Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD's Secret Spying Unit and bin Laden's Final Plot Against America

by Matt Apuzzo

  Finally, in 1988 Borelli he got the adrenaline rush he’d always wanted. He joined the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, which was responsible for infiltrating Mexican drug cartels. He signed up for tactical training, which allowed him to join the SWAT team on predawn raids. Between shifts, he squeezed in classes that got him certified as a paramedic. In 1993, when federal agents stormed the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, to arrest cult leader David Koresh on weapons charges, Borelli was inside a Bradley armored fighting vehicle nearby, waiting to treat the wounded.

  Legions of FBI agents were reprogrammed to fight terrorism after 9/11. It was a massive organizational change. For Borelli, though, it wasn’t that big a shift. His work as a medic had made him part of a national initiative to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction. That’s what led him to Africa after the 1998 embassy bombings and to Yemen two years later, when al-Qaeda attacked the USS Cole Navy destroyer, killing seventeen American sailors. He’d become one of the bureau’s go-to agents on terrorism and was part of a small group that had seen the al-Qaeda threat up close. So after 9/11, when headquarters put out the call for volunteers to go overseas, it was an easy decision. Borelli raised his hand.

  Borelli, who was divorced, worked long, unpredictable hours. In his one-bedroom apartment, he drank out of plastic cups and ate off disposable plates so he wouldn’t have to do the dishes. After two and a half decades at the bureau, most of the agents who’d worked alongside him through the height of the war on terrorism were packing it in. Some took cushy, high-paying jobs overseeing security at Fortune 500 companies. Others were making money in government consulting. In a year, he, too, would be eligible to retire, maybe start a second career.

  The truth was, he lived for nights like this.

  2

  A SPY IN NEW YORK

  David Cohen didn’t come to the NYPD in 2002 to make friends with the feds. And in his seven years on the job as the NYPD’s top intelligence officer, he certainly had not.

  Prominently displayed on the wall of his office at One Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan was a framed copy of a newspaper article from 2007. The story described how, on Cohen’s orders, the NYPD stopped Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s motorcade at John F. Kennedy Airport. Ahmadinejad was in New York to attend the opening of the United Nations General Assembly, and, like the other world leaders, he arrived with an entourage of armed security guards.

  All the details, including who would be there and how many would be armed, had been worked out in advance with the State Department. Ahmadinejad was hardly a beloved figure in Washington, but he and his colleagues were traveling on diplomatic visas and had to be afforded the same treatment that American diplomats expected overseas. No pat-downs, no delays. The Iranians were allowed to have eleven armed guards, and the State Department felt comfortable that’s exactly how many they had.

  But the Iranian motorcade had an NYPD escort, and that car refused to move. Cohen suspected that the Iranian delegation had brought more weapons than it had acknowledged. The NYPD wanted to run a handheld metal detector over each Iranian before the motorcade was allowed to leave. It was a flagrant breach of diplomatic protocol, and the Iranians wouldn’t stand for it. It was ugly, too, for the State Department, which had no patience for the NYPD’s meddling. The standoff lasted about forty minutes before police allowed the motorcade to leave the airport.

  “Way to go, NYPD,” the New York Daily News cheered afterward. Though the incident infuriated the State Department, it sent a message to the Iranians and to the Washington bureaucrats: In New York, David Cohen makes the rules.

  The slight, bookish, and bespectacled Cohen had clashed with several arms of the government but most frequently with the FBI. In public, the NYPD and the FBI always wore their brightest smiles and sang each other’s praises when talking about their partnership. But as the city approached the eight-year anniversary of 9/11, with word spreading through the top ranks of the NYPD about an apparent terrorist plot in motion, relations between the bureau and Cohen’s Intelligence Division were especially chilly.

  A few months earlier, Cohen had been caught running an undercover operation far outside his jurisdiction, out of an apartment near the Rutgers University campus in New Brunswick, New Jersey, forty miles from Manhattan. Using a fake name, an NYPD detective rented a first-floor apartment in a building filled with graduate students and young professionals. Ordinarily, when an officer conducts an investigation out of state, he coordinates with the local and state police. If it’s a terrorism case, the FBI expects a call too. Cohen kept the NYPD operation secret. The undercover officer was there to manage operations around the state and, posing as a student, to keep tabs on the Muslim student group at Rutgers.

  The whole thing fell apart when a building superintendent unlocked the apartment door to conduct an inspection. The place was nearly empty, with no sign that anyone had been there for weeks. Surveillance photos of nearby buildings and terrorist literature were strewn about the table. When the building manager called 911, he and the dispatcher sounded equally confused.

  “The apartment has about—has no furniture except two beds, has no clothing, has New York City Police Department radios,” the manager said.

  “Really?” the dispatcher asked.

  “There’s computer hardware, software, you know, just laying around,” the manager continued. “There’s pictures of terrorists. There’s pictures of our neighboring building that they have.”

  “In New Brunswick?” the dispatcher asked, her voice rising with surprise.

