- Hey, everybody get off the street.
- Off the street! - Let's go!
Get off the street! [distant sirens blaring]
- It's the middle of the goddamn night.
We don't have him.
We're finding bombs in public transit places.
He knew how to make a pressure cooker bomb
with a certain explosive mix.
He knew how to make another pressure cooker bomb
with a different explosive mix.
[explosion booms]
[glass shattering]
- And in all likelihood, you have a bomb factory
in a residential neighborhood in New Jersey.
[explosion booms]
- Now he's got pipe bombs.
- The guy definitely was, like, a homegrown
violent extremist, right? - He was.
- No know knew it. He wasn't on the radar.
- Massive manhunt right now is underway
for 28-year-old Ahmad Khan Rahimi.
- And we have a rush hour coming Tuesday morning
where 5.6 million people are
going to crowd into the subway trains of New York,
a million more into the New Jersey Transit system,
and we have, literally, a mad bomber on the loose.
[gunshot bangs]
- Holy shit.
[dramatic music]
- In the FBI, we make a lot of headlines.
♪
Drug busts,
mob stings,
terrorist takedowns.
- Get down! Get down!
- 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.
[indistinct radio chatter]
What really goes down,
we save that for each other
when we're talking agent to agent.
♪
This is "FBI True."
[ominous music]
♪
- Cindy Coppola is a 23-year veteran of the FBI.
She worked on cases that included organized crime
and terrorism,
and took part in multinational investigations
into drug trafficking and money laundering.
Coppola finished her career with the Los Angeles division,
running two offices, supervising investigations
and providing undercover security
for special events.
- So refresh my memory.
In 2016, that's when the Chelsea bombing happened,
and that's when you guys ended up
working together, correct?
- September 17, 2016.
New York is on security lockdown.
- John Miller was the former assistant director
of Public Affairs for the FBI.
He was the Deputy Commissioner for Intelligence
and Counterterrorism at the New York Police Department.
- United Nations General Assembly is there.
The world leaders who represent literally 90%
of the globe's population are in, like, what,
10 square blocks of the East Side of Manhattan.
Everything starts to go a little crazy.
[dramatic musical sting]
- Breaking news out of Seaside Park
where an explosion on the race course
of the Semper Five 5K puts the entire area on lockdown.
- So I was at Clemson University,
at a football game with my son--
he was a freshman at Clemson--
and my phone buzzed.
- Chuck Berger joined the New York Joint
Terrorism Task Force in 1999.
He spent 22 years working with the FBI's
Counterterrorism Division.
- And I looked at the phone, and I get this update
from the JTTF that a suspected IED had gone off
in Seaside Heights in New Jersey,
which is in Newark Field Office's territory.
- You're down there in Clemson.
You're thinking, I hope I don't have to go back for this.
- Exactly. - Right?
- Right. And then a couple minutes later
or half an hour later, it came back,
was confirmed that it was an actual device.
So Newark FBI was investigating it.
- That's a symbolic target, military target,
and civilian target because there's,
you know, a couple of thousand people
running in this race.
If the bomb had gone off on time,
there would have been casualties.
Now we were looking at this as something serious.
But it was 70 miles away,
so we were monitoring it
because you just don't know what happens next.
- Their bomb techs were on the scene,
collecting the evidence, doing the forensics,
and really, the next thing we knew--
it was about 8:30 at night,
and one of my agents calls me.
And he's like, a bomb just went off in New York.
[explosion booms]
[glass shattering]
[shouting]
- Hey, everybody, get off of the street!
- Of the street! - Let's go!
Get off the street!
[indistinct shouting]
[distant sirens blaring]
[suspenseful music]
- A device had been placed outside
of a demolition dumpster
and had launched this demolition dumpster
all the way across 23rd Street,
about 125 feet downrange across two-way traffic
and into the sidewalk on the other side.
- Did people get hurt? - A number of people were hurt.
- Come with me. Come with me.
I'm holding you, okay? Come with me.
You're okay.
Nothing's going to happen.
Okay?
[sirens blaring]
♪
- About half an hour later, a lady comes out
of her building on 27th Street,
sees something suspicious in the garbage.
- I was at the scene on 23rd Street.
And my sergeant called, and he said,
hey, we have a suspicious package up on 27th Street.
And I said, Andy, a bomb just went off in Manhattan.
Everything is gonna be a suspicious package.
And he said, Boss,
I'm looking at a pressure cooker
with a cell phone taped to the top of it,
and, like, a red light flashing and wires going inside.
- Holy shit. There's another one.
[suspenseful music]
- Now we're sitting on a third device.
We had this beautiful thing here.
It's a ticking bomb, but it's intact.
That is a potential bottomless pit of evidence,
forensics, you know.
- Yeah, for fingerprints or anything.
