Enemies Within (18 page)

It suggested that becoming a terrorist was a four-step process, from preradicalization and self-identification to indoctrination and, finally, “jihadization.” Nascent terrorists are typically in an identity crisis, the NYPD said. Some might be angry over discrimination or racism. Others might be angered by the Palestinian-Israeli conflict or the plight of Muslims in war-torn countries. As they become more politically active and embrace fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, they are more likely to engage in what the NYPD called “extremist-like discussions” in cafés, gyms, halal butcher shops, student associations, and study groups.

Silber and Bhatt argued such troubling talk eventually leads to a spiritual mentor and a coterie of like-minded extremists. The budding terrorist withdraws from the mosque. His views harden and simplify: You are either a believer or a nonbeliever, and it is acceptable to use violence on nonbelievers. He and his friends discuss putting their views into action. Maybe they go overseas for terrorist training or try their hands at outdoor activities such as camping, paintball, or target shooting. They might make a suicide video or draft a will. At this stage, they can pick a target anytime.

Perhaps most frightening was what the NYPD described as the “candidates” for terrorism.

“Middle-class families and students appear to provide the most fertile
ground for the seeds of radicalization,” Silber and Bhatt wrote. “A range of socioeconomic and psychological factors have been associated with those who have chosen to radicalize to include the bored and/or frustrated, successful college students, the unemployed, the second and third generation, new immigrants, petty criminals, and prison parolees.”

In short, the NYPD saw terrorists everywhere. The middle class and the unemployed. The aimless and the ambitious. Criminals and college students. Longtime American citizens and new arrivals. Anyone.

To Larry Sanchez, the analyst who came to the NYPD on loan from the CIA and stayed,
Radicalization in the West
was not merely an academic treatise. It was a map for law enforcement, one that the NYPD was already following. Zone defense was intended to spot would-be terrorists early in the four-step process. That meant police had to be in coffee shops, halal delis, gyms, bookstores, mosques, and student groups. They needed to know who was getting more religious and more politically active. They had to find the young men who felt that Muslims were discriminated against and those angered over the plight of the Palestinians.

They needed to think differently about activities protected by the Constitution.

“Let me try to answer it this way,” Sanchez told Congress in 2007, when Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut asked how the NYPD identified terrorists before they attacked. “The key to it was first to understand it and to start appreciating what most people would say would be noncriminal, would be innocuous, looking at behaviors that could easily be argued in a Western democracy, particularly in the United States, to be protected by First and Fourth Amendment rights, but not to look at them in a vacuum, but to look across to them as potential precursors to terrorism.”

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In the 1970s, Police Commissioner Patrick Murphy made a similar argument as he tried to fend off Martin Stolar and his lefty lawyer friends in court. New York had endured bombings, kidnappings, shootings, and assassinations, all politically motivated. It would be foolish, Murphy said, for police to ignore the views that underpinned those attacks. It was the NYPD’s responsibility, he continued, to keep close surveillance on “groups that because of their conduct or rhetoric may pose a threat to life, property, or government administration.”
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The Handschu case curtailed the NYPD’s ability to carry out such investigations. As soon as the new, post-9/11 rules took effect in 2003, the Intelligence Division again made political rhetoric a central motivator of its investigations.

The Demographics Unit was a start. The rakers catalogued places that the analysts believed could be “radicalization incubators.” But knowing which coffee shops catered to devout Muslims wasn’t enough. Cohen needed people living in the neighborhoods, checking in at the bookstores and buying goat meat at the butcher counter. What he needed was a roster of informants, people who could be what he called “listening posts.”
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Recruiting informants became a priority for the Intelligence Division. Analysts scrutinized the city’s long list of taxi-license holders, looking for Pakistanis and Afghans with criminal records or paperwork violations. Anything they could use as leverage. Detectives trawled central booking, identifying men from their countries of interest. Maybe they were there for drugs, maybe for drunken driving or jumping turnstiles. The detective would ask, “How’d you like to turn your life around?”
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He’d get the charges reduced or dismissed, provide some walking-around money, and sign up a recruit for the war on terrorism.

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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 NYPD
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”