Sept. 11 Panel Challenges Ignorance of Threat Scenario

Failure to consider that airliners might be seized and crashed deemed ‘fatuous’

Senior U.S. government officials have told an independent commission that prior to Sept. 11, 2001, they never conceived that airliners might be used as weapons of mass destruction. These admissions raise serious questions about the ability of the aviation security system to adjust its defenses to a pattern of precursor events, raising the specter that terrorists could alter their method of attack and once again inflict a deadly surprise.

This bureaucratic mindset revealed in the first public hearings by an independent commission into the 9/11 attacks has implications not only for aviation security, but for aviation safety as well. In many cases, a fatal accident is the culmination of a history of precursor incidents and events. A proactive approach to incident analysis and trend tracking can help avoid accidents.

The security breakdowns evident in the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history represent a harsh object lesson in the cost of complacency. What emerged from two days of testimony is a case study in bureaucratic blindness. Recall the test for color blindness – the cards imprinted with colored dots, in which the individual being tested is asked what number is contained on the card. For persons with correct color vision, the numbers readily emerge from the seemingly random pattern of colored dots.

So, too, with the threat to aviation security. There were a number of events, equivalent to the dots on the test card for color vision, showing a pattern of activity indicating that airplanes might be hijacked for purposes far deadlier than unscheduled flights to Cuba.

And yet the members of the 9/11 commission did not ask the obvious follow up. Even if the notion of using the airplanes as flying bombs was not recognized by top government officials, what was being done to increase protection against hijackings? This question gets beyond the uncertain use to which the plane would be put after hijacking to probe what security officials were doing to prevent hijackings in the first place.

In the face of a mounting pile of threat assessments, the officials responsible for aviation security did not, for example, ban the carriage of bladed instruments that could be used as weapons. These officials did not have to know specifically what potential hijackers were going to do with the airplanes. If they had banned bladed items from being carried aboard, the 9/11 hijackers might well have been thwarted, or they might not have been able to gain control of four airliners in less than an hour.

Commissioner John Lehman pointedly asked Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta about the failure to appreciate the potential for airliners to be seized and used as air-to- ground missiles:

Lehman: “Mr. Secretary, I have one question, and that is, we had testimony … that there were many intelligence reports leading up to 9/11 and actual plots uncovered to use aircraft as missiles.”

Mineta: “There was nothing in those intelligence reports that would have been specific to anything that happened on the 11^th of September. There was nothing in the preceding time period about aircraft being used as a weapon or of any other terrorist types of activities of that nature.”

Lehman: “Just to follow up, Mr. Secretary, given the fact that there were, in the preceding couple of years, about a half a dozen novels and movies about hijackings being used as weapons and the fact that there were reports floating around in the intelligence community, did you personally think that that was a possibility, that it could have happened? Or when it happened, did it just take you totally by surprise? Because yesterday [May 22], we had testimony from the former FAA [Federal Aviation Administration] administrator that, in effect, it never entered her mind.”

Mineta: “I had no thought of the airplane being used as a weapon. I think our concentration was more on hijackings … I don’t think we ever thought of an airplane being used as a missile.”

Lehman’s questioning referred to the previous day’s testimony from former FAA Administrator Jane Garvey. She said:

“On Sept. 10 [2001], based on the intelligence reporting we were seeing, we continued to see attacks upon aircraft with explosive devices as the most dangerous threat. We were also prepared for the type of hijackings in which the hijacker wanted transportation or wanted hostages to further some political objective.

“Over the years there had been a small number of reports … that one terrorist group or another may have talked of blowing up or crashing an aircraft after hijacking it. There was, however, no credible law enforcement reporting or intelligence confirming these stories. Similarly, there have been many possible terrorist attack scenarios developed by theorists, but no hard evidence of that the type of attack we saw on September 11 was in the making, or that the perpetrators had the capability to carry out such an attack within the United States.

“In a 1994 Air France hijacking there was media speculation that the hijackers may have planned to crash the aircraft into the Eiffel Tower. Since September 11, that incident has been touted as alleged proof that we should have seen the attack coming. But, in fact, that information was unconfirmed and there was no current reporting indicating that seizure of aircraft in order to attack ground targets was being planned or was likely.

“Hindsight is always 20/20. But looking back on bits and pieces of information that have surfaced in the wake of September 11 is one thing. Seeing the same patterns when only a part of the data now being studied was previously available … is quite another thing.”

