Fictional Doomsday Team Plays Out Scene After Scene [View All]

[Rose Siding]

They disguise themselves as janitors, ambulance crews and food-processing-plant employees. They gather supplies by staging burglaries at a pharmacy and a plumbing supply store. They smuggle weapons into the United States by hiding them in furniture cushions imported from Europe or sneaking them in from Mexico. Ever so patiently and meticulously, this fictional team of terrorists plots its attacks.

To federal officials, the conspirators are known as Universal Adversary, the make-believe force behind a dozen doomsday scripts that the Department of Homeland Security has compiled in an effort to help the nation prepare for, or perhaps even prevent, future attacks.
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Similar scripts involving the Universal Adversary will be used early next month, when Homeland Security officials stage mock chemical and biological attacks involving more than 10,000 law enforcement, public safety, health and other officials in Connecticut and New Jersey, as well as Canada and Britain.

Like the terrorists in the Sept. 11 attacks, the members of Universal Adversary generally enter the United States through official border control points, rather than risk an illegal border crossing. They spend weeks or even months studying their targets, often getting jobs inside the institutions they want to attack.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/26/politics/26home.html?