A NEAR MISS
THE DARK GREEN 1993 Nissan Pathfinder crept west on Forty-fifth Street in New York City, the silhouette of its driver barely visible behind the car’s tinted windows. It was a balmy eighty-degree Saturday evening in Times Square, just after 6 p.m. on May 1, 2010. The ebbing sun glinted off nearby skyscrapers as the area’s famous pulsating neon lights began to gather strength in the dusk, transforming the ganglion of streets and alleyways into an electrifying commercial carnival. The cylindrical eight-story NASDAQ sign at 4 Times Square stood watch, with a palette of over sixteen million colors splashed across eight thousand panels displaying lavish advertisements and stock information. Times Square is an iconic landmark—a metaphor for everything American, from overindulgence to technological innovation and celebration. Dubbed “the Crossroads of the World,” it is an agora, in the words of writer James Traub, “a simulacrum of a place, an ingenious marketing device fostered by global entertainment firms.”1
Gangs of tourists eddy through Times Square each day, enticed by Broadway shows and the mesmerizing lights. On New Year’s Eve over one million giddy revelers pack into the streets to watch the Waterford crystal, energy-efficient LED ball drop at the stroke of midnight. Yet Times Square’s swelling crowds and allure also make it a tempting target.
In May 2010, Faisal Shahzad, a thirty-year-old Pakistani who had recently become a naturalized U.S. citizen, pulled his Nissan Pathfinder to the curb at the southwest corner of Forty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue with its hazard lights flashing.2 He parked near the Minskoff Theatre, which had a hulking yellow billboard advertising the Broadway play The Lion King. Shahzad was about five feet, nine inches tall and had wavy black hair parted carefully in the middle and a thin layer of unshaven stubble. He had recently purchased the Pathfinder. He had not come to Times Square to soak in the atmosphere, however. After pulling over, he ignited a fuse in the backseat of his sport utility vehicle, waited for a few moments, and stepped onto the street. The car held an explosive device that he had assembled at his Connecticut home. Now he was preparing to detonate it. The bomb consisted of two analog battery-powered alarm clocks with electrical wire. They were routed to a canister filled with M88 fireworks, two red 5-gallon cans of gasoline, 250 pounds of urea-based fertilizer placed in white plastic bags, a pressure pot with more M88s, and three 20-gallon propane tanks.3
“It was in three sections,” Shahzad later remembered. The first “was the fertilizer bomb. That was in the trunk. It was in a cabinet, a gun cabinet. The second was—if that plan didn’t work—then the second would be the cylinder, the gas cylinders I had. And the third I had was a petrol, a gas to make fire in the car.”4
Shahzad stepped out of the car and left the keys in the ignition, the motor still running. He was hoping to maim and kill scores of people, destroy portions of the surrounding buildings, and cause severe economic disruption. Times Square, teeming on a warm spring Saturday night, was ideal. He was going to teach the United States a lesson for daring to “attack” Muslim countries. “Until the hour the U.S. pulls its forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan,” he explained, “and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops killing the Muslims and stops reporting the Muslims to its government, we will be attacking U.S.”5
He then started walking, at first briskly, toward Grand Central Station, listening for the explosion. It didn’t come. He continued walking. Shahzad had designed the bomb to detonate between two and a half minutes and five minutes after he lit the fuse. But something malfunctioned. He didn’t know what or how.
Around 6:30 p.m., a street vendor named Lance Orton stooped down to tie his shoes. “Wow,” Orton said. “That looks like smoke’s coming out of that thing.”6 He looked around to see if anyone else had noticed. No one had, at least at first. But the smoke continued to pour out of the car from all sides. Wayne Robinson, a vendor who worked with Orton, then alerted police officer Wayne Rhatigan, who was sitting atop a horse in Times Square.
“I saw the ignition running and the hazard lights on. It was kind of parked haphazardly,” said Rhatigan, who smelled what he thought was gunpowder.7 He circled the vehicle on his horse and radioed for assistance, sparking an evacuation of the surrounding area. Members of the New York Police Department’s bomb squad and fire department came to the scene and began working furiously to identify the source of the smoke from inside the Pathfinder. If it was a bomb, they would have only seconds, or perhaps minutes, to diffuse it. Fire department officials used thermal imaging cameras to detect the heat source and sent in a robot, which smashed the back window and showed images of the bomb materiel.8
Shahzad was confused. What had happened to his bomb? Disappointed, he disappeared into the night.
Advance at America’s Heart
The third wave continued. Barely four months after Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s bombing on Northwest Airlines Flight 253, Faisal Shahzad had tried to launch a terrorist attack in the United States. Miraculously—again—the bomb failed to go off. Shahzad had received his bomb-making training in Pakistan, but unlike most serious plots after September 11, 2001, al Qa’ida was not directly involved. Instead, this attack stemmed from a shadowy group that called itself Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan—the Pakistan Taliban.
Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan was actually an umbrella organization under which various Islamist militant groups united in December 2007. The leader was Baitullah Mehsud, who hailed from the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan.9 The charismatic Mehsud was praised by fellow fighters for his “faithfulness, devotion and love for Jihad.”10 He was killed by a U.S. drone strike in August 2009. Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan’s primary goals were to establish an extreme interpretation of sharia law in areas they controlled along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, unite against U.S. and other coalition forces in Afghanistan, and perform defensive jihad against the Pakistan Army. Many of their leaders were deeply anti-Western and in particular anti-American. “My desire is to advance at America’s heart and strike it, and to destroy Americans’ pride and self-conceit,” Baitullah Mehsud told senior al Qa’ida leader Shaykh Sa’id al-Masri.11
From its inception, Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan had developed links with al Qa’ida. By 2010 key Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan leaders such as Hakimullah Mehsud and Qari Hussein had established a working relationship with al Qa’ida’s chief operating officer, Atiyah abd al-Rahman al-Libi, religious leader Abu Yahya al-Libi, and military operational leader Ilyas Kashmiri, who had worked with David Headley. A U.S. intelligence assessment acknowledged that some Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan leaders “are receptive to this message and increasingly are adopting al Qa’ida’s anti-Western rhetoric and agenda.”12 Al Qa’ida leaders benefited from Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan’s safe haven in Mehsud tribal areas of Pakistan, and Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan in turn benefited from al Qa’ida’s training and explosives expertise to build bombs and execute attacks, as well as from its global terrorist links to raise funds. In a few cases the two groups cooperated in conducting terrorist attacks in Pakistani cities.13
Faisal Shazad’s father, Bahar ul-Haq, was a senior official in the Pakistan Air Force who ascended to air vice marshal before retiring in 1992. An opponent of extremism, he spoke British-accented English and drank alcohol socially, but he was stern with his children and sometimes quick to anger. When Shahzad, who was born in Karachi on June 30, 1979, was twelve, his father was transferred from Jedda, Saudi Arabia, to Quetta, Pakistan.14 Chauffeurs, servants, and armed guards tended to the family in an insular world made up almost exclusively of military families. When Shahzad entered high school in the mid-1990s, his family had settled in Karachi. Around 1998, Shahzad left Pakistan and landed at Southeastern University in Washington, D.C.15
Southeastern was a long way from Karachi. The now defunct university was situated at the intersection of Sixth and I streets in southwestern Washington, in an up-and-coming area nestled between the bustling restaurants of Washington’s waterfront district and a series of low-income housing projects less than a mile from the U.S. Capitol. Shahzad studied there for five semesters, taking mostly business classes and maintaining a grade-point average of 2.78.16 In 2000 he transferred to the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, whose well-groomed campus overlooks a tranquil section of Long Island Sound. Friends and acquaintances recalled that he strolled around campus with an air of confidence and often wore tight T-shirts that highlighted his well-defined muscles. On the weekends he sometimes hit New York City’s Bengali-themed nightclubs, and he “could drink anyone under the table,” recalled a former classmate.17
In many ways Faisal Shahzad was a successful immigrant. While not a stellar student, he received a bachelor of science degree in computer applications and information systems from the University of Bridgeport in 2001, and returned to earn a master’s degree in business administration.18 While working on his master’s, he landed a job as an accountant at Elizabeth Arden, Inc. in nearby Stamford, Connecticut.19 The company sponsored his H-1 working visa, which enables U.S. companies to employ foreign workers temporarily in specialty occupations.
The story of Shahzad’s radicalization mirrors that of many terrorists, from José Padilla to Najibullah Zazi. Several factors contributed to his journey to terrorism: a growing obsession with easily available extremist information on the Internet, a network of radical colleagues to sympathize with, and—importantly—training and indoctrination by a terrorist group in Pakistan.
Around 2001, Shahzad began to visit tanzime.org and other websites to listen to religious lectures. Over the next several years he was drawn to the charismatic Anwar al-Awlaki because of the cleric’s frankness and perceived elegance. Shahzad also listened to Shaykh Abdallah Ibrahim al-Faisal, who had helped radicalize London suicide bomber Germaine Lindsay. Much like Awlaki, Faisal preached across a range of media, including sermons in mosques, informal meetings, and religious courses. He also spread extremist propaganda through e-mail, fiery Internet preaching, and on-line chat rooms.20 Faisal was arrested in the UK in February 2002 and was eventually convicted of encouraging the murder of Jews, Hindus, Americans, and other non-Muslims, telling his followers that the way forward was “the bullet, not the ballot.”21 In 2007, Shaykh Abdallah Ibrahim al-Faisal was deported to Jamaica, where he continued to influence individuals like Shahzad and support Islamic extremism.
