Whilst important science is being done inside the station, there's also a constant flow of new experiments to be performed outside...
In contrast, China's ambitions to have their own orbiting annex on Mir remain stubbornly grounded for now.
However, development of their own means of getting to orbit are going much more smoothly.
Lastly, here's a quick comparison of the various return-capable vehicles in the TL as of the mid-1990s.
I know it's been said about 150+ times before, but love these images! 
And I certainly see a few unique differences between TTL's Lóngxīng Spacecraft and OTL's Shénzhōu Spacecraft, yet both still carry their Heritage from the Soyuz Spacecraft on which they are based.
So now all the ESA needs to do is find the finance to finish their work on Minotaur to make it safe for Manned Spaceflight. And technically, since it was made with Cargo Return in mind, they already have a lot (but nowhere near all) of the hard work done already. I estimate mid-late 2000's for when they'll be able to do it.
And I certainly see a few unique differences between TTL's Lóngxīng Spacecraft and OTL's Shénzhōu Spacecraft, yet both still carry their Heritage from the Soyuz Spacecraft on which they are based.
So now all the ESA needs to do is find the finance to finish their work on Minotaur to make it safe for Manned Spaceflight. And technically, since it was made with Cargo Return in mind, they already have a lot (but nowhere near all) of the hard work done already. I estimate mid-late 2000's for when they'll be able to do it.
I know it's been said about 150+ times before, but love these images!
Thanks! I love doing them!
Something I'm curious about, how much of the results from the CGL studies are based on OTL research and how much is extrapolation by the authors? As I understand, partial gee is still a big unknown IOTL.
Also, I noticed Barnes gets Star Trek: Eternal Conflict screened on Freedom in 1994, but the film was released in 1993. Was it a Christmas release and an early '94 screening, or did Paramount hold up the rights for permitting a public viewing in that 'territory'?
(Trust a Trekkie to nit-pick that sort of thing )Finally, I wonder if Andrei Orlov is any relation to Yuri Orlov, or maybe the famous cosmonaut Dr. Vasili Orlov
We completely made them up from whole cloth, somewhat like my description of the surfaces of Pluto and Charon.
Also, I noticed Barnes gets Star Trek: Eternal Conflict screened on Freedom in 1994, but the film was released in 1993. Was it a Christmas release and an early '94 screening, or did Paramount hold up the rights for permitting a public viewing in that 'territory'?
It needed to be reformatted from theatrical film release to one compatible with NASA's communications/rebroadcasting system. Also, no one asked for it earlier
Great work, Nixonshead.
You've really outdone yourself this time.
The comparison graphic of the crew vehicles is especially helpful.
You've really outdone yourself this time.
The comparison graphic of the crew vehicles is especially helpful.
I've been looking at updating the Mission List on Wiki for the missions mentioned in post #13, and from the information in the post I've extrapolated the following. Perhaps the authors could confirm/refute (and anyone else throw in an opinion too ):
==== Freedom Expedition 20 ====
Launched: October, 1993
Spacecraft: Apollo Block IV
Commander: Peggy Barnes
Notes: Peggy Barnes’ final spaceflight before retirement. Her stint on the station would include the Outer Space Premier screening of Star Trek: Eternal Conflict in early 1994.
==== Freedom Expedition 22 ====
Launched: April, 1994
Spacecraft: Apollo Block IV
Commander: Gerald Mitchell
==== Freedom Expedition 23 ====
Launched: July, 1994
Spacecraft: Apollo Block IV
Commander: Maxwell Quick
Flight Scientist 1: Beverly McDowell
Flight Scientist 2: Edward Boxall (ESA)
Notes: Along with Gerald Mitchell, Quick and McDowell formed the “LEO Trio” band.
==== Freedom Expedition 24 ====
Launched: October, 1994
Spacecraft: Apollo Block IV
Flight Scientist 1: Andrei Orlov (RKA)
Notes: First visit of a Russian cosmonaut to Freedom. Orlov on guitar replaces Mitchell in the “LEO Trio” to perform for Thanksgiving.
I've assumed Peggy Barnes was Commander on her flight (IIRC it's a bit of a tradition that retiring astronauts get to command the station for their final mission), and that her stay is 6 months overlapping 1993-94 (mainly to fit with the Star Trek viewing dates, though based on Workable Goblin's reply above it could be later.)
I've assumed that McDowell was on Quick's Expedition 23 crew rather than Mitchell's 22, since she doesn't return to Earth with Mitchell (though she could be on a long stay). I've further assumed that British ESA astronaut Boxall (a creation for the EVA image, based on discussions with e of pi) was on the same crew (since they EVA'd together, so presumably trained together).
I noted Orlov as an "RKA" (Russian Space [Kosmos] Agency) cosmonaut. I think that's the agency they were under around that period IOTL (not Roscosmos, which was the label I used on the Neva pictures - I'll have to retcon that one day...), so I assume it would be ITTL too.
I'm thinking of how best to include the Mir missions, as several noteworthy flights occurred in the last update, but given the far more irregular schedule of TKS flights and relative lack of information, I'm not sure how best to approach this on the Wiki. Any suggestions?
):==== Freedom Expedition 20 ====
Launched: October, 1993
Spacecraft: Apollo Block IV
Commander: Peggy Barnes
Notes: Peggy Barnes’ final spaceflight before retirement. Her stint on the station would include the Outer Space Premier screening of Star Trek: Eternal Conflict in early 1994.
==== Freedom Expedition 22 ====
Launched: April, 1994
Spacecraft: Apollo Block IV
Commander: Gerald Mitchell
==== Freedom Expedition 23 ====
Launched: July, 1994
Spacecraft: Apollo Block IV
Commander: Maxwell Quick
Flight Scientist 1: Beverly McDowell
Flight Scientist 2: Edward Boxall (ESA)
Notes: Along with Gerald Mitchell, Quick and McDowell formed the “LEO Trio” band.
==== Freedom Expedition 24 ====
Launched: October, 1994
Spacecraft: Apollo Block IV
Flight Scientist 1: Andrei Orlov (RKA)
Notes: First visit of a Russian cosmonaut to Freedom. Orlov on guitar replaces Mitchell in the “LEO Trio” to perform for Thanksgiving.
I've assumed Peggy Barnes was Commander on her flight (IIRC it's a bit of a tradition that retiring astronauts get to command the station for their final mission), and that her stay is 6 months overlapping 1993-94 (mainly to fit with the Star Trek viewing dates, though based on Workable Goblin's reply above it could be later.)
I've assumed that McDowell was on Quick's Expedition 23 crew rather than Mitchell's 22, since she doesn't return to Earth with Mitchell (though she could be on a long stay). I've further assumed that British ESA astronaut Boxall (a creation for the EVA image, based on discussions with e of pi) was on the same crew (since they EVA'd together, so presumably trained together).
I noted Orlov as an "RKA" (Russian Space [Kosmos] Agency) cosmonaut. I think that's the agency they were under around that period IOTL (not Roscosmos, which was the label I used on the Neva pictures - I'll have to retcon that one day...), so I assume it would be ITTL too.
I'm thinking of how best to include the Mir missions, as several noteworthy flights occurred in the last update, but given the far more irregular schedule of TKS flights and relative lack of information, I'm not sure how best to approach this on the Wiki. Any suggestions?
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And we love having them! Seriously, I can't thank Nixonshead and Michel enough for the work they've done bringing this stuff to life. Workable Goblin and I feel really thankful for having the chance to work with artists of this caliber, and to get to see this stuff ourselves.
As Workable Goblin said, it's whole cloth based off a bit of common sense ("some is probably better than none but less good than all") and hope ("since there's no real data, why not just go ahead and assume that long-term habitation on the Moon and Mars will be physiologically possible?"). Anyone who wishes to quibble with this decision is invited to go ahead and launch their own real life partial-G bio-satellite--nothing could please me more than to be disproved by real-life partial G data.
After consulting with Brainbin on this, it's been fixed as a December release, but then with the time to format it for broadcast to the station and slot it into crew schedules and such, it ends up as a showing early in '94. (And I'm sure the production team absolutely hates the thought of a late-in-the-run free advertising bit, right?)Also, I noticed Barnes gets Star Trek: Eternal Conflict screened on Freedom in 1994, but the film was released in 1993. Was it a Christmas release and an early '94 screening, or did Paramount hold up the rights for permitting a public viewing in that 'territory'?
Expedition 20 sounds good, and it would fit date-wise with the finalized Eternal Conflict release date. I'm not sure if she'd command it, though--I'd been assuming that Freedom would stick with the Apollo/Skylab tradition that the mission commander is the Apollo ascent commander and thus the senior pilot astronaut on the flight, with the station commander then being the command of the "older" of the two expedition crews on board. If you compare to their introductions, all past mentioned station commanders were pilots. Thus, as a flight scientist, not a pilot, Barnes would be exempt from command by this system--there might be some kind of "Science Officer" like ISS had early on, the person in charge of keeping station science operations flowing smoothly, which could be a suitably Trekish alternate senior "officer" title in this case.
However, I could be sold on the idea that with Freedom's 6-month rotations and the transition of the station from assembly to research utilization, they change it so that the commanders are also drawn from the flight scientists--so there's one of the two pilot astronauts who commands the capsule on the way up, but once on-station either that pilot or a senior flight scientist can be the Expedition commander. In addition to letting Barne be station commander, this would also allow station command slots to be given (occasionally, it is a US-dominated project even more than the OTL ISS) to senior European or other partner astronauts--something our international readers might like.
Any readers have any thoughts on the matter?
Yeah, my intention was for Boxall and McDowell to both be Expedition 23 members.
My approach so far in the text has been not to touch Mir expedition number with a ten foot pole.I'm thinking of how best to include the Mir missions, as several noteworthy flights occurred in the last update, but given the far more irregular schedule of TKS flights and relative lack of information, I'm not sure how best to approach this on the Wiki. Any suggestions?
