The terrorists didn’t rest on their laurels after 9/11. They didn’t take a victory lap through the streets of Karachi or Kabul and call it a day. As far as they were concerned, September 11, 2001, was the spectacular start to an endless barrage of attacks on America and, especially, New York City, target number one. Their goal: obliterating public confidence, wrecking the U.S. economy, and fatally undermining what in their view were the godless values of the West.
This wasn’t just our speculation. We learned it through painstaking intelligence gathering, daily experience, and often from the terrorists themselves, who ended up turning on their cohorts far more often than you might expect. We had plenty of evidence to judge from. They kept coming at us, confident that they would score a string of victories or at the very least would ultimately wear us down.
We counted sixteen attempts in all—genuine, active terror plots launched by Islamic extremists intent on causing damage and killing people in New York City, all potentially deadly, many possibly catastrophic—during my twelve years as the city’s police commissioner. The plots started with Iyman Faris and his aborted attack on the Brooklyn Bridge—and just kept rolling from there.
That’s where the vigilance really came in.
We knew all along that the law of averages was against us: We had to beat them every single time. They only had to beat us once. Painful as 9/11 was, the consequences of a repeat performance were almost too terrible to contemplate. And we knew the threats could come from nearly anywhere. There was an almost infinite array of variables we had to guard against.
The sixteen plots to attack New York City were not just the wide-eyed rantings of zealous believers or the harmless fantasies of the mentally ill. Let me be clear about this: they were live, active conspiracies, perpetrated by people intent on mass murder, stopped somewhere on the road to execution by diligent law enforcement and, yes, quite a bit of luck.
Some of these plots were more ambitious or better financed or more sophisticated than others. None of them was a joke. Some, like the scheme to breach the PATH train tunnel below the Hudson River and flood lower Manhattan, were hatched in distant countries. Others, like Shahawar Siraj’s plan to put a bomb in a Macy’s bag and blow up the Herald Square subway station because “Jews shop at Macy’s,” were 100 percent homegrown. Some of the plots—the transatlantic airliner attack, the Times Square truck bomb, the one we call the Florida-to-New-York plot—got disconcertingly close to succeeding. Some, like Najibullah Zazi’s cross-country quest to place bombs on moving subway trains in New York, got terrifyingly close. All sixteen were tied in one way or another to the cause of radical Islam.
To understand how we were able to protect the city and the region, we have to dig into the frightening details of these individual conspiracies, climbing inside and taking the plots apart. Every one teaches an important lesson going forward, including the biggest one of all: in the years and decades that are coming, we must never drop our guard.
We were lucky, I suppose, that Iyman Faris came first. We learned so much from his aborted plot to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge. As the first post-9/11 sleeper agent captured inside the United States, Faris perfectly illustrated the importance of the counterterror measures we were rolling out then and the kinds of enemies we would be facing in the years to come. Zealous. Motivated. Willing to commit mass atrocities. Free to move around. The Ohio truck driver’s plot to blow up the “Godzilla bridge” in New York approached the operational phase before he and his handlers decided to pull the plug. But they didn’t pull back for reasons entirely of their own. They canceled the bridge attack because of the visible security precautions we had put in place in the first half of 2002. “The weather,” Faris communicated to his handlers, was just “too hot.” We learned about that lifesaving assessment only after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was arrested in Pakistan in March 2003. But it was sincerely gratifying to see that the decision had been made as a direct reaction to the precautions we had put in place.
Faris’s journey from cheerful young immigrant to heartless terrorist also turned out to be highly instructive. His path would be followed by many other aspiring terrorists in the years to come. Born June 4, 1969, in Azad, Pakistan, Faris was only twenty-four when he arrived in Ohio on a student visa. He never enrolled in college, but given the looseness of immigration enforcement in those pre-9/11 days, no one followed up on that.
A friendly young man with an easy smile and an occasional volatile streak, Faris got a job as a cashier at a gas station, where he met an American woman named Geneva Bowling, who worked at a local auto-parts company and stopped in regularly for discount gas. The daughter of a Kentucky preacher, she was twelve years older than Faris, had been married at least twice before, and had a ten-year-old son named Michael. Iyman and Geneva married in a Muslim ceremony in 1995 and moved into her townhouse in Columbus.
At first, Faris seemed well on his way to achieving the American dream. His wife’s family liked him. He got along well with his stepson. The two of them watched movies together and played Comanche: Maximum Overkill. One of their favorite movies was Air Force One, in which Harrison Ford plays the president and Gary Oldman a terrorist leader who holds the First Family hostage. Faris became a U.S. citizen in December 1999, five years after arriving in America.
But there were problems beneath the surface. Neighbors heard the couple fighting. Faris sought counseling from a local imam, reporting thoughts of suicide. The young immigrant was briefly hospitalized for psychiatric evaluation when he tried to jump off a bridge. He told his wife he’d been having blackouts and hearing voices. His main tormentor, he said, was a half man who looked like Faris and would speak to him from the branches of a tree.
The five-year marriage ended in 2000, the same year Faris’s father died. Faris and a friend traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan. The friend knew people who were involved with the militant Islamic group al-Qaeda. In late 2000, nearly a year before 9/11, the friend brought Faris to meet Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda’s fanatical leader, at a training camp in Afghanistan.
On a trip to Karachi in early 2002, Faris was introduced to bin Laden’s lieutenant Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. “How else can you help al-Qaeda?” Mohammed asked.
Faris described his work as a truck driver in America and his access to American airports and cargo planes. After weighing a grander plan for simultaneous attacks in New York and Washington, he and the bin Laden lieutenant settled on the idea of severing the cables on the Brooklyn Bridge. In all future communications, Faris was told, he should refer to gas-powered cable cutters as “gas stations.”
I’d been back in the role of police commissioner for three and a half months when Faris returned to America in April 2002. As he resumed his life in Ohio, no one suspected a thing. But between then and March 2003, Faris sent several coded messages to his al-Qaeda contacts in Pakistan, often going through an intermediary in the United States. He reported that he was still trying to locate the “gas stations.”
On March 19, 2003, after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was in custody and had begun providing information, FBI agents approached and briefly interviewed Faris at a hotel in Cincinnati. They questioned him again in Columbus and at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia. He admitted he’d returned to America as a sleeper agent and described making trips to New York in order to case the Brooklyn Bridge. He explained how the NYPD’s intense security measures had caused him to doubt the wisdom of the plan. The radio cars on the bridge, the Harbor Unit boat in the water, the attention he had not expected to find.
After many hours of questioning, Faris agreed to work as a double agent. With FBI agents monitoring his communications traffic now, he continued exchanging e-mail messages with his al-Qaeda handlers. On May 1, he pleaded guilty at U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia to providing material support to a terrorist organization overseas. U.S. district judge Leonie Brinkema sentenced him to the maximum term he faced, twenty years in federal prison.
After the bridge plot was foiled and Faris was safely in custody, the NYPD tightened security even more. I made my tour of the cable shed, now far more heavily fortified. We took additional measures to secure the access points to the bridge’s cables. The new rules mandated that no work could be done on the bridge without prior approval of the NYPD Intelligence Division.
As Iyman Faris was casing the Brooklyn Bridge, a CIA mole inside al-Qaeda reported that the terror network had plans to place poison-gas devices on New York City subway trains. If the terror network’s technicians could achieve something like that, we knew, the damage could be catastrophic. The subway at rush hour is a very crowded place. The plot talk, which started as a rumor, was confirmed in early 2003 when Bassam Bokhowa, a jihadist from Bahrain, was captured in Saudi Arabia. On his laptop, Saudi security forces discovered detailed plans for building what the terrorists were calling a mubtakkar, the Arabic word for “new invention.” This case showed vividly, as others would later, how intelligence gathering abroad can be hugely valuable in protecting a city like New York.
As the Saudi interrogators tried to find out more, using whatever techniques they used, technicians at a CIA laboratory in Virginia began building a prototype from the laptop schematics. It wasn’t all that difficult. The plans showed a cantilevered device with two interior chambers. One was for sodium cyanide. The other was for hydrochloric acid. Both chemicals were widely available and legal to possess. The same way a cell phone could trigger a hidden explosive, a remote signal would break open the seal between the two chambers. That would create hydrogen cyanide, a highly volatile colorless gas with the faint odor of peach pits or bitter almonds.
Once the gas was inhaled, the symptoms would come on quickly. They included nausea, disorientation, burning eyes, fever, chills, skin irritation, and, with a sufficient dosage, swift death. The only protection was a gas mask. It was hard to imagine distributing one of those to each of the subway’s five million daily riders.
But here’s the good news about chemical and biological terror attacks and why, though certainly alarming, this wasn’t the most likely of the sixteen plots to succeed. To be effective, the poison has to be airborne. It has to disperse. It has to be dense enough to do the intended damage but diffuse enough to reach more than a few potential victims. This is a very difficult balance to achieve. In the annals of terrorism, there have been very few successful large-scale poison-gas attacks. Even in military warfare, poison gas is a weapon of intimidation as much as it is one that succeeds in practice.
Still, the FBI and CIA, with on-the-ground investigative backing from the NYPD Intelligence Division, squeezed hard for more details. The Saudi interrogators said they had gotten all they could from Bassam Bokhowa. The CIA mole, whose name was Ali, identified the key creator as Yusuf al-Ayeri, nickname “Swift Sword.” Ali said the target date was forty-five days off.
