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 | | From: | torresD | | Subject: | Nixon-era panel envisioned terrorist attacks | | Date: | Sun, 23 Jan 2005 22:38:12 GMT |
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 | http://edition.cnn.com/2005/US/01/23/nixon.terrorism.ap/
Nixon-era panel envisioned terrorist attacks
Sunday, January 23, 2005 Posted: 1807 GMT (0207 HKT)
WASHINGTON (AP) --
Nearly three decades before the September 11 attacks,
a high-level government panel developed plans to
protect the nation against terrorist acts ranging
from radiological "dirty bombs" to airline missile attacks,
according to declassified documents obtained by The Associated Press.
"Unless governments take basic precautions,
we will continue to stand at the edge of an
awful abyss,"
Robert Kupperman,
chief scientist for the Arms
Control and Disarmament Agency,
wrote in a 1977 report that summarized
nearly five years of work by the Cabinet
Committee to Combat Terrorism.
The group was formed in September 1972
by President Nixon after Palestinian
commandos slaughtered 11 Israeli athletes
at the Munich Olympic Games.
The committee involved people as diverse
as Henry Kissinger to a young Rudolph Giuliani,
the once-secret documents show.
"It is vital that we take every possible
action ourselves and in concert with other
nations designed to assure against acts of
terrorism,"
Nixon wrote in asking his secretary of state,
William Rogers, to oversee the task force.
"It is equally important that we be
prepared to act quickly and effectively
in the event that, despite all efforts
at prevention,
an act of terrorism occurs involving
the United States, either at home or
abroad," the president said.
The full committee met only once,
in October 1972, to organize,
but its experts did get together twice
a month over nearly five years to identify
threats and debate solutions, the memos show.
Eventually, the group's influence
waned as competing priorities,
a change of presidents ushered in by Watergate,
bureaucratic turf battles and a lack of spectacular
domestic attacks took their toll.
But before that happened,
the panel identified many of the same
threats that would confront President
Bush at the dawn of the 21st century.
The experts fretted that terrorists might
gather loose nuclear materials for a
"dirty bomb" that could devastate an
American city by spreading lethal
radioactivity.
"This is a real threat, not science fiction,"
National Security Council staffer
Richard T. Kennedy wrote his boss,
Kissinger, in November 1972.
Rogers,
in a memo to Nixon in mid-1973,
praised the Atomic Energy Commission's
steps to safeguard nuclear weapons.
Rogers, however,
also warned the president that
"atomic materials could afford
mind-boggling possibilities for
terrorists."
Committee members identified commercial
jets as a particular vulnerability,
but raised concerns that airlines
would not pay for security improvements
such as tighter screening procedures and
routine baggage inspections.
"The trouble with the plans is that
airlines and airports will have to
absorb the costs and so they will
scream bloody murder should this
be required of them,"
according to a White House memo from 1972.
"Otherwise,
it is a sound plan which will curtail
the risk of hijacking substantially."
By 1976,
government pressure to improve airport
security and thwart hijackings had awakened
airline industry lobbyists.
The International Air Transport Association said
"airport security is the responsibility of the
host government.
The airline industry did not consider
the terrorist threat its most
significant problem;
it had to measure it against other priorities.
If individual companies were forced
to provide their own security,
they would go broke,"
according to minutes from one meeting.
Thousands of pages of heavily blacked out records
and memos obtained by the AP from government archives
and under the Freedom of Information Act show the task force:
discussed defending commercial aircraft
against being shot down by portable
missile systems;
recommended improved vigilance at potential
"soft" targets, such as major holiday events,
municipal water supplies, nuclear power plants
and electric power facilities;
supported cracking down on foreigners living
in and traveling through the United States,
with particular attention to Middle Easterners
and Arab-Americans;
developed plans to protect U.S. diplomats
and businessmen working abroad against
kidnapping and attack.
Though the CIA routinely updated the
committee on potential terrorist threats
and plots, task force members learned
quickly that intelligence gathering and
coordination was a weak spot,
just as Bush would discover three decades later.
Long before he was mayor and helped
New York City recover from the September 11
attacks on the World Trade Center,
Giuliani told the committee in May 1976
that he feared legal restrictions were
thwarting federal agents from collecting
intelligence unless there had been a
violation of the law.
Giuliani, who at that time was the
associate deputy attorney general in
President Ford's Justice Department,
suggested relaxing
intelligence collection guidelines --
something that occurred with the
Patriot Act three decades later
Other committee members said that
obstacles to intelligence gathering
were more bureaucratic than legal.
Lewis Hoffacker,
a veteran ambassador who served as
chairman of the terrorism working group,
told the AP that institutional rivalries,
particularly between the FBI and CIA,
were a constant source of frustration
even in the 1970s.
"That was our headache,
a quarter-century ago,"
said Hoffacker, now retired.
"They all pulled back into their little fiefdoms.
The CIA was always off by itself,
and the FBI was dealing with the
same situation they're dealing
with today."
Finding the political will to
fight terrorism in the absence
of a major attack in the United
States also quickly became a problem.
Proposals for international penalties
against countries harboring terrorists
drew little support from the United Nations,
the memos show.
"The climate at the 1974 General Assembly
was such that no profitable initiative in
the terrorism field was feasible,"
Ford heard from Kissinger,
his secretary of state, in early 1975.
Two years later, the working group was
absorbed by the National Security Council.
In a 1978 report, the Senate Governmental
Affairs Committee worried that the Carter
administration was not giving enough
attention to terrorism.
"The United States will not be able to
combat the growing challenge of terrorism
unless the executive policy-making apparatus
is more effectively and forcefully utilized,"
the Senate committee warned.
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