- For everything. - Everything.
- We want to know what's inside it.
- Yeah. - Who touched it.
Who had a hair fall off their head
while they were closing it that could, you know,
could get us the DNA.
I mean, we wanted to know everything
that device could tell us.
We also had to get inside it, and this was--
this was a very diabolical bomb-maker,
because it had been epoxied shut with this cement.
It means that the bomb maker was saying,
I want so much pressure that the top isn't gonna pop off,
that the pressure cooker itself--
the pot is gonna break into a million pieces,
and my shrapnel is gonna fly at, you know,
15,000 feet per second and kill anyone nearby.
But somebody had worked hard to make this deadly.
There's opportunity there.
[chuckles] It's also a little bit dangerous.
- Because they'd use the robot?
[upbeat music]
♪
- The bomb squad is operating the robot.
The FBI agents and the detectives are saying,
get us the phone.
♪
So the robot's claw cuts the wires on the phone,
picks up the phone, turns around,
and rolls slowly down the street,
west on 27th Street.
And at the end of the street,
half a block from where the bomb is,
There's a bomb squad detective with a bag,
and the robot comes up with its claw,
opens the claw.
The phone drops into the bag.
So that phone is rushed, like, right then and there.
This phone and evidence from the post-blast scene
on 23rd Street--
everything's going to Quantico.
One lab, one team, one set of evidence,
one chain of custody for that evidence.
♪
They called the whole explosive section
of the lab in and said, stand by.
Evidence is going to be coming in in dribs and drabs,
'cause we got one post blast,
and we got one hot, live device here.
So we didn't know if we had one person--
- Or several. - Putting down bombs
or several people putting down several bombs.
- How did you end up linking the subject to that house?
- The Jersey phone and the other phone are burners.
And we eventually find out it came from a Dollar Store,
and it was a set of five, I think.
- So what do you do then?
- We have a house under surveillance
that's above a chicken store.
- And that, when one of the phones was activated,
it was activated from that house.
- So it was activated at that address,
but there's a bunch of people there, right?
- Yes. - So you have no clue
who's gonna be the bad guy.
- So at this point we're looking at the house
and who's there, and there's a number of people,
siblings, parents, and cousins, and husbands.
[ominous music]
And this has taken a tremendous amount of work.
This wasn't just the JTTF, right?
We pulled in scores of agents from outside the JTTF,
detectives from all over the NYPD
and just going block to block, giving them an assignment,
pulling video, seeing who walked where, and going back.
It's a very manual process.
- We were doing an extensive video canvas, saying,
let's go up and down all of these streets
and try and figure out how did these things get here.
And on 27th Street we get a couple of breaks.
- We're able to pull video, and we could see
a male pulling two rolling bags.
He's wearing a backpack and a fanny pack.
- Walks in. Just walking.
- He's walking down the street, and he--
- No car. - Nope.
He walks down the street, and he places the rolling bag
next to the dumpster and walks away.
Two gentlemen walked down the street, well-dressed.
One of them spots the rolling bag in the garbage,
pauses, picks it up,
unzips it, takes out the bomb,
and looks at it. - Are you kidding me?
- I kid you not.
- Who are these two guys?
And we're thinking, the bomb didn't function,
so they sent the second team, like,
to flip the arming switch, to adjust the timer,
to see what was wrong, which, in and of itself,
is not a desirable job.
Gee, the bomb didn't quite go off.
Go play with it. - Yeah.
I wouldn't want that job.
- And they take the bomb, and like John described,
it looks like a bomb
from, like, the Road Runner cartoon, right?
It looks like a bomb.
- There's a pressure cooker with a telephone
attached to the top of it.
He puts that down. He picks up the bag.
He holds it up, like "look what I got."
It's a Louis Vuitton roller bag.
And then they keep going down the street, talking like--
- Nothing happened. - Like nothing happened.
- It wasn't really-- it was a knockoff, counterfeit.
But-- - Knockoff.
I was going to say, it's probably a knockoff.
It's New York, yeah.
- But that becomes part of the debate, which is,
we had a room full of agents and detectives,
and the room splits down the middle,
where half the room is saying,
that's a guy who-- that guy's to arm the device.
And other people are like, this is New York.
It's garbage day. He's garbage-picking.
But now we're pulling video and trying to backtrack
to figure out, you know,
where did these two gentlemen come from?
Where did they go?
Where did our bomber come from?
Where did they go?
- So when you guys saw the video of the guy bringing
the roller bag and you potentially had that house,
you know, in New Jersey with the family,
did you ever show that video to the family
to identify if that's a family member?
- So we looked at the family members
that we knew who were in the house
and compared their photos to the video.
- And you had two brothers. - Okay.
Two brothers, okay.
- So you had Ahmad, and you had his brother.
