In the years after the attacks on September 11th, 2001, the NYPD had at least four “embedded” CIA officers in their midst. And because at least one of the officers was on unpaid leave at the time, the officer was able to bypass the standing prohibition against domestic spying for the agency and help conduct surveillance for the police force. In his words, he had “no limitations.”

The news comes from a FOIA request by the New York Times for a 2011 review by the CIA’s inspector general of the embedded analysts. The report, published Wednesday by the paper, criticized the program’s “irregular personnel practice,” “inadequate direction and control,” and risks posed to the agency’s practice and reputation. The existence of the review is public knowledge — it followed the Pulitzer-winning series of reports on NYPD spying on Muslims, which reported on the CIA’s assistance to the NYPD, and vice versa:

“Though the CIA is prohibited from collecting intelligence domestically, the wall between domestic and foreign operations became more porous. Intelligence gathered by the NYPD, with CIA officer Sanchez overseeing collection, was often passed to the CIA in informal conversations and through unofficial channels, a former official involved in that process said. By design, the NYPD was looking more and more like a domestic CIA.”

As the Times notes, the public statement on the CIA’s review of the program stated that no laws had been broken. But the actual document shows that the agency had a much more mixed response to the program, and reveals more details on how the program worked:

“The report shows that the first of the four embedded agency officers began as an adviser in 2002 and went on an unpaid leave from the agency from 2004 to 2009. During that latter period, it said, he participated in — and directed — “N.Y.P.D. investigations, operations, and surveillance activities directed at U.S. persons and non-U.S. persons.”

C.I.A. lawyers signed off on the arrangement because the officer was on a “leave without pay” status at the agency and was “acting in a personal capacity and not subject to C.I.A. direction.” As a result, the official “did not consider himself an agency officer and believed he had ‘no limitations’ as far as what he could or could not do,” the report said.”

Earlier this month, the ACLU sued the NYPD over the domestic spying program, which targeted Muslims. Meanwhile, the CIA itself isn’t having the best news day either — but at least the Times story wasn’t the result of a leak.

Jun 26, 2013

Find this story at 26 June 2013

© 2013 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

“The Terror Factory” author Trevor Aaronson exposes the Bureau’s undercover sting operations for the farce they are

In the dozen years since the 9/11 attacks, we’ve watched as a classified new legal regime for government surveillance has been hashed out, local police forces have become heavily armed military-type units and a whole new layer of bureaucracy has hatched to provide us with an abundance of “homeland security.”

Proponents of this build-up argue that it’s made us safer. They point to hundreds of foiled plots to make their case. But Trevor Aaronson, author of The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terrorism, dug into these supposedly dastardly plots and found that they are much less than meets the eye.

Aaronson recently appeared on the AlterNet Radio Hour. Below is a lightly edited transcript of the discussion.

Joshua Holland: Trevor, the raw statistical data say that Americans have a significantly better chance of being struck dead by lightning than of being killed in a terrorist attack here at home. It’s obviously different for people in some other countries.

I got that from the official terrorism statistics put out by the FBI and other related agencies. And they also track foiled attacks. These law enforcement agencies say that these foiled attacks prove that they are saving American lives. How would you respond to that?

Trevor Aaronson: I’d say that the majority of the foiled attacks that they cite are really only foiled attacks because the FBI made the attack possible, and most of the people who are caught in these so-called foiled attacks are caught through sting operations that use either an undercover FBI agent or informant posing as some sort of Al-Qaeda operative.

In all of these cases, the defendants, or the would-be terrorists, are people who at best have a vague idea that they want to commit some sort of violent act or some sort of act of terrorism but have no means on their own. They don’t have weapons. They don’t have connections with any international terrorist groups.
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In many cases they’re mentally ill or they’re economically desperate. An undercover informant or agent posing as an Al-Qaeda operative gives them everything they need… gives them the transportation, gives them the money if they need it, and then gives them the bomb and even the idea for the terrorist attack. And then when that person pushes a button to detonate the bomb that they believe will explode—a bomb that was provided to them in whole by the FBI—agents rush in, arrest them and charge them with conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction and then parade that person out to the public saying, “Look at us. We caught a terrorist. This is us keeping you safe.”

If you look at the record of prosecutions in the decade after 911, there has yet to be a case of some Al-Qaeda operative providing the means for a wannabe terrorist to do an act of terrorism. It’s only the FBI that’s providing the means through these sting operations. What this has done is really inflate the threat of terrorism within the United States—particularly from Muslim terrorists—because in almost all of these cases sting operations target men on the fringes of Muslim communities who might be mentally ill, economically desperate or otherwise very easily manipulated by an informant who can make a lot of money in these sting operations.

JH: The thing that I find eye-opening about this is—I’ve certainly known that many of these supposed plots were basically inventions of the FBI, but I didn’t know it was that consistent. You’re saying that this is the case with all of the suspects we’ve heard of in the post-911 era?

TA: For the purposes of my book, I used the 10 years after 9/11 as the area that I was going to analyze data in, and what we know is that in the 10 years after 9/11, there were a little more than 500 defendants who were charged with federal crimes involving international terrorism. About 250 involved people who were charged with things like immigration violations or lying to the FBI and who are somehow linked to terrorism.

Their charges did not involve any sort of terrorist plot. Of the 500, you have about 150 who were caught in sting operations; these operations that were solely the creation of the FBI through an FBI informant or undercover agent providing the means and the opportunity, the bomb, the idea and so on.

Then if you’re really being generous, you can find only about five people of the 500 charged with international terrorism who were involved in some sort of plot that either had weapons of their creation or their acquisition or were connected to international terrorists in some way. These include Najibullah Zazi who came close to bombing the New York City subway system, Faisal Shahzad, who delivered a bomb to Times Square that fortunately didn’t go off, and then you have Jose Padilla—the dirty bomber—the underwear bomber and the shoe bomber, for example.

Being generous, those are the five that you can point to in the decade after 9/11 who seemed to pose a significant threat. Fortunately, none of them were successful. That’s a handful compared to the more than 150 who were caught in these sting operations, and in these sting operations the men never had access to weapons; it was only the FBI that provided it as part of the sting operation that they were controlling from beginning to end.

JH: I’m no attorney, but this sounds like it gets close to entrapment. Have defense attorneys raised that?

TA: Yeah, and this is an interesting area of this story. Obviously, a layman like you or me looking at this thinks this is definitely entrapment. Unfortunately, the legal definition of entrapment is very different, and what we know is that 11 defendants have formally argued entrapment in these cases and none have been successful.

A large reason for that is the government is able to argue against entrapment in two ways; one is to say the person was predisposed to commit the crime. That he had done something that suggested he was interested in committing a crime before the introduction of the government agent.

Traditionally speaking, if this was a bank robbery plot, the government would have to prove that the defendant was researching bank robberies or casing banks prior to the FBI informant getting involved. The FBI and the Department of Justice are able to do this very easily in these terrorism cases in part because they are able to introduce evidence that is really sketchy to prove that there was predisposition.

For example, often the government will cite the fact that someone watched a jihad video and they’ll put on the stand a government expert who will testify that, “Hey, you know, because he watched the jihad video and this is one of Al-Qaeda’s classics,” that meant he was becoming a terrorist and the government line essentially, rather an absurd one, is that if you watch a Jihad video then, trance-like, you become a terrorist. It’s absurd on its face because I’ve watched those videos. You’ve watched those videos and I don’t think either of us are going to become terrorists.

At the same time, how the government is able to argue against entrapment is to really weight the jury in its favor and it does that by – in these sting operations, the government controls every aspect of the plot so they could have a guy who wants to commit violence and they say to him, “Okay, here’s a nine millimeter handgun. Go to the mall and shoot a couple people in the knee.”

That would be awful but it wouldn’t be something that would necessarily shatter the security of the United States of America. Instead, in these sting operations, they give the defendants these bombs that are so enormous and so big that even a sophisticated criminal organization would have trouble obtaining them. Then they have them unleash those bombs at subway stations or downtown skyscrapers and it makes the jury think, You know what? I ride that subway system. I have a son who works at that skyscraper. What that does is effectively erode any empathy that the jury might have for the defendant and that empathy is necessary for a jury to say, You know what? That person was entrapped.

What we’ve seen is a very effective role by the government in battling against this entrapment defense and now that we have 11 cases where entrapment has been formally argued, none being successful. I’m among those who say if you’re a Muslim charged with terrorism in the United States there really is no such thing as entrapment today.

JH: I’m a fan of that show Breaking Bad, and yet I have not started cooking meth in my backyard.

TA: If you ever got involved in a sting operation with meth, the fact that you’re a “Breaking Bad” fan might be used against you.

JH: Now, you said that a lot of people caught up in this dragnet, if you will, are poor, have mental health problems, are disenfranchised and sound like they are marginal people. Can you give us a few examples, specific case studies in the book to illustrate this point?

TA: Yes. One example which is really an absurd one is a man named Derek Shareef. Derek was this recent convert to Islam and he worked at a video game store in Rockford, Illinois. As it happens, his family has ostracized him as a result of his conversion and he was living in his car, which also happened to have just broken down.

Derek, who is earning close to minimum wage at this video game store, was really down on his luck. We don’t know exactly why the FBI targeted him but they sent an informant into the video game store.

This informant was a convicted drug dealer who then started working with the FBI and it happened to be the day before Ramadan and the informant strikes up a conversation with Derek and Derek explains the hard circumstances he’s found himself in.

The informant says, “You know what? I’ve got an extra bedroom at my place. I don’t use my car very often; you’re welcome to use it. Why don’t you stay with me while you get back on your feet?” Derek, being newly religious and devout, thinks this is the work of God since it’s the day before Ramadan and he goes and lives with this man, and over the course of weeks, this man’s slowly stoking Derek’s anger about his circumstances and about American foreign policy. Derek at some point says, “I want to do something about this. I want to kill a judge.” The informant says, “Okay, which judge?”

Of course, Derek couldn’t name the name of any judges and so the informant then gets Derek involved in a more manageable plot. He suggests that they go attack a shopping mall on Christmas Eve. For whatever reason, as in a lot of these plots, Derek agrees that he wants to do that, but the problem for the FBI informant and the FBI agent in this case was that Derek didn’t have any money.

He didn’t have any money to buy guns. He didn’t have any money to buy any weapons that he would need for the plot, so the FBI agents and the undercover informant cook-up this idea where the FBI informant will introduce Derek to an arms dealer who can provide grenades and Derek, in turn, has these two ratty, old stereo speakers, which are the only thing he has of earthly value and the informant tells Derek, “I think if you bring your stereo speakers to an arms dealer, he’ll just say, OK, fair trade and here’s four grenades.”

I don’t know many arms dealers in this world, but I’m pretty sure that none of them is going to accept old stereo speakers for grenades, but of course, Derek didn’t know that. Derek shows up at the shopping mall dutifully carrying his stereo speakers, gives them to the undercover agent who’s posing as the arms dealer, and the arms dealer hands over the grenades. Agents rush in, arrest Derek and charge him with conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction, and he’s ultimately serving 17 years in prison.

Clearly that’s an example of a man on the fringes of our society, unlikely to ever commit significant violence on his own and yet through this sting operation he is empowered to get involved in a plot that, were it real, would have been really horrifying. And when it’s portrayed in the public and through the media, it does seem horrifying. Here is this man plotting with an Al-Qaeda operative, an undercover FBI informant, to blow up people in a shopping mall on one of the busiest shopping days of the year.

Of course, the truth is that that was nothing more than a fantasy by the FBI, controlled at every step by the FBI and no one was really in danger and there’s no evidence to suggest that Derek ever would have met a real Al-Qaeda operative who could have made him the terrorist that he apparently wanted to be.

JH: Trevor, let’s talk a little about the incentives here. It seems to me—and this isn’t an original thought—that there’s a bureaucratic imperative to justify agency budgets. After 9/11, kind of in a panic, we basically doubled the size of our intelligence agencies, created a new Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI refocused its mission.

How much of this tendency to entrap these people comes from that imperative to justify bloated counter-terrorism budgets in your view?

TA: Actually a lot. I’m not of the opinion that there are high-ranking people at the FBI who are saying, You know what? We want to stick it to Muslims in the United States. Although there’s evidence of xenophobia and a certain amount of Islamophobia within the FBI, I don’t think that’s the real reason behind this.

Instead, I think the reason we’re seeing these really aggressive sting operations is the result of something of a bureaucratic evil. That is every year Congress allocates the FBI’s budget, and they set the counter-terrorism budget at $3 billion, which is the largest part of the FBI’s budget, more than it receives for organized crime and financial fraud.

The FBI can’t exactly spend $3 billion and say, Hey; you know what? We spent your money and we didn’t find any terrorists. Even though the truth is that there’s a lot of money for counter-terrorism and just not a lot of terrorists going around today. What happens is that these sting operations are a very convenient mechanism for the FBI to say, Hey look at us. We’re keeping you safe.

From the highest levels of the FBI, there’s pressure to build counter-terrorism cases because they just received $3 billion from Congress and that pressure then flows down to the field offices, which then, in turn, put pressure on individual agents to build counter-terrorism cases and those individual agents then incentivize informants who can make hundreds of thousands of dollars per case.

They’re sent out in the communities looking for people interested in committing acts of terrorism. What they’re not finding are people who are actively building bombs or getting involved in significant terrorist plots.

Instead, they’re finding these outliers, these people on the fringes of communities who for the most part are loudmouths who might aspire to violence but have no means of their own. And then they’ll bring them into the plot knowing that if they get someone on the hook, they can make lots of money, and then when they get a prosecutable case, that case floats up and you have a situation where FBI director Robert Muller consistently testifies before Congress about counterterrorism and cites these cases involving sting operations and what he describes as, Oh, this would have been a terrible, terrible thing had it been allowed to occur … it was a bombing of synagogues in the Bronx, or whatever it might be and never fully describes how that plot to bomb synagogues in the Bronx was really only made possible through an FBI informant who provided everything that the guy needed.

My criticism of this is not only that this bureaucratic evil exists and this is what is happening, but on a greater level the question people should be asking is, Why, despite all of this money and 15,000 informants employed by the FBI today are they finding it so easy to catch these people who are mentally ill and economically desperate while they’re missing the really dangerous people?

Faisal Shahzad delivered his bomb to Times Square and no one knew about him until that day. If you take the case in Boston with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, this was someone that the FBI even looked at and decided he’s not a threat.

The FBI has proven itself very good at catching these people in sting operations who can be easily manipulated, but they’ve also proven themselves almost incompetent in finding the truly dangerous terrorists who do have these connections overseas.

By Joshua Holland
Wednesday, Jul 10, 2013 08:30 PM +0200

Find this story at 10 July 2013

Copyright © 2013 Salon Media Group, Inc.

Our hearts go out to the victims of the Boston Marathon bombing, and our thoughts are always with them and their families. The cover story we are publishing this week falls within the traditions of journalism and Rolling Stone’s long-standing commitment to serious and thoughtful coverage of the most important political and cultural issues of our day. The fact that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is young, and in the same age group as many of our readers, makes it all the more important for us to examine the complexities of this issue and gain a more complete understanding of how a tragedy like this happens. –THE EDITORS

Peter Payack awoke around 4 a.m. on April 19th, 2013, and saw on his TV the grainy surveillance photo of the kid walking out of the minimart. The boy, identified as “Suspect #2” in the Boston bombing, looked familiar, thought Payack, a wrestling coach at the Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. On the other hand, there were a million skinny kids with vaguely ethnic features and light-gray hoodies in the Boston area, and half the city was probably thinking they recognized the suspect. Payack, who’d been near the marathon finish line on the day of the bombing and had lost half of his hearing from the blast, had hardly slept in four days. But he was too agitated to go back to bed. Later that morning, he received a telephone call from his son. The kid in the photo? “Dad, that’s Jahar.”

“I felt like a bullet went through my heart,” the coach recalls. “To think that a kid we mentored and loved like a son could have been responsible for all this death. It was beyond shocking. It was like an alternative reality.”

People in Cambridge thought of 19-year-old Dzhokhar Tsarnaev – “Jahar” to his friends – as a beautiful, tousle-haired boy with a gentle demeanor, soulful brown eyes and the kind of shy, laid-back manner that “made him that dude you could always just vibe with,” one friend says. He had been a captain of the Cambridge Rindge and Latin wrestling team for two years and a promising student. He was also “just a normal American kid,” as his friends described him, who liked soccer, hip-hop, girls; obsessed over The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones; and smoked a copious amount of weed.

Payack stared at his TV, trying to reconcile Dzhokhar, the bomber accused of unspeakable acts of terrorism, with the teenage boy who had his American nickname “Jahar” inscribed on his wrestling jacket. He’d worn it all the time.

That afternoon, Payack spoke with CNN, where he issued a direct appeal. “Jahar,” he said, “this is Coach Payack. There has been enough death, destruction. Please turn yourself in.”

At that precise moment, just west of Cambridge, in suburban Watertown, Jahar Tsarnaev lay bleeding on the floor of a 22-foot motorboat dry-docked behind a white clapboard house. He’d been wounded just after midnight in a violent confrontation with police that had killed his 26-year-old brother, Tamerlan. For the next 18 hours, he would lie quietly in the boat, as the dawn broke on a gray day and thousands of law-enforcement officials scoured a 20-block area in search of him. He was found just after 6 p.m., though it would take nearly three more hours for FBI negotiators to persuade him to surrender.

The following morning, Payack received a text from one of the agents with the FBI’s Crisis Negotiating Unit. He’d heard Payack’s televised appeal, told him he’d invoked the coach’s name while speaking with Jahar. “I think it helped,” the agent said. Payack was relieved. “Maybe by telling Jahar that I was thinking about him, it gave him pause,” Payack says. “Maybe he’d seen himself going out as a martyr for the cause. But all of a sudden, here’s somebody from his past, a past that he liked, that he fit in with, and it hit a soft spot.”

When investigators finally gained access to the boat, they discovered a jihadist screed scrawled on its walls. In it, according to a 30-count indictment handed down in late June, Jahar appeared to take responsibility for the bombing, though he admitted he did not like killing innocent people. But “the U.S. government is killing our innocent civilians,” he wrote, presumably referring to Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I can’t stand to see such evil go unpunished. . . . We Muslims are one body, you hurt one, you hurt us all,” he continued, echoing a sentiment that is cited so frequently by Islamic militants that it has become almost cliché. Then he veered slightly from the standard script, writing a statement that left no doubt as to his loyalties: “Fuck America.”

I
n the 12 years since the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there have been more than 25 plots to strike the United States hatched by Americans, most of which were ill-conceived or helped along by undercover operatives who, in many cases, provided their targets with weapons or other materials. A few – including the plots to blow up the New York subway system and Times Square – were legitimate and would have been catastrophic had they come to fruition. Yet none did until that hazy afternoon of April 15th, 2013, when two pressure-cooker bombs exploded near the marathon finish line on Boylston Street, killing three people, including an eight-year-old boy. Close to 300 more were injured by flying shrapnel, with many losing a leg, or an arm, or an eye; a scene of unbelievable carnage that conjured up images of Baghdad, Kabul or Tel Aviv.

