McCaul - Failures of Imagination

In the weeks before the Allied landing at Normandy, thousands of young men flew dangerous missions over occupied Europe to prepare the way for the historic American-led invasion. These were desperate hours. The Nazi war machine was on the march, and for the pilots as well as their commanders, victory was uncertain.

The Allies B-17soften called Flying Fortresseswere remembered by some of those pilots as little more than tin cans with wings. They were vulnerable to attacks from the Luftwaffe in the air and Nazi antiaircraft artillery stationed on the ground. On some of those missions, as many as one out of every three planes was gunned down.

When he first climbed into his B-17, my father was a twenty-year-old bombardier navigator in the Army Air Corps. He flew thirty-five missions over the European theater, many of them harrowing. Thankfully, he was among those blessed to find their way back home to their families after World War II was over.

For many decades before the Second World War, Americans like my dad had lived under the comfortable and false assumption that we were protected from turmoil and terror by the vast oceans along our coastlines. On December 7, 1941, we learned we were wrong. And, unfortunately, not for the last time.

The two deadliest attacks perpetrated against Americans on our own soilthe bombing of Pearl Harbor and the terrorist airliner hijackings of September 11, 2001came as complete surprises to the intelligence community. They shouldnt have been.

In hindsight, there was nothing improbable in 1941 about Japanese fighter-bombers descending from the skies over the most vulnerable American port in the Pacific. Similarly, there was nothing improbable in 2001 about civilian airliners being turned into cruise missiles targeting Americas symbols of financial, military, and political power. Indeed, less than a decade earlier, terrorists had bombed the very same World Trade Center with the intention of toppling both towers.

As the 9/11 Commission put it in their oft-referenced report on the attacks: The most important failure was one of imagination. Admiral Bobby Inman, a veteran of the intelligence community who served in senior positions at the CIA, DIA, and NSA, said that 9/11 was grounded in a failure of the imagination, the kind in which you dont know what you are looking for; you dont know where to look. We didnt see the enemy coming. Because we didnt want to.

Expanding the limits of our imagination is the purpose of this book. The goal is not to frighten people and certainly not to entertain. Instead, it is to envision possible scenarios through which terrorists, foreign nations, and their allies could inflict great damage on our homeland. In other words, we cant afford to live under comfortable and false assumptions any longer. We need to imagine the worst in order to prevent it.

Today, the free world faces numerous dangers, many of them brought to us by the same sort of radical Islamists who once allied themselves with Hitler. These enemies of civilization seek the death and destruction of the American way of life, and they view no citizen of our nation as an innocent bystander. They seek the worlds most lethal weapons and will gladly kill any man, woman, or child in their line of sight.

There are other dangers that await us in this new century, too, from lone-wolf terrorists seeking to sow chaos to amoral cyber-mercenaries to nations seeking to undermine Americas global leadership and maybe even the very foundations of our democracy itself.

Make no mistake about it: the United States of America is still very much a target. Operations against us, using diverse methods, are discussed around the worldand here at homeevery single day. Our vulnerabilities are being probed, our fortitude tested. Foreign citizens, even our fellow Americans, are being recruited to wage acts of horror and violence on our homeland. Some of these attacks have been thwarted in their planning stages; others were stopped when they were far closer to being carried out. Other plots are forming even now, waiting for just the right moment. And we are not ready for them.

Fourteen years since the September 11 attacks, the United States is not any safer. In fact, we are less safe, even as the threats against our people multiply. That is why this book is needed so urgently.

Before my election to Congress, I was a federal prosecutor. I served as the chief of counterterrorism and national security in the U.S. Attorneys Office for the Western District of Texas, where I led the Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF) and got a firsthand look at the threats against our citizens. Now, as chairman of the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Homeland Security, I see every day the interconnected threats that span the world and link together Americas web of enemies.

Ive also met the dedicated men and women working around the country and around the world to stave off these threats. One exercise in which the intelligence community frequently engages is setting up so-called Red Teams, informal groups of people tasked with the job of thinking like our enemies, probing our own weaknesses, and gaming out future scenarios in which American security might be put at risk.

This book is a series of Red Team exercises in which ordinary Americans can be observers. They have been developed in consultation with experts in a number of fields and reflect the latest unclassified intelligence assessments. There are, of course, any number of different potential terror scenarios to choose from, but for the purposes of this book, our list includes:

A decapitation strike on Americas political leadership at the U.S. Capitol

Detonation of a dirty bomb smuggled into Texas across the Rio Grande

A foreign agent connected to China tampering with an American presidential election

A shooting rampage at the Mall of America the day after Thanksgiving

A devastating and debilitating attack on the East Coasts power grid as part of a wide-ranging cyber strike

Radicalized black widows releasing a deadly strain of smallpox at Disney World

A jetliner explosion over downtown Los Angeleson Oscar night

Russia invading the Baltic states, neutralizing the NATO Alliance, and threatening the American coastline