22 July 2007

Something Wicked



The Second Witch in Macbeth looks up in scene one of Act VI, peering out at the audience of groundlings. She   says:

“By the pricking on my finger,
Something wicked this way comes.”

I feel my thumbs positively aching this morning. It is a splendid day at Big Pink, and maybe that is part of it. The humidity is low, the sky is bright and the temperature gloriously temperate for this time of the year.

It is the kind of day when you look up and wonder what might be coming out of the sky, just as we did six years ago.

I was working haphazardly on a couple of book reviews for the Fall issue of the magazine I edit in exactly the same way. One book was a scholarly tome that I am unlikely to fully digest before press time, since I got my copy of Harry Potter's last adventure in the mail yesterday, and if I am going to while away the time at the pool, it will be with him rather than a survey of regional challenges to the relations between democratic societies and their intelligence services.

Not that it isn't important. It is just too nice, just as it was that other day. The other book I was reviewing was more problematic. It is by Israeli author and security consultant Juval Aviv.

“Staying Safe” is not an intelligence book, per se, and relations between security and intelligence have always been a seam in the baric of the system as bumpy as that between the “warning” community and “law enforcement.” One is looking forward to forestall evil in the future and the other, Janus-like, is looking back to build a case for prosecution after the worst has happened.

He does have a clear message about what is coming next, and it is neither pleasant nor rocket science. Aviv says the war is returning to America, just as it has come to the United Kingdom and Spain before that.

When he is not being President and CEO of Interfor, Inc., an international investigative and intelligence firm that has worked for Congress, Aviv pops up on cable TV talking to people like Bill O'Reilly on the Fox news.

His book claims that in an appearance on the show prior to the 7/7 attacks on the London tube system he predicted something would happen there. O'Reilly laughed, saying he wanted him back on the show after it happened. Of course the matter was quietly dropped, since Bill hates to be reminded of his failures.

I have an ambivalent relationship with the Israelis in the security business. I admire their pluck and boldness, while remaining uncomfortable with they way they have played the cards they have been dealt of late. I think their spy Jonathon Pollard should rot in jail, and I am uncertain how we came to be in a position where a religious state is the lynchpin of our regional strategy.

I do not like their opponents, yet believe there is an injustice that must be addressed in some manner to stop the constant bloodshed, and the metastasizing of the suicidal ideologues.

As to his bona fides in the business, Aviv was reportedly on Golda Meir's security detail, and was appointed by her to track down and bring justice to the Palestinians who killed the Israeli athletes at the Olympic village in Munich. He appears as a synthesis of the characters in the movie about hunt for the bad guys produced by Steve Spielberg. There was some ambivalence in the treatment. To get Bad Guys, the story goes, sometimes you wind up being exactly like them.

There is a lot in the book that I do not agree with. It claims Aviv passed information about an impending attack to the Administration in August of 2001. Purportedly, he indicated airplanes would be used as bombs and target high profile buildings and monuments.

If it were true, I expect it might have been heard in all the recriminations since. True or not, though, members of Congress have hired him as a consultant, and his message now is that the next attack on US soil will occur within the next few months.

It is not rocket science, and the unclassified version of the recent National Intelligence Estimate is equally gloomy. Aviv is more specific than what was released to the public.   Specifically, he believes that the tactics will be multi-axis, and avoid the high-profile and largely symbolic security that now envelops commercial air travel. He predicts the next attack will target the airport itself, just as the Glasgow bombers did.

He thinks that rather than an SUV ramming the terminal, the terrorists will target busy times and with the point of attack at the front end of security: at the check-in desks.

This is hardly the stuff of revelation. His prediction is an updated recollection of the May 30, 1972, attack on the Lod (now Ben Gurion) airport at Tel Aviv by a three-man hit squad from the Japanese Red Army. The trio arrived via Air France Flight 132 dressed in business suits and carried what appeared to be violin cases. The operation was planned and supported by the General Command of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP-GC), and was designed to avoid Israeli profiling by using the Japanese nationals.

As the three men passed the ticket counter area, they produced automatic weapons from their cases and began to spray the crowd indiscriminately while hurling hand grenades. Twenty-six travelers were killed and seventy-eight injured.

The attack has eerie foreshadowing of much larger and more deadly attacks. One of the terrorists survived and was released as part of a 1983 prisoner exchange. The other two died of their own hands in the assault.

Nor are Aviv's other predictions unique, since variations have been circulating in homeland security circles for years. He thinks the next attacks will occur shortly, and will involve suicide and non-suicide bombers in places Americans congregate willingly: Disneyland, Las Vegas, The Mall of America. Extrapolating just a bit from what has already happened in London and Madrid, that means the timing will be at rush hour, and hit low-security high-density nodes in the public transportation system.

Aviv says the multi-axis attack will be coordinated for time, and include targets in the heartland.

I checked my time zones. For those on the East Coast, that will probably drive the timing to the late afternoon, bracketing the late rush hour in New York and Washington with the early rush in Chicago, and likely concentrations of people on the West Coast- perhaps LAX or theme parks in the early afternoon.

Like the Lod airport killers, he says that the next attack will feature an element designed to defeat profiling, which is the role of home-grown attackers along the line of Azzam the American, the former southern California schoolboy who serves as an al Qa'ida media consultant.

Aviv's book goes on to become something much more like one of the self-help books that sell so well to the American public. How to recognize a terrorist, how to protect your family and business; how to stay alive.

Like his predictions, they are a pastiche of hard-won lessons that no one ever ought to have to learn.

I could have written the book myself, and certainly you could. I can't dismiss the fact that the Bad Guys are going to act out their bloody drama again here. It is inevitable, and nothing that can be dismissed out of hand. In fact, I feel like the Second Witch, whose thumb is aching.

Something wicked this way comes. It is not rocket science. Stay safe, won't you?

Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

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