Original subtitles

Times Square on a beautiful Saturday,

it is packed. There was a T-shirt vendor

who saw an individual get out of a car,

and take a lighter and toss it in the passenger seat.

- And then you heard this little pop-pop-pop-pop.

- All that glass, all those bits and shards

that are from 20 stories, 30 stories high.

They're going to come crashing to the ground.

This is a bomber.

Are they going to activate some other bombs?

Find the guy. Stop the next act.

- We need to pull every single camera.

He's on a plane.

- Clock is ticking. - Get that plane back now!

In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.

Drug busts, mob stings,

terrorist takedowns.

We understand why people want to tell stories about us.

- Mark it. - Freeze!

- FBI. - FBI!

- Action!

- But they don't know the half of it.

What really goes down?

We save that for each other,

when we're talking agent to agent.

This is FBI True.

- Guys, it's so great to see you.

Haven't seen you in, like, a minute.

- Kristy Kottis is a 24-year veteran of the FB.

She worked gangs, crimes against children,

as well as human and drug trafficking.

- Pete where were you on May 1st, 2010?

- I was in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn.

- Peter Licata was one of the FBI's top bomb experts.

He dealt with more than 300 Improvised Explosive Devices

on missions to Iraq.

In 2010, he led the Weapons of Mass Destruction

Squad for New York City.

My counterparts in the NYPD bomb squad,

they tell me we got a thing going on Times Square.

You probably want to start rolling this way.

I got a call, not unusual

because it always happens either on a Friday or Saturday

when you're getting ready to relax.

The assistant special agent in charge called up,

"Can you respond as the on-scene commander?"

- Greg Ehrie was recruited from the US Air Force

to join the FBI,

where he worked organized crime and intelligence cases.

In 2010, he was Supervisory Special Agent

for the New York Domestic Terrorism Squad.

- At this point, we had been doing a lot of bomb threats

- We've been through this before.

This is not our first time.

And so everyone knows what their mission is.

- Richard Frankel got his start in the FBI

investigating the infamous Gambino crime family.

After the attacks on 9/11,

he moved into national securit.

By 2009, Frankel was responsible

for domestic terrorist threats

for the FBI's New York field office.

- So you're first on scene. What do you see?

- It's Times Square on a beautiful Saturday,

right around when shows are letting out,

shows are coming in, it is packed.

I look for my team. I look for my counterparts,

and the first thing goes, what do we have here?

And what they tell me is there was a T-shirt vendor

right on the corner of 45th and Broadway

who saw an individual get out of a car, a Nissan Pathfinder,

and take a lighter and toss it in the passenger seat.

- And then you heard this little pop-pop-pop-pop!

Which was almost like a firecracker

going off and stuff. And then sparks inside the car,

you could see them.

- At that point, the T-shirt vendor

sees a fire start to engulf the car.

- And when that happened, everyone started running.

Go, go! Everybody back up!

Everybody back up!

Come on, keep going back. Just keep moving.

- The FDNY, they see two red, five-gallon gasoline jugs

in the back seat of this of this SUV.

They see some fusing systems. They see some pyrotechnics,

a.k.a. firecrackers, consumer grade firecrackers.

They see three propane tanks in the cargo area of this SUV.

And then they see a really long gun locker.

And they're like, this isn't a normal car fire.

We've got something more.

- So based on your experience as a bomb tech

looking at this device,

you're recognizing how powerful this would have been

if it went off. How powerful are we talking?

- Catastrophic.

You have Times Square. You have 45th Street.

You have to worry about the fragmentation

from the vehicle, the device itself.

And then what we call secondary and tertiary fragmentation.

Which is all that glass.

All those bits and shards that are from 20 stories,

30 stories high.

They're going to come crashing to the ground

and not just at 45th and Broadway.

We're talking all the way up the east side on 45th Street.

We're talking around the block

and we're talking all the way back down to the Hudson River,

going down the west Side.

In order to get a view of the device,

you use a remote-controlled robot to do a reconnaissance

for you to get a look at the hazard

without putting a bomb tech in harm's way.

First thing you do is you make the device safe,

a.k.a. render it safe neutralizer,

which means you separate any fusing system

or the switch from the energetic or the explosives.

