A troubled University of Oklahoma mechanical engineering student named Joel Henry Hinrichs III sat down on a park bench on his campus in the early evening of Oct. 1, 2005. A few hundred yards away, a stadium packed with some 83,000 fans cheered as their team took on their rival Kansas State.
Inside Hinrichs’ bag was about three pounds of a highly unstable explosive made from common household chemicals, according to press reports. Collectively called triacetone triperoxide, they were concocted from a similar recipe bombers used in a deadly attack on the London transit system three months earlier.
And then the fans inside the stadium heard the explosion.
Hinrichs had blown himself up. There were no other victims. Police later ruled the incident “an accidental suicide.”
There was never any hard evidence that the student intended to enter the stadium and his true intentions remain conjecture. But the ease with which the chemicals were obtained and the bomb was constructed has not been lost on counterterrorism experts.
While the public, Congress and the media’s attention remains focused on preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction on U.S. soil, the fight against improvised explosive devices — or homemade bombs — continues mostly out of view, and does not receive the same attention as the chemical, biological or nuclear threats.
Despite this, bomb scares in the United States are an almost daily occurrence.
“We’re not even looking at roadside bombs. We’re more worried about a mass transit event like London or Madrid,” said David Tuttle, director of the Department of Homeland Security’s explosives division in the science and technology directorate.
“How do we develop technology that prevents that kind of thing from happening?” he asked at a National Defense Industrial Association DHS science and technology stakeholder’s conference.
History shows that terrorists, both domestic and foreign, may desire weapons of mass destruction, but building or obtaining them is extremely hard. However, there have been hundreds of terrorist attacks in the United States using homemade bombs during the last 50 years, said Ruth Doherty, program executive officer for counter-IED in the explosives division.
Finding the materials to make them is relatively easy. Downloading how-to instructions from the Internet is easier still.
“We’re addressing the entire threat cycle from the beginning of the formation of someone to be a bomber, all the way through to helping a community to recover both physically and socially from the event of a bombing,” she said.
The explosives division’s budget in 2009 is $96 million, which is less than half of the chemical-biological division’s allocation. Most of this $96 million is directed toward protecting airliners. The Domestic Nuclear Detection Office has a budget of $514 million.
Meanwhile, a small outfit in DHS’ national protection and programs directorate, the office of bombing prevention, has a $10 million budget and gets by with about 10 staff members and a handful of contractors.
William Flynn, who oversees the office as the director of the protective security division, said it will double its staff numbers next fiscal year and has received an additional $4 million in funding.
“It’s a very positive signal of the support we are receiving from our administration and Congress,” he told National Defense. “It’s a small budget, but a good boost.”
Flynn did not have a ready number for the amount of funding the federal government spends on the domestic IED threat. He pointed out that the 2008 budget for Homeland Security grants, which the Federal Emergency Management Agency distributes to state and local first responders, required that 25 percent of all monies be spent on strengthening IED attack deterrence, prevention and protection capabilities. That came to about $425 million. That requirement did not make it into the 2009 budget, though.
There has been growing recognition within the federal government of the homemade explosives threat — although many of the initiatives have come years after the 9/11 attacks. President Bush signed the Homeland Security Presidential Directive-19 on Feb. 12, 2007, which ordered federal agencies to coordinate their efforts in domestic counter-IED realm and put a national strategy to combat domestic IEDs in place.
An HSPD-19 Joint Program Office, which will seek to coordinate the counter-bomb efforts in the federal government, is being stood up. An executive board has been named and it is circulating a charter among all the federal agencies with a stake in the problem, Flynn said.
And there are many stakeholders out there. The Justice Department and the FBI will lead the new office, which will also have representatives from the State Department and the Pentagon’s Joint IED Defeat Organization. A deputy will come from DHS’ bombing prevention office. Within DHS, there are several agencies which have a hand in the problem: the Coast Guard, Secret Service and Transportation Security Administration are amongst them.
“We have to look at the emerging threats … to stay ahead of the curve on these things,” Flynn said of the technologies that might be used to defeat bombers.
The presidential directive has already resulted in a National Science and Technology Council report “Research Challenges in Combating Terrorist Use of Explosives in the United States,” which identified 10 critical gaps that need to be addressed.
Among them were: rapid standoff detection of person-borne IEDs; radio controlled bomb countermeasures; waterborne-IED detect and defeat systems; and better analytic tools to identify groups or individuals who are planning such attacks.
Another report “IEDs: Coming to America,” was not released to the public. But Doherty shared some of its conclusions. One of its main points was that only so much can be done to leverage the work the Defense Department has carried out to combat IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq.
