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London terrorists missed their target

By PETER D. ZIMMERMAN
Published July 24, 2005

LONDON - I think they are trying to play with my mind, and I don't like it. For the second time in two weeks my new hometown was hit by backpack bombs, almost precisely mimicking the lethal attacks of 7/7, as July 7 has become known here. Four bombs. Three on Tube subway trains and one on a bus, exactly like the first attack. Repetition should frighten more than random bombs.

This time there were no explosions, and no deaths, mutilations or shrapnel injuries. Speculation ran the gamut from copycat bombers with no skills, to home-brew explosive that had so deteriorated over the last week that it was impotent. Sir Ian Blair, the commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police, said that the intentions of Thursday's bombers must have been to kill, and in that we know they failed. My first thought was that the bombs were deliberate "blanks," with detonators but no explosives. It was hard to believe that four bombs were wired up in much the same way as on 7/7, but that last week's specimens failed to detonate. Besides, dummy bombs would have had the advantage of preserving the bombers for another run in the future.

But it appears that Sir Ian was right. News pictures of one of the surviving backpacks show a quantity of yellow-orange material that certainly looks like explosives. And we knew that after the first attacks on 7/7 the surviving members of the sleeper cell had more explosives. Both days saw long delays between initial reports of attacks and any solid information emerging from the authorities. It is a new lesson in the "fog of war" and what "intelligence cycle time" really means. There is a lengthy period when rumors fly - arrests, hospitals attacked, dud bombs, real bombs - and there seems little to do about it. The media are reporting what they see and hear, and what the police tell them, but they also amplify rumors and often unreliable information from eyewitnesses. Reliable and detailed information didn't get out for hours.

Whether the bombs of July 21 were meant to murder or merely to frighten, psychology was a major part of the message. On 7/7 all four bombs were intended to detonate in the subway. But one attacker was forced to take a bus because the Underground system shut down quickly after the first three blasts. Perhaps his time fuze didn't explode properly, and he was forced to leave the Underground, and set off his device by hand on the only transportation left, one of London' iconic red double-decker buses.

On 21/7, as the British write dates, one bomb was deliberately placed on a bus, so that the pattern was identical to that of the first round. Even if this second round had been intended to kill but failed, the pattern was to remind Londoners and tourists that al-Qaida remained in business, and could attack the city in an instant.

One thing is new: Armed police shot and killed one suspected bomber Friday morning as he was trying to flee. London cops are almost never armed. But this is the city that survived the Blitz when 40,000 were killed and hundreds of thousand made homeless by German bombs. Every Londoner I talk to is determined that he or she will live up to the tradition established from 1940 to 1945. The London population of today is very different from that in the early 1940s - more immigrants, many from Muslim lands - and fewer people of the "native" English stock. It doesn't seem to matter except for the small number of Londoners who became our enemies.

The aim of terrorists is to terrify. In London they have missed their target. The terrorists have everybody watching, and in a day or a week or two may kill many more. They have the capability. But they won't paralyze this city except during the periods needed for police investigations and to clear the dead and injured and repair the damage. London lived with the decades of IRA bombings, too.

I frequently walk past Columbia House, home of the CBS Radio News team during the Battle of Britain. These days I can sometimes hear a faint voice from the roof: "This is . . . London, and this is Edward R. Murrow reporting."

I went back to work in the U.S. Capitol on Sept. 12, 2001, and on the day after the anthrax attacks. I'll watch for stray packages, and I won't do anything foolish, but I will be damned if these guys are going to change my life with their backpacks. The rest of London seems to agree.

Peter D. Zimmerman is Professor of Science and Security at King's College London. He was formerly chief scientist of the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.

[Last modified July 22, 2005, 21:01:02]