Paul J. Caffera

In the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, aviation experts warn that shoulder-launched antiaircraft missiles could be used against American passenger jets in the future. Terrorist organizations like Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida network are already believed to own such missiles, and some say it will only be a matter of time before they filter into the U.S. — if they haven’t already.

So-called Man-Portable Air Defense Systems, or MANPADS, are capable of knocking a jet out of the sky from as far as five miles away and at an altitude of up to 13,000 feet in as little as 13 seconds. Those aboard often have no warning before the missile explodes as it slams into an engine, air-conditioning unit or other heat-producing device on the aircraft.

In addition to American-made Stingers — currently in the news because hundreds were supplied by the U.S. to the mujahedin fighters in Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979 — there are also Russian versions of the technology, including the Strela and IGLA series missiles. Highly accurate, easy to use and conceal, they are readily available on the black market around the world.

According to a 1997 CIA report, shoulder-launched missiles were used 27 times against civilian aircraft in the last 19 years, resulting in 400 casualties. A 1994 State Department report offers a slightly higher figure — 536 fatalities of passengers and crew as a result of 25 civilian aircraft incidents involving MANPAD missile attacks. A Department of Defense report released in 2000 goes a step farther, stating that “one of the leading causes of loss of life in commercial aviation worldwide has been from MANPADS attacks, with over 30 aircraft lost.”

Most of the incidents have been concentrated in Africa and the former republics of the Soviet Union, but there have also been attacks in Near East Asia and Central America.

The prospect of a domestic antiaircraft missile attack has captivated American minds for several years now. Speculation that a Stinger was behind the explosion that downed TWA Flight 800 was so great that the Pentagon even launched several of the missiles off the coast of Florida during the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation of the crash in order to disprove those theories.

The threat to commercial aviation first emerged in 1973, when Italian police arrested five Palestinian terrorists armed with antiaircraft missiles as they waited to shoot down an El-Al plane in Rome. But the first actual launching of a MANPAD missile at a commercial aircraft came in November, 1975, in the skies above Angola, according to a report published by the Pentagon’s Joint Technical Coordinating Group on Aircraft Survivability.

Among the most widely publicized incidents involving commercial aircraft were the downings of two Rhodesian Airlines flights in 1978 and 1979 over what is now Zimbabwe, using Russian SA-7 missiles. The attacks resulted in the deaths of at least 111 passengers and crew.

In 1993, according to the State Department, a TU-154 aircraft in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia carrying 100 passengers, including a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, made a crash landing at the airport in Sukhumi after being struck in midair by a heat-seeking MANPADS missile. Only 26 of the passengers were able to escape before the plane exploded into flames on the runway, killing everyone left on board.

In the decades since the missiles first emerged, various government agencies have become increasingly alarmed by the threat they pose.

Gary Stubblefield, who heads the security firm Vantage Security and has testified before Congress about the threat of terrorism, describes the shoulder-fired missiles as “aviation’s dirty little secret.”

In April, Air Force Gen. Charles T. Robertson Jr., the commander in charge of the military’s “heavy lift” services, responsible for transporting troops and weaponry to hotspots around the world, told a Senate subcommittee that MANPADS “are the most serious threat to our large and slow-flying air mobility aircraft. These systems are lethal, affordable, easy to use, and difficult to track and counter.”

Robertson has good reason for worry. Despite the fact that some military planes carry sophisticated sensors to detect a MANPADS attack, and can deploy countermeasures to help defend against them, 12 of the 29 aircraft lost during the Gulf War were lost to MANPADS attacks, a recent RAND Institute study noted. Civilian aircraft are virtually defenseless in the face of an antiaircraft missile attack.

Although loath to discuss this threat publicly, officials in a variety of federal agencies have been aware of the danger for decades.

“Probably my greatest concern, every day, is the threat posed by the increasing global proliferation of man-portable air defense systems or MANPADS,” Gen. Robertson told the Senate Armed Forces Committee last May. “We know that MANPADS are available and are likely in the hands of our terrorist adversaries.”

Both the State Department and the Congressional Research Service have drawn the same conclusion. In remarks before the International Rescue Committee in 1998, then-Secretary of State Madeleine Albright warned, “We are also pressing to conclude an agreement to control the export of shoulder-fired missiles, which too many terrorist groups, criminal syndicates and narco-trafficking organizations possess.” In a 1999 report to Congress, the Congressional Research Service offered what is perhaps the most ominous missive yet — that it is “highly likely” that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida terror network have acquired MANPADS.

If so, bin Laden and al-Qaida wouldn’t be alone. At least 27 guerrilla and terrorist groups already have access to MANPADS, a recent report in Jane’s Defense Review alleged. “It is logical to assume that bin Laden’s al-Qaida network is in possession of additional MANPADS. If this is true, then al-Qaida represents the most significant threat to international civil aviation. Given bin Laden’s specific threats against U.S. citizens, this threat is especially relevant with regard to U.S.-owned airlines,” the Jane’s report concluded.

Others believe attacks on American carriers would most likely happen abroad. “Given the porosity of our borders, it is possible for such weapons to be smuggled into the U.S.,” says William Hoehn Jr., a terrorism expert and professor of international affairs at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “But I would guess that the greater MANPADS danger to U.S. civil aviation is still from takeoffs and landings overseas.”

Federal Aviation Administration spokeswoman Laura Brown acknowledges the weapons’ viable threat to civil aviation, noting that the FAA has “clearly considered it.” Brown says the FAA established a special task force on MANPADS. The interagency group — which included representatives of the Department of Defense, the FAA and the intelligence community — issued a classified report in 1998. Since that time, despite the government’s concerns about antiaircraft missiles, no major changes have been made to either commercial aircraft design or in-flight operations to reduce the risk to travelers from a terrorist intent on shooting down a jet.

Steps can be taken to make commercial aircraft less vulnerable to MANPADS. Gulfstream Aviation, a manufacturer of corporate jets, already offers an infrared countermeasures (IRCM) package as an option on its aircraft. Other measures that can be taken include attaching flare dispensers, installing “sacrificial” nozzles onto engines, locating infrared sources in less vulnerable areas of the aircraft, keeping flight control hydraulics away from likely hit locations, separating fuel systems from likely hit locations and hardening or shielding critical components around infrared sources.

