One of the unique characteristics that separates terrorism from all other types of conflicts is the ability of a single incident to throw an entire nation into crisis and create repercussions far beyond the original event. The taking of American hostages at the US embassy in Tehran in November 1979, for example, led to a more than fourteen-month-long crisis that virtually paralyzed the administration of President Jimmy Carter and may have led to his defeat in the 1980 presidential election. The September 11, 2001, hijacking-suicide attacks in the United States changed the course of US domestic and foreign policy for years afterward. For many Americans, it was the first time they seriously thought about the threat of terrorism. And the November 2008 terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, led to deteriorating relations between India and Pakistan. India accused Pakistan of being involved in the shootings that left more than 160 people dead. Many other countries have also seen a terrorist incident affect government and society long after the event is over.
Yet for all the crises and repercussions that terrorism has caused in the past, the potential for a major, successful terrorist attack involving a weapon of mass destruction is the most troubling. The fatality level would likely be higher than any previous terrorist incident, with one estimate running as high as between one and three million people killed if there were an anthrax attack over Washington, DC.1 Such an event would also create a medical, political, and social crisis unparalleled in our history. How real, then, are the prospects for such an attack, and how likely are lone wolves to be among the perpetrators?
TERRORISTS AND WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
When I first began writing about the potential of terrorists using weapons of mass destruction (commonly referred to as “WMD”) in the late 1980s,2 there were two main criticisms leveled at anybody dealing with this topic. The first was that you might be giving new ideas to terrorists, who were busy at the time setting off car bombs, hijacking planes, kidnapping individuals, and doing other types of conventional terrorist attacks throughout the world. The assumption then was that terrorists did not know much about these weapons, so the less said or written about the subject, the better. The days of WMD terrorism being a taboo topic, however, are long gone. Today, there are countless books, articles, Internet websites, television commentaries, and government reports devoted to this issue.
The second criticism was that terrorists did not have the capabilities to effectively acquire and use WMDs, and, therefore, any publications that warned about the threat would needlessly alarm the public. That criticism can still be heard today. The example that is often pointed to is the failure of the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo to launch a successful WMD attack despite a multiyear research effort to acquire and use such weapons and virtually unlimited funds and personnel to support that effort. Their 1995 sarin nerve gas attack in the Tokyo subway did not cause maximum casualties (twelve people died), mainly because the cult had not manufactured a potent-enough batch of the nerve agent. Even if they had, the group still chose a poor delivery method to disperse the sarin; they simply left several punctured containers on the floor of the five subway trains they attacked. Aum also failed in its efforts to produce biological agents.3
The thinking is that if Aum could not perpetrate an effective attack with a weapon of mass destruction, then why should we worry about this threat? There are, however, plenty of reasons to worry. First, Aum's large size (approximately fifty thousand members) may have actually worked against the cult's efforts to launch a major, successful chemical or biological terrorist attack. Bureaucratic politics, factions, divisions in the group, and lack of focus and coordination all can add to the problems that large groups sometimes face in planning and implementing a terrorist operation. Furthermore, Aum's members were constantly striving to please their leader and guru, Shoko Asahara, and were basically on a “fishing expedition” to find the most effective weapon, including conventional weapons, for an attack.4 The ineptitude shown in the cult's efforts to devise an effective delivery system for the sarin nerve gas indicates that the group had not researched thoroughly or correctly understood the dispersal method regarding chemical and biological agents.5
The technological revolutionary age that we are now living in, however, should aid future terrorists in overcoming the challenges in properly dispersing WMDs, including dealing with issues such as wind direction, sunlight, and temperature when releasing biological agents. As more information becomes available on the Internet and from other sources, we can expect to see more groups and individual terrorists experimenting with dispersal techniques. As analysts at Sandia National Laboratories point out, “The ever increasing technological sophistication of society continually lowers the barriers, resulting in a low but increasing probability of a high consequence bioterrorism event.”6
Not all terrorists, though, would be interested in acquiring and using weapons of mass destruction. One of the major factors that could inhibit a group from using these weapons is concern that an attack would create a backlash among the organization's supporters. Many terrorist groups, such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army when it was active in Northern Ireland, depend upon the support—political, logistical, and financial—of significant segments of the population. While its “constituency” may not necessarily approve of the group's violent acts, they nevertheless support the group's political objectives. That support could be eroded if such a group were to use weapons of mass destruction. Supporters may condone certain killings as necessary to further the cause, but it is quite another thing to justify killing thousands of people.
It is not just the reaction from their supporters that would inhibit many terrorist groups from launching an attack with a weapon of mass destruction. There would also be concern that such an attack would unleash too strong a response from the government that is the target of the attack. While eliciting a repressive response that curtails civil liberties is sometimes the goal of terrorist groups, since such a response could turn the population against the government, a WMD attack would likely result in the enthusiastic support of the public to crush the group responsible by eliminating it through arrests and other acts.
