Kelly on Hometown Security: ‘This Is World War III’

December 17, 2002
BY COLIN MINER

The threat was specific and, if true, a lot of New Yorkers were going to die.

A plan was underway to attack the subway station at Columbus Circle.

That was the word from the New York office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which notified the New York Police Department of the threat. There weren’t a lot of details about when the attack would take place or in what form it would come.

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly dispatched extra officers to the station so that if terrorists were to show up they would be met by a visible law enforcement presence.

At the same time, Mr. Kelly’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, David Cohen, got to work.

Even though Mr. Cohen had only been on the job a short while, threats like this were nothing new. He had recently retired from more than three decades at the Central Intelligence Agency, where he had been both the deputy director for intelligence and deputy director for operations.

There were a couple of things that didn’t seem quite right about the threat. For instance, it was a specific threat against a target that hadn’t come up a lot in intelligence analysis of the hundreds of threats made since September 11.

Mr. Cohen got on the phone and dove into his deep pool of law enforcement contacts. From the FBI in New York, he was able to determine they had heard it about from their headquarters in Washington. From FBI H.Q., he found out the information came from the CIA.

A call to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., revealed that the tip came from their station in London. As a former deputy director of the CIA, Mr. Cohen was able to call the London station and learn that the threat came from a drunk in pubs.

In a matter of hours, a threat had come in, been assessed, and dismissed.

“This is an example of how it’s supposed to work,” Kevin Donovan, the assistant director in charge of the FBI’s New York office, told The New York Sun. “Everyone working together to protect the city of New York and the people who live here.”

It is also an example of how New York is a city at war.

While others fight the war on terror or the war on drugs, or even the war on poverty, New York City is fighting on those fronts and more. It is a war being fought in the streets, at City Hall, and even over conversation at dinner.

And while the city might win the war, it is likely to lose some of the battles, despite all the preparations and precautions.

“This is World War III,” Commissioner Kelly told the Sun. “People may not recognize it as such but that’s because it doesn’t look like World War I or World War II.”

Mr. Kelly presides over a department caught between a rock and a hard place. While the threats and challenges keep increasing, the money to fight those threats is drying up.

His department has been doing a job that few would have expected. Not only has there not been another attack, crime is down in all the major categories except rape.

But, experts caution, the absence of an attack does not mean an absence of danger.

“The further we get away from the last attack the closer we get to the next one,” according to John Timoney, head of Beau Dietl Security and a former police commissioner in Philadelphia and former first deputy commissioner in New York.

“Clearly this stuff is not over with,” Mr. Timoney said. “There are indications these people will likely be heard from again. New York has been successfully attacked twice, with two other attempts being broken up. If they are looking to target a city with symbolic structures where they can get a high body count, then this is the place.”

Michael Cherkasky, head of Kroll Security and a former top official in the office of Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, also sees it that way.

“New York is a landmark for country, a landmark for capitalism, and a city filled with targets,” Mr. Cherkasky said. “We have repeatedly been a target, are now a target and are filled with so many targets of opportunity.”

As a result, the city has been tested almost everyday and has had to reinvent the way it protects itself.

And, everyone agrees, it has not been an easy process.

On October 5, 2001 — just weeks after the attack on the World Trade Center — the White House was informed that a terrorist with a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon that had been smuggled out of the former Soviet Union was headed to New York.

The source of the information, the White House was told, was an operative of the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency codenamed “Dragonfire.”

The Department of Energy dispatched teams with devices that, in theory, would be able to detect the presence of a radiological device.

In the end, it turned out the super secret source, Dragonfire, was merely passing on information about a conversation he had overheard in a Las Vegas casino. The FBI, Department of Energy, and others, were able to determine the threat was non-existent.

But, once word of the threat leaked out, the city’s law enforcement structure realized a much larger threat had existed: no one had informed the city of what was going on. The threat was assessed; the detection teams deployed, and no one in the New York Police Department had any idea what was going on.

Police Commissioner Kelly and Assistant FBI Director Kevin Donovan say they are determined to make sure that does not happen again.

“We meet a minimum of three, four times a month,” Mr. Donovan said. “We work to make sure that if we have information that they need, then they get that information.”

Another problem with how the Dragonfire situation played out, experts say, is it is not 100% clear the detectors would have worked well.

