Award-winning Newsweek reporter Christopher Dickey offers an interesting look at the Arab world as seen through the eyes of some the western expatriates--lost colonels and aging explorers, oilmen, sea captains, even retired spies--lingering in the Middle East.

The NYPD is the best and most ambitious antiterror operation in the world. Its seat-of-the-pants intelligence is the gold standard for all others.

Christopher Dickey, who has reported on international terrorism for more than twenty-five years, takes readers into the secret command center of the New York City Police Department's counterterrorism division, then onto the streets with cops ready for the toughest urban combat the twenty-first century can throw at them. But behind the tactical shows of force staged by the police, there lies a much more ambitious and controversial strategy: to go anywhere and use almost any means to keep the city from becoming, once again, Ground Zero. This is the story of the coming war in America's cities and New York's shadow war, waged around the globe to stop it before it begins.

Drawing on unparalleled access to Police Commissioner Ray Kelly and other top officials, Dickey explores the most ambitious intelligence operation ever organized by a metropolitan police department. Headed by David Cohen, who ran the CIA's operations inside the United States in the 1980s and its global spying in the 1990s, the NYPD's counterterrorism division had uptotheminute details of new attacks set in motion to target Manhattan in 2002 and 2003.

New York's finest are now seen by other police chiefs in the United States as the gold standard for counterterrorism operations and a model for even the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Yet as New Yorkers have come to feel safer, they've also grown worried about the NYPD's methods: sending its undercover agents to spy on Americans in other cities, rounding up hundreds of protesters preemptively before the 2004 Republican convention, and using confidential informants who may be more adept at plotting terror than the people they finger.

"Securing the City" is a superb investigative reporter's stunning look inside the real world of cops who are ready to take on the world and at the ambiguous price we pay for the safety they provide.

Kurt Kurtovic wanted nothing more than to be left in peace, to make a life with his wife and child in Westfield, Kansas. Then September 11 happened and Kurt knew they'd never be safe again unless he did what only he could do, take terror to the terrorists. He knew their world, knew how they worked, knew their weak points. He knew, because he'd been one of them.
But as Kurt wages his bloody campaign, hunting down his former Al-Qaeda comrades in Britain, Spain, and Africa, he becomes the hunted. And so do his wife and child back home. The most dangerous agents of terror, he discovers, are in the United States: those who don't want the wars to end; those who believe "we have waited thousands of years for Judgment Day, never knowing when it would come. But now we can put it on the calendar. We can fix a date." As a man-made apocalypse approaches, Kurt realizes that some of America's most ruthless enemies walk its corridors of power every day.
In the tradition of Graham Greene and John le Carre, this hard-driving narrative of vengeance and redemption by one of America's most prescient writers on espionage and terror is a riveting thriller about the horrors of the recent past -- and the dangers of the near future.

He is the perfect terrorist. He's an all-American boy. Kurt Kurtovic is someone you might know -- and ought to fear. Kurt was a U.S. Army Ranger. Born and raised in Kansas, he was trained to kill for -- what? Once he might have said "for God and country." Kurt searches in the former Yugoslavia, the land of his parents, for a place, for faith, for a cause. In the midst of the horrors in Bosnia, Kurt is recruited to fight by a holy warrior, a terrorist Iago, who plays on all of Kurt's doubts and fears: America is the evil behind the horror, but Kurt can change it. He can take the war home. He can penetrate to the heart of the U.S. elite. He can teach his country a lesson so horrible it will never forget. In this riveting story of war, love, and deception, Christopher Dickey takes us to the white-hot core of the terrorist mind. "Innocent Blood" is as real as today's headlines -- and tomorrow's.