by Dennis Smith
At that point I went to NYU [New York University] for a short time on the teaching faculty, and then joined a consulting company, for which I went to Haiti for six months to take charge of the international responders. So I was out of municipal police business and doing work for the federal government, now in a totally different sphere. I, too, certainly wasn’t focused at all on the terrorist threat.
I do remember, though, sitting in the lobby of the World Trade Center on February 26 with an engineer who had been trapped in the elevator, and who had just cut himself out to safety. He said that they could never take those buildings down. The bomb crater went from the B1 to the B5 level, but they were supported by huge beams. There was some consideration that their plan may have been to take this tower down, perhaps even with the aim of one building falling into the other. But the engineer’s insistence that they could never take the building down struck me.
In 1996 I was working for a litigation support company when Bob Rubin, who was then the secretary of the treasury, called and asked for some advice, and then asked if I would be interested in going to the federal government as undersecretary of the Department of the Treasury in enforcement. At that time about 40 percent of all federal law enforcement was in the Treasury Department, including the Secret Service, the ATF [the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives], and U.S. Customs, and was responsible for all federal law enforcement training, with the exceptions of the FBI and the DEA [Drug Enforcement Agency]. So he asked me to go and become undersecretary for treasury, and I did, in 1996. I was sworn in and had U.S. Customs reporting to me. The customs commissioner left, and I interviewed a lot of people and made some recommendations to Secretary Rubin, who was not happy with them. Finally, I said, what about me for that job? To demote oneself is a fairly un-Washington thing to do, but in 1998 I became the customs commissioner and remained in that position until the end of the Clinton administration. Then, in early 2001, I went to Bear Stearns as head of global security.
So, on September 11, 2001, I was physically in the Bear Stearns building at 345 Park Avenue when the first plane struck. Initially it was said to be a small plane, but then, fifteen minutes later, the second plane hit, and of course it was obviously an intentional act involving terrorism of some sort. We were in the process of building the new Bear Stearns headquarters a block and a half away, and I was told there was panic there. I went to the building and tried to calm people down.
My wife, Veronica, was out of the country, but I was concerned about my son Gregory, who was a reporter for New York 1. I didn’t know where he was, and I couldn’t contact him. Nor could I contact my other son, James, who was downtown as well. I was also concerned about my home, and I knew, by all indications, that I couldn’t get back there, because I lived literally one block away from the World Trade Center, in Battery Park. I didn’t know what the vulnerability of my apartment building was. There was a fair amount of—I wouldn’t say chaos, but people were very uncertain and didn’t know what to do. Some wanted to go home; others wanted to stay. There were problems with transportation. The most memorable thing that day was to witness the first building fall, because you could see part of the South Tower from our building. I thought back to that conversation I had had in the lobby of that very tower on February 26, 1993, about its never coming down. But the building went down. Like so many other people, I was just dumbstruck.
Ultimately the feeling that kicked in was a desire to help in some way, to bring my experience to bear on the issue of arresting and bringing into custody whoever had done this—and preventing something like it from ever happening again. It was a common belief for the next months that another attack was imminent: Something else was going to happen; it was just a matter of time.
The magnitude of the event so far exceeded anything that we had ever experienced. I had been around and had known police officers who were killed in the line of duty, but when I saw the breadth and scope of the impact of losing twenty-three police officers in one hour—that was horrific. Most of the twenty-three police officers killed that day were from the ESU [Emergency Service Unit], which I had served with. I knew Sergeant Michael Curtin, who was also in the Marine Corps Reserve, and who was killed that day.
And then the impact on the Fire Department, losing of 343 men—that was very hard to believe, to internalize. If it had happened in the Police Department it would have been, percentagewise, the equivalent of twelve hundred officers. Initially the estimates of the overall death toll were much higher than three thousand; some people were predicting as many as ten thousand. The true number was just unknown, and it took days to sort that out.
I was asked by Secretary of Transportation Norman Minetta to come to Washington to join a committee that had been formed to get planes back in the air, as all commercial flying schedules in the Northeast had been greatly impacted by the events. I met with people at the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] and was involved for a few days, eager to help. There were other conferences, and it was interesting to both the power of the airline industry and the federal regulatory agencies.
Shortly after the attack, in October, I was asked and agreed to endorse Michael Bloomberg for mayor, who was seen as a tremendous long shot after September 11. The day after he was elected he called me. I had my own thoughts about what the city should do in the wake of this attack, but I was not really preparing to come back to the job of New York City police commissioner.
When I took the position my primary thought was that business had to be done differently in terms of protecting our city. Here we had had two major attacks, both at the same site. New York had to do more as an entity to protect itself. We could not rely solely on the federal government. You can offer all sorts of rationales, but the federal government had failed.
The NYPD is an organization of fifty thousand people. That is formidable in size, and we needed to configure the agency in such a way that it would be an integral and important player in protecting the city from a terrorist event. So I started thinking about it, and put up a long sheet of butcher-block paper on which I wrote out the changes in the structure of the department, which is what we have today.
