ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Espionage, Intelligence, and Security Volume ...

Architecture and Structural SecurityTimes. “At heart, the task involves what seems like acontradiction: designing a building that is secure fromattack while affording the openness appropriate for apublic building.”Prior to the 1970s, security was not the paramountconsideration in architecture and therefore, comfort andthe human touch remained preeminent considerations.Planners of the 1972 Olympic Village in Munich, Germany—wanting to avoid the appearance of an armed camp, withits potential evocations of Hitler and the 1936 BerlinGames—had created an open, friendly village that provedvulnerable to Palestinian terrorists. The subsequent assaultby Black September left 11 Israeli athletes and oneGerman policeman dead. Olympic officials learned fromMunich and, thenceforth, greatly intensified the securitymeasures surrounding the Games; likewise the plannersof government buildings eventually learned from the terroristattacks of the 1990s.The Ronald Reagan building. The learning process was farfrom instantaneous, as illustrated by a look at the RonaldReagan Building in Washington, D.C. It was completed inJuly 1997, a year after the Khobar Towers and a yearbefore the Africa bombings. The first World Trade Centerbombing and Oklahoma City were still fresh in memory asevidence that terrorism was no longer a phenomenonfrom which Americans on U.S. soil were exempt. Yet, a1999 report by security experts at Sandia National Laboratoriesfound that the building, which had run well overbudget to finish at $818 million, was “highly vulnerable”to terrorist attack.Several factors made the vulnerability of the ReaganBuilding particularly dismaying. There was its proximityto the White House and Capitol, combined with the largenumbers of employees to be housed there. Additionally, itwould serve as the headquarters of sensitive agenciessuch as the U.S. Customs Service, and the venue of highsecurityevents such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization50th anniversary celebrations in April, 1999. Yet,the GSA, hoping to defray some of the costs by leasingspace to the private sector for restaurants, shops, andconvention facilities, had wanted to avoid creating a buildingthat looked like an armed fortress.The Oklahoma City Federal Campus. By contrast, a Chicagoarchitectural firm managed to create a secure environmental—yetone that did not seem constricting to itsinhabitants or visitors—in their design for Oklahoma City’sFederal Campus. The new name was chosen to avoid anyreference to “Federal Building,” a term forever associatedin local minds with the structure in Oklahoma City that hadbeen destroyed, along with 168 people.Design architects planned the site in such a way that,rather than lying hidden behind a protective plaza, thebuilding fills the block on which it sits. This has the addedEncyclopedia of Espionage, Intelligence, and Securitybenefit of addressing an aesthetic problem in the OklahomaCity downtown, which, like that of other sunbeltcities such as Atlanta or Houston, is pockmarked withempty lots. By building to the boundaries of the site, theFederal Campus conveys a sense of a populated environmentthat serves to invite traffic. Welcoming traffic wasalso apparently in the architects’ considerations whenthey fought off security planners’ attempts to close offstreets around the building, a measure that might havekept away the public.One of the few obvious signs of protective considerationsin the design is the lack of glass in the outer perimeterof the Federal Campus. The building does have extensiveglass areas, but these are inside the protectedcourtyard, and the glass itself is reinforced—rather likethat of a car windshield—so that it would shatter ratherthan break in the face of concussive force. Walls on eitherside of the lobby are made to create a powerful aestheticeffect, while protecting office workers in the event of anexplosion.Designing and Protecting thePost-September 11, 2001, WorldIronically, in its September, 2001 issue, which went topress before the bombings, Signal reported that GSA wastesting a risk assessment and property analysis softwareproduct called RAMPART as a means of determining buildings’vulnerabilities to terrorism. Designed at Sandia, RAM-PART made it possible to study a number of threats, bothnatural and manmade, and allowed users to assess buildingswith a point-and-click walk-through assessment toolthat took less than two hours.After the World Trade Center terrorist attack, theidea that such software could get into the wrong handsprompted a joint statement by the American Institute ofArchitects (AIA) and the GSA to immediately report anysuspicious requests to the appropriate local FBI field office.Just as terrorists’ strange requests at flight schools—e.g., their desire to learn how to fly a plane, but not how toland—should have, and in some cases did raise red flags,the AIA and GSA warned architects, engineers, and othersconcerning requests for intricately detailed plans of majorbuildings.Months earlier, an AIA member firm had receivedseveral e-mail messages from an alleged student in Egyptwho requested plans that would show extremely specificinformation about conduits, duct work, wiring, risers, andother aspects of a particular building. Acting with prescience(given that this was before September 11), the firmturned the requests over to the FBI. The wisdom of suchmeasures became all the more apparent after the March,2003, capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a high-rankingal Qaeda figure who revealed that plans were in theworks for attacks on structures ranging from the White49