The Intercept potx

PART 1
BACKGROUND NOISE
September 2009
New York City
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 1 10/3/12 2:51 PM
B
assam Shah had driven through a day and two nights from
Denver, stopping only for gas, eating fried pies, drinking Red
Bull, and urinating into a plastic milk jug between gas station
fill- ups.
At dawn, in the chaos of merging lanes on the New Jersey side
of the George Washington Bridge, orange traffic cones squeezed the
cars to the right. Port Authority Police cars blocked the available
lanes, routing all visitors to the city to a checkpoint just beyond the
tollbooths. Commuter congestion into New York City was building
at that early hour, though still not at its heaviest.
Two men in blue Windbreakers and baseball hats waved flash-
lights up ahead, peering into a car’s rolled- down windows. They
wore wires in their ears.
Shah saw no dogs. For that, he was relieved. He was ten cars
back from the search point.
He watched the driver, a man traveling alone like him, get out
to open his trunk. The searchers— now he saw the words port au-
thority police on the backs of their jackets— shined their lights
inside. They lifted the mat off the spare tire, conferred . . .
. . . then let the man drive away.
Shah had to risk it. The decision was not a difficult one. If he
fled, they would stop him and search him intimately and rejoice at
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 3 10/3/12 2:51 PM
4 dick wolf

their success. Instead, he made himself small, exactly as he had been
trained to do, settling into the persona of a grateful immigrant.
His story— he was driving into New York to check on his fam-
ily’s coffee cart— had the benefit of being the truth. It was verifiable.
Truth by admission was imperative in a situation such as this one.
He eased the Ford Taurus forward, warm vent air breathing
on him, soothing him. It was a muggy early autumn morning. He
counted down as each driver was quizzed, each car scrutinized.
When his time came, he lowered his window and faced his inter-
rogators.
“Where are you going?” asked the younger of the two black
cops, shining his light in Shah’s face.
“To Queens,” Shah answered. He felt his confidence ebb as the
words left him. Something felt wrong here. But to be this close and
fail was impossible. He had felt certain the police were watching him
in Colorado. But his cross- country drive had been uneventful. He
had to push past his self- consciousness.
“You are coming from where?” the cop asked.
“Denver,” answered Shah. “My home. Near there— Aurora.”
All true. No lies.
The cop nodded. Truth or lies, it did not seem to matter much to
him. “Step out of the car, please.”
Of course they would make him get out. Shah was an Afghan,
twenty- four years old, with caramel skin. His neck beard, hair, and
eyebrows were all reddish brown. Physically, Shah fit every little
box on their desperately simplistic checklist of profiling character-
istics. The embodiment of what many Americans considered a dan-
gerous man.
He clicked open his seat belt obediently, attempted a smile, and
emerged before the great bridge in the warm air over the Hudson

River.
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 4 10/3/12 2:51 PM
the intercept 5
The other policeman leaned inside the open car door, scouring
the front seats with his flashlight as though it were a laser irradiating
the floorboards and upholstery in search of clues.
“Mind unzipping that?” the cop said, stabbing his light beam at
the Nike gym bag on the backseat.
Shah could have refused. He knew his constitutional rights
under U.S. law; indeed, most every Afghan in the States knew these
laws by heart. These men had no warrants, but they could “ask” him
to accompany them somewhere else for more searching. All they
needed was a pretense. Such was the thin thread upon which Shah’s
freedom now hung.
He pulled out the bag, feeling the heat of the high- candlepower
flashlight beam upon his tan hands. He opened it, removing a long
head wrap, bunching it in his hands. He pulled out two robes thick
with a few days’ body odor. He pulled out a half- burned candle and
sticks of incense.
In other words, he had exactly what these men expected an
Afghan to have.
They peered further inside, touching nothing with their blue-
gloved hands. Shah’s laptop case was on the seat next to the bag; he
showed it to them, and they were satisfied. They asked him to open
the trunk and he complied. They discovered nothing there except
the spare tire, a basic tool kit, and some grime.
And then it was over. They nodded to the driver’s seat as a ges-
ture that they were done and looked to the next vehicle. Shah de-
ferred to them without making eye contact, got into the rental car,
buckled up, and drove away.

