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Crush the Cell: How to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves

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Full Disclosure: I have known Mike Sheehan for over 20 years and think highly of him.

Did you ever wonder just what those Homeland Security color codes mean? If you read Sheehan's book, you will know you can stop caring about them.

This is the book that helps you understand how a small group of dedicated men have so damaged and befuddled us and how we can defeat them without destroying the fabric of our lives. Sheehan discards the pedantic in favor of the practical. He is prescriptive without pretense. He explains why he thinks Hezbollah has not struck outside the Middle East in years, but admits he does not know if or when they might reach across the seas again.

Michael Sheehan has hit the balance point. He makes it clear that the terrorists dangerous and can do terrible damage. But he does so with no effort to terrify. His personal experience, from having his own boots on the ground to cabinet-level policy issues and back down to rubbing elbows with street detectives, gives Sheehan the ability to craft practical solutions that fit policy considerations at the highest level.

He reminds us that al Qaeda has been creative and persistent, but also bumbling (overloaded the boat; forgot to bring the gun).

His overall message: We can beat these guys if we keep calm, think about our actions, take our hits and stay with it.

Michael Sheehan has had a diverse and serious career in the counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency field. He is a good professional and worthy of respect. However, this book is awful. It is anecdote and admonition, without any organized advice or analysis. It may have made a decent essay, if it had been rigorously prepared. Sheehan's experience, including his most recent in one of the best counter-terrorism outfits in the world -- the NYPD -- should have lent itself to a very good exposition of how understanding cells and applying intelligence dominance can succeed in disrupting terror networks. Other books have begun to give analysis on this, and if Sheehan had included that analysis and highlighted it against his career insights, it could have been a very good book, particularly highlighting a more intelligence-centric and law enforcement model that one will expect this Administration to take in counter-terrorism. This book utterly fails to do this. It's a back of the envelope effort, poorly edited, if at all, that resulted, as one can tell from this review, in a disappointed reader. I'd hate to think that Sheehan, who, I repeat, has had an honorable career (and has great musical tastes) was just trying to cash in.

The author obviously had an interesting career and he would like to share it will all of us. As an memoir it is a good read. But how we can "crush the cell"? It does not get there until the very end and with loads of sarcastic comments.

Having heard a brief interview of Michael A. Sheehan and a few of his more thoughtful insights on dealing with terrorism, I was anxious to pick up a copy of his book and see what more he had to say. If the balance of his book was at all similar to his few interview responses then indeed, here was a fresh voice amidst the drone of officialdom.

What a disappointment.

The author's 20 years in the Army as a Special Forces officer, counterterrorism adviser and National Security Council staff member indeed gave him a wide perspective from which to develop his own views and recommendations for dealing with terrorists. But that is what leaves one so wanting.

Of all the time Sheehan spent around real soldiers, the majority of his book is devoted to throwing rocks at other government agencies (primarily the DOD, CIA and FBI) for their inability to predict and counter real terrorism threats. How odd that these criticisms would come from a junior diplomat who served tours at the United Nations and State Department--two institutions of limited worth and even less accomplishment, Mr. Sheehan's service notwithstanding.

He serves up most of his criticism for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. How he came to develop his animus toward the FBI is probably a function of the time he spent at NYPD. The NYPD has been a notorious critic of the FBI and its easy to understand how that attitude can spread among the ranks--with or without justification.

The farther along I got in the book, the more obvious it became that the author had some serious coping issues with the FBI. Oddly enough--and to Sheehan's credit--he admits as much.

On page 193 he writes, "By now my prejudices are surely obvious to you: I have tremendous respect and admiration for the people I worked with at NYPD, but my experiences with FBI have left me with mixed emotions." He then goes on to compare how the NYPD and the FBI differ in how they handle their responsibilities--a silly exercise in the first place--and concludes, not surprisingly, that the NYPD covers areas that the FBI ignores. So what?

