Enemies Within (30 page)

An al-Qaeda leader, Sheikh Nasrulah, visited the class to talk about suicide operations. He told the students they could volunteer but warned that those who signed up would need to be patient. The sheik explained that patience was the most important quality al-Qaeda looked for in a volunteer. He said the 1998 embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania had taken approximately nine months to plan and execute.

Vinas listened and kept training. In July, after more than four months in the mountains, he started his final course, on projectile weapons theory. He learned how to set up and fire rockets and mortars, and two weeks later he completed al-Qaeda’s basic training. Vinas, the US Army dropout, had become an al-Qaeda soldier. He was told to move to another town and wait for deployment orders. He and a friend, a Belgian citizen, listened to BBC broadcasts of the 2008 Beijing summer Olympics to pass the time. In September Vinas was among a
group of fighters who received instructions from Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, al-Qaeda’s top military commander in Pakistan and Afghanistan. They departed for a town near the border of Afghanistan and linked up with another outfit led by Abu Yahya al-Libi, a Libyan who eventually rose to the number two spot in al-Qaeda. The fighters prepared to mount an attack against US Forward Operating Base Tillman, in Afghanistan. The outpost was named after Pat Tillman, the former football safety for the Arizona Cardinals who joined the US Army and was killed by friendly fire near the base in 2004.

Using a spotter, the fighters climbed the side of a mountain and launched four missiles at the base from the Pakistani side of the border. They missed their mark, but if al-Qaeda had any doubts remaining about Vinas, that day erased them. He wasn’t a spy. He was an eager infantryman.

A world away, in Vinas’s hometown, New Yorkers were preparing to commemorate the seventh anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Kelly told the Associated Press that his department’s counterterrorism operations had been transformed. “We can put in a lot of measures, a lot of procedures, and brag about what we’re doing,” he said. “But preventing another attack—that’s the ultimate standard. So far, so good.”
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The investigators on CT-4, the squad handling the Vinas case, had no idea where he was. Borelli thought he might have been killed in a training accident or drone strike. There were plenty of ways to die in Waziristan.

The Vinas case could have been the NYPD’s moment to shine. Cohen had been keeping tabs on the Islamic Thinkers Society since 2003, yet he hadn’t been able to spot Vinas. But he knew plenty about the Islamic Thinkers. So while the FBI worked desperately to figure out whether someone in New York had helped Vinas gain entrée to al-Qaeda, Cohen was running a secret parallel investigation. The case, dubbed Operation Witches Brew, targeted Vinas’s friend Zarinni.
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Cohen had an informant in the inner circle of the Islamic Thinkers
Society. But he didn’t tell the FBI, which was separately investigating one of the group’s top members.

Neither the FBI nor the NYPD knew at that time that Vinas was connected to Islamic Thinkers. But, as usual, the dueling investigations caused intense friction. That came to a head in March, when the society member whom the FBI was investigating threw his computer hard drive into the Passaic River in Paterson, New Jersey. One of the NYPD’s informants was in the car at the time, but Cohen didn’t tell the FBI for weeks. When the bureau’s dive team recovered the drive, it was useless.

On April 18 Lauren Anderson, the acting special agent in charge of terrorism in New York, went to Cohen’s office to smooth over the tensions and learn more about the NYPD’s informant. Cohen told her it was the “policy of the NYPD not to reveal asset information to any outside law enforcement agency.”
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In this case, Cohen went on, he had decided to make an exception because of the national security concerns. He then lectured Anderson, who had spent most of her career investigating terrorism and handling sensitive espionage cases, about how to handle sources. He said he would agree to share information about the Witches Brew investigation, but that “any such possible disclosure of a highly sensitive NYPD Intelligence Division asset must be treated with the utmost discretion.”
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He then demanded that Anderson create a subgroup of agents—“a very small internal compartment”—who would be the only ones privy to whatever information he agreed to share from his Intelligence Division. After Anderson had agreed to all Cohen’s conditions, he handed her a file with the latest intelligence that his team had collected on Zarinni. There was nothing in the file that helped the hunt for Vinas.

