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

by Matt Apuzzo

  Inside NYPD Intelligence, it didn’t seem all that different from the way the police and FBI had dismantled the Mafia. Only now officers weren’t infiltrating a criminal organization but a neighborhood. They were keeping tabs on whoever might be following the four steps of radicalization. Top NYPD officials regarded it as an innovative approach that set the department apart from its reactive FBI counterpart.

  “NYPD Intelligence must be more proactive. It doesn’t get gifts over the transom from CIA, so it digs around the city’s hot spots,” former NYPD deputy commissioner for counterterrorism Michael Sheehan wrote in his 2008 book, Crush the Cell, “NYPD takes a grassroots approach to finding sources and winds up covering areas the FBI ignores.”11

  The informant paperwork was kept in a small but busy third-floor office in Chelsea called the Sensitive Data Unit. As the informant ranks swelled, Cohen boasted to colleagues that he had an informant in every Yemeni market in New York. The goal, he told colleagues, was to have one inside every mosque within a 250-mile radius of the city.12

  To accomplish his goals, Cohen got one of his detectives, Steve Pinkall, into the CIA’s spy training school, the Farm, in Virginia. It was an unprecedented arrangement. The CIA trains officers to work in hostile environments, to make sources, to pass intelligence while under surveillance. The CIA trains its people to break the laws of foreign governments and to operate undetected in places where the Constitution doesn’t apply. Pinkall ultimately failed to graduate.13 But the NYPD bosses were still proud when he returned to work, trained in the ways of the CIA and ready to put them to use in New York.

  The informants who served as listening posts didn’t need CIA training. Their job was simply to keep eyes and ears open for literature and conversation. Informants reported periodically and were available to answer questions or identify photographs. When a CIA drone strike or a US military operation in Iraq or Afghanistan was in the news, Cohen would tell his detectives to take the pulse of the community—he called it “pulsing.” The detectives called their informants: Who was angry? What protests were planned? What was being said at the coffee shops, on college campuses, or in the mosques?

  Cohen lifted the strategy directly from the FBI’s 1960s playbook. It was the bureau that coined the phrase “listening post” in 1967 as part of what it called its Ghetto Informant Program. FBI agents came up with the idea as a way to monitor black neighborhoods, which they saw as ripe for radicalization. Informants would report to the FBI on blacks planning civil disturbances and riots. Sometimes they’d just hang out. Other times, as the Church Committee discovered, the informants were “given specific assignments to attend public meetings of ‘extremists’ and to identify bookstores and others distributing ‘extremist literature.’ ”

  Now, beyond its informant network, the NYPD also relied on officers working undercover inside Muslim neighborhoods. Originally the Special Services Unit recruited them at the Police Academy, while they were still green and hadn’t been programmed to look, talk, and act like cops. The cops created a cover story, usually one in which the new recruit fails out of the academy or decides the department isn’t for him after all. But senior Intel officials worried that it was beginning to look suspicious that Muslim recruits were consistently failing. Better to recruit them after they applied to be cops but before they even arrived at the academy.

  The undercover officers got fake names and were assigned NYPD handlers who would be their primary liaison to the department. Sometimes they were given specific targets. Often they were told to live their lives and report to their handler about what they heard and saw. Along with the informants and the Demographics Unit, the undercover officers helped the NYPD catalogue the city’s mosques and Muslim student groups. Detectives scribbled license plate numbers in mosque parking lots and copied phone numbers from sign-up sheets for paintball trips. They attended study groups and went white-water rafting. And they reported to their handlers whatever rhetoric they heard in sermons or among worshippers milling about the mosque after prayer.14

  Rhetoric was a hot topic in meetings at NYPD Intel. It came in a variety of flavors that were equally disconcerting to police: anti-American, anti-Israel, radical, extremist, and more. All made it into police files.

