As more details began to surface about the British-based terrorist plot that was thwarted, I received the following email from former Federal Aviation Administration counter-terror expert Bogdan Dzakovic who wrote, "My prediction came true. Efforts to do a massive bombing campaign against aviation."
His prediction? It was something chilling and prophetic he voiced to me 12 months ago when I had interviewed him for my book, Patriots Act: Voices of Disssent and the Risk for Speaking Out. "If I were a terrorist mastermind plotting another big attack," he told me, "and I could muster up another 20 guys, I'd scatter them around to different airports around the country. I would give each one of them three bombs and three different sets of luggage. Some of those bombs will make it onto flights."
His scenario bears some similarity to what the U.K. terrorists had planned to achieve, even though they planned to bomb several aircraft over the Atlantic ocean. Their plot also echoes an earlier, but botched terrorist mission from the 90s known as the "Bokinka Operation," and which involved simultaneous flights over the Pacific.
So just how safe are the deadly skies? Are the FAA, Transportation Security Administration, and Homeland Security really up to the task of preventing another 9/11?
Dzakovic doesn't think so.
For many years, Bogdan was on the front lines of battling aviation terrorism. He had been a federal air marshal before being selected to head up the FAA's Red Team--its most elite counter-terror unit.
The Red Team was a small, elite squad who conducted mock undercover raids as terrorists and hijackers. It probed vulnerable areas inside airports. With surprising ease and frequency during routine tests, members of his team slipped bombs, guns and knives onto aircraft.
Several days after Sept. 11, 2001, the FAA grounded the Red Team, apparently because it didn't want to be embarrassed by the team's findings. Dzakovic disagreed with this shameless attempt to bury the truth. And so he took the bold step of filing a whistle-blower disclosure in October 2001 with the Office of Special Counsel, an independent government agency. That document -- the first of its kind by an FAA Security Division employee -- set in motion a lengthy and costly investigation by the inspector general.
But instead of rewarding Dzakovic, the newly formed Transportation Security Administration, which had swallowed the FAA, punished him by reassigning him to an entry-level clerical position behind a desk. He spent months punching holes in paper and putting training binders together for new TSA employees. The counter-terrorism expertise of this valuable 14-year FAA veteran was stupidly wasted. He wanted to spend the rest of his career fighting bad guys, but his government bosses thought that wasn't such a good idea after he became a whistle-blower. (As of 2006, he's still doing entry-level work.)
On May 22, 2003, Dzakovic was invited to speak before the 9/11 Commission, which conducted an 18-month inquiry into U.S. intelligence failures leading up to September 11.
"The Red Team was extraordinarily successful in killing large numbers of innocent people in these simulated attacks," he told the commissioners. "We breached security up to 90 percent of the time. The FAA suppressed these warnings. Instead, we were ordered not to write up our reports and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities, to see if the problems had been fixed. Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests and what we would be 'checking.'
"What happened on 9/11 was not a failure in the system. Our airports are not safer now than before 9/11. The main difference between then and now is that life is now more miserable for passengers."
You won't find Dzakovic's testimony anywhere in what the 9/11 Commission published in July 2004: "Final Report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States." (Only a single footnote on page 441 lists his appearance before the commission.)
I talked to Bogdan shortly after "United 93" came out last spring. He refused to see the film for personal and professional reasons. I included portions from our conversation in an Huffington Post column in early May. Here's what he said at the time:
"Since 9/11, I learned to have less contempt for the terrorists than I do for the bureaucrats and politicians who could have prevented 9/11 but didn't. They served in very pivotal positions of influence but due to gross incompetence or the fear of actually fulfilling their oaths of office to defend this country or possibly even something a bit more sinister, they failed to take any action. After 9/11, they all scurried into their little rat holes and waited for the firestorm to burn itself out. Then they crawled out and suddenly they are experts in aviation security.
"Many of the FAA bureaucrats that actively thwarted improvements in security prior to 9/11 have been promoted by FAA or the Transportation Security Administration. I have never in my life been around more gutless, inept and outright ignorant people than I have at TSA headquarters, most of whom are in management. You combine this atmosphere with absolutely no accountability and it is a very dangerous formula for a repeat of 9/11.
"The TSA does have a team of people doing testing, but as I mentioned in my testimony to the 9/11 Commission, the current team should more properly be called a "Pink" Team because they are not operating to the capabilities of the terrorists. Instead, it's geared to the training levels of the airport screeners. The TSA has not fully appreciated the true value of a Red Team -- which is getting the team to actually think like terrorists so that they can identify vulnerable areas in security."