Many terrorists might also be concerned about the personal risks involved in using WMDs. Terrorists tend to work with what they are familiar with. Conventional explosives, automatic weapons, and rocket-propelled grenades are among the weapons in the comfort zone of most terrorists. The fear of being infected with a biological agent or being exposed to radiation when working with a nuclear weapon could scare away many terrorists. Further, if the terrorists believe that conventional attacks, such as car bombings, hijackings, armed assaults, are meeting their objectives, there would be little incentive to launch a chemical, biological, or nuclear attack.
What type of terrorists, then, would be interested in using weapons of mass destruction? It would likely be those who exhibit the following characteristics: a general, undefined constituency whose possible reaction to a WMD attack does not concern the terrorists; a perception that conventional terrorist attacks (car bombings, hijackings, assassinations) are no longer effective and that a higher form of violence or a new technique is needed; and a willingness to take risks by experimenting with and using unfamiliar weapons.7 Among the groups that could be described as meeting these criteria are doomsday religious or millenarian cults and neo-Nazi and white-supremacist groups.8 These types of terrorist groups have amorphous constituencies whose concern about a public backlash is unlikely to deter the use of nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons. Furthermore, they are likely to view conventional terrorist tactics as insufficient for gaining the attention and reaction they seek. They might, therefore, be willing to experiment with unfamiliar weapons.
For example, among the reasons cited for Aum Shinrikyo's sarin attack on Tokyo's subway system was the goal of setting in motion a sequence of events that would eventually lead to Armageddon, a prediction that had been made by the cult's leader, Shoko Asahara. Another reported reason for the attack was to create a crisis in Japan that would preoccupy or topple the Japanese government and thereby prevent an anticipated raid by Japanese authorities on the cult's headquarters. Conventional weapons were likely viewed by the cult as inadequate to bring about either of these objectives. White supremacists and neo-Nazis have also been attracted to weapons of mass destruction, due to the potential of killing large numbers of people. In one incident, a white-supremacist group, known as The
Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord, intended to poison the water supplies of major US cities in the mid-1980s with potassium chloride. When federal agents raided the group's compound in Arkansas, they discovered a large cache of weapons, including thirty gallons of potassium cyanide.9
Religious militants are also potential users of WMDs. If terrorists believe that acts of violence are not only politically but also morally justified, there is a powerful incentive for any type of attack. The belief that one is rewarded in the afterlife for violence perpetrated on earth encourages the undertaking of high-risk and high-casualty attacks. One of the biggest worries after the 9/11 attacks was whether al Qaeda was going to drop the other shoe with a major WMD attack. Although they did not, the group was certainly thinking about it. Documents and equipment discovered in Afghanistan in 2002 indicated that al Qaeda was considering the use of biological weapons and had constructed a laboratory near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan to develop anthrax.10 In addition, al Qaeda was interested in nuclear weapons. A twenty-five-page essay titled “Superbomb” was discovered in 2002 in the Kabul home of Abu Khabab, a senior al Qaeda official. That document included information on different types of nuclear weapons, the properties of nuclear materials, and the physics and effects of nuclear explosions.11
Groups that have the sponsorship of a foreign government may also be potential candidates to use weapons of mass destruction. Due to such sponsorship, they could easily be provided with the necessary training, resources, and weapons, particularly in the case of chemical and biological agents. The risk, however, for any government supplying terrorists with these weapons is the possibility of the terrorists turning them against that government itself one day. State sponsors of terrorism also have to be convinced that any attack with a weapon of mass destruction by a group they are supporting cannot be traced back to that government. Otherwise, they may face a massive retaliatory strike by the country that was targeted.
Retaliation, of course, is not a concern for lone wolf terrorists. In fact, they have very little to worry about in terms of the reactions of government or society should they use a WMD. They have no supporters or financial and political backers who might be alienated by a WMD attack and no headquarters or training camps that could be hit in retaliatory raids. A lone wolf might also believe that committing a conventional terrorist attack similar to those occurring regularly around the world would not yield as much publicity and notoriety as an attack with a chemical, biological, or nuclear weapon.
One of the biggest reasons why lone wolves are likely to use a weapon of mass destruction is that these individuals have proven time after time that they can “think outside the box.” They are not afraid to try new things. We have seen how a lone wolf, Mario Buda, committed the first vehicle bombing in the United States in 1920. Although not a WMD, Buda's vehicle bomb nevertheless demonstrated the creative nature of lone wolves, a characteristic necessary for those terrorists who might use WMDs. Buda had no idea if his plan would work; there had not been any standoff attacks like that attempted in the United States. The idea to put explosives in a horse-drawn wagon, park it near his targets on Wall Street, and then walk away after setting a timer was novel for those times. There had been an attempt in France in 1800 to assassinate First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte (before he became emperor) with a bomb that had been built into a barrel on a horse-drawn cart. That attempt failed, and the bomb exploded after Napoleon's carriage had passed the spot in the street where the horse and cart were parked. Approximately fifty-two people were either killed or injured in the blast. It is doubtful that Buda was aware of this novel use of a horse and cart for a terrorist attack, since it happened more than a hundred years before he sprang into action on Wall Street.12
THE STRANGE CASE OF DR. IVINS
Another example of a lone wolf thinking outside the box—and this time using a weapon of mass destruction—is the case of Bruce Ivins. Ivins was responsible for the 2001 anthrax letter attacks in the United States, which represented the first time anthrax was sent through the mail with the intent to infect people who opened the letters. His story is revealing for how dangerous lone wolves can be.