According to Ali, al-Ayeri had visited Ayman al-Zawahiri, a fast-rising al-Qaeda leader, in January 2003 to describe the mubtakkar and tell him about the plot to drop the devices in the New York subway and other high-traffic spots.
But al-Zawahiri had balked.
The terrorist leader called the device unlikely to create a sufficient number of casualties. He said a gas attack in the subway was not spectacular enough to follow the triumph of 9/11. Al-Qaeda blinked again.
We were lucky that the terrorists decided in the end to pull back. Unfortunately, that string of retreats could not continue forever. But in this long-running fight of ours, we were happy to take our victories any legal way we could get them.
Fighting terror is much too important and too delicate a duty to be used as a tool of partisan politics—by any side. That has always seemed obvious to me. That’s why I was made distinctly uncomfortable by what I came to think of as the 2004 election plot.
On July 28 of that year, delegates at the Democratic National Convention in Boston nominated John Kerry as the party’s candidate to challenge President George W. Bush. Four days later, on August 1, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security raised the terror threat level to orange—“high alert”—for cities with major financial institutions across the East Coast. White House spokeswoman Erin Healy cited disturbing intelligence that was “very new, coming in during the last seventy-two hours.”
This was based on the arrest in the United Kingdom of Dhiren Barot, an Indian-born midlevel al-Qaeda operative known by his nickname Issa al-Hindi, “Issa the Hindu.” Barot had compiled fifty-one compact discs that contained terror-planning reports and research. On a computer hard drive in London, investigators also found an eighty-minute video from a reconnaissance trip Barot had made to New York, Washington, and Newark, New Jersey. During the trip, he had visited numerous sites, including the New York Stock Exchange, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the Citicorp building, the World Trade Center, the Prudential building in Newark, and the International Monetary Fund and World Bank buildings in Washington. A portion of the video zoomed in on the Trade Center. An unseen man in the background mimicked the sound of an explosion.
“Ka-boom!” the man said.
The footage was spliced into a videotape of the Bruce Willis movie Die Hard: With a Vengeance.
Undeniably frightening material. The only problem? It was all three or four years old. The minute we were notified, I wanted to know: What was so urgent about raising the terror alert now?
I had my doubts.
I couldn’t help but notice the political calendar. Did raising the threat level have anything to do with the president’s reelection campaign? Was someone in Washington trying to gin up public anxiety about an imminent terror attack? I wasn’t certain, but the thought did cross my mind.
As soon as we got word that the threat-assessment material was available in Washington, we arranged through the Joint Terrorism Task Force to have the documents rushed up to New York. The material arrived that night. By then, Michael Sheehan, a former U.S. Special Forces officer and ambassador-at-large for counterterrorism at the State Department, had taken over from Frank Libutti as our deputy commissioner for counterterrorism. Sheehan was another world-class expert who agreed to serve in the police department. He had taken a rare weekend at the beach. When we notified him, he drove straight back to police headquarters. He and David Cohen stayed until way past midnight, reviewing every page of the threat reports so they could brief me first thing on Sunday morning. I wanted to hear straight from them what the documents said, how the heads of our intelligence and counterterrorism divisions interpreted them, and what we should do about it.
These guys never said no when something came up. Like me, they hardly ever took a day off. And when they did, they were inevitably rushing back to 1 Police Plaza to deal with one issue or another. I was blessed to have these two seasoned professionals constantly available to us, able to read complex intelligence documents and interpret them, independent of whatever the Washington intelligence community might have to say.
Between them, they probably had seventy years’ experience doing just that. That is what they were there for. I knew they would have their own thoughts, informed by long careers at the highest levels of the diplomatic and intelligence worlds.
“We don’t doubt the importance of the plot,” Cohen said the next morning. “We do doubt its imminence.”
“There is nothing here to suggest that this activity, however genuine it might have been, has any active component at this point,” Sheehan said.
Their recommendation? No need to raise the terror level now. It was good to hear that Barot was finally in custody, they agreed. But there was simply no evidence, Sheehan and Cohen said, that his reconnaissance trip had led to any further action.
From police headquarters, Sheehan, Cohen, and I went to the FBI command center at 26 Federal Plaza, where we joined a secure conference call in Washington. U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were on the line. FBI director Robert Mueller also participated in the call.
“Why do we need to raise the threat level?” I asked.
The Washington officials repeated the list of targets and reiterated their importance to the financial system. But no one on the call was able to offer any evidence that the threat was remotely imminent. It had potential for being current, of course. All threats do. But it certainly didn’t seem immediate to me.
I expressed my reservations. I passed along the analysis of our two deputy commissioners. Everyone responded politely. The Department of Homeland Security went ahead and raised the threat level to orange.
In a briefing with journalists later that day, Ridge made the threat sound quite ominous. “The preferred means of attack would be car or truck bombs,” he said. “That would be a primary means of attack.”
It would be up to New York City, he went on, to consider moving its own threat level to red, the highest level. Ours had been at permanent orange since September 2001. “This is not the usual chatter,” Ridge cautioned. “This is multiple sources that involve extraordinary detail.”
Asked about the chain of decision, White House spokeswoman Healy said this: “The president made the final decision today agreeing with the recommendation of Secretary Ridge to go ahead and raise the threat level in these select areas.”
And that was that.
The threat level stayed elevated until November 10, eight days after President Bush handily defeated John Kerry. Only after he’d left office did Tom Ridge publicly acknowledge that the terror-threat level could be a political—as well as a security—decision.
He wrote in his book, The Test of Our Times, that he was pressured by other members of the Bush Administration to raise the national terror-alert level again just before the 2004 election. Such pressure, he said, contributed to his decision to resign on November 30 of that year.
For his part, Barot was indicted in the Southern District of New York along with his friends Nadeem Tarmohamed and Qaisar Shaffi. But they were never tried in the United States. They and four other codefendants were charged and convicted in London for their terror plotting. Barot was sentenced to forty years to life in prison.
Shahawar Siraj was just a neighborhood blowhard, a loudmouth clerk in a Brooklyn bookstore, not the kind of individual worthy of federal investigation—or so the FBI believed.
We took a different view. An Arabic-speaking detective from the NYPD Intelligence Division heard Siraj’s violent ramblings, noting that they frequently veered into threats of terrorism against Americans. To us, the America-hating bookstore clerk seemed like someone to keep a careful eye on.
I am very happy that we did. The twenty-two-year-old Siraj earned the distinction of being the first fully homegrown terrorist intent on killing New Yorkers after 9/11. Unlike fellow American Iyman Faris, Siraj didn’t have to travel to the Middle East to get radicalized, and his timing couldn’t have been much more disturbing: he threatened to hit Herald Square just as the 2004 Republican National Convention was coming to Madison Square Garden, two blocks away.
The Siraj case demonstrated the core value of the NYPD Intelligence Division’s deep undercover efforts in the fight against terrorism. It showed how effective undercover detectives with diverse backgrounds can be. And it showed the importance of not leaving terror fighting entirely in the hands of the FBI. The FBI took a pass on Shahawar Siraj. We didn’t. We were right.
Much credit goes to an undercover officer who used the pseudonym Kamil Pasha. Born in Bangladesh, he became a New York City police officer and was assigned to the Intelligence Division. There, he used his training, his street smarts, and his own cultural understanding to help foil this potentially catastrophic terror plot.
When Pasha walked into Islamic Books & Tapes on Fifth Avenue, next door to the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge mosque, he recognized immediately that Siraj was a whole lot more than a neighborhood loudmouth. Pasha introduced Siraj to Osama Eldawoody, an Arabic-speaking man who had worked with us as a paid confidential informant. Thankfully, Pasha’s colleagues and supervisors in the Intelligence Division understood how to use the informant effectively, how to analyze field reports, and how to protect the undercover, the informant, and their families as the case slowly unfolded. This is what experienced detectives do.
Siraj had come to America from Karachi, Pakistan, six years earlier, entering the country illegally through Canada. His parents and young sister were already here seeking asylum. His uncle owned the bookstore. In April 2004, Siraj introduced our informant to James Elshafay, a heavyset nineteen-year-old high school dropout who lived with his mother and aunt in the Rossville section of Staten Island. He’d clearly had a troubled young life, failing the eighth grade three times and sniffing glue and using drugs as a teenager. When Elshafay tried to join the U.S. Army, he was rejected because of a “personality disorder.” His mother was Irish, his father Egyptian. In the previous eighteen months, he had developed an interest in his Islamic heritage. He’d grown a beard. He’d begun to pray. And he’d started to notice a lot of anti-Muslim prejudice, which he said the police never did anything about. Elshafay said he’d seen a sign that read GOD BLESS AMERICA on one side and KILL THE ARAB BABIES on the other.
Eventually Elshafay confided that he had drawn up a list of targets to attack. They included subway stations on Forty-Second and Fifty-Ninth Streets in Manhattan, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, and Staten Island’s three police precincts, the 120th in St. George, the 122nd in New Dorp, and the 123rd in Tottenville.
Soon Siraj was showing Eldawoody CDs with bomb-making instructions. “I want at least a thousand to two thousand to die in one day,” Siraj said. “I’m going to fuck this country very bad.”
