The Threat by Andrew G. McCabe

Author:Andrew G. McCabe
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

5

Benghazi to Boston

RELIVING THE HORROR, AGAIN AND AGAIN

No Red Lines

Try to hit the alligator closest to the boat. In 2011, when I returned to headquarters from the HIG, that was the counterterrorism division’s guiding strategy. And the water was teeming with alligators. As in the case of Zazi and the New York City subway plot, sometimes we got lucky. In May 2010, a Pakistani named Faisal Shahzad left a Nissan Pathfinder packed with propane, gasoline, fireworks, and timing triggers parked in Times Square. Vendors called the police when the car began smoking after a failed detonation. Three days later, Shahzad slipped past FBI surveillance teams outside his house and was pulled off a flight by Customs and Border Protection officers minutes before the airplane was to leave for Pakistan. In October of the same year, we were spared the loss of possibly two airliners when security officers found bombs packed in toner cartridges on aircraft at East Midlands Airport, in the United Kingdom, and Dubai International Airport, in the United Arab Emirates. Both packages were the creative and deadly work of AQAP bomb maker Ibrahim al-Asiri. In January 2011, observant workers discovered a backpack containing a radio-controlled pipe bomb on the route of the Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Washington. Investigators determined that the perpetrator, a white supremacist named Kevin Harpham, had laced the bomb’s shrapnel with rat poison to aggravate the injuries.

In September 2016, a man named Ahmad Khan Rahimi gave us three near misses in a single day. One Saturday morning, a bomb made by Rahimi detonated in a garbage can just before the start of a fun run in Seaside Park, New Jersey. No one was injured. That night, a pressure-cooker bomb made by Rahimi detonated on a street in Chelsea, in Manhattan, injuring a number of people but producing no fatalities. A second pressure-cooker bomb made by Rahimi, also left on the street in Manhattan, miraculously failed to detonate despite being handled and moved by several passersby. The next day multiple bombs—all the work of Rahimi—were discovered at the train station in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Rahimi was taken into custody after a shootout with police in Linden, New Jersey.

Unfortunately, near misses were not our only experiences during those years. In Fort Hood, Texas, in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, in Overland Park, Kansas, in Chattanooga, Tennessee, in San Bernardino, California, in Orlando, Florida, terrorists killed or wounded many people. With each tragedy we improved our ability to respond and, we hoped, to prevent the next one. The inevitable next one. I had returned to CT during a milestone month of what I still nostalgically refer to as the “War on Terror.” On May 2, 2011, U.S. forces killed Osama bin Laden. Though still a danger, al-Qaeda was no longer the monolithic, overriding threat it had once been. Counterterrorism now required thinking about a larger variety of extremist groups, including state-sponsored groups. Did Lebanon’s Hezbollah, or the Quds Force of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps, have a presence in the U.

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