Terrorism on the Unguarded Sea

by The Boston Globe

What if by sea? With security tightening on the land routes into the United States from Canada and Mexico, and with new warnings that the United States could face a nuclear or biological attack within five years, could the next outrage come through America's largely unguarded ocean frontiers?

The distance from Karachi to Mumbai is about the same as from Haiti to Miami, Tampico to Houston, Halifax to Boston, and Baja, Calif., to Los Angeles, says an old shipmate from my Navy days. Wouldn't it be simple for terrorists to acquire a ship, perhaps a fishing trawler, and sail it into any number of ports virtually undetected?

"There is now no routine surveillance of the broad oceanic approaches to the homeland," he says. "Only in the close approaches to major US ports does the Coast Guard maintain the type of active radar coverage essential to the control of shipping, and this surveillance is focused on the relatively large commercial ships..."

Because he is still involved with government work he asked that I not use his name.

Much thought has been given to the possibility that mass death could arrive in a closed container aboard a container vessel, and be shipped directly from its port of entry to anywhere in the United States. Efforts are made to inspect ships in their ports of departure, with the cooperation of foreign governments, but even so only a tiny fraction get inspected.

But my friend argues that terrorists, having gone to great effort to acquire their death-dealing devices, might not be willing to consign them to commercial shipping systems.

"There is no system in place for detecting and investigating the larger number of ocean-going, noncommercial vessels plying our coastal waters that are capable of carrying weapons of mass destruction," he says.

A yacht could slip into Miami from the Caribbean virtually undetected and blow the city to smithereens. A small freighter offshore could launch smaller attack boats, as the Somali pirates do, and as was done in Mumbai, and remain undetected until too late.

The same would be true of any number of European ports, especially in the Mediterranean with close proximity to the discontent of North Africa. It wouldn't have to be nuclear to do great damage. One remembers the French ammunition ship that blew up by accident in Halifax harbor during World War I, devastating the city. Port cities everywhere are vulnerable to what would be powerful, maritime truck bombs.

Stephen Flynn, a former Coast Guard officer, now at the Council on Foreign Relations, points out that in addition to our sea ports, most of America's inland cities are located along waterways, "and the level of patrols is next to none. We are very exposed to water-borne attack."

My ex-Navy friend thinks we need a sea-traffic control system, "analogous to the one that manages all air traffic. But, politically, this is proving to be very hard. Commercial and general aviation grew up under the eye of government air traffic control systems. Seafaring has been unregulated and uncontrolled since the beginning of time," he says. There is no mandatory identification system for smaller boats entering US waters.

The Coast Guard does have a "Marine Domain Awareness" program, and a volunteer auxiliary in which civilians donate their time, their boats, and sometimes planes, to patrol our coasts and harbors looking out for anything unusual. According to Flynn, this is probably the best way to thwart an attack because terrorists like to carry out surveillance and make dry practice runs. People who work our waterfronts and in coastal waters are in the best position to notice something strange.

Flynn thinks this should be greatly expanded, with Homeland Security "engaging with the maritime public, yacht clubs, fishermen, coastal home owners, dock workers, and the like, telling them what to look for." He says the British are much better at alerting communities than we are.

Drug runners now use semi-submersible submarines to avoid detection. Terrorists could follow suit with something much worse than heroin aboard. The 9/11 attacks came from the air from our own airports. The fire next time could come undetected, as my Navy friend says, from the "great anonymity of the ocean."