Enemies Within (3 page)

The formation of the task force was an attempt to solve all that. The NYPD detectives assigned to it had top security clearances and were deputized as federal marshals, which meant they could investigate outside the city’s borders, where NYPD jurisdiction normally ended.

After 9/11, city task forces became the centerpiece of the nation’s law enforcement response to terrorism. There were now roughly one hundred task forces, big and small, in cities around the country. But there was nothing like the New York JTTF. In any other major city, the municipal police department contributed maybe a handful of officers to the effort. In New York, more than one hundred NYPD officers participated. Shea oversaw all of them. He’d been there six or seven months and already had a reputation as all business, which the agents appreciated. A former US Marine, he was tall and lean, with a short haircut to match his temper.

“Have you heard about this case?” Borelli asked.

“Yeah, I know,” Shea said.

By now there were signs of movement. Phones were starting to ring in the secure room. Emails were coming in. Through official channels and interoffice chatter, word spread that something was going on.

Borelli and Shea began assembling their teams, ordering investigators on the streets to get back to Chelsea. Zazi, in order to drive into New York, would need to take a state highway and either a bridge or a tunnel. Those were the purview of the New York State Police and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, two other agencies represented on the task force. The situation as they knew it was that an Afghan-American had spent five months in Pakistan, was in contact with a known al-Qaeda email address, used an al-Qaeda code word for an attack, and was speeding toward New York.

“This thing is going to unravel so fucking fast,” Borelli said.

“Put out the warning order,” he told his team. Nothing else mattered. Postpone all plans. “Christmas is canceled.”

Bill Sweeney and officials at headquarters in the J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building on Washington’s Pennsylvania Avenue had scheduled a video teleconference in about an hour to coordinate the operation. Agents from Denver were following Zazi across the country, and headquarters wanted to make sure that the responsibility passed seamlessly from one field office to the next as he approached New York. Denver had already tapped Zazi’s cell phone, and agents were listening to his calls in real time. By the time the teleconference began, Borelli would be expected to have started surveillance on the men who’d traveled with Zazi to Pakistan: Zarein Ahmedzay and Adis Medunjanin. He’d need taps for their phones, too.

Dozens of FBI agents would soon be on the streets. Borelli needed someone who could keep track of them, plus the information coming from Denver and Washington. Running a command center was a thankless, stressful job. Borelli approached Ari Papadacos, a supervisor on the terrorism financing squad whose expertise predated 9/11. At the time, Papadacos was running an investigation into the Alavi Foundation, an organization that promoted Islamic and Persian culture. The FBI believed it was a front for the Iranian government. Based on that casework, the US Justice Department was preparing to confiscate Alavi’s $600 million building on Fifth Avenue, which would be one of the biggest counterterrorism seizures in US history.

“Hey, buddy,” Borelli said, all smiles as he strolled up to Papadacos. “Whatcha workin’ on this week?”

Borelli took the elevator to the eighth floor and entered the large conference room known as the Joint Operations Center. It looked a bit like the sales floor in some boiler-room call center, with flat-screen televisions on the walls and computers set up on long tables. A row of digital clocks displayed the time in every US time zone. This was the room that the FBI used to oversee massive operations such as manhunts
and the New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square. It was now open for business.

There was one more organization to call. Besides the many city police officers assigned to the federal task force, the NYPD had its own intelligence unit, a separate squad that operated in near secrecy and fancied itself a miniature CIA for New York’s five boroughs. Unlike Shea’s cops on the task force, the detectives from the intelligence unit were not federal marshals. Most did not have security clearances. Often the task force was in the dark about the NYPD Intelligence Division’s activities. That was by design. While Borelli and Shea favored a single, collaborative investigation led by the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Intelligence Division went its own way. That occasionally enraged both the FBI agents and the NYPD officers assigned to the task force. The competitive, often adversarial relationship had bruised plenty of egos and even undermined investigations.

