Securing the City
Inside America's Best Counterterror Force--The NYPD
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With an informed eye on the history of New York City as a leading target of world terrorism, Dickey, Newsweek's Paris bureau chief and Middle East regional editor, chronicles the effectiveness and resources of the high-tech intelligence operation of the New York Police Department. He speaks without bias of hard-nosed veterans Raymond Kelly, the pragmatic NYPD police commissioner, and David Cohen, a former CIA analyst, who formed the counterterrorism division, which watches over the city with more than 600 cops and operatives stationed stateside and around the world. As Cohen says: "There's a plot taking shape on New York City every day of every week since 9/11." Dickey examines the history of terrorism in the city, but poses the thorny question of surveillance vs. civil liberties (e.g., helicopters whose cameras can look directly into specific apartments) since the 2001 World Trade Center tragedy and the Madrid and London bombings. In the increasingly crowded field of "war on terror" books, Dickey's (Summer of Deliverance: A Memoir of Father and Son) measured meditation on a secured city and its vigilant police force stands out as one of the best.
Customer Reviews
securing the city
The first couple of hundred pages of this book are about the authors great dislike for the FBI and the CIA, and his love for David Cohen. Very little about the NYPD. The author is full of himself, which makes for a boring book.