During a classified briefing in 1999, FAA official Raymond Schillinger described the government’s research into identifying aircraft and airport vulnerabilities. A subsequent report released by the National Defense Industrial Association, a organization representing major defense corporations, described Schillinger’s briefing as “a sobering presentation that described FAA studies regarding the MANPADS threat to commercial and transport aircraft.”

The report also noted that “the FAA’s research and experimentation indicate a definite need to reduce vulnerability to MANPADS. The small size and portability of these missiles make them a lethal threat, especially in takeoff and landing corridors. Since there have been no confirmed incidents in the U.S., it is difficult to convince aircraft manufacturers and airline companies of the potential cost benefits to making the aircraft less susceptible and less vulnerable to MANPADS …”

How vulnerable does that leave America’s airlines? “If terrorists [in the U.S.] had them, they could use them against buildings, airliners, etc.,” warns Ivan Eland, a terrorism expert at the Cato Institute’s Defense Policy Studies program. “There is very little the authorities could do about it.”

Dr. Todd Curtis, creator of AirSafe.com and a former Air Force officer and Boeing safety analyst, cautions that if there were a “dedicated person (who) wanted to shoot down a plane, there’s nothing to stop them.”

A handful of major American airliners contacted multiple times during the reporting of this article — including United, Northwest, Continental, Southwest and others — refused comment when asked by this reporter about the vulnerability of commercial airliners to missile attacks. Numerous calls to the Airline Pilots Association went unreturned.

Peter Foster, spokesman for the Air Canada Pilots Association, was less reserved. The danger of a MANPADS attack, he says, is “a constant threat to the air system, no doubt about it.” Foster also stated that this danger “has not been considered in (commercial) aircraft design.”

MANPADS missile systems first gained widespread fame in the war between Afghanistan and the former Soviet Union. During that conflict, Soviet forces were running roughshod over Afghan defenders until the United States began supplying the anti-Soviet mujahedin with Stinger missiles. These MANPADS have been credited with turning the tide in that conflict against the Russians. Of the more than 900 stingers supplied to the mujahedin, many were never fired and remain in the arsenals of various groups in Afghanistan, despite a reported $55 million CIA effort to retrieve them.

Many of the Stingers have fallen into the hands of the Taliban, which has long been secreting bin Laden. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard Myers last month estimated that the Taliban possesses between 200 and 300 MANPADS.

The security threat is not limited to regions where MANPADS are traded on the black market. They also represent a possible danger inside the U.S. After undertaking a comprehensive inspection of U.S. military storage depots, the General Accounting Office concluded that inventory control of military MANPADS stockpiles is so poor that hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of the weapons are unaccounted for.

The GAO report raised another serious question about the safeguarding of America’s Stinger stockpile. During the Gulf War, citizens of other countries were involved in the transport of U.S. Stingers on unguarded trucks. One Army official quoted by the GAO said that it would be “pure luck” if none of the missiles were lost. “Lax military oversight (has left) these missiles, which are in demand by terrorists and drug dealers, vulnerable to threat,” the GAO concluded in its report.

In addition to the U.S.-supplied Stingers in Afghanistan, newer and more sophisticated MANPADS are now being produced by former Warsaw Pact nations. All kinds of MANPADS have been flowing into the world’s underground arms markets, where their black market cost is under $100,000 — well within the reach of many deep-pocketed terrorist groups.

In the mid-1990s, the U.S. became so concerned with the proliferation of MANPADS that it lobbied hard for the adoption of global export controls. As a result of the campaign, the U.S. and other countries adopted the Wassenaar Arrangement. Though it does not restrict the sale of MANPADS, Wassenaar does promote the “transparency” of arms sales as a way to curb inappropriate transfers of weapons.

“We put the lid on the box, but before we did, a lot of them (MANPADS) got out of the box,” a State Department official who asked not to be named concedes.

But Wassenaar’s greatest weakness lies in its inability to thwart black-market sales. “Many countries besides the U.S. have manufactured MANPADS, including Russia (from former Soviet designs), France, Germany, the U.K. and others,” says Georgia Tech’s Hoehn. “The former Soviet Union sold them widely to most of its client states, including Iran and Iraq — as we did to our allies and to the Afghan rebels. I suspect they are almost as readily available on the ‘secondary arms markets’ as land mines, only more expensive,” he says.

Even if MANPADS are only sold to legitimate governments with the intention of their being used for self-defense, there is no guarantee that they will remain secure. In 1998, soldiers in the former Soviet republic of Georgia staged an uprising against the government of Eduard Shevardnadze and seized a cache of the shoulder-fired missiles. Whether by stealth or force of arms, if one is determined to obtain the missiles, they are available — and they are small enough for a terrorist to easily smuggle into any country, including the United States.

We’ve already had close calls.

Federal law enforcement agencies have recently arrested a handful of people trying to smuggle MANPADS in and out of the United States in high-profile cases. Two of the most recent events occurred near Miami. In 1997, a group of smugglers from the former Soviet Union was arrested for attempting to ship a load of MANPADS into the U.S. from Bulgaria. When federal agents arrested the men in Florida, fortunately, the missiles were still in Bulgaria.

More recently, on June 12, federal officials arrested two men in an arms deal sting operation — an Egyptian and a Pakistani, both from New Jersey — in a warehouse in West Palm Beach, Fla., on charges that they intended to export a wide variety of sophisticated weaponry, including American-made Stingers. The day of their arrest, the two suspects inspected a MANPADS missile at the warehouse and allegedly expressed interest in selling missiles to a foreign country. Later, an attorney for the Egyptian man at the center of the case, Diaa Mohsen, quoted in the Palm Beach Post, said the weapons would most likely have gone to the Republic of Congo or Pakistan.