And as we got more and more video of him
in different places and clearer shots of the face--
and now you're looking at the two.
You're like, is it this brother or that brother?
You're like, no, it's that brother.
- And it appeared to be Ahmad.
- We know somebody bought
five burner phones in a store.
We know we've got three phones attached
to bombs that have already gone off or been rendered safe.
It means there's a couple of more phones out there,
which suggests there could be more bombs out there.
- And in all likelihood, you have a bomb factory
in a residential neighborhood in New Jersey.
Well, you're not just gonna go knock on the door
and say, where's Ahmad.
- I remember hearing that the suspected bomber
tested a bomb at the house or some--
or somewhere in New Jersey.
- He was blowing stuff up in the backyard to figure out,
like, is this bomb design functional?
- Sure.
- Is my mixture going to high order
when it's time to blow up.
[explosion booms]
But we don't find that till later.
We think we know who the bomber is.
We have a house under surveillance
that's above a chicken store,
you know, in a Jersey town
and a whole bunch of people come out.
The surveillance team is saying, we got a male out,
we've got a female out, we've got another male out,
groups getting into the car.
I'm sitting there saying, okay, now what are we going to do?
One of them looks like our guy.
Confirmed it's our guy?
Not confirmed it's our guy, looks like our guy.
Car is on the move.
We got a very good surveillance team.
We've got elements of SWAT behind them,
and then they get on the highway,
heading to New York City.
And now it's really decision time.
Here's the problem.
I mean, these are people from New Jersey.
If they go south, they're probably
going to Kennedy Airport.
If they go north, they're probably
coming into Manhattan.
Neither one of those is a good option for us,
so we've got to do this stop.
- Right.
- So what happened next?
- Surveillance team drops back,
SWAT ops, operatives, close in.
They block the car off.
There's broken glass.
There's flash-bangs, people pulled out of the cars.
- The entire Belt Parkway is now jammed with traffic
because there's these cars
and people being yanked out and put on the ground
and hands up.
And everybody's got their cell phones,
and they're filming this.
And it's going to Twitter.
It's going to YouTube.
- And Ahmad's not there.
[dramatic music]
♪
- We don't have our felony subject.
We have a bunch of family members.
And now, in the train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey,
two homeless guys find a backpack.
One of them happens to be looking for a backpack.
He wants it for a job interview.
So these two guys go be-boppin' down the street
till they open the backpack, and there's pipes
and there's wires and there's cell phones.
And now we have another ticking bomb.
[suspenseful music]
- That's one of the other phones.
- So there's a number of different devices
of different designs, which is interesting.
So these devices are not pressure cookers
with phones on them.
They're pipe bombs with fuses. - Okay.
- We're not liking this guy because he knew
how to make a pressure cooker bomb
with a certain explosive mix.
He knew how to make another pressure cooker bomb
with a different explosive mix.
Now he's got pipe bombs.
- They bring out the FBI robot.
And again, they pull open the bag.
The devices were so unstable--
[explosion booms]
They detonate, and it destroys the robot.
- Oh, wow. - The entire robot--
they blew up-- it blew up the robot,
killed the robot.
- He got a full robotic funeral, though.
[laughter]
So it's not just a guy who went on the internet
and figured out how to make a bomb.
This seems to be a skilled bomb maker
who knows how to make a number
of different kinds of devices.
It's the middle of the goddamn night.
We don't have him.
We're finding bombs in public transit places,
and we have a rush hour coming Tuesday morning
where 5.6 million people are going to crowd
into the subway trains of New York,
a million more into the New Jersey Transit system,
and we have, literally, a mad bomber on the loose.
- So we don't have him in-pocket.
Now the presumption is he knows that we know,
and so where are we doubling our efforts,
trying to find Ahmad?
So this is truly a manhunt.
[suspenseful music]
♪
- Meanwhile, at police headquarters,
we're swearing in the new commissioner.
His first day started at midnight the night before,
and he's saying, we've been all this time
without a terrorist attack in New York City, since 9/11,
and on my first day we have one
and now a mad bomber on the loose.
He said, I need this guy to be caught
before I'm sworn in,
and I said, we're on it.
- [chuckles] - And It's 5:00 in the morning.
We've got a couple of thousand law enforcement people
who know this guy's identity and are looking for him
along with the FBI, the NYPD,
the JTTF, the NSA, the CIA.
I mean, there's no part of the intelligence community
that isn't pulling threads on, where did this guy travel?
Who does he know? Who does he call?
All those wheels are turning.
But at this point, we're sitting in the JOC,
talking about, okay, so how do we get this
to everybody who's not sitting in front of a television
or listening to the radio in their car?
And somebody says, you know that thing where
all the phones go off and they make that terrible noise
and they say, like, a storm is coming
and here's the evacuation route?
