The Federal civil defense law was written before the advent of the hydrogen bomb and the recent striking advances in methods of delivering modern weapons. This law must be realistically revised. Plans to meet post-attack situations are, of course, essential, but the Federal Civil Defense Administration needs authority to carry out necessary pre-attack preparations as well. It must be enabled to assure adequate participation in the civil defense program. It must be empowered to work out logical plans for possible target areas which overlap state and municipal boundaries.…
PRESIDENT DWIGHT EISENHOWER, 19561
In the beginning, it was just germ weapons, gas, poison gas, biological weapons, bioweapons, and chemical weapons; then came Gadget; Trinity, Little Boy, the fission bomb, the atomic bomb, the A-bomb, the plutonium bomb, the nuclear bomb; Super; the fusion bomb, the hydrogen bomb, the H-bomb; atomic weapons; nuclear weapons, hydronuclear weapons, thermonuclear weapons; warheads, nukes, bunker busters; bombs with the explosive power of one thousand tons of TNT, of one million tons, of ten million tons, of megatons; backpack-sized special atomic demolition munitions; improvised nuclear devices; radiological weapons; tactical nuclear weapons; enhanced radiation (ER) weapons, neutron bombs, nonstrategic nuclear weapons; radiological dispersal devices; atomic, biological, and chemical (ABC) weapons; nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) weapons; chemical, biological, and radiological (CBR) weapons; chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) weapons; chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear, and high-yield explosives (CBRNE); biological, nuclear, incendiary, chemical and explosive (BNICE) weapons; weapons of mass destruction (the Soviet epithet for America’s arsenal); weapons of mass destruction (the American epithet for everyone else’s arsenal), weapon of mass effect, and on and on. They are bad, all bad; real bad. So we need to be ready—but how much preparation for preventing WMD do we need if we are neglecting greater dangers?
The first incident: on October 18, 2001, three days after an anthrax-laced letter arrived in Senate offices and after others were opened at the New York Post and NBC News at Rockefeller Center in New York, Dick Cheney thought he might die. As he was on his way to visit ground zero in New York for the first time since 9/11, the White House Situation Room called to report that biological sensors installed around the White House grounds detected botulinum toxin. “If the result was confirmed, it could mean the president and I, members of the White House staff, and probably scores of others… had been exposed to one of the most lethal substances known to man,” Cheney recalls. “A single gram, evenly dispersed and inhaled,” he said, could kill a million people.2
The filters from the aerosol sensors were carefully bagged and rushed to a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory outpost that had quietly moved into space at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, literally a mile up 16th Street from the White House. There the scientists would determine the nature and origin of the triggering pathogen.3
President Bush was on a state visit to China, and it fell to the vice president to inform him via secure videoteleconference that he and others might have been exposed. “Mr. President,” Cheney intoned, “White House biological detectors have registered the presence of botulinum toxin, and there is no reliable antidote. Those of us who have been exposed to it could die.”4
Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was traveling with the president and was in the room during the call, sank back in his chair, calculating his time left on Earth.5
“I didn’t particularly want to die in China,” National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice later wrote of her thoughts at the time.6
The second incident: almost a year later, the 708-foot M/V Palermo Senator motored into New York harbor as the midnight hour approached, its twenty-four-man crew eagerly awaiting dry land after completing a 3,800-mile transit from Spain. The Liberian-flagged container ship was finishing its usual circuit from the Far East through the Mediterranean Sea and across the Atlantic Ocean, laden with a hodgepodge of products for the American market.7 A coast guard law enforcement team boarded the Palermo Senator to conduct a standard inspection—standard except that it was also September 10, 2002, the day before the first anniversary of the World Trade Center attacks, and President Bush was scheduled to appear at a memorial service the next day at Ellis Island, just six miles away from where the Palermo Senator was to dock.
Tom Ridge, the head of the Office of Homeland Security in the White House, declared the anniversary observances a “national security special event”; for public consumption, the homeland security alert level was raised from yellow to orange: “The US intelligence community has received information, based on debriefings of a senior al Qaeda operative, of possible terrorist attacks timed to coincide with the anniversary of the September 11th attacks on the United States,” the White House said in a statement.8
The Coast Guard boarding went off without incident, and the vessel was authorized to proceed into New York harbor for an 8 a.m. arrival at Berth 92 at the Port Newark/Elizabeth Marine Terminal. The boarding report—coast guard form 4100—noted unexplained sounds coming from a container below and recommended further investigation in port: perhaps it was stowaways, a common enough event. The Captain of the Port for New York—the senior federal official—ordered a joint boarding by the Port Authority Police; US Customs, Immigration and Naturalization; and the FBI Newark office. Since the Department of Energy had a radiation detection team in New York for the 9/11 anniversary, it was also invited to participate; it would at the least be a good opportunity to test equipment.