Although law enforcement officials have had success in stopping the import of MANPADS into the U.S., it may only be a matter of time before terrorists outsmart officials. A recent Rand Institute study suggested that if terrorists took their cue from drug smugglers along the porous U.S. border, the future could be grim.

“Hundreds of thousands of people cross the U.S. border illegally every year, and individual drug shipments into the country are often as large as tens of tons,” said the Rand study. “There is no reason to believe that a sufficiently motivated adversary could not duplicate the accomplishments of immigrants and drug smugglers. Indeed, a nation or terrorist group might hire smugglers for their expertise.” In theory, they could smuggle weapons as easily as the tons of cocaine they bring in every year.

When asked about the potential threat of smuggling identified in the Rand report, U.S. Customs Service spokesman Kevin Bell conceded: “More (drugs) get in than we can guess, and I would think that would be the same situation [with respect to MANPADS].”

The White House, meanwhile, recently ushered a major package of security measures through Congress. But President Bush’s own spokespeople admit that those measures will not eliminate the risk posed by MANPADS to air travelers. When asked by Salon what steps the White House is taking to reduce the threat of missile attacks, spokesman Ken Lisaius referred to comments made previously by press secretary Ari Fleischer. “Ari stated that the threat (to travelers) had been diminished, not that the situation is threat-free,” Lisaius said.

Dr. Robert Pfaltzgraff Jr., a professor of international security studies at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, warns that the threat is the logical outcome of the global proliferation of MANPADS. “We should not discount the possibility that they are in the United States and may be used,” he cautions.

“We’re in deep trouble.”

Although Chinooks used for Special Forces operations are reported to carry anti-missile technology, a U.S. Army official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told Salon that the National Guard CH-47 Chinook helicopter shot down on Sunday was unprotected. The chopper was being used to ferry at least 36 troops from Fort Carson, Colorado’s, 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment to the main U.S. military base in Baghdad; from there, they were to proceed to Kuwait City, where they would have boarded one of two daily commercial airliners that the Pentagon has hired to bring troops home for a two-week break from the Iraqi war zone.

Sixteen troops died and 20 were seriously injured when the helicopter exploded and crashed in flames near Fallujah, a center of loyalty to fallen dictator Saddam Hussein.

Though the U.S. troops aboard the Chinook were probably thrilled to be taking a leave from the war, their entire route home would have been vulnerable. Like the downed helicopter, the commercial jets that would have flown them out of Kuwait lack expensive anti-missile technology. These airliners have been chartered to transport nearly 500 troops per day to Frankfurt, Germany, and then on to either Baltimore, Atlanta, or Dallas/Fort Worth. Similar commercial craft are used to ferry about 90 percent of the U.S. troops that go into and out of Iraq. Critics inside and outside the U.S. military have warned for months that the big, lumbering jets are obvious targets for Iraqi insurgents who are trying to kill American troops and drive the United States out of Iraq and the Middle East.

Earlier this year, the Pentagon proposed a $25 million program to begin equipping the commercial airliners used for troop transport with advanced technology to protect them from the shoulder-fired missiles. But when the Bush administration did nothing to win approval of the measure, Republican leadership in the House of Representatives slashed the request to $3 million, far short of the sum needed to expedite wartime protection of the aircraft.

“[Sunday's] tragic events in Iraq are a reminder of the reality of the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles,” Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., told Salon. “These weapons are easy to acquire, easy to use, and have now become a weapon of choice among terrorists. Secretary [Donald] Rumsfeld acknowledged as much [Sunday] morning, yet we aren’t doing enough to protect troops transported on civilian aircraft and we aren’t doing anything to protect civilians.”

In a series of stories since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Salon has disclosed that the spread of the missiles has alarmed military brass, airline security experts and some elected officials. The launchers are small, light and easy to hide; al-Qaida operatives have them, security experts say, and so do other terror organizations. Late last year, suspected Qaida terrorists fired on a charter jet filled with Israeli travelers at Mombasa, Kenya, only narrowly missing the target. Over the past 20 years, over half of all combat aircraft lost in global conflicts have been shot down by shoulder-fired missiles.

The danger from shoulder fired-missiles in the Persian Gulf region is well-known. Last year, terrorists launched an attack just outside a Saudi Arabian air base, and over the summer, Saudi officials captured a large cache of shoulder-fired missiles. From time to time, U.S. military officials have turned up buried caches of missiles in occupied Iraq. Still, despite capturing many shoulder-fired missiles, Saddam acquired so many of the portable missile systems that the Iraqi resistance is still well-armed.

“The resistance has been targeting aircraft at Baghdad Airport for several months,” says Vincent Cannistraro, former chief of counter-terrorism for the CIA. “I have heard of at least 26 SAMs fired at aircraft. The routine for aircraft landing or taking off at the airport has included countermeasures against the SAMs.”

On Sunday, in the aftermath of the Chinook take-down, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was asked about the shoulder-fired missile arsenal held by the Iraqi resistance. His reply: “Enormous numbers. Enormous numbers … Oh, have to be more than hundreds. There are weapons caches all over that country. They were using schools, hospitals, mosques to hide weapons. Think of it, in Bosnia, in the last six months, they have found 40 tons of weapons in a country that we’ve occupied for six years.”

Israel, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, is one of a handful of congressional experts on the missile threat who have pressed, without success, for measures to protect military and U.S. civilian aircraft from the global proliferation of shoulder-launched missiles. But he’s baffled that President Bush hasn’t done more to protect the troops. Along with Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Israel sponsored a bill to equip all commercial airliners in the U.S. with anti-missile systems — an effort that could cost up to $15 billion, by some estimates. Due in large part to administration opposition, that bill died on Capitol Hill.

As part of the debate surrounding the president’s request for $87 billion to fund the ongoing military operations and reconstruction in Iraq, Israel and Boxer tried — unsuccessfully — to obtain financing to protect the 300 commercial jets that the Pentagon most often uses to transport our military forces within the United States and overseas.

Top national security officials began meeting last year to assess and address the risk that shoulder-fired missiles pose to U.S. airliners and, by extension, to the U.S. economy. But to date, critics say, the federal government has done almost nothing to prepare for the possibility — some call it a probability — that terrorists will use shoulder-launched missiles against American commercial jetliners, either within or outside the United States.

