Enemies Within (38 page)

Browne called the stories “fiction.” Kelly said his investigators “simply follow leads.”

“We’re going to follow those leads wherever they take us,” he said. “We’re not going to be deterred, but we’re certainly not singling out any particular group.”

Mayor Bloomberg said religion played no part in the city’s counterterrorism efforts.

We learned that these comments were untrue.

The Demographics Unit, for instance, neither followed leads nor generated any. It mapped Muslim businesses, mosques, and people.

Was any of it illegal? We don’t know. As this book shows, the NYPD and its lawyers interpreted the Handschu guidelines as allowing them to investigate entire mosques as terrorist organizations and to monitor people’s political views if they spoke Pashto. The fact that some terrorists had been members of Muslim student organizations was enough to justify monitoring entire groups.

The NYPD says it’s all been legal. And it might be right.

The Justice Department declined to open a civil rights investigation, privately telling the FBI that there were no obvious victims. White House Homeland Security advisor John Brennan visited NYPD headquarters and said the department wasn’t doing anything illegal and had struck the right balance to keep the city safe.

“It’s not a trade-off between our security and our freedoms and our rights as citizens,” Brennan said. The Handschu lawyers have gone back to court to get the NYPD’s tactics declared improper. Muslims in New York and New Jersey have sued. Regardless of the outcome, the NYPD’s programs are likely to join waterboarding, secret prisons, and warrantless wiretapping as tactics of our time that will be debated for years.

•  •  •

Zazi’s plot failed because of good partnerships, good intelligence, and good luck. NSA officials intercepted the “marriage is ready” email and passed it to the CIA, which shared it with the FBI. Before 9/11, there
was no guarantee that would have happened. It certainly wouldn’t have happened as quickly as it did. The Joint Terrorism Task Force model in Denver and New York worked, building criminal cases and generating intelligence. The investigation was bolstered by partnerships with the Colorado State Patrol and the NYPD detectives assigned to the task force, relationships that have grown stronger over the years.

Going alone, as Cohen favored, didn’t work. For all the information that Cohen gathered on Americans—where they ate and prayed, what they thought of drones, where they watched sports, and which barber cut their hair—the NYPD Intelligence Division was a nonfactor in the investigation.

Somehow, though, the Zazi plot contributed to Intel’s growing mythology. In May 2012, before he left the NYPD’s analytical ranks for a consulting job, Mitchell Silber wrote an opinion piece for the
Wall Street Journal
: “How the NYPD Foiled a Plot to Bomb the Subways.”
¹

The NYPD added Zazi to a list of schemes it claimed to have thwarted since 9/11. By the time we started writing about the Intel Division, that tally had swelled to fourteen.

“We have the best police department in the world, and I think they show that every single day, and we have stopped fourteen attacks since 9/11, fortunately without anybody dying,” Bloomberg declared.
²

“Under Commissioner Ray Kelly’s leadership, at least fourteen attacks by Islamic terrorists have been prevented by the NYPD,” Representative Peter King of Long Island said.

The numbers were false.
³
Every government agency promotes itself, but the NYPD’s combination of publicity and secrecy prevented people from assessing whether its intelligence programs worked and are worth the cost in money and trust.

New Yorkers had no idea they were paying for something that, at the most important moment, had proven useless. When the US intelligence community errs, there is congressional oversight. The police department faced no questions about what went wrong in the Zazi
case. Nobody was called to testify about why the Demographics Unit hadn’t provided early warning, why investigators infiltrating student groups didn’t spot the trio of terrorists, or why the many informants and undercover officers hadn’t triggered alarms. Nobody asked whether such programs were worth continuing.

The same would be true in May 2010 when Faisal Shahzad, a naturalized US citizen from Pakistan who believed the nation was at war with Islam, tried to detonate a car bomb in Times Square. The NYPD’s $150 million electronic surveillance system, with more than two thousand cameras, failed to spot the smoking Nissan Pathfinder. Only a design flaw kept the bomb from detonating. A Muslim street vendor noticed it and alerted police.

Since 9/11, more secrets than ever have been kept from Americans in the name of keeping them safe; a government of the people has inched toward becoming a government kept from the people. In Washington, the administration uses its classification stamp to withhold information. In New York, the police department, with no authority to keep documents classified, routinely denies the release of basic information: crime reports, organizational charts, mug shots, and more.

Were it not for a few whistle-blowing NYPD officials with access to Intelligence Division files, it’s not clear when or if any of these programs would have been disclosed. We still don’t know what other domestic intelligence programs were created, what information they collected, whether they worked, or whether they’re still in use.

And there’s no system in place for anyone outside the NYPD to find out.

•  •  •

As this book goes to print, Raymond Kelly still runs the New York Police Department. Following our stories, he said he had changed nothing about the department’s intelligence-gathering practices.
⁴
It’s not
clear whether he’ll have a job after the 2013 mayoral election to replace Bloomberg, who faces term limits. David Cohen is still deputy commissioner for intelligence. Deputy Chief Jim Shea is no longer on the Joint Terrorism Task Force but remains with the NYPD. Paul Ciorra, the department’s good soldier, never publicly complained about his transfer following the blowup over Afzali’s phone call. In 2012 he was promoted to the rank of inspector. Hector Berdecia retired from the department and took a job with the federal government, allowing him to spend more time with his family.

The Demographics Unit was renamed the Zone Assessment Unit in 2010 over fears about how the title would be perceived if it leaked out. But rakers still troll Muslim neighborhoods, filing an average of four new reports every day.
⁵
Today Cohen’s Intelligence Division has a budget of $60 million and commands nearly six hundred officers even as al-Qaida’s power diminishes.

