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Sunday, January 19, 2003

By John Mintz, The Washington Post

WASHINGTON -- Top federal officials, increasingly concerned that terrorists will attack U.S. commercial aircraft with shoulder-fired missiles, are developing plans to thwart such strikes with measures that range from sophisticated anti-missile technology to simple changes in takeoff schedules.

An interagency task force that reports to the National Security Council is also coordinating emergency inspections of every large U.S. airport to determine their vulnerability to the small, portable missiles, senior government officials said. And it is planning a public education campaign designed to teach police departments and citizens who live and work near airports to identify the missiles if they see someone assembling one.

While acknowledging their alarm at the danger of portable missiles being fired at the approximately 6,700 commercial aircraft operating in the United States, administration officials stressed last week that the highest echelons of the U.S. government are focused on the threat and are determined to maximize the traveling public's safety.

"We have drawn together the best thinkers in government and in the contracting world" to address the issue in recent months, said one senior government official. "We now grasp the threat, and we grasp our options."

U.S. air carriers, already staggered by financial losses caused in part by the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, are arguing that the government should bear the cost of any required high-tech equipment, which could carry billion-dollar price tags.

"Protecting our citizens and defending our nation against threats of this type is the responsibility of our federal government," said Michael Wascom, a spokesman for the Air Transport Association, which represents U.S. carriers. "As with any aspect of providing for our national defense, this subject is best addressed by our government."

U.S. military and intelligence officials have been aware of the dangers presented by shoulder-fired missiles for decades, and in the days after Sept. 11 initiated high-level meetings on the possible danger. But two recent attacks against aircraft with portable missiles added to the sense of urgency.

In May, a Russian-built SA-7 missile was fired at a U.S. military jet taking off from Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, but missed its target. On Nov. 28, two missiles of the same brand and factory batch as the ones used in Saudi Arabia were fired at an Israeli jetliner seconds after it took off from Mombasa, Kenya. They also streaked wide of their target, at almost the same moment that an Israeli-owned hotel in Mombasa was destroyed in a car bombing that killed 16 people. Officials concluded that the al-Qaida terrorist network was behind all the attacks.

Guerrilla and terrorist movements have long used the so-called "man-portable" missiles to bring down passenger aircraft, killing hundreds of civilians. In the 1980s, Afghan fighters repeatedly brought down Soviet helicopters with U.S.-supplied Stinger missiles.

But the Mombasa attack may be the first such missile ever launched against a passenger carrier far from a war zone, officials said. The attacks confirmed U.S. intelligence experts' belief that al-Qaida has access to a supply of the weapons and may now be uncrating them as a new terror tactic. The interagency task force stepped up its meetings just days after the failed shootdown of the Israeli jetliner in Kenya.

The five-foot long missiles and launchers would be relatively easy to smuggle into this country, especially since they can be broken down into component parts for easy transport, officials said. At 30 pounds each, they could be concealed in a van, arms specialists said. "Manpads" (or man-portable air defense systems) can be shot out the sunroof of a car, or even through underbrush, they said.

There are more than 700,000 of the missiles in existence, though the number controlled by rebel militias, terrorists and criminal gangs is estimated in the hundreds or a few thousand, arms experts said. Even so, they are fairly easy to acquire -- underground arms dealers sell them for as little as $25,000 apiece from Peshawar to Beirut.

The interagency task force -- led by the Transportation Security Administration and including representatives of the Pentagon, the FBI and the State Department -- held two days of meetings on the missiles in December. Last week, the group sent a preliminary report, weighing various government actions, to a top-level panel convened by the White House's NSC.

Already, U.S. officials have been dispatched in a stepped up effort to persuade foreign militaries to destroy some of their missile stocks and prevent the theft of the rest. Another step will be to educate the American public to identify the missiles if they see them, "while not wanting to scare anybody," said one government official working on the issue. He cited as examples neighborhood watch programs in towns beneath flight paths, and airport business groups.

Authorities said they also may want to vary the takeoff times of aircraft each day, a practice followed by Israeli commercial airliners.

Officials also said the government will initiate a program to retrain commercial pilots in the technique of landing a jet once it has lost an engine.