The Fifteenth Anniversary

of 9/11:

Past Lessons and Future Outlook

October 14, 2016

THE INTER-UNIVERSITY CENTER FOR TERRORISM STUDIES

The Fifteenth Anniversary of 9/11: Past Lessons and Future Outlook

Table of Contents Ambassador (Ret.) Charles A. Ray ................................................................................... 1

David Albright ........................................................................................................................ 7

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The Fifteenth Anniversary of 9/11 1

Ambassador (Ret.) Charles A. Ray

Former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for POW/Missing Personnel Affairs and Ambassador to Cambodia and Zimbabwe. Previously, he served in the United States

Army for twenty years

You have heard a couple of very good, I think, high level sort of macro political views. What I would like to think of as a view from an AWACS now, if I could, I would like to take us down to tree top level and talk about post 9/11 as seen from a Huey.

Like our parents or at least those of us who are old enough to have parents who

were adults in 1941; our parents remember precisely and clearly where they were and what they were doing on December 7, 1941. Those of us here, I am sure, remember clearly where we were and what we were doing on September 11, 2001. On that day I

was a student in the State Department’s now defunct program called The Senior Seminar, which was designed to bring foreign affairs officials and professionals who had spent most of their adult lives representing the country but not living in it very much, back, put them together and give them a ground level view of the country they were representing.

On that morning, we were in Seattle getting ready to go and visit Boeing and

Microsoft. When I woke up in my hotel room and uncharacteristically for me, I am a cartoon watcher when I travel in the morning, I tuned into CNN just in time to watch that second plane fly into the towers. It took me about 30 seconds to realize I was not watching a promo for a cheap thriller, and hit me in the gut like a 280 pound boxer in a golden gloves match that you are losing.

We came back, my seminar colleagues and I, to a much changed Washington. We

started that August looking at a leisurely nine months off get to know the country so we could do a better job when we went back overseas. What we realized on September 12th was that the country that we represent was forever changed and that we had to take a much closer look at that country and the world that we would be going out to more than we ever had in the past.

A year later, slightly over a year later, on December 26, 2002, I went back to that

world. I got off a plane in Phnom Penh, Cambodia as the fourth U.S. ambassador to that country. Cambodia is a quiet country, especially in December. It is a Buddhist country and they do not do a lot of wild Christmas celebrations. The embassy was closed. I had one member of my household staff on duty; and my wife and I were looking forward to about a month of peace and quiet; a chance to get settled in and get to know the place.

Of course, it was a bit complicated by that fact that at that point in time our

relationship with Cambodia, a country of zero strategic significance to the United States, in a region of really only marginal significance, was problematic.

The Prime Minister, Hun Sen, was not very well liked in many quarters here in

Washington. His primary opposition on the other hand was very well loved here in Washington because he spoke excellent English, he spoke French, he carried a French

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passport, and he wore finely-tailored three-piece suits, the perfect foreigner to interact with policymakers here. He was glib, he was smooth. Hun Sen’s a peasant, educated in a pagoda, one eye, and if you want to talk about a disconcerting experience, sit across the table from a man who you know is a dictator, a former Khmer Rouge, a combat veteran, and that one eye never waivers, it is chilling.

So we did not really get along with the government too well. Basically, except for

demining activities, we could not deal with the army, we had very limited counter-drug cooperation with the national police. I did not pay much attention to any of this until the end of January, roughly a month and half or so after arriving, when in response to a soap opera actress on Thai TV who insulted Cambodia, the students in Phnom Penh rioted, burned the Thai embassy to the ground, burned most Thai-owned business, caused the Thai ambassador to have to go over a wall and into the river and a boat to escape with his life, and the borders were closed between Thailand and Cambodia. There were threats; Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra at the time actually threatened to send in the Thai Special Forces. I do not think many people here in the States actually understood this, I do not think Cambodia got a lot of coverage. We were very close to these two countries going to war. I watched the riots from the vantage point of my home office format my residence overlooking the street that the rioters used to get to the embassy to burn it down and that the army used to follow them to chase them away. But it was something that happened after this riot, after the borders were closed that really changed things for us in Cambodia.

