Securing the City by Christopher Dickey

Author:Christopher Dickey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-02-03T16:00:00+00:00

As Cohen was back-channeling to the CIA and Sheehan was back-channeling to the DIA, the FBI’s fury about NYPD operations just kept growing. And that was only the beginning of the internecine clashes complicating efforts to protect New York City in 2003 and 2004. While Cohen’s connections had given him about as good a picture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s confessions as anyone could get outside the waterboarding room, the FBI wanted direct access to KSM. It had its own questions it wanted to ask, and its own agents who wanted to ask them directly. Months passed, and then months more. The CIA would not budge. No direct access.

In the case of Iyman Faris, meanwhile, the Feds were shutting out the NYPD. The FBI had Faris down at Quantico talking about his plans to burn through the suspension cables of the Brooklyn Bridge. They had the pictures he’d taken while casing likely targets all over the city (including, perhaps, Kelly’s apartment building). But they wouldn’t let the NYPD detectives near him. “Iyman Faris says, ‘Oh, I was gonna drive my truck over the Brooklyn Bridge,’” remembers one of the frustrated police investigators. “Well, any New York cop knows you can’t take a truck over the Brooklyn Bridge. But the FBI agent may not know that, because none of them live in Long Island, they all live in New Jersey.”

The related Paracha investigation case caused more bad blood, still, as Sheehan himself would acknowledge later. In March 2003 his detectives in the JTTF had gone with FBI agents to the offices of International Merchandise in the garment district, where the American-educated Pakistani businessman Saifullah Paracha and his Jewish partner had, over the course of the previous ten years, built their business importing cheap clothes.3 Saifullah was out of the country, but his twenty-three-year-old son, Uzair, was working from a desk in the offices. The cops told him they just wanted to question him. He went peaceably. And question him they did. “We broke him down,” said one of the police investigators. “He spilled out everything.” He admitted to having contacts with Majid Khan and others in KSM’s plot to bring a second wave of attacks to America’s shores.

The interrogators had quite a bit to work with at that point. Information from KSM’s confessions was filtering out and more details came from the Pakistani businessman known to the Parachas as “Mir” and in subsequent court documents as C-1—Confidential Informant 1.4 The elder Paracha had met twice with Bin Laden in 1999 and 2000. By early 2003 Saifullah Paracha allegedly suggested smuggling explosives and chemicals to attack Americans. More frightening still, he proposed using nuclear weapons against U.S. troops and, as one U.S. government document alleged, “suggested a source for such weapons.”5 (At the time, the nuclear black market operations of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan were still extremely active.) Saifullah Paracha had a background in basic physics and had studied as a computer systems analyst at the New York Institute of Technology. He

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