The regularity of Freedom and Spacelab flights means I can work out later mission numbers without having to construct the precise history and purpose of each intermediate mission, but Mir and Salyut 7 give no such luxury. "Unnamed Oct, 1994 Mir Expedition"? Alternately, given that they're now back to a more regular schedule, it might be possible to calculate a rough number of flights to have elapsed since Mir's start to the noted Oct 1994 flight, and make that the new baseline for Mir expedition numbers.
fantastic art work Nixonhead and so many picture,
i'm back on Europa-2HE and Europa-3 (it take some time)
but i looking for quick sketch on US Spacesuits
what they use On Freedom ?
Skylab had ICL apollo A7LB, so would they used advance ICL suits for Freedom ?
ICL study 1968 the A8 and A9 suits, one of those concept had mid-entry system
and what about Intravehicular activity suits for Apollo Launch and emergencies on station and Hard Shell space suits for Advance Lunar mission ?
i'm back on Europa-2HE and Europa-3 (it take some time)
but i looking for quick sketch on US Spacesuits
what they use On Freedom ?
Skylab had ICL apollo A7LB, so would they used advance ICL suits for Freedom ?
ICL study 1968 the A8 and A9 suits, one of those concept had mid-entry system
and what about Intravehicular activity suits for Apollo Launch and emergencies on station and Hard Shell space suits for Advance Lunar mission ?
For the Freedom spacecsuits, Part II post#20 said:
For the EVA images, I took this model from the NASA website and modified it - mainly rigging it for posability, but also some tweaks to the textures (making the suit material darker, different flags, logos, etc). The source website tags it as 'Shuttle, ISS', and you can make out the shape of the SAFER system on the backpack. So it's basically the same as an OTL ISS suit. If you like, I could run off some orthogonal images of these.
THX, Nixonhead
i loosing the overview about ETS post
on ILC space Suit
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/ILC-SpaceSuits-RevA.pdf
page 55 has over A8 and A9 design, what let to A7LB on Skylab (and Spacelab)
Page 76 the Prototype for Shuttle EVA suits
Intravehicular Space Suit aka emergency suit/launch suit.
Page 68
i loosing the overview about ETS post
on ILC space Suit
http://history.nasa.gov/alsj/ILC-SpaceSuits-RevA.pdf
page 55 has over A8 and A9 design, what let to A7LB on Skylab (and Spacelab)
Page 76 the Prototype for Shuttle EVA suits
Intravehicular Space Suit aka emergency suit/launch suit.
Page 68
Well, I don't know about you guys, but after that tease last week I'm getting pretty excited to see this week's post
Part III, Post 14: The 1994 Christmas Plot
Hello everyone. I apologize for the delay--I walked out of the last final of my college career thinking to myself, "I know there's something I should be doing, but I can't think what" and then dazedly went to get lunch. Anyway, last week, you may recall that I updated the situation in space at the end of the quiet years, then closed by saying that the quiet years were about to see their end. Today, Workable Goblin picks up right where I left off, in the air over the lonely Pacific.
This one's a little unusual, with a bit of strong language and some potential trigger warnings, so please keep that in mind. Anyway, without further ado, please fasten your seatbelt low and tight across your hips as we move into this week's post..
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part III: Post #14
Captain: So, you know, having to work Christmas and all--
First Officer: Uh-huh.
Captain: Well, Mary isn’t happy about it, but I was thinking, you know, Chicago’s awful this time of year--
First Officer: Yeah.
Captain: So I was going to take her to the Bahamas.
First Officer: Yeah, y--
<extremely loud static noise>
Captain: Fuck!
First Officer: What the hell was that?
UAL 882: Oakland Control, this is United eight-eight-two heavy declaring emergency.
Oakland Control: Roger eight-eight-two heavy, what is your emergency?
UAL 882: Major pressurization loss, we’re descending at best speed to flight level one-zero-zero and requesting a diversion to Vancouver, that’s Yankee Victor Romeo.
Oakland Control: Request granted.
Captain: Jim, can you tell the flight attendants to prepare for emergency landing?
Flight Engineer: Yeah. Uh, uh, I can’t get in contact with them. Should I go find out what’s going on?
Captain: Yes.
<several minutes later>
Flight Engineer: There’s a huge hole in the fuselage aft of the wing, huge. It must have been a bomb.
JAL 001: Oakland Control, JAL zero-zero-one heavy declaring emergency, we’re picking up a distress beacon from Clipper eight-five-eight heavy, position...
KAL 19: Mayday, mayday, mayday Oakland Control, KAL one-nine heavy picking up distress beacon from Delta eight-six-seven heavy...
NBC News: We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news...NBC News headquarters in New York is getting unconfirmed reports of multiple downings of transpacific airliners, that is multiple airliners over the Pacific dropping out of contact with Air Traffic Control. NBC News is beginning to work on this story, very disturbing if true, and we’re trying to figure out exactly what is happening...
White House Chief of Staff: I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. President, but we have a situation...
NBC News: More information on the possible attack on airliners crossing the Pacific. Our Tokyo bureau is reporting that at about the same time airliners began dropping out of contact, a bomb exploded in an aircraft at Narita International Airport, that’s the Tokyo international airport, killing several maintenance workers. Several of the missing flights had departed Tokyo, so there may be a connection...
Oakland Control: Oakland Control to all aircraft, ATC Zero conditions in effect. All aircraft divert to nearest available airport, this is an emergency situation.
UAL 882: Vancouver, United eight-eight-two heavy requesting clearance for runway eight-Lima.
Vancouver Control: Roger United eight-eight-two heavy, you are cleared for runway eight-Lima.
UAL 882: Roger Vancouver, we have multiple wounded, make sure ambulances are there.
Vancouver Control: Roger United eight-eight-two heavy, multiple wounded.
NBC News: We’re getting live footage from Vancouver, that’s in Canada, of the landing of United Flight 882, which reported a serious in-flight emergency earlier this morning, possibly related to the Tokyo bombing and the disappearance of several other airliners. Just a moment...my God...
NBC News: Unconfirmed reports of bomb threats phoned in to the Sears Tower, the World Trade Center, and the Empire State Building, which are obviously being taken very seriously in light of this morning...
(N/B: It was later determined that all bomb threats made or suspected that day were fake or mistaken)
NBC News: We’ve just gotten--hang on, the White House is reporting that President Gore will be addressing the nation about this morning’s attacks shortly from an undisclosed location.
President Albert A. Gore, Jr.: This morning, a terrible and vicious attack was carried out against the United States...
...We must take decisive action to ensure such a tragedy never happens again, by working with our friends around the world to improve security, increasing the transparency of our intelligence apparatus, and strengthening our ties globally. Because what our enemies have forgotten is that we are stronger together, and tonight we stand driven by a new resolve...
...We will not stop, we will not hesitate, we will not rest until the perpetrators of this heinous crime are found and brought to justice...
...I have already directed the Department of Transportation to begin reviewing the nation’s air security, and how the security and safety of air transport could be improved. Together with Congress, in the coming days my Administration will implement measures to protect our skies, our roads, our rails and seaways from further attacks. We will also review the actions taken by our intelligence agencies leading up to this attack, and implement new procedures to make sure they can ferret out any future attacks before they occur...
...Finally, I ask that all of you listening or watching direct your prayers and thoughts to the families and friends of the victims, who have had their loved ones suddenly struck down without warning or provocation. We stand with you--we all must stand with you, and stand together in the face of such reckless brutality. Thank you, and God bless America.
With the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union and the increasingly direct presence of the United States in the Middle East, many young, wealthy Arab men who had been involved in the Afghanistan struggle and who had been radicalized during it began turning their thoughts to what they perceived as the other great oppressor of Muslims in the world, the United States. A staunch supporter of Israel and many secular regimes in the Middle East, America had also committed the unpardonable sin of deploying heathen Christian and Jewish troops to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, defiling, as they saw it, the land of Muhammad with infidels. Already, many of them had joined together to continue the jihad they saw themselves engaging in beyond the limits of Afghanistan; now, they had a clearly defined target for that jihad. The most powerful and influential members of the Arab Afghans joined together to form what they termed “منظمة,” the “Organization,” an informal term for the network of fellow travelers that had germinated in the hard land of Afghanistan that was adopted as a discreet name as they began to look outwards.
At first, the “Organization” attempted to bring its expertise and skills to Muslims involved in conflicts around the world, and establish a network of sympathizers, contacts, safehouses, and resources for future actions. Organization members fanned out to Bosnia, Somalia, Algeria, and other locations where Islam was, as they saw it, under threat, establishing small but often influential cells promoting an Islamist ideology hostile to the West and especially the United States. Their greatest success, however, was in Southeast Asia, home to one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the world across Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. For decades, a series of Islamic insurgencies had plagued the islands of the East Indies, doing little damage but nevertheless persisting despite government efforts to root them out. Now the Organization sought to provide these insurgencies with training, money, and a goal, to turn them from a thorn in the side of governments to a legitimate threat, or even a government themselves.
The founders of the Organization’s operations in Southeast Asia swiftly created a sophisticated recruitment and operational program to expand their initial small core of Organization operators. Rather than overtly advertising that they were seeking fighters for jihad, something which would undoubtedly attract the attention of the governing authorities, they merely created Islamic charities. Although these charities would provide somewhat questionable sermons along with their orphanages, schools, soup kitchens, and so on, they made sure to stay within the line of what their host governments considered permissible speech. These served as part one of the Organization’s recruitment strategy, identifying potential recruitment candidates to the Organization. As the charities worked through areas, employees of several ostensible “recruitment agencies” followed behind, seeking out the candidates identified by the charities and offering well-paying short-term jobs that would require travel to the Middle East. As the Gulf States of Arabia had long been hungry for cheap labor from Southeast Asia, this attracted little attention from authorities. Instead of working at a construction site or on an oil field, however, Organization recruits were funnelled to a series of training camps in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and educated with practical skills like bomb-making, guerrilla warfare tactics, target selection, and so forth, training them to be terrorists. In addition to the practical education, recruits were ideologically instructed as well, turning them into loyal servants of the global jihad.
