Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (31 page)

Over the next five weeks, the young man went through the Taliban’s boot camp and learned how to make bombs. The Pakistani Taliban leaders saw a special prize in Shahzad, who carried an American passport, and, like Al Qaeda with Zazi, asked him to return to the United States to carry out an attack. Ultimately, the Pakistan Taliban wired Shahzad $12,000 to bankroll his failed plot to plant a car bomb in Times Square on Saturday night, May 1, 2010. After his arrest, Shahzad cooperated with investigators, but he sounded a defiant note at his sentencing in federal court in Manhattan on June 21, declaring himself “a Muslim soldier.” “Brace yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun,” Shahzad said. “Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me.”

All three men—Zazi, Hasan, and Shahzad—used their understanding of American lifestyles, their American citizenship or residency, and their American freedoms to fly under the radar of authorities. Hasan’s deadly attack succeeded. Zazi came within days of carrying out his plan. And Shahzad actually parked his explosives-packed SUV in Times Square, only to be foiled by faulty workmanship and an alert street vendor nearby who reported the smoking vehicle. But as Michael Leiter would warn seven months later, one day in the future, a homegrown terrorist will prevail.

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In the Obama administration, efforts to combat domestic radicalization remain largely without a central coordinator. FBI field offices have stepped up their outreach programs to Muslim communities, seeking to build trust even as they defend undercover sting operations designed to weed out the aspiring homegrown terrorist seeking the means to go operational. Using rules revised at the end of the Bush administration, the FBI also has freer rein to begin investigating a person or group as a potential security threat, even without evidence of wrongdoing. Agents are allowed to use religion or ethnicity as a factor—as long as it is not the only factor—when selecting subjects for scrutiny. The Homeland Security Department is seeking to strengthen ties to local, state, and tribal law enforcement and emergency services departments through support to regional intelligence fusion centers. And the Department of Education is working to share information on counterradicalization programs with several school districts from around the country that have significant Somali American populations. More than thirty young men from Somalia who are now U.S. citizens or have permanent resident status have left the United States to fight in Somalia, and American counterterrorism officials fear that one day some may return to attack the United States. “As the pace of mobilization increases, we have also increased the capacity of domestic programs,” Leiter said, noting that President Obama has ordered regular briefings on national and global counterradicalization programs.

But the government is struggling to settle on a common strategy for identifying and defeating a homegrown threat that is becoming increasingly diverse and difficult to track. Counterterrorism experts at the National Counterterrorism Center, at the FBI, and at Homeland Security are analyzing patterns of behavior, Internet communications, and travel patterns. In the battle of measures and countermeasures, Al Qaeda and other extremist groups are looking to speed up the time between radicalizing an individual and mobilizing that person for action. “What we have seen is that the distance between radicalization and putting a bomb on is sometimes days and weeks,” said Michael Chertoff, the former secretary of Homeland Security.

This narrowing of the “radicalization gap” is putting more pressure on state and local authorities as well as on the general public to be more keenly aware of unusual behavior. A growing number of big-city police departments and other law enforcement agencies across the country are embracing a new system to report suspicious activities that officials say could uncover terrorism plots but that civil-liberties groups contend might violate individual rights. In Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Miami, and several other cities, officers are filling out terror tip sheets if they run across activities that seem out of place, like someone buying police or firefighter uniforms, taking photographs of a power plant, or espousing extremist views.

Ultimately, state and federal officials intend to have a nationwide reporting system in place by 2014, using a standardized system of codes for suspicious behaviors. It is the most ambitious effort since the September 11 attacks to put in place a network of databases to comb for clues that might foretell acts of terrorism. “We have to enlist literally state and local and community people to be part of the eyes and ears about what is brewing,” Chertoff said. “It is going to be in this kind of an environment the beat policemen who see something funny or unusual that is likely to be able to detect one of the threads of a plot.”

In late 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced a public awareness program called If You See Something, Say Something, aimed at encouraging millions of Americans to identify and report suspicious activities. The campaign, which started on the New York and Washington subway systems, has expanded to include Walmart, the Mall of America, the sports and general aviation industries, and hotel and lodging associations. This type of campaign makes sense, as long as civil liberties are not abused. But the emphasis on the program now raises questions why such an obvious program had not already been in place.

Vulnerabilities exposed by the Zazi plot and by the terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, in November 2008 have prompted the Homeland Security Department to retool many of the training programs it provides to government specialists as well as to industry groups. Homeland Security’s office of bomb prevention conducts training courses not only on how to defuse homemade bombs but also on how to identify and report people who try to buy large quantities of commonly used beauty supplies, such as acetone and hydrogen peroxide, which are also the main ingredients used to make triacetone tiperoxide, or TAPT, the explosive of choice for many terrorists, including Zazi. Homeland Security has also been running training exercises with the hotel and shopping mall industries. In December 2010, for example, the department gathered hotel and mall security officials at a location in northern Virginia where they participated in a mock terrorist attack to test their responses.

Muslim community leaders in the United States have denounced the rise in homegrown radicalization. Law enforcement officials say that a growing number of Muslim leaders who are angry and embarrassed at a tiny minority of violent extremists are providing authorities with information about individuals who are espousing violence in the name of Islam. Steven L. Gomez, special agent in charge of counterterrorism in the FBI’s Los Angeles field office, said that as a result of community meetings he has held, one individual came forward with a tip about a man who was becoming radicalized. “That person said, ‘I am telling you this because I trust you,’” Gomez said. “That is a success right there.”