We discovered, quite by happenstance, that for months prior to the January 2003

riots, that a team from Jemaah Islamiyah, a terrorist group based in Indonesia, had been conducting surveillance of the U.S and British embassies, preparing a bombing attack. They had even gone so far as to rent a garage, buy a truck, buy explosives, and hire a driver to drive that truck into the selected target. That last thing, hiring a driver, and the riots were the weak points in their plan. Of course, we knew none of this until one of the planners was arrested later in Thailand. The man that they hired, a Muslim, a Cham, which is an ethnic group in Cambodia that is about 55 percent Muslim, had second thoughts about becoming a martyr. He was not quite sold on whether getting the 72 virgins early was really a good deal. So he quit on them, creating a bit of a recruiting problem. And then when the borders were shut and there was threat of war, they could no longer sneak back and forth across the border easily, so the plan was put on hold.

When the Thai and U.S. authorities arrested one of the plotters in northern

Thailand, and we discovered this, what we discovered was that they decided to hit the British embassy which would have actually been worse than bombing us because the British embassy was in a very congested neighborhood and the number of casualties

would have been enormous. The American embassy, I have to say, was in a commercial area. We rented a group of buildings including a gas station and a former brothel and looped them together with corrugated iron and green plastic; it was a really horrible looking embassy. It would have almost been a delight to have it blown up but I did not want to have to write letters home to families of my staff explaining how I let that happen. But at any rate, what had occurred to me when we got this information, when my station chief briefed me on it, was how close we came to disaster because we had been forbidden from having a close working relationship with the very people whose job it is to try and secure the country’s borders. And they were

The Fifteenth Anniversary of 9/11 3

not able to secure the borders because they did not have proper training, they did not have proper equipment and no one was offering it to them.

One of the things that I did on my own initiative because during the ambassadorial

seminar they gave all newly appointed ambassadors, was establish a good working relationship with the commander of the Pacific Command. It was mentioned in the seminar that you should have a good relationship with your geographic military commander. Having spent 20 years in the army, that sounded like a good idea to me so I spent a lot of my travel time going to Hawaii, having meetings with the commanders, two successive commanders of Pacific command during my tenure, about the military and security situation in that part of the world and how it impacted Pacific Command as well as my embassy.

What we discovered in our talks was that there were a lot of holes in the backdoor

screen because not only were we not allowed, my embassy that is, to deal with the Cambodian military, or the police, neither was Pacific Command, for purely political reasons. The information that we had about the threat though, was not available until I delivered it to Pacific Command, to our military counterparts, so they could not use this information to go to the Pentagon to argue for a different lash up in the relationship. I discovered later that the information that I got from my intelligence people on my country team had not been made available to the country desk back here in Washington either because the people at Langley and the people at Foggy Bottom operated in different stovepipes, they had different priorities.

When I went to State and pointed this out, and pointed out that, the global war on

terrorism was well underway then in other parts of the world, no one had given much thought to the fact that roughly five to eight percent Cambodia’s population is Muslim. Anyone care to guess how many people in Washington were aware of that fact? About two, the desk officer, and maybe an analyst at Langley… The fact is that we cared so little and paid so little attention to that country and that part of the world that the demographic makeup of the population was basically unknown. What was also unknown was the Jemaah Islamiyah, funded by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia were actively working to radicalize that population. Again, we were totally unaware. Why? Because we had not been given the go ahead to talk to the people who would know this kind of thing. The Cambodians saw it as no particular threat to them, and since we did not have the relationship, it did not come to us until we started to reach out.

I made a proposal to State; let us take another look at this whole relationship

issue. The answer back was, “Not now. There might be a few people here who get upset for political reasons, so let us not stir the hornet’s nest.” I listened to that for about six months, and about the third time someone said it, I will not repeat what I

said at my staff meeting when the message came back because it was not clean, I was pretty PO-ed. So I did what every ambassador is authorized to do but few have the nerve to do, I ignored State and I sent a personal communication, what is called a P4 message, directly to the Secretary of Defense, notifying the Secretary of State and my assistant secretary, outlining the situation and asking that he consider reviewing the policy the military relationship between the U.S. and Cambodia. I outlined the reasons, supported by the commander of Pacific Command. I will not go into the response I got from the bureaucracy at State. Needless to say, my name was stricken from a lot of party lists. I was even accused of violating the ‘chain of command.’