•  •  •

The division was the brainchild of the city’s sixty-eight-year-old police commissioner, Ray Kelly, and his top intelligence official, David Cohen. There was a mythology surrounding the division, the result of Kelly and Cohen’s eagerness to boast about its capabilities while simultaneously refusing to say how exactly it carried out its business. Even its organizational chart was a secret. And the secrets held, thanks to a city council that never asked questions and a New York media that spared the Intelligence Division much serious scrutiny.

Everyone knew, however, that Kelly and Cohen had built a deep roster of undercover officers, a web of informants, and teams of linguists and analysts that were unrivaled by any police department in the country. It was clear where Cohen saw his four-hundred-person division, with a budget of $43 million, in the city’s law enforcement hierarchy.

“We’ve got the feds working for us now,” Cohen had boasted in a fawning 2005
New Yorker
profile of the new, post-9/11 NYPD.

NYPD Intelligence, or simply Intel, as both the FBI and NYPD often called it, was across the street from the FBI’s office in Chelsea, above the upscale food court of Chelsea Market and near the New York offices of the Food Network and ESPN. There was even a footbridge connecting the FBI and Intel offices. But it was locked at both ends. The two organizations never quite seemed to be on the same team.

A year earlier, NYPD Intel had been keeping tabs on a Staten Island man named Abdel Hameed Shehadeh, whose anti-American views were taking an increasingly violent tone. He confided in a close friend that he hoped to wage violent jihad, or holy war in defense of Islam, and dreamed of dying a martyr. He said he wanted to fly to Pakistan and find his way to a terrorist training camp.

Shehadeh’s friend was an NYPD informant, yet Cohen’s detectives never crossed the footbridge to tell the FBI what they knew. They worked the case in secret for months, until Shehadeh was headed to the airport, his bags packed for an al-Qaeda camp. Only then did the FBI get a phone call. Cohen wanted to let Shehadeh into Pakistan and send an undercover NYPD detective there too. On the seventh floor of FBI headquarters, top counterterrorism agents were stunned. They knew nothing about this case and, with the clock ticking, they were being asked to help arrange an international covert operation for a municipal police department. Absolutely not. People could get killed.

Yet FBI agents had no probable cause to keep him off an airplane. They hadn’t been involved in the investigation and hadn’t developed evidence against Shehadeh. So the agents pulled strings with their Pakistani counterparts and had him turned back at the airport in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan. That bought them time to build a case, but a much weaker one. The incident enraged the FBI and contributed to the perception that Cohen was more interested in making sure that his guys got the credit than in preventing another attack. On the other side of the footbridge, the Intel brass believed that the FBI wouldn’t be happy until it was in charge of everyone.

Despite camaraderie with the NYPD detectives who worked under Shea, many in the FBI, including Borelli, did not trust Cohen. But the truth was, if anyone would have insights into Zazi and his accomplices, if anyone would have a neatly organized dossier or a well-placed informant, it would be NYPD Intel. Like it or not, Cohen and his team were going to be involved in the Zazi case.

NYPD Intel was emblematic of a post-9/11 mind-set. In the aftermath of the attacks, the government persuaded Americans that keeping them safe required new rules and a new way of thinking. To some US officials, the FBI seemed a relic. The bureau was designed to investigate crimes after the fact, but terrorists needed to be stopped before they attacked. Defeating them, Vice President Dick Cheney said days after 9/11, required going to the “dark side.” That meant imprisoning people indefinitely without charges, locking them in secret jails and using interrogation tactics that the United States once considered torture. The FBI did not participate in such efforts and fended off arguments that it was not cut out to fight terrorism.

“FBI officials want arrests and convictions,” William E. Odom, former head of the National Security Agency, wrote in a 2005
Washington Post
opinion piece calling for the creation of a domestic CIA. “FBI operatives want to make arrests, to ‘put the cuffs on’ wrongdoers. They have little patience for sustained surveillance of a suspect to gain more intelligence.”

