A never-ending race

Last week we reported how the reality of the changing face or modern warfare and especially the threat of airborne terror has suddenly crept up on Southern Africa. Truth is that globally for some time now  authorities have been involved in a never-ending race to keep aviation safe.

A report also published last week  by Stratfor Global Intelligence gives a fascinating account of the race with terrorists to stay one step ahead in the battle to keep international aviation safe.

While aviation security and some of the measures being implemented have become a big media issue in recent weeks, coupled with the appearance of explosive devices in air cargo, Stratfor’s Scott Stewart gives a thought-provoking account of developments on this front over the past almost 50 years.

Overview

Commercial aviation has been threatened by terrorism for decades. From the first hijackings and bombings in the late 1960s to last month’s attempt against the UPS and FedEx cargo aircraft   and letter bombs to European leaders dispatched from Greece, the threat has remained constant. Jihadists have long had a fixation with attacking aircraft.

When security measures were put in place to protect against Bojinka-style attacks in the 1990s — attacks that involved modular explosive devices smuggled onto planes and left aboard — the jihadists adapted and conducted 9/11-style attacks.

When security measures were put in place to counter 9/11-style attacks, the jihadists quickly responded by going to onboard suicide attacks with explosive devices concealed in shoes.

When that tactic was discovered and shoes began to be screened, they switched to devices containing camouflaged liquid explosives.

When that plot failed and security measures were altered to restrict the quantity of liquids that people could take aboard aircraft, we saw the jihadists alter the paradigm once more and attempt the underwear-bomb attack last Christmas.

In a special edition of Inspire magazine released last weekend, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) noted that, due to the increased passenger screening implemented after the Christmas Day 2009 attempt, the group’s operational planners decided to employ explosive devices sent via air cargo.

Finally, it is also important to understand that the threat does not emanate just from jihadists like al Qaeda and its regional franchises. Over the past several decades, aircraft have been attacked by a number of different actors, including North Korean intelligence officers, Sikh, Palestinian and Hezbollah militants and mentally disturbed individuals like the Unabomber, among others, and now the economic disaffected in Greece.

Realities

While understanding that the threat is very real, it is also critical to recognise that there is no such thing as absolute, foolproof security. This applies to ground-based facilities as well as aircraft.

If security procedures and checks have not been able to keep contraband out of high-security prisons, it is unreasonable to expect them to be able to keep unauthorised items off aircraft, where (thankfully) security checks of crew and passengers are far less invasive than they are for prisoners.

As long as people, luggage and cargo are allowed aboard aircraft, and as long as people on the ground crew and the flight crew have access, aircraft will remain vulnerable to internal and external threats.

This reality is accented by the sheer number of passengers that must be screened and the number of aircraft that must be secured.

According to figures supplied by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), in 2006, the last year for which numbers are available, the agency screened 708,400,522 passengers on domestic flights and international flights coming into the United States. This averages out to over 1.9 million passengers per day.

Another reality is that, as mentioned above, jihadists and other people who seek to attack aircraft have proven to be  resourceful and adaptive. They carefully study security measures, identify vulnerabilities and then seek to exploit them.

Their innovative efforts to camouflage explosives in everyday items and hide them on the bodies of suicide bombers will continue and these efforts will be intended to exploit vulnerabilities in current screening systems.

The latest issue of Inspire magazine demonstrated how AQAP has done some very detailed research to identify screening vulnerabilities. As the group noted in the magazine: “The British government said that if a toner weighs more than 500 grams it won’t be allowed on board a plane. Who is the genius who came up with this suggestion? Do you think that we have nothing to send but printers?”

AQAP also noted in the magazine that it is working to identify innocuous substances like toner ink that, when X-rayed, will appear similar to explosive compounds like PETN, since such innocuous substances will be ignored by screeners.

Radiology experts also tell us that it takes special training, skills and experience to properly  and accurately interpret X-rays. To find such staff to deploy in sufficient numbers at airports across the globe is no small challenge.

With many countries now banning cargo from Yemen, it will be more difficult  to send those other items in cargo from Sanaa, but the group has shown itself to be flexible, with the underwear-bomb operative beginning his trip to Detroit out of Nigeria rather than Yemen. In the special edition of Inspire, AQAP also specifically threatened to work with allies to launch future attacks from other locations.