Vinas, sitting in Pakistan, never imagined that he was the target of a major US manhunt. Neither, apparently, did his al-Qaeda commanders, who, freshly convinced of his commitment to their cause after the attempted raid on the Tillman base, tapped him as a kind of operations consultant. He was, after all, an American passport holder intimately
familiar with their targets in New York. Vinas, it turned out, had a lot to tell his al-Qaeda bosses. He had a near photographic memory and an eye for detail. He told al-Qaeda’s operatives about a choke point on the Long Island Rail Road, which connects the suburbs of Long Island to New York City and carries nearly three hundred thousand commuters daily. He drew a diagram so his commanders could understand what he meant when he explained where he thought a well-placed bomb could inflict maximum casualties on passengers.

Vinas quickly became something of a celebrity. He took meetings with al-Qaeda’s top leaders, who came to Waziristan to speak with the scrappy American kid from New York. Vinas met several times with al-Libi, a close associate of Osama bin Laden’s. He mingled with Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, who the following year would launch a devastating attack on a US base in Afghanistan, killing five CIA officers and two contractors.
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Vinas even appeared wearing a mask in a propaganda video with al-Libi.

One evening he dined with Saleh al-Somali, the head of worldwide operations, who unbeknownst to Vinas was also overseeing the training of another American, Najibullah Zazi, and his two friends who had slipped out of New York and into al-Qaeda’s shadow world. As far as Vinas was concerned, all that mattered was that, for once, he was valued, and he was a success. His new friends gave him a nickname: Bashir al-Ameriki, “the American who brings good news.”

By November, with winter approaching, the fighting season in Afghanistan was coming to a close. Al-Qaeda, along with the Taliban, would regroup in the spring after the snow melted and recommence operations against the Americans. Tired from the months of training, Vinas was looking forward to leaving Waziristan and returning to Peshawar. He had a friend there who said he could stay with him and even offered to help Vinas find a wife. On November 13 he bought a ticket for a bus—known locally as a “flying coach”—in Miram Shah and settled in for the long journey back to Peshawar. At a checkpoint, one of
many that ringed the city, Pakistani police stopped the bus. Vinas stood out. Who was the white guy coming from the lawless tribal areas in a bus filled with dark faces? Vinas panicked and tried to stab a Pakistani police officer, hoping to create confusion and make a quick escape. It didn’t work. The police beat him up and took him into custody, notifying the US Consulate in Peshawar that they had arrested an American. The FBI legal attaché at the US Embassy soon received word about Vinas and alerted Borelli’s team in New York.

When Borelli, now the assistant special agent in charge of counterterrorism, heard the news, his first thought wasn’t about what possible threats might be looming. All he could think was, “Holy shit, he’s not dead.”

The day after the FBI arrested Vinas, he was secretly indicted in Brooklyn federal court. In the cramped offices of the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division in Washington, Jim McJunkin and Michael Heimbach devised a strategy for getting Vinas home without al-Qaeda’s leaders realizing that their prize was in American custody. If the terrorist group figured it out, it would change or abort whatever plans it might have told Vinas about. The FBI was going to be responsible for asking Vinas questions, but its CIA partners had specific information they wanted: Where was the last place you trained? Where did you stay? Which al-Qaeda leaders did you see? Where did you meet them? Ideally, the CIA could use the informant to launch immediate drone strikes against their top targets.

Vinas remained in Pakistani custody for several days. He was then moved to a military base in Rawalpindi, the home of Pakistan’s intelligence services, where they questioned him before handing him over to US custody. From Rawalpindi, Vinas was flown to the US-run prison at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul in Afghanistan. When he arrived, he was met by Jeffrey Knox, an ambitious federal prosecutor from Brooklyn, who was there in case Vinas wanted to cut a deal. Almost immediately, Vinas was read his Miranda rights.