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The response from the Pentagon was positive. I was invited by the Secretary of

Defense to come back to Washington and lead a delegation of defense officials to the Hill in deference to State’s fear that we would antagonize certain people on the Hill who were anti Hun Sen, to explain the rationale behind our proposal, with full support of the Secretary of State. Turned out it was what I call preemptive capitulation and that people were afraid to try something for fear that someone would be upset with them, when, in fact, one of the most vehement anti-Hun Sen elements on the Hill, when I briefed him looked at me and said, “What took you guys so long to come up with this idea. It makes perfect sense.”

So, we went about changing the policy. We developed, and I have to add here, we

did not change our stress on the importance of human rights and democracy. I would quite often go into meetings with the prime minister with an offer for military training, followed by a lecture on the sorry state of human affairs in Cambodia, and this went on for nearly three years. It resulted in a number of things that I will mention in a minute, but I would like to point out what the problems were, and already mentioned some of it. The main problem was that every bureaucratic organization dealing in Cambodia had a high fence around itself; had its information in stovepipes and it had its plans in the refrigerator. No one talked to anyone. The smoke of political consideration got lost in the bureaucratic maze of, “We do not do anything that upsets anyone for any reason.” And it took someone who was willing to listen, and for that I will forever be thankful to Secretary Rumsfeld, he and I disagreed on a lot of things, but we both agreed on that. That, in order to do your job, sometimes you have to break a few eggs; sometimes you have to put yourself at risk.

We forged a completely new relationship in Cambodia and on Cambodia. The

Defense Department, intelligence agencies and the State Department contingent in country began actually talking to each other and sharing information’ and we began talking to the Cambodians about more than human rights, mines and drugs. We began coordinating our plans. The Department of Defense’s training plans were not even put into final format until I got a chance to approve the drafts. Intelligence operations were discussed in my office or in our SCIF before they were implemented and for diplomatic initiatives, I would pull the whole country team together and we would discuss the pluses and minuses and ways they could be shaped to be most effective.

What was the outcome of that? First of all, we did not have a terrorist attack. My

embassy was not blown up, nor was the British embassy. We did not even have a terrorist incident. The other, a huge population of people in Washington were given an education. There was a Muslim population in Cambodia that was, in fact, problematic.

It had nothing to do with the current War on Terrorism. The Cham Muslims, who Washington had conveniently forgotten, were the people whose villages were hit the hardest during the U.S.-Vietnamese incursion into Cambodia in the late 60s. Roughly half of their villages were bombed out of existence. This was a group of people who had every reason on Earth not to like Americans. They were marginalized, they were among the poorest of the poor in Cambodia, they were the last in line to get access to government programs, and a number of things. Once we recognized this and once I got Washington to acknowledge there was a Muslim population and therefore we should no longer be left out of State’s Muslim outreach programs, we were able to deploy a

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modest amount of funds, identify what their problems were and start addressing them.

We were given validation that it worked from a most unlikely and improbable

source about six or eight months after we started it. A French anthropologist, I might point out an anti-American French anthropologist, came into my office and wanted to know what we had done. When she started her research, the opinion of the United States among the Cham population was about 75 percent negative, within six months it had gone to nearly 80 percent positive, and she wanted to know what the hell we were doing. She was shocked when she learned that basically we were just talking to them, something we hadn’t really done since re-establishing a diplomatic presence in the country.

