It's late on a Thursday night, and a nondescript, low-riding, 32-foot workboat chugs quietly into one of the nation's largest seaports and heads for a pier near a cluster of oil storage tanks. In the small wheelhouse are three men – the skipper, a deckhand and an explosives expert – on a clandestine suicide mission.
Seconds after the vessel ties up, the crew detonates its hidden cargo – a diesel-fuel bomb with plastic explosives – turning the shoreside oil tanks into an inferno and giving the city its first taste of maritime terrorism. The port is shut for days, and shipping near other major U.S. harbors slows to a crawl.
Staff Sgt. Dominic HauserPetty Officer 3rd Class Jason Miele, Yorktown, Va., defends the USS Yorktown docked on the Ashley River during exercise Harbor Shield 2002 held in Charleston S.C. on Apr. 17, 2002.
No such attack has yet been launched against a U.S. port or waterfront target, but the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Coast Guard and other key federal and state law enforcement agencies are focusing on the small-boat security threat as a serious gap in the nation's defense against terrorist attacks.
"There is no intelligence right now that there's a credible risk" of this kind of attack, says Admiral Thad Allen, commandant of the Coast Guard. "But the vulnerability is there."
While the government has taken steps to tighten security for large passenger and cargo vessels (those with displacements of 300 gross tons or more), it has done little to meet the threat of terrorists using small craft – either fishing vessels or recreational boats – to carry explosives or even weapons of mass destruction.
Moreover, U.S. authorities may be hamstrung to do much for several more years.
An effort by Allen last June to sound out small-boat operators on a variety of ideas for tightening security for recreational boats and small commercial vessels drew an immediate backlash from all quarters – and ended with little beyond an agreement by boating interest groups to think about the problem further.
"What I'm trying to do is to kind of stick my toe in the water and see if I get bit by a piranha," the admiral told a group of state legislators before the National Small Vessel Security Summit, at which authorities unveiled a spate of possible steps to help identify operators and passengers of such boats.
He didn't have to wait long for a reaction. "These are ill-conceived solutions that will inconvenience everyone and not result in a substantial increase in security," Michael G. Sciulla, senior vice-president of the BoatU.S. (the Boat Owners Association of the United States), said following Allen's remarks. Other industry interest groups had similar responses. Chastened, the Coast Guard set up working groups with industry leaders to mull the problem further.
It doesn't take much to appreciate the potential of the small-boat threat. Authorities cite the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, in which terrorists in the Yemini port of Aden used a small boat to approach the port side of the destroyer and set off an explosion that blew a large hole in the warship's hull. It killed 17 U.S. sailors and injured 39 more.
In August 2005, terrorists fired rocket-propelled grenades at two U.S. warships moored in Aqaba, Jordan. And in November of that year, pirates attacked a cruise liner 100 miles off the coast of Somalia, using two 25-foot rigid inflatable boats.