  Fearing the apartment was the base for a terrorist cell, New Brunswick police officers and agents from the FBI’s Newark, New Jersey, office rushed to the building. It didn’t take them long to figure out what was going on. The local police closed the matter with a one-page report and a simple note: “Through Police investigation, it was determined there was no evidence of criminal activity found at that location.”

  At the FBI, the incident met with a mixture of anger and amusement. On the one hand, what was Cohen doing sending officers into New Brunswick without telling anyone? On the other, the operation was amateurish. What kind of detective leaves police radios and surveillance photos sitting in an unmanned safe house?

  The FBI seized everything in the apartment, forcing on Cohen the humbling task of asking the agents for his stuff back. Though the story hadn’t made the news, it was a complete embarrassment, even inside NYPD Intel. Cohen didn’t mind when FBI agents pounded their fists in anger. But now they were rolling their eyes.

  Despite this testy relationship, there was never any doubt that Cohen would be brought into the Zazi investigation. In any other city in America, the investigation would be the unquestioned responsibility of the FBI. State and local police would help, but it would all run through the local Joint Terrorism Task Force. But New York, with eight million residents, the stock exchange, the Statue of Liberty, and a permanent scar from terrorism, wasn’t like any other city. No other city had an intelligence division like the NYPD’s. And no department had anybody quite like David Cohen, backed by the most powerful figure in American policing.

  • • •

  Weeks after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when the residents of his Lower Manhattan apartment complex were finally allowed back into the building, Raymond Kelly and his wife, Veronica, went up to the roof. They lived in Battery Park City, on the Hudson River, a block from the World Trade Center. They looked out over the heap of twisted metal and watched it still smoldering.

  The towers were part of their neighborhood. Back in February 1993, during the final year of Mayor David Dinkins’s administration, Kelly was the police commissioner when terrorists detonated a truck bomb in the garage below the North Tower. Six people were killed and more than a thousand were injured in an explosion that left behind a 130-foot crater. Later, when the building was finally declared safe and the shops in the concourse reopened, Kelly was one of the first customers to retur
n while the rest of the city was still on edge.

  Through it all, Kelly was confident and reassuring, declaring, “We must remember that fear is a type of weapon as well, one to which we must not submit.”

  That was all in the past. He was out of government. He’d enjoyed a decadelong career with the NYPD and a stint with the US Customs Service. In the mid-1990s he directed an international police force in Haiti during the turbulent period after president Jean-Bertrand Aristide returned to power. Now Kelly was watching a crisis from the sidelines. He had a lucrative job as director of corporate security for the Wall Street investment bank Bear Stearns. But his city—his neighborhood—was shattered, and he felt powerless.

  Though his name had been floated in the press as a possible candidate to return to his old job at One Police Plaza, that seemed unlikely. Two weeks before the mayoral election, his preferred candidate, billionaire Republican Michael Bloomberg, trailed Democrat Mark Green by 16 points in the polls. Besides, Kelly wasn’t angling for a comeback. He’d made it clear that, on the off chance that Bloomberg won, he was going to persuade the current police commissioner, Bernard Kerik, to stay on the job.

  Outgoing mayor Rudy Giuliani, though, would change Bloomberg’s—and Kelly’s—fate. With little more than a week left in the race, Giuliani, who was riding a wave of immense popularity after the terrorist attacks, endorsed Bloomberg on the steps of city hall. Bloomberg quickly flooded the airwaves with a sixty-second advertisement that was more of a farewell from Giuliani than a rallying call for Bloomberg.

  “It’s been an honor to be your mayor for eight years,” Giuliani said in the ad. “You may not have always agreed with me, but I gave it my all. I love this city. And I’m confident it will be in good hands with Mike Bloomberg.”

  The man whom the media was calling “America’s mayor” had spoken. Voters turned out for his handpicked successor. Bloomberg won by 2 percentage points. And when Kerik declined the offer to stay on the job, Kelly was the obvious pick for police commissioner. He was sixty years old, but he’d never lost the discipline or posture of his days as a marine lieutenant during the Vietnam War. He stood square shouldered and always perfectly upright, making the most of his roughly five-foot-eight height. With a barrel chest, buzz cut, and a smile that verged on a smirk, the native New Yorker had been compared to Popeye, if the comic strip hero ever traded his sailor uniform for a custom-made suit and pocket square.

  There was more than a bit of irony in Giuliani’s role in Kelly’s reappointment. Back in 1993, it was Giuliani who had swept Dinkins from office by portraying the administration as weak on crime. Never mind that Kelly had inherited a department beset by corruption, losing the fight against crack and still smarting from its disastrous handling of a deadly 1991 riot in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights. Never mind that it was Kelly—not Giuliani, as has been said repeatedly—who started the crackdown on the homeless squeegee men who harassed drivers at red lights and demanded money for washing their windows. And never mind that crime rates started ticking downward on Kelly’s watch.

