Week 3 Discussion

NYPD's COUNTERTERRORISM DIVISION

Unless objectives are converted into action, they are not objectives; they are

dreams.

Peter F. Drucker

In November 2001, weeks after Al Qaeda had successfully attacked New York City for the second time, newly appointed police commissioner Ray

Kelly decided that NYPD would fight its own war against terrorism. The

federal government had provided for the city's protection in 1993 when the

group later known as Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center, and the feds

were also responsible when two planes devastated the Twin Towers. The time

had come, Kelly believed, to make New York's first line of defense the NYPD

rather than the U.S. military or what cops call the “three letter guys”—the CIA,

DHS, FBI, CIA, and NSA.

Specifically, Kelly took three bold actions: establish a counterterrorism

division; dramatically expand the intelligence division (which had been

essentially an escort service for visiting dignitaries) and hire a former senior

CIA official, David Cohen, to run it; and increase the number of cops working

with the FBI on the Joint Terrorism Task Force. But listing these three actions

does not convey the enormity of the challenge Kelly faced. According to

Cohen, in the early days of the Kelly regime, everything was intense and

anything seemed possible. “It was like putting tires on a speeding car,” Cohen

said.

Although NYPD might have 50,000 employees and a budget of nearly $4

billion, Kelly was essentially trying to transform a local police department into

an organization that could compete on an international scale. If they were to

make New York City safe again, Kelly and Cohen thought they needed to build

something different from the federal agencies; that meant an organization with

minimum bureaucracy and maximum flexibility. The result was basically a

combination of crime fighting and intelligence gathering, a hybrid approach

that has since become known as “intelligence-led policing.” Journalist

Christopher Dickey explains, “The aim should be to gather information and

intelligence, identify risk, and then manage the risks by intervening selectively

to protect against the threat. Sometimes that means detaining a suspect, but use

of information and intimidation to disrupt potential plots may be even more

effective. Sometimes, all that's required is to make a target harder to hit, or to

put on a show that makes it seem so.”

Plans to do this type of policing were developed in morning meetings that

Kelly held with the heads of the intelligence division and counterterrorism

division every day at eight o'clock sharp. Because Kelly never missed a

morning, Cohen never missed a meeting. From those meetings, Cohen said,

“We created the playbook.”

Why would a city need its own CIA? Some would say New York City had

no choice. Terrorists are obsessed with New York City, focusing on it, Dickey

writes, “like a compass needle quivering toward magnetic north.” Consider

this. The 1998 remake of Godzilla, starring Matthew Broderick, was largely

rejected by American audiences, but Al Qaeda sympathizers abroad loved it.

The scenes of Godzilla stomping across New York City, crushing everything

in its path, were mesmerizing and inspiring. One captured terrorist leader

warned of an attack against “the bridge in the Godzilla movie.” Interrogators

had to rent the film to find out what he meant: the Brooklyn Bridge.

Moreover, organizations like the FBI and the CIA didn't always share vital

information. Therefore, NYPD began to get its intelligence its own way,

posting cops with their counterparts in London, Paris, Amman, Montreal,

Santo Domingo, Singapore, Tel Aviv, and other foreign cities. Once the

division began to gather important information on its own, it could deal with

the FBI and CIA from a position of strength. “There is no such thing as

information sharing,” said Cohen. “There is only information trading.”

Language was the key. NYPD could not run informers in immigrant

communities, much less undercover cops, if it didn't have personnel who spoke

the dialects. NYPD could not have the Cyber Intelligence Unit successfully

patrol chat rooms if it didn't have personnel who could talk about the same

street corners and schools that others in the chat room knew. A record search

showed that about 2500 department employees spoke a foreign language. The

department's Chinese speakers can converse in Fukienese as well as Mandarin;

its Spanish linguists talk with Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Honduran, Puerto

Rican, or Dominican accents. NYPD officers speak Russian, French, German,

Farsi, Dari, and Pashto, too. In contrast, because of strict security clearance

procedures, the CIA, the FBI, the U.S. military, and the U.S. State Department

are weak in linguists.

