Thursday, Feb. 9, 2006 | 12:33 p.m.
Washington
Here's a trick question: Which warm-weather tourist towns does the U.S. government believe are at risk of a terrorist strike?
Orlando, Fla.? Honolulu? New Orleans?
Correct on all three.
Las Vegas?
"If anything is a soft target, it's that," said Vincent Cannistraro, former director of National Security Council intelligence, as well as a former director of CIA counterterrorism, now a top consultant.
"It's Sin City," Cannistraro said. "It's a popular (terrorist) perception that no matter who you kill, you've probably killed the right people - people who are engaged in things they shouldn't be.
Looking at naked women. Drinking, gambling. It's how they rationalize these things."
So Las Vegas must be on any government list of the most likely terrorism targets, right?
No, it's not - and the government won't say why.
The answer is classified, bottled up in files at the Homeland Security Department. But interviews with more than two dozen security experts and federal and state authorities found some likely answers, numerous suggestions and a large dose of incredulity.
"If they are going to include Fort Lauderdale (Fla.), they should have included Las Vegas," said Tanya DeGenova, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, now a security consultant. "It definitely should be ranked higher than Cleveland. And Las Vegas is going to make a much bigger statement than Cincinnati."
The story of The List begins with good intentions. Homeland Security worked diligently in 2005 to create a list of 35 urban areas most likely to draw a terrorist strike. That list is important because the cities on it receive a total of $765 million to beef up security under the Urban Area Security Initiative program.
With so much money at stake, the government wanted to apply objective criteria to its decisions - to try to curtail the politicking. Toward that end, federal computer programmers attempted to devise a scientific method.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff explained last month that the list was the result of a complex new formula that factored in endless columns of data, including intelligence data, and made 3.2 billion computer calculations. The department crunched data to assess three categories:
The result is a list unveiled Jan. 3 that is "risk-based," not politically driven, Chertoff said. The federal anti-terrorism money would no longer be widely distributed as a "party favor," he said.
Chertoff had predicted the political fallout and got it. Nevada law enforcement officials were dumbstruck. Elected officials howled. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called for Chertoff's resignation.
Chertoff said he didn't care. It wasn't a popularity contest, he said.
Homeland Security officials will not say why Las Vegas got the ax. Asked whether the opinions of security experts such as Cannistraro, DeGenova and others were ever taken into account - that Las Vegas seems like a common-sense target - department spokesman Marc Short said, "The analysis here is a very objective one. To introduce subjectivity into this would make it a very political process."
As it turns out, Homeland Security's formula may not be a total mystery. Similar calculations have been made by terrorism experts outside the agency, including those at the Rand Corp., a think tank with a long record of analyzing U.S. government policies and programs.
In preparing a report published late last year, "Estimating Terrorism Risk," Rand researchers focused on data that assessed the same factors used by the department - threat, vulnerabilities and consequence.
Henry Willis, lead author of the report, said he has no inside knowledge of the Homeland Security report, and wouldn't speculate on its formula.
But it's likely a safe assumption that Rand drew from some of the same data and formulas as Homeland Security researchers. In some cases, information was provided to Rand by the insurance industry, which calculates terrorism insurance rates in various cities, and is widely considered a reliable source.
Rand's study looked at 47 cities and ranked them in a number of ways. Any terrorism risk predictions should rely on various kinds of analyses, Willis said. Three important assessments from Rand offer clues to the omission of Las Vegas:
Under this analysis, Las Vegas' vast suburbanlike sprawl would make a terrorist strike on a single location here less damaging than in a city of high rises. "If you don't have density, then you don't really have threat," Willis said.
Asked if that calculation included the 300,000 people found in the Strip corridor on any given weekend, Willis said it didn't. It's based on U.S. Census data of the permanent population.
"That's a very good point," he said. Using the visitor factor, the calculation for Las Vegas would change, as it would for any tourist-destination city.
The result makes little sense other than as a comparison of risk among cities. The estimate for Las Vegas: one death. By comparison, the estimate for New York was 304; for Chicago, 54; and Washington, 29. It also compares to .05 in Columbus, Ohio; .01 in New Orleans and .0004 in Memphis, Tenn.
Other clues to Homeland Security's rationale can be found by analyzing The List by looking for common traits among cities on The List, security experts say.
