Empire State Building

Transcription

1 Pat O Brien, FBI WMD Coordinator for New York City, tells Gwyn Winfield about building, and keeping, a coalition together CBRNeWORLD Empire State Building The only thing worse than having to work with one 500lb gorilla would presumably be having to work with two. From the outside that would seem to be Pat O Brien s job as WMD Coordinator for the FBI New York Office. The city is traditionally the favourite flavour of target for terrorists worldwide, and it has been funded appropriately: New York Police Department (NYPD) and Fire Department of New York (FDNY) both have a CBRN defence capability equivalent to some Nato members. With the threat being constantly high, and funding running accordingly, there are some strong feelings about how things should be done, and those emotions can run strongly inside New York as much as outside. Holding the ring, and helping ensure that this emotion is put to practical, constructive, use is Pat O Brien, who as WMD Coordinator has to help manage any terrorist incident that happens in New York. New York doesn t have a monopoly on ego and personality, however. While many cities fire and police departments get along, many do not, so it is not a unique experience for a WMD Coordinator to ensure that cap badge and jurisdiction politics are kept out of it. For some regions the FBI WMD Coordinator might be the most educated responder in CBRN, in New York he will be one of many. So what does the FBI bring to New York that it doesn t already have? One of the first things that Mr O Brien is keen to point out is that the work of the Bureau is not August 2013 CBRNe WORLD 13

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3 Empire State Building CBRNeWORLD There's more than one way of doing things in NYC, and it is the job of the WMD Coordinator to ensure that all are heard CBRNe World just constrained to FDNY and NYPD, and neither is it just limited by New York City. As such, neither is it the job for just one man, as Mr O Brien explained: In other field offices you will have the Coordinator, and he might be the sole focal point for the whole WMD programme, even if they are attached to the JTTF (Joint Terrorism Task Force). We have a dedicated squad in the New York JTTF that focuses on the WMD mission, that also brings in expertise from our partners in NYPD, FDNY (who have a presence with us through their Fire Marshals, their sworn law enforcement side), NY State police, New York City DEP (Department of Environmental Protection) police, the law enforcement custodians for the water system north of the city, the United States Postal Inspection Service (USPIS), Port Authority, MTA (Metropolitan Transit Authority) and Amtrak police. We are able to address threats not only in terms of what the Bureau brings, but we leverage the expertise of all the partner agencies house and within our area of responsibility. The coordination piece is huge because there is such an organic capability in the city and the other eight counties that we cover: Nassau, Suffolk and Westchester Counties in particular all have robust WMD capabilities and a wealth of resources. How do we leverage that, and marry up the front end capability with a national response, so that everyone is dialled in? Inevitably if you look for something you will find something, that something might not always be something nefarious. It is as important to be able to quickly understand that problem and manage it before it turns to crisis, as it is to respond to a crisis. There is a wealth of high stakes decisions that need to be made in a short space of time when dealing with the sensitivities of a large city like NYC, and dealing with the infrastructure, movement of commerce and people throughout the NE corridor in the US is incredibly important. Something going wrong in NY has a serious rippling effect, and that has to be recognised in the management piece. For the Bureau it is not necessarily about bringing a single capability, but how do we assist with getting the proper situational awareness so we can make the best collective decision that we can. As the Suffolk County PD article showed (CBRNe World June 2013) there is strength in depth in the New York region, but even giant capability, such as Suffolk and Nassau County possess, is nothing compared with the titanic capability of FDNY and NYPD (See CBRNe World, Autumn 2009). How then does a small federal team persuade, cajole or impose their will on such entities as FDNY and NYPD when they need to? It is not really about having to impose it, said Mr O Brien, it is about working together and building the relationships up front, so when it does happen we are already working together. It is not the Bureau imposing itself; it will always be a joint operation, and robust as those two agencies are when you are look at a real WMD event it will quickly tap out everyone s organic resources and the way of getting what is collectively needed from the US government comes through the FBI and the WMD programme. We saw it in the anthrax attacks in How do we coordinate and get the best out of what is available to us? Mr O Brien went on to say that the strength of the local capability was in itself an advantage, that their ability to match all but the largest incident allowed them more time to plan and build for the specials. When there is such a local, organic capability, it provides us with the luxury of focusing on the worst-case scenarios, so that if a device with WMD material was discovered how are we poised to deal with that and eliminate the threat, either from a render-safe perspective from EOD or isolating and removing the material. It gives us the luxury of focussing on the high consequence, knowing that at the local level they have a great idea of day-to-day preventative activities that we can coordinate with but don t fall on our shoulders In the August 2013 CBRNe WORLD 15

