How Much Risk Will We Take?

By Amanda Ripley

We should be feeling safer right now. British officials appear to have foiled a plot to blow up as many as 10 U.S.-bound passenger jets with liquid explosives hidden in carry-on luggage. Another batch of alleged operatives has been discovered and taken out of commission. Several thousand men, women and children did not die ghastly deaths over the Atlantic Ocean. "This," said Republican Congressman Christopher Shays when the arrests of 24 suspects was announced last week, "was a good day."

Then why did it feel so bad? Why did a bullet dodged feel like the beginning of something and not the end? Minutes after the news broke, counterterrorist experts popped up on TV screens like Pez dispensers to remind us that our homeland-security system is ill equipped to stop the kind of attack the suspected London bombers were said to be planning. President George W. Bush warned against false comfort, saying although he believes the U.S. is more secure than it was before 9/11, "we're still not completely safe." Worst of all, the Brits, who can normally be counted on to snuff out hysterics, warned that we had narrowly avoided "mass murder on an unimaginable scale."

The sense of dread can be attributed in equal parts to the identities of the suspects (24 men and women believed to have been born in Britain, one of whom has already been released without charge), to the supposed imminence of the attacks and to their purported targets: more planes falling out of the sky. But our collective shudder is by now practically instinctive. Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have conditioned ourselves to spike every triumph in the struggle against terrorism with a shot of anxiety. Try as we might to secure the perimeter, we walk in the shadow of risk. "This is the story of terrorist threats," says Bruce Hoffman, a counterterrorism analyst at the Rand Corp. "We close up one set of vulnerabilities, and they attempt to exploit another."

Our triumph last week was muted because it was also a test--a test of our understanding of terrorism. Do we continue to react reflexively to each new scheme, regardless of the probability of the threat and the feasibility of preventing it? Or do we have an honest discussion about risk and the costs of safety? After the discovery of the liquid-bomb plot, does it make sense to funnel billions more dollars into new machines that can detect liquid explosives, even though the past three sizable attacks pulled off by Islamic terrorists in major metropolises have been on trains in Madrid, London and Bombay? Banning cologne from planes and testing bottles of baby formula for explosives may make us feel proactive, but are we being smarter? "We can't just radically shift our strategy every time there's an event," Michael Chertoff, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), tells TIME. "The key is balance and constantly looking at the entire landscape."

Yet clear-eyed equanimity about how to best manage risk is exactly what gets lost every time a new, harrowing plot is uncovered. The U.S.'s response to the London arrests is already drifting toward overkill, as men with badges ask moms to taste the baby formula and women hide lipstick tubes in their bras. Two days after the arrests, British authorities, who have decades of experience dealing with terrorist bombings, were complaining to DHS about an excess of caution. More than one plane from London was turned back, and at least seven British Airways flights had to be canceled because U.S. officials took so long conducting background checks of passengers. "We understand the need for new security measures," says a British government representative. "But we are keen for the actions to impact as little as possible on passengers."

In a world where every successful antiterrorism operation serves only to highlight another vulnerability, trying to stop the next attack can seem like an exercise in futility. But that's exactly the point. Terrorists can't be deterred forever. Dealing effectively with the threat posed by al-Qaeda requires a more sober and rational approach than we have pursued over the past five years, one that involves figuring out how much we are truly willing to change our way of life to reduce the risk of another 9/11. Until that calculation is made, terrorists will continue to succeed even when they fail. "The secondary concern of all terror plots has always been the secondary impact of attacks--getting democracies and free societies so frenzied to prevent new attacks that we start eroding and violating the very freedoms and liberties that the authors of terrorism themselves want to destroy," says French terrorism expert Roland Jacquard. "There will always be holes. One-hundred-percent security doesn't exist. We can do everything possible or viable to increase our security, but cutting off your arm because your hand risks gangrene is going too far." The question is, How do you know when you have gone far enough?

What's lost in the hand wringing about the vulnerabilities and security holes exposed by the London plot is how much the counterterrorism community got right. Over a year ago, Britain's MI5 launched an investigation that spanned at least three continents. Pakistani officials helped track the British suspects, and U.S. intelligence provided intercepts of the group's communications. "It was really a joint effort, the kind of cooperation you probably wouldn't have had before Sept. 11," says a U.S. official who is regularly briefed on terrorist threats.

