The Longest War (42 page)

N
ajibullah Zazi, a lanky Afghan-American man in his mid-twenties, walked into the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver, on July 25, 2009, in a visit that was captured on a store video camera. Wearing a baseball cap and pushing a shopping cart down the aisles of the store, Zazi appeared to be just another suburban guy, although not too many suburban guys buy six bottles of Clairoxide hair bleach, as Zazi did on this shopping trip. He returned to the same store a month later and purchased another dozen bottles of “Ms. K Liquid,” which is also a peroxide-based hair bleach. Aware that these were hardly the typical purchases of a heavily bearded, dark-haired young man, Zazi—who had lived in the States since the age of fourteen—kibitzed easily with the counter staff, joking that he had to buy such large quantities of hair products because he “
had a lot of girl friends
.”

Zazi, a sometime coffee cart operator on Wall Street, was in fact planning to launch what could have been the deadliest terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11 using the seemingly innocuous hair bleach to assemble homemade bombs, a signature of al-Qaeda plots in recent years. During early September 2009, at the Homewood Studio Suites motel in Aurora, Zazi mixed and cooked batches of the noxious chemicals in the kitchenette of his room. On the night of September 6, as Zazi labored over the stove, he made a number of frantic calls to someone whom he asked for advice on how to perfect the bombs. Two days later Zazi was on his way to New York in a rented car. By now President Obama was receiving daily briefings about Zazi, sometimes as many as
three or four a day
.

Zazi was spotted in downtown Manhattan on Wall Street on the eighth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks just a few blocks from the gaping hole where the World Trade Center had once stood. By then he was under heavy FBI surveillance and eight days later Zazi was arrested. He later admitted that “the plan was to conduct martyrdom operations on
subway lines in Manhattan
.”

Zazi was the first genuine al-Qaeda recruit to be discovered living in the United States in six years. On his laptop the FBI discovered he had stored
pages of handwritten notes
about the manufacture and initiation of explosives and the components of various detonators and fusing systems, technical know-how he had picked up at one of al-Qaeda’s training facilities in Pakistan’s tribal regions sometime between the late summer of 2008 and January 2009, when he finally returned to the United States. The notations included references to TATP, an explosive used in Richard Reid’s shoe bomb and the London 7/7 suicide bombings.

A constellation of serious domestic terrorism cases surfaced during the last years of the second Bush term and during Obama’s first years in office, which showed that a small minority of American Muslims were not immune to the al-Qaeda ideological virus. And quite a number of those terrorism cases were more
operational
than
aspirational
, unlike many of the domestic terror cases that had preceded them following 9/11. The jihadists in these cases were not just talking about violent acts to a government informant but had actually traveled to an al-Qaeda training camp; had fought in an overseas jihad; had purchased guns or explosives; were building bombs and casing targets; and in a couple of cases, had actually killed Americans.

The Zazi case was a reminder of al-Qaeda’s ability to attract recruits living in America who were “clean skins” without previous criminal records or
known terrorist associations and who were intimately familiar with the West. Similarly, Bryant Neal Vinas, a twenty-something Hispanic-American convert to Islam from Queens, New York,
traveled to Pakistan’s tribal areas
in the summer of 2008. There he attended al-Qaeda training courses on explosives and handling weapons such as rocket-propelled grenades, lessons that he put to good use when he participated in a rocket attack on an American base in Afghanistan in September 2008. Vinas was captured in Pakistan the same month and was turned over to the FBI. He told his interrogators that he had provided al-Qaeda members details about the
Long Island Rail Road
, which the terror group had some kind of notional plan to attack. (The fact that seven years after 9/11 a kid from Long Island managed to waltz into an al-Qaeda training camp, a feat that no American spy had done, despite the some $75 billion a year that the United States was spending on its intelligence agencies, says a great deal about how the U.S. intelligence community actually works.)

An American who rose to prominence in al-Qaeda several years after 9/11 was Adam Gadahn, a
Californian convert
to militant Islam. Gadahn, a heavily bearded man in his twenties wearing a white robe and turban, became a regular on-camera presence in al-Qaeda videos using his jihad handle of “Azzam al-Amriki” and delivering finger-wagging lectures about the perfidious United States. Typical of those appearances was a video in which Gadahn said “fighting and defeating America is our first priority.… The streets of America shall run red with blood.” In 2006 Gadahn became the first American
charged with treason
in more than five decades.