That's FEMA.
It's like, who's FEMA?
Federal Emergency Management.
That's Homeland Security. Homeland Security.
We got Homeland Security there.
Get FEMA on the phone.
And we're talking to the FEMA guy, and we're saying,
we need to put this out.
He said, that's not a weather alert.
That's like a "wanted" thing, you know.
Like, I know, but you guys have that button
where you can make it to 50 miles
or 100 miles or 150--
we need that entire Metropolitan area donut.
We're talking New York, New Jersey, you know,
the entire Metropolitan area.
We need that to go to every phone,
and you can make that happen--
this guy's picture, this guy's name.
Find this guy.
And the guy says, I'm going to have to get authorization
because it's not weather.
[chuckling] But we can't do a picture.
Do you know what year it is?
What do you mean you can't text out a picture?
My kid's 12.
He can text out a picture.
And they said, sir, the system was designed
with the carriers, and it carries
a minimum amount of data, which is what they agreed to.
And that doesn't write-- look, mister,
we've never asked the general public,
have you seen a storm that looks like this before?
- So it wasn't an obvious call.
You put somebody's face out
and it's the wrong person, and that person either
accelerates the violence, or maybe an act of violence
is committed against him or somebody who looks like him.
It was--it was a hard call.
- But it was the right call.
- Everybody's phone blows up.
- BOLO alert. [alarm sounding]
- And here's this thing-- find Ahmad Khan Rahimi.
- And I remember seeing cable news,
and the hosts look down at their phones
because their phones all started--
- And they're all going off at--
- Right. - Outstanding.
- So it went off on live TV.
[suspenseful music]
It was about half an hour later.
We get this call from Linden, New Jersey.
And so a business owner
owns a bowling alley kind of bar.
There's a person sleeping on his--
by the front door.
So he called 911.
- The police officer from Linden, New Jersey, pulls up.
- So this is Angel Padilla.
He's an ex-Marine.
He wakes up that morning.
He sees the BOLO and gets his ballistic helmet
and puts it in the car and his other vest.
And he tapes the picture of this guy to the dashboard,
and he gets the call of the homeless guy sleeping
in the doorway.
- As you watch the body camera video,
if there was a noise that went off
like when your head clicks,
holy shit, that's the guy-- - Right.
- You could almost hear it
because you see Angel's demeanor change slightly.
He goes to his radio, and he says--
- He calls another car.
He says, are you out there?
And nobody answers.
[radio beeps]
- Dispatch to 709.
[ominous music]
♪
[gunshots bang]
- Angel Padilla's hit.
Meanwhile, a couple of blocks away,
there's a cop named Hammer,
is coming down in the SUV, sees Rahimi.
Rahimi shoots at him. [gunshot bangs]
The bullet goes through the window,
hits his light package up at the top there,
and ends up hitting him in the forehead.
So he's been shot in the head.
- Holy shit. Wow. - And he says,
well, I don't have time to shoot at this guy,
so he goes to run him over.
And he just misses him, and Rahimi dodges the car
and is still running and shooting
as other officers are trying to set a perimeter
around him, respond in.
And there's a brand-new rookie, also an ex-Marine.
[gunshot bangs] Rahimi is firing at him
from across the street.
- They're shooting at the car!
[gunshot bangs]
[sirens blaring]
[gunshot bangs] [indistinct]
[gunshot bangs]
He's shooting [inaudible].
- As the rookie comes out with his gun,
he remembers, oh, there's a rifle in this car,
and I was a Marine.
So he picks up the rifle, and he aims at Rahimi.
- [inaudible]
- And he fires the shots.
[gunshots bang]
And Rahimi is hit.
[indistinct shouting]
[suspenseful music]
♪
- Meanwhile, the new commissioner
has taken the oath.
We hand him an index card saying,
"Suspect down, shot by cops in Linden, New Jersey,
in custody."
And he's like, okay, now I can get sworn in.
[applause]
- Our Counterterrorism and Intelligence Bureaus
are second to none.
We saw this in action on Saturday night
when our personnel responded quickly and decisively
to that blast in Chelsea.
- There was a lot going on that day.
[explosion booms]
[glass shattering]
[dramatic music]
♪
[gunshot bangs]
♪
- Going back to the two guys that were on the street
that came out at dinner--
did you guys ever identify them?
- They went to their room.
They turned on the news.
They realized what they did
and that they were in big trouble.
So they went out the back of the hotel
and threw it in a dumpster.
So of course-- [laughs]
- They didn't take the fake Louis Vuitton.
- They did not. - [laughs]
- So, of course, they're like-- - And now we want the bag.
- Yeah. - We want the bag.
And so now we had agents and detectives
tracking dumpsters to landfills,
trying to recover the bag.
♪