When the bestselling novel The Hot Zone was written by Richard Preston in the 1990s, it made famous a little-known military research facility located just an hour's drive from Washington, DC. The US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID), located at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Maryland, is the military's premier research laboratory for developing medical defenses against biological warfare threats. In 1989, USAMRIID personnel helped contain an outbreak of an Ebola virus among primates in a commercial laboratory animal-holding facility in Reston, Virginia. Had the virus spread to humans, it would have been a national medical catastrophe. Preston's book described the incident and rightly portrayed the USAMRIID scientists as national heroes.13
Ivins, however, who began working at USAMRIID in 1980, was definitely not a national hero. He was a very troubled man who turned his brilliant mind against his own country. His path to becoming the first person to successfully send “live” anthrax through the mail is one filled with obsession, revenge, fear, and mental illness.
When Ivins first came to USAMRIID in 1980, he was assigned to work on developing a new and more effective anthrax vaccine. This was a high priority for the US defense community, since, only one year earlier, there had been an accidental anthrax outbreak at a secret Soviet military microbiology plant in Sverdlovsk that killed at least sixty-six people. That incident proved that the Soviets were producing anthrax to be used as a biological weapon. Ivins, who had a doctorate in microbiology, thus began his lifelong research on anthrax. By the time of his death by suicide in 2008, Ivins had become one of the world's leading authorities on growing anthrax spores. He not only provided spores to his colleagues at USAMRIID for their own research, but many other anthrax researchers around the world also relied on his work.14
Ivins was a family man who volunteered at the local Red Cross and attended church regularly. He led what his friends called a “hippie mass” in church, playing keyboards and acoustic guitar. He was known as an eccentric, showing up for work in clothes that were a few sizes too small and working out at the gym in dark socks and heavy boots. When he became flustered over something, he would stammer and flap his arms, trying to make his point. His colleagues liked him, finding him to be both smart and generous.15
Ivins, however, hid a dark side from everyone. He was obsessed with the Kappa Kappa Gamma (KKG) sorority, driving three hours or more to visit KKG chapter houses on various campuses, look at the house for approximately ten minutes, and then drive home for another three hours. He broke into the houses on two occasions, once to steal the sorority's cipher, which was a decoding device for the sorority's secret rituals, and another time to steal the actual ritual book.16 He also showed an excessive interest in a former University of North Carolina (where Ivins did postdoctoral work) graduate student when he learned that she had been an advisor to the sorority. He vandalized the property where she lived.17 Later in the anthrax investigation, when FBI agents asked Ivins about his interest in KKG, he stated, “Oh, it's not an interest. It's an obsession.”18 What, then, could have caused Ivins to focus so much energy on the sorority and want to take revenge against it? All it took was a Kappa Kappa Gamma co-ed turning him down for a date when he was a student at the University of Cincinnati.19
Ivins did not have a happy childhood. He had a dominating mother who was physically abusive to his father. She struck her husband on different occasions with a broom, a skillet, and a fork.20 Ivins felt that his family treated him as an “unwanted outsider” and that his father ignored him.21 He was a loner as a teenager and had difficulty communicating with females.22 Nevertheless, Ivins eventually married and raised a family. However, although he was a renowned microbiologist, he became very worried by the summer of 2001 that funding for his anthrax-vaccine research at Fort Detrick would be drastically cut or even eliminated. Ivins was working on two different types of anthrax vaccines. One was a military anthrax vaccine, known as AVA, which had come under intense scrutiny and criticism by many military personnel who had been given the vaccine. They complained about its side effects, which included painfully swollen muscles and joints, headaches, and serious immune-system disorders. There were also questions raised about whether the vaccine would remain effective after up to three years in storage. Ivins was working with a private company to solve these problems, but the company was having trouble in its efforts to produce a better AVA vaccine. Meanwhile, Ivins was also working on another type of anthrax vaccine, called rPA (recombinant Protective Antigen). This was a genetically engineered vaccine, also known as the “Next Generation Vaccine,” that Ivins believed would solve all the problems associated with the AVA vaccine. Ivins was coinventor of that new vaccine and was set to collect patent royalties if the vaccine ever came to market.23
This was unlikely, though, as Pentagon officials were telling managers at USAMRIID to shift personnel and resources away from research on anthrax vaccines and into the research and development of products that could be used against other biological agents, such as glanders, tularemia, and plague. When USAMRIID management approached Ivins in the summer of 2001 about working on glanders (a bacterium that kills both livestock and humans), Ivins replied angrily, “I am an anthrax researcher. This is what I do.”24 The fear of not being allowed to work on anthrax vaccines was cited by the US government as a motive for his anthrax letter attacks.
