The Terrorist Threat
The U.S. hasn't been hit again, but some experts say the nation's defenses can't be made foolproof

by Mike Francis
Reprinted with permission of The Oregonian

June 3, 2007

WASHINGTON — It's been almost six years since the Twin Towers crumbled in New York. Since then, the United States has realigned almost two dozen federal agencies to create a Department of Homeland Security, spent billions of dollars, added a layer to the federal intelligence bureaucracy, instituted rules for screening air passengers and launched military operations in two countries.

It's been a massive official response to one awful morning. Since then, no terrorists have attacked America, although England and Spain suffered deadly attacks on transit centers. Why there and not here?

"I'm a little surprised that there hasn't another terrorist attack," says Norman Rabkin, the Government Accountability Office's managing director for Homeland Security and Justice issues. "Maybe it's because the systems are working.

"Or maybe we're just lucky."

Many experts such as Rabkin who spoke to journalists in Washington last month for a homeland security program conducted by International Reporting Project at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies, say virtually the same thing: It's most likely a question of when, not if, terrorists will strike on U.S. soil again. They say no intelligence or law-enforcement effort can stop every potential attack.

"I'm the first guy to say we're not going to protect everybody against everything," says Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff. But Chertoff says his department is becoming a more effective counterterrorism agency, though not "to the point of perfection."

Government officials immersed in the counter-terrorism effort say the culture changed: 9/11 taught them that the threat against America is real and information about potential threats must be shared, not hoarded. Yet it's a daunting challenge, they acknowledge, to feed the appropriate information to the appropriate person in time for it to be useful. Some say, in fact, that it's more complicated than ever.

"On counter-terrorism, my sense is that we have not made things better," says Paul Pillar, a visiting professor at Georgetown University and the former national intelligence officer for the Middle East and South Asia at the Central Intelligence Agency. "In some cases, we've made them worse."

Pillar argues, for example, that the new National Counterterrorism Center in northern Virginia duplicates similar analytical centers at the CIA, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and elsewhere. It's an additional stovepipe for information. And, he notes, the new office of the director of national intelligence required a staff, which adds an inevitable layer of bureaucracy.

Plenty of people differ with Pillar. They say the institutions formed after the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 make it easier for agencies from the FBI to the Coast Guard to do their jobs.

The fact is, Homeland Security has become a multibillion-dollar industry with many thousands of players, from the Lockheed Martin contractors who staff the reception desk at the National Counter Terrorism Center to Vice-Admiral Mike McConnell, the national intelligence director. Yet nobody in the business believes the country is safe from another attack.

"We have improved the odds," says John McLaughlin, a senior fellow at Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies and acting director of the CIA in 2004, "but the odds still favor the terrorists."

A multitude of threats

The range of ways a potential terrorist could cause havoc in America is dauntingly broad. Al-Qaida demonstrated an unprecedented ability to stage a spectacular attack, what Daniel Prieto, a senior fellow at the Homeland Security Center of the Reform Institute, calls "the terrorist trifecta." The 9/11 attacks killed thousands of people, destroyed a highly symbolic target and caused dramatic economic damage.

Yet small-time plotters, from the wannabes who hoped to shoot up Fort Dix in New Jersey to the Iranian-born "Tar Heel jihadist" who drove his car into a crowd of students at the University of North Carolina, also can violate our sense of security. Counterterrorism officials frequently cite the homeless sniper tandem that terrorized Washington, D.C., in 2002. The shootings paralyzed the region, they remember. How much worse would it be, they wonder, if a half-dozen sniper teams struck different cities on the same day?

"I worry the most about the low-tech, low-grade stuff," says Georgetown's Pillar, citing those plots. Why hasn't something bigger happened since? "A good question," he says.

For every plotter with a murderous thought, there is a potential target, from the Sears Tower in Chicago to a packed football stadium. So agencies such as the FBI sift through thousands of leads a day, from isolated crank calls about blowing up the White House to thefts of dynamite. Agents rate each threat by plausibility. They corroborate leads, assess vulnerability of the targets, then push the information to the right place, such as the local police department.

Or not. Every piece of information simply can't be pushed down the line, agents say. The trick is finding the signal in the noise.

"In the five years since 9/11, there hasn't been a terrorist attack that has succeeded," John Miller, the FBI's assistant director of public affairs, says. "How many plots have been disrupted?"

So far, nothing awful has happened. But even Israel, with a vigilant and experienced counterterrorism apparatus, only disrupts "80 to 90 percent" of the plots against it, Miller says: "One in 10 get by."

It's a thought to sober any law enforcement official on the front lines.

Cathy Lanier, Washington, D.C.'s police chief and organizer of the bureau's Homeland Security/Counterterrorism branch, visited Israel to see how it works to keep its citizens safe. "Everything that seems unimaginable (here) probably seemed unimaginable there at one time," she said.

While the invasion of Afghanistan limited Osama bin Laden's ability to execute another attack like 9/11, the war in Iraq fosters new threats against the United States, counterterrorism experts agree.

"Why haven't we been hit?" asks Lee Hamilton, the former Indiana congressman who served on the 9/11 Commission and the Baker-Hamilton Group. "We've been doing some things right. We've disrupted Al-Qaida. We've made some things safer.

"But it's also luck."

Copyright © 2007 International Reporting Project. All Rights Reserved.