Though language is hugely important in eliciting intelligence, the Counter

Terrorism Division had other operations designed to prevent future attacks. For

example:

OPERATION HERCULES. Every day, officers of different precincts

go to a location that was chosen at random to provide a show of force to

deter anyone out there who might be planning an attack. The heavily

armed “Hercules team” also moves around the city at random protecting

high-value targets and infrastructure and disrupting operational planning

details of terrorists. The reason for this theatricality is that cops “have to

make themselves seem all-powerful and all knowing.”

OPERATION NEXUS. The NYPD also involves business in

counterterrorism. A program called Operation Nexus, begun in 2002,

networked police officers “with businesses that might be exploited by

terrorists. Companies that sold chemicals like hydrogen peroxide or

nitrate fertilizers, the stuff of homemade bombs, needed to have their

consciousness raised. But so did self-storage warehouses (where

components and chemicals might be hidden), exterminators (poisons and

sprayers), propane gas vendors (the canisters can serve as ready-made

explosives), cell phone vendors (mobiles work as timers and triggers). …

some 80 different categories of businesses were deemed of interest to the

police.”

OPERATION KABOOM. Inside the windowless Counterterrorism

Bureau headquarters, the Special Projects Group, or “red cell,” plots

terrorist attacks. The idea is to take several cops who have no particular

experience with explosives and see what they can pull together from

information on the Internet and from suppliers within a few hours drive

of Manhattan. One model they used was the massive bomb detonated by

the Irish Republican Army at Manchester, England, in June 1996.

Disturbingly, the team was able to pick up 1200 pounds of ammonium

nitrate—the same stuff used by the IRA—in Pennsylvania without

incident.

In addition to language skills and various visible and undercover activities,

the counterterrorism division has the technology to stay one step ahead of the

enemy. On the ground, thousands of cops wear “personal radiation detectors”

which are very effective at picking up minute traces of potentially dangerous

rays. In addition to the city's 300 square miles of land, there are 165 square

miles of waterways—any of which would make good entry points for weapons

of mass distraction. The counterterrorism boats don't look different from other

police boats on the water, but the classified technology they carry makes them

unique. But the most high-tech tools are 1000 feet above the city, giving

officers on the ground real-time intelligence. Dickey describes his ride one cold

winter night in an unmarked NYPD helicopter:

The morning is clear in a way—in that way—that is always a little

heartbreaking if you were here on September 11, 2001. There were police

choppers in New York's sky then, too, but not like this one, which can see so

much from so far. It is a state-of-the-art crime-fighting, terror-busting, order-

keeping techno-toy, with its enormous lens that can magnify any scene on the

street almost 1000 times, then double that digitally; that can watch a crime in

progress from miles away, can look in windows, and sense the body heat of

people on rooftops or running along sidewalks, can track beepers slipped under

cars, can do so many things that the man in the helmet watching the screens

and moving the images with the joystick in his lap . . . is often a little bit at loss

for words. “It really is an amazing tool,” he keeps saying. On the left-hand

screen is a map of Manhattan. He punches in an address on the Upper East

Side, my address. The camera on the belly of the machines swerves

instantaneously, focuses, and there on the second screen is my building scene

from more than a mile away now, but up close and personal from this

surprising astral angle. The cameras and sensors are locked onto it, staying

with it as the chopper turns and homes in.

Assess how well the NYPD has converted its objectives into actions. What

actions besides those mentioned in the case would you recommend? What are

the limitations or weaknesses in NYPD's approach? Dickey is sharply critical

of “the dangerously ill-conceived, mismanaged, and highly militarized global

war on terror,” and sees the success of the NYPD's counterterrorism program

as offering an alternative approach. Do you agree or disagree?