ADE 651
The ADE 651 is a fraudulent bomb detector produced by the British company Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd. It was claimed to detect many substances, such as drugs or explosives, from long distances. The device was sold to various countries, particularly in Iraq where the government was claimed to have spent £52 million for security operations. The product was invented by Jim McCormick, ATSC's managing director.
The device features a swiveling antenna attached to a plastic grip and was claimed to be charged by a user's static electricity. Users would insert "programmed substance detection cards" to supposedly detect specific substances, which were claimed to absorb the vapors of those substances. However, investigations revealed that the product was incapable of detecting anything, essentially being a dowsing rod. The ADE 651 was used primarily by Iraqi security forces for security checkpoints. Due to the false sense of security, many critics pointed to numerous incidents where bombings occurred despite the presence of the ADE 651 at security checkpoints, underscoring its ineffectiveness.
In 2010, the British government banned the exportation of the device to Iraq and Afghanistan after military officials' claims of its ineffectiveness. McCormick was later arrested on the suspicion of fraud. He was later convicted on three counts of fraud, receiving a ten-year prison sentence in April 2013.
Device
The ADE 651 consists of a swivelling antenna mounted via hinge to a plastic handgrip. It has no battery or other power source; its manufacturer claimed that it is powered solely by the user's static electricity. To use the device, the operator was to walk for a few moments to "charge" it before holding it at right angles to the body. After a substance-specific "programmed substance detection card" is inserted, the device is supposed to swivel in the user's hand to point its antenna in the direction of the target substance. The cards are claimed to be designed to "tune into" the "frequency" of a particular explosive or other substance named on the card.Husam Muhammad, an Iraqi police officer and user of the ADE 651, described the proper use of the device as more of an art than a science. "If we are tense, the device doesn't work correctly. I start slow, and relax my body, and I try to clear my mind." The cards were supposedly "programmed" or "activated" by being placed in a jar for a week along with a sample of the target substance to absorb the substance's "vapours". Initially, McCormick reportedly used his own blood to "program" the cards for detecting human tissue, but eventually gave up even the pretense of "programming" them when demand for the devices was at its peak.
The use of the device by Iraqi and Pakistani security forces has become a major international controversy. The very similar GT200 and Alpha 6 devices, widely used in Thailand and Mexico, also came under scrutiny in the wake of the revelations about the ADE 651.
Promotional material issued by ATSC claimed that the ADE 651 could detect such item as guns, ammunition, drugs, truffles, human bodies, contraband ivory and bank notes at distances of up to, underground, through walls, underwater or even from aircraft at an altitude of up to. In a promotional video, McCormick claimed that the device could detect elephants from away.
The ADE 651 was said to work on the principle of "electrostatic magnetic ion attraction". According to the promotional material, "by programming the detection cards to specifically target a particular substance,, the ADE651 could "by-pass" all known attempts to conceal the target substance. It has been claimed to penetrate lead, concrete, and other materials used in attempts to block the attraction." Prosec, a Lebanese reseller of the ADE 651, claimed on its website that the device works on nuclear quadrupole resonance or nuclear magnetic resonance. McCormick told the BBC in 2010 that "the theory behind dowsing and the theory behind how we actually detect explosives is very similar".
Development and manufacture
The ADE 651 is a descendant of the Quadro Tracker Positive Molecular Locator produced in the 1990s by Wade Quattlebaum, an American car dealer, commercial diver and treasure hunter. The Quadro Tracker was promoted by Quattlebaum initially as a device to find lost golf balls, and later as a means of detecting marijuana, cocaine, heroin, gunpowder, and dynamite using "carbo-crystalised" software cards. Like the ADE 651, it consisted of a hand unit on which a swinging antenna was mounted, linked to a box worn on the belt in which the cards were inserted to identify the "molecular frequency" of whatever the user wanted to detect. The cards were "programmed" by photocopying a Polaroid photograph of the target, cutting up the resulting copy, and pasting the pieces between two squares of plastic. Quattlebaum sold the devices for between $395 and $8,000 for a unit claimed to be capable of detecting humans, using a Polaroid photograph of the individual concerned for the "programming." A cheaper variant called the Golfinder or Gopher was available for $69.Although the Quadro Tracker was enjoined from being manufactured or sold in the United States after a 1996 federal court case, Quadro's four principal figures escaped criminal sanctions after a jury failed to convict them. The company's secretary, Malcolm Stig Roe, moved to the United Kingdom after jumping bail and set up two new companies to sell fake detection devices. Some of the distribution agents broke away and began producing their own copies of the Quadro Tracker, such as the Alpha 6, Mole Programmable Substance Detector, Sniffex and GT200. The increase in security spending that followed the September 11 attacks in the United States opened up lucrative opportunities for sellers of security equipment.
