J.J. Green, wtop.com
WASHINGTON – Two bombs concealed in printer toner cartridges and addressed to synagogues in Chicago were dismantled before they exploded at their destinations.
But neither house of worship nor Chicago may have been the real targets.
“I don’t think they intended to take these down in an airport, I suspect they were hoping for these to go off in the air,” says Phillip Mudd, the former deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency Counter Terrorism center.
Mudd, whose last job was Associate Executive Assistant Director at the FBI’s National Security Branch, believes the plot was part plot and part propaganda.
“The splash that would happen on Al-Jazeera and CNN to reinforce the fact that they (al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula) are the new brand name in town and people around the world who are looking for Jihad and who don’t want to go to Pakistan because of how much fighting there is in Pakistan right now would say, let me go to Yemen,” Mudd says.
No official reason has been given by the Obama administration for why the bombs did not detonate.
Fred Burton, a former State Department Counter terrorism agent, says, “The packages had been floating around for quite some time. Either you might have had a malfunction, or you could have had a timing failure or perhaps you’re missing some component.”
Mudd concurs.
“I assume it’s because the bomb maker didn’t construct them properly.”
“It’s worth remembering that when you look at what you’ve seen in the past few years, {the} Dec. 25 attack, the attempt in Times Square, the efforts by Naji Bullisazi, the man who was trying blow up the subways in New York and now the failures of these package bombs, these guys aren’t perfect at what they do and they’re struggling to reach the United States and explode weapons like this,” Mudd says.
There are other possible reasons why the U.S. dodged another bullet.
“I wonder if some of this was not just improper devices, but it was very good intelligence that led people to disrupt them before they could go off,” Mudd says.
“Perhaps the intention was to scare and not necessarily to kill,” Burton says.
U.S. authorities will not say exactly when or how they learned about the plot, but in hindsight, a remark by Transportation Security Administration head John Pistole might be a clue.
During an Oct. 25 interview with WTOP, when asked how the administration stays ahead of terrorist plots, Pistole said TSA engages in “red-teaming and vulnerability testing” with the U.S intelligence and law enforcement communities to forecast how terrorists might evolve.
“We believe the bomb maker for Abdulmutallab is still out there and that there could be similar devices that could show up at any time,” Pistole said.
Three days later, after President Barack Obama announced to a stunned nation the plot had been uncovered, Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism John Brennan said al-Qaida and its franchises had been active and seeking new ways to attack the U.S.
“And as we saw last Christmas Day with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, that they will, in fact, take steps to carry out those intentions,” Brennan said.
His comments hinted at a connection between the Christmas Day attempt and the discovery of the package bombs, along with Pistole’s concern on about the bomb maker being at large.
When pressed at the White House news conference about how the plot was uncovered, Brennan revealed little details.
“I’m not going to go into the details about how we became aware of it,” he said. “But the redundant layers of security, the tremendous work of the counterterrorism professionals, law enforcement, homeland security and intelligence were the reasons why we were able to succeed.”
According to a U.S. intelligence source who requested anonymity, “the U.S. government had been notified weeks before the plot was exposed that something was coming.”
The source says Saudi Arabian intelligence provided the tip.
Investigators speculated that more than a dozen devices in addition to the two that were found might be on route to the U.S. While no other devices have turned up, it’s not yet clear if others may be sitting in cargo holds somewhere in the world.
(Copyright 2010 by WTOP. All rights reserved.)