When the Bush administration this year allowed the much more modest $25 million measure to protect troop-transport craft to wither, some military officials were outraged. Though Bush portrays himself as a firm ally of men and women on the front lines, the critics said, he was leaving them vulnerable. “I am appalled,” one Defense Department official told Salon earlier this year, asking to remain anonymous. “We are setting ourselves up for a fall. We are paying lip-service to force protection and instead are digging a deeper hole in which to bury our head.”

The outcome shocked many in the Defense Department and, critics said, it clearly could leave troops vulnerable. “I am appalled,” said one Defense Department official who asked to remain anonymous. “We are setting ourselves up for a fall. We are paying lip-service to force protection and instead are digging a deeper hole in which to bury our head.”

The $25 million measure was approved by the U.S. Senate, but slashed to $3 million in the powerful House Appropriations Committee, chaired by U.S. Rep. C.W. Bill Young, a Florida Republican. The lower sum, part of the proposed $400 billion defense budget for 2004, was approved in negotiations between the two chambers and is all but certain to be in the budget sent for approval to the president.

No president in recent memory has been a fiercer ally of men and women in uniform. “We will not cut corners when it comes to the defense of our great land,” Bush said last year. Even Ronald Reagan, one of the most forceful proponents of a strong military ever to inhabit the White House, never donned a flight suit and flew onto the deck of an aircraft carrier aboard a Navy plane. But this week, officials said, the Bush administration offered no support to protect the troop-transport planes.

“The administration never made the case for why it needed the money,” said John Scofield, a spokesman for the House Appropriations Committee. “It was never clear what they were going to do with the money.” An aide to a Republican senator, who asked to remain anonymous, said the full funding would have been approved if Bush had pressed for it. “If the president says that something is important, he will get the funding from this Congress,” the aide said. “All he has to do is ask.”

In a series of stories since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Salon has disclosed that the proliferation of shoulder-launched missiles has alarmed airline security officials and many congressional officials. The launchers are small, light and easy to hide, and they are known to be in the hands of al-Qaida and other terrorist organizations. Late last year, suspected al-Qaida terrorists fired on a charter jet filled with Israeli travelers at Mombassa, Kenya, but the missile narrowly missed its target. Top national security officials began meeting last year to assess and address the risk, and some have suggested it would cost around $15 billion to equip 5,000 U.S. jetliners with anti-missile technology. But to date, critics say, the federal government has done almost nothing to prepare for the possibility — some call it a probability — that terrorists will use shoulder-launched missiles against American commercial jetliners, either within or outside the United States.

Contrary to the images portrayed in movies, most combat troops and other military personnel do not cram into the back of military transport planes when deploying around the world. Like the rest of us, they usually fly in commercial jets both within the United States and abroad.

Through the Civilian Reserve Aviation Fleet program, the Defense Department contracts with commercial airlines to provide jets and air crews during times of crisis. In return for participating in the program, airlines are guaranteed peacetime business with the Defense Department. The reserve aviation fleet “forms the majority of the DoD’s passenger airlift capability,” according to Navy Capt. Stephen Honda, spokesman for the Pentagon unit responsible for airlifting military personnel and equipment. By some estimates, over 90 percent of the military personnel moved by the Defense Department are transported on aircraft operated by CRAF carriers. And like every other commercial airliner in this country, these airliners are completely unprotected from the threat from shoulder-fired missiles.

But military craft flying in and out of Baghdad have been targeted at least three times since May by anti-U.S. forces with shoulder-launched missiles. All of those aircraft likely had sophisticated anti-missile countermeasures, and all of the shots missed their targets. Still, the threat of shoulder-fired missiles remains so great in Iraq that the Baghdad airport has remained closed to all but essential military and aid aircraft. That is the risk facing the planes that would ferry up to 20,000 reserves and National Guard troops to the Iraqi capital if Rumsfeld goes ahead with the call-up.

Pentagon documents show that shoulder-fired missiles are the single greatest killer of military aircraft, accounting for well over 50 percent of all combat losses in recent decades. Additionally, Pentagon documents show that these missiles have successfully hit 41 civilian aircraft and destroyed at least 30 of these. In the process, about 1,000 passengers and crew have been lost. Air Force Gen. John W. Handy, head of the U.S. Transportation Command, recently said that the danger posed by shoulder-fired missiles “is perhaps the greatest threat that we face anywhere in the world, and the proliferation of MANPADS is well documented.”

Some in Congress are deeply concerned about the elimination of funding to begin protecting the troop-transport aircraft. U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, a New York Democrat and outspoken proponent of federal spending to protect commercial jetliners, blasted the Bush administration in an interview this week for failing to take care of troop-transport planes. “Out of a $400 billion defense budget, $3 million is completely inadequate, particularly against thousands of shoulder-fired missiles in the hands of terrorists including al-Qaida,” Israel said. “We have simply got to stop shortchanging this glaring threat to American airplanes.”

According to Pentagon budget documents obtained by Salon, the missile defense program for aircraft in the military reserve program would have leapfrogged the lethargic anti-missile efforts currently gearing up at the Department of Homeland Security. In its first year, the Defense Department program would have measured the “heat signatures” of the commercial airliners used to transport troops, and then begun devising anti-missile measures to protect those planes. Measuring the heat signatures is a critical step, since shoulder-fired missiles are “heat seekers” and home in on the infrared radiation given off by aircraft. Currently, the DHS has no plans to conduct similar measurement efforts.

With $3 million, defense officials will be able to record those heat signatures, but little work on missile-jamming equipment will be possible unless money can be found elsewhere in the Pentagon budget.

Should terrorists begin targeting the troop-transport aircraft, there likely will be widespread political and economic effects. “The ability to rapidly deploy military force across the globe is a key element of American power and influence in the world and helps to create the stability and security that is the basis for investment and trade on which the prosperity of the U.S. and others depend,” says James Bodner, former undersecretary of defense in the Clinton administration.

