In the wake of Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and the NSA surveillance scandal, it is clear that the front lines
of the War on Terror are as domestic as they are foreign. Enemies Within: Inside the NYPD’s Secret Spying Unit and Bin Laden’s Final Plot Against America, an exposé by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, lays bare the complexities of counterterrorism in modern America, the lengths to which the government will go to “get their man,” and the price we pay for our relative security.
Interweaving the story of Najibullah Zazi, a home grown would-be terrorist, with a larger narrative on counterterrorism efforts in post-9/11 New York, Apuzzo and Goldman reveal the not-so-coordinated interagency efforts, questionable legal tactics, and the massive network of surveillance on Muslim New Yorkers that they argue the NYPD has been using for the last decade. Apuzzo and Goldman make their argument deftly, using a combination of witty prose and personal accounts that poignantly address the tradeoff between security and civil liberties facing America.
A Brave New Intelligence World
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, the worst attack since Pearl Harbor, the American security apparatus changed philosophy; it was no longer enough to deal with threats as they appear—the best defense henceforth would need to be strong offense. Out of this mentality, the authors tell us, the NYPD Intelligence Unit, known as “Intel,” was born.
Headed by former CIA analyst David Cohen and backed entirely by Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, Intel launched a broad-based intelligence operation, paying for informants (“rakers”)
to report on mosques, Muslim-owned businesses, and Islamic student groups. “It is difficult to overstate the revolutionary nature of what Cohen … had created,” Apuzzo and Goldman write. “In a few short years, the NYPD—a force twice the size of the FBI—had gotten into the business of secretly assessing the religious and political views of US citizens, believed it was not constrained by jurisdictional boundaries, and viewed activities protected by the First Amendment as precursors to terrorism.”
Intel, they argue, operated without federal or local oversight, adhered to loose legal guidelines, and, with a staff largely inexperienced in intelligence work, was drowning in subjective reports and thousands of files. The authors fault Intel with more than just potential First and Fourth Amendment violations, questioning its ineffectiveness altogether. The book’s witty and sometimes sarcastic prose describes a unit chronically incapable of acting appropriately on information or sharing leads with other agencies. Add to that a tense relationship with the New York branch of the FBI and the Joint Terrorism Task Force, and Intel’s effectiveness seems severely limited.
The pursuit of Najibullah Zazi compounded the already dysfunctional relationship. Zazi was a Pakistani immigrant whose beliefs turned violent after the negative backlash against the Muslim community post-9/11. He and his co-conspirators trained under one of Osama bin Laden’s closest deputies and returned to the U.S. with the intent of orchestrating another attack on New York. After being alerted to the plot, the FBI and Intel butted heads, which allowed Zazi to enter the city with a bomb. Eventually paranoia led Zazi and his friends to abort their mission to blow up the subway system, flushing the contents of their bomb down the toilet instead. When a mishandled Intel informant warned Zazi that the police were after him, he fled back to his family in Denver, and broke down during an FBI interview, confessing everything. That was the only reason he was arrested for anything other than lying to the police.
The case proves a central theme for Apuzzo and Goldman: more information and fewer rights, they argue, do not necessarily breed results. Intel’s network did not stop Zazi or wring
a confession. And when put to the test a second time by the Times Square car bomber, it was a technical malfunction, not the NYPD, that prevented an explosion, and a concerned Muslim street vendor, not Intel, who noticed the smoking car.
The Tide of Skepticism
Still, there are those who take Apuzzo and Goldman’s conclusions with a heavy grain of salt. In a Wall Street Journal review of the book, Gabriel Schoenfeld writes, “in the age of mass terrorism, even one successful attack is far too many” and for that reason “police work is measurable, in part, by the absence of the wrongdoing it aims to prevent.” On this metric, he believes, “the NYPD is clearly doing something right.” Michael Sheehan, the former deputy commissioner of counter terrorism for the NYPD and author of Crush the Cell, agrees and uses his own experience and interpretations of the War on Terror to extol Intel’s practices.
This perspective is not a surprising one. In post-9/11 America, our default response to new counterterrorism methods is to applaud them. The sacrifices made by New York police and firefighters in our defense makes harsh criticism of their new efforts seem unfair, or as Schoenfield writes, “an injustice to New York’s Finest.”
It is true that Apuzzo and Goldman’s conclusions could be seen as dismissive of the security that New York has benefitted from since 9/11. Their depiction of the NYPD, especially Intel, as bumbling wannabe spies is hardly in line with the fearless, patriotic images we typically associate with our police force. However, Apuzzo and Goldman correctly reject the post hoc ergo proctor hoc argument that a lack of successful attacks means the NYPD’s practices are both effective and acceptable. There is any number of reasons that a particular terrorist plot did not come to fruition, and while this should not belittle the tireless work done by law enforcement nationwide, neither is it accurate to blindly attribute to them all the success of our safety, especially in the face of such controversial tactics.
Drawing the Line
Still others find fault with Apuzzo and Goldman’s alarmist view of the unit. “In this account, at least [Intel], seem[s] clownish but relatively harmless,” writes New York Times reviewer Tara McKelvey. “One might conclude that if the police were better at recordkeeping and stayed away from pastry shops, the squad would be O.K. That hardly seems to be the point of the book, given its concern with civil liberties.” While McKelvey’s criticism, that Intel’s depiction as confused and uncoordinated renders them unthreatening, is a little unfair, it is true that at times Apuzzo and Goldman’s criticisms seem more personal
or theatrical than practical. Almost an entire chapter is spent berating David Cohen’s career in the CIA, and the upstanding FBI agent that Apuzzo and Goldman champion seems dashingly attractive, with “a strong jaw and a full head of dark hair.”
But the authors’ descriptive license should not be confused with the core of their argument. Their message, after all, is both clear and substantive: the investigation of mosques, student groups, businesses, and communities on the basis of their owners’ or members’ religious beliefs is not only morally questionable, but also potentially unconstitutional. Profiling people who speak Arabic or Pashto, who dress as observant Muslims, or who have ties to the Middle East and Eastern Europe, criticize the government, or in one notable case, praise the government—all activities protected by our First Amendment rights—raises real questions about the legitimacy of NYPD actions. That these tactics, the authors claim, do not even yield the results intended makes the offenses that much worse.
More than ten years after 9/11, the day is coming when we must emerge from the murky gray zone in which we are currently operating and draw a definitive line between the rights we are willing to give up for our safety, and those that are too precious to lose. Until that day arrives, however, the least we can ask is to be informed of the liberties our government is taking on our behalf. For most of us, reading Enemies Within is an excellent start to that.
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