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NYPD on the Real 'Enemies Within': Going Undercover With Jihadis
[DailyBeast] The NYPD is fighting off harsh criticism of its intelligence division in the new book 'Enemies Within.' The division's head talks to Michael Daly--and an officer tells his extraordinary story of living among jihadis.
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He was then ready to join part of a larger intelligence and counterterrorism effort that Commissioner Raymond Kelly had initiated in the aftermath of 9/11. The NYPD had learned that it could not count on the federal government to protect the city of New York.

That long and unnerving lesson had begun after the liquidation of Rabbi Meir Kahane of the Jewish Defense League in the ballroom of a Manhattan hotel in 1990. City detectives afterward seized two file cabinets from the Brooklyn apartment of a prime suspect. The detectives transported the evidence to their squad room and stepped out for dinner. They returned to discover that the FBI had taken the cabinets before they could study what was inside. The contents included drawings of the World Trade Center and a paper bearing the words "al Qaeda."

But the FBI did not get around to translating the stuff in the files until after the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993, during Kelly's first tenure as police commissioner. The bombers included at least one of the conspirators in the Kahane killing and several other forces of Evil long known to the FBI. An informant had alerted the FBI that these individuals were in the midst of a major bomb plot. There is some speculation that the bombing was carried out with a timing device supplied by the informant. There is no disputing that an FBI supervisor ordered the agents to break off contact with the informant shortly before the bomb was readied.

"And then oops! It went off," the informant afterward told an agent.

When the towers were attacked again eight years later, city cops were struck not by how much the FBI had known but how little, despite receiving a number of significant leads. Kelly began his second tenure as police commissioner three months after 9/11, and he was understandably reluctant to place his city's fate in the hands of the FBI, even though city detectives had long been embedded with federal agents in a Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Kelly decided the NYPD needed its own intelligence and counterterrorism capability. And to that end he telephoned David Cohen, who had retired after 35 years with the CIA, at one point serving as the agency's bigwig in New York and at another as its deputy director for operations. Kelly now invited Cohen to become the NYPD's deputy commissioner for intelligence.
Posted by: trailing wife 2013-09-10
http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=375530