The men settled on the busy Herald Square subway station at Sixth Avenue and Thirty-Fourth Street, beneath Macy’s department store. They decided to tour the targeted location on Saturday, August 21. The Republican National Convention was set to open nine days later, on August 30. For their reconnaissance visit, Siraj assumed a disguise, a do-rag and baggy pants. He said he wanted to look less Arabic and more hip-hop. When they got to the subway station, Siraj, Elshafay, and Eldawoody split up, each doing his own recon, taking special note of where the benches and garbage cans were.
The plan they developed was for Siraj to place the bombs in the subway. Elshafay would stand as his lookout. They would go in the Thirty-Third Street entrance and come out on Thirty-Fourth Street. But when the three of them met two days later to finalize their plans, Siraj seemed to get cold feet. “I’m not ready to die,” he said.
After all their discussion and planning, maybe the attack was off.
But Elshafay spoke up. “I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll place the bombs in the subway.”
And he had his own idea for a disguise. When the day came, he said, he would wear the black hat, long coat, and side curls of a Hasidic Jewish man “’cause they know the Jews aren’t the ones doing it.”
Siraj suggested his friend put the explosive devices in a Macy’s bag: “Jews shop at Macy’s,” he said.
At this point, supervisors in the Intelligence Division decided they had more than enough evidence to move in. On August 27, Siraj was arrested outside the bookstore in Bay Ridge. In his pocket was Elshafay’s diagram. Elshafay was taken into custody at the Noor Al-Islam mosque on Staten Island. Before the police cuffed him and put him in a patrol car, the devout Muslim asked if he could have a cigarette.
Elshafay pleaded guilty and agreed to testify against his friend, who went to trial in front of U.S. District Judge Nina Gershon. Siraj was convicted of all charges. Before he was sentenced, he made a statement to the court. While claiming to feel remorse, he tried to shift some of the blame to others. “I am taking responsibility for Thirty-Fourth Street, but I was manipulated.”
Judge Gershon didn’t buy it.
“They had the potential, if not thwarted, to wreak havoc with the New York City transportation system, indeed, the tristate-area transportation system,” she said, sentencing him to thirty years in federal prison.
Majid Khan had a problem.
The veteran al-Qaeda operative was sitting in Karachi, Pakistan, 7,500 miles from the United States. He’d left America secretly in violation of U.S. immigration law. Now he had direct orders from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to bomb underground storage tanks at gas stations in Maryland.
That’s when he met twenty-three-year-old Uzair Paracha and proposed a deal. Uzair’s father, Saifullah Paracha, owned a business in New York, marketing apartments in Karachi to Pakistani American families. Khan offered to invest $200,000 in the business—in return for a favor.
A series of favors, actually.
Small, personal favors, we knew, often help to lubricate international terrorism, similarly to religious zeal and large piles of money. Families like the Parachas—affluent, educated, international, traveling frequently back and forth—are valuable assets to organizations like al-Qaeda. They help to get the murderous business done.
Though he spent much of his childhood in Pakistan, Uzair was highly Americanized. As a young child, he attended the Rainbow Montessori preschool in Queens. He managed a New York gas station during his summer breaks from college. He wore designer jeans and pricey sneakers. He always had the latest cell phone.
During a meeting at an ice cream shop in the Pakistani capital in early February 2003, Khan detailed his request. Uzair, a legal permanent resident of the United States who could travel between the two nations without raising suspicion, would return home to New York. There he would undertake a series of actions designed to fool immigration authorities into believing that Khan was still in the United States.
To execute this ruse, Uzair would use Khan’s credit card and deposit money into Khan’s bank account. He would call U.S. immigration officials, pretending to be Khan, to inquire about the status of Khan’s pending passport application. Once the passport was sent, Uzair would use the key Khan gave him to retrieve the passport from the Maryland post office box Khan had given as his mailing address. Impersonating Khan, Uzair would close the postal box and hand-deliver the passport to Khan in Pakistan. The al-Qaeda man could then return to the U.S. to execute Mohammed’s murderous plan.
To make sure the job got done, Khan provided handwritten instructions to Uzair. Each item had a star in front of it.
*Always call from a pay phone.
*Put money in the bank account.
*Use the card at any gas station.
*Practice the signature.
To help Uzair pull off the identity ruse, Khan also included his father’s and mother’s names and gave Uzair his Maryland driver’s license, his Bank of America ATM card, his social security card, and a high school ID bearing Khan’s name and photograph.
Uzair returned to America and followed Majid Khan’s script. He made the calls. He added the deposits. He used the credit cards. In phone calls to U.S. immigration officials, he pretended to be Khan, helping the al-Qaeda operative lay his phony trail. But on March 28, 2003, members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force, including FBI agents and New York City detectives, arrested Uzair Paracha in New York and searched his home.
The presence of NYPD detectives in large numbers gave the terrorism task force the benefit of street smarts, investigative experience, and diverse relationships that the FBI agents seldom had. Many of the federal agents came from other places. They’d been in New York on relatively short tours between transfers in and out of other postings. They were talented investigators in their own right with access to the deep resources of the FBI. But I would match our seasoned detectives against most of them.
In his possession, Uzair still had the items Khan had given him. He admitted that his father, Saifullah, had told him of Khan’s ties to al-Qaeda. This information couldn’t have been jarring to Uzair. He already knew his father admired Osama bin Laden.
After a two-week trial, during which he testified and tried unsuccessfully to disavow the confession he had given over the course of several days, Uzair was convicted of providing material support to a designated foreign terrorist organization and four other charges. Judge Sidney Stein sentenced Uzair to thirty years in prison.
His father, Saifullah Paracha, accused of using his business connections to help smuggle bomb-making chemicals into the United States, was sent to military custody at Guantánamo Bay.
Majid Khan pleaded guilty on February 29, 2012, in a military court at Guantánamo Bay to working with al-Qaeda. He admitted to the gas-station plot, to complicity in the 2003 bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, and to planning to assassinate Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf.
Think of lower Manhattan, and particularly the World Trade Center, as a giant bathtub. Deep in the middle. Shallower around the edges. The only thing missing is the water, and that’s waiting right nearby. Billions and billions—no, trillions—of gallons of water. In the Hudson River. In New York Harbor. In the Atlantic Ocean beyond that. So much water, it’s almost impossible to quantify. It’s the job of the bedrock and the earth and some landfill and a lot of tall buildings with deep foundations to keep all that water out. Otherwise lower Manhattan would drown. If someone could somehow pierce the wall of the bathtub, then you’d be getting into the realm of big-budget disaster movies.
In 2005, we learned with considerable alarm that someone was plotting to do exactly that—drown us from thousands of miles away.
Operation Life Raft. That’s what we called the case. Although the plotters schemed with each other entirely overseas, their multinational conspiracy made clear to everyone: you don’t have to be in New York City to threaten New York City. Had it succeeded, the PATH train plot could have been truly devastating.
In summer 2005, FBI counterterrorism agents picked up some disturbing messages in online chat rooms, detailing a planned attack on the Hudson River PATH train tunnels that link lower Manhattan and northern New Jersey. The agents tracked some of the web postings and e-mail messages to Assem Hammoud, a thirty-year-old economics and computer science instructor at the Lebanese International University.
When Lebanese armed forces showed up at his door on April 27, 2006, Hammoud admitted to exchanging detailed maps and other information about the tunnel plot with like-minded unaffiliated terrorists around the world.
The FBI kept the arrest a secret, not wanting to alert the other plotters. It was a serious plot with catastrophic potential. Those tunnels, century-old cast-iron tubes that rest on the river bottom under a thin layer of silt, are a crucial part of the metropolitan region’s commuter transportation network.
As the FBI and foreign agents worked diligently overseas, NYPD detectives surveyed the highly tempting underwater target. The PATH tunnels were easily accessible. Nearly 250,000 people ride those trains every weekday. Maritime engineering experts had chilling warnings about how much of a charge of explosives would be needed to pierce the tunnel walls and flood a major part of lower Manhattan south of Fourteenth Street.
Without divulging an inappropriate level of detail here, the answer was “Not much.” An unbelievably small blast could do it, breaching the tunnel and delivering a devastating torrent of water into the low elevation of the crowded city.
Proof of concept would come years later with Hurricane Sandy. Lower Manhattan, which began to fill with water, really was like a bathtub. The Port Authority has since fortified the tunnel with a bank-to-bank bomb-resistant covering.
As part of Operation Life Raft, the NYPD and Port Authority police put extra security on the tunnel, while authorities overseas continued mining data off Hammoud’s computer. They found maps, bomb plans, and intricate descriptions of the tunnels, stations, and trains—a full digital compendium of deadly and incriminating details.
The conspirators got into some highly precise detail. According to their plans, they would enter Canada first, crossing into the United States from the north. Once in New York, they would board PATH with backpacks full of explosives, which they planned to detonate while the trains were inside the Hudson River tunnels, drowning those passengers who were not killed in the immediate blast. The plotters even mentioned a strike date for October or November of 2006.
Cracking the case was an excellent example of international law enforcement cooperation. Not only did the FBI and the New York City police play a crucial role, so did law enforcement agencies in six other countries.
Two men were arrested in England and Canada. The conspirators from the other countries were not arrested.
