The mind-set of the bomb squad

RICHARD ESPOSITO has the hard edge of a street-smart detective, but all he’s armed with is a reporter’s notebook. The longtime TV and tabloid cop-shop groupie never fires blanks. In “Bomb Squad: A Year Inside the Nation’s Most Exclusive Police Unit,” ABC News reporters Esposito and Ted Gerstein go undercover with New York City’s death-defusers for a year and hit one bull’s-eye after another. They narrate a street saga so visual it could become the pilot for the next “24”-style TV show.

“Bomb Squad” is a tense tour of a century of potentially explosive events that draws us close enough to see skillful fingers probing one “suspicious package” after another, yet far enough away to feel protected.

The timing for this unique look inside the world of the bomb-busters could not be better. The former head of the CIA’s now disbanded Osama bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, said last month in an interview on MSNBC that a “regrouped” Al Qaeda and Taliban “are going to detonate a nuclear device inside the United States.” The authors introduce us to robots, containment vessels, 90-pound suits of armor, ergonomic helmets, the Army’s 300-acre Hazardous Devices School, handheld X-ray devices and “backscatter vans” whose X-ray fields can penetrate thick walls in search of weapon dumps.

The nuclear threat that Scheuer warns of was already a familiar fact to the 33-member elite New York Police Department unit that welcomed Esposito and Gerstein for 365 days in 2004. “Bomb Squad” reveals that a month after the Sept. 11 attacks, the CIA was warning that Al Qaeda had “procured or made a nuclear weapon or weapons” that were “being smuggled or already in place” in Washington, New York City or both. During the weeks of the alert, bomb squad commander Jerry “Pappy” Sheehan walked around with a briefcase cuffed to his wrist.

The NYPD was told that the feds had only one team and one “cutter” trained to defuse any bomb, so the squad would have to handle one discovered in New York. Four of the squad’s senior officers volunteered “to disarm a device knowing full well they would almost certainly die, even if they succeeded in saving the city of New York.”

In retelling the 9/11 and the 1993 World Trade Center bombing stories, the book almost incidentally, without fanfare, indicts former New York City Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose presidential campaign is making the threat of terrorism a central theme.

Although Giuliani is barely mentioned, the “failure to act on what was learned after the blast” in 1993, when he was elected mayor, was an “inexcusable” error in “critical ... management and response to potential mass casualty” incidents,” Esposito and Gerstein conclude.

“It was as if no one had read” the damning fire department reports after the first bombing, they lament, adding that all the same deadly problems came back to haunt the 9/11 first responders. Like the “few scattered flakes of snow” that fell that day, “the event’s significance quickly melted away.”

Similarly, the authors avoid any conclusions about the endless false alarms that emanate from the Bush administration’s intelligence apparatus, although the current squad commander, Lt. Mark Torre, declares that “virtually every dollar spent on Homeland Security has been a dollar wasted.”

If the bomb-busters look more often like ghost-busters, chasing chimerical threats, Esposito and Gerstein are too apolitical to let the squad say why. Their only explicit foray into presidential politics is the extraordinary tale of the FALN, the Puerto Rican nationalists whose bombs maimed two squad members, blinded another cop, killed four diners at Fraunces Tavern, and left a trail of unparalleled American carnage in the 1970s and 1980s. They angrily denounce President Clinton’s 1999 decision to pardon 16 FALN terrorists but fail to explain that his wife was courting New York Latinos in her 2000 U.S. Senate race.

The FALN attacks are just part of the fascinating chronology of bomb squad battles, starting with its founding in 1903, when it was called the “Italian Squad,” set up to stop the extortion bombings of the “Black Hand,” a secret society of Italian thugs. When its first commander, Giuseppe Petrosino, was killed in Sicily, more than 200,000 people went to his funeral in New York.

The tales stretch through the killing of two squad detectives by the Irish Republican Army, infiltrating a German plot to bomb ships in New York Harbor, the key role two squad members played in tracking the first World Trade Center bombers and the 2,500 bomb runs the squad makes a year.

Predictably, the embedded authors traded accolades for access, the only door-opener into a paramilitary universe. So everyone in “Bomb Squad” is a hero all the time, even though Esposito and Gerstein’s year on the job consisted of tame stuff and they don’t report seeing any significant bomb threats. “Why do bomb technicians” -- as the authors say squad members prefer to be called -- “stand over these devices so willingly? Thirty-three times that question was asked of the NYPD Bomb Squad members and thirty-three times the ... member’s answer was the same: ‘Somebody has to do it.’ ”

In fact, contrary to this mantra, half the squad quit shortly after 9/11, it’s quietly noted elsewhere in the text, because overtime pay had so fattened their pensions that they were able to collect their maximum payout for life. “Security and family came first” is how Esposito and Gerstein explain it. These mass retirements meant that a mostly rookie bomb squad guarded the city when New Yorkers were seeing Al Qaeda lurking in every shadow.

But no one can deny that most of what the squad does is circumspect heroism -- sublimating danger, celebrating will. “[A] pocketknife and a prayer” is another mantra of the trade, when all the high-tech flash is reduced to a duel with a wire. “Since 9/11,” FBI Supervisory Agent Dave Jernigan tells the authors, “everybody wants a bomb squad. I think there is some kind of security blanket feeling that they’ve got somebody who they can call to take care of things right away.”

Esposito and Gerstein, by bringing us inside the bomb squad members’ daily lives, show them to be an indispensable and, until now, invisible layer of protection, people who still need every new resource but are committed to bravely serve.

Wayne Barrett, a senior editor at the Village Voice, is co-author of “Grand Illusion: The Untold Story of Rudy Giuliani and 9/11.”