Kelly - Vigilance : my life serving America and protecting its Empire City

I yman Faris was perfectly positioned to deliver the follow-up attack to 9/11.

If you had asked his neighbors in Columbus, Ohio, they would have described Faris as a quiet, hardworking family man. He held down a regular job as a long-haul trucker, delivering chemicals and other flammable materials to airport cargo depots across the United States. He married a preachers daughter from Kentucky and doted on his teenage stepson. Hed even become a U.S. citizen, swearing allegiance to his newly adopted homeland. Thats the man almost everyone knew. But Iyman Faris was living a double life. A thirty-three-year-old native of Pakistan, he had spent time at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan and was now an al-Qaeda sleeper agent. Using disguised e-mail accounts, he was trading frequent messages with top terror operatives overseas. Late in 2002, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the principal architect of the 2001 World Trade Center attack, directed Faris to drive his tractor-trailer to New York City.

He wasnt coming just to see the Brooklyn Bridge. He was coming to destroy it.

By the time Faris left Ohio, he already had a detailed plan. Using a gas-powered blowtorch, he would slice several of the bridges heavy suspension cables. It really wouldnt be that difficult, he was convinced. If the right cables were severed, the integrity of the 120-year-old span could be swiftly undermined, causing the mile-long bridge deck to collapse 275 feet into the East River below. Depending on the time of day, the death toll could be comparable to 9/11, easily reaching thousands of lives.

* * *

I took over as New York City police commissioner at the beginning of 2002, three months and twenty-six days after the worst terrorist attack ever executed on American soil. For the next twelve years, I had an immense responsibility: making sure that nothing remotely like the terrible events of September 11, 2001, ever happened again. Every day, I asked myself the same question: What can we do to tilt the odds a little more in our favor? My job was to keep finding ways. The pressure was enormous. The resources were never sufficient. The terrorists had many advantages. The critics were everywhere. But I had an incomparable organization behind methe New York City Police Departmentand a daunting threat hanging over my head. I knew that if we failed even once, the consequences would be devastating. If the terrorists succeeded again after their triumph on 9/11, something vital and irreplaceable would certainly be lost.

Stopping terror wasnt the only thing I had to contend with when the citys new mayor, Michael Bloomberg, put me in charge of the worlds greatest police department. We had to lock up street criminals, extending the crime drop that had started in the early 1990s under Mayor David Dinkins, when I served as NYPD commissioner the first time, and had accelerated through the Rudy Giuliani years. We had to maintain order and protect the quality of life in New York. We also had to improve the departments strained relations with some of the diverse communities we served. But none of that, important as it was, was more urgent than protecting Americas largest city, which was also Americas ripest target, from another deadly terror attack.

Our enemies kept coming at us, over and over again, sixteen times in all. Thats the number of serious terror plots launched against New York City and the number of plots that were foiled. With our federal partners and some luck, we didnt fail once in those twelve years. The terrorists went 0 for 16.

How did we do it?

It took leadership. It took teamwork. It took extraordinary expertise, inside and outside the police department, from some of the smartest and most dedicated people Ive ever met. It took effective relationships with the FBI, the CIA, and many other organizations.

But more than anything, the post-9/11 terror fight required vigilanceconstant, relentless, tireless, and creative vigilance. This was no responsibility that could be assumed halfheartedly. There was no going through the motions here. The terrorists never let up, and neither did we.

* * *

We had known for months that the Brooklyn Bridge was a prime target for al-Qaeda terrorists.

The bridge in the Godzilla movie, they called it in e-mails and text messages intercepted by U.S. and foreign intelligence agencies overseas. With sufficient planning and a little bit of luck, the terror schemers were confident, they could wreck at least as many New York landmarks as the famous movie monster had.

It was easy to see why the bridge was such an enticing target. It was massive. Iconic. Almost as well-known as the toppled towers. Another feature of the downtown skyline recognized the world over. And best of all, the bridge was right out in the open and busy all the time, carrying 120,000 vehicles a dayplus another 8,000 runners, walkers, skaters, and bikersbetween lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.

How could the local police possibly protect a structure as large and open as that?

The minute I was briefed on the Godzilla chatter, during my second month on the job, I ordered security stepped up on the bridge. I want radio cars on the Brooklyn side and the Manhattan side, I said to David Cohen, NYPD deputy commissioner of intelligence, who had previously run clandestine operations at the CIA.

And lets put a boat in the water below the bridge, I added.

In the months and years that followed, we would activate similar strategies at high-profile locations around the city as we rolled out our comprehensive post-9/11 antiterror campaign. We flooded the zone with uniformed police officers and established our own extensive undercover intelligence and counterterrorism operations, something no other local police department had ever attempted before. We hired top people from the upper ranks of the FBI, the State Department, the military, and, in Cohens case, the CIAfar beyond the normal recruitment pool for local law enforcement. We initiated Operation Hercules, a unique Demographics Unit, and the Lower Manhattan Security Initiative. High-visibility critical response vehicles cruised the streets. We stationed full-time New York City police detectives in terror hot spots overseas. Some of these measures didnt always sit well with the federal agencies that had long considered terror fighting their exclusive purview. But leaving the citys security entirely in federal hands hadnt worked out so well for New York. Twice already, once in 1993 and again in 2001, the terrorists had struck us. Twice was more than enough. Now it was time for Americas top target to face an unavoidable reality of the modern terror age: no one would ever protect New York as well as New Yorkers would.