One of his major beefs with the FAA --as he told me during our interviews for Patriots Act-- is that "it used to say, leading up to 9/11, that 'we must be doing something right because there has not been a terrorist attack against the U.S. aviation industry since Pan Am 103.' Well, the fact of the matter is the terrorists operate on their schedule, not on our concept of how they should operate.
"The bad guys are smart enough to test the system. In fact, U.S. troops found Arabic language translations of General Accounting Office documents, describing how bad aviation security was, in some of the Afghanistan caves used by the Taliban and al Qaeda. The terrorists do a very thorough job before they undertake an operation.
"But one thing the FAA itself acknowledged pre-9/11 was that the favorite weapon of terrorists, when they weren't using a grenade or a bomb or a gun, was a knife of less than four inches in length. And these knives were specifically allowed to be carried on board by FAA regulations even though they knew it was their favorite weapon. Because the 9/11 terrorists studied the system, they did not break any FAA regulation. They carried (box-cutters) less than four inches in length.
"The nature of aviation security invites an attack because it must first and foremost 'process' people and their luggage as rapidly as possible, while providing at least some illusion that effective screening is actually taking place. The FAA did a great job of maintaining this fiction, and the TSA is doing the same with billions of dollars of our tax money.
"For example, the one thing we determined on the Red Team was that in order for the CTX bomb-detection machines to be used effectively, you need to have the absolute minimum number of bags going through them because the machines aren't reliable for mass searching of bags. It has to be limited as much as possible to the most suspect people.
"All it takes to bypass these so-called layers of security is a little research from open sources. You can easily find the technical specs of bomb-detecting machines; many are published online by the manufacturers. With a rudimentary knowledge of chemistry and electronics, which the bad guys have proven they have, you can figure out how to beat every single one of these systems.
"The next step, as the 9/11 terrorists demonstrated, is to do some basic surveillance of the system just to see how things operate and get familiar with the airport environment. When (former Red Team member) Steve Elson and Fox News were doing their own undercover sting story at Logan Airport in the spring of 2001, the hijackers were doing their own dry runs at the same time and at the same airport.
"The real problem is that the TSA is built on the same weak foundation as the FAA. It will always be at least one step behind the terrorists. Remember the shoe bomber? Right after that incident, the TSA made everyone take off their shoes at the screening checkpoints. Then we had the female Chechen terrorists who apparently hid explosives in their underwear. And so TSA screeners started groping female passengers until a big public outcry brought that silliness to a stop. Next time the terrorists might put explosives in toothpaste tubes, and you can count on TSA screeners squishing out all the toothpaste from passengers' bags."
Well, we can expect that sports drinks and hair gel will now be permanently banned. This was what the British terrorists planned to use to disguise the explosives.
"From my Red Team testing days," continued Dzakovic, "the only thing that ever really had me concerned about getting caught trying to sneak a weapon on board was a human being doing profiling. "It's looking at very small anomalies and behavior like nervousness or how someone answers questions. You don't simply ask a passenger 'yes' or 'no' questions. The journalist Paul Sperry said that Islamic suicide terrorists will coat themselves with lilac as some kind of blessing it has for the next life when he's supposed to meet his seventy-two virgins. A profiler should be looking for those subtle signs.
"Another thing I learned from my research was that in every hijacking, passengers or flight crews recognized something hinky about the hijackers before the hijacking began, and this was either on the plane, on the ground before the plane took off, or when the passengers were still in the terminal building. Every single time the hijackers gave off these signs."
But what about the signs being given off by the government? Predictably, Homeland honcho Michael Chertkoff right away issued a red terror alert on Thursday. President Bush said from Crawford, Texas that "the country is safer than it was on 9/11." This seems like mixed signals to me. Are we supposed to be more afraid? Or more reassured?
The real truth is this: As long as the FAA, TSA, Homeland Security, and Congress ignore listening to experts like Bogdan Dzakovic and acting on their advice and warnings, our nation is not better off. It's easier to punish whistleblowers like this former Red Team leader than it is to fix systemic problems, which are the cumulative result of years of bureaucratic inertia, partisan politics, lack of accountability, special-interest lobbying, and turf wars.
Don't rock the boat might work for many in D.C. But that mind-set, to use a more fitting metaphor, just doesn't fly when it comes to the safety of millions of American passengers who each day nervously prepare for departure.
And now, that fear just ratcheted up another disturbing notch.