I knew the counterterrorism bureau had to be moved up in importance in the department—there were only seventeen investigators on the terrorism task force at the time of September 11. I knew we needed to have a strong relationship with the FBI. I knew that our intelligence division had to be more formed, and we needed people outside of policing to be a part of it. The police department, not unlike the fire department, is tradition bound, and the question was, Who could I bring in from the outside to head the counterterrorism bureau? Who would be accepted? I decided that, given my background, I wanted a former Marine Corps general to come in and head it. I also knew we needed a medical and scientific component with the ability to assess the threat from chemical, biological, and radiological weapons and to learn how to protect ourselves—that meant a doctor and medical staff. In our intelligence division I wanted to get someone from outside the agency with relevant credentials. And I wanted to build up our language skills, so I looked to have someone come in from the CIA. I wanted to bring in people from federal agencies who were involved in fighting terrorism. All of these guiding principles were written out on the butcher-block paper.
I reached out to Frank Libutti, a lieutenant general who had just retired from the Marine Corps and had tremendous credentials. And he came onboard in January of 2002. I reached out to David Cohen, whom I knew from his time as the CIA head of station in New York. We drafted several retired FBI agents. We were able to hone our own internal language skills while at the same time broadening our recruitment to obtain people with sensitive language capabilities that we thought we needed for our own internal intelligence investigations.
This is a “can do” organization, and by January of 2002 we had our counterterrorism headquarters set up in Brooklyn. You have to consider that people in the first months of any life-changing event are usually tr
ying to find the light switches, so this was quite a remarkable achievement. And we continued to bring in people from other parts of the department.
We thought about going to other countries. When I was customs commissioner we had legats [legal attachés] overseas. One of our concerns was that there might be investigations going forward that involved New York, investigations that we knew nothing about. And I knew a cop-to-cop relationship could work in other countries, as there’s a sort of recognition in the international law enforcement community that cooperation works pretty well. I took the experience of having customs legats and tailored it to our needs. The concept was to have what we call trip wires, or listening posts, people in other parts of the world who could give us any sort of heads-up, any information that would better protect New York.
The first location where we put this in place was Tel Aviv, Israel, where we had Detective First Grade Mordecai Dzikansky. We knew that the Israelis would be very supportive of this concept. We sought to identify someone in the NYPD who had strong roots in Israel, and even may have gone to school there. Mordecai—Morty—had gone to Hebrew University for a couple of years, and was now a detective. He was received extremely well. At that time there were lots of suicide bombings in Israel, so we thought we could learn something about what we call tradecraft going on, because we believed that it was going to come here.
To get Morty to the site of a bombing within thirty or forty-five minutes, he was given an office with the national police, and he was soon sending back detailed information that we would never have been able to get anywhere else—there’s no vehicle for that sort of data to come to municipal police agencies.
In March of 2004, bombings took place as trains were coming into the station in Madrid, Spain, but the bombs themselves had been assembled in pickup vans in the vicinity of outlying stations. Obviously we’ve been very sensitive to such incidents because of our own train system. We sent Morty to Madrid, as well as a team from our transit bureau that had been involved in helping the MTA design their cars. We found out very quickly from Morty—the Spaniards had good camera surveillance—that some vans had been used to put the bombs together. One of the bombs, which they were using cell phones to activate, had not been detonated, so we had really detailed information on the device. We saw that the bags themselves that carried the bombs were pretty big and weighed about twenty-two pounds. So we got that information out quickly to the patrol force working around our subway stations, and we felt our patrols started to increase the comfort level of the riding public.
On July 7, 2005, bombs went off in London at eight o’clock in the morning. Our guy in London was actually on the subway going to work when it happened, and when he got to headquarters he was able to give us real-time information. We didn’t know if this was part of a worldwide event or if it was isolated in London, so we buttressed our uniformed patrols. I called a meeting that day and said that I wanted to have knapsacks and bags checked in the subways but to make sure it passed muster as far as Supreme Court decisions regarding stops and searches went. We put that in place within a couple of hours and are still doing it today. Obviously some of this we do for effect. We want to advertise the effort, and at least get people thinking about the fact that we are aware.
In January of 2011 we sent a top guy, a former member of the Israeli defense force, to Moscow, and he told us some unsettling things. This was just after the Domodedovo Airport bombing, in which 35 people were killed and 168 people were injured, and he looked at the security they had in place there and said it was very lax: Guards who were supposed to be checking the machines were on cell phones; the machines were going off, and people were just allowed to go through. Our guy tested the system with keys in his pockets, and they simply let him go. Mumbai is another example of where we got granular information because of the trip-wire protocol.
We have the right people in place because of our department’s size. We have Arabic speakers in Dubai. We’ve got NYC police officers who were born in Spain, in Madrid. We have people who were born in Israel. We’ve got Canadian-raised officers in Montreal.