According to the Department of Justice's official report on the incident, “Dr. Ivins’ life's work appeared destined for failure, absent an unexpected event.”25 That event would, of course, be an anthrax attack that created demand for anthrax vaccines. And that is exactly what happened following the September and October 2001 anthrax letter attacks, when the Food and Drug Administration fast-tracked approval of the AVA vaccine, putting Ivins back to work on anthrax vaccines.26 Ivins may also have had a financial motive for the attacks, since, as noted above, he had a patent for the rPA vaccine. The more concern there was throughout the country about the threat of anthrax, the higher the probability that Ivins's rPA vaccine might someday make it to market.
In addition to worries over not being able to work on anthrax vaccines, Ivins was also under severe emotional distress in the period leading up to the anthrax letter attacks. He wrote several alarming e-mails to a former female colleague, Mara Linscott, who used to work with him at Fort Detrick. In one e-mail, sent in October 1999, he wrote: “It's getting to be lately that I've felt there's nobody in the world I can confide in. You're gone now, and one of the reasons I was so sorry to see you go was a very selfish one—I could talk to you openly and honestly, and that was in itself a great lifter of my spirits.”27 He confided in her that he was seeing a psychiatrist and going to group therapy sessions but that it wasn't helping. In a June 2000 e-mail, he wrote: “Even with the Celexa [an antidepressant drug] and the counseling, the depression episodes still come and go. That's unpleasant enough. What is REALLY scary is the paranoia…. Depression, as long as I can somewhat control it with medication and some counseling, I can handle. Psychosis or schizophrenia—that's a whole different story…. Ominously, a lot of the feelings of isolation—and desolation—that I went through before college are returning. I don't want to relive those years again.”28 In an earlier e-mail, in April 2000, he wrote that, at times, “it's like I'm not only sitting at my desk doing work, I'm also a few feet away watching me do it. There's nothing like living in both the first person singular AND the third person singular!”29 In yet another e-mail sent to Linscott, in August 2000, Ivins wrote: “I wish I could control the thoughts in my mind. It's hard enough sometimes controlling my behavior. When I'm being eaten alive inside, I always try to put on a good front here at work and at home, so I don't spread the pestilence…. I get incredible paranoid, delusional thoughts at times, and there's nothing I can do until they go away, either by themselves or with drugs.”30
Ivins was fixated on Linscott, who was twenty-nine years younger than him. He told one of his therapists that he had intended to kill Linscott (at one point he had been angry with her) by driving to upstate New York in 2000 to watch her play in a soccer game and offering her a glass of wine afterward from a jug of wine that he had spiked with poison. Linscott, however, was injured during the game, and Ivins changed his mind. The therapist told Ivins that she would have to report this to the authorities and had him sign a statement pledging to contact her immediately if he had any further homicidal thoughts.31
Despite his deteriorating mental health, nobody stopped Ivins from continuing to work with anthrax spores at Fort Detrick. A report in later years (March 2011) by a panel of behavioral analysts stated that Ivins's history of mental problems should have disqualified him from obtaining a security clearance and that he should not have been allowed by the army to work with dangerous biological agents.32
But work he did, and in the weeks leading up to the first wave of anthrax letters in September 2001 and the second wave in October 2001, Ivins spent unusually long hours alone at night in his lab, a behavior that investigators later argued was evidence he was preparing the deadly anthrax spores for the letter attacks. There was even stronger circumstantial evidence pointing to Ivins as the anthrax letter culprit, including the finding by the FBI that an anthrax spore-batch (from the Ames anthrax strain) known as RMR-1029 was the parent material for the anthrax letter attacks and that Ivins had created and maintained this spore-batch in his laboratory at USAMRIID. Ivins was also among the few anthrax researchers in the country who had the ability to produce the highly purified spores that were used in the mailings.33
Additional circumstantial evidence identifying Ivins as the perpetrator was the fact that the anthrax letters were sent from a mailbox outside the Princeton University offices of the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, the same sorority with which Ivins later admitted he was obsessed. Even though Princeton, New Jersey, was an approximately three-hour drive from Frederick, Maryland, where USAMRIID is located, as noted earlier, Ivins often took three-hour or even longer drives to visit various KKG sorority chapter houses in different states.34 Investigators also learned that Ivins had taken unauthorized environmental samplings (by taking swabs) for anthrax contamination after the attacks in the Fort Detrick building where he worked. When he found anthrax contamination only in the area where he himself worked and realized that it would point to him as a suspect in the attacks, he decontaminated his office and lab and failed to report it.35 He also submitted questionable samples of RMR-1029 when asked to do so by the FBI, a move viewed by investigators as a way to deceive them into thinking that he never had the same batch of anthrax spores that were used in the attacks.36
