Would-be terrorists in U.S. hobbled by logistics
say that while some terrorist operatives have come to the United States and gathered the necessary ingredients to make a homemade bomb, the devices rarely work. This is a big reason why the United States has not seen many successful explosive attacks. The expertise to assemble the components — to get the detonator just right, to insert the timer, to pull together an explosive powerful enough — is very hard to do correctly.
Temple-Raston notes that regulations in the United States present further obstacles. Bomb makers in Afghanistan and Pakistan have military-grade explosives all around them. In the United States, explosives are regulated, so terrorists are forced to fashion bombs by boiling down household products like peroxide and hair spray.
This is what Najibullah Zazi, the man behind a plot to bomb the New York subway system and other transportation targets in 2009, had to do. He was buying hair dye at a Denver beauty supply store so he could concentrate it into a highly volatile explosive called TATP, or triacetone triperoxide.
It is unclear whether he was actually able to do that. Zazi, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy to use weapons of mass destruction among other charges, faces a possible life sentence without parole.
Lacking support and expertise
Experts say making a bomb is also very hard to do alone. In the Middle East, there are teams of people who are behind bomb plots. “The huge difference between the unsuccessful bombings we’ve seen here and the highly successful and countless day after day successful bombings we see in Iraq or Afghanistan is that the bomb makers have some significant support with people who knew what they are doing,” Turchie says.
The teams on the ground include financiers, explosives experts who can predictably turn out devices that work, distributors who get the bombs out to the targets, and people who do reconnaissance.
That model was used successfully to attack the United States in 1993. An operative named Ramzi Yousef joined forces with a handful of explosives experts to mix a urea nitrate bomb.
They put the bomb in a van, drove it into the underground parking garage of Tower 1 of the World Trade Center, and detonated it. The bombing killed six people and injured more than 1,000.
Leo West, a former explosives expert with the FBI, says it would be hard to launch that kind of operation now. “The security has improved so much, it has become very difficult for these people to get into the country,” he says.
Without a team, terrorist groups have been forced to rely on just one or two people at a time, and then hope to get lucky.
Evading detection during the testing phase
Temple-Raston writes that there is one more hurdle: Even if someone made a bomb, West says, it would need to be tested — and that attracts attention. “That testing phase, as well as the target selection and surveillance phase, those are the phases of the operation where the bomber is most vulnerable to being found out or uncovered,” he says.
The suspect in the Times Square bombing never tested his car bomb — he just assumed it would work, according to officials close to the case. The fireworks the suspect allegedly hoped to use as part of the detonator would not have ignited in a chain reaction — the safety fuses have to be lit individually. The fertilizer he allegedly bought was not the kind that blew up — the kind that does has been regulated since the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995.
All these mistakes were made in spite of the fact that the man accused of the Times Square bombing attempt, naturalized U.S. citizen Faisal Shahzad, allegedly had hands-on training in Pakistan.
Temple-Raston notes, though, that this is not to say that terrorist organizations have given up. U.S. intelligence officials say militant groups are still trying to reach into America and find someone who is capable of succeeding where others have failed.
