TRACKING TERROR THREATS
A New Day in New York, Part 1
07/16/07
It’s 11 o’clock on a Monday
morning in early July. Coffee cup in hand,
Joe Demarest is standing before a packed
conference room deep in the heart of our
New York office in Manhattan. Glancing quickly
at the bullet points he’s made in his
green, government-issue notebook, he looks
up and says, “All right everybody.
Let’s get started.”
It’s
the regular weekly meeting of our New
York Joint Terrorism Task Force. Filling
the room are a hundred or so major players
and agency reps on the task force, the
oldest and largest of its kind in the nation.
Beyond poking fun at himself and sharing
an occasional laugh, Demarest is serious
and straightforward while he leads the
meeting, asking probing questions and expecting
everyone to know their stuff.
Demarest’s
intensity is driven by the task force’s
daunting daily task: protecting the Big Apple,
one of the country’s ultimate terrorist
targets, from possible attack by global jihadists
and by homegrown radicals inspired by their
ideology. Since 9/11, to be sure, there has
been no shortage of threats to run to ground—from
a plan to bomb the Herald Square subway station
a few years back to the recently disrupted
plot to blow up major fuel tanks at J.F.K.
airport.
To do its job, the task force pulls
together some 500 investigators, analysts,
and other experts from 44 different government
agencies in the region. Represented
are officials from law enforcement, homeland
security, the military, and the intelligence
community. They each bring to the table
their own skills and perspectives; at the
same time, they are tethers to the information
pools of their larger agencies, which range
from Amtrak to the Yonkers Police. Nearly
half of the task force members hail from
outside the Bureau. The lion’s share—more
than 130 in all—are supplied by the
New York City Police Department, our partner
on the terror task force for more than
a quarter century.
Demarest
begins the meeting by briefing the contingent
on the FBI’s latest
investigations and initiatives, turning the
floor over to his case agents and analysts
for the telling details. He then goes around
the room, agency rep by agency rep, calling
on each to share what they know and what
they have going on in the week ahead.
“This is one important way of making
sure nothing falls through the cracks, of
keeping everyone up to speed and in sync,” says
Demarest, a nearly 20-year veteran of the
Bureau who worked international terrorism
operations at FBI Headquarters for several
years after 9/11 before returning two years
ago to the city where he has spent most of
his career. “We all have to be transparent.
Our success depends on it.”
This
growing transparency has helped the task
force gel into a virtually seamless operation,
says Demarest. “We’re
so intertwined that where you’re from
doesn’t much matter anymore,” he
points out. “We think and act as a
team.”
In
the days ahead, we’ll talk in
more detail about how this team operates—in
particular, how it is synthesizing and acting
on intelligence in new and important ways.
Stay tuned.
Resources:
-
Inside
FBI Counterterrorism
- More
terrorism stories
