Enemies Within (31 page)

Borelli huddled with Ari Papadacos, the supervisor helping run the command center. They still needed Zazi to disclose more of his plan, but they couldn’t let him carry a bomb onto the subway. They decided that if he was seen leaving the apartment with a backpack or bag, they would stop him. If not, they would continue to follow.

At about 6:50 a.m., a little more than an hour before the memorial ceremonies were to begin, Zazi walked out of Khan’s building with his computer bag and suitcase. He put them in the rented Impala, and headed toward the subway station empty-handed. He was in jeans and a long-sleeve blue shirt, no backpack—nothing that looked as if he were carrying a bomb. In Chelsea, Borelli and Papadacos told the surveillance team to keep up its guard. They still didn’t know whom Zazi was going to meet or who else might be involved with his plan. Don’t stop him, they ordered. Let’s see where he goes.

About 7:15, Zazi stepped on the 7 train heading into midtown Manhattan. Within a half hour, he was at Grand Central Terminal, where he climbed the stairs to transfer to the express 4 train, along with hundreds of commuters heading downtown. Fifteen minutes later, he popped out of the Bowling Green stop in the heart of New York’s Financial District, not far from the famous bronze statue of Wall Street’s charging bull. Zazi walked to the intersection of Stone Street and Broadway, a fifteen-minute walk from where the Twin Towers crumbled. Nervous FBI agents watched for almost an hour as Zazi hung around talking to the man running his coffee cart and joking with former customers.

Blocks away, about 8:45 a.m., Mayor Michael Bloomberg spoke after a moment of silence, paying tribute to the thousands who had died, including rescue workers:

Just as our hearts return to those we lost, we also remember all those who spontaneously rushed forward to help, however and whomever they could. Their compassion and selfless acts are etched in our city’s history.

Zazi left about 9:15 a.m., heading back the way he came. For the twenty-four-year-old, the expedition was nothing more than a ruse. If anyone questioned what he was doing in New York, Zazi wanted to be able to say that he came to check on his coffee cart. Now he could.

He descended into the Bowling Green subway station, this time hopping the 5 train to Grand Central. Once he arrived, Zazi hustled up the stairs, cutting his way through the crowds. He stepped behind a pillar and, in the bustle, the surveillance team didn’t notice him darting down the stairs and onto a 7 train to Queens.

Panicked, the surveillance team canvassed the dim, low-ceilinged station for Zazi. Had he gone back to Queens? Had he jumped on a train the other direction? The entrance to the Times Square shuttle was down a long corridor. Had they missed seeing him go in that direction? Or was he out of the subway altogether and heading upstairs into Grand Central’s vaulted central hall?

There are certainties in the surveillance business: You will either lose your target, or you will get made. Get too close, and you’ll be blown. Stay too far back to avoid detection, and the target will get away.

Zazi, as the professionals say, was in the wind. Gone.

•  •  •

In Denver, Mohammed Zazi’s phone rang. Ahmad Wais Afzali, the imam from Abu Bakr, was calling. The two men didn’t know each other well, and it was still early in the morning in Colorado. The imam spoke quickly: He needed to get in touch with Mohammed’s son right away. The young man was in trouble. The police had come around asking
questions. They had showed him photographs of Najibullah Zazi and his cousin Amanullah, as well as Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin.

Mohammed Zazi was stunned. He hung up and called his son.

Najibullah Zazi was already back in Flushing at the popular Cyber Land internet café on Northern Boulevard near Flushing High School, killing time before his 2:50 p.m. flight from LaGuardia to Denver. “Peace be upon you,” he answered in Pashto after he saw his father’s number come up on his phone. It was about 11:40 a.m.

“How are you, my son?” Mohammed asked.

“I am well,” his son replied.

His father told him about the phone call with Imam Afzali.

“He said they brought pictures of these four people, asking, ‘What kind of people are they? What do they do?’ ” Mohammed explained.

“Okay,” Najibullah replied.

“What’s going on anyway? What did you all do?” Mohammad asked.

“We haven’t done anything,” Najibullah insisted.

Mohammed advised his son to speak with a lawyer or to seek Afzali’s advice.