The radiation team arrived from Manhattan at midmorning and took its readings. At 1 p.m., the team leader told the on-scene commander that the instruments indicated abnormal levels. FBI and military watch centers in Washington were immediately notified, and the FBI special agent in charge of the Newark Field Office called his boss, an assistant director, who reported the anomaly to the White House. Executive agents on duty there immediately slid into crisis mode, automatically designating the FBI as the “lead federal agency” and automatically triggering the crisis management contingency plan.9
It was the day before the first anniversary of 9/11, and a radiation alert in New York City was a scenario that could have come right out of a movie. But it wasn’t quite the stuff of Hollywood, with some dashing G-man combining brilliance and biceps directly updating the president while nimble fingers hastily coaxed desperately needed information from computer systems and databases. However, watch officers did pick up real-world versions of red phones and did alert some specialized team, whose heroes promptly hopped into waiting vehicles to be shuttled to rotor-whirling helicopters.
The third incident: as the floodwaters of Hurricane Katrina were receding in 2005, a mysterious figure known only as Akhtir, from the Baluchistan region of Pakistan, finished developing the final components of two radiological dispersal devices—“dirty bombs”—and readied them for shipping. The shadowy Akhtir’s college degree and background in science made him especially worrisome to American intelligence.
It took months of negotiations and preparation, and a ton of money, but a man named Cherrad, one of the senior operatives of the Islamic terrorist organization known only as EZ, arranged the delivery of the two nuclear cores stolen from the arsenal of the former Soviet Union. They were moved by truck through Iran to the Pakistani coast, where Akhtir’s job was to fabricate the uranium spheres into improvised explosive devices. Once two senior operatives known as Ebrahim and Husseini finished their training, the EZ plan was to transfer the devices to Mexico and then on to the United States for simultaneous detonation, one on the West Coast, one in Washington, DC. Cherrad arranged for a Greek freighter captain to be bribed, and Ebrahim accompanied the deadly cargo to a small port in southern Mexico, aided by the Sinvergüenza Cartel and its established drug-smuggling channels. While the two weapons were stored in a warehouse—one called New Dayton and the other Landport—Akhtir calculated just how much plastic and water were needed to shield radiation emissions while the weapons were in storage and how to mask the emissions altogether when crossing the American border. Two months later, after meticulously packing a truck-trailer with bags of kitty litter to mask New Dayton, a Sinvergüenza operative drove the bomb-laden eighteen-wheeler across the border between ports of entry in Texas, meeting up with Ebrahim on the other side, smuggled in by a coyote known for his skill and his high prices. Once Husseini arrived, he would take possession of Landport and accompany the device across Mexico to a charter vessel headed for Oregon.
The recruited suicide martyrs, Abbas Fahim and Badi Al Tayyib, arrived in the United States from Pakistan on student visas, clearing immigration without suspicion. New Dayton was safely stowed away in a suburban Maryland safe house, and once Ebrahim met up with the bombers, he sent an e-mail to EZ Central Command notifying them that the “reception” was ready. A day later, he received a response: detonation was to take place at 9 p.m. East Coast time on July 4, simultaneous with Husseini’s arrival on the West Coast.
False alarm?
From the dawn of the nuclear era, scenarios of a nuclear or biological attack have been the driving force of both those committed to the ABCs and the executive agents of the XYZs, a what-if burrowing deeply into the American psyche. It doesn’t really matter at what point you enter the theater—the Soviet explosion in 1949, China, bomber and missile gaps, the brink in 1962, Israel’s boldness or Pakistan’s counter, Iraq’s genocide; South African, Libyan, North Korean, or Iranian defiance, al Qaeda, Iraq’s demise—the nightmare never ends. Indeed, the only tangible medication ends up being the science of size, lethality, detection, and protection. The rest is just psychology and terror.
The incident on October 18, 2001, was real; the Palermo Senator alert was real; the EZ conspiracy was a fictional scenario for a national preparedness exercise held in 2007. Each plays its part in the drama and each tells a tale of between-the-lines.
Here’s how the real world works: on the first anniversary of 9/11, the Palermo Senator was ordered to return to sea once radiation was detected, but it had to wait for the next high tide to make it through the Kill van Kull, the waterway between Staten Island and Bayonne, and that wasn’t going to be until 11:30 p.m. The ship was then escorted back out to sea to an exclusion zone offshore, with FBI sharpshooters and a coast guard maritime security team on the scene, but pretty much nothing else to be instantly done. The reason was that the Palermo Senator held about 1,200 metal shipping containers, some forty feet long, in fifteen rows of thirteen containers each, some stacked ten deep, some above deck and some below.
