Published 12 Feb 09

International Desk

By Abigail R. Esman
World Defense Review columnist

America's Best Counterterror Force: The NYPD
An interview with Christopher Dickey, author of Securing the City

Every New Yorker knows the sign: "If you see something, say something." The slogan is plastered across subway cars and buses, in train stations and tourist sites. More than seven years after the attacks of 9/11, with an economic crisis squeezing security budgets and safety programs throughout the country, how safe is New York now, really?

Pretty darn safe, it turns out. And while Federal agencies like the Department of Homeland Security have certainly done their part, the real credit, according to a new book by Newsweek's Middle East and Paris bureau chief Christopher Dickey, goes to the NYPD – the New York Police Department. Since the September 11 attacks, the force has become one of the strongest anti-terrorism agencies in the world, and for his latest book, Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force: The NYPD (Simon & Schuster, $26.00), Dickey went behind the scenes to discover how it got that way, and just how good it is.

The answer: Very good – so good, in fact, that more people should be following their example, and absorbing the lessons they have learned. In the middle of his whirlwind book tour, Mr. Dickey took time to talk to WDR's Abigail R. Esman about his book, and about counter-terrorism efforts in general.

Abigail R. Esman: What were some of the major changes the NYPD instituted after 9/11?

Christopher Dickey: Ray Kelly had been commissioner of the NYPD in 1993 when the first World Trade Center attack took place. At the time, most Americans, Kelly included, thought the FBI, CIA and other Federal agencies ("the three-letter guys," as cops call them) had the problem of terrorism under control. 9/11 showed that was not the case, and that New York City would always be at the top of the terrorist hit list. So when Kelly was brought back to head the NYPD in January 2002, he set out to address the threat directly.

Esman: In what way?

Dickey: He created a new Counterterrorism Bureau with several hundred officers, which would coordinate with the FBI while developing its own technical means to detect various threats, including nuclear, radiological, chemical and biological weapons. The bureau was also concerned with defense of important buildings (forcing a re-design of the skyscraper being erected at Ground Zero) and with protection of infrastructure, including – and especially – the mass transit system. There is also a certain amount of showmanship involved, with the very conspicuous deployment of scores of police cars around the city at unpredictable times and places to impress and deter would-be attackers.

But Kelly also wanted to change the function of the existing Intelligence Division of the NYPD, redirecting its efforts to focus on penetrating possible terrorist organizations, whether on the ground in New York, or on the World Wide Web, and assigning several liaison officers to foreign capitals, including London, Paris and Tel Aviv, where they are in constant contact with the local cops. The one in Paris, for instance, has a desk in the intelligence division of the French national police.

To run that operation, Kelly hired David Cohen, who had been the director of operations – the spymaster, if you will – for the CIA's clandestine services in the 1990s.

Esman: Which of these proved most effective?

Dickey: What really sets the NYPD apart is the performance of the Intelligence Division, which has about 600 people in it. Remember, this is a police force with, relatively speaking, enormous resources: about 35,000 officers and another 17,000 civilian employees. And it increasingly reflects the diversity of New York City, where 40 percent of the population of 8.5 million was not born in the United States of America. By identifying and testing officers already on the force in 2002, the NYPD was immediately able to utilize hundreds of cops who spoke languages relevant to terrorist investigations – Arabic, Dari, Farsi and so on – and who already were on the force. The intelligence division got many of the most talented of these, and in a matter of months had about twice as many Arabic speakers as the FBI. The ones at the NYPD, moreover, were mostly native speakers. This became a tremendous advantage in undercover work, in liaising with local communities, and for intelligence gathering on the Web. (Federal agencies, by contrast, require security clearances and background checks that are almost impossible to get for would-be employes who were born overseas.)

Esman: Were there some measures they wanted to introduce, but were not allowed? What were they, and why did they not pass? Should they have, in your view?

Dickey: The NYPD under Kelly has often seemed to overreach, been slapped down by the courts, fought back, and finally got what it wanted. A case in point was revision of guidelines in place for decades that had prevented it from investigating certain political and religious organizations.

Esman: I gather there were some differences between the NYPD and the FBI/CIA. What were they, and how did this play out?

Dickey: The Federal agencies were long accustomed to treating local police as clients to be informed when the Feds thought it appropriate. The NYPD does not wait and goes out to find its own relevant information, sometimes bypassing the Federal government altogether, sometimes playing one federal agency against another. In 2002, for instance, the NYPD had direct access to some of the CIA's most delicate information, supplied to Cohen through a special CIA operative assigned to his staff. The Counterterrorism Bureau meanwhile forged independent links with the Defense Intelligence Agency. The FBI, used to running the counter-intel, counter-terror show, did not like the changes.

The other area of major friction lay in the fact that the NYPD's operations are devoted entirely to preventing terrorist attacks, with very little emphasis on building legal cases for future convictions. This means it may use a number of techniques, including arrests for wholly different – or dubious – "crimes" in order to intimidate would-be terrorists or, indeed, to recruit them as informers. This is standard procedure for cops, and not only in terrorism cases, but it would be largely out of bounds to the FBI or the CIA.

Esman: Police departments in Europe, especially in Brussels, now consult regularly with the NYPD on anti-terrorism programs. Are you aware of any measures introduced to NY from abroad? Or did the NYPD provide training to European police forces?