A research study currently underway at the RAND Institute estimates that the direct cost of one plane’s being shot down – for the loss of life and the cost of the aircraft — would be $1 billion. The ripple effect of such a loss would likely be enormous, as people reassess the wisdom of traveling by air.

The military has taken a multi-pronged approach to protecting its combat jets and the Air Force’s large transport aircraft. It uses intelligence to uncover threats, conducts missions to capture shoulder-fired missiles from terrorists and other groups, and has installed sophisticated systems on its aircraft to jam attacking missiles and direct them away from the targeted aircraft. As a backup, since no electronic countermeasures system is 100 percent effective, the military also designs its aircraft to be able to withstand the detonation of a shoulder-fired missile warhead.

Shortly after the failed missile attack in Kenya last year, the administration formed an interagency task force to seek solutions to the shoulder-fired missile threat. Soon, however, that effort was being criticized for focusing on window-dressing solutions that cost little — and provide little protection. Confronted by congressional pressure, the administration pledged to put together a plan for combating terrorist missile attacks.

In March, Transportation Security Administration head Adm. James Loy seemed to call for an expedited push to address the threat. Speaking to CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” he said, “I think the right thing for us to do is to continue the methodical study process that has been undertaken by the National Security Council, not with years of study to come but with weeks of study to come.” Still, the administration failed to act. During congressional deliberations leading up to the vote to fund ongoing operations in Iraq, Congress ordered the Department of Homeland Security to come up with a plan to counter the threat from shoulder-fired missiles.

The department delivered a report in May that proposed spending $2 million this year to set up an administrative office to coordinate the anti-missile activities and up to $60 million next year. The White House, however, failed to seek any funding to implement the plan. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security began a much-hyped program that was supposed to have identified one or two promising technologies before the end of this month. Instead, the program petered out. In recent days a department official told Salon that the program “was never going to solve the problem [because] it lacked the necessary funding.” Still, despite the department’s dismal track record on this issue, the official insisted that a new Homeland Security program — funded in the first year with $60 million that the Congress appropriated after the White House failed to request any funding at all to address the threat — will begin the process of finding a solution. In early October, the Homeland Security officials will brief defense contractors on its goals and requirements for a missile countermeasures system for use on commercial airliners. But the program won’t yield significant progress before 2006.

“We’re heading out on a long, slow jog, when a faster pace is warranted,” says Israel. “I am convinced that the threat of shoulder-fired missiles to our commercial airplanes is serious enough to merit significantly more energy and resources.”

In the meantime, U.S. troops are being transported around the globe on aircraft that are unable to ward off a missile attack and have not been designed to take a missile hit. For the families of the troops about to be called up and sent to Iraq, this must be a chilling proposition.

“The fact that we’re able to sting this guy,” the president said, “is a pretty good example of what we’re doing in order to protect the American people.”

Within days, however, a more critical view began to emerge among top national-security experts: The arrest of Lakhani and two alleged accomplices was welcome, yes, but its significance was being dramatically overstated by an administration on the defensive over its failure to capture Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein and its struggles in Afghanistan and Iraq. By the critics’ line of reasoning, the administration was exaggerating the significance of the Lakhani arrest just as it had the arrests last year of alleged “dirty bomber” Jose Padilla and the Lackawanna Six “sleeper cell” in New York. While officials were tipping off reporters in advance of the bust, they complained, the administration was continuing to resist substantive — and expensive — measures to protect commercial jets.

A terrorist who wants a shoulder-fired missile is not going to go to someone like Lakhani to buy one, says Vincent Cannistraro, former head of counter-terrorism for the CIA. “This was not a terrorist incident,” he told Salon. “It did not involve the penetration of a plot or terrorist cell.” He added: “This was a truly ludicrous situation … hyped in advance by a Justice Department anxious to show success.”

“This is not a huge victory in the War on Terror,” agrees Charles Peña, director of defense policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. “This just shows that we can sting a guy, not a bad thing, but it does not make it harder for al-Qaida or other terrorists to get these weapons.”

Ivo Daalder, a former National Security Council director for European affairs in the Clinton administration and now a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, offers a blunt assessment of the arrest: “All hype.” Daalder praises the Bush administration’s success in toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan and killing or arresting numerous top al-Qaida leaders overseas, but he sees the administration’s domestic approach as flawed.

“The administration has made homeland security a political issue. The president consistently uses terror for political gain,” he says. “[U.S. Attorney General] John Ashcroft’s Justice Department is all about hype and not reality.”

Reports from the Department of Defense and other government agencies show that shoulder-fired missiles have hit at least 43 civil aircraft since the 1970s. Of these, 30 aircraft — 69 percent of the total — were shot down, leaving more than 900 air travelers dead. In an investigative report last year, Salon found that dozens of countries have produced hundreds of thousands of the shoulder-launched missiles, and that many of them have found their way to the black market. Jane’s Intelligence Review reported in 2001 that the missiles are already in the hands of up to 27 terrorist groups.

And it seems certain that al-Qaida is among them. A Pentagon spokesman told Salon last year that U.S. forces in Afghanistan had captured 5,592 shoulder-fired missiles during operations to destroy al-Qaida. The terrorist group is widely believed responsible for a missile attack on an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya last November — a case in which the missiles narrowly missed their target.

Lakhani, born in India but now a British citizen, was arrested last week at a hotel in Newark, N.J., and charged with offering to sell a sophisticated Russian SA-18 Igla missile to a man posing as a liaison to terrorists. Reports said that the suspect had first come onto intelligence radars last year when he began inquiring about the purchase of weapons on the Russian black market. Russian, British and American undercover agents then staged an elaborate setup, first selling an inoperative missile launcher and then busting him in Newark when he tried to sell it to a government informant posing a middleman for a Somalian terror group with ties to al-Qaida.

“Make one explosion … to shake the economy,” Lakhani allegedly told the buyer.

