US SECURITY

Aspects familiar to some

By John Donnelly, Globe Staff, 9/12/2001

With the US increasing security across the country, FBI agents as well as law enforcement was visible, especially around New York City and Washington D.C. (AP PHOTO)

ASHINGTON - The well-coordinated terror attacks yesterday that breached security at three airports and exposed the vulnerability of the airspace in New York and Washington was not a scenario completely foreign to US counterterrorism experts.

US intelligence, for instance, knew well of a failed plot in early 1995 by Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, a Sunni Muslim militant, to bomb 11 US aircraft in Asia in retaliation for US support of Israel. Yousef, the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, also told FBI agents after his capture in 1995 that he wished he could have destroyed one of the towers.

And Senator John F. Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, and other officials said yesterday that there was a general warning earlier this summer that Osama bin Laden, the Saudi financier of terror operations, was planning an attack against Americans. ''The intelligence community informed me several months ago that they knew Osama bin Laden was working and they even had thwarted some efforts,'' Kerry said. ''People who say they had no warning of this are not telling you the truth.''

With that as a backdrop, members of Congress and analysts yesterday raised questions about why the surprise attacks were a surprise, and how, after years of security improvements at US airports, could attackers hijack four airplanes simultaneously. Questions focused on the state of airport security for domestic flights and the readiness of the US military to defend Washington's major institutions from aircraft bearing down on the White House, the Capitol, or the Pentagon.

There was a span of approximately 37 minutes between the second aircraft hitting the World Trade Center and the aircraft hitting the Pentagon yesterday. But two Pentagon spokesmen could not say whether US military jets or antiaircraft batteries were in position to shoot down the airliner.

Jessica Stern, a counterterrorism expert who teaches the subject at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, said the scenario of a civilian airliner closing in on the centers of power in Washington raised a number of troubling questions. ''We need to know more about'' the information possessed by the Pentagon in the minutes before the collision, she said. ''They could be thinking, `If it's a civilian airliner, it could be a plane that flew off course.' At what point do you make the decision this is a civilian not flying off course and this is a suicide attack?''

Others were more critical. Robert Fitzpatrick, a former FBI official, called the attacks ''the greatest counterterrorism screw-up in US history.''

''The NSA, the CIA, the FBI all are tasked with getting this kind of information, billions and billions of dollars are spent on this,'' said Fitzpatrick, who runs a private security firm. ''And if we can't get it, there's something very, very wrong. This is a modern-day Pearl Harbor. Security heads are going to roll over this.''

Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counterterrorism in the CIA, said ''The real question is how could this have happened? Clearly there was a major failure in the gathering of intelligence ... The efforts were focused abroad and obviously missed a massive terrorist attack planned for American soil.''

Cannistraro also said that there may have been ''a deception operation'' involved in which key figures around bin Laden, who were aware their conversations were being intercepted, led investigators to believe they were planning attacks on American targets in the Persian Gulf and other foreign locations, including Tokyo and South Korea. He said there had been a string of high-level warnings to Americans abroad put out by the US State Department. ''It's pretty clear they were deceived, and must have been relying too heavily on intercepts that were intended to point them in the wrong direction,'' he said.

Warren B. Rudman, the former New Hampshire senator and co-chair of the US Commission on National Security for the 21st Century, cautioned against blaming US intelligence. He said a better response would be to put more funding toward intelligence gathering. ''There are plenty of threat assessments, ones where they use explosives, or trucks, or boats with explosives or nuclear weapons, but that really is irrelevant,'' Rudman said. ''But the trick is to penetrate some of these organizations, and that is very hard to do.''

Rudman's commission, which undertook one of the most exhaustive studies of US security needs in recent history, found that although US intelligence has had many successes in the past year, domestic security needed to be significantly tightened. Its opening paragraphs underlined the weaknesses in US security: ''America's present global predominance does not render it immune from these dangers. To the contrary, US preeminence makes the American homeland more appealing as a target, while America's openness and freedoms make it more vulnerable,'' the panel wrote.

Despite that threat, the panel said, ''the US government has not adopted homeland security as a primary national security mission. Its structures and strategies are fragmented and inadequate.''

Said Rudman yesterday, ''It will take more vigiliance, more preparedness on the ground. You can't blame anyone for these things. When you have people willing to commit suicide, they are very hard to stop. This is exactly what the people of Israel have been facing.''

Critics have questioned spending on preparedness for bioterrorism, which has received double-digit budget increases under the Clinton and Bush administrations. A report last year argued that much of that money should have gone instead for preparedness against more conventional attacks. It suggested, for instance, that truck bombings that devastated the World Trade Center in 1993 were far more likely than a chemical strike.

Globe reporters Ralph Ranalli in Boston, and Anthony Shadid and Glen Johnson in Washington, and Charles Sennott in London contributed to this report. John Donnelly can be reached by e-mail at donnelly@globe.com.

This story ran on page A9 of the Boston Globe on 9/12/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.