Once back out in New York harbor, the coast guard cutter Escanaba, together with New York and New Jersey state police boats, provided overwatch while plans were put together to transport twenty-five people and two tons of equipment in eight-foot seas to the target ship (the Palermo Senator had no helicopter deck). Even though the Department of Energy had radiation specialists on the scene, a “PDD-39” event (one of several secret presidential directive types) meant mobilization of a tailored domestic emergency support team, including the FBI’s hazardous materials response unit from Quantico, Virginia; the technical specialists would initially deal with whatever was found.10 Responders also included the Nuclear Emergency Search Team—called NEST—the main components coming from New Mexico and Nevada. Armed support was provided by a military weapons of mass destruction “render safe” team and an in extremis unit called JSOTF (pronounced j-so-tiff), the Joint Special Operations Task Force, which was made up predominantly of navy SEALs, who deployed from their Norfolk-area base. The Los Alamos NEST members were the last to arrive, at 10 p.m. on the night of the eleventh.
Eight federal departments, nine local agencies, and a dozen local police departments had their work cut out for them. The search would begin at first light the next morning, just as soon as a unified command meeting oriented the intergovernmental gaggle and all the paperwork and coordination was complete. Lawyers in Washington were contacting the German owner of the ship and the South Korean shipping company that operated it.
At 12:30 p.m. on September 12, the DEST and the Coast Guard commenced boarding, at least according to statements released to the press. The news media gave the incident its usual treatment, heightening the gravity of the danger and massacring most of the facts before dropping the story altogether when details at eleven fizzled: TV and radio and Internet reporting said an intelligence tip had alerted the Coast Guard, that the ship had been boarded as it approached New York because it had already been identified as a “high threat vessel” with known cargo from the Middle East, that Iraq was somehow involved—thus confirming that Saddam had nuclear weapons. The deployment of navy SEALs, never officially mentioned in any government statement but quickly leaked, was particularly headline-worthy, partly demonstrating America’s fascination with its secret operators, partly providing hopeful imagery that the military (or somebody) had arrived to save the day, but in the end even the SEALs were not enough to sustain attention.11
Sixty hours and thirty minutes elapsed from the moment when the Palermo Senator was initially boarded and its entrance into New York harbor and its inspection. By then President Bush had come and gone from New York and the 9/11 anniversary had passed as well. Technicians—some moon-suited and taking nothing for granted and others in their normal uniforms—worked through most of the day and night, finally isolating the radioactive source: a shipment of ceramic roofing tiles emitting natural ionizing radiation from trace elements of thorium. The Palermo Senator was cleared at noon on September 13 to proceed once again into port and unload its cargo: mission accomplished.
The “hot wash” of the incident—the government’s after-action report—produced a long list of deficiencies: despite all of the information-sharing and dot-connecting that supposedly blossomed after 9/11, data on tracking and identifying the shipping containers already in the hands of the customs service was never passed along; there was little real-time intelligence on ships entering New York despite the 9/11 anniversary, the national alert status, and the national security special event that had been declared; the FBI, though in the lead, was only one of a dozen agencies reporting simultaneously to Washington, each agency’s situation report contradicting others, creating a confounding picture; the Coast Guard was wholly unprepared for the scenario and neither the FBI nor the Coast Guard had the assets to perform a forcible boarding of the ship at sea; there were no protocols for radiation assessment before the ship entered port; detection equipment meant for land use was too bulky to get onto the ship and too sensitive to use at sea. Despite clear instructions from the attorney general placing the FBI in charge and a classified presidential directive implementing plans, there was confusion regarding who was in charge and way too many agencies became involved; state and local officials lacked security clearances and could not be let in on the full operation; it was unclear to those on the scene who was in the lead at the city and state levels; and communications between state-level responding agencies was lacking, particularly in the seam between New York and New Jersey.
One might ask how such an incident could happen a year after 9/11, nine months after the customs service unveiled its Container Security Initiative, which promised that ships would be inspected at foreign ports to thwart these very possibilities. One might ask how a foreign ship was allowed to sit in the middle of the nation’s largest metropolitan area for eighteen hours before radiation was even detected. And then, one might ask how it took almost three days from arrival before a full inspection took place; and even then, how a ship that authorities thought might have a nuclear weapon on board could be taken less than ten miles offshore.
Indeed, one might ask, and it would be an uncomfortable grilling. Nevertheless, presumably all the asking would result in an orgy of improvement: rewriting directives and plans, beefing up response teams, enhancing equipment and training. The failure, in fact, would be treated like most other government bungles, as an opportunity to do better, and it was: America is so vast, with its largest city on one coast and the second largest on another, that preparing for this “no fail” weapons of mass destruction mission requires not just supernatural logistics but a far more massive blanket than was available that day. If terrorists manage to obtain or crudely build and smuggle a nuclear device into the country; or if they prepare a biological agent to spread in the middle of Washington or at a teeming sports stadium or through a city water system, the government has to get the warning in enough time to deploy to any location from Maine to Florida to Hawaii, and then it has to perform miracles. There are the imponderables that can’t be resolved merely through spending more money or reorganizing and rewriting: what if that specific ship were carrying some kind of nuke hidden in a shipping container, one with a timer? Could the FBI, military explosive ordnance disposal experts, or the navy SEALs have prevented an explosion, had there been a nuke, had they found it in time?
