Inside The Bomb Squad

A retired FBI explosives expert reveals radiology's role in homeland defense

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Before the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, before 17 U.S. sailors lost their lives in a Yemeni port aboard the USS Cole – even before Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols brought down the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City – six Islamic militants detonated a Ryder rental van in the underground garage below the New York City World Trade Center in February 1993.

Ramzi Yousef – who entered the United States with a false passport and bomb-making instructions – was released due to overcrowded Immigration and Naturalization Service holding cells. For $300, he later purchased urea pellets, nitroglycerin, sulfuric acid, aluminum and magnesium azide, bottled hydrogen and sodium cyanide – ingredients of a 600-kilogram explosive device constructed to expel cyanide vapors throughout the buildings' elevators and ventilation shafts.

Although Yousef's car bomb was powerful enough to cut off the buildings' main electrical power line and blow through three floors of reinforced concrete, he did not achieve his intended goal: poisoning the Trade Center's several thousand workers and visitors to the New York City landmark. The cyanide evaporated in the explosion.

Nonetheless, six people lost their lives, and another 1,040 were injured in the blast, which expelled smoke as high as the 93rd floor of both towers, cutting off the buildings' four stairwells, as well as their emergency lighting system.

Yet when FBI special agent Dave Williams arrived on the scene, his first hypothesis wasn't necessarily that of a biological attack – until he observed several of the workers on the scene coming down with upset stomachs.

"A number of the guys were getting sick and throwing up," Williams says. "I realized we had never checked the crime scene for radioactive material."

Williams, the now retired HAZMAT and explosives expert, froze in his tracks. For a brief moment, he wondered whether he might have an even larger disaster on his hands – a so-called "dirty bomb."

Known to the NSA, CIA, and FBI denizens as RDDs (radiological dispersal devices), dirty bombs are essentially a security worker's worst nightmare. According to the Nuclear Threat Initiative (NTI), a Washington, D.C.-based, privately held global security think tank, "the threat of radiological terrorism ... is an unfamiliar and unconventional form of attack, and this lack of knowledge has only served to increase public fear."

Williams agrees. "Basically, with a dirty bomb, people are going to get excited, so there's a psychological and financial impact," he says. "Everybody within a four-block area of the crime zone would not be able to go back to those buildings to work until it was absolutely certain that everything had been cleaned up."

Although Yousef's bomb did not in fact contain any radioactive materials (the vomiting was later attributed to a nasty, but unrelated, flu bug), the possibility of such a threat caused a radical shift in the thinking process of America's security policymakers. Now anti-terror planning had to incorporate another unforeseen contingency: radioactiveassault.

The effects of this adjusted mindset are undoubtedly far-reaching: "Just the simple fact that you could get on the Internet and Google 'dirty bomb' has caused the U.S. government to spend countless millions on researching [anti-RDD] technology," says Williams.

Williams has a particular intimacy with America's homeland security technologies. Retired from the FBI, he continues to serve as a consultant to the NSA and Office of Domestic Preparedness, and teaches forensic science at the American Public University System, a distance learning institution based in Charleston, W.V. Williams was also involved in the roll-out of anti-radiation security technology to more than 450 bomb squads in America.

"Every bomb squad has an explosive detector that detects alpha, beta and gamma particles," says Williams. "We also found the best possible neutron detector and handed one to every bomb squad in the country for every two men. It was costly, it's out there and we gave them very in-depth treatment as to how to use them."

Tools of the Trade

The actual technology used in crime scene radiology detection is manufactured by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), one of the nation's largest research and engineering companies, and Exploranium GS of Canada. In their arsenals are several devices, including a real-time X-ray device, the SAIC RTR4, and the Exploranium GR-130 and GR-135 hand-held radiation monitors, which can detect gamma and neutron emissions.

"The detection apparatus in high-risk areas are very good," says Williams. "The hand-held monitors that we supplied to bomb squads only run $300 to $600, and the neutron detector costs even less than that. It's even smaller than the wand they use at the airport to scan your body."

Each of these devices plays its part in the initial forensic analysis that transpires when federal agents are first alerted to the scene of an incident. One of the first things a bomb technician reaches for is his real-time X-ray device.

"It probably takes a bomb technician 45 to 60 minutes to determine what's going on after first arriving on a scene," says Williams. "The first thing you do is take an X-ray [of the suspected device]. The feds have real-time X-ray scanners and can even e-mail their analyses to someone else for interpretation if they need it. With a real-time X-ray, they can increase the number of pulses without having to re-scan."