Some leading ones:
In Las Vegas, however, the Las Vegas Motor Speedway draws more than 150,000 fans. The Thomas & Mack Center and the two largest casino venues can seat more than 15,000 for some events.
McCarran International Airport is No. 6.
The Strip is unquestionably the nation's leading symbol of hedonism.
These vacation hot spots lure tourists year-round. Las Vegas caters to 38 million tourists a year.
Which brings us full circle - what about Las Vegas?
It was "foolish" to leave Las Vegas off the list, given al-Qaida's interest in it as a symbol of America - and sin, Cannistraro said.
Las Vegas may even be a more likely target than New York because of that city's heightened daily sensitivity to intelligence reports, and a more sophisticated security infrastructure dedicated to identifying terrorists, Cannistraro said.
"Las Vegas is a hell of a lot bigger target than the Jefferson Memorial that they put all these big barricades around," said Randy Larsen, one of the nation's top terrorism consultants. "What is more of a symbol of American decadence than Las Vegas?"
In spite of the Homeland Security Department's well-publicized effort to determine The List by scientific analysis, some terrorism experts are skeptical. They believe the simple explanation for the Las Vegas omission is politics.
"I don't know anyone who believes it wasn't political," said Neil Livingstone, chief executive of GlobalOptions Inc. and a widely quoted terrorism expert and author. "The failure to include Las Vegas is mind-boggling. They're either using the wrong data or the wrong system if they think Las Vegas is not a target."
Experts note that since Sept. 11, 2001, other branches of the federal government have treated Las Vegas as if it sported a bull's eye.
Consider: Federal authorities poured resources into an investigation of the five 9/11 hijackers who had visited Las Vegas, combing for credible clues about whether the city was next.
After 9/11, government officials considered Las Vegas perhaps a top 5 target, based in part on intelligence gathered from captured al-Qaida operatives, Livingstone said.
Fearing an attack on the night of New Year's Eve 2003, the Homeland Security and Transportation departments restricted airspace over just a handful of U.S. urban areas, including the Strip.
And the FBI was highly concerned about videotapes unearthed in 2002 - footage shot in Las Vegas casinos by suspects in an alleged terrorist cell in Detroit.
Here's one more theory: If politics played a role in dropping Las Vegas from the list, Reid might be to blame. Reid has been a thorn in the side of the Bush administration for years, Nevada State Archivist Guy Rocha noted.
"You'd be surprised by partisan politics?" Rocha said.
"It's possible this administration thinks Nevada is not red enough," Reid said, "but I certainly hope they wouldn't be so petty as to play politics with the safety and security of more than a million people."
In the weeks since Homeland Security computers spit out The List, the Las Vegas question has taken root among officials in Washington intimately involved with terrorism.
Even members of the 9/11 Commission, which last year recommended that Homeland Security devise a better formula for distributing urban security money, said they were perplexed by the omission of Las Vegas.
Former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., was careful not to criticize Homeland Security, but he said Las Vegas was hard for al-Qaida to ignore as a powerful symbol of the West.
"If you asked me - without any data - I'd put Las Vegas on the list," Kerrey said.
The commission's investigators had attempted to find more information about why the five 9/11 hijackers met in Las Vegas, but the panel reached no conclusions. Former Indiana Democratic Rep. Tim Roemer, also a commissioner, said he could offer no more insight than what was in the report.
"That continues to be a source of frustration to me," Roemer said. "But the bigger question is: What were they planning to do in Las Vegas in the future? And what sleeper cells remain in the United States?"
Even the federal government's top prosecutor in Nevada, U.S. Attorney Daniel Bodgen, questioned The List. "I am mystified by the process used by (Homeland Security) to determine the rating and the amount of terrorism funding for Las Vegas," Bodgen said, noting that 38 million tourists pass through Las Vegas each year and that terrorists have targeted tourist sites in other countries.
When a Sun reporter asked FBI Director Robert Mueller last month about the subtraction of Las Vegas from The List, he smiled. He wouldn't publicly question Homeland Security's results. Then he said with a nod: "I really can't answer that. Talk to Mike Chertoff."
Terrorism consultant Larsen said Chertoff could rectify his agency's error by giving himself the discretion to add a few cities to The List that aren't on the computer list.
Data-driven formulas can create highly reliable lists, Larsen said. "But at times you miss the obvious. Las Vegas just seems like the Sin City target."
Benjamin Grove can be reached at (202) 622-7436 or at [email protected].
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