Inside The NYPD's Anti-Terror Fight

Police Department Created Own Anti-Terror Unit

(CBS) 
"I knew we had to do something different," says Kelly. "I knew we had to configure the department differently. We had to change our mindset."

Kelly became commissioner four months after 9/11. His mandate: to transform the NYPD. He created a Counter-Terrorism Bureau, dramatically expanded the Intelligence Division, and increased the number of cops working on terrorism with the FBI from 17 to 120.

He also ordered the NYPD’s 37,000 officers to undergo training in how to handle chemical, biological and radiological attacks, and mandated that the Emergency Services Unit be prepared to respond to scenarios like an attack on the subway.

"The breadth and scope of their training has changed dramatically as a result of September 11," Kelly explains.

Another change is that detectives are taking courses, like one titled "Global Jihad," that covers subjects ranging from the history of Islam to the mind of a suicide bomber.

It’s taught in the Counter-Terrorism Bureau, which was started four years ago and housed in a then-vacant warehouse in Brooklyn. Detectives in the warehouse work on keeping the city safe. They collect information on potential threats.

Civilian analysts do research on everything from radical Islam and militant terrorist organizations to detailed analysis of bomb making techniques and terrorist attacks.

"Has any other police department in this country, or anywhere in the world, taken the kind of steps that you have here in New York?" Bradley asked Kelly.

"I don't believe so, no," the commissioner replied.

Kelly says the NYPD still works closely with the feds, but he took those steps knowing he was stepping on the FBI and the CIA’s traditional turf.

Kelly says he didn’t discuss these changes with the FBI in the beginning. "No, we just did it on our own," he says.

He did it, in part, by hiring David Cohen and Michael Sheehan, two of the most experienced people in U.S. intelligence.

Before becoming the NYPD’s intelligence chief, Cohen was America’s spymaster — the Director of Operations at the CIA, where he served 35 years. He had been out of the intelligence business for two years when Kelly brought him back in.

"We show up every morning with that core assumption in our mind, that if they could, they’d like to come back. Can they? Our job is to raise the bar and make it more difficult, if not impossible," says Cohen.

"It would seem, at least to an outsider, that part of what you're trying to do is to take elements of what the CIA does and what the FBI does and put them within the New York Police Department," Bradley said.

"That’s what we've certainly tried to do. I'd like to think that we've had some success," Cohen replied.

Asked how the FBI and his former colleagues at the CIA reacted to the NYPD's changes, Cohen says there was a lot of initial suspicion. "What does this NYPD Intelligence Division gonna be up to? If I were in their shoes, I'd be suspicious too. Especially of me," says Cohen, laughing.

They might also be suspicious about what Michael is up to. He has held key posts in intelligence and the military, and now heads the NYPD's Counter-Terrorism Bureau.

"What we do in the counter-terrorism bureau is try to define what the threat is," Sheehan explains. "And understanding the threat. That drives everything that we do."

Sheehan acknowledges the NYPD has its own informants working undercover in the city. "The key to counter-terrorism is intelligence," he says, "and the key to intelligence are informants".