New Yorkers by nature are often impatient—places to go, people to see, subways to catch. We loathe waiting too long for service.

New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly is one of those people—at least when it comes to protecting his city of 8.2 million. Post-Sept. 11, 2001, Kelly felt that the New York Police Department (NYPD), one of the largest law enforcement units in the world—charged with protecting a financial and cultural icon of America—simply could not wait for threat information to filter through regular bureaucratic channels. So Kelly created his own version of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). In the years since, it has grown to be respected by its federal counterparts and held up as a model for other local police departments.

“You have a lot of interest and focus in New York, and I think, frankly, it provides lessons on what we might look for in the future” in terms of collecting and sharing threat information, said David Heyman, director of the Homeland Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, DC. “It wasn’t so much a need for New York to go into the tribal areas of Pakistan or into Afghan caves and actually find out who’s planning an attack against New York and when. It’s really much more about being where the threat emerges and where information about the threat has materialized first.”

The roots

Kelly created his Counterterrorism Bureau in 2002 to guard against international and domestic terrorism in his city. A $1.2 million grant from the New York City Police Foundation helped set up the Counter Terrorist Operations Center to centralize the gathering, analyzing and disseminating of threat information.

Counterterrorism Commissioner Richard Falkenrath, who helped create the federal Department of Homeland Security as a former deputy homeland security adviser to President George Bush, is responsible for the bureau’s overall strategy and policies.

David Cohen, a former deputy director of the CIA Directorate of Intelligence and director of operations, heads up the Intelligence Division. “This is a man who also knows a lot about the craft and he also happens to be a New Yorker, so he knows a lot about New York. That’s a terrific combination,” said Brian Jenkins, a counterterrorism expert at the Rand Corporation who has known Cohen for almost 30 years.

With a budget of about $200 million, approximately 1,000 police work the counterterrorism beat, about half of whom are assigned strictly to counterterrorism. The Intelligence Division’s civilian analyst ranks will swell to 30 within the year, while the bureau’s Counter Terrorism Division will soon have 10 billets of its own. These analysts have been lured from the federal government and other government feeder outlets, like think tanks. Personnel receive language training equal to that of native speakers in over 60 languages; more than 500 certified speakers are assigned to the counterterrorism or intelligence commands. The Defense Department often calls upon their expertise.

“If you’re trying to assemble a talented team of analysts … casting a broad net to attract diverse individuals is extremely important,” explained Jenkins. “You kind of want to be at the creative edge, and certainly the NYPD has been at the creative edge.”

Cohen’s division used to primarily protect visiting dignitaries and was focused on drugs and crime. It now spends almost all of its time looking at how and where potential terrorists gather, where they travel and how they raise funds. It has a cyber unit, although not many details are publicly available about exactly what it does, and media reports have stated that some undercover agents infiltrate potentially dangerous groups.

NYPD officials would not comment for this story.

NYPD liaisons work in overseas terror targets like Singapore, London, Toronto, Montreal, Tel Aviv and Amman, Jordan. More often than not, terrorist plots against the United States have been hatched, financed or staffed overseas at some point. New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg has described their role as working on “law enforcement issues of mutual concern and to obtain a full picture of the global terrorist threat—a threat which can rear its head in our city at any time.”

After an attack—such as the Mumbai, India, train bombing on July 11, 2006—the NYPD liaison interacts with local officials to see what lessons can be learned and sends home information that may somehow lead back to New York—or anywhere else in the United States, for that matter—faster than the speed of federal channels. Domestic precautions can then be taken.

“What’s really, I think, at the heart of what New York has done better than anybody else is build the necessary networks for sharing the information in a thorough and timely manner so that they’re on top of things before things are on top of them,” Heyman said.

Those NYPD overseas liaisons are not necessarily intelligence collectors, per se. “It’s not [the liaison’s] business to find out whodunnit, but rather to relay first-hand information from the front lines, so to speak,” Jenkins added.

A rocky road

Mike Baker, a 14-year covert field-operations officer for the CIA—the agency traditionally responsible for overseas intelligence—said the work done by police overseas often complements intelligence efforts, since CIA intelligence officers and law enforcement haven’t necessarily been trained in the same techniques and processes. In the case of a train bombing, for instance, law enforcement is on the scene and doing forensic studies, while the CIA is scouring human intelligence sources.

“Police, law enforcement—even from the intelligence perspective, is an entirely different animal than the CIA or an intelligence services,” said Baker, now the CEO of Prescience LLC, a global intelligence and risk management firm. “The difference … is we would speak the language of the intelligence guys … not necessarily so with police.”

An NYPD official earlier this year became the first nonfederal agent to have a seat at the National Counterterrorism Center, the primary US government organization for integrating and analyzing all intelligence pertaining to terrorism and counterterrorism and operational planning.

This is not to say, however, that everything’s all sunshine and roses. In the beginning of the NYPD’s overseas efforts, the relationship between federal agencies and the NYPD was frosty. After all, Kelly was spurning the inefficient yet traditional Washington stovepipe model of information sharing that many say still plagues counterterror efforts today.

There have been recent complaints by some critics, including the Los Angeles Police Department, that Kelly doesn’t share access to intelligence. Reports suggest the NYPD and FBI still rub each other the wrong way and that Kelly’s crew has been shut out of some New York-related terror investigations.

“I wouldn’t blow smoke and say it always worked great and there are no issues of coordination between the agencies,” said Baker, who knows people who work in the intelligence and counterterrorism divisions. “There’s always room for improvement, but it has worked out well.

“That initial Byzantine suspicion” on the part of federal agencies that the NYPD was a hostile agency is “not an issue anymore,” he said.

The NYPD’s Intelligence Division in 2007 released a report, Radicalization in the West, to help local and federal law enforcement, as well as Washington policymakers, understand what drives “‘unremarkable’ people to become terrorists” and how to counter the threat. Authors traveled the globe to analyze who had participated in thwarted and planned plots against the West, their motivations and how they became so radicalized.

In a world where analysis of terror trends and threat information usually come from the federal level and work their way down, this role reversal was revolutionary.

“There’s a tendency in the federal government to think hierarchically—to think in terms of hubs and spokes, with Washington being the hub,” said Jenkins, who consulted with the Intelligence Division on the report. “They [NYPD] do sometimes irritate people who are organized in a very hierarchical fashion … [but] the terrorists aren’t organized according to our convenience.” HST