“Portable and handheld equipment for detecting highly explosive radiological materials like that are notoriously unreliable in urban environments,” according to Stephen Flynn of the Council of Foreign Relations and the director of the Council’s recent project that produced the report, “America Still Unprepared, America Still in Danger.”

Messrs. Kelly and Donovan and others point to a related problem from within that could lead to disaster.

“We need more money for more equipment,” Mr. Kelly said. “While the federal government has increased the military budget by $100 billion, no extra money has been sent to the local level.”

What of the $20 billion aid package?

“That money was to make us whole again,” according to Mr. Kelly. “It wasn’t new money for new training and new equipment.”

Senator Schumer says the money issue is a real problem.

“We are asking our local law enforcement officials to do much more work and we are giving them nothing in terms of support,” he said. “When the Homeland Security package was drawn up, the White House kept saying put in what you want but nothing that costs money.”

Mr. Donovan of the FBI would also like to see more money.

“Even on an issue like infrastructure it would be great if we had enough money to make space for all the members of the Joint Terrorist Task Force,” Mr. Donovan said. “But you have to do the best you can with the resources you have.”

And doing the best they can involves confronting threats of all shapes and sizes.

Law enforcement officials estimate they have broken up or disrupted about half a dozen genuine threats against the city. And, they say, the fight continues.

As The New York Sun first reported, the FBI and New York Police Department have been investigating a chain of fried chicken restaurants for ties to both Al Qaeda and heroin dealers. Sources say investigators have evidence the heroin dealers have been using the chicken restaurants as fronts for selling drugs and laundering the profits to terrorists.

And there is an ongoing investigation of Yemenis in Brooklyn who are allegedly laundering hundreds of thousands of dollars for Al Qaeda.

And then there are the areas where the city is vulnerable even if there has not been a specific threat against the area.

Those range from the possibility of Moscow-style attacks on Broadway theaters to dirty bombs to small pox.

And there is a concern that the one area that has seen a significant building up in security — the airports — might encourage terrorists to look at other possible targets.

“There’s been a tremendous effort to beef up security at the airports,” said Howard Safir, a former city police commissioner. “But since that’s not a secret, terrorists know they should probably look elsewhere.”

Since the list of possible targets keeps growing, law enforcement officials say they have to expand their intelligence gathering.

“We could sit here and name 100 absolutely first class targets and 1,000 other targets,” Mr. Cherkasky said. “And there is no way we can afford to sit here and have guards at all of them 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. It’s just not feasible.”

City officials spend a lot of time working on emergency drills to stay on their toes. While there had been only one exercise in the year leading up to September 11, 2001, there have been more than a dozen since.

The exercises — involving the police, fire, health departments as well as the emergency management office and other agencies — have tested the city’s response to situations ranging from dirty bombs at Yankee Stadium to biological attacks on the subway.

And while the drills make people more prepared, it doesn’t mean they are any less concerned.

“The possibility of a biological attack really scares me,” said Dr. Neal Shipley, the head of emergency medicine at North General Hospital in Harlem.

Dr. Shipley said that even though they may know how to respond to an attack, hospitals do not have all the equipment they need to do it right.

“Early next year we are supposed to get a $40,000 grant to help pay for equipment and training,” he said. “It will only scratch the surface of what we need.”

Another issue that officials concede works better in theory and in tabletop exercises than it will in practice is evacuation. The thought of millions of people at the same time trying to cross the dozen bridges and tunnels that connect Manhattan makes officials nervous.

“On September 11, when it came to getting people out of lower Manhattan, things may not have gone perfectly but they went better than anyone would have imagined,” one emergency official said. “No matter how hard we think about having to do it again, no one is sure if we can do that well again.”

One area that most officials say needs to have its security increased immediately is the marine ports around the city.

“Hundreds of thousands of containers come into the area every day,” according to Mr. Kelly, who also used to run the Customs Service. “And maybe 2% are checked.”

It was in one of those containers that Spanish police found a suspected member of Al Qaeda getting ready to be transported to America.

His container had been outfitted with a bathroom, food, and a computer with information about American airports.

“The ports are the greatest threat to the security of the United States,” Senator Schumer said. “It is what I am most afraid of.”

http://www.nysun.com/sunarticle.asp?artID=409