Enemies Within (23 page)

When Davis was about fourteen, he called the FBI field office in Detroit. He reached the complaints agent, the guy who takes cold calls. He wasn’t interested in making chitchat with a teenager who said he
wanted to be an FBI agent when he grew up. But before hanging up, the agent told Davis, “If you wanna be in the FBI, you gotta be an accountant or a lawyer.” So Davis majored in accounting at Michigan State University. He got his CPA license. He didn’t care at all about being an accountant. He wanted to join the FBI, and he did.

He worked violent Ku Klux Klan cases in Virginia. He worked fraud and corruption cases in Chicago with code names such as Sourmash, Hedgeclipper, and Silver Shovel. Before 9/11, the criminal investigative division was the bureau’s premier assignment, the way toward promotions and great cases. But in the year following the attacks, one out of every four agents was pulled out of the criminal division. Davis was at headquarters in Washington then, as an assistant section chief in the fraud unit. But he felt like an executioner. He’d walk through the office, tap guys on the shoulder, and watch them walk out the door and into the war on terrorism.

Davis understood the realignment, but he wondered whether the surge outpaced the actual threat. There were crimes that weren’t being investigated in the new FBI. A year after the attacks, when Davis got to Indiana as the assistant special agent in charge, he thought, “I don’t know if there are terrorists here. But I know there are criminals.” It didn’t matter. Terrorism overshadowed everything.

It was ironic, then, that a tour in Baghdad, not a criminal case, had defined his career. It was 2003, and Davis had left Indianapolis to become the FBI’s second-in-command in Iraq. Agents fingerprinted and photographed Iraqi detainees. They questioned prisoners and passed whatever they learned back to headquarters. Late one Saturday afternoon, word began spreading in the Baghdad Operations Center that the military had snatched someone important. Davis grabbed an FBI fingerprint specialist named David Shepard and headed out to meet a team of commandos from Delta Force, which led them to a house on a compound near the Baghdad airport.

The Delta guys allowed Davis and Shepard to talk to the prisoner.
He spoke English, the soldier said. But no chitchat. Get in and get out. They opened a door to a large, tiled room. There were more soldiers inside, seated around a small table on a raised platform. The room was otherwise empty except for a small bed, which is where Davis first saw Saddam Hussein.

Shepard could usually fingerprint and photograph a prisoner in about five minutes. He’d done thousands. But the Iraqi dictator’s hands were slathered in moisturizing lotion to cure the dry, cracked skin that came from his time on the run, hiding in a camouflaged hole. Shepard couldn’t get a good print. He tried baby wipes and alcohol swabs—even special wipes with cayenne pepper on them. Finally, Shepard began rubbing Saddam’s fingers, trying to get more blood to his hands and improve the clarity of the fingerprints. It was a surreal scene: the young FBI agent massaging Saddam Hussein’s hands.
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When the prints were done, they swabbed Saddam’s cheek for DNA and took his mug shot. Davis then told him to face the wall for a profile shot. Saddam seemed genuinely upset.

“This is how you treat criminals,” he protested.

“That’s right,” Shepard said. “Face the wall.”

Davis took it all in. He was processing an infamous dictator in a war zone half a world away from home. And he thought, “All I ever wanted to do was work bank robberies.”

•  •  •

As the hour for the Haqqani event drew near, and with the FBI still uncertain what, if anything, was being planned, police descended upon downtown Denver. Cops shut down roads around the museum. Snipers hid on rooftops. An FBI surveillance team camped outside Zazi’s house in Aurora, and SWAT team members waited up the road. Garcia stationed a state trooper on the highway. Anybody who left Zazi’s house and started toward Denver would quickly see blue lights in the rearview.

Despite those precautions, as Brenda Leffler and Steve Garcia from the Colorado State Patrol stood on the footbridge connecting the art museum’s two buildings, they wondered privately whether that night would be the first time they’d have to use their guns.

The police kept Haqqani off the street as much as possible. He’d given interviews earlier in the night, and his security detail, rather than walk him around the corner to his next event, ushered him through a series of back rooms, up an elevator, across a rooftop garden, and down another elevator. Now he and the governor were at the footbridge, about to walk to the speech.

