The Spymaster of New York

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.

Throughout the storms that battered the CIA in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Cohen seemed to fall upward. The agency suffered through Iran-contra, failed to foresee the collapse of the Soviet empire or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and discovered moles burrowed deep inside its clandestine services. All around Cohen, things seemed to be crumbling. "When I became the DDO, there were seven people in clandestine service training. Seven!" he remembers. He kept on as best he could, creating what became known as the bin Laden unit in the mid-1990s, long before most of the world had heard of the terrorist mastermind. But by the time Cohen decided to take a job in the private sector in 2000, he was more reviled than revered, blamed for many woes that were not of his making.

Then 9/11 happened, and Kelly asked him to head the NYPD's Intelligence Division, making its primary mission to stop terrorist attacks on New York. Cohen asked for two days to decide, but called back in about an hour. "It's like starting the CIA over in the post-9/11 world," he said later. "What would you do if you could begin it all over again? Hah. This is what you would do."

In those first months of 2002, the conventional wisdom was that Al Qaeda was planning a second wave of attacks on the United States—as Vice President Dick Cheney said, new horrors were "not a matter of if, but when." Cohen had to scramble to get his organization up and running. "It was like putting tires on a speeding car," he said. He turned to the CIA for help, getting Lawrence Sanchez, a senior operative who had also been head of intelligence at the Department of Energy, seconded to the NYPD. Sanchez was able to keep Cohen abreast of anything and everything the CIA learned abroad, including whatever information about New York might be spilled by prisoners interrogated at the agency's "black sites."

But when it came to dealing with his old agency, Cohen believed, as he told colleagues, "there's no such thing as information sharing, there is only information trading." So the question was how his shop could start generating the kind of intel product that he could barter. He suggested to Kelly that New York cops be assigned overseas in cities where the local police were already deeply immersed in the fight against terrorists. But the real key to the success of the intelligence division lay closer to home.

Some 40 percent of New Yorkers are born outside the United States. That could be a dangerous problem, and in the popular imagination it probably is, but Kelly and Cohen saw the city's demographics as one of their greatest assets. In the aftermath of 9/11, the FBI and CIA (the "three-letter guys," in police parlance) had terrible problems finding agents and operatives who were fluent in foreign languages. Cold War–style background checks often eliminated recruits who had been born overseas. And native-born Americans were uninterested in foreign languages. In 2002, the total number of undergraduate degrees granted in Arabic in all U.S. colleges and universities—yes, all of them—was six.