Target behaviour.

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This week is the promised follow-up to last week’s discussion on exploding cars in film and TV, and how screenwriters don’t really understand how terrorists and criminals go about achieving this grim feat of engineering and chemistry. Last week we looked at the tactics that a bomber might use, including the size of the bomb and how to initiate it. We looked at the three main categories of IED: victim-operated, command, and timed, and saw that the first one was the most practical for a would-be terrorist.

This week we’ll focus more on target behaviour, i.e. those unfortunates in film and TV who get blown up (or narrowly dodge same). We will set the scene for this with a discussion of the real tactics used by terrorists and some unfortunate real-life examples of car assassinations.

So, with that in mind, let me give you a word of warning. We’re going to discuss some pretty nasty killings and show some pictures of cars which were blown up with people inside them. I’m not going to be gratuitous for the sake of it, but it is a grisly topic and so a certain amount is unavoidable. You can sit this one out, no shame, and I won’t include it in the final exam.

And just to remind you again from last week, I’m deliberately not using the term “car bomb”, since this (in my experience) is used to denote a car full of explosives which is designed to kill a large number of people and/or destroy property. Instead, we’ll use the unwieldy “a bomb in a car”, or the jargon-y “UVIED”¹, or the even more unwieldy “in-car assassination using explosives”.

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The reality of UVIEDs is grim

So, I said at the top that I wasn’t going to tell you how to blow up a car. And I still won’t, because I have no desire to end up on a watchlist². I will discuss, in non-technical terms, some of the characteristics of real vehicle assassinations.

The abbreviation used for a “bomb in a car” is UVIED (under vehicle improvised explosive device³), which is quite telling in itself. Historically, these IEDs are placed underneath a car, usually underneath the driver’s seat. They can be rigged to initiate when the car moves, or else with a remote-control mechanism. They have to be big enough to kill the target, but small enough to fit under the car and not be too conspicuous. In the now-familiar taxonomy from last week, they are “victim-operated” IEDs⁴.

They are used by criminals and terrorist groups the world over, with some differences in methodology from group to group and era to era. This isn’t too surprising: the “talent pool” of IED builders will never be massive⁵, so the same designs will be used again and again by the same group. Broadly speaking, some common tactics and techniques are:

Let’s take a grisly but necessary look at some of the examples above:

Airey Neave was a British Army officer who had been decorated for his exploits during WW2, including an escape from the notorious Colditz Castle POW camp. In his later life he became a Member of Parliament in the Conservative Party, and later rose to become a prominent advocate for the Unionist cause in Northern Ireland. He was targeted by the INLA⁶ with an IED underneath his car which was triggered by a tilt-switch (a common trigger for UVIEDs). As Neave’s car ascended an incline coming out of the Palace of Westminster, the device detonated. Neave lost both of his legs in the blast and died a short time later in hospital.

Maksym Shapoval was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Ukrainian military who played an active role in resisting the Russian invasion of the Donbas region. He was killed by a bomb planted in or under his car in Kyiv, with Russian agents presumed to be behind the murder. One bystander was injured in the attack whose aftermath you can see in the clip below:

There are some notable points about the attacks above which differentiates them from the movies. Firstly, the cars are not completely atomised, as they often are in films. The damage is very serious, but it’s localised to the area where the target (usually the driver) is located. Secondly, the victims often suffer a bloody, painful death where they lose their legs in the blast and then bleed out. We don’t usually see this in films. Thirdly, the devices are usually placed underneath the car, and don’t rely on the car’s ignition. Fourthly, and thankfully, they are rare. Although no consolation to the victims themselves, we can at least take some satisfaction in the fact that this isn’t as common as Hollywood makes it out to be.