While he was at the University of Bridgeport, Shahzad also met Muhammad Shahid Hussain, a young Pakistani who would eventually become a Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan associate and would play a crucial role in transforming Shahzad into a terrorist. They briefly lived together, partied together, read the Qur’an, and talked about Islam and the plight of Muslims. By 2007, Shahzad had become increasingly disturbed at what he perceived as widespread aggression against Muslims in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Palestine.
Like Adam Gadahn and the young Muslims in Lackawanna, Shahzad withdrew from local mosques because most individuals did not share his beliefs. He attempted to convince some of his Connecticut- and New York–based friends that jihad—including violent jihad—was required for all Muslims, but he didn’t find much support. Some in his immediate family were aware of his radicalization, but they, too, were mostly opposed to violent jihad.
Around 2007, Shahzad’s friend Muhammad Shahid Hussain informed him that a Pakistani named Muhammad Shoaib could assist him with jihad training. Shoaib was a computer expert who had militant contacts. Hussain began including Shahzad and Shoaib on the same e-mail distributions in early 2008. They discussed articles and sermons related to Islam, as well as videos of mujahidin conducting successful attacks in countries like Iraq.22 Shahzad’s father noticed a change in his son, who had become more religious-minded, prayed regularly, fasted every Thursday, and grew a beard.23
Philip Mudd later commented that Shahzad’s radicalization illustrated the continuing spread of al Qa’ida’s revolutionary zeal. “The proven presence of plotters from affiliated groups during the past two years is perhaps the most significant evolution of the threat faced during this period,” he wrote. “The Detroit airliner and Times Square attempts represent a rare and significant step by an ideological affiliate of al Qa’ida to show intent and capability to reach into the United States, the first time an affiliate has succeeded since 9/11.”24
Shahzad had come to an important revelation: it was his duty to conduct violent jihad. Around this time he explained his epiphany to a friend in an e-mail, contending that Islam was under attack. “And today our beloved Prophet,” he explained, “has been disrespected and disgraced in the whole world and we just sit and watch with shame and sorrow and most of us don’t even care.” He fumed about the arrogance of the United States and its allies. “Everyone knows how the Muslim country bows down to pressure from west,” he wrote. “Everyone knows the kind of humiliation we are faced with around the globe.”
Shahzad was equally disparaging about the Muslim world, which had strayed far from the “straight path.” Echoing Sayyid Qutb and Ayman al-Zawahiri, he characterized most contemporary Muslims as infidels, accusing them of being “ignorant of Islam and illiterate of Quran and Sunnah.”25 The only course of action, he concluded, was to “fight them until there is no more tumult or oppression, and there prevail justice and faith in Allah altogether and everywhere.”26
He concluded his e-mail by implying that he would now sacrifice everything—including his family—for jihad. His day of judgment was coming. But he was not yet ready to fight. First he needed training.
A Crash Course in Bomb Making
Shahzad’s radicalization occurred just as he was developing into a successful businessman. After a stint at Elizabeth Arden, he secured a job in 2006 as a financial analyst for Affinion Group, a marketing and consulting business in Norwalk, Connecticut. He enjoyed steady work, became a naturalized U.S. citizen on April 17, 2009, and bought a home at 119 Long Hill Avenue in nearby Shelton. The 1,356-square-foot, three-bedroom Colonial was in a cozy neighborhood, within walking distance of an ice cream parlor and a handful of local restaurants, like Billy D’s Full Belly Deli. He had also married Huma Asif Mian, a U.S. citizen who had graduated from the University of Colorado in Boulder, and had two children with her. Mian’s Facebook page joked that she spent her time “Changing Diapers, Feeding Milk, Wiping Drools, Being Sleep Deprived.” She also praised Shahzad.
“What can I say,” she wrote, “he’s my everything.”27 In their house Shahzad showed off birthday and greeting cards from admirers. One, which was addressed to “Sweetest Faisal,” read like a poem:
And I’m really eager to know
how things are going at
your end, I’m thinking about
you, because you’re one of
those special people, who matter
to me, and I would really
like for us, to keep in touch28
But this life was coming to an end. After quitting his job, Shahzad stopped making payments on his house and defaulted on the mortgage. His bank, Chase Home Finance, foreclosed on his home in September 2009 and then auctioned it off the following year.29Around July 2, 2009, Shahzad traveled to Pakistan and stayed with his family in Peshawar for six months. His wife and children stopped in Saudi Arabia to see her family and then joined him in Peshawar.30 During this time Shahzad prepared to undertake terrorist training, but he told his wife that he would be traveling to Lahore to participate in the Muslim missionary fundamentalist movement Tablighi Jamaat.
