Antiterrorism agency taps Boston-area brains

WASHINGTON -- The Pentagon wants a team of Boston-area social scientists and mathematicians to study whether mapping the web of relationships among terrorist organizations, arms scientists, and potential suppliers can help disrupt groups seeking to obtain weapons of mass destruction, according to government officials.

The secretive Defense Threat Reduction Agency has tapped Boston College and Woburn-based Aptima Inc. to see if "social network analysis" -- charting the cultural, political, and financial connections among people, groups, and computers -- can help identify the pipeline of money, material, and technical knowledge most likely to lead to a catastrophe such as terrorists obtaining a nuclear, chemical, or biological weapon.

The three-year project, equal parts sociology, anthropology, and mathematical theory, marks a departure from traditional tools of intelligence gathering, such as spy satellites or eavesdropping on communications.

Officials say the rise of terrorists groups and their use of readily available technology have placed a premium on finding more precise ways to use mounds of data to understand the motivations and anticipate the actions of hidden enemies.

"This is really a new investment area for us," Robert Kehlet , coordinator of basic university research for the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, said in an interview. "We'd like to know how these networks form, how decisions are made, what kind of influence cultural factors have."

The goal, Kehlet said, is to determine "what are the dynamics of a group or network that decides they are going to employ or even build weapons of mass destruction."

The Defense Threat Reduction Agency was created in 1998 with a focus on preventing weapons proliferation after the Cold War. With an annual budget of roughly $2.7 billion, it "safeguards America and its allies from weapons of mass destruction by providing capabilities to reduce, eliminate, and counter the threat, and mitigate its effects," according to its mission statement.

Much of the agency's attention is on securing nuclear weapons materials that became surplus after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Agency officials also develop new technologies to identify an attack that uses weapons of mass destruction . However, national security officials increasingly believe that the emerging discipline of social network analysis can help ferret out the groups or individuals most likely to pose such a threat.

The military used that type of analysis on a much smaller scale to capture Saddam Hussein, according to specialists. The military intelligence unit searching for him in 2003 developed a program called "Mongo Link" to chart Hussein's personal and tribal relationships based on information from informants, military patrols, and electronic intercepts. One of the 62,500 connections the unit developed led directly to the former dictator's hide-out.

"Instead of having an amorphous foreign population that seems impenetrable, social network analysis provides you a way to visualize the nodes in the network and how things move through that network, such as weapons, pieces of knowledge, or people," said Montgomery McFate , a former Navy analyst who has studied the theory. "Terrorist organizations do not have organizational charts. They have relationships, and if you can understand those relationships you have gained valuable intelligence."

The theory could be especially useful with outlaws involved in the illicit trade of weapons of mass destruction, a black market that requires a diverse set of contacts -- including individuals with the highly technical expertise necessary to obtain, transport, or develop such weapons.

Mapping those links, Kehlet said, will "assist in reducing that threat."

Using a grant of about $500,000 from the Pentagon, Boston College, and Aptima plan to rely on real-world examples to test the theory, including the well-documented black-market nuclear network that was operated by A.Q. Khan, the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb.

"Once you 've mapped out the network you should be able to know who is going to have power and where you need to put your resources to counter that," said Stephen Borgatti , head of BC's Organization Studies Department and the project leader.

"The primary goal is to enhance the body of knowledge," said Kehlet. "We are looking to get a bit of science done but also develop those students into the future workforce."

Meanwhile, engineers at Aptima will try to determine if the theory can be translated into computer software that can synthesize the billions of bits of data a social network under analysis can develop.

"Can we model the data and say 'Hmm, I think there is a pattern here that you might want to take a second look at,' " said Daniel Serfaty , president of Aptima. To do so, he said, could create a tool with the potential to become "an early warning system."

Taken a step further, Serfaty said, such tools could identify which link in the chain of connections poses the biggest threat, and "what is the node that should be disabled or the link that should be cut to disable the network."

Added Borgatti: "You don't just have to throw bombs at the problem. If we put pressure on those people, it will domino through."

Bryan Bender can be reached at bender@globe.com.