paying informants to visit mosques overseas and report on what they heard. Was the imam preaching violence? Was the ideology radical? Were fanatical factions of the congregation breaking away? The informants became informally known as “mosque crawlers.”

It didn’t take long for CIA officials to realize the effort was a waste of time and money. The mosque crawlers never produced valuable intelligence. The CIA scrapped the idea and focused its efforts elsewhere. But Cohen and Sanchez picked up where the CIA left off and duplicated the effort in New York.

A good crawler was one who made the rounds, visiting several mosques and listening closely to what people were saying. The best crawlers filed hundreds of reports, and not just on radical or violent talk. Cohen wanted his network of informants and undercover officers to take note of what Muslims in the tristate area were saying or doing, no matter how innocuous.

The NYPD’s web of cops and crawlers slowly amassed a great deal of information, not only in the city but also on Long Island, in suburban Westchester County, and across the state line in New Jersey. They reported on the ethnicities and national origins of those who prayed. They wrote down the names of those who sat on the governing councils, or
shuras
. Informants snapped pictures and collected license plate numbers of congregants as they arrived. Police mounted cameras on light poles and aimed them at mosques. When a new imam was hired, the NYPD used a pole camera to identify him.
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Plainclothes detectives working for the Demographics Unit mapped and photographed mosques for their files. The NYPD had its informants go into the mosques and collect lists of people attending classes, including cell phone numbers and email addresses.
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Still, Cohen wasn’t content with the information from the field. He had the analyst’s instinct to gather as much data as he could to understand where his enemy lurked. He launched an initiative to exploit
I-94s, the immigration forms that foreign nationals filled out when they visited the United States, to find people for questioning. Through contacts at US Customs and Border Protection, officers in the Intel Division obtained the forms and then tracked down the people who filled them out. These foreigners and their families were asked a series of questions, including, “What mosques might a visitor attend if he wanted to lie low during his time New York?” The detectives would pass the answers to the informant builders at the Terrorism Interdiction Unit.
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All this information went into the police reports that were supposed to help Cohen’s analysts figure out which mosques and imams needed closer monitoring. By 2004, approximately two years after Sanchez came aboard, the division had produced an intelligence packet identifying eight former and current imams as radical religious leaders. Another list catalogued forty “mosques of concern”—including several with congregations composed largely of African American converts, many of whom had petty criminal records but no demonstrable connections to terrorism.
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“Just about any mosque can be a mosque of concern,” said a former official involved in the program.

Eventually Cohen got his bugs. Instead of hiding them inside walls, he hid them on people. Because the FBI wouldn’t play ball, he armed his undercover officers and informants with recording devices, careful to use them only at the mosques under investigation. The NYPD had a variety of devices available, with commercial names such as the F-Bird and the Eagle. They could hide a microphone inside a wristwatch or the small electronic key fob used to unlock car doors. The devices allowed NYPD informants to secretly record sermons and conversations.
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And just as their investigation into Time’s Up and the Friends of Brad Will allowed the NYPD to collect information about other liberal groups that planned to protest the government, terrorism enterprise investigations allowed the police to collect information otherwise protected by the First Amendment.

After a Danish newspaper published cartoons lampooning the Prophet Muhammad in late 2005 and early 2006, protests erupted around the globe. Scores died in Africa and the Middle East. In Denmark, a Somali man armed with an ax broke into the home of the cartoonist, who hid in a panic room and was unharmed.

At the Bronx Muslim Center, however, Sheik Hamud al-Silwi gave a long sermon exhorting followers to use their American right to protest peacefully:

We have to do something about it, but not what those people are doing back home. They are burning and destroying stuff, and they should know that the Prophet does not want something like that to happen. We should follow the Prophet in the best way we can, boycott anything that was made in Denmark, don’t buy or sell anything that has to do with them. We should send letters to our legal organizations and explain how we feel and demand that they do something about it.
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Al-Silwi’s comments were reported, verbatim, in police files. Normally, a call to protest and boycott would be off-limits because it related to First Amendment activity, not a crime. But al-Silwi was the target of an investigation, which meant that the NYPD considered his sermons fair game, even when they were peaceful political comments.

Responding to the Danish cartoon controversy, police prepared a report for Police Commissioner Kelly in February 2006, a document that provided a window into the NYPD’s collection efforts. Informants slipped into at least five mosques to listen to remarks about the cartoons.
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Nothing in the report pointed to any incipient violence in New York City.

In some instances, the conversations catalogued had nothing to do with terrorism or violence at all. In October 2006, after New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle crashed his single-engine plane into a residential
tower on Manhattan’s Upper East Side during a flying lesson, investigators determined almost immediately that it was an accident.

