The Spymaster of New York

In sweltering Mumbai last November, two days after the terrorist rampage that killed or wounded more than 500 people, some odd figures joined the alphabet soup of agencies investigating the atrocity—three New York Citypolice detectives. In 2005 other American cops looked at bomb detonators with Scotland Yard after the London tube bombings. Still others turned up in Madrid after its own train attacks in 2004, and several times in Jerusalem after suicide bombings there.

The cops showed up because David Cohen, the spymaster of the NYPD, sent them. A former director of clandestine operations for the Central Intelligence Agency, Cohen wants his own people seeing up close and right away the warning signs—he calls them signatures—that might have revealed a terrorist operation taking shape. And if the FBI, the CIA or any other federal agency objects to the NYPD making the world its beat, Cohen doesn't really care. "Listen to this," he told me one morning at his office at police headquarters in downtown Manhattan. "We got a report from the FBI on the Madrid bombing which was terrific, it was great … It was f–––ing 18 months later!" He drank from a mug with the eagle-andcompass seal of the CIA on it. "They tried the best they could."

Ever since Police Commissioner Ray Kelly took over the NYPD in 2002 and set out to reinvent the department's role fighting terrorists, there have been fights with the Feds, too. Cohen has been right in the middle of them. The most recent, last year, involved his demand that the FBI move faster on requests for federal wiretaps on people with suspected links to terrorists. In a testy exchange of letters between Kelly and the then Attorney General Michael Mukasey, the Feds said they didn't want to submit requests to the courts that might get shot down. The cops wanted them approved yesterday. "In situations short of unambiguous emergency, the system too often moves too slowly and with too little urgency," Kelly wrote.

As the cops see it, "there's a plot taking shape against New York City every day of every week since 9/11," says Cohen. "What that plot consists of, who's doing it and where it's percolating from can change, but there's someone out there every day of the week thinking about that." Kelly, who did a turn as commissioner in 1993, when the World Trade Center was first attacked, returned to the job after 9/11 determined to make sure the city would not be blindsided again. Never a believer in the "clash of civilizations," he called the Bush administration's Global War on Terror "the GWOT," and made the word sound almost obscene. Kelly wanted to keep the combat intensely focused and pragmatic. The idea would be to prevent terrorists from acting, not to prosecute them after the fact. And the key to that would be real-time, actionable intelligence. Which is why he called on Cohen.

The choice wasn't as obvious as a CV might make it seem. There's probably never been a spymaster at the Central Intelligence Agency so hated by so many of his own spies as Cohen was in the mid-1990s when he ran the Directorate of Operations. "His first name wasn't David," recalls a top operative who served with him. "It was 'F–––ing Cohen'." Working obsessively, smoking pack after pack of cigarettes each day, Cohen was one of those gray men in the world of intelligence who can disappear into the background of a room, like John le Carré's George Smiley. He never quite fit in with the self-styled swashbucklers of the DO.

His whole career, in fact, Cohen had been an outsider on the inside. He was a street-smart kid from Boston, educated at Northeastern University, who joined the agency in 1967 when it was still dominated by the Ivy League. As an analyst, he focused on global issues like commodity markets and the oil trade, while most others specialized in countries or regions. In the late 1980s he oversaw the CIA's highly limited and controversial intelligence gathering inside the United States, which included recruiting "agents of access" in immigrant communities who could help recruit other agents abroad. After he was appointed deputy director for operations in 1995, he led the agency's spies around the world yet had never served in the field himself.