The NYPD is, despite its post-9/11 focus on terrorism, a city police department responsible only for law enforcement within New York City. It has roughly 35,000 sworn officers to deal with a land mass of just over 300 square miles and a population of roughly 8.2 million. It has a commissioner at its head and a mayor over him.

The FBI, by comparison, has approximately 12,000 special agents to deal with the entire United States and over 40 foreign locations. It has a director at its head and an attorney general over him. It also has 535 members of Congress who think that the FBI is their own security force to be steered and directed at their very whim. These members of Congress are responsible for adding needless jurisdiction onto the FBI further diverting it from more urgent work like terrorism and organized crime. You bet there is a difference in how the NYPD and the FBI approach their responsibilities.

What works for the NYPD within its 300 miles of real estate is fine. But by no means is it possible or even practical for other cities in the nation.

What has worked, albeit with some bumps along the way, has been the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Forces established first, not coincidentally, in New York City. These groups of local, state, and federal law enforcement officers and analysts are the keystone to effective interagency terrorism communications and investigations around the nation and they are working just fine.

Sheehan spends a great deal of his book discussing terrorism history and recounting all of the events of the last two decades. That is great background but in terms of providing new thinking, you have to wait for the final chapter of the book, appropriately titled, Crush the Cell.

Oddly enough, in that chapter the FBI is trashed yet again in a disparaging description of its InfraGard program. The FBI began this program in its Cleveland field office in 1996 and by 1998 it expanded to the entire nation. It is nothing more than a public-private effort coordinated by the FBI to make security and executive personnel in our nation's key asset corporations more aware of the threat against their business products and processes from hostile and non-hostile governments, individuals and terrorists.

Sheehan had this to say about InfraGard on page 233, "We were very skeptical of it, for its main event seemed to be a golf outing that appeared to be little more than a networking opportunity for FBI agents to make contacts with private-sector employers for whom they'd work when they retired."

It was such a bad idea, that NYPD started a copy-cat program called "NYPD Shield" so as not to be bested by the FBI. One has to wonder about Sheehan's analytical prowess having first made an erroneous assessment about InfraGard's value as an FBI program and then shifting to become a cheerleader for NYPD's version. It is said that imitation is the highest form of flattery.

Here is one final note about Sheehan's attention to detail. On pages 93-94 in the chapter titled, "Lone Wolves, Cults, and Radical Movements," Sheehan makes two major errors of fact. Discussing the incident at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, he writes, "On August 21, 1992, FBI agents surrounded the home of Randy and Vicki Weaver, suspected militia radicals...before they reached the house, the agents encountered the Weavers' fourteen-year-old son Samuel, who was purportedly hunting with his dog. They shot the dog, sparking a scuffle that left Samuel and a federal agent dead."

While Sheehan got the chain of events correct, it wasn't the FBI on the Weaver's mountain at that point. The initial shootout on Ruby Ridge was between U.S. Marshals and the Weavers--the FBI was no where near Ruby Ridge. The FBI was called in to fix things once they had been screwed up by US marshals and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

In another example of confusion, Sheehan describes the attempt by agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to arrest David Koresh by surprise on a minor gun violation even after Koresh had been tipped off by associates to the agents' presence in the area. Sheehan writes on page 94, "ATF (with FBI) pursued the raid anyway and ended up laying siege to the Branch Davidian compound for fifty-one eventful days."

The FBI had nothing at all to do with the blunders at Waco the day of the initial raid. The FBI was no where near Mt. Carmel on that fateful day. That was all ATF. So why he writes that the ATF pursued the raid with the FBI is absolutely incorrect and rather surprising for someone with his pedigree.

The FBI did come to the rescue of the ATF at Waco, absolutely, just as it did for the U.S. Marshals at Ruby Ridge, but in no case was the FBI a participant in the planning or execution or initial assaults on Ruby Ridge or Waco. Indeed, had the FBI been involved in those aspects, things might well have turned out quite differently and the dozens of people who perished as a result of these needless incidents might be alive today.

