Enemies Within (35 page)

“If you can do anything,” she said, “do something about it.”

Mohammed Zazi was furious. Why was he hearing about this only now?

“What kind of sister are you?” he protested.

Mohammed said his wife, Bibi, and his nephew Amanullah would take care of it.

The morning that Najibullah Zazi went to the lawyer’s office, Bibi and Amanullah made the short drive to his aunt and uncle’s house. Zazi’s mother and aunt poured the bleach down the toilet of the upstairs bathroom, filling the house with fumes. They ran the fan and opened the windows, but it did little to lessen the sharp odor.

Downstairs, Amanullah cut the mask and goggles to pieces with a knife. The women did the same with the now-empty plastic bottles.
They stuffed the debris into a plastic bag. They realized they couldn’t leave it on the curb with the trash. The FBI was probably watching. They had to get rid of the bag discreetly.

Amanullah had an idea. They stuffed the bag into Bibi’s eight-year-old son Osman’s backpack. When the family returned to its third-floor apartment, Bibi opened the backpack and handed her boy the plastic bag. Here, she said. I’ll give you five dollars if you throw this in the trash outside.
⁶

If the FBI were watching, perhaps agents would merely see a boy taking out the garbage after school.

•  •  •

Reporters began showing up that afternoon, knocking on the apartment door and asking questions. Najibullah Zazi did not keep quiet as his lawyer had instructed.

“This looks like it’s going toward me, which is more shocking every hour,” he told the
New York Times
over the phone.

“I live here, I work here,” he told the
Denver Post
, standing in the doorway of his apartment. “Why would I have an issue with America? This is the only country that gives you freedom—freedom of religion, freedom of choice. You don’t get that elsewhere. Nobody wants to leave America. People die to come here.”

Folsom told reporters it was a misunderstanding.

“If the feds are that interested in him,” he explained to Denver’s ABC affiliate that afternoon, “why is it they haven’t served a search warrant?”

As Folsom spoke, Jim Davis and Steve Olson at the FBI in Denver were, in fact, preparing those documents. Now that Zazi had a lawyer and the attention of the national media, the agents realized there was little chance they would catch him doing something incriminating. They would raid Zazi’s apartment and his uncle’s house the following day.

Davis watched and read the interviews with a mixture of bewilderment and worry. He was stunned that Zazi was talking to reporters.
Zazi’s demeanor, however, worried him. He didn’t have the cold stare of Mohamed Atta, the hijacker who piloted a jet into the World Trade Center’s North Tower. He appeared nervous but earnest. Standing on the balcony outside his apartment, wearing a blue striped button-down shirt and denying any link to al-Qaeda, Zazi was believable.

He reminded Davis of Richard Jewell, the security guard who for a time was under investigation for a bombing in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park during the 1996 Summer Olympics. Investigators leaked his name to reporters, making him a public suspect in a blast that killed one person and injured more than a hundred. Jewell maintained his innocence, and, when the FBI finally exonerated him two months later, the Justice Department had to apologize.

Zazi was a terrorist, but if the FBI couldn’t build a case, he could end up looking like a post-9/11 Richard Jewell, a Muslim man forced into the spotlight by the bureau and a victim of calumny.

The night before the raids, Davis and Olson shared the same fear. What if they didn’t find anything?

Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Zazi was on the national news again Wednesday morning, September 16, as reporters camped outside his apartment and staked out Folsom’s law office. Neither could leave without facing a barricade of microphones and tape recorders.

In New York, Ray Kelly reassured people that the city had never been safer thanks to the police.

“We’re the best protected city in world,” he said. “There are no guarantees, as we live in a dangerous world. Certainly 9/11 showed that to us, and we can see developments throughout the world that underscore that. But we are doing more than anyplace else, and we’ll continue to do that.”

Folsom believed his client when he said he was merely a shuttle
driver swept up in a terrorism investigation. Folsom professed Zazi’s innocence at every opportunity, but until he knew what evidence the FBI had, he was defending Zazi against whispers and rumors.

The attorney called the FBI. Zazi, he said, wanted to clear up things. If the FBI was interested, Folsom would bring Zazi downtown that day.