What investigators look for in such a situation, says Williams, is a map of the device – usually a timing device, a trigger and some kind of liquid explosive. Other detection factors can also help alert agents to the nature of the threat they're dealing with.

"Keep in mind," he says, "when a bomb tech is suited up, he'll walk out with his radiation detector. If that thing starts going off, he's got another clue. As soon as this detection equipment starts beeping, different command procedures are followed."

The technology requires no real maintenance except keeping the batteries charged and calibrating the instruments prior to every response, which takes a total of three minutes, Williams says. The GR-135 detector boasts a built-in nuclide identification library and can determine the exact radioactive material an agent is looking at.

"Some of them are as idiot-proof as not requiring calibration," says Williams, "but the products aren't infallible. A number that detect explosives can also pick up shoe polish and tobacco. Who wants that false-positive at an airport?"

Fight or Flight

"If that light goes off and beeps steadily," however, "we tell bomb techs to run away," Williams admits. Such a scanner result typically indicates a dense neutron source, and that can mean only one thing: a high-yield nuclear device.

"There's nothing you can do in that situation," says Williams. "Every bomb tech always has a good pair of running shoes."

The likelihood of high-yield nuclear bombs coming close to detonation without any prior detection or field intelligence is highly unlikely, Williams says. Present-day detection apparatus are very accurate, albeit limited by distance. Yet, he says, satellite imagery could probably pick up a small depository of tritium (a naturally occurring, beta-emitting hydrogen isotope used in the manufacturing of watch faces) without any problem. Moreover, says Williams, most states have passed laws requiring notification of any hazardous material prior to its transportation through their borders.

"There is an entity in place that you're supposed to notify," says Williams. "Whether they all do that or not, who knows? If you were moving tritium gun sights in bulk for a gun show, let's say, I don't think it's regulated."

What such laws are typically not anticipated to cover, however, are radioactive persons. A December 2002 New York Times article reported that a number of otherwise-unsuspicious individuals were detained for questioning by police officers – one man was twice strip-searched in the Manhattan subway system – after triggering radiation detectors. Each had previously undergone radiation therapy, and residual amounts of the isotopes used to treat them were still setting off radiation detectors in bridges, subways and tunnels.

The practice had become so widespread that any patient ingesting radiopharmaceuticals – like the iodine-131 used to treat one New Yorker with an overactive thyroid condition – now is typically given a letter of introduction by his or her physician. At the recommendation of the Society of Nuclear Medicine, such letters typically must contain the patient's name, as well as the name of the procedure he or she has undergone, the date of treatment and specific information about the radionuclide used in treatment, including its half-life and the condition for which it was administered. Although such procedures might sound extreme to some, Williams points out that public stoppages of travelers or transit passengers seldom occurs without some relevant intelligence about a possible, credible threat.

Aside from avoiding satellite imagery detection and local law enforcement, another obstacle to moving an RDD stealthily (if at all) involves sheer weight. Radioactive materials, while prized for their destructive potential, must be heavily shielded in order to be transported without bringing harm to their users – or potential buyers. A Russian man who was apprehended trying to sell what appeared to be several pounds of plutonium, Williams recalls, had only an ounce or so of the material itself. Investigators discovered that the shielding he had been using to transport the materials comprised the bulk of his device's weight.

Another thing working in the favor of federal security agents is that dirty bombs are very difficult to create and even harder to successfully detonate to their intended end.

"A dirty bomb is nothing more than an improvised explosive device that has radioactive material added to it," says Williams. "The radius of fragmentation is what spreads the radioactive material, and it is very difficult to incorporate radioactive material into a bomb like this."

In order to make a weapon that can perform at its optimum potential, an explosive device has to contain aerosolized radioactive ma-terial, according to Williams – which is so difficult to come by that the word "scarce" hardly covers it.

"You'd have to take that cesium-137 pill and grind it into a fine powder in order to up its efficacy. Most of the people who do that are going to wind up dead or very sick."

Chemical Burn

The real trouble with terrorist bomb threats – native or foreign – stems from broad, public access to the recipes required to make these explosives, as well as the slim budget necessary to purchase their component materials. It's a dilemma faced not only by America, says Williams, but by many countries around the world.