Looking back over the decade since 9/11, Michael Leiter acknowledged that putting counterradicalization plans in place both at home and abroad much earlier could have helped blunt the threat sooner. Now, as Al Qaeda and its affiliates increasingly aim to encourage and exploit self-radicalized Americans, Leiter knew that he could defend against the inevitable only so long. “We are going to see the trend you see in the short term continue,” Leiter said in November 2010. “Our job is to make sure no one gets killed, all the time knowing that we can’t do that.”

9

“IS AL QAEDA JUST KLEENEX?”

On a Tuesday morning in the spring of 2010 President Obama’s top national security aides rushed into the Oval Office with an alarming report: Credible intelligence warned of a new terror plot to strike the United States with an unconventional weapon. This warning came just as the administration and its counterterrorism council were recovering from the intelligence failure that allowed the Christmas bombing attempt in Detroit four months earlier to come far too close to success. And the source of the new plot was the same: Yemen, the sanctuary for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). Formed in 2009 through the merger of Osama bin Laden’s Yemeni and Saudi affiliates, AQAP had become the region’s most active and alarming terrorist organization.

American intelligence assets, aided by Saudi Arabia’s clandestine service, had picked up the chatter and had spotted the faint signs. AQAP operatives were attempting to acquire significant quantities of castor beans, which are used in cooking and in food production; they also offer some medicinal benefits. But inside the castor bean itself is something else: ricin, a toxin so potent that even harvesting the bean in its natural state is dangerous without proper precautions.

AQAP, like many other Al Qaeda affiliates, remained determined to strike at the United States with a weapon of mass destruction, but for the moment it focused on the less ambitious goal of using toxins. “Brothers with less experience in the fields of microbiology or chemistry, as long as they possess basic scientific knowledge, would be able to develop other poisons such as ricin or cyanide,” the AQAP propaganda arm would post to its online English-language journal,
Inspire
, in the fall of 2010, in an article headlined “Tips for Our Brothers in the United States in America.” Administration and intelligence officers would see this as another piece of evidence, public proof, of the AQAP threat stream. In the past, such articles had been dismissed as largely inspirational rather than operational.

This time, though, American intelligence believed the threat was real.

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Connect the dots.

That’s what you do to fight terrorism. The picture is never sharp. The information is never precise. What’s the threat? How capable are the would-be actors? From where and how soon? You build the assessment bit by bit until a recognizable pattern emerges, one that can be subjected to analysis supplemented by experience, gut instinct—and luck. If this doesn’t come together you have a failure of predictive intelligence.

The April 2010 intelligence reports warned that AQAP operatives in Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, were attempting to contract out for large quantities of castor beans. The operatives planned to move the castor beans and other precursor agents to a hideaway in Shabwa Province, in one of Yemen’s rugged, nearly unapproachable tribal areas, where they would concoct their supplies of potent toxins. “The assumption was they were attempting to weaponize them,” said a senior administration official. How would they do it? Most likely packed around an explosive, and most likely in a contained space, like a shopping mall or a subway system.

The precedent was a 1995 attack in the Tokyo subway, when the Aum Shinrikyo cult released sarin nerve gas on underground trains, killing twelve, injuring more than five thousand, and nearly paralyzing one of the world’s leading economies for weeks. AQAP had come up with an even more deadly plan. A speck of pure ricin the size of the period at the end of this sentence can kill if injected into the bloodstream; a minute amount of it, if inhaled or swallowed, will cause death within thirty-six hours. There is no antidote or cure. Several countries, including the United States, have tried unsuccessfully to convert ricin into a weapon causing mass casualties, but that hasn’t stopped terrorists from trying. In 2003, British and French operatives broke up Al Qaeda cells that possessed components and manuals for making ricin bombs and maps of the London Underground.

Intelligence officers considered this latest threat “significant” and an indication of the evolution of the new enemy. A ricin-dispersing bomb detonated in the New York subway or the Washington Metro or San Francisco’s BART would not result in mass destruction on a 9/11 scale, but as one counterterrorism expert pointed out, “The actual casualties of a given isolated attack might be small, but the psychological impact on people who ride transportation systems around the world would be significant. Do I have to now worry about getting poisoned on the way to work, each time I step on the metro?”

Gathered in the White House Situation Room, senior national security and intelligence aides debated whether AQAP had the sophistication to pull off the attack, even as the intelligence picture became clearer. They noted that a ricin bomb requires more chemical and engineering sophistication than just wrapping the toxin around an explosive. In the course of the debate, intelligence officials argued that the questionable capacity of the plot might be an indication of a larger American success against Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda’s senior leadership hiding in Pakistan. The intelligence was clear that any attacks against the United States would more likely come from outside Pakistan’s tribal areas, the officials pointed out, and that meant the terror network was splintered. Any new attacks would be smaller bore, and, while deadly, would be indicative of Al Qaeda’s diminished capability and ambition.

Other officials insisted that this was a misreading of the emerging tactical directives among the Al Qaeda offshoots. It was true, one official said, that AQAP could not mount a 9/11 type of attack, “but that is not their approach. They are trying to find targeted ways to do limited attacks that have big psychological impact and/or show that they can.”

In February 2011, Michael Leiter of the National Counterterrorism Center told Congress that he considered AQAP “probably the most significant risk to the U.S. homeland.” Leiter had reason to be especially sensitive to AQAP’s growing threat. The failed Christmas Day plot in 2009 showed that the NCTC missed clear warning signs that Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the Nigerian man trained by AQAP, was plotting to blow up the airliner. The lesson was noted throughout the American intelligence community. “After Christmas, a discussion that had been out there, but sort of on the low burn, suddenly became a bigger issue,” said the DIA’s John Tyson. “What about the non-CT data? When you get CT data, you have to bang it up against this non-CT data—this travel data and customs and visa data and all of this information that, quite frankly, we don’t need to know until we have a need to know.”