Disturbingly, al-Qaeda has been able to recruit American-educated scientists such as Aafia Siddiqui, who has a degree in biology from MIT and a Ph.D. in neuroscience from Brandeis. When the slight Pakistani-American mother of three in her mid-thirties was arrested in eastern Afghanistan in 2008, authorities maintain she was carrying documents about the manufacture of chemical, biological, and radiological weapons and descriptions of various New York City landmarks. Another al-Qaeda recruit with an American science degree is Yazid Sufaat, a graduate in biochemistry of California Polytechnic State University who set up Green Laboratory Medicine Company in Kandahar in 2001 to acquire anthrax and other biological weapons. But Sufaat was never able to buy the right strain of anthrax suitable for a weapon and was arrested in Malaysia three months after 9/11. Similarly, Abdur Rauf, a biologist working for the Pakistani government, traveled around Europe on behalf of Ayman al-Zawahiri in the late 1990s looking for anthrax suitable for weaponization. In a letter recovered in Afghanistan in December 2001, Rauf explained to Zawahiri that he was unable to acquire “pathogenic” anthrax, that is, the lethal strain of the agent.
Al-Qaeda’s inability to acquire lethal strains of anthrax or to “weaponize” anthrax should not be surprising. The anthrax attacks in the United States in the fall of 2001 targeting several politicians and journalists caused considerable panic but only killed five people. The author of that attack, Bruce E. Ivins, was one of the leading biological weapons researchers in the United States. Even this brilliant scientist could only weaponize anthrax to the point that it killed a handful of people. Imagine then how difficult it would be for the average terrorist, or even the above-average terrorist, to replicate Ivins’s efforts. (Gary Ackerman, an American scholar of the use of WMD by terrorists, points out, however, that Ivins, who mailed out a number of anthrax-laced letters, could have infected far more people if he had put the anthrax spores in a salt shaker, gone to the top of a building and sprinkled the spores on passersby. Of course, this also would have quickly led to Ivins’s arrest.)
If al-Qaeda’s research into WMD was strictly an amateur affair, its plots to use these types of weapons have wavered between the ineffectual and the plain nutty. Take the 2003 “ricin” case in the United Kingdom, which was widely advertised as a serious WMD plot and ended up amounting to nothing. In the months before the invasion of Iraq, media in the United States and Great Britain were awash in stories about a group of men arrested in London who possessed highly toxic ricin to be used in future terrorist attacks. Not only that, but those arrested were reported to be “associates” of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, whom the Bush administration was then presenting as the key link between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein. This supposed confluence of WMD, al-Qaeda, and Saddam was, of course, a useful building block of the case for war against the Iraqi dictator. On January 16, 2003, two months before the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, CNN reported this story under the headline “Ricin Suspects Linked to al-Qaeda.” And three weeks later, when Secretary of State Colin Powell gave his speech at the United Nations laying out the American case for war against Iraq, he put up a slide that linked the “UK poison cell” to Zarqawi.
But two years later, at the trial of the men accused of the ricin plot, a government scientist testified that the men never had ricin in their possession, a charge that had been triggered by a false positive on a test. The men were cleared of the poison conspiracy except for an Algerian named Kamal Bourgass, who was convicted of conspiring to commit a public nuisance by using poisons or explosives.
A similar nonevent was the widely trumpeted plan by the al-Qaeda recruit Dhiren Barot to build a dirty bomb to be detonated either in the United Kingdom or the United States after 9/11. Barot wrote a letter to the leaders of al-Qaeda proposing that he would mine the small amount of radioactive material known as americium that can be found in ordinary smoke detectors and use it to build a radiological device. In his presentation document to al-Qaeda, Barot said that the americium from around ten thousand smoke detectors would be needed to make the bomb effective and that once the device was detonated the subsequent radioactive cloud “has the potential to affect around 500 people.” Barot estimated that buying the ten thousand smoke detectors necessary to make the bomb would cost more than one hundred thousand dollars. Neither Barot nor anyone in al-Qaeda ever implemented any part of this harebrained scheme, which Michael Sheehan, who was in charge of counterrorism for the New York Police Department at the time of Barot’s 2004 arrest, describes as “comical.” Indeed, of the 172 cases of individuals charged or convicted of a jihadist terrorist crime in the United States between 9/11 and the fall of 2010, none involved chemical, biological, radiological, or nuclear weapons.