So, what do you get out of that? When we do not talk to each other, and I think

most people would agree that the whole 9/11 issue, in fact I think it was said, had certain agencies shared what they knew with certain other agencies, it probably could have been prevented. Even within agencies, had everyone within an agency had access to the information so that they could analyze it from a different point of view than the owners of that information did, it could have been prevented. Had we been prepared or willing to think outside of the box, to do things a little differently than we have always done them. As I said, I was the fourth ambassador to Cambodia, my three predecessors, extremely capable people, were content to continue the status quo. “Can’t talk to the military? Ok I won’t talk to the military.” Maybe it is because I am ex-military, but when I go into a country I really want be not so much in bed, that is a bad analogy, I want to have a good relationship with the guys with the guns. The guys who can protect me, I want to know them and I want to know them well; I do not want to ignore them when I go to receptions. So I decided to get outside the box, I was close to retirement so I was not really risking much.

The theme of today’s event is retrospective on the past and looking at the future,

and so I would just like to close with a comment on the future, and again from this ground level Huey perspective. Have things changed? A few have. From my observation, my last job before retiring, 2009-2012, I served as ambassador to Zimbabwe. Things have changed, State has this very expansive public diplomacy program to reach out to populations around the world to influence their thinking.

But, and there is always a “but,” the bureaucracy that led to the stovepiping and

isolation of information pre-9/11, I am sorry to say, is still alive if not well. There is still a tendency on the part of the bureaucracies in this town to stovepipe information, to withhold information as power, “I know it, you don’t; therefore, I have an advantage over you.” There is still, I think, an American tendency to look at short term precedent

rather than long term interests, and, a lack of, as was said, looking at how your enemy thinks. When I was in the military in the 60s, we had a slogan, “Know your enemy.” Somewhere since the 1960s we seem to have forgotten that. It does not matter what you think. You might not think you are in a war, but if the guy shooting at you thinks you are in a war, guess what? You are in a war.

We need to get back to the old saying, keep your friends close, but, know a hell of a

lot more about your enemies, and frankly, as I listen to the political debates in this town these days, as I talk to colleagues who are still in the bureaucracy, I am just not

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convinced that we are there yet. Whether that means the death of civilization, I am not that pessimistic, I think civilization will survive, it might be a little ragged around the edges, but we somehow always manage to survive. But I do not think we should be thinking of mere survival, we should be thinking about thriving, and in order to thrive we have to cook from a different menu than we have been doing for the last 50 years.

The Fifteenth Anniversary of 9/11 7

David Albright

A physicist and Founder & President, Institute for Science and International Security. He is a former inspector of the Iraqi nuclear program and a faculty member at Princeton

University and George Mason University

I met Yonah in the 1980s on a preventing nuclear terrorism project that was done in collaboration with Paul Leventhal at the Nuclear Control Institute. And in fact this threat has changed in many ways but we are still confronted with the basic question of how a terrorist would use or misuse nuclear materials or radiological sources. I add that that today terrorists could also launch cyber attacks against nuclear facilities. Nonetheless, it remains very hard to conceptualize what they want to do. We do not know much about what they have done or how they think about nuclear terrorism.

I think 9/11 was certainly a tough shock on this question. Doug mentioned some of the changes, or the reality that kind of took over US thinking. One was that Afghanistan was an area that was safe for terrorists to work on nuclear weapons. It was also an area close to Pakistan where there were many scientists and engineers in the nuclear establishment who were willing to work with these terrorists. They had been radicalized, and they were willing to provide information and other types of assistance that was aiding the al-Qa'ida effort to get nuclear weapons. Fortunately that effort had not gone very far by the time the United States invaded Afghanistan. Certainly, it was not going to go very fast given the immense challenges in putting together a nuclear explosive device. But no one had thought this type of effort was even possible in such a backwards place as Afghanistan. So, a central lesson of 9/11 was that you had to deny terrorists territory where they can work safely on WMDs.

And coming forward to today, you have to ask the question, have we done that with

Daesh or ISIL? What have they been doing over the last several years to further their terrorist goals to acquire certain types of nuclear explosive capabilities or radiological dispersal devices? In fact, let me just ask a question. Can you tell me that they do not have radioactive sources that are, in the International Atomic Energy Agency's terms, Category 1 materials? If they do have them, why have they not used them? I have no idea what the answer to the second question. We have the assumption that if they have the capability to harm us they will. But in fact we do not know very much about what they are planning, and what they intend to do. And I think that poses hope and also great risk for us.

