The Foreign Service Journal, June 2010

What Went Wrong with the Nigerian Bomber? O mar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the youngest of 16 children born to a wealthy Nigerian banker, had followed the path of many children of the developing world’s elite. In 2005 he enrolled at University College London, where he earned a low C grade point average in engineering and fi- nance. A devout Muslim, he was the president of the school’s Islamic Society, and had shown some public sym- pathy with radical groups preaching violence. But that his- tory was either not known, or did not leave a negative impression on the consular officer in London who issued him a multiple-entry tourist visa on June 12, 2008, for a trip to Houston. That should have changed in November 2009, when the young man’s father made an extraordinary visit to the U.S. embassy in Abuja. He warned State and CIA officers that his son had taken up with radical Islamists in Yemen, known as the training ground for a jihadist group called al- Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula. The message was taken se- riously enough for reporting back to Washington in a Visas Viper cable, a procedure set up by the department after the 1993 World Trade Center bombing attempt to ensure that a foreign individual with potential terrorist links was placed on the appropriate watch lists. The cable was shared with the National Counterterrorism Center, which is responsible for collating and analyzing intelligence to decide which indi- viduals should be listed on the massive terrorist watch list of some 400,000 names built out since the 9/11 attacks. The NCTC’s failure to pull together the different threads that pointed to Abdulmutallab’s involvement in a terrorist plot is well-known. It did include his name in an extensive NCTC database of potential terrorists, the Terrorist Identities Data- mart Environment. But he was never placed on any watch lists, such as the “no fly” list that would have kept him from boarding the Dec. 25, 2009, Northwest Airlines flight from Amsterdam to Detroit with plastic explosives strapped to his body. What is less well known is that the State Department could easily have kept Abdulmutallab from ever boarding the plane simply by revoking his visa. Why, in the wake of his father’s warning, did that not happen? In the immediate aftermath of the failed bombing, the de- partment’s response to 12/25 looked like a rerun of 9/11. Several State Department officials pointed the finger at the in- telligence community by suggesting incorrectly that State could only have revoked the visa if it had been directed to do so by the NCTC. The center’s director, Michael Leiter, caus- tically rebutted that claim at a Senate hearing in January: “I will admit that when I was told of that authority that I don’t Of the 15 hijackers who received visas in Saudi Arabia, only two were interviewed. Security was a concern in Saudi Arabia, but it was the physical security of the embassy that was foremost on the mind of Thomas Furey, who took over as consul general in Riyadh in 2000 after three years of supervising the world’s largest consular operation, inMexico City. Furey inherited what he later called a “chaotic and dysfunctional” operation in Riyadh. Visa applications were growing by 5 percent a year, but Washington had refused to authorize more con- sular officers. Crowds would queue daily outside the em- bassy, raising fears that the building could become a terrorist target, as had already happened in August 1998 when al- Qaida detonated truck bombs outside U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing more than 200 people. Furey hit upon a solution. Some U.S. embassies around the world were already permitting travel agents to handle the initial paperwork of the visa application, an innovation Furey adopted. Under the scheme, Saudis could fill out visa applications and leave their passports with one of 10 authorized travel agencies, and the bundle of applications would be delivered daily to the U.S. embassy for process- ing. If the embassy wanted to interview an applicant, word would be sent back through the travel agent and an inter- view would be scheduled. In the first summer of the program, in 2001, the num- ber of people gathering outside the embassy fell to a frac- tion of the normal traffic. Furey loved the innovation so much that he gave it a catchy name — “Visa Express.” In the three months before 9/11, three of the hijackers re- ceived their visas through the Visa Express scheme. Following the attacks, the program became a lightning rod. Conservative activists dubbed it a “Travelocity for ter- rorists,” and charged Mary Ryan personally with nurturing a “courtesy culture” at State that was “inherently inimical to the types of reforms necessary to keep out terrorists.” Un- 42 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / J U N E 2 0 1 0 F O C U S