  But Cohen’s newly reinvented Intelligence Division faced a challenge similar to the one faced in the 1960s: How do you know what rhetoric to worry about? Encouraging someone to commit violence clearly crosses the line. But until then, when does political philosophy warrant criminal investigation?

  Figures on all sides of the political spectrum have used violent language. In the 1960s, radical activist Abbie Hoffman declared, “The only way to support a revolution is to make your own.” Decades later, Republican congresswoman Michele Bachmann issued a similar call in opposing a tax plan to reduce carbon emissions:

  I want people in Minnesota armed and dangerous on this issue of the energy tax, because we need to fight back. Thomas Jefferson told us, “Having a revolution every now and then is a good thing.” And the people—we the people—are going to have to fight back hard if we’re not going to lose our country.

  Similarly, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1964, student leader Mario Savio implored left-wing activists to “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus” of the political machine. “You’ve got to make it stop.” In upstate New York in the 1980s, antiabortion crusader Randall Terry inspired a right-wing cause with the simple command “If you believe abortion is murder, then act like it.” One of the targets of those protests, Dr. Barnett Slepian, was murdered in his home in 1998 by an antiabortion fanatic.

  During the 1960s and 1970s, rhetoric alone was enough to get a group investigated by the NYPD15 or the FBI. Federal agents opened an investigation into the Socialist Workers Party, for instance, even though it had not espoused violence or revolution. It was based on politics. “The SWP is not just another socialist group but follows the revolutionary principles of Marx, Lenin, and Engels as interpreted by Leon Trotsky,” the FBI wrote in opening its investigation.16

  Under Cohen, Muslim rhetoric captured the division’s attention. The new Handschu guidelines said that the NYPD could start investigating whenever there was a “possibility of unlawful activity.” The department could retain any information as long as it related to “potential unlawful or terrorist activity.” Those standards were so broad that analysts and investigators said they were meaningless. Where is there not a possibility of unlawful activity?

  In a deposition taken by the Handschu lawyers, Thomas Galati, the commanding officer of the Intelligence Division, showed how broadly those rules were interpreted. Police could keep files on any conversation in Urdu, he said, because Pakistanis who spoke the language—there are more than fifteen million—qualified as a concern.17

  The NYPD’s zone defense considered rhetoric alone as a serious allegation of actual terrorism. In 2004, for example, the Terrorist Interdiction Unit created a watch list of twenty-six people. The document included dossiers on people suspected of donating money to al-Qaeda; a man believed to be an associate of an Algerian terrorist group; and two people who said they wanted to throw a Jew in front of a train.

  And then there was Tariq Abdur Rashid, an assistant imam who made the list for his views on the wars in the Middle East. Police said Rashid repeatedly denounced US involvement overseas and condoned the death of American soldiers “trying to take over and occupy a land that they have no business being on.” Rashid also said the United States is a puppet for the Jews.18 Such views may be distasteful, unpatriotic, and anti-Semitic. They are not illegal.

  Because an interest in Middle East politics was seen as an indicator of radicalization, NYPD detectives were interested in being wherever people gathered to watch Al Jazeera, the Arabic news channel. The NYPD’s files on the Meena House Café in Brooklyn, for instance, noted that, “the Al Jazeera news network is shown here with all the local Arabic newspapers available for all
.” Similarly, police files declared the Bay Ridge International Café in Brooklyn a “traditional place for young people to gather. Al Jazeera is always on at this location.”

  Not airing Al Jazeera was also suspicious. At the Tea Room in Bay Ridge, police wrote, “The Al Jazeera news channel is prohibited inside this location because the owner feels it brings about extra scrutiny from law enforcement.”

  It was all part of the new strategy, outlined by Sanchez in his testimony before Congress, to investigate what police believed were the precursors to terrorism, even when they were legal.

  “All you had was rhetoric,” explained a former NYPD official who regularly attended meetings with Cohen and Sanchez. “If you had actual criminal activity, you’d have a case.”