All along the bridge, spangles of light glistened off the morning
dew that coated the thick steel cables. Below, the running lights of
barges on the Hudson River dimmed as though in awe of the dawn-
ing sun.
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 5 10/3/12 2:51 PM
6 dick wolf
He felt great exhilaration at having passed the checkpoint, which
was meant to discourage interlopers, but in fact seemed to him now
like a threshold.
He was inside now. And it had been easy.
At the same time, Shah’s anger began to rise anew. He cursed the
deference the bridge trolls forced him to adopt. He was a man who
valued his dignity. So he took in the beauty and magnificence of the
view with a sneer.
As the city passed across his windshield, Shah’s confidence re-
turned, knowing that the detonators were securely fish- lined into
the passenger- side air- conditioning vent.
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 6 10/3/12 2:51 PM
I
n lower Manhattan, on the twenty- third floor of FBI headquar-
ters at 26 Federal Plaza, not far from City Hall, the Joint Terror-
ism Task Force meeting was already under way. Jeremy Fisk, a
detective assigned to the NYPD’s Intelligence Division, arrived late,
hobbled by a sprained ankle.
He had missed a layup in his over- thirty league the previous
night— he played twice each week at ten p.m., a ridiculous time for
an amateur to pursue any sport, but the only time he could reliably
make with his schedule— and came down on someone else’s foot and
rolled his. He had sat on the court floor gripping his shin just above
his hyperextended ankle, waiting for the swelling to begin and curs-

ing himself.
That’s it, he’d thought, for the thousandth time in his life.
Enough with the basketball. They said that biology is destiny, and
so it was that a formerly tall- for- his- age fourteen- year- old now
spent two evenings a week with like- minded desperadoes throwing
himself around a basketball court. He loved the game, but never the
sheer exhaustion of running up and down the court— an exhaus-
tion that came more easily these days. Fisk had topped out at five-
eleven, never playing college after the JV team at Villanova, riding
the bench because everybody else was better and, eventually, taller
than he was.
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 7 10/3/12 2:51 PM
8 dick wolf
Fisk limped over to the wall. The briefing room was over-
crowded with representatives of the various agencies that comprised
the JTTF. There were similar task forces in over one hundred cities
nationwide, but New York’s was, appropriately, the biggest. Besides
the host agency, the FBI, full- time federal participants included the
U.S. Marshals Ser vice, the Secret Ser vice, the Bureau of Alcohol, To-
bacco, and Firearms, the Diplomatic Security Ser vice, Immigration
and Customs Enforcement, the Internal Revenue Ser vice, the army,
the Naval Criminal Investigative Ser vice, and more than a dozen
others, in addition to state and local law enforcement departments.
Such task forces are often derogatorily referred to as “alpha-
bet soup,” due to the large number of acronyms. To Fisk’s eyes, the
JTTF was worse. It was alphabet, minestrone, potato leek, French
onion, clam chowder, gumbo, and Scotch broth . . . many great tastes
that did not belong on the same menu.
Fisk’s department, the Intelligence Division, was not part of
the JTTF. It functioned as a separate intelligence- gathering agency

