Could It Happen Again?

National Review Online: Terrorists May Still Use Planes

(National Review Online)  This column was written by Anne Morse.

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Journalist Annie Jacobsen gained a certain degree of fame last year as the woman who wrote about the strange and frightening behavior of a group of Syrian "musicians" aboard a Northwest Airlines flight. She has now written a riveting book, "Terror in the Skies: Why 9-11 Could Happen Again" about what happened that day and in the months that followed. Jacobsen put her investigative skills to work, and discovered that the harrowing events that took place on her flight were far from an isolated occurrence. She ends her book with a warning: If our security system does not improve, another 9/11 is almost inevitable.

The events of Flight 327, on June 29, 2004, became notorious after Jacobsen described them on WomensWallStreet.com. Jacobsen, her husband, and their four-year-old son boarded Flight 327 in Detroit, the last leg of their flight home to Los Angeles after a family vacation in Connecticut. Settling into their seats, the Jacobsens noticed 14 Middle Eastern men board the plane. Shortly after takeoff, she writes, "The unusual activity began." One of the men got up and entered the restroom at the front of the coach section, taking with him a large McDonald's bag. Leaving the restroom, he passed the bag to another man and gave him a thumbs-up sign. For the next hour, the men used the restroom consecutively. They congregated in groups at the rear of the plane. One of them stood in first class a foot from the cockpit door. Two were standing mid-cabin, and two more were standing in the galley, keeping an eye on the flight attendant. Others spent the flight patrolling the aisles, scrutinizing increasingly nervous passengers.

Unable to stand it any longer, Jacobsen's husband got up and spoke with a flight attendant, who told him the captain was concerned about what was going on, and that there were people on board "higher up than you and me watching" — an apparent reference to federal air marshals. But it got worse: As the plane prepared to land, seven of the men suddenly stood up in unison and walked to the front and back lavatories of the coach-class cabin. One by one, they entered the lavatories, each spending about four minutes inside. Two men stood against the emergency-exit door; another stood blocking the aisle. At the back of the plane, two more men stood next to the bathroom, blocking the aisle. They ignored repeated orders from a flight attendant to sit down. "The last man came out of the bathroom, and as he passed [one of the other Syrians] he ran his forefinger across his neck and mouthed the word 'No,'" Jacobsen writes.

As they deplaned, the Jacobsens saw two air marshals flash their badges and pull over several of the men. She later learned that representatives of the FBI, the LAPD, the Federal Air Marshals Service (FAMS) and the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) met the plane. But, contrary to protocol, there was nobody from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the post-9/11 law-enforcement arm of what was once the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which oversees the air marshals. Nor was there anyone to take statements from passengers who'd witnessed the events. The Jacobsens told airport security what they had seen, and eventually told their story to a FAMS supervisor, who directed them to write down their statements and swear to their veracity. It quickly became clear that key elements of the story they (and a flight attendant) told — particularly regarding what the men had done with the McDonald's bag — conflicted with accounts offered by the Syrians.

The next day Jacobsen was surprised to find no mention of the incident in the newspapers, or of any arrests at LAX. She began doing some online digging — and what she found chilled her. Jason Burke, a correspondent for the London Observer, had written a story a few months earlier headlined "Terrorist Bid to Build Bombs in Mid-Flight: Intelligence Reveals Dry Runs of New Threat to Blow Up Airlines." Burke described "dry runs" on European flights by terrorists attempting to carry components of explosive devices onto passenger jets hidden in everyday items like cameras and medicine bottles, and assemble them in mid-flight — in restrooms. Burke noted that the United States was aware of these dry runs and that recent British Airways flights from London to Washington had been canceled over fears of such attacks. The French also knew of these attempts after discovering 100 grams of the explosive pentrite hidden in an armrest on a jet arriving in France from Morocco. (In August 2004, barely a month after the Jacobsens' flight, two civilian aircraft in Russia exploded, killing all 90 passengers and crew. The cause of the explosions? Bombs that had been placed in the planes' bathrooms by women with links to Chechen terrorists.)

When Jacobsen decided to write about her experience aboard Flight 327, she was contacted by Dave Adams, the head of public affairs at FAMS. Adams insisted that the Middle Eastern men on her flight were "just musicians" from Syria. They'd been questioned by FAMS, the FBI, and the TSA. Their story checked out, Adams said, and none of their names appeared on the FBI's "no fly" list. Given the evidence that terrorists had been trying to assemble bombs in airliner restrooms, why, Jacobsen asked, had air marshals done nothing about the Syrians' bizarre behavior — much of it involving restrooms? "Our... agents have to have an event to arrest somebody," Adams explained.

Jacobsen didn't buy Adams's "they were just musicians" story, and her gripping account of what happened on Flight 327 — "Terror in the Skies, Again?" — was posted on July 12, 2004, on WomensWallStreet. It exploded through the blogosphere, then the mainstream media, spawning intense debate. To some, Jacobsen was a courageous journalist exposing deadly flaws in America's security system; to others, she was a racist, paranoid mommy with an overactive imagination. Jacobsen's persistence in pursuing the story angered higher-ups in FAMS, and led to her testimony to the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.

Astonishingly, Jacobsen writes, many of the federal agents who investigated the events of Flight 327 continued to insist that nothing unusual happened. In a sense, this was correct: These dry runs, or probes, apparently happen all the time. In the weeks after she posted her story, Jacobsen received more than 5,000 e-mails — including 250 from commercial pilots, flight attendants, and other airport employees who are forbidden by their employers to talk to the press about similar "incidents." Gary Boettcher, president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, told Jacobsen that she'd likely witnessed a "dry run," and that he'd had many similar experiences himself: "The terrorists are probing us all the time." Mark Bogosian, an American Airlines pilot, said incidents like the one she described were a "dirty little secret" that airline crew members had known about for some time. Air marshals sent e-mails congratulating Jacobsen for bringing to light "something that had been going on since shortly after 9/11 and was being suppressed." Many airline employees expressed outrage over security procedures that are lax, politically correct, and likely to lead to another 9/11.