When it seems impossible to discover additional shady military exercises occurring Sept. 11, 2001, there comes along yet another investigator uncovering secret documents pointing to unprecedented military actions happening the same day.
National Security Archive senior fellow Jeffrey T. Richelson is reporting in his new book, “Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, America’s Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad,” that the U.S. nuclear bomb squad, known as the Nuclear Emergency Search Team, was out of the country on its first foreign deployment since 1998, at a British air base in the Cotswolds, on Sept. 11 as part of Operation Jackal Cave.
According to the book, the exercise involved more than 500 personnel, 62 aircraft, 420 short tons of cargo, the CIA and a special operations force that would seize a mock nuclear device that the NEST squad would disable.
The after-action report from the deployment, “DOE EXERCISE 03-01 JACKAL CAVE” notes the early termination of the exercise because of the attacks, but finds useful “strengths and weaknesses” including the need to “[i]ssue secure international cell phones to control members and team leaders.”
The heavily redacted report created in 2003 and prepared for the Department of Energy’s Office of Emergency Response by the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education gives only hints of the exercise, including continuing training and exercises between the Department of Energy’s Joint Technical Operations Teams (JTOT) and the Army’s 21st Ordnance Company (EOD) to “enhance command and control relationships.”
A Sept. 13, 2001 report by the BBC News Online quotes British Squadron Leader John Morris of Royal Air Force station Fairford that U.S. planes were flying to the station after being recalled from their participation in Operation Jackal Cave.
Morris is also quoted in a story printed in the Swindon Advertiser in South West England in an article dated Aug. 30, 2001 in which he describes RAF Fairford, a former wartime base, hosting a major United States European Command sponsored training exercise between September 5 and 18. Morris said Fairford would be used as a transit point for the exercise.
“Fixed wing transport aircraft will arrive and depart from the base in support of the exercise,” Morris said in the article. “There will be some early morning and late evening flights, and all flights will be for unit movement and none for local flight training. There will be no ground tactical training taking place and the overall training event will exercise crisis planning and response capabilities.”
Fairford was undergoing a £60 million runway upgrade and was temporarily reopened for the exercise.
Its most prominent use recently has been as a base for USAF B-52s during the 2003 Iraq War, Operation Allied Force in 1999, and the first Gulf War in 1991.
Fairford is also the only TransOceanic Abort Landing site for NASA’s Space Shuttle in the UK. It also has NASA-trained fire and medical crews stationed on the base.
According to the Jackal Cave report, the Department of Energy participants and equipment were returned to the U.S. by military airlift within five days of Sept. 11.
The question remains and should be posed to every major politician and military expert as to why so many drills and exercises were scheduled at the same time.
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 270
Edited by Jeffrey T. Richelson
Posted - January 23, 2009
For more information contact:
Jeffrey T. Richelson - 202/994-7000
Washington, D.C., January 23, 2009 - When the 9/11 hijackers crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the U.S. nuclear bomb squad was out of the country on its first foreign deployment since 1998, at a British air base in the Cotswolds, according to the new book Defusing Armageddon and key primary sources posted today in the National Security Archive's Nuclear Vault by Archive senior fellow Jeffrey T. Richelson.
The after-action report from that deployment, "DOE EXERCISE 03-01 JACKAL CAVE," notes the early termination of the exercise because of the terrorist attacks, but finds some useful "strengths and weaknesses" including the need to "[i]ssue secure international cell phones to control members and team leaders." According to the book, the exercise involved more than 500 personnel, 62 aircraft, 420 short tons of cargo, and the CIA as well as a special operations force that would seize a mock nuclear device that the squad would disable.
The documents were obtained by Archive Senior Fellow Jeffrey T. Richelson while conducting research for his new book, Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, America’s Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad.
