Standing Well Back
1930-1940

Sharp Knives on 40ft poles and tubs of water – IED response in the 1930s

I came across this edition of “Popular Mechanics” from July 1932 with a couple of interesting IED related articles – the first is the invention of a postal x-ray machine for IED detection, and then a longer article on IEDs including some postal IEDs that killed an amateur bomb tech, working with a sharp knife on the end of a 40 ft pole.  Also detailed is an IED that was placed in a tub of water in Milwaukee police headquarters – it detonated, killing 14 policemen.  On page 110 there’s also interesting reference to biometrics on IEDs, and the exploitation of evidence from them.

The article also makes reference to the famous New York Bomb Disposal expert Owen Eagen who died of natural causes in 1920 after a career where he is said to have dealt with over 7000 IEDs – a good indicator that New York was once a hotbed of anarchists and criminals who very often resorted to IEDs. I’m currently researching Eagen’s efforts as an early bomb tech and will blog on this in the future. Suffice for now to say there were more than 125 IED incidents in New York between January and October 1913.

1880-1890

The Tsar and the suicide bomber

I have been promising for some time a blog post about the 1881 assassination of the Tsar by suicide bomber in St Petersburg, the site of which I visited a few month ago.  I think that this incident is particularly interesting for the following reasons:

  1. It was a suicide bombing by any definition and thus invites comparisons with modern suicide terrorism
  2. It seems to have sparked and inspired the revolutionaries of the time, demonstrating what was possible – for the next 25 years revolutionaries around the world sought to repeat the impact of the incident
  3. The design was enabled by the development of dynamite in the late 1860s and it would appear by Russian military experience of fusing from the sea mines I discussed last week

The late 1870s and early 1880s were politically a time of great drama. In Russia Anarchists and Nihilists were active and some sought the use of violence to achieve their goals in the light of poor harvests and industrial recession.  The Nihilists objected to the status quo of the ruling class and the capitalist control of the economy and in that at least there are some very modern echoes. One particular group, the Narodnaya Volya (The People’s Will) decided to target the Tsar.  One of this group’s early attempts to assassinate the Tsar was in Moscow in 1879  – the terrorists dug a tunnel from a house and planted three large command initiated IEDs under the railway on a track (by digging a tunnel under a road from a nearby house) that the Tsar was predicted to use. The attack failed as did an attempt a year later when explosives were planted in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg by an employee Stephan Khalturin who was able smuggle the explosives in bit by bit. The picture below shoes the aftermath.

 

I can’t find details of the construct of this device but I believe it was a timed IED. The Tsar delayed a reception dinner thus missing the explosion, but many people were killed or badly wounded in the incident. Amongst the dead were all the members of the Finnish Guard in a room below the intended victims.

In an early example of an “attack the Network” C-IED effort the Russian secret police, the Okrhana, was established in the light of the failed bomb attacks (along with the rise of left wing revolutionary groups) and they were the archetypal “secret police”, running double agents, agents provocateurs, surveillance and interception of communications. They also operated internationally.

On the 13 March the Tsar once again overruled the advice of his security staff and took his carriage on a well known and predictable route through St Petersburg from Michaelovsky Palace to the Winter Palace. Once again this is a story of terrorists exploiting the known and predictable routes of their target. An armed Cossack sat with the coach-driver and another six Cossacks followed on horseback. Behind them came a group of police officers in sledges.

All along the route he was watched by members of Narodnaya Volya, who had carefully planned a triple IED attack. On a street corner near the Catherine Canal a woman terrorist gave the signal to two of the conspirators to throw their bombs at the Tsar’s carriage. The bombs missed the carriage and instead landed amongst the Cossacks. The Tsar was unhurt but insisted on getting out of the carriage to check the condition of the injured men. While he was standing with the wounded Cossacks another terrorist, Elnikoff, stepped forward with a shout and threw his bomb on the ground between himself and the Tsar.

Alexander was mortally wounded and the explosion was so great that Elnikoff also died from the bomb blast.  The device used is quite interesting – he is a contemporary description and an image.

 

 The infernal machine used by Elnikoff was about 7 1/2, inches in height. Metal tubes (bb) filled with chlorate of potash, and enclosing glass tubes (cc) filled with sulphuric acid (commonly called oil of vitriol), intersect the cylinder. Around the glass tubes are rings of iron (dd) closely attached as weights. The construction is such that, no matter how the bomb falls, one of the glass tubes is sure to break. The chlorate of potash in that case, combining with the sulphuric acid, ignites at once, and the flames communicate over the fuse (ff) with the piston (c), filled with fulminate of silver. The concussion thus caused explodes the dynamite or “black jelly” (a) with which the cylinder is closely packed.

You will note some similarities, in principle, with parts of the initiating system from the Russian sea mines of the Crimean war that I posted last week.