There was also after 9/11 a recognition that nuclear explosives are not as hard to

build as often believed. In the work Yonah and Paul did in the mid-80s, they brought in the very renowned U.S. nuclear weapons experts Carson Mark and Ted Taylor, and

they made convincing arguments based on their experience building some of the most robust U.S. nuclear weapons that terrorists could build an implosion style nuclear explosive. They would not have to spend their efforts just on gun type devices but they could also build the more sophisticated implosion ones, which require less nuclear explosive materials, separated plutonium or highly enriched uranium.

I think a lesson after 9/11 is that it is really hard for terrorists to build implosion

weapons but doable. It is hard because they do not have the laboratory research

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conditions necessary to master the use of high explosives in an implosion system, which requires a great deal of spherical symmetry and also requires a great deal of diagnostic equipment so you actually know what is going on during the testing of high explosives, e.g. did your experiment fail or not? And so it is a tough problem for terrorists. But from what I have read of George Tenet's memoirs, al-Qa'ida was exploring some of this. They were trying to learn how to master high explosives used in nuclear weapons. That work may have continued since then. And we do not know really much about the people or teams that may be working on these problems. But I think the bottom line is that you have to worry that terrorist groups at some point will be able to build an implosion system and at that point you may see a greater effort to get the actual nuclear explosive material needed to fuel the explosive device.

We have been fortunate that there have not been large thefts of plutonium or

highly enriched uranium. Another lesson of 9/11 is that these nuclear explosive materials have to be better protected. You have to consolidate the locations that store them. You have to try to eliminate them. Highly enriched uranium can be easily eliminated through diluting it back down to low enriched uranium or natural uranium. Plutonium is tougher but it certainly can be protected better. And so there has been time to develop quite a number of successful efforts to consolidate, minimize, and better protect fissile material, but more needs to be done.

The downside is that there is a lot of fissile material out there--4,000 tons of

plutonium and highly enriched uranium in the world. You need just kilograms of it to make a bomb. And so you have an on-going challenge of how to further improve the controls over this material. I think that is going to be a priority for this country for quite a while, because in the end it does not take that much to make a bomb, particularly if you know how to make implosion-type nuclear explosive devices. On the civil nuclear side, if you look at civil plutonium use – it is used quite a bit in France, and Japan wants to do pursue plutonium separation and use in its power reactors. The separated plutonium, which is the more dangerous form from a nuclear weapons point of view, is moved around by truck and plane. So, it is in transport, and truck transport of fissile material in particular poses difficult challenges to protect adequately against terrorist attack or theft.

Now on threats to nuclear facilities, I will make this brief. The recent episodes in

Belgium where there were feard of nuclear facilities being attacked by Daesh terrorists. I do not know the extent of what Daesh planned or really the extent of what Belgium could have done to prevent such attacks, but it raises another aspect to this problem. If you want to cause a huge nuclear accident or problem, you can go for nuclear facilities. And you have to worry not only about the actual physical seizing of facilities, but also cyber attacks. I think preventing these scenarios is very difficult.

As one aspect of my work in the 90s, I was involved in trying to understand the

Rocky Flats nuclear weapons production site and the off-site releases of plutonium that had happened there. Part of what we learned involved some of the physical protection procedures and practices of the plant. In one training session to test the adequacy of the site’s physical protection, National Guard troops entered the site using helicopters and tried to seize the plutonium stored in a major vault. In this session, as in other ones, the troops were usually caught or stopped as they were leaving the building with the plutonium. But what if, from a terrorist point of view,

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seizing the plutonium was the goal, not escaping with it? There were tons of plutonium and highly enriched uranium stored in the vaults at Rocky Flats. If terrorists were able to seize a facility with lots of fissile material in it, without planning to get off site with it, they could cause one massive criticality accident. So, you not only have to have robust physical protection but you also have to think about how to extend the protection in new ways that are not typically well protected against.

