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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Could an operation as extensive as Marwan's remain a secret?
First and foremost among the reasons why jihadists don't often stray far outside their ranks to pull off terrorist attacks is operational security. A high-ranking Yemeni operative of al-Qaida known as Khallad told U.S. interrogators that outside of a willingness to commit suicide, the most important criterion in selecting participants for the 9/11 attacks was the patience necessary to endure years' worth of planning and training while escaping detection. Opening an ambitious series of operations to individuals not bonded to a terror cell through strong ideological ties is an invitation to have a plot penetrated and compromised. It's no accident that the 9/11 hijackers restricted their contacts when inside the U.S. to as few people as necessary. Indeed, a Spanish police informant reportedly warned his contacts months before the Madrid bombings that the train station was being targeted -- information he said he acquired from his pot-dealing brother-in-law.
And even if Marwan's plan relied exclusively on jihadists, it wouldn't prevent careless errors. Key al-Qaida operative Ramzi bin al-Shibh informed Mohammed Atta during a July 2001 meeting in Madrid that Osama bin Laden wanted the attacks on New York and Washington expedited out of fear that having too many U.S.-based operatives for too long would jeopardize the plot. The detention of Zacarias Moussaoui shows bin Laden was right to worry. Within three days of Moussaoui's arrival at flight school in Eagan, Minn., in August 2001, INS agents arrested him on immigration charges. He immediately attracted the suspicion of his flight instructor through his stated desire to "take off and land" a Boeing 747 and his disinterest in earning a commercial pilot's license, not to mention his cash payment of an $8,300 training fee. While the FBI was never able to unspool information from Moussaoui into an understanding of the imminent 9/11 attack -- which the 9/11 Commission considers a missed opportunity to thwart the plot -- bin al-Shibh believes that bin Laden and 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed might have actually called off the operation had they known beforehand that Moussaoui was in custody.
Unlike bin Laden, Marwan isn't so troubled by operational security. He films his terrorist communiqué in the back room of a trendy nightclub -- so hot that its dance floor is pulsing during the worst terrorist attacks in American history! -- which his agents equipped with special catacombs for hasty exits. Marwan's sprawling network inside is abuzz with activity that should have made it low-hanging fruit for the data-mining juggernaut of CTU. The Araz family transformed an abandoned factory on the outskirts of L.A. into the terrorist equivalent of an office building, complete with secure Internet servers. A Midwestern cell stands ready to overwhelm a military convoy carrying a nuclear warhead at practically a moment's notice. While Dina Araz tells CTU that the cells didn't communicate with one another, Marwan checks in with everyone constantly. "Spot communication may not be such a problem, but maintaining cells that communicate regularly and crystallize a number of attacks probably would be more difficult," Stevenson says. "The more you communicate given operations, the more likely it is that the security authorities will find out."
Ironically, the inability of CTU to pick up on the terrorists' myriad sloppiness might lend an element of realism to "24" -- that is, good old-fashioned incompetence. If there's ever a 24 Commission, CTU director Erin Driscoll is in serious trouble.
What if the terrorists got their hands on the "nuclear football"?
By the time they did, it would be useless. On a day of spectacular attacks -- from the kidnapping and show trial of Defense Secretary James Heller to the meltdown of a San Gabriel nuclear reactor (there isn't one, in case you were wondering) -- by far the most traumatic is the airborne destruction of Air Force One. While incapacitating the president of the United States obviously has its utility if you're a terrorist, for Marwan it's merely a fringe benefit. What he's really after is the nuclear football, the briefcase containing the attack options and authorization codes for the nation's nuclear arsenal that never leaves the president's side. Blowing up Air Force One while the president is onboard and recovering the football from the smoldering wreckage just seemed the easiest path from point A to point B.
Why Marwan goes to the trouble is a mystery. Leave aside for a moment the question whether the titanium interior of the most important attaché case in history could survive a missile strike and then a 30,000-foot plummet. In the event of an attack on the president, says Globalsecurity.org's John Pike, the football "would have been inactivated immediately. [Then] the football that the vice president carries is hot." From the perspective of national-security procedure, the issue isn't the football, but the chain of command for the stewardship of its contents. If a scenario like Marwan's really played out, antiques collectors would have a greater use for a purloined nuclear football than terrorists would. As Pike puts it, "You might be able to sell it on eBay as a curiosity."
It gets weirder. Marwan manages to rip a page out of the football's codebook. He quickly informs his Midwestern operatives that it contains the location of a warhead in transit to a facility in Iowa and instructs his team to intercept the nuke. That's sheer fantasy. The football's crucial contents are the Single Integrated Options Plan -- the menu for ordering a nuclear attack à la carte -- and the authentication mechanisms to instruct the National Military Command Center at the Pentagon that the time is at hand. "It does not concern itself with day-to-day movements of anything," says a knowledgeable former senior administration official. "And it does not contain specific information needed to unlock a single nuclear weapon."