The Muslim community is marbled by fear and isolation. The NYPD is in their mosques, businesses, and student groups. Worshippers are afraid to congregate. Young men worry that growing beards will attract police attention. People fear that talking politics, marching in protests, or attending academic lectures will land them in police files.
⁶

They believe this because it happens.

“Your job is to protect us,” said Tahanie Aboushi, a Manhattan lawyer. “If we are now afraid of you, the community will pull together and cut themselves off from law enforcement.”

The FBI has already seen that happening. The top agent in New Jersey made headlines in 2012 when he said the NYPD’s tactics were isolating Muslims and making the region less safe.

“These are people that are our friends” Michael Ward said. “These are people that have embraced law enforcement, embraced the mission that we have in counterterrorism, and you can see that the relationships are strained.”

•  •  •

Larry Sanchez left the NYPD in December 2010 after a falling-out with Cohen, taking a lucrative job in the Persian Gulf region as a consultant. The CIA’s inspector general found that Sanchez’s assignment in New York had been marked by inconsistent oversight and a lack of clear rules but said no laws had been broken. He was replaced by a clandestine officer, Lance Hamilton, whose assignments in Pakistan and Jordan had made him one of the most senior operatives in the CIA.
⁷
Nobody ever provided a direct answer about what Hamilton was doing inside a municipal police department. After his assignment was revealed, the CIA recalled him to Langley. As far as we know, the CIA no longer has an officer embedded inside the NYPD.

The New York City Council was trying to create an inspector general to oversee the police department, someone who would subject the nation’s largest police department to the kind of internal review and program oversight seen at the CIA, FBI, and other executive agencies. Bloomberg and Kelly are adamantly opposed. They say any outside oversight would make New York a more dangerous place to live.

Many FBI agents named in this book have since left the bureau.

Jim Davis became executive director of the Colorado Department of Public Safety. He finally got to chase criminals. Steve Olson is close to retirement age and thinking about his second career, one that will help put his children through college.

Art Cummings, Mike Heimbach, Jim McJunkin, and Brenda Heck joined the corporate world, leaving behind a legacy of helping to reshape the bureau to fight terrorism after 9/11. Greg Fowler, the head of the New York task force, became special agent in charge of the FBI’s Portland, Oregon, office. His boss, Joe Demarest, runs the cybercrime division at FBI headquarters in Washington. Ari Papadacos and Bill Sweeney are still fighting terrorism.

Robert Mueller faced mandatory retirement in 2011, but President Obama asked him to stay two more years. Congress extended Mueller’s term, making him the second-longest-serving FBI director behind J. Edgar Hoover. Mueller’s term expires September 4, 2013.

•  •  •

Don Borelli went on to retire from the FBI, accepting a position as vice president with a Manhattan consulting firm. When the Zazi investigation finally slowed down, Borelli took a week off for his forty-ninth birthday. He flew to New Mexico with a bottle of whisky and went fly-fishing.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book grew out of a series for the Associated Press, where we have been given the two great luxuries in American journalism: time to piece together stories and the space to tell them. Supporting investigative journalists is rarely easy and often expensive but we are fortunate to have the backing of many wonderful bosses. AP president Gary Pruitt, Executive Editor Kathleen Carroll, and Senior Managing Editor Mike Oreskes have been unwavering. Ted Bridis is our editor, defender, and friend. Sally Buzbee, AP’s Washington bureau chief, is one of the industry’s great champions of investigative reporting.

As journalists and, later, as authors, we relied on the support and contributions of talented colleagues, including Christopher Hawley, Tom Hays, Peter Banda, Maria Sanminiatelli, Nahal Toosi, David Stringer, Justin Vogt, Justin Pritchard, James Risen, David Caruso, Mark Mazzetti, Julie Tate, Michael Powell, Charles Dharapak, John Doherty, Len Levitt (who has been tilting at windmills longer than any of us), and the incomparably talented Eileen Sullivan.

This book would not have been possible without the trust and help of many current and former officials from the NYPD, FBI, CIA, the Justice Department, Colorado State Patrol, and elsewhere. We received help along the way from Mike Kortan, Richard Kolko, and Beth Lefebvre from the FBI; Lance Clem at the Colorado Department of Public Safety; Preston Golston at CIA; Robert Nardoza at the US Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of New York.

Defense lawyers Robert Gottlieb, Justin Heinrich, Steve Zissou,
Robert Boyle, Ron Kuby, Michael Dowling, and Deborah Colson were generous with their time. The Handschu lawyers—Martin Stolar, Jethro Eisenstein, Paul Chevigny, and Franklin Siegel—summoned boxes from warehouses to help us understand a fight that has spanned decades.

We are grateful to Melanie Pearlman and Christina Gradillas at the CELL; Adrienne Schwisow; Landon Nordeman; Umair Khan; Fahd Amed; Daniel Baker at FlightAware; and chefs Robert Berry, Justin Smillie, and Richard King, who kept our sources and us well fed with some of New York’s best food.

Several people named in this book helped us greatly. Many more could not be named, either here or elsewhere, but provided invaluable documents and insight into the NYPD’s inner workings and the race to stop Najibullah Zazi. For that, we thank you.

We are indebted to our agents, Gail Ross and Howard Yoon, and to Matthew Benjamin and his team at Touchstone, who visualized the story we wanted to tell and supported this book at its earliest stages.

Stephen Merelman and Amy Fiscus provided deft edits. They lived inside our sentences and our brains, leaving both sharper and wiser. Their insights and suggestions made this book immeasurably better. We are lucky to have such friends, mentors, and colleagues.

We owe much of our success to our loving parents.

And, of course, we are forever thankful for the support of our wives, Becky and Allison, who put up with so much during two years of reporting. We love you.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS