On a cloudless September afternoon, I stopped by 1 Police Plaza in Lower Manhattan to see Rebecca Ulam Weiner, an enigmatic figure who occupies one of the most consequential and improbable perches in America’s national security hierarchy. As the NYPD’s deputy commissioner of intelligence and counterterrorism, her chief mission is to “counter terrorism and mitigate targeted violence, fight crime, and protect people, places, and events in New York City.” And that’s not the half of it.

As part of her sprawling portfolio, the 47-year-old mother of two relies on a mind-boggling suite of assets that Americans might otherwise assume are controlled by the CIA, FBI, DHS, Secret Service, or other agencies. Weiner has access to a legion of intelligence analysts, counterassault and dignitary-protection teams, a flotilla of boats, radiation-sniffing and surveillance aircraft, the nation’s biggest bomb squad, a counter-drone unit, a remote contingent of NYPD detectives stationed in 13 cities overseas, and a network of multilingual undercover operatives who subvert malicious actors across the US and around the world.

Dubbed Intel or ICB for short, the Intelligence & Counterterrorism Bureau was forged from the fires of 9/11. For more than a decade, its members drew scorn from and fought turf wars with America’s spooks and special agents. But after helping foil more than 60 terrorist plots, Weiner’s squad has made a quantum leap from deeply controversial to positively indispensable. NYPD Intel disrupts terror attacks, runs deep undercover operations, and disseminates threat assessments and flash reports to its sister agencies as well as foreign intelligence services—offering expertise and muscle for cases as varied as mystery drones flying over the tristate area and December’s fatal shooting of UnitedHealthcare’s CEO in midtown Manhattan.

In August I approached Weiner’s team with the idea of chronicling its operations. Just on the horizon loomed the annual 9/11 commemoration, the first anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel and the violence and upheaval it wrought, and a highly contentious US election. The NYPD agreed, citing the volume of threats facing New York and the country—and the department’s unique role in combating them.

Meanwhile, Weiner and her team were on the lookout for Iranian agents prowling the city, actively planning to assassinate former US officials.

When I arrived at her 11th-floor office, Weiner was sporting a baby blue pin on her lapel, a vestige of the September 11 ceremony at the World Trade Center memorial she had attended—and helped secure—earlier in the day. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the men pining for their jobs, Donald Trump and JD Vance, were there. Responsibility for their safety that morning fell in part to Weiner. Though fierce political foes, the four principals were united by the occasion’s solemnity. They were also defiant in their decision to stand together on the proverbial X: what security specialists refer to as a position of maximum vulnerability. It wasn’t political theater. Weeks earlier, an assassin had shot at Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania—killing a spectator—and four days later, a second gunman would be caught fleeing Trump’s golf club in West Palm Beach.

As we sat in her inner sanctum—surrounded by diplomas (Harvard College, Harvard Law), assorted law enforcement tchotchkes, and her young kids’ artwork—events in Ukraine and the Middle East conspired to make it feel as though the world were spinning off its axis. At the same moment, three floors above, her boss, police commissioner Edward Caban, was about to resign under pressure from his boss, Mayor Eric Adams, who would soon be indicted. (Shortly thereafter, Caban’s replacement, Tom Donlon, would fall under federal investigation as well.)

The machinations inside the cloistered halls of 1PP and Gracie Mansion, however, paled in comparison to what was happening on the streets. An ISIS-inspired plot to murder Jews in Brooklyn had just been stymied. That was on the heels of arrests in New York, LA, and Philly of a group of Tajik men with alleged ISIS ties who had come across the Mexican border. Meanwhile, Weiner and her team were on the lookout for Iranian agents prowling the city and actively planning to assassinate dissidents and former US officials—Trump among them—in a series of overlapping plots, revealed here in minute detail for the first time. All of this was happening against the backdrop of an election and a poisonous political atmosphere that had drawn an alphabet soup of wing nuts, including what those in counterterror circles refer to as racially/ethnically motivated violent extremists (REMVE), homegrown violent extremists (HVE), and anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists (AGAAVE).