  Giuliani dismissed Kelly’s strategy of community policing. He thought it forced cops to act like social workers. In late 1993, Giuliani held a secret meeting at the Tudor Hotel on Forty-second Street to give Kelly a chance to argue for his own job. But as soon as Kelly mentioned community policing, the mayor-elect cut him off and ended the meeting. Kelly was finished.1

  By putting more police on the streets and using computerized crime mapping, Giuliani oversaw a seemingly miraculous turnaround in crime, one that changed policing strategies worldwide. But now, weeks after 9/11, with Kelly poised to retake the NYPD’s top job, the city was suffering from a very different malaise.

  It was not the racially charged city that Kelly had patrolled as a young officer in 1968, back from Vietnam, where he had conducted coastal raids and search-and-destroy missions and saw battle in the Que Son Valley.2 And it was no longer a city of two thousand murders a year, as it was when he was police commissioner the first time. When Kelly last led the force, six in ten New Yorkers said that crime was their top issue. Now the city was a safe tourist mecca but on edge nevertheless.

  It wasn’t only because of 9/11. On the heels of those attacks, anthrax started arriving in the mail. The day before Bloomberg was voted into office, a sixty-one-year-old hospital stockroom worker was buried in the Bronx. She’d died of anthrax inhalation, despite no known contact with any of the letters. Then, on November 12, 2001, the day after news of Kelly’s imminent reappointment was leaked to the media, American Airlines Flight 587, destined for the Dominican Republic, took off from JFK and immediately crashed in a Queens neighborhood, killing all 260 people on board and 5 more on the ground. It turned out to be an equipment failure, but the government closed airports, bridges, and tunnels all over the country as a precaution.

  The threat of terrorism had changed America’s views overnight. Television pundits debated the benefits of torturing prisoners or shipping them off to countries that would do it.

  “Torture is bad,” CNN’s Tucker Carlson said, but then added, “Keep in mind, some things are worse. And under certain circumstances, it may be the lesser of two evils. Because some evils are pretty evil.”3

  FBI agents around the country, and particularly in New York, were rounding up hundreds of Muslim immigrants on suspicion of a connection to the 9/11 attacks. They were held in secret, typically without charges and without contact with their families or lawyers. Many were abused physically or verbally.

  The suspects were held on immigration charges, but the reasons for suspicion were often dubious. One grocery store employee was arrested after someone called the FBI and reported that the store was being run by Middle Eastern men. There were two to three grocers on each shift, which the caller said was “too many people to run a small store.” For this, the worker was treated as part of the 9/11 investigation.4

  It was against this backdrop that Kelly prepared for his return to One Police Plaza, the first man to rise from cadet to police commissioner and the first person to hold the top job twice.

  His encore performance called for a new approach. Kelly had been a cop all his adult life and, throughout his career, the NYPD was ready to respond to whatever came its way. It was one of his detectives, working alongside a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agent, who found a vehicle identification number in the debris following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That helped police locate the rental agency that owned the truck and, ultimately, the terrorist who’d rented it.

  But the NYPD never had a chance to prevent that bombing. And that attack had done nothing to change the attitude of the federal government—specifically the FBI—which rarely gave local police the information it needed ahead of time. After 9/11, the debris field a block away from Kelly’s apartment had crystallized the notion that as long as the federal government controlled all the information, the NYPD was merely waiting to respond to the next attack, helpless to prevent it.

  That was unacceptable to Kelly. The NYPD needed its own intelligence unit, one that would rival the FBI in ability and focus on New York in a way the FBI never could. Kelly knew the man to run it.

  • • •

  In November 2001, two months before being sworn in, Kelly called Cohen and offered him a job as the NYPD’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, a new position. The two men had never worked together, but they’d met back in the mid-1990s, when Kelly was working in the private sector and Cohen was the CIA’s station chief in New York,

  Like Kelly, Cohen had since left government for Wall Street. He was a vice president for the global insurance giant American International Group. He’d been in the job for only about a year, and he told Kelly he’d need a few days to think about it.5

  It was a rare opportunity not just to return to intelligence work but also to build something from scratch. He’d joined the CIA in 1966 as a twenty-six-year-old economist, a slender young man with a firm jaw and conservative pompadour haircut in the st
yle of a young Ronald Reagan. Cohen left in 2000, having served as the top operations officer in the entire agency. And during those nearly thirty-five years, he’d been at his best when he found opportunities to create something.

  Back in the 1980s, he started an analytical team to investigate terrorism; the first of its kind at the agency. In 1991 he forced the merger of the CIA’s two domestic units, believing that they would operate better as one, with him at the helm. Then in 1996, years before Osama bin Laden entered the public consciousness, and at a time when many in the CIA regarded the scion to a wealthy Saudi family as little more than a moneyman, Cohen assigned a dozen officers to gather intelligence on him. That unit, known as Alec Station, built the foundation for everything the CIA would come to know about bin Laden.

  But while Hollywood often portrayed the CIA as an all-knowing intelligence service capable of sophisticated espionage and cunning, the real CIA could be a bureaucratic morass. It was often reactive, rushing to respond to whatever crisis bubbled up in the world or whatever had upset some senator or congressman. Changing anything on its own meant dealing with micromanagers at the White House and meddling politicians on Capitol Hill. That meant real vision—real change—was seldom realized.