An uneasy panic settled over Boston when it was revealed that the Tsarnaev brothers were not, as many assumed, connected to a terrorist group, but young men seemingly affiliated with no one but themselves. Russian émigrés, they had lived in America for a decade – and in Cambridge, a city so progressive it had its own “peace commission” to promote social justice and diversity. Tamerlan, known to his American friends as “Tim,” was a talented boxer who’d once aspired to represent the United States in the Olympics. His little brother, Jahar, had earned a scholarship to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and was thinking about becoming an engineer, or a nurse, or maybe a dentist – his focus changed all the time. They were Muslim, yes, but they were also American – especially Jahar, who became a naturalized U.S. citizen on September 11th, 2012.

Since the bombing, friends and acquaintances of the Tsarnaevs, as well as the FBI and other law-enforcement officials, have tried to piece together a narrative of the brothers, most of which has focused on Tamerlan, whom we now know was on multiple U.S. and Russian watch lists prior to 2013, though neither the FBI nor the CIA could find a reason to investigate him further. Jahar, however, was on no one’s watch list. To the contrary, after several months of interviews with friends, teachers and coaches still reeling from the shock, what emerges is a portrait of a boy who glided through life, showing virtually no signs of anger, let alone radical political ideology or any kind of deeply felt religious beliefs.

At his arraignment at a federal courthouse in Boston on July 10th, Jahar smiled, yawned, slouched in his chair and generally seemed not to fully grasp the seriousness of the situation, while pleading innocent to all charges. At times he seemed almost to smirk – which wasn’t a “smirk,” those who know him say. “He just seemed like the old Jahar, thinking, ‘What the fuck’s going on here?'” says Payack, who was at the courthouse that day.

It had been the coach who’d helped Jahar come up with his nickname, replacing the nearly impossible-to-decipher Dzhokhar with a simpler and cooler-sounding rendering. “If he had a hint of radical thoughts, then why would he change the spelling of his name so that more Americans in school could pronounce it?” asks one longtime friend, echoing many others. “I can’t feel that my friend, the Jahar I knew, is a terrorist,” adds another. “That Jahar isn’t, to me.”

“Listen,” says Payack, “there are kids we don’t catch who just fall through the cracks, but this guy was seamless, like a billiard ball. No cracks at all.” And yet a deeply fractured boy lay under that facade; a witness to all of his family’s attempts at a better life as well as to their deep bitterness when those efforts failed and their dreams proved unattainable. As each small disappointment wore on his family, ultimately ripping them apart, it also furthered Jahar’s own disintegration – a series of quiet yet powerful body punches. No one saw a thing. “I knew this kid, and he was a good kid,” Payack says, sadly. “And, apparently, he’s also a monster.”

T
hough Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was raised largely in America, his roots are in the restive North Caucasus, a region that has known centuries of political turmoil. Born on July 22nd, 1993, he spent the first seven years of his life in the mountainous Central Asian republic of Kyrgyzstan, where his father, Anzor, had grown up in exile. Anzor is from Chechnya, the most vilified of the former Soviet republics, whose people have been waging a near-continuous war since the 18th century against Russian rule. Dzhokhar’s mother, Zubeidat, is an Avar, the predominantly Muslim ethnic group of Chechnya’s eastern neighbor, Dagestan, which has been fighting its own struggle for independence against the Russians since the late 1700s. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Chechen nationalists declared their independence, which resulted in two brutal wars where the Russian army slaughtered tens of thousands of Chechens and leveled its capital city, Grozny. By 1999, the violence had spread throughout the region, including Dagestan.

Though Islam is the dominant religion of the North Caucasus, religion played virtually no role in the life of Anzor Tsarnaev, a tough, wiry man who’d grown up during Soviet times, when religious worship in Kyrgyzstan was mostly underground. In Dagestan, where Islam had somewhat stronger footing, many women wear hijabs; Zubeidat, though, wore her dark hair like Pat Benatar. The couple met while Anzor was studying law and were married on October 20th, 1986. The next day, their first child, Tamerlan, was born. Three more children would follow, all of them born in Kyrgyzstan, where Anzor secured a job as an investigator in the prosecutor’s office in the nation’s capital, Bishkek.

It was a prestigious position, especially for a Chechen, but Anzor had larger ambitions. He hoped to take his family to America, where his brother, Ruslan, an attorney, was building an upper-middle-class life. After Russia invaded Chechnya in 1999, setting off the second of the decade’s bloody wars, Anzor was fired from his job as part of a large-scale purge of Chechens from the ranks of the Kyrgyz government. The Tsarnaevs then fled to Zubeidat’s native Dagestan, but war followed close behind. In the spring of 2002, Anzor, Zubeidat and Jahar, then eight, arrived in America on a tourist visa and quickly applied for political asylum. The three older children, Ailina, Bella and Tamerlan, stayed behind with relatives.

During their first month in America, Jahar and his parents lived in the Boston-area home of Dr. Khassan Baiev, a Chechen physician and friend of Anzor’s sister, who recalled Anzor speaking of discrimination in Kyrgyzstan that “went as far as beatings.” This abuse would be the premise of the Tsarnaevs’ claim for asylum, which they were granted a year later. In July 2003, the rest of the family joined them in Cambridge, where they’d moved into a small, three-bedroom apartment at 410 Norfolk St.; a weathered building with peeling paint on a block that otherwise screams gentrification.

There are just a handful of Chechen families in the Boston area, and the Tsarnaevs seemed a welcome addition. “They had wonderful children,” recalls Anna Nikeava, a Chechen who befriended the Tsarnaevs shortly after they arrived. “They were very soft, like cuddly kittens, all four kids, always hugging and kissing each other.” And the parents, too, seemed to adore each other, even while Anzor, who spoke broken English, worked as a mechanic, making just $10 an hour. For the first year, the Tsarnaevs received public assistance. But they never seemed to struggle, Anna says. “They were very much in love and enjoying life. They were fun.”

Chechen families are very traditional – Anna, a warm and talkative woman in her late forties, tells me that in her country, “Ladies don’t wear pants, you have to wear a skirt,” and marrying outside the culture is taboo. The Tsarnaevs were atypical in that regard. Zubeidat was a “very open, modern lady” with a taste for stylish jeans, high heels and short skirts. “She had the tattooed eyebrows, permanent makeup, very glamorous,” says Anna. “And her children were always dressed up nicely too.”

Zubeidat adored her children, particularly Tamerlan, a tall, muscular boy she compared to Hercules. Jahar, on the other hand, was the baby, his mother’s “dwog,” or “heart.” “He looked like an angel,” says Anna, and was called “Jo-Jo” or “Ho.”

“He was always like, ‘Mommy, Mommy, yes, Mommy’ – even if his mom was yelling at him,” says Anna’s son Baudy Mazaev, who is a year and a half younger than Jahar. “He was just, like, this nice, calm, compliant, pillow-soft kid. My mom would always say, ‘Why can’t you talk to me the way Dzhokhar talks to his mother?'”

There were five or six Chechen boys of roughly the same age in their circle, but Baudy and Jahar were particularly close. Now a student at Boston University, Baudy remembers family get-togethers in the Tsarnaevs’ cramped, top-floor apartment, where Jahar and Tamerlan shared a small room with a bunk bed; in an even smaller room, their sisters shared just a mattress. There was never room for everyone around the tiny kitchen table, so the boys would engage in epic games of manhunt, or play video games on the giant TV in the living room, while their parents ate and socialized. Anzor was famous for his booming laugh, which Jahar inherited – “It was so loud, the whole room would know if he was laughing,” says Baudy.

Jahar idolized his older brother, Tamerlan – all the children appeared to – and as a child, he followed his brother’s example and learned to box. But it was wrestling that became his primary sport, as was also true for Baudy, a squarely built kid who competed in a higher weight class than the slender, 130-pound Jahar. “It’s a Chechen thing,” says Baudy. “When I went to Chechnya to see my cousins, the first thing they ask is, ‘You want to wrestle?'”

Baudy is fiercely proud of his heritage, and Jahar, who shares a name with Chechnya’s first president, Dzhokhar Dudayev (one of Anzor’s personal heroes), had similar “Chechen pride.” He embraced the national Chechen symbol, the wolf; learned traditional dances; and could speak Chechen as well as Russian. He even talked about marrying a Chechen girl. “He would always talk about how pretty Chechen girls were,” says Baudy, though, to his knowledge, Jahar had never met one, aside from the sisters of some of their friends.

There were many, many Jahars in Cambridge: children of immigrants with only the haziest, if idealized, notions of their ethnic homelands. One of the most liberal and intellectually sophisticated cities in the U.S., Cambridge is also one of the most ethnically and economically diverse. There are at least 50 nationalities represented at the city’s one public high school, Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, whose motto – written on walls, murals and school-course catalogs, and proclaimed over the PA system – is “Opportunity, Diversity, Respect.” About 45 percent of its students live in public or subsidized housing, largely in the city’s densely populated working-class neighborhoods. There are more affluent areas, and in them live the children of professors from nearby Harvard and MIT who also attend Rindge, “but not in tremendous numbers,” says Cambridge schools superintendent Dr. Jeffrey M. Young. “What you do have is some actively engaged political families” – like those of the school’s most famous alumni, Matt Damon and Ben Affleck – “and then there’s the voiceless, who we try to encourage to have more of a voice.”

All of the Tsarnaev children went to Rindge, as the school is known, but it was Jahar who assimilated best. Though he’d arrived in America speaking virtually no English, by high school he was fluent, with only a trace of an accent, and he was also fluent in the local patois. (Among his favorite words, his friends say, was “sherm,” Cambridge slang for “slacker.”) Jahar, or “Jizz,” as his friends also called him, wore grungy Pumas, had a great three-point shot and became a dedicated pot smoker – something a number of Cambridge teens tell me is relatively standard in their permissive community, where you can score weed in the high school bathrooms and smoke on the street without much of a problem. A diligent student, he was nominated to the National Honor Society in his sophomore year, which was also when he joined the wrestling team. “He was one of those kids who’s just a natural,” says Payack, his coach, who recalls Jahar as a supportive teammate who endured grueling workouts and runs without a single complaint. In his junior year, the team made him a captain. By then, everyone knew him as ‘Jahar,’ which his teammates would scream at matches to ensure the refs would never mispronounce his name.

“I could never quite get his name – Dokar? Jokar?” says Larry Aaronson, a retired Rindge history teacher (Jahar, he says, eventually told him to call him “Joe”). Aaronson, a longtime friend of the late historian Howard Zinn, also lives on Norfolk Street, down the block from the Tsarnaevs’ home. “I asked him once where he was from, and he said Chechnya. And I’m like, ‘Chechnya? Are you shitting me?'” says Aaronson. “I said, ‘My God, how did you cope with all that stress?’ And he said, ‘Larry, that’s how come we came to America, and how lucky that we came to Cambridge, of all places!’ He just embraced the city, the school and the whole culture – he gratefully took advantage of it. And that’s what endeared me to him: This was the quintessential kid from the war zone, who made total use of everything we offer so that he could remake his life. And he was gorgeous,” he adds.

J
ahar’s friends were a diverse group of kids from both the wealthier and poorer sections of Cambridge; black, white, Jewish, Catholic, Puerto Rican, Bangladeshi, Cape Verdean. They were, as one Cambridge parent told me, “the good kids” – debate champs, varsity athletes, student-government types, a few brainiacs who’d go off to elite New England colleges. A diligent student, Jahar talked about attending Brandeis or Tufts, recalls a friend I’ll call Sam, one of a tight-knit group of friends, who, using pseudonyms, agreed to speak exclusively to Rolling Stone. “He was one of the realest dudes I’ve ever met in my life,” says Sam, who spent nearly every day with Jahar during their teens, shooting hoops or partying at a spot on the Charles River known as the “Riv.” No matter what, “he was the first person I’d call if I needed a ride or a favor. He’d just go, ‘I got you, dog’ – even if you called him totally wasted at, like, two or three in the morning.”

“He was just superchill,” says another friend, Will, who recalls one New Year’s Eve when Jahar packed eight or nine people – including one in the trunk – into his green Honda Civic. Of course, he adds, the police pulled them over, but Jahar was unfazed. “Even if somebody caught him drinking,” says his buddy Jackson, “he was the calm, collected kid who always knew how to talk to police.”

He had morals, they all agree. “He never picked on anybody,” says Sam, adding that much like his brother, Jahar was a great boxer. “He was better at boxing than wrestling – he was a beast.” But while he could probably knock out anyone he wanted, he never did. “He wasn’t violent, though – that’s the crazy thing. He was never violent,” says Sam.

“He was smooth as fuck,” says his friend Alyssa, who is a year younger than Jahar. Girls went a little crazy over him – though to Jahar’s credit, his friends say, even when he had crushes, he never exploited them. “He’d always be like, ‘Chill, chill, let’s just hang out,'” says Sam, recalling Jahar’s almost physical aversion to any kind of attention. “He was just really humble – that’s the best way to describe him.”

Cara, a vivacious, pretty blonde whom some believe Jahar had a secret crush on, insists they were just friends. “He was so sweet. He was too sweet, you know?” she says sadly. The two had driver’s ed together, which led to lots of time getting high and hanging out. Jahar, she says, had a talent for moving between social groups and always seemed able to empathize with just about anyone’s problems. “He is a golden person, really just a genuine good guy who was cool with everyone,” she says. “It’s hard to really explain Jahar. He was a Cambridge kid.”

Cambridge kids, the group agrees, have a fairly nonchalant attitude about things that might make other people a little uptight. A few years ago, for instance, one of their mutual friends decided to convert to Islam, which some, like Cara, thought was really cool, and others, like Jackson, met with a shrug. “But that’s the kind of high school we went to,” Jackson says. “It’s the type of thing where someone could say, ‘I converted to Islam,’ and you’re like, ‘OK, cool.'” And in fact, a number of kids they knew did convert, he adds. “It was kind of like a thing for a while.”

Jahar never denied he was a Muslim, though he sometimes played it down. He fasted during Ramadan, which included giving up pot – an immense act of self-control, his friends say. “But the most religious thing he ever said was, ‘Don’t take God’s name in vain,'” says Alyssa, who is Jewish. “Yeah,” says Jackson, “he might have been religious, but it was the type of thing where unless he told you, you wouldn’t know.”

A few years ago, one Rindge wrestler, another Muslim, attended an informal lunchtime high school prayer group, where he spotted Jahar. “I didn’t know he was Muslim until I saw him at that Friday prayer group,” he says. “It wasn’t something we ever talked about.”

His friend Theo, who also wrestled with Jahar, thinks somewhat differently. “I actually think he had a real reverence for Islam,” he says. There was one occasion in particular, a few years ago, when Jahar became visibly uncomfortable when James, the friend who’d converted, began speaking casually about the faith. “He didn’t get mad, but he kind of shut him down,” Theo recalls. “And it showed me that he took his religion really seriously. It wasn’t conditional with him.”

Yet he “never raised any red flags,” says one of his history teachers, who, like many, requested anonymity, given the sensitivity of the case. Her class, a perennial favorite among Rindge students, fosters heated debates about contemporary political issues like globalization and the crises in the Middle East, but Jahar, she says, never gave her any sense of his personal politics, “even when he was asked to weigh in.” Alyssa, who loved the class, agrees: “One of the questions we looked at was ‘What is terrorism? How do we define it culturally as Americans? What is the motivation for it – can we ever justify it?’ And I can say that Jahar never expressed to us that he was pro-terrorism at all, ever.”

Except for once.

“He kind of did, one time to me, express that he thought acts of terrorism were justified,” says Will. It was around their junior year; the boys had been eating at a neighborhood joint called Izzy’s and talking about religion. With certain friends – Will and Sam among them – Jahar opened up about Islam, confiding his hatred of people whose “ignorance” equated Islam with terrorism, defending it as a religion of peace and describing jihad as a personal struggle, nothing more. This time, says Will, “I remember telling him I thought certain aspects of religion were harmful, and I brought up the 9/11 attacks.”

At which point Jahar, Will says, told him he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Will asked why. “He said, ‘Well, you’re not going to like my view.’ So I pressed him on it, and he said he felt some of those acts were justified because of what the U.S. does in other countries, and that they do it so frequently, dropping bombs all the time.”

To be fair, Will and others note, Jahar’s perspective on U.S. foreign policy wasn’t all that dissimilar from a lot of other people they knew. “In terms of politics, I’d say he’s just as anti-American as the next guy in Cambridge,” says Theo. Even so, Will decided not to push it. “I was like, ‘Wow, this dude actually supports that? I can’t have this conversation anymore.'”

They never brought it up again.

I
n retrospect, Jahar’s comment about 9/11 could be seen in the context of what criminal profilers call “leakage”: a tiny crack in an otherwise carefully crafted facade that, if recognized – it’s often not – provides a key into the person’s interior world. “On cases where I’ve interviewed these types of people, the key is looking past their exterior and getting access to that interior, which is very hard,” says Tom Neer, a retired agent from the FBI’s Behavioral Analysis Unit and now a senior associate with the Soufan Group, which advises the government on counterterrorism. “Most people have a public persona as well as a private persona, but for many people, there’s a secret side, too. And the secret side is something that they labor really hard to protect.”

There were many things about Jahar that his friends and teachers didn’t know – something not altogether unusual for immigrant children, who can live highly bifurcated lives, toggling back and forth between their ethnic and American selves. “I never saw the parents, and didn’t even know he had a brother,” says Payack, who wondered why Jahar never had his family rooting for him on the sidelines, as his teammates did. “If you’re a big brother and you love your little brother, why don’t you come and watch him in sports?”

Theo wondered, too. “I asked him about that once, and he told me that he’d boxed when he was younger, and he’d never lost a boxing match, so he didn’t want his dad to see him lose.” It sounded plausible: Jahar had an innate ability as a wrestler, but he never put in the time to be truly great. “It wasn’t really on his list,” says Theo. On the other hand, losing didn’t seem to bother him, either. “Other kids, when they lose they get angry – they think the ref made a bad call, and maybe they’ll throw a chair. Or they’ll cry, or sulk in a corner,” says Payack. Jahar would simply walk off the mat with a shrug. “He’d just kind of have this face like, ‘Oh, well, I tried.'”

On Senior Night, the last home match of the season, every Rindge senior wrestler is asked to bring a parent or relative to walk them onto the gym floor to receive a flower and have their picture taken. Jahar brought no one. “We had one of the coaches walk him out to get his flower,” says Payack. This, too, didn’t seem to bother Jahar – and even if it did, he never mentioned it. “With our friends, you don’t need to confide in them to be close to them,” says Jackson.