In all, I think that this terrorist attack is one of the most significant in history – the first “suicide bombing” to gain international attention, and certainly an attack that inspired revolutionaries the world over.  My friend Greg Woolgar, who is about to publish a much needed book on the Victorian Bomb disposal expert and first proponent of IED exploitation and technical intelligence, Colonel Majendie, tells me that the good colonel visited St Petersburg in the aftermath to seek intelligence on the device.

1880-1890

The curious case of Professor Mezzeroff – IED expert, terrorism proponent and New York liquor salesman

Strange things occurred in the late 1800s  It was a time when the recent development of dynamite and other explosives coupled with the not unrelated fevers of Irish nationalism and anarchy became ever more febrile.  The Irish Republican Brotherhood joined the mix of fashionable secret societies and gained a significant following in the US where it became the “Fenian Brotherhood” and “Clan na Gael”.     Large quantities of arms were acquired  and the Fenians even organized raids into Canada from the USA with the US government curiously ignoring their efforts initially probably because of antipathy towards  the UK for its less than fulsome support for the Union during the Civil War.

In the 1880s a new face appeared on the scene, calling himself “Professor Gaspodin Mezzeroff”.  Claiming a Russian background he portrayed himself as a scientist/chemist and explosives expert imbued with the experience of Russian nihilism… but one who embraced the Irish republican cause.  He lectured extensively at public meetings, raising money and advocating the use of dynamite by terrorists to further the political cause of the Irish republicans.

O’Donovan Rossa, a key Irish republican activist and leader,  advertised courses in IED manufacture, (for $30) taught by Mezzeroff, and Mezzeroff’s meeings were widely reported in the press of the time.  Certainly he came to the attention of the British and their nascent “Special Irish Bureau” of the London Metropolitan Police.

Mezzeroff was decribed as “ a tall, sharp-faced man with curly hair arranged around his pate and a ‘grizzly moustache’, Habitual wearing of black clothes and steely spectacles rounded off the sinister effect of a character straight out of Dostoevsky or Conrad. His origins were mysterious, although he had the accents of an Irishman.  At a public meeting in 1885 in New York to pronounce the death penalty on the Prince of Wales, Mezzeroff was introduced as “ England’s invisible enemy” and he dared the US congress to make laws preventing Irishmen from using dynamite in England – an act recently suggested by General Abbott of the US Army Engineers .

Mezzeroff issued pamphlets with IED designs and certainly IEDs constructed in the US were shipped clandestinely into England, and used in a number of attacks.  An amusingly skeptical, indeed hilarious report of one of Mezzeroffs meetings from the New York Times is worth reading, here

Mezzeroff’s IED designs are curious and worthy of examination, perhaps in a future blog. One included an exploding cigar and indeed I have a contemporaneous photo of such a device from the Scotland Yard museum that I found in a  book published in 1902.

Mezzeroff published a letter in an anarchist pamphlet “The alarm” stating:

“and I won’t stop until every workingman in Europe knows how to use explosives against autocratic government and grasping monopolies.“

He claimed to always carry an IED:

“I take it through the street  in my pocket; I carry it about in horse cars – if you carry two or three pounds (of nitro-glycerine) with you people will respect you much more than if you carried a pistol.”

As it happens, Mezzeroff was a pseudonym.  It was an elderly New Yorker ,a gentleman called Richard Rogers by some sources or “Wilson” by other sources, who by day ran a liquor shop in New York. Another pseudonym was “Dr Hodges”.

Mezzeroff ran a bomb making school in the Greenpoint area of Brooklyn and a number of his graduates went on to short if partially successful IED planting campaigns in the UK. By 1886 however the public interest in such things waned, especially with the implication of an IED causing the events that led to Chicago’s “Haymarket massacre”. It is clear too that the US government became much less tolerant of these exhortations to violence.

As for Mezzeroff, he disappeared from view, probably returning to his real name (whatever that was) and liquor selling shop.

I should also note that there is a fascinating side story about British intelligence operations in the USA against the Fenian bomb makers – numerous paid informers, secret agents, “dirty tricks”, intercepted IEDs and sting operations –  a real “defeat the network” campaign and including a report from the Pinkertons agency describing how, when operating undercover on behalf of the British consul-general in New York, they were shown a number of IEDs made by a Patrick Crowe of Peoria, Illinois. More on this to come.

19th Century

IEDs in the American Civil War

I’m enjoying a fascinating book about improvised munitions from the American Civil War. The book is a new edition of two period documents, firstly the “Rains Torpedo Book” written by an innovative Confederate officer , General Gabriel Rains and describing a significant number of ingenous IEDs that he designed and deployed.  At the time both land mines and sea/river mines were all known as “torpedoes”.  The second document, included in the book, is from the Federal perspective  “Notes Explaining Rebel Torpedoes and Ordnance” by Captain Peter S Michie. I’d recommend the book to anyone interested in Counter-IED for the unusual perspective it gives. Here’s a link to Amazon: Confederate Torpedoes

As an example there is a description of a triple IED attack mounted by Rains in  the aftermath of the Battle of Williamsburg in 1862.