Lacking an extradition treaty with Lebanon, we could not get Assem Hammoud back to New York for prosecution. Given the realities of the Lebanese justice system, he ended up serving only three years in prison. If he’d been prosecuted and convicted in America, he’d have faced thirty years or more.
But there was a clear lesson to be learned from the case. Several of them, actually.
One was that rail and transit systems made very inviting targets. Huge damage could be achieved with relatively modest effort. And while airports were vastly more secure since the 9/11 attacks, relatively little attention or resources had gone toward keeping America’s urban and suburban transit systems safe.
Another lesson had to do with the importance of international cooperation. Without that, this plot could have gone much further than it did.
Finally, we were reminded again that law enforcement had to become even more vigilant in monitoring blogs, websites, chat rooms, and other digital forums. They provide an easy way for our enemies to organize themselves. Plots that used to require face-to-face meetings, international rendezvous, and in-person recruitment campaigns can now be launched with a few short keyboard strokes or one click of a mouse.
Russell Defreitas had what he was convinced was the perfect terror target: the underground pipeline that delivers jet fuel to John F. Kennedy International Airport.
Part of a large national energy network known as the Buckeye Pipeline, this underground section runs from northern New Jersey, beneath some of the busiest parts of Manhattan, and into Queens, with branches feeding the needs of LaGuardia and Kennedy airports.
The deadly possibilities were a cause of glee for the former JFK baggage handler and his coconspirators. An underground conflagration raging across the region, propelled by igniting jet fuel, sending high-energy fireballs toward New York’s international transportation hub—that sounded positively spectacular to these America-hating terrorists.
“Anytime you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to the United States,” Defreitas was caught on tape bragging to an informant run by a veteran NYPD detective with the Joint Terrorism Task Force. “To hit John F. Kennedy, wow… They love JFK like he’s the man. If you hit that, the whole country will be in mourning. It’s like you can kill the man twice.”
“Even the twin towers can’t touch it,” one of his coconspirators agreed. “This can destroy the economy of America for some time.”
Defreitas, an American citizen who came from the South American nation of Guyana, concocted the plan in early 2007 with other terror-minded extremists from that part of the world. Joining the conspiracy were two other Guyanese men, Abdel Nur and Abdul Kadir. Kadir was a former member of the Guyanese National Assembly. The fourth conspirator was Kareem Ibrahim, who came from Trinidad. The investigation was led by the JTTF, but it was a senior NYPD detective who ran the probe. That made perfect sense, since Defreitas was so well wired into the underbelly of life around the airport.
In his job at the airport, Defreitas claimed to have observed weapons being shipped to Israel and became outraged that they might be used to harm Muslims. That, he asserted, was what spurred him to act.
The plotters conducted extensive surveillance of the pipeline and related targets. They carefully reviewed satellite photos. They attempted to make contact with another Islamic terrorist group. We even had reports of a possible Iran connection, though that was never proven.
When I was first briefed on the details of the plot, I knew immediately how horrendous a pipeline explosion could be, especially in a crowded part of Manhattan. With hundreds and hundreds of miles of potential access points, it was nearly impossible to secure them all. This was a terror conspiracy that would have to be foiled by solid detective work with informers and cooperators and reports from the inside, not by placing patrol cars on every corner in New York. Thankfully, given the depths of NYPD contacts in these communities, we were able to get that detective work done.
Defreitas was arrested in Brooklyn in early June 2007. His three coconspirators were taken into custody in Trinidad and extradited to New York in June 2008, where they were indicted for conspiring to cause “death, serious bodily injury, and extensive destruction” at Kennedy Airport. “One of the most chilling plots imaginable,” said U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf of the Eastern District of New York. “Had it succeeded,” she said, “it could have resulted in unfathomable damage, deaths, and destruction.”
Some people in the media tried to minimize the plot. The New York Times buried the story on page 37, noting that no explosives had been purchased and the plotters hadn’t actually blown up anything. Time magazine asked pointedly, “The JFK Plot: Overstating the Case?” Wired magazine portrayed the plot as a joke: “Portrait of the Modern Terrorist As an Idiot.”
But it’s easy to shrug off a plot that never happened. And these conspirators certainly had the motive, the inside knowledge, and the energy. We are fortunate they were caught in time.
Thankfully, New York congressman Peter King, who chaired the House Homeland Security Committee, understood all that. “We’ve gone from criticizing them for not doing enough immediately after 9/11 to now criticizing them too much.” He called such reactions “the price of success when you haven’t been attacked in six years.”
Defreitas, Ibrahim, and Kadir were convicted at trial and sentenced to life in federal prison. Nur pleaded guilty and was sentenced to fifteen years. Their appeals were all denied by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The judges there seemed to get the seriousness of the plot. The conspirators intended “to explode pipelines and jet-fuel tanks at JFK Airport in order to kill countless Americans and other travelers, disrupt air travel, and harm the American economy,” the judges wrote. “The gravity of the crimes for which they were convicted easily justifies the life sentences that were imposed.”
One way to kill Americans is to come to America and do it in person. Another way is to explode liquid bombs aboard international flights bound for New York; Washington, DC; Chicago; and other cities.
That was Rashid Rauf’s preferred method.
Born in 1981 to religious Pakistani parents, Rauf was raised in the northern factory city of Birmingham, England. His father, who’d been a sharia judge back home in Kashmir, worked as a baker in Birmingham. The city was rife with fundamentalist Islam that often collided with the traditions of the Christian faith. Rauf attended Washwood Heath Secondary School, where Israr Khan, a Muslim teacher, leaped up during Christmas carols one December day and shouted: “Who is your god? Why are you saying Jesus and Jesus Christ? God is not your god. It is Allah.”
Seven months after 9/11, when he was twenty-one, Rauf moved to Bahawalpur, Pakistan, leaving England amid reports that he was wanted for questioning in connection with the murder of his uncle. Soon Rauf was traveling to Afghanistan, where he formally signed on with al-Qaeda. Increasingly devout, the intense young man married the daughter of Ghulam Mustafa, founder of a local Deobandi madrassa, Darul Uloom Madina. Through his new wife’s family and his own networking skills, he got to know several top al-Qaeda leaders and got busy working his way up the terror organization.
By 2005, Rauf had assumed an important role in the group: He was responsible for shepherding recruits who arrived from England and other Western countries. He would meet the wide-eyed newcomers. He would assess whether they were serious candidates for jihad. He would pass promising ones on to senior al-Qaeda leaders, who would try to persuade them to launch suicide missions back home.
Among Rauf’s prized protégés were Mohammed Siddique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer, perpetrators of the horrific 7/7 attacks on the London transportation system in July 2005. Fifty-two commuters were killed that day. After helping to recruit the killers, Rauf managed the bombing plot from afar via Yahoo messages, e-mails, and mobile phones.
He eventually began handling some of the persuasion himself, never forgetting to mention the seventy-two dark-eyed virgins who awaited male Muslim martyrs and how badly Muslims had been treated at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He was a friendly face who could easily relate to disaffected young Muslims from the West. Later he would play exactly that role with Long Island Rail Road bombing conspirator Bryant Neal Vinas and New York subway bomb plotters Najibullah Zazi, Adis Medunjanin, and Zarein Ahmedzay. But in late 2005 and early 2006, Rashid Rauf was focused on blowing planes out of the sky.
It wasn’t as easy as it would have been a few years earlier.
Since 9/11, thanks in part to Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta and our Rapid Response Teams, security had been vastly improved in America’s and the world’s air travel systems. Airport screening was far more effective. Tighter carry-on restrictions were in place. While some people complained that the searches were intrusive, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration and many parallel agencies abroad did a far better job than the airlines had. Cockpit doors had been hardened, and armed air marshals were aboard many flights. But no security system is unbeatable, and the terrorists were constantly dreaming up new ways to overcome whatever we thought to put in place. The latest idea from Rauf and his coconspirators in Britain and Pakistan: liquid explosives.
For many months, the British intelligence service MI5 was picking up chatter about an air travel terror plot, an especially bold one. The plan was to start with the powdered soft-drink mix Tang, then add in some other chemicals. The mixture would be hidden in soda bottles and sneaked aboard transatlantic flights, ready to be combined and ignited in the air. One trip to the restroom later, there would be a ready-mix bomb on board.
As the British investigators followed their leads, all the evidence pointed in one direction: at mastermind Rashid Rauf.
The chatter was right. He had a plan. It targeted seven transatlantic flights on three airlines—American, United, and Air Canada. The flights would leave London’s Heathrow Airport, bound for New York, Washington, Chicago, San Francisco, Toronto, and Montreal. Suicide bombers on board would mix the explosive cocktails and set the bombs to explode. The seven planes were scheduled to depart within a 155-minute window, ensuring that once the bombs began detonating, there would be no way to stop the other bombers.
Had it been executed, Rauf’s scheme would have caused “mass murder on an unimaginable scale,” one British official warned as the details leaked out. On August 9, 2006, twenty-four people were arrested in London and Birmingham, England. Rauf was picked up in Pakistan.
Immediately, British and U.S. authorities raised the threat level on transatlantic flights to “critical” and “red,” the highest on each nation’s risk chart, and tightened airline baggage rules. International air travel was thrown into turmoil for days. From that week forward, only small quantities of liquids were allowed on board, and then only in clear plastic bags.
