Standing Well Back
1920-1930

The Bath School Bombing – 1927

I’ve been doing this blog for some time, and vacuuming up data on historical bombing incidents for even longer. For some reason I thought I had done a piece on the Bath School Bombing some years ago – but turns out I hadn’t.

The tragedy of the Bath School Bombing is still with us today – so called “lone-wolf” terrorists with a grievance against society are still with us and that strange focus on schools still perplexes us all. The attack has some technical aspects that are interesting – the bomber emplacing a concealed large device over many weeks, the classic “return to the scene” and the use of a suicide car bomb – an early one.

Here’s the story. In 1927 Andrew Kehoe was a 55 year old single man living in the town of Bath, not far from Lansing in Michigan, USA. His mother had died when he was a child. His step-mother died in a strange accident with a stove and there are allegations that Kehoe or his father may have tampered with that stove.  So, he had a troubled childhood.   He had in earlier years killed a neighbour’s dog and also a horse that he owned, out of frustration with it. So – an angry man. He later qualified as an electrician which is probably pertinent.

In 1926 Kehoe lost a local election, and this appears to have been the cause of his subsequent acts. He started stockpiling explosives at that time, and also, it seems he undertook various actions to make his foreclosed farm less valuable to its eventual owners – he cut all the wire fencing, killed the trees and killed his grapevines. His wife, Nellie, suffered from tuberculosis and this further strained his finances. At the time of the attack she was chronically ill.

It seems Kehoe’s plan was to punish the community that rejected him – and that the school, (which he objected to paying taxes to support) was as good a representative of the community as he could find. Indeed he was employed by the school as a temporary electrician at one time, so knew the layout and access to the school buildings. Kehoe bought explosives from farm suppliers in small batches over many months and after the incident, police came to the conclusion that more dynamite was stolen by him from a bridge construction team some time earlier.

On May 16, his wife Nellie was discharged from hospital and some time later was murdered by Kehoe. He set a number of incendiary devices in the home and its outbuildings. These were initiated at 0845 on 18 May.   At about the same time, a timed explosive device detonated underneath the North wing of the school where the device had been hidden in the basement. The device was timed with an adapted alarm clock. 38 people were killed in the explosion – mostly children. Lessons had started 15 minutes earlier.

At about 0915, Kehoe arrived at the bomb site in his Ford truck. He summoned over the police chief, Superintendent Emory Huyck.  There was a brief struggle over a rifle and then the truck itself exploded, killing Kehoe, the Police Chief, a local man, and a child who had survived the first explosion. Another man died later from injuries caused. It appears that additional shrapnel had been piled on the back seat on top of a charge of dynamite. I think there is little doubt that this was in effect a suicide VBIED. Investigation at his home found the body of his wife and also two dead, hobbled horses , feet tied with wire, in a burnt-down stable.

During the follow up to rescue injured children another 500 pounds of explosive was found in the basement under the South wing of the school. It had failed to detonate, but was also attached to a timer set to switch at 0845.  Here’s photo of the recovered explosives.

After the events investigators found this sign attached to the Kehoe property gate, presumably attached there by Kehoe himself.

This sad tale suggests that lone bombers are not solely modern phenomena. Easy access to explosives enables such acts, and the technology is “easy”.  The strained mental health of potentially violent people remain issues today.

(All images public domain)

20th Century

Never New, Fact and Fiction

And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet

One of the strange things about terrorism, and suicide terrorism in particular, is that people always think it is “new”. There is something about the fear of terrorism that always makes it fresh, always makes it feel like a new encounter. Add to that the short memories that people have, and the general perception is that suicide terrorism is a newly thought of tactic, or strategy,  but as I have detailed here before and as Iain Overton’s excellent “The Price Of Paradise” covers, these tactics are simply recycled, decade by decade, century by century.

There are themes within this tactic too. Themes that play out in public, in the mind of the public, and perhaps which terrorist groups recognise and copy, or reflect. Fact and fiction become confused.   There is a theme, played out frequently, of the innocent child, an unwitting, unknowing bomber, tasked with carrying an explosive device, without being aware it is going to explode. You’ve that recently, yes?     Nigeria, or was it Yemen? Gaza? Syria? Afghanistan?  Well, yes probably, but it’s not new.

Here’s a clip from a 1936 film by Alfred Hitchcock, called “Sabotage”, which plays on the fear of the public in the mid 1930s, of infiltration by terrorist groups bent on destroying the nation.  Here, an innocent unwitting child is tasked with delivering a package to a tube station in London- Piccadilly. The clip is classic Hitchcock. Having being delayed en route the boy is on a bus, approaching Piccadilly when the bomb detonates.

