Many Small Firms Pop Up Following Sept. 11 Attacks
By Thanassis Cambanis, The Boston Globe
The fear of another terrorist strike - along with a steady stream of federal dollars unleashed after Sept. 11 - has spawned a mushrooming industry of counterterrorism consultants, eager to sell their advice to law enforcement agencies in major cities such as Boston.
But officials at agencies such as the MBTA, which hosted a two-day terrorism workshop this week, said they are wary of “fly-by-night” outsiders peddling useless information and have made a concerted effort not to jump on trendy but ultimately fruitless antiterrorism bandwagons.
“I have resisted purchasing the sexy item of the day,” said Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority General Manager Michael Mulhern. “We have to be careful not to get caught up in wanting the quick fix.”
There’s great pressure on public agencies, from police departments to the Massachusetts Port Authority to the MBTA, to show they’re making changes to forestall future terrorist attacks. And as institutions without any resident counterterrorism specialists seek advice, they’ve had to learn quickly to separate the wheat from the chaff.
A quick Internet search for counterterrorism consultants yields dozens of companies with enticing ads, bearing slogans like “Win Against Terrorism” and “Your Mind Is Your Primary Weapon.”
Police departments, transit agencies, and other newcomers to the war on terrorism have had to rely on word of mouth within the law enforcement community to distinguish the small number of proven players from those who only began conducting training and threat assessment after Sept. 11.
“You have to find a way to filter out folks that are fly-by-night and really focus on experienced professionals,” Mulhern said.
Over the last year, outside consultants seem to be everywhere. They appear on talk shows and cable networks, they’ve padded their Web sites, and fielded speaking invitations and consulting offers from entities as diverse as the State Police and the American Trucking Association (which recently proposed changing its name to “America’s Trucking Army” in response to Washington’s call for antiterror vigilance.
Steve Valent, a police officer in Rahway, N.J., with a background in “crime prevention through environmental design,” advertises on the Internet for his part-time enterprise, Aggressive Security Consultants. With two friends, he has founded a second company, The National Conference on Homeland Security.
“We hope this will be a prosperous enterprise for the three of us,” Valent said. “Hopefully, we’ll be working with the federal government.”
To get a sense of the size of the market, Massachusetts alone appropriated more than $ 32 million to pay for the reaction to Sept. 11. Washington has sent the state $ 22 million just to deal with bioterror threats, and a spokeswoman for the governor’s office said more federal antiterror funds are expected. Inevitably, some of that money will land in the pockets of entrepreneurial consultants.
Gerard T. Leone, head of the Anti-Terrorism Task Force in the US attorney’s office in Boston, said he has talked with many people since last fall but hasn’t paid a single outside expert.
“Since 9/11, it’s become a cottage industry,” Leone said. “In terrorism, you’ve got a lot of self-proclaimed experts, people who have pulled public source information off the Internet but don’t have any practical experience.”
Most of the small coterie of recognized security experts got their start in the public sector, either in the military, as federal agents, or as CIA operatives. High salaries in the private sector, however, draw many of the most experienced people away from government; a case in point is the FBI’s counterterrorism chief Dale L. Watson who this week announced he was leaving to join the Virginia-based business consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton.
For the time being, though, agencies like the T and Massport have used outside consultants to examine their vulnerabilities, recommend action plans, and train staff members.
At this week’s conference, for example, 160 people, including 30 MBTA employees, heard from specialists on the psychology of terrorism and even from celebrity writer Sebastian Junger, the author of “The Perfect Storm,” who also covered Afghanistan’s civil war.
“We learned a lot about terrorism, types of threats, how to keep our organization crisp-minded, and streamline information sharing,” Mulhern said. “We have to institutionalize the way we approach security, but you’re not going to do that with a quick hit here and there, bringing an expert in.”
Shortly after Sept. 11, the MBTA brought in outside consultants to conduct an immediate threat assessment that resulted in 250 recommendations; later the authority hired two independent teams, one federally funded, to perform vulnerability studies.
The antiterror consulting boom doesn’t worry people like Walter Purdy, a director of the Terrorism Research Center, which has serviced a steady flow of law enforcement and government clients since 1996 and was a key organizer of the conference sponsored this week by the MBTA.
“If you can attach the word terrorism to something, it’s a cash cow for some people,” Purdy said. The center, a small boutique firm located just outside Washington, D.C., that works with an established international network, hasn’t changed its approach to business since Sept. 11, he added.
“We had plenty of business before 9/11,” he said. “So there’s no reason to dilute the product to get business.”
While consultants have swamped the security market in the surge to catch-up with terrorists after Sept. 11, key players in the government’s strategy like Leone believe their influence will wane.
“I’m not going to spend public money for people I should be able to find within the government,” Leone said.