Enemies Within (27 page)

Through it all, Shata was unaware that he was under suspicion, though he thought the NYPD was shadowing a board member at his mosque.
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The surveillance continued after Shata left Bay Ridge to become the imam of Masjid Al-Aman, or “mosque of peace,” which was flourishing on six acres in Middletown, New Jersey.
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In December 2008, after Shata performed the hajj, the spiritual pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, an NYPD informant drove him home from the airport. The informant told his Intelligence Division handlers that he had “nothing significant to report.”
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Years later, when Shata learned that the NYPD was spying on him, he was devastated, believing that he’d been targeted for no other reason than his religious affiliation.

“This is very sad,” he said, looking at his name in the NYPD files. “What is your feeling if you see this about people you trusted?”
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Shata’s case wasn’t the only one in which the NYPD and FBI diverged in thinking and tactics. Both agencies were interested in a twenty-six-year-old Islamic teacher named Mohammad Elshinawy. He taught at several New York mosques, including the Al-Ansar Center, a windowless Sunni center that opened in 2008 in southern Brooklyn and was attended by young Arabs and South Asians.

The FBI learned that Elshinawy might have been involved in recruiting people to wage violent jihad overseas, prompting agents to investigate him. The case remained open for many months but was eventually closed without charges being brought against Elshinawy. Federal investigators never bothered trying to get permission to infiltrate
Al-Ansar. “Nobody had any information the mosque was engaged in terrorism activities,” a former law enforcement official recalled.

Cohen and his commanding officer, Assistant Chief Thomas Galati, were not convinced. As one former law enforcement official recalled, Cohen and Galati thought that Al-Ansar could be the next Finsbury Park Mosque in London. The imam there was convicted of soliciting murder and inciting racial hatred, and was widely believed to be encouraging his followers to wage violent jihad.
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Short, bearded, bespectacled, and fluent in Arabic, Elshinawy was a Salafist whose father was an unindicted coconspirator in the 1993 World Trade Center attacks.
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“Elshinawy is a young spiritual leader that lectures and gives speeches at dozens of venues, mostly in the NY area. His views are hardcore Salafi ones. His following is generally young (10 years to 25 yrs),” a 2008 surveillance request stated. “He has orchestrated camping trips and paintball trips in the past.”

According to the document, detectives in the Terrorist Interdiction Unit considered the imam a threat because “he is so highly regarded by so many young and impressionable individuals.”

In other words, Elshinawy was a puritanical Muslim with a platform. He had the oratorical power to radicalize other Muslims, even if he had never been involved with terrorism. Other Muslims who had been radicalized had attended his lectures, reinforcing the NYPD’s suspicion.

“There have been clusters of individuals who are being investigated by other units of this division who have made overt attempts to go and get Jihadi type of training from overseas,” police wrote. “Some of the members of these clusters have stated that they regard Elshinawy as their spiritual leader.”
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Meanwhile, Cohen’s informants were keeping tabs on the mosque’s members. One report noted that members of Al-Ansar were fixing up the basement and turning it into a gym. “They also want to start Jiujitsu classes in Al-Ansar,” according to the report.
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As far as the NYPD was concerned, no part of Elshinawy’s life was out of bounds. In March 2008 a police informant attended a gathering for the imam before he left for Egypt on a six-week trip to find a bride. When Elshinawy returned, US immigration officers stopped him at the airport. According to NYPD documents, Elshinawy refused to answer questions beyond saying that he had been visiting family. He wouldn’t even empty his pockets. In addition, the report noted, “he was clean shaven upon his arrival. Very unusual for him, and we don’t know why at this point.”
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Cohen’s people wasted no time following up. Within days of Elshinawy’s arrival, two NYPD informants monitored his lecture at the Brooklyn Islamic Center. It turned out that the airport story was a false alarm. In a follow-up report from one of the informants, an NYPD lieutenant reported to Cohen, “He is not clean shaven, so that info we got was wrong . . . but everything seems normal with him.”
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By October, as Elshinawy prepared for his wedding to the woman he’d found in Egypt, the NYPD prepared a full-scale surveillance operation for the ceremony at the center, which was the target of its own terrorism enterprise investigation.
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The plan included wiring up an informant to record the wedding and placing a camera in a parked car nearby and pointing it at the mosque entrance. The NYPD could record everyone who came and went. Before the wedding, a lieutenant with the Terrorist Interdiction Unit submitted the details to Cohen as part of the written daily summary of Intelligence Division activities.

