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WASHINGTON – Jan and McKinney Taylor planned a special trip to celebrate their birthdays. The couple spent two weeks last November traveling through India with a tour group.

“It was a beautiful place,” said McKinney, who goes by Mac. “A great trip.”

The final stop for the elderly couple was Mumbai, where they stayed at the renowned Taj Mahal Palace & Tower Hotel. On the last night of their trip, the couple ordered dinner in their room and waited for their 11 p.m. car to take them to the airport. And that’s when the terrorists struck.

“Our table had just been taken out when we heard this metal kind of banging noise,” said Mac. “I told my wife, ‘that’s gunfire.’ We called down to the desk and they told us the hotel was under attack and to stay in our rooms and lock our doors.”

The Taylors spent the next 44 hours stuck in that room as ten members of a Pakistani terrorist organization rampaged through the city. The group, armed only with assault weapons and hand grenades, attacked hotels, restaurants, hospitals and other locations, killing more than 170 people and wounding more than 300 others.

The event opened the eyes of many Americans to a new style of attack, in which terrorists bypass airports and high-profile buildings in favor of targets with less notoriety and far less security.

“Soft targets,” as they are known, include hotels, shopping centers, sports stadiums, and similarly accessible locations. Long a terrorist target in countries such as Israel, soft targets have not been a big issue in the U.S. The last major attack on American soil, September 11, 2001, was directed at high-profile targets – the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

But experts warn that attacks on soft targets are possible here given their desirability to terrorists and the difficulty in defending them.

The question for public and private officials: how do you guard against such an attack without putting the country on lockdown? Chris Furlow, the former executive director of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, emphasized the need to preserve openness in society.

“We need to make sure we are protecting the very values that the terrorists are seeking to destroy,” he said.

‘Ideal Killing Zones’

Brian Michael Jenkins, a senior advisor for the Rand Corp., says that soft targets are ‘ideal killing zones’ for terror groups.

“These venues offer ease of access, certainty of tactical success, and the opportunity to kill in quantity,” he told a congressional committee at a hearing on the lessons the U.S. could learn from the Mumbai attacks.

Attacks on soft targets are difficult to defend, he said, given the vast number of potential locations and the need to maintain some level of openness and freedom of movement.

“In many ways, soft targets are the Achilles heels of open societies,” said Juan Carlos Zarate, the chief counterterrorism advisor to former President George W. Bush.

In a country where people spent more than a billion nights in hotels in 2007, and where millions use public transportation systems each day, the prospect of a soft target attack is alarming.

Zarate said that the superior training of law enforcement officials in the U.S. as compared to those in Mumbai made an identical attack unlikely, but he also said the government and private sector needed to be aware of the threat and ways to defend against it.

From the president to the cleaning lady

The new administration has already begun shifting the national security landscape, with an executive order closing Guantanamo Bay and a commitment to end harsh interrogation techniques. Mac Taylor, who lives in Richmond, is concerned that the new policies will make America more vulnerable to an attack.

“These people are our enemy,” he said in a telephone interview. “They want to kill us. You better interrogate them and stop them first.”

President Barack Obama and officials from the Homeland Security Department have said the U.S. must prepare for a wide variety of possible attacks and be adaptive in training to deal with an adaptive enemy.

Raymond Kelly, the police commissioner in New York City, emphasized the importance of intelligence in prioritizing threats.

“You can’t be everywhere and defend every target,” he said. “So intelligence becomes key.”

Kelly said that the NYPD has developed comprehensive training programs for its officers to be able to identify and deal with threats. 

Furlow, who currently works with Ridge Global, a security consulting firm led by former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, says the most important players in preventing a soft target attack are private citizens -- not law enforcement or government officials.

“Government can only do so much,” he said. