CIA Investigates Its Partnership With NYPD

WASHINGTON — The CIA says it has launched an internal investigation into whether the agency broke the law in its close cooperation with New York City's police department.

The CIA's new director, David Petraeus, said the agency's inspector general began investigating at the request of acting director Michael Morell, before Petraeus took office just over a week ago. The agency's unprecedented cooperation with the NYPD was the subject of an eight-month investigation by The Associated Press.

At a congressional hearing Tuesday, Petraeus said there is a CIA adviser at the police department and the CIA wants "to make sure we are doing the right thing."

The director of national intelligence, James Clapper, said he thought Americans' privacy had not been violated by the close relationship. The AP found that the NYPD had dispatched undercover officers into ethnic communities to monitor daily life and scrutinized more than 250 mosques and Muslim student groups in the years after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.