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Saturday's
Lagniappe
Thwarting
the Airline Plot: Inside the Investigation
AP
Armed police officers with an automatic weapons
stands outside of the British Airways terminal at JFK International
Airport in New York, Friday, Aug. 11, 2006.
By
Brian Bennet and Douglas Walleron of Time Magazine
Wednesday night was a long and troubling one for Homeland Security
Secretary Michael Chertoff. A bubbling plot by British citizens
to blow up airplanes had come to a boil in the past three days,
and as British authorities arrested dozens of suspects around
London, it was Chertoff's job to coordinate the U.S. defenses.
Scary intelligence reports pop up all the time, but this particular
terror operation got close enough to being carried out that
it rattled even the normally sedate Chertoff. "Very seldom
do things get to me," he told Rep. Peter King, the Republican
chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in a phone
call late Wednesday night. "This one has really gotten
to me."
Chertoff
had good reason to be worried. Senior U.S officials have confirmed
to TIME details of the plot that led the secretary to ratchet
up the color-coded security alert for British-U.S. flights to
an unprecedented red for "Severe." A total of 24 individuals
were arrested in Britain overnight and, says one senior U.S.
official who was briefed on the plot, five still remain at large.
Their plan was to smuggle the peroxide-based liquid explosive
TATP and detonators onto nine different planes from four carriers
— British Airways, Continental, United and American —
that fly direct routes between the U.K and the U.S. and blow
them up mid-air. Intelligence officials estimate that about
2,700 people would have perished, according to the official.
Britain's
MI-5 intelligence service and Scotland Yard had been tracking
the plot for several months, but only in the past two weeks
had the plotters' planning begun to crystallize, senior U.S.
officials tell TIME. In the two or three days before the arrests,
the cell was going operational, and authorities were pressed
into action. MI5 and Scotland Yard agents tracked the plotters
from the ground, while a knowledgeable American official says
U.S. intelligence provided London authorities with intercepts
of the group's communications. Most of the suspects are second
or third generation British citizens of Pakistani descent whose
families hailed from war-torn Kashmir. U.S. officials believe
the 29 members were divided into multiple cells and planned
to break into small groups to board the nine planes.
During
the past few months the plotters' attack plans had changed,
> said Deputy Secretary for Homeland Security Michael Jackson.
"There were different data sets about their interests over
time that evolved," he said. It was only in recent days,
said Jackson, that the plans began to focus on British-U.S.
flights. The plot was "very near execution" but not
imminent, Jackson said. "We didn't pull people off of airplanes."
So
as not to derail the British round-up, Chertoff had to wait
until the early hours of Thursday morning after all the London
arrests were made before notifying U.S. airports of the threat,
say senior DHS officals. When it became clear the arrests would
be wrapped up around 1 a.m Washington time, Chertoff got on
a conference call with his Homeland Security Advisory Committee
to approve changing the threat level. Then calls when out to
the airlines, airline security companies and labor unions affected
by the changes, as well as to members of Congress.
Though
the plot has all the hallmarks of an al Qaeda operation, U.S.
officials cautioned that there isn't yet evidence of a direct
link between the plotters and the organization's top leaders.
"We're not convinced this particular operation is connected
to the al Qaeda chain of command," Charles Allen, Chief
of Intelligence for the Department of Homeland Security, told
reporters on Thursday afternoon. As for whether the attack was
being timed for the fifth anniversary of Sept. 11, Allen said
he thought the attack would simply be launched when it was ready.
"I am a long standing believer that terrorist plotters
or planners execute when they have all of the plot together,"
said Allen. "We have no evidence this was timed to any
particular holiday or special event."
The
plot also appears to be a return to older terrorist tactics
of trying to blow up an airplane in mid air, rather than turn
the jet into a missile as the Sept. 11 attackers did. Allen
stressed that the plans seemed designed to kill passengers,
not crash into a city on the ground. "We have no evidence
there was targeting of cities," said Allen, "This
was an effort to destroy multiple aircraft in flight —
not against any territory of the United States."