This is really very peculiar.  Tube stations were attacked in the 1880s with IEDs and again in 1939, three years after this film was made  Then again in the 1970s, including the Piccadilly  bomb which exploded at a bus stop outside Green Park station in 1975. Then more recently buses in 1996 and  2005 were again attacked   and tube stations have also been targeted again. But here in the clip, masterful suspense by Hitchcock weirdly foreshadows numerous attacks. Crowds of people, and military parades included… will the bomb go off?   And of course military bands and mounted units themselves became targets for real in 1982

So, it’s really a strange thing to see this modern essence of a threat, a child proxy suicide bomber in a fictional movie from 1936.  The rest of the movie (which can be found on YouTube in full)  ends with the bomb maker, with a suicide IED hidden in his coat, detonating his device behind a cinema as the police evacuate the theatre and mount a raid to capture him.  He had been discovered by an undercover police operation.  Such modern themes.

 

 

 

Book reviews

Book Review – The Price of Paradise by Iain Overton

 

This blog, as a whole is driven by my personal interest and experience in dealing with the technology and tactics of IEDs.  Almost deliberately, throughout my career, I have tried to separate away the technology and tactics from the politics and the motivations of those conducting the attack  To an EOD professional, worrying about the politics or the psychology is a distraction at the scene. But that is not to say that they are not important. “The Price of Paradise”, by Iain Overton addresses the peculiar aspects of politics and motivation that produce suicide bombers and as such is a vitally important contribution to understanding the phenomena.  It does not purport to be a book about “suicide bombs”, focusing on the human aspect of this mode of attack.

The book is a careful exploration, and thorough. It is easy to read, insightful and well worth its place on the shelf of the EOD professional, complementing perhaps references to technical and tactical aspects of the devices themselves.

I’m intrigued that Mr Overton traveled to many of the places where the attacks were carried out or instigated from, – St Petersburg, Lebanon and Sri Lanka and elsewhere, and the responses he had from the people there. I was affected by his habit of picking up a pebble here, a rock fragment there, and a flower in another place, removing nuggets from the places he visits, and in parallel picking nuggets of another sort from the people he interviews. It’s an effective methodology and gives the book a useful structure.

Mr Overton is also good at pointing out the laziness and the formulaic responses of western media to a suicide bombing, with journalists on autopilot seeking out negatives from the family history, to enable the easy story that fits the “loser” haunted by inner demons epithet.  He also points that out sometimes professional psychologists have also failed to address the challenges of this complex subject.  One take away is that we need a much better psychological toolkit. The book has made me think again about how “the spectacle” inspires others within the group carrying out the attack, and that aspect probably sometimes outweighs even the psychological fear of the bomber’s targets of the unknown face in the crowd carrying a hidden suicide bomb. So the “effect” of the bomb sometimes, in one sense, is more inwardly facing to the group of perpetrators  than outwardly affecting their targets.

I learned quite a few new facts about suicide bombing – For example I was unaware of the link between the Tamil Tigers and the Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon in the early 1980s. I had also, until reading this, underestimated the level of cult-like importance that Tamil Tiger leader Prabakhakaran had on his followers. Similarly, I had perhaps underestimated too the cult-like leadership role of al-Baghdadi of Daesh. Elsewhere I was struck by the explanation of Pakistani “conspiracy culture” and tortuous but nonsensical explanations which causes a peculiar blindness to some acts of terror in that country and to a degree the Pakistani diaspora in the UK. Similarly he points out a matching, mirrored, moral blindness surrounding drone attacks by the UK and the US. I also found his exploration of the female and child suicide bombers insightful, especially their apparently different motivations.

I was moved in particular by Mr Overtons description, necessarily detailed, of the injuries caused by suicide IEDs. He clearly found this difficult to write about, but such reportage is necessary and too often avoided. This is a powerful chapter, it needs to be and he has done it well. I was moved again by the pieces on individual survivors, and their perspectives.   Mr Overton tells their stories, tiny facets in a larger context with clarity and honesty, allowing us in our minds to extrapolate to all the others killed and injured in the same attacks.

In the later chapters of the book, the author examines some of the West’s responses, in terms of policing, intelligence and security, and the commercial opportunities these have driven, and points out much nonsense that exists in this area. I think he gets it mostly right, if at times he is a little unforgiving.  The politics of counter-terrorism is a difficult conundrum.  Terrorists kill way less people in most western countries than there are killed in road traffic accidents. Both sorts of death are nasty and gory but politicians often have the much smaller threat of terrorism at the top of their agenda, because it feels existential to their electorate. Generally it isn’t existential to the society it threatens. Terrorists might claim that it is but we shouldn’t believe them  (I mean that last sentence on several levels of meaning).

