Recent portrayals of body cavity bombs as game changers that may present a new means of delivering a devastating Bojinka-plot-style attack against commercial aviation are more knee-jerk over-reaction than thoughtful security guidance.
One such article: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1218562/Bombers-hide-devices-inside-bodies-Travellers-Europe-face-body-X-rays.html#
My rationale for taking this with a grain of salt is that there are a lot of experiments that terrorist groups have tried out and then just given up for one main reason: they didn't work. The recently reported body cavity bomb killed the suicide bomber but not his target. Now the details of this kind of attack are coming out on radical web sites. Is it because the terrorists are bragging about it and trying to show off, or is it because this was a failed experiment and they are trying to get some bit of mileage out of it? I suspect the latter.
I see this phenomenon as analagous to the chlorine weaponization fears we witnessed in the opening months of 2007 in Iraq. It became almost a fad, until about March or April 2007, to throw a chlorine cylinder into the back of a pick-up that had been turned into a truck bomb. While the handful of cases of this action created a lot of fears of chlorine weaponization and new WMD attacks in the U.S., the reality proved otherwise. Fatalities came not from chlorine gas attacks, but from the explosions. Moreover, the bombs themselves consumed most of the chlorine released from cylinders. By November of that year, the trend had gone the opposite way. Too much control of chlorine out of fears of weaponization led to delays in delivering it for water disinfection, and cholera outbreaks in Iraq started to occur, as a result.
My sense is that the same kind of phenomenon is taking place with these body cavity bombs. So if the terrorists can't use the tactic effectively to attack targets, they seem to be trying to get mileage out of it to force the rest of us to overspend on new defenses.
What to do as a defender? Take a page from California's Office of Emergency Services of the 1990s and from TSA's current playbook that allows some flexibility in implementing random, enhanced security measures. OES did this during the first Gulf War when shadowy threats of Iraqi agents in California left private and public entities clamoring for advice about what to do. In addition to feasible countermeasures, an OES instructor recommended placing visible signs saying things more or less like, "We are sorry for the inconvenience caused by our extra security during these times of heightened alert." This tactic gave pause to potential attackers, even when the defenders had not yet implemented a single extra security measure. Such measures remain in our current playbook, and it makes no sense to scrap them or to treat one more botched attack as a game changer. Used judiciously, tactics already in hand are not a bad way of turning the tables on adversaries who would try to scare us as their consolation prize for not being able to blow us up with something pulled from their ... nether regions.
PS: The Bojinka plot to blow up multiple airplanes at the same time failed.
- Nick Catrantzos
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Nick Catrantzos + Tom Goff
- All Secure
- NICK CATRANTZOS is the lead author of the All Secure website and is the emeritus security director for a large public organization. He has also managed security aspects of corporate takeovers, response to international hostage situations, and finding and keeping secrets. He has been board certified in security management, licensed as a private investigator, and certified as an incident commander. He worked as a case officer for a discreet branch of public service. He protected stealth technology at Lockheed and, later, as a consulting security director for both Kroll and Control Risks, he assisted executives with workplace violence cases and with protecting VIPs and critical assets globally in volatile areas. Nick's partner, TOM GOFF, was a captain in the Military Police Corps, U.S. Army Reserve and has a law degree from the University of California at Davis. He is a former reporter for Fortune Magazine, was senior editor at New York Magazine and Esquire, and has provided crisis and communications counsel to senior executives at Fortune 500 companies, including Lockheed, ARCO, Microsoft, Nissan, and Sony Pictures.