NEWSLETTER

TEXT AND PICTURES BY JON FOX


On the conference’s second day, Richard Falkenrath, a former homeland security advisor to President Bush and now head of the New York City Police Department’s counterterrorism division, suggested that the intense focus on scanning the sea-bound shipping containers is misplaced.

“It seems to me that Washington is fixated on one particular delivery system—international shipping containers—for reasons I don’t fully understand,” he said.

He was, in a way, answering the question I couldn’t get answered the day before. He was also arguing that a $40 million initiative to ring New York City with radiation detector equipment shouldn’t be sliced in half as Congress had just proposed.

Rather than worrying so much about shipping containers, people, especially in cities, should be concerned about the vans or trucks that could blend with the crush of traffic and convey a dirty bomb, he said. “That’s the delivery vehicle we’re worried about most.”

In a dense city like New York, such an attack could be “potentially catastrophic,” he said. While it wouldn’t have as great of consequences as an improvised nuclear attack, it is certainly much more likely, he said.

A dirty bomb packed with the radioactive alkali metal Cesium 137 may not kill a large number of people—perhaps no more than a conventional bomb attack—but it could render swaths of the city uninhabitable due to unacceptably high levels of radiation.

The isotope could actually bond with concrete and buildings. “You can’t just rinse it off. You have to tear it down and rebuild it,” he said. It would be a “nightmare scenario.”

After a day of talks like this the FBI was happy to shuttle us all over to South Beach to enjoy the bustle of the tourist strip. Perhaps it was done as a courtesy, eliminating the need for a $25 cab, or maybe it was a security measure for the scientists and law-enforcement people enjoying the incredible humidity of a South Florida June, but each night at eight and then again at nine, two buses would leave the hotel for the beach. With a full retinue of Miami motorcycle cops leading the way, we sped through red lights as even more cops blocked intersections and stopped traffic.

Some bystanders smiled at the buses’ tinted windows, more or less everyone stared, and I saw one woman give us the slowly rotating wrist and cupped palm of the British royal wave.

Then at 11 and again at midnight the buses and motorcycle escorts would return to hump us all back to the hotel. That first night, as I climbed onto the 11 o’clock bus, a woman from some Eastern European nation’s defense department posed in front of one of the jack-booted police officers as a colleague took a photo.

On the ride back I sat next to a terrorism consultant from Romania and made small talk.

The next day, I approached one of the vendor booths where two guys sat reading the newspaper next to a mannequin in a black radiation suit. For about $1,000 the whole get-up could be yours and you’d be pretty much OK in the event of a dirty bomb going off down the block, they said. They offered to let me try on what felt like a very heavy wetsuit.

So this is good against a dirty bomb, but let’s say a nuclear bomb goes off on the other side of the city and you didn’t happen to die in the initial blast. Will this do anything to protect me from that radiation? I asked.

“You’re pretty much screwed then,” the bigger of the two guys said. Boots, gloves, and respirator are sold separately. I was assured I could get them relatively cheap.

On Wednesday, everyone was bused over to the Orange Bowl (again with the motorcade) to watch what turned out to be an underwhelming demonstration of a simulated response to a simulated dirty bomb in a simulated warehouse. An assault team repelled from a Blackhawk helicopter behind a nearby grove of palm trees. Apparently they had planned to have the SWAT team drop right into the stadium, but the rotor wash from the copter would have knocked down all the mesh partitions that were standing in for warehouse walls. Once the would-be terrorist bombers were neutralized with paintball assault rifles, the bomb squad brought in a rickety-looking robot [pictured above] to shoot a small metal box with some water that had been packed inside shotgun shells.

And voila, in a burst of agua the box was pushed off a table and the firing circuits in the device were dislodged! Simulated crisis averted! The crowd erupted in riotous cheers. (Just kidding. Nobody said anything.)

On my last night in Miami, I took the party bus back into South Beach. By 10 PM I was in Mango’s Tropical Café. Waitresses in skin-tight, animal-print pantsuits were taking turns getting up and halfheartedly dancing on a horseshoe-shaped bar in the middle of the club. The place was filled with FBI agents in shorts, untucked shirts, and unwaveringly sober haircuts. There were U.S. government officials and foreign representatives. There was the guy who had given a lengthy and mind-numbing PowerPoint presentation earlier in the day. He was eating dinner at a table a few feet away from a woman shimmying on top of the makeshift stage. One of the FBI’s joint terrorism task forces from a northeastern city was milling around near the entrance. Even closer to the stage was a table full of Bulgarians—three men joylessly chain smoking and one woman. They weren’t talking and didn’t seem to be watching the show until a bouncer lifted the female dancer down off the bar and three men got up on stage and began a coordinated dance routine that ended with bare male chests. The Bulgarians turned to look and were apparently displeased. They left shortly thereafter.

The dancing waitresses in their remarkable pantsuits resumed their turns on the bar stage, and I spent my last night in Miami drinking beer with a guy who had “top secret” security clearance, shoulder-to-shoulder with G-men. I can only hope the FBI is already working on next year’s conference, in Las Vegas perhaps. The brighter our lights shine the more the terorists hate us. Dance, girls, dance!

JON FOX


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