Obviously, analysts said, such an arrest may have saved lives, and it was a justified law enforcement effort to take a potentially dangerous group of arms traders out of commission. “”The president has made clear we are in an ongoing war against terrorism,” said Christopher Christie, U.S. attorney for the district of New Jersey, said after the arrest. “Today the good guys won a battle in that war.”

Ashcroft was even more effusive. “This investigation,” he said, “shows that all agencies of the federal government and our international allies will work together tirelessly to keep innocent people safe.”

In the 24 hours after Lakhani’s arrest, experts on terrorism and politicians from both sides of the aisle pointed out the serious threat from these deadly accurate and easily transported weapons that the military calls MANPADS, for man-portable air defense systems. But, in America, a week can be an eternity. Between the blackout of 2003 and the continuing circus surrounding the California recall election, serious discussions about how to address this long-standing and growing threat quickly fell out of sight.

But, critics say, Bush administration officials who were describing Lakhani as a major arms dealer and suggesting that he had ties to terror groups appear to have been exaggerating. And they said flatly that the arrest did little to protect the U.S. commercial aviation industry and its passengers.

For many experts and members of Congress, the Bush administration’s efforts in combating the shoulder-fired missile threat have been too little and too late; and in recent months, aviation security experts — including some military and government officials — have begun to question Bush’s commitment to solving the problem.

Among the strongest advocates of the need to move quickly to protect the nation’s airliners is U.S. Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y. “After the attacks on Sept. 11, we cracked down on security at airports, searched every bag, put military police at airports, and shut down vulnerable airports until we knew they could be protected,” he says. “We’ve protected our airports quickly, but when it comes to protecting our aircraft from shoulder-fired missiles, it is just taking too long.” Israel and a number of other members of Congress have been pressing the administration to protect America’s airliners since al-Qaida attacked an Israeli airliner just after takeoff from Mombasa, Kenya, using Russian-designed SA-7 missiles.

Shortly after the Mombasa attack, Israel joined Sens. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., and Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., in calling for $10 billion to equip commercial airliners with a new and highly effective laser system that the Air Force is beginning to install on its large, slow transport planes, the ones most similar to commercial jets. Administration opposition killed that proposal, as well as a much smaller effort initially proposed by Florida Republican John Mica, chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee. Mica’s proposal would have provided the administration with $30 million to study ways of adapting military countermeasures into less expensive models for commercial aircraft.

But leaks from the administration’s Interagency Task Force showed a preference for low-cost solutions, such as training people who live or work near airports to recognize a missile attack, regardless of whether those solutions offer any real level of protection. When pushed by Congress to take more concrete actions, the administration took two inconsistent approaches: The Department of Homeland Security decided that the solution to this threat lay in sophisticated countermeasures and the Defense Department rejected the need for countermeasures on civilian aircraft.

An aide to a key Republican House member says the administration’s failure was a function of the budget cycle, noting that the process of preparing next year’s budget began well before November’s al-Qaida attack on the Israeli airliner in Kenya. But Leon Panetta, former chief of the Office of Management and Budget and later President Clinton’s chief of staff, rejected that excuse: “That’s bull!” If addressing the shoulder-fired missile issue were truly a priority for the administration, he suggested, the White House would have sent Congress an emergency supplemental budget request — as it did to fund the war in Iraq.

“We use emergency supplementals to fund unforeseen emergencies such as wars, disasters and fighting fires,” Panetta notes. “If the administration considered [defending against shoulder-fired missiles] critical to the security of our citizens no one in Congress would question an emergency supplemental.”

Despite inattention on the part of the administration, Mica and Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., recently secured a congressional commitment for $60 million for research aimed at defeating the shoulder-fired missiles. Though the budget is not yet official, and $60 million pales in the face of the estimated $10 billion to $18 billion needed address the threat posed by shoulder-fired missiles, both men see this initial funding as secure. While a welcome development, Byrd laments the delay in moving forward to protect the nation’s travelers.

“With such agreement, I expect that the work finally will get underway,” Byrd told Salon last week. “Unfortunately, because of White House obstinance earlier this year, the work is several months behind where it should be.” Mica, the only member of Congress to hold hearings on the shoulder-fired-missile threat, told Salon that he is confident that he can move Department of Homeland Security to act “sooner rather than later.” But he stresses that he wants to make sure that “we don’t spend money on systems that won’t work.”

Adm. James Loy, chief of Bush’s Transportation Security Administration, seemed to tell CBS News’ “60 Minutes” in March that the effort to address the threat should be expedited. “I think the right thing for us to do is to continue the methodical study process that has been undertaken by the National Security Council, not with years of study to come, but with weeks of study to come.” Now, however, it looks like the first fruits of the DHS’s work will not emerge before 2006.

Until the administration’s program gets up and running, and several years of research and development yield a sufficiently inexpensive solution to the portable-missile threat, the American public must rely upon the efforts of law enforcement to protect the nation’s airliners. But even after the arrest of Lakhani, Byrd and others remain uneasy. “We cannot rely solely on law enforcement stings to protect air passengers from missile attack,” Byrd says. “We must invest in defenses to help save lives now.”

The administration recently blocked two congressional measures to address the threat, including a comprehensive $9 billion plan to begin outfitting passenger jets with sophisticated anti-missile equipment. Instead, a new report by Bush’s Department of Homeland Security says the administration is proposing a timetable in which the study and planning would not be completed until 2005, and the first widespread installation of anti-missile technology would be years away, at best. Only $2 million would be spent in the next few months to assemble staff and data on the risk posed by portable missiles; up to $60 million would be allocated next year to continue the study.

But the threat posed by the lightweight portable missiles — formally known as “man-portable air defense systems” — has already been demonstrated in a decade of government research. Today, the administration’s less-than-urgent approach to airline security is provoking angry attacks in Congress.

In a letter sent Thursday to Tom Ridge, Bush’s secretary of homeland security, Sen. Robert Byrd ripped the administration for its seeming nonchalance. And the West Virginia Democrat reiterated his concerns in an interview with Salon. “When it comes to fighting in distant lands, the administration’s attitude is, Spare no expense,” he said. “But when it comes to fighting the war on American soil, the administration prefers to shop in bargain basements.”

