Securing the City: Inside America's Best Counterterror Force--The NYPD |  | Author: Christopher Dickey
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Category: Book
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Rating:  18 reviews
Media: Paperback
Edition: Reprint
Pages: 336
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ISBN: 1416552413
Dewey Decimal Number: 973
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Product Description
The NYPD is the best and most ambitious antiterror operation in the world. Its seat-of-the-pants intelligence is the gold standard for all others.Christopher Dickey, who has reported on international terrorism for more than twenty-five years, takes readers into the secret command center of the New York City Police Department's counterterrorism division, then onto the streets with cops ready for the toughest urban combat the twenty-first century can throw at them. But behind the tactical shows of force staged by the police, there lies a much more ambitious and controversial strategy: to go anywhere and use almost any means to keep the city from becoming, once again, Ground Zero. This is the story of the coming war in America's cities and New York's shadow war, waged around the globe to stop it before it begins. Drawing on unparalleled access to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other top officials, Dickey explores the most ambitious intelligence operation ever organized by a metropolitan police department. Headed by David Cohen, who ran the CIA's operations inside the United States in the 1980s and its global spying in the 1990s, the NYPD's counterterrorism division had uptotheminute details of new attacks set in motion to target Manhattan in 2002 and 2003. New York's finest are now seen by other police chiefs in the United States as the gold standard for counterterrorism operations and a model for even the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet as New Yorkers have come to feel safer, they've also grown worried about the NYPD's methods: sending its undercover agents to spy on Americans in other cities, rounding up hundreds of protesters preemptively before the 2004 Republican convention, and using confidential informants who may be more adept at plotting terror than the people they finger. Securing the City is a superb investigative reporter's stunning look inside the real world of cops who are ready to take on the world and at the ambiguous price we pay for the safety they provide.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
 Review from The Economist March 16, 2009
MT (Princeton, NJ)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I read this book based on The Economist's review (see it below). There is plenty of food for thought here about how best to counteract terror. One of the most positive and comforting parts of this story: New York and America continue to benefit from immigration. Contrary to what many think, the safest cities are those with immigrants. The American dream is alive in NYC and keeping it alive is the best anti-terror policy of all. The NYPD has taken some interesting and innovative approaches to combating terror--if you're interested in the topic you'll find the book thought provoking.
NYPD's fighting force
Feb 12th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The NYPD offers an alternative to the highly militarised war on terror
It is not often that a city has its very own counter-terrorist force. But since the attacks of September 11th 2001, New York has felt uniquely vulnerable--and uniquely entitled to special protection. In a vivid and thought-provoking book about the years since the twin towers collapsed, Christopher Dickey analyses how the New York Police Department (NYPD) counter-terrorism division has made itself one of the best in the business.
This did not happen easily or without resistance. The NYPD's commissioner, Ray Kelly, a former marine, and his intelligence chief, David Cohen, who had worked for the CIA, faced considerable opposition in building their team. The principal aim was to use human intelligence to prevent future attacks. To achieve that they had to gather accurate and detailed information about al-Qaeda and other groups, and learn from the attacks they launched overseas. Never mind that this irritated the FBI and the CIA--the "three-letter guys", as Mr Dickey calls them--who tended to regard the NYPD as some kind of Johnny-come-lately muscling in on their turf.
Mr Dickey ends up admiring Mr Kelly and Mr Cohen for creating a counter-terror organisation which many now regard as among the most energetic. They fought for and won the right to station people overseas--in London, Tel Aviv and as far off as Singapore--to provide first-hand information-gathering from useful places. And their most important achievement, in Mr Dickey's estimation, is to have turned New York's multicultural diversity to their advantage, building up a team of more than 600 linguists fluent in some 50 languages and dialects. In 2007 NYPD analysts published a 90-page booklet, "Radicalization in the West", seeking to pass on what they had learnt about the home-grown threat in Europe and America.
A scheme to attack a busy New York subway station was foiled just two days before the Republican convention in 2004 when, thanks to an informant, Mr Kelly was able to arrest the Muslim plotters. The group was clearly incompetent but, as Mr Dickey points out, motley conspirators could be dangerous, "even when some were morons".
"Securing the City" is a gritty, down-to-earth work; a very American book about a very American city. Mr Dickey accompanies cops on the beat, rides in their helicopters and describes in detail their gizmos and their crime labs. He delights in a tough-guy language that owes as much to Mickey Spillane as to Raymond Chandler. So the general reader can enjoy a book that has the pace and drama of a thriller, and for the specialist interested in questions such as how to defend a city of nearly 8.5m people, or what turns young Muslims into suicide-bombers, there is much to ponder.
