Three months ago, one of the CIA's most experienced clandestine operatives started work inside the New York Police Department. His title is special assistant to the deputy commissioner of intelligence. On that much, everyone agrees. Exactly what he's doing there, however, is much less clear. Since The Associated Press revealed the assignment in August, federal and city officials have offered differing explanations for why this CIA officer – a seasoned operative who handled foreign agents and ran complex operations in Jordan and Pakistan – was assigned to a municipal police department. The CIA is prohibited from spying domestically, and its unusual partnership with the NYPD has troubled top lawmakers and prompted an internal investigation. His role is important because the last time a CIA officer worked so closely with the NYPD, beginning in the months after the 9/11 attacks, he became the architect of aggressive police programs that monitored Muslim neighborhoods. With the earlier help from this CIA official, the police put entire communities under the microscope, according to internal police documents, based on ethnicity rather allegations of wrongdoing. It was an extraordinary collaboration that at times troubled some senior CIA officials and may have stretched the bounds of how the CIA is legally allowed to operate in the United States. The arrangement surrounding the newly arrived CIA officer has been portrayed differently than that of his predecessor. When first asked by the AP, a senior U.S. official described the posting as a sabbatical, a program aimed at giving the man in New York more management training. Testifying at City Hall recently, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the CIA operative provides his officers “with information, usually coming from perhaps overseas.” He said the CIA operative provides “technical information” to the NYPD but “doesn't have access to any of our investigative files.” But the CIA already has someone with that job. At its large station in New York, a CIA liaison shares intelligence with the Joint Terrorism Task Force in New York, which has hundreds of NYPD detectives assigned to it. And the CIA did not explain how, if the officer doesn't have access to NYPD files, he is getting management experience in a division built entirely around collecting domestic intelligence. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, mischaracterized him to Congress as an “embedded analyst” – his office later quietly said that was a mistake – and acknowledged it looked bad to have the CIA working so closely with a police department.All of this has troubled lawmakers, including Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who has said the CIA has “no business or authority in domestic spying, or in advising the NYPD how to conduct local surveillance.” The CIA's deep ties to the NYPD began after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when CIA Director George Tenet dispatched a veteran officer, Larry Sanchez, to New York, where he became the architect of the police department's secret spying programs. While still on the agency payroll, Sanchez, a CIA veteran who spent 15 years overseas in the former Soviet Union, South Asia, and the Middle East, instructed officers on the art of collecting information without attracting attention. He directed officers and reviewed case files.Sometimes, officials said, intelligence collected from NYPD's operations was passed informally to the CIA. Sanchez also hand-picked an NYPD detective to attend the “Farm,” the CIA's training facility where its officers are turned into operatives. The detective, who completed the course but failed to graduate, returned to the police department where he works today armed with the agency's famed espionage skills.