The anthrax letter attacks occurred in two waves. First, two letters postmarked on September 18, 2001, were sent to television news anchor Tom Brokaw at NBC News and to “Editor” at the New York Post, both located in New York City. Then, two more letters, postmarked on October 9, 2001, were mailed to the Washington, DC, offices of Senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. Another envelope filled with anthrax spores that was never recovered was believed to have been sent to the American Media, Inc., building in Boca Raton, Florida. Five people died from inhaling the Bacillus anthracis spores, and seventeen others were infected, some by inhaling the spores and others by absorbing the spores through the skin, which is known as cutaneous anthrax. Ten thousand more people believed to have been exposed to the anthrax spores underwent antibiotic prophylaxis. Several postal facilities and mailrooms were contaminated, as were buildings and offices on Capitol Hill. The Environmental Protection Agency spent $27 million from its superfund program to decontaminate the Capitol Hill facilities.37
The anthrax attacks, coming on the heels of the 9/11 suicide attacks, spread fear throughout the country that al Qaeda had struck again. There was also concern that the United States would now experience bioterrorism in addition to the usual conventional terrorist attacks such as hijackings, bombings, assassinations, and so forth. Meanwhile, the investigation by the FBI would last nearly seven years and become one of the largest and most complex in the agency's history. The Amerithrax Task Force, as the investigative effort was called, involved twenty-five to thirty full-time investigators from the FBI, the US Postal Inspection Service, and other law-enforcement agencies, as well as federal prosecutors from the District of Columbia and the Justice Department's Counterterrorism Section. More than ten thousand witness interviews were conducted on six different continents, as were eighty searches. More than six thousand items of potential evidence were recovered. The case also involved the issuance of more than 5,750 grand jury subpoenas and the collection of 5,730 environmental samples from sixty site locations.38
It took many years before the FBI was able to connect all the dots and identify Ivins as the prime suspect. Along the way, the agency wrongly suggested that a physician who used to work at Fort Detrick, Steven Hatfill, might be the anthrax attacker. Hatfill sued the government and won a $5.8 million settlement from the Department of Justice, which also issued an official letter exonerating him.39 When the FBI finally started questioning Ivins in 2007 about his role in the anthrax attacks, the troubled scientist began to unravel. He never admitted to the attacks, but there were many inconsistencies in his interviews with investigators, including telling them that he really wasn't an expert on anthrax.40 His mental health, which was always fragile, further deteriorated during this period. In a group therapy session on July 9, 2008, he told the participants that he had access to a .22-caliber rifle, a Glock handgun, and body armor and planned to kill all his coworkers and everybody else who had wronged him in his life. The therapist called the police the next day. Instead of arresting him, though, the police took Ivins to Frederick Memorial Hospital for evaluation. He was released two weeks later. Soon afterward, he committed suicide by taking an overdose of Tylenol PM.41
Because of the missteps in the FBI investigation, including initially suggesting that Hatfill was the anthrax letter attacker, and the lack of a “smoking gun” to implicate Ivins, many people believed that Ivins was innocent. The FBI, however, announced shortly after his suicide that charges were about to be brought against Ivins for the anthrax letter attacks. Then, in February 2010, the Justice Department, FBI, and the US Postal Inspection Service formally concluded their investigation into the attacks and issued a report that presented the circumstantial case against Ivins.42 In January 2011, a National Academy of Sciences panel concluded that while the genetic analysis of the anthrax used in the attacks “did not definitively demonstrate” that they were grown from a sample taken from his laboratory, the evidence was “consistent with and supports an association” between Ivins's flask and the anthrax used in the attacks.43 Additionally, the panel of behavioral analysts that faulted the army for not taking earlier action against Ivins in view of his serious psychological problems also stated that the government's case against Ivins was persuasive. They wrote: “Dr. Ivins was psychologically disposed to undertake the mailings; his behavioral history demonstrated his potential for carrying them out; and he had the motivation and the means.”44 The panel also found that Ivins committed the attacks in order to get revenge against an array of imagined enemies, including the news media, and also “to elevate his own significance” and thereby rescue his anthrax vaccines research, the funding for which was being threatened in 2001.45
The tragic case of Bruce Ivins demonstrates what can happen when you take a brilliant but very troubled man and give him access to some of the deadliest germs in the world. Although he served his country well for most of his life, dedicating his career to finding the best vaccine to protect Americans from anthrax infection, he ultimately could not fight the demons in his mind that drove him to become the most infamous lone wolf bioterrorist in US history. Part ego, part greed, and a lot of paranoia, Ivins could not resist the temptation to use the very germs he dedicated his life to fight against as a weapon in his nefarious plans for glory, revenge, and possible financial reward. That an entire nation was held at bay by the acts of a solitary individual illustrates the impact of the lone wolf terrorist.
WHEN INNOVATION AND CREATIVITY BECOME DANGEROUS
In most fields, we applaud individuals and organizations that are innovative and creative. From art, music, and theater to science, technology, and business, those who dare to be different and think outside the box can be rewarded with financial and professional success. But when terrorists become innovative and creative, they can be quite dangerous. Their innovations can become new ways to inflict fear and bloodshed upon the world. Earlier, I described some of the reasons why lone wolves are innovative, including the lack of any group decision-making process that could stifle creativity. Lone wolves are also not afraid of failing, unlike many terrorist groups that carefully calculate the costs and benefits of any planned attack. How, then, do some lone wolves use their creativity and innovation for terrorist operations?