“Is everybody ready?” Ritter asked.

Leffler was surprised to detect a hint of nervousness in the governor’s voice.

“Yes, Governor,” she said. “Everybody’s ready.”

While Haqqani and Ritter spoke, Olson and Davis of the FBI decided to send the informant—the one that Jackie Gee from the sheriff’s office had cultivated—into Zazi’s apartment. It would be a social call. He’d talk to the family, get a sense of whether anyone was on edge, and have a look around. Short of having a video camera in the apartment, it was the next best thing.

Before arriving at the complex, the informant stopped up the street and met FBI agents and an ATF agent named Doug Lambert. He sat on the curb as Lambert walked his dog, Ostermann, around the informant. Like all bomb dogs, Ostermann, a four-year-old black Labrador retriever, was certified to detect bulk explosives. But Ostermann, named after famed NYPD bomb squad detective Glenn Ostermann, could also sniff out trace amounts of bomb-making materials and residue, including chemicals used to make peroxide explosives such as TATP. Ostermann’s job was to make sure the informant was clean when he went into Zazi’s apartment.

Olson called Davis at the art museum. The informant was in the apartment.

The art museum auditorium was packed with perhaps six hundred people. From a balcony, Davis and Garcia watched as the audience, bathed in blue houselights, settled in for a short film before the speech. It had been three days of nearly nonstop work, and both men were tired and edgy. Garcia reached for a white wooden chair nearby and sat down.

Just then an alarm went off. Police radios came to life. Garcia saw officers running. Something was going on. He sprang up. This was it.

But the officers weren’t running to the stage or toward the governor. They weren’t running down toward the crowd at all. They were running toward
him
.

The white chair was part of an exhibit, one that used chairs as a study of design trends over the years. When Garcia sat down, he’d triggered the museum’s alarm. Security guards and jumpy police were heading his way.

“Stand down! Stand down!” he called out a bit sheepishly. “My bad.”

The clamor on the balcony was lost on most of the crowd, drowned out by the film. Ritter took the stage to introduce Haqqani, who sat in a canvas director’s chair to make remarks and field questions from a moderator. Haqqani told the audience that the United States and Pakistan were making progress in defeating al-Qaeda and its sympathizers.

“There has been no major attack in the United States since 9/11,” he said. “We are able to find out about more planned attacks ahead of their execution than in the past.”

Back on the balcony, by a small couch underneath a stairwell, Davis grabbed his cell phone, getting an update from Olson.

The informant had made it into and out of Zazi’s apartment. He’d greeted Mohammed Wali Zazi with a hug. The apartment was nearly bare, with cushions and mats on the floor rather than couches and furniture. He’d sat and made small talk with the family. Nobody seemed jittery. No hint of anything sinister.

Once the informant left the apartment, the FBI put him back on
the curb for Lambert and his dog to inspect. Lambert had never tried anything like this, using an informant as a human swab for bomb residue. He’d never even heard of it being done. But he’d seen dogs detect gunpowder on the sleeves of FBI agents long after they’d been to the firing range. In theory, this wasn’t that different. “It’s not a hundred percent,” he’d told Davis and Olson. “But it’s an indicator.” To be cautious, he sat some FBI administrative employees on the curb next to the informant. If a dog is told to search one area alone, he’s more likely to generate a false positive.

Ostermann circled the informant and smelled something for sure. The dog was drawn to the man’s chest.
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Perhaps he had picked up chemicals from hugging Mohammed Zazi, Olson and Davis surmised.

As Olson relayed the story, Davis couldn’t help but respond with a rueful laugh. Then he turned to Garcia.

“This ain’t good.”

•  •  •

At FBI headquarters in Washington, Mike Heimbach, the FBI’s top counterterrorism agent, wanted to know exactly what happened with the dog. He or his boss, Art Cummings, would have to brief the director.

Robert Mueller III, the sixth director in the history of the FBI, could be a fearsome man to brief. Everybody who’s done it has a story, and it’s always some variation of the red car:

An FBI briefer tells Mueller that agents are following a car.

“What color is it?” the director asks.

“Red,” the agent replies. He’d seen that one coming.

“What shade of red?”