The only post-9/11 cases where al-Qaeda or any of its affiliates actually used any kind of WMD was in Iraq, where al-Qaeda’s Iraqi affiliate laced more than a dozen of its bombs with the chemical chlorine in 2007. Those attacks sickened hundreds of Iraqis but the victims who died in these assaults did so largely from the blast of the bombs, not because of inhaling chlorine. Al-Qaeda stopped using chlorine in its bombs in Iraq in mid-2007 in part because the insurgents never figured out how to make the chlorine attacks especially deadly, and the bombmakers were captured or killed.
Charles Faddis, who headed up the CIA’s operations against the Iraqis who were building the chlorine bombs, recalls “there was a lot of effort to secure the chlorine, to get a hold of the tanks, to track these guys down, to kill them or capture them. Meanwhile the attacks are not being particularly successful. … The people are dying in the blast, but fortunately nobody is dying from chlorine.”
Despite the difficulties associated with terrorist groups acquiring or deploying weapons of mass destruction and al-Qaeda’s sorry record in the matter, there was a great deal of hysterical discussion about this issue after 9/11. Clouding everything was the semantic problem of the ominous term “weapons of mass destruction,” which is really a misnomer as it suggests that chemical, biological, and nuclear devices are all equally lethal. In fact, there is only one true weapon of mass destruction that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people and that is a nuclear device.
The Bush administration in particular tended to conflate chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons under the rubric of WMD as if they were all equally dangerous. The false claims advanced by the Bush administration that Saddam was building up a serious WMD program and that his regime had given training in “poisons and deadly gases” to al-Qaeda associates in Iraq were the apogee of this hysteria, as they helped to embroil the United States in the disastrous Iraq War.
But there were many other examples of such hysteria. In his 2004 book, Osama’s Revenge: The Next 9/11, Paul L. Williams, a sometime consultant to the FBI, trotted out the dubious tales about the missing Soviet suitcase nukes and quoted Yossef Bodansky, the head of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism, who had told a congressional committee in 1998 that “there is no longer much doubt that bin Laden has succeeded in his quest for nuclear suicide bombs,” whatever that means.
A widely publicized piece of hyperbolic reporting by the Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Ron Suskind in his 2006 book, The One Percent Doctrine, told the story of a group of jihadists who had been arrested in Bahrain three years earlier. One of them had an illustration of a device called a “mubtakar” stored on his computer. The mubtakar could supposedly be used to mix sodium cyanide with hydrogen to create lethal hydrogen cyanide, similar to the Zyklon B gas that was used by the Nazis in their concentration camps.
Suskind described the device as “a fearful thing, and quite real” and that “in the world of terrorist weaponry, it was the equivalent of splitting the atom.” Milton Leitenberg of the University of Maryland, who had worked on chemical and biological weapons issues for four decades, said that Suskind’s “splitting the atom” claim was “the stupidest statement I have heard in many years,” and pointed out that the much-vaunted mubtakar likely wouldn’t work at all. And there is no evidence tha
t al-Qaeda terrorists actually built a mubtakar (an Arabic word, ironically, for “invention”), or that al-Qaeda ever developed hydrogen cyanide gas.
In The One Percent Doctrine, Suskind also reported that sometime in early 2003 al-Qaeda set in motion a hydrogen cyanide attack on the New York City subway but Ayman al-Zawahiri called off the attack for some unknown reason. In an excerpt of the book that ran prominently in Time magazine, Suskind was credited with discovering that “al-Qaeda terrorists came within 45 days of attacking the New York subway system with a lethal gas similar to that used in Nazi death camps.”
