Enemies Within - 9781476727936

Two Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists take an unbridled look into one of the most sensitive post-9/11 national security investigations, a breathtaking race to avert a second devastating terrorist attack on American soil.

For Americans who wonder, “How safe are we?” Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman pull back the curtain to reveal the strengths and weaknesses of our counterterrorism measures. Chillingly, their real-life domestic spy story—based on hundreds of previously unpublished New York Police Department internal memos and exclusive interviews with intelligence sources—indicates that many of those strategies aren’t even close to being useful, functional, or successful.

Six months after the 9/11 attacks, New York Police Commissioner Ray Kelly initiated a straightforward, yet audacious, antiterrorist plan to be implemented in the Big Apple. The NYPD would dispatch a vast network of undercover officers and informants—known as “mosque crawlers” and “rakers”—into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations in mosques and community centers. And yet their shady tactics proved to be fruitless.

Through the harrowing tick-tock narrative of forty-eight hours in 2009, the NYPD and the FBI track suspected terrorist Najibullah Zazi—the single greatest threat to US domestic security since 9/11—as he makes his way from Denver to New York to launch an attack. In telling their story, the authors provide readers an inside look at the complex and often contradictory state of counterterrorism and intelligence in America.

Enemies Within answers the tough questions about the effectiveness of the measures we take to protect ourselves from real and false threats. Its shocking details about the tactics and activities of the NYPD will be headline news and reveal what it really takes to hunt down terrorists in America.