Even within the Defense Department, officials privately acknowledge that further study is not the solution to the problem. “We know what we need to do to solve the  problem in commercial aircraft,” one official said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “All we need is the funding to make it happen.”

Airline security experts estimate it will cost $9 billion to $18 billion to equip the nation’s passenger fleet with “directed infrared countermeasures systems” that can deflect a missile from its course. The Department of Homeland Security report to Congress called the anti-missile systems “the most promising” technology for protecting airliners. The systems use pulses of light to jam the missiles’ guidance systems, a technology effective against the early-generation portable missiles that are most likely to be in the hands of terrorists. The most sophisticated anti-missile systems use lasers to confuse attacking missiles and are just beginning to enter service on military transport aircraft.

The cost is steep — too steep, analysts say, to be borne by U.S. airlines that are already struggling with nearly $100 billion in debt. But the cost of not making the investment could be even greater. If terrorists shot down even one commercial airliner, they could potentially paralyze traffic in the $300-billion-per-year airline industry, with shockwaves spreading throughout the U.S. economy.

In an investigative report last year, Salon detailed how the commercial jets in the United States — and the millions of passengers who fly on them — are at risk from the small, light and easily hidden missile systems. They are relatively easy to fire, and when operated properly, they can bring down a jet at altitudes as high as 10,000 feet. More advanced versions can reach aircraft traveling at over 15,000 feet.

To be sure, there are skeptics who believe that the threat of shoulder-fired missiles is overblown. Steven Brill, the former publisher of Brill’s Content and author of the new book “After: How America Confronted the September 12 Era,” derides recent congressional moves to protect airlines from them. “It’s a stupid policy initiative,” Brill told Salon on Monday. A terrorist missile attack on an airliner “could happen tomorrow,” he said, “but it is still a stupid initiative.” In Brill’s opinion, terrorists are more likely to strike at “mass transit, rail, air cargo, and office building ventilation systems.” Those, he says, are the places where the government should be spending money to avoid terrorist attacks.

But that is a minority position. Those most familiar with the danger, regardless of political stripe, agree that the missiles pose a significant, immediate threat. Rep. John Mica, a Florida Republican who chairs the House aviation subcommittee, has called the risk “sobering,” and at a Washington news conference in March, he said: “We can’t afford to not act.” A Boeing official privately described the shoulder-launched missiles as “the greatest current threat to the U.S. air transport system.” Over the past year, intelligence officials have grown increasingly concerned about the likelihood that al-Qaida has smuggled the launchers into the United States. The FBI in May 2002 issued a remarkable bulletin to local and state law enforcement agencies warning that al-Qaida possessed such missiles and would likely attempt an attack inside the United States.

On Election Day last November, the Transportation Security Administration convened a secret meeting in a secure conference room in Washington to inform a group of airline CEOs of the growing threat posed by the missiles. And just days ago, the Group of Eight industrial powers meeting in Evian, France, issued a sobering message: “We reiterate our deep concern about the threat posed to civil aviation by [the portable missiles], especially in the hands of terrorists or states that harbor them.”

Although officials often cite the SA-7, the most widely proliferated and among the least capable shoulder-fired missiles, as the one terrorists are most likely to unleash against U.S. airliners, recent reports out of the Middle East indicate that Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based terrorist group with an annual budget the CIA says exceeds $200 million, has recently acquired SA-18 missiles from Syria. These super-sophisticated Russian-made missiles are far more accurate — and potentially far more lethal — than the SA-7 missiles used in the Mombasa attack last year. Should al-Qaida obtain these new-generation missiles from Hezbollah, Syria, or another willing broker, it will significantly enhance its ability to blast American airliners out of the sky.

Officials at the Department of Homeland Security declined repeated requests for comment on the Bush administration’s airline security plan. The Air Transport Association, an industry group representing many of the commercial carriers, said yesterday that the federal government, and not the industry, should be responsible for such an overarching security concern.

“Defending against the threat of terrorist attacks has always been a fundamental government responsibility,” said association spokeswoman Diana Cronan. “The airline industry, having been made aware by appropriate government authorities of concerns with the potential use of shoulder-fired missiles, is doing everything within its power to assist the government in its decision making as to the proper response to these and all terrorist threats.”

In Congress, numerous U.S. officials have expressed alarm at the risk and have pressed for a commitment by the Bush administration to address it — but so far without success. In the weeks leading up to the vote on funding the Iraq war, a measure sponsored by Rep. Steve Israel, D-N.Y., and Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., proposed spending $9 billion to install anti-missile systems on commercial airliners; the measure failed, due largely to White House hostility. Then, the administration blocked a bipartisan plan, pushed by Mica, chair of the House aviation subcommittee, to spend $30 million in the current fiscal year to begin the process of adapting military technology to commercial airliners.

Instead, according to the Department of Homeland Security report, the Bush administration has committed to spend just $2 million in the current fiscal year, which ends September 31, mostly for creating a “special government staff office to manage the effort.” For the 2004 budget year, the administration says, “project costs are not to exceed $60 million.” But that $60 million is not actually in the budget plan provided to the Congress, and the Homeland Security report states that the administration will “not seek additional or supplemental funding for this effort.” That prompted a pointed question in Byrd’s letter last week to Ridge. “If the Administration does not plan to request additional funding for the [research],” he asked, “how will the activities in the program plan … be funded?”

According to the Office of Management and Budget, the administration has made no efforts to seek to have money shifted from one line item to another within the budget; nor has it sought new monies for anti-missile defense research. With Washington approaching the summer months, when little of substance gets done, and with the new fiscal year beginning shortly after the Congress returns to work in September, there is little evidence that the administration has firm spending plans for 2004.

And even if the $60 million does materialize, it’s not enough, critics say. “Anything under $100 million is chump change,” said one Capitol Hill source who asked to remain anonymous.