Jahar’s family seemed to exist in a wholly separate sphere from the rest of his life. Jackson, who lived nearby, would occasionally see Anzor working on cars; several others knew of Jahar’s sisters from their older siblings. And there were always stories about Tamerlan, who’d been a two-time Golden Gloves champion. But almost nobody met Tamerlan in person, and virtually no one from school ever went to the Tsarnaevs’ house. “I mean never – not once,” says Jackson. One friend of Jahar’s older sister Bella would say that the apartment at 410 Norfolk “had a vibe that outsiders weren’t too common.”

T
here are a number of indications that the troubles in the Tsarnaev family went deeper than normal adjustment to American life. Anzor, who suffered from chronic arthritis, headaches and stomach pain, had an erratic temperament – a residual, he’d say, of the abuse he’d suffered in Kyrgyzstan – and struck one neighbor on Norfolk Street as a “miserable guy,” who’d bark at his neighbors over parking spaces and even grab the snow shovels out of their hands when he felt they weren’t shoveling the walk properly. Despite his demeanor, he was an intensely hard worker. “I remember his hands,” says Baudy. “He’d be working on cars in the Boston cold, no gloves, and he’d have these thick bumps on his knuckles from the arthritis. But he loved it. He saw his role as putting food on the table.”

Zubeidat, an enterprising woman, worked as a home-health aide, then switched to cosmetology, giving facials at a local salon and later opening a business in her home. “She never wanted to commit,” says Baudy, who liked Jahar’s mother but saw her as a typical striver. “She was trying to get rich faster – like, ‘Oh, this is taking too long. We’ll try something else.'”

But the money never came. By 2009, Anzor’s health was deteriorating, and that August, the Tsarnaevs, who hadn’t been on public assistance for the past five years, began receiving benefits again, in the form of food stamps and cash payouts. This inability to fully support his family may have contributed to what some who knew them refer to as Anzor’s essential “weakness” as a father, deferring to Zubeidat, who could be highly controlling.

A doting mother, “she’d never take any advice about her kids,” says Anna. “She thought they were the smartest, the most beautiful children in the world” – Tamerlan most of all. “He was the biggest deal in the family. In a way, he was like the father. Whatever he said, they had to do.”

Tamerlan’s experience in Cambridge was far less happy than Jahar’s. Already a teenager when he arrived in America, Tamerlan spoke with a thick Russian accent, and though he enrolled in the English as a Second Language program at Rindge, he never quite assimilated. He had a unibrow, and found it hard to talk to girls. One former classmate recalls that prior to their senior prom, a few of Tamerlan’s friends tried to find him a date. “He wasn’t even around,” she says, “it was just his friends asking girls to go with him.” But everyone said no, and he attended the prom alone.

After graduating in 2006, he enrolled at Bunker Hill Community College to study accounting, but attended for just three semesters before dropping out. A talented pianist and composer, he harbored a desire to become a musician, but his ultimate dream was to become an Olympic boxer, after which he’d turn pro. This was also his father’s dream – a champion boxer himself back in Russia, Anzor reportedly pushed Tamerlan extremely hard, riding behind him on his bicycle while his son jogged to the local boxing gym. And Tamerlan did very well under his father’s tutelage, rising in the ranks of New England fighters. One of the best in his weight class, Tamerlan once told a fighter to “practice punching a tree at home” if he wanted to be truly great. But his arrogance undermined his ambitions. In 2010, a rival trainer, claiming Tamerlan had broken boxing etiquette by taunting his fighter before a match, lodged a complaint with the national boxing authority that Tamerlan should be disqualified from nationwide competition as he was not an American citizen. The authorities, coincidentally, were just in the process of changing their policy to ban all non-U.S. citizens from competing for a national title.

This dashed any Olympic hopes, as Tamerlan was not yet eligible to become a U.S. citizen. His uncle Ruslan had urged him to join the Army. It would give him structure, he said, and help him perfect his English. “I told him the best way to start your way in a new country – give something,” Ruslan says. But Tamerlan laughed, his uncle recalls, for suggesting he kill “our brother Muslims.”

Tamerlan had discovered religion, a passion that had begun in 2009. In interviews, Zubeidat has suggested it was her idea, a way to encourage Tamerlan, who spent his off-hours partying with his friends at local clubs, to become more serious. “I told Tamerlan that we are Muslim, and we are not practicing our religion, and how can we call ourselves Muslims?” she said. But Anna suspects there was something else factoring into the situation. Once, Anna recalls, Zubeidat hinted that something might be wrong. “Tamerlan told me he feels like there’s two people living in him,” she confided in her friend. “It’s weird, right?”

Anna, who wondered if Tamerlan might be developing a mental illness, suggested Zubeidat take him to a “doctor” (“If I said ‘psychiatrist,’ she’d just flip,” she says), but Zubeidat seems to have believed that Islam would help calm Tamerlan’s demons. Mother and son began reading the Koran – encouraged, Zubeidat said, by a friend of Tamerlan’s named Mikhail Allakhverdov, or “Misha,” a thirtysomething Armenian convert to Islam whom family members believe Tamerlan met at a Boston-area mosque. Allakhverdov has denied any association with the attack. “I wasn’t his teacher,” he told the New York Review of Books. “If I had been his teacher, I would have made sure he never did anything like this.” But family members have said Allakhverdov had a big influence on Tamerlan, coming to the house and often staying late into the night, talking with Tamerlan about Islam and the Koran. Uncle Ruslan would later tell The Daily Mail that Allakhverdov would “give one-on-one sermons to Tamerlan over the kitchen table, during which he claimed he could talk to demons and perform exorcisms.”

Zubeidat was pleased. “Don’t interrupt them,” she told her husband one evening when Anzor questioned why Allakhverdov was still there around midnight. “Misha is teaching him to be good and nice.”

B
efore long, Tamerlan had quit drinking and smoking pot, and started to pray five times a day, even taking his prayer rug to the boxing gym. At home, he spent long hours on the Internet reading Islamic websites, as well as U.S. conspiracy sites, like Alex Jones’ InfoWars. He told a photographer he met that he didn’t understand Americans and complained about a lack of values. He stopped listening to music. “It is not supported by Islam,” Tamerlan said. “Misha says it’s not really good to create or listen to music.” Then, in 2011, he decided to quit boxing, claiming it was not permitted for a Muslim to hit another man.

Zubeidat, too, had become increasingly religious – something that would get in the way of her marriage as well as her job at an upscale Belmont salon, where she broke for daily prayers and refused to work on male clients. She was ultimately fired, after which she turned her living room into a minisalon. One of her former clients recalls her wearing “a head wrap” in the house, and a hijab whenever she went outside. “She started to refuse to see boys who’d gone through puberty,” recalls the client. “A religious figure had told her it was sacrilegious.”

What really struck her client, beyond Zubeidat’s zeal, were her politics. During one facial session, she says, Zubeidat told her she believed 9/11 was a government plot to make Americans hate Muslims. “It’s real,” she said. “My son knows all about it. You can read on the Internet.”

It was during this period that Jahar told his friend Will that he felt terrorism could be justified, a sentiment that Tamerlan apparently shared. Whether or not Jahar truly agreed with his brother, their relationship was one where he couldn’t really question him. In Chechen families, Baudy says, “Your big brother is not quite God, but more than a normal brother.” When they were kids, Baudy recalls, Tamerlan used to turn off the TV and make them do pushups. Now he urged them to study the Koran.

“Jahar found it kind of a nuisance,” says Baudy, and tried to shrug it off as best as he could. But he couldn’t do much. “You’re not going to get mad at your elders or tell them to stop doing something, especially if it’s about being more religious.” During one visit a few years ago, Baudy recalls, Tamerlan interrupted them on the computer to say that if they were going to be surfing the Internet, they should focus on their faith. He gave them a book – Islam 101 – and instructed them to read. He gave the same book to James, the high school convert who, as a new Muslim, was one of the very few of Jahar’s friends who came to the house. Tamerlan also taught James how to pray. “I guess they’d sit there for hours,” says Sam, who would hear about it afterward. Sam couldn’t figure it out. “It was crazy because back a few years ago, Timmy was so like us, a regular dude, boxing, going to school, hanging out, partying all the time. But then he changed and became anti-fun.”

By 2011, all remnants of “Timmy” seemed to be gone. When his close friend and sparring partner Brendan Mess began dating a nonpracticing Muslim, Tamerlan criticized Mess’ girlfriend for her lack of modesty. And he also reportedly criticized Mess for his “lifestyle” – he was a local pot dealer. On September 11th, 2011 – the 10th anniversary of 9/11 – Mess and two of his friends were killed in a grisly triple murder that remains unsolved. Since the bombing, authorities have been vigorously investigating the crime, convinced that Tamerlan had something to do with it, though so far there’s no hard evidence.

“All I know is Jahar was really wary of coming home high because of how his brother would react. He’d get really angry,” says Will. “He was a really intense dude.”

“And if you weren’t Muslim, he was even more intense,” says Sam, who notes that he never met Tamerlan in person, though he heard stories about him all the time from Jahar. “I was fascinated – this dude’s, like, six-three, he’s a boxer – I wanted to meet him,” says Sam. “But Jahar was like, ‘No, you don’t want to meet him.'”

Jahar rarely spoke to his friends about his sisters, Ailina and Bella, who, just a few years older than he, kept to themselves but also had their own struggles. Attractive, dark-haired girls who were “very Americanized,” as friends recall, they worshipped Tamerlan, whom one sister would later refer to as her “hero” – but they were also subject to his role as family policeman. When Bella was a junior in high school, her father, hearing that she’d been seen in the company of an American boy, pulled her out of school and dispatched Tamerlan to beat the boy up. Friends later spotted Bella wearing a hijab; not long afterward, she disappeared from Cambridge entirely. Some time later, Ailina would similarly vanish. Both girls were reportedly set up in arranged marriages.

Anna Nikeava was unaware the girls had even left Boston, and suspects the parents never talked about it for fear of being judged. “Underneath it all, they were a screwed-up family,” she says. “They weren’t Chechen” – they had not come from Chechnya, as she and others had – “and I don’t think the other families accepted them as Chechens. They could not define themselves or where they belonged. And poor Jahar was the silent survivor of all that dysfunction,” she says. “He never said a word. But inside, he was very hurt, his world was crushed by what was going on with his family. He just learned not to show it.”

Anzor, who’d been at first baffled, and later “depressed,” by his wife’s and son’s religiosity, moved back to Russia in 2011, and that summer was granted a divorce. Zubeidat was later arrested for attempting to shoplift $1,600 worth of clothes from a Lord & Taylor. Rather than face prosecution, she skipped bail and also returned to Russia, where she ultimately reconciled with her ex-husband. Jahar’s sisters, both of whom seemed to have escaped their early marriages, were living in New Jersey and hadn’t seen their family in some time.

And Tamerlan was now married, too. His new wife, Katherine Russell, was a Protestant from a well-off family in Rhode Island. After high school, she’d toyed with joining the Peace Corps but instead settled on college at Boston’s Suffolk University. She’d met Tamerlan at a club during her freshman year, in 2007, and found him “tall and handsome and having some measure of worldliness,” one friend would recall. But as their relationship progressed, Katherine’s college roommates began to worry that Tamerlan was “controlling” and “manipulative.” They became increasingly concerned when he demanded that she cover herself and convert to Islam.

Though Katherine has never spoken to the press, what is known is that she did convert to Islam, adopting the name “Karima,” and soon got pregnant and dropped out of college. In June 2010, she and Tamerlan were married; not long afterward, she gave birth to their daughter, Zahira. Around this time, both her friends and family say, she “pulled away.” She was seen in Boston, shopping at Whole Foods, cloaked and wearing a hijab. She rarely spoke around her husband, and when alone, recalls one neighbor, she spoke slowly with an accent. “I didn’t even know she was an American,” he says.

Jahar, meanwhile, was preparing for college. He had won a $2,500 city scholarship, which is awarded each year to about 40 to 50 Cambridge students; he ended up being accepted at a number of schools, including Northeastern University and UMass Amherst. But UMass Dartmouth offered him a scholarship. “He didn’t want to force his parents to pay a lot of money for school,” says Sam, who recalls that Jahar never even bothered to apply to his fantasy schools, Brandeis and Tufts, due to their price tags. A number of his friends would go off to some of the country’s better private colleges, “but Jizz rolled with the punches. He put into his head, ‘I can’t go to school for mad dough, so I’m just going to go wherever gives me the best deal.’ Because, I mean, what’s the point of going to a school that’s going to cost $30,000 a year – for what? Pointless.” His other friends agree.

A middling school an hour and a half south of Boston, UMass Dartmouth had one distinguishing feature – its utter lack of character. “It’s beige,” says Jackson. “It’s, like, the most depressing campus I’ve ever seen.” Annual costs are about $22,000.

Jahar arrived in the fall of 2011 and almost immediately wanted to go home. North Dartmouth, where the university is based, is a working-class community with virtually nothing to boast of except for a rather sad mall and a striking number of fast-food joints. It has a diverse student population, but their level of curiosity seemed to fall far below his friends’ from Rindge. “Using my high-school essays for my english class #itsthateasy,” Jahar tweeted in November 2011. “You know what i like to do? answer my own questions cuz no one else can.”

“He was hating life,” says Sam. “He used to always call and say it’s mad wack and the people were corny.” His one saving grace was that one of his best friends from Rindge had gone to UMass Dartmouth, too – though he would later transfer. “All they would do was sit in the car and get high – it was that boring,” says Sam.

On the weekends, campus would empty out and Jahar came home as often as he could. But home was no longer “home,” as his parents were gone. Many of his closest friends were gone as well. Tamerlan, though, was always around. “Pray,” the older brother told the younger. “You cannot call yourself a Muslim unless you thank Allah five times a day.”

M
uch of what is known about the two years of Jahar’s life leading up to the bombing comes from random press interviews with students at UMass Dartmouth, none of whom seemed to have been particularly close with Jahar; and from Jahar’s tweets, which, like many 18- or 19-year-olds’, were a mishmash of sophomoric jokes, complaints about his roommate, his perpetual lateness, some rap lyrics, the occasional deep thought (“Find your place and your purpose and make a plan for the future”) and, increasingly, some genuinely revealing statements. He was homesick. He suffered from insomnia. He had repeated zombie dreams. And he missed his dad. “I can see my face in my dad’s pictures as a youngin, he even had a ridiculous amount of hair like me,” he tweeted in June 2012.

Jahar had begun his studies to be an engineer, but by last fall had found the courses too difficult. He switched to biology and, to make money, he dealt pot – one friend from his dorm says he always had big Tupperware containers of weed in his fridge.

As he had at Rindge, Jahar drifted between social groups, though he clung to friends from high school who also attended UMass Dartmouth. But he soon gravitated to a group of Kazakh students, wealthy boys with a taste for excellent pot, which Jahar, who spoke Russian with them, often helped to provide. By his sophomore year, even as he gained U.S. citizenship, he abandoned his American Facebook for the Russian version, Vkontakte, or VK, where he listed his world view as “Islam” and his interests as “career and money.” He joined several Chechnya-related groups and posted Russian-language-joke videos. “He was always joking around, and often his jokes had a sarcastic character,” says Diana Valeeva, a Russian student who befriended Jahar on VK. Jahar also told Diana that he missed his homeland and would happily come for a visit. “But he did not want to return forever,” she says.

Tamerlan’s journey the past two years is far easier to trace. Though no more Chechen than his brother, Tamerlan was also – as his resident green card reminded him – not really an American. Islam, or Tamerlan’s interpretation of it, had become his identity. He devoured books on Chechnya’s separatist struggle, a war that had taken on a notably fundamentalist tone since the late 1990s, thanks to a surge of Muslim fighters from outside of the Caucusus who flocked to Chechnya to wage “holy war” against the Russians. It is not uncommon for young Chechen men to romanticize jihad, and for those who are interested in that kind of thing, there are abundant Chechen jihadist videos online that reinforce this view. They tend to feature Caucasian fighters who, far from the lecturing sheikhs often found in Al Qaeda recruitment videos, look like grizzled Navy SEALs, humping through the woods in camouflage and bandannas. Tamerlan would later post several of these videos on his YouTube page, as well as “The Emergence of Prophecy: The Black Flags from Khorasan,” a central part of Al Qaeda and other jihadist mythology, which depicts fierce, supposedly end-times battles against the infidels across a region that includes parts of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran.

But Brian Glyn Williams, a professor of Islamic studies at UMass Dartmouth and an expert on terrorism and the politics of Chechnya, believes that Tamerlan’s journey – which he calls “jihadification” – was less a young man’s quest to join Al Qaeda than to discover his own identity. “To me, this is classic diasporic reconstruction of identity: ‘I’m a Chechen, and we’re fighting for jihad, and what am I doing? Nothing.’ It’s not unlike the way some Irish-Americans used to link Ireland and the IRA – they’d never been to Northern Ireland in their lives, but you’d go to certain parts of Southie in Boston, and all you see are donation cans for the IRA.”

For Jahar, identity likely played into the mix as well, says Williams, who, though he never met Jahar at UMass Dartmouth, coincidentally corresponded with him during his senior year of high school. One of Williams’ friends taught English at Rindge, and “he told me he had this Chechen kid in his class who wanted to do his research paper on Chechnya, a country he’d never lived in.” Williams agreed to help Jahar. “The thing that struck me was how little he actually knew,” he says. “He didn’t know anything about Chechnya, and he wanted to know everything.”

Whether Jahar gained much from his studies – or even did much of it – is unknown. Tamerlan, having devoured all the books he could find, was preparing to take the next step. In January 2012, he traveled to Dagestan, where he spent six months. Dagestan has been embroiled in a years-long civil war between Muslim guerrillas and the (also Muslim) police, as well as Russian forces. Bombs go off in the streets regularly, and young men, lured by the romance of the fight, often disappear to “go to the forest,” a euphemism for joining the insurgency. Tamerlan, too, seemed to have wanted to join the rebellion, but he was dissuaded from this pursuit by, among others, a distant cousin named Magomed Kartashov, who also happened to be a Dagestani Islamist. Kartashov’s Western cousin, who came to Dagestan dressed in fancy American clothes and bragging of being a champion boxer, had no place in their country’s civil war, he told Tamerlan. It was an internal struggle – in an interview with TIME magazine, associates of Kartashov’s referred to it as “banditry” – and had only resulted in Muslims killing other Muslims. Kartashov urged Tamerlan to embrace nonviolence and forget about Dagestan’s troubles. By early summer, Tamerlan was talking about holy war “in a global context,” one Dagestani Islamist recalls.

In July 2012, Tamerlan returned to Cambridge. He grew a five-inch beard and began to get in vocal debates about the virtues of Islam. He vociferously criticized U.S. policy in the Middle East. Twice over the next six or eight months, he upset services at a local mosque with a denunciation of Thanksgiving, and also, in January 2013, of Martin Luther King Jr.