  But NYPD Intel rarely made cases, much to the frustration of officers who didn’t care for their new mission of just watching, following, and listening. There was a running joke: “This is Intel. We don’t make cases. We make overtime.”

  • • •

  If parsing political speech posed challenges for the NYPD, interpreting religious rhetoric was even more difficult. Radicalization in the West mentioned frequently the role of Muslim extremists and their speech in the process of creating terrorists. The NYPD’s intelligence files often included, without elaboration, the fact that someone had engaged in extremist or radical rhetoric.

  Exactly what qualified as radical rhetoric at the NYPD was a matter of debate. Galati, the commanding officer, said it was any “conversation which would be inciting somebody or encouraging somebody to commit an unlawful act.”19 He acknowledged that definition wasn’t written down anywhere, leaving detectives, informants, and analysts to decide when religious speech should become part of a police file.

  Such a decision is seldom clear-cut. Spiritual oratory, regardless of faith, can be fiery and passionate. If an imam says that the 9/11 hijackers were sent by Allah to get America’s attention, is that radical Islamic rhetoric? When Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association religious group declared, “The jihadists on 9/11 were the agents of God’s wrath in order to get our attention,” was that radical Christian rhetoric?

  In one document, the NYPD recorded the words of a Brooklyn imam: “Satan is with all people who do not accept Allah. Islam is the one and true religion.”20

  Seen through the lens of the NYPD’s new preventive strategy, the words seemed to embody the indoctrination phase discussed in Radicalization in the West.

  A theologian, on the other hand, might point out that the comment is a variation on the Catholic doctrine of extra ecclesiam nulla salus (“Outside the church there is no salvation”) or the Protestant tenet of solus Christus (“Christ alone”). But Intel analysts and investigators, the ones deciding what went in police files, weren’t sitting around discussing the universal theme of one true faith in monotheistic religions. They erred on the side of reporting the rhetoric.

  From time to time, Stuart Parker, a city attorney assigned to the Intelligence Division, would tell people not to rely so heavily on adjectives such as anti-American and extremist in their files.21 But that was a record-keeping issue. Once the Handschu rules allowed police to decide what religious views were suspicious, there was little discussion about whether they were qualified to judge. Or whether they should.

  Rhetoric collection was driven in part by intense pressure on detectives to produce.

  “If anything goes on in New York,” Cohen told his officers, “it’s your fault.”22

  If terrorists launched an attack, and it turned out they’d been radicalized inside a mosque and held meetings in a coffee shop, no cop wanted to be the last one to have visited there and reported nothing extraordinary. So they reported everything they saw.

  “The living room contained a love seat and two futons,” one official wrote in a report on how Moroccans assimilated into New York. “There was a small table as well as an entertainment center. There were two Korans. One on top of each speaker. On the wall, there was a 2006 calendar from the Beit El Masjid,” a Brooklyn mosque.

  Among Cohen’s inner circle, nobody believed that all Muslims were terrorists. Even most Muslim extremists weren’t terrorists. Neither were most people who opposed Israel’s policies, criticized America, or railed against its use of drones. But recently it seemed most terrorists were Muslim. And all of them had been extremists. Among those, some had opposed Israel, disparaged America, or criticized drones. Zone defense meant watching the city’s roughly seven hundred thousand Muslims to find the tiny few who might become terrorists.

  Any trait shared among terrorists was seen as a possible indicator, even if that trait also applied to many innocent people. For instance, in 2009 Cohen started a program to monitor everybody in New York City who wanted a new name.23 The initiative began after a Memphis man named Carlos Bledsoe killed one US Army private and wounded another in a drive-by shooting at a military recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. Bledsoe was a recent convert to Islam and had taken the name Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad. A few months later, intelligence officials learned about David Headley, a Chicago man who’d helped the terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba plan a terrorist attack in India in 2008. Headley was born Daood Sayed Gilani and had changed his name to something more traditionally American so that he could travel without attracting suspicion.

