Enemies Within (11 page)

Sanchez’s proposal ignored some important differences between the US and Israel. Brooklyn and Queens, for instance, were not occupied territories or disputed land. There was no security wall being erected in New York City. Israel does not have a constitution, and Muslims there do not enjoy the same freedom as Jews. In fact, they are routinely discriminated against.
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And, most significantly, unlike Israel, New York was not trying to preserve a religious identity.

In the words of one former senior police official, reflecting on his role in transforming the NYPD, “Desperation breeds novel ideas.” Besides, it was hardly unusual for Israel to serve as a model for a US counterterrorism program. In the months after 9/11, American politicians flew to Israel in droves and extolled the virtues of Israeli tactics. Twenty years before the CIA opened its network of secret prisons, Israel was operating its own black site, called Facility 1391, to hold and interrogate prisoners indefinitely. Like its CIA cousins, Facility 1391 permitted harsh interrogation and was off-limits to human rights inspectors with the International Committee of the Red Cross.
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The US looked to Israel, too, when crafting the rules for interrogation at black sites. In its memos, the Justice Department noted that the
Israeli Supreme Court had, in 1999, determined that sleep deprivation, painful stress positions, and intense, lengthy interrogations were cruel and inhuman but did not constitute torture. The Justice Department concluded that international law allowed “an aggressive interpretation as to what amounts to torture.”
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In fact, America’s signature offensive counterterrorism strategy not only replicated a tactic used by Israel but also used a strategy that the United States abhorred until 9/11. It was Israel that popularized the phrase
targeted killing
to describe its precise attacks on suspected militants. In July 2001 the American ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, had a different word for it. “The United States government is very clearly on the record as against targeted assassinations,” he said. “They are extrajudicial killings, and we do not support that.”
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That was before 9/11, before the Predator drone became the CIA’s signature weapon in the war on terrorism and before the word
assassination
was scrubbed from the US counterterrorism lexicon.

Once Cohen persuaded Judge Haight to relax the Handschu rules, Sanchez’s vision could become a reality. The new rules made it explicit: “For the purpose of detecting or preventing terrorist activities, the NYPD is authorized to visit any place and attend any event that is open to the public on the same terms and conditions as members of the public generally.” The only caveat was that police couldn’t document and keep any information from these visits unless it related to potential criminal or terrorist activity. That rule was intended to prevent the NYPD from building files on innocent people, as it did during the 1960s. Cohen, however, took a very broad view of what qualified as information related to terrorist activity.

Cohen and Sanchez enjoyed one advantage at the NYPD that they never had at the CIA. The department drew recruits from one of the most diverse talent pools in America, and the force reflected that. The FBI and CIA struggled to recruit Arabic speakers and Middle Eastern agents. In part, that was because those jobs required top-secret security
clearances, which meant passing background checks that look unfavorably on applicants who still had strong ties overseas. The NYPD didn’t have that problem. The police force had long been a stepping-stone to the middle class for immigrants. One in five academy graduates were born overseas. So when Cohen went searching for officers who could blend into Muslim neighborhoods, he didn’t have to look far. He recruited young Middle Eastern officers who spoke Arabic, Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, and Urdu. They would be the ones raking the coals, and inevitably they became known as “rakers.”
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The effort began simply enough, with a copy of the 2000 US census. The police did what anyone else could do with that data trove. They mapped the city based on ethnicity and ancestry. The NYPD was interested in what it called “ancestries of interest.” There were twenty-eight, nearly all of them Muslim countries. There were Middle Eastern and South Asian countries such as Pakistan, Iran, Syria, and Egypt. Former Soviet states like Uzbekistan and Chechnya were included, too, because of their large Muslim populations. The last “ancestry” on the list was “American Black Muslim.”
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Every day, the rakers would set out from the intelligence offices at the Brooklyn Army Terminal. They’d work in teams, usually of two, and visit businesses.

They were not officially working undercover. At the NYPD, that designation is reserved for officers who use an assumed identity, with fake paperwork and a cover story. But the rakers weren’t advertising their police affiliation, either. Their job was to blend in and look like any other young men stepping in off the street.

The routine was almost always the same, whether they were visiting a restaurant, deli, barbershop, or travel agency. The two rakers would enter and casually chat with the owner. The first order of business was to determine his ethnicity and that of the patrons. This would determine which file the business would go into. A report on Pakistani locations, for instance, or one on Moroccans. Next, they’d do what the NYPD
called “gauging sentiment.” Were the patrons dressed in the clothing of observant Muslims? What were they talking about? If the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera was playing on the TV, the police would note it and also observe how people were acting. Were they laughing, smiling, or cheering at reports of US military casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan? Did they talk Middle Eastern politics? If the business sold extremist literature or CDs, the officers would buy one or two. Was the owner selling fake IDs or untaxed cigarettes? Police would note it. If customers could rent time on a computer, police might pay for a session and look at its search history. Were people viewing jihadist videos or searching for bomb-making instructions?

On their way out, the rakers would look for bulletin boards or fliers about community events. Was there a rally planned in the neighborhood? The rakers might attend. Was there a cricket league? The rakers might join. If someone advertised a room for rent, the cops would bring the flier back with them. That could be the cheap apartment used by the next Mohamed Atta.

•  •  •

In the beginning, raking was normally done by neighborhood. Sanchez had the NYPD carve the city up into about eighteen zones, and the rakers would visit Muslim businesses in each. They often picked their own targets, with a supervisor sitting in a parked car somewhere nearby in case of trouble. Sometimes they were sent to neighborhoods based on world events. If there was a car bombing in Lebanon, a Predator drone strike in Pakistan, or a firefight in Afghanistan, the rakers would be in those neighborhoods, gauging sentiment and reporting back. If people in a Pakistani barbershop were enraged over a drone attack that killed nearby civilians, it might be a warning sign that retaliation was imminent.