The boys’ uncle Ruslan hoped that Jahar, away at school, would avoid Tamerlan’s influence. Instead, Jahar began to echo his older brother’s religious fervor. The Prophet Muhammad, he noted on Twitter, was now his role model. “For me to know that I am FREE from HYPOCRISY is more dear to me than the weight of the ENTIRE world in GOLD,” he posted, quoting an early Islamic scholar. He began following Islamic Twitter accounts. “Never underestimate the rebel with a cause,” he declared.

Though it seems as if Jahar had found a mission, his embrace of Islam also may have been driven by something more basic: a need to belong. “Look, he was totally abandoned,” says Payack, who believes that the divorce of his parents and their subsequent move back to Russia was pivotal, as was the loss of the safety net he had at Rindge.

Theo, who goes to college in Vermont and is one of the few of Jahar’s friends to not have any college loans, can’t imagine the stress Jahar must have felt. “He had all of this stuff piled up on his shoulders, as well as college, which he’s having to pay for himself. That’s not easy. All of that just might make you say ‘Fuck it’ and give up and lose faith.

Wick Sloane, an education advocate and a local community-college professor, sees this as a widespread condition among many young immigrants who pass through his classrooms. “All of these kids are grateful to be in the United States. But it’s the usual thing: Is this the land of opportunity or isn’t it? When I look at what they’ve been through, and how they are screwed by federal policies from the moment they turn around, I don’t understand why all of them aren’t angrier. I’m actually kind of surprised it’s taken so long for one of these kids to set off a bomb.”

“A
decade in America already,” Jahar tweeted in March 2012. “I want out.” He was looking forward to visiting his parents in Dagestan that summer, but then he learned he wouldn’t receive his U.S. passport in time to make the trip. “#Imsad,” he told his followers. Instead, he spent the summer lifeguarding at a Harvard pool. “I didn’t become a lifeguard to just chill and get paid,” Jahar tweeted. “I do it for the people, saving lives brings me joy.” He was living with Tamerlan and his sister-in-law, who were going through their own troubles. Money was increasingly tight, and the family was on welfare. Tamerlan was now a stay-at-home dad; his wife worked night and day as a home-health aide to support the family.

Tamerlan had joined an increasing number of Cambridge’s young adults who were being priced out due to skyrocketing real-estate prices. “It’s really hard to stay in Cambridge because it’s becoming so exclusive,” says Tamerlan’s former Rindge classmate Luis Vasquez, who is running for a seat on the Cambridge City Council. “We feel like we’re being taken over.”

In August, Jahar, acutely aware of the troubles all around him, commented that $15 billion was spent on the Summer Olympics. “Imagine if that money was used to feed those in need all over the world,” he wrote. “The value of human life ain’t shit nowadays that’s #tragic.” In the fall, he returned to North Dartmouth and college, where, with no Tamerlan to catch him, he picked up his life, partying in his dorm and letting his schoolwork slide.

“Idk why it’s hard for many of you to accept that 9/11 was an inside job, I mean I guess fuck the facts y’all are some real #patriots #gethip,” Jahar tweeted. This is not an uncommon belief. Payack, who also teaches writing at the Berklee College of Music, says that a fair amount of his students, notably those born in other countries, believe 9/11 was an “inside job.” Aaronson tells me he’s shocked by the number of kids he knows who believe the Jews were behind 9/11. “The problem with this demographic is that they do not know the basic narratives of their histories – or really any narratives,” he says. “They’re blazed on pot and searching the Internet for any ‘factoids’ that they believe fit their highly de-historicized and decontextualized ideologies. And the adult world totally misunderstands them and dismisses them – and does so at our collective peril,” he adds.

Last December, Jahar came home for Christmas break and stayed for several weeks. His friends noticed nothing different about him, except that he was desperately trying to grow a beard – with little success. In early February, he went back to Rindge to work with the wrestling team, where he confided in Theo, who’d also come back to help, that he wished he’d taken wrestling more seriously. He could have been really good had he applied himself a bit more.

At 410 Norfolk St., Tamerlan, once a flashy dresser, had taken to wearing a bathrobe and ratty sweatpants, day after day, while Jahar continued to explore Islam. “I meet the most amazing people,” he tweeted. “My religion is the truth.”

But he also seemed at times to be struggling, suggesting that even his beloved Cambridge had failed him in some way. “Cambridge got some real, genuinely good people, but at the same time this city can be fake as fuck,” he said on January 15th. Also that day: “I don’t argue with fools who say Islam is terrorism it’s not worth a thing, let an idiot remain an idiot.”

According to a transcript from UMass Dartmouth, reviewed by The New York Times, Jahar was failing many of his classes his sophomore year. He was reportedly more than $20,000 in debt to the university. Also weighing on him was the fact that his family’s welfare benefits had been cut in November 2012, and in January, Tamerlan and his wife reportedly lost the Section 8 housing subsidy that had enabled them to afford their apartment, leaving them with the prospect of a move.

Why a person with an extreme or “radical” ideology may decide to commit violence is an inexact science, but experts agree that there must be a cognitive opening of some sort. “A person is angry, and he needs an explanation for that angst,” explains the Soufan Group’s Tom Neer. “Projecting blame is a defense mechanism. Rather than say, ‘I’m lost, I’ve got a problem,’ it’s much easier to find a convenient enemy or scapegoat. The justification comes later – say, U.S. imperialism, or whatever. It’s the explanation that is key.”

For Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the explanation for his anger was all around him. And so, dissuaded from his quest to wage jihad in Dagestan, he apparently turned his gaze upon America, the country that, in his estimation, had caused so much suffering, most of all his own.

In early February, soon after losing his housing subsidy, Tamerlan drove to New Hampshire, where, according to the indictment, he purchased “48 mortars containing approximately eight pounds of low-explosive powder.” Also during this general period, Jahar began downloading Islamic militant tracts to his computer, like the first issue of the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire, which, in an article titled “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” offered detailed instructions on how to construct an IED using a pressure cooker, explosive powder from fireworks, and shrapnel, among other readily available ingredients.

Jahar returned home for spring break in March and spent time hanging out with his regular crew. He brought his friend Dias Kadyrbayev home with him, driving Dias’ flashy black BMW with the joke license plate TERRORISTA. He hung out with a few friends and went to the Riv, where they lit off fireworks; he met other friends at a local basketball court, one of his usual haunts. He looked happy and chill, as he always did, and was wearing a new, brown military-style jacket that his friends thought was “swag.” “And that was the last time I saw him,” says Will.

What went on in the apartment at 410 Norfolk during March and early April remains a mystery. “It’s hard to understand how there could be such disassociation in that child,” says Aaronson, who last saw Jahar in January, presumably before the brothers’ plan was set. “They supposedly had an arsenal in that fucking house! In the house! I mean, he could have blown up my whole fucking block, for God’s sakes.”

According to the indictment, the brothers went to a firing range on March 20th, where Jahar rented two 9mm handguns, purchased 200 rounds of ammunition and engaged in target practice with Tamerlan. On April 5th, Tamerlan went online to order electronic components that could be used in making IEDs. Friends of Jahar’s would later tell the FBI that he’d once mentioned he knew how to build bombs. But no one seemed to really take it all that seriously.

“People come into your life to help you, hurt you, love you and leave you and that shapes your character and the person you were meant to be,” Jahar tweeted on March 18th. Two days later: “Evil triumphs when good men do nothing.”

April 7th: “If you have the knowledge and the inspiration all that’s left is to take action.”

April 11th: “Most of you are conditioned by the media.”

The bombs went off four days later.

O
n the afternoon of April 18th, Robel Phillipos, a friend of Jahar’s from Cambridge as well as from UMass Dartmouth, was watching the news on campus and talking on the phone with Dias. He told Dias, who was in his car, to turn on the TV when he got home. One of the bombers, he said, looked like Jahar. Like most of their friends, Dias thought it was a coincidence and texted Jahar that he looked like one of the suspects on television. “Lol,” Jahar wrote back, casually. He told his friend not to text him anymore. “I’m about to leave,” he wrote. “If you need something in my room, take it.”

According to the FBI, Robel, Dias and their friend Azamat met at Pine Dale Hall, Jahar’s dorm, where his roommate informed them that he’d left campus several hours earlier. So they hung out in his room for a while, watching a movie. Then they spotted Jahar’s backpack, which the boys noticed had some fireworks inside, emptied of powder. Not sure what to do, they grabbed the bag as well as Jahar’s computer, and went back to Dias and Azamat’s off-campus apartment, where they “started to freak out, because it became clear from a CNN report . . . that Jahar was one of the Boston Marathon bombers,” Robel later told the FBI.

But no one wanted Jahar to get in trouble. Dias and Azamat began speaking to each other in Russian. Finally, Dias turned to Robel and asked in English if he should get rid of the stuff. “Do what you have to do,” Robel said. Then he took a nap.

Dias later confessed that he’d grabbed a big black trash bag, filled it with trash and stuffed the backpack and fireworks in there. Then he threw it in a dumpster; the bag was later retrieved from the municipal dump by the FBI. The computer, too, was eventually recovered. Until recently, its contents were unknown.

The contents of Jahar’s closely guarded psyche, meanwhile, may never be fully understood. Nor, most likely, will his motivations – which is quite common with accused terrorists. “There is no single precipitating event or stressor,” says Neer. “Instead, what you see with most of these people is a gradual process of feeling alienated or listless or not connected. But what they all have in common is a whole constellation of things that aren’t working right.”

A month or so after the bombing, I am sitting on Alyssa’s back deck with a group of Jahar’s friends. It’s a lazy Sunday in May, and the media onslaught has died down a bit; the FBI, though, is still searching for the source of the brothers’ “radicalization,” and Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, capitalizing on the situation, has put Tamerlan, dressed in his crisp, white Saturday Night Fever shirt and aviator shades, in the pages of its most recent Inspire. Jahar has a growing and surprisingly brazen fan club – #FreeJahar – and tens of thousands of new Twitter followers, despite the fact that he hasn’t tweeted since before his arrest.

Like so many of his fans, some of Jahar’s friends have latched onto conspiracy theories about the bombing, if only because “there are too many unanswered questions,” says Cara, who points out that the backpack identified by the FBI was not the same color as Jahar’s backpack. There’s also a photo on the Internet of Jahar walking away from the scene, no pack, though if you look closely, you can see the outline of a black strap. “Photoshopped!” the caption reads.

Mostly, though, his friends are trying to move on. “We’re concerned with not having this tied to us for the rest of our lives,” says Alyssa, explaining why she and Sam and Jackson and Cara and Will and James and Theo have insisted I give them pseudonyms. Even as Jahar was on the run, his friends started hearing from the FBI, whose agents shortly descended upon their campuses – sometimes wearing bulletproof vests – looking for insight and phone numbers.

“You’re so intimidated, and you think if you don’t answer their questions, it looks suspicious,” says Jackson, who admits he gave up a number of friends’ phone numbers after being pressed by the FBI.

Sam says he thinks the feds tapped his phone. All of the kids were interviewed alone, without a lawyer. “I didn’t even know I could have a lawyer,” says Jackson. “And they didn’t tell me that anything I said might be used against me, which was unfair, because, I mean, I’m only 19.”

But the worst, they all agree, is Robel, who was interviewed four times by the FBI, and denied he knew anything until, on the fourth interview, he came clean and told them he’d helped remove the backpack and computer from Jahar’s dorm room. Robel is 19 but looks 12, and is unanimously viewed by his friends as the most innocent and sheltered of the group. He is now facing an eight-year prison sentence for lying to a federal officer.

“So you see why we don’t want our names associated,” says Sam. “It’s not that we’re trying to show that we’re not Jahar’s friends. He was a very good friend of mine.”

J
ahar is, of course, still alive – though it’s tempting for everyone to refer to him in the past tense, as if he, too, were dead. He will likely go to prison for the rest of his life, which may be his best possible fate, given the other option, which is the death penalty. “I can’t wrap my head around that,” says Cara. “Or any of it.”

Nor can anyone else. For all of their city’s collective angst and community processing and resolutions of being “one Cambridge,” the reality is that none of Jahar’s friends had any idea he was unhappy, and they really didn’t know he had any issues in his family other than, perhaps, his parents’ divorce, which was kind of normal.

“I remember he was upset when his dad left the country,” says Jackson. “I remember he was giving me a ride home and he mentioned it.”

“Now that I think about that, it must have added a lot of pressure having both parents be gone,” says Sam.

“But, I mean, that’s the mystery,” says Jackson. “I don’t really know.” It’s weird, they all agree.

“His brother must have brainwashed him,” says Sam. “It’s the only explanation.”

Someone mentions one of the surveillance videos of Jahar, which shows him impassively watching as people begin to run in response to the blast. “I mean, that’s just the face I’d always see chilling, talking, smoking,” says Jackson. He wishes Jahar had looked panicked. “At least then I’d be able to say, ‘OK, something happened.’ But . . . nothing.”

That day’s Boston Globe has run a story about the nurses at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital who took care of Jahar those first few days after his capture. They were ambivalent, to say the least, about spending too much time with him, for fear of, well, liking him. One nurse said she had to stop herself from calling him “hon.” The friends find this story disgusting. “People just have blood in their eyes,” says Jackson.

One anecdote that wasn’t in the article but that has been quietly making its way around town, via one of his former nurses, is that Jahar cried for two days straight after he woke up in the hospital. No one in the group has heard this yet, and when I mention it, Alyssa gives an anguished sigh of relief. “That’s good to know,” she says.

“I can definitely see him doing that,” says Sam, gratefully. “I hope he’s crying. I’d definitely hope . . .”

“I hope he’d wake up and go, ‘What the fuck did I do the last 48 hours?’ ” says Jackson, who decides, along with the others, that this, the crying detail, sounds like Jahar.

But, then again, no one knows what he was crying about.

by Janet Reitman
JULY 17, 2013

Find this story at 17 July 2013

Copyright ©2013 Rolling Stone

This handout photo provided by Jamill Noorata, taken May 3, 2012, shows Shamiur Rahman, left, sitting with Siraj Wahhaj at John Jay Community College in New York. Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bengali descent who has now denounced his work, was a paid informant for the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit was under orders to “bait” Muslims into saying bad things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press. (AP Photo/Courtesy of Jamill Noorata)
NEW YORK — A paid informant for the New York Police Department’s intelligence unit was under orders to “bait” Muslims into saying inflammatory things as he lived a double life, snapping pictures inside mosques and collecting the names of innocent people attending study groups on Islam, he told The Associated Press.

Shamiur Rahman, a 19-year-old American of Bangladeshi descent who has now denounced his work as an informant, said police told him to embrace a strategy called “create and capture.” He said it involved creating a conversation about jihad or terrorism, then capturing the response to send to the NYPD. For his work, he earned as much as $1,000 a month and goodwill from the police after a string of minor marijuana arrests.

“We need you to pretend to be one of them,” Rahman recalled the police telling him. “It’s street theater.”

Rahman said he now believes his work as an informant against Muslims in New York was “detrimental to the Constitution.” After he disclosed to friends details about his work for the police — and after he told the police that he had been contacted by the AP — he stopped receiving text messages from his NYPD handler, “Steve,” and his handler’s NYPD phone number was disconnected.

Rahman’s account shows how the NYPD unleashed informants on Muslim neighborhoods, often without specific targets or criminal leads. Much of what Rahman said represents a tactic the NYPD has denied using.

The AP corroborated Rahman’s account through arrest records and weeks of text messages between Rahman and his police handler. The AP also reviewed the photos Rahman sent to police. Friends confirmed Rahman was at certain events when he said he was there, and former NYPD officials, while not personally familiar with Rahman, said the tactics he described were used by informants.

Informants like Rahman are a central component of the NYPD’s wide-ranging programs to monitor life in Muslim neighborhoods since the 2001 terrorist attacks. Police officers have eavesdropped inside Muslim businesses, trained video cameras on mosques and collected license plates of worshippers. Informants who trawl the mosques — known informally as “mosque crawlers” — tell police what the imam says at sermons and provide police lists of attendees, even when there’s no evidence they committed a crime.

The programs were built with unprecedented help from the CIA.

Police recruited Rahman in late January, after his third arrest on misdemeanor drug charges, which Rahman believed would lead to serious legal consequences. An NYPD plainclothes officer approached him in a Queens jail and asked whether he wanted to turn his life around.

The next month, Rahman said, he was on the NYPD’s payroll.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not immediately return a message seeking comment on Tuesday. He has denied widespread NYPD spying, saying police only follow leads.

In an Oct. 15 interview with the AP, however, Rahman said he received little training and spied on “everything and anyone.” He took pictures inside the many mosques he visited and eavesdropped on imams. By his own measure, he said he was very good at his job and his handler never once told him he was collecting too much, no matter whom he was spying on.

Rahman said he thought he was doing important work protecting New York City and considered himself a hero.

One of his earliest assignments was to spy on a lecture at the Muslim Student Association at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in Manhattan. The speaker was Ali Abdul Karim, the head of security at the Masjid At-Taqwa mosque in Brooklyn. The NYPD had been concerned about Karim for years and already had infiltrated the mosque, according to NYPD documents obtained by the AP.

Rahman also was instructed to monitor the student group itself, though he wasn’t told to target anyone specifically. His NYPD handler, Steve, told him to take pictures of people at the events, determine who belonged to the student association and identify its leadership.

On Feb. 23, Rahman attended the event with Karim and listened, ready to catch what he called a “speaker’s gaffe.” The NYPD was interested in buzz words such as “jihad” and “revolution,” he said. Any radical rhetoric, the NYPD told him, needed to be reported.

John Jay president Jeremy Travis said Tuesday that police had not told the school about the surveillance. He did not say whether he believed the tactic was appropriate.

“As an academic institution, we are committed to the free expression of ideas and to creating a safe learning environment for all of our students,” he said in a written statement. “We are working closely with our Muslim students to affirm their rights and to reassure them that we support their organization and freedom to assemble.”

Talha Shahbaz, then the vice president of the student group, met Rahman at the event. As Karim was finishing his talk on Malcolm X’s legacy, Rahman told Shahbaz that he wanted to know more about the student group. They had briefly attended the same high school in Queens.

Rahman said he wanted to turn his life around and stop using drugs, and said he believed Islam could provide a purpose in life. In the following days, Rahman friended him on Facebook and the two exchanged phone numbers. Shahbaz, a Pakistani who came to the U.S. more three years ago, introduced Rahman to other Muslims.

“He was telling us how he loved Islam and it’s changing him,” said Asad Dandia, who also became friends with Rahman.

Secretly, Rahman was mining his new friends for details about their lives, taking pictures of them when they ate at restaurants and writing down license plates on the orders of the NYPD.

On the NYPD’s instructions, he went to more events at John Jay, including when Siraj Wahhaj spoke in May. Wahhaj, 62, is a prominent but controversial New York imam who has attracted the attention of authorities for years. Prosecutors included his name on a 3 ½-page list of people they said “may be alleged as co-conspirators” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, though he was never charged. In 2004, the NYPD placed Wahhaj on an internal terrorism watch list and noted: “Political ideology moderately radical and anti-American.”

