ENEMIES WITHIN

Two Pulitzer-prize winning journalists pull back the curtain on the NYPD’s shocking post-9/11 security tactics and offer a thriller-like ride into what it really takes to hunt down terrorists in America. The book offers an unbridled look into one of the most sensitive national security investigations of the last decade. For those who wonder, “How safe are we?” the story reveals the strengths and weaknesses of our counter-terrorism measures.

Six months after the 9/11 attacks, then-CIA director George Tenet sent a veteran operative named Larry Sanchez from Washington, D.C., to New York for a secret meeting. The plan was as straightforward as it was audacious. The NYPD would carve up the city into zones and dispatch a vast network of undercover officers and informants -- also known as "mosque crawlers" and "rakers" -- into Muslim neighborhoods to eavesdrop on conversations at deli counters, in mosques, and in community centers. It was the ultimate preventative measure. To spot potential threats, countless innocent people would be scrutinized and harassed.

To pull it off, the NYPD would need to literally rewrite the rules of policing. Their plan required total secrecy. For one thing, the NYPD didn’t want to alert potential attackers about what they were up to. For another, the police were wary of how New Yorkers – residents of the most liberal city in the country – would feel about the NYPD watching their every move.

ENEMIES WITHIN is a book by two Associated Press reporters who did ask, and who won a Pulitzer Prize this year for their investigative reporting on this subject. This book tells the story of the last decade of intelligence work and the NYPD through the harrowing tick-tock narrative of 48 hours in 2009, as FBI and NYPD officials tracked a suspected terrorist who was making his way from Denver to NYC to launch a terrorist attack on the eight-year anniversary of 9/11. ENEMIES WITHIN reads like a thriller, but will endure as a cautionary tale about the failures of the large and, for the most part, unchecked NYPD Intelligence Division. In telling the story of Najibullah Zazi – the single greatest threat to US domestic safety since 9/11 – the authors give readers an inside look at the complicated and often contradictory state of counter-terrorism and intelligence in this country. More than ten years after the World Trade Center collapsed, Apuzzo and Goldman ask the tough questions about the value of some of the measures we take to protect ourselves from real and false threats. In some cases, due to greed and unchecked power, the threats lie more with the institutions and agencies that claim to protect us. No greater example can be found than in NYC, and no better story can be told than the one involving Zazi.

In the dramatic re-telling of the NYPD's desperate attempt and near failure to thwart a single bomb-maker and his plot to launch a devastating attack on New York City, ENEMIES WITHIN offers a stark view of what works when trying to keep America safe – and what doesn’t.

Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman are investigative reporters for The Associated Press in Washington, D.C. They shared in the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting for a series on the New York Police Department's clandestine spying program targeting American Muslims. Together, Apuzzo and Goldman have uncovered the location of a CIA prison, revealed widespread cheating on FBI exams, and showed how the CIA's haphazard disciplinary system resulted in promotions for officers who kidnapped and killed the wrong people. They have shared the Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting, a George Polk Award, the Paul Tobenkin Memorial Award and the Edgar A. Poe Award from the White House Correspondents’ Association. Apuzzo has covered organized crime, corruption and law enforcement in Massachusetts, Connecticut and Washington. Goldman has covered crime and government for newspapers in Virginia and Alabama. He reported from Las Vegas and New York for the AP.