Talk of the Nation (3:00 PM ET) - NPR August 15, 2003
Latest developments in the war on terror
NEAL CONAN, host:
And now we turn to events here in the United States. Earlier this week, a federal sting operation led to the arrest of three men allegedly involved in the sale of a shoulder-fired missile to a man whom they believed was a terrorist. Authorities charged that the suspects believe the missile would eventually be used to shoot down an American commercial airliner. While this particular missile involved in the sting was a dud, experts worry that there are several thousand shoulder-launched missiles unaccounted for, available on the world market, and that many have fallen into the wrong hands.
Joining us now to talk about the potential danger and about what's being done about it is Tim Brown. He's a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org. He joins us by phone from The Plains in Virginia.
Good of you to join us.
Mr. TIM BROWN (GlobalSecurity.org Senior Fellow): Thank you.
CONAN: And also with us is Steven Simon, senior analyst for the Rand Corporation. He and his colleague Daniel Benjamin wrote the book "The Age of Sacred Terror." He's with us by phone from his office in Pentagon City, Virginia.
Good to have you on the program.
Mr. STEVEN SIMON (Rand Corporation Senior Analyst): Hi.
CONAN: Tim, let's start with you. What can you tell us about the SA-18, the type of missile that was involved in this sting operation?
Mr. BROWN: Well, the SA-18 is a Russian-designed missile. It's the latest version in this long series of man-portable shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. It's sort of--you know, every couple of years they come out with a new model, just like cars. This particular one has a little bit bigger warhead, more sensitive seeker head. It's equivalent of basically having a better digital camera with more pixels that can see and distinguish targets a little bit better from, let's say, flares or decoys. And had it been a live missile, it probably would have had a lot higher probability of hitting a target if it were used by a terrorist against a commercial airliner. So...
CONAN: This is roughly the Russian equivalent of a Stinger.
Mr. BROWN: Basically. That's right.
CONAN: Steven, have these and similar missiles been used in previous terror attacks?
Mr. SIMON: Well, similar missiles have in a number of places--Africa. A number of war zones in Africa have seen the use of missiles like this. They've been launched in Sri Lanka, Chechnya and Saudi Arabia and, you know, of course, in Mombasa against that Israeli-chartered airplane last November.
CONAN: And that was the SA-7, an earlier Russian shoulder-launched missile, a more primitive version of this new one, the SA-18.
We'll have more from both of these gentlemen and talk with you about your perceptions of safety and what can be done with technology to protect commercial aircraft from these so-called MANPADS, man-portable air-defense systems. Our phone number if you'd like to join the conversation is (800) 989-8255. That's (800) 989-TALK. And our e-mail address is totn@npr.org.
More after a break. I'm Neal Conan. It's TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
(Announcements)
CONAN: This is TALK OF THE NATION. I'm Neal Conan in Washington.
We'll bring you an update on the blackout later in the program. For now, we're talking about the latest developments in the war on terror. You're invited to join our discussion--(800) 989-8255; (800) 989-TALK. And our e-mail address is totn@npr.org.
Our guests are: Tim Brown, a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org, and Steven Simon, a senior analyst with the Rand Corporation and co-author of the book "The Age of Sacred Terror."
And let's get to a phone call. Our first caller is Bob, who's on the line with us from Huntley, Illinois.
BOB (Caller): Yeah. Hi. Good afternoon. My question real quickly is: If the missile was a dud set up by the Russians for us and the buyers were FBI agents, then who did we really stop? We didn't stop anybody selling weapons; we didn't stop anybody really looking to buy weapons; we just caught some poor schmuck and we're going to send him to prison.
CONAN: Steven Simon.
Mr. SIMON: What a great question. Yeah, I think the law enforcement objectives here were to flush out the middle men because it's the middle men who actually bring these weapons to the bad guys. Pulling on that string eventually will lead to the terrorists, but I expect that law enforcement felt it was premature to do that. They had to start with this one step, which was difficult enough to arrange, especially given the complex coordination required to bring together the Russian, British and American pieces of the puzzle.
