There are a number of ways to make liquid explosives. My guess is that terrorists would use one based on the peroxide family. This is because it is relatively easy to initiate such explosives. There is no need for a detonator and a booster. A burning cigarette or a match would be enough to set them off. The basic materials to achieve this are readily available in unlimited quantities in hardware stores, pharmacies, agricultural suppliers, and supermarkets. Sadly, most airports are not yet equipped with the appropriate means to detect those explosives. The truth is that there is no efficient way to stop a suicide bomber who carries a peroxide-based explosive on his body or in his carry-on luggage.
The Mossad chemists concluded that while it would be difficult to destroy an aircraft with one liquid-based bomb, it could be achieved by combining several bombs on one aircraft and placing them near windows or escape hatches. But even a small device could sever an aircraft’s hydraulic control cables. MI5 chemists had studied the precedents for such attacks on board an aircraft. In June 1985, Sikh militants had obliterated an Air India aircraft over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 329 passengers. Pan Am Flight 103 had been similarly destroyed on December 21, 1998, over the Scottish town of Lockerbie. In 1995, al-Qaeda operatives planned to attack a number of passenger planes over the Pacific Ocean. One aircraft owned by Philippine Airlines was attacked with a nitrocellulose bomb, which killed one passenger and injured ten others. On December 22, 2001, Richard Reid, a British-born follower of Osama bin Laden, tried to destroy American Airlines Flight 63 as it flew from Paris to Miami. He had explosives stuffed in his shoes.
The details of all these acts were on the screens in the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre in London. At 10:30 on a warm Sunday night in August, the red light on the senior duty officer’s desk blinked. The caller was Eliza Manningham-Buller, head of MI5. Moments earlier she had been told that four months of a patient and top-secret investigation by MI5, MI6, the CIA, Mossad, and Pakistan’s intelligence service was about to reach its climax. John Scarlett, the head of MI6, had just received a “flash” encrypted e-mail from a field agent in Karachi. Pakistan intelligence had confirmed that al-Qaeda was about to launch a series of attacks on British and American transatlantic flights from Heathrow. It was the moment the greatest terrorist threat Britain had ever faced brought JTAC to “full operational mode.” In rapid succession, Tony Blair was alerted. He contacted President Bush. By then key officials in Cobra, the government crisis team, were being briefed. So was Sir Ian Blair, Britain’s top policeman. Airline chiefs and other authorities, including the director of security for the Channel Tunnel, were also alerted. All the heads of foreign intelligence were told. By then the Anacapa charts were filling, the center’s plasma screens were alive with data, and the phones blinking furiously. Over the next six days, into and out of the work stations—each equipped with state-of-the-art communications systems—information flowed. Intelligence—once only shared with the CIA, French, and German security services—was exchanged with other services. The question all urgently needed to answer was: had they picked up even “a whisper in the wind” of when the plot to destroy the airliners would happen? From Rome came the first hint. SIMSI, the Italian secret service, said they had a large number of terror suspects under surveillance. One had admitted the attack would come “very soon.”
