Free Enemies Within by Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman

been a cop, never made an arrest, never had to build a case or send someone to prison. But he was now the final word on how police collected intelligence in America’s biggest city.
    Cohen had been clear about what he intended to do. But not even the Handschu lawyers could envision how Cohen’s new authority would alter the NYPD’s mission. He had been given lenient rules and the sole authority to enforce them, exactly what he’d said he needed for the NYPD to detect and disrupt a terrorist plot.
    He didn’t yet know the name Najibullah Zazi, but he knew that was precisely the kind of person he needed to stop.

3
    HEADING EAST
    DENVER
    Wednesday, September 9, 2009
    Zazi continued east on I-70, past grain elevators and tiny frontier towns toward the Kansas plains and miles of sunflowers. It was midmorning, and the top FBI officials in Colorado assembled in a glass-walled conference room known as the “fishbowl” in a downtown Denver federal building. The building, a relic of the 1960s, was overdue to be renovated. The wall-to-wall carpet, matted and worn in spots, was a leaf motif set in seafoam, khaki, and olive. It looked like something from a far-off-the-Strip Las Vegas casino. Depending on where you stood, the place smelled faintly of sewage.
    Gathered were the field office’s senior agents, who met on every big case. But on the morning of September 9, they were joined by two unusual visitors: a case officer and an analyst from the CIA. The email address that had been traced back to Pakistan was, without question, an operational al-Qaeda address. There was no doubt about that. The CIA officials did not reveal that the NSA had been using a highly classified program called Prism to monitor the address, but such details didn’t matter to the FBI agents. Everyone in the room knew the governmentmonitored suspicious foreign emails—sometimes with specific warrants, sometimes without.
    The CIA made clear that officials had been watching the [email protected] account for months. Five months earlier, the British Security Service, better known as MI5, arrested twelve people in the English cities of Manchester and Liverpool on suspicion of being part of a terrorist plot. The suspected ringleader had been cheerfully emailing with the supposed Sana Pakhtana about his search for a wife and plans for a nikah , the Arabic word for wedding.
    “I met with Nadia family and we both parties have agreed to conduct the nikah after 15th and before 20th of this month,” read one email sent shortly before the arrests. “Anyways I wished you could be here as well to enjoy the party.”
    The Brits were fairly sure that Sana Pakhtana was linked, either directly or indirectly, to al-Qaeda’s global operations chief, a man named Saleh al-Somali. 1 The case against the dozen men arrested in Britain had fallen apart for lack of evidence. But that didn’t change the opinion, either in the United States or Britain, that one of al-Qaeda’s most senior operatives was behind that email account. And anyone sending chummy messages to that account represented a threat.
    Jim Davis, the FBI special agent in charge, was already convinced that the Pakistani email address was serious business. He’d understood that since Steve Olson from the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force first called him during a Labor Day cookout and told him about the suspicious email exchange. Davis was less certain about the Colorado email. And that’s what he wanted to know more about. Could there have been some mix-up? Email routes can be faked. Was it possible the Yahoo computer server was located in Colorado but the sender was somewhere else? The FBI had a team of agents chasing a man across the country, all because of that email. How sure was everyone about the trace?
    The CIA said it was certain. The email tracked back to a computerin an apartment in a gated town house community in Aurora, a diverse suburb that had ballooned into a city of three hundred thousand,