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Observations
Connection the dots
Herold tries to keep MPD ahead of terrorists
(Published September 20, 2004)

By CARRIE DEVORAH

Jeff Herold is a difficult man to get hold of.

When he finally sits, for an interview, he is candid about being an officer in one of the country’s finest branches, the Metropolitan Police Department's Special Operations Unit. His job keeps him traveling around the country, giving him "a chance to learn and train best practices of police." Herold’s lessons can be a matter of life and breath.

"Officers know the unknown is always ahead of them in these days of terrorism, unsure if they will live or die in a situation threatening the District," he says.

The nation's capital after 1 p.m. on Sept. 11, 2001, Herold recalled, was a ghost town. When the plane hit the Pentagon, "I was sitting right here," he said, pointing to his chair. His desk is covered with manuals and papers related to terrorism and disaster mitigation. Visibly affected, Herold whispered, "the whole building shook."

Herold looks out his shuttered window at civilians walking about. "That’s why I don’t have a problem with what happened in Iraq -- or any other actions against any other Middle East country, wishing death or destruction to any other person because of their beliefs," he says.

Herold offered me a seat and a cold soda from the machine outside his office. He says with conviction: "I’ve become more aggressive than I was prior to 9/11."

Herold spoke last fall at a D.C. disaster mitigation conference. He told the audience that on 9/11, when the feds left the city, his unit was left responsible for commuters wanting to get home. A show of hands responded to his Q & A as to the length of time it took commuters to get home.

"More than four hours?" he asked.

"It was inexcusable," he apologized. "It won’t happen again."

He left the dais, rushing for another commitment. I secured his business card and the promise he would sit with me for an interview. Several months later, we were sitting in Herold’s office at Special Operations. By then, I knew more about terrorism, Mideast terrorism. My youngest brother was murdered by a suicide bomber in Israel last Jan. 29. Small world that it is, Herold’s boss, Commander Cathy Lanier, was in Jerusalem the day Chezi and 10 other commuters on Egged Bus 19 were brutally murdered.

At first, Herold and I talked about 9/11. I was a crime analyst working at the UCLA Police Department that day. He asked about my department’s experience. I told him we had been ordered off the air. We knew the country had been attacked. We were told to anticipate a West Coast attack. Herold said his men were not ordered off line. "Cell phones stopped working because the network was just used up. Radios became pretty much unusable because of the increase in traffic." Nextel, the network the department used, failed. Herold has since found another way of working with police and emergency managers around the country.

"The only thing that really worked for us, and we’re still using them now -- they’ve issued them to most of the officers -- are Blackberries. We type our messages in back and forth." I told Herold a friend of mine was one of several ham radio operators who played a role in transmitting communications in 9/11’s wake.

"There is a group called REACT in Washington," he said. "We didn’t use them here."

Found to be effective for communicating on and post 9/11, when other systems failed, the military appropriations provided $300,000 to expand ham radio operations.

Herold is concerned with developing a disaster plan for the District. A lot of what is known about human reaction to toxins is theory from results produced in testing on animals. More was learned about human exposure to nerve agents after the Tokyo subway station tragedy and from the gas chambers in Nazi Germany.

Developing a foolproof disaster plan is challenging. Herold acknowledges he does not know the type of weapons Iraq posseses. He does know they had nerve agents because they used them against their own population about 10 years ago, he says. MPD learned a lot about anthrax after the postal contamination in 2001. He knows the danger of anthrax is when people re-aerosolize spores. "All that’s needed," he says, "is between 700 to 1,500 spores."

Officers are issued suits to wear during a biological or chemical attack. The suits have an air life of 20 minutes that may diminish based on the permeation factor of the suit’s material and breathing devices filtering biological substances.

"So, I just can’t say it will work for 15 minutes. Just can’t say," Herold says.

He swivels in his desk chair to show me "Smart Suit," the computer program he will rely on when the department responds to an emergency "weapons of mass destruction" call. Herold said "we wouldn’t know that this stuff is in the environment until people got symptomatic or we got lucky and found it." Herold explains once the substance is determined, its name is entered into the program. He will be provided details such as breathing time, exposure to the chemical, how to kill the chemical, how to protect the chemical.

Israel is sophisticated in civilian preparation for WMD’s. WMD-prepared "safe rooms" are built into new homes. Residents are issued gas masks along with antidotes for known biological and chemical toxins. WMD preparedness can be guesswork. There isn’t a preparedness formula for unknown toxins under development. Herold asks that my line of questioning be changed. Answering a question about a painful inevitability is etched in his face. He is an officer sworn to preserve life, at all cost to his own life. Herold’s considerations are "more feet on the ground" than a spiritual approach to a disaster.