For example, the chief component of the bomb constructed by McVeigh and Nichols for use in the Oklahoma City attack was ammonium nitrate – a compound commonly found in chemical lawn fertilizers – and a popular detonator used by bomb-makers within the Irish Republican Army (IRA). The British federal government attempted to regulate the concentration of ammonium nitrate in fertilizer bombs constructed by the IRA by manufacturing fertilizer in a way that limits its oxidation potential.

"The Brits found out that they could lower the ammonium nitrate content [of lawn fertilizer] to 27 percent instead of 30 percent and limit the use of fertilizer in bombs," says Williams. "Well, the IRA found out that they could add icing sugar to the mix and it made a more effective explosive than it had been before. People are going to innovate."

British citizen and Islamic convert Richard Reid provided another example. Dubbed by newspapers as the "shoe-bomber," Reid is remembered for his December 2001 attempt to detonate an explosive device concealed within his sneaker on an international flight from Paris to Miami. The trigger explosive Reid tried to activate is known as TATP (triacetonetriperoxide), a highly volatile substance in even small amounts, says Williams.

"Half a coffee cup of the stuff would be enough that they would be picking you up with a spoon and a stick if it detonated," Williams says.

TATP is another such chemical that can be prepared with ingredients readily available in any drug store or supermarket: acetone, hydrogen peroxide and a mineral acid. Reid's story provides further evidence, Williams says, that anyone determined enough doesn't need much to suc-ceed in constructing a homemade bomb.

"Give me 20 minutes in the supermarket and I could [build an explosive device that could] take your car apart from a long distance," he says.

Classified Information

Nowadays, when Williams purchases fertilizer for his lawn, it's recorded. Today, anyone who purchases more than 50 pounds of ammonium nitrate gets their vehicle placarded before it can leave the store parking lot; a process he helped to implement among retailers. Security experts are coming to discover, Williams says, that it's far easier to control information than access, especially when securing the nation's nuclear power plants.

"The backgrounds of the people who are working in these major infrastructures are very thoroughly researched," says Williams. "They have a classification on their background that goes back to when they were weaned. On these nuclear sites, they do a six-month to once-a-year credit, criminal and neighborhood investigation. Polygraphs, physicals; if anything shows up a little bit different, there's room for dismissal, and it happens regularly."

However, Williams points out, "even if the radioactive medicine is locked up, a janitor has the key."

"Like any information, the number of leaks is directly related to the number of people who know that information," he continues. "I would say err on the side of classification rather than disclosure. I do know that there are a number of [nuclear] techniques, materials and manufacturing sites that are classified – that will stay as classified as Area 51 – for good reason."

A case study in declassification nightmares occurred in the late 1960s, when the military released its munitions and booby-trap handbooks. Then-19-year-old William Powell changed the cover and resold it as the popular dissident's technical manual, The Anarchist Cookbook. (In an interesting side note, Powell has since recanted his actions, calling for cessation of the book's publishing, the rights of which he does not own.)

A Matter of Time

Frustratingly to tacticians and planners like Williams and his counterparts in federal intelligence agencies, no amount of forethought, hyper-strategizing or information secrecy can account for every contingency. No amount of planning can incorporate every eventuality. No task force, no matter how well trained, can prevent every potential disaster. Williams believes it will ultimately be a matter of time before another terrorist attack is enacted on American soil.

"Given all the information that I've seen, biological weapons are the biggest threat, then chemical, then explosive, then nuclear," Williams says. "Think of the common flu. How much trouble could you cause with a sick guy and an infected tissue shaking hands in an airport? Putting something as simple as E. coli in a spray bottle and going over to the salad bar in a restaurant; you're going to cause a lot of havoc."

"I think we're going to see smallpox or an explosive attack," he predicts.

Yet, at the same time, he cautions, homeland security is the type of problem that no amount of duct tape or plastic wrap can wholly combat. Ultimately, the best weapon against such threats is individual preparedness and self-awareness. Dentists and physicians should be aware of their radioactive sources and work to maintain the security of those materials.

"This country is very difficult. We try to please everyone, but you can't," Williams says. "The biggest thing we need to teach our people is not to panic. Be aware of your surroundings. If you're working in a hospital and you see someone who looks like they don't belong, ask if they need help. Just saying, "Can I help you?' can be enough of a deterrent to disrupt or discourage terrorist operations."

— Matthew N. Skoufalos is a New Jersey-based freelancer. Questions and comments can be directed to editorial@rt-image.com.