It’s worth mentioning one film which I came across which does have a very realistic bomb-in-car scene, in that the actual victim is someone other than the intended target:

And, as a complete contrast, here’s the obligatory (for this blog) ridiculous James Bond clip. This time it’s from For Your Eyes Only, and the Q Branch of MI6 have decided that rigging Bond’s own car with explosives linked to a very movement-sensitive switch is a good idea:

What’s even less realistic than how readily that car blows up is how easily the window glass breaks. Unlike the examples in the next section, though, these poor mooks have no reason to suspect that the car will blow up⁷. Realistic behaviour on the part of Hollywood victims is hard to find.

Nobody checks their cars…

Hollywood characters are not ignorant of the threats facing them but seem to have a learned helplessness regarding doing anything about it. This is a shame, because UVIEDs (especially if they have the amount of bang shown in films) are easy to spot, if you look for them. The terrorist will be nervous and under time pressure when they emplace the IED, so it’s going to be hard to conceal it very well. A little bit of searching around the car would go a long way.

Of course, the difference is that you need to check your car every day, whereas the terrorist only needs to emplace the IED once. Still, for this reason, people who are likely to be targeted by criminals or terrorists (e.g. security forces during an insurgency) are often trained to check their car for UVIEDs before touching it. This can involve using long angled mirrors to see every point under the car, or can be as simple as an “eight-point check”:

Here’s some friendly Canadian forces doing an under-vehicle search at a checkpoint:

That’s not to say that these checks are foolproof (see examples in previous section), but they significantly improve your chances. However, we never really see Hollywood characters check underneath their cars before getting in.

Checking your car for IEDs serves two purposes. Firstly, and obviously, it alerts you to a threat to your life. Secondly, and more subtly, it alerts a would-be terrorist to the fact that you’re a vigilant person who will find an IED if they try to place one.

By carrying out checks, the potential victim can turn a “targetable action” into a non-targetable action. For example, if I leave my house every morning and, without stopping to check, pull the driver’s door handle to open the door, that’s a targetable action. A terrorist can place an IED under the car door which is triggered by either the door handle or the opening of the door. My action of opening the door is a targetable action. However, if I leave the house, pull out a torch and pocket mirror, and check under the car door before touching the handle, then there’s no longer a targetable action. I will see any IED before touching the door, and then obviously will not touch the door. Okay, the terrorist could hide the IED much better, but that takes more effort to make and more time to emplace, and I might still see it. In all likelihood, they will just find another person to target (or maybe another way to target me, but at least it won’t be in my car).

This doesn’t just apply to car doors, of course, but to every part of the car that the terrorist could potentially target. It also applies to the checks soldiers do for IEDs after dismounting from their vehicles. There’s a saying in counter-IED: you’re not doing checks to stop the IED which is there, but for the IED which could be there next time.

But—and this is where it really gets mind-boggling—we often see see Hollywood characters neglect their checks even when they think there’s a high likelihood of a bomb.

…even when they suspect a bomb

When a character in film or TV faces the threat of an exploding car, they still don’t bother to check for bombs underneath before getting in. In last week’s post we linked to the scene from Wise Guys where Danny De Vito is tasked with starting his boss’s car. It’s played for laughs, like this one from The Simpsons where Homer becomes a bodyguard for Mayor Quimby who receives a death threat from Fat Tony and the Springfield Mob:

It’s not always played for laughs, though. In The Sum of All Fears, the baddie Nazi suspects that he might be a target, so he gets his bodyguard to start the car for him:

I’m in two minds about this one. On the one hand, it nearly illustrates the idea of a “targetable action”. The bodyguard starts the Nazi baddy’s car for him because he’s paranoid (and quite rightly so). However, we can assume that the bombers know about his trick, and also know how he likes to light up before driving off. So the targetable action is pressing the cigarette lighter.

Why I still roll my eyes a bit here is because neither man does a physical check of the car to look for an IED or even signs the car has been tampered with. Whatever the difficulty in wiring up to a car’s ignition (which we spoke about last week), putting a switch underneath the cigarette lighter would be harder again, especially without leaving an obvious wire coming out and going to the bomb. The filmmakers are trying to be too smart here, because they know that we expect to see a car get atomised in a fireball. They give us what we want, but only after tricking us.