Najibullah’s phone beeped. Imam Afzali was calling on the other line.

“Peace be upon you,” he told his father by way of good-bye and then picked up Afzali’s call. The two exchanged formal greetings in English, and the imam asked how things were going in Colorado.

“Colorado is a beautiful state,” Zazi responded, a much better place than New York to raise a family.

“Full of headache,” Afzali agreed. “Big-city problems.”

Afzali got to the point. He needed cell phone numbers for Medunjanin and Ahmedzay.

In Denver, agents were listening to the call, courtesy of the secret warrant they had obtained days before.

“You’re in New York now?” Afzali asked.

“Yeah, I’m in New York.”

“I would like to have a meeting with you,” Afzali said. “I was exposed to something yesterday from the authorities. And they came to ask me about your characters. They asked me about you guys.”

Afzali asked when Zazi and the others had last traveled to Pakistan, and why. They talked about Zazi’s marriage and Ahmedzay’s two daughters. The imam asked whether Zazi was going to Friday prayers. Perhaps they could meet there.

“I have a flight to catch. I am going back to Colorado. I have business.”

Afzali said be careful.

“Go home, be with your father and mother, praise be to God, do your job, keep your head down, mind your own business,” he said.

“You know,” Afzali continued, “don’t get involved in Afghanistan garbage and Iraq garbage. That’s my advice for you. You’re an American.”

Zazi understood. “I always supported the Ameri—I mean, the thing is, I always tell people I’m, you know, the US is the best,” he said.

Afzali ignored Zazi’s nattering: “Listen, our phone call is being monitored.

“Even if you feel that US is not the best,” he continued, “we have no business Islamically; we have no business with those people.” He told Zazi not to be like the Salafists. “This is not the right path or attitude.”

Afzali said he would try to convince the authorities that Zazi and his friends were good people. “I pray for you,” he said.

“May God grant you goodness,” Zazi replied and then hung up.

Now he knew that the ghosts following him since the stop on the George Washington Bridge the day before were real.

While that call was going on, Borelli and Papadacos were at the FBI command center across town in Chelsea. They were on a videoconference with colleagues and Justice Department lawyers. Jim Shea, a deputy chief in charge of the NYPD detectives on the task force, was seated at the table. And in a moment of comity, the FBI invited Paul Ciorra, one of David Cohen’s top deputies, to join the call.

The computer screen was divided into small boxes, each containing
the video feed from another office. With headquarters leading the session, each group took turns reviewing the day’s events. Downtown, the 9/11 memorial ceremony was in hour three, though the key public figures had made their appearances and left. Zazi was at large, and the task force still didn’t know his intentions.

Jim Davis, the special agent in charge in Denver, abruptly interrupted the overview. He had news: Someone had called Zazi and tipped him off about the investigation. The tipster was in New York, and his name was Ahmad Afzali. No one at the command center conference table recognized the name. FBI headquarters demanded to hear from each office whether anyone there knew Afzali, the man who had just blown their case.

As one office after another reported knowing nothing, Paul Ciorra, sitting next to Shea, typed feverishly on his BlackBerry. Then his face turned ashen.

“That’s my source,” he announced to those at the command center. The room fell silent.

The meeting finished quickly, and most of the participants scattered. The phone in Chelsea had been muted, so it didn’t broadcast Ciorra’s confession. For now, only those in the room knew what had happened. Shea, an ex-Marine, stood up and faced Ciorra.

Shea was furious. Cohen should have talked to the task force so they could decide together whether Afzali was trustworthy.

“This is rookie 101 shit!” Shea shouted. “This was totally fucking irresponsible! How could you do that? Any entry-level detective knows you can’t do that kind of shit. You’ve jeopardized this whole thing!”
¹

Ciorra didn’t say anything about Cohen’s signing off on Intel’s decision to approach Afzali. Instead, he absorbed Shea’s outrage without rebuttal. The FBI officials in the room stayed out of the fight; they were mad, too, but they didn’t want to get between two cops. Borelli felt bad for Ciorra, who he thought was a stand-up guy. It took courage to admit that Afzali was working for the Intelligence Division. A lesser man would have walked out of that room without saying a word.

