Editor's note: This
report is based on a one-year investigation by CNN into air cargo
security in light of a thwarted plot by al Qaeda in October 2010 to blow
up cargo jets over the United States. CNN's Nic Robertson's report "Deadly Cargo" airs on CNN Presents, Saturday and Sunday February 18, 19 at 8 p.m. ET.
London (CNN) -- The call came into the London
Metropolitan Police bomb squad in the early hours of the morning.
Isolated at the East Midlands airport in central England was a UPS
package dispatched from Yemen, containing a laser printer that Saudi
intelligence believed had been converted into a bomb.
Before dawn a bomb squad arrived on the scene. The plane had been
cleared and left at 4:20 am, without the package identified by its
waybill number as the laser printer. Officers inspected the printer and
lifted out the ink cartridge but found no explosive device. According to
security sources, they also brought in specially trained dogs and
passed the printer through an X-ray scanner, but those, too, failed to
locate any explosives.
The security cordon around the area where the laser printer had been
isolated was lifted. But Saudi counter-terrorism officials implored
British authorities to re-examine the printer. When they did, they found
400 grams of the high-explosive PETN inside the ink cartridge.
The bomb had been timed to explode hours earlier. But the bomb squad
had inadvertently defused the device earlier when they had lifted the
printer cartridge out of the printer, disconnecting the explosives from
the timer.
A similar drama had been playing out at an airport in Dubai in the
United Arab Emirates, where another printer bomb had been located that
same day. These were some of the most sophisticated explosive devices
ever seen from al Qaeda.
Timeline: 2010 printer bomb scare
These discoveries on October 29, 2010, sent shock waves through
Western capitals. Not only had these bombs gone through screenings at
several airports without being detected, they also had traveled on
passenger jets during the first legs of their journeys.
And most disturbing of all: For many hours, the explosives went
undetected by bomb experts in two countries, despite being right in
front of them.
A few weeks after the incident, U.S. Senator Susan Collins asked
Transportation Security Administration chief John Pistole whether the
bombs would have been detected by the country's current security system.
"In my professional opinion, no," Pistole replied.
The group that claimed responsibility for the plot -- the Yemen-based
al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula -- appeared to have found the
Achilles heel of international aviation.
While much airport security is concentrated on screening passengers
and their checked bags, about half the hold on a typical passenger
flight is filled with cargo. In fact, over a third of cargo by volume
that entered the United States in 2010 was shipped on passenger jets,
according to the Department of Transportation. That is 3.7 billion tons.
Another 7.2 billion tons of air cargo came in on all-cargo aircraft,
according to the DOT.
And the screening requirements for such cargo are not as strict as they are for passengers and their checked bags.
If it took authorities in Britain and Dubai hours to identify a bomb
that was right in front of them, what are the chances of finding such
devices amid the millions of tons of air cargo flying into the United
States each day?
A difficult quandary
U.S. authorities were already aware of the potential for terrorists
to take advantage of lax cargo security. A law that required screening
for all cargo on domestic and inbound international passenger flights
had taken effect two months before the printer bomb scare.
While the Transportation Security Administration was able to ensure
the screening of all domestic cargo, it fell short when it came to
screening all inbound international cargo, according to the U.S.
Government Accountability Office.
Reconstructing al Qaeda's printer bomb
A Lethal Alliance: al Shabaab & al Qaeda
So the TSA announced that the 100% requirement would be brought into
effect for inbound flights by January 2012. Now, the TSA has
indefinitely deferred this goal in favor of a risk-based approach,
according to Massachusetts Rep. Ed Markey.
Following the 2010 bomb plot, the United States and its international
partners took a number of steps to bolster air cargo security. They
banned cargo shipments assessed as too high a risk that originated from
or transited through Yemen and Somalia. U.S. authorities implemented
enhanced screening for passenger jet cargo assessed as having an
elevated risk and tightened procedures for incoming mail. Those
requirements have not been made public. The Department of Homeland
Security brought in enhanced screening for U.S.-bound shipments on
all-cargo aircraft.
While industry insiders say progress has been made, some lawmakers on
Capitol Hill express concern about any approach that doesn't involve
the screening of all cargo.
"The low-risk cargo does not receive anywhere near the level of
security as the high-risk cargo," said Markey, who co-authored
legislation mandating screening on passenger jets by August 2010.
"There is no such thing as low-risk cargo because, in the hands of al Qaeda, that cargo becomes high risk."
But some of those on the frontlines of air cargo security point out
that the risk-based approach stems from on-the-ground realities.
"Identifying high-risk cargo wherever it is in the supply chain and
singling it out for physical screening is the better approach to
securing cargo on an international scale," said David Brooks, the head
of American Airlines air cargo.
And the industry says TSA mandates are not easy to enforce when they
involve other countries that may face logistical challenges in
conforming to U.S. inspection standards. Economic factors also played a
role in the U.S government's delay in imposing 100% inbound screening.
It was a quandary that al Qaeda exploited. "(Our goal was to) force
upon the West two choices: You either spend billions of dollars to
inspect each and every package in the world or you do nothing and we
keep trying again," al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula announced after
the package bomb plot.
New technology
Even if 100% of all plane cargo is screened, it's no panacea for keeping bombs off airplanes.