Dickey: There is a lot of consultation back and forth, both formal and informal, although there is no NYPD officer assigned to Brussels. Kelly does not pretend to offer grand solutions to the Europeans, but if there is one major lesson to be learned from the NYPD it is the success it has had bringing ethnic, cultural, national and linguistic diversity into its ranks, then using that to gather intelligence not only about potential local threats, but transnational ones.

Esman: How does security in NYC measure up to other major US cities?

Dickey: No other American city comes close to having a force as large or intelligence and counterterror operations as sophisticated as those of the NYPD. The Los Angeles Police Department, for instance, has fewer than 10,000 officers.

Esman: Did you find gaps in New York security?

Dickey: A big, ongoing concern remains the harbor, where there is so much traffic and there are so many containers coming in that could hold bombs or weapons of mass destruction. Another major concern is that terrorists in other cities, where the police and intelligence operations are not so effective, may plot attacks to be carried out in New York City.

Esman: What could the military learn from the NYPD programs?

Dickey: The military's function is different. The question might better be posed as to what national governments can learn about pragmatic, focused, non-ideological counterterrorist activities. Invading and occupying foreign territory is the least effective way to neutralize the threat in most cases. What works is a focus on prevention and deterrence combined with very active human intelligence networks and, occasionally, covert action.

Esman: While researching the book, what sense did you get of the seriousness of "homegrown terrorism?"

Dickey: Homegrown terrorism is the least effective form of terrorism. There is a long history of bombs fizzling, horrid-sounding poisons proving ineffectual, would-be martyrs deciding they didn't want to die after all. But a homegrown effort with no links to external organizations is also, theoretically, the most likely to blindside the police. The argument in a 2007 NYPD report called "Radicalization in the West" that radicalism and potential terrorist cells "permeated" the Muslim communities in NYC is patently ridiculous, and the NYPD has pulled back from that position. But what that report does do is identify stages in the process of radicalization that bear watching. The most important is not when people start going to the mosque. Not at all. The most important stage is when they stop, and withdraw into a small group nursing its own anger and refusing to listen to anyone in the Muslim community who would question plans for violent jihad. It's at that point that the NYPD intel division, if it becomes aware of the group, will intervene in various ways. One is to pick up a member or members for some petty offense, like sitting on two seats in the subway, then questioning him and even threatening to expose him to his buddies as an informer. The technique is insidious, but the cops in the intel division maintain it has been effective.

Esman: A Turkish-American friend of mine told me recently that she had encountered some fundamentalist, Islamist perspectives among members of the Turkish community in the U.S., and there are known cases of honor killings in America, particularly in the Pakistani community. These would suggest the presence some form of hard-core Islam. How much of that homegrown threat involves Muslims? What other groups are of concern?

Dickey: The focus of attention has been on Muslim groups not least because sometimes those groups send members to train in Afghanistan and Pakistan – at which point they are no longer homegrown, and acquire much more dangerous skills. That was true of the 9/11 plotters, certainly, but also of the London bombers.

It should be noted, however, that most terrorist incidents that have taken place in the United States, or are known to have been thwarted there in the last decade have in fact been the work of very different groups, whether racists, anti-abortion activists, or even radical animal rights activists.

Esman: Does the press pay enough attention to domestic threats?

Dickey: No. Most notably, it fails to cover near misses, and to evaluate what lessons they might hold for the future – when they might not miss.

Esman: Can you cite an example or two of events you felt that should have received attention, but did not?

Dickey: For investigators and analysts, a near miss can be an important source of intelligence, but for the public and the media there's just a sigh of relief, life goes on, and the news organizations turn their attention elsewhere. In the case of New York City, you have the member of the Japanese Red Army, Yu Kikumura, hired by Qadhafi to build bombs disguised and set them off in Manhattan in 1988 as partial revenge for the American bombing raids on Tripoli and Benghazi in 1986. He was caught by accident at a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike.

Another example: Two of the accomplices in the murder of Meir Kahane were never prosecuted in the killing, and later went on to take part in the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. That injured 1,000 people, but killed only six. It quickly became little more than a footnote in the city's memory.

And in 1997, two Palestinians came within a couple of hours of blowing themselves up on the B Train subway beneath the East River in a Hamas-style action where one detonates, rescue workers arrive, and then the second detonates. It was sheer luck, again, that one of the plotters told an Egyptian flatmate what was about to happen, and the Egyptian panicked and went the police – but he couldn't speak English and it took many precious hours for him to convince the cops of the danger. If they had dismissed his ravings, as some were inclined to do, the carnage would have been at least as bad as what happened in London years later.

But almost nobody outside the police force remembers the incident.

Esman: Are there stories that continue to be important, that the press continues to overlook? If so, can you surmise why?

Dickey: Almost all stories are covered, to some extent. The question is whether the public pays attention.

Esman: We hope they will. Thank you for your time, and best of luck with the book.

Christopher Dickey's Securing the City is available at local bookstores, via Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com, and through the publisher.

— Abigail R. Esman is an award-winning author-journalist who divides her time between New York and The Netherlands. In addition to her column in World Defense Review, her work has appeared in Foreign Policy, Salon.com, Esquire, Vogue, Glamour, Town & Country, The Christian Science Monitor, The New Republic and many others. She is currently working on a book about Muslim extremism and democracy in the West to be published by Praeger in 2010.

Abigail R. Esman can be reached at esman@worlddefensereview.com.

Visit Esman on the web at abigailesman.com.

© 2009 Abigail R. Esman

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