On Thursday, after the suspects had been arrested, the FBI and DHS sent an internal memo to state and local law-enforcement agencies warning that peroxide-based explosives could be used in an attack. But the memo could offer only so much guidance. No one could tell airport searchers exactly what to look for. Even if they knew, they wouldn't have the tools to find it. So post-9/11 airport supplications reached a new low, as throngs of passengers handed over their deodorant, hair gel and bottled water. The airline industry, which had just reported its best quarterly profits in six years, faces a possible new cataclysm. London Heathrow Airport came to a standstill, and one of aviation's most lucrative routes, between New York City and London, suddenly seems fraught with risk.

For many counterterrorism officials, the scale and depravity of the plot seem chilling enough to justify the drama. "Very seldom do things get to me," Chertoff told Congressman Peter King, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee, in a phone call late Wednesday night. "This one has really gotten to me." A British official says investigators believe the bombers planned waves of attacks. By blowing up planes over the Atlantic, they would make it nearly impossible to gather forensic evidence. Then after people returned to flying, the terrorists would strike again. That benign items--iPods and soda bottles, the stuff of teenagers' backpacks--could be turned into weapons of mass destruction seemed like a new, unsettling perversion. Or at least it felt new.

Despite the news-channel talk of a fresh threat, people have been trying for almost 20 years to blow up planes with liquid explosives packed in carry-on baggage. Terrorists, like movie studios and toddlers, don't like to try new things. In 1987 two North Korean agents posing as father and daughter put a radio packed with plastic explosives and a whisky bottle full of liquid explosives in a bag in the overhead bin of a South Korean airliner. Then they got off on a layover. The subsequent explosion sent the plane spinning into the jungle near the Thailand-Burma border, killing all 115 people onboard.

In 1994 al-Qaeda foreshadowed the London plot almost exactly when Pakistani terrorist Ramzi Yousef and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who went on to mastermind the 9/11 attacks, drew up a scheme to bomb 12 planes over the Pacific during a 48-hour period. They nicknamed the plan Bojinka. They intended to have five terrorists take liquid explosives in carry-on bags onto planes and then assemble the bombs onboard. All but one of the planes were to be U.S. bound. On Dec. 11, Yousef ran a dress rehearsal on a Philippine Airlines jet. He carried the explosives onboard in contact-lens-solution bottles. Like the North Koreans, he disembarked after positioning the bomb in the cabin. It successfully detonated, killing a Japanese passenger and injuring 10 others. But because of the very small quantity of explosives, it did not take down the plane. A month later, Yousef accidentally started a fire in his apartment while working with the explosives. The Bojinka plan was thwarted when police arrived to investigate and discovered a laptop containing details of the plot.

Since 1969, explosives have killed about 2,000 people on planes. "Explosive devices are--and will remain--the primary threat to aviation indefinitely," says Steve Luckey, a former security director of the Air Line Pilots Association. "Bomb components are easy to get, easy to hide, and the payoff is huge."

Liquid explosives are particularly diabolical. Like plastic explosives, a small amount of them can release a massive amount of force. And they can be easily disguised to look harmless. In 2002 the FBI issued a warning that al-Qaeda members had discussed sneaking onto planes liquid explosives disguised as coffee. The bombers who struck London's transit system in July 2005 used a variant of a peroxide-based explosive, triacetone triperoxide (TATP). "We didn't wake up and discover liquid explosives this week," says DHS Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson.

Then why does the system remain so vulnerable to that brand of attack? The explosives-detection machines in airports today are not able to sniff out liquid explosives in a sealed container. Airline-security experts interviewed by TIME were divided on the question of whether the technology even exists to effectively detect liquid explosives in airports. Private companies have been working on various devices for years, but it's not clear if any are sufficiently accurate, cheap and fast. The fix is elusive because explosives can literally appear in any form--from computer paper to Jell-O, solid to gas--and they can be detonated by an endless mosaic of everyday devices. "Unless you are prepared to conduct intimate body searches or scans of every single passenger on every single flight, you cannot guarantee security from smuggled explosives. It's as simple as that," says Charles Shoebridge, a British security analyst and former counterterrorism officer.

Still, some experts believe the U.S. should be doing more to defend against bombs in general. The White House's Homeland Security Advisory Council has a director for nuclear threats and one for biochemical threats but no one specifically tasked to handle explosives. As in other parts of DHS, some of the best minds in the explosives unit have left in frustration. "There has been a hemorrhaging of talent," says a former senior U.S. official.

