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NEW YORK (AP) — It’s the morning rush in the Times Square subway
station, a routine convergence of humanity and mass transit that
makes New York City hum. Mixing seamlessly with subway riders are
New York Police Department officers with heavy body armor and
high-powered rifles, commanders in blue NYPD polo shirts carrying
smart phone-size radiation detectors and a panting police dog named
Sabu.
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“This is the new normal,” Inspector Scott Shanley of the NYPD’s
Counterterrorism Division says. “The only people who sometimes get
raised up are tourists.”
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Since terrorists brought down the twin towers on Sept. 11, 2001,
subways have been bombed in terror attacks across the world,
including in Madrid, London and this spring in Minsk, Belarus. The
possibility that New York’s sprawling, porous and famously gritty
subway system could be next has become a constant worry – leading
to a new normal of suspicious package alerts, bomb-sniffing dogs,
cameras trained on commuters and passengers listening to the
missive, “if you see something, say something.”
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The campaigns encouraging residents to report suspicious activity
strike Manhattan writer Anne Nelson, 57, as Orwellian.
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“New York is about expression and life and vibrancy,” she said,
walking through Times Square. “It’s not about living in an
atmosphere of fear.”
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But authorities here believe a serious attack on the 24-hour subway
system with more than 400 stations, would potentially cripple the
city in ways worse than the Sept. 11 attack – a concern shared in
other countries reliant on mass transit and viewed as enemies by
terrorists.
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The human toll – going back when the Aum Shinrikyo cult’s 1995
nerve gas attack killed 12 people and injured thousands in Tokyo’s
subways – has already been devastating. In Madrid, Islamic
militants set off 10 backpack bombs on the commuter rail network in
2004, killing 191 people and wounding more than 1,800; in London,
another suicide bomb strike killed 52 commuters and injured 700 in
the city’s deadliest attack since World War II; and earlier this
year in Minsk, a remote-controlled bomb killed 12 people and
wounded 200 in the city’s main subway station.
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In New York, no one has pulled off an attack, but there have been
plenty of scares.
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Last year, a homegrown al-Qaida operative, Najibullah Zazi, pleaded
guilty to plotting a suicide bomb attack timed for rush hour to
cause the most bloodshed. The former airport shuttle driver told a
judge his plan was “to conduct a martyrdom operation on the subway
lines in Manhattan as soon as the material was ready.” The NYPD
also foiled a 2004 plot to bomb Manhattan’s Herald Square subway
station. And there were reports in that al-Qaida considered a
cyanide attack on the subway system in 2003.
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New York’s subway system, the largest in the country, has more than
465 far-flung stations, most with multiple entrances, and 800 miles
of track that would stretch to Chicago if laid end to end. Last
year, it carried 5.2 million riders on the average weekday – well
more than double the number of travelers who pass through U.S.
airports each day.
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“It’s really a potentially very vulnerable environment – one that
you can’t totally protect,” said William Bratton, a Kroll security
firm executive who’s headed New York and Los Angeles police
departments and was chief of the New York City transit. “That’s the
reality of it. … It’s a unique challenge.”
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Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has said the NYPD tries to meet
that challenge by going to “extraordinary lengths” in the subways
each day “to make our presence seen and felt in different ways,
giving would-be terrorists and common criminals cause to think
twice.”
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“We have a lot of ground to cover,” he says.
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Pre-9/11, covering that ground meant mostly fighting conventional
crime – from robberies and assaults to fare beating and drug
possession.
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Post, the department has asked its 2,500 uniformed and plainclothes
transit officers to fight terror as well.
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Officers have been given training in how to spot terror suspects
casing the subways. They’ve also been instructed to be on the alert
for people walking in a stiff manner, sweating heavily and talking
to themselves – signs of a potential suicide bomber.
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The counterterror arsenal includes more than 30 bomb-sniffing dogs;
silent alarms and motion detectors intended to prevent tampering
with ventilation systems to make a chemical or biological attack
more lethal; and a vast system of security cameras wired with live
feeds from Penn Station, Grand Central Terminal and Herald
Square.
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More new normal: Random bag checks – once challenged in court as a
civil rights violation – are done tens of thousands of times each
year in the subways with barely any complaints. The department uses
high-tech detection devices to screen riders for peroxides or
nitrates common in homemade explosives, sometimes with the help of
agents on loan from the Transportation Safety
Administration.
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The security strategy also includes regular inspections of tunnels
under the East River, and sending officers periodically onto subway
cars, asking passengers to beware of suspicious package. The roving
teams can calm commuters, discourage would-be attacks or disrupt
plots already set in motion, police say.
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Police rely on counterterrorism drills to stay sharp, said Shanley.
One exercise involves having an undercover officer with a mock
device, stashed in a backpack and emitting gamma rays, slip into
the subway to test the ability to detect and neutralize a real
radioactive threat.
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Above ground, NYPD analysts constantly mine for intelligence about
potential plots that can dictate how it deploys forces. The
department has dispatched detectives to Moscow, Madrid, London and
Mumbai, India, to see what lessons can be learned from overseas
terror attacks.
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London’s transit system has long been affected by the threat of
bombs – there are no garbage bins on the subway or in train
stations, for example, a legacy of the years when London was an IRA
target.
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After the 2005 attack, the emergency services were criticized for
lapses in their response – confusion, a shortage of first aid
supplies and radios that did not work underground. Police have
since been issued with digital radios capable of operating
throughout the subway system.
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The biggest change since the bombings has been the decision to
equip some members of the British Transport Police officers who
patrol the transit network with guns. Most British police do not
carry firearms.
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There also were intelligence lapses. Britain’s domestic
intelligence service, MI5, had two of the London bombers under
surveillance as part of an investigation into an earlier, foiled,
bomb plot. They were never pursued because officials were
overwhelmed with other threats perceived to be more
serious.
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Home Secretary Theresa May, the government official responsible for
MI5, said earlier this year that “a considerable number of
improvements” had been put in place since 2005 but declined to give
details for security reasons.
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In Spain, the national rail company Renfe said security measures on
that network have in fact been beefed up since the massacre. But it
refused to give details, calling the issue confidential and
sensitive.
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Another state-owned company, Adif, which manages Spain’s
long-distance train stations, said it has assigned more guards at
train stations and broadened use of closed-circuit security
cameras. It also has sought more coordination with various national
and local law enforcement agencies to identify threats.
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The heightened security in subways has become second nature in New
York, though fears persist.
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At Grand Central Terminal last week, 54-year-old consultant Robin
Gant said the threat of terrorism still weighs on her 10 years
after the Sept. 11 attacks. But she wondered about how she can
fairly
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“I look at people and who’s to judge? You just never know who might
be the one,” she said. “No matter how safe you feel, you’re always
on yellow alert.”
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—
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Associated Press writers Karen Zraick in New York, Jill Lawless in
London and Daniel Woolls in Madrid contributed to this
report.
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