The Foreseeable Past

Known as the Common Strategy, the FAA’s hijacking protocol instructed pilots and crews never to resist, confront, or negotiate with hijackers. Instead, they were to peacefully accede to a hijacker’s demands, even if this meant turning over control of the aircraft.

This policy was developed starting in the 1960s in response to a rash of air piracy, and at the time it made sense. Through the early 1970s, most domestic hijackings were carried out by fugitives and criminals seeking to flee America. The destination was often Cuba (which had no extradition for hijackers until 1973), and the FAA’s primary concern was loss of life on the aircraft. Not unreasonably, the agency, essentially, advised: Everyone sit still and enjoy the ride. The Common Strategy remained in place, largely unaltered, until September 11.

In the aftermath of 9/11, various U.S. officials have insisted they had no way of foreseeing the use of a hijacked airplane as a weapon. Former FBI director Louis Freeh told the 9/11 Commission he “never was aware of a plan that contemplated commercial airliners being used as weapons after a hijacking. I don’t think that was integrated into any plan.” President Bush said much the same during his April 13 press conference: “Nobody in our government at least–and I don’t think in the prior government–could envision flying airplanes into buildings, on such a massive scale.”

Besides which, as one FAA official who left the agency shortly before 9/11 told me, “Up to 9/11 the Common Strategy was borne out by 40-some years of history. . . . The accepted theory was: Agree to almost anything and just get the airplane down on the ground. Once the airplane is on the ground, then we have a lot of other resources to put on it.”

Not everyone sees it that way. Former FAA security chief Billy Vincent says, “The argument that we had no idea that the hijackers could use the airplanes as bombs is pure bull–.” Vincent Cannistraro, a former head of the CIA’s counterterrorism operations, says that by the mid-1990s, there was sufficient evidence of terrorists “thinking of flying planes into buildings” that the Common Strategy clearly needed revision. Even before that, there had been cases of people planning to use commercial aircraft as weapons. Troubled Passage, the fifth volume of the FAA’s self-published history, describes two such hijackings. In November 1972, three fugitives hijacked a Southern Airlines DC-9 and threatened to crash it into a nuclear facility. The authorities became so concerned that they shot out the plane’s tires during a refueling stop.

Then in February 1974, one Samuel J. Byck stormed a Baltimore airport, killed a security guard, and boarded a plane sitting at the gate. He ordered the plane to take off, and when there was a slight delay, Byck shot the pilot and copilot. Wounded by the police, he committed suicide before the plane got off the ground. Afterwards, it was discovered that Byck had left behind a tape detailing “Operation Pandora’s Box,” his plan to crash the plane into the White House.

Fast forward to convicted terrorist Ramzi Yousef. The New York Times reports that “in interviews with FBI agents in the mid-’90s [Yousef] seemed obsessed with the notion of hijacking airliners and attacking vulnerable targets.” When Yousef’s terror cell in the Philippines was broken up in 1995, one of his followers, Abdul Hakim Murad, told Philippine police that he and Yousef had discussed hijacking a commercial jet and flying it into CIA headquarters at Langley. The report, which was passed on to U.S. authorities, sketched the idea this way: “He will board any American commercial aircraft pretending to be an ordinary passenger. Then he will hijack said aircraft, control its cockpit, and dive it at the CIA headquarters. There will be no bomb or any explosive that he will use in its execution. It is simply a suicidal mission that he is very much willing to execute.”

Even aside from these events, members of the intelligence community had considered the scenario. Last week, NORAD revealed that it ran a simulation between 1991 and 2001 in which the central concern was a hijacked airliner being crashed into a high-profile building in the United States.

