 Dick
Coffman is an international business and security
consultant and media commentator on intelligence,
homeland security and terrorism. He is managing
Director of Odysseus
Group International, which provides risk
management and security solutions to the transportation,
basic infrastructure and manufacturing industries.
Mr. Coffman specializes in ports and maritime
security and homeland defense. He is founder
and President of Coffman
Global Group, which leverages worldwide
networks for business development and marketing
in high technology, basic materials and capital
construction.
Mr. Coffman has conducted assessments of intelligence
operations for the U.S. Customs Service and
the Office of Naval Intelligence and for a
major defense contractor.
Mr. Coffman served 31 years in the Central
Intelligence Agency where he formed and managed
the Agency's first counterterrorism analytic
organization and served as Chief of Station,
chief of staff to the Director of the Clandestine
Service, coordinator of major worldwide covert
intelligence programs and CIA representative
to the NATO Commander.
He also served four years in the U.S. Marine
Corps, including duty in Vietnam in 1965 and
1966. Mr. Coffman remained in the Marine Corps
Reserves retiring in 1992 at the grade of
Colonel. Mr. Coffman is a student of military
history and an authority on the U.S. Civil
War.
Coffman
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June 2, 2004
Two widely reported stories this week underscore the terrorist peril facing the US homeland and give us perhaps one last opportunity to fix serious homeland security problems before disaster strikes.
Cabinet secretaries Tom Ridge and John Ashcroft and FBI Director Robert Mueller are warning that terrorists already in the US are planning major attacks this Summer to coincide with significant political events and holidays.
At the same time, a prestigious think tank released a report this week that a newly fortified and more clandestine and dangerous al Qaeda is ready to strike the US and its western allies with weapons of mass destruction.
As with other alerts since 9/11, it is impossible for outsiders to assess the accuracy and credibility of threat information, let alone pin down the timing, location or method of attack without access to classified information. By going public and using dire language to describe the threat, it is clear that senior security officials are taking this information very seriously.
Nor is the threat diminished by Ridge's decision not to elevate the national alert from "yellow" to "orange." The fact that the alert system has been raised five times since 9/11 has become an albatross to national preparedness. Putting the entire nation on alert is costly in resources and over time erodes Washington's credibility. A targeted approach is more efficient and realistic.
Both the US Government and the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), one of the world's best at making strategic assessments, have concluded that al Qaeda - giddy over bringing down Spain's pro US government with its March 11 attacks against Madrid's rail commuter system - is planning to impact the US November elections or other major events this Summer.
In a report issued this week, IISS says that the Madrid attacks show that al Qaeda has regained its footing after severe setbacks in Afghanistan and elsewhere and constitutes a more dangerous threat in the West.
In fact, regional and local al Qaeda affiliates and cells are newly fortified by experienced middle-level terrorist cadres dispersed around the world, and are employing highly disciplined clandestine techniques putting them further from law enforcement reach. According to IISS, these cadres, numbering 18,000, have been galvanized by Iraq and inspired by Osama bin-Ladin's iconic stature and periodic taped messages.
While clearly prepared to attack soft targets, IISS correctly believes that al Qaeda is aiming for a 9/11-scale spectacular in the US using weapons of mass destruction.
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One can only hope that these warnings will stir the US from further drift into pre 9/11 complaisance, including disdain and indifference to sensible and necessary measures to plug serious vulnerabilities on the home front.
While many of these actions will pay off only in the long term, others will harden our defenses quickly. Taken together, however, these measures signal a higher level of seriousness and determination to protect the homeland and will serve as deterrence to terrorists seeking to attack high impact and lightly defended targets.
Domestic Intelligence. Topping the list is a dangerous shortfall of domestic intelligence. The warnings from senior US officials inadvertently but glaringly emphasize how little we know about al Qaeda's presence, strength, plans and activities in the US. If we had better intelligence, the threat would presumably be more manageable.
We have attempted to patch over the lack of a credible, centralized domestic intelligence collection and analytic capability by establishing a welter of analytic fusion centers to "connect the dots."
In fact, we need more dots on the domestic terrorist threat to connect. To correct this, we have tried to reorient parts of the FBI to domestic terrorism collection. The Bureau - which has no premonitory intelligence tradition, heretofore little interest in it and a reactive, law enforcement mindset - has made but modest progress down this tortuous difficult road hardly matching the urgency of the threat.
The final recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, which are likely to address the domestic intelligence problem might represent the last chance to build a national consensus behind establishment of such a capability as soon as feasible.
Illegal Immigration. Lack of domestic intelligence might be less harmful if we as a nation could come to grips with the out-of-control problem of illegal immigration, which completely undermines our attempts to secure our borders against terrorists and conveyances packed with explosives and weapons.
How can we hope to develop programs, statutes, protocols and regimens for controlling our internal security in an environment of blatant disregard for our laws and border enforcement among other basic legitimate security concerns?