Once their training was completed, the recruits were given a handsome bonus payment--fully equal to what they had been promised--and sent home to part three of the recruitment strategy, emplacing the operatives. Some were simply given assurances that their support was vital for the jihad and assisted in finding jobs at home, where they would funnel part of their pay back to the Organization. Others were recruited by Organization businesses, often employing skills similar to those they had been taught in while overseas, allowing them to maintain those skills for the future. A third and final group was sent to existing organizations such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines and the descendents of the Darul Islam movement in Indonesia, where they trained members in the same skills they themselves had been trained in by the Organization. Through the success of the businesses established by the Organization and the remittances of those not employed directly by then, the entire operation was self-sustaining, indeed profitable enough to support less successful Organization networks elsewhere in the world.
The Organization in Southeast Asia quickly grew to encompass a network of hundreds of fighters, sympathizers, and fellow travelers, building up a loyal, dedicated, and capable cadre of believers who would spread the word among other Muslims. Gradually, existing terrorist organizations found themselves more and more influenced by Organization ideology and propaganda, and with cliques of Organization sympathizers often making up their most dedicated--and radical--core. With a recruitment and training organization firmly established by mid 1993, the Organization’s leaders became anxious to start actually carrying out jihad, and prodded the organizations they had been training to begin doing things, rather than simply drink money and men that could be put to other uses. Energized by their newly radicalized members, most set to with a will, targeting people, companies, and organizations they felt were un-Islamic. At first, this took the form of petty crimes; attacks on liquor stores, prostitutes, banks, the shaming or extrajudicial punishment of those the jihadis felt were immoral or licentious, and so on. While all well and good, this was not precisely the global war against the West the Organization had had in mind, and they pushed their members to find more spectacular and effective methods of attacking the decadent West.
At this juncture, a young, recently recruited, but quickly advancing member of the Organization’s Southeast Asian operations proposed a bold plot which could not help but pique the interest of the Organization’s senior members. He set forth a complex, multilayered plan which (in his estimation) would strike a great blow against the United States, attacking multiple locations one after the another to keep Americans off balance and fearful. The great strike, which he grandly titled “Allah’s Spear,” consisted of three successive phases, each of which would be more and more deadly and strike closer and closer to America itself. In the first phase, the Organization would carry out a series of attacks against Western targets on the islands of Southeast Asia, especially those the Organization felt were corrupting the people, using planted bombs and trained hit squads of gunmen. With blood flowing overseas, the United States would be wounded, if not deeply quite yet. During the second phase, the Organization would escalate, targeting the transports bringing Americans away from their country. In particular, the member proposed, a massive simultaneous bombing attack could be made on American airlines, destroying a dozen or more aircraft on a single day, killing thousands of people, and bringing the air travel system--not just in the United States but at least in the Pacific Rim, if not the entire world--to its knees. Finally, during the third phase the war would move to America itself, targeting famous landmarks and buildings such as the World Trade Center and Empire State Building in New York, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Pentagon, Capitol Building, and White House in Washington D.C., and other locations around the country for bombing attacks.
Senior members of the Organization liked the grand scope and aggressive action of Allah’s Spear, but felt that as of its proposal the organization did not have the numbers, finances, or other resources needed to carry out its complex interlocked plan of attacks on the West and the United States, prodding the plan’s mastermind to simplify it into a single grand action. After considerable thought, he and they agreed that the attack on airliners seemed to best fit the criteria of being both practical for the Organization’s relatively limited abilities and yet being extremely visible. With the dimensions of Allah’s Spear set, work began on actually bringing the plan into being. Bombs needed to be designed, couriers and bombmakers recruited, safehouses and targets designated. As 1993 flowed in 1994, Allah’s Spear gradually began to take on a more and more definite form.
As with any good engineer, the mastermind had planned for a series of tests prior to the main attack, to verify the performance and functionality of the bombs and the effectiveness of the planned infiltration and exfiltration tactics under “real-world” conditions. During 1994, a series of attacks were carried out against minor targets spread across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, escalating from the bombing of an empty phone booth in Johor to an attack on a brothel in Balikpapan, which killed six prostitutes and their clients and wounded several others. During the course of these attacks, a number of different explosive mixtures and possible trigger mechanisms were tested before the final bomb design was settled on, consisting of a disguised explosive mixture detonated by a timer based on a cheap watch. As a final “dry run,” the plotters decided to test their bomb system on an actual flight, eventually chosen to be Malaysian Airlines Flight 82, Kuala Lumpur-Taipei-Los Angeles. A backup member of the group selected to place the bombs on the aircraft boarded the flight, placed the bomb under a seat in the middle of the aircraft, and deplaned in Taipei, where he boarded a flight to Karachi, Pakistan, the location of a Organization safehouse. Flight 82 continued on from Taipei until the bomb exploded over the mid-Pacific, hundreds of miles away from any land. Out of sight of land-based radar systems, and out of contact with air traffic control or other airliners, the flight simply vanished into thin air. Within hours, the disappearance was noted, and within days a small amount of debris was recovered by search teams, but no evidence that the apparently tragic disappearance of an airliner was anything more than an accident was uncovered until much later.
By the beginning of November, the Organization was satisfied that everything was in place for the attack, and final preparations began among those who would actually be carrying it out. After a lengthy discussion, it was decided that the bombings would have the maximum impact if they were carried out on Christmas Day. Beginning in the morning of Christmas Eve, members of the Organization began boarding aircraft in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, routes which would have taken them to the United States if they had continued to their end. Instead, after “losing” a series of small objects in a variety of hiding places, they deplaned and boarded other flights, also terminating in the United States, which also were the beneficiaries of their forgetfulness. When they disembarked from these aircraft, they boarded still other flights, this time ending in Pakistan. By the evening of the 24th of December, at least by their time, all six of the “plane men” were safely heading towards Organization safehouses, their mission complete. Simultaneously, at exactly eight o’clock on the morning of Christmas Day, measured in Pacific Time, some thirty minutes after sunrise along the West Coast, eleven bombs detonated in eleven airliners scattered across the length and breadth of the Pacific Ocean. The United States--the world--would never be the same again.
Within minutes of the bombs going off, the first responses were being mounted at Narita International Airport, located in Tokyo. One of the aircraft targeted, a United Airlines 747 flying between Jakarta, Taipei, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, had developed mechanical problems on the Taipei-Tokyo leg, after the bomber had disembarked in Taipei to board another flight, and had therefore been removed from service before beginning the Tokyo-Los Angeles portion of the flight. While a small team of maintenance workers was inspecting the aircraft and preparing it for overnight storage, the bomb exploded, killing five and wounding three. Had this taken place later in the day, it would certainly have been the first of the bombings to be reported to the outside world; however, as it occurred early in the morning, Tokyo time, reports on the explosion took several hours to percolate outwards to the major news networks. By the time NBC News and CNN were reporting on the Tokyo bombing, the other attacks were already major news, and coverage focused on whether the bombing was related to the disappearance of many airliners throughout the Pacific basin.
Shortly after the bombing at Narita, the crew of United Flight 882, the company’s route from Tokyo to Chicago, radioed the Pacific control center at Oakland (responsible for most flights across the Pacific), informing them that they had lost cabin pressurization and were descending to a lower level and diverting to Vancouver, the nearest major airport capable of handling the 747 they were flying. Almost simultaneously with Flight 882’s declaration of an emergency, a number of flights reported picking up distress beacons from other flights along the length and breadth of the Pacific Ocean, along with losing radio contact with other aircraft, sometimes in mid sentence. Initially, Oakland air controllers were confused by the reports, wondering if some incredibly unlikely coincidence had caused several airliners to drop out of contact at the same time, until Flight 882 checked back in, reporting that they had suffered a bomb attack. At 8:34 AM, just minutes after controllers began to suspect foul play, a member of the controller team excused himself for a smoke break, walked to a nearby phone booth, and called the offices of KPIX-5, KNTV-11, and CNN, informing them that a major air disaster, possibly a terrorist attack, was in progress. Nearly simultaneously, Oakland Control was calling Federal Aviation Administration headquarters in Washington D.C., telling confused headquarters staff that a major disaster was likely in progress, possibly a terrorist attack. Additional calls were made to North American Aerospace Defense Command, informing them that a major terrorist attack was possibly in progress. However, as all the aircraft had been downed over the Pacific Ocean, well out of range of air traffic control radars, there was a considerable amount of confusion not only at NORAD but also at FAA headquarters and at Oakland Control itself about what, if anything, should or even could be done to address the disaster, a problem compounded by the fact that it was Christmas Day and all three organizations were operating on relative skeleton crews, with many experienced staff taking the day off to enjoy the holidays.
After more than an hour of confused circular phone calls, the FAA finally settled on a drastic, but logical response: stop the flights. All of them. Because of confusion about which flights had even been affected, let alone the possibility of other flights, perhaps over the Atlantic or the middle of the country instead of the Pacific, having been booby-trapped, it was concluded that nothing less than a shutdown of all American air traffic could contain the threat of further attacks and allow a determination of what, exactly, had happened. Traffic in the air would be allowed, indeed required, to land, at the earliest possible time; traffic, especially overseas traffic, still on the ground needed to be prevented from departing. Quickly, calls went out from the United States to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Mexico City, Lagos, Madrid, in short virtually every airport in the world from which aircraft traveled to the United States to prevent further departures to the United States until further notice and to order aircraft already in the air to turn back before reaching American airspace. Despite a total shutdown of American air traffic having occurred only once before, during Operation Skyshield more than thirty years earlier, the clearance of American airspace went relatively smoothly; within four hours of the order being given, no civil aircraft, whether general aviation or major carrier, were airborne nationwide, while those aircraft which had been traversing the Pacific or Atlantic had either landed according to schedule or been diverted to alternate airfields, depending on which approach would get them on the ground sooner.