Then once we have the explosive isolated,

we can put it in a vehicle or a flatbed

and we can haul it out of there.

Whether he was able to set this device off or not,

it doesn't matter. The bomb didn't explode,

but this is still a bomber.

- So all these thoughts are starting to race

through my head. Now the temperature's

gone up even more, because you're thinking,

it's not a pipe bomb, which is damaging enough.

How big could this be?

- It was just a couple of short years ago,

you had the Mexican consulate bombing.

You had a bombing at the Times Square

recruiting station just around the corner.

You had a potential attack on the New York City subway system.

- Our job since 9/11 has been to prevent

an act of terrorism in New York and elsewhere.

And we can't let this happen a second time on our watch.

- I'm starting to think at this point,

okay, where's the subject? Who was driving the car?

Because are they going to activate some other bombs?

And in my head, I literally am thinking of a stopwatch

being clicked. because now, the hunt is on.

The JOC is now completely up and running.

You've got analysts, you've got surveillance teams,

you've got lawyers from both the U.S. Attorney's office

and the FBI.

The entire task force is up and running

and it's 24-7.

I'm on the phone with Greg, with Pete,

with everyone saying, is there any other bomb?

Is there any other actor here in the United States

that we have to worry about? And the mission was,

find the guy. Stop the next act.

Everyone was about the mission

- Remember Times Square, busy.

People are moving around. It's not evacuated yet.

Who came out of that car and went somewhere?

We need to pull every single camera.

You know, I need to see a face. Who came out of that car?

- Wasn't there some information that we ran down

because it was video of a man changing his clothes?

- We are currently examining video that shows

a white male in his 40s

in Shubert Alley, looking back in the direction

of West 45 Street.

He also was seen shedding a dark-coloured shirt,

revealing a red one underneath.

This happened about a half block

from where the vehicle was parked.

- Looks like he's coming from the car.

Very suspicious. Goes down an alley.

- It's a clue.

So we start to focus in on that very quickly.

That became a person of interest.

So we are getting some information that's coming in.

The license plate, because it was obvious,

we got that one.

- We run it. What do we get?

- Comes back to a body shop over in Brooklyn.

So let's get people out to that body shop,

find out what we know. But remember, everywhere we go,

even if it doesn't look good, you're assuming

this is a terrorism organization.

This is a bomber. This is somebody who's armed.

So you can't just go willy nilly.

I remember them dragging the owner of this body shop

out of bed, you know, and talking to him.

He was able to very quickly say it belonged to a pickup truck

that he still had right there. He said, I thought the plates

were still in the car. So we know that's a dead end.

So I remember banging Pete and his folks hard to say,

"Give me something from here."

There's a set of keys

that somebody had left, didn't know what they were to.

- We're looking for what we call trace evidence,

which are fingerprints, hairs, fibers, any DNA,

the lighter and the keys that are found

on the floorboard of the seat.

- Pete was able to relay to us the VIN number,

the one in the windshield was obliterated.

And at some point, very quickly, when you were going to move

the car, somebody was able to get the VIN

from the frame underneath.

- Finding the VIN... - Huge.

- Huge, and that is almost a turning point in our mind

because we're like, we can solve this.

- The VIN number came back to, I remember, to an 18-year-old

who had sold the car to somebody.

We start sending people out and it was over in...

- Connecticut. - Connecticut, it was up

in Connecticut.

So we sent a group of people up there,

and she tells us she got a call from somebody who said,

"I'd like to buy the car." And he looked at it.

He paid cash. But the brother stops

and is talking to our agents and says,

"You know, he never gave us a name."

The person who bought the car did make the mistake.

He gave them a phone number. So we start running that down.

- You've got the phone number, you run it...

- Yeah, numerous calls to Pakistan,

specifically on the... Right before the bomb

was put in place. Now it's, okay. Game is on.

We know this is an act of terror.

The focus now is find this individual

and who else is connected.

And then we found a clip of video...

- And you will see that the Muslim war has just started.

- Right now, we have the VIN,

the license plate, the phone number.

- We start running all the numbers

with our other government agency friends.

