Counterstrike: The Untold Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda (30 page)

“The transformation of a Western-based individual to a terrorist is not triggered by oppression, suffering, revenge or desperation,” the study concluded. “Rather, it is a phenomenon that occurs because the individual is looking for an identity and a cause and unfortunately, often finds them in extremist Islam. There is no useful profile to assist law enforcement or intelligence to predict who will follow this trajectory of radicalization. The radicalization process is accelerating in terms of how long it takes and the individuals are continuing to get younger.”

Leiter expressed a similar frustration, confiding to guests at a dinner in Washington several months earlier: “I have a better understanding of radicals in London than anywhere in the U.S., except New York City.” Entering the radicalization process does not necessarily mean that a terrorist will pop out the other end of “the funnel” every time; the NYPD report concluded that individuals who stop short of carrying out attacks are still dangerous, serving as “mentors and agents of influence to those who might become the terrorists of tomorrow.”

What concerns Leiter and other senior officials is not just the number of Americans becoming radicalized but the worrisome number of those who are becoming “mobilized for action.” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano put it this way: “It is difficult to understand why someone goes from a nice upper-middle-class household in the United States to a training camp in Yemen or the FATA and then comes back and wants to kill people.” The tougher defenses the United States has erected since 9/11 to prevent foreign-based terrorists from entering the country have put a premium on terrorist groups recruiting or at least inspiring those living in America, who can operate freely and under the radar. “We have a good capability to detect and disrupt these sort of multipurpose teams that take months to plan, rehearse, fund, provide the logistics support for an attack,” said Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, in testimony to the Senate Homeland Security Committee on January 20, 2010, less than a month after the Christmas Day plot that nearly brought down an airliner landing in Detroit. “But we are not as capable as we should be of carrying out the much more difficult task of detecting these self-radicalized citizens of the United States, Europe, other countries like Nigeria, who are given a very simple mission—with an advanced bomb to carry it out—or who plan their own attacks, inspired by Al Qaeda’s message but not directed by Al Qaeda.” Thus it becomes imperative for the government to get smarter on tracking what Philip Mudd, a former top CIA and FBI official, calls “the digital exhaust that a human being leaves around the world,” including e-mail messages, cell phone calls, and travel information. “Counterterrorism in newspapers is about plots,” Mudd said. “Counterterrorism in practice is about people,” with a premium placed on “how we understand the distinction of tracking that person overseas and tracking that person domestically.”

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The homegrown terrorist threat within America’s borders defies easy description. A growing number of individuals have been self-radicalized through the Internet. Others have traveled to Pakistan’s tribal areas, seeking to join the militants who are fighting American troops in Afghanistan, only to be recruited by Al Qaeda for suicide missions back home. Three cases illustrate the range of threats facing counterterrorism officials.

Najibullah Zazi

On Monday afternoon, September 7, 2009, Jim Davis, the head of the FBI’s office in Denver, was enjoying the Labor Day holiday grilling hamburgers and drinking beer on his patio when the phone rang. It was Steve Olson, Davis’s top deputy for national security issues, relaying an urgent message from FBI headquarters in Washington. A sharp-eyed CIA analyst monitoring intercepts from the e-mail account of an Al Qaeda facilitator in Peshawar, Pakistan, had spotted a chilling message sent from the United States: “The marriage is ready”—terrorist code that a major attack is set to go. “Everyone knows what that means,” said Davis, who served with the FBI in Afghanistan and Iraq, where he was one of the first federal investigators to interview Saddam Hussein after he was captured in December 2003. “There was no doubt in my mind that at that moment we were talking about an Al Qaeda operative.” And that Al Qaeda operative, it turned out, was living quietly in Aurora, Colorado, a Denver suburb. His name was Najibullah Zazi. And he was seeking advice from an Al Qaeda facilitator in three increasingly frantic e-mails about how to mix the proper ingredients for a flour-based explosive.

Zazi was a twenty-four-year-old former Manhattan coffee-cart vendor who was now working as a shuttle bus driver at the Denver international airport. As Davis ordered round-the-clock surveillance on the suspect, FBI analysts scoured law enforcement and intelligence databases but found little to go on. Two days later, early in the morning of Wednesday, September 9, Davis got another jolting phone call: Zazi had left town in a Hertz rental car, heading east on Interstate 70 at speeds exceeding one hundred miles an hour. “At that point we don’t know if he’s running to something or if he’s running from something,” said Davis. “We don’t have any idea what his intent is at that point.” A Colorado state patrolman pulled Zazi over as he approached the Kansas border and asked where he was going. New York City, Zazi told the officer, who let him go with a warning.