Single-view X-ray machines -- the technology still used at a
significant number of air cargo warehouses around the world -- lack the
resolution to thoroughly vet the contents of shipments, according to
industry insiders. The machines find it difficult to distinguish PETN
from similar powdered substances, explosive detection experts told CNN.
It was a weakness that al Qaeda exploited in the printer bomb plot by filling the ink cartridges with PETN.
"The toner cartridge contains the toner which is carbon based and
that is an organic material. The carbon's molecular structure is close
to that of PETN," AQAP boasted after the attempted attack.
Under TSA guidelines, cargo screening can involve a variety of
methods including physical inspection, dogs, a variety of single-view or
multiview X-ray machines, and "explosive trace detection" -- which
involves running a hand-held device over the surface or insides of a
package, which "sniffs" the air for minute quantities of explosive.
Dogs also are used to sniff for bombs, but for years, TSA officials
have had reservations about relying on canine teams to screen for
explosives. According to explosive detection experts, PETN in particular
is difficult for sniffer dogs to detect, because very little of it
disperses into the air.
Physical inspection of every package is impractical given the volume of cargo and the ease with which PETN can be hidden.
In order to keep one step ahead of the terrorists, airlines and air
cargo handlers are investing millions of dollars in the latest
generation of advanced X-ray machines and explosive trace detection.
"PETN can be found quite easily in very small amounts using trace
detection equipment and in bulk form by (advanced) X-ray machines," said
Kevin Riordan, technical director at Smiths Detection, a British
company that is one of the leading producers of explosive detection
equipment.
If the British bomb squad at East Midlands airport had such
equipment, they would have been able to see the PETN inside the printer
cartridge, according to another UK detection expert.
But Riordan conceded that even if authorities had the latest
equipment, al Qaeda could take steps to make detection more difficult.
"We'd have to say there is always a way through," he told CNN. "The risk is never removed totally."
Air cargo industry insiders say that combining several layers of
screening is the best protection against future al Qaeda bomb plots. And
all those interviewed by CNN stressed the critical role of
intelligence.
"There is no 100%, foolproof system for all cargo," U.S. Homeland
Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told CNN, "but what we can do and
are doing is maximizing our ability to prevent such a plot from
succeeding.
That included "good intel, good information sharing."
A unique challenge
The new generation of multiview X-ray machines and explosive
detection equipment is now routinely used to scan all checked and hand
luggage at airports in the United States and Europe, according to
explosive detection experts, but not yet all air cargo.
Parts of Africa, the Middle East and Asia are lagging behind in
deploying this technology at air cargo departure points, according to
air cargo industry insiders. U.S. officials say they've put a high
priority on new global standards to plug the technology gap.
"The global supply chain presents some challenges because the weakest
link in that global supply chain can adversely affect the security
throughout that supply chain," said TSA administrator Pistole.
Scanning air cargo presents unique challenges because a high
proportion of it has been consolidated into large pallets by the time it
arrives at airports and is ready to be loaded onto planes. TSA has yet
to license any technology that can reliably detect explosives within
pallets.
In the United States this had led to more than half of cargo
screening being conducted at off-airport sites, according to Brandon
Fried, executive director of the Air Forwarders Association. The shift
towards screening of smaller configurations of cargo at these sites
before palletization helped U.S. authorities meet the 100% screening
mandate for domestic cargo.
But other parts of the world are lagging behind in adopting such initiatives.
There is no such thing as low-risk cargo because, in the hands of al Qaeda, that cargo becomes high risk.
Rep. Ed Markey, D-Massachusetts
Homeland security experts say the private sector must step up to the plate if air cargo is to be secured.
"The U.S. has policies on how much cargo needs to be screened
inbound. We can control that to some degree, but we are very much
reliant on our partners," said Robert Liskouski, a former director of
infrastructure protection at the Department of Homeland Security.
U.S. flag carriers say they have taken steps to bolster cargo
security since the package bomb plot. In April 2011, TSA air cargo
security chief Doug Brittin told the International Air Cargo Association
that airlines were screening 80% of inbound air cargo and some U.S.
flag carriers as much as 95%.
After missing the August 2010 deadline, the United States has yet to
set a new timeline to implement the 100% screening mandate for inbound
cargo flights, according to a letter from TSA's Pistole to U.S.
legislators in December 2011. But he said he expects to meet that goal
no later than 2013.
Industry insiders hope a voluntary pilot program called Air Cargo
Advance Screening, in which airlines send manifest data to U.S. Customs
and Border Protection several hours before departure, will further
bolster inbound screening. But U.S. authorities say challenges lie ahead
in bringing the program fully on stream.
Despite last year's elimination of al Qaeda chief Osama bin Laden,
the threat from the terrorist group still remains a major concern.
Recent months have seen AQAP, the group responsible for the 2010 printer
bomb plot, take advantage of political turmoil in Yemen to expand its
operations. Saudi Arabia's counterterrorism service believes this will
bolster the group's ability to target the United States. And it believes
Ibrahim al Asiri, the group's master bomb-maker, has trained several
apprentices in how to make sophisticated PETN-based bombs.
Markey says that time is not on the United States' side.
"Every day that goes by is another day that al Qaeda might exploit
that opening -- and once again successfully terrorize our country," he
told CNN.
