Our vulnerabilities will always be

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By MARTIN DYCKMAN

© St. Petersburg Times,
published September 16, 2001

TALLAHASSEE -- When I lived in Washington, I couldn't drive past the White House or Pentagon without wondering about their close proximity to the National Airport takeoff and landing pattern. What if a plane went astray, or were commandeered by terrorists? I took it for granted, however, that important people in government were thinking about that, too.

Now that it has happened, though in a different way, the hardest part to believe is that it wasn't anticipated. If it isn't fair to blame the FBI or CIA for not detecting the plot, it's harder to forgive the laggard response once it was demonstrably under way. Not one, not two, not three but four planes had been hijacked. Shouldn't there have been an automatic alarm to scramble jet fighters and to evacuate the Capitol and other potential terrorist targets along the eastern seaboard? Yet the White House wasn't cleared until two minutes after the Pentagon had been struck, which was 40 minutes after the second attack at the World Trade Center made horribly clear that the first was no accident. Does the FAA function in a vacuum? Is there no one in government who sits beside the domestic equivalent of a nuclear button?

Hindsight comes easily, of course, which is why nations are forever preparing to fight the last war at the expense of leaving themselves unready for the next one. With strict new levels of air security we probably don't have to worry too much about another hijacking. But as someone in official Washington warned Friday, we can be even more certain that Osama bin Laden and other terrorist enemies are searching out our other vulnerabilities.

It is to be assumed -- or, at least, hoped -- that some very bright people on our side will be tasked to do the same thing; to put themselves inside bin Laden's mind and do as he would do. But once they do, will anyone take it to heart? This sort of exercise is routine in the military. They call it war gaming. Every nation's military establishment spends its peacetimes planning -- or so they hope -- for all imaginable contingencies. Ours knew in detail what it would do, for example, had Soviet tanks ever poured through the Fulda Gap, and if the invasion of Kuwait took Foggy Bottom by surprise, it wasn't so at the Pentagon.

But in the pitiless afterlight of Sept. 11, 2001, it is urgent to ask whether we war-game terrorists in the same fashion as we war-game foreign governments, and if so, to what use the results are put. The apparent answers are not encouraging.

I put the first question to Sen. Bob Graham, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee. After checking with its staff, Graham's press secretary, Paul Anderson, reported back that the "intelligence community has never done war games of the kind of scenario" that occurred Tuesday. Whether domestic law enforcement ever had, they didn't know.

Ron Thomas, a counterterrorist expert at Florida State University, tells me that various domestic agencies engage in a fair amount of war-gaming.

"I can't say that I was actually in a meeting where that particular scenario was ever discussed," he said Friday, "but what I could tell you is that there were a lot of training programs where we came up with numerous scenarios like that."

But then what? It's left to various state and local agencies to take the scenarios and do what they will with them. Dan Gelber, an attorney and a Florida state representative, led an extensive investigation of counterterrorism preparation for Sen. Sam Nunn's permanent investigations committee. The hearings, he recalled last week, exposed "a total lack of coordination among state, federal and local agencies." New York City did take the warnings to heart and conducted a major preparedness exercise, but even there it was fighting the last war, mimicking the nerve gas attack that a cult had actually carried out in Tokyo.

We've got to do much, much better.

For a start, Congress should take seriously the recommendation of the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, co-chaired by former Sens. Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, to establish a Cabinet-level "Homeland Security Agency." The department would incorporate the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which is currently responsible for responding to disasters, with elements of the Coast Guard, Border Patrol and Customs Service that would be devoted to prevention. The new agency would not replace the FBI, CIA or other intelligence services, but it would provide someone of Cabinet rank to sit at the table with them.

"There is no national security problem of greater urgency," Rudman warned as he delivered the recommendation to Congress less than six months ago. He said the mission of the new agency would be "to prevent, to protect, and to respond to the problem of terrorism and other threats to the homeland."

With antiterrorism responsibilities now so greatly fragmented, Rudman noted, "it is extremely difficult for the Congress, in its oversight role, to have a sense of what the administration is doing with respect to major national security objectives. . . . There has been no systematic effort from the (National Security Council) level to direct the priorities of the intelligence community. . . ."

A year and a half earlier, the commission's first-phase report had warned, with eerie if not precise prescience, of what lay ahead in September 2001.

". . . For many years to come," it said, "Americans will become increasingly less secure, and much less secure than they now believe themselves to be."

Americans should "expect conflicts in which adversaries, because of cultural affinities different from our own, will resort to forms and levels of violence shocking to our sensibilities. . . . America will become increasingly vulnerable to hostile attack on our homeland, and our military superiority will not entirely protect us. . . . "

And there was also this: "U.S. intelligence will face more challenging adversaries, and even excellent intelligence will not prevent all surprises. . . ."

We haven't seen the end of it, nor even, perhaps, the worst. We may be surprised again. But we can surely do a better job of getting ready.

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