Frankly, it has become tiresome to enumerate the countless examples of American politicians at all levels encouraging such law-breaking by providing illegals: drivers licenses; in-state tuition rates to state-financed universities; privileged positions on waiting lists for publicly subsidized housing; immunity from enforcement action by forbidding local police forces - most of whom swear to uphold the Constitution and laws of this land - from enforcing federal immigration statutes; and, official recognition of foreign-issued documentation to establish eligibility for public benefits and subsidies.
This attitude must fundamentally change, or we will never be safe within our borders.
Privacy Jihad. While on the subject of necessary attitude changes, it seems past time to end the "Privacy Jihad," the phrase coined by the Wall Street Journal to describe fierce although misguided and ill-considered opposition to such technology and analytic techniques as data mining and link analysis and to the Patriot Act.
The technology sorts through trillions of bits of scattered data helping law enforcement and intelligence agencies to identify threats, pinpoint terrorists and provide promising investigative leads.
Having successfully scuttled the Pentagon's Total Information Awareness program, opponents have focused on a computerized airline passenger screening system called CAPPS II, which would check information routinely and voluntarily provided by passengers including names, addresses, telephone numbers and credit card numbers against existing terrorist and criminal databases and assign a risk factor for each passenger. Based on that score, the passenger could receive additional screening or be refused boarding.
CAPPS II has been delayed several times while the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) sought to construct elaborate safeguards to prevent governmental abuses. Particularly stunning have been the actions of several commercial airlines - whose survival wholly depends on reassuring a nervous flying public - who have with great fanfare pulled out of test runs of the system when critics publicized their involvement.
To its great credit, DHS has tenaciously persisted in moving forward with development and testing of this system and still plans to deploy it operationally this year. Given their enormous stake in safe travel, the airlines almost certainly will cooperate in such a system once operational.
Equally as misguided and potentially destructive is opposition to extension of the Patriot Act, which has facilitated unparalleled cooperation among US law enforcement and intelligence and given these agencies legal tools to fight terrorists long available to Organized Crime task forces.
The 9/11 Commission hearings made clear that this statute has eliminated the "wall" that prevented law enforcement and intelligence agencies from sharing information prior to 9/11. The hearings identified instances in which the "wall" blocked information regarding the 9/11 plot from reaching agencies that might have taken action to uncover and undermine the conspiracy.
Loose Nukes. The Administration this week announced a program to revitalize US efforts to rigorously identify, secure and dispose of enriched Uranium, an essential building block for a "dirty bomb."
Energy Secretary Abraham said the new $450 million program aims to return to the US some 330 tons of enriched Uranium from Russia by the end of next year and to eliminate all Russian spent fuel by the end of 2010.
This is a useful start on a long-needed effort to deny terrorists materials and capabilities to build radiation weapons. Not only is there abundant evidence that al Qaeda is fascinated with building deliverable mass destruction weapons, but it is entirely feasible with enough time and resources to catalog and take critical materials and technologies off the market.
Worse, much of this material in Russia and its former constituent republics is in the hands of bureaucracies and parastatal companies starved for revenue and with thousands of under employed and under paid workers with sophisticated technical and scientific skills. No longer able in the post Cold War world to build weapons systems using these deadly payloads, these facilities and workers are ripe for exploitation by rogue nations and terrorist organizations with the cash to buy these materials and operational savvy to move it clandestinely outside the former Soviet Union.
While the US and its western allies have launched programs since 1992 to take nuclear and chemical materials off the black market, follow up funding and action have been lacking. This program will not totally eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction falling into terrorist hands, but, if implemented vigorously, it will reduce what is now a serious threat.
Enlisting the Private Sector. With some 85 percent of the nation's critical infrastructure, including ports, bridges, factories, production facilities, power plants and utility grids, in the hands of the private sector, it seems almost elementary that governments at all levels would have worked out a division of labor and allocation of resources to ensure this infrastructure is protected.
But, distracted by massive start-up problems, DHS is still struggling with knotty, but very basic issues. For example, DHS says that it will not impose new mandates and regulations on the private sector, nor foot the bill for security measures. At the same time, several surveys indicate the private sector - under pressure to cut costs - has ratcheted up spending on security only fractionally and reluctantly since 9/11.
Federal action is urgently required, and several things can be done in the short term. Using the model of legislation to aid the hard struck commercial aviation industry immediately after 9/11, Congress can again enact laws to shield the private sector from liability suits and provide low-cost insurance coverage. Both Congress and the Executive Branch need to provide safeguards for such proprietary information as computer codes, manufacturing processes and fail-safe mechanisms so that cooperating on security measures with government authorities doesn't penalize industry.
DHS needs as a matter of priority to develop effective formulas for allocating federal funds both to localities and infrastructure based on vulnerability and risk assessments. Heretofore, such allocations have been based on case-by-case decisions or per capita calculations, which have shortchanged threatened areas and funded remote, less threatened areas.
While we can't hope to protect the nation's entire infrastructure, we need to get to work on determining what is most important, what is most vulnerable and what is most threatened and strengthen our defenses accordingly. The cost of not doing so is too awful to contemplate.
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© 2004 Richard Coffman. All opinions expressed in this article
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