within the New York Police Department. He was here as little more
than a courtesy.
Fisk shifted his weight off his hurt ankle, leaning against the
wall behind a liaison from the Postal Inspection Ser vice. At the head
of the room, Cal Dunphy, the current top FBI special agent assigned
to the JTTF, was bald by choice, his broad jaw forming his head into
a perfect oval. His eyes briefly flashed on Fisk when he entered, but
nothing was said. Dunphy pulled notes from a file and consulted
them through the lenses of his rimless eyeglasses.
“We’re in his car and on his phone. We’re in his laptop. Mr. Shah
is moving with full confidence, and yet has no idea that we’ve got a
flashing beacon on his back, bright and strong.”
The FBI and Intel had had many operational differences of opin-
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 8 10/3/12 2:51 PM
the intercept 9
ion in the past. The chief source of friction was their shared jurisdic-
tion: a good old- fashioned turf battle. Two well- financed ops groups
with similar but not identical agendas, going toe- to- toe in the great-
est and most targeted city in the world. And neither side had either
margin or tolerance for error.
They did not work well together. Recently, and too often, they
had stepped on each other’s toes, compromising the other’s investi-
gation. Various attempts had been made at improving communica-
tion and coordination, but nothing altered the fact that they were
two dogs fighting over the same piece of meat.
So each agency kept the other at arm’s length. The FBI had Shah
all to itself in Denver. Now Shah was in the Big Apple, on Intel’s ter-
rain. They had learned enough from the mistakes of the past to es-
tablish a baseline of coordination, resulting in Fisk’s presence at this
briefing. But that didn’t mean they were suddenly on the same page.

As Dunphy went on, it was clear to Fisk that the FBI was merely
going through the motions. They were sharing the results of their
surveillance info but not the sources. They wanted point on Shah.
They certainly didn’t want Intel tracking him independently.
A couple of different liaisons asked questions that were intended
to make them appear smart and involved, but without any true in-
terest in moving the issue forward. Groupthink. Fisk saw Dunphy
glance his way. Dunphy, to his credit, knew Fisk wasn’t going to let
this ride.
Fisk stuck out his hand, as though hailing this train that was
going around in circles. “This whole thing makes me itchy,” he said.
“I don’t like it. He’s here now. Right in the city. We know what he’s
got. We know what he’s here for. I think letting him dangle like this
is too goddamn risky. You say you’re confident of his timeline— ”
“We’ve got three days, Fisk.”
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 9 10/3/12 2:51 PM
10 dick wolf
“Having a GPS tag on a fox who’s already in the henhouse
doesn’t reassure me much.”
Dunphy all but sighed. “Nothing would reassure you, Fisk.”
“Grabbing him now would.”
“And give up three critical days of intelligence gathering? Who
knows what we can get from this guy? This is crux time. Invaluable.
This is the fruit at the bottom, Fisk. The sweet stuff. I understand
your skittishness, but we’re holding a strong hand here— ”
“It’s not skittishness; it’s common sense. You’re telling me this
guy is on a controlled burn. I’ve seen those things get out of hand
many times. All it takes is a sudden shift in the wind.”
Dunphy smiled. Fisk knew what that smile meant. He saw par-
ents use it on their kids in the park. “We’ve got the best meteorolo-

gists in the business.”
“Predicting the weather is not the same as making it rain,” said
Fisk.
The FBI had conducted various undercover terror stings since
the dawn of domestic terrorism. For every terror plot that arose
organically, which is to say without domestic law enforcement
interference— the underwear bomber in a jetliner over Detroit, or
the planned attack on Fort Dix, New Jersey— two others originated
with the prodding of undercover federal agents. Not unlike actual
terror cell leaders, they radicalized vulnerable Muslim suspects by
fomenting anti- American dissent and supplying the conspirators
with dummy materials, such as fake C- 4 explosive or harmless blast-
ing caps. These paper conspiracies were then passed off as major law
enforcement victories, vanquished threats to homeland security. But
it was no exaggeration to say that the FBI had instigated more terror
plots in the United States since 9/11 than Al- Qaeda.
Fisk continued, “My concern is that everyone is on board with
your plan— except the terrorist himself.”
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 10 10/3/12 2:51 PM
the intercept 11
“Noted,” said Dunphy, pissed off now, and finished with Fisk.
“Anybody else?”
Fisk had heard enough. One of the pleasures of not being be-
holden to the JTTF was the ability to walk out of a meeting— or
hobble, which was just what Fisk did.
Intercept_i_x_1_390.indd 11 10/3/12 2:51 PM