“I have done nothing wrong, but I have been framed,” Rashid Rauf told a Pakistani court in December. “Everything against me is based on lies, lies.”
He needn’t have worried. Unfortunately, the justice system in Pakistan didn’t take terrorism as seriously as we did. Rauf was never extradited to England, as authorities there were requesting. Instead, a judge in Rawalpindi found insufficient evidence that the al-Qaeda operative had been involved in a terror plot and reduced the charges to forgery and possession of explosives.
A year later, in December 2007, Rauf escaped from custody under highly suspicious circumstances. On his way back from a court hearing, Rauf was allowed to enter a mosque for prayer while the police officers who were transporting him stopped for lunch at McDonald’s. Not surprisingly, Rauf took the opportunity to escape.
He didn’t enjoy his freedom for long. On November 22, 2008, he was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan.
Rauf’s legacy, however, has been a lasting one for the traveling public. As a result of his plot, the TSA limited the total volume of liquids each passenger may bring aboard an aircraft and instituted the 3-1-1 rule: Liquids, gels, aerosols, creams, and pastes must be transported in quantities of 3.4 ounces or less. They must be sealed in one-quart clear plastic zip-top bags. Each passenger is limited to one bag.
Bryant Neal Vinas was a nice Catholic boy living in the Long Island suburbs of New York, an average student at Longwood High School, a Sunday congregant at St. Francis de Sales Church, a dedicated fan of the hapless New York Mets.
But then something changed. Vinas’s case vividly emphasized what can happen when even a seemingly normal American kid falls under the influence of radical ideology.
Vinas wasn’t the first to walk down this frightening path from American boy to terrorist operative. The short list already included al-Qaeda propaganda chief Adam Gadahn, “American Taliban” John Walker Lindh, and former California street-gang member Jose Padilla. But al-Qaeda leaders were still very much on the lookout for white Westerners who could be recruited as suicide bombers, people who could travel freely back to America and easily blend in.
Vinas left Long Island for Pakistan in 2007 to study religion, he said—but he was already a committed jihadist on a gradual path to violent action. Born December 4, 1983, to immigrant parents from South America, both Catholic, Vinas loved G.I. Joe and wrestling. After high school, like a lot of kids, he had trouble figuring out what came next. He joined the army but was discharged three weeks into boot camp at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He worked as a truck driver and in a car wash and was in and out of technical college.
Sometime in 2003, the brother of a friend gave Vinas a copy of the Koran and spoke with him about Islam. Vinas converted in 2004 and began attending services at the Al Falah mosque in Queens. He spent time with some of the hardliners at a mosque in nearby Selden, joining a discussion group called Islamic Thinkers Society, where people spoke approvingly of jihadist groups including al-Qaeda. Like many young men who would later turn to terror, Vinas watched videos of Anwar al-Awlaki, a charismatic New Mexico–born imam sometimes described as the “bin Laden of the Internet.”
Vinas left for Pakistan in September 2007, ready to join the fight against America. In late March 2008, he trained in the mountains of Waziristan. He traveled through the tribal areas in the spring and summer, and met some of al-Qaeda’s most senior leaders. The al-Qaeda operatives persuaded Vinas to return to the United States and carry out an attack there. The target he and his handlers settled on was the Long Island Rail Road, the commuter train system that served the area where he’d grown up. Vinas proposed detonating a bomb aboard a moving train, timing the explosive so that it would inflict maximum damage, inside the East River tunnel as the lines converge on Manhattan.
All that must have been enticing to al-Qaeda’s upper echelon. But plots like this can only be successful if the planning is kept secret, and Vinas was not very good at that. Before he even left Pakistan, local authorities had learned about his plotting and arrested him in Peshawar. The Pakistanis turned him over to the FBI—American radicalized, Pakistani trained, and ultimately neutralized before he was able to strike.
New York was fortunate Vinas couldn’t keep his mouth shut. All we could do was learn from his path to terrorism. Vinas got radicalized to violence before he ever left home in quiet North Patchogue, escaping the notice of his local police department while becoming enamored with al-Qaeda terrorism.
This happened outside the jurisdiction of NYPD. Nevertheless, we redoubled our efforts and cooperation with the many suburban police departments that ring New York City, in Long Island’s Nassau and Suffolk Counties especially. They understood the importance of working cooperatively with the NYPD. Our worlds were deeply intertwined. Their counties were more diverse than ever. Many of their residents worked in the city. Anything that happened in the boroughs would surely affect their suburban economies. Vinas’s hometown police in Suffolk County took the case extremely seriously, vowing to make sure the next Bryant Neal Vinas didn’t escape detection.
They hated Jews and also America, and they were more than ready to act on it. They conspired in 2009 to bomb two synagogues in the Bronx and fire a Stinger surface-to-air missile at a military plane near the Air National Guard station in Newburgh, New York.
The good news was that James Cromitie, David Williams, Onta Williams, and Laguerre Payen, petty criminals from lower Westchester County, New York, seemed to have no ties to any international terror groups. The bad news was the viciousness of their intentions.
There wasn’t much doubt what the men hoped to accomplish. They were caught on tape repeatedly spouting incendiary threats against America in general and Jews in particular. “I don’t give a fuck if a bunch of Jews are in there,” ringleader Cromitie said about planting a bomb outside one of the synagogues. “I will let it go off. Jews are the wickedest people that Allah has created.”
This case, like several others, emphasized the importance of using credible confidential informants. Shahed Hussain was a Pakistani national who was granted asylum in the United States based on a claim of political persecution. Like many cooperators, he had his own issues. In 2002, he was convicted of fraud based on misconduct as a translator at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Albany. Nevertheless, he was an effective confidential informant. He befriended Cromitie and his fellow plotters, pretended to sympathize with their extremist views, and let them think he would facilitate their conspiracy. In fact, he was reporting back to us every step of the way and making sure that the homegrown jihadists didn’t succeed.
The plot took a while to hatch. At times, the informant had to nudge, focus, cajole, and even urge the suspects. But in the final analysis, they were perfectly clear on what they were doing, and they agreed. They staked out their targets carefully. With a digital camera they purchased at Walmart, they took photos of the locations. On May 6, they drove to a warehouse in Connecticut to pick up what they believed was a surface-to-air guided missile and three improvised explosive devices, all of which were actually duds. They brought the weapons back to a storage facility in Newburgh, keeping them there until the night of the planned attack, May 20, 2009. That night, they placed what they thought were homemade bombs, each packed with thirty-seven pounds of phony C-4 plastic explosives, into two cars already parked outside the Riverdale Temple, a Reform synagogue, and the nearby Riverdale Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue.
The men were arrested literally as the plot was going into effect. By the time NYPD detectives and FBI agents moved in, Cromitie and the other three conspirators had gone so far as to plant bombs—or what they believed to be bombs. The men were taken into custody as they were about to leave the block and drive to the National Guard base to shoot down the military aircraft. On the way, they planned to detonate the synagogue bombs with a signal from a mobile phone.
I watched the various transactions on a live video feed and went up to the scene with Joseph Demarest, the assistant director of the FBI, to brief reporters personally.
“There was a driver who was a cooperator, and there was the individual who placed the bombs in the vehicle, and then there were three lookouts,” I explained to reporters after the arrests. “As everyone was going back to the car, that is when the signal was given to the emergency service officers to move in.” They used a tractor-trailer to block the street and prevent the plotters’ escape.
The men “stated that they wanted to commit jihad,” I continued. Arresting them, I added, “speaks to our concern about homegrown terrorism.”
The relationship between the four men and the undercover informant would become a key dispute among the lawyers in the case. But no one made the defendants do any of this, and given all the evidence we helped amass, there couldn’t possibly be any doubt about the violent intentions of James Cromitie and his friends.
On June 29, 2011, when three of the men were set to be sentenced in federal court, Judge Colleen McMahon said they weren’t “political or religious martyrs,” but “thugs for hire, pure and simple.” She probably should have added, “thugs who were caught trashing Jews, spouting violent Islamic rhetoric, planting what they thought were bombs outside synagogues, and preparing to fire a Stinger missile at a U.S. military aircraft on American soil.”
The judge also objected to the ways the informant manipulated ringleader Cromitie. “The essence of what occurred here is that a government, understandably zealous to protect its citizens from terrorism, came upon a man both bigoted and suggestible, one who was incapable of committing an act of terrorism on his own. It created acts of terrorism out of his fantasies of bravado and bigotry, and then made those fantasies come true.” She added, “The government did not have to infiltrate and foil some nefarious plot—there was no nefarious plot to foil.”
Despite her florid language, Judge McMahon ruled that the convictions were all appropriate under the law. She sentenced Cromitie, Onta Williams, and David Williams to twenty-five years in prison. Two months later, she gave Laguerre Payen the same sentence. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals later confirmed that the district judge was right.
There was no doubt that Najibullah Zazi had what it took to commit mass murder in the name of Allah: zeal, dedication, top-flight terror training, and some genuine organizational skills. Of all the plots we faced in New York after 9/11, none came closer to deadly results than this one. Stopping Zazi and his two young immigrant friends from detonating bombs in the subway took everything we had.
Zazi’s family had moved from Afghanistan to Pakistan and then to Queens, easily New York’s most diverse borough, arriving when he was fourteen. At the Abu Bakr mosque, young Zazi got to know two other immigrant teenagers, Bosnian-born Adis Medunjanin and Zarein Ahmedzay, whose family had followed the Zazis’ path from Afghanistan to Pakistan to New York.