The net effect, Israel says, is that the White House is putting lives at risk. “The more we know about the threat of [portable missiles],” he said in an interview, “the more we know we need to defend against it. We were given a warning shot last year when shoulder-fired missiles missed an Israeli jet in Kenya, but we cannot count on their missing next time. I am happy that the administration has now acknowledged the threat, but they must follow through with real action … We’ve debated it. We’ve held hearings on it. We’ve researched it. We’ve studied it. We’ve analyzed it. Now it’s time to act on it.”

Boxer sounded a similar theme in an interview Friday. “We have known for a long time that there is a credible threat of attack against our commercial aircraft,” she said. “Although there is progress being made by the administration, this progress is too slow.”

Byrd and others describe the White House budget plans as a window onto Bush’s priorities. By this measure, the need to protect airliners from missile attack seems to be a back-burner issue.

Administration officials, of course, disagree. In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security has been trumpeting its efforts at surveying the areas around airports to identify the locations from which terrorists are most likely to launch a portable-missile attack. And in a letter last month to House Armed Services chairman Duncan Hunter, Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II seemed to back that plan in outlining his opposition to the Israel-Boxer bill. “The Department of Defense recommends exploration of other potentially effective measures such as counter-proliferation, airfield security, and improved border control,” Haynes wrote.

But experts in thwarting missile attacks, both inside and outside the government, say that approach simply won’t work. “Most of the current proposals for securing the airspace around airports are either unworkable or useless,” says Daniel Goure, a defense analyst at the nonpartisan Lexington Institute who served on Bush’s Department of Defense transition team.

One reason is that aircraft are vulnerable to even the oldest shoulder-launched missiles just before they land if they are within a long, roughly triangular swath of territory, about 4 to 6 miles wide, that extends 50 miles or more from the airport. An Air Force official recently noted that airport security measures are doomed to failure because the area around an airfield that needs to be secured in order to protect airliners ranges from 900 to 1,800 cubic miles of airspace.

“All a terrorist has to do is hide in the back of a pickup truck, under a tarp,” said one intelligence official who asked not to be named. “When the driver of the truck spots a target aircraft and stops, all the shooter needs to do is throw off the tarp, stand and fire. It will only take a matter of seconds, and there is no way to stop that kind of attack.”

Other signals reinforce the sense that the White House does not view the situation with urgency.

After reviewing the technology available for protecting passenger jets from missile attack, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the Homeland Security Council concluded that only two companies are involved in developing directional infrared countermeasures systems: Northrop Grumman, an American company that builds the Air Force’s new large aircraft laser system, and BAE, a U.K. firm working on a laser system for the Navy’s tactical aircraft. But the review failed to identify a third alternative: Israeli defense contractor Rafael also builds a laser anti-missile system, and unlike the Northrop Grumman and BAE systems, Rafael’s system has actually been tested on a commercial jet against live missiles — something the Bush administration’s plan does not envision doing until around 2005.

Rafael’s test occurred from March 9 to 13 at Israel’s southern Uvda Air Force Base and involved the very Boeing 757 that was attacked in Kenya. Using a variety of missiles, fired from several angles and distances, Rafael’s system successfully jammed every missile fired at the jet. Despite these impressive results, and the lower cost of Rafael’s system, it does not appear that this system is in the running to protect U.S. passengers.

Regardless of which system or systems might eventually receive approval from the Department of Homeland Security, none will be allowed onto airliners without the approval of the Federal Aviation Administration. Here again, the Bush administration is taking a go-slow approach. Current plans do not call for any action on FAA certification to begin until the autumn of 2004, and then the certification process is expected to take a year or more.

When asked whether the FAA could accelerate its assessment of whether anti-missile systems adversely affect such critical issues as aircraft electrical and hydraulic systems, weight balance, and flight response, an FAA spokeswoman said the agency “can do anything on an expedited basis if [it] has enough people.” But extra people means extra money, and that does not appear to be forthcoming.

After the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, security officials were able to restore passenger confidence by federalizing security personnel and implementing more rigorous passenger- and baggage-screening procedures. But if a U.S. passenger jet is shot out of the sky with a shoulder-launched missile, there are few confidence-building security improvements that could be implemented quickly to restore confidence in the security of the civil aviation system.

Even if anti-missile systems were installed aboard every airliner, that would still only be a part of the overall solution. Jets equipped with anti-missile defense systems can be hit by what the military calls “leakers” — missiles that get through an aircraft’s defensive systems. Because of this, the U.S. military conducts “live fire” testing, in which missiles are fired at aircraft and aircraft components to obtain data on how to build aircraft able to withstand missile hits. Robert E. Ball, widely recognized as an expert in the field of aircraft survivability and the author of the world’s only textbook on the subject, notes that live-fire testing “costs very little compared to the cost of the aircraft and the value of the lives saved.”

James O’Bryon, a retired Pentagon official who for years headed up the Defense Department’s live-fire testing program, says that live-fire testing typically adds a fraction of 1 percent to the cost of aircraft, about the same as the expense that crash-testing adds to a new automobile. As an added benefit to this approach, the design modifications that allow an aircraft to survive a missile hit also provide a degree of protection against threats such as rocket-propelled grenades, high-caliber machine guns, and sniper rifles.

But this is another area where the Bush administration has been unwilling to spend money. “Until we can test commercial aircraft through live-fire testing,” one Defense Department official told Salon, “we will remain in the dark as to how the aircraft respond to a [shoulder-launched missile] attack.” It may be that for certain aircraft, relatively minor engineering modifications, such as moving or armoring hydraulic lines, will result in making airliners far less likely to be lost if hit by a missile.

Many experts inside and outside government believe that it is almost inevitable that al-Qaida or another group will try to take down a U.S. airliner with a shoulder-launched missile. Vincent Cannistraro, a former chief of counter-terrorism operations for the CIA, says that al-Qaida has a history of learning from its failures; neither the government nor the public should assume that the next group of al-Qaida operatives sent to bring down a jet will duplicate the mistakes made in Mombasa, he says.

“Time and again,” Byrd told Salon, “the Bush administration pays lip service to the nation’s great homeland security needs, yet when push comes to shove, they steadily refuse to put forth the necessary resources. Words and promises need to be backed up with the money to make those words a reality.”