Putting Sheehan's obsession with the FBI aside for the moment, he does finally provide some interesting recommendations at the end of his book. While many of them are not new--how the creation of the Department of Homeland Security was a mistake; the uselessness of the Director of National Intelligence--a few are indeed bold in their concept.

Yet despite his obvious distaste for the FBI (not one FBI mention in his long list of acknowledgments) he does touch on the creation of a domestic MI-5 to replace the intelligence collection and analysis currently performed within the FBI. On this note, I am in total agreement.

The FBI is without equal anywhere in the world in terms of its criminal investigative abilities. The story is not so compelling, however, with regard to the FBI's intelligence collection and analysis. To be sure that capability has grown tremendously in a parallel to sky's-the-limit post-9/11 budgets for anything related to terrorism.

But the FBI still has 535 masters and as crime creeps up in certain parts of the country, their voices have been rising asking "Where's the FBI?" Those are many of the same voices who asked with all of the political astonishment that they could muster, "How could the FBI have failed to connect the dots which might have prevented 9/11, dots we all see so clearly now?" They were too busy doing things that Congress demanded that they do; things that local police could and should have been doing on their own.

The answer to both is to remind Congress of what exactly the FBI is and should continue to be. In my view, it should continue to be the best criminal investigative organization the world has ever known. But in order to do that, it needs to relinquish responsibility for intelligence collection and analysis in both its present counterintelligence and counterterrorism branches and give those to a new stand alone organization, the MI-5 option.

This, among other proposals, are cataloged in the final chapter under Offensive and Defensive Strategies. It is within those pages where Sheehan is at his best. From understanding the enemy to border security to unilateral offensive operations to take out al Qaeda targets wherever they are found, Sheehan gives voice to what many "operators" have known all along. It is just too bad that so much of his book was spent on old news of FBI shortcomings and meaningless news (to the overall terrorism topic) of NYPD business practices.

Still, after all is said and done and experts have weighed in, the question remains, will the United States summon the national, political and moral will to follow through where real national security threats are identified?

Overall not bad, but rambles a little. If you are a national security or CT professional I strongly recommend this book. For everyone else, all of the main points and recommendations are summed up in the last chapter.

As someone who targeted terrorists in Iraq for over a year I was hoping to learn some new TTPs (tactics, techniques, and procedures) that could be applied to crushing terrorist cells. Oddly, the book focused more on Mr Sheehan's recent experiences at the National Security and NYPD level that seemed to have little to do with actually pursuing terrorists.

The book also made some recommendations that were somewhat vague. For example, the author says we must prevent terrorists from entering the country (obviously). Advocates for a border fence (I think), but then states that they are ineffective unless defended on both sides such as the Korean DMZ. I was left a little confused. Exactly what type of border security do you advocate?

The author also has the background and experience to understand constitutional restrictions placed on government and law enforcement, but then states "we must shut down web sites (no matter who runs them) that make available information on bomb making and other forms of violence." A rather broad, ambiguous, and unconstitutional statement I must say.

Overall I agree with the premise of crushing terrorist cells as the best form of defense, but the book never quite lived up to the title.

Crush the Cell was three books in one -- an overview of terrorism and its history (okay), an autobiography of his career in counterterrorism (rather self inflating, to the point of being rather annoying), and a summary of his viewpoint of US terrorism approach and DHS (from a linear point of view, close to absent of additional opinions and statistics to support beyond his personal perspective). It is just me or did anyone else notice that Mr. Sheehan is current one of those "overpriced contractors" he mocks in his book?

This is an excellent book that puts in perspective much of what is talked about with the "War on Terror" and which provides an analysis of the effectiveness of the various government agencies involved in countering terrorists.