Look for the bomber, not just the bomb

The ability to camouflage explosives in a variety of ways or hide them inside the bodies of suicide operatives means that the most significant weakness of any suicide-attack plan is the operative assigned to conduct the attack. Even in a plot to attack 10 or 12 aircraft, a group would need to manufacture only about 12 pounds of high explosives — about what is required for a single, small suicide device and far less than is required for a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device. Because of this, the operatives are more of a limiting factor than the explosives themselves; it is far more difficult to find and train 10 or 12 suicide bombers than it is to produce 10 or 12 devices.

A successful attack requires operatives who are not only dedicated enough to initiate a suicide device without getting cold feet; they must also possess the nerve to calmly proceed through airport security checkpoints without alerting officers that they are up to something sinister.

This set of tradecraft skills is referred to as demeanour and while remaining calm under pressure and behaving normally may sound simple in theory, practising good demeanour under the extreme pressure of a suicide operation is very difficult.

Demeanour has proved to be the Achilles heel of several terror plots and it is not something that militant groups have spent a great deal of time teaching their operatives. Because of this, it is frequently easier to spot demeanour mistakes than it is to find well-hidden explosives. Such demeanour mistakes can also be accentuated, or even induced, by contact with security personnel in the form of interviews, or even by unexpected changes in security protocols that alter the security environment that a potential attacker is anticipating and for which he has has planned .

Profiling

There has been much discussion of the often-controversial subject of profiling, but the difficulty of creating a reliable and accurate physical profile of a jihadist, and the adaptability and ingenuity of the jihadist planners, means that any attempt at profiling based only on race, ethnicity or religion is doomed to fail, not least on the basis of  human rights – and the legal and moral objections and possible obstacles this can cause.

In fact, profiling can also prove counterproductive to good security by blinding people to real threats. They will dismiss potential malefactors who do not fit the specific profile they have been provided.

In an environment where the potential threat is difficult to identify, it is doubly important to profile individuals based on their behaviour rather than their ethnicity or nationality — what is referred to as focusing on the “how” instead of the “who.”

Instead of relying on physical profiles, which allow attack planners to select operatives who do not match the profiles being selected for more intensive screening, security personnel should be encouraged to exercise their intelligence, intuition and commonsense. A Caucasian U.S. citizen who shows up at the US embassy in Nairobi or Dhaka claiming to have lost his passport may be far more dangerous than some random Pakistani or Yemeni citizen, even though the American does not appear to fit the profile for requiring extra security checks.

However, when we begin to consider traits such as intelligence, intuition and commonsense, one of the other realities that must be faced with aviation security is that, quite simply, it is not an area where the airlines or governments have allocated the funding required to hire the best personnel. Airport screeners make far less than FBI special agents or CIA case officers and receive just a fraction of the training.

Before 9/11, most airports in the United States relied on contract security guards to conduct screening duties. After 9/11, many of these same officers went from working for companies like Wackenhut to being TSA employees. There was no real effort made to increase the quality of screening personnel by offering much higher salaries to recruit a higher calibre of candidate.

There is frequent mention of the need to make US airport security more like that in Israel. Aside from the constitutional and cultural factors that would prevent American airport screeners from ever treating Muslim travellers the way they are treated by El Al, another huge difference is simply the amount of money spent on salaries and training for screeners and other security personnel. El Al is also aided by the fact that it has a very small fleet of aircraft that fly only a small number of passengers to a handful of destinations.

Additionally, airport screening duty is simply not glamorous work. Officers are required to work long shifts conducting monotonous checks and are in near constant contact with a travelling public that can at times become surly when screeners follow policies established by bureaucrats at much higher pay grades. Granted, there are TSA officers who abuse their authority and do not exhibit good interpersonal skills, but anyone who travels regularly has also witnessed fellow travellers acting like idiots.

While it is impossible to keep all contraband off aircraft, efforts to improve technical methods and procedures to locate weapons and IED components must continue. However, these efforts must not only be reacting to past attacks and attempts but should also be looking forward to thwart future attacks that involve a shift in the terrorist paradigm. At the same time, the often-overlooked human elements of airport security, including situational awareness, observation and intuition need to be emphasised now more than ever. It is those soft skills that hold the real key to looking for the bomber and not just the bomb.

(This article is a slightly shortened version of the original Strafor report and also contains some small additions by our own staff)