With
five members of the cell believed to be at large, the threat
still looms and intelligence officials are still working to
unravel the full extent of the plot. "I don't believe we
know all the dimensions of this plot. Time has to pass to determine
that a network was disrupted," said Allen. Worries another
U.S. official: "Plan A has been stopped, but the concern:
Is there a Plan B?"
The
possibility that liquid explosives could be smuggled onto a
plane is not a surprise to counterterrorism experts, and the
tightening of U.S. airport security could only be temporary
as security officials learn more about the extent of the plot
and how to defend against such an attack. The current measures
— stripping passengers of anything liquid in their carry-on
luggage — were in reaction to these particular arrests,
and not to the realization of a new, unforeseen threat. "We're
primarily concerned about this particular plot," said Allen,
implying that the new security measures are not permanent.
FBI
and Department of Homeland Security officials quickly alerted
law enforcement agencies around the country to the peroxide-based
liquid explosives the London plotters planned to bring aboard
the American-bound planes. An alert the FBI and DHS sent out
Thursday to state and local law enforcement agencies —
which is classified "For Official Use Only" and was
obtained by TIME — warns them that the peroxide-based
explosives could also be employed in future attacks here.
The
Joint Homeland Special Assessment, which the FBI and DHS's Office
of Intelligence Analysis drafted and sent out, is titled "Possible
Terrorist Use of Liquid Explosive Materials in Future Attacks."
The document states: "The FBI and DHS have no information
of plotting within the United States, but such a possibility
cannot be discounted." The FBI-DHS report notes that Osama
bin Laden's top deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri insisted in a July
27 videotape that Al Qaeda was still intent on conducting another
"spectacular" attack in the United States. Zawahiri,
the report notes, used photos of the World Trade Center burning
on Sept. 11 and 9/11 leader Muhammad Atta "in the background
of this video."
The
FBI-DHS report next warns law enforcement agencies about the
two peroxide-based liquid explosive that could be used in a
future attack against the U.S.--triacetone triperoxide (TATP)
or hexamethylene triperoxide diamine (HMTD). The report describes
how a terrorist would assemble bombs with these chemicals. Peroxide-based
liquid explosives "are sensitive to heat, shock, and friction,
can be initiated simply with fire or electrical charge, and
can also be used to produce improvised detonators," the
report states. "For example, TATP or HMTD may be placed
in a tube or syringe body in contact with a bare bulb filament,
such as that obtained from inside a Christmas tree light bulb,
to produce an explosion." The report doesn't mention anything
about a terrorist assembling such a bomb on a plane, but it
does warn that manufacturing such a device can be dangerous
for the bombmaker. "Because of the instability of these
substances," the report notes, "spontaneous detonation
can occur during the production process."
Over
the past ten years peroxide-based explosives have popped up
in a number of terror operations, according to FBI-DHS report.
"Terrorist have used peroxide-based explosive both as a
main charge (weighing in excess of 20 pounds) and improvised
detonators," the joint assessment states. "TATP was
popularized as a main charge explosive in suicide bombs used
by Palestinian terrorist groups."
Ramzi
Yousef, who was convicted in 1996 for plotting to simultaneously
bomb up to a dozen U.S. commercial airliners flying in the Far
East, had manufactured TATP detonators. Arrested Dec. 14, 1999,
for planning to attack Los Angeles International Airport in
the millennium bombing plot, Ahmed Ressam had HMTD and RDX (cyclotrimethylene
trinitrame) in a vial in the trunk of his car. He also had over
100 pounds of urea sulfate white powder and eight ounces of
nitroglycerine mixture.
More
recently, British shoe bomber Richard Reid tried to detonate
his device with TATP as the initiator while aboard a Dec. 22,
2001, American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami. A mixture
of TATP and ammonium nitrate was used in suicide bombs in Casablanca,
Moroco on May 16, 2003. And the FBI-DHS report notes that four
of the suicide bombers in the London subway attack July 7, 2005
"used peroxide-based explosive devices (IEDs), concealed
inside rucksacks." With such a rich history, liquid explosives
are sure to challenge America's counter-terror defenses for
many years to come.
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