Importantly, Mr. Sheehan makes a careful distinction between insurgents and terrorists and suggests that insurgents such as Hamas are not now as big a threat to the United States as they are made out to be. His main point is that we should focus on gathering intelligence which will enable us to crush terrorist cells whose main objective is to take action which will harm persons and property in the United States.

I was surprised to learn about the extensive counter-terrorism activities of the New York Police Department where Mr. Sheehan played a major role.
His credentials are impressive beginning with graduation from West Point, becoming a Green Beret and working with the National Security Agency, the State Department, the UN and the NYPD.

He takes a critical look at steps taken since 911 which have been misguided such as throwing together disparate agencies into the Department of Homeland Security and creating a National Intelligence Agency.

I have been critical of the Government's efforts to monitor electronic transmissions but am more sympathetic to these efforts as a result of reading this book.

Without explicitly criticizing President Bush, Sheehan makes it clear that it is not helpful for politicians to use the threat of terrorism to make us more fearful than is necessary.

Contained some facts I did not know about terrorism and counterterrorism. Straight-forward, readable prose. Marred by incessant self-praise, self-aggrandizement, and name dropping by the author. Little in the way of how to crush the cell.

What makes Michael Sheehan's new book, "Crush the Cell," different from the many other literary works addressing the threat of terrorism confronting our country and the world? It certainly is a terrific read that provides a view from the trenches that only someone with Mr. Sheehan's front-line experience in the war against terrorism could provide. And, there is surely no one else out there who has the perspective Sheehan brings to this topic. Mr. Sheehan has served his country as a Special Forces officer in the military and confronted the threat of radical terrorist in high-level Federal Government and law enforcement positions. Sheehan was one of the most senior counterterrorism officials in the Clinton Administration and served as the top terrorism cop in what has been the main domestic battleground in this conflict, New York City. His experience and perspective gained from these and many other assignments to various "hot-spots" (e.g., Haiti, Somalia, and perhaps, most stressful, the U.N.), provide ample reasons to read this book. But the main reason you won't be able to put it down is the author's imminently readable style in telling his compelling story, or rather, series of compelling stories.

These numerous vignettes, which come from Sheehan's unique experiences as a Green Beret, the State Department's Coordinator for Counterterrorism, and the NYC Deputy Police Commissioner for Counterterrorism (and other fascinating, often dangerous postings), puts the reader in the trenches with him. Each real life tale of his part in trying to prevent 9/11 before it happened and in trying to prevent it from recurring, is told in a down-to-earth manner. So much so that you will feel like Mr. Sheehan was explaining all this to you over a cup of coffee in your kitchen. His unpretentious tone compliments Sheehan's ability to cogently and clearly untangle the many nuances of a highly complicated matter.

In just a few pages, Mr. Sheehan takes the reader through the history of the Islamic religion to explain the roots of the current fanatical terrorist movements. He sorts out the different terrorist groups, their agendas, their state sponsors, and their religious pedigrees. Sheehan debunks many of the myths that both oversimplify their motives (most suicide bombers are seeking more than a night in paradise with 72 virgins) and magnify their abilities (returning a rental truck after a pre-9/11 attempt to blow up the World Trade Towers shows the ineptitude of many of their foot-soldiers). What emerges is a clear picture of a ruthless and relentless, but often incompetent, foe that can be stopped if the right tools and methods are put into place.

Others have pointed fingers and, on occasion, appeared to use their insider accounts to satisfy personal agendas or increase book sales by airing salacious charges against their former bosses and peers. Instead, Mr. Sheehan takes the high road. Mostly, he only looks back critically to help inform his readers about events that provide the basis for his way forward. Some may say that he is too forgiving, but his book is not without criticism. The main targets for his warranted anger are the timid bureaucrats whose inability to take decisive action frustrated efforts that might have prevented 9/11. Unfortunately, we will never be able to prevent such individuals from reaching senior positions in our government and even our military leadership. Mr. Sheehan realizes this, so he provides a solution that should help, and one that should help overcome another ill we currently suffer in this conflict.

