On July 18, Homeland Security sent federal agencies and state officials a collection of Central Intelligence Agency threat assessments listing malls, banks, prominent companies and tall buildings as being soft targets most at risk of bomb attacks. Another set of confidential government assessments released in July said that since the London attacks suicide bombings were "a preferred method of attack among extremists."
The possibility of suicide attacks against the nation's 1,200 enclosed shopping centers, bustling icons of U.S. wealth and consumerism, is still only a grim theory. But the mere idea has transformed the way private security companies train their guards and go about their business. The inspiration for their preparation for the unthinkable did not come from the Federal Bureau of Investigation or the Department of Homeland Security. It came from Israel, the country with the most experience keeping human bombs out of its shopping centers.
Cameras are often used by terrorists to help plan operations, and most malls in America have banned their use. Security company IPC International Corp. is working with Rivercenter mall, which straddles the San Antonio River. Venetian-style canals send low-slung boats full of sightseers and Mariachi bands down the middle of the mall. The Alamo, Texas' most sacred historic shrine, is just 100 feet away. More than 19 million people visit the mall every year, most of them camera-toting tourists. Any attempt to stop them from using their cameras could be a financial disaster.
In the immediate aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, the mall industry reached out to the White House for help with its security concerns but found that not much thought had been give to their situation.
When the Department of Homeland Security sent out teams of threat-assessment experts — many of them former Navy Seals —- to the nation's malls in 2003, their recommendations seemed so extreme that industry officials balked.
William Flynn, director of the Protective Security Division at the Department of Homeland Security, concedes the department has been on a steep learning curve since 9/11 and has been trying to adapt as threats change and the department learns more about the needs and abilities of the private sector. Moreover, Homeland Security officials say their energies have been focused on trying to figure out how to protect more-menacing potential terrorist targets in private hands like chemical facilities and power plants.
According to Malachy Kavanagh of the International Council of Shopping Centers, a trade group that is helping to shape security standards for the industry, malls face in miniature what the Homeland Security Department wrestles with every day: How to provide more security to people without disrupting their way of life or undermining commerce.
The task isn't easy. Shopping malls are designed to be open to the flow of goods, services and people. In many towns, malls are more than just retail meccas: They are tourist attractions, entertainment hubs, art galleries, classrooms and meeting places where senior citizens, young mothers and teenagers just hang out.
Mall developers and owners have resisted employing aggressive security measures for fear of scaring customers away. They also want to keep overhead fees for their retail tenants down as much as possible.
Unsatisfied with the counterterrorism help it received from the government, the mall industry turned to the place with the most expertise in the area: Israel.
Over the years, the Israelis have developed a sophisticated security system to protect enclosed shopping centers. The cornerstone of the Israeli strategy is to deny a bomber entrance to the mall by creating layers of defenses from paramilitary sentries to watchmen trained to recognize the behavior patterns of people about to blow themselves up.
To date, there never has been a successful breach of an Israeli shopping mall by a suicide bomber despite more than a hundred attempts. The most recent took place on July 12, when a suicide bomber attempted to attack the Hasharon Mall in the coastal town of Netanya, 25 miles north of Tel Aviv. Israeli authorities say the bomber was deterred by the police and security guards in front of the mall and blew himself up at a crosswalk near the entrance, killing four passersby and wounding 90. The attack was considered blunted because a detonation inside the mall would have claimed many more lives.
American mall owners, however, found many of Israel's methods as unpalatable as some of the early advice coming out of Homeland Security.
Enter Arik Arad, who served as Israel's head of shopping-center security, a government post, from 1993 to 2003. Mr. Arad spoke to the shopping-center group in his official capacity in late 2002 and later was brought in as a consultant. His message to mall owners: Forget about the hand-held metal detectors, the machine guns and the explosives-sniffing dogs. Instead, he said, adopt Israel's "software" approach to shopping-mall security by learning the terrorist modus operandi.
Mall-security companies immediately began integrating the Israeli techniques into their training programs. Many security experts say the effort has placed the U.S. mall-security industry far ahead of its counterparts in other sectors, such as mass transit and the protection of many public buildings.
IPC has 6,500 uniformed employees guarding more than 400 malls in 46 states, including the shops at Union Station in Washington and Woodfield Mall outside Chicago. The company reached out for psychological studies of suicide bombers and was one of the first security companies to employ Israeli tactics in their training.
Among the things IPC learned from its studies of the Israeli approach was to teach employees to use all their senses when looking out for bombers, not just their sight. Often suicide bombers will anoint themselves with perfume, fragrant soap or rosewater in preparation for what they believe will be their martyrdom — which leaves a flowery tell-tale scent.
Once suspicious behavior has been identified, the Israelis act quickly, but not violently. The key to stopping or pre-empting an attack, they've found, is simply to walk up, look the suspect in the eye and ask: "Can I help you?" The Israelis call it "soft contact" and find that it's often enough to force a bomber to abandon his plan or make him detonate early, away from his target.
Of course, the method does carry risks. Several Israeli security guards have died in foiling mall attacks by suicide bombers. But their efforts have doubtless saved hundreds of lives.