That evening at John Jay, a friend took a photograph of Wahhaj with a grinning Rahman.

Rahman said he kept an eye on the MSA and used Shahbaz and his friends to facilitate traveling to events organized by the Islamic Circle of North America and Muslim American Society. The society’s annual convention in Hartford, Connecticut, draws a large number of Muslims and plenty of attention from the NYPD. According to NYPD documents obtained by the AP, the NYPD sent three informants there in 2008 and was keeping tabs on the group’s former president.

Rahman was told to spy on the speakers and collect information. The conference was dubbed “Defending Religious Freedom.” Shahbaz paid Rahman’s travel expenses.

Rahman, who was born in Queens, said he never witnessed any criminal activity or saw anybody do anything wrong.

He said he sometimes intentionally misinterpreted what people had said. For example, Rahman said he would ask people what they thought about the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Libya, knowing the subject was inflammatory. It was easy to take statements out of context, he said. He said wanted to please his NYPD handler, whom he trusted and liked.

“I was trying to get money,” Rahman said. “I was playing the game.”

Rahman said police never discussed the activities of the people he was assigned to target for spying. He said police told him once, “We don’t think they’re doing anything wrong. We just need to be sure.”

On some days, Rahman’s spent hours and covered miles (kilometers) in his undercover role. On Sept. 16, for example, he made his way in the morning to the Al Farooq Mosque in Brooklyn, snapping photographs of an imam and the sign-up sheet for those attending a regular class on Islamic instruction. He also provided their cell phone numbers to the NYPD. That evening he spied on people at Masjid Al-Ansar, also in Brooklyn.

Text messages on his phone showed that Rahman also took pictures last month of people attending the 27th annual Muslim Day Parade in Manhattan. The parade’s grand marshal was New York City Councilman Robert Jackson.

Rahman said he eventually tired of spying on his friends, noting that at times they delivered food to needy Muslim families. He said he once identified another NYPD informant spying on him. He took $200 more from the NYPD and told them he was done as an informant. He said the NYPD offered him more money, which he declined. He told friends on Facebook in early October that he had been a police spy but had quit. He also traded Facebook messages with Shahbaz, admitting he had spied on students at John Jay.

“I was an informant for the NYPD, for a little while, to investigate terrorism,” he wrote on Oct. 2. He said he no longer thought it was right. Perhaps he had been hunting terrorists, he said, “but I doubt it.”

Shahbaz said he forgave Rahman.

“I hated that I was using people to make money,” Rahman said. “I made a mistake.”

___

Staff writer David Caruso in New York contributed to this story.

By ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO
Oct. 23, 2012

Find this story at 23 October 2012

 
© 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Terms and conditions apply. See AP.org for details.

NEW YORK (AP) — When a Danish newspaper published inflammatory cartoons of Prophet Muhammad in September 2005, Muslim communities around the world erupted in outrage. Violent mobs took to the streets in the Middle East. A Somali man even broke into the cartoonist’s house in Denmark with an ax.

In New York, thousands of miles away, it was a different story. At the Masjid Al-Falah in Queens, one leader condemned the cartoons but said Muslims should not resort to violence. Speaking at the Masjid Dawudi mosque in Brooklyn, another called on Muslims to speak out against the cartoons, but peacefully.

The sermons, all protected under the First Amendment to the Constitution, were reported back to the NYPD by the department’s network of mosque informants. They were compiled in police intelligence reports and summarized for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

Those documents offer the first glimpse of what the NYPD’s informants — known informally as “mosque crawlers” — gleaned from inside the houses of worship. And, along with hundreds of pages of other secret NYPD documents obtained by The Associated Press, they show police targeting mosques and their congregations with tactics normally reserved for criminal organizations.

They did so in ways that brushed against — and civil rights lawyers say at times violated — a federal court order restricting how police can gather intelligence.

The NYPD Intelligence Division snapped pictures and collected license plate numbers of congregants as they arrived to pray. Police mounted cameras on light poles and aimed them at mosques. Plainclothes detectives mapped and photographed mosques and listed the ethnic makeup of those who prayed there.

“It seems horrible to me that the NYPD is treating an entire religious community as potential terrorists,” said civil rights lawyer Jethro Eisenstein, who reviewed some of the documents and is involved in a decades-old, class-action lawsuit against the police department for spying on protesters and political dissidents. The lawsuit is known as the Handschu case.

The documents provide a fuller picture of the NYPD’s unapologetic approach to protecting the city from terrorism. Eisenstein said he believes that at least one document, the summary of statements about the Danish cartoons, showed that the NYPD is not following a court order that prohibits police from compiling records on people who are simply exercising their First Amendment rights.

“This is a flat-out violation,” Eisenstein said. “This is a smoking gun.”

Kelly, the police commissioner, has said the NYPD complies with its legal obligations: “We’re following the Handschu guidelines,” Kelly said in October during a rare City Council oversight hearing about the NYPD surveillance of Muslims.

The AP has reported for months that the NYPD infiltrated mosques, eavesdropped in cafes and monitored Muslim neighborhoods. New Muslim converts who took Arabic names were compiled in police databases.

Recently, the NYPD has come under fire for its tactics. Universities including Yale and Columbia have criticized the department for infiltrating Muslim student groups and trawling their websites. Police put the names of students and academics in reports even when they were not suspected of wrongdoing. And in Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker said he was offended by the NYPD’s secret surveillance of his city’s Muslims.

After the AP revelations, U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) called on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to look into the NYPD operation in Newark. U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr. (D-NJ), said the NYPD shouldn’t be operating in New Jersey without notifying local and federal authorities.

In a statement, Pascrell said profiling was wrong: “We must focus on behavioral profiling rather ethnic or religious profiling.”

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne did not respond to an email seeking comment. Browne has previously denied the NYPD used mosque crawlers or that there was a secret Demographics Unit that monitored daily life in Muslim communities.

At a press event on Thursday, Mayor Michael Bloomberg refused to answer questions about the NYPD’s activities.

The NYPD spying operations began after the 2001 terror attacks with unusual help from a CIA officer. The agency’s inspector general recently found that relationship problematic but said no laws were broken. Shortly after that report, the CIA decided to cut short the yearlong tour of an operative who was recently assigned to the NYPD.

Kelly, the police commissioner, and Bloomberg have been emphatic that police only follow legitimate leads of criminal activity and do not conduct preventive surveillance in ethnic communities.

“If there are threats or leads to follow, then the NYPD’s job is to do it,” Bloomberg said last year. “The law is pretty clear about what’s the requirement, and I think they follow the law. We don’t stop to think about the religion. We stop to think about the threats and focus our efforts there.”

But former and current law enforcement officials either involved in or with direct knowledge of these programs say they did not follow leads. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the secret programs. But the documents support their claims.

Officials say that David Cohen, the deputy commissioner for intelligence, was at the center of the efforts to spy on the mosques.

“Take a big net, throw it out, catch as many fish as you can and see what we get,” one investigator recalled Cohen saying.

The effort highlights one of the most difficult aspects of policing in the age of terrorism. Solving crimes isn’t enough. Police are expected to identify would-be terrorists and move in before they can attack.

There are no universally agreed upon warning signs for terrorism. Terrorists have used Internet cafes, stayed in hostels, worked out at gyms, visited travel agencies, attended student groups and prayed at mosques. So, the NYPD monitored those areas. In doing so, they monitored many innocent people as they went about their daily lives.

Using plainclothes officers from the Demographics Unit, police swept Muslim neighborhoods and catalogued the location of mosques, identifying them on maps with crescent moon icons, the well-known symbol of Islam. The ethnic makeup of each congregation was logged as police fanned out across the city and outside their jurisdiction, into suburban Long Island and areas of New Jersey.

“African American, Arab, Pakistani,” police wrote beneath the photo of one mosque in Newark.

“Mosque in private house without any signs. Observed 25 to 30 worshipers exiting after Jumma prayers,” police wrote beneath another Newark mosque photo.

As the Demographics Unit catalogued Internet cafes, hostels, grocers and travel agencies, officers noted how close the businesses were to mosques.

Investigators looked at mosques as the center of Muslim life. All their connections had to be known.

Cohen wanted a source inside every mosque within a 250-mile radius of New York, current and former officials said. Though the officials said they never managed to reach that goal, documents show the NYPD successfully placed informants or undercovers — sometimes both — into mosques from Westchester County, N.Y., to New Jersey.

The NYPD used these sources to get a sense of the sentiment of worshippers whenever an event generated headlines. The goal, former officials said, was to alert police to potential problems before they bubbled up.

After the fallout from the Danish cartoons, for instance, the informants reported on more than a dozen conversations inside mosques.

Some suggested boycotting Danish products, burning flags, contacting politicians and holding rallies — all permissible under the law.

“Imam Shamsi Ali brought up the topic of the cartoon, condemning them. He announced a rally that was to take place on Sunday (02/05/06) near the United Nations. He asked that everyone to attend if possible and reminded everyone to keep their poise if they can make it,” according to a report prepared for Kelly.

At the Muslim Center Of New York in Queens, the report said, “Mohammad Tariq Sherwani led the prayer service and urged those in attendance to participate in a demonstration at the United Nations on Sunday.”

When one Muslim leader suggested they plan a demonstration, a person involved in the discussion to obtain a sound permit was, in fact, working for the NYPD.

All that was recorded in secret NYPD files.

The closest anyone in the report came to espousing violence was one man who, in a conversation with an NYPD informant, said the cartoons showed the West was at war with Islam. Asked what Muslims should do, he replied, “inqilab,” an Arabic word that means changing the political system. Depending on the context, that can mean peacefully or through an upheaval like a coup. The report, which spelled the word “Inqlab,” said the informant translated it as “fight” but the report does not elaborate further.

Even when it was clear there were no links to terrorism, the mosque informants gave the NYPD the ability to “take the pulse” of the community, as Cohen and other managers called it.

When New York Yankees pitcher Cory Lidle and his flight instructor were killed Oct. 11, 2006, when their small plane crashed into a Manhattan high-rise apartment, fighter planes were scrambled. Within hours the FBI and Department of Homeland Security said it was an accident. Terrorism was ruled out.

Yet for days after the event, the NYPD’s mosque crawlers reported to police about what they heard at sermons and among worshippers.

At the Brooklyn Islamic Center, a confidential informant “noted chatter among the regulars expressing relief and thanks to God that the crash was only an accident and not an act of terrorism, which they stated would not be good either for the U.S. or for any of their home countries.”

Across the Hudson River in Jersey City, an undercover officer reported a pair of worshippers at the Al-Tawheed Islamic Center reacted with “sorrow.”

“The worshippers made remarks to the effect that ‘it better be an accident; we don’t need any more heat,'” the officer reported.

Another informant told his handler about a man who became agitated after learning about the crash. The man urged the informant not to go into Manhattan until it was clear what was going on, the informant said.

Five days after the crash, long after concerns that it was terrorism had passed, the NYPD compiled these reports into a memo for Kelly. The report promised to investigate the man who had appeared agitated.

“A phone dump will be conducted on subject’s phone for that day and time period,” the memo said.

In some instances, the NYPD put cameras on light poles and trained them on mosques, documents show. Investigators could control the cameras with their computers and use the footage to help identify worshippers. Because the cameras were in public space, police didn’t need a warrant to conduct the surveillance.

If the NYPD badly wanted to know who was attending the mosque, they could write down the license plates of cars in the mosque parking lots, documents show. In some instances, police in unmarked cars outfitted with electronic license plate readers would drive down the street and record the plates of everyone parked near the mosque.

Abdul Akbar Mohammed, the imam for the past eight years at the Masjid Imam Ali K. Muslim, a mosque in Newark that was cataloged in NYPD’s files, said of the program: “They’re viewing Muslims like they’re crazy. They’re terrorists. They all must be fanatics.”

“That’s not right,” he said.

In 2006, the NYPD ordered surveillance at the Masjid Omar, a mosque in Paterson, N.J., a document shows. There’s no indication that the surveillance team was looking for anyone in particular. The mosque itself was the target.

“This is reportedly to be a mosque that is attended by both Palestinian and Chechen worshipers,” the document reads. “This mosque has a long history in the community and is believed to have been the subject of federal Investigations.” Federal law enforcement officials told the AP that the mosque itself was never under federal investigation and they were unaware the NYPD was monitoring it so closely.

Police were instructed to watch the mosque and, as people came and went from the Friday prayer service, investigators were to record license plates and photograph and videotape those attending.

“Pay special attention to all NY State license plates,” the document said.

The brief file offered no evidence of criminal activity.

To conduct such broad surveillance as the NYPD did at Masjid Omar, FBI agents would need to believe that the mosque itself was part of a criminal enterprise. Even then, federal agents would need approval from senior FBI and Justice Department officials.

At the NYPD, however, such monitoring was common, former police officials said.

The Omar mosque sits in central Paterson in a neighborhood heavily populated by Palestinians, Egyptians and other Arabs. It’s about 20 miles west of Manhattan. About 2,000 worshippers meet regularly at the Sunni mosque, which was once a church.

On a recent Friday, the three-story high, cream-colored mosque bustled with activity.

About 200 men crowded the crimson carpet in the main hall as Imam Abdelkhaliq El-Nerib led prayers from a gold-painted pulpit at the front of the room. Wall hangings with Arabic script and geometric patterns hung on either side of the pulpit. Dozens more worshippers knelt on a blue tarp spread outside. The mosque has two services on Fridays to accommodate the large congregation.

“We’re not committing a crime, so of course we take issue with them spying on our people just because they’re praying in the mosque,” El Nerib said through a translator. “To track people who are frequent visitors to the mosque simply because they are coming to the mosque negates the freedom of religion that is a fundamental right enshrined in this country’s Constitution.”

Members of the mosque pointed out errors in the police document. The address, for instance, is wrong. And though the document says Chechens attended the mosque, worshippers said they had never heard of any. Most attendees are Palestinian, said El-Nerib, who’s Egyptian.

El-Nerib said he has a good relationship with local police. He, like others interviewed at the mosque, said they have nothing to hide.

“Whether it’s in public or private, we say the same thing: We are loyal American citizens,” El-Nerib said. “We are part and parcel of this society. We have lived here, we have found nothing but safety and security and protection of our rights.”

___

Associated Press writers Chris Hawley and Eileen Sullivan contributed to this report.

Online:

View the NYPD documents: www.ap.org/nypd

NYPD cartoons: http://apne.ws/zVwtCt

NYPD Omar: http://apne.ws/wsrSvN

NYPD crash: http://apne.ws/xB9kVM

___

ADAM GOLDMAN and MATT APUZZO
Feb. 23, 2012

Find this story at 23 Februari 2012

Contact the Washington investigative team at DCinvestigations (at) ap.org

Follow Apuzzo and Goldman at http://twitter.com/mattapuzzo and http://twitter.com/goldmandc

© 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Terms and conditions apply. See AP.org for details.

NEW YORK (AP) — From an office on the Brooklyn waterfront in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, New York Police Department officials and a veteran CIA officer built an intelligence-gathering program with an ambitious goal: to map the region’s ethnic communities and dispatch teams of undercover officers to keep tabs on where Muslims shopped, ate and prayed.

The program was known as the Demographics Unit and, though the NYPD denies its existence, the squad maintained a long list of “ancestries of interest” and received daily reports on life in Muslim neighborhoods, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

The documents offer a rare glimpse into an intelligence program shaped and steered by a CIA officer. It was an unusual partnership, one that occasionally blurred the line between domestic and foreign spying. The CIA is prohibited from gathering intelligence inside the U.S.

Undercover police officers, known as rakers, visited Islamic bookstores and cafes, businesses and clubs. Police looked for businesses that attracted certain minorities, such as taxi companies hiring Pakistanis. They were told to monitor current events, keep an eye on community bulletin boards inside houses of worship and look for “hot spots” of trouble.

The Demographics Unit, a team of 16 officers speaking at least five languages, is the only squad of its kind known to be operating in the country.

Using census information and government databases, the NYPD mapped ethnic neighborhoods in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut. Rakers then visited local businesses, chatting up store owners to determine their ethnicity and gauge their sentiment, the documents show. They played cricket and eavesdropped in the city’s ethnic cafes and clubs.

When the CIA would launch drone attacks in Pakistan, the NYPD would dispatch rakers to Pakistani neighborhoods to listen for angry rhetoric and anti-American comments, current and former officials involved in the program said.

The rakers were looking for indicators of terrorism and criminal activity, the documents show, but they also kept their eyes peeled for other common neighborhood sites such as religious schools and community centers.

The focus was on a list of 28 countries that, along with “American Black Muslim,” were considered “ancestries of interest.” Nearly all were Muslim countries.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg said last week that the NYPD does not take religion into account in its policing. The inclusion of American black Muslims on the list of ancestries of interest suggests that religion was at least a consideration. On Wednesday, Bloomberg’s office referred questions to the police department.

How law enforcement agencies, both local and federal, can stay ahead of Islamic terrorists without using racial profiling techniques has been hotly debated since 9/11. Singling out minorities for extra scrutiny without evidence of wrongdoing has been criticized as discriminatory. Not focusing on Muslim neighborhoods has been equally criticized as political correctness run amok. The documents describe how the nation’s largest police force has come down on that issue.

NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said the department only follows leads and does not simply trawl communities.

“We do not employ undercovers or confidential informants unless there is information indicating the possibility of unlawful activity,” Browne wrote in an email to the AP.

That issue has legal significance. The NYPD says it follows the same guidelines as the FBI, which cannot use undercover agents to monitor communities without first receiving an allegation or indication of criminal activity.

Before The Associated Press revealed the existence of the Demographics Unit last week, Browne said neither the Demographics Unit nor the term “rakers” exist. Both are contained in the documents obtained by the AP.

An NYPD presentation, delivered inside the department, described the mission and makeup of the Demographics Unit. And a police memorandum from 2006 described an NYPD supervisor rebuking an undercover detective for not doing a good enough job reporting on community events and “rhetoric heard in cafes and hotspot locations.”

At least one lawyer inside the police department has raised concerns about the Demographics Unit, current and former officials told the AP. Because of those concerns, the officials said, the information gathered from the unit is kept on a computer at the Brooklyn Army Terminal, not in the department’s normal intelligence database. The officials spoke on condition of because they were not authorized to discuss the intelligence programs.

The AP independently authenticated the NYPD presentation through an interview with an official who sat through it and by reviewing electronic data embedded in the file. A former official who had not seen the presentation said the content of the presentation was correct. For the internal memo, the AP verified the names and locations mentioned in the document, and the content is consistent with a program described by numerous current and former officials.

In the two years following the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD Intelligence Division had an unusual partnership with Lawrence Sanchez, a respected veteran CIA officer who was dispatched to New York. Officials said he was instrumental in creating programs such as the Demographics Unit and met regularly with unit supervisors to guide the effort, all while on the CIA’s payroll.