"We do what we can to assure that the civilian population is as safe as it can be. We cannot protect them from the event. We can mitigate the event to the point we lessen the impact on society," he says.

Lack of intelligence sharing from the federal government is Herold’s biggest stumbling block to developing an effective disaster plan for D.C. Foreign policies "don’t drift down to our level," he says. "Some of the complaints that we’ve had are not with Intel -- it's more with what we get out of the federal government in the U.S. What threats do you have? How can I design a response with the police department, which is what I do, if I don’t know what the threat is? They’ve gotten much better at it. They’ve gotten clearances for a lot of us so that that complaint is lessened to a great extent than it was a year and a half and two years ago."

"The (federal government's) roadmap, although I am aware of it, has not changed any of our philosophies or deployments or response to a terrorist event. …What really changed our way of thinking in response and prevention was 9/11. And," says Herold, "it took a 9/11 for us to start to realize more that we also can become victims here. A lot of us were banging the table going as far back as 1995. Saying we really need to start concerning ourselves with these kinds of things, with those types of events."

The federal government, he continued, sponsored a bill that put out several million dollars to help municipalities get ready for a terrorist type of event. In 1995, Am Shrikiyo, the terrorists released toxins in the Japanese underground.

Herold, openly Jewish, was raised by practicing Jews, to believe he is no different than anyone else. He is proud of his fairly thick skin, his family’s beliefs, his history, being and refusal to be discriminated against.

"It’s the way I was brought up. If you don’t like it, its just too … bad," he says. "When my family came from Europe they were all reform, even at that point when they first came over. They’re mostly from Austria. A lot of my family was put to death in Bavaria."

Herold’s experience with the Middle East is limited, at this time, to details his commanding officer brought back from Jerusalem. He intends to go to Israel. Plane tickets sit in his drawer, waiting for his boss to let him get out of town. His intention is to cross over into the territories, to learn about terrorism, firsthand.

"Of course, I would cross over but I would be doing it as an American, a guest of the Israeli government at that point. I don’t know how well I would be accepted. I don’t think they would like me too much." He didn’t know if he will even be allowed to cross into the territories without the protection of the Israeli military. "In that part of the world, they do not differentiate between a municipal police officer and a government law enforcement official."

Herold thinks the left-wing Muslims are "more mainstream Western than we think they are." Referring to one of the last female suicide bombers in Israel, killing herself and Israeli soldiers at a check point. I told Herold, in Israel, a version of her story I heard was her husband, while fighting with her, told her to go blow herself up. Her friends told media that she thought her husband would stop her, apologize for what he said, and they would live happily ever after. Her husband, cradling his motherless children, was beside himself for what he said to her in anger. A little too late.

I told Herold the residents of my brother’s community in Betar Ilit expressed to me, Jews are taught to pray for hope; Muslims are taught to pray for hate. "I would tend to agree with that," he said. Herold has seen videos of the teachings in Mideast Muslim communities. He shakes his head at what he viewed, 3 year olds being taught to become a suicide bomber is a rite of passage. "I don’t see how you can change that mindset. It’s innate. It’s ingrained in their psyche," he said.

Herold challenges the statistic that 85 percent of suicide bombers are prevented from entering Israel to carry out their attacks. He looked at pictures of the Wall that Commander Lanier brought back with her from Israel. Herold feels lengthening or shortening the Wall "may make a difference. It will follow people through so that people could be checked moving from the territories into Israel." Someone determined to attack Israel will find a way around it, he said.

Lanier and other police commanders from across America were in Israel to observe strategies Israeli police enforce to combat terrorism. Lanier and fellow officers viewed Bus 19’s detonation site after the dead, injured and wreckage were removed.

"I don’t know what the answer is in that region," said Herold, "I do understand the mindset to some extent of the Palestinian, to some extent." His understanding came from a briefing presented by a former CIA employee working for Rand Corp, "a security company, 'beltway bandits' employed by the federal government." 'Beltway bandits,' he explains, are the organizations around the Capitol Beltway that prosper off government contracts. The government "outsources almost everything. Weapons systems. A lot of their intelligence gatherings. RAND, SAIC (Science Applications International Corporation)."