The ADE 651's inventor was Jim McCormick, managing director of ATSC, was previously a salesman specialising in communications equipment but had no scientific or technical background. He established a private limited company on 23 July 1997 under the name "Broadcasting and Telecommunications Ltd" which he subsequently renamed "Advanced Tactical Security & Communications Ltd". The company was based in a former dairy in Sparkford, Somerset. After he came across the Mole Programmable Substance Detector in 2000, McCormick signed up as a distribution agent, paying the UK-based manufacturer £10,000 for a single unit. The device was withdrawn from sale only a year later after it was investigated by Sandia National Laboratories on behalf of the US National Law Enforcement and Corrections Technology Center, and was found to be useless.
Image:ADE 100 at QEDcon 2016 01.jpg|thumb|right|Photo of ADE 100 taken at QEDcon 2016
McCormick responded to this setback by copying Quadro's Golfinder, sticking an ATSC label onto it, renaming it the ADE 100, and marketing it as a bomb detector. Between 2005 and 2009 he produced and sold several iterations of the design. One of these, the ADE 101, was sold for up to $7,000 per unit. He also marketed a version called the ADE 650. The ADE 651 was a further development of the same design. According to an associate of ATSC, the devices were manufactured at a cost of £150 each by suppliers in Great Britain and Romania. The associate told The New York Times: "Everyone at ATSC knew there was nothing inside the ADE 651." A whistleblower who worked to sell the device around the world with McCormick told the BBC that he once challenged McCormick over the device's effectiveness. McCormick was said to have answered that the device did "exactly what it's meant to... it makes money."
ATSC was the principal vendor of the ADE devices. Its accounts at Companies House recorded a turnover of £1.78 million for the year to 31 July 2008, with a gross profit of £1.35 million. Its sole shareholder was its owner, McCormick. A sister company at the same location, ATSC Exports Ltd, was established on 21 January 2009, also as a private limited company. It had not filed any accounts as of January 2010. There were also several resellers of ATSC's fake bomb detectors, including Cumberland Industries UK, a company based in Kettering, Northamptonshire, and Prosec of Baabda, Lebanon.
Users
The device has been sold to 20 countries in the Middle East and Asia, including Iraq and Afghanistan, for as much as US$60,000 each. The Iraqi government is said to have spent £52 million on the devices. It was widely used by the Iraqi Police Service and the Iraqi Army. The Iraqi Interior Ministry bought 800 of the devices in 2008 for £20m and a further 700 in 2009 for £32m, in no-bid contracts with ATSC. The Iraqi government paid up to £37,000 for the devices despite the purchase price being put at around £11,500. The Iraqi Army's Baghdad Operations Command announced in November 2009 that it had purchased another hundred of the devices. McCormick of ATSC has said that the devices were sold for £5,000 each, with the balance of the cost going on training and middlemen. The training included instructions to Iraqi users to "shuffle their feet to generate static electricity to make the things work."The ADE 651 has been used at hundreds of Iraqi police and Iraqi military checkpoints across the country, often replacing physical inspections of vehicles. Major-General Jihad al-Jabiri of the Interior Ministry's General Directorate for Combating Explosives has defended the device: "Whether it's magic or scientific, what I care about is detecting bombs. I don't care what they say. I know more about bombs than the Americans do. In fact, I know more about bombs than anyone in the world." He told a press conference that the ADE 651 has detected "hundreds of roadside bombs and car bombs" and any deficiencies were due to defective training in the device's use. The Iraqi Interior Minister, Jawad al-Bulani, also defended the device, telling Al Iraqiya television that the ADE 651 had "managed to prevent and detect more than 16,000 bombs that would be a threat to people's life and more than 733 car bombs were defused." He said: "Iraq is considered as a market area for many companies producing such devices... and there are other rival companies trying to belittle the efficiency of these instruments the government is buying".
In Mexico, the Government of Colima bought an ADE 651 for more than $60,000. Also, in the photography accompanying an article about the GT200 published in newspaper La-Ch.com, a Mexican soldier can be seen using an ADE 651. It is possible that the Secretariat of National Defense also bought some units.
According to a promotional website for the ADE 651, the device was also used by the Lebanese Army, the Chinese Police, the Royal Thai Police and the Interior Ministry of the Kurdistan Regional Government in Iraqi Kurdistan. The website claimed that the Jordanian government required hotels to employ ADE 651 devices to scan vehicles entering underground car parks. ATSC's McCormick says that 20 countries have acquired the device, with purchasers including "the Saudis, Indian police, a Belgian drug squad, a Hong Kong correctional facility and the Chittagong navy." The police in the Belgian municipal region of Geel-Laakdal-Meerhout used the device to detect drugs. Pakistan's Airport Security Force also used the ADE 651 as a bomb detector at the Jinnah International Airport in Karachi.