How Secure Are The Skies?

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In 1978 an Air Rhodesia plane carrying 52 passengers and four crew members was shot down by guerrillas with a shoulder-fired missile. A few months later, the missile-toting guerrillas fired on another Air Rhodesia flight, killing all 59 people on board. Scary stuff, but there have been few instances since then of such a weapon firing on and downing a commercial airliner. In the past 18 months, alQaeda has twice tried to down planes with shoulder-fired missiles; both times they missed. It turns out that shoulder-fired missiles, while compact enough to fit in a duffel bag, are not particularly reliable weapons. But with an estimated 350,000 of them in government caches around the globe and countless more for sale on the black market, there is an abundance of them available. Even people like Hemant Lakhani think they can get their hands on one.

Lakhani, 68, a Briton born in India, was arrested in New Jersey last week in a joint sting operation by the FBI and the Russian Federal Security Service for trying to sell a shoulder-fired missile to an informant posing as a terrorist. In what appears to be a coincidence, at almost the exact moment the FBI was beaming over Lakhani's arrest, security forces in Saudi Arabia discovered a document indicating that Saudi militants were casing King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh in preparation for an attack on a British target. U.S. officials believe that the militants may have planned to assault passengers at the check-in lines or down a plane with a shoulder-fired missile.

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Of the two cases, Lakhani's is both more surprising (it happened on U.S. soil) and less menacing (he never came close to either a terrorist or a weapon). According to a criminal complaint filed in Newark federal court last week, Lakhani first came to the FBI's attention in 2001 when an informant posing as the representative of a Somali terrorist group asked about getting a shoulder-fired missile. Lakhani's response: "It can be done." In July, after the FBI had wired $86,500 to Lakhani's alleged suppliers, he met in Moscow with two Russians who inserted themselves into the negotiations and, unbeknownst to him, were agents. The Russians showed Lakhani a replica of an Igla-S portable antiaircraft missile — one of the more accurate shoulder-fired missiles — and promised that they could ship it into the U.S. undetected. Lakhani was apparently so impressed that he met with them again a few days later in St. Petersburg to ask for 50 more.

Lakhani turned up at the Wyndham hotel in Elizabeth, N.J., last Tuesday to meet with his supposed buyer and remove the first Igla-S (the same replica) from its packing crate. The FBI was waiting for him. But before making the arrest, they recorded a lengthy conversation in which he allegedly incriminated himself in the bulk missile purchase. When agents finally burst in, Lakhani was so stunned that he stood frozen in the middle of the room.

The FBI insists that Lakhani is a "significant international arms dealer," but the degree of his apparent gullibility (wouldn't an arms kingpin have known something about suppliers and fake weapons, or at least become suspicious about last-minute negotiators?) immediately led to speculation that the bureau had used a drift net to catch a minnow. Indeed, there is no evidence tying Lakhani to any terrorist group (though he did refer to Americans as "bastards" on an FBI tape), nor is there anything to explain why a man who until three years ago owned a clothing business would have been interested in weapons brokering. Still, says New Jersey U.S. Attorney Christopher Christie: "Mr. Lakhani presented himself to us, not the other way around."

While the Lakhani case posed no immediate threat to U.S. security, the situation in Saudi Arabia was clearly imminent and volatile. Following the Saudi announcement, British Airways suspended all flights into the country, and the British and American embassies in Riyadh issued fresh alerts to their nationals. The U.S. message read in part, "There is credible information that terrorists have targeted Western aviation interests in Saudi Arabia."

Shoulder-fired missiles are available all over the world, but at the moment the Middle East is a virtual Wal-Mart. By most estimates, Saddam Hussein had a hidden collection of more than 1,000 shoulder-fired missiles before the war, and, says Lieut. General Ricardo Sanchez, commander of the coalition ground forces in Iraq, "there's by no means any sense of comfort on my part that we have identified and secured everything that was out there." The Pentagon is so concerned that it is offering $500 for every shoulder-fired missile Iraqis turn over to authorities, but so far, not a single check has been written. And with Iraq's borders more or less unguarded, Sanchez says, "there could be all sorts of munitions and just about every other kind of smuggling happening."

The White House is operating under the assumption that it is only a matter of time before one of those shoulder-fired missiles emerges as a domestic threat. June's homeland-security appropriations bill included $60 million to study whether the antimissile technology currently used on military planes can be adapted for commercial use. Meanwhile, the Senate Commerce Committee is debating the commercial airline missile-defense act, which proposes equipping all commercial aircraft in the U.S. fleet (nearly 7,000 planes in all) with antimissile technology at a cost experts place, rather unexpertly, between $10 billion and $100 billion.