We are still trying to get our arms around the radicalization process. I think you see Peter King [see page 82] taking this issue on, and he’ll be doing a lot more of that. In 2007 we published a report by Mitch Silber and Arvia Bhatt, who are part of our intel house. We sent them all over the world. They went to Australia and to the Netherlands and tried to get some understanding of the phenomenon of what they call unremarkable people deciding to kill innocent people in their own country. Their report talks about the four stages of radicalization, and it really is seen as the template for our law enforcement and intelligence community. We’re working on the second version of that now to refine it.
We know a fair amount about the radicalization process, where people start, how their ideas change, and when they decide to commit jihad. We are learning more and more about it, but it’s no easy task, because we have also seen people who have just radicalized themselves. There are others who have been radicalized by a “sanctioner.” If you look at the case of eighteen young men in Toronto, their sanctioner was in essence a custodian in a mosque. Do we see it as a problem in the United States? Yes. But we don’t know what we don’t know.
When you search for the indicators to identify someone who is going to decide to kill other people, they don’t jump out at you. Whom do we watch? What are the tipping points where people will decide to inflict violence ? They’re not easy to see. We have thousands of people who come here on a student visa. It is probably a good thing overall for this country to have student exchange, but how do you vet them? There are thirty thousand students from Saudi Arabia going to school in Western countries, most of them here.
It is very, very hard to predict where we will be in the future, and no really thoughtful people have come out with anything definitive. A lot is based on economics. People want jobs, but there are no jobs at the end of jihad. If they change their government, that doesn’t translate into jobs. So what does that mean? It means more frustration, more uncertainty. Is that an opportunity for the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups like that to come in and take over? Perhaps. We don’t know.
One thing we have not seen in all the Middle East turmoil is American flags and Israeli flags being burned. So if you had to pick out one reason for upheavals in the Middle East and in Africa, it is that people want to advance economically. But there’s no real structure in place to do this. The only country with the resources to make a difference in other Arab countries is Saudi Arabia, and they haven’t really shown the propensity to do that sort of thing so far. Nobody knows the direction these countries will take. Look at Iran in 1979. They got rid of the shah, supposedly for all the right purposes, but the effort was subverted and was captured by radical Islamists. Could that happen today? Yes, it could happen. What do we do about it? It’s going to take generations to change this jihadist thinking. My sense is, they are looking for the goods they see everywhere, but these are poor countries, and they are not able to change overnight. If a high-tech economy comes to them, it’s going to be well down the road.
Let’s assume democracy breaks out. It’s a pretty messy process. The reality is that having somebody like Mubarak sit on the top of the Middle East and provide stability was a good thing for us. It’s nice to espouse the virtues of democracy, but there are a lot of countries that aren’t ready. George Will asked recently, “Would you want to see democracy in Pakistan?” If there’s some semblance of democracy that breaks out in certain countries, it doesn’t necessarily bode well for us at all. Why? Because the strongman model has worked reasonably well for stability in the Middle East. It’s worked reasonably well for the United States. It’s worked reasonably well for Israel. Getting away from that is just uncharted water; nobody knows what the result could be. And could these democratic efforts be subverted and negatively change the direction of a country? Absolutely. If it’s going to change inevitably, what do we do? We can’t necess
arily change the tide of history.
I’m not saying everything depends on our military strength, but it’s kind of the big guy you need standing behind you. Talk softly and carry a big stick. Our military is the big stick that we’ve depended on in the past. I think the world might sense the reluctance on our part to use justified, legitimate force, based on the reaction of the American people. The polls show that a majority want us out of Afghanistan, and there’s no discernible benefit so far with what’s happened in Iraq. Yes, there’s some form of democracy, but who knows what that all means down the road? Do we have the will? It may have been undermined by what turned out to be the longest war in our history.
David Prezant
Dr. David Prezant is the chief medical officer of the New York City Fire Department. After the first plane went into the North Tower, he headed for the World Trade Center from his hospital in the Bronx. He soon helped set up a triage station on West and Liberty streets, less than a half block away from the South Tower, the first tower to fall. When it did fall, the building came down in eight seconds. He only remembers seeing people running before he was blown off his feet and thrown through the air.
I was born, according to my parents, at Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, which is on the Grand Concourse. And I lived in that area around the Grand Concourse for the first six years of my life, roughly. We then moved closer to Montefiore Medical Center on Mosholu Parkway, and I started school at PS 80. I had always hoped to go to Bronx Science, but when I was going into fifth grade we moved to Yonkers. There I finished grade school, and then went to Lincoln High School, a normal high school with no science specialization. From there my parents told me that I could go to the college of my choice, but they had only a limited amount of money. I didn’t want to burden myself with loans, so I had to think about whether I wanted to go to a state school or a private school. I got into all of the state schools in New York, but I also got into Columbia, which is where I decided to go.