Iyman Faris was perfectly positioned to deliver the follow-up attack to 9/11.
If you had asked his neighbors in Columbus, Ohio, they would have described Faris as a quiet, hardworking family man. He held down a regular job as a long-haul trucker, delivering chemicals and other flammable materials to airport cargo depots across the United States. He married a preacher’s daughter from Kentucky and doted on his teenage stepson. He’d even become a U.S. citizen, swearing allegiance to his newly adopted homeland. That’s the man almost everyone knew. But Iyman Faris was living a double life. A thirty-three-year-old native of Pakistan, he had spent time at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and was now an al-Qaeda sleeper agent. Using disguised e-mail accounts, he was trading frequent messages with top terror operatives overseas. Late in 2002, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the 2001 World Trade Center attack, directed Faris to drive his tractor-trailer to New York City.
He wasn’t coming just to see the Brooklyn Bridge. He was coming to destroy it.
By the time Faris left Ohio, he already had a detailed plan. Using a gas-powered blowtorch, he would slice several of the bridge’s heavy suspension cables. It really wouldn’t be that difficult, he was convinced. If the right cables were severed, the integrity of the 120-year-old span could be swiftly undermined, causing the mile-long bridge deck to collapse 275 feet into the East River below. Depending on the time of day, the death toll could be comparable to 9/11, easily reaching thousands of lives.
* * *
I took over as New York City police commissioner at the beginning of 2002, three months and twenty-six days after the worst terrorist attack ever executed on American soil. For the next twelve years, I had an immense responsibility: making sure that nothing remotely like the terrible events of September 11, 2001, ever happened again. Every day, I asked myself the same question: What can we do to tilt the odds a little more in our favor? My job was to keep finding ways. The pressure was enormous. The resources were never sufficient. The terrorists had many advantages. The critics were everywhere. But I had an incomparable organization behind me—the New York City Police Department—and a daunting threat hanging over my head. I knew that if we failed even once, the consequences would be devastating. If the terrorists succeeded again after their triumph on 9/11, something vital and irreplaceable would certainly be lost.
Stopping terror wasn’t the only thing I had to contend with when the city’s new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, put me in charge of the world’s greatest police department. We had to lock up street criminals, extending the crime drop that had started in the early 1990s under Mayor David Dinkins, when I served as NYPD commissioner the first time, and had accelerated through the Rudy Giuliani years. We had to maintain order and protect the quality of life in New York. We also had to improve the department’s strained relations with some of the diverse communities we served. But none of that, important as it was, was more urgent than protecting America’s largest city, which was also America’s ripest target, from another deadly terror attack.
Our enemies kept coming at us, over and over again, sixteen times in all. That’s the number of serious terror plots launched against New York City and the number of plots that were foiled. With our federal partners and some luck, we didn’t fail once in those twelve years. The terrorists went 0 for 16.
How did we do it?
It took leadership. It took teamwork. It took extraordinary expertise, inside and outside the police department, from some of the smartest and most dedicated people I’ve ever met. It took effective relationships with the FBI, the CIA, and many other organizations.
But more than anything, the post-9/11 terror fight required vigilance—constant, relentless, tireless, and creative vigilance. This was no responsibility that could be assumed halfheartedly. There was no going through the motions here. The terrorists never let up, and neither did we.
* * *
We had known for months that the Brooklyn Bridge was a prime target for al-Qaeda terrorists.
“The bridge in the Godzilla movie,” they called it in e-mails and text messages intercepted by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies overseas. With sufficient planning and a little bit of luck, the terror schemers were confident, they could wreck at least as many New York landmarks as the famous movie monster had.
It was easy to see why the bridge was such an enticing target. It was massive. Iconic. Almost as well-known as the toppled towers. Another feature of the downtown skyline recognized the world over. And best of all, the bridge was right out in the open and busy all the time, carrying 120,000 vehicles a day—plus another 8,000 runners, walkers, skaters, and bikers—between lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
How could the local police possibly protect a structure as large and open as that?
The minute I was briefed on the Godzilla chatter, during my second month on the job, I ordered security stepped up on the bridge. “I want radio cars on the Brooklyn side and the Manhattan side,” I said to David Cohen, NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence, who had previously run clandestine operations at the CIA.
“And let’s put a boat in the water below the bridge,” I added.
In the months and years that followed, we would activate similar strategies at high-profile locations around the city as we rolled out our comprehensive post-9/11 antiterror campaign. We flooded the zone with uniformed police officers and established our own extensive undercover intelligence and counterterrorism operations, something no other local police department had ever attempted before. We hired top people from the upper ranks of the FBI, the State Department, the military, and, in Cohen’s case, the CIA—far beyond the normal recruitment pool for local law enforcement. We initiated Operation Hercules, a unique Demographics Unit, and the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. High-visibility critical response vehicles cruised the streets. We stationed full-time New York City police detectives in terror hot spots overseas. Some of these measures didn’t always sit well with the federal agencies that had long considered terror fighting their exclusive purview. But leaving the city’s security entirely in federal hands hadn’t worked out so well for New York. Twice already, once in 1993 and again in 2001, the terrorists had struck us. Twice was more than enough. Now it was time for America’s top target to face an unavoidable reality of the modern terror age: no one would ever protect New York as well as New Yorkers would.