The EZ scenario was written by FEMA and an intergovernmental team for exercise TOPOFF 4—TOPOFF standing for Top Officials—held from October 15 to 19, 2007. TOPOFF 4 is one of thousands of exercises and war games constantly running, the scenarios right out of the movies, but each meant to test the government in realistic ways, to find flaws and inconsistencies and thus serve as platforms for improvement.12 Most of the TOPOFF 4 exercise ran at the unclassified level and involved practicing communications and mobilization, and indoctrinating the various cleanup crews and first responders in the procedures to be followed after a WMD detonation or spread. As the State of Oregon announced reassuringly to its citizens, “This full-scale exercise will give state and local emergency management and response agencies the opportunity to test plans, procedures and equipment, while focusing on the following capabilities: evacuation/shelter-in-place, mass care, mass prophylaxis and communications. State and local participants will also benefit from close interaction with the federal government, voluntary organizations, international partners and the private sector.”13
The publicly released and official scenario for TOPOFF 4 included three dirty bombs, one in Oregon, one in Phoenix, and one on the island of Guam, all slated to be detonated. But hidden from public view was also a fourth, EZ’s New Dayton in Washington, the star of separately running and overlapping war games—Vigilant Shield, Positive Response, Global Lightning, Forward Challenge—each sponsored by the people at NORTHCOM, the Joint Chiefs, Strategic Command, and the Program to practice a little corner of the extraordinary.
As Washington’s exercises reached their eleventh hour, an EZ member conducting surveillance around the intended target was apprehended. Things then moved fast: At 0530 on June 21 exercise time, the FBI “confirmed” from the apprehended suspect that there was a WMD near Washington. The federal government went to Continuity of Government Condition (COGCON) 3, and then COGCON 2, and then 1, seamlessly implementing evacuation and relocation procedures for a select set of role-playing Program workers and civil servants. At 0730, the FBI players learned the specific location of the suburban Maryland safe house where the mock device was being kept (all set up at Andrews Air Force Base for the players to assault); the DEST and national “assets” were deployed, exercise style within two hours, defying both physics and reality. Nine hours later (exercise time), the safe house was stormed, the radiological device disarmed, the place secured, the bomb evacuated.
Everything in Washington unfolded like clockwork and ENDEX (end of exercise) was declared a huge success, the ghost of the Palermo Senator exorcised—that is, until the next Tier I national-level exercise, scheduled for 2009, which would again put the executive agents to the test. Meanwhile, across the country, the fictional EZ operative Husseini made it to the notional city of Landport (“Portland” rearranged). At 10 a.m. on the same morning when the FBI was swatting the terrorists away in DC, Husseini’s charter boat arrived in port, only to be boarded by Customs and Border Protection officers. But it was too late: Husseini detonated his radiological dispersal device precisely at noon, 3 p.m. East Coast time. Washington had satisfactory ENDEX; Oregon, together with Arizona and Guam, which were similarly “attacked,” had a whole lot of work to do in terms of consequence management and cleanup.14
Yet for the executive agents, that was in some ways a perfect outcome. A postulated nuclear attack on Washington has always been the gift that keeps on giving, from before Eisenhower and with every successive administration before and after 9/11. The scenario, whatever era it is revised for, whoever the perpetrator, justifies emergency measures, physical redundancy, and, of course, an equation in which the Constitution becomes secondary to “survival” between the lines. Post-9/11, though, the singular nightmare scenario of the first strike was transformed into a day-to-day never-ending limbo in which catastrophic attack was seen as inevitable—and thus necessitated all of the exceptions of the XYZs.
It isn’t enough for four planes to be hijacked on the same morning, for two to crash into the World Trade Center towers while the third almost simultaneously crashes into the Pentagon on a random sunny Tuesday in September, to test the government and justify the creation of a system of exceptions. The way martial life is imposed and then sustained necessitates weapons of mass destruction—the unimaginable and the fantastic. That’s why the TOPOFF failures were also victories for the executive agents. If it seems that safety is guaranteed, panic will cease. Always there must be lit fuses, evidence of a breeze drifting toward a house of cards, rumors of infiltration. And yet if there’s no evidence of burgeoning competence, power will shift away from the executive agent community. And if the XYZs are to define American life, that cannot be allowed to happen.