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Summary
The NYPD is the best and most ambitious antiterror operation in the world. Its seat-of-the-pants intelligence is the gold standard for all others.Christopher Dickey, who has reported on international terrorism for more than twenty-five years, takes readers into the secret command center of the New York City Police Department's counterterrorism division, then onto the streets with cops ready for the toughest urban combat the twenty-first century can throw at them. But behind the tactical shows of force staged by the police, there lies a much more ambitious and controversial strategy: to go anywhere and use almost any means to keep the city from becoming, once again, Ground Zero. This is the story of the coming war in America's cities and New York's shadow war, waged around the globe to stop it before it begins.Drawing on unparalleled access to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other top officials, Dickey explores the most ambitious intelligence operation ever organized by a metropolitan police department. Headed by David Cohen, who ran the CIA's operations inside the United States in the 1980s and its global spying in the 1990s, the NYPD's counterterrorism division had uptotheminute details of new attacks set in motion to target Manhattan in 2002 and 2003.New York's finest are now seen by other police chiefs in the United States as the gold standard for counterterrorism operations and a model for even the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet as New Yorkers have come to feel safer, they've also grown worried about the NYPD's methods: sending its undercover agents to spy on Americans in other cities, rounding up hundreds of protesters preemptively before the 2004 Republican convention, and using confidential informants who may be more adept at plotting terror than the people they finger.Securing the Cityis a superb investigative reporter's stunning look inside the real world of cops who are ready to take on the world and at the ambiguous price we pay for the safety they provide.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
With an informed eye on the history of New York City as a leading target of world terrorism, Dickey, Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor, chronicles the effectiveness and resources of the high-tech intelligence operation of the New York Police Department. He speaks without bias of hard-nosed veterans Raymond Kelly, the pragmatic NYPD police commissioner, and David Cohen, a former CIA analyst, who formed the counterterrorism division, which watches over the city with more than 600 cops and operatives stationed stateside and around the world. As Cohen says: "There's a plot taking shape on New York City every day of every week since 9/11." Dickey examines the history of terrorism in the city, but poses the thorny question of surveillance vs. civil liberties (e.g., helicopters whose cameras can look directly into specific apartments) since the 2001 World Trade Center tragedy and the Madrid and London bombings. In the increasingly crowded field of "war on terror" books, Dickey's (Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son) measured meditation on a secured city and its vigilant police force stands out as one of the best. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A journalist with remarkable access explains how the New York City Police Department has set the standard for preventing terrorist attacks. Though he's also written several spy novels (The Sleeper, 2004, etc.), Dickey's day job is as Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor for Newsweek. Reporting around the world for three decades, he has developed excellent sources that enabled him to see up close the NYPD's counterterrorism operations, many instituted since 9/11. The book is a valentine to NYC police commissioner Raymond Kelly and intelligence chief David Cohen, who cooperated with the author. Yet Dickey is not mindlessly upbeat; he shows that the police force has numerous problems, though primarily outside the counterterrorism realm. Furthermore, the author is sometimes extremely critical of the CIA and the FBI. Those agencies, he demonstrates, frequently fail to cooperate with the NYPD or each other and are filled with shortsighted, often downright incompetent agents. As a quasi-insider, the author learned many things that contravened conventional wisdom, and he shares those with readers. While politicians and frightened constituents demonize illegal immigrants, for example, law-enforcement officials know that most undocumented entrants into the United States help keep urban areas safe: They work hard and try to avoid trouble, and after they settle in, their non-English language skills and ties to their nations of origin can become assets for municipal police. The narrative's overarching subject is the propriety of limits placed on a law-enforcement agency when the dangers of another 9/11 are real, but overly aggressive behavior might impinge on civil liberties. "How far would they go to protect the lives of millions of people all around them whose homes and jobswere part of the number one terrorist target in the world?" Dickey asks. "How far would they not go to protect them? Maybe Kelly and his team could be trusted to walk that line in a reasonable way most of the time. Maybe." Well-reported examination of cutting-edge police work. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