What’s more, officials at the World Trade Center and Pentagon were themselves concerned about a September 11-style attack, according to Jeff Beatty, a former FBI, CIA, and Delta Force operative who runs Total Security, a consulting firm. Beatty had worked with security personnel at both sites. His brief threat-matrix analysis had concluded that both were vulnerable to jumbo-jet suicide attacks. “In both cases, to their credit, we weren’t the first ones telling them that,” Beatty says. “They had come to that on their own. I guess that kind of begs the question: If the World Trade Center and the Pentagon could conceive of this attack against them, why couldn’t the airlines?”

When asked, the FAA declines to comment. The official who left the agency before 9/11 blames a failure of intelligence: “The FAA was a regulatory security agency. It did not have access to first-line intelligence data. Ithad what the other agencies gave it.” He explains that in order to revise the Common Strategy, “the FAA would have had to show that there was an immediate threat–which they couldn’t.”

As far as access to intelligence goes, Cannistraro says the FAA, as part of the counterterrorism center at CIA, “was familiar with all of the latest intelligence threats against aircraft.” And Vincent, who left the FAA in 1986 and is now president of Aerospace Services International, says the agency turned its eye from this evidence. “If you don’t want to do anything, you can find any number of excuses for not doing it,” he says.

Consider the hijacking of Air France flight 8969 out of Algiers in 1994. After Islamic militants took over, they landed for refueling in Marseilles, and commandos stormed the plane. Recounting the incident, the former FAA official says, “There were reports that the hijackers really wanted to fly the plane into the Eiffel Tower, but all the hijackers got killed . . . and nothing was ever verified.”

The FAA must have a mighty high standard for verification. The Air France hijackers claimed they wanted to fly to Paris and hold a press conference. When negotiators in Marseilles offered to make media outlets available to them, the hijackers refused, demanding 27 tons of fuel, though 10 tons was sufficient to reach Paris. The French embassy in Algiers, meanwhile, received a phone tip claiming that the hijackers’ real goal was to detonate the plane over Paris (20 sticks of dynamite were later found onboard). The tip triggered the decision to launch the commando raid in which the terrorists were killed. Afterwards, freed hostages told authorities they’d overheard the hijackers whispering about crashing the jet into the Eiffel Tower.

Circumstantial though it is, all this evidence might have persuaded many people outside the FAA that terrorists were actively interested in using airliners as weapons. But, notes Vincent, “Actionable intelligence is in the eye of the beholder.”

Indeed, the 9/11 Commission staff report itself concedes that “the potential for terrorist suicide hijacking in the United States was officially considered by the FAA’s Office of Civil Aviation Security dating back to at least March 1998. However, in a presentation the agency made to air carriers and airports in 2000 and early 2001 the FAA discounted the threat because, ‘fortunately, we have no indication that any group is currently thinking in that direction.'”

The threat, of course, was real. Had the FAA appreciated it, the agency could have rewritten the Common Strategy at any time, according to Vincent. While the normal rule-making process is prolonged, the FAA could have adopted an Emergency Amendment “in about an hour or so.” Crews could have been instructed to land a hijacked plane as soon as possible, for example, and to keep cockpit doors locked at all costs. Says Vincent, “You would do everything in the world to keep that airplane from being commandeered by the adversary. Including unusual maneuvers. You wanted to get that airplane on the ground immediately. . . . It’s a philosophy change.”

The 9/11 Commission was hard on the FAA, but civilian security experts are harder. “I think there was enough information out there that if I had been in the airline business, I would have changed my Common Strategy prior to 9/11,” says Jeff Beatty.

The former FAA official disagrees. “How are you going to tell an airline, ‘Well, we think it’s kind of a good idea but we don’t have any real information and we don’t have any threat and we haven’t had a hijacking in over 10 years, but we think you ought to do this’? No, it ain’t going to fly. It’s typical Tom Clancy, and of course the industry fights Tom Clancy all the time.”

In Clancy’s 1994 bestseller Debt of Honor, a Japanese terrorist flies a commercial jumbo jet into the Capitol. The FAA must have discounted that one, too.

Jonathan V. Last is online editor of The Weekly Standard.