"The briefing that was put out by the gentleman from Rand said the Middle Eastern mindset is mainly comprised of everything that has ever happened to that population from the time of Mohammed to today, compressed into one small little capsule, so to speak. … Yeah, they have baggage going back thousands of years and every one of their people have that baggage, so whatever happened back in Mohammad’s times happened to them personally to each one of those people in that society," he said.

Rand, a government "think tank," has contributed thoughts on child welfare, justice, education, drug policy, social welfare and national security since 1948. Clients include the United Nations, World Bank, European Commission and Heinz Endowments, chaired by Teresa, wife of Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry. Frank Carlucci, founder of Carlyle Group, sits on RAND’s Board of Trustees. George Bush Sr.’s relationship with Carlyle began in 1990. He was compensated in shares. He resigned his seat from networking and speaking for Carlyle in October 2003. Binladin Group was among investors in the $13 billion company.

Rand’s latest fiscal year budget, $160 to $170 million dollars, was split 50-50 between defense and domestic issues. RAND grew out of the Army Air Corps, says company spokesman Warren Roback. During WWII, the air corps became the Air Force. The military foresaw rapid changes in the military’s future. To prepare for the changes and have an outside perspective, RAND was developed with Douglas Aircraft. The company continued to expand. Rand's deputy director of external communications says, "At any given time, RAND has hundreds of research projects going on. Rand is an independent research organization. We provide research to many groups including the government, helping them address research and difficult issues."

"Rand research should help intelligence," says Roback. He hopes clients use RAND research to address their issues whether deciding to train individually in the law enforcement agency to deal with terrorism or health issues, RAND’S areas of expertise.

Herold picks up a copy of THOR. THOR, an anacronym named after the mythical Norse god of war, thunder and strength, published in 2002, "intended to give first response personnel operational direction at terrorism incidents." THOR was out of date when it was written. The munitions chapter does not address train bombings such as occured internationally in Russia and Madrid. Nor does the handbook address suicide bombers. Israel began suffering from bomb murderers in 2000.

Herold shakes his head at the notion of using the FBI profilers to profile bomb murderers. "You look at the profile that was created for the sniper murderers two years ago. The profile done by the FBI was completely opposite to the people committing the murders. Some people are completely outside the profile. Women are outside our profile," said Herold, noting bomb murderers include children and women. The reality is America’s at danger from other ethnicities as evidenced with the arrest by FBI agents of Portland, Ore., caucasian attorney Brandon Mayfield, reported by CNN to be an Islam convert, possibly involved in the March 11 Madrid train bombings that killed 190 people. Herold is not concerned that bomb murderers blend or that anyone approaching him might be "it." "You are always aware or alert for things like that. I couldn’t say for sure just because that is an African American walking towards me that he is not a Muslim trained in the Middle East, schooled in the Middle East to be the first murder bomber in the U.S."

"We actually are more challenged. We have more assets concentrating on murder bombings. I think that since there’s no real profile of a murder bomber that technology is going to have to be used to detect these folks."

Herold is a little concerned over things he has heard through Boston and New York police departments, such as Gerry Adams, leader of the Irish Republican Army, being funded with "fees" for speaking engagements and by the Ancient Order of the Hibernia, American Irish descendants, allegedly using the money for terrorist training in Europe. "They either have proof or it is just supposition on their part," he says. Herold says the department sees Ireland as a minor player in terrorism. "They may be a little bit more effective in the training area -- we know that they are in South America training terrorists in South America, in the Middle East and Asia." Herold points at Bali as new ground terrorists discovered. Herold does not know details of the IRA being linked to events. Herold’s personal thought is that some of these folks may just be anarchists in philosophy and they may just do anything essentially to degrade the effectiveness of government. I tell him about the sign in Northern Ireland that I photographed. Pictured are an IRA soldier and a PLO soldier. The words in between them say, "Two people, one cause." His eyebrows raise. No words were said.

Herold says the problem for a U.S. response to bus bombings is that America’s never had one so there is nothing to gauge it or consider it, until it happens. The risk of being involved in a situation like that in the U.S. is considered pretty much non-existent. "We’re real good at slamming a door after an event in the U.S.," he said. "The one you didn’t slam is the one that is going to get you. The event that is going to occur is going to get you through the door you didn’t even think about. 9/11 happened -- we just didn’t slam all the doors."

