Enemies Within (10 page)

Cohen and Sanchez had met during their days at Langley. When Cohen was deputy director of operations, Sanchez was the top assistant—essentially the chief of staff—to Cohen’s immediate boss, CIA executive director Nora Slatkin. But the two really got to know each other in 1997, when Cohen became CIA station chief in New York and the CIA detailed Sanchez to the staff of United Nations Ambassador Bill Richardson.

When Richardson left the United Nations in 1998 to become President Bill Clinton’s energy secretary, he took Sanchez with him, appointing him the department’s chief intelligence officer. Again, he was on loan from the CIA, this time to help protect the nation’s nuclear secrets and research.

When Cohen called in early 2002, Sanchez was in limbo. Though
he’d been working for the CIA, he’d been answering to someone else for a long time. Now he was back under the CIA’s roof and was looking for a new assignment. Cohen pitched him on another out-of-town job. And he pitched Sanchez’s boss, CIA Director George Tenet, who gave his consent.

Cohen’s idea, putting a CIA officer inside a municipal police department, had never been tried. The NYPD was a pure law enforcement agency, one whose primary function was keeping the city secure. The CIA, by its very charter, was prohibited from having any “police, subpoena, or law enforcement powers or internal security functions.” But this was months after 9/11. The finger-pointing over who’d missed the warning signs had begun, and the only question that mattered was how the federal government could make the country—and particularly New York—more secure. New York could have asked for anything, and Washington would have had a hard time refusing.

Normally, when a CIA officer takes a temporary assignment inside another agency, the arrangements are spelled out in great, lawyerly detail. Who’s going to pay the bills? Who exactly is in charge of the assignment? What are the job duties? Will the officer temporarily sever ties to the agency? The rules of Sanchez’s unprecedented assignment were never committed to writing, much less submitted for review.
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Twenty-seven years after the Church Committee and the beginning of congressional oversight, nobody on Capitol Hill, in either of the intelligence committees, approved Sanchez’s appointment. The authority for the move was murky. Under a presidential order signed by Ronald Reagan, the CIA was allowed to provide “specialized equipment, technical knowledge, or assistance of expert personnel” to local law enforcement, but only when the details were approved by CIA lawyers. Instead, Tenet sent Sanchez to New York solely on his say-so. As director of central intelligence, Tenet asserted the authority to move his people from station to station as he saw fit to protect the country. At a time when the CIA was immersed in plans to carry out a covert war
against al-Qaeda and create a network of secret prisons to hold and interrogate suspected terrorists, the decision to send Sanchez to New York generated little discussion and no controversy.

To the extent that Sanchez had an official title, it was the CIA director’s counterterrorism liaison to the state of New York. In reality, he was Cohen’s personal liaison to the CIA. The agency was paying the bills, but it was not at all clear what his job duties were or to whom he answered. He had an office at the CIA station in Manhattan and another at NYPD. At both places, nobody was quite sure what he did. He’d start many mornings at his CIA office, reading the latest intelligence reports. Then he’d head for One Police Plaza to give Cohen a personal briefing that was far more expansive than the updates he could get from the FBI or CIA.

At the NYPD, the word was that Sanchez was a consultant. John Cutter, a veteran cop who served as one of Cohen’s top uniformed officers, remembers his introduction. “This is Larry Sanchez. Larry’s a consultant. Larry knows things that can help us, and Larry knows people who can help us.” The fact that he was CIA spread quickly through the ranks. Whether he was retired or active was unclear.

Sanchez was easy to talk to and easy to like. He was a former amateur power lifter and boxer, and though he was nearly bald, with patches of hair above each ear, he still had thick biceps and a broad chest. Sanchez wore a diamond stud earring, and he told great stories about scuba and skydiving, about working overseas. He recalled parachuting into Iraq with army commandos from Delta Force. If you left a conversation believing that Sanchez was a covert officer, not a career analyst, he wasn’t going to do anything to disabuse you of that impression.