First, several lone wolves have combined knowledge of a particular field with creativity in designing an attack. For example, Bruce Ivins was one of the world's foremost authorities on anthrax and was able to use that expertise in preparing anthrax spores for the letter attacks. Other individuals or groups may have thought up a similar scenario but felt it was beyond their capability to produce spores that would survive being sent through the mail. Ivins, although depressed and suffering most of his life from mental illness, was still confident enough in his own abilities as a scientist to believe he could do something nobody before had ever attempted. He was aware, like most people, that the Postal Service had been used in the past for terrorist attacks, such as the sending of letter and package bombs in the United States and other countries. Why not try something different, he most likely thought, such as sending a biological agent through the mail?
Mario Buda, another lone wolf we discussed earlier, combined expertise with creative thinking as the likely perpetrator of the 1920 Wall Street bombing. Buda was quite knowledgeable about dynamite, having been involved in prior attacks that used that type of explosive. When he was active with an Italian anarchist group, the Galleanists, Buda was a major player in constructing dynamite bombs that were used in a national mail-bomb plot and then in another series of attacks in which the Galleanists simply left bombs in the middle of the night in front of the homes of prominent officials, including the home of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer. When Buda, who was hiding in New Hampshire, decided in September 1920 to strike one last time in retaliation for the recent indictment of his friends and fellow Galleanists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, he had to come up with a new mode of attack. He probably knew that the authorities would be on the lookout for attacks similar to those that Galleanists had tried before. That would eliminate the use of package bombs or placing bombs at the doorsteps of targets. A standoff attack, in which a powerful bomb would be far enough away from the target not to arouse suspicion but still near enough to cause damage, would seem to be the best option. Since there had not been any major automobile or horse-and-cart bombings by terrorists in the United States in the past, Buda likely felt confident that police and security guards would not be suspicious of a horse-drawn wagon parked close to the J. P. Morgan building and other targets on Wall Street.46 Buda was thus able to implement the first vehicle bombing in US history. He traveled to New York, where he constructed the bomb with a timer and placed it in a horse-drawn wagon that he rode to Wall Street.47 He then fled the scene of his carnage, never to be heard from again.
Another area where a lone wolf can combine expertise in a field with imaginative thinking is cyberterrorism. This involves using the Internet and other communication and information systems that are linked by computers to cause disruptions and chaos in government, businesses, and everyday life. Among the worst-case scenarios would be terrorists sabotaging air traffic control systems and thereby causing airplane crashes; sabotaging electric power systems, thereby causing power blackouts; or sending computer viruses around the world that cause disruption or even collapse of international financial and banking systems. Most cyberterrorist attacks thus far, however, have been relatively low-level incidents, including distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, which are “attempts to render computers unavailable to users through a variety of means, including saturating the target computers or networks with external communication requests, thereby denying service to legitimate users.”48 Although no cyberterrorist attack has yet to approach the worst-case scenarios, the history of terrorism has taught us to never underestimate the ability of individuals or groups to defy expectations. What makes cyberterrorism so attractive to lone wolves is that they can launch an attack in the privacy of their own home. The targets could be a government or business located anywhere in the world. Just as the Internet is growing with breathtaking speed, so too are the computer skills of individuals everywhere. It would be naïve and dangerous to assume that a sophisticated cyberterrorist attack is beyond the capabilities of the knowledgeable and skilled lone wolf computer geek.
Having a particular skill, however, is not a prerequisite for a lone wolf to think up and implement an innovative attack. Lone wolves can get up to speed regarding weapons, tactics, and other aspects of a terrorist operation through individual research via the Internet or, in pre-Internet days, through acquiring books, articles, and other materials from libraries and other sources. For example, Muharem Kurbegovic, the Alphabet Bomber, who was among the first terrorists to threaten to use chemical warfare agents, learned how to make chemical weapons in the mid-1970s by reading such books as Guide to Chemical and Gas Warfare, The Book of Poison, and Unconventional Warfare Devices and Techniques. These books were found in his apartment after his arrest.49 In today's Internet world, there is really nothing holding a creative terrorist back. Once an individual thinks up a new or different type of terrorist scenario, he or she can begin reading webpages, blogs, online publications, and other information to learn enough about the target, tactic, and/or weapon required for the planned attack.
Lone wolves can also use their creativity and innovation to catch counterterrorist planners off guard. Protecting against terrorism in the past has been more of a reactive than anticipatory strategy. Airport security, for example, adapts rather than anticipates what terrorists may do. Once terrorists began sneaking knives and other weapons onboard for hijackings in the early 1960s, airports screened passengers with metal detectors. When terrorists began blowing up planes in midair with bombs hidden in luggage in the late 1960s, x-ray machines were put in place at airports in an effort to discover these bombs. Following an attempt by Richard Reid, a British citizen with ties to al Qaeda, to bring down an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami on December 22, 2001, with explosives hidden in his shoes, airports began requiring passengers to take off their shoes for inspection before boarding planes. The tendency by security officials to wait until something happens and then take measures to try to prevent similar attacks plays into the hands of the creative terrorist, who, by thinking up something clever and new, is able to stay one step ahead of those dedicated to combating this threat.
