Our first test of how the NYPD could transform itself for the modern age came just a month after I took over as Mike Bloomberg’s police commissioner and four months since the 9/11 attacks. The World Economic Forum was due to arrive at the Waldorf Astoria hotel on January 31, 2002. This high-level group of government leaders, global business titans, and academic experts usually gathered in Davos, Switzerland. As a gesture of post-9/11 solidarity—and because construction was going on at the Davos site—this year, they were heading to New York. Their single agenda item: confronting global issues raised by the terror attacks.
“In these extraordinary times,” forum president Klaus Schwab said, “greater international cooperation is needed to reverse the global economic downturn, eradicate poverty, promote security, and enhance cultural understanding. As the world’s financial capital and the site of the recent terrorist attacks, there could be no better place than New York City to confront these issues.”
Which all sounded fine. But who was going to protect these people—high-value targets, all of them—once they arrived? They were sure to attract a rowdy crowd of protestors, including a fiery contingent of anarchists, some of them with a proven penchant for violence. Such a protest the previous summer had left one demonstrator dead at a summit of wealthy nations in Genoa, Italy. So were we ready here?
I called a planning meeting in the executive conference room at 1 Police Plaza with chiefs and commanders from the Intelligence Division and elsewhere. At that point, David Cohen hadn’t yet come up from Washington.
I went around the long wooden table, asking basic questions and looking for information.
How many protestors were we expecting? What groups did they represent? What was being said on the Internet? What demonstrations did they have planned? Where would the attendees be eating? How would they get back to their hotels? Should we expect the protestors to arm themselves? If so, with what kinds of weapons? What had happened the past two or three times these two worldviews had clashed?
None of this required classified intelligence. Much of the information was available from open, public sources or a few hours of working the phones. From the answers I received, I didn’t get the feeling anyone had scratched too hard. What I got from the people in the room were a lot of vague assurances and more than one uncomfortable stare. Perhaps we were still suffering from the aftershocks of 9/11.
I knew we had to spring into action before the leaders and the protestors arrived. We dispatched detectives to Seattle, Quebec, and Genoa to learn how demonstrations there had slipped into violence and vandalism. How had minor scuffles suddenly escalated into massive chaos?
From the information we gathered, we devised an overall crowd-control plan. We blocked off the streets around the Waldorf. We flooded the area with police. Once the protests began, we cordoned the marchers into clearly designated routes, giving them plenty of room to express themselves but blocking them from rushing the hotel. We stationed buses, motorcycles, and radio cars around the perimeter. We positioned video cameras on nearby buildings and flew helicopters overhead.
It did cost us a lot in overtime expenses, but I was fairly happy with the way things turned out. It showed the power of strong focus and fast attention, if not long, deep planning. We got through the summit with no major catastrophes—five days of loud demonstrations with the usual bevy of minor arrests, but nothing really bad at all.
“It was our intention from the beginning to set the tone and have a robust force in place… to show that we were prepared for anything,” I explained to the New York media as the forum finally ended and everyone was heading home. “And I think that was very helpful in dissuading those people bent on causing a problem from doing that.”
Mayor Bloomberg certainly sounded impressed. “People had the ability to demonstrate, people had the ability to say what they thought, and they did it generally without impinging on others’ rights,” he said. When the protestors became unruly, “the police department acted appropriately, with restrained but forceful consideration for the citizens of this city.”
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We appreciated the upbeat reviews from city hall, but these raucous New York anarchists had nothing on other potential threats facing us: suicide bombers. Overseas training camps. Sophisticated masterminds. A willingness to kill innocent civilians. Technical expertise. Powerful religious fervor. A fully developed concept of martyrdom. Money and a communications network. A large immigrant population in America easy to hide within. Taken all together, the new breed of Islamic jihadists were more daunting than anything America had seen before.
The only way to handle that threat, I was convinced, was to create our own full-scale intelligence and counterterror operation inside the NYPD, overseen by David Cohen, Frank Libutti, and me. Every day, I wanted to increase the chance that the terrorists would fail. That required constant vigilance. We couldn’t rely entirely on others to protect the city. We’d seen how that had worked out—twice. We had reached the era of self-help now.