As the Middle East editor of Newsweek, Mr Dickey is not only one of America's most knowledgeable commentators on the area, he was writing about Osama bin Laden for almost a decade before the attacks on the twin towers. He adds fascinating new detail and asks some troubling questions. What was learnt from waterboarding senior al-Qaeda captives such as Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammad? Where do you draw the line between protecting security and abusing human rights? What do we know now about the Madrid and London bombings--and the important question of whether the bombers acted alone or with help from al-Qaeda? Whereas the Spanish attacks seem to have been home-grown, the evidence suggests to Mr Dickey that the leader of the London bombers, Mohammad Sidique Khan, was "an active al-Qaeda recruiter".
The book shifts constantly from the local to the global and back. It is sharply critical of "the dangerously ill-conceived, mismanaged, and highly militarised `global war on terror'," and sees the success of the NYPD's counter-terrorism programme as offering an alternative approach. Mr Dickey worries about the depth of Muslim anger which drives the violence, and to which America has been largely oblivious. But he also draws comfort from the resilience of New Yorkers, whose faith in the American dream may well turn out to be their strongest line of defence.
Thinking Globally, Policing Locally May 5, 2009
Michael Gunther (Maryland, USA)
"Securing The City" describes, with journalistic immediacy, how the NYPD's Counterterrorism Division is organized and operates to keep the city safe after 9/11. The author's main premises, amply supported throughout the book, are: (1) to prevent terror attacks, there is no substitute for good, seat-of-the-pants, ground-level policing and information-gathering; (2) it is vital to save lives by preventing such attacks in the first place, even if this just amounts to scaring the bad guys off rather than arresting them; and (3) the real threat is an ever-mutating mixture of global, local, and even homegrown terrorist cells and individuals. Logically enough, Dickey (and the NYPD) concludes that local police forces must adopt a global information-gathering reach to do their jobs of keeping us safe here at home. That is why the NYPD sends officers overseas to exchange intelligence with their counterparts in other countries, and why every agency involved in the effort - local police, FBI, CIA, etc. - absolutely _must_ work together seamlessly to keep our country safe. And the author gives many examples of where they don't, as well as where they do.
These ideas are not obvious, and not easy - they are difficult to implement, and have been resisted every step of the way. Christopher Dickey has done a great service in bringing them forward so compellingly for public debate. The book's title is a little misleading, since it is really global in scope; the NYPD is just the example he uses, both positive and negative, to make many of his points. I think the book is important; that following its recommendations can make America safer; and that policy makers and concerned citizens will benefit by reading, debating, and learning from it.
The Best Anti-Terrorist Force in the USA is the NYPD January 13, 2010
Daniel Dubno (New York, NY USA)
This is a wonderful read... a fascinating analysis of the NYPD's astounding effort to apply real intelligence to the threat of terrorism. It features terrific interviews and insights into New York's most daring and impressive effort to redefine how threats are assessed, managed, and countered in a time where national leadership has failed to protect us. Chris Dickey is an amazing investigative journalist and "Securing the City" is mandatory reading if you want to understand how counter-terrorism can be handled effectively.
Protective and paranoid, defending and vile March 13, 2009
Dr Alexander Elder (New York, USA)
2 out of 4 found this review helpful
I ordered this book after seeing a review in one of my favorite magazines The Economist and read it from cover to cover. Since I live in Manhattan and have lost a family member on 9/11, the issue of 'Securing the City' gets my undivided attention.
Dickey has done a very workmanlike job describing the measures put into effect by the NYPD after the '3-letter agencies' such as the CIA and FBI failed to protect the city and the country prior to 9/11.
He describes turf wars with the 3-letter guys that erupted when NYPD began to develop its own intelligence service and stationing agents abroad. To my view, this was like the emergence of competition after the breakup of ATT phone monopoly decades ago. The arrival of smaller aggressive competitors has improved service for everybody.
Dickey also describes many of the vile aspects of NYPD work, such as inserting an agent-provocateur to create a 'cell' of two young moslems - one a schizophrenic, another mildly retarded - then dragging them into courts and using the psychotic to testify against the retarded to send him to prison for 30 years. He also goes way too easy on NYPD for their behavior during the recent Republican National convention. Those were ugly days, like living in an occupied city. I was walking with my daughter one day when a kevlar-helmeted, M-16 toting guardian of order was directing traffic and kicked with his jackboot the door of a car whose driver was not paying attention.
Several reviewers have given Dickey bad ratings because of what he wrote about. I say, he is a serious professional journalist who writes in a clear and engaging way. Praise or criticize the book on its merits!
Thank you Mr Dickey, as head to my roof deck to look at the unmarked police helicopters incessantly hovering overhead.
Timely March 19, 2009
KH in San Diego (San Diego)
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
I hope and pray Obama reads this, great book that our leaders need to read.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 18
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