They Help NYPD Understand The Roots of Terrorism
By Robert F. Worth, The New York Times
Last August, shortly before the Republican National Convention, New York police officials grew concerned about a Pakistani immigrant from Queens who had begun telling his friends that he was going to plant a bomb in the subway station in Herald Square.
A group of Police Department analysts quickly built a profile of the immigrant, drawing on confidential informants, surveillance and links with other law enforcement agencies around the world. Although he did not have ties to known terrorists, the analysts discovered, he had moved from idle threats to making sketches of the station and talking about buying explosives. Within a few days, the immigrant and an accomplice were arrested on a conspiracy charge, and their case is pending.
The analysts who helped build that case, as it happens, were not police officers. They were civilians, part of a group of eight hired over the past two years to educate the department about terrorist tactics and help search for threats in the city.
They are far from typical police recruits: all of them arrived at the Police Department with advanced degrees, and several have done stints at Ivy League universities and the Council on Foreign Relations. One speaks fluent Arabic and has years of experience in the Middle East; another speaks Armenian, Romanian, German and Spanish and has a background in intelligence.
Together, they represent a new facet of police work in New York: understanding the roots of terrorism.
The analyst program, which several terrorism experts said was the first of its kind in the country, was conceived by Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly in late 2001 as one phase of a broad antiterrorist effort that has already transformed the department. On any given day, 1,000 department employees work directly on terrorism-related issues, including active investigations and biological-weapons drills. The department now has its own liaison officers working full time in Britain, France, Israel, Canada and Singapore, all of them filing daily reports on developments there.
One challenge, though, has been figuring out what to do with that flood of information.
“I knew in putting these things together that we needed professional analysts to synthesize the information coming in from a variety of sources,” Mr. Kelly said recently. “So we reached out.”
The first civilian analysts were hired for the department’s intelligence division in 2003. The division is housed in a two-story office that is discreetly hidden above a busy Manhattan shopping mall. (The department asked that the exact location be kept secret.) There are now five analysts based there, working alongside Arabic and Farsi linguists, dozens of police detectives and liaison officers from other city and state agencies.
Most of their time is spent sorting through the vast sea of data that comes in every day from a variety of sources: confidential informants, interrogations, surveillance of criminal suspects and the department’s telephone tip line, which receives as many as 150 calls a day.
“Someone’s taking pictures here, someone else is buying canisters there; we have to put it together and figure out what it means,” said Laura J. Mendelson, an analyst who has worked in the intelligence division for two years.
Ms. Mendelson is the only analyst who has clearance to see classified federal government documents. Her colleagues’ access to the government’s most important information is limited for now, but they are expected to receive clearance soon, said David Cohen, the Police Department’s deputy commissioner for intelligence, who worked for 35 years at the Central Intelligence Agency.
Ms. Mendelson has worked in the Middle East and North Africa and speaks fluent Arabic, an advantage in ferreting out information from the city’s Arab immigrants.
Another analyst worked previously at the Council on Foreign Relations, and a third was hired after he impressed Mr. Cohen with a presentation at Columbia University on terrorist financing.