(Soundbite of beeping)
CONAN: Bob, is that your beeper going off?
BOB: No. Oh, sorry. No. I just don't--we have limited resources, you know, not to belabor the point, and I just don't know if that was our best move to begin with, because we could do this forever. Look at the war on drugs.
CONAN: Well, all right. Bob, thanks very much for the question.
BOB: OK.
CONAN: One of the reasons Bob's skepticism may be justified, Tim Brown, is that there are an awful lot of these missiles, if not necessarily SA-18s, but SA-7s and a lot of other ones.
Mr. BROWN: Right. Yeah, there are quite a few of the older vintage missiles floating around out there. In fact, the missiles that were fired in Kenya match the serial numbers of a missile canister found in Saudi Arabia last year. Both were believed to be fired by al-Qaeda members. And so evidently, when they bought these, they bought them in a block, a whole batch of them, and they all had basically the same batch numbers. So it's presumed that al-Qaeda still has quite a few of those older SA-7s in their inventory. And so that the next trick would be basically successfully smuggling them into the United States and then using them.
And the other thing is they may not even really need to get them in the United States. If they just attacked a US aircraft at an international airport overseas somewhere, I think they could have the similar effect, which is basically to damage the airline system.
CONAN: The missile you mentioned in Saudi Arabia was another failed attempt to bring down an airliner. How effective are these things if we're talking about a couple of failed attempts that we know about?
Mr. BROWN: Well, they're basically fire-and-forget missiles. The real secret is that if you have the technology, you can use it; there really isn't a whole lot at pointing the thing and aiming it. One of the reasons it might not have worked is because these missiles have a shelf life, and if they're not stored under the proper conditions, maybe it's too humid or they start to rust--or the coolant system which keeps the seeker head and the battery operating--those have a shelf life. And if those are expired, it's like basically trying to use your digital camera and you have dead batteries. So that might be a reason why they failed their target.
CONAN: Let's get another caller. Carl joins us on the line from Kansas City, Missouri.
CARL (Caller): Hi. It's interesting to me--I have more of a comment than a question. There are a lot of even legislatures and senators that talk about retrofitting commercial aircraft with countermeasures, and that really isn't a reasonable option. When you've got countermeasures that are 5,000 degrees coming out of a commercial airplane that might be landing over a populated area, you're going to be burning down a lot of homes and buildings.
CONAN: What Carl is referring to, just as way of explanation, is that these are heat-seeking missiles, and one of the most common countermeasures is to fire a flare which is hotter than the aircraft's engine so that the missile seeker would track the flare rather than the aircraft itself.
Steven Simon, there are a lot of proposals for airliners to be retrofitted with these kinds of technologies.
Mr. SIMON: Yes. But the government faces a dilemma, in part, expressed by the caller. There'd be an enormous investment required for just about any available technology. Some, as the caller indicated, simply are not applicable to civil aviation, like the use of flares. Nobody wants to keep explosives on airplanes. There are other fixes out there, like lasers that would be automatically activated and deployed and blind the seekers on incoming missiles.
But the thing is that, as Tim explained, missile technology is evolving, and we need to be really sure that we don't make a huge investment in a technology that then becomes superseded or made obsolete by advances in missile technology. So this thing needs to be approached, you know, slowly and carefully. But, you know, in a situation where the number of these attacks may well increase, they will certainly continue. So, you know, the government's in a bit of a dilemma, and, you know, it's not going to be easy to work through.
CONAN: Carl, if you're still there, thanks very much for the call. We appreciate it.
And I wanted to ask Tim Brown: Other than countermeasures on the aircraft, these things have a fairly limited range, about, I guess, oh, 10,000 feet or so; in terms of the SAM-7 maybe twice that, not quite twice that in terms of the SA-18. But can't you protect by protecting the area around the airport? In other words, if you're up high enough, they can't shoot you.
Mr. BROWN: Well, that's right. And the problem is that traditional airport security, even in the post-9/11 environment, is really focused on keeping people out of the airport perimeter. So you have sensors, you have jersey barriers blocking people so they can't run a truck onto the Tarmac and blow something up.
