Shadow warrior

He has been one of the keys to keeping the city safe from terror, yet David Cohen is a man few New Yorkers have ever heard of. He likes it that way. After a career that took him to the top of the Central Intelligence Agency, Cohen joined the NYPD four months after 9/11. Commissioner Ray Kelly assigned him the mission of building an international counter-terrorism bureau with the goal of preventing further attacks.

Those were terrifying days. American lived in fear that radical Islamists would strike again.

After failing to put the pieces together that might have averted mass murder on U.S. soil, the federal government scrambled to mount defenses. And Kelly and Cohen resolved that, as much as possible, New York must be the master of its own fate.

Cohen succeeded brilliantly and, with the change in administrations, he is moving on from the NYPD after 12 years here. He will leave behind an intelligence division that is second to none in merging grass-roots information with da- ta from abroad.

His troops stayed ahead of the curve as the threat morphed from enemies based abroad to home-grown plotters and then to a mixture of the two. In the latest trend, Al Qaeda types are urging locally-based jihadists to mount attacks like the mall assault in Kenya.

Cohen’s tenure saw 20 New York-centric plots, including 13 busted up by the work of the intelligence division. Think plans to topple the Brooklyn Bridge, bomb the Herald Square subway station and use explosives to flood the Hudson River tunnels.

Despite all that, the unit’s primary time in the limelight has been as the victim of patently groundless charges that it engaged in “spying” on Muslims. The ill-informed have had their say while Cohen stayed in the shadows to which he is accustomed.

Now, though, he deserves hearty applause for an accomplishment few would have predicted in the early dark days: Not a single New Yorker’s life was lost to terror on Cohen’s watch. Remarkable.