This story was entirely false, according to Michael Sheehan, who ran counterterrorism operations for the New York Police Department (NYPD) at the time of the supposed hydrogen cyanide plot. Sheehan recalls that when he and his colleagues at NYPD “drilled down” on the supposed cyanide gas threat, they found “there was some reports of sketchy reliability that said there was a couple of guys in New York City that were going to use this improvised chemical thing in the subway, and we never identified that those two guys existed or came to the U.S. or that the source really knew what he was talking about.” Sheehan also dismisses the notion that Zawahiri had ever canceled what was, after all, a nonexistent operation. “That’s ridiculous. There was no evidence that he had ever called it off.” John McLaughlin, the deputy director of the CIA at the time, also says the mubtakar story “has been blown out of proportion. We did take the device seriously, but this was one of a dozen or a hundred things we were looking at, and we had no indication that there was a specific plot about to unfold.” As a matter of “due diligence” the Agency did alert local authorities to what a mubtakar might look like if it were ever constructed. McLaughlin recalls, “We built a model of it, and we took it around so people could see what it was, but we were not saying this is the main thing you have to worry about.”
Even the sober political scientist Graham Allison, a founding dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard, wrote a 2004 book titled Nuclear Terrorism predicting that “on the current path, a nuclear terrorist attack on America in the decade ahead is more likely than not.” Coming from Allison, who had served in the Pentagon as a senior official under President Clinton, this dramatic warning received considerable attention. Yet, many years after Allison first made his grim prediction, not a shred of evidence has emerged to substantiate this doomsday claim.
Similarly, the congressionally authorized Commission on the Prevention of Weapons of Mass Destruction Proliferation and Terrorism issued a report in December 2008 that concluded: “It is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013.” The findings of this report received considerable ink in the New York Times and Washington Post and plenty of airtime on networks around the world. And the day the report was released, incoming vice president Joe Biden was briefed on its contents.
The report’s overall conclusion that WMD terrorism is likely to happen “somewhere in the world” in the next five years was simultaneously stating the obvious—because terrorists had already engaged in crude chemical and biological weapons attacks—but also highly unlikely because the prospects of al-Qaeda or indeed any other terrorist group having access to a true WMD—a nuclear device—is near zero for the foreseeable future.
To understand how complex it is to develop an atomic weapon, it is worth recalling that Saddam Hussein put hundreds of millions of dollars into his nuclear program with no success. Iran, which has had an aggressive nuclear program for almost two decades, is still years away from developing a nuclear bomb. Terrorist groups simply don’t have the resources of states and so the notion that they could develop their own, even crude, nuclear weapons is fanciful.
Even if they did have access to such resources, acquiring sufficient highly enriched uranium (HEU) to make a bomb is next to impossible for terrorists. The total of all the known thefts of HEU around the world tracked by the International Atomic Energy Agency between 1993 and 2006 was just less than eight kilos, far short of the twenty-five kilos needed for the crudest bomb. (And none of the uranium thieves were linked to al-Qaeda.) So, even building the simple gun-type nuclear device of the kind that was dropped on Hiroshima would be extraordinarily difficult for a terrorist group because of the problem of accumulating sufficient quantities of HEU.
What about terrorists who might be given a nuke by a state? This was one of the underlying rationales of the push to topple Saddam in 2003. But governments are not about to hand over their crown jewels to organizations that they don’t control, and giving a terror group a nuclear weapon exposes the state sponsor to large-scale retaliation. The United States destroyed Saddam’s regime on the mere suspicion that he might have a nuclear weapons program and that he might give some kind of WMD capacity to terrorists; imagine what would happen to a country that actually did what Saddam was accused of doing. Also, nuclear states are well aware that their atomic weapons give off distinctive signatures after they are detonated, which means that even in the unlikely event that they wanted to get away with giving a nuke to terrorists, they couldn’t.
