Inside The NYPD's Anti-Terror Fight

Police Department Created Own Anti-Terror Unit

(CBS) 
Security checks and bag searches on the city's subways and trains are routine.

Every day, the Harbor Unit patrols landmarks from the Statue of Liberty to the Staten Island Ferry. Every day, police divers check the base of the Brooklyn Bridge for explosives.

And every day, helicopters with high-tech cameras monitor the city, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

While there's a lot of what the NYPD's doing that 60 Minutes can show, there's more that it can't — like the activities of the 600 Intelligence Division cops who operate from an undisclosed location, behind an unmarked door.

The main vehicle extremists and terrorists use to communicate, recruit, raise money, and disseminate propaganda is the Internet. The Intelligence Division has a cyber unit that tries to penetrate it.

"There's eight of us. I myself speak two languages," one member of the unit explained.

The cyber unit is drawn from the police department’s own resources — NYPD cops from Middle Eastern and South Asian backgrounds. 60 Minutes was allowed to discuss their work, if we didn't identify them.

Asked what they look for in these chat rooms, a member of the unit says, "Information that will relate to New York City. The ultimate goal for us is not to allow anything else like September 11 to ever happen again."

"These people in the chat rooms have no idea they're talking to an NYPD cop?" Bradley asked.

"Sure hope not," a unit member replied, laughing.

The value of the information they find, says one member, is priceless. "You cannot put a price tag on intelligence."

Just how priceless, the police say, has been shown twice a year and a half ago when a tip from an NYPD informant uncovered a plot to bomb the subway station outside Macy’s Department store, and once before in 2003, when a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge by al Qaeda operative Iyman Farris was uncovered.

Cohen is confident that these plots would not have been uncovered without the changes the commissioner wanted.

"Absolutely not. There is no question in my mind. They would have been moving forward," Cohen says.

How close did New York come in those cases to another disaster?

"I don't know the answer to that, because all we really know is that we scared them off or stopped them," says Mayor Bloomberg. "For all I know we've deterred lots of attacks. And we'll never know."

Commissioner Kelly says he does know it's inevitable that terrorists will try to attack New York again. What's not inevitable, he says, is that they will succeed.

"When you look at the fact that there hasn't been a successful attack against New York since 9/11, do you attribute that to luck or to the changes you've put in place in New York City?" Bradley asked Kelly.

"I don't know," the commissioner replied. "We're doing what we think we have to do to protect the city. We could just be lucky. But we'll take that."