Both the NYPD and CIA have said the agency is not involved in domestic spying. A U.S. official familiar with the NYPD-CIA partnership described Sanchez’s time in New York as a unique assignment created in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

After a two-year CIA rotation in New York, Sanchez took a leave of absence, came off the agency’s payroll and became the NYPD’s second-ranking intelligence official. He formally left the agency in 2007 and stayed with the NYPD until last year.

Recently, the CIA dispatched another officer to work in the Intelligence Division as an assistant to Deputy Commissioner David Cohen. Officials described the assignment as a management sabbatical and said the officer’s job is much different from what Sanchez was doing. Police and the CIA said it’s the kind of counterterrorism collaboration Americans expect.

The NYPD Intelligence Division has unquestionably been essential to the city’s best counterterrorism successes, including the thwarted plot to bomb the subway system in 2004. Undercover officers also helped lead to the guilty plea of two men arrested on their way to receive terrorism training in Somalia.

“We throw 1,200 police officers into the fight every day to make sure the same people or similarly inspired people who killed 3,000 New Yorkers a decade ago don’t come back and do it again,” Browne said earlier this month when asked about the NYPD’s intelligence tactics.

Rep. Yvette Clarke, a Democrat who represents much of Brooklyn and sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, said the NYPD can protect the city without singling out specific ethnic and religious groups. She joined Muslim organizations in calling for a Justice Department investigation into the NYPD Intelligence Division. The department said it would review the request for an investigation.

Clarke acknowledged that the 2001 terrorist attacks made Americans more willing to accept aggressive tactics, particularly involving Muslims. But she said Americans would be outraged if police infiltrated Baptist churches looking for evangelical Christian extremists.

“There were those who, during World War II, said, `Good, I’m glad they’re interning all the Japanese-Americans who are living here,'” Clarke said. “But we look back on that period with disdain.”
___

Online:

View the NYPD documents: http://bit.ly/q5iIXL and http://bit.ly/mVNdD

MATT APUZZO and ADAM GOLDMAN
Aug. 31, 2011

Find this story at 31 August 2011

_Goldman contributed from Islamabad, Pakistan. Apuzzo and Goldman can be reached at dcinvestigations(at)ap.org or at http://twitter.com/mattapuzzo and http://twitter.com/goldmandc

© 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Terms and conditions apply. See AP.org for details.

NEW YORK (AP) _ In New Brunswick, N.J., a building superintendent opened the door to apartment No. 1076 one balmy Tuesday and discovered an alarming scene: terrorist literature strewn about the table and computer and surveillance equipment set up in the next room.

The panicked superintendent dialed 911, sending police and the FBI rushing to the building near Rutgers University on the afternoon of June 2, 2009. What they found in that first-floor apartment, however, was not a terrorist hideout but a command center set up by a secret team of New York Police Department intelligence officers.

From that apartment, about an hour outside the department’s jurisdiction, the NYPD had been staging undercover operations and conducting surveillance throughout New Jersey. Neither the FBI nor the local police had any idea.

Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the NYPD has become one of the country’s most aggressive domestic intelligence agencies. A months-long investigation by The Associated Press has revealed that the NYPD operates far outside its borders and targets ethnic communities in ways that would run afoul of civil liberties rules if practiced by the federal government. And it does so with unprecedented help from the CIA in a partnership that has blurred the bright line between foreign and domestic spying.

Neither the city council, which finances the department, nor the federal government, which contributes hundreds of millions of dollars each year, is told exactly what’s going on.

The department has dispatched teams of undercover officers, known as “rakers,” into minority neighborhoods as part of a human mapping program, according to officials directly involved in the program. They’ve monitored daily life in bookstores, bars, cafes and nightclubs. Police have also used informants, known as “mosque crawlers,” to monitor sermons, even when there’s no evidence of wrongdoing. NYPD officials have scrutinized imams and gathered intelligence on cab drivers and food cart vendors, jobs often done by Muslims.

Many of these operations were built with help from the CIA, which is prohibited from spying on Americans but was instrumental in transforming the NYPD’s intelligence unit.

A veteran CIA officer, while still on the agency’s payroll, was the architect of the NYPD’s intelligence programs. The CIA trained a police detective at the Farm, the agency’s spy school in Virginia, then returned him to New York, where he put his new espionage skills to work inside the United States.

And just last month, the CIA sent a senior officer to work as a clandestine operative inside police headquarters.

While the expansion of the NYPD’s intelligence unit has been well known, many details about its clandestine operations, including the depth of its CIA ties, have not previously been reported.

The NYPD denied that it trolls ethnic neighborhoods and said it only follows leads. In a city that has repeatedly been targeted by terrorists, police make no apologies for pushing the envelope. NYPD intelligence operations have disrupted terrorist plots and put several would-be killers in prison.

“The New York Police Department is doing everything it can to make sure there’s not another 9/11 here and that more innocent New Yorkers are not killed by terrorists,” NYPD spokesman Paul Browne said. “And we have nothing to apologize for in that regard.”

But officials said they’ve also been careful to keep information about some programs out of court, where a judge might take a different view. The NYPD considers even basic details, such as the intelligence division’s organization chart, to be too sensitive to reveal in court.

One of the enduring questions of the past decade is whether being safe requires giving up some liberty and privacy. The focus of that debate has primarily been federal programs like wiretapping and indefinite detention. The question has received less attention in New York, where residents do not know for sure what, if anything, they have given up.

The story of how the NYPD Intelligence Division developed such aggressive programs was pieced together by the AP in interviews with more than 40 current and former New York Police Department and federal officials. Many were directly involved in planning and carrying out these secret operations for the department. Though most said the tactics were appropriate and made the city safer, many insisted on anonymity, because they were not authorized to speak with reporters about security matters.

The story begins with one man.

___

David Cohen arrived at the New York Police Department in January 2002, just weeks after the last fires had been extinguished at the debris field that had been the twin towers. A retired 35-year veteran of the CIA, Cohen became the police department’s first civilian intelligence chief.

Cohen had an exceptional career at the CIA, rising to lead both the agency’s analytical and operational divisions. He also was an extraordinarily divisive figure, a man whose sharp tongue and supreme confidence in his own abilities gave him a reputation as arrogant. Cohen’s tenure as head of CIA operations, the nation’s top spy, was so contentious that in 1997, The New York Times editorial page took the unusual step of calling for his ouster.

He had no police experience. He had never defended a city from an attack. But New York wasn’t looking for a cop.

“Post-9/11, we needed someone in there who knew how to really gather intelligence,” said John Cutter, a retired NYPD official who served as one of Cohen’s top uniformed officers.

At the time, the intelligence division was best known for driving dignitaries around the city. Cohen envisioned a unit that would analyze intelligence, run undercover operations and cultivate a network of informants. In short, he wanted New York to have its own version of the CIA.

Cohen shared Commissioner Ray Kelly’s belief that 9/11 had proved that the police department could not simply rely on the federal government to prevent terrorism in New York.

“If anything goes on in New York,” one former officer recalls Cohen telling his staff in the early days, “it’s your fault.”

Among Cohen’s earliest moves at the NYPD was making a request of his old colleagues at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va. He needed someone to help build this new operation, someone with experience and clout and, most important, someone who had access to the latest intelligence so the NYPD wouldn’t have to rely on the FBI to dole out information.

CIA Director George Tenet responded by tapping Larry Sanchez, a respected veteran who had served as a CIA official inside the United Nations. Often, when the CIA places someone on temporary assignment, the other agency picks up the tab. In this case, three former intelligence officials said, Tenet kept Sanchez on the CIA payroll.

When he arrived in New York in March 2002, Sanchez had offices at both the NYPD and the CIA’s station in New York, one former official said. Sanchez interviewed police officers for newly defined intelligence jobs. He guided and mentored officers, schooling them in the art of gathering information. He also directed their efforts, another said.

There had never been an arrangement like it, and some senior CIA officials soon began questioning whether Tenet was allowing Sanchez to operate on both sides of the wall that’s supposed to keep the CIA out of the domestic intelligence business.

“It should not be a surprise to anyone that, after 9/11, the Central Intelligence Agency stepped up its cooperation with law enforcement on counterterrorism issues or that some of that increased cooperation was in New York, the site of ground zero,” CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Youngblood said.

Just as at the CIA, Cohen and Sanchez knew that informants would have to become the backbone of their operation. But with threats coming in from around the globe, they couldn’t wait months for the perfect plan.

They came up with a makeshift solution. They dispatched more officers to Pakistani neighborhoods and, according to one former police official directly involved in the effort, instructed them to look for reasons to stop cars: speeding, broken tail lights, running stop signs, whatever. The traffic stop gave police an opportunity to search for outstanding warrants or look for suspicious behavior. An arrest could be the leverage the police needed to persuade someone to become an informant.

For Cohen, the transition from spying to policing didn’t come naturally, former colleagues said. When faced with a decision, especially early in his tenure, he’d fall back on his CIA background. Cutter said he and other uniformed officers had to tell Cohen, no, we can’t just slip into someone’s apartment without a warrant. No, we can’t just conduct a search. The rules for policing are different.

While Cohen was being shaped by the police department, his CIA background was remaking the department. But one significant barrier stood in the way of Cohen’s vision.

Since 1985, the NYPD had operated under a federal court order limiting the tactics it could use to gather intelligence. During the 1960s and 1970s, the department had used informants and undercover officers to infiltrate anti-war protest groups and other activists without any reason to suspect criminal behavior.

To settle a lawsuit, the department agreed to follow guidelines that required “specific information” of criminal activity before police could monitor political activity.

In September 2002, Cohen told a federal judge that those guidelines made it “virtually impossible” to detect terrorist plots. The FBI was changing its rules to respond to 9/11, and Cohen argued that the NYPD must do so, too.

“In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait far too long,” Cohen wrote.

U.S. District Judge Charles S. Haight Jr. agreed, saying the old guidelines “addressed different perils in a different time.” He scrapped the old rules and replaced them with more lenient ones.

It was a turning point for the NYPD.

___

With his newfound authority, Cohen created a secret squad that would soon infiltrate Muslim neighborhoods, according to several current and former officials directly involved in the program.

The NYPD carved up the city into more than a dozen zones and assigned undercover officers to monitor them, looking for potential trouble.

At the CIA, one of the biggest obstacles has always been that U.S. intelligence officials are overwhelmingly white, their mannerisms clearly American. The NYPD didn’t have that problem, thanks to its diverse pool of officers.

Using census data, the department matched undercover officers to ethnic communities and instructed them to blend in, the officials said. Pakistani-American officers infiltrated Pakistani neighborhoods, Palestinians focused on Palestinian neighborhoods. They hung out in hookah bars and cafes, quietly observing the community around them.

The unit, which has been undisclosed until now, became known inside the department as the Demographic Unit, former police officials said.

“It’s not a question of profiling. It’s a question of going where the problem could arise,” said Mordecai Dzikansky, a retired NYPD intelligence officer who said he was aware of the Demographic Unit. “And thank God we have the capability. We have the language capability and the ethnic officers. That’s our hidden weapon.”

The officers did not work out of headquarters, officials said. Instead, they passed their intelligence to police handlers who knew their identities.

Cohen said he wanted the squad to “rake the coals, looking for hot spots,” former officials recalled. The undercover officers soon became known inside the department as rakers.

A hot spot might be a beauty supply store selling chemicals used for making bombs. Or it might be a hawala, a broker that transfers money around the world with little documentation. Undercover officers might visit an Internet cafe and look at the browsing history on a computer, a former police official involved in the program said. If it revealed visits to radical websites, the cafe might be deemed a hot spot.

Ethnic bookstores, too, were on the list. If a raker noticed a customer looking at radical literature, he might chat up the store owner and see what he could learn. The bookstore, or even the customer, might get further scrutiny. If a restaurant patron applauds a news report about the death of U.S. troops, the patron or the restaurant could be labeled a hot spot.

The goal was to “map the city’s human terrain,” one law enforcement official said. The program was modeled in part on how Israeli authorities operate in the West Bank, a former police official said.

Mapping crimes has been a successful police strategy nationwide. But mapping robberies and shootings is one thing. Mapping ethnic neighborhoods is different, something that at least brushes against what the federal government considers racial profiling.

Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said the Demographic Unit does not exist. He said the department has a Zone Assessment Unit that looks for locations that could attract terrorists. But he said undercover officers only followed leads, disputing the account of several current and former police and federal officials. They do not just hang out in neighborhoods, he said.

“We will go into a location, whether it’s a mosque or a bookstore, if the lead warrants it, and at least establish whether there’s something that requires more attention,” Browne said.

That conflicts with testimony from an undercover officer in the 2006 trial of Shahawar Matin Siraj, who was convicted of planning an attack on New York’s subway system. The officer said he was instructed to live in Brooklyn and act as a “walking camera” for police.

“I was told to act like a civilian _ hang out in the neighborhood, gather information,” the Bangladeshi officer testified, under a false name, in what offered the first narrow glimpse at the NYPD’s infiltration of ethnic neighborhoods.

Officials said such operations just made sense. Islamic terrorists had attacked the city on 9/11, so police needed people inside the city’s Muslim neighborhoods. Officials say it does not conflict with a 2004 city law prohibiting the NYPD from using religion or ethnicity “as the determinative factor for initiating law enforcement action.”

“It’s not profiling,” Cutter said. “It’s like, after a shooting, do you go 20 blocks away and interview guys or do you go to the neighborhood where it happened?”

In 2007, the Los Angeles Police Department was criticized for even considering a similar program. The police announced plans to map Islamic neighborhoods to look for pockets of radicalization among the region’s roughly 500,000 Muslims. Criticism was swift, and chief William Bratton scrapped the plan.

“A lot of these people came from countries where the police were the terrorists,” Bratton said at a news conference, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. “We don’t do that here. We do not want to spread fear.”

In New York, current and former officials said, the lesson of that controversy was that such programs should be kept secret.

Some in the department, including lawyers, have privately expressed concerns about the raking program and how police use the information, current and former officials said. Part of the concern was that it might appear that police were building dossiers on innocent people, officials said. Another concern was that, if a case went to court, the department could be forced to reveal details about the program, putting the entire operation in jeopardy.

That’s why, former officials said, police regularly shredded documents discussing rakers.

When Cohen made his case in court that he needed broader authority to investigate terrorism, he had promised to abide by the FBI’s investigative guidelines. But the FBI is prohibited from using undercover agents unless there’s specific evidence of criminal activity, meaning a federal raking program like the one officials described to the AP would violate FBI guidelines.

The NYPD declined to make Cohen available for comment. In an earlier interview with the AP on a variety of topics, Police Commissioner Kelly said the intelligence unit does not infringe on civil rights.

“We’re doing what we believe we have to do to protect the city,” he said. “We have many, many lawyers in our employ. We see ourselves as very conscious and aware of civil liberties. And we know there’s always going to be some tension between the police department and so-called civil liberties groups because of the nature of what we do.”

The department clashed with civil rights groups most publicly after Cohen’s undercover officers infiltrated anti-war groups before the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York. A lawsuit over that program continues today.

During the convention, when protesters were arrested, police asked a list of questions which, according to court documents, included: “What are your political affiliations?” “Do you do any kind of political work?” and “Do you hate George W. Bush?”

“At the end of the day, it’s pure and simple a rogue domestic surveillance operation,” said Christopher Dunn, a New York Civil Liberties Union lawyer involved in the convention lawsuit.

___

Undercover agents like the rakers were valuable, but what Cohen and Sanchez wanted most were informants.

The NYPD dedicated an entire squad, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit, to developing and handling informants. Current and former officials said Sanchez was instrumental in teaching them how to develop sources.

For years, detectives used informants known as mosque crawlers to monitor weekly sermons and report what was said, several current and former officials directly involved in the informant program said. If FBI agents were to do that, they would be in violation of the Privacy Act, which prohibits the federal government from collecting intelligence on purely First Amendment activities.

The FBI has generated its own share of controversy for putting informants inside mosques, but unlike the program described to the AP, the FBI requires evidence of a crime before an informant can be used inside a mosque.

Valerie Caproni, the FBI’s general counsel, would not discuss the NYPD’s programs but said FBI informants can’t troll mosques looking for leads. Such operations are reviewed for civil liberties concerns, she said.

“If you’re sending an informant into a mosque when there is no evidence of wrongdoing, that’s a very high-risk thing to do,” Caproni said. “You’re running right up against core constitutional rights. You’re talking about freedom of religion.”

That’s why senior FBI officials in New York ordered their own agents not to accept any reports from the NYPD’s mosque crawlers, two retired agents said.

It’s unclear whether the police department still uses mosque crawlers. Officials said that, as Muslims figured out what was going on, the mosque crawlers became cafe crawlers, fanning out into the city’s ethnic hangouts.

“Someone has a great imagination,” Browne, the NYPD spokesman, said. “There is no such thing as mosque crawlers.”

Following the foiled subway plot, however, the key informant in the case, Osama Eldawoody, said he attended hundreds of prayer services and collected information even on people who showed no signs of radicalization.

NYPD detectives have recruited shopkeepers and nosy neighbors to become “seeded” informants who keep police up to date on the latest happenings in ethnic neighborhoods, one official directly involved in the informant program said.

The department also has a roster of “directed” informants it can tap for assignments. For instance, if a raker identifies a bookstore as a hot spot, police might assign an informant to gather information, long before there’s concrete evidence of anything criminal.

To identify possible informants, the department created what became known as the “debriefing program.” When someone is arrested who might be useful to the intelligence unit _ whether because he said something suspicious or because he is simply a young Middle Eastern man _ he is singled out for extra questioning. Intelligence officials don’t care about the underlying charges; they want to know more about his community and, ideally, they want to put him to work.

Police are in prisons, too, promising better living conditions and help or money on the outside for Muslim prisoners who will work with them.

Early in the intelligence division’s transformation, police asked the taxi commission to run a report on all the city’s Pakistani cab drivers, looking for those who got licenses fraudulently and might be susceptible to pressure to cooperate, according to former officials who were involved in or briefed on the effort.

That strategy has been rejected in other cities.

Boston police once asked neighboring Cambridge for a list of Somali cab drivers, Cambridge Police Chief Robert Haas said. Haas refused, saying that without a specific reason, the search was inappropriate.

“It really has a chilling effect in terms of the relationship between the local police department and those cultural groups, if they think that’s going to take place,” Haas said.

The informant division was so important to the NYPD that Cohen persuaded his former colleagues to train a detective, Steve Pinkall, at the CIA’s training center at the Farm. Pinkall, who had an intelligence background as a Marine, was given an unusual temporary assignment at CIA headquarters, officials said. He took the field tradecraft course alongside future CIA spies then returned to New York to run investigations.

“We found that helpful, for NYPD personnel to be exposed to the tradecraft,” Browne said.