We see this again in The Irishman. Although it’s only in Jo Hoffa’s imagination that the car blows up, we still get that thrill as the audience:

But if we focus on her behaviour in the scene, despite how obviously worried she is, she still takes the exact same risk as in the previous clip. The only concession is that she makes sure to look sad and nervous while turning the key.

This is like running headlong toward a brick wall while grimacing at the pain you’re about to experience. Why not try to find a route around the wall? But maybe that’s just a part of human nature. Perhaps we don’t want to find the way around the wall.

Conclusion: Behavioural changes work, but require a will

To come full circle, I think characters in film and TV have an exaggerated learned helplessness which is not very realistic. At the same time, though, they are reflecting something which is a very real problem for militaries and security services around the world: people’s reluctance to see themselves as victims or targets, and therefore their reluctance to take basic steps to protect themselves.

Soldiers in conflict zones need to be trained and drilled and supervised and drilled again to make sure that they carry out basic counter-IED tasks. Even though their lives might be on the line, the threat doesn’t seem as real as the threat getting shot does. Or perhaps because the range of potential injuries is so much worse from an IED, soldiers simply choose not to imagine that outcome, and therefore take fewer precautionary measures.

I was once told⁸ about a US Army staff officer during the early days of the 2003 Iraq War gloating about how “dumb” the insurgents were. “The last seventeen IED attacks on our convoys where we took casualties, their tactics have been the same. They don’t change it up at all.” The point being, of course, that if the enemy are using basic tactics successfully against you, then you’re the “dumb” ones, not them.

Just because Hollywood reflects the worst traits of learned helplessness, doesn’t mean we should all follow suit. Of course the chances that anybody reading this will ever be threatened by an IED in their car is (thankfully) very slim, but it might still be good to learn what not to do from film and TV characters. So let me wrap up this week’s post with a quick “dos and don’ts” PSA.

Should you ever find yourself threatened by mobsters, criminals, or terrorists who have a track record of using in-car assassinations with explosives:

Do	Don’t
Find a secure place to park your car, e.g. a locked garage	Be shy or coy about the fact that you’re checking the car. Remember, you’re doing it so they won’t target you in the future
Install an obvious CCTV camera (even one of the dummy ones)	Close your eyes and wince while turning the key: this won’t help
Do a quick 8-point check on your car before touching it if it’s been left out in the open	Forget about the other things they can target besides the ignition: doors, the boot/trunk, car seats
Better still: use a hand-held mirror and pen light (or phone camera and torch) to help with the above checks	Be afraid to call the police if you see anything unusual
	Try to deal with any IED yourself, ever

That’s all from me for this week, thanks, as always, for reading! Your support is most appreciated, and please like and share with anyone who would be interested. Next week we’re going to be going to Iraq for an EOD review of The Hurt Locker, as long promised.

Featured Image: The Irishman, Netflix (2019)

1. Which stands for under-vehicle improvised explosive device. ↩︎
2. I also don’t want to contribute to IED proliferation. I’m sound like that. ↩︎
3. Okay, technically there is a difference, in that an “under-vehicle” IED is a subset of “bomb in car” category. There have been some cases of people killed in cars by bombs that were not underneath the car, but the generalisation holds for the vast majority of cases, so we’ll stick to it here. ↩︎
4. Just in case you were under a rock until now, “IED” = “improvised explosive device” = “bomb”. ↩︎
5. Not only because of the advanced skills, equipment, and supplies needed, but also because it’s a very dangerous job. ↩︎
6. Irish National Liberation Army, a socialist republican splinter group from the Irish Republican Army (IRA), formed in the early 1970s. ↩︎
7. Because, as I said, it’s an utterly ridiculous idea. ↩︎
8. Massive caveat here, in that the story was told by a British Army source. British military personnel love nothing more than an excuse to bash the Yanks, especially in an area where they (the Brits) are world leaders, such as counter-IED. ↩︎