  The NYPD began reviewing court filings to see who was changing his or her name. Someone taking an Arabic name might be a recent convert and, like Bledsoe, might be angry and preparing to strike. Someone Americanizing his Arabic name might be the next Headley. Of course, most people who change their names are not terrorists. Taking a new Arabic name as part of a religious conversion is protected by the First Amendment. And in New York, immigrants have been taking new Americanized names since they first began stepping off the ferry from Ellis Island to Manhattan.

  Once the NYPD had the names, analysts picked some—most often those that looked like they might be from Muslim countries—and ran what they called a “round robin” on them. Analysts performed background checks, looking at criminal records, travel history, business licenses, and immigration documents. The results were stored on a spreadsheet. Then, detectives from the Leads Unit would hit the streets to interview people about why they changed their names.

  The Leads detectives had drilled their share of dry holes before. The unit was responsible for checking out every terrorist tip that came in, no matter how vague or preposterous. A sign in the unit read, “Deposit All Intel Division Bags of Shit Here.” But the name-change program seemed like a new level of time wasting. They didn’t find any radical converts. And those who abandoned their Arabic names for something more American all seemed to say the same thing: They were trying to blend in, but not for the reason that Cohen feared. They were simply tired of the discrimination that came with being Muslim in America.

  “Let me guess,” a detective would say when a colleague came back from a fruitless interview. “He was getting harassed.”

  Programs like this put the detectives and analysts in a tough spot. Everyone agreed that identifying a terrorist before he attacked was a good idea. And it was Muslims, not Catholics or Protestants, who’d hijacked the airplanes on 9/11. There were, without question, radical Islamic leaders espousing violence in the name of religion. Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born cleric who’d been seen as a moderate when he preached in Virginia, went on to become al-Qaeda’s chief propagandist. He inspired Western terrorists with his internet sermons:

  To the Muslims in America, I have this to say: How can your conscience allow you to live in peaceful coexistence with a nation that is responsible for the tyranny and crimes committed against your own brothers and sisters?

  And:

  Don’t consult with anybody in killing the Americans. Fighting the devil doesn’t require consultation or prayers seeking divine guidance. They are the party of the devils.

  So ignoring Islamic rhetoric—or anything that might be a warning sign—seemed foolhardy
. But in the race to identify future terrorists, innocent religious and political speech was treated the same as legitimately threatening comments.

  In late 2003 the NYPD received a tip that people were training for jihad in the basement of the Masjid al-Ikhwa, a Brooklyn storefront mosque with a congregation primarily of African Americans.24 Over the next eight months, a pair of NYPD informants visited repeatedly, helping police compile dossiers on the imam, the teachers, and the man who collected donations during Friday prayers.

  One teacher was especially worrisome. He had a history of violent crime and asked a police informant, “How many Jews do you think we could take out on a Saturday at Marcy and Bedford with an AK-47 in three minutes?”

  As the informants informed, the catalogue of rhetoric grew. And the line about the AK-47 was given no more attention than general pronouncements about politics such as, “President Bush is behind it all and that Secretary of State Colin Powell has a deceiving tongue. Muslims throughout the world are being oppressed.” The police files even noted that the imam declared—with total accuracy—“people are sent into the Mosque to spy on it and see what’s going on.”

  By June 2004, the police hadn’t found any jihadists in the basement. They hadn’t made any case at all. But they had compiled two pages of rhetoric.

  • • •

  By using religious views and rhetoric as potential terrorist indicators, the NYPD was wading into a theological debate that began in the mid-seventh century: the schism between Sunnis and Shia.

  When the Prophet Muhammad died in AD 632, he did not have a male heir, leaving open the question of who would follow him as Islam’s leader. Most Muslims declared their support for the Prophet’s father-in-law, Abu Bakr, who was chosen by a council of the Prophet’s disciples. A small group believed that only God could choose the Prophet’s successor and that Muhammad, acting on God’s will, had appointed his son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi Talib.