Technically, suicide bombs are about as simple as you can get.  They are essentially command-initiated devices with many of the unknowns or complications taken out. And that provides an attraction to the terrorist. No need to play with radio frequencies, encoders and decoders. No complex wiring. No need to risk exposure of the attack when laying a command wire.  No need for complex teamwork. Explosives, battery, detonator, switch, maybe two. Nothing more needed. In a good proportion of suicide bombing attacks the bomber gets as close as possible to their target, not only to increase the chances of success but this also reduces the amount of explosives needed. There’s also a complex equation about the quantity of explosives a person can carry on them, against the distance they expect to be able to get from their target.  So from my technical and tactical perspective, there are further reasons that the suicide bomb has become prevalent, that weave amongst the motivational and political described so well in the book.

But my technical and tactical interests also mean I notice any weakness where the author touches on such matters. Such things are pretty much irrelevant to most readers perhaps but since my audience here is mostly made of of people in the EOD game, I have to flag them, even if they appear picky.   So… the book has the Russians defeated in the Crimea in 1851, which isn’t quite right – it was a few years later. The Crimean War has an interesting role in the development of explosive technology and I submit in the general public awareness of the potential of explosives. In particular, the device that killed the Tsar had a derivative of the “Jacobi fuse”, developed by Alfred Nobel’s father, Immanuel, for the Russian military at the time of the Crimea.  A diagram of that Jacobi fuze,    http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/12/24/the-russian-jacobi-fuze-1854.html consisting of a glass tube filled with sulphuric acid, which when broken is mixed with potassium chlorate is very similar to the suicide bomb initiation system designed by People’s will explosives expert Kilbalchich. http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2011/11/7/the-tsar-and-the-suicide-bomber.html  In my mind, Kilbalchich’s bomb design is clearly derived from Nobel Senior’s munition design.

The book also defines dynamite as nitro-glycerine mixed with silicon, which technically is too much of a stretch for me.  The role that the admittedly “silicaceous” kieselguhr plays in combination with nitroglycerine is much more complex than just “combining” with the material added to make dynamite.  And Kieselguhr or indeed sand, is not “silicon”.   But Mr Overton is spot-on in describing Alfred Nobels dynamite as an enabling technology for terrorist bombings, as was the fuze designed  by his father.. Mr Overton is on slightly weak ground in other technical aspects, for instance describing a 5lb dynamite device as having a “blast range” of 1m. Firstly “blast range” isn’t a meaningful phrase, and the blast from 5lb of dynamite is certianly lethal well beyond 1 metre.  Elsewhere there is a little confusion over certain, admittedly very complex, explosive effects and IED designs compared to conventional munitions.  A few paragraphs on C-IED technology I found a little hurried and without clarity.

Other minor technical errors do not detract from the usefulness of the book, but to the technical minded, they are very mildly irritating. “Hexogen” is described as a semtex-like plastic explosive. Well, yes and no. Hexogen is RDX. RDX is a component of some plastic explosives, including Semtex, but it is the separate plasticiser which makes it plastic. Hexogen on its own is not a plastic explosive. Rather like saying raisins are like fruit cake. In the same paragraph, (which appears to be sourced from a NYT article) there is reference to “timing caps”, a strange phrase without a clear meaning.

In one sense this book is unfinished. The suicide bomb, enabled by the technological developments of the mid 19th century is here to stay, and with it huge complexities in terms of its users. This is not, unfortunately, the final word. We’ll see plenty more in the future, regrettably.  But for now, this book is good, well written and useful. Recommended.

Link to amazon

20th Century

Going Around and Coming Around

During World War One there was an extensive IED sabotage campaign run by German agents and diplomats in North America.  I have written in previous posts about some of these bombing incidents. See:

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/1/22/massive-explosion-in-new-jersey.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2012/1/17/new-yorks-ied-task-force-1905-1919.html

http://www.standingwellback.com/home/2013/9/17/kurt-jahnke-the-legendary-german-saboteur.html

One of the protagonists, or “players” in this great game was a young aristocratic German military officer, serving as diplomat on the staff of the German Embassy in Washington., His name was Kapitan Franz von Papen.


Von Papen in 1914 (public domain)

Von Papen was a man who clearly enjoyed intrigue. As well has involvement in the German sabotage campaign in 1915, he was also involved in discussions as an intermediary to Irish revolutionaries looking for a  supply weapons for the Easter rising of 1916, and was involved in liaison with Indian nationalists as part of the Hindu German Conspiracy.   In December 1915 he was declared “persona non grata” by the US government because of alleged complicity on the Vanceboro Bridge bombing .   Travel home to Germany was challenging, but Von Papen received a diplomatic document, a Laissaiz Passer, meaning he travelled via Falmouth in England knowing he could not be detained by the British under diplomatic law.  To his horror the laissez passer did not cover his luggage and in front of him on the dockside at Falmouth the British officials opened his bags finding code books and incriminating documents.