“We have nothing on the lucky bride at this time but hopefully will learn about her at the service,” the lieutenant wrote.
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The NYPD continued to keep an eye on Elshinawy and his students for years, sometimes using an informant named Shamiur Rahman, a nineteen-year-old American of Bangladeshi descent who grew up in Queens. He had been arrested on marijuana possession and cut a deal to work as an informant. The NYPD Intel detectives also submitted a separate request to the surveillance specialists in the Technical Operations
Unit, known for its distinctive logo depicting a pair of eyes peeking out of a garbage can with a camera.

Rahman took pictures of the sign-up sheet listing those who attended Elshinawy’s classes, and then sent them to his NYPD contact, a detective named Stephen Hoban. Rahman communicated with Hoban by text message. He’d send the detective his daily plans, including which mosque he planned to visit or if he was going to attend a prayer session, a class, or a rally.

“Okay, let me know who is there,” Hoban would respond.

Wherever Rahman went, Hoban was especially interested in names and pictures.
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Rahman would send photos of people who led prayers at the mosques—including, in one case, a Muslim NYPD officer.
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He even took pictures of the bags of rice, canned beans, and boxes of Cheerios being delivered to needy Muslims.

“I need pictures from the rally,” Hoban wrote. “And I need to know who is there.”

“Can you text me the names of who was at the rally today?”

“Did you take pictures?”

“Get pictures.”

For all his success in blanketing the community, by 2009, Cohen had little to show in the way of arrests or prosecutions other than the Herald Square case. What mattered, though, was that there had been no terrorist attacks. In the same way that the NYPD’s CompStat computer system of mapping crimes had prioritized reducing crime rates over arrests or convictions during the late 1990s, the Intelligence Division prioritized a 100 percent success rate in avoiding attacks.

When investigations don’t have to lead to arrests and prosecution, they can linger for years. There was little incentive to close investigations on mosques, because without the investigations, collecting information about sermons, boycotts, and protests would be against the rules. Shutting down a case would shut off one of the major intelligence pipelines flowing out of Muslim neighborhoods. By Cohen’s reading
of the new Handschu rules, the standard for renewing an investigation was low. And because Cohen didn’t have to make arrests, he didn’t have to justify keeping cases open with no end in sight.

As a former colleague observed, “Who was going to tell Cohen no?”

On May 12, 2009, four months before Zazi set off alarms, Cohen and his top deputies and lawyers gathered to approve and renew investigations. Larry Sanchez was there, as were Deputy Inspector Paul Ciorra, analytics chief Mitch Silber, and Stu Parker, the Intelligence Division’s attorney. Two lawyers working for the city, Thomas Doepfner and Andrew Schaffer, were also in the room. The agenda included a slew of requests to renew some of the terrorism enterprise investigations that had been going on since 2003.

The Brooklyn Islamic Center, Al-Farooq, the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge, and Masjid Al-Falah had all been under investigation for six years. All were approved for another extension.

There was nothing on the agenda about a trio of angry young men from Queens and a plot to bomb the subways during Ramadan.

9

THE AMERICAN WHO BRINGS GOOD NEWS

Zazi and Ahmedzay didn’t stick around long at the Muslim Center of New York. Zazi was infecting Ahmedzay with anxiety, escalating his paranoia about who might be watching. Neither knew that Borelli’s agents were outside, waiting for them to emerge, but before they left the mosque, they ditched Zazi’s bomb-making components that he had carried in his bag. They dumped the hydrochloric acid down the toilet and threw Zazi’s goggles and Christmas tree lights in the bathroom trash. A scale and a calculator, needed to measure the bomb-making ingredients, remained in his suitcase in the car. He’d need to discard those later.

