FBI Surveillance of Times Square Suspect ‘Broke Down’
Accused Times Square bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad spent more than three hours at New York's JFK airport unwatched by authorities while he waited to board a plane out of the country because FBI surveillance of him "broke down," says an administration official familiar with the matter. The FBI is not denying that the surveillance encountered problems.
According to a timeline made available to Declassified by the administration official, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive information, Shahzad arrived at JFK airport at 7:30 p.m. EDT on Monday and bought a ticket for a flight to Dubai, intending, as reported earlier by NEWSWEEK, to take a connecting flight from there to Pakistan. Authorities earlier in the day—perhaps as early as 12:30 p.m. Monday—had decided to put Shahzad on a U.S.-wide official "no-fly list" due to his status as a prime suspect in the bombing investigation. But because that list only slowly makes its way into reservations computers operated by private airlines, the suspect was able to obtain both a ticket and boarding pass for his flight to the Persian Gulf emirate, the official said.
Shahzad apparently hung around the airport unnoticed for an hour or two. When his flight was called for boarding, he was allowed to board the flight unhindered.
About 10:40 p.m., after his flight to Dubai had already started boarding, officers from the Homeland Security department's Customs and Border Protection (CBP) bureau, who are responsible for collecting passenger manifests for a final vetting, got the passenger list for Shahzad's flight, the official said. The list was transmitted for review to the Terrorist Screening Center, a Washington, D.C.–area interagency unit managed by the FBI, which is responsible for maintaining terrorist screening databases, including the national no-fly list. A quick check of the list by the center turned up Shahzad's name, which had been entered on the master no-fly list just hours earlier. The center alerted CBP officers at JFK that the main Times Square bombing suspect had apparently been allowed to board a plane.
When uniformed CBP officers arrived at the departure gate, the official said, they discovered that the plane's door had already been closed. However, before the plane began its pushback from the gate, the CBP officers had the door reopened and went on the plane. They located Shahzad quickly. The bombing suspect's reaction was one of resignation, said the official familiar with events. "I was expecting you," he told the officers. "Are you NYPD or FBI?" The officers then showed him their badges and told him they were from Customs and Border Protection.
A second official, who also asked for anonymity, confirmed that Shahzad was taken off the plane after the door initially had been closed but before it left the gate. Both officials disputed reports that the plane had actually begun to taxi with Shahzad aboard. According to the second official, after Shahzad was removed from the plane, the door was shut again and began to taxi for the first time. At that point, the second official said, the plane was called back and the door opened a second time so that the FBI could "offload two additional persons of interest." There is no indication who these people are or why the FBI was interested in them, but nobody besides Shahzad so far has been charged by the Feds in connection with the failed bombing attempt.
Asked how Shahzad managed to spend three hours at the airport, get a ticket, and board a plane apparently outside the scrutiny of what was supposed to be tight FBI surveillance, one of the officials said: "It's fair to say there was a breakdown there." Details of how and why the FBI surveillance of Shahzad went awry are still murky at best. But the FBI is not denying that something might have gone amiss.
Another official familiar with the investigation told Declassified: "This situation was extremely fast-moving, involving multiple locations. The FBI identified him and within a few hours had already located him and begun surveillance, which, by its nature, involves risk-benefit considerations with respect to potential effects on the course of the investigation if the surveillance is detected. Risks can be mitigated by building in layers of redundancy, which was done in this case. In this case, he was added to appropriate watch lists. He was caught as he tried to escape."
In an e-mailed comment to Declassified, Richard Kolko, a spokesman for the FBI's New York office, said: "This was a complicated and fast-moving investigation which took only 55 hours from the incident to the arrest. We are not going to discuss specific operations."
While Homeland Security, often blamed for aviation security lapses and gaffes, can take credit for spotting and grabbing the suspect, officials concede not all of its procedures worked perfectly either. Once Shahzad's name had been entered on the no-fly list due to his status as a suspect in the bombing case, the alert on him should have been entered into all airline-reservation systems so that he would be denied a ticket and authorities would be alerted if and when he tried to buy one. According to a knowledgeable official, fearing that the no-fly listing would move too slowly through the system, Homeland's Transportation Security Administration did put out a special alert related to Shahzad and asked airlines to check their passenger lists by hand to see if his name was on them. But this emergency procedure didn't work, and he still wasn't taken off the plane until what was essentially the 59th minute of the 11th hour.
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