Shahzad’s immediate goal was to learn how to build a bomb. He had an American passport and could come into the United States legally without raising suspicion. His citizenship status would be valuable for Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan and its al Qa’ida allies. In the fall of 2009, Shahzad met with Hakimullah Mehsud, who had replaced Baitullah Mehsud as head of Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, which had temporarily relocated to North Waziristan because of Pakistani military operations in South Waziristan. After patiently listening to Shahzad volunteer to attack the United States, Hakimullah advised him to attend a training camp in North Waziristan. Over the next several months, Shahzad met Hakimullah Mehsud several more times in preparation for the attack.31
The next forty-day period would be critical for the success of Shahzad’s terrorist mission. From December 9, 2009, through January 2010 he lived with members and associates of Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan in North Waziristan and underwent training. Five of those days involved building and detonating different types of bombs, under the tutelage of an experienced bomb trainer who used several pseudonyms, including Angar. Each day of the training was conducted at a different site. Shahzad’s trainers gave him a bomb-making manual to study, which he did for about two weeks. He practiced building and detonating bombs, using ammonium nitrate and other substances.32 It was a crash course in bomb making, Shahzad later explained. “How to make a bomb,” he said, “how to detonate a bomb, how to put a fuse, how many different types of bombs you can make.”33
As FBI officials like Art Cummings later recognized, Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan leaders took precautions with Shahzad. They isolated him from other operatives for at least two reasons. One was to prevent him from obtaining information about other plots, just in case he was captured and interrogated in the future. A second was to ensure that others didn’t find out about his operation. The decision to isolate him was similar to what al Qa’ida leaders had done with Najibullah Zazi and al Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula officials had done with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab.34
Shahzad also met with Qari Hussein, a senior Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan leader, who provided him with $15,000 before he returned to the United States. During this period he discussed with Tehreek-e Taliban leaders—including Muhammad Shoaib, who would become his day-to-day handler—his plan to detonate a bomb in the United States. They also discussed potential targets. Shahzad recorded a suicide video titled “A Brave Effort by Faisal Shahzad to Attack the United States in Its Own Land,” in which he declared that the impending attack was revenge for the U.S. war in Afghanistan. In the video, Shahzad praised Baitullah Mehsud and Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi as “martyrs.” The video was produced by Umar Media, the public relations arm of Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan, and was approximately forty minutes long. It began with footage of Shahzad holding and then firing a machine gun in what appeared to be the mountains of Pakistan. After approximately four and a half minutes, he spoke directly into the camera while holding the Qur’an.
“We have decided that we are going to raise an attack inside America,” he said defiantly. One of the objectives, he explained, was to “incite the Muslims to get up and fight against the enemy of Islam . . . Jihad is one of the pillars upon which Islam stands. Jews and Christians have to accept Islam as a religion and if you don’t do that, then you are bound to go in hellfire.”35
Fully radicalized and committed to his mission, Shahzad now posed a serious threat to the United States. He had a strong desire to attack the U.S. homeland, an American passport to get into the country without raising suspicion, and some training to build a bomb. Earlier that year, he had explained his intentions in an e-mail to a friend. He criticized the views of so-called “moderate” Muslims. “I bet when it comes to defending the lands,” said Shahzad, “his opinion”—referring to one Pakistani moderate—“would be we should do dialogue.” He had “bought into the Western jargon” of calling the mujahideen “extremist,” Shahzad wrote. “My sheikhs are in the field,” he explained. “If you don’t have the right teacher, then Satan should become your sheikh.”36
Following in the footsteps of his heroes, Shahzad returned to the United States in February 2010 on an Emirates Airlines flight into New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. It was time to execute the operation.
