Bombs On Board

In 1988, two Libyans in Malta bought a Toshiba boom box, filled it with more than 10 oz. (280 g) of plastic explosive and loaded it into a brown Samsonite bag that was put on an aircraft bound for New York City. Ever since that flight—Pan Am 103—blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people, the world has known that international air transport is vulnerable to terrorism. Last week came a frightening reminder of that truth. There were no casualties this time, but the could-have-been scenarios were sobering: two bombs hidden inside the toner cartridges of Hewlett-Packard P2055 LaserJet desktop printers made their way from Sana’a, Yemen, by FedEx and UPS to cargo hubs in Dubai and Britain—traveling some of the way in the holds of passenger aircraft—before being intercepted just hours short of take-off for Chicago.

An attack that could have killed hundreds on board those planes—and more on the ground below—days before U.S. midterm elections might have succeeded if not for U.S. and Saudi intelligence services discovering the threat. But if the bombers failed in their mission, they got the world’s attention. President Barack Obama made a statement from the White House 24 hours after the plot was discovered, and U.S. counterterrorism forces went into action. Authorities searched UPS and FedEx planes in Philadelphia and Newark and a UPS truck in New York City, all of which were carrying cargo from Yemen. The U.S., U.K., Germany and the Netherlands grounded all cargo from Yemen, and the U.S. Postal Service froze mail from that country.

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The plot, which was probably the work of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni affiliate, exposed the vulnerabilities of the global cargo-security system. Nearly 81 billion lb. (37 billion kg) of cargo is carried every year by aircraft around the world, 34.8 billion lb. (16 billion kg) in the U.S. alone. Of that, 6.6 billion lb. (3 billion kg) is carried on passenger flights in and out of the country. While passengers have learned to endure greatly increased checks at airports over the past decade, security procedures for shipments run the gamut from screening all cargo in some countries to virtually none of it in others. As for the U.S., last June the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) told Congress it would miss an August 2010 deadline to screen all cargo on inbound passenger flights to the U.S. The TSA’s John Sammon told Congress the administration would need another three years to get from 65% screening to 100% on those flights but admitted he wasn’t sure how they would do it. (All domestic cargo is screened, as is all “high-risk” international cargo, but the TSA won’t say whether a printer sent from Yemen to a synagogue in Chicago qualifies as high-risk.)

Underlying the vulnerabilities are predictable challenges like cross-border differences over the need for security measures and the difficulty of searching cargo, especially in poor countries like Yemen. But there is also a hardheaded calculation of cost. Last spring the TSA considered imposing a strict cargo-screening standard on all passenger flights inbound to the U.S. but decided that forcing airlines to do so would be too costly. The TSA’s conclusion: “The effect of imposing such screening standards in the near future could result in increased costs for international passenger travel and for imported goods and possible reduction in passenger traffic and foreign imports,” according to a June 2010 report by the Government Accountability Office. On Nov. 2, TSA head John Pistole echoed the position at a conference of the International Air Transport Association in Frankfurt. “Security cannot bring business to a standstill,” Pistole said.

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It’s a position that might have seemed defensible until the cargo bombs: after all, the economic recovery is fragile, and there have been no casualties so far from bombs on cargo planes. But the Yemeni bomb plot has weakened such arguments. Congressman Ed Markey, a Democrat from Massachusetts who introduced the 2007 legislation requiring full screening of cargo on inbound U.S. passenger flights by August 2010, says TSA is giving in to industry concerns. “The same argument has been made since 9/11 by the airline industry with regard to screening all passengers on flights—that it would cause expense and delay—and neither has occurred,” he says. Had they succeeded, al-Qaeda’s bombings would certainly have changed the TSA’s calculation of the cost of security. The question is whether a close shave might have the same effect.

Death by Delivery
The plotters had sophisticated bombmaking skills and an understanding of the weaknesses in the global cargo-security system. Printer cartridges have a sealed compartment where a bomb can artfully be hidden, and pentaerythritol tetranitrate, the explosive used in the Yemen bombs, is a concentrated powder almost indistinguishable on X-ray scanners from the powdered ink normally found in printer cartridges. Multiple electronic parts in the cartridge can mask a triggering mechanism—in this case, it was the processing board from a cell phone connected to the printer head, which was designed to act as a detonator.

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U.S. officials believe the bombmaker was Ibrahim al-Asiri, a Saudi member of al-Qaeda’s Yemeni arm, known as al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. Al-Asiri is thought to have fabricated the underpants bomb that failed to detonate last Christmas on board a plane bound for Detroit. That plot failed in part because the bomber, Nigerian Umar Abdulmutallab, was overpowered by fellow passengers. On this occasion, al-Asiri sought to eliminate human error by launching his bombs into the global cargo network from close to home. The smooth-functioning international freight system would be his delivery mechanism.