Surprisingly, even almost a decade after 9/11 a number of Americans bent on jihad also managed to travel to al-Qaeda’s headquarters in the tribal regions of Pakistan. In addition to Zazi and Vinas,
David Headley
, an American of Pakistani descent living in Chicago—he had legally changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006 to avoid suspicion when he traveled abroad—also had significant dealings with militants based in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

Sometime in 2008, Headley hatched a plan to attack the Danish newspaper
Jyllands-Posten
, which three years earlier had published cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed that were deemed to be offensive by many Muslims. In a message to a Pakistan-based Yahoo group on October 29, 2008, Headley wrote, “Call me old fashioned but I feel disposed towards violence for the offending parties.”

The cartoons of the Prophet had become a particular obsession of al-Qaeda. In March 2008, bin Laden publicly denounced the publication of the
cartoons as a “catastrophe”
for which punishment would soon be meted out. Three months later, an al-Qaeda suicide attacker bombed the Danish embassy in Islamabad,
killing six
. For al-Qaeda and allied groups, the Danish cartoon controversy had assumed some of the same importance that Salman Rushdie’s fictional writings about the Prophet had for Khomeini’s Iran two decades earlier.

In January 2009, Headley traveled to Copenhagen, where he reconnoitered the
Jyllands-Posten
newspaper on the pretext that he ran an immigration business that was looking to place some advertising in the paper. In coded correspondence with militants in Pakistan, Headley referred to his plot to take revenge for the offensive cartoons as the “Mickey Mouse project.” On one of his email accounts Headley listed a set of procedures for the project that included “Route Design,” “Counter Surveillance,” and “Security.”

Following his trip to Denmark, Headley met with Ilyas Kashmiri in the Pakistani tribal regions to brief him on his findings. Kashmiri headed a terrorist organization, Harakat-ul-Jihad Islami, closely tied to al-Qaeda. Headley returned to Chicago in mid-June 2009 and was arrested there three months later as he was preparing to leave for Pakistan again. He told investigators that he was planning to kill the
Jyllands-Posten
’s cultural editor, Flemming Rose, who had first commissioned the cartoons, as well as Kurt Westergaard, who had drawn the cartoon he found most offensive: the Prophet Mohammed with a bomb concealed in his turban.

Headley said that he also cased a synagogue near the
Jyllands-Posten
headquarters at the direction of a member of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) in Pakistan, the same group that had carried out the Mumbai attacks that killed some 170 people in 2008. The Lashkar-e-Taiba militant whom Headley was in contact with mistakenly believed that the newspaper’s cultural editor was Jewish. When he was arrested, Headley had a book titled “How to Pray Like a Jew” in his luggage and a Memory Stick containing a video of a close-up shot of the entrance to the
Jyllands-Posten
offices in Copenhagen.

Headley also played a
key role in LeT’s massacre in Mumbai
in late November 2008, traveling to the Indian financial capital on five extended trips in the two years before the attacks. There Headley made videotapes of the key locations attacked by the ten LeT gunmen, including the five-star Taj Mahal and Oberoi hotels and the Nariman House, a Jewish community center, which was a particular target of LeT’s gunmen and would help further explain why Headley had the book about Jewish prayer rituals in his luggage at the time of
his arrest. Headley also scouted out possible locations on Mumbai’s seafront where the attackers, who originated in the Pakistani seaport of Karachi, could land their boat before they launched their attacks.

For many years after 9/11, the United States government had largely worried about terrorists coming into the country. David Headley was an American
exporting
the jihad overseas. But he was far from the only one. By the summer of 2010
some three dozen American citizens or residents
had been charged with traveling to an overseas training camp or war zone for jihad since 9/11: three who trained with the Taliban; ten who trained with al-Qaeda; eight who trained with the Pakistani terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba; three who had trained with some other unspecified jihadist outfit in Pakistan; and more than a dozen who had fought with the Somali al-Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabab. (The actual number of Americans who had traveled overseas for jihad since 9/11 was likely larger, as not everyone who did so ended up being charged or convicted of a crime.)