 

Documents were found which detailed the payment of over $3Million to the German agents involved in the sabotage campaign.   Transcripts of the seized documents are available here and make fascinating reading.  His cheque stubs were annotated with significant detail such as “for the purchase of picric acid”  “for dum-dum investigation” and exposed several agents who lived in England but were offering services to the Germans.   Of note is the Germany authorities in Berlin asking him to find out details of how Mexican revolutionaries were blowing up trains in 1914, “in order to form an opinion whether, in the event of a European war, explosions of this kind would have to be reckoned with”.

One can imagine the apoplectic Prussian officer watching as the British officials simply opened his bags and took the documents out.   Further documents linking Von Papen to the Bombing Campaign in the US were discovered in a Wall Street office he rented. Other documents incriminated the Austria Ambassador who was collecting munition shipping data for the Germans.  One might have thought that Von Papen would have learned his lesson.  But no….  In a later parallel, while serving with the Ottoman Army in Palestine the following year, he left behind a suitcase in a room he was using in Nazareth as the British advanced. In it, papers were found belonging to him incriminated several agents he was running locally.  All in all then, Von Papen’s spy-craft was pretty shoddy.

In 1916, an US indictment was issued against him for plotting to blow up Canada’s Welland Canal, based on the seized documents from Falmouth.  He remained under indictment as he rose in the ranks of the German inter-war political scene, becoming Chancellor of Germany in 1932, at which point the US charges were rescinded.   There is this rather nice quote about Von Papen at the time by the French Ambassador “His appointment to Chancellor of Germany was met by incredulity. He enjoyed the peculiarity of being taken seriously by neither his friends nor his enemies. He  was reputed to be superficial, blundering, untrue, ambitious, vain, crafty and an intriguer.”   He was subsequently easily out-manouvered by the Nazis.  He was then made Ambassador to Austria, in the run up the the Anschluss.

In 1939 he was appointed as Ambassador to Turkey, where the intrigue of the war years suited his inclinations, if not his expertise. The Turks initially objected pointing out that his previous diplomatic activity had involved sabotage in the US and subversion in another (Austria). but he was appointed.  In 1942 a peculiar incident occurred, an act of intrigue against the man with so much experience of it himself.  There are conflicting version of this story but it would appear that the most convincing is this:

The Russian intelligence service , the NKVD, decided to assassinate Von Papen.  After an abortive attempt to incorporate a Czech officer, they found a Yugoslav born communist, now Turkish,  to conduct the mission. The perpetrator was told to shoot Von Papen who regularly strolled along a particular avenue with his wife, then cover their escape by triggering a “smoke bomb”.  But with NKVD subterfuge the smoke bomb wasn’t a smoke bomb at all, but contained a large amount of high explosive. The perpetrator fired one shot at Von Papen, which missed then immediately triggered the smoke bomb’ which exploded blowing the shooter to pieces.  His penis was found in a tree and a distinctive wart on the skin near an eyebrow was also recovered from the scene.   The NKVD had also , allegedly planted documentation in the device packaging suggesting the perpetrators was from the German Embassy itself. Another version suggests that this was “reported” by TASS as disinformation.   Then idea was that the assassination would occur and the perpetrator would be blown to bits to reduce the risk of the incident being compromised as an NKVD operation.

Von Papen and his wife survived the attack, shaken but largely unharmed. For what it is worth Von Papen suspected the British. The Russian embassy hinted that the Americans “knew” it was the gestapo who were responsible.  The turks arrested the “station chief” of the NKVD (officially listed as an “archivist”)  at the Russian embassy . This occurred amongst diplomatic uproar as the Turks surrounded the Russian embassy for two weeks demanding he be handed over.   Two other emigre Yugoslav communists (from the Muslim community) were also arrested.  These latter two confessed that the Soviets had ordered the assassination.   They claimed that the Russians had given the perpetrator, Omer Tokat, a revolver and the supposed smoke bomb. all defendants were found guilty. Things got complicated in subsequent appeals (too complex to explain in a short blog).

After the war Von Papen was convicted at the Nuremberg trials , released in 1949 and died 20 years after that.

1900-1910

Multiple suicide bomber attacks in 1904 or 1905

This is very intriguing – a second hand report about Japanese troops using multiple suicide bombing as a tactic against the Russians in 1904 or 1905. I’ve spent a few hours looking for a primary source or even a better secondary source and can’t find one – vague references to the tactic but no specifics.  Fascinating in its implications.   Rather than lift the story, here’s a straight image from the book, as is.

 

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