When lone wolves suffer from mental illness, their creativity and innovation present even greater challenges for counterterrorist officials. No longer can any sense of rationality be expected from these types of terrorists. While all lone wolves, as noted earlier, have an advantage over terrorist groups in not having to worry about alienating their supporters with a misguided attack or having their group wiped out in a government or law-enforcement crackdown following a major incident, there is still an element of rationality for most lone wolves in their decision making. Not so for those lone wolves who are emotionally disturbed. That makes it more difficult for authorities to anticipate the actions of these types of terrorists.
The creative and innovative nature of lone wolves also makes them capable of launching “black swan” types of attacks. These are unique, novel terrorist incidents that nobody had previously thought possible. The term “black swan” was originally a metaphor for things that were believed impossible to exist. This was due to the fact that, for centuries, people in Europe had only seen white swans in nature. However, after the discovery of Australia and the sightings of black swans in the late-seventeenth century, the meaning of the term changed to refer to things and events that were perceived to be impossible but could actually occur. According to Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of the bestselling book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, a black swan has three main attributes. First, it is an event that is an outlier, since it lies beyond the realm of normal expectations. Second, it has an extreme impact. And third, even though we never expect such an event to occur, we tend to come up with explanations for it after its occurrence, which then makes the black swan seem to be explainable and predictable.50 While terrorist groups may also be capable of perpetrating black-swan attacks, the boundless nature of lone wolves and their total freedom to think up anything they want and then try to act on it makes them more likely than a terrorist group to commit an attack off everyone's radar.51
GAS, GERMS, OR NUKES: WHICH IS MORE LIKELY FOR A LONE WOLF WMD ATTACK?
I discussed earlier why I believe lone wolves are prime candidates for using weapons of mass destruction. These reasons range from a lack of any self-constraints concerning casualties or reactions as lone wolves decide upon an attack to the ability to think outside the box and design creative, innovative, and dangerous attacks. However, since WMDs include chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons, it is important to determine which of these is more likely to be used by the individual terrorist.
Of the three different, basic types of WMDs, chemical weapons are the easiest for a lone wolf with a background in chemistry to produce. Chemical agents are “poisons that incapacitate, injure, or kill through their toxic effects on the skin, eyes, lungs, blood, nerves, or other organs.”52 The precursor chemicals for the production of many chemical warfare agents are readily available from commercial chemical suppliers, and several chemical weapons, such as sarin, tabun, and VX gas, can be made either at home or in a small laboratory. As is true for terrorist groups, a lone wolf still has obstacles to overcome in terms of dispersing chemical agents. If not done properly, as in the case of Aum Shinrikyo, the attack is compromised. Yet, with information on how to effectively disperse chemical agents available from the Internet and other sources, this is not an insurmountable obstacle for a lone wolf.
Acquiring, producing, and dispersing biological agents is somewhat more difficult, but it's still within the ability of those lone wolves with scientific backgrounds. While Bruce Ivins had the expertise to produce the particular strain of anthrax that he sent through the mail to his various targets, not every lone wolf who chooses to use bioweapons needs to be a Fort Detrick microbiologist. As with chemical weapons, there is enough publicly available information on the Internet and in other sources to help the lone wolf who wants to launch a bioterrorist attack. One of the major differences between chemical and biological weapons is that chemical weapons are primarily manmade (such as sarin nerve gas), while biological weapons are comprised of living organisms such as bacteria and viruses as well as toxins derived from plants or animals. Biological warfare agents involve “the deliberate use of disease and natural poisons to incapacitate or kill people.”53 Among the biological agents that could be used by lone wolves are bacterial agents such as anthrax, viral agents such as smallpox, and toxin agents such as ricin. An important distinction to make regarding biological agents is that some, such as anthrax, cause infectious but not contagious diseases, while others, such as smallpox, cause infectious and contagious diseases. People exposed to anthrax, therefore, do not have to be quarantined, but those exposed to smallpox will have to be isolated from others. Contagious diseases can also spread around the world as one person passes the disease to another. The mass-killing potential of biological agents makes these attractive weapons for lone wolves.
There is, however, a great deal of uncertainty regarding how exactly a bioterrorist attack will unfold. Bioterrorism is characterized by much more uncertainty regarding tactics, targets, weapons, and scenarios than is the case for conventional terrorism, the terrorism that we are all more familiar with because it has happened so many times before. Conventional terrorism includes tactics such as hijackings, bombings, shootings, kidnappings, barricade/hostage incidents, suicide airplane attacks, and the like. The targets of conventional terrorist attacks include governments, militaries, businesses, and society, while the weapons used by conventional terrorists are, among other things, explosives, guns, knives, and rocket-propelled grenades. And with many different types of conventional terrorist attacks occurring over the years, ranging from simultaneous car and truck bombings to assassinations and hijackings, we know of thousands of different scenarios that may occur.