The timing was ominous. The eighth anniversary of 9/11 was two days away. The end of Ramadan and the opening of the UN General Assembly, with scores of world leaders arriving in New York, was near. Hundreds of agents scrambled in what became known as Operation High Rise, as Zazi sped toward New York. As Zazi arrived in New York on Thursday, September 10, he was stopped on the George Washington Bridge as part of what was meant to look like a routine random check of cars entering the city. But the law enforcement officials at the bridge failed to find two pounds of high explosives hidden in his trunk. Spooked by the traffic stop, Zazi gave the explosives to a high school friend and accomplice, who flushed them down the toilet. Zazi also learned that New York City detectives had visited an imam he knew, asking questions about him.

The next day, Friday, September 11, the police towed Zazi’s illegally parked car and searched the laptop computer they found inside. Among the files was a nine-page bomb-making guide. That night, the FBI raided the homes of suspected sympathizers, bringing the plot to an end. But federal prosecutors still did not have enough evidence to charge Zazi with a crime, and he was allowed to fly home to Denver on Saturday, September 12. Reporters, tipped off by the raid in New York, hounded Zazi, who gave impromptu interviews to deny any wrongdoing. After spending two days in a furious media frenzy with television crews camped outside his apartment, Zazi paid a surprise visit to the FBI office in Denver on Monday, September 14, accompanied by his lawyer. “He thought he could talk his way out of this,” Steve Olson said. Instead, after twenty-eight hours of interviews spread over three days, Zazi was arrested and charged on Saturday, September 19, and the full outlines of a harrowing plot that had been unfolding for months came into focus. Zazi and two accomplices had planned to carry homemade backpack bombs into the middle of packed rush-hour subway cars running between Grand Central Terminal and the financial district, and blow themselves up. Zazi characterized the plot as a “martyrdom operation” that he was just days away from executing when he realized he was under government surveillance.

The plot had been hatched soon after Zazi and his two accomplices, high school friends from Flushing, Queens, flew to Peshawar the previous year, on August 28, 2008, eager to join the fight in Afghanistan and avenge what Zazi believed were the senseless deaths of women and children at the hands of American soldiers. In Pakistan, however, they met three senior Al Qaeda leaders who persuaded them that they could help the jihadist cause more by returning to New York and carrying out an attack there. The Al Qaeda leaders were the brain trust for the group’s operations against the United States and other Western countries: Saleh al-Somali, Rashid Rauf, and Adnan G. el-Shukrijumah, a Saudi-born naturalized American who is still considered one of the most dangerous Al Qaeda figures at large. (Rauf and al-Somali have since been killed by CIA drone strikes in Pakistan.) Zazi’s plot was one of three, including thwarted attacks in Britain and Norway, that the three Al Qaeda planners orchestrated.

Zazi remained in Pakistan, taking terrorist training courses in how to handle AK-47s and other weapons, how to make suicide vests, and how to fire rocket-propelled grenades. He returned to New York on January 15, 2009, and soon moved to Colorado, where his aunt and uncle lived. Zazi got a job driving an airport shuttle van and started buying bomb ingredients in beauty-supply stores, telling one clerk who commented on the volumes of materials he was buying, “I have a lot of girlfriends.” Zazi experimented with bomb materials in a hotel suite he rented in Aurora. It was from that hotel that Zazi sent his fateful e-mails to Pakistan over Labor Day weekend after he failed to cook up the correct lethal concoction. Had Zazi mixed the chemicals correctly the first time, Olson said, “there would have been no need for the follow-on emails that started this whole case. That’s how close this was. He was going for mass casualties.”

Zazi pleaded guilty to terrorism charges on February 22, 2010, and has been cooperating with the FBI. Investigators point to Zazi as the archetype of the most difficult challenge facing authorities today: a homegrown operative who travels freely, is skilled in interpersonal relations, and who understands the intricacies of American life so well that he gave several interviews to journalists after the FBI had identified him as a terrorism suspect following the raids in New York. And yet beneath that confident surface lay deep-seated anxieties that apparently pressed him to plot against his country. “He felt somewhat of a misfit, an outcast,” said Eric Jergenson, the agent who led the FBI team that interviewed Zazi in Denver. “He wanted to make a statement and accomplish something.”