I instituted a morning meeting every day with Cohen and Libutti. I didn’t want a single day to begin without my being fully informed about terror threats, cases, and investigations in New York City and around the world. If terrorism was going to be our top priority, we couldn’t afford to miss any important developments in that arena.
So we took on an enormous challenge. We built something that no city, including New York, had ever attempted before—our own highly trained, well-staffed, fully integrated counterterror capacity. Then again, there had never been another American city that faced New York’s threats.
There were always unknowns in this business, but Libutti had a stock way of answering when people asked about the prospect of another attack. “I believe the bad guys have us on their mission profile,” the retired general said. “They attacked us one time in the nineties, when they didn’t do as much damage as they wanted. They attacked us again in 2001, when they did a lot of damage. If they have the means to come and attack us, don’t you think they’ll try again?”
With his military bearing and Marine Corps background, Libutti made the new bureau his next mission. We carved out space at 1 Police Plaza for the offices and set up a working facility at a large, out-of-the-way location in Brooklyn. We didn’t want to call attention to ourselves. We had electronic maps on the walls and digital readouts from foreign capitals such as Moscow, London, Tel Aviv, and Riyadh. We set up a global intelligence room with twelve large flat-screen TVs mounted from the ceiling. Via satellite, we could instantly access live broadcasts of Al Jazeera and other international programming. I assigned George Brown, a three-star chief, to work with Libutti.
We made a major new commitment to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force. Prior to 9/11, there were 17 New York City police detectives assigned to the task force. We upped that to 120. We expanded our role in the task force for several reasons. We wanted to be sure the bureau had the staffing to protect us properly. We also wanted our people involved in everything going on at the JTTF. I liked having the power of numbers on our side. Part of Libutti’s job was finding qualified people in the department who could be assigned to the task force, then coordinating the flow of information from them back to the NYPD. When Libutti left after two years to become undersecretary of the new U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Michael Sheehan, another first-class professional, replaced him as deputy commissioner for counterterrorism.
Some of our counterterrorism efforts had to be handled discreetly. But others, our Hercules teams along with our critical response vehicles—as many as a hundred at a time—were purposely visible. The elite, heavily armed convoys moved around the city, arriving in black Suburbans and other vehicles with armor-plated vests and submachine guns, sometimes with air or sea support. They popped up without warning at the Empire State Building, Times Square, Columbus Circle, the New York Stock Exchange, Bloomingdale’s—you never knew quite when or where or why they had suddenly converged on a particular location. They showed that the NYPD could turn out massive force in a hurry, and that was a good message to send. Clearly part of the purpose was to intimidate potential terrorists. New York was not an easy target, we wanted to continue reminding them.
At the same time that we were building the Counter-Terrorism Bureau, David Cohen was launching a series of new initiatives that completely reorganized and reshaped the NYPD Intelligence Division. One thing that reorganization involved was getting our people into the neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens. Intelligence Division detectives worked the blocks of New York as a source of tips and intelligence. There was no nation on earth that didn’t have some immigrants in New York. These people often knew things that could help protect America, and most of the time they were perfectly happy to help. The point for us was never to trample on anyone’s culture or religion. We were there to follow evidence of potential threats from anywhere in the world. Sometimes, though, there was still no substitute for being there.
That was the thinking behind our decision to station as many as a dozen NYPD detectives in terror-prone locations overseas. No local police department had ever attempted anything like it, but it turned out to be a useful tool for us. When I was Customs commissioner, we had legats, legal attachés based at U.S. embassies overseas. They fed us valuable information from a perspective we did not otherwise have. I wanted to embed our people as listening posts inside the police departments in other cities in order to protect New York. So we did.
Starting in 2003, we stationed New York police detectives in Tel Aviv, and the program grew to include detectives stationed in Abu Dhabi, Lyon, Amman, Madrid, London, Tel Aviv, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, Singapore, and the Dominican Republic, listening for anything that might have an impact on New York. The terrorists knew no national boundaries. Why should the New York City police?
Our people got some pushback from U.S. ambassadors in certain countries. “You have to report here,” they said.
“Why?” we asked.
“You’re not federal employees,” we were told.
“So?”