The FBI was interested.

Nobody knew what to make of the divorce lawyer who fell into a terrorism case and now promised to offer up his client to the FBI. It went against every rule in the cat-and-mouse game that agents and defense attorneys usually played. Jim Davis was convinced that Zazi wouldn’t show. His lawyer might not have a clue, but Zazi did. Maybe Folsom had some inkling that the FBI was planning a raid, and this was an attempt to buy time. Surely he would think better of it and cancel the meeting.

Davis and Steve Olson led two FBI teams to Aurora, one for Zazi’s apartment, the other for his uncle’s house. Whether or not Zazi showed up for the meeting, the raids would go as planned.

Shortly before two o’clock, Folsom and a colleague arrived at the federal building in downtown Denver with Najibullah Zazi and his father. They checked in at the reception desk and were told to leave their cell phones in a storage locker. Security rules, the FBI explained. No outside cell phones allowed.

It was a lie. The FBI didn’t want anyone to tell Zazi that his house was being searched. Once the phones were locked up, Davis and Olson got the word: Hit the houses.

Zazi left his father in the reception area and followed his lawyers toward a conference room, where they sat across from an agent named Eric Jergenson. He had a shaved head and the build of a farmhand. A native of Oshkosh, Wisconsin, he kept miniature Green Bay Packers and University of Wisconsin Badgers football helmets on his desk. Jergenson had entered the FBI Academy in 2002, inspired like so many of his peers to join the fight against terrorism.
⁷

Every FBI investigation has a case agent who drives it and makes
decisions. When the Zazi affair began, Jergenson was the case agent, but that was on a piece of paper. The investigation was so high profile that Olson and Davis ran things in Colorado, with all of FBI headquarters in Washington weighing in. That changed when Zazi walked into the building. Top FBI officials don’t conduct interviews. Jergenson was up.

The FBI was certain that Zazi was a terrorist. Yet the bureau had no idea with whom or for whom he was working. Zazi’s arrival at the FBI was an all-too-real variation on the philosopher’s ticking-time-bomb scenario, which first appeared in Jean Lartéguy’s 1960 French novel
The Centurions
, in which a soldier beats an Arab dissident into confessing.

For decades, scholars have used the ticking bomb as a thought experiment. One prisoner knows the location of the hidden device. How far is the jailer willing to go to extract the information? Who would allow the innocent to die to protect the rights of a terrorist? Doesn’t the jailer have an ethical obligation to do everything in his power?

The fictional scenario presaged a post-9/11 principle: “To protect our people, we need more than retaliation, we need more than a reaction to the last attack,” President George W. Bush said in 2006. “We need to do everything in our power to stop the next attack.”

“Everything” meant tactics that previously would have been off-limits, such as eavesdropping on Americans without warrants, holding people in offshore prisons without charges, and, in New York, spying on Muslim college students and taping sermons.

The ticking-time-bomb scenario assumes that the jailer must go to extreme lengths. Since 9/11, the word
interrogation
has conjured images of hooded men being whisked to secret CIA prisons in Asia or Eastern Europe. There the CIA shaved their heads and faces, stripped them, and stood them for photographs. Subjected to constant light and noise, the naked prisoners were shackled in uncomfortable positions to keep them from sleeping. They were slapped, doused with water, thrown against the wall, and locked in small boxes. Most notoriously, CIA contractors strapped three prisoners to boards and poured water
over their cloth-covered faces. Waterboarding simulates drowning and is so terrifying and agonizing that the United States prosecuted and executed Japanese soldiers for waterboarding American prisoners during World War II.
⁸
When the International Committee of the Red Cross interviewed the detainees about the CIA’s tactics, the humanitarian group—responsible under international law for protecting prisoners—declared them to be torture.
⁹

By contrast, FBI agents traditionally acted more like Hector Berdecia at the NYPD, bringing White Castle hamburgers and building rapport in the years before he ran the Demographics Unit. The bureau had a long history of success with that strategy, but in the aftermath of 9/11, it struggled to find its place in the newly proclaimed war on terror. Prosecuting terrorists in federal courts seemed weak; a throwback to a time before America was at war. In the months after 9/11, when Don Borelli was dispatched to Islamabad, he and his government colleagues set up a system for fingerprinting and photographing suspected al-Qaeda operatives flushed out of eastern Afghanistan by the US invasion and captured. Borelli assumed that he was building a foundation for criminal trials in the United States someday.

