I’m wondering if there exists , sometimes, a more individual, tactical effect on the psychology of individuals in battle, and specifically within the mind of an EOD operator on a planned operation, i.e. one where there is time and planning activity to carry out in advance.   Does innate caution change as H-hour get closer? Is this simply a natural effect of knowing you have thought of everything and your planning is good? Or is it simply a psychologically based falsehood?. I suspect it is both and difficult to tell the two apart.  I certainly recall operators who were a little perturbed at the beginning of planning an operation and who were much more confident even if I thought their plan was less than perfect. Also, intriguingly I never remember feeling too much concern on those planned ops I did myself. But I am now old and addled of mind and it was a long time ago.

Now, there’s an issue here to dig into.  As a commander I wanted my operators to be confident. I didn’t want to see over-cautious, unsure, tentative operations. There’s nothing worse for the units the EOD team is supporting than to see their EOD operator being unsure and lacking confidence. On more than one occasion I had to sit down with unit commanding officers and either move an operator or try and protect him from a commander who thought he wasn’t on top of things.   But at the same time I wanted that confidence to be justified, and I wanted an operator to put up his hand and say “Hang on, its not as straight forward as that,”when it came to pushy commanders asking too much. Once I was even banned from a brigade area (only for a couple of hours!) by a 1 star who thought I was not supporting his aims and as he called it (wrongly) spreading alarm and despondency amongst senior policemen over a specific operation. It took a few phone calls to close that one out , I can tell you.

The Rubicon Theory suggests there are two mind sets – firstly “deliberative” which dominates during the pre-decisional phase. It’s cautious and tentative and should prompt detailed planning when various courses of action are considered and compared.  This switches to “implemental” once decisions are made.  That’s fine too, but the danger to EOD operators is that the implemental mind-set is liable to override new information as it comes in and tends to assume that planned EOD actions will be successful.   I see almost a parallel here with earlier blogs comparing the “thought-through” approach with the “instinctive” approach, that matches the constructed complex render safe procedures developed for a planned op with the SOP, rapid deployment “drills and skills” approach sometimes needed on higher tempo operations. As ever, the difficulty is separating the two, and knowing when to use one or the other.   If we have SOPs that we automatically use in certain scenarios, by God we should be confident in them.

The authors of the paper describe something interesting. People in “implemental” mind sets are much less open and receptive to new information that perhaps they should pay attention to. Instead (and this is important) they seek information that supports the choice they have already made.  I think that’s something that every EOD operator (and intell analyst) should avoid doing, whatever the scenario.  Looking back, frankly, it’s a failure I myself was guilty of on certain operations and I can now recall seeing it on others, although I was probably too dumb to see it as such, back then. 20/20 hindsight can be a sickening thing.  Implemental mind sets are over optimistic, and although EOD operations must activate implemental activity at some stage we need to guard against the weaknesses it generates. I suspect the key once again , is to recognise when a planned EOD action hasn’t done what you expected and be able to re-think from there. I sense that’s where things can go wrong if not grasped or recognized at that stage, but I won’t give examples for offending the living!

Suffice to say that this paper is a good read for EOD operators – take out the strategic war fighting examples the paper uses and insert your own tactical EOD experiences. It’s startling stuff.

Police responded to the scene of the traffic accident, and without checking the back, took the vehicle to the police vehicle pound…  A week later the vehicle owner called to try and locate his truck … and was led to a very smelly truck in the vehicle pound where the police discovered the putrefying remains of the delivery boy, and a one ton bomb ready to go off at the flick of a switch.  By then Ramzi Yousef and disappeared but he did leave his fingerprints on the bomb.  Yousef, the man behind the first World Trade Center bomb in New York is often described as a terrorist mastermind and genius, but the facts of some of his exploits don’t bear that out. He nearly blew his hand off in an incident in Pakistan when a device functioned and set fire to his bomb making facility accidentally in Manila while planning Operation Bojinka.

The Georgian attack sounds as if it was simply a grenade fastened to the underside of the diplomats vehicle with, at a guess, a simple string to a wheel to pull the pin or the grenade from an enclosure.   The Indian attack could very well be the same sort of incident, looking at the damage to the car. (But note I haven't yet the details to confirm this assessment). Both seem a little amateur for either Hezbollah or Iran.

Last month Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, the spokesman for Iran's Joint Armed Forces Staff, was quoted by the semiofficial ISNA news agency last month as saying that Tehran was "reviewing the punishment" of "behind-the-scene elements" involved in the assassinations in Iran in the last few months, so a motive - retaliation- is clearly present.

Note that the vehicle attacked in India was bearing "diplomatic" plates.

A small number of the IEDs contained dynamite rather than gunpowder.  Here’s a selection of a the few dozen or so that I have found records of: 

• In 1913 suffragettes planted a 5lb gunpowder IED in a house at Walton Heath in Surrey belonging to politician Lloyd George, severely damaging it, and the components of a second IED were discovered in the house. The device was believed to have been very crude and initiated by a candle burning down to a metal can of gunpowder, surrounded by nails.  A similar device was used at a house not far away Walton-on-the-Hill three weeks later.
• Also in 1913 a dynamite IED was planted in St Paul’s Cathedral, but it failed to detonate.  An EOD team from the Chief Inspector of Explosives led by Major Cooper-Key of the Royal Engineers dealt with the device (after it had been placed in a  bucket of water (!!).  It contained ¾ of a pound of nitroglycerine, in a metal case. A small adapted watch and a battery were connected to an electric detonator.  However the electrical connection was faulty and the device failed.
• On April 14, 1913, a small timed device was found attached to railings outside the Bank of England.
• In January 1914 two IEDs with burning fuzes were planted in the Kibble winter botanical gardens in Glasgow. A night-watchman, came across one device with the fuze burning. He bravely cut the fuze off with a pocketknife.  Seconds later a second device exploded causing considerable damage.
• On 11 June 1914, an IED hidden in a lady’s handbag was placed on the back of “King Edwards chair” or the coronation throne  in Westminster Abbey , the throne built around the historical “Stone of Scone”.  The device exploded causing minor damage and reportedly contained steel nuts as shrapnel.