Part of the duty involved constantly working with local authorities, obtaining valuable information. Part of it involved rushing in wherever a bombing or another attack had just occurred, then relaying the details back home. After the bombings in Madrid in 2004, in London in 2005, and in Mumbai in 2008, our detectives were on the street in less than twenty-four hours, funneling up-to-the-minute information back to New York.
This wasn’t mere curiosity on our end. As we kept learning, terrorism is in many respects a copycat business. Ideas, trends, and inspiration travel around the globe. We could have waited months for Washington to summarize the events in London or Madrid or wherever they happened. Or we could get our people there serving only us. If New York was on someone’s target list, we didn’t want to wait for their boys with box cutters to start boarding planes.
Singapore, Jakarta, Tel Aviv—wherever the trouble was, we could have New York City police detectives on the ground in just a few hours. They did a terrific job wherever they went, providing us with real-time, granular information that we never would have gotten before. Who was responsible? What did the local police know? What contacts, if any, did the suspects have in New York? No one but the NYPD would make the effort to find out these things. Wherever terrorists struck, we wanted to know: What does this mean for New York?
We kept getting better and better at our techniques. When ten Islamic militants from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorist organization carried out a multi-day assault of shootings and bombings at hotels and other prominent sites in Mumbai in November of 2008, killing 164 people, we had three Intelligence Division detectives on the ground immediately. They sent back constant updates. Less than a week later, the detectives had prepared a seventy-five-page report, detailing everything that was known and how it connected to us. Based on that, we conducted our own tabletop command exercise at 1 Police Plaza and a larger training scenario at Floyd Bennett Field. We also brief four hundred members of NYPD SHIELD, the security directors of major companies. This was all done within a week’s time of the events in Mumbai. The efforts were designed to get people thinking strategically about how to handle what we now knew were realistic terror scenarios, bouncing ideas off each other, reacting in the pressure of the moment, and facing the immediate consequences of the decisions that are made. These role-play exercises can be highly valuable in focusing people’s minds. We shared the results of our examination with the FBI, who took months to finish their own report on the attacks. I was concerned that we might not have a sufficient number of qualified people to respond to our own Mumbai-style attack. I decided we should train two hundred members of our Organized Crime Control Bureau in heavy-weapons tactics as a backup to the Emergency Service Unit. In addition, we filmed the lobbies of major hotels in the city as a resource for police officers, in case they had to respond to a major event inside.
This was a whole new frontier for the NYPD, and we didn’t want these overseas assignments to be subject to the budgetary whim and whimsy of the city council. To pay for the postings, we turned to the New York City Police Foundation, the only authorized charitable arm of the department, which had supported NYPD programs for more than thirty years. Given the diversity of the department, we had no trouble finding people with the language and cultural backgrounds to make these foreign assignment postings effective.
We received warm welcomes from most overseas law enforcement agencies. Many in the U.S. government encouraged our efforts as well, although there was always some sensitivity about turf. FBI director Robert Mueller came to support us, too.
We just pressed ahead.
In 2005, we started the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative, a unique private-public partnership designed to bring extra protection to the Financial District, one of the most tempting terror targets on earth. There were so many entities operating on that tiny patch of densely packed real estate, truly the home office of American capitalism. Wouldn’t it be better, we asked, if everyone cooperated?
Mayor Bloomberg and I floated the concept to Hank Paulson, chairman of Goldman Sachs, whose firm had a major presence downtown. He liked the idea, and so did other key Wall Street figures. Participants included the New York police, the Port Authority police, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, and corporate security officials from some of the largest companies downtown. Our goal was to make the 1.7 square miles south of Canal Street the safest business district in the world.
We created the Lower Manhattan Coordination Center, manned twenty-four hours a day by police officers and representatives of private firms and governmental agencies in the area. We installed hundreds of security cameras in lower Manhattan, as well as license plate recognition scanners, which fed those images into a central database. We set up posts with uniformed police officers near sensitive locations. We had special radiation and nuclear-material detectors, which we installed on boats, helicopters, and trucks. We equipped some of our officers with detectors on their gun belts. For all this, we got terrific support from downtown companies and other law enforcement organizations.