For example, preventing a bombing would ideally mean capturing bombers before they detonate the device. “It’s become axiomatic in the community that if one gets the bomber, you don’t have to get the bomb,” said Doherty.
In Iraq, special operations forces can kick down doors, quickly exploit intelligence and move on to the next target to take down networks. “We have to respect constitutional, statutory, regulatory and sociological environment in which we live,” she said.
There has been a long history of bombing incidents in the United States. Some are loners such as the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski or Eric Rudolph, perpetrator of the Olympic Centennial Park attack. They both carried out sustained campaigns. Some are part of terrorist cells such as the Islamic extremists who set off a truck bomb underneath the World Trade Center in 1993.
Despite all these high-profile incidents, there isn’t enough data to draw many conclusions, Doherty said. The Middle East sees hundreds of bombings per month and analysts have a large sampling to spot trends. That isn’t the case here.
On the “defeat” side, troops overseas have much more freedom to destroy an IED in place. “We’re not just going to set a bomb off in the Metro system,” Tuttle said.
Detecting explosives from standoff distances was one of the key technology challenges outlined in the National Science and Technology Council report.
“The diversity of materials that can potentially be used to devise homemade explosives, and their normal presence in the streams of commerce make detection of these materials a particularly difficult problem,” said the report.
Tuttle said suspicious package calls are almost a daily occurrence in the United States. “Can we get technology that can quickly assess and diagnose whether there is a threat or not?” he asked. “Because most of the time it is not a threat.”
In one demonstration project, the explosives division used two sensors to tackle the “person-borne” problem. Scanning a crowd at a Washington state hockey rink, it used thermal sensors to see if there were any “hot” items such as explosives hidden underneath clothing or in a bag. If there was a hit, a millimeter wave sensor, which can gather more detailed images, was used to determine if there were hidden explosives.
The human factors division within the science and technology directorate is also studying whether telltale signs on a subject’s face can give away intent. These “micro-facial leakages” may tip off a guard that someone is extremely nervous and may intend to carry out a terrorist attack.
Car or truck bombs are another major concern. They can travel at high rates of speed and plotters can pack more explosives inside. History shows that “terrorist networks will most likely use [vehicle-borne IED] tactics to attack our homeland,” the technology council report concluded.
Finding out what is inside a possible car bomb or disabling it before it reaches its target are tough problems, Tuttle acknowledged. And then there are water-borne IEDs. There is an ongoing debate among federal agencies as to whether boat bombs or homemade underwater mines should fall under DHS or the Defense Department’s purview, he said.
Tuttle said the directorate is concentrating on systems that can be fielded within two to three years. Yet technology will never be the whole solution, he suggested.
“How in the world are you ever going to get explosive detection capability deployed everywhere?” he asked. “It’s hard enough to do just in the airports.”
Geospatial imagery might be able to pinpoint likely targets where high-tech sensors can be employed, but in reality a bomber can strike just about anyplace there is a crowd.
There are low-tech solutions to detecting and defeating bomb plots before they come to fruition, Flynn said. Good old fashioned police work — and tips from the public — often catches bombers before they can act.
The case at the University of Oklahoma provides one example. An off-duty police officer overheard Hinrichs ask a feed store employee whether he carried ammonium nitrate fertilizer, which was a component of the 1995 Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City. The store did not. But the officer followed him out to the parking lot and noted his car’s license plate number. A quick background check revealed that Hinrichs did not have any warrants or a criminal record.
Nevertheless, the officer intended to investigate the suspicious activity. Hinrichs blew himself up two days later before the officer had a chance to follow up, though.
“We’re going to prevent the next attack by somebody seeing something suspicious and reporting that,” said Flynn.
The office offers a bomb making material awareness course designed for employees who work in retail or wholesale stores that sell bomb component precursors. The course teaches them how to spot suspicious activity and who to contact if it’s detected.
Terrorist plots usually involve the surveillance of targets during the planning stage. A second course teaches police and security guards how to spot suspicious packages and to recognize when targets are being staked out. About 20,000 security personnel have taken that course so far.
The office also runs the TripWire secure information-sharing database where local law enforcement can learn the latest tactics, techniques and procedures being used by terrorists worldwide. Bomb squads, special weapons and tactic teams and other first responders can tap into the database for expert analyses, images and video. It now has nearly 8,000 users, Flynn said.
“We’re very closely plugged into JIEDDO to see what the tactics, techniques and procedures the bad guys are using in theater,” Flynn said.
Recent hotel bombings in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the December terrorist assault in Mumbai, India, provide case studies. Subject matter experts offer recommendations on how to counter such activity. The Justice Department also runs a similar program, the Bomb Data Center.
“To deploy our limited resources most efficiently, we must study the enemy as thoroughly as he has studied us,” said the science and technology council report.