The Final Stage
Shahzad returned to Connecticut, less than an hour’s drive from New York, but his family remained in Pakistan. He stayed in a hotel for a few weeks while he looked for housing.37 He then rented a second-floor apartment at 202–204 Sheridan Street in Bridgeport, a three-story beige building in a drab neighborhood with cracked sidewalks and closely set houses. Shahzad had few indulgences. He slept on an air mattress in a spartan bedroom with a bare desk and a black folding chair. He drank instant coffee, lifted free weights, and watched a handful of DVDs, including the romance Up in the Air, starring George Clooney and Vera Farmiga. In many ways, Shahzad was an ordinary thirty-year-old American. He nibbled on Oreo cookies, barbecue potato chips, and Subway sandwiches washed down with milk, AriZona iced tea, or Gatorade. Only a few items in his apartment, such as the green, leather-bound Qur’an and prayer beads, hinted that he was a Muslim.38
Shahzad had been pondering an attack in New York City for some time. In April or May 2009 he had sent a PowerPoint presentation to Muhammad Shoaib with photographs of possible targets, including the World Financial Center, Grand Central Station, and the Federal Reserve Bank. He had also shown the presentation to several Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan leaders, including explosives trainer Qari Hussein.39
When he left Pakistan, he had little money. So he turned to Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan for help. “I asked them for some cash,” he said. “My cash was like $4,500 that I had with me when I was leaving, and I asked for some more cash because I had to do the whole operation here, so they gave me initially $4,900 something.”40
With over $9,000 in cash, a bomb-making manual in Urdu that he could barely read, his notes in English, and blind determination, Shahzad began to put together the bomb.41 But unlike Najibullah Zazi, the 2005 London bombers, and the 2006 UK transatlantic plotters, he did not rent or purchase a separate location to build the bomb. He made it in his Bridgeport apartment, alone. Surprisingly, none of the neighbors became suspicious enough to call police. “Nothing alarmed me about him, because he was just a person in the neighborhood fixing his house. He didn’t talk much to people,” said Bill Jackson, a contractor working on the house next door.42
Shahzad’s family did not contact authorities in the United States or Pakistan, despite their concern that Shahzad was becoming radical. In 2008, for example, Shahzad had asked his father for permission to fight in Afghanistan, but his father said no. Beginning in February 2010, he bought fertilizer, propane, gasoline, and other ingredients from stores across Connecticut.43 They were legal purchases and consequently did not arouse suspicion. He generally paid in cash to avoid a paper trail, as he had been taught in countersurveillance training. In March he drove to Matamoras, Pennsylvania, and went shopping at Phantom Fireworks Showroom. Video surveillance showed Shahzad clad in loose-fitting jeans and a jacket, strolling along the vacant aisles of the 20,000-square-foot store, calmly examining various types of fireworks and declining an offer of help from an assistant manager. He was particularly interested in M88 Silver Salute fireworks, a Phantom Fireworks brand that sold for $10.99 for a thirty-six-count box. The M88s were about an inch and a half long and an inch in diameter. Each contained roughly 50 milligrams of explosives, about the size of a quarter of an aspirin. If Shahzad hoped that M88 fireworks would ignite one another, however, he miscalculated. The M88s were about 98 percent paper, and each fuse had to be ignited individually.44The crash course in bomb making hadn’t been enough.
Much like Najibullah Zazi, Shahzad had trouble making the bomb. He considered using ammonium nitrate but concluded that it would arouse too much suspicion. So he turned to urea-based fertilizer. Yet he could not find the right type of fertilizer and queried Muhammad Shoaib in Pakistan, who checked with Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan explosives experts. The fertilizer he had was good enough, they replied.
Shahzad used the Internet to access websites that provided real-time video feeds of Times Square. These websites enabled him to determine which areas of Times Square drew the largest crowds and the times when those areas would be most populated. Shahzad also maintained regular contact with Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan associates, especially Muhammad Shoaib, who acted as his liaison in Pakistan when he had questions. Using software programs that were installed on his laptop while he was in Pakistan, Shahzad and Shoaib were able to exchange information about the bomb he was building and other topics.45 They communicated several times a week through social networking and file-sharing services, Voice Over Internet Protocol (VOIP), Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), and an occasional e-mail or telephone call—partly to conceal their identities. To evade intelligence and law enforcement agencies, they created new Gmail accounts to communicate with each other. Their last communication before the May 1 attack was only three or four hours earlier.46
In order to conduct the attack, Shahzad also needed somewhere to place the bomb. He settled on a sport utility vehicle, since it would be spacious enough to hold the materials. Around mid-April he found an advertisement for a Nissan Pathfinder on craigslist.org. Shahzad called the owner, a nineteen-year-old college student named Peggy Colas. They met in the parking lot of Price Rite grocery store in Bridgeport. Shahzad arrived in a black Isuzu Rodeo and paid with cash, handing Colas thirteen $100 bills. After buying the Pathfinder, he installed black window tinting to make it more difficult to see into the vehicle, presumably to hide the bombs.
Shahzad also purchased a semiautomatic rifle, which he planned to use in the event he was captured in connection with the bomb plot. To ensure that he was fully prepared if confronted by law enforcement authorities, he went to a firing range in Connecticut to practice shooting the gun.47
One of the benefits of his training in Pakistan was improved counterintelligence—what operators sometimes call tradecraft. Shahzad removed the license plates from the Pathfinder and bolted on plates he had picked up at a nearby junkyard. He used a prepaid cellular telephone, which he activated around April 16 and deactivated around April 28, to contact Colas. He spoke to her about a dozen times during this period.48And he continued to pay for almost everything with cash.
