What are all the terrorist doing during the pandemic?

Over the years I’ve realized one thing: terrorists don’t take a break. While we’ve been busy dealing with the Covid-19 crisis, they’ve been regrouping and planning their next move. No, I’m not saying this to scare you (but look at what happened in Reading, in the UK, over the weekend). The main reason for saying this now is to show you the parallel between the pandemic and terrorism. No one ever wants to plan for a threat like this because no one thinks it’s going to affect them. 

   I’ve given many talks in Canada on the threat of terrorism, including kidnap and ransom, physical security and cyber attack. From governments to global corporations, law enforcement agencies to intelligence services, all of them have the same tendency to stick their heads in the sand until it’s too late. That means that what was a minor weakness in their security response plans rapidly becomes a significant vulnerability that terrorists are all too ready to exploit.

   And this really frustrates me. I call it the Deny and Suppress Syndrome: terrorism happens in other countries, not here, not in Canada. So, if it isn’t going to happen then you don’t have to spend time and money preparing for it. Budgets are tight, we all know that, but there’s nothing you can do to save money once the bomb has gone off or the vehicle has driven into a crowded market. Just because they’re happening in Europe doesn’t mean they won’t happen in your neighbourhood. The same radicalization techniques are used worldwide: look for disengaged young people, give them a cause and a promise that they’ll be remembered, and it doesn’t take long to persuade them to do some pretty bad things. 

The problem for Canada is that other countries are getting better at spotting this happening and preventing homegrown terrorists from emerging or preventing the return of those who’ve gone abroad to fight. So, the terrorists will move on to easier targets.

   As long as Canadian organizations and companies don’t believe that terrorism is a real and present threat, they won’t proactively plan to prevent attacks. A bit like Covid-19 and look how that worked out for us. 

   Without an acceptance that terrorism is a threat to our way of life, we won’t have appropriate security management plans, crisis intervention protocols or contingency plans in place. That means we will always be playing catch up with terrorist threats because we’re not watchful and we’re not ready. 

   Whose responsibility is it to be ready, to be watchful of potential terrorist activity? Well, that depends on who you ask. I’ve carried out security audits across Canada and everyone seems to think it’s someone else’s job and no one really wants to talk about what could happen. As I keep reminding people, just because it hasn’t happened to you doesn’t mean it won’t.

   Let’s have a look at what did happen in 2016, when a terrorist attack was thwarted by the RCMP in Strathroy, near London. Aaron Driver, 23 years old, was travelling in the back of a taxi near his home in Strathroy. He was carrying two homemade explosive devices, one of which he detonated in the backseat of the taxi, injuring both himself and the taxi driver. He was then shot dead by the RCMP before he could detonate the second device. His plan had been to detonate both devices in downtown London. If Driver had been successful, a significant number of people would have been killed or seriously injured. 

   This was a reminder to me of why I’d carried out a ‘Red Team’ exercise. Working with a recent Masters graduate from a program in Emergency Management, I conducted an exercise to see how easy it would be to plan and execute a major terrorist attack on downtown Toronto. We scoped out a multiple bomb attack against a large, critical infrastructure facility in the downtown core. This meant multiple visits to the target to research the physical locality, taking hundreds of photographs in and around the target area. We acted in the way that terrorists do when they are planning an attack, visiting and revisiting the same site, and no one stopped us. While we were doing our recce we encountered security personnel, police officers and lots of members of the public. Believe me, if we tried the same thing in a city in the UK there would have been a considerable amount of interest in us.

   A year later, I got to use my Red Team report when I was delivering a presentation on Critical Infrastructure Protection at the University of Toronto. The select audience included Ontario law enforcement agencies and Provincial emergency planning organizations. I explained what I’d done, why I’d done it and what it had told me about the key vulnerabilities of Toronto in the face of a terrorist threat. Over tea and biscuits, I waited for questions from the variety of security personnel, some in uniform and some of a very high rank. They were surprisingly reticent, and I only received a couple of questions around the time and place of the Red Team exercise. I’m guessing there were no terrorists in the room that day because they’d have been really interested in what we’d done because they’d have seen the value of that information, collected without challenge or question.

   So, while we’ve all had our focus on Covid-19, and haven’t really learned that effective crisis planning could have prevented problems with things like PPE, terrorists have been making good use of the situation. Security agencies, border control and intelligence services have all been distracted by the virus, giving terrorists an opportunity to step into the gaps. 

   Now would be a really good time to learn from the pandemic and to recognise that we always need to plan for a threat, even when it isn’t in plain sight. If we take anything from the Covid-19 situation it should be that there will be another crisis and that if we make effective crisis prevention and management plans now, we’ll be able to cope with whatever comes next. Terrorism hasn’t gone away, it really hasn’t. It may take new forms over time, but it is still there and will seek out the path of least resistance. Much like a virus.

Alan W. Bell is President of Globe Risk International. He is an internationally renowned expert on threat, risks and vulnerabilities for organisations, providing advice and guidance from the C-suite to the shop floor.