While the skies above the United States were being cleared, news of the incident was also making its way further and further up the chain of command. While NORAD remained stymied by the question of what, exactly, the military’s role in all of this should or ought to be, officers at the command and officials at the FAA both came to the same conclusion soon after being told of the attacks: the President needed to know. Soon afterwards, the phones at the Gore residence in Carthage, Tennessee, where the First Family had retreated for the Christmas holiday, began ringing with the news. At the time, shortly after noon, the President and his family were playing Parcheesi together, leaving the White House Chief of Staff to answer the phones. Only minutes after being informed of the attacks, he had informed the President and the head of the Secret Service detachment responsible for his safety. The Gore family were quickly whisked into the Presidential limousine, which proceeded towards nearby Nashville International Airport. Escorted by local police officers, the Presidential motorcade made the fifty mile drive--normally an hour-long effort--in about forty minutes. Once at the airport, they were transferred to SAM 28000, the VC-25 which had transported the Gores to Tennessee, and rapidly lifted into the air. Now relatively safe, the question arose of where Air Force One should take the President; although the VC-25 was equipped for aerial refueling and could theoretically remain in the air virtually indefinitely (limited only by non-fuel consumables needed by the engines, as well as drinking water and food), the threat was terrorism, not nuclear war, and in any case the aircraft was not well equipped to support its passengers (including the President’s ailing 86 year old father) for long periods of time. The President favored returning to Washington and the White House, but the Secret Service overruled him, fearing that the attacks on airliners in the morning had been a prelude to attacks on other American targets, including the White House, later in the day. Instead, they argued, the aircraft should transport the President to a secure site, probably a military base, where the Secret Service and the military could protect him against possible follow-on attacks. After a brief argument, Gore acquiesced to their logic, and after a short debate they selected Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska as their destination. Formerly the home of Strategic Air Command, Offutt was remotely located and heavily defended, with access to significant communication facilities, making it an ideal temporary refuge for the President during an unprecedented attack on the United States.
As the President was taking off from Nashville International, commentators at CNN, NBC News, and other news networks were beginning to speculate on the unprecedented shutdown of civilian air traffic over the United States. Unaware of the magnitude of the tragedy that had largely unfolded by that time, and with little other than a few anonymous phone calls and short FAA press releases to go on, many criticized the FAA’s decision as being too hasty, and quite possibly out of all proportion to the actual threat. This criticism quickly elevated into consensus, and before the skies had even been cleared completely the television networks had already created an image of the order as an affront to American liberties and values, and a complete overreaction to whatever had actually occurred, which was still unknown. Then, Flight 882 finally made it to Vancouver. Due to the severe damage it had taken during the attack, the United 747 had had to descend to a low altitude and fly slowly, at less than 250 knots, lest its passengers pass out and die from hypoxia or the structure be torn apart from aerodynamic stresses. By the time it was at last on final approach to Vancouver International, the major US and Canadian television networks had long since become aware of the aircraft’s plight and had dispatched news teams to cover its landing. Many were, perhaps not explicitly, considering this the make-or-break moment for the government narrative of events; if there was no evidence that a bomb had gone off, then clearly they, not the FAA, had correctly judged events. In the event, Flight 882 delivered that evidence in spades. As it slowly approached the runway, the omnipresent eyes of television quickly saw that a massive gash, clearly the result of some explosion, had torn open the rear of the aircraft, exposing passenger and cargo levels to the outside. The hordes of television commentators who had been passing judgement did not even wait for the aircraft to actually touch down (which it did successfully, neither suffering further damage nor causing further injury to the passengers and crew) before reversing direction; now, the government had not gone far enough in merely shutting down US air travel, as were there not other means, methods, and avenues of attack than aircraft bombing? With no claims of responsibility forthcoming, speculation quickly turned to the perpetrators of the attack, and dozens of wild theories proliferated across the airwaves about who might have bombed American airliners that morning, and why. Probably the most popular theory in the immediate aftermath was that the Japanese Red Army, famous for a series of terrorist attacks in the 1970s and ‘80s, often targeting airliners, had organized for a single last gasp after the fall of the Soviet Union, but everyone from Colombian narcoterrorists to Iranian suicide bombers to the United States government itself were fingered as possibilities.
While the national media was begin to consume itself in wild guessing, President Gore had finally taken stock of the situation and was preparing to address the nation. After leaving Carthage, Gore had been essentially out of touch with the nation until he landed at Offutt and was transferred to the base’s secure command complex. Although of course Air Force One had on-board communications capabilities, they were limited compared to the facilities present at Offutt, and not really capable of supporting a television address. Once the First Family and key advisors were safely ensconced in the bunker, he and his chief advisors quickly and unanimously agreed that it was vital he appear quickly to allay possible concern about his health and to assure Americans that their government was aware of and responding to the crisis with an eye for more than just the immediate problem. After a brief pause while they worked out the specifics of what he was going to say, Gore took to the national airwaves late in the afternoon Christmas Day. Despite the hastily created script, the unfamiliar surroundings, and the sheer magnitude of the disaster that he now had to grapple with, the result was one of the greatest speeches of his career--no mean feat for a man often derided as stiff and wooden in delivery. The essence of the speech was quite simple: a disaster had occurred, but no worries; the government was on it, and was already taking measures to bring to justice its perpetrators and prevent any future attacks. The fact that no one had any clue who had carried out the attack or why was swept under the carpet, an inconvenient fact in this hour of sorrow.
Even after Gore’s speech, though, there was as of yet one last act to the tragedy left to play out. Pan Am Flight 822, with the route Kuala Lumpur-Taipei-Seattle-Tacoma, had been in the air at the time of the bombings, and diverted to Vancouver like most other airliners crossing the Pacific. After safely touching down and disgorging its 312 passengers and crew, it had been taxied to a secure area of the airport for later checks by the RCMP, intended to find any unexploded bombs that might exist aboard any other aircraft. At eight o’clock in the evening, just before bomb squad members were about to board to begin their sweep, a final bomb, whose timer had been (as the FBI and NTSB later determined) accidentally offset by twelve hours detonated. As at Narita, this destroyed the aircraft, Clipper Empress of the Skies, but in the process it provided a great deal of valuable forensic information for investigators which otherwise would have been hard to come by. Fortunately, no one was killed by this final blast, and only minor injuries were caused to police officers readying themselves for boarding the aircraft.
A total of 2,984 people were killed Christmas morning by the attacks, making Allah’s Spear, often known as the Christmas Plot, the deadliest single terrorist attack in world history. If those killed earlier, during the dry run attacks, are counted as victims as well, 3,413 people were murdered by Organization agents during the execution of Allah’s Spear, with the passengers and crew of Malaysia Airlines Flight 82 making up the vast majority of the additional 429 victims. About half of the victims of the attacks were American citizens, with the rest a kaleidoscopic mixture of mostly Indonesians, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, together with small numbers of people from many other countries.
As Gore had promised Christmas afternoon, the very next day his administration began to actively move itself to meet this new threat. Vacations were canceled as cabinet staff began to make their way back to Washington, as did the President. A flurry of executive orders implementing new security measures, from increased screening at federal building entrances to air marshals aboard domestic and international flights were drafted and issued by the White House over the next few days. Most prominent among these early measures was a temporary shutdown of air travel within the United States, until greater security could be assured to travelers. Given that it was the midst of the busy winter travel season, this order had the greatest impact on ordinary Americans, many of whom were suddenly cast in the position of having to beg or borrow what transportation they could or enjoy a suddenly and unexpectedly extended vacation. Congress, as in many other cases, followed, not starting their “emergency session” until the 29th, the Thursday following the attack. The larger number of senators and representatives compared to cabinet officials and the question of whether the emergency session should be considered part of the 103rd or the 104th Congress delayed their meeting several days while they wrangled out the details; in the end, it was agreed that the 104th Congress should be sworn in six days early to avoid any potential legal complications that might arise from a very short session of the 103rd Congress. The following day, the 30th of December, Gore addressed a special joint session of Congress, largely repeating the themes from his speech Christmas afternoon. After the weekend, Congress reconvened on the 2nd of January, 1995, ready to begin developing and passing anti-terror legislation.
The broad details of the legislation had been worked out largely by Gore’s staff during the previous week, with some input later on from the newly elected Speaker of the House and Majority Leader in the Senate. Although it called for a number of measures to be taken to harden American targets against terrorist attacks, including the creation of new Air Security and Port Security Administrations within the Department of Transportation, the FBI investigation was already turning up evidence that the attacks had originated outside of the United States, and of course had taken place in international waters. Therefore, the primary aim of the legislation was to prevent, not to reduce the damage from, terrorist attacks, largely by improving efforts to gather intelligence on terrorist activities. Besides increases in the ability of the NSA, among others, to spy on suspected terrorists, even without a warrant (although, since many terrorists were not American citizens in the first place, warrants were not strictly speaking required), efforts were put in place to increase intelligence sharing between the various agencies--the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and more--responsible for identifying and preventing terrorist attacks. A special commission was also created to investigate the attacks in more depth and make more specific recommendations, although its report was not expected for several months at least.
