http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/14/nyregion/cia-examining-legality-of-its-work-with-new-york-police.html

September 13, 2011

C.I.A. Examining Legality of Work With Police Dept.

By MARK MAZZETTI

WASHINGTON -- The Central Intelligence Agency has opened an internal inquiry into whether its close cooperation with the New York Police Department in the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks has broken any laws prohibiting the agency from collecting intelligence in the United States.

During his first Congressional testimony as the C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus said Tuesday that the agency's inspector general had begun to investigate its work with the Police Department "to make sure we are doing the right thing." Mr. Petraeus said the inquiry began last month, but gave few details about its scope.

The C.I.A. is prohibited from gathering intelligence on American soil, but some have criticized its counterterrorism cooperation with law enforcement services as a de facto domestic spying campaign. The head of the Police Department's intelligence unit, David Cohen, is a former C.I.A. official, and the agency has a senior clandestine officer embedded in the New York police force.

James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said during the same Congressional hearing on Tuesday that while there were no C.I.A. officers out on the streets of New York collecting intelligence, he thought it was "not a good optic to have C.I.A. involved in any city-level police department."

Under Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, Mr. Cohen has been involved with expanding the Police Department's global reach and trying to penetrate overseas terror networks that might be planning attacks in the city. But he has also overseen a number of controversial department efforts to infiltrate New York's Muslim community and monitor city mosques to gather information about possible terror plots. Last month, The Associated Press reported that department intelligence officers had infiltrated dozens of mosques and had established a so-called Demographics Unit using plainclothes police officers to monitor ethnic groups in the metropolitan region.

The department's chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said he and his colleagues welcomed the agency's inquiry.

Muslim advocacy groups have called the department's operations illegal, and have asked for a Justice Department investigation into the C.I.A.'s cooperation with local police forces.

On Tuesday, Cyrus McGoldrick of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said that his group "cautiously" welcomed the agency's decision to examine its relationship with the Police Department, although he said he would have preferred an independent investigation into the matter. He said he hoped "the agency's investigation will be undertaken honestly and transparently."

Marie E. Harf, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that its cooperation with American police forces in the past decade "should not be a surprise to anyone," and that its work with the department in New York "is exactly what the American people deserve and have come to expect following 9/11."

"The agency's operational focus, however, is overseas and none of the support we have provided to N.Y.P.D. can be rightly characterized as 'domestic spying' by the C.I.A.," Ms. Harf said.

Inquiries by the agency's inspector general have sometime taken years to complete, and the results of such investigations are rarely made public. Generally, if the inspector general's office finds evidence that agency operatives broke the law, he will refer the matter to the Justice Department for prosecution.

The current inspector general, David B. Buckley, is a former Air Force officer and staff member on the House Intelligence Committee.

William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York.