U.S. Nuclear Detection and Counterterrorism, 1998-2009
By Jeffrey T. Richelson
In the late 1990s the Nuclear Emergency Search Team continued to conduct exercises, which reflected the changes made in the wake of the October 1994 MIRAGE GOLD exercise. (Note 1) The briefing materials and after-action reports for the exercises (Document 1a, Document 1b, Document 2, Document 3) also reflected that the Nuclear Emergency Search Team had become an umbrella term for NEST's various specialized teams, including teams that worked closely with the military. The LINCOLN GOLD Augmentation Team (LGAT) supported U.S. special operations forces (such as Delta Force and other special mission units) while the Joint Technical Operations Team (Document 8) cooperated with the military on disablement and device transportation.
In 2002 the name of NEST changed slightly when it became the Nuclear Emergency Support Team (Document 4), which highlighted NEST's role in supporting the FBI with respect to domestic incidents and the Department of State with respect to foreign incidents. By that time, the events of September 11, 2001 – which caught some NEST personnel overseas in the midst of the JACKAL CAVE exercise (Document 3) – had produced heightened concern about a terrorist attack on the U.S. homeland employing either a nuclear device or a radiological dispersal device, more commonly known as a 'dirty bomb.' (Document 9).
Osama bin Laden had, as early as 1998, expressed an interest in obtaining nuclear weapons, and material found in Afghanistan supported the view that al-Qaeda was interested in obtaining a nuclear capability. Interrogation of captured al-Qaeda official Abu Zubaydah led to the arrest of American citizen Jose Padilla (Document 5) who, in a meeting with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, had proposed a dirty bomb attack on a U.S. city. Padilla was arrested in May 2002 on his return to the United States. A year later al-Qaeda's interest in nuclear destruction was given a nod of approval by a prominent Saudi cleric in his "A Treatise on the Legal Status of Using Weapons of Mass Destruction Against Infidels" (Document 7). More recently, a U.S. National Intelligence Estimate (Document 18) concluded that al-Qaeda remains interested in acquiring and employing weapons of mass destruction.
The concern about terrorist acquisition of weapons of mass destruction, particularly nuclear weapons, has resulted in numerous studies of how a terrorist group might acquire such nuclear weapons or material. A RAND Corporation study (Document 11) consists of three case studies relevant to the issue – one concerning the Japanese group Aum Shinrikyo (responsible for the 1993 sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway system), another focusing on al-Qaeda, and a third on the theft of nuclear fuel rods from a reactor in Kinshasa.
Concern has also manifested itself in the requirement that the National Intelligence Council produce a yearly report (Document 14) on the security of the nuclear weapons of the Russian Ministry of Defense as well as of Russia's civilian nuclear material.
In seeking to prevent any acts of nuclear terrorism, the U.S. has sought to develop several layers of defense – of which NEST, the FBI, and military units are the final layer. The preceding layers include materials protection, control and accountability, port of departure screening, at-sea interdiction, Coast Guard inspection, and border protection. Several of these layers represent an attempt to combat nuclear smuggling (Document 13). An organization within the Department of Homeland Security – the Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (DNDO) – is responsible for conceiving and developing much of the architecture, including portals to detect radioactive materials at border crossings (Document 16, Document 19, Document 20).
Another DNDO activity, managed through its National Technical Nuclear Forensics Center – is nuclear attribution (Document 21), whose objective, in the event of a nuclear detonation, is to determine the origin of the nuclear material used through analysis of the nuclear fallout and debris – in the hope that such a capability would help dissuade nations that might otherwise be willing to provide nuclear material to terrorist groups.
NEST's primary responsibility remains domestic. It was deployed in response to the 9/11 attacks and as a precautionary measure during National Special Security Events, and has also conducted surveillance of selected Muslim sites looking for signs of radiation. But it also still operates overseas – at least once to investigate a ship feared to be carrying radioactive material, and on other occasions, including the 2008 Beijing Olympics, as a precaution. (Note 2) The role of the Department of Energy (that is, NEST and other units) as well as other departments in providing nuclear detection assistance to foreign nations was spelled out in a Department of State-led strategic plan (Document 10) issued in 2004.
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