The Intercept

A great many police forces across the country had traded on the emotion and fear of 9/11 to bolster their budgets and departments—from large cities to small towns, law enforcement expenditures rose precipitously throughout the first decade of the twenty-first century—but only one municipal agency created its own mini-CIA.

The Counter-Terrorism Bureau of the NYPD and its partnership with the JTTF was the public side of the NYPD’s efforts. The true face of counterterrorism, the Intelligence Division, was rarely seen. As such, the often controversial details of Intel’s i

Just weeks after the last fires were extinguished at the newly christened Ground Zero, Commissioner Kelly hired David Cohen, a thirty-five-year veteran of the Central Intelligence Agency, to become the NYPD’s first civilian intelligence chief. His job was simple and yet chilling: defend the preeminent city in the world from attack.

At that time, the Intelligence Division was primarily used for escorting various visiting dignitaries around the city. Cohen, with the commissioner’s full support, transformed Intel from a cushy preretirement assignment into a specialized unit that analyzed intelligence, ran drills and undercover operations throughout the five boroughs, and cultivated a broad network of informers to feed the division its insider data. While undercover work is a staple of big-city police departments, no other urban law enforcement organization in the nation worked as aggressively to infiltrate potential terror cells.

To do so, Cohen brought over various former espionage colleagues, first to screen and hire officers, and then to educate those officers in the tradecraft of information gathering, interdiction, and threat assessment. The goal was to locate and neutralize pockets of militancy before they became fully radicalized terror cells.

Fisk had been a detective bureau investigator for two years before being promoted for a spot in Intel. Being fluent in Arabic certainly helped. Fisk’s mother was Lebanese, hailing from a wealthy family who had openly despaired when she married his father, a Texas-born diplomat. While Fisk’s salary remained the same at Intel—he was Detective Two, no matter where he worked inside the NYPD—he wasn’t hampered by budgetary concerns as he had been on regular duty. No hassles about buying or repairing equipment: funding was available and easily procured. What he had not been prepared for were the opportunities for travel, with assignments taking him to London; Lyon, France; Tel Aviv; Toronto; Egypt; even Iraq.

He was, for all intents and purposes, an intelligence officer inside the NYPD.

Covert intervention was equal parts art and science. The adrenaline flowed differently when you were investigating crimes before they happened, rather than reacting to immediate and developing crises. The Tantric anticlimax of serving search and arrest warrants—of taking the puzzle apart before it was quite put together—was the only drawback to Intel.

Success meant that nothing happened. No bomb detonated, no bridge collapsed, nobody screamed in the night. It meant that the city kept moving. Keeping men and women going to work, children playing in parks, elderly people complaining about the weather: this was his job.

Fisk opened his eyes, returning to full consciousness. The office buzzed around him. The city sentinel rested but never slept.

His computer had booted up. The wallpaper on his monitor was a spectacular view of Manhattan looking north from Governors Island.

He dug in right away, sca

Rakers were real cops, undercover, many of them new to Intel. The term came from a controversial remark an NYPD spokesman once made about sending ethnically matched agents into neighborhoods to “rake the coals looking for hot spots.” Most Intel cops got their start as rakers, including Fisk. Those vans that pull up outside a New York deli or convenience store at ten thirty at night, their drivers dollying in racks of soda and candy—for eight months that had been Fisk, delivering goods throughout the five boroughs . . . but mostly listening and watching.

So-called mosque crawlers were civilians on the payroll who hung around, watched, and—when they thought they had something—reported. Some were motivated by ancient hatreds. Some had had relatives killed by the Taliban or Al-Qaeda. Some needed the money. And some—many—had chosen informing as a lesser evil over arrest.

ACLU-style activists railed against perceived abuses of privacy by the Intel Division’s secretive surveillance methods. It was profiling, pure and simple, they charged—something cops had been doing for centuries. Show me a better way, Fisk always thought. But as the saying went, there were no liberals in a foxhole.

Fisk sifted through the reports, keeping track of what amounted to gossip from Muslim neighborhoods. Whose brother was in town from overseas? Whose friend wasn’t around suddenly? Why were these two men and a woman having coffee at that bookstore in Astoria where nobody ever went?

Before Intel, most cops working terrorist cases didn’t even know that Muslims prayed in congregation on Fridays. Intel’s special Analytic Unit, comprising experts from both academia and intelligence, figured out things like why a man whose family had been wiped out by a drone in Afghanistan a week ago might be somebody to look at closely. One of the many lessons of 9/11 was that there needed to be a central brain trust to process all incoming data, to interpret what the rakers were seeing and hearing. The AU tracked the big picture, the nuances and co

Much of Fisk’s daily work involved slogging through reports from his informants and reading memos that the FBI decided to share. Days like this one were few and far between. This thing with Bassam Shah was hot.

Fisk walked to the heart of the Intel building, known officially as the Global Intelligence Room, though nobody ever called it anything other than The Room. It was a sunken pit roughly the size of an Olympic swimming pool, open on one side where a wide three-step staircase led up to cubicles and offices.

A dozen flat-screen televisions hung from ceiling mounts on the side walls, broadcasting Al-Jazeera and every other foreign news service from big satellite dishes set next to the backup generators outside. Headlines from the world’s news sources ticked in red across LED displays under the TVs. On the front wall, an electronic world map tracked threats with coded lights for New York, Tel Aviv, London, Riyadh, Islamabad, Baghdad, Manila, Jakarta, Tokyo, and Moscow.

On the floor beneath the map were banks of consoles with computer screens rivaling NASA’s Mission Control. Linguists in headphones, fluent in Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Fujianese, Spanish, French, and other languages, tracked and logged pertinent items coming across the newswires and broadcasts. They fed useful information to the officials in perimeter offices who maintained the threat board. Those officials briefed response teams and field agents who followed up on the ground in New York City.

Fisk sat in on an Analytic Unit meeting updating Shah’s progress. Intel Division was shoe-leather detective work and big-picture tea-leaf reading.

“How’d the briefing go?” asked Louise, a language tech who was an expert on Arabic dialects.

“Wonderful. A lovefest.”

“Did they kick you in the shins again?”

“Basketball injury,” said Fisk, smiling. “But, yes.”

“You ask for it.”

“Listen, I want somebody the JTTF doesn’t know. A fresh face.”

“Uh-oh. What are you going to do?”

Fisk feigned offense. “My job. Any recommendations?”

“Depends. Are they going to get in trouble for you?”