The idea troubled senior FBI officials, who saw it as the NYPD and CIA blurring the lines between police work and spying, in which undercover officers regularly break the laws of foreign governments. The arrangement even made its way to FBI Director Robert Mueller, two former senior FBI officials said, but the training was already under way and Mueller did not press the issue.

___

NYPD’s intelligence operations do not stop at the city line, as the undercover operation in New Jersey made clear.

The department has gotten some of its officers deputized as federal marshals, allowing them to work out of state. But often, there’s no specific jurisdiction at all. Cohen’s undercover squad, the Special Services Unit, operates in places such as New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Massachusetts, officials said. They can’t make arrests and, if something goes wrong _ a shooting or a car accident, for instance _ the officers could be personally liable. But the NYPD has decided it’s worth the risk, a former police official said.

With Police Commissioner Kelly’s backing, Cohen’s policy is that any potential threat to New York City is the NYPD’s business, regardless of where it occurs, officials said.

That aggressiveness has sometimes put the NYPD at odds with local police departments and, more frequently, with the FBI. The FBI didn’t like the rules Cohen played by and said his operations encroached on their responsibilities.

Once, undercover officers were stopped by police in Massachusetts while conducting surveillance on a house, one former New York official recalled. In another instance, the NYPD sparked concern among federal officials by expanding its intelligence-gathering efforts related to the United Nations, where the FBI is in charge, current and former federal officials said.

The AP has agreed not to disclose details of either the FBI or NYPD operations because they involve foreign counterintelligence.

Both Mueller and Kelly have said their agencies have strong working relationships and said reports of rivalry and disagreements are overblown. And the NYPD’s out-of-state operations have had success.

A young Egyptian NYPD officer living undercover in New Jersey, for example, was key to building a case against Mohamed Mahmood Alessa and Carlos Eduardo Almonte. The pair was arrested last year at John F. Kennedy Airport en route to Somalia to join the terrorist group al-Shabab. Both pleaded guilty to conspiracy.

Cohen has also sent officers abroad, stationing them in 11 foreign cities. If a bomber blows himself up in Jerusalem, the NYPD rushes to the scene, said Dzikansky, who served in Israel and is the co-author of the forthcoming book “Terrorist Suicide Bombings: Attack Interdiction, Mitigation, and Response.”

“I was there to ask the New York question,” Dzikansky said. “Why this location? Was there something unique that the bomber had done? Was there any pre-notification. Was there a security lapse?”

All of this intelligence _ from the rakers, the undercovers, the overseas liaisons and the informants _ is passed to a team of analysts hired from some of the nation’s most prestigious universities. Analysts have spotted emerging trends and summarized topics such as Hezbollah’s activities in New York and the threat of South Asian terrorist groups.

They also have tackled more contentious topics, including drafting an analytical report on every mosque within 100 miles of New York, one former police official said. The report drew on information from mosque crawlers, undercover officers and public information. It mapped hundreds of mosques and discussed the likelihood of them being infiltrated by al-Qaida, Hezbollah and other terrorist groups.

For Cohen, there was only one way to measure success: “They haven’t attacked us,” he said in a 2005 deposition. He said anything that was bad for terrorists was good for NYPD.

___

Though the CIA is prohibited from collecting intelligence domestically, the wall between domestic and foreign operations became more porous. Intelligence gathered by the NYPD, with CIA officer Sanchez overseeing collection, was often passed to the CIA in informal conversations and through unofficial channels, a former official involved in that process said.

By design, the NYPD was looking more and more like a domestic CIA.

“It’s like starting the CIA over in the post-9/11 world,” Cohen said in “Protecting the City,” a laudatory 2009 book about the NYPD. “What would you do if you could begin it all over again? Hah. This is what you would do.”

Sanchez’s assignment in New York ended in 2004, but he received permission to take a leave of absence from the agency and become Cohen’s deputy, former officials said.

Though Sanchez’s assignments were blessed by CIA management, some in the agency’s New York station saw the presence of such a senior officer in the city as a turf encroachment. Finally, the New York station chief, Tom Higgins, called headquarters, one former senior intelligence official said. Higgins complained, the official said, that Sanchez was wearing both hats, sometimes acting as a CIA officer, sometimes as an NYPD official.

The CIA finally forced him to choose: Stay with the agency or stay with the NYPD.

Sanchez declined to comment to the AP about the arrangement, but he picked the NYPD. He retired last year and is now a consultant in the Middle East.

Last month, the CIA deepened its NYPD ties even further. It sent one of its most experienced operatives, a former station chief in two Middle Eastern countries, to work out of police headquarters as Cohen’s special assistant while on the CIA payroll. Current and former U.S. officials acknowledge it’s unusual but said it’s the kind of collaboration Americans expect after 9/11.

Officials said revealing the CIA officer’s name would jeopardize national security. The arrangement was described as a sabbatical. He is a member of the agency’s senior management, but officials said he was sent to the municipal police department to get management experience.

At the NYPD, he works undercover in the senior ranks of the intelligence division. Officials are adamant that he is not involved in actual intelligence-gathering.

___

The NYPD has faced little scrutiny over the past decade as it has taken on broad new intelligence missions, targeted ethnic neighborhoods and partnered with the CIA in extraordinary ways.

The department’s primary watchdog, the New York City Council, has not held hearings on the intelligence division’s operations and former NYPD officials said council members typically do not ask for details.

“Ray Kelly briefs me privately on certain subjects that should not be discussed in public,” said City Councilman Peter Vallone. “We’ve discussed in person how they investigate certain groups they suspect have terrorist sympathizers or have terrorist suspects.”

The city comptroller’s office has audited several NYPD components since 9/11 but not the intelligence unit, which had a $62 million budget last year.

The federal government, too, has done little to scrutinize the nation’s largest police force, despite the massive federal aid. Homeland Security officials review NYPD grants but not its underlying programs.

A report in January by the Homeland Security inspector general, for instance, found that the NYPD violated state and federal contracting rules between 2006 and 2008 by buying more than $4 million in equipment through a no-bid process. NYPD said public bidding would have revealed sensitive information to terrorists, but police never got approval from state or federal officials to adopt their own rules, the inspector general said.

On Capitol Hill, where FBI tactics have frequently been criticized for their effect on civil liberties, the NYPD faces no such opposition.

In 2007, Sanchez testified before the Senate Homeland Security Committee and was asked how the NYPD spots signs of radicalization. He said the key was viewing innocuous activity, including behavior that might be protected by the First Amendment, as a potential precursor to terrorism.

That triggered no questions from the committee, which Sanchez said had been “briefed in the past on how we do business.”

The Justice Department has the authority to investigate civil rights violations. It issued detailed rules in 2003 against racial profiling, including prohibiting agencies from considering race when making traffic stops or assigning patrols.

But those rules apply only to the federal government and contain a murky exemption for terrorism investigations. The Justice Department has not investigated a police department for civil rights violations during a national security investigation.

“One of the hallmarks of the intelligence division over the last 10 years is that, not only has it gotten extremely aggressive and sophisticated, but it’s operating completely on its own,” said Dunn, the civil liberties lawyer. “There are no checks. There is no oversight.”

The NYPD has been mentioned as a model for policing in the post-9/11 era. But it’s a model that seems custom-made for New York. No other city has the Big Apple’s combination of a low crime rate, a $4.5 billion police budget and a diverse 34,000-person police force. Certainly no other police department has such deep CIA ties.

Perhaps most important, nobody else had 9/11 the way New York did. No other city lost nearly 3,000 people in a single morning. A decade later, police say New Yorkers still expect the department to do whatever it can to prevent another attack. The NYPD has embraced that expectation.

As Sanchez testified on Capitol Hill: “We’ve been given the public tolerance and the luxury to be very aggressive on this topic.”

____
MATT APUZZO AND ADAM GOLDMAN
Aug. 23, 2011

Find this story at 23 August 2011

Associated Press writers Tom Hays and Eileen Sullivan in Washington contributed to this report.
© 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Terms and conditions apply. See AP.org for details.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Three months ago, one of the CIA’s most experienced clandestine operatives started work inside the New York Police Department. His title is special assistant to the deputy commissioner of intelligence. On that much, everyone agrees.

Exactly what he’s doing there, however, is much less clear.

Since The Associated Press revealed the assignment in August, federal and city officials have offered differing explanations for why this CIA officer — a seasoned operative who handled foreign agents and ran complex operations in Jordan and Pakistan — was assigned to a municipal police department. The CIA is prohibited from spying domestically, and its unusual partnership with the NYPD has troubled top lawmakers and prompted an internal investigation.

His role is important because the last time a CIA officer worked so closely with the NYPD, beginning in the months after the 9/11 attacks, he became the architect of aggressive police programs that monitored Muslim neighborhoods. With the earlier help from this CIA official, the police put entire communities under the microscope based on ethnicity rather allegations of wrongdoing, according to the AP investigation.

It was an extraordinary collaboration that at times troubled some senior CIA officials and may have stretched the bounds of how the CIA is legally allowed to operate in the United States.

The arrangement surrounding the newly arrived CIA officer has been portrayed differently than that of his predecessor. When first asked by the AP, a senior U.S. official described the posting as a sabbatical, a program aimed at giving the man in New York more management training.

Testifying at City Hall recently, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the CIA operative provides his officers “with information, usually coming from perhaps overseas.” He said the CIA operative provides “technical information” to the NYPD but “doesn’t have access to any of our investigative files.”

CIA Director David Petraeus has described him as an adviser, someone who could ensure that information was being shared.

But the CIA already has someone with that job. At its large station in New York, a CIA liaison shares intelligence with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, which has hundreds of NYPD detectives assigned to it. And the CIA did not explain how, if the officer doesn’t have access to NYPD files, he is getting management experience in a division built entirely around collecting domestic intelligence.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, mischaracterized him to Congress as an “embedded analyst” — his office later quietly said that was a mistake — and acknowledged it looked bad to have the CIA working so closely with a police department.

All of this has troubled lawmakers, including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has said the CIA has “no business or authority in domestic spying, or in advising the NYPD how to conduct local surveillance.”

“It’s really important to fully understand what the nature of the investigations into the Muslim community are all about, and also the partnership between the local police and the CIA,” said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill., a member of the House Intelligence Committee.

Still, the undercover operative remains in New York while the agency’s inspector general investigates the CIA’s decade-long relationship with the NYPD. The CIA has asked the AP not to identify him because he remains a member of the clandestine service and his identity is classified.

The CIA’s deep ties to the NYPD began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when CIA Director George Tenet dispatched a veteran officer, Larry Sanchez, to New York, where he became the architect of the police department’s secret spying programs.

While still on the agency payroll, Sanchez, a CIA veteran who spent 15 years overseas in the former Soviet Union, South Asia, and the Middle East, instructed officers on the art of collecting information without attracting attention. He directed officers and reviewed case files.

Sometimes, officials said, intelligence collected from NYPD’s operations was passed informally to the CIA.

Sanchez also hand-picked an NYPD detective to attend the “Farm,” the CIA’s training facility where its officers are turned into operatives. The detective, who completed the course but failed to graduate, returned to the police department where he works today armed with the agency’s famed espionage skills.

Also while under Sanchez’s direction, documents show that the NYPD’s Cyber Intelligence Unit, which monitors domestic and foreign websites, also conducted training sessions for the CIA.

Sanchez was on the CIA payroll from 2002 to 2004 then took a temporary leave of absence from the CIA to become deputy to David Cohen, a former senior CIA officer who became head of the NYPD intelligence division just months after the 9/11 attacks.

In 2007, the CIA’s top official in New York complained to headquarters that Sanchez was wearing two hats, sometimes operating as an NYPD official, sometimes as a CIA officer. At headquarters, senior officials agreed and told Sanchez he had to choose.

He formally left the CIA, staying on at the NYPD until late 2010. He now works as a security consultant in the Persian Gulf region.

Sanchez’s departure left Cohen scrambling to find someone with operational experience who could replace him. He approached several former CIA colleagues about taking the job but they turned him down, according to people familiar with the situation who, like others interviewed for this story, spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the department’s inner workings.

When they refused, Cohen persuaded the CIA to send the current operative to be his assistant.

He arrived with an impressive post-9/11 resume. He had been the station chief in Pakistan and then Jordan, two stations that served as focal points in the war on terror, according to current and former officials who worked with him. He also was in charge of the agency’s Counter Proliferation Division.

But he is no stranger to controversy. Former U.S. intelligence officials said he was nearly expelled from Pakistan after an incident during President George W. Bush’s first term. Pakistan became enraged after sharing intelligence with the U.S., only to learn that the CIA station chief passed that information to the British.

Then, while serving in Amman, the station chief was directly involved in an operation to kill al-Qaida’s then-No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahri. But the plan backfired badly. The key informant who promised to lead the CIA to al-Zawahiri was in fact a double agent working for al-Qaida.

At least one CIA officer saw problems in the case and warned the station chief but, as recounted in a new book “The Triple Agent” by Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick, the station chief decided to push ahead anyway.

The informant blew himself up at remote CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, in December 2009. He managed to kill seven CIA employees, including the officer who had warned the station chief, and wound six others. Leon Panetta, the CIA director at the time, called it a systemic failure and decided no one person was at fault.

___

ADAM GOLDMAN AND MATT APUZZO
ct. 17, 2011

Find this story at 17 August 2011

Contact the Washington investigative team at DCInvestigations(at)ap.org

Read AP’s previous stories and documents about the NYPD at: http://www.ap.org/nypd

Follow Goldman and Apuzzo at http://twitter.com/goldmandc and http://twitter.com/mattapuzzo

© 2013 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. Terms and conditions apply. See AP.org for details.

Central Intelligence Agency operatives on the ground during the Sept. 11, 2011, fatal attack on America’s embassy in Benghazi have since been subjected to so many lie detector tests that several sources say they’re being bullied and threatened into silence.

Some of the agents on the ground that day have been ordered to take multiple polygraph tests since January — and for some, it’s been a monthly detail, The Daily Mail reported.

The paper cited sources with direct knowledge of the situation and said agents are being asked questions like: Are you talking about Benghazi with the media? Are you talking about the attacks with members of Congress?

A source who spoke to CNN described the queries and polygraphs as “unprecedented,” and added, “You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation.”

Another source said the CIA was exerting “pure intimidation” to silence the agents, The Daily Mail reported.

CNN analyst Robert Baer said CIA operatives are normally subjected to internal agency questioning and lie detector tests once every few years, “never more than that,” The Daily Mail said.

“If somebody is being polygraphed every month, or every two months, it’s called an issue polygraph, and that means that the polygraph division suspects something, or they’re looking for something, or they’re on a fishing expedition,” Mr. Baer said, in the report. “But it’s absolutely not routine at all to be polygraphed monthly, or bimonthly.”

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd said the agency is not hiding anything.

“CIA employees are always free to speak to Congress if they want,” he said in a statement reported by The Daily Mail. “We are not aware of any CIA employee who has experienced retaliation, including any non-routine security procedures, or who has been prevented from sharing a concern with Congress about the Benghazi incident.”

CNN reported that up to 35 CIA agents had been on the ground in Benghazi as the attack progressed.

By Cheryl K. Chumley
Friday, August 2, 2013

Find this story at 2 August 2013

© Copyright 2013 The Washington Times, LLC.

The CIA has been subjecting operatives to monthly polygraph tests in an attempt to suppress details of a reported US arms smuggling operation in Benghazi that was ongoing when its ambassador was killed by a mob in the city last year, according to reports.

Up to 35 CIA operatives were working in the city during the attack last September on the US consulate that resulted in the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, according to CNN.

The circumstances of the attack are a subject of deep division in the US with some Congressional leaders pressing for a wide-ranging investigation into suspicions that the government has withheld details of its activities in the Libyan city.

The television network said that a CIA team was working in an annex near the consulate on a project to supply missiles from Libyan armouries to Syrian rebels.

Sources said that more Americans were hurt in the assault spearheaded by suspected Islamic radicals than had been previously reported. CIA chiefs were actively working to ensure the real nature of its operations in the city did not get out.

So only the losses suffered by the State Department in the city had been reported to Congress.
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“Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency’s missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency’s workings,” CNN reported.

Frank Wolf, a US congressman who represents the district that contains CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, is one of 150 members of Congress for a new investigation into the failures in Benghazi.

“I think it is a form of a cover-up, and I think it’s an attempt to push it under the rug, and I think the American people are feeling the same way,” he said. “We should have the people who were on the scene come in, testify under oath, do it publicly, and lay it out. And there really isn’t any national security issue involved with regards to that.”

A CIA spokesman said it had been open about its activities in Benghazi.

“The CIA has worked closely with its oversight committees to provide them with an extraordinary amount of information related to the attack on US facilities in Benghazi,” a CIA statement said. “CIA employees are always free to speak to Congress if they want,” the statement continued. “The CIA enabled all officers involved in Benghazi the opportunity to meet with Congress. We are not aware of any CIA employee who has experienced retaliation, including any non-routine security procedures, or who has been prevented from sharing a concern with Congress about the Benghazi incident.”

By Damien McElroy
11:06AM BST 02 Aug 2013

Find this story at 2 August 2013

© Telegraph Media Group Limited 2013

CNN has uncovered exclusive new information about what is allegedly happening at the CIA, in the wake of the deadly Benghazi terror attack.

Four Americans, including Ambassador Christopher Stevens, were killed in the assault by armed militants last September 11 in eastern Libya.

Programming note: Was there a political cover up surrounding the Benghazi attack that killed four Americans? Watch a CNN special investigation — The Truth About Benghazi, Tuesday at 10 p.m. ET.

Sources now tell CNN dozens of people working for the CIA were on the ground that night, and that the agency is going to great lengths to make sure whatever it was doing, remains a secret.

CNN has learned the CIA is involved in what one source calls an unprecedented attempt to keep the spy agency’s Benghazi secrets from ever leaking out.

Read: Analysis: CIA role in Benghazi underreported

Since January, some CIA operatives involved in the agency’s missions in Libya, have been subjected to frequent, even monthly polygraph examinations, according to a source with deep inside knowledge of the agency’s workings.

The goal of the questioning, according to sources, is to find out if anyone is talking to the media or Congress.

It is being described as pure intimidation, with the threat that any unauthorized CIA employee who leaks information could face the end of his or her career.

In exclusive communications obtained by CNN, one insider writes, “You don’t jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well.”

Another says, “You have no idea the amount of pressure being brought to bear on anyone with knowledge of this operation.”

“Agency employees typically are polygraphed every three to four years. Never more than that,” said former CIA operative and CNN analyst Robert Baer.

In other words, the rate of the kind of polygraphs alleged by sources is rare.

“If somebody is being polygraphed every month, or every two months it’s called an issue polygraph, and that means that the polygraph division suspects something, or they’re looking for something, or they’re on a fishing expedition. But it’s absolutely not routine at all to be polygraphed monthly, or bi-monthly,” said Baer.