But he began to run short of money. While training in Pakistan, Shahzad had estimated that he could conduct the attack for $9,000. Upon returning to Connecticut, however, he realized that the cost of rent, vehicles, Internet, and daily sustenance, combined with the cost of building the bomb, would exceed his available funding. So he begged Muhammad Shoaib for more money.
In mid-February 2010, Shoaib took around $5,000 to an Islamabad hawala owner. A hawala is an informal money-transfer system that operates outside of normal banking channels and relies on brokers, known as hawaladars, to transfer money from one location to another. Hawalas are a quick and cost-effective way to transfer money and are often used throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. A customer approaches a hawala broker in one city and gives a sum of money to be transferred to a recipient in another city. The hawala broker calls another broker in the recipient’s city and gives disposition instructions about the funds, usually minus a small commission. On February 25, Shahzad received the $5,000 in cash from a hawala broker in Massachusetts. But he soon realized that he needed more money and went back to Shoaib, who was beginning to get impatient. Still, Shoaib came through. On April 6, Shahzad picked up another $7,000 in cash from a hawala broker in Ronkonkoma, New York, which was sent at Shoaib’s direction.49
As May 1 approached, Shahzad assembled the bomb at his home in Connecticut. During the late afternoon of May 1 he loaded the bomb into the back of the Pathfinder and folded his semiautomatic rifle into a laptop computer bag. He carefully wiped the inside of the vehicle with a towel to remove any fingerprints. He then drove for approximately an hour until he arrived in Times Square and parked the Pathfinder.50 When the bomb didn’t go off, he walked to Grand Central Station, carrying the 9-millimeter Kel-Tec rifle in his bag. “I was waiting to hear a sound but I couldn’t hear any sound,” he concluded, “so I thought it probably didn’t go off.”51
On his way home, Shahzad placed a call to his landlord saying that he was on the train home from New York and needed to be let into his apartment. When he got there, he sent a message, presumably to Muhammad Shoaib in Pakistan, explaining his failed attempt. He also began to follow media coverage of the attempted bombing.52 FBI and other members of the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force immediately responded, evacuating the area around the bomb. New York police chief Raymond Kelly was in Washington, D.C., for the annual White House Correspondents Dinner when his cell phone rang, alerting him of the attempted bombing. He quickly informed mayor Michael Bloomberg, who was also at the dinner. At 10:55 p.m. the two men left the event, drove to the airport, and returned on the mayor’s private jet, touching down just after midnight at La Guardia Airport.
The hunt for Shahzad had begun. Investigators quickly discovered that the vehicle had stolen Connecticut license plates and that the dashboard vehicle identification number (VIN) had been removed. Not knowing who was responsible, they were now racing to find the bomber before he conducted another attack—or fled the country. Fortunately, they had some clues. After they towed the Pathfinder to a Queens forensic garage, an Auto Crime Unit detective crawled underneath the vehicle and discovered that the VIN number on the Pathfinder’s engine block was still intact.53 The Nissan manufacturer had stamped the VIN on the firewall separating the engine from the cabin, and had included a different serial number system used to track inventory and identify stolen parts on the engine, chassis, and transmission.
Police then frantically began conducting interviews—with the Pathfinder’s previous owner, Peggy Colas; with the owner of the license plates, who had sent them to a nearby junkyard; and with street vendors and pedestrians who may have glimpsed Shahzad getting out of the vehicle. Colas described Shahzad as a Middle Eastern or Hispanic male, possibly twenty-five to thirty-five years old, with short black hair, brown eyes, and a dark complexion. Connecticut State Police brought in a sketch artist to work with her on a portrait of Shahzad.54
Colas was horrified. “I’m soooo happy I got a new car :),” she had written on her Facebook page after selling the Pathfinder to Shahzad a few weeks earlier. But her euphoria didn’t last long. “OMG!” she wrote on May 4, “I HAD A CRAZY DAY . . . IT’S OFFICIAL. I HAVE BAD LUCK. SMH I HOPE THEY FIND THAT BASTARD.”55
Joint Terrorism Task Force members also began combing through hundreds of hours of closed-circuit television video covering the time and place of the attempted bombing. This was much easier in theory than in practice. Times Square is covered by a maze of cameras, creating reams of video footage. Sifting through this proved to be an enormous, labor-intensive effort. They also traced Shahzad’s Verizon cell phone records, since he had called Peggy Colas a dozen times to purchase the Pathfinder. The phone records helped break the case. Shahzad had received four calls from a Pakistani number and had placed a call to Phantom Fireworks in Pennsylvania—the source of the M88s in the car. More clues began to surface. Investigators began to trace other evidence left in the unexploded vehicle—the keys to Shahzad’s black Isuzu Rodeo, two cans of gasoline, fertilizer, and three propane tanks. On May 3, Shahzad’s landlord saw him enter the garage and noticed two bags of fertilizer there, which FBI agents later recovered, along with more fireworks.56 It was now only a matter of time before law enforcement agencies arrested Shahzad.