However, merely protecting American targets against terrorist attacks or identifying terrorist plots would do little to eradicate the problem. Terrorism itself, the conditions that created it, needed to be uprooted and destroyed overseas, preferably with the cooperation of the nations in which terrorism was flourishing, possibly without. In this, practical policy was beginning to intersect with the idealism that had grown in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the Quiet Years, when many citizens had assumed that the United States military no longer had a significant role to play in ensuring the nation’s security given its newly found power and global dominance. Few, of course, wished to return to the isolationism and small militaries of the 1930s or earlier decades; many, instead, wanted to use the splendid little military that had been created since the Vietnam War in pursuit of further spreading the liberal democracy that seemed everywhere on the march, intervening in African civil wars, the Balkans, and other trouble spots around the world out of a desire to ensure global peace and security, or simply American dominance. Although it was an audacious and idealistic goal, the more realistic Gore Administration had largely eschewed global use of military force outside of existing commitments in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Informed by the President’s own experiences as a Vietnam veteran, in the wake of the attack the Pentagon continued to reject calls for deployment of American troops to trouble spots, even trouble spots linked with terrorism, whether or not Islamic in origin. Instead, the Gore Administration pursued a more indirect strategy, focusing on assisting nations with their own fights against terrorism rather than having an American white knight dive in and take complete responsibility. The nature of this assistance varied widely, from mere expressions of diplomatic support, to covert assistance in obtaining key war materiel (not necessarily from the United States itself; Russia, China, France, and other major arms dealers often saw their negotiations smoothed by American diplomacy in cases where the United States felt it would be embarrassed by direct support), to provision of military intelligence on terrorist cells and leaders, to, in some cases, direct support by American special forces and American air power, including the new and increasingly popular option of the armed drone. While drones had been extensively used by the Air Force since the Vietnam War, and attempts to build drones dated back as far as World War I, the development of satellite-based navigation and communications systems during the 1990s, together with general technological development, had led to a new level of capability for uncrewed aircraft. Although the new generation of drones had been intended as mere replacements or supplements to older piloted reconnaissance aircraft like the U-2 or the SR-71, their utility in gathering intelligence in virtual real-time quickly led to interest in arming them to strike directly at any targets found. Why call in F/A-18s, say, from a carrier offshore to attack a target, running the risk that he might be lost before they can reach him, when the drone itself could attack? By 1997, the first Hellfire-armed drones were beginning to reach the skies about trouble spots around the globe, quickly proving their utility in attacking suspected terrorists rapidly and efficiently. If there was, in military jargon, “collateral damage” from time to time, it seemed a small price compared to the security of thousands threatened by these men, and compared to the tens or hundreds of thousand who would suffer or die from more conventional methods of restraining terrorism.
Besides attempts to prevent future attacks and understand past attempts, of course, there was the matter of finding, capturing, and hopefully imprisoning or even executing the actual perpetrators and masterminds of the attack. Within hours of the first notice, the FBI had begun what would become the largest criminal investigation in US and perhaps world history, ultimately involving to a substantial extent more than thirty police and intelligence agencies worldwide and a massive international manhunt for the eventual suspects. Initially, most of the investigative focus was on the aircraft which had survived to land; before nightfall, the FBI had already liaised with the RCMP and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police to investigate the bombings at Narita and Vancouver, while another group of special agents recovered manifest information for all known lost flights from the targeted airlines. Through painstaking analysis of the flight routes over the next months, they determined that each bombed flight had passed through one or more “node airports” in East Asia, connecting two or more of the targeted flights, while equally thorough checks on the passenger and cargo manifests uncovered hundreds of possible leads that needed to be tracked down. Even within a few days of the explosions, however, the FBI was already contacting police agencies around the world to assist them in tracking down possible suspects, the originators of possibly suspect cargo and baggage, and so on.
The first big break in the investigation was the discovery more than a month after the bombings of the wreckage of one of the targeted airliners in deep water between Hawaii and the Aleutians. A joint Navy-JMSDF recovery operation, making extensive use of Japanese and American deep-diving submersibles, was able to retrieve nearly 60% of the airliner’s remains from more than two kilometers of water. Analysis of the wreckage by the FBI showed that, like United 882 and Pan Am 822, the aircraft had been destroyed by a mid-flight explosion in the passenger area, almost certainly a bomb. Together with forensic analysis of the remains of the bombs from those two flights, it had been all but proved that all nine lost airliners had been downed by bomb attacks. In the meantime, most of the suspects generated by analysis of passenger, crew, and worker manifests had been eliminated, leaving an ever-narrowing list of possible perpetrators. At the top of the FBI’s interest list were passengers who had disembarked from the doomed airliners prior to their last takeoff. Of particular interest were those who had immediately afterwards boarded international flights, especially several who had then traveled to countries seemingly tailor-made for frustrating American inquiries into their whereabouts and activities during the flights. Suspecting that they might be the perpetrators of the attack, the FBI established contacts with the Pakistani Federal Investigation Agency, where most of the persons of particular interest had fled, and with several other foreign police agencies. At the same time, analysis of the targeted flights had shown a definite pattern pointing to Subang International Airport, in Malaysia, and Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, in Indonesia, as the likely origins of the attacks. Although indirect, evidence was beginning to build pointing to Islamic terrorists, not the Japanese Red Army or other Cold War remnants as the perpetrators of the attacks.
With a better idea of the enemy that they were looking for, the dragnet being laid by the FBI and associated agencies began to narrow, focusing on tracking leads in Southeast Asia relating to radical Islam. While the Organization’s activities may have been largely below the radar of local authorities, the global scope of the Christmas Plot investigation was able to piece together a trail connecting the Christmas Plot’s perpetrators to the Organization’s operations, and then began following leads about the Organization itself. Finally, the leads added up to something far more. In the early morning hours of June 7th, 1995, some six months after the bombing, agents of the Federal Investigation Agency, assisted by members of the FBI and the Diplomatic Security Service of the American Department of State raided a safehouse belonging to the Organization, where they believed one or more of the attack’s perpetrators were hiding. Within, they found far more than just two of the attackers; they found a treasure trove of computers, record books, and other information about the group’s leadership, organization, and some limited insight into future plans. It was the breakthrough that the Gore Administration had been waiting for--a cohesive look at the identity of the attackers, and a wealth of actionable intelligence. Gore once more addressed the nation to announce the capture. It was a success that vindicated Gore’s less military, more international approach to the disaster, as even without deploying a single US soldier abroad, linked forces of allied intelligence sources--including connections that hadn’t existed before the attack--had been able to ferret out and capture some of the perpetrators and begun to catalogue the organizations and operations that had supported them. While what could be done about this list of organizations was being undertaken, the most visible result of the capture was the extradition of the two captured terrorists to the United States for trial. While the spectre of radical terror had not disappeared--indeed, in many areas it had not even ablated much--the capture of the two terrorists and lead up to their trial was something of a closing to the immediate chapter of the Christmas Plot. However, the changes in attitude wrought around the world would not fade so easily--indeed, they would continue to echo around the world.
This one's a little unusual, with a bit of strong language and some potential trigger warnings, so please keep that in mind. Anyway, without further ado, please fasten your seatbelt low and tight across your hips as we move into this week's post..
Eyes Turned Skyward, Part III: Post #14
Captain: So, you know, having to work Christmas and all--
First Officer: Uh-huh.
Captain: Well, Mary isn’t happy about it, but I was thinking, you know, Chicago’s awful this time of year--
First Officer: Yeah.
Captain: So I was going to take her to the Bahamas.
First Officer: Yeah, y--
<extremely loud static noise>
Captain: Fuck!
First Officer: What the hell was that?
UAL 882: Oakland Control, this is United eight-eight-two heavy declaring emergency.
Oakland Control: Roger eight-eight-two heavy, what is your emergency?
UAL 882: Major pressurization loss, we’re descending at best speed to flight level one-zero-zero and requesting a diversion to Vancouver, that’s Yankee Victor Romeo.
Oakland Control: Request granted.
Captain: Jim, can you tell the flight attendants to prepare for emergency landing?
Flight Engineer: Yeah. Uh, uh, I can’t get in contact with them. Should I go find out what’s going on?
Captain: Yes.
<several minutes later>
Flight Engineer: There’s a huge hole in the fuselage aft of the wing, huge. It must have been a bomb.
JAL 001: Oakland Control, JAL zero-zero-one heavy declaring emergency, we’re picking up a distress beacon from Clipper eight-five-eight heavy, position...
KAL 19: Mayday, mayday, mayday Oakland Control, KAL one-nine heavy picking up distress beacon from Delta eight-six-seven heavy...
NBC News: We interrupt this program to bring you breaking news...NBC News headquarters in New York is getting unconfirmed reports of multiple downings of transpacific airliners, that is multiple airliners over the Pacific dropping out of contact with Air Traffic Control. NBC News is beginning to work on this story, very disturbing if true, and we’re trying to figure out exactly what is happening...
White House Chief of Staff: I’m sorry to interrupt, Mr. President, but we have a situation...
NBC News: More information on the possible attack on airliners crossing the Pacific. Our Tokyo bureau is reporting that at about the same time airliners began dropping out of contact, a bomb exploded in an aircraft at Narita International Airport, that’s the Tokyo international airport, killing several maintenance workers. Several of the missing flights had departed Tokyo, so there may be a connection...
Oakland Control: Oakland Control to all aircraft, ATC Zero conditions in effect. All aircraft divert to nearest available airport, this is an emergency situation.
UAL 882: Vancouver, United eight-eight-two heavy requesting clearance for runway eight-Lima.
Vancouver Control: Roger United eight-eight-two heavy, you are cleared for runway eight-Lima.
UAL 882: Roger Vancouver, we have multiple wounded, make sure ambulances are there.
Vancouver Control: Roger United eight-eight-two heavy, multiple wounded.
NBC News: We’re getting live footage from Vancouver, that’s in Canada, of the landing of United Flight 882, which reported a serious in-flight emergency earlier this morning, possibly related to the Tokyo bombing and the disappearance of several other airliners. Just a moment...my God...
NBC News: Unconfirmed reports of bomb threats phoned in to the Sears Tower, the World Trade Center, and the Empire State Building, which are obviously being taken very seriously in light of this morning...
(N/B: It was later determined that all bomb threats made or suspected that day were fake or mistaken)
NBC News: We’ve just gotten--hang on, the White House is reporting that President Gore will be addressing the nation about this morning’s attacks shortly from an undisclosed location.
President Albert A. Gore, Jr.: This morning, a terrible and vicious attack was carried out against the United States...
...We must take decisive action to ensure such a tragedy never happens again, by working with our friends around the world to improve security, increasing the transparency of our intelligence apparatus, and strengthening our ties globally. Because what our enemies have forgotten is that we are stronger together, and tonight we stand driven by a new resolve...