The evidence was more substantive than the “media speculation” cited by Garvey, based on the testy questioning by 9/11 commission member Richard Ben Veniste of two officers on duty that day in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD):

Ben-Veniste: “Well, obviously it would be hard to imagine posturing for the exact scenario. But isn’t it a fact, sir, that prior to Sept. 11, 2001, NORAD had already in the works plans to simulate in an exercise a simultaneous hijacking of two planes in the United States?”

“That was Operation Amalgam Virgo.”

Col. Alan Scott, USAF (Ret.): “Yes, sir. Specifically Operation Amalgam Virgo, which I was involved in before I retired, was a scenario using a Third World … uninhabited aerial vehicle launched off a rogue freighter in the Gulf of Mexico. [Major] General [Larry] Arnold [USAF, retired] can back me up. At the time one of our greatest concerns was the proliferation of cruise missile technology and the ability of terrorist groups to get that technology, get it close enough to our shores to launch it. In fact, this exercise – in this exercise we used … drones, which are about the size of a cruise missile, to exercise our fighters and our radars in a Gulf of Mexico scenario.”

Ben-Veniste: “You are referring to Amalgam 01, are you not?”

Scott: Yes, sir, Amalgam 01.”

Ben-Veniste: “I am referring to Amalgam 02, which was in the planning stages prior to Sept. 11, 2001, sir. Is that correct?”

Scott: “That was after I retired, and I was not involved in 02.”

Ben-Veniste: “Will you accept that the exercise involved a simultaneous hijacking scenario?”

Scott: “I was not involved in 02.”

[Major] General Craig McKinley [representing NORAD]: “Sir, I do have some information on 02, if you would allow me to read it for the record.”

Ben-Veniste: “Please.”

McKinley: “Amalgam Virgo in general, 02, was an exercise created to focus on peacetime and contingency NORAD missions. One of the peacetime [missions] … is support to other government departments. Within this mission falls hijackings. Creativity of the designer aside, prior to 9/11, hijack motivations were based on political objectives, i.e., asylum or release of captured prisoners or political figures. Threats of killing hostages or crashing were left to the script writers to invoke creativity and broaden the required response for players.” (Continued on next page.)

Ben-Veniste: “Well, isn’t that a bit fatuous given the specific information that I’ve given you? It wasn’t in the minds of the script writers when the Algerians had actually hijacked the plane, which they were attempting to fly into the Eiffel Tower … I don’t mean to argue with you, but … given the awareness of the terrorists’ use of planes as weapons, how is it that NORAD was … not better prepared to defend against the hijacking scenarios of a commercial jet laden with fuel used as a weapon to target citizens of the United States? Would you agree that on the basis of the information available … could there have been better preparedness by NORAD to meet this threat?”

McKinley: “In retrospect, sir, I think I would agree with your comment.”

Other witnesses challenged the claimed lack of foreknowledge. Bogdan Dzakovic, at the time a security expert on the FAA’s Red Team, a group formed, as he said, “to replicate tactics that terrorists might use against us,” said precursor events should have caused alarm bells to sound.

Dzakovic, now employed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), told the commissioners:

“Virtually every expert on terrorism for several years prior to 9/11 had been screaming about the ever growing threat to the United States by a new breed of terrorists willing to inflict mass casualties on civilians. The first major wake-up call occurred in 1995, when terrorists planned on blowing up a dozen U.S. commercial aircraft over the Pacific Ocean. This was thwarted by an accidental fire in the [Manila, Philippines] apartment where the bombs were being constructed.

“The second major wake-up call occurred in 1994 when terrorists planned on crashing an airliner into the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Only quick and decisive action by French commandos prevented this disaster. There were also additional indicators.”

Mary Schiavo, former inspector general for the Department of Transportation, and now an aviation lawyer, testified to the commissioners: “Osama bin Laden was a copycat killer … he followed the example of several previous terrorist attacks. Documents seized … long before 9/11 revealed that he intended to crash a plane into the CIA [Central Intelligence Agency] building near Washington, D.C.”

“In the events of September 11, while astonishing in the number of casualties and the enormity of the devastation, neither the modus operandi of the terrorists, nor crashing planes into buildings, was new,” she went on to assert. “In fact, these types of hijackings and the crashing of planes into buildings, had been planned and thwarted on several previous occasions. Even the Colombine school shooters talked about crashing planes into buildings – before 9/11.”