In contrast to Cohen’s aloof, sometimes combative personality, Sanchez was outgoing and friendly. One retired officer remembers Cohen making a rare appearance at an Intelligence Division Christmas party at a Chelsea steak house and awkwardly approaching two officers sitting at the bar. He congratulated them on a good, successful year and thanked them for their hard work. They looked at him, confused. They
weren’t members of the Intelligence Division. They worked for a different unit and happened to be having their party there too. Sanchez, by comparison, was a regular at police events. He knew the officers and was good at both mentoring and socializing.

In the early days, Sanchez and Cohen would meet at Cohen’s high-rise apartment building on the Upper West Side, off Central Park, and discuss their vision for the NYPD. The pockets of cloistered Middle Eastern and South Asian neighborhoods were a particular concern for the two CIA veterans. The 9/11 attacks had been planned in communities walled off from the police by language, religion, and culture. New York was dotted with similar enclaves, places where someone could rent a cheap room and remain inconspicuous.
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In New York, Cohen and Sanchez reviewed the dossiers that had been built on the 9/11 hijackers. Some of the intelligence came from government sources, but in the wake of the attacks, journalists from around the globe worked to piece together the lives of the terrorists aboard the airplanes that morning. Sanchez looked at the life of Mohamed Atta, the ringleader of the hijacking operation, and saw a learning opportunity for the NYPD. Here was a man who’d managed to fade into anonymity on three continents, someone who Osama bin Laden trusted to avoid detection while planning the most ambitious terrorist mission ever. He was a man who announced calmly, “Everything will be okay,” and then steered American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. And he was about to become a case study in how to prevent terrorism. Sanchez and Cohen believed the Atta case contained the clues that future investigators could use to identify people before they attacked.

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In Cairo, Egypt, Atta was raised in a family dedicated to scholarship, not prayer. His father, a lawyer, expected his son to learn. Atta and his sisters were not allowed to play outside. His parents timed the walk home
from school and expected Atta to be back in the apartment studying without delay. In a densely populated, neighborly section of the city, his family seldom socialized or broke the fast with neighbors during the holy month of Ramadan.
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Eventually Atta graduated from Cairo University with a degree in architectural engineering and then continued his studies in Germany.

Friends in Cairo don’t recall seeing Atta’s family at the mosque. They certainly weren’t regulars. But when Atta arrived in Hamburg in 1992, he immediately sought out the nearest one.
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At the Technical University of Hamburg-Harburg, Atta applied himself to his studies. He also became increasingly religious and confrontational over moral and spiritual issues but never advocated violence.
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When he moved into university housing, his strict religious practices and stern personality quickly isolated him from his two successive roommates. He started a Muslim student group, a daily prayer session where investigators believe he met two men who would become hijackers with him.
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He began attending the Al Quds mosque, where a radical version of Sunni Islam was preached.

In 1998 he rented an apartment with two friends, Ramzi bin al-Shibh and Marwan al-Shehhi. They shared a growing anti-American sentiment that, at least at first, they were not shy about discussing at the local pub where they went to talk—never to drink.
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The shopkeeper on the corner near Atta’s apartment recalls him growing out his beard and dressing in traditional Arab robes, called dishdashas.
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Al-Shehhi would go on to pilot United Airlines Flight 175 into the South Tower of the World Trade Center. Bin al-Shibh, who was unable to get a visa to join his friends on their mission, was later captured and imprisoned in secret CIA prisons. His cooperation provided the foundation for much of
The 9/11 Commission Report
.

When Atta and al-Shehhi arrived in the United States in 2000, they stayed in New York, moving from cheap motels to short-term leases in Manhattan’s Hudson Heights and Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhoods.
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Al-Shehhi enrolled in an English class. They traveled the country, conducting premission surveillance, assembling their team, and training to fly jets. They attended mosques sporadically, visited internet cafés, and joined gyms.