When I asked a top US diplomat for his read on Weiner, he called her “the real deal,” an assessment based in no small measure on where he’s run into her at national security conferences. “When I hit the hotel gym at 5:30 in the morning,” he said, “she’s always there on the treadmill.”

“The variety of threats that we have right now,” Weiner observed, “are unprecedented in the 20 years I’ve been in this work.” Whether they know it or not, New Yorkers—and Americans across the land—are now standing on the X.

In no small measure, safeguarding America’s financial and cultural capital—and its 8 million residents—rests on the shoulders of a five-foot-five-inch national security prodigy with a backstory that is the stuff of cinema. “If you didn’t have a Rebecca Weiner, you would have had to make her up,” her predecessor, John Miller, told me. “How her life has come full circle.”

The H-Bomb and Its Fallout

Weiner grew up in a family steeped in secrets and service. In 1939, her grandfather, Stanislaw Ulam, enticed by a teaching offer from Harvard, fled Poland ahead of the Nazi invasion. Soon enough he was contacted by the renowned mathematician John von Neumann, who suggested that Ulam relocate with his wife to New Mexico “for war work” but did not (and could not) explain anything more. “Knowing nothing about the place, my grandfather checked out a library book on the American Southwest,” Weiner recounted as we raced along the Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive in a blacked-out Suburban. “Based on who had checked out the book before him, he figured out that the US was working on a fission device.”

Her grandparents moved to Los Alamos in the early days of the top-secret Manhattan Project. So early, in fact, that Weiner’s mother, Claire, was among the first babies born on the Hill, as Los Alamos was euphemistically known. There, Ulam collaborated closely with Edward Teller on the hydrogen bomb, which cycled through various nicknames, including the Super, Ivy Mike, and the Teller-Ulam Design.

Ulam’s contributions to America’s national defense were extraordinary. Not only did he codevelop a weapon so destructive that scientists and policymakers believed its mere existence would help ensure the peace amid a very cold Cold War, but he was also the brains behind Orion, an Elon Musk–sounding endeavor to harness nuclear-pulse propulsion to slingshot rocket ships into deep space. Weiner remembered how her grandfather’s achievements at work did not always sit well at home. She said her grandmother, a French émigré whom she called Mémé, grew disenchanted with America’s ongoing nuclear enterprise in the wake of the devastating A-bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In short, it seems that what her grandfather considered elegant solutions to thorny math and physics problems, his wife viewed as unacceptable, or at least troubling, moral choices.

While a Harvard undergrad, Weiner studied the impact that women had on the Manhattan Project and, last year, wrote about her family’s unique dynamic and dilemmas: “Mémé vividly recount[ed] the moment she came across my grandfather sitting in the kitchen one day, staring blindly into their garden. ‘I found a way to make it work,’ he said. ‘It’s a totally different scheme, and it will change the course of history.’ ” Pulling no punches, Weiner noted, “When the U.S. tested Ivy Mike, the first hydrogen bomb built using the new design, it vaporized an entire South Pacific island.” In our conversations it was evident that the New Mexico native has internalized the lessons of her lineage. She needs no reminder that with great power comes great responsibility.

“Hopefully I will have more success keeping the bombs out of Manhattan than the Manhattan Project had making a bomb to ‘keep peace forevermore.’ ”

In a way, she is so laser focused, she seems unfazed by the internecine battles of New York City—or NYPD—politics. (In November she learned she would be reporting to her third police commissioner in two months: her close friend Jessica Tisch, heir to the Loews fortune, who has three degrees from Harvard and a background in counterterrorism.) Given the relentless pace and tremendous stakes of Weiner’s job, I was also struck by her breezy demeanor and wicked sense of humor. She burst out laughing when I asked her to comment on Miller’s observation about her: “Somewhere there’s a strange corollary between building the bomb that was meant to bring peace in the Manhattan Project to being in charge of the project that keeps bombs out of a place called Manhattan.” Ribbing her friend and former boss, she replied, “That’s the insight you have as you’re eating Cool Ranch Doritos after smoking way too much pot.”