In September 2009, the Somali Islamist insurgent group Al Shabab
formally pledged allegiance
to Osama bin Laden following a two-year period in which it had recruited Somali-Americans and other U.S. Muslims to fight in the war in Somalia. Six months earlier bin Laden had given
his own imprimatur
to the Somali jihad in an audiotape he released titled “Fight On, Champions of Somalia.”

In 2006, with American encouragement and support, Ethiopia, a predominantly Christian country, invaded Somalia, an overwhelmingly Muslim nation, to overthrow the Islamist government there known as the Islamic Courts Union (ICU). While far from ideal, the ICU was the first government in two decades to have brought
some measure of stability
to the failed Somali state, but its rumored links to al-Qaeda–like groups had put it in the Bush administration’s crosshairs.

Some two dozen Somali-Americans, motivated by a combination of nationalist pride and religious zeal, traveled to Somalia in 2007 and 2008 to fight the Ethiopian occupation. Most of them associated themselves with
Al Shabab
—“the youth” in Arabic—the insurgent group that would later proclaim itself to be an al-Qaeda affiliate. Many of Al Shabab’s recruits hailed from Minnesota, where the largest number of Somali-Americans are concentrated.

Al Shabab managed to plant al-Qaeda–like ideas into the heads of even its American recruits. Shirwa Ahmed, an ethnic Somali, graduated from high school in Minneapolis in 2003, then worked pushing passengers in wheel-chairs
at the Minneapolis airport. During this period Ahmed was radicalized; the exact mechanisms of that radicalization are still murky but in late 2007 he traveled to Somalia. A year later, on October 29, 2008,
Ahmed drove a truck
loaded with explosives toward a government compound in Puntland, northern Somalia, blowing himself up and killing about twenty people. The FBI
matched Ahmed’s finger
, recovered at the scene of the bombing, to fingerprints already on file for him. Ahmed was the first American suicide attacker anywhere. It’s possible that eighteen-year-old Omar Mohamud of Seattle was the second. On September 17, 2009, two stolen United Nations vehicles loaded with bombs blew up at Mogadishu airport, killing more than a dozen peacekeepers of the African Union.
The FBI suspected
that Mohamud was one of the bombers.

Al Shabab prominently featured its American recruits in its propaganda operations, releasing two videos in 2009 starring Abu Mansoor al-Amriki (“the father of Mansoor, the American”), who was in fact Omar Hammami, a twenty-five-year-old from Alabama who was raised as a Baptist before converting to Islam while he was in high school. In the video Amriki delivered an eloquent rejoinder to President Obama’s speech in Cairo, in which the president had extended an olive branch to the Muslim world. Mansoor addressed himself to Obama in a flat American accent: “
How dare you
send greetings to the Muslim world while you are bombing our brothers and sisters in Afghanistan. And how dare you send greetings to Muslims while you are supporting Israel, the most vicious and evil nation of the modern era.” Another Al Shabab video from 2009 shows Amriki preparing an ambush against Ethiopian forces and featured English rap lyrics extolling jihad intercut with scenes of his ragtag band traipsing through the African bush.

The chances of getting killed in Somalia were quite high for the couple of dozen or so Americans who volunteered to fight there; in addition to the two men who conducted suicide operations,
six other Somali-Americans
between eighteen and thirty years old were killed in Somalia between 2007 and 2009, as was Ruben Shumpert, an African-American convert to Islam from Seattle. Given the high death rate of the Americans fighting in Somalia, as well as the considerable attention this group received from the FBI, it was unlikely that American veterans of the Somali war posed much of a threat to the United States itself. It was, however, plausible, now that Al Shabab had declared itself to be an al-Qaeda affiliate, that U.S. citizens in the group might be recruited to engage in anti-American operations overseas.

The fact that American citizens had engaged in suicide operations in Somalia raised the possibility that suicide operations could start taking place in the United States itself; to discount this possibility would be to ignore the lessons of the British experience. On April 30, 2003, two Britons of Pakistani descent launched a suicide attack in Tel Aviv; the first British suicide bomber, Birmingham-born Mohammed Bilal, blew himself up
outside an army barracks
in Indian-held Kashmir in December 2000. Despite those attacks, the British security services had concluded after 9/11 that suicide bombings would
not be much of a concern
in the United Kingdom itself. Then came the four suicide attackers in London on July 7, 2005, which ended that complacent attitude.