Permanent Emergency by Kip Hawley

Author:Kip Hawley [Hawley, Kip]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780230120952
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2012-11-15T05:00:00+00:00

ONCE THE TSA GOT INVITED TO THE MORNING BRIEFING AT EIGHT A.M. every weekday and often on Saturdays, I instituted a new internal intel meeting at eight-thirty to follow that briefing. After Operation Glidepath, I wanted all of the TSA’s networks to become intel-driven, so attendance was not limited to just the heads of operations or analysts but also included people from PR, strategy groups, or scheduling personnel. To drive our work with intelligence reporting meant bringing every department into the fold at as high a level as we could, but because of the wide range of security clearances, the briefings were also a good lesson on how intel was shared from the public all the way up to the top.

When a threat flickers across the US intelligence community’s radar, even the most serious plot is first issued as a vague bulletin to state and local law enforcement. Later that morning, after the information is invariably leaked to the public, a DHS spokesperson will attempt to quell the ripple of media interest with the soothing mantra, “This information is of limited specificity and uncertain credibility.” If the plot and media reporting continued to develop and expand, the next official statement might read: “The United States and its European allies are at risk of a terrorist attack, although there is no specific, credible threat at this time.” Three words—specific, credible, and imminent, abbreviated “SCI”—were the threshold below which action was often considered imprudent.

I viewed this obsession with clearing the SCI barrier as a technique that many people in the intel community employed to cover their behinds and pass the buck. For any threat stream considered below the SCI hurdle, once the paperwork was reported and filed, any threat to the official’s career was mitigated, if not the actual plot. The same paperwork could also be used to pass on the onus for actually protecting the country. If it wasn’t classified, I would have hung on my office wall a letter from a senior CIA official informing me that there was reporting of active al-Qaeda plotting against American commercial aviation and that I should take all necessary precautions. It was like a game of hot potato: If a plane goes down, it’s your problem now.

But the TSA wasn’t the NSA or the CIA; we all had different roles, and given the uncertain nature of most intel reporting—most threats, real or fake, never reach SCI level—we often had act on our own by quietly inserting subtle but effective security measures against these half-seen, shadowy plots. Our mission was clear: Keep planes in the sky and trains on the track. I knew there would be no way to explain or do other than take the blame head-on after a successful attack on American transportation.

Meanwhile, at one of our morning briefings, we’d get the classified version of the threat intel: “Senior al-Qaeda operations planners have given approval to begin preparing a dedicated cell of Western operatives for a coordinated series of attacks on European passenger rail targets.

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