Lanier is one of almost 20 officers in five separate groups the Metropolitan Police Department has sent over the last two years to Israel, learning about terrorist mitigation riding with and working with the Israeli national police force. The officers don’t travel Israeli buses while they are visiting there. "To be perfectly honest," said Herold, "if I was in Israel, I’m not going to ride a bus either. It’s risky traveling into areas like that." Definitely, it's still relatively safe to travel a bus in Israel, however if you want to cut your risk even less you stay out of the areas where there is risk. Even though it's a slight chance of getting murdered by a bomber because buses run thousands of people a day, and we lose a few a year.

The Israeli government's limited dissemination of terror attack scenes is challenging D.C.’s ability to prevent similar disasters. "Pictures of victims are going to help us. Pictures of scenes may. Victims at scenes may. Blast patterns may. However for a bombing, it is better to prevent because you are not going to mitigate a bombing." Herold said the problem with bomb murders is they happen in a blink of an eye. Jerusalem Post reporter Erik Shacter survived Bus 19’s explosion. He wrote about hearing a whine and seeing a flash before realizing he was injured in a bus bombing.

Lanier deferred comment on Bus 19 or D.C. officers' ability to handle a second terrorist strike in the nation’s capital to the department’s press officer, Sgt Joe Gentile. Gentile said that "the reality is that we remain on a heightened level of alert. That has been the case since Sept 11 after the terrorist attack. We work very closely with other city and federal agencies to keep as informed as possible about possible terrorists." Gentile stated citizens are assisting the department, daily reporting calls for something suspicious. "Today we went out on a call that turned out to be a briefcase left on a street corner. Even if it turns out to be nothing, call. We encourage citizens to contact the police immediately."

I forgot to ask Gentile what will happen to District civilians during an attack if the new government Internet service provider is not working, again. After 9/11, I was speaking with an officer in the Capitol Police. He told me, then, their system was down around 9/11. A virus, I recall. Twice, in the month, when I had been speaking with sworn officers, the department was experiencing computer problems. Someone in authority ordered the government put on one line. I could not send Gentile an email. He said there was a virus, a worm, preventing him from accessing his emails. He was still waiting for his new password to be given to him.

MPD is working to assist the local community prepare for an "event," as he calls it. "We’re doing everything we can to prepare it from happening. And if we cannot prevent it, like 9/11, we couldn’t prevent it, we will do our best to mitigate the outcome." He clarifies "mitigate": "Lessen the impact of the outcome."

Herold is reworking the plan for the strategic national stockpile of medicine, prophylactic type drugs available throughout the country. Herold points to a binder dealing with a biological attack, laying on his bookshelf under D.C.’s Snow Emergency Plan. "If you have an event, (enforcement word for terror attack), that’s (the stockpile) moved into your area, distributed by the Department of Health." Herold recently worked alongside the National Research Cap Council, getting academia talking about risk communication for a day. Herold says academia recommends not discussing percentages of "the chance of something happening." He confides there is a 3 to 6 percent risk of a biological or chemical event happening. "Too low on the level," he says, pointing out WMD is the correct term to cover both potentials of attack.

MPD is considering the ripple effect of a terrorist attack, beyond the dead, on to the living at the scene, witness to body mutilation, covered in blood. MPD has used grief counselors to fill in the city’s events emergency plans like the Ballou Senior High School shootings. Herold is convinced they have not dealt with terrorist response. Assistance is available from the faith community. He does not know if they have put things in place to deal with such massive events.

Herold supports the Patriot Act. He believes it gives enforcement a little bit more authority. Herold emphasizes the Act is not as far reaching as to violate the constitution, as argued by presidential opponents. The standard of balance and checks law enforcement follows to prevent improper enforcement or detention is "reasonable suspicion."

President Bush called Congress to renew and strengthen. Bush addressed the need for removal of legal and bureaucratic restrictions on information sharing between law enforcement, intelligence and national security officials. The President said the restrictions made it difficult to "get a complete picture of the terrorist threats preventing law enforcement from having all the pieces of the puzzle in one place." "Now," the President said, "FBI agents, Federal prosecutors, and intelligence officials can protect our communities by "connecting the dots" to uncover terrorist plots before they are completed while respecting constitutional rights."

Herold’s candor is typical of MPD officers, willing to sacrifice their own lives for strangers. Profiling terrorists concerns officers. Herold said, "There is always going to be the one profile we haven’t developed yet that is going to surprise us. Anything is possible at anytime."

"I think the cells," said Herold, "are already here, waiting to be awakened."

Copyright 2004, The Common Denominator