Politely put, Mueller was detail oriented. It was the former federal prosecutor in him. He liked to visualize things. Mueller would sit at his desk and listen intently. Sometimes
he’d have his chair turned slightly, feet out to one side, shoulders angled a bit toward his briefer. Other times he’d lean in, elbows on his desk, hands clasped an inch or so beneath his chin. Experienced briefers could see it coming: prosecutor mode, machine-gun mode, blood-in-the-water mode, whatever you wanted to call it. One giveaway was when he’d cock his head to the left to ponder something. The briefing was over. It was about to become a conversation. Mueller had questions and there had better be answers.

Since 9/11, Washington has become a city of briefings. An infrastructure has sprung up to make sure that the nation’s policy makers have every piece of information they want. There have always been briefings, of course, but now there are more, if only because there are more agencies and more people with security clearances. There are briefings at the Department of Homeland Security, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the National Counterterrorism Center, and the Transportation Security Administration—agencies that didn’t exist before the attacks. Each day, the government churns out a small library of materials for the sessions. They have names such as briefing books, matrices, threat assessments, intelligence reports, and intelligence summaries. It would be impossible to digest them all, but they’re all there, in case anyone wants to read them.

At the FBI, Mueller gets his daily briefing at seven in the morning. When a field office has an investigation that could make it onto the director’s desk, an analyst in the field prepares a document for headquarters the evening before. If a case is that important, the office is almost certainly swamped, which means that the analyst must break away from a busy investigation and spend time explaining to headquarters what’s already been done. On a terrorism case, the briefing document goes to the International Terrorism Operations Section, or ITOS, pronounced “eye-toss” in bureauspeak.

Information doesn’t flow into ITOS. It floods. It gushes. Reports arrive from the CIA and the NSA, from satellites, soldiers, foreign intelligence agencies, and more. Back when Heimbach was an ITOS section chief, before his promotion to oversee all of counterterrorism, he took
an eighteen-inch section of fire hose and mounted it to the office wall out at Liberty Crossing, the undisclosed location that is not a secret, hidden in plain sight near a northern Virginia shopping mall. The fire hose was a symbol of their shared experience drinking from the high-pressure intelligence spigot.

Each night before they go home, Heimbach and the other bosses review the documents so they know what the director might hear in the morning. If something isn’t quite clear, or if there’s a chance that Mueller might cock his head to the left, somebody will call the field office and ask for more information. Often that means more work for the analyst and more time away from the actual investigation.

That’s for the morning meeting. There was a time when Mueller was getting a second briefing at four o’clock in the afternoon, too.

This was the stuff that drove Davis nuts. He was convinced that headquarters was often more focused on having the right answers for the next briefing than on making the right decisions for the investigation. If the briefing went bad, a supervisor was stuck standing there looking like an idiot in front of the director. If the investigation went bad, the field office would take the blame. Davis thought headquarters was cliquish and too removed from the reality that agents faced while making cases. He not only disliked headquarters, he cultivated an outsider’s reputation.

Needless to say, Washington saw things differently. The agents and analysts at headquarters and out at Liberty Crossing were experts in their subjects. At any given time, the Counterterrorism Division had as many as 5,500 open cases, including legitimate terrorists, would-be jihadists, and the hapless idiots who try to buy plastic explosives or missile launchers from undercover agents.
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The analysts knew how one investigation fit into another. People like Saleh al-Somali were not abstract ideas to them. That big case in the field, the one the analyst doesn’t have time to brief? Maybe it’s one piece of something stretching across five field offices. There’s probably an international component to
it, meaning the legal attachés in London or Pakistan might be involved. Maybe the White House wants to know the latest because it has policy implications. So brief it.

Heimbach could usually straddle that divide. He’d been a standout field agent and was sensitive to the implications of demands from headquarters. He and Davis were old friends, so Davis didn’t get upset when Heimbach wanted to know more about the dog and the informant. Ostermann seemed to be validating the FBI’s suspicion that there were explosives in Zazi’s apartment or had been at one point. There had been no sign of a bomb in the rental car on the George Washington Bridge, so it could still be in Colorado. The Zazi family had easy access to the Denver airport. If there had been explosives in the house, Heimbach wanted to be sure that Zazi hadn’t loaded them into one of the cars parked outside.