But it is an entirely different story when we look at the world of bioterrorism. Since there has never been a bioterrorist attack with large numbers of casualties, perpetrated either by a lone wolf or a terrorist group, there is no substantial track record of previous major bioterrorist incidents to guide us in planning for this threat. We really don't know what tactics, targets, weapons, or scenarios will be associated with current and future bioterrorists. In terms of tactics, lone wolves could disperse anthrax spores from a low-flying airplane or crop duster, or they might release a biological agent from the ground in an aerosol device such as a spray can. They could place ricin in the heating, ventilation, air-conditioning (HVAC) system of a building, or they could infect somebody with smallpox and watch it spread around the world. The targets could be the usual suspects, such as governments, militaries, businesses, and the general public, or it could be the economy. A viable target could be agriculture, for example, in the form of destroying crops and livestock. The weapons for a lone wolf bioterrorist attack could be any one biological agent or a combination of several different biological agents, including anthrax, smallpox, botulinum toxin, ricin, and/or new, novel agents that are genetically engineered. And when it comes to scenarios, we are confronted with basically a blank slate. We know of the anthrax letter attacks, but almost everything else when assessing what terrorists are likely to do with bioweapons is pure speculation, since we just do not have a database or history of major incidents to analyze. All this works to the advantage of the lone wolf perpetrating a bioterrorist attack. Furthermore, since biological agents are invisible, odorless, and tasteless, and symptoms of a biological-agent attack may not appear for hours or even days, a lone wolf could thus unleash these agents without raising suspicions at the scene of the attack.
The technological barriers for a lone wolf interested in producing and disseminating a biological agent are not insurmountable. As one microbiologist writes:
Today, anyone with a high school education can use widely available protocols and prepackaged kits to modify the sequence of a gene or replace genes within a microorganism; one can also purchase small, disposable, self-contained bioreactors for propagating viruses and microorganisms. Such advances continue to lower the barriers to biologic-weapons development.54
Former secretary of the navy Richard Danzig agrees, noting:
Compared to working with nuclear materials, the challenges of developing the requisite know-how and obtaining the required equipment for bioterrorism are modest. The hurdles that impede obtaining an effective biological weapon will vary from pathogen to pathogen, according to the mode of distribution and the efficiency desired by an attacker. But all these hurdles are being lowered by the dissemination of knowledge, techniques, and equipment.55
The most difficult, and therefore least probable, of the weapons of mass destruction that could be used by a lone wolf is a nuclear weapon. The appeal of such a weapon to a terrorist lies in its killing potential. Nuclear weapons “can be more than a million times more powerful than the same weight of conventional explosives, create shock waves, high pressures, flying debris, and extreme heat—the same mechanisms by which conventional explosives injure and kill, albeit at vastly increased scale.”56 Nuclear explosions also create radiation, which can kill or injure exposed people at the instant of detonation. There is also the risk of fallout, which can spread over an area much greater than that affected by the bomb's immediate radius. Fallout can also lead to long-term, delayed medical problems, including cancer and genetic abnormalities.57
Yet the technological, logistical, and financial obstacles involved in acquiring or building and using nuclear weapons would seem to be too much for a lone wolf to overcome. Nuclear weapons are much more expensive to produce than chemical or biological weapons, and the technology needed to devise such weapons is not widely available. It is also much more difficult for a lone wolf to transport a nuclear device to a target site without being discovered through radiation detectors and other security devices than it would be for a lone wolf to transport a chemical or biological weapon. While a lone wolf could attempt to attack a nuclear power plant with a conventional explosive, the tight security in place at most nuclear plants would be difficult for a lone wolf to penetrate. Furthermore, a conventional explosive is unlikely to do much damage to nuclear-reactor plants because they are built to resist damage by explosives and even the impact of commercial aircraft.58
There has been much discussion in policy and academic circles regarding terrorists building a crude nuclear device or stealing a nuclear weapon. Distinguished political scientist Graham Allison observed that “nuclear terrorists are most likely to use a small weapon stolen from the arsenal of one of the nuclear states.”59 However, one of the world's leading terrorism experts, Brian Michael Jenkins, disputes this argument, noting, “While the possibility that some talented team of terrorists conceivably might someday design and build a crude nuclear device cannot be entirely dismissed, no terrorist group, not even those with potential access to poorly guarded nuclear sites like Russia's Chechens or those with hundreds of millions of dollars to spend like al Qaeda, has come close.”60 Both Allison and Jenkins were referring to groups or cells of terrorists and not to lone wolf operatives, for which obtaining and using a nuclear weapon would be even more difficult. Lone wolves are, however, capable of setting off a “dirty bomb,” which is not a nuclear bomb but rather a conventional explosive filled with radioactive material. While such an attack would not kill large numbers of people, except for those killed by the initial blast, it would still cause widespread panic and health problems related to airborne radiation.
Given how dangerous lone wolves can be, their creativity and innovation make them difficult to ignore. Yet there is a missing link in the story of lone wolf terrorism. Unlike many terrorist groups that have female members or even female leaders, the majority of lone wolves have been male. Why, then, have we not had many female lone wolves, and should we expect this to change in the coming years?