"My wife and children went to Palestine and Jordan recently. I told them, 'Find a place you like and we'll move back.' But my kids were born here; they don't want to go."
On Monday,August 23, two days after Siraj, Elshafay, and Dawadi conducted their reconnaissance of the Thirty-fourth Street subway station, the men got together in Brooklyn to give real shape to their attack plan. Playing out his role, Dawadi said the brotherhood had approved their mission and directed them to conceal the bombs- which Dawadi would get from the brotherhood-in backpacks.
In the midst of the session, Siraj, who had from the beginning been the most vocal about his desire to commit an act of terror and had tried to project the fafade of a tough guy, seemed to get cold feet. Suddenly, he told his companions he didn't want to handle the bombs. He would help with the planning, he would go with them to Thirty-fourth Street, but he didn't want to actually go down into the subway with the explosives. "I am not ready to die," he said.
"There was silence for a bit when Siraj finished talking," one of the detectives says. "Then, very calmly, James says, 'I'll do it. I'll place the bombs in the subway.' "
Energized by his decision to be the pivotal player in the plot, Elshafay then said he had an idea. He'd dress like an Orthodox Jew to put the explosives in place. He'd put on side curls and a long black coat. He would go in the Thiry-third Street entrance and come out on Thirty-fourth, and they could pick him up there. Warming to this image, Siraj suggested putting the bombs in a Macy's bag. "Jews shop at Macy's," he offered.
By this time, days before the start of the Republican convention, the cops were taking every precaution. They had the suspects under twenty-four-hour surveillance and were working closely with the U.S. Attorney's office to make sure they were getting all the elements they needed for an airtight case.
Then, early in the morning on August 27, one of the lead detectives got a call at home to get to the NYPD's counterterrorism bureau in Brooklyn as quickly as possible. The decision had been made to move on the suspects.
Since Siraj had an assault case pending against him, the cops used it as a lure. They called and asked him to come to the 68th Precinct in Bay Ridge at three o'clock to get the case closed out. He said fine. But when he left work at Islamic Books and Tapes that Friday afternoon, he was headed in the opposite direction.
Not taking any chances, the cops grabbed him. In his pocket was the original hand-drawn map of targets that Elshafay had first given him back in April-the one he had hidden among the volumes in the bookstore.
Elshafay was also called by the cops and told there was a traffic accident they needed to talk to him about. His mother dropped him at the mosque on Staten Island, where the cops arrested him. Before they put him in the patrol car, he asked if he could have a cigarette.
"There's no question in our mind that they would have played this out completely," says Cohen. "If they couldn't get the explosives or if they just got frustrated, they had other options. All it takes is an AK-47 and a desire to become a martyr. Well, they have no options now."
Craig Horowitz has covered politics, crime, and the New York Police Department for more than a decade as a contributing editor at New York magazine. Horowitz, who has written more than forty cover stories for New York magazine, is at work on his first novel.
The arrest of the would-be subway bombers took place barely forty-eight hours before the opening of the Republican convention in New York. As a result, it was, for the most part, a one-day news event. While under different circumstances the successful undercover police operation might have been a significant ongoing story, given the timing, it was swallowed up by convention coverage.
Consequently, police department brass couldn't have been more eager when I approached them about doing a piece that examined the undercover operation. They were so eager, in fact, they did something they never do-they gave me access and details against the wishes of the U.S. Attorney's office. The accused terrorists hadn't even been indicted yet and the U.S. Attorney's office was taking great pains to insure that nothing interfered with the successful prosecution of the suspects. This included a ban on talking to the media.
But the cops desperately wanted this story told. Three years ago, when Ray Kelly became New York City's Police Commissioner, he revamped the NYPD to deal with the dangers of a post-9/11 world. He created a counterterrorism unit, he hired talent from the CIA and the military, and he vowed that fighting terrorism would be just as important as fighting street crime.
However, when you're battling street crime, success and failure are easy to measure. Murder goes up or goes down. Rapes increase or they decrease. But how do you effectively measure the terrorist acts that didn't happen? The ones all the painstaking work may have prevented? In fact, most of the successes will never be made public.
Telling the story of the arrests of James Elshafay and Shahawar Matin Siraj gave the NYPD an unusual opportunity to get the word out.
Justin Kane and Jason Felch
To Catchan Oligarch
from San Francisco magazine
The strange and epic case of the United States of America versus Pavel Ivanovich Lazarenko, which this spring asked twelve Bay Area residents to decide whether the former prime minister of a country six thousand miles away had broken the nation's laws more than a decade ago, actually began one cool night in January 1998 when FBI special agent Bryan Earl paid a visit to a small Dumpster in Sausalito.
Earl is not the type to skulk under cover of darkness. A smoothfaced man with hints of gray at his temples, gentle blue eyes, and a profound sincerity, he looks more like a tax accountant than one of Louis Freeh's or Robert Mueller's blue-suited special agents. His pious demeanor hints at his Mormon upbringing on the quiet side of Las Vegas, and it's easy to picture him wandering around Mexico in a suit and tie, with a small black name tag on his chest and the Book of Mormon under his arm, as he did twenty years ago. Not the first man you would imagine in the FBI, he is the first man you would want working there-the embodiment of God, family, and country.
At age thirty-two, tired of practicing corporate law in D.C., he had sent an application to the FBI on a whim and then surprised himself by joining up. A year later, as a rookie fresh out of Quantico, he found himself in San Francisco, eventually part of the FBI's local ten-member Eurasian Organized Crime Squad, investigating financial fraud and money-laundering schemes linked to the former Soviet Union and, in some cases, the infamous Red Mafiya. Earl enjoyed being part cop, part missionary, spreading the gospel of the American legal system among former communists for whom the distinction between politics, business, and crime had fallen with the Berlin Wall.
In late 1997, Earl had been handed the name of Peter Niko-layevich Kiritchenko, a Sausalito businessman whom Ukrainian authorities had asked the FBI to check out. It was a routine foreign police request, the kind, Earl's supervisor would later say, that most FBI agents would fulfill and forget. According to the Ukrainians, Kiritchenko had come up in the early stages of a Ukrainian investigation into the just-deposed prime minister, Pavel Lazarenko. At the time, Ukraine was a new ally of the United States, helping reduce the dangerous stockpile of nuclear weapons in the former Soviet Union, and nobody wanted to endanger the fragile relationship that had been forged with Ukraine's autocratic president, Leonid Kuchma. Lazarenko was Kuchma's biggest political rival. Many Ukrainians considered the investigation into the upstart presidential challenger to be a politically motivated ploy.