...We will not stop, we will not hesitate, we will not rest until the perpetrators of this heinous crime are found and brought to justice...
...I have already directed the Department of Transportation to begin reviewing the nation’s air security, and how the security and safety of air transport could be improved. Together with Congress, in the coming days my Administration will implement measures to protect our skies, our roads, our rails and seaways from further attacks. We will also review the actions taken by our intelligence agencies leading up to this attack, and implement new procedures to make sure they can ferret out any future attacks before they occur...
...Finally, I ask that all of you listening or watching direct your prayers and thoughts to the families and friends of the victims, who have had their loved ones suddenly struck down without warning or provocation. We stand with you--we all must stand with you, and stand together in the face of such reckless brutality. Thank you, and God bless America.
With the ongoing collapse of the Soviet Union and the increasingly direct presence of the United States in the Middle East, many young, wealthy Arab men who had been involved in the Afghanistan struggle and who had been radicalized during it began turning their thoughts to what they perceived as the other great oppressor of Muslims in the world, the United States. A staunch supporter of Israel and many secular regimes in the Middle East, America had also committed the unpardonable sin of deploying heathen Christian and Jewish troops to Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War, defiling, as they saw it, the land of Muhammad with infidels. Already, many of them had joined together to continue the jihad they saw themselves engaging in beyond the limits of Afghanistan; now, they had a clearly defined target for that jihad. The most powerful and influential members of the Arab Afghans joined together to form what they termed “منظمة,” the “Organization,” an informal term for the network of fellow travelers that had germinated in the hard land of Afghanistan that was adopted as a discreet name as they began to look outwards.
At first, the “Organization” attempted to bring its expertise and skills to Muslims involved in conflicts around the world, and establish a network of sympathizers, contacts, safehouses, and resources for future actions. Organization members fanned out to Bosnia, Somalia, Algeria, and other locations where Islam was, as they saw it, under threat, establishing small but often influential cells promoting an Islamist ideology hostile to the West and especially the United States. Their greatest success, however, was in Southeast Asia, home to one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the world across Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines. For decades, a series of Islamic insurgencies had plagued the islands of the East Indies, doing little damage but nevertheless persisting despite government efforts to root them out. Now the Organization sought to provide these insurgencies with training, money, and a goal, to turn them from a thorn in the side of governments to a legitimate threat, or even a government themselves.
The founders of the Organization’s operations in Southeast Asia swiftly created a sophisticated recruitment and operational program to expand their initial small core of Organization operators. Rather than overtly advertising that they were seeking fighters for jihad, something which would undoubtedly attract the attention of the governing authorities, they merely created Islamic charities. Although these charities would provide somewhat questionable sermons along with their orphanages, schools, soup kitchens, and so on, they made sure to stay within the line of what their host governments considered permissible speech. These served as part one of the Organization’s recruitment strategy, identifying potential recruitment candidates to the Organization. As the charities worked through areas, employees of several ostensible “recruitment agencies” followed behind, seeking out the candidates identified by the charities and offering well-paying short-term jobs that would require travel to the Middle East. As the Gulf States of Arabia had long been hungry for cheap labor from Southeast Asia, this attracted little attention from authorities. Instead of working at a construction site or on an oil field, however, Organization recruits were funnelled to a series of training camps in Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, and educated with practical skills like bomb-making, guerrilla warfare tactics, target selection, and so forth, training them to be terrorists. In addition to the practical education, recruits were ideologically instructed as well, turning them into loyal servants of the global jihad.
Once their training was completed, the recruits were given a handsome bonus payment--fully equal to what they had been promised--and sent home to part three of the recruitment strategy, emplacing the operatives. Some were simply given assurances that their support was vital for the jihad and assisted in finding jobs at home, where they would funnel part of their pay back to the Organization. Others were recruited by Organization businesses, often employing skills similar to those they had been taught in while overseas, allowing them to maintain those skills for the future. A third and final group was sent to existing organizations such as the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines and the descendents of the Darul Islam movement in Indonesia, where they trained members in the same skills they themselves had been trained in by the Organization. Through the success of the businesses established by the Organization and the remittances of those not employed directly by then, the entire operation was self-sustaining, indeed profitable enough to support less successful Organization networks elsewhere in the world.
The Organization in Southeast Asia quickly grew to encompass a network of hundreds of fighters, sympathizers, and fellow travelers, building up a loyal, dedicated, and capable cadre of believers who would spread the word among other Muslims. Gradually, existing terrorist organizations found themselves more and more influenced by Organization ideology and propaganda, and with cliques of Organization sympathizers often making up their most dedicated--and radical--core. With a recruitment and training organization firmly established by mid 1993, the Organization’s leaders became anxious to start actually carrying out jihad, and prodded the organizations they had been training to begin doing things, rather than simply drink money and men that could be put to other uses. Energized by their newly radicalized members, most set to with a will, targeting people, companies, and organizations they felt were un-Islamic. At first, this took the form of petty crimes; attacks on liquor stores, prostitutes, banks, the shaming or extrajudicial punishment of those the jihadis felt were immoral or licentious, and so on. While all well and good, this was not precisely the global war against the West the Organization had had in mind, and they pushed their members to find more spectacular and effective methods of attacking the decadent West.
At this juncture, a young, recently recruited, but quickly advancing member of the Organization’s Southeast Asian operations proposed a bold plot which could not help but pique the interest of the Organization’s senior members. He set forth a complex, multilayered plan which (in his estimation) would strike a great blow against the United States, attacking multiple locations one after the another to keep Americans off balance and fearful. The great strike, which he grandly titled “Allah’s Spear,” consisted of three successive phases, each of which would be more and more deadly and strike closer and closer to America itself. In the first phase, the Organization would carry out a series of attacks against Western targets on the islands of Southeast Asia, especially those the Organization felt were corrupting the people, using planted bombs and trained hit squads of gunmen. With blood flowing overseas, the United States would be wounded, if not deeply quite yet. During the second phase, the Organization would escalate, targeting the transports bringing Americans away from their country. In particular, the member proposed, a massive simultaneous bombing attack could be made on American airlines, destroying a dozen or more aircraft on a single day, killing thousands of people, and bringing the air travel system--not just in the United States but at least in the Pacific Rim, if not the entire world--to its knees. Finally, during the third phase the war would move to America itself, targeting famous landmarks and buildings such as the World Trade Center and Empire State Building in New York, the Sears Tower in Chicago, the Pentagon, Capitol Building, and White House in Washington D.C., and other locations around the country for bombing attacks.
Senior members of the Organization liked the grand scope and aggressive action of Allah’s Spear, but felt that as of its proposal the organization did not have the numbers, finances, or other resources needed to carry out its complex interlocked plan of attacks on the West and the United States, prodding the plan’s mastermind to simplify it into a single grand action. After considerable thought, he and they agreed that the attack on airliners seemed to best fit the criteria of being both practical for the Organization’s relatively limited abilities and yet being extremely visible. With the dimensions of Allah’s Spear set, work began on actually bringing the plan into being. Bombs needed to be designed, couriers and bombmakers recruited, safehouses and targets designated. As 1993 flowed in 1994, Allah’s Spear gradually began to take on a more and more definite form.
As with any good engineer, the mastermind had planned for a series of tests prior to the main attack, to verify the performance and functionality of the bombs and the effectiveness of the planned infiltration and exfiltration tactics under “real-world” conditions. During 1994, a series of attacks were carried out against minor targets spread across Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Philippines, escalating from the bombing of an empty phone booth in Johor to an attack on a brothel in Balikpapan, which killed six prostitutes and their clients and wounded several others. During the course of these attacks, a number of different explosive mixtures and possible trigger mechanisms were tested before the final bomb design was settled on, consisting of a disguised explosive mixture detonated by a timer based on a cheap watch. As a final “dry run,” the plotters decided to test their bomb system on an actual flight, eventually chosen to be Malaysian Airlines Flight 82, Kuala Lumpur-Taipei-Los Angeles. A backup member of the group selected to place the bombs on the aircraft boarded the flight, placed the bomb under a seat in the middle of the aircraft, and deplaned in Taipei, where he boarded a flight to Karachi, Pakistan, the location of a Organization safehouse. Flight 82 continued on from Taipei until the bomb exploded over the mid-Pacific, hundreds of miles away from any land. Out of sight of land-based radar systems, and out of contact with air traffic control or other airliners, the flight simply vanished into thin air. Within hours, the disappearance was noted, and within days a small amount of debris was recovered by search teams, but no evidence that the apparently tragic disappearance of an airliner was anything more than an accident was uncovered until much later.
By the beginning of November, the Organization was satisfied that everything was in place for the attack, and final preparations began among those who would actually be carrying it out. After a lengthy discussion, it was decided that the bombings would have the maximum impact if they were carried out on Christmas Day. Beginning in the morning of Christmas Eve, members of the Organization began boarding aircraft in Jakarta and Kuala Lumpur, routes which would have taken them to the United States if they had continued to their end. Instead, after “losing” a series of small objects in a variety of hiding places, they deplaned and boarded other flights, also terminating in the United States, which also were the beneficiaries of their forgetfulness. When they disembarked from these aircraft, they boarded still other flights, this time ending in Pakistan. By the evening of the 24th of December, at least by their time, all six of the “plane men” were safely heading towards Organization safehouses, their mission complete. Simultaneously, at exactly eight o’clock on the morning of Christmas Day, measured in Pacific Time, some thirty minutes after sunrise along the West Coast, eleven bombs detonated in eleven airliners scattered across the length and breadth of the Pacific Ocean. The United States--the world--would never be the same again.