Jim McJunkin, the head of FBI terrorism operations, thought FBI leadership should confront Cohen. A year earlier, after Cohen tried to let a would-be jihadist into Pakistan for training, McJunkin had given the order to turn him around, avoiding a potential international incident. Cohen was steamed; but in a meeting with FBI colleagues in New York, the hot-tempered McJunkin let it be known that if Cohen had a problem with the decision, they could settle it in an alley.

McJunkin told friends that the NYPD treated the FBI like “the fat kid at the end of the lunch table.” Cohen easily bullied the FBI because it never fought back.

When Art Cummings, the head of all FBI national security, learned about the Afzali phone call, he too was livid. Cummings reviewed the wreckage in a phone call with Joe Demarest, the head of the FBI’s office in New York. The case was compromised, and Shea and Ciorra were on the verge of brawling.

“We are having fistfights in the squad area over this,” Demarest said.

In Robert Mueller’s office on the seventh floor of FBI headquarters in Washington, Cummings told the director what happened. They were burned, he said. The investigation was compromised. Mueller was furious, but only for a moment.

“What’s done is done,” he responded. “Get the operation back on track.”

Cummings dialed David Cohen in New York. Cohen didn’t try to obfuscate. “We fucked that up,” he said. “I’m going to deal with it.” FBI officials didn’t have to wonder long who would take the fall. Within days, Ciorra, a major in the Army National Guard who had earned a Bronze Star during a deployment in Iraq, was transferred to the department’s Highway Patrol.

The blowup was the culmination of years of friction between the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force and Cohen’s Intelligence Division. There had been plenty of instances of what the FBI perceived as recklessness: the approach of the Hezbollah operative in 2006; the fiasco with the hard drive in the Passaic River; Cohen’s trying to let Abdel
Shehadeh fly to Pakistan for jihadist training. Once, Intel had recruited a source inside the building that housed the Iranian Mission to the United Nations. Counterintelligence is the responsibility of the FBI, and the stunt could have imperiled a sensitive operation. The bureau was so enraged that the Justice Department considered charging Cohen or someone from his unit with obstruction of justice.
²

Some episodes had been comic, such as the NYPD’s amateurish safe house near Rutgers University. This time, the task force believed that the department might have blown the biggest terrorism case in the United States since 9/11. For the FBI agents and the police officers on the task force, it was irrefutable evidence that Cohen was more liability than partner. His army of informants had failed to spot the threat posed by three terrorists from Queens. Now one of those same informants had proven more loyal to his friends than to law enforcement.

But Borelli and the rest of the task force had more pressing things to think about than who was at fault: They had to find Zazi.

•  •  •

By 1:00 p.m., the surveillance teams still hadn’t tracked him down. They knew he was in Queens, thanks to data from his cell phone, but they couldn’t pinpoint his location. The investigators were fairly confident that Zazi’s plan, whatever it had been, was disrupted, but they wanted to gather enough evidence to bring charges before he could regroup or, worse, flee.

One thing they knew for sure was that Zazi’s red Impala was still outside the apartment where he’d spent the night, and his computer bag was in the car. The laptop represented the FBI’s best chance for unraveling his plan and figuring out who else was involved. They knew Zazi had a flight to Denver booked from LaGuardia Airport at 2:50 p.m. Borelli was desperate to get the computer before Zazi returned for the car and headed for the airport. They needed to tow that car.

When FBI officials gathered on another videoconference to discuss it, however, there was reluctance to tow the Impala. With Zazi in the wind, it was a risk. What if he walked around the corner toward the car as police were hooking it to the wrecker? The car was parked legally. How would they explain that? They had no idea what Zazi had been up to in the hours since the surveillance team had last seen him at Grand Central. FBI agents don’t like unknowns, and this case was producing new ones at a rapid clip.

Davis and Steve Olson in Denver pushed for towing the car. Countless vehicles were towed every day in New York, they argued. What was the big deal?

Borelli agreed.

“We’re doing it,” Borelli said. “We’re doing it. We’re getting the car.”

Nobody objected.

Borelli turned to Ray Johnson, an NYPD sergeant on the task force.

“Tow the car,” he said. “Get one of your wreckers, tow the car, get it out of there.”