Together, the three friends spent hours watching videos of two radical clerics—Anwar al-Awlaki and Abdullah el-Faisal, a Jamaican-born preacher who’d been convicted in London of stirring up racial hatred and urging his followers to murder Christians, Hindus, Americans, and Jews. All three became convinced they had a personal duty to defend Islamic lands against foreign invaders.
Soon they decided to act on that belief.
In August 2008, they flew to Pakistan, planning to enter Afghanistan. There, they hoped to fight with the Taliban forces against U.S. military and allied troops. They would stay, in Zazi’s words, until “the country was liberated” and “ask God to give us martyrdom while fighting.”
Zazi’s cousin helped connect the young believers to al-Qaeda operatives, who passed them along to Rashid Rauf, the terror network’s designated wrangler of Western recruits. Rauf and others, including Adnan Gulshair el-Shukrijumah, ultimately persuaded the three young friends to return to New York and conduct a suicide mission. They discussed possible targets. Grand Central Terminal, Times Square, Penn Station, the New York Stock Exchange—each had its own attractions as a terror target. But el-Shukrijumah cautioned the men not to overreach. Other missions had failed because the overly grandiose suicide bombers had tried to do something too big. A mission that succeeded in setting off a bomb in a movie theater, the terror leader told the young men, was preferable to one that failed to bring down the Federal Reserve.
The three friends from Queens all assumed kunyas, al-Qaeda terror names. Medunjanin became Mohammed. Zazi became Salihuddin. Ahmedzay took the name Omar. They headed off to a training camp in North Waziristan, where they fired heavy weapons and watched other propaganda videos.
Well versed in the art of terror and fully motivated to act, the young trio needed only to settle back into life in the United States. Medunjanin returned first, arriving in New York on September 25, 2008. Ahmedzay traveled to Afghanistan to spend time with his wife. In November 2008, Zazi went for further training on how to build and detonate explosives. At another al-Qaeda camp in North Waziristan, he learned how to mix chemicals to create different kinds of detonators and how to make and ignite a main charge. Before he left Peshawar, Zazi recorded his own martyrdom video, e-mailed his bomb-making notes to himself, and worked out a secret code. When the plan was entirely in place, Zazi agreed to e-mail that the “marriage” was ready.
Zazi returned to Queens on January 15, 2009. Ahmedzay followed from Afghanistan a week later. Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin decided they were less likely to attract attention from law enforcement if they weren’t all in New York. So Zazi moved to Colorado, where his uncle’s family lived, and started acquiring what he would need to build an acetone peroxide detonator. Some things he was able to get at Lowe’s Home Improvement. Other items he purchased at Walmart. But for the concentrated hydrogen peroxide that was a key component of the detonator, Zazi shopped at various beauty-supply stores around Denver, a shopping spree caught on videotape and later shown repeatedly on cable news. When asked by a clerk why he needed so much hydrogen peroxide, he replied, “I have many girlfriends.”
Zazi visited New York in August. There, he, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin narrowed down the targets they would hit. The subway seemed promising. A Manhattan line at rush hour—maybe the 3 or 4 train—would offer the greatest number of victims, they decided. Each of the three men would strap on a bomb and go to a different location.
Zazi returned to Denver, where he continued to perfect the formula for the explosive. He called Ahmedzay and, using code, shared the news: He had fixed the wire on his computer, he told Ahmedzay. Had he fixed the whole computer, meaning the detonator and the main charge, Ahmedzay wanted to know. Zazi responded that he hadn’t fixed the whole computer. He had fixed the wires.
But for one slipup, Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin might well have succeeded, their plan causing vast casualties in the New York City subway. However, the notes Zazi took at explosives-training camp in North Waziristan were incomplete. Unsure of the proportions of the components for the main charge, he grew rattled. Using the code they had devised in Pakistan, Zazi e-mailed his al-Qaeda contact and told him that the wedding was ready. That e-mail and others that followed caught the attention of law enforcement. The FBI began following Zazi.
Before sunrise on September 9, 2009, Zazi left Denver for New York City in a rental car. The acetone peroxide, hydrochloric acid, scale, scotch tape, goggles, and Christmas tree lights Zazi had with him couldn’t all be brought on an airplane. He planned to drive straight through. Once in New York, he and Ahmedzay would buy the other items they needed for the main charge—hydrogen peroxide, flour, and ball bearings—as well as batteries for the detonators and backpacks to hold the completed bombs. Medunjanin would join them to finalize their targets. Zazi believed he was no more than five days from completing the mission.
The FBI asked the Port Authority police to stop and search Zazi’s car before he entered New York City. They asked the Port Authority, I am convinced, so that the NYPD would not be involved.
The Port Authority police did as the FBI had requested. Zazi was stopped as he drove onto the George Washington Bridge on September 10. As Zazi sat in the driver’s seat, the officers searched the rental car. Zazi didn’t resist. He just sat there. He didn’t run. He didn’t jump. He didn’t make a move of any sort. But for reasons I’m not sure I’ll ever understand, the Port Authority police found none of the bomb-making material he had in the trunk—not the acetone peroxide, not the hydrochloric acid, not the scale, not the tape, not the goggles, not the Christmas tree lights—none of it.
How could they miss all that? I don’t know. But they allowed a would-be terrorist onto the streets of New York carrying a trunkload of bomb-making equipment. Zazi said later that he would have jumped off the bridge if the Port Authority police had found the bomb-making materials. He never had to. They didn’t find a thing.
With that stop, Zazi knew he’d been made. The first chance he had, he dumped the chemicals and other bomb ingredients he had brought with him from Denver.
The New York Times and others reported widely—and incorrectly—that the three men abandoned their plan on September 11, once Zazi learned from Ahmad Wais Afzali, an imam at a mosque Zazi had attended, that the NYPD was asking questions about Zazi and his two friends. Afzali had worked as an NYPD informant and was told by an NYPD deputy inspector he worked with that the FBI was interested in Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin. The press blamed Afzali—and therefore the NYPD—for tipping Zazi’s father off that law enforcement was onto him. The Times published two front-page, above-the-fold stories asserting this. I took the allegation seriously. It forced me to transfer the deputy inspector.
However, the Times story simply wasn’t true. Zazi later testified that what actually tipped him off was the bridge stop on September 10. This is an example of how a leak put out by federal law enforcement and believed willingly by the New York Times could unfairly besmirch the image of the NYPD and a police executive.
The next day, September 11, the JTTF seized Zazi’s car in Queens while he took the subway to lower Manhattan and the area near the New York Stock Exchange. The car was towed to the 109th Precinct, where investigators copied the contents of his laptop computer and put the computer back in his car. After retrieving his car at the 109th Precinct, Zazi flew back to Colorado on September 12.
He agreed to be interviewed by the FBI in Denver the following week. He was questioned about the bomb-making notes on his computer and denied they existed. He was arrested on September 19 and charged with lying to federal agents.
Ultimately, Zazi, Ahmedzay, and Medunjanin were indicted on terrorism-related charges in the Eastern District of New York. Zazi and Ahmedzay pleaded guilty to charges that subjected them to terms of life imprisonment. However, they entered into cooperation agreements to try to lessen their sentences. Both testified at Medunjanin’s trial. He was convicted of nine charges and sentenced to a term of life.
Of all the plots, none came closer to being realized than this one. These three young men had the training, the patience, and the skill to pull it off. Had they succeeded in detonating their subway bombs, the results could truly have been catastrophic. Their plan was to perpetrate the attack on September 14, 2009—and it just so happened that President Obama was in New York City that day.
If you see something, say something.
The NYPD was constantly urging citizens to alert authorities about suspicious activities. Several Times Square street vendors seemed to have taken that message to heart.
Alioune Niass, a Muslim immigrant from Senegal, was selling framed photographs of the New York skyline on Saturday, May 1, 2010, outside the Minskoff Theatre at Seventh Avenue and West Forty-Fifth Street, where The Lion King would be staged that night. He noticed smoke rising from a 1993 Nissan Pathfinder parked near his table and alerted mounted police officer Wayne Rhatigan. (Later, several other vendors would also boast they were the first to alert police: Lance Orton, Duane Jackson, and Wayne Robinson.) Officer Rhatigan saw the smoke, caught an aroma that smelled like gunpowder, and radioed for help, summoning the NYPD Emergency Service Unit, the bomb squad, and the FDNY. Quickly, police closed off Times Square from Forty-Third to Forty-Ninth Streets. The mammoth Marriott Marquis hotel was also evacuated.
The bomb unit brought in a remote-controlled robotic device. After a careful search of the smoking vehicle, officers inventoried three propane tanks, two five-gallon canisters filled with gasoline, several plastic bags of fertilizer, 152 M-88 fireworks, and two alarm clocks connected to wires.
Joe Esposito and David Cohen reported immediately to Times Square. Mayor Bloomberg and I were at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner in Washington that night. We left promptly and flew back to New York. “Had it detonated,” I said to reporters when I got back to New York, “it would have caused casualties, a significant fireball.”
In the years since 9/11, most of New York’s terror plots were busted by early detection, investigators uncovering incriminating evidence at home or abroad. The Times Square bombing attempt fell victim to the perpetrator’s own incompetence.
