In New York, a Turf War in the Battle Against Terrorism

"We just see ourselves very much at risk here," said New York Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly. He said he does not want to rely solely on other agencies for the city's protection. (By Helayne Seidman -- The Washington Post)

"Local law enforcement is best placed to gather ground-level intelligence," said Roger Cressey, the principal deputy to the counterterrorism chief at the National Security Council from 1999 to November 2001. "Only when you combine that with what you are getting at the federal level will you create a holistic picture of the threat. NYPD has done that and is a model for other major metropolitan cities to follow."

For Kelly, the vast and pricey operation fulfills a pledge to protect the city and provide its 8 million residents with a sense of security. Kelly, a former Marine and a Customs Service chief in the Clinton administration, is serving his second stint as commissioner and often chides himself and the city for not being more aggressive after the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

He said he is not prepared to rely entirely on others for the city's protection. "We just see ourselves very much at risk here, the top of the target list," he said.

Shut Out of Local Cases

In March 2003, working from information gleaned by the CIA, NYPD detectives and FBI agents investigated and then arrested a Pakistani national named Uzair Paracha. Investigators said Paracha had been working with several senior al-Qaeda suspects, including Majid Khan -- whose family lives in the Baltimore area -- on plots that included blowing up gas stations on the East Coast.

The detectives and agents learned enough to tip off the CIA to the whereabouts of Paracha's father, a businessman and alleged al-Qaeda financier who investigators said had met with Osama bin Laden. Four months after the younger Paracha's arrest, the CIA picked up Saifullah Paracha in Thailand and then secretly rendered him to a CIA prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

NYPD detectives had previously been to Bagram, with Pentagon permission, to interview detainees connected to New York. But the Paracha case was treated differently. For the first time, the FBI blocked detectives from joining a bureau interrogator who was traveling to Bagram to interview the elder Paracha.

The FBI agent in charge in New York, Joe Billy, said the interrogator would brief detectives on her discoveries, but she went on extended leave after her return, according to a former NYPD official. As a result, whatever detail was extracted about the Paracha family's contacts or intentions in New York went unreported to the police, the official said.

"We wanted to send our lead detective on the case to Bagram with the FBI agent to talk to Paracha," said James Waters, a deputy commissioner and the senior ranking NYPD officer in the joint task force. But "the FBI just didn't want the NYPD there."

The ban on NYPD visits to Bagram, where hundreds of prisoners were detained by the CIA and the U.S. military, lasted two years and outraged New York detectives working on the task force, two officials recalled in interviews. By the time access was restored, Paracha had been moved to the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. New York detectives interviewed him there, years after his arrest.

FBI spokesman John Miller said: "There were a number of issues and agencies involved in the Paracha case. We worked through it, and we're all fine now."

Just as the Paracha investigation was getting underway, FBI agents in Ohio were secretly questioning a Kashmiri-born truck driver named Iyman Faris. On orders from Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the orchestrator of al-Qaeda's attacks against the United States, Faris plotted to help bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, prosecutors later alleged.

After two scouting trips, Faris reported back to Mohammed that security in New York was too tight to carry out the attack, prosecutors said in court documents. In May 2003, two months after Faris was secretly detained, then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft held a news conference to announce his indictment for allegedly planning an al-Qaeda attack in New York.