For Sanchez, this was a road map for the new NYPD. The federal government was tightening security at airports, getting tough on visa requirements, freezing money used to finance attacks, and requiring background checks for foreigners attending flight schools. With Cohen, the NYPD could go further. The story of Mohamed Atta was one of missed opportunities. There were people who’d seen signs of trouble, radical ideology, and anti-American vitriol: housemates and roommates, shopkeepers and pub patrons, fellow students and mosque-goers. They didn’t think anything of what they saw until it was too late.

If the NYPD had its own eyes and ears in those cloistered communities, maybe things could be different. They needed be in the shop to spot the next Mohamed Atta in his kaftan with his newly grown beard. They had to be at the restaurant to overhear the group of friends ranting about America. If NYPD detectives infiltrated Muslim student groups, maybe they could identify the young man with the seething fanaticism. If the cops had a better handle on what went on inside the mosques, or which internet cafés were nearby—or even which gyms a young Middle Eastern man would attend—then maybe they could piece together the clues. Maybe they could prevent the next 9/11.

The nearly successful effort by Richard Reid to detonate explosives in his shoes aboard American Airlines Flight 63 in December 2001 further validated the NYPD’s plans. Reid, who later became known as the “shoe bomber,” was a British citizen and Islamic convert who attended north London’s fiery, anti-American mosques. He had spent days in Paris before his flight, staying in the diverse neighborhood near the busy Gare du Nord train station. He ate at many of the restaurants in the area and used an internet café to send his mother his will and a final letter: “What I am doing is part of the ongoing war between Islam
and disbelief (and as such a duty upon me as a Muslim).” Only after the attempted bombing did French authorities unravel the terrorist organization in Paris that supported Reid. To Cohen, that underscored the crisis.
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Profiling
is a loaded word in policing because it conjures images of white cops pulling over young black men and searching for guns or drugs. Racial profiling uses race as a stand-in for behavior: “That driver is probably up to no good because he’s black.” But racial profiling and behavioral profiling are different. The FBI, for instance, builds profiles of serial killers through its Behavioral Analysis Unit. And while such social science has not been immune from criticism, these profiles have been credited with helping solve crimes and catch killers.

Sanchez envisioned a similar role for the NYPD, but with an important difference: It would not wait until a crime was committed. He wanted NYPD detectives to be the surrogates for all the people who missed the significance of Atta’s growing radicalization. It was an audacious plan, because the behaviors to be profiled were common not only to Atta and his murderous friends but also to a huge population of innocent people. Most café customers, gym members, college kids, and pub customers were not terrorists. Most devout Muslims weren’t, either. Nevertheless, Cohen liked the idea. He compared it to raking an extinguished fire pit. Most coals would be harmless and gray. But rake them carefully, and you might find a smoldering ember—a hot spot waiting to catch fire.
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Like Sanchez’s very relationship with the NYPD, there was nothing like what he was proposing anywhere in American law enforcement. People who kill abortion doctors or bomb clinics have common behavioral traits too. They tend to be Christian; usually fervently so. They attend church, often participate in protests outside clinics, and acquire weapons. There has been no known effort to establish police eyes and ears in Christian churches, antiabortion groups, and gun clubs in hopes of spotting the next abortion-doctor killer. But New York was not under attack by fanatical, antiabortion Christians.

There was, however, precedent for what Sanchez wanted to do. The surveillance abuses of the 1960s and 1970s were born out of a similar desire to identify trouble spots by monitoring lawful communities. Decades before that, in 1919, New York state senator Clayton Lusk led the Joint Committee Investigating Seditious Activities. He commissioned ethnic maps of New York. Irish, Germans, Russian Jews, Italians, and other groups were designated on color-coded charts to help authorities root out disloyalty and radicalism.
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But Sanchez didn’t get his inspiration from New York’s troubled past. Rather, he got the idea from one of America’s closest allies, a country that had lived under the threat of terrorism for decades. Sanchez told friends and colleagues that the NYPD was taking its cue from Israeli officers’ methods of keeping tabs on the military-occupied West Bank, the swath captured from Jordan in the 1967 Six-Day War.
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