Within minutes of the bombs going off, the first responses were being mounted at Narita International Airport, located in Tokyo. One of the aircraft targeted, a United Airlines 747 flying between Jakarta, Taipei, Tokyo, and Los Angeles, had developed mechanical problems on the Taipei-Tokyo leg, after the bomber had disembarked in Taipei to board another flight, and had therefore been removed from service before beginning the Tokyo-Los Angeles portion of the flight. While a small team of maintenance workers was inspecting the aircraft and preparing it for overnight storage, the bomb exploded, killing five and wounding three. Had this taken place later in the day, it would certainly have been the first of the bombings to be reported to the outside world; however, as it occurred early in the morning, Tokyo time, reports on the explosion took several hours to percolate outwards to the major news networks. By the time NBC News and CNN were reporting on the Tokyo bombing, the other attacks were already major news, and coverage focused on whether the bombing was related to the disappearance of many airliners throughout the Pacific basin.
Shortly after the bombing at Narita, the crew of United Flight 882, the company’s route from Tokyo to Chicago, radioed the Pacific control center at Oakland (responsible for most flights across the Pacific), informing them that they had lost cabin pressurization and were descending to a lower level and diverting to Vancouver, the nearest major airport capable of handling the 747 they were flying. Almost simultaneously with Flight 882’s declaration of an emergency, a number of flights reported picking up distress beacons from other flights along the length and breadth of the Pacific Ocean, along with losing radio contact with other aircraft, sometimes in mid sentence. Initially, Oakland air controllers were confused by the reports, wondering if some incredibly unlikely coincidence had caused several airliners to drop out of contact at the same time, until Flight 882 checked back in, reporting that they had suffered a bomb attack. At 8:34 AM, just minutes after controllers began to suspect foul play, a member of the controller team excused himself for a smoke break, walked to a nearby phone booth, and called the offices of KPIX-5, KNTV-11, and CNN, informing them that a major air disaster, possibly a terrorist attack, was in progress. Nearly simultaneously, Oakland Control was calling Federal Aviation Administration headquarters in Washington D.C., telling confused headquarters staff that a major disaster was likely in progress, possibly a terrorist attack. Additional calls were made to North American Aerospace Defense Command, informing them that a major terrorist attack was possibly in progress. However, as all the aircraft had been downed over the Pacific Ocean, well out of range of air traffic control radars, there was a considerable amount of confusion not only at NORAD but also at FAA headquarters and at Oakland Control itself about what, if anything, should or even could be done to address the disaster, a problem compounded by the fact that it was Christmas Day and all three organizations were operating on relative skeleton crews, with many experienced staff taking the day off to enjoy the holidays.
After more than an hour of confused circular phone calls, the FAA finally settled on a drastic, but logical response: stop the flights. All of them. Because of confusion about which flights had even been affected, let alone the possibility of other flights, perhaps over the Atlantic or the middle of the country instead of the Pacific, having been booby-trapped, it was concluded that nothing less than a shutdown of all American air traffic could contain the threat of further attacks and allow a determination of what, exactly, had happened. Traffic in the air would be allowed, indeed required, to land, at the earliest possible time; traffic, especially overseas traffic, still on the ground needed to be prevented from departing. Quickly, calls went out from the United States to Tokyo, Hong Kong, Sydney, Mexico City, Lagos, Madrid, in short virtually every airport in the world from which aircraft traveled to the United States to prevent further departures to the United States until further notice and to order aircraft already in the air to turn back before reaching American airspace. Despite a total shutdown of American air traffic having occurred only once before, during Operation Skyshield more than thirty years earlier, the clearance of American airspace went relatively smoothly; within four hours of the order being given, no civil aircraft, whether general aviation or major carrier, were airborne nationwide, while those aircraft which had been traversing the Pacific or Atlantic had either landed according to schedule or been diverted to alternate airfields, depending on which approach would get them on the ground sooner.
While the skies above the United States were being cleared, news of the incident was also making its way further and further up the chain of command. While NORAD remained stymied by the question of what, exactly, the military’s role in all of this should or ought to be, officers at the command and officials at the FAA both came to the same conclusion soon after being told of the attacks: the President needed to know. Soon afterwards, the phones at the Gore residence in Carthage, Tennessee, where the First Family had retreated for the Christmas holiday, began ringing with the news. At the time, shortly after noon, the President and his family were playing Parcheesi together, leaving the White House Chief of Staff to answer the phones. Only minutes after being informed of the attacks, he had informed the President and the head of the Secret Service detachment responsible for his safety. The Gore family were quickly whisked into the Presidential limousine, which proceeded towards nearby Nashville International Airport. Escorted by local police officers, the Presidential motorcade made the fifty mile drive--normally an hour-long effort--in about forty minutes. Once at the airport, they were transferred to SAM 28000, the VC-25 which had transported the Gores to Tennessee, and rapidly lifted into the air. Now relatively safe, the question arose of where Air Force One should take the President; although the VC-25 was equipped for aerial refueling and could theoretically remain in the air virtually indefinitely (limited only by non-fuel consumables needed by the engines, as well as drinking water and food), the threat was terrorism, not nuclear war, and in any case the aircraft was not well equipped to support its passengers (including the President’s ailing 86 year old father) for long periods of time. The President favored returning to Washington and the White House, but the Secret Service overruled him, fearing that the attacks on airliners in the morning had been a prelude to attacks on other American targets, including the White House, later in the day. Instead, they argued, the aircraft should transport the President to a secure site, probably a military base, where the Secret Service and the military could protect him against possible follow-on attacks. After a brief argument, Gore acquiesced to their logic, and after a short debate they selected Offutt Air Force Base, Nebraska as their destination. Formerly the home of Strategic Air Command, Offutt was remotely located and heavily defended, with access to significant communication facilities, making it an ideal temporary refuge for the President during an unprecedented attack on the United States.
As the President was taking off from Nashville International, commentators at CNN, NBC News, and other news networks were beginning to speculate on the unprecedented shutdown of civilian air traffic over the United States. Unaware of the magnitude of the tragedy that had largely unfolded by that time, and with little other than a few anonymous phone calls and short FAA press releases to go on, many criticized the FAA’s decision as being too hasty, and quite possibly out of all proportion to the actual threat. This criticism quickly elevated into consensus, and before the skies had even been cleared completely the television networks had already created an image of the order as an affront to American liberties and values, and a complete overreaction to whatever had actually occurred, which was still unknown. Then, Flight 882 finally made it to Vancouver. Due to the severe damage it had taken during the attack, the United 747 had had to descend to a low altitude and fly slowly, at less than 250 knots, lest its passengers pass out and die from hypoxia or the structure be torn apart from aerodynamic stresses. By the time it was at last on final approach to Vancouver International, the major US and Canadian television networks had long since become aware of the aircraft’s plight and had dispatched news teams to cover its landing. Many were, perhaps not explicitly, considering this the make-or-break moment for the government narrative of events; if there was no evidence that a bomb had gone off, then clearly they, not the FAA, had correctly judged events. In the event, Flight 882 delivered that evidence in spades. As it slowly approached the runway, the omnipresent eyes of television quickly saw that a massive gash, clearly the result of some explosion, had torn open the rear of the aircraft, exposing passenger and cargo levels to the outside. The hordes of television commentators who had been passing judgement did not even wait for the aircraft to actually touch down (which it did successfully, neither suffering further damage nor causing further injury to the passengers and crew) before reversing direction; now, the government had not gone far enough in merely shutting down US air travel, as were there not other means, methods, and avenues of attack than aircraft bombing? With no claims of responsibility forthcoming, speculation quickly turned to the perpetrators of the attack, and dozens of wild theories proliferated across the airwaves about who might have bombed American airliners that morning, and why. Probably the most popular theory in the immediate aftermath was that the Japanese Red Army, famous for a series of terrorist attacks in the 1970s and ‘80s, often targeting airliners, had organized for a single last gasp after the fall of the Soviet Union, but everyone from Colombian narcoterrorists to Iranian suicide bombers to the United States government itself were fingered as possibilities.
While the national media was begin to consume itself in wild guessing, President Gore had finally taken stock of the situation and was preparing to address the nation. After leaving Carthage, Gore had been essentially out of touch with the nation until he landed at Offutt and was transferred to the base’s secure command complex. Although of course Air Force One had on-board communications capabilities, they were limited compared to the facilities present at Offutt, and not really capable of supporting a television address. Once the First Family and key advisors were safely ensconced in the bunker, he and his chief advisors quickly and unanimously agreed that it was vital he appear quickly to allay possible concern about his health and to assure Americans that their government was aware of and responding to the crisis with an eye for more than just the immediate problem. After a brief pause while they worked out the specifics of what he was going to say, Gore took to the national airwaves late in the afternoon Christmas Day. Despite the hastily created script, the unfamiliar surroundings, and the sheer magnitude of the disaster that he now had to grapple with, the result was one of the greatest speeches of his career--no mean feat for a man often derided as stiff and wooden in delivery. The essence of the speech was quite simple: a disaster had occurred, but no worries; the government was on it, and was already taking measures to bring to justice its perpetrators and prevent any future attacks. The fact that no one had any clue who had carried out the attack or why was swept under the carpet, an inconvenient fact in this hour of sorrow.
Even after Gore’s speech, though, there was as of yet one last act to the tragedy left to play out. Pan Am Flight 822, with the route Kuala Lumpur-Taipei-Seattle-Tacoma, had been in the air at the time of the bombings, and diverted to Vancouver like most other airliners crossing the Pacific. After safely touching down and disgorging its 312 passengers and crew, it had been taxied to a secure area of the airport for later checks by the RCMP, intended to find any unexploded bombs that might exist aboard any other aircraft. At eight o’clock in the evening, just before bomb squad members were about to board to begin their sweep, a final bomb, whose timer had been (as the FBI and NTSB later determined) accidentally offset by twelve hours detonated. As at Narita, this destroyed the aircraft, Clipper Empress of the Skies, but in the process it provided a great deal of valuable forensic information for investigators which otherwise would have been hard to come by. Fortunately, no one was killed by this final blast, and only minor injuries were caused to police officers readying themselves for boarding the aircraft.