The rakers were in mosques too, gauging the sentiment of the imams
and the congregations. They’d scan bulletin boards for scraps. They bought neighborhood newspapers and identified religious schools, community centers, hotels, and gyms. The NYPD was creating a new kind of map. Just as political maps showed the borders of New York City and topographic maps revealed the city’s elevation, rakers charted New York’s human terrain, mapping people and their attitudes.
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The idea of getting to know a community was a hot topic at the FBI too. And like the NYPD, the bureau had its own advisor on loan from the CIA, an analyst named Phil Mudd. He wanted the FBI to be more aggressive, to focus less on making isolated criminal cases and more on collecting intelligence. Inside the bureau, he was one of the biggest advocates of what became known as domain management, a process in which FBI offices nationwide compiled information on communities and assessed where terrorist threats might emerge. Like the NYPD, the FBI began with census data. It could then overlay other data—crimes, informant locations, potential targets—and create maps of neighborhoods. It used that information to find informants, assess threats, and decide where to conduct outreach to community leaders. Also like the NYPD, the FBI focused its efforts on Muslim neighborhoods. There was no FBI Catholic outreach program, nor was anyone interested in mapping Scottish immigrant neighborhoods. Domain management was controversial both inside the FBI and, when it became public, among civil libertarians.

While the NYPD and FBI had similar goals, they diverged at one important point. The FBI was prohibited, both under its guidelines and under federal law, from collecting and storing information concerning constitutionally protected activities such as religious and political speech unless related directly to law enforcement activities. That meant the FBI could not keep tabs on which pastry shop posted religious fliers on its bulletin board. Nor could the bureau put in its files that a Turkish couple owned a restaurant that served a “devout clientele.” The FBI could not keep a file on an Egyptian travel agent who was “devout in
appearance.” And it could not send plainclothes agents into mosques to assess “sentiment.”

NYPD did all of that. While Cohen had promised Judge Haight that his reinvented Intelligence Division would follow the same rules as the FBI, it did not. The newly created NYPD unit was explicitly instructed to “analyze religious institutions, locations, and congregations.”
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Sanchez took a particular interest in the program’s success, reading the reports and coaching the police on how to improve. Their daily dispatches were compiled into bound color reports that filled the bookshelves in Cohen’s office. Mosques and religious schools were catalogued and hot spots were mapped by ethnicity for every precinct. The reports allowed police to visualize their city in a new way. If a group of young Muslim men were growing increasingly radicalized and planning an attack, these hot spots were the likeliest places to detect and locate them. There were hundreds of hot spots on the maps, all screaming for attention.

In a few years, the new unit had made New York’s warren of ethnic neighborhoods seem much more manageable. There would be other programs; other trip wires to set. But with each new report, the chance of an al-Qaeda cell going undetected in New York seemed to diminish. Cohen’s new squad embodied the change he’d hoped to bring to the NYPD. They were acting more like intelligence officers and less like cops.

Inside the NYPD, it was christened the Demographics Unit.

•  •  •

In late 2006, when Captain Steve D’Ulisse waved Hector Berdecia into his office in Chelsea and told him he was being assigned to oversee the Demographics Unit, Berdecia didn’t know what he was inheriting. Berdecia was on leave from the Intelligence Division in 2003 when Cohen and Sanchez originally hatched the idea for the unit. On active duty in the US Army Reserve, he’d been in Iraq’s Babylon Province, near the
lawless area south of Baghdad dubbed the “Triangle of Death.” He had been back a year and heard about a “Middle Eastern team” mentioned in passing around the office, but he didn’t pay much attention.

On Cohen’s orders, the sturdily built lieutenant with a shaved head and a broad, boyish smile had spent the past year creating and running the Citywide Debriefing Team. Each morning, the team would receive a list of people arrested in the past twenty-four hours and who were born in one of the NYPD’s countries of interest. Men between sixteen and forty-five were of particular concern. Berdecia and his detectives tried to talk to every person on the list. They were interested in tips about terrorism, of course, but they were after more mundane information too. Did the Egyptian cabdriver know where a new immigrant could rent a cheap room? Could the Moroccan student tell you where to buy a fake ID? Where do you learn English? What mosque do you pray at? Where’s a good gym? When you get to America, who helps you get on your feet?

The tactic had worked well in the 1990s, when everyone arrested on gun charges would get asked where to buy weapons. Even nonviolent criminals were asked. In the post-9/11 era, police were asking every Muslim what he knew about terrorism.

The debriefing job suited Berdecia. He’d spent nearly his whole career in plain clothes, rising through the ranks on his signature skill: sitting across from someone and getting him to talk. Berdecia had a knack for spotting what mattered to people. The father of two knew whether to play to their sense of family (“Do you really want to spend three summers away from your children?”) or to their manhood (“If you go upstate, do you want another man coming into your house taking care of your old lady?”). Out in the Seventy-second Precinct in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood during the early 1990s, Berdecia would buy a four-pack of miniburgers, fries, and a soda from the White Castle down the street and slide them across the table. I’m not your enemy, he’d say. No hard feelings. I just want to talk.

That was his strategy in Iraq, too, where he was a military police
officer responsible for debriefing prisoners picked up by Iraqi authorities. He worked through a translator, but the tactic was the same. In December 2003, when US Special Forces were hunting for a former Iraqi brigadier general believed to be training an al-Qaeda cell, it was Berdecia who caught him, and without firing a shot. He had an informant tell the general that the US government was prepared to pay him $50,000 in reparations for bombing his land. All he had to do was show up and claim the money. And he’d receive an official apology, too. When the general arrived, he and Berdecia chatted over tea until the general was hauled away, hooded and cuffed, in the back of a military gun truck.