We run that and we found the person who bought the car

did make numerous calls to Pakistan.

- And during this time, we also have a Pakistani Taliban

group releasing a video taking credit for the bomb,

even though it didn't explode.

- Up until this point, it's a criminal case.

But once you now see Pakistan and you see it on the phone,

we now have a whole new host of tradecraft

that we can use.

Um, we've got the military there.

You know, their criminal and counterintelligence

investigators are with us.

You can start seeing who on the other side

was being talked to.

And now reverse that

and see who they're talking to in the United States.

- Pete, did this bomb have an IED signature

that you recognized from a certain...

Like, these are used in Afghanistan.

These were used in Pakistan.

- You have a locker that's weighing over about

200 pounds, full of some type of fertilizer mixture

with propane tanks and gasoline cylinders

and all this stuff.

A signature of what was happening overseas.

Al Qaeda has posted several

videos providing step-by-step instructions

on how to construct a car bomb

using propane tanks and gasoline.

- So it's like, okay, what did this guy think

he or she was going to do?

And it's now starting to scale in our mind's eye,

the technical expertise of this individual.

So we went to rural Pennsylvania.

We found a similar vehicle.

We were in an isolated, desolated area,

very rural, not anyone around. And we built a device,

over 200 pounds of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil detonating.

It was a devastating device.

Now, you picture that in the middle of Times Square

at six-something on a Saturday.

- When Pete and his team set off that live shot,

that bomb...

we all looked at that and said, "What if?"

- So we've got the phone number.

- We run that, and a young analyst comes up and says,

"Hey, that number was listed on a customs form

a year or two before, and it comes back to somebody."

So in other words, somebody had come into the United States,

gone through customs and listed that number as a contact.

And that was Faisal Shahzad.

. We got something.

Now we have something real.

The bomb squad. They're still working the bomb

and getting any information that you can.

Analysts now focus on Faisal Shahzad.

Get us everything.

- And there was a clip of video...

- Jihad is the obligate duty in Islam of every Muslim.

This attack on the United States

will also be a revenge attack for all the Mujahideen.

- So now we have oh, this is really

looking like our person,

- We actually went out and found

where the firecrackers were bought.

- We started to receive some of that video feed

and that wound up being Faisal Shahzad.

It was again, collecting that evidence

to get that paper to get him arrested.

- We know who he is. We know where he is.

We've got the surveillance team out there,

and they're following Faisal Shahzad in Connecticut.

- Again, you're looking, is he going to meet

with somebody? Is there somebody else?

Is there another SUV out there that's rigged?

Is there something else out there?

The temperature's rising.

- All the Muslim Arabs

that have been martyred,

I will take revenge on their behalf inshallah.

And I really wish that the hearts of the Muslim

will be pleased with this attack and inshallah.

- Surveillance team is following him around

and in the JOC, behind the scenes,

we're talking to Rich. We're talking to the special

agent in charge. And as he's going around,

what if he gets out of a car?

What if he pulls up into a school parking lot?

What if he gets out carrying a backpack?

Do we arrest him? Do we have enough to arrest him?

We have to engage him.

Is this going to be a bomber that we have to stop?

We're putting agents in harm's way.

- Right. - They're going to potentially

come face to face with somebody

who just planted a bomb in Times Square.

So all these thoughts are going on.

And at one point,

he comes out of his residence...

He is in his SUV, a white Isuzu Trooper,

drives to a mall.

He parks in a parking lot. We're making decisions

literally on the spot live.

And he gets out of the car wearing, I think,

shorts and a t-shirt. So our comfort level

at least goes down.

But we come up with the idea,

"Hey, while he's in this mall, we don't know how much

time we have. Get that keychain

that we found in the Nissan Pathfinder

in Times Square.

- You mentioned there was another set of keys.

Were those keys found in the car

or like in the ignition on the seat?

- I think they were found on the floorboards.

He just threw things in the car

in the middle of Times Square. Dumb mistake, right?

- Right. - So we go up to Connecticut

and we try the second set of keys

in the lock of his car.

So now we know the lawyers are happy.

We can arrest this person.

