NYC's war on terrorism rivals nation's effort

NEW YORK -- Scores of police officers pulled their squad cars to a stop just before dawn near the public library in Midtown Manhattan, parking on both sides of a converted mobile home, a command post on wheels.

Inside, surrounded by half a dozen police captains, Inspector Sal DiPace opened a packet stamped "sensitive" that detailed how 200 officers from all five New York boroughs would help protect America's largest city from terrorists during Thanksgiving week.

Welcome to the front line in the war on terrorism, a metropolis of 8 million scarred forever by the huge pit where the World Trade Center once stood, a city whose leaders are making an all-out effort to ensure that what happened Sept. 11, 2001, never happens again.

Their endeavor is massive. In the five years since the attacks, New York has transformed its antiterrorist network, making the city's program the envy of security officials across the nation.

"The NYPD has been doing very sophisticated, very creative things," said Brian Michael Jenkins, a counterterrorism specialist at the RAND Corporation, a research center. He termed many of the city's initiatives "best practices" adopted from law enforcement agencies worldwide. For New York, protection has become job one for police.

On the day before Thanksgiving, DiPace told his team that in the theater district, "it's matinee Wednesday, the craziest day of the year." The packet contained intelligence from federal agencies as well as guidance from the New York Police Department's own overseas officers, deployed to ensure speedy, accurate information on the latest terrorism tactics.

DiPace said there had been "threats the last couple of days" to the Empire State Building, instructed police officers to step on and off subway trains, and warned that the United Nations and the Lebanese consulate could be hot spots after the killing of Lebanese Industry Minister Pierre Gemayel the day before.

In a few hours, Manhattan's sidewalks would be teeming with people, including throngs of high school dancers and musicians waiting to perform in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Minutes after the meeting, DiPace would send nearly 100 squad cars -- lights flashing -- from 42nd Street to scores of locations across the city, including the United Nations, the 102-story Empire State Building, and the Lebanese consulate. The "surge" is aimed at driving off terrorists who might be eyeing potential targets.

It was just one part of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's counterterrorism program, a multilayered effort that capitalizes on the eyes and ears of a 37,000-member force, more than 25 heavily armed harbor patrol boats, seven helicopters with zoom and infrared cameras, 275 interpreters, intelligence analysts, and a $200 million budget.

Kelly "has a unique force" and "can do a lot with those numbers," said Michael Rolince, a former FBI international counterterrorism chief.

The Police Department's counterterrorism program is acclaimed as a national model, despite its daunting task of shielding masses of people, Wall Street, six bridges, four tunnels, 600 subway miles, and two major airports from bombs and chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear attacks.

Since the terrorist attacks of 2001, New York police and federal agents have foiled an apparent 2003 Al Qaeda plot to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge, a 2004 scheme to bomb the subway outside Macy's, and an Al Qaeda plot last summer to bomb the Holland Tunnel in the misplaced hope that Hudson River water gushing through the breach would submerge Manhattan's more elevated financial district.

For unexplained reasons, the Al Qaeda number two man, Ayman al Zawahri, reportedly called off a 2003 plot to release cyanide in the subways, Rolince said.

Lured by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to a second tour as police commissioner in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, Kelly listened to revelations that the CIA, the FBI, and other federal agencies had bungled chances to uncover Al Qaeda's suicide hijacking plot. Kelly, the only officer to rise from cadet to the top job and whose condo overlooks Ground Zero, soon declared that New York would defend itself.

It does so every day, by land, water, air, and in myriad ways that the public can't see.

Before Sept. 11, 2001, about 17 New York police detectives were assigned to counterterrorism. Now there are 1,000. Kelly, who oversaw the US Customs Service and the Secret Service from 1996 to 1998, has recruited former CIA, White House, and State Department officials to lead the effort.

The NYPD motto might be: Prepare for anything. Police across the city wear radiation pagers. Police and fire communications systems are now linked. About 140 officers are detailed to the FBI's New York Joint Terrorism Task Force. Another 140 are based at a Counter-Terrorism Bureau, situated in a nondescript building at a secret site outside Manhattan to provide redundancy if an attack disables One Police Plaza.

The bureau has a terrorism library so officers can learn how Islamic radicals and other militants think, a multimedia room that monitors broadcasts of the Arabic-language TV network Al-Jazeera, and intelligence analysts with graduate degrees from elite colleges. It has trained nearly 12,000 officers in how to respond to a biological, chemical, or radiological attack in hazardous-material suits.

Officers in the Intelligence Division's Shield program inspect major corporate facilities and alert them to security weaknesses. Taking a page from Britain's Scotland Yard, police in the Nexus program implore sensitive businesses, such as those that sell guns or chemicals, to report suspicious activity.