Schiavo described the situation as a “rising crime wave” in which officials responsible for the aviation security system did not tighten it to provide better protection against terrorist attacks.

Regarding the claims of senior government officials they could not have known the 9/11 attacks would happen, Dzakovic testified, “The truth is, they did know. What happened on 9/11 was not a failure in the system, it was a system designed for failure. [The] FAA very conscientiously and deliberately orchestrated a dangerous facade of security.”

“They knew the terrorist threat was rising, but gambled nothing would happen if we kept the vulnerability secret and didn’t disrupt the airline industry,” he charged. “Our country lost that bet.”

Immediately following the 9/11 attacks, box cutters, knives, scissors and such were banned. Even fingernail clippers were prohibited, showing the swift shift from bureaucratic blindness to bureaucratic overkill.

The 9/11 commission has a year to complete its inquiry and produce a report.

Box Cutters – Banned or Not?

Chairman Tom Kean: “There’s been some confusion as to the issue of box cutters. You testified, I gather [before Congress], that as of September 11 [2001], the FAA did not prohibit box cutters. Yesterday we got testimony from the ATA [Air Transport Association] that in checkpoint operation guides, box cutters were classified as restricted items, which could be kept off an aircraft if identified. What was the status of box cutters within the aviation system as a whole, and certainly in Boston, where those checkpoints were?” [Kean was referring to Boston’s Logan airport, where terrorists evidently armed with box cutters hijacked two of the four airplanes on 9/11)

[Transportation] Secretary Norman Mineta: “The FAA regulation referred to blades of four inches or greater as prohibited items. And so a box cutter was really less than four inches. Now, on the other hand, the airline industry had a guideline. And in that guideline, they did prohibit box cutters … but in the FAA regulations, that was not the case. All they referred to was the length of the blade, and that was four inches. And so under the FAA regulations, box cutters would have been okay on an airplane.”

Source: 9/11 commission hearing, May 23, 2003

Activity Timeline Prior To 9/11

• Sept. 11, 1994: A Cessna aircraft is stolen in the late evening from a Maryland airport by a single pilot. The plane crashes at 2 a.m. into the south lawn of the White House. The pilot is killed.
• Dec. 24, 1994: Algerian terrorists dressed as airport officials commander Air France Flight 8969 in Algiers. The flight departs Algeria and lands in Marseilles, France. The hijackers demand the aircraft be filled with three times the amount of jet fuel they need to fly to Paris. French commandos storm the plane killing all four terrorists.
• July 1996: Concerned that there may a terrorist attack at the Olympic Summer Games, planes are banned from getting near Olympic events.
• October 1996: An Iranian plot to hijack a Japanese airliner and fly it into a landmark in Tel Aviv, Israel, is uncovered.
• August 1998: U.S. intelligence learns that a “group of unidentified Arabs planned to fly an explosive-laden plane from a foreign country into the World Trade Center.”
• September 1998: U.S. intelligence learns that Osama bin Laden’s forces might fly an aircraft loaded with explosives into a U.S. airport.
• April 2000: An individual walks into the FBI’s Newark, N.J., office and announces that he had been in a terrorist training camp in Pakistan where he learned airplane- hijacking techniques. He declares that others in the plot had pilot training.
• July 2001: U.S. officials are concerned for the safety of President George W. Bush at the G-8 summit in Genoa, Italy. Defensive surface-to-air missiles and combat aircraft are deployed.
• Aug. 6, 2001: President Bush is told in his daily intelligence briefing in Crawford, Texas, that Al-Qaeda terrorists might hijack airplanes.
• August 2001: Intelligence agencies were told of a possible bin Laden plot to bomb the U.S. embassy in Nairobi, Kenya, or crash a plane into it.

Source: U.S. Congress, Joint Intelligence Committee Staff Statement, Sept. 18, 2002

Crime Wave in the Sky

Hijackings, 1970-2001:

• 823 airliners hijacked worldwide
• 115 incidents of hijackers thwarted by passengers/crew
• 109 U.S. airliners hijacked on U.S. soil
• 58 U.S. airliners hijacked on foreign soil
• 11 foreign airliners hijacked on U.S. soil

Cockpit intrusions worldwide: 30 in the 18 months prior to 9/11

Bombs on airliners worldwide, 1970-2001: 31

Airliner shoot-downs worldwide, 1970-2001: 59