Election Reform

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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/12/nyregion/12LACK.html


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News of the Derwish connection reached the Buffalo F.B.I. on May 17, 2002. "Headquarters was calling and telling us that everybody's watching Buffalo," said David Britten, an agent there.

Within weeks, dozens of agents were working Lackawanna. Mr. Needham, Buffalo's one-man terrorism team, had gotten two partners on the case — Mr. Britten and Michael Urbanski, a state police investigator on loan to the F.B.I. The office had formed a terrorism task force of about 25 officers from federal, state and local agencies. Eventually, reinforcements arrived from around the country, in unmarked cars with out-of-state plates. "They stuck out like a sore thumb," said Dennis O'Hara, the Lackawanna police chief.

Investigators obtained secret foreign intelligence warrants to monitor phone and e-mail traffic, according to officials involved in the investigation. Getting a warrant approved is usually achingly slow, but Buffalo's applications flew through.

Headquarters ordered written updates twice a day, at 6 a.m. and 2 p.m. Mr. Mueller was briefed twice daily, the officials said, and he often made Lackawanna part of his daily briefing to President Bush. Stanley Borgia, then second in command in the Buffalo F.B.I., said, "I would look at my watch and say, `8:30. The president is saying to the director, `What's going on in Buffalo?' "

Investigators who a month earlier had been without hard evidence of a serious crime now had their eyes and ears in so many places that the hint of threat appeared almost everywhere.

On a pay phone, they detected what one referred to as "assessment calls" between Mr. Derwish and some suspects. "One of the recruiters was calling, `How are the guys doing?' " said an F.B.I. official. The concern was that Mr. Derwish might activate his recruits. In one call, an official said, a friend of the suspects warned Mr. Derwish that the F.B.I. was watching.

The approach of the Fourth of July in 2002 brought a chorus of terror warnings around the country. In Lackawanna, agents were told that one man named in the anonymous letter might be buying propane tanks, according to two law enforcement officials. They feared a bomb.

Then, just before July 4, an informant told the local police of overhearing talk that men dressed as Arab women might attack a mall with explosives hidden under their clothes. "It was tense, very tense," Chief O'Hara said. "I can tell you one thing, on the Fourth of July, I didn't let my wife or family go to any malls."

But the suspects barely stirred. "They just did their normal routine," said Mr. Borgia. "They just went about their normal lives."

In fact, throughout that summer they mostly went about their normal lives. But with the first anniversary of Sept. 11 approaching, with the case being briefed in Washington twice daily, with orders from the White House on down to prevent any act of terrorism, and with it increasingly clear the men had lied about training with Osama bin Laden, even normal looked suspicious.