“I was watching the news and then after a day or two I had realized they’re getting close,” he said, “so I decided to go to JFK and take a plane and try to go back, if I can.”57
Using IP-to-IP chat, Shahzad contacted Shoaib several times between May 1 and May 3 to devise his escape. Shoaib planned to pick up Shahzad at the airport in Pakistan.58 On May 3, Shahzad bought a ticket on Emirates Air Flight 202 to Dubai, with an apparent plan to continue to Pakistan, and drove to JFK Airport.59 Around noon that day he was placed on the No Fly List, but he still managed to board the flight. Only minutes before it departed, law enforcement officials rushed onto the plane and arrested him; he had been identified by an alert U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent.60 It was a dramatic end to a tense two-day manhunt.
After his arrest, Shahzad waved his Miranda rights and admitted his guilt. He acknowledged that he had purchased all of the components of the bomb found in his car in Times Square. He had loaded the car with the bomb, driven it to Times Square, and parked it. He had attempted to begin the detonation process before he had abandoned the car. And he believed that the bomb would kill about forty people.61
Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan released a short video claiming responsibility for the attempted attack in revenge for the death of Baitullah Mehsud and the slaying of al Qa’ida in Iraq leaders Abu Omar al-Baghdadi and Abu Ayyub al-Masri.
“We Tehreek-e Taliban with all the Pride and Bravery,” they announced, “take full responsibility for the recent attack in the USA.”62
Behind the scenes, however, Tehreek-e Taliban Pakistan leaders were furious. Shahzad’s failure to carry out the attack had not itself been a disaster, but the fact that Shahzad had divulged some of the group’s plans, procedures, and tactical details was a serious concern.63 Pakistani officials, working with the CIA and the FBI, arrested Muhammad Shoaib and several other accomplices, including Muhammad Shahid Hussain. Despite withering criticism over the years by U.S. government officials for supporting militant groups, Pakistani law enforcement and intelligence agencies illustrated on this occasion that they could be helpful.
Two Lovely Children
It might be tempting to dismiss Shahzad as an incompetent nitwit.64 He was certainly clumsy and amateurish. But it was not all his fault. The bomb’s problems—no way to initiate an explosive detonation, use of nonexplosive materials, difficulties with the urea-based fertilizer—indicated that his training was insufficient. Indeed, he had received less than a week of explosives-related training. Still, his car bomb nearly succeeded. In late June 2010 the New York Joint Terrorism Task Force conducted a controlled detonation of a bomb that was nearly identical to the one Shahzad used, except that the bomb technicians ensured that it would detonate. The technicians also placed other vehicles nearby to measure the explosive effects of the bomb. While it was impossible to calculate precisely the impact Shahzad’s bomb would have had, the controlled detonation suggested that it would have been devastating to the surrounding area. It would have killed and maimed pedestrians in the blast zone and torn apart buildings in the vicinity.65
Shahzad remained remorseless.
“I take it there’s no question that you intended that the bomb go off, that it explode on the street next to a building?” asked judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum during his trial in June 2010. “What building was going to be blown up by the bomb?”
“Well, I didn’t choose a specific building,” Shahzad responded, “but I chose the center of Times Square.”
“Were there a lot of people in the street?” Judge Cedarbaum inquired.
“Yes,” he said. “And obviously the time, it was evening, and obviously it was a Saturday, so that’s the time I chose.”
“That is,” Judge Cedarbaum tried to clarify, “you wanted to injure a lot of people?”
“Yes,” Shahzad replied coldly. “Damage to the building and to injure people or kill people. But again, I would point out one thing in connection to the attack, that one has to understand where I’m coming from, because this is—I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier. The U.S. and the NATO forces, along with 40, 50 countries has attacked the Muslim lands. We—”
“But not the people who were walking in Times Square that night,” Judge Cedarbaum said, perplexed. “Did you look around to see who they were?”
“Well, the people select the government,” Shahzad responded. “We consider them all the same. The drones, when they hit—”
“Including the children?” she interrupted, pressing him.