Yet the NYPD’s informant machine kept humming along. At the Brooklyn Islamic Center, a confidential informant “noted chatter among the regulars expressing relief and thanks to God that the crash was only an accident and not an act of terrorism.”
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“The worshippers made remarks to the effect that ‘it better be an accident; we don’t need any more heat,’ ” an undercover officer reported from the Al-Tawheed Islamic Center in Jersey City, New Jersey.
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“In summary,” the NYPD’s analysts concluded, “there is no known chatter indicating either happiness over the crash, regret that it was not a terrorist attack, or interest in carrying out an attack by similar method.”
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•  •  •

By 2006, the intelligence community had al-Qaeda on its heels. The CIA had rounded up dozens of its operatives and sent them to secret prisons around the world. There had been attacks in London and Madrid, but none in the United States. In New York, the NYPD regularly trumpeted its role in keeping America safe in a stream of news stories and television interviews. “We have brought on board some of the best young minds in this country to help us analyze intelligence,” Kelly told TV talk show host Charlie Rose. “We have a lot of, as I say, energetic young people who maybe want to have a career in the world of intelligence but have come to the NYPD because that‘s where the action is.”

Cohen was happy to take credit. “Our job is to raise the bar and make it more difficult, if not impossible,” Cohen told the CBS news program
60 Minutes
. “That’s what we certainly try to do. I like to think that we’ve had some success.”

In a lengthy internal PowerPoint presentation entitled “Intelligence Division—Strategic Posture 2006,” the NYPD laid out its accomplishments.
The department had catalogued more than 250 mosques as to their ethnic makeup, leadership, and group affiliations in the metro area. The presentation showed that the department had a source in many of them—either a confidential informant or an undercover officer. Though no investigation resulted in charges against a mosque for being a terrorist organization, the list of mosques of concern kept growing: from 40 to 53 in two years. Cohen could actually measure his success in the war on terror.

The NYPD had also expanded the number of people under investigation. Cohen’s analysts had identified 138 “persons of interest” in New York City. A person of interest was “an individual with threat potential based on their position at a particular location, links to an organization, overseas links, and/or criminal history.”

Evidence of current criminal activity wasn’t listed as a factor.

The list included imams who were prominent in civic activities. Some had decried terrorism. Others, such as Sheikh Reda Shata, had stood shoulder to shoulder with the NYPD and Mayor Michael Bloomberg to show support for the police in their counterterrorism efforts.

Shata was the imam at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, one of the mosques that the NYPD had been investigating as a terrorism enterprise since 2003. It’s not clear what more Shata could have done to avoid suspicion. He invited NYPD officers from the local precinct for breakfast and threw going-away parties when they transferred. He had breakfast and dinner with Bloomberg at Gracie Mansion, the mayor’s official residence, and he invited FBI agents into his mosque to speak with congregants.
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“I have been impressed with his desire, as he’s expressed it to me, to do good and do right,” Charles Frahm, the FBI’s top counterterrorism agent in the city, told the
New York Times
for its Pulitzer Prize–winning series on Shata’s life in America.

Born and raised in Egypt, Shata was educated at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, a center of Islamic learning. He taught Islamic law in Saudi
Arabia and worked as an imam in Stuttgart, Germany. After 9/11, when someone defiled his mosque with feces and graffiti,
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he decided it was time to leave. When the job at the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge opened, with its hundreds of worshippers, he jumped at the opportunity.

Shata arrived in New York in 2002, about the same time that Cohen was hired to transform the NYPD Intelligence Division. It didn’t take long for the NYPD to hear about the new Egyptian imam at the mosque, which had a large Palestinian membership. He quickly fell under suspicion, and his name was among those the police considered part of the city’s “radical leadership.” The secret NYPD files noted his education at Al-Azhar and his birth date but wrongly described him as Palestinian.
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The Special Services Unit assigned an undercover officer, and the Terrorist Interdiction Unit sent a confidential informant to spy on Shata and his mosque, even as he met with Kelly and conducted cultural-sensitivity training at the Sixty-eighth Precinct in Brooklyn in 2006.
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The same year that the
Times
held up Shata as an example of how one imam learned to “find ways to reconcile Muslim tradition with American life,”
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hints of the NYPD’s extensive spying were trickling out.

Shahawar Matin Siraj, the twenty-three-year-old Pakistani immigrant accused of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station, had gone to trial, forcing the NYPD to reveal some investigative methods. An informant testified that he’d attended 575 prayer services at the Bay Ridge mosque.
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His handler generated hundreds of reports, many of them based on daily visits there.
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An undercover officer, testifying under a fake name, said that his job was to be a “walking camera” among the Muslims.

Covering the trial, the
New York Times
wrote that NYPD documents unearthed at trial “suggest that there could be as many as two dozen such investigations, but it could not be learned whether any others bore fruit.”
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What reporters didn’t realize was that the mosques themselves were the targets, and the NYPD had decided that houses of worship
might be terrorism enterprises. In a city where routine police reports aren’t public and where NYPD press officers hand out summaries of cases they consider newsworthy, the police made it hard for journalists to dig deeper into the secret programs they’d glimpsed.

“Beyond the detective’s testimony, police officials yesterday would not discuss the scope of the program and provided no details about its structure, its guidelines, or its successes or failures,” the
Times
wrote. “Several officials, however, suggested it was in its early stages.”
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