As Sheehan makes clear, the U.S. is misspending billions of dollars on terrorist prevention methods that won't work, are inefficient, or are just pork. Equally important, Mr. Sheehan argues, we are not dedicating enough resources for what is really needed to prevent future attacks: better intelligence that is better used. With improved intelligence and smarter analysis of the intelligence we are able to gather, Sheehan points out, the U.S. can be better positioned to penetrate terrorist cells, learn about their plans, and thereby disrupt terrorist operations before they result in new attacks. Mr. Sheehan destroys some myths in this area as well, making the case that the U.S. can succeed in recruiting individuals who have the language abilities and backgrounds that would allow them to join terrorist organizations, or at least to get close enough to them to provide much better information about their activities. In addition, Sheehan argues that improving other elements of our intelligence gathering tools, fixing some of the continuing bureaucratic stove-pipes in the intelligence communities, and improving intelligence sharing with state law-enforcement agencies, would vastly increase the ability of the U.S. to prevent future terrorist attacks.

There would be an added benefit from improving our intelligence gathering and the way we analyze and use that intelligence. Sheehan observes that substantial savings would be realized from eliminating, or at least reducing, post-9/11 activities that aren't doing much to make us any safer. Mr. Sheehan ably demonstrates how the N.Y.P.D. was able to minimize costs, even as it ramped up its counterterrorism activities, by improving its intelligence operations and analysis. Its improved ability to gather intelligence and to understand the threat allowed the N.Y.P.D. to better able to allocate its resources and more efficiently expend funds on truly useful counterterrorism measures.

In explaining how this came to be, Mr. Sheehan greatly praises the efforts New York's Police Commissioner, Raymond Kelly, and the former CIA intelligence officer Kelly hired to build up the N.Y.P.D. intelligence operation, David Cohen (clearly, however, Sheehan is also to be credited). While, as noted, Sheehan doesn't point fingers, his praise for Cohen and Kelly stands in stark contrast to the lack of praise for others in the Defense and State Departments and the White House whom he tried to warn about Osama Bin Laden. It is difficult to argue with Sheehan's case for improving the U.S.' ability to gather and analyze intelligence, however, one is left to wonder how we can improve the ability of our leaders. After all, Mr. Sheehan and others, such as Richard Clarke, were able to discern from the intelligence then available that Bin Laden and al Qaeda posed a grave threat to the United States. They clearly tried to warn senior officials in both the Clinton and Bush White Houses about the danger that lay just around the corner, to virtually no avail (personally, I fault the former more than the latter, as the 9/11 planning and execution was too far along for the Bush Administration to prevent it, and the Bushies were just getting on their feet when Clark and others tried to focus their attention on the Bin Laden/al Qaeda threat).

So, while it is unstated in his book, Mr. Sheehan makes a solid argument for one other thing the U.S. needs to prevent future terrorist attacks. I.e., strong, creative and decisive leaders who are willing to act on the improved intelligence that Mr. Sheehan argues for. We can only hope that potential senior counterterrorism officials in the next administration read his book, as they will clearly see a leader of that caliber in Mr. Sheehan.

Disclaimer: I too have known the author for many years.

Admittedly, Sheehan does a fairly good job of providing a historical overview of terrorism throughout the world. He also provides some insights from his view of the actions taken or not taken during and after the events of 9/11. However, Sheehan comes across as very narcissistic. He speaks extensively about where he worked over his career and how that makes him an expert. It is important to note that much of his view is from his experience in New York City. Albeit, experience in a city that has a central role during and after the attacks of 9/11, it is very limited and myopic. Lastly, he makes several states where he bashing DHS and how the agency was developed and ineffective. What is comical and discrediting to Sheehan is that he criticizes the very person he currently is, "an over paid contractor". It is also important to note that all the "experts" and important people who provide outstanding reviews on the dust cover to this book are all person friends and most he worked for or with in his career. Not very objective!