A total of 2,984 people were killed Christmas morning by the attacks, making Allah’s Spear, often known as the Christmas Plot, the deadliest single terrorist attack in world history. If those killed earlier, during the dry run attacks, are counted as victims as well, 3,413 people were murdered by Organization agents during the execution of Allah’s Spear, with the passengers and crew of Malaysia Airlines Flight 82 making up the vast majority of the additional 429 victims. About half of the victims of the attacks were American citizens, with the rest a kaleidoscopic mixture of mostly Indonesians, Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese, together with small numbers of people from many other countries.
As Gore had promised Christmas afternoon, the very next day his administration began to actively move itself to meet this new threat. Vacations were canceled as cabinet staff began to make their way back to Washington, as did the President. A flurry of executive orders implementing new security measures, from increased screening at federal building entrances to air marshals aboard domestic and international flights were drafted and issued by the White House over the next few days. Most prominent among these early measures was a temporary shutdown of air travel within the United States, until greater security could be assured to travelers. Given that it was the midst of the busy winter travel season, this order had the greatest impact on ordinary Americans, many of whom were suddenly cast in the position of having to beg or borrow what transportation they could or enjoy a suddenly and unexpectedly extended vacation. Congress, as in many other cases, followed, not starting their “emergency session” until the 29th, the Thursday following the attack. The larger number of senators and representatives compared to cabinet officials and the question of whether the emergency session should be considered part of the 103rd or the 104th Congress delayed their meeting several days while they wrangled out the details; in the end, it was agreed that the 104th Congress should be sworn in six days early to avoid any potential legal complications that might arise from a very short session of the 103rd Congress. The following day, the 30th of December, Gore addressed a special joint session of Congress, largely repeating the themes from his speech Christmas afternoon. After the weekend, Congress reconvened on the 2nd of January, 1995, ready to begin developing and passing anti-terror legislation.
The broad details of the legislation had been worked out largely by Gore’s staff during the previous week, with some input later on from the newly elected Speaker of the House and Majority Leader in the Senate. Although it called for a number of measures to be taken to harden American targets against terrorist attacks, including the creation of new Air Security and Port Security Administrations within the Department of Transportation, the FBI investigation was already turning up evidence that the attacks had originated outside of the United States, and of course had taken place in international waters. Therefore, the primary aim of the legislation was to prevent, not to reduce the damage from, terrorist attacks, largely by improving efforts to gather intelligence on terrorist activities. Besides increases in the ability of the NSA, among others, to spy on suspected terrorists, even without a warrant (although, since many terrorists were not American citizens in the first place, warrants were not strictly speaking required), efforts were put in place to increase intelligence sharing between the various agencies--the FBI, the CIA, the NSA, and more--responsible for identifying and preventing terrorist attacks. A special commission was also created to investigate the attacks in more depth and make more specific recommendations, although its report was not expected for several months at least.
However, merely protecting American targets against terrorist attacks or identifying terrorist plots would do little to eradicate the problem. Terrorism itself, the conditions that created it, needed to be uprooted and destroyed overseas, preferably with the cooperation of the nations in which terrorism was flourishing, possibly without. In this, practical policy was beginning to intersect with the idealism that had grown in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union, during the Quiet Years, when many citizens had assumed that the United States military no longer had a significant role to play in ensuring the nation’s security given its newly found power and global dominance. Few, of course, wished to return to the isolationism and small militaries of the 1930s or earlier decades; many, instead, wanted to use the splendid little military that had been created since the Vietnam War in pursuit of further spreading the liberal democracy that seemed everywhere on the march, intervening in African civil wars, the Balkans, and other trouble spots around the world out of a desire to ensure global peace and security, or simply American dominance. Although it was an audacious and idealistic goal, the more realistic Gore Administration had largely eschewed global use of military force outside of existing commitments in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. Informed by the President’s own experiences as a Vietnam veteran, in the wake of the attack the Pentagon continued to reject calls for deployment of American troops to trouble spots, even trouble spots linked with terrorism, whether or not Islamic in origin. Instead, the Gore Administration pursued a more indirect strategy, focusing on assisting nations with their own fights against terrorism rather than having an American white knight dive in and take complete responsibility. The nature of this assistance varied widely, from mere expressions of diplomatic support, to covert assistance in obtaining key war materiel (not necessarily from the United States itself; Russia, China, France, and other major arms dealers often saw their negotiations smoothed by American diplomacy in cases where the United States felt it would be embarrassed by direct support), to provision of military intelligence on terrorist cells and leaders, to, in some cases, direct support by American special forces and American air power, including the new and increasingly popular option of the armed drone. While drones had been extensively used by the Air Force since the Vietnam War, and attempts to build drones dated back as far as World War I, the development of satellite-based navigation and communications systems during the 1990s, together with general technological development, had led to a new level of capability for uncrewed aircraft. Although the new generation of drones had been intended as mere replacements or supplements to older piloted reconnaissance aircraft like the U-2 or the SR-71, their utility in gathering intelligence in virtual real-time quickly led to interest in arming them to strike directly at any targets found. Why call in F/A-18s, say, from a carrier offshore to attack a target, running the risk that he might be lost before they can reach him, when the drone itself could attack? By 1997, the first Hellfire-armed drones were beginning to reach the skies about trouble spots around the globe, quickly proving their utility in attacking suspected terrorists rapidly and efficiently. If there was, in military jargon, “collateral damage” from time to time, it seemed a small price compared to the security of thousands threatened by these men, and compared to the tens or hundreds of thousand who would suffer or die from more conventional methods of restraining terrorism.
Besides attempts to prevent future attacks and understand past attempts, of course, there was the matter of finding, capturing, and hopefully imprisoning or even executing the actual perpetrators and masterminds of the attack. Within hours of the first notice, the FBI had begun what would become the largest criminal investigation in US and perhaps world history, ultimately involving to a substantial extent more than thirty police and intelligence agencies worldwide and a massive international manhunt for the eventual suspects. Initially, most of the investigative focus was on the aircraft which had survived to land; before nightfall, the FBI had already liaised with the RCMP and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police to investigate the bombings at Narita and Vancouver, while another group of special agents recovered manifest information for all known lost flights from the targeted airlines. Through painstaking analysis of the flight routes over the next months, they determined that each bombed flight had passed through one or more “node airports” in East Asia, connecting two or more of the targeted flights, while equally thorough checks on the passenger and cargo manifests uncovered hundreds of possible leads that needed to be tracked down. Even within a few days of the explosions, however, the FBI was already contacting police agencies around the world to assist them in tracking down possible suspects, the originators of possibly suspect cargo and baggage, and so on.
The first big break in the investigation was the discovery more than a month after the bombings of the wreckage of one of the targeted airliners in deep water between Hawaii and the Aleutians. A joint Navy-JMSDF recovery operation, making extensive use of Japanese and American deep-diving submersibles, was able to retrieve nearly 60% of the airliner’s remains from more than two kilometers of water. Analysis of the wreckage by the FBI showed that, like United 882 and Pan Am 822, the aircraft had been destroyed by a mid-flight explosion in the passenger area, almost certainly a bomb. Together with forensic analysis of the remains of the bombs from those two flights, it had been all but proved that all nine lost airliners had been downed by bomb attacks. In the meantime, most of the suspects generated by analysis of passenger, crew, and worker manifests had been eliminated, leaving an ever-narrowing list of possible perpetrators. At the top of the FBI’s interest list were passengers who had disembarked from the doomed airliners prior to their last takeoff. Of particular interest were those who had immediately afterwards boarded international flights, especially several who had then traveled to countries seemingly tailor-made for frustrating American inquiries into their whereabouts and activities during the flights. Suspecting that they might be the perpetrators of the attack, the FBI established contacts with the Pakistani Federal Investigation Agency, where most of the persons of particular interest had fled, and with several other foreign police agencies. At the same time, analysis of the targeted flights had shown a definite pattern pointing to Subang International Airport, in Malaysia, and Soekarno-Hatta International Airport, in Indonesia, as the likely origins of the attacks. Although indirect, evidence was beginning to build pointing to Islamic terrorists, not the Japanese Red Army or other Cold War remnants as the perpetrators of the attacks.
With a better idea of the enemy that they were looking for, the dragnet being laid by the FBI and associated agencies began to narrow, focusing on tracking leads in Southeast Asia relating to radical Islam. While the Organization’s activities may have been largely below the radar of local authorities, the global scope of the Christmas Plot investigation was able to piece together a trail connecting the Christmas Plot’s perpetrators to the Organization’s operations, and then began following leads about the Organization itself. Finally, the leads added up to something far more. In the early morning hours of June 7th, 1995, some six months after the bombing, agents of the Federal Investigation Agency, assisted by members of the FBI and the Diplomatic Security Service of the American Department of State raided a safehouse belonging to the Organization, where they believed one or more of the attack’s perpetrators were hiding. Within, they found far more than just two of the attackers; they found a treasure trove of computers, record books, and other information about the group’s leadership, organization, and some limited insight into future plans. It was the breakthrough that the Gore Administration had been waiting for--a cohesive look at the identity of the attackers, and a wealth of actionable intelligence. Gore once more addressed the nation to announce the capture. It was a success that vindicated Gore’s less military, more international approach to the disaster, as even without deploying a single US soldier abroad, linked forces of allied intelligence sources--including connections that hadn’t existed before the attack--had been able to ferret out and capture some of the perpetrators and begun to catalogue the organizations and operations that had supported them. While what could be done about this list of organizations was being undertaken, the most visible result of the capture was the extradition of the two captured terrorists to the United States for trial. While the spectre of radical terror had not disappeared--indeed, in many areas it had not even ablated much--the capture of the two terrorists and lead up to their trial was something of a closing to the immediate chapter of the Christmas Plot. However, the changes in attitude wrought around the world would not fade so easily--indeed, they would continue to echo around the world.
There were a few deaths. The bomb onboard it wasn't enough to bring it down, but it certainly wasn't friendly to anyone in the surrounding few rows.