Nidal Hasan

Major Nidal Hasan, an Army psychiatrist of Palestinian ancestry, looked like any one of the hundreds of troops on November 5, 2009, when he walked into a processing center at Fort Hood, Texas, where troops receive medical attention before being deployed or after returning from overseas. At first, he sat silently at an empty table. Then he bowed his head for several seconds, as if praying, rose, and pulled a high-powered pistol from beneath his coat. “
Allahu akbar
,” he cried—“God is great.” And then he sprayed gunfire across the room, killing thirteen people within minutes. In retrospect the warning signs were blinking red. Beginning in late 2008, Hasan wrote about twenty e-mail messages to the radical Yemeni American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, asking whether his religious obligations would justify a Muslim American soldier to kill fellow soldiers. Some of the e-mail messages were intercepted and forwarded for investigation to a Joint Terrorism Task Force led by the FBI. But a Pentagon analyst who scrutinized the e-mails decided they were in line with Hasan’s clinical research and warranted no further inquiry.

Hasan’s relatives, however, recall that five years before the fatal shootings, he had grown disgruntled with the Army, complaining about anti-Muslim harassment. They said that he looked into getting a discharge from the service, but because of a shortage of mental-health specialists and Arab Americans in the military, he feared his chances of getting out were slim. In the meantime, Hasan alarmed some colleagues by voicing increasing opposition to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose traumatized and injured veterans he was counseling. He anguished over reconciling his religion with his military duties, but his supervisors paid little heed. In a 2007 PowerPoint demonstration to explain why some Muslim American soldiers might feel divided loyalties, he quoted incendiary passages from the Koran, including “And whoever kills a believer intentionally, his punishment is hell.” In his presentation, Hasan wrote, “If Muslim groups can convince Muslims that they are fighting for God against injustices of the ‘infidels,’ then Muslims can become a potent adversary; i.e., suicide bombing.”

The Defense Department’s review of the incident, released in January 2011, recommended that the Pentagon spend as much time and effort protecting its personnel from internal threats as it does safeguarding them from external dangers. It also urged the Pentagon to work more closely with the FBI, and to develop awareness programs to train commanders to identify risky behavior within the ranks. Secretary Gates has said that he is especially concerned that the military does not seem to be alert to signs of radicalization in its own ranks, to be able to detect its symptoms, or to understand its causes.

Faisal Shahzad

Faisal Shahzad seemed to be an ideal example of the American immigrant success story. In 2006, at the age of twenty-six, he was working as a financial analyst at Elizabeth Arden, the global cosmetics firm; he had married a Pakistani American from Colorado; he had purchased a new home in Shelton, Connecticut; and he was on the path to becoming an American citizen and a father. But even as the Pakistani-born young man was enjoying America’s financial promise and expansive culture, however, he was growing increasingly bitter toward his adopted country’s foreign policy, particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His anger fueled a religiously infused alienation that caused deep concern among his friends. “Can you tell me a way to save the oppressed? And a way to fight back when rockets are fired at us and Muslim blood flows?” he wrote in a lengthy e-mail to friends. “Everyone knows how the Muslim country bows down to pressure from west. Everyone knows the kind of humiliation we are faced with around the globe.”

A pivotal moment came on July 10, 2007, when Pakistani commandos stormed the Red Mosque in Islamabad, ending a lengthy standoff with armed militants in a firefight that left more than one hundred people dead. While policy makers in Washington praised the Pakistani government’s decision to confront the Islamist militants, Shahzad was outraged by the assault at the mosque he had frequented during his periodic visits home. During one of those trips a year later, Shahzad’s pathway to militancy seemed clearer than ever. He asked his father for permission to fight in Afghanistan, a request his father turned down. Shahzad’s resentment continued to build, and by April 2009, when he got his American citizenship, he sent an e-mail message to friends saying that his “sheikhs are in the field.” By June, he had left for Pakistan. His wife packed up their children and moved to Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where her parents were living. Six months later, Shahzad had linked up with Pakistani associates and had found his way to Waziristan and the Pakistani Taliban through a connection at the Red Mosque.