CIA spokesman Dean Boyd asserted in a statement that the agency has been open with Congress.

“The CIA has worked closely with its oversight committees to provide them with an extraordinary amount of information related to the attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi,” the statement said.

“CIA employees are always free to speak to Congress if they want,” the statement continued. “The CIA enabled all officers involved in Benghazi the opportunity to meet with Congress. We are not aware of any CIA employee who has experienced retaliation, including any non-routine security procedures, or who has been prevented from sharing a concern with Congress about the Benghazi incident.”

Among the many secrets still yet to be told about the Benghazi mission, is just how many Americans were there the night of the attack.

A source now tells CNN that number was 35, with as many as seven wounded, some seriously.

While it is still not known how many of them were CIA, a source tells CNN that 21 Americans were working in the building known as the annex, believed to be run by the agency.

The lack of information and pressure to silence CIA operatives is disturbing to U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf, whose district includes CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

“I think it is a form of a cover-up, and I think it’s an attempt to push it under the rug, and I think the American people are feeling the same way,” said the Republican.

“We should have the people who were on the scene come in, testify under oath, do it publicly, and lay it out. And there really isn’t any national security issue involved with regards to that,” he said.

Wolf has repeatedly gone to the House floor, asking for a select committee to be set-up, a Watergate-style probe involving several intelligence committee investigators assigned to get to the bottom of the failures that took place in Benghazi, and find out just what the State Department and CIA were doing there.

More than 150 fellow Republican members of Congress have signed his request, and just this week eight Republicans sent a letter to the new head of the FBI, James Comey, asking that he brief Congress within 30 days.

Read: White House releases 100 pages of Benghazi e-mails

In the aftermath of the attack, Wolf said he was contacted by people closely tied with CIA operatives and contractors who wanted to talk.

Then suddenly, there was silence.

“Initially they were not afraid to come forward. They wanted the opportunity, and they wanted to be subpoenaed, because if you’re subpoenaed, it sort of protects you, you’re forced to come before Congress. Now that’s all changed,” said Wolf.

Lawmakers also want to know about the weapons in Libya, and what happened to them.

Speculation on Capitol Hill has included the possibility the U.S. agencies operating in Benghazi were secretly helping to move surface-to-air missiles out of Libya, through Turkey, and into the hands of Syrian rebels.

It is clear that two U.S. agencies were operating in Benghazi, one was the State Department, and the other was the CIA.

The State Department told CNN in an e-mail that it was only helping the new Libyan government destroy weapons deemed “damaged, aged or too unsafe retain,” and that it was not involved in any transfer of weapons to other countries.

But the State Department also clearly told CNN, they “can’t speak for any other agencies.”

The CIA would not comment on whether it was involved in the transfer of any weapons.

Posted by Drew Griffin, Kathleen Johnston
August 1st, 2013
05:00 PM ET

Find this story at 1 August 2013

© 2012 Cable News Network

To really understand the push-pull over the bungled talking points in the wake of the Benghazi attack, you have to understand the nature of the U.S. presence in that city.

Officially, the U.S. presence was a diplomatic compound under the State Department’s purview.

“The diplomatic facility in Benghazi would be closed until further notice,” then-State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland announced last October.

But in practice – and this is what so few people have focused on – the larger U.S. presence was in a secret outpost operated by the CIA.

About 30 people were evacuated from Benghazi the morning after the deadly attack last September 11; more than 20 of them were CIA employees.

Clearly the larger mission in Benghazi was covert.

The CIA had two objectives in Libya: countering the terrorist threat that emerged as extremists poured into the unstable country, and helping to secure the flood of weapons after the fall of Moammar Gadhafi that could have easily been funneled to terrorists.

The State Department was the public face of the weapons collection program.

“One of the reasons that we and other government agencies were present in Benghazi is exactly that. We had a concerted effort to try to track down and find and recover as many MANPADS [man-portable air defense systems], and other very dangerous weapons as possible,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton testified before Congress in January.

The CIA’s role during and after the attacks at the diplomatic post and the CIA annex in Benghazi have so far escaped much scrutiny.

The focus has been on the failure of the State Department to heed growing signs of the militant threat in the city and ensure adequate security, and on the political debate over why the White House seemed to downplay what was a terrorist attack in the weeks before the presidential election.

But the public needs to know more about the agency’s role, said Republican congressman Frank Wolf, of Virginia.

“There are questions that must be asked of the CIA and this must be done in a public way,” said Wolf.

Sources at the State Department say this context explains why there was so much debate over those talking points. Essentially, they say, the State Department felt it was being blamed for bungling what it saw as largely a CIA operation in Benghazi.

Current and former U.S. government officials tell CNN that then-CIA director David Petraeus and others in the CIA initially assessed the attack to have been related to protests against an anti-Muslim video produced in the United States.

They say Petraeus may have been reluctant to conclude it was a planned attack because that would have been acknowledging an intelligence failure.

Internally at the CIA, sources tell CNN there was a big debate after the attacks to acknowledge that the two former Navy SEALs killed – Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty – were CIA employees. At a 2010 attack in Khost, Afghanistan, when seven CIA officers were killed in the line of duty, the agency stepped forward and acknowledged their service and sacrifice. But in this instance – for reasons many in the Obama administration did not fully understand – it took the CIA awhile to “roll back their covers.” Petraeus did not attend their funerals.

Wolf said he and his office are getting calls from CIA officials who want to talk and want to share more.

“If you’re 50 years old and have two kids in college, you’re not going to give your career up by coming in, so you also need subpoena power,” said the Republican congressman. “Let people come forward, subpoena them to give them the protection so they can’t be fired.”

But is the secrecy surrounding the CIA’s presence in Benghazi the reason for the administration’s fumble after fumble when trying to explain what happened the night of the attack?

There were 12 versions of talking points before a watered down product was agreed upon– suggesting an inter-government squabble over words that would ultimately lay the blame on one agency, or the other.

Perhaps the State Department did not want to get in the line of fire for a CIA operation that they in many ways were just the front for, the CIA “wearing their jacket,” as one current government official put it.

The CIA did have an informal arrangement to help the mission if needed, but it was not the primary security for the mission. The State Department had hired local guards for protection.

People at the CIA annex did respond to calls for help the night of the attack. But despite being only a mile away, it took the team 20 to 30 minutes to get there. Gathering the appropriate arms and other resources was necessary.

None of this diminishes questions about how the White House, just weeks before the presidential election, seemed to downplay that this was a terrorist attack. Or the State Department’s initial refusal to acknowledge that it had not provided adequate security for its own officials there.

But the role of the CIA, its clear intelligence failure before the attack, and – as it continued to push the theory of the anti-Muslim video – after the attack, bears more scrutiny as well.

Posted by Jake Tapper
May 15th, 2013
07:48 PM ET

Find this story at 15 May 2013

© 2012 Cable News Network

When House Republicans called a hearing in the middle of their long recess, you knew it would be something big, and indeed it was: They accidentally blew the CIA’s cover.

The purpose of Wednesday’s hearing of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee was to examine security lapses that led to the killing in Benghazi last month of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three others. But in doing so, the lawmakers reminded us why “congressional intelligence” is an oxymoron.

Through their outbursts, cryptic language and boneheaded questioning of State Department officials, the committee members left little doubt that one of the two compounds at which the Americans were killed, described by the administration as a “consulate” and a nearby “annex,” was a CIA base. They did this, helpfully, in a televised public hearing.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) was the first to unmask the spooks. “Point of order! Point of order!” he called out as a State Department security official, seated in front of an aerial photo of the U.S. facilities in Benghazi, described the chaotic night of the attack. “We’re getting into classified issues that deal with sources and methods that would be totally inappropriate in an open forum such as this.”

A State Department official assured him that the material was “entirely unclassified” and that the photo was from a commercial satellite. “I totally object to the use of that photo,” Chaffetz continued. He went on to say that “I was told specifically while I was in Libya I could not and should not ever talk about what you’re showing here today.”

Now that Chaffetz had alerted potential bad guys that something valuable was in the photo, the chairman, Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), attempted to lock the barn door through which the horse had just bolted. “I would direct that that chart be taken down,” he said, although it already had been on C-SPAN. “In this hearing room, we’re not going to point out details of what may still in fact be a facility of the United States government or more facilities.”

May still be a facility? The plot thickened — and Chaffetz gave more hints. “I believe that the markings on that map were terribly inappropriate,” he said, adding that “the activities there could cost lives.”

In their questioning and in the public testimony they invited, the lawmakers managed to disclose, without ever mentioning Langley directly, that there was a seven-member “rapid response force” in the compound the State Department was calling an annex. One of the State Department security officials was forced to acknowledge that “not necessarily all of the security people” at the Benghazi compounds “fell under my direct operational control.”

And whose control might they have fallen under? Well, presumably it’s the “other government agency” or “other government entity” the lawmakers and witnesses referred to; Issa informed the public that this agency was not the FBI.

“Other government agency,” or “OGA,” is a common euphemism in Washington for the CIA. This “other government agency,” the lawmakers’ questioning further revealed, was in possession of a video of the attack but wasn’t releasing it because it was undergoing “an investigative process.”

Or maybe they were referring to the Department of Agriculture.

That the Benghazi compound had included a large CIA presence had been reported but not confirmed. The New York Times, for example, had reported that among those evacuated were “about a dozen CIA operatives and contractors.” The paper, like The Washington Post, withheld locations and details of the facilities at the administration’s request.

But on Wednesday, the withholding was on hold.

The Republican lawmakers, in their outbursts, alternated between scolding the State Department officials for hiding behind classified material and blaming them for disclosing information that should have been classified. But the lawmakers created the situation by ordering a public hearing on a matter that belonged behind closed doors.

Republicans were aiming to embarrass the Obama administration over State Department security lapses. But they inadvertently caused a different picture to emerge than the one that has been publicly known: that the victims may have been let down not by the State Department but by the CIA. If the CIA was playing such a major role in these events, which was the unmistakable impression left by Wednesday’s hearing, having a televised probe of the matter was absurd.

The chairman, attempting to close his can of worms, finally suggested that “the entire committee have a classified briefing as to any and all other assets that were not drawn upon but could have been drawn upon” in Benghazi.

Good idea. Too bad he didn’t think of that before putting the CIA on C-SPAN.

danamilbank@washpost.com
By Dana Milbank,

Find this story at 10 October 2012

© The Washington Post Company

We may be finally learning more about the CIA’s involvement in the 2003 abduction and rendition to torture of a Muslim cleric, Hassan Mustafa Nasr (aka Abu Omar). This week, Sabrina De Sousa confirmed that she was a former CIA undercover officer, and provided new details about events that led to the first (and, to date, only) prosecutions and convictions for abuses committed by U.S. officials as part of its “extraordinary rendition” program. Her account highlights the desperate need for the United States to thoroughly investigate the role of government officials in acts of torture and extraordinary rendition committed in the years following 9/11.

In 2003, CIA agents seized Abu Omar from the streets of Milan, Italy and rendered him to Egypt for interrogation and torture by Egyptian officials. He was later released without charge or trial.

In September 2012, Italy’s highest court affirmed the in absentia convictions of 23 Americans, including De Sousa, and two Italians involved in Abu Omar’s kidnapping and torture. The ACLU opposes trials in absentia, which raise serious due process concerns; the Italian proceedings serve as a reminder, however, of the lack of accountability in the United States for CIA abuses. De Sousa, who was sentenced by the Italian court to seven years in prison, had previously denied any involvement with the CIA, claiming instead that she was a State Department employee and that she should have been granted diplomatic immunity from prosecution.

De Sousa now admits that at the time of the extraordinary rendition, she was a CIA agent and involved in the rendition as a translator between the CIA snatch team and their Italian counterparts. Incensed for “being held accountable for decisions that someone else took,” De Sousa has provided shocking – but by no means surprising – details about the extraordinary rendition operation in a series of recent interviews with McClatchy Press.

De Sousa revealed that the former CIA station chief in Rome, Jeffrey Castelli, had exaggerated the threat Abu Omar posed in order to win approval for the extraordinary rendition, and misled his superiors into believing that Italian military intelligence had agreed to the operation. She also claims that the extraordinary rendition was approved at the highest levels of government despite doubts about the threat Nasr posed; those involved in the decision-making process, she says, included former CIA director George Tenet; Condoleezza Rice, who was national security advisor at the time; and then-President Bush. (Among those convicted, Robert Lady, the CIA’s former Milan station chief, was sentenced in absentia to nine years for his involvement in the rendition; read De Sousa’s account for more on his case.)

De Sousa’s revelations highlight the need for greater transparency and accountability by the United States government for the torture and abuse that occurred during the Bush administration. Criminal investigations initially opened into specific allegations of abuse have all been closed and the government has consistently shut down attempts to challenge its actions in court through claims of state secrets and immunity. Other nations, such as Italy, however, have taken a different approach.

Click here to learn how different countries have pursued accountability for their roles in the U.S. torture and rendition program.

In addition, the European Court of Human Rights recently agreed to consider a second case against Poland over allegations from another former CIA prisoner, Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn (known as Abu Zubaydah), who was tortured while held in a secret CIA-run prison in Poland. While these measures are an important step in ensuring accountability for U.S. actions on the global stage, they do not absolve the U.S. from its own responsibility under international law to hold those who were responsible for CIA abuses accountable, and release information about the unlawful activities carried out as part of the extraordinary rendition program. An important starting point should be the declassification and publication of the Senate Select Intelligence Committee report, the only official account of the CIA’s torture and abuse. De Sousa may have provided important information on one specific extraordinary rendition, but we need far more to ensure that abuses committed by the United States are fully brought to light.

07/31/2013
By Allison Frankel, ACLU Human Rights Program at 2:39pm

Find this story at 31 July 2013

Accountability for Torture: Infographic

© ACLU

WASHINGTON — The chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee says she is planning a push to declassify hundreds of pages of a secret committee report that accuses the Central Intelligence Agency of misleading Congress and the White House about the agency’s detention and interrogation program, which is now defunct.

The 6,000-page report, which took years to complete and cost more than $40 million, is the only detailed account to date of a program that set off a national debate about torture. The report has been the subject of a fierce partisan fight and a vigorous effort by the C.I.A. to challenge its conclusions, and last month, the agency’s director, John O. Brennan, delivered a lengthy rebuttal to the report to committee leaders.

But the committee’s chairwoman, Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, said in a statement this week that the report was on “firm ground” and that she planned to ask the White House and C.I.A. to declassify its 300-page executive summary after “making any factual changes to our report that are warranted after the C.I.A.’s response.”

The committee’s top Republican, Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, said he believed the report was deeply flawed and agreed with the intelligence agency’s critique. But he said he believed that a summary of the report could be made public, as long as it was accompanied by a summary of the agency’s response and a dissenting statement from committee Republicans.

The clash over the report is, at its core, a fight over who writes the history of what is perhaps the most bitterly disputed part of the American government’s response to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. More than four years have passed since the C.I.A. closed its secret prisons, and nearly a decade since agency interrogators subjected Qaeda detainees to the most brutal interrogation methods, including the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

For defenders of the interrogation program, the Senate criticism represents second-guessing of actions taken at a desperate time to stop terrorist attacks. For critics, the report is a first step toward coming to terms with a shameful departure from American values that included the official embrace of torture.

According to several people who have read it, the Senate report is particularly damning in its portrait of a C.I.A. so intent on justifying extreme interrogation techniques that it blatantly misled President George W. Bush, the White House, the Justice Department and the Congressional intelligence committees about the efficacy of its methods.

Several senators have also said the report concludes that the use of waterboarding, wall-slamming, shackling in painful positions, forced nudity and sleep deprivation produced little information of value. It concludes that the use of those techniques did not disrupt any terrorist plots and made no significant contribution to finding Osama bin Laden, the Qaeda founder, who was killed in a SEAL team raid in 2011.

The C.I.A. response challenges a number of these conclusions, in part by questioning the accuracy of facts cited in the report.

A C.I.A. spokesman, Dean Boyd, said the agency’s response “detailed significant errors in the study,” though he added that the agency “agrees with a number of the study’s findings.”

In a separate statement, Mr. Brennan made clear his continuing opposition to coercive interrogation methods, which were used by the agency when he held high-level positions. “I remain firm in my belief that enhanced interrogation techniques are not an appropriate method to obtain intelligence and that their use impairs our ability to play a leadership role in the world,” he said.

Mr. Chambliss said the report’s shortcomings stemmed from its being based exclusively on documents. “The folks doing the report got 100 percent of their information from documents and didn’t interview a single person,” he said, adding that while there were “some abuses,” the program was more effective than the report concludes.

The committee completed its report late last year and submitted it to the C.I.A., where it sat for months. The agency’s response to the report was due in February, but it was not delivered to the committee until the end of June.

Senator Jay Rockefeller, Democrat of West Virginia, suggested that the committee would not automatically accept the agency’s corrections to the report. “My colleagues and I will apply the same level of scrutiny to the C.I.A.’s response that we used during our own exhaustive review of the program,” he said.

Some Democratic lawmakers and human rights advocates are frustrated that the White House has remained largely absent from the debate, though a May 10 photograph on the White House Flickr feed shows Mr. Brennan speaking with President Obama while holding a copy of the C.I.A. response to the Senate report.

In a statement on Friday, Caitlin Hayden, a White House spokeswoman, urged the committee and the C.I.A. “to continue working together to address issues associated with the report — including factual questions.”

She said that at some point, “some version of the findings of the report should be made public.”

Senator Mark Udall, Democrat of Colorado, said that squarely facing the mistakes of the interrogation program was “essential for the C.I.A.’s long-term institutional integrity, for the legitimacy of ongoing sensitive programs, and for this White House, which so far has rejected requests to discuss the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report with members or committee staff.”

Though the committee’s investigation began as a bipartisan effort, Republicans dropped out in August 2009 after Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that the Justice Department was reviewing the interrogation program. In part because they expected many C.I.A. officers to refuse to discuss the program during the Justice Department review, committee Democrats decided to base their investigation solely on documents, ultimately reviewing some six million pages.

The costs of the investigation ballooned over four years. The C.I.A. insisted that committee staff members be allowed to pore over thousands of classified agency cables only at a secure facility in Northern Virginia — and only after a team of outside contractors had examined the cables first. Government officials said that between paying for the facility and for the contractors, the C.I.A. had spent more than $40 million on the study.

Mrs. Feinstein angrily complained about what she called a pattern of unnamed officials speaking to reporters to discredit the Senate report.

“I am appalled by the persistent media leaks by anonymous officials regarding the C.I.A.’s response to the committee’s study,” she said, adding that the leaks began three months before the agency delivered its formal response.

“Leaks defending the C.I.A. interrogation program regardless of underlying facts or costs have been a persistent problem for many years,” she said. “This behavior was, and remains, unacceptable.”

July 19, 2013
By MARK MAZZETTI and SCOTT SHANE

Find this story at 19 July 2013

© 2013 The New York Times Company