But airport security traditionally has not focused on, you know, the two or three kilometers outside or the half mile outside of the airport perimeter where someone could, you know, in a duct line, so to speak, lurk there and wait off the end of the runway and then fire at an aircraft. And it really would require, you know, expanding the size of the perimeter which, in a lot of major metropolitan areas, is just not practical in terms of eminent domain and having to increase the patrols, the cost of having additional personnel and security. So there's really no easy solution to this, whether it's countermeasures or increasing security or trying to keep the borders clear of anybody smuggling these. There's really no silver bullet in it.
And on the other hand, you know, if you look at $7 billion to $10 billion worth of investment on these countermeasure systems, which is what they're talking about the cost being or maybe even more--on the other hand, you have to ask yourself sort of: How much is that going to--What's the economic impact going to be to the airline industry if al-Qaeda, you know, decides to fire off two or three of these at three of four different airports around the country and bring down two or three airliners?
If you just look at the economic fallout from 9/11 on the airline industry, not to mention the economy, you know, $10 billion seems cheap.
CONAN: Steve Simon, Tim raises some pretty serious questions there. There's also the factor that these things--well, it's commonly said, can be fit into a golf bag, so smuggling them in is presumably not beyond the realms of the imagination. We've raised a lot of questions with the difficulties of things that are going to be very hard or expensive or impossible to do. So what is possible?
Mr. SIMON: Well, I think we'll ultimately settle on a multipronged approach. First, the administration has already dispatched teams to foreign airports, as well as to domestic airports, to survey them and get a sense of where an attacker would want to be to take the best shot at an incoming aircraft or one taking off from the airport. They'll want to map those, go over them with local law enforcement, sensitize local law enforcement to the issue, and enable local law enforcement to respond quickly and look for signs of suspicious activity when there was the warning that such a weapon might be used at that place. That's one step.
The other step is to work through the trade-offs and the technological challenges in installing countermeasures on aircraft. The Boxer-Simon bill, you know, now in play on the Hill, which Tim referred to, which places about a $7 billion bill on the retrofitting of approximately 6,800 aircraft in the civil fleet is just one example of legislation that we're going to see down the road creating momentum for the installation of countermeasures and eventually actually getting something on the airplanes when it looks like it makes sense to do that.
Now since September 11th, bear in mind, you know, on the aviation side of the equation, we've had a number of artificial deadlines imposed on government agencies and airlines and airports to install a whole bunch of technologies and begin a whole bunch of new procedures. And it hasn't worked out all that well, in part, because the deadlines were artificial and not really in tune with, you know, the unfortunately slow pace that these developments proceed at when they're done right.
So this is going to be just as true of the technological side. And there will be a renewed effort or a strengthened effort to block the smuggling of these weapons and to try to clamp down on illegal trade generally. And the sting operation that we saw in New Jersey involving the Russians and the British and the Americans was one example of that strategy. So there'll be a mix of these things, and Lord knows the combination is not going to be foolproof, especially since we have an adversary in the form of al-Qaeda that is really committed to attacking American aviation and the aviation of its allies. They've tried to do it with everything from shoe bombs to crashing the airplanes into buildings to using missiles against them.
By the way, the attempt in Saudi Arabia was apparently against a US tactical aircraft taking off from Prince Sultan Air Base, but--and not, you know, an American civil aircraft. But nevertheless, they're going to keep doing this, and as has been indicated by you and Tim, there are plenty of these weapons available.
CONAN: Well, thanks very much, I guess. That's not exactly cheerful news, but, obviously, something we need to know. We appreciate your time. Steven Simon, thanks very much.
Mr. SIMON: Thank you.
CONAN: Steven Simon is the co-author of "The Age of Sacred Terror," also a senior analyst for the Rand Corporation. He was with us by phone from his office in Pentagon City, Virginia. And Tim Brown is a senior fellow at GlobalSecurity.org.
We appreciate your time today, of course, as well.
Mr. BROWN: Thank you.
CONAN: Tim Brown was with us by phone from The Plains in Virginia.
And you're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News.
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