“Well,” said Shahzad, “the drone hits in Afghanistan and Iraq, they don’t see children, they don’t see anybody. They kill women, children, they kill everybody. It’s a war, and in war, they kill people. They’re killing all Muslims.”
“Now we’re not talking about them,” Judge Cedarbaum clarified, “we’re talking about you.”
“Well, I am part of that,” he responded, starting to get annoyed. “I am part of the answer to the U.S. terrorizing the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks, because only—like living in U.S., the Americans only care about their people, but they don’t care about the people elsewhere in the world when they die. Similarly, in Gaza Strip, somebody has to go and live with the family whose house is bulldozed by the Israeli bulldozer. There’s a lot of aggression.”66
Several months later Judge Cedarbaum sentenced Shahzad, who had become an American citizen the year before, to life in prison. “There is really no basis here for me to believe that somebody who falsely swore allegiance to this country, who swore to defend this country, who took oath a year ago to defend this country and to be loyal to it, has now announced and by his conduct has evidenced that his desire is not to defend the United States or Americans, but to kill them,” she said.67
Shahzad responded, “I did swear, but I did not mean it.”68
Osama bin Laden, who was holed up in his Abbottabad house in Pakistan and monitoring news of the attack, was perturbed. In a late 2010 letter to al Qa’ida’s general operations manager, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman al-Libi, bin Laden expressed indignation. “Of course you know that this is not permissible to tell such a lie to the enemies and is considered perfidy,” bin Laden explained. “Perhaps the brother was not aware of this,” he said, referring to Shahzad, “but it has raised questions about him. Please ask our brothers in the Taliban in Pakistan to clarify the position and make clear that such perfidy is forbidden, and their position toward it and toward the brother is that perhaps he was unaware that what he was doing was considered perfidy.”
But bin Laden wasn’t done. He had recently seen a photo of Shahzad with Hakimullah Mehsud. “Please get clarification as to whether or not Mehsud was aware that the oath of American citizenship includes a pledge by the person taking the oath not to harm the United States,” bin Laden told Libi. “You of course know the negative effects that can result from not minding this matter, and there is still the suspicion of the Mujahidin that they renege on oaths and commit perfidy.”69
In an e-mail to a friend several years before, Shahzad had explained that the time was drawing near for violent jihad. Hearkening to the day of resurrection, he quoted from the Qur’an.
That Day shall a man flee from his brother,
And from his mother and his father,
And from his wife and his children.
Everyman, that Day, will have enough to make him careless of others.70
The verse was more apt than he knew. His own family—his father, wife, and in-laws—were among the most distraught. His father, Bahar ul-Haq, was stunned and humiliated about his son’s activities, which cast a shadow over his stellar professional career and his family’s reputation. Shahzad’s father-in-law, M. A. Mian, offered these words: “We all know these things, what the geopolitical problems are,” he said. “Every day we sit in our living rooms with our friends and we discuss these issues. But to go to this extreme, this is unbelievable. He has lovely children. Two really lovely children. As a father I would not be able to afford to lose my children.”71
End of an Era
The Shahzad plot signaled the end of an era. Both Art Cummings and Philip Mudd retired from the U.S. government. For Mudd, the end was bittersweet. He had joined the CIA in 1985 and devoted most of his career to counterterrorism, moving to the FBI in 2005 and eventually becoming its senior intelligence adviser. President Obama nominated him to become undersecretary for intelligence and analysis in the Department of Homeland Security, with the support of Secretary Janet Napolitano. But Mudd quickly ran into problems. Democrats on Capitol Hill announced that they would probe Mudd’s knowledge of and role in coercive interrogation techniques while he was at the CIA, including his time as deputy director of the Counterterrorism Center. Rather than risk a confirmation fight, he withdrew his name and retired early in 2010.
“The President believes that Phil Mudd would have been an excellent Undersecretary of Intelligence and Analysis but understands his personal decision and the choice he has made,” remarked White House spokesman Nick Shapiro.72 It was a halfhearted, if not disingenuous, defense of Mudd. The White House did not have the stomach for a major confrontation with congressional Democrats over the legacy of coercive techniques.
For Art Cummings, the end was sweeter. In his twenty-three-year career with the FBI he had worked virtually every type of case as an agent. He had systematically risen up the FBI’s hierarchy to head counterterrorism and counterintelligence, thanks in part to his extraordinary competence, hard work, and blunt approach. It was fitting, then, for Cummings to retire on May 1, 2010, the day of Shahzad’s attempted attack. The timing couldn’t have been better.
“We’re winning,” Cummings said to himself. “Even Timothy McVeigh could put a serious bomb together. But al Qa’ida was clearly on the wane. Shahzad’s bomb was a piece of crap.”73