For the same reason that states won’t give nukes to terrorists, they also won’t sell them, either. This leaves the option of stealing a nuclear weapon, but nuclear-armed governments, including Pakistan, are quite careful about the security measures they place around their most valued weapons. After 9/11 the United States gave Pakistan some $100 million in aid to help secure its nukes. And the Department of Defense has assessed that “Islamabad’s nuclear weapons are probably stored in component form,” meaning that the weapons are stored unassembled, with the fissile core separated from the nonnuclear explosive. Such disassembling is one layer of protection against potential theft by jihadists. A further layer is Permissive Action Links (PAL), essentially electronic locks and keys designed to prevent unauthorized access to nuclear weapons, and Pakistan asserts that it has the “functional equivalent” of these. As a result of these measures, Michael Maples, the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2009 that “Pakistan has taken important steps to safeguard its nuclear weapons.”
Though a true WMD attack by terrorists in the United States that would kill hundreds of thousands is extraordinarily unlikely, former vice president Cheney—in the course of defending the Bush administration’s use of waterboarding and other such measures—claimed in February 2009 that such an attack was “a high probability,” adding that “whether or not they can pull it off depends on whether or not we keep in place policies that have allowed us to defeat all further attempts, since 9/11, to launch mass-casualty attacks against the United States.” In other words, if there were an attack on the United States that killed many tens of thousands, it would be the Obama administration’s fault, since, in Cheney’s telling, it was the Bush administration’s extralegal policies that kept America safe after 9/11, including safe from terrorists wielding weapons of mass destruction.
Luckily, the chances of such an attack are quite remote, but the story of A. Q. Khan, the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, does provide some pointers about how a group like al-Qaeda might be able to recruit scientists with the know-how to build an atomic weapon. After obtaining his Ph.D. in Belgium in 1972, Khan, a metallurgist by training, traveled to Holland, where he secured a job in a company that made centrifuges suitable to enrich uranium for a nuclear device. Khan was able to steal the blueprints for the centrifuges and send them to officials in Pakistan, who eventually built devices based on those designs to enrich enough uranium to make a number of atomic weapons.
For his role in building Pakistan’s bomb, Khan became a national hero, but motivated by greed, Khan also proliferated nuclear technology to rogue states like Libya. That made him a rich man with four houses in Islamabad, a collection of vintage cars, and a villa on the Caspian Sea, but eventually Khan’s career of nuclear proliferation was discovered by the United States and he was placed under house
arrest by the Pakistani government in 2003, where he remains.
One of the worrisome features of Khan’s story is that while he was not an Islamist ideologue himself, one of the younger scientists working with Khan in the mid-1970s on Pakistan’s program to build a nuclear weapon with stolen technology was Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, the same pro-Taliban nuclear scientist who more than two decades later would be discussing atomic weaponry with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan.
Governments must, of course, be cognizant that scientists motivated either by greed or ideology might give WMD know-how to terrorist groups. But even a group armed with such scientific knowledge would still have to overcome enormous technical challenges to build a workable nuclear device or to weaponize agents such as anthrax. And so groups like al-Qaeda will for the foreseeable future continue to use the tried-and-true tactics of hijackings, truck bombs, and suicide attacks, rather than being able to successfully pull off the deeply uncertain, complex, and prohibitively expensive task of developing true weapons of mass destruction. This, of course, does not preclude al-Qaeda or its affiliates from deploying crude biological, chemical, or radiological weapons over the coming years, but these will not be weapons of mass destruction. Rather, they will be weapons of mass disruption, whose principal effect will be panic and few deaths.
Part II
Nemesis?
Wars begin when you will, but they do not end when you please.
—Niccolò Machiavelli
Chapter 14
The United States of Jihad
Although we have discovered only a handful of individuals in the United States with ties to al-Qa’ida senior leadership since 9/11, we judge that al-Qa’ida will intensify efforts to put operatives here.
The Longest War Page 30