New York Review of Books Review
"NEVER forget" the T-shirts and bumper stickers declared after 9/11, and no American - let alone New Yorker - ever will. Yet even those of us who call the city our home, who ride its crowded subways every day and frequently find ourselves in just the sort of landmark that might make an attractive target for the next strike, are more or less oblivious to the war on terror being waged around us. It's a strange kind of war, and not simply because it's being fought out of public view. Unlike the global war on terror, its success is measured not by the number of high-value combatants taken into custody, or by the acreage of terrorist-friendly territory brought under control, but by the absence of something - another attack. How has the New York Police Department kept the city safe since 9/11? It's a question that has received surprisingly little attention, and it's one that Christopher Dickey, the Paris bureau chief of Newsweek, sets out to answer in "Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force - the NYPD." Dickey's subtitle suggests that he is going to take us behind the scenes, and the book certainly opens with great promise. The author is floating high above Manhattan in a newfangled police helicopter - a "crime-fighting, terror-busting, order-keeping techno toy" - equipped with, among other things, sensors that can pick up the body heat of people running on the sidewalks below, and with a lens that can magnify street scenes almost 1,000 times. For the most part, though, that insider feeling proves elusive over the remainder of the book. Instead of atmospherics and access, what we get is solid newsmagazine reporting rendered in straightforward prose, interrupted by the occasional out-of-key pulp flourish. ("The kid needed a handler," Dickey writes of Majid Khan, an enthusiastic young jihadi whom Khalid Shaikh Mohammed took under his wing.) This is not to say that "Securing the City" isn't an informative and even valuable book. Dickey does, in a somewhat scattershot way, provide a complete picture of how the Police Department's counterterrorism unit works, the challenges it faces and the secrets to its success at discouraging another attack. Much of the credit is due to the city's police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly. When Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg brought Kelly back to 1 Police Plaza for a second tour of duty in the wake of 9/11 - he had served as commissioner under Mayor Dinkins in 1992 and '93 - there weren't even 25 cops on the terrorism beat. Within a week, Kelly had announced the creation of a new counterterrorism bureau that today numbers more than 1,000 officers on its rolls. But Kelly knew he was going to have to do more than throw bodies at the problem, that to battle terrorism he would need to get beyond the traditional methods of law enforcement. Preventing the next attack would depend foremost on human intelligence. Toward that end, Kelly made key hires from outside the department. He tapped David Cohen, the C.I.A.'s former head of clandestine services, as his deputy commissioner for intelligence, and Michael Sheehan, a former Green Beret and counterterrorism expert, as his deputy commissioner for counterterrorism. At the same time, Kelly recognized that his counterterrorism bureau was going to have to be different from the federal agencies; after all, 9/11 had illustrated nothing so much as the failure of the F.B.I. and C.I.A. to keep America safe. As Dickey writes, the city's team would have to be "an organization with minimal bureaucracy and maximum freedom of movement, able to anticipate threats and to act on that information." The result was basically a combination of crime-fighting and intelligence-gathering, a hybrid approach that has since become known as "intelligence-led policing." Cameras on a New York Police Department surveillance helicopter. Much as the terrorists used the openness of our society to their advantage, Kelly's counterterrorism organization exploited New York's demographics to theirs. A city of immigrants, New York offered a deep pool of fluent Arabic speakers from which to draw linguists, undercover officers and detectives. And because Police Department employees don't need security clearances, they didn't have to go through the same onerous vetting process as federal agents. As a result, Dickey writes, as of 2006, the F.B.I. had a grand total of 33 agents with "some proficiency" in Arabic, while the department had more than twice as many officers who were fluent. New York's thriving Muslim community worked in the Police Department's favor in other ways, too. Kelly and his men saw that it was not the regular mosque-goers they had to be concerned about, but rather those who had withdrawn from an immigrant mainstream that didn't approve of their radicalism. The department's new mission initially met with