Part of the problem the Coast Guard or any port police force faces is discerning a terrorist needle in a mammoth haystack of legitimate recreational boaters. The US has no national registry or national system of operator licensing for the 18 million recreational boats in the United States. The only way to anticipate whether a boater may pose a threat is by observing the vessel and its operator’s behavior. The Coast Guard does not usually provide an escort for tankers carrying crude oil, so there often is not even anyone available to make this call. For LNG, the Coast Guard has established a half-mile exclusion zone on either side of a tanker — essentially a regulatory no-man’s land that boaters are supposed to steer clear of. But a small boat traveling at 50 knots can enter that zone and be alongside a ship in just over 30 seconds. Once the LNG tanker is inside the harbor, the channel may be only a few hundred yards wide, a distance that can be traveled in the blink of an eye. This leaves virtually no time for the Coast Guard escort vessels to determine that they are facing an imminent attack as opposed to a reckless or ignorant everyday boater. Firing on the attacking boat is very problematical. Even if there were not all the risks associated with using automatic firearms near a waterfront where people live, work, and play, it is extremely hard to hit a small vessel moving at a high speed from another moving vessel.

As for securing a small boat to carry out an attack, Khalid, Nabih, and their compatriots learned that purchasing a Zodiac boat with a powerful outboard motor in the US was about as easy as buying a plasma television. It could then be outfitted with an improvised shape charge constructed with explosive materials and technology readily available within the US. The best way to gain access to the water without drawing too much attention to themselves would be to transport their Zodiacs on a trailer puller behind an SUV to an open public boat ramp. Once inside the harbor, two Zodiacs traveling at the speed of 40-plus knots could pull out of a nearby marina, penetrate the Coast Guard’s security perimeter, and be alongside a lumbering vessel with little risk of being intercepted. It would be a suicide mission, but Allah would surely reward them for carrying out such a bold strike on the infidels.

Confident that their plan was a viable one, the group met with their imam, who commended them for their unwavering commitment to defeating the crusaders. He provided them with contacts at mosques in the Los Angeles and Boston areas. The five men decided they would leave within a month on different flights to Logan and LAX.

Once in the US, their preparations began in earnest. Their goal was to carry out the attack within six months, ideally as close to the 9/11 anniversary as possible. Khalid and his compatriots screened several possible candidates referred to them by the local imam. They settled on two first-generation Pakistani immigrants whom the imam had successfully radicalized. Both had been arrested for their involvement in a car-theft ring that specialized in stealing luxury automobiles in the New York area and shipping them to Latin America in containers for resale on the black market. While serving time in the New York State prison system, they had become devout Muslims. A prison chaplain suggested that after they were released, they should reach out to a friend of his who was the imam of a mosque in northern Massachusetts. He said his friend would be happy to help them find jobs and a place to live. The chaplain was right; the imam found them an apartment and lined them up with jobs in nearby Nashua, New Hampshire. Meanwhile, he took them under his wing, taking a very personal interest in their religious education.

The reason Khalid needed additional recruits was that he had determined it would take a minimum of two Zodiacs to carry out the attack on the LNG ship. First, there was always a chance that the Coast Guard would get lucky and intercept or succeed at firing at and hitting one of the boats before it reached the target. Second, according to reports he had read, there was some debate among experts as to whether the rupture of a single six-million-gallon double-walled cargo tank would be sufficient to ignite the entire vessel and its load of 30 million gallons. A safer bet would be to breach two of the ships’ five tanks.