Now let me end with Daesh. What have they learned? Do they have radioactive

sources? I assume they have not worked a lot on nuclear weapons in Syria and Iraq but we do not follow this as closely as we used to. I assume that it is an important question for the intelligence community. But I do think that one of the problems we are going to face, and Daesh demonstrates, is that it is very hard to deny these terrorists physical space. In terms of the long term threat of nuclear terrorism, they need bases and they need places safe to work on WMD, gathering experts and equipment. I think a lesson of Daesh has to sober one that is not necessarily going to be easy to deny them this safe territory.

Academic Centers

Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies (IUCTS)

Established in 1994, the activities of IUCTS are guided by an International Research Council that offers recommendations for

study on different aspects of terrorism, both conventional and unconventional. IUCTS is cooperating academically with

universities and think tanks in over 40 countries, as well as with governmental, intergovernmental, and nongovernmental bodies.

International Center for Terrorism Studies (ICTS)

Established in 1998 by the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, in Arlington, VA, ICTS administers IUCTS activities and

sponsors an internship program in terrorism studies.

Inter-University Center for Legal Studies (IUCLS)

Established in 1999 and located at the International Law Institute in Washington, D.C., IUCLS conducts seminars and research

on legal aspects of terrorism and administers training for law students.

International Advisory and Research Council Honorary Chairman

Prof. Edward Teller * Hoover Institution

Prof. A. Abou-el Wafa Cairo University Prof. Asher Maoz Tel Aviv University

Prof. Jayantha W. Atukorala Sri Lanka Prof. Serio Marchisio Instituto di Studi Giuridcic sulla

Prof. Paolo Benvenuti Universita Di Firenze Communita Inernazionale

Prof. Edgar Brenner * Inter-University Center for Legal Studies Prof. Dr. Herman Matthijis Free University Brussels

Prof. Ian Brownlie Oxford University Prof. Jerzy Menkes Poland

Prof. Abdelkader Larbi Chaht Universite D-Oran-Es-Senia Prof. Eric Moonman City University of London

Prof. Mario Chiavario Universita Degli Studie Di Torino Prof. Yuval Ne’eman * Tel Aviv University

Prof. Irwin Cotler McGill University Prof. Michael Noone The Catholic University of America

Prof. Horst Fischer Ruhr University Prof. William Olson National Defense University

Prof. Andreas Follesdal University of Oslo Prof. V.A. Parandiker Centre for Policy Research

Prof. Gideon Frieder The George Washington University Prof. Paul Rogers University of Bradford

Prof. Lauri Hannikaninen University of Turku, Finland Prof. Beate Rudolf Heinrich Heine University

Prof. Hanspeter Heuhold Austrian Institute of International Affairs Prof. Kingsley De Silva International Center for Ethnic Studies

Prof. Ivo Josipovic University of Zagreb Prof. Paul Tavernier Paris-Sud University

Prof. Christopher C. Joyner * Georgetown University Prof. B. Tusruki University of Tokyo

Prof. Tanel Kerkmae Tartu University, Estonia Prof. Amechi Uchegbu University of Lagos

Prof. Borhan Uddin Khan University of Dhaka Prof. Richard Ward The University of Illinois at Chicago

Prof. Walter Laqueur CSIS Prof. Yong Zhang Nankai University, China

Francisco Jose Paco Llera Universidad del Pais Vasco *Deceased

Director Professor Yonah Alexander

Senior Staff Sharon Layani Patrick Murphy

Lisa Winton

Senior Advisors Michael S. Swetnam

CEO and Chairman, Potomac Institute for Policy Studies

Professor Don Wallace, Jr.

Chairman, International Law Institute

Technical Advisors Mary Ann Culver

Alex Taliesen

Fall 2016 Internship Program Cameron Dively Carnegie Mellon University Sheona Lalani George Washington University Jacob T. Fuller The University of Oklahoma April Lee George Washington University

Daniel J Hennessy University of California, Berkeley Cameron Niven University of California, San Diego

Eunice Kim State University of New York at Geneseo Riley Plamp University of Michigan

Please contact the Inter-University Center for Terrorism Studies at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies, 901 North Stuart Street, Suite 200,

Arlington, VA 22203. Tel.: 703-525-0770 Email: yalexander@potomacinstitute.org, ICTS@potomacinstitute.org