In February 2002 the CIA identified a Pakistani microbiologist named Dr. Rauf Ahmad, who was working with al-Qaeda.
¹⁰
Ahmad had been working on biological weapons for al-Qaeda and had spelled out those efforts in letters to Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian who served as Osama bin Laden’s deputy. Borelli and a pair of CIA officers met him at a suburban safe house, where Pakistani intelligence held him more as a houseguest than as a prisoner. In a second-floor sitting room, Ahmad rang a bell, and a servant fetched tea and cookies.

“Would you like some?” Ahmad asked his visitors in English.

The Americans listened as Ahmad, a midlevel government scientist, spun a story. He supported al-Qaeda, yes, but he would never hurt anybody. They talked amicably for two days as Ahmad dug himself deeper. On the third day, Borelli and the CIA officers confronted him with documents.

Without warning, Ahmad sprang to his feet and yanked off his sweater. At first, the Americans thought he was going for a bomb or a gun. Then they sensed that he felt physically constricted by his own lies. He was trying to unburden himself.

Once he regained his composure, he began answering questions, admitting what they already knew: He had been recruited to be al-Qaeda’s chief scientist in charge of weapons of mass destruction. He had been instructed to make anthrax. He pointed out the location of a laboratory he’d set up in Kandahar. He detailed everyone he had met in al-Qaeda and how he gained entrée into the organization. For Borelli, it was the biggest confession of his career. When it was over, he did what he’d been trained to do. He got Ahmad to sign a statement admitting everything he’d just said, for the court case.

Court cases, however, were out of fashion. The most important terrorism suspects were dragged into the CIA’s secret prisons. Hundreds of terrorists and sympathizers—even some without any ties to terrorism—went to the military’s prison at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba. The new judicial system there allowed hearsay and coerced statements, which supposedly would make prosecutions easier. Nearly a decade after the attacks, the Guantánamo military commissions had proven a morass. They had not produced significant victories. The 9/11 masterminds had yet to go to trial, their cases stalled from years of fighting over the government’s untested legal system. FBI agents believed that, had the plotters been sent to federal court, they would have already been tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed—all without treating them like the soldiers they believed they were.

Once President Barack Obama came into office, with his promise to close Guantánamo and transfer detainees to the United States to stand trial, his Republican rivals portrayed federal court as a weak venue favored by a weak administration. Obama wanted to read terrorists their Miranda rights and give them attorneys, even if it meant missing out on information that could save lives.

So Zazi’s case would be watched closely across Washington, not only
among law enforcement but also at the White House and in Congress. If the case fizzled, it would provide more ammunition to those who argued that terrorism suspects—even those living inside the country—should be shipped to Guantánamo, where people could be held indefinitely without the rigorous evidentiary requirements of federal court.

The FBI doubted it could prove Zazi was part of a bomb plot. The agents were certain they could not prove Medunjanin’s or Ahmedzay’s involvement. Still, Jim Davis never considered sending anyone besides Jergenson into the conference room with Zazi. Though Jergenson had only about seven years on the job, he’d stood out for deftly recruiting and handling a valuable counterterrorism informant.
¹¹
The Midwesterner was friendly, patient, and respectful. He never played the bad cop. Olson joked that Jergenson was everybody’s best friend.

“So, here we are, I guess,” Jergenson said, casually kicking off his interview. He wore a short-sleeve button-down shirt with neither a jacket nor a tie, and he leaned back slightly in his chair.

“There’s been a lot on the news, everything else,” he continued. He chuckled a bit, and Zazi did too. “What I think we can do today, if it’s possible, with all of us here, is that we just have an open discussion, if that’s possible. Maybe we can clear the air a little bit. I mean, nothing to hide here.”