We had no advance warning of the plans in this case. Despite all our efforts and resources, we picked up nothing from international communications or well-sourced investigators in New York neighborhoods. Nobody did. We learned about the plot only after the perpetrator, Faisal Shahzad, parked his dark-blue SUV with tinted windows on one of the most crowded corners in all of America, then failed in his carefully planned attempt to make the vehicle explode.
Sometimes the incompetence of our adversaries is the best weapon we have.
Painstaking investigative work by NYPD detectives and FBI agents reconstructed exactly what happened here. The patterns Shahzad followed were familiar. But it was crucial nonetheless—maybe even more so in this case—that we piece together every scrap of evidence we could find.
Born in Pakistan in 1979 to a well-off family, Faisal Shahzad attended primary school in Saudi Arabia and came to America at age eighteen in 1998 to study at Southeastern University in Washington, DC. He transferred to the University of Bridgeport in Connecticut, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in computer applications and information systems. He went on to earn a master’s degree at the same university, working part-time as a junior accountant for the cosmetics company Elizabeth Arden in Stamford, Connecticut.
By all appearances, Shahzad was living the immigrant’s American dream, getting a good education, building a promising career, and buying a home in the suburbs. In 2006, he got his green card as a lawful permanent resident and went to work as a junior accountant at Affinion Group in Norwalk, Connecticut. On April 17, 2009, he became an American citizen. With that, he had truly completed his successful immigrant’s journey.
But something was obviously going on beneath the surface. He’d apparently been listening to al-Awlaki tapes. A few weeks after becoming a citizen, he stopped paying his mortgage and defaulted on the loan. On June 2, 2009, he called from the airport to tell his wife, who’d been resisting his pressure to wear a hijab, that he was moving to Pakistan. She declined to join him and moved with their two young American-born children to Saudi Arabia, her family’s home.
Shahzad got on a flight to Dubai, then arrived in Pakistan on July 3, 2009, and quickly found his way to a terror-training camp in Waziristan. It wasn’t al-Qaeda he was training with but the Tehrik-e-Taliban, an extremist group known in the West as the Pakistani Taliban.
In the camp, he received training in weapons and explosions. He recorded his own forty-minute martyrdom video, discussing his plan to attack the United States and encouraging other Muslims to follow suit.
That tape provides a chilling look into the mind of a would-be terrorist. “A Brave Effort by Faisal Shahzad to Attack United States in Its Own Land,” the video is titled. It is produced by Umar Media, the communications arm of Tehrik-e-Taliban. The video opens with Shahzad cradling then firing a machine gun. He speaks directly to the camera and explains himself.
“We decided we are going to raise an attack inside America,” he says in clear, confident English.
The goal, he says, is to “incite the Muslims to get up and fight against the enemy of Islam.”
He goes on to explain that jihad is one of the pillars that holds up Islam. “I’ve been trying to join my brothers in jihad ever since the 9/11 happened,” he says. “I am planning to wage an attack inside America.”
He certainly seemed to mean it.
His radicalism complete, Shahzad returned to the United States on February 3, 2010. Over the next three months, he purchased the bomb components he would need: fertilizer in Connecticut, fireworks in Pennsylvania, other items elsewhere. However, he changed the formula to avoid suspicion. He received $12,000 from Tehrik-e-Taliban, on top of $5,000 he had received while he was still in Pakistan. He bought the Pathfinder through an ad on Craigslist on April 24, paying $1,300 in cash, and got the windows tinted.
In searching for an appropriate target—somewhere that was accessible and very crowded—he watched real-time live video feeds from Times Square. He decided Saturday night was the busiest time of all.
Security video shows that Shahzad arrived in Times Square at 6:28 p.m., parking at Seventh Avenue and West Forty-Fifth Street. The bomb components were laid out carefully. In case he was confronted, he had with him a folded semiautomatic rifle in a laptop bag.
He lit the fuse, grabbed the laptop bag, shut the car door, and walked briskly away, confident that the SUV would explode shortly and dozens of people would be killed. He walked west on West Forty-Fifth Street then made his way to Grand Central Terminal.
But the vehicle only smoldered. Somehow, the fuse failed to detonate the intended explosion. The bomb never went off. The street vendors sounded their various warnings, and no one was hurt. All Shahzad’s plans had come to nothing.
On his way to Grand Central, he stopped for a moment, waiting to hear the horrific explosion. He heard nothing at all. Once Shahzad got home to Connecticut, he turned on the television and heard about the vehicle bomb that forced the evacuations in the Theater District but failed to explode.
It was a fast but intense investigation. The NYPD and the FBI were both deeply engaged. Investigators reviewed E-ZPass records, which showed when Shahzad had driven into Manhattan, and gathered footage from near one hundred security cameras tracing his arrival and getaway. Shahzad fled quickly, but the case was broken by tracing the ownership of the SUV. The plates on the Pathfinder had been stolen from a Ford truck, so that went nowhere. And the vehicle identification number had been removed from the dashboard and the door. But investigators found the number hidden beneath the engine block. That was traced to the last registered owner, a female college student. She said she’d sold the SUV to a man whose name she didn’t remember, but she did have a cell phone number, which was traced to a disposable phone that also had registered calls to Pakistan and to a fireworks store in Pennsylvania. Investigators also found a set of keys in the Pathfinder that were ultimately traced to Shahzad’s house in Connecticut and to the 1998 Isuzu Rodeo he had parked eight blocks from Times Square for his getaway.
FBI surrounded Shahzad’s house in Bridgeport, but somehow he managed to slip away. Through a federal terrorist database, we got word he was already at Kennedy Airport. He had driven with his 9-millimeter rifle, which he left in the car, and boarded a flight to Pakistan via Dubai. After the plane had left the gate and was about to taxi onto the runway, authorities boarded, pulled him off, and placed him under arrest. He refused to express remorse for his actions, and he pleaded guilty at his first court appearance and was ultimately sentenced to life in prison.
Not all terrorists are fueled by deep religious fervor. Some are small-time, racist criminals seeking easy profit and infamy by killing people or blowing things up. Ahmed Ferhani and Mohamed Mamdouh never gave much indication that they believed in anything, other than taking what didn’t belong to them and hating people different from themselves.
Born in Algeria in 1985, Ferhani moved with his family to New York as an eight-year-old. He was arrested in October 2010 for a robbery in Manhattan. It was then that an NYPD detective overheard him saying he hated Jews and was angry at the terrible way Muslims were treated around the world.
“They’re treating us like dogs,” he complained.
He also mentioned an interest in jihad and said he might like to become a martyr.
There’s nothing illegal about crazy boasts or strong opinions, even ugly ones. But the apocalyptic, racist talk from the twenty-five-year-old robbery suspect convinced detectives to keep an eye on him. He definitely seemed to be a troubled young man, suffering from bipolar disorder and living in his father’s basement in Whitestone, Queens.
We brought the case to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, but the supervisors had no interest in Ferhani’s racist blathering. There wasn’t sufficient connection, they said, to overt criminal acts. Who could possibly know if he was just another hothead racist or someone with truly dangerous intent? To us, that was the point. He was someone worth watching. We pressed the case on our own. That judgment paid off.
By April 12, 2011, Ferhani was telling an NYPD undercover detective that he wanted to blow up the biggest synagogue in Manhattan, musing that he might disguise himself as a Hasidic Jew. He said he’d sell drugs to raise the money for the operation. He also introduced the undercover to a young friend from Queens.
Mohamed Mamdouh was just twenty years old and seemed to share Ferhani’s anger and prejudices. Zionists, he said, look like “little fucking rats.” He was working as a taxi dispatcher, but he’d had his own scrapes with the law. He’d pleaded guilty to stealing jewelry, a laptop, and a bottle of vodka from a girlfriend and kicking her four-year-old poodle Lulu so hard he bruised the dog’s ribs.
Mamdouh said he wanted to blow up ten synagogues one at a time. “Hell, yeah, I would love to blow that motherfucker up,” he said about one of them.
Ferhani claimed to have some weapons but said he wanted to purchase more.
One undercover introduced the young man to another undercover, who posed as a gun dealer. The three of them met on May 11 at Twelfth Avenue and West Fifty-Eighth Street, where Ferhani gave a $100 down payment for three semiautomatic handguns, three boxes of ammunition, and what he believed to be a hand grenade. He asked about buying a bulletproof vest, a police scanner, and a full box of grenades.
Ferhani was arrested at the scene. Mamdouh was arrested several blocks away. Once the FBI had shown no interest, the U.S. attorney’s office seemed uninterested too. We brought the case to Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance. Ferhani and Mamdouh were arraigned May 12 on New York State terrorism charges, which were enacted after 9/11. This was the first time ever that New York State terrorism charges rather than federal charges were brought against terror plotters. Ferhani and Mamdouh were held without bail.
After much legal wrangling, Ferhani pleaded guilty to ten charges, including conspiracy as a crime of terrorism and criminal possession of a weapon as a crime of terrorism. Mamdouh pleaded guilty as well. Ferhani got ten years in state prison. Mamdouh got five.
In the view of Jose Pimentel, the list of potential targets was long.
“People have to understand that America and its allies are all legitimate targets in warfare,” he wrote on his website, trueislam1.com. “This includes, facilities such as army bases, police stations, political facilities, embassies, CIA and FBI buildings, private and public airports, and all kinds of buildings where money is being made to help fund the war.”