The military instituted a new legal system for suspected terrorists captured abroad and held at the Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba. Hearsay evidence and coerced confessions were admissible and, even if you won your case, there was no guarantee that you’d go free. In an America where the government could eavesdrop without warrants and lock citizens in a military prison without charges, the FBI’s reliance on indictments, respect for the accused’s right to remain silent, and adherence to the rules of evidence seemed anachronistic.

Kelly and Cohen were in the vanguard of the new security elite.
They recast the Intelligence Division’s role, didn’t concern themselves with arrests and convictions, and focused instead on disrupting terrorist attacks.

The FBI and NYPD had spent eight years and billions of dollars preparing for this moment. Their strategies differed, but, thanks to nearly a decade without a successful al-Qaeda attack in the United States, the debate over what worked in the fight against terrorism was largely academic. For all the money spent, for all the informants recruited, and for all the emails and phone calls intercepted, most terrorism cases in the US since 9/11 followed a similar script: An undercover agent sold a fake bomb to a dim-witted, angry young man and then arrested him. Press releases followed. From the early hours of the investigation, it was clear that Zazi and his friends were different. They were going to test the government’s programs and its philosophies.

Like most FBI agents of his generation, Borelli hadn’t signed up to fight terrorism. Armed with a business degree from the University of Southern California in 1983, he’d landed a promising job at Arthur Andersen, one of the Big Five accounting firms. But he’d quickly grown bored of the minutiae of ledger entries, and he dreaded the certified public accountant exam. Borelli didn’t want a life behind a desk, staring at numbers. He wanted excitement, and the FBI seemed like a good place to start. When he arrived at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, he was twenty-five years old—the third youngest in his class. He imagined that life as a G-man would mean kicking in doors, gun drawn. But as a young agent in Dallas, Borelli’s first assignment was to investigate the savings and loan crisis that was wiping out hundreds of banks. There he was, sitting behind a desk, staring at numbers. He considered quitting but stuck it out. He learned to investigate real estate fraud and other financial crimes.

Finally, in 1988 Borelli he got the adrenaline rush he’d always wanted. He joined the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which was responsible for infiltrating Mexican drug cartels. He signed up for
tactical training, which allowed him to join the SWAT team on predawn raids. Between shifts, he squeezed in classes that got him certified as a paramedic. In 1993, when federal agents stormed the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, to arrest cult leader David Koresh on weapons charges, Borelli was inside a Bradley armored fighting vehicle nearby, waiting to treat the wounded.

Legions of FBI agents were reprogrammed to fight terrorism after 9/11. It was a massive organizational change. For Borelli, though, it wasn’t that big a shift. His work as a medic had made him part of a national initiative to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction. That’s what led him to Africa after the 1998 embassy bombings and to Yemen two years later, when al-Qaeda attacked the USS
Cole
Navy destroyer, killing seventeen American sailors. He’d become one of the bureau’s go-to agents on terrorism and was part of a small group that had seen the al-Qaeda threat up close. So after 9/11, when headquarters put out the call for volunteers to go overseas, it was an easy decision. Borelli raised his hand.

Borelli, who was divorced, worked long, unpredictable hours. In his one-bedroom apartment, he drank out of plastic cups and ate off disposable plates so he wouldn’t have to do the dishes. After two and a half decades at the bureau, most of the agents who’d worked alongside him through the height of the war on terrorism were packing it in. Some took cushy, high-paying jobs overseeing security at Fortune 500 companies. Others were making money in government consulting. In a year, he, too, would be eligible to retire, maybe start a second career.

The truth was, he lived for nights like this.

2

A SPY IN NEW YORK

David Cohen didn’t come to the NYPD in 2002 to make friends with the feds. And in his seven years on the job as the NYPD’s top intelligence officer, he certainly had not.

Prominently displayed on the wall of his office at One Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan was a framed copy of a newspaper article from 2007. The story described how, on Cohen’s orders, the NYPD stopped Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s motorcade at John F. Kennedy Airport. Ahmadinejad was in New York to attend the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, and, like the other world leaders, he arrived with an entourage of armed security guards.