Title – Sub –Terra Shell “ 115,000 men turned by 4 of these”

The day after the Battle of Willamsburg, Va, my brigade formed the rearguard of Genl. Johnston’s army, and we were employed at very hard work, in getting over a mud slosh in about 3 miles from that city toward Richmond our own artillery, and that taken from the enemy. Afterward I discovered that such was the nature of the place , from woods and the tortuous road, we could not bring a single piece of artillery to bear, and the enemy were coming on pursuing and shelling the road as they came. Not knowing how to protect our good soldiers, the sick and disabled, , which usually bring up the rear of an army in retreat, I involuntarily fell back and found in the road, in a mud hole a broken down caisson. On opening this, nothing was within except 5 shells of this size and shape., which I put in the hands of 5 soldiers, and proceeded with them to the rear , where our Confederate cavalry guard was stationed and under their supervision, the colonel being present we planted 4 of the shells in the road a little beyond a fallen tree, the first obstacle the enemy would find on their route. I put the three together about a yard part in a triangular form, and one a little to the left in a basket and with some sensitive primers, which I happened to have, after they were buried to their tops, I primed them, covering lightly with soil out of view, and then withdrew.  As the enemy approached the cavalry retired also.

There were twp explosions as the enemy’s cavalry came upon them, so the 3 shells planted near each other must have exploded as one , and the other separately.

 Lawyer’s A ‘s statement – “I was in Williamsburg at the time in the possession of the enemy, and such was the demoralizing effect, that for 3 days and nights they stopped and never moved a peg after hearing the reports” So these 4 shells checkmated the advance of 115,000 men under Gen McClellan and turned them from their line of march, for they never used the road afterward, supposing it thus armed though they advanced by the York River road finally.

 Other devices used are fascinating including the first electrical command wire initiated IEDs I have found – more to follow in future blogs.

19th Century

Copycat IED attacks – 100 years apart

One of the reasons I study historical IED attacks is the parallels with current IED attacks. Sometimes the parallels need a bit of analysis to see; sometimes the parallels are frankly startling.  He’s some specific UK examples.  It is often forgotten that the Irish terrorists have been planting IEDs in England since the late 19th century.  There were then subsequent campaigns in 1939 (the “S Plan”) and later in the 20th century. It is interesting that sometimes the exact same targets were attacked.

The IRA’s “S Plan” in particular, although largely unsuccessful, posed an intriguing terrorist threat worthy of study because the IRA in the early months of 1939 attacked the national electrical power supply infrastructure in the UK. Not with much success, I admit, but nonetheless with clear strategic intent.  There are a few other terrorist campaigns where specific aspects of infrastructure have been targeted but this is an interesting one. Details of the quite broad ranging S Plan attacks are here.

Below is a list of attacks that match or replicate IED attacks from earlier campaigns. In particular I would highlight the repeat attacks on Victoria Station (three times), and Hammersmith Bridge

Prisons:

1. 1867 – A “fenian” device used to breach a prison wall at Clerkenwell

2. 1939 IRA device blew up against the wall of Walton Gaol in Liverpool

London Train/ Tube stations

1. 1883/1884/1885 IEDs exploded at Gower St Station (now Euston Square) and Victoria Station left luggage office. Device defused at Charing Cross Station. Other devices exploded in tunnels

2. In 1939/1940 Devices exploded at Tottenham Court Road, Leicester Square, Kings Cross and Victoria Station left luggage office then in 1940 Euston station. IRA two devices defused at Baker Street

3. 1991, 1992 IEDs at Paddington station, Hammersmith and Victoria Station, London Bridge station, other devices on trains and near stations

Hammersmith Bridge

1. March 1939 Hammersmith Bridge attacked with two IEDs

2. June 2000 Hammersmith Bridge attacked with one IED

Houses of Parliament

1. 1884 Fenian devices exploded in the Houses of Parliament

2. 1974 IRA device exploded at the Houses of Parliament

Department stores

1. 1939 department stores attacked with incendiaries

2. 1991/1992 department stores and shops attacked with inendiaries

Scotland Yard

1. In 1884 a device exploded next to Scotland Yard, headquarters of the Metropolitan Police

2. In 1973, Police defused a bomb outside New Scotland Yard

Tower of London

1. 1885 An explosion at the Tower of London

2. 1974  An explosion at the Tower of London

Gasworks

1. 1883  A gas works was attacked with an IED in Glasgow

2. In 1939 gasworks were on the intended strategy of the IRA’s S Plan

3. In 1993 A gas works was attacked in Warrington

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