4 CBRNeWORLD Empire State Building NYC's defence is to ensure that attacks don't get close to critical infrastructure CBRNe World early hours of any event, where a lot of municipalities would struggle with the resources that they need, we will have resources available to us, we won t have lag time: where there is a problem we can respond collectively. We won t have every piece of equipment that we would like, or that is available, but we will have enough to get that ball rolling and then fill in with the niche pieces that might be missing, rather than immediately reaching back and being dependent on other people. It is a luxury to have that. There won t be any wait time between the obvious partners, FDNY and NYPD, and the partners in the outer counties. We will have the resources to work collectively. Much as Suffolk County officials explained in the last issue, there is a need to look outside the immediate defences of NYC, the ramparts of New York s defence is in the outlying districts. This mindset ensures that Manhattan itself is not too mesmerising, and that equal opportunity is given to the neighbourhood. The intelligence tells us that we cannot have that view [that just focuses on NYC]. When we look into other terrorist incidents often the target of that attack is not where the operational preparation piece is. The Bureau invests a lot of time and effort in the left of boom time frame, to prevent, detect and deter rather than respond, so setting up tripwires and methods to identify WMDrelated activities prior to an actual event, having the buy-in from our counties is a critical part of it, said Pat O Brien. Many other responder forces in the US, and elsewhere, are dealing with sequester, or a draw down in funding and resources, but what impact does this have on New York? There is a school of thought that suggests that since it always will be the primary target that it should remain cut-free, but equally a cut in New York s grant funding would go a long way to ensuring that other regions would have to reduce their capability less. Mr O Brien stated that it was more likely that New York would just maintain their capability, getting neither better or worse, that their capability was strong enough to weather 16 CBRNe WORLD August

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6 CBRNeWORLD Empire State Building the sequester storms and remain unscathed. This was not to suggest that there wouldn t be positive change, even if it wasn t driven by grant funding, and he pointed to the benefits from being an all-hazard response. The biggest areas of improvement will be in the all-hazard approach, the same mind-set exists in FBI HQ but it is a lot easier at the local level to accomplish that, since we are co-located and share a mutual mission, whereas the HQ level has different funding streams; the directorate, the lab, and other areas which have historical lanes that need to be broken down and crossed over. Our biggest advantage will be not having just a bomb tech, or a WMD or hazmat programme, not having the three programmes stovepiped, and not necessarily working with each other, but moving towards being grey, all hazards. We see it now with our WMD Coordinators and Bomb Technicians. Half of the Coordinators are bomb techs, half of the Bomb Techs are assistant coordinators, same thing on the hazmat side, all the WMD personnel are hazmat trained, and two on the hazmat team are also bomb techs, so we are cross-train within ourselves. When we look at the growth areas, where the threats are, there is the home-made explosive threat, and their precursor chemicals can trip our WMD trip wires. If those two communities don t speak then it is very easy for the bomb techs to get tunnel vision and concern themselves only with the device and the render-safe piece, and have the WMD side of the house worrying only about intercepting the chemicals beforehand, and what happens once it is married to the device well, that is hazmat or the bomb techs responsibility. We need to blur that out, so it gets buy-in across the board of what the three mission sets are and have them working towards one goal, rather than three individual goals that may support one another. In New York we have the luxury of being further ahead as we have a dedicated squad. That definition, and course of action, are fine if you define all hazards as CBRNE, but some see it as being far wider than that, encompassing different major incidents, such as tornadoes, earthquakes, floods etc. That skills needed to deal with mass casualty events are largely agnostic: for example contaminated remains/sites could be due to a hurricane, tsunami or terrorist attack. In many cases the spectrum has to be considered at all times, just because there has been a natural disaster doesn t mean that crime or terrorist activities will stop consider Hurricane Katrina. In fact, some individuals might choose to strike when the responders are already maxed out in dealing with another event. Pat O Brien agreed, It is a good point. Often a WMD attack might not result in catastrophic loss of life, but that does not mean that it doesn t have a catastrophic effect: it can be financial, a denial of access. When we have natural disasters like Sandy, terrorists see what the impact of denying a certain area is, such as the financial markets, and how that taxes the local resources and operations in the municipality. An attempted attack might not be successful by one metric but still have the other metrics of success, so it might not have a large casualty count but psychological and financial effects are as real as the human effect, in terms of the overall goal of terrorism itself. New York, like London, has a fairly robust psychology, and an exceptionally capable responder force. Currently, much like many branches of the military, the WMD Coordinators are engaged with the shift in the aim point: that the terrorist groups are changing as foreign operations are wound down, although their target set and choice of weapons remain the same. Mr O Brien is keen to point out that they are not abandoning any target set, but they are trying to get in front of the trends, so that the response, and intelligence, are there long before the threat evolves. Much like the street artists who juggle chainsaws it s hard not to have respect for Mr O Brien and the job that he does. There is a New York mindset, and neither FDNY or NYPD will suffer fools (and sometimes each other) gladly, and to be able to tread the line between them, and provide assets that complement rather than compete, cannot be the easiest of tasks. Mistakes would be messy for everyone! Communication needs to happen between FBI teams as well as other NYC responders CBRNe World 18 CBRNe WORLD August