Alarming as his words were, this was another case the FBI wasn’t interested in. We ran with it alone.
Pimentel wasn’t a likely terrorist. He was born November 8, 1984, in the Dominican Republic, and moved to upper Manhattan as a child. He didn’t convert to Islam until he moved upstate to Schenectady for college. His marriage had dissolved. He was smoking a lot of marijuana. He was spending way too much time on the Internet. He found his way to Inspire, the English-language online propaganda magazine run by al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Among the articles he read and linked to at his own website were “The Preparatory Manual of Explosives” and “How to Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” He also posted fifteen video clips of senior al-Qaeda motivational speaker Anwar al-Awlaki to his YouTube account.
Pimentel had moved back to New York and was living with an uncle at Broadway and West 138th Street when Pimentel’s online activities attracted our attention. An undercover NYPD informant got to know him.
“We really have no excuses as Muslims here, you know, like, as jihadi Muslims in the West, we don’t have any excuse for not to be blowing shit up,” Pimentel said in one rambling conversation caught on tape by the informant. “At the end of the day, you know what I’m saying, when you can make a bomb with, like, twenty to thirty to forty dollars.”
It wouldn’t be that hard to take down a building with a bomb, he said. “All we got to do is put it in the basement. And I was thinking, like this is what we should do: If we put it, the car has to be facing the direction that we’re going to exit. You feel me? And we should put it in a bag that doesn’t look too suspicious, like a garbage bag.”
We stuck with him as he rambled on. When he stopped trusting one confidential informant, two other confidential informants and an undercover detective stepped in.
Pimentel wasn’t all talk either. What he lacked in proper diction he made up for in follow-through. By August of 2011, he began plotting his own bomb attack. He got more focused after September 30, when al-Awlaki was killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen.
Pimentel and the informants collected the components to build three bombs. At a 99 Cent store in Manhattan, he bought a clock similar to one he’d seen on the Inspire site. He found elbow joints, work gloves, Christmas lights, and nails at Home Depot.
Using step-by-step instructions from Inspire, he began drilling holes in the pipes, preparing the incendiary powder from six hundred matchstick tips and doing everything else needed to assemble the bombs. I watched him do all this on video. He considered various potential targets, including police cars and postal vehicles, but settled on U.S. troops returning home from Iraq and Afghanistan, considering them the most potent target imaginable. On November 20, 2011, when Pimentel was one hour away from having the bombs fully assembled, we moved in, taking him into custody.
Pimentel was prosecuted not by the federal government but by Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance. Although the would-be bomber insisted he’d been entrapped by our undercover informant, he pleaded guilty at New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan to a state terrorism charge and was sentenced to sixteen years in prison.
Unlike many future terrorists, Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis didn’t immigrate innocently to America and then become radicalized once he was here. The twenty-one-year-old left his native Bangladesh on a student visa in January 2012 with a single-minded plan.
Jihad.
He brought bomb-making instructions on his hard drive and tried to recruit willing coconspirators in New York. One of the people he approached turned out to be an FBI informant. In a recorded telephone call, Nafis asked for help launching a terror attack on American soil. The informant introduced him to an undercover FBI agent.
“We just want to meet our lord as soon as we can,” Nafis told the agent at a meeting in Central Park on July 24, six months after he’d arrived. He said he intended to commit a suicide attack, something “very, very, very, very big that will shake the whole country.”
One possible target, he said in August, was the New York Stock Exchange. Our cameras captured him scouting out the building at Broad and Wall Streets. By mid-September, he had switched his focus to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Liberty Street, less than a five-minute walk from the World Trade Center. A date was chosen: October 17.
“We will not stop until we obtain victory or martyrdom,” he declared.
He said he hoped the attack would disrupt America’s upcoming presidential elections. He wrote an article that he gave to the undercover, which he hoped Inspire magazine would post after the attack. Nafis wrote: “All I had in my mind [was] how to destroy America… I came up to this conclusion that targeting America’s economy is [the] most efficient way to draw the path of obliteration of America as well as the path of establishment of Khilafa,” Islam’s dominance of the world.
Nafis’s final plan called for assembling a thousand-pound bomb in several plastic trash bins inside a van and then attaching a detonator. On the day the attack was set to occur, Nafis drove to a warehouse, where he filled the garbage cans and loaded them into the van. He drove to the lower Manhattan Financial District and parked outside the Federal Reserve. The JTTF followed him all the way.
He walked to the Millenium Hotel on Church Street, where he had already booked a room. From the hotel, Nafis repeatedly tried to detonate the bomb with a remote-control device.
Of course, nothing went off. What he thought was a thousand pounds of explosives was, in fact, inert material provided by the JTTF. The remote detonator didn’t detonate anything.
Nafis was arrested at the hotel, a man with murderous intentions who failed to achieve his goal.
He pleaded guilty at U.S. District Court in Brooklyn to attempting to use a weapon of mass destruction. On the day of his sentencing, Judge Carol B. Amon said she was convinced that the young Bangladeshi “would have executed this plan or a similar, perhaps less grand one, had he not been discovered.”
She sentenced him to thirty years.
Raees Qazi was at home in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, when he first tried to contact terror leaders in Yemen. Just nineteen years old, he sent word that he was prepared to lay his life on the line fighting the Western infidels in Afghanistan.
No, thank you, he was told. The terror network had enough fighters in that war zone. Do something in America instead.
So Qazi came up with a plan, and it wasn’t to attack the Galleria at Fort Lauderdale. New York was the target he quickly settled on, following in the footsteps of many would-be terrorists before him, all of them eager to make a violent splash on the world’s top stage.
Like Faisal Shahzad, Qazi wanted to attack somewhere crowded and public. Like Jose Pimentel, he consulted the Inspire article “How to Build a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom.” Like almost every other aspiring young jihadist in the United States and Europe, he’d been listening to the stirring sermons of Anwar al-Awlaki.
Qazi recruited his thirty-year-old brother, Sheheryar Qazi, to help plan a mission. He figured his older brother could help with some money too. After researching volatile chemicals and the methods for making explosives from household items like Christmas lights, Raees was ready to proceed. In Sheheryar’s words, his younger brother “would be a lone wolf” like Shahzad, who’d attempted to set off the SUV bomb in Times Square.
Born in Pakistan, the Qazis were naturalized U.S. citizens who’d spent most of their lives in South Florida’s Muslim community. Raees made a living selling bicycles on Craigslist and doing maintenance work at a local mosque. Sheheryar worked as a cab driver.
On November 23, 2012, after shaving his beard to be less conspicuous, Raees got a ride to New York City with a friend. For several days, he pedaled a bicycle around Manhattan scouting possible terror targets, including Wall Street, Times Square, and the Broadway Theater District. But we were onto him, thanks to the excellent street sources of our NYPD detectives at the JTTF and especially the in-depth knowledge of NYPD intelligence chief Tom Galati. Galati recognized a phone number that Raees had dialed, connecting it to the National Street Mosque in Flushing, Queens. From that point forward, we shadowed his target-hunting trip around New York.
But Raees wasn’t able to organize the actual attack yet. He ran out of money first. He had no organizational help. He headed back to Florida disappointed. On his way from New York, he phoned his older brother. “Continue to practice,” Sheheryar said. “We can raise money. Then, you can return to carry out your attack.”
We weren’t ready to move in yet. We wanted to see how the brotherly plot developed. But the FBI and NYPD were definitely all over the Qazis.
Back in Florida, Raees continued collecting bomb-making components that he stored at the Qazi family apartment in Fort Lauderdale. By this point, his e-mails to the Middle East were also being monitored. “When Raees gets his first chance, he’s going to do it,” the brother said in a secretly recorded conversation with one of our informants. “He has taken his covenant and written down his life in the name of their God, Allah.”
There didn’t seem to be much wiggle room there.
Convinced the plot was an immediate threat, FBI agents arrested the two brothers on November 29, 2012, in Florida. In a search of the Qazi family apartment, agents found batteries taped together, stripped Christmas lights, and parts of a remote-control toy car that could have been used to set off a bomb. On the younger brother’s computer, agents detected searches for PETN, the explosive used by Richard Reid, the so-called shoe bomber who tried to blow up a jetliner three months after 9/11.
Both brothers pleaded guilty to federal terrorism charges, admitting they plotted a terrorist attack on landmarks in New York City and later assaulted two deputy U.S. marshals while in custody. Raees also pleaded guilty to a charge of attempting to provide material support to al-Qaeda. Both got the maximum penalties allowed by law—thirty-five years for Raees and twenty years for Sheheryars.
* * *
It’s a record we have a right to be proud of—sixteen serious terror plots against New York City, none of them successful. The perpetrators were discovered and brought to justice. The city remained safe. It was a massive effort that required the commitment and dedication of thousands of people and numerous law-enforcement agencies—police and prosecutors, local, state and federal—and the cooperation of decent citizens in New York, America, and abroad. We also got lucky a few times.
I have no illusion that this job will be completed any time soon. Certainly our counterterror campaign must continue for many years to come. The terrorists aren’t through with us, and we mustn’t be through fighting them. New plots are being hatched right now. I am certain of that. All we say with certainty is this: our vigilance has paid off so far, and the battle presses on.