predictable resistance from a territorial F.B.I., which bristled at initiatives like Cohen's plan to station men overseas or Sheehan's request for a secure facility in which to review top-secret documents. For a while, the New Yorkers simply worked around the feds, which only exacerbated the tension with Washington. The director of the F.B.I., Robert Mueller, eventually came to New York to smooth things out with Kelly and his lieutenants and inaugurate a new era of cooperation. "Securing the City" details some of the counterterrorism unit's most prominent successes, including the foiling of a plot hatched in Brooklyn to bomb the heavily trafficked Herald Square subway station. Relying partly on intelligence from an undercover Muslim agent in Bay Ridge, the Police Department arrested the two men responsible days before the 2004 Republican National Convention. The subsequent trial garnered a lot of attention in the press, and not all of it reflected well on Kelly and Cohen. Some civil libertarians argued that the department had exaggerated the seriousness of the plot, that the conspirators were inept and their plan at best half-baked. Dickey points out, fairly, that even incompetent conspirators can be dangerous. While he deals only glancingly with the Police Department's efforts to negotiate the delicate balance between protecting the city and preserving civil liberties, it is clear that he approves of the job Kelly has done. It's hard to disagree with this assessment. Reading this book, one can't help contrasting the quiet vigilance of the department's counterterror unit with the fear-mongering and, well, flagrant lawbreaking that has characterized the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terror. Dickey is working with fascinating stuff, but "Securing the City" never quite picks up much narrative momentum. Ultimately, it feels more like a collection of dispatches than a cohesive book. The problem is largely one of storytelling. Dickey goes out of his way to mention that he has been covering terrorism for two decades. This is hardly necessary: his command of the material amply demonstrates that he knows what he's talking about. But Dickey fails to get beneath the surface of his characters or dramatize their struggle to keep the city safe. With respect to Kelly in particular, this was a lost opportunity. A born-and-bred New Yorker from a large Catholic family, Kelly rose to the commissioner's office from the lowly ranks of the cadets. He and his wife were living in Battery Park City, in the neighborhood of what would soon become known as Ground Zero, when the towers fell. Kelly's transformation of the Police Department in the wake of 9/11 was no doubt a deeply personal endeavor, yet beyond a cursory biographical sketch and a lot of quotations, we never get much of a sense of him or his relationship to New York. For all its limitations, though, "Securing the City" remains an undeniably timely book. In the coming weeks, the new administration will begin the daunting task of setting a fresh course for the war on terror. As it does, it would do well to spend at least a little time examining the success of the New York Police Department. Jonathan Mahler is a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and the author of "The Challenge: Hamdan v. Rumsfeld and the Fight Over Presidential Power."
Library Journal Review
Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor introduces us to the 500 officers and analysts who make up the NYPD's antiterrorist division worldwide. With an eight-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Prologue | p. 1 |
| Section I The Scramble for Safety | |
| The Cop: The Rise of Ray Kelly | p. 9 |
| The Spy: The Unusual Career of David Cohen | p. 20 |
| The Dark Side: Cohen Among the Clandestines | p. 30 |
| The City: Anatomy of a Target | p. 39 |
| The Battleground: Manhattan and Megiddo | p. 51 |
| The Black Sites: Ways of Making Them Talk | p. 69 |
| The Second Wave: Not the Best-Laid Plans | p. 82 |
| Section II Building the System | |
| Safe Streets: Cops on Dots | p. 99 |
| Showtime: Surges and Scuba | p. 108 |
| Red Cells: The Counter Terrorism Bureau | p. 118 |
| Green Clouds: Weapons of Mass Disruption | p. 126 |
| Narrative: Iranian Probes-2003 | p. 136 |
| The Warehouse: From Sharing to Trading | p. 140 |
| The Feds: Against Them and with Them | p. 152 |
| Narrative: The Madrid Bombings-2004 | p. 164 |
| Neighbors: Other Cities, Other States | p. 170 |
| Apathy: Rising Threats and Waning Patience | p. 178 |
| Anger: Conventions and Causes | p. 192 |
| Narrative: The London Bombings-2005 | p. 205 |
| Section III The Precarious Balance | |
| Bad Numbers: The Battle for Morale | p. 217 |
| Loners and Copycats: The Contract on Kelly | p. 224 |
| Clusters: Homegrown Terrorism and National Resources | p. 228 |
| The French Connection: Confronting Chaos | p. 240 |
| Rings of Steel: Defending Ground Zero | p. 244 |
| Urban Legends: Of Eccentrics and Immigrants | p. 250 |
| New Year's Eve: The Countdown | p. 257 |
| Epilogue | p. 269 |
| Appendix A Note on Target Cities | p. 273 |
| Notes | p. 279 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 309 |
| Index | p. 311 |