To send a package from the UPS or FedEx facilities in Sana’a, you need only show an ID card and provide a full name—no different from most places in the world. The first bomb was taken to FedEx’s Sana’a office in the middle of last week; the second was dropped off at the UPS office a few doors away. Both stores are in Hadda Street, an area popular with wealthy Yemenis who frequent its many Western-style restaurants. It is not clear if the packages underwent any kind of security check either at the courier offices or at Sana’a airport. Typically, couriers in Sana’a do a visual inspection of the contents before they are sealed. At the airport, the Ministry of the Interior, which controls airport security, runs all outgoing cargo packages through X-ray machines, according to a longtime employee of an international courier company in Sana’a.

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Whatever screening the packages went through in Yemen may have been the last. Neither FedEx nor UPS flies cargo planes out of Yemen, so both bombs went into the hold of passenger planes leaving the country. The FedEx bomb was loaded onto a Qatar Airways Airbus A320 passenger jet bound for Doha, Qatar. Qatar Airways CEO Akbar al-Baker said no inspection was performed on the package and insisted that doing so was not the airline’s responsibility. “It’s not the job of airlines to inspect baggage,” he said. From Doha, the package traveled on another passenger jet to FedEx’s cargo hub in Dubai. (On Nov. 2, al-Baker said Qatar Airways was no longer sure the bombs had traveled on its planes.)

The second package, en route from Yemen to UPS’s cargo hub in Cologne, Germany, also passed through Dubai. If the initial screening in Sana’a was lax, in Dubai it seems to have been spotty at best. Cargo moving through Dubai International Airport is set aside for a 24-hour “cooling” period before continuing on to its final destination. But there usually isn’t much more of a security check on individual parcels, according to the U.A.E.’s General Civil Aviation Authority. “Usually, the transit cargo does not get screened anywhere in the country unless there is a suspicion,” said Saif al-Suaidi, director general of the aviation authority, according to media reports from the region.

At every step of the journey, the bombs became harder to detect through screening. When they get to major hubs for air couriers, like Cologne for UPS and Dubai for FedEx, packages headed for the same destination are bundled with others and shrink-wrapped onto a pallet or loaded into a special airfreight container and sealed; once inside, the cargo becomes difficult to screen or inspect. Only specialized machines can provide a detailed view inside multiple packages. Yet 75% of all cargo on wide-body jets is on pallets or in containers.

From the hub in Cologne, the UPS package traveled in a container on a Boeing MD-11 to another cargo facility at East Midlands airport in Britain, where it awaited departure to Philadelphia and eventually Chicago. On an intelligence tip, possibly from a Saudi source, passed on to the British security services, local police checked the hold of the plane and found the package. Initially, however, it tested negative for explosives, and the flight was cleared for departure. Only after the second package was found at the FedEx facility in Dubai on the same tip and tested positive for explosives did British security services take another look at the UPS package and identify the bomb.

Costs and Consequences
Authorities have been aware of the threat from cargo traveling on passenger jets for years. Earlier this year, the TSA told the Government Accountability Office, “The security threat posed by terrorists introducing explosive devices in air-cargo shipments is significant, and the risk and likelihood of such an attack directed at passenger aircraft is high.” As long ago as 2007, the GAO warned the TSA that it was putting the entire supply chain of air cargo in jeopardy by insufficiently addressing that risk.

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But that’s hard to do. Even if U.S. procedures were perfect, foreign governments may have different ideas about how and whether to screen cargo. The most damning finding in the June GAO report was that the TSA has no way of telling whether the screening methods of other countries are effective at detecting the kinds of bombs al-Qaeda is now producing. The TSA doesn’t name and shame the problem countries, a practice Markey of Massachusetts says shows “our government has [not] been tough enough on them to establish standards.” But even countries with sophisticated facilities don’t necessarily screen everything. In the past, Britain has said it screens 100% of cargo on passenger jets, but it has emerged that, like Dubai, it doesn’t scan transiting cargo. TSA is lobbying foreign governments to get security introduced as a supply-chain concept.

Technology could help, but only to some extent. TSA has approved 77 technologies from various manufacturers for use in screening cargo. Unfortunately, most don’t have a big enough opening to handle large pallets or containers, and those that do are either too expensive or can’t be produced in bulk. TSA’s Sammon told Congress in June that he and his colleagues “share the committee’s concern about the pace to develop and approve new technologies.” There are devices that can scan every container for explosives before they are loaded into the cargo plane, even without unpacking them. But a single machine costs more than $10 million, and at least five to 10 minutes are needed to check each shipment. Given multiple global departure points, the cost would be crippling. One option is for the TSA to pass some of the responsibility on to cargo carriers: it could, for example, require carriers coming to the U.S. to screen all their cargo. But until now, the TSA has concluded that doing so would “unduly impede the flow of commerce.”

The fundamental problem, however, is that screening doesn’t automatically lead to safety. Al-Qaeda is good at finding weaknesses; al-Asiri, the suspected bombmaker in Yemen, seems particularly creative at doing so. “If the only way to find these things is to open every box, we just can’t do it,” says Steve Alterman of the Cargo Airline Association. “It’s impossible.” He’s right, of course, unless you want the threat of terrorism to bring international trade to a standstill. But that may be the week’s scariest revelation of all.

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