We kept deepening our ties with the city’s—and the nation’s—corporate community. When it came to technology, and especially security, we found plenty of overlap. Later, in cooperation with Microsoft, we created the Domain Awareness System, which we licensed out to other cities around the world, with New York getting 30 percent of the profits. This important effort was coordinated by Deputy Commissioner Richard Falkenrath and Director of Counterterrorism Policy Jessica Tisch. When a threat call came in, an alert would pop up on a computer screen, instantly showing officers an interactive map of the neighborhood, footage from nearby security cameras, radiation-level readings, and whether any other threats had recently been received.
Some of our activities were controversial, even the ones that shouldn’t have been. This being New York, there are always people willing to criticize and often people ready to sue. We got some of both on a counterterror campaign. One unexpected flash point was our small Demographics Unit, which was part of the Intelligence Division.
The idea was a simple one: We should know who lived where. That could help us in many ways. People are drawn to the familiar. They often live near people like themselves. This is especially true of immigrants getting settled in a new, foreign land. That’s one reason people say New York is made up of many “communities.” If a Chechen brother left a bomb at the Boston Marathon and began driving toward New York, wouldn’t you want to know that there are Chechen immigrant communities in Brooklyn and New Jersey—and not have to launch a panicked scramble in search of them? (The stated intent, by the way, of the Boston Marathon Bombers was to go to New York and plant explosives, but they were cornered by Boston-area police before carrying out this plan.) If one small town in Libya produced twelve suicide bombers, wouldn’t it be worth knowing where their cousins lived in New York? If you came to the city from Moldova, chances are you know some other Moldovans—probably on the same two blocks in the Bronx. Should the police have pretended that wasn’t true?
Our Demographics Unit officers gathered their information by walking around and talking to people in the diverse neighborhoods of New York. They didn’t sneak in anywhere. They identified themselves. It was done out in the open. They recorded accurate information about what they saw and heard. It’s hard to imagine police work much less intrusive than this.
Nonetheless, in a breathless series of articles, two reporters from the Washington bureau of the Associated Press made the Demographics Unit sound like a massive intrusion into people’s private lives, something out of North Korea or 1984. Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman filed more than fifty articles in all and repurposed the pieces in a book titled Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America. The work won a rash of journalism awards including the Pulitzer Prize. Frankly, I don’t care if they wrote a thousand articles and won the Nobel Peace Prize. Their work was deceptive, imbalanced, and wildly overhyped. The reporters fundamentally mischaracterized what the Demographics Unit was all about. The pieces actually read like they’d been dictated by disgruntled federal law enforcement officers in Washington.
The reporters’ basic claim was that the Demographics Unit violated the rights of Muslims in our information-gathering process. In fact, everything the unit did was legal, appropriate, and fully vetted by NYPD attorneys. In addition, the information-gathering techniques were explicitly permitted under the federal-court guidelines known as the Revised Handschu Agreement. That agreement, first signed in 1984 and overseen by U.S. District Judge Charles Haight, settled a lawsuit that came out of a 1971 prosecution of twenty-one members of the Black Panther Party who were acquitted of conspiring to blow up police stations and department stores in New York. That agreement laid out which techniques the NYPD could and could not use in investigating crimes connected to political activity. In 2002, at my direction, NYPD General Counsel Stephen Hammerman asked Judge Haight to approve a revision of Handschu in light of the new threats the city faced in the post-9/11 world. The judge agreed. He decided that a criminal predicate was not always needed for police to gather information. He recognized that it might be too late for that. The revised guidelines explicitly permitted the NYPD investigators to attend meetings open to the public, to review websites available to the public and to produce reports and studies that would help us better protect the city—the very techniques that the Demographics Unit and others in the Intelligence Division were employing. In many of the articles, the AP reporters didn’t seem to have ever heard of Handschu. The misunderstandings ran deep. The reporters complained that the unit’s work didn’t result in any arrests. Well, that wasn’t the point. The investigators were gathering information. They weren’t supposed to be making arrests. Paul Browne had a perfect answer to that. Said Paul: “That’s like saying Derek Jeter ‘admitted’ to having never scored a touchdown.”
The bottom line? Despite all the hype, the Demographics Unit continued its important information gathering. We eventually changed its name to the Area Assessment Unit, but its important work stayed the same. New York City was safer as a result.