The plan was off, at least for now. Their goal was staying out of prison.

Zazi dropped off his friend at his apartment. By that time, Flushing was dotted with task force surveillance cars. Ahmedzay went upstairs. Fear washed over him. He couldn’t shake it. Damn being a martyr. If the FBI was really onto them, he was the one who had the most to lose. He had the jar of explosives in his closet. He’d look like the mastermind.

Ahmedzay hurried to his bedroom, threw open the closet door, and grabbed the jar that Zazi had brought from Denver. He went to the bathroom, dumped it into the toilet, and flushed. There was residue in
the basin, so Ahmedzay scraped at it with a piece of cardboard, picking up the rest of the powder.

He figured that he should burn the cardboard to destroy any trace of the chemical. He struck a match.
Pop!
The TATP ignited, unleashing a burst of bluish light. Ahmedzay’s head jerked back. Even knowing that the powder was designed to make a bomb, he hadn’t expected it to be so explosive.

The burst of light only confirmed Ahmedzay’s deepening conviction, the one he had originally felt in Pakistan: They were in way over their heads.

Ahmedzay stepped back into his bedroom and grabbed his computer. With a few keystrokes, he pulled up the videos and lectures about jihad stored on his hard drive—all representing hours and hours he had spent thinking about waging war on America. He erased them. Then he hunkered down, not daring to leave the house the rest of the night.

Zazi, meanwhile, headed to Abu Bakr, his childhood mosque, which was full with Ramadan worshippers. Men prayed on the first and second floors while the women held prayers in the basement. Zazi spotted Medunjanin in the crowd and maneuvered his way next to him. He pulled out his cell phone and quickly tapped out a text: The plan is off.

He didn’t send it. Rather, he showed it to Medunjanin, who responded calmly, “I love you. I love for the sake of God.”

Escape was now the priority. Zazi had to get out of New York before the shadows following him closed in.

They split up. Zazi decided it would be too suspicious to return to Ahmedzay’s house, and he didn’t want to put Medunjanin at further risk. Still, he needed somewhere to spend the night. As prayers ended, he noticed an Afghan immigrant named Naiz Khan, a high school pal from the neighborhood. They’d shot pool and played video games together as teens. Zazi said he was in town for the night and needed a place to stay. Khan gladly offered to share his apartment. It was on Forty-first Avenue, he said, up the street.

It looked to the FBI as though Zazi might be headed back to Ahmedzay’s house after leaving Abu Bakr. But he surprised the agents by parking his car on the street and unloading his luggage. Bag in hand, he walked to a seven-story apartment building at 144-67 Forty-first Avenue, pressed the buzzer, and disappeared. This address wasn’t associated with any of Zazi’s relatives. He hadn’t called anyone there. Nor had he sent any emails or text messages indicating that he was spending the night there.

That was just the beginning of Borelli’s problems. An email was making its way around the FBI that night, and each time it was forwarded, more people got concerned. It summarized the traffic stop on the George Washington Bridge, and one line in particular jumped out at everyone. The cop on the bridge had noted a large water jug on the floor of Zazi’s car. That was all he’d written. Had he inspected the jug? Was anyone even sure it was water?

Mike Heimbach, the FBI’s head of counterterrorism, didn’t get the email. Instead, he received a phone call from Jim McJunkin, the deputy assistant director working out at the undisclosed location in northern Virginia. The two were old friends, both Pennsylvania natives who’d started as cops—McJunkin as a state trooper, Heimbach as an officer in the Rust Belt town of Pottstown. Heimbach was in his office on the fifth floor of FBI headquarters, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue, when McJunkin broke the news.

“How the fuck does that happen?” Heimbach thought. They’d repeatedly discussed the importance of the car search.

Down the hall from the director, Art Cummings had a similar response.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“I know,” Heimbach said. “You can’t make this up.”