The suffragettes also used letter bombs (and acid devices) posted to intended victims, as well as a significant series of straightforward arson attacks.

Only a couple of days ago some sort of apparent explosive device was found in the lavatory of a Libyan plane in Egypt    For what its worth I don’t think it was an IED but the story is pretty cloudy for now.

In May 2008 there was the very peculiar incident in Exeter, UK, where a decidedly odd individual detonated a device while he was in the lavatories of a fast food resturant.

In 1957 an elderly man blew himself up in the lavatory of a passenger aircraft over California. A good investigation report is here    The device was constructed by dynamite and blasting caps with the blasting caps initiated by matches and burning paper.  Only the perpetrator was killed.

A similar dynamite IED functioned in the lavatory of an aircraft in 1962 over Iowa, this time killing all aboard. http://www.airsafe.com/plane-crash/western-airlines-flight-39-1957.pdf

A Canadian passenger aircraft  blew up after a device exploded in the lavatory over British Colombia in 1965. The crime was never solved.

In 1939, as part of a significant Irish terrorist bombing campaign in England a bomb was planted in a public lavatory in Oxford street. Disaster was averted when the lavatory attendant dumped the IED in a  bucket of water (not a good response, but a brave man).  Several other incidents in this campaign were IEDs left in lavatories. The attendant was awarded £5 for his bravery

In 1884, during another Irish bombing campaign in England, (yes there have been a few) the headquarters of the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard, was severely damaged in an explosion caused by a large IED being left in a public lavatory next door to the police Headquarters.  Here’s a picture. 

There’s an interesting aspect to this story. Several months earlier, in 1883, an Irish revolutionary organization , the Irish Republican Brotherhood sent a letter to Scotland Yard  threatening to 'blow Superintendent Williamson off his stool' and dynamite all the public buildings in London on 30 May 1884. The Met Police largely ignored the warning, and then on the very day promised the explosion at Scotland Yard occurred, as did two other explosions elsewhere in London.  The failure of the Met Police to protect their own headquarters, as well as the occurrence of several other IED attacks across London embarrassed the police severely and led indirectly to the formation of Special Branch.

There are numerous other IED attacks on lavatories, too many to list.

For the past few years I’ve been mentally filing interesting accidental explosions from history and I’m now being encouraged to gather my notes together, and indeed relay some of the intriguing aspects to these stories. Shortly you’ll see a new page on this blog dedicated to such events.

Here’s a great example:

In August 1769 lightning struck the tower of the Church of San Nazaro on Brescia, Italy.  In the vaults of the church over 200,000 pounds of explosive was stored. The resulting explosion killed 3000 people and destroyed a large part of the city.

For many centuries gunpowder was stored in churches – there seems to have been a belief that the church bells prevented lightning. Unfortunately I guess the opposite is true – the tall steeples and towers on a church actually encourage lightning strikes.  During thunder storms teams of men rang the bells in church towers in efforts to prevent thunderstorms.  During the period 1753 to 1786 lightning killed 103 French bell ringers. A triumph of belief over evidence surely.

Interestingly Franklin was extremely active in advising European governments after the Brescia event on the principles of lightning protection for munitions stores. At one stage there was a dispute over the best shaped lightning rods , with Franklin a proponent of sharp pointed rods on top of buildings and an Englishman, Benjamin Wilson urging the use of ball shaped terminals below the roof line. The argument became political, and George III decided he didn’t want American advice…. And Franklin’s conductors were replaced on several British munitions stores.  One of them in Sumatra subsequently disappeared with a bang during a  thunderstorm.

As late as 1856 gunpowder stored in a church in Rhodes was hit by lightning and it exploded killing , allegedly, 4000 people.

www.intelmsl.com/blog

A post a couple of months ago gave details of the development of IEDs by Confederate officer Brigadier General Gabriel Raines in the American Civil War. I've now found a record of the same officer using IEDs even earlier, in the Second Seminole Indian War in Florida in 1840. Here's the story:

In 1839 Raines was posted as a company commander in north central Florida. In May 1840 he became commander of a single unit holding Fort King as other forces responded to (insurgent) activity at other Forts (FOBs). The insurgent forces seeing Fort King undermanned started to exploit the situation and killed two soldiers within sight of the Fort.  Raines wanted to seize the initiative and deter such attacks so developed an IED, a buried shell, covered with military clothing, designed to function if the clothing was picked up on a simple pull mechanism.  After several days waiting the IED exploded and Raines, with 18 men, went to the explosion site, but found "naught but a dead opossum".  However while investigating his own IED he was attacked by a group of 100 Taliban Seminoles. Although they were fought off, Raines suffered serious injury, and was not expected to survive. Even his obituary was published in a newspaper. However he recovered, was promoted, and commended for “Gallant and Courageous service”. He went on to place a second IED but later had to remove if because his own soldiers were scared of it.  Raines’s actions were not approved by many in the US military.  20 years later when he used IEDs against the Union, his “dastardly business” was again condemned by Union Brigadier General William Berry who had not forgotten Raines’ exploits in Florida.

Raines died in 1881 of medical conditions associated with his injuries sustained in 1840.