As we’ve previously talked about on the show, after 9/11 the NYPD stopped relying on Federal agencies for intelligence, and started gathering their own.
Well, Christopher Dickey has written an amazing book on the topic. Here, from the publisher’s website:
The NYPD is the best and most ambitious antiterror operation in the world. Its seat-of-the-pants intelligence is the gold standard for all others.
Christopher Dickey, who has reported on international terrorism for more than twenty-five years, takes readers into the secret command center of the New York City Police Department’s counterterrorism division, then onto the streets with cops ready for the toughest urban combat the twenty-first century can throw at them. But behind the tactical shows of force staged by the police, there lies a much more ambitious and controversial strategy: to go anywhere and use almost any means to keep the city from becoming, once again, Ground Zero. This is the story of the coming war in America’s cities and New York’s shadow war, waged around the globe to stop it before it begins.
Drawing on unparalleled access to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other top officials, Dickey explores the most ambitious intelligence operation ever organized by a metropolitan police department. Headed by David Cohen, who ran the CIA’s operations inside the United States in the 1980s and its global spying in the 1990s, the NYPD’s counterterrorism division had uptotheminute details of new attacks set in motion to target Manhattan in 2002 and 2003.
New York’s finest are now seen by other police chiefs in the United States as the gold standard for counterterrorism operations and a model for even the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet as New Yorkers have come to feel safer, they’ve also grown worried about the NYPD’s methods: sending its undercover agents to spy on Americans in other cities, rounding up hundreds of protesters preemptively before the 2004 Republican convention, and using confidential informants who may be more adept at plotting terror than the people they finger.
Securing the City is a superb investigative reporter’s stunning look inside the real world of cops who are ready to take on the world and at the ambiguous price we pay for the safety they provide.
Tonight, Mike and Mark speak with Chris Dickey about this great book, and the story behind it.
About the guest:
Award-winning author Christopher Dickey is the Paris Bureau Chief and Middle East Regional Editor for Newsweek Magazine. Previously he worked for The Washington Post as Cairo Bureau Chief and Central America Bureau Chief. Chris’s Shadowland column, about counter-terrorism, espionage and the Middle East, appears weekly on Newsweek Online. For links to recent columns and articles, visit the Shadowland archive. Chris’s nonfiction books include “Securing the City,” to be published in February 2009, as well as “With the Contras,” “Expats,” and “Summer of Deliverance.” He has also written two acclaimed thrillers: “Innocent Blood” and “The Sleeper.”
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