Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America by Apuzzo Matt & Goldman Adam

Author:Apuzzo, Matt & Goldman, Adam [Apuzzo, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Touchstone
Published: 2013-09-02T18:30:00+00:00

8

MOSQUES

NEW YORK

While the NYPD and FBI worked together on the Joint Terrorism Task Force to figure out what Zazi was up to, Cohen and his team at the Intelligence Division were going their own way.

Early Thursday morning, September 10, hours before Zazi crossed the George Washington Bridge, Cohen and his top lieutenants gathered downtown in his office on the eleventh floor of One Police Plaza for their regular seven fifteen morning meeting. As the men took turns updating Cohen about operations and fresh intelligence, the conversation shifted to Zazi and what the division should do. The FBI led the investigation, but Intel had the kind of granular information about New York’s Muslims that the bureau hadn’t been able to collect, whether by choice or by regulation. The NYPD was going to work its sources and find out what it could.

Deputy Inspector Paul Ciorra, a balding, stout former soldier, asked whether one of his detectives could show pictures of Zazi and his friends to an informant in Queens. Cohen agreed.1 Nobody at the table, including Assistant Chief Thomas Galati or Cohen’s closest aides, raised objections. And nobody suggested checking with Borelli or even with Jim Shea, the NYPD’s chief on the JTTF. It was understood that this was going to be a unilateral operation.

Daniel Sirakovsky, a former Bronx narcotics detective, had been moved to the Intelligence Division after 9/11 and had spent years developing sources in the Muslim community. He didn’t recognize any photographs of Zazi, Ahmedzay, Medunjanin, or Zazi’s cousin Amanullah, but he had an informant who might.

Sirakovsky knew an Afghan imam in Flushing named Ahmad Wais Afzali. A native of Kabul, Afzali had followed the familiar path of refugees from the Afghan capital to Queens, arriving in 1981 as a ten-year-old in flight from the Soviet invasion. He’d gotten his green card but never finished high school. Afzali had been married and then divorced after pleading guilty to attempted sexual abuse with an ex-girlfriend. He maintained that the sex was consensual and received probation, but the experience deepened his commitment to studying Islam. In 1993 he joined his parents in Virginia, where they had opened a pizzeria. Afzali enrolled in a Koranic Arabic course at an Islamic institute in Fairfax, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, and earned money as a housepainter and plasterer. Three years later, he returned to Flushing, where he continued his Islamic studies, and by 1999, he was an imam and an assistant to the president at Abu Bakr—the same mosque where Zazi and his friends had spent time; where they began plotting their transformation into terrorists.

Sirakovsky met Afzali in 2008 at 26 Federal Plaza, the Manhattan building that houses a federal immigration court. Afzali was embroiled in a five-year fight to avoid deportation after the sex charge. The US Board of Immigration Appeals ruled that Afzali could stay in the country, but officials hadn’t yet returned his confiscated Afghan passport and US green card.

Sirakovsky began meeting Afzali at a mortuary in Woodside, Queens, where he was now working as a funeral director.

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