* * *
I took 9/11 very personally, as did many New Yorkers. Two thousand, seven hundred and fifty-three people were killed at the World Trade Center that day, including 343 New York City firefighters, 23 New York City police officers, and 37 Port Authority police officers. I had friends and colleagues among the victims, quite a few of them. My wife, Veronica, and I lived two blocks from the site, which was now a giant pile of rubble on the other side of West Street. This wasn’t just our city. It was our neighborhood. It took eight weeks before Veronica and I were allowed back in our apartment, which had to be cleaned by HAZMAT specialists.
The whole city was having real trouble getting back on its feet. Hundreds of local companies still hadn’t returned to their offices. Manhattan’s vibrant nightlife was so quiet, you could get a restaurant reservation anywhere. Taxi traffic breezed through Midtown even at rush hour. These were all troubling signs. Wall Street, tourism, retail, and real estate—the powerful pillars of the city’s economy were a series of giant question marks. Corporate CEOs were starting to ask if it still made sense to maintain large operations in the city, with its sky-high rents and inherent vulnerabilities.
And then there was this—if we suffered another attack, I was convinced, we really did risk losing something crucial: The New York that people everywhere knew and loved. The New York that was the center of global commerce. The New York where talented and ambitious people came to realize their dreams. The New York that was a diverse and powerful font of media, entertainment, culture, and the arts.
If people no longer felt secure living and working here, how could New York be any of those?
* * *
When Iyman Faris finally arrived at the Brooklyn Bridge, he didn’t like what he saw.
An NYPD radio car was parked at the Manhattan end of the roadway, where the bridge cables were most readily accessible. A uniformed police officer was inside, sitting there, watching. A second police car was at the Brooklyn end of the bridge, the other point of vulnerability. An officer was inside that car as well, scanning everything. In the water below, a boat from the NYPD Harbor Unit was patrolling near the bridge supports.
I don’t believe Faris caught sight of the extra security cameras that were sending live video feeds of the bridge to 1 Police Plaza, two short blocks away. He never even made it to the small machine sheds at either end of the bridge. They sheltered some of the bridge’s key cable connections and other machinery. Prior to 9/11, anyone with a crowbar could have busted inside and gone to work in total privacy. Now those cable sheds are like little vaults.
Faris took in the scene. He weighed his options. And something almost miraculous occurred. The sleeper-agent truck driver from Ohio listened to his own second thoughts. After carefully surveying the bridge and our new intensified security measures, he concluded that his bridge plot was unlikely to succeed.
He sent a coded message to his al-Qaeda handlers back in Pakistan.
“The weather is too hot,” he wrote.
Aren’t those great words?
They showed, very early on, that our measures were having a real impact on the safety of New York, dissuading would-be terrorists who were intent on mass murder in the city we were sworn to protect.
It was one mind changed, but it was also a huge victory for law enforcement, local and federal alike—the first of many, thank God—and a major catastrophe avoided for the people of America and New York. In the years to come, those measures and countless others would continue paying dividends.
* * *
Much of the Faris plot was revealed after Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s arrest in Pakistan in March 2003, showing how intelligence activities overseas can be intimately tied to security at home in America. When Faris was confronted the following month in Ohio by the FBI and quickly pleaded guilty to providing material support to al-Qaeda, I wanted to see for myself just how secure the bridge cables were. So I rounded up David Cohen and Mike Sheehan, our deputy commissioner for counterterrorism. With a couple of uniformed officers, the three of us took a ride.
We left police headquarters and went to the foot of the bridge. Traffic was roaring in both directions. Horns were honking. Limos were heading out to the airport. Taxis and private cars were creeping past. Runners, walkers, and bikers were streaming by. I’d crossed that bridge thousands of times before. But I had never looked at it quite like this.
I climbed over a waist-high railing that separated the roadway from the understructure of the bridge. I was wearing a suit, and I couldn’t help but notice how filthy everything down there was. With Cohen and Sheehan behind me, I stepped into a dark, cramped room. I saw where the bridge’s thick cables split into several thinner cables and were anchored to the shore.
As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I could hear the traffic rumbling nearby, just a few feet from where we stood. But there was no way anyone on the outside could possibly see us in there.
I thought to myself: Someone could sit in here for hours or days without being discovered. And it wouldn’t take nearly that long. Had our units not been on the scene to spook Faris when he arrived, had the bridge facilities not been hardened yet, he could easily have entered this room and cut or weakened the cables of the bridge. He was a truck driver. He knew how to handle tools. He had the practical skills of a working American and the endless zeal of the committed jihadist—a deadly combination if there ever was one.
Shocking as it was to contemplate, had we not been in a position to deter him, he could well have taken down the bridge.
I know the two deputy commissioners were thinking the same thing I was. “Thank God we put our cops where we put them,” I said. “Where else should they go?”