DHS has spent $732 million this year on aviation R&D for explosives-detection programs. Jackson said he did not have figures on hand for how much went to detecting liquid explosives in particular. Far more is spent on homeland security now compared with before 9/11, but many security experts say it's still not nearly enough. "The Pentagon's budget is 10 times that of DHS," notes Clark Kent Erwin, a former inspector general for DHS.

But given the hard reality of limited resources, what is the rational thing to do next? "Some people say, Let's push all the money into something that happened last week," says Chertoff. "[But] we still have to think about all the other things that could happen." Shoulder-fired missiles, for example, could be just as dangerous to plane passengers as liquid explosives. Some politicians argue that we should develop Star Wars-- style missile-defense technology to protect planes. But that would cost an estimated $10 billion to build and billions more to maintain.

It's worth considering the probability of an attack, not just the possibility. Once terrorists decide to bomb an airline with liquid explosives, how likely is it that they will succeed? Some 2,000 bombs are planted every year on U.S. soil, and almost none are liquid explosives. That's because they are extremely volatile. Some explode if dropped a couple of feet. Friction can set off TATP. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to check such a bomb in a suitcase. Even if the components are carried on separately--the safest strategy to avoid detection and premature detonation--mixing the materials produces a foul stench that would probably attract attention, according to a U.S. airline explosives expert.

Every time the government scrambles to defend against the newest threat, it runs the risk of shortchanging more pressing ones. Investing in body-scanning machines or prohibiting carry-on luggage might provide a degree of security against liquid explosives, but such steps would do nothing about the fact that most of the cargo shipped on passenger planes goes entirely uninspected--for bombs or anything else. DHS relies instead on a program it calls Known Shipper, which leaves it up to air carriers and freight forwarders to screen regular cargo customers so they can load boxes onto planes with only spot inspections. The Government Accountability Office warned last October that the industry isn't adequately investigating shippers. But the Bush Administration and the airlines, which make about $17 billion a year from cargo on passenger planes, have resisted introducing tougher rules.

The key, though, has less to do with the sheer number of searches than with trying to make sure we're conducting the right ones. Several security experts interviewed by TIME said they hope the London plot encourages Americans to do more sophisticated profiling of suspects. The U.S. already profiles all passengers, using computer software. But the methodology is outdated. The system searches for people who pay with cash or book their flight less than 24 hours in advance. The country has a legal, moral and political aversion to officially sanctioned discrimination. But there are ways to profile other than skin color. Software could search passengers' previous travel itineraries or their nationality, for example.

While the U.S. tries to improve its fragmented intelligence capabilities, the second best defense might be vigilance. Most terrorists make mistakes, just as other criminals do. Mohammed told CIA interrogators that he had inadvertently packed a copy of the Bojinka plan with all the targeted flights and explosion times in his bag on the Philippine Airlines test run. Nobody noticed. Today someone might--just as a flight attendant noticed Richard Reid trying to light his shoe in a failed attempt to blow up a transatlantic plane. "We're lucky the people we're up against are so incompetent," says Larry Johnson, a former State Department counterterrorism official.

The trick is to find that narrow space between vigilance and paranoia. After the Bojinka plot was uncovered in 1995, aviation officials banned carry-on aerosols and most liquids and gels heavier than an ounce on U.S. planes leaving Manila. Eventually, the ban faded away. And people kept flying.

Regular people are often more comfortable assessing risk than officialdom expects. They may not be perfect at it, but they do it every day. Nancy Bort of Arlington, Va., landed at Washington's Dulles International Airport on the first flight from London Heathrow after the arrests. The plane arrived nearly two hours late, and the passengers emerged clutching plastic bags for their passports and not much else. But Bort was unfazed. "I still think I have a greater chance of being hurt in a car accident than getting killed by a terrorist," she said.

Last year car crashes claimed the lives of an estimated 40,000 people in America. Terrorists? Zero.

With reporting by Reported by Jessica Carsen, J.F.O. McAllister/ London, Simon Elegant/ Beijing, Leo Cendrowicz/ Brussels, Bruce Crumley/ Paris, Mimi Murphy/ Rome, Brian Bennett, Timothy J. Burger, SALLY B. DONNELLY, Tracy Samantha Schmidt, DOUGLAS WALLER, Michael Weisskopf/ Washington