- So we're back at the command post

and we know he went back to his residence

and everything our surveillance is telling me,

we know that he's still inside.

So we're going to get our FBI SWAT team

stacked at the door, which means they're going to be

ready to go and crash the door.

I actually start the briefing and as I'm briefing,

I get tapped on the shoulder by a member of the JTTF,

the federal air marshal liaison.

He goes, "Rich, I gotta talk to you."

I'm like, "Listen, I can't talk to you now.

We're going to go." I go, "We got surveillance

on him," and we start arguing.

"JTTF, FBI, we think this guy is in the apartment."

He goes, "Faisal Shahzad is not in his room.

He's at the airport. He's on a plane."

Everything our surveillance is telling me,

we know that he's still inside.

Faisal Shahzad is not in his room.

- Somebody says, "Where's the car?"

He's driving a white Isuzu Trooper. It's not there.

- I believe there was another white vehicle nearby.

So when the change of the eye happened,

they didn't even think that the vehicle would move

because there's still another white vehicle

in that general location.

So the federal air marshal liaison.

He goes, "Rich, I gotta talk to you.

He's at the airport. He's on a plane."

I got the documentation here.

That's his passport number. That's his date of birth.

The only thing we don't have is the picture."

He's like, "This is the guy.

He's on a plane. Get that plane back now!"

- Inshallah eight years has passed by in Afghanistan

and you'll see that the Muslim war has just started.

- I make it from 14th Street to JFK in, like 18 minutes.

- Legend. - No, he didn't.

- Greg, you dispute the fact. - I dispute this.

- I made it in 18 minutes. - He got there very fast.

He got there in very good time. - I had troopers

actually tell me I drove well.

A trooper never tells an FBI agent they drove well

unless he did something like that.

So we get out of the car, we all go running in

into Terminal 4, I believe it was.

- it's a footrace now. It's a straight on sprint.

He gets to the airport, he gets on the plane.

They shut the door, - And that plane is,

by all accounts now,

basically going to be entering international space.

We have to know, are there guns?

Are there bombs? Are there any other bad guys?

We have to know this immediately.

- Imagine you're on the plane. You're Faisal Shahzad,

and you think you're home free. Doors close.

You know, please prepare for takeoff.

- Engines wind back down, plane turns around.

You go back to the gate.

- I think it was Customs and Border Protection.

They went on board, I think, with a couple of Port Authority

cops and brought Faisal Shahzad off the plane.

And they've now, for the first time, I think,

in the history of JFK,

taken somebody off of an airplane

that had already left the gate.

So at this point, we have to take care

of what's going on in New Haven.

But we want to do it smart and safe

because that place could be wired.

- Bomb techs go ahead and they start

clearing for hazards, tripwires, booby traps.

Then that's passed to the command post,

going, "Alright. We're good."

- And then you got the three suits from, you know,

the Joint Terrorism Task Force,

who then take him into a room to begin the interview.

And again, this is not supposed to be a Mirandaed interview.

The interview basically is public safety.

And I said to the to the agent and the detectives,

"Do not Mirandize him. I want him to waive

presentment to the courts.

I want him to waive the attorney.

I want him to waive everything he can

and that he wants to speak to us in private."

And he goes, they go back in and said, "Yep, he does.

And by the way, we kind of can't shut him up.

He keeps wanting to tell us what's going on."

- So we have the homerun already.

We have, the human being,

we have the parts that we believe hr's associated with.

All this does is now put that final nail in the coffin

and put the final, "Happy birthday, Faisal.

We gotcha..." - Exactly.

- ...on the cake for the prosecutor to go,

"We've got our guy, and there's no doubt in anyone's eye.

- A suspect is now in custody

and is being questioned.

The American people can be assured that the FBI

and their partners in this process

have all the tools and experience they need

to learn everything we can.

And that includes what, if any,

connection this individual has to terrorist groups.

Shahzad surprised a NY courtroom,

telling a judge that he wanted to plead guilty

in what was expected to be a routine arraignment.

He said he would plead guilty and 100 times more.

- 53 hours from the lighting the fuse to being under arrest.

The fact that the JTTF worked the way it did.

It was as it should be.

Subtitling: difuze