Making Black Magic

The world of illusion isn’t only for stage acts—old tricks can also make for dangerous new threats in the nation’s airports and beyond.

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One night in the summer of 2005, I was having drinks with prestidigitator Harry Anderson at his club, Oswald’s, in New Orleans, discussing the finer points of sleights of hand and, more broadly, the legerdemain of magic. ...

I explained that counterterror intelligence analysts had examined information indicating Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations had studied the discipline of his craft at some point—techniques like classic misdirection, sleights, illusions and gaffed tricks. These counterterrorists were concerned that some terrorists had experimented with using parlor tricks to do things like sneak explosives on board an aircraft.

Given his long career in the arcane art of conjuring, I asked Harry if he thought it was possible that a highly motivated individual like a terrorist could train well enough to successfully employ some of these gimmicks for nefarious purposes. ...

The concept of terrorists as magicians was rekindled this past February when the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Intelligence and Analysis issued an intelligence advisory warning about the possibility that Al Qaeda or other terrorist organizations might try to use women jihadists hiding explosives inside “pregnancy prosthetics … that mimic the look of a pregnant woman.” ...

Earlier this year, terrorists began to use a crude form of deception in their dispatching of female jihadists. In Iraq, Al Qaeda used Muslim women wearing suicide vests to carry out bombings after increased security and protective concrete walls made car bombings more difficult.

But as security authorities wise up to terrorists’ new ruses, the more astute among counterterrror intelligence authorities are pondering truly frightening scenarios terrorists are believed to have studied to hide explosives—like lining pregnancy prosthetics with sheet plastic explosives. They warn that the wearer may be able to get through airports that have no effective trace explosives sniffers or whole body imagers.

“This suddenly has become a very viable possibility,” said a veteran counterterrorist HSToday regularly talks to on background.

Combined with well-rehearsed misdirection and deception to cause momentary confusion and diversion, terrorists might be able to whisk any prosthetic-wearing jihadist past some airports’ security, the counterterrorist mused—“it would only take one.” ...

“Terrorists are getting exponentially smarter,” Kushner said. And according to counterterror experts, they’re coming up with more and more ways to slip past our first lines of defense. To do so, they’ve been experimenting with some really off the wall methods of deception to disguise their suicidal methodologies, like hiding upwards of three pounds of C-4, Semtex or some other plastic bonded explosive (PBX) rectally, vaginally and even surgically. The explosive could be remotely detonated while the bomb is inside terrorists’ bodies. ...

Philip Mudd, a high-ranking FBI counterterrorism official, told CBS news that European citizens of Pakistani descent and a few Americans were discovered to have been recruited as jihadists.

“They’ve realized that if they want to operate successfully they need to have people who look like us, act like us and are very difficult to find,” Mudd said.

“Whether it’s Americans or whether it’s people who can launch from Europe, because they have visas or passports that allow them to travel to the United States, [Al Qaeda is now] looking for people who can operate in the West.”

“…Or be recruited from the West,” another senior federal counterterror official told HSToday. ...

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