Within less than a week of his arrest in the western mountains of Pakistan, Vinas was aboard the FBI’s Gulfstream 5 at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens. On the tarmac, Borelli and several heavily armed FBI agents stood in the cold and watched as Vinas came off the plane. It had been almost a year since US intelligence had learned about the American jihadist, and now they had him.

Once he was on US soil, Vinas was treated like any other high-risk criminal suspect. He was taken to the Brooklyn detention center and given a lawyer. The next day, the lawyer told Knox, who was handling the case, that Vinas might be willing to offer something prosecutors wanted in exchange for lenience: information about the threat to the Long Island Rail Road. On November 22, a Saturday—when federal courts are typically closed—Vinas appeared before a judge for a special hearing. That Tuesday, the FBI and Department of Homeland Security put out an alert about a possible threat to New York’s transit system. In late November and December, American drones pummeled North Waziristan, where Vinas had trained and lived. One of those killed was the Saudi trainer, a top al-Qaeda bomb maker, who taught the explosives course that Vinas had taken. Vinas’s information was precise.
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In January 2009 Vinas pleaded guilty to terrorism charges in secret proceedings. FBI agents continued to interview him, and he talked freely. As he had found in his last months with al-Qaeda, his knowledge made him important. He had the respect of the FBI.

For Jim McJunkin, Vinas’s cooperation was a victory in a war in which some argued the FBI had little value. McJunkin held out hope that Osama bin Laden, who was under indictment for the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa, would someday be captured and prosecuted in New York, just like Vinas. Even during war, McJunkin once told his agents, the FBI was in the business of building cases that lead to trials. “Never forget that,” he reminded them.

Vinas also proved that the worst fears of the US intelligence community were real. For years, the assumption had been that an al-Qaeda
sympathizer had to know someone to get into al-Qaeda. There was, intelligence analysts believed, an organized method for screening recruits and funneling them to Waziristan. When FBI agents looked at “radicalizers” in American mosques, they looked for that pipeline. It was reassuring to imagine that a would-be terrorist couldn’t wind up in an al-Qaeda camp simply by showing up in Peshawar one afternoon.

Vinas disproved that theory. Anybody with enough resolve and luck, it turned out, could make his way into al-Qaeda’s embrace. Vinas’s capture turned out to be one of the greatest successes in the war on terror. But his case served as a reminder to Borelli and his colleagues that other Americans could easily go down the same path without anyone in the intelligence apparatus noticing. Vinas told investigators that nobody in New York helped him with plans to wage jihad.
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His old friend Zarinni didn’t have any ties to al-Qaeda. All those guys in New York, he said, they were all talk.
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All it took, Vinas told them with a hint of pride, was the guts to get on a plane and go.

The fear that had been nagging Borelli for a year now was, What if somebody managed to make it to Pakistan for training and then returned to the US unnoticed? Everything he’d seen suggested that’s exactly what he faced with Zazi and his friends. He closed his eyes on the couch for a bit, but he did not sleep well.

10

IN THE WIND

NEW YORK

Friday, September 11, 2009

The morning of September 11, 2009, dawned gray and rainy, the opposite of the clear blue sky the hijacked jets had torn through in 2001. Just as every year since, workers had spent days preparing ground zero, still a construction site, to welcome hundreds of mourners for the reading of the names of the almost three thousand people killed in the attacks. The list of dignitaries due to appear at the service included Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, and Vice President Joe Biden, who would lay flowers and read a short poem, “Wild Geese,” by the American writer Mary Oliver.

Security was tight, but only a select few, if any, of the NYPD officers responsible for securing Lower Manhattan were aware of Zazi, or that some of their counterparts had spent the night in Chelsea trying to figure out whether his sudden appearance in New York had anything to do with the memorial service. The task force office was alive with investigators trying to puzzle out Zazi’s plans, combing records for clues and taking in reports from surveillance teams tailing fifteen identified associates of the young Afghan.

Shortly after 6:00 a.m., the FBI intercepted a phone call from Zazi, who was still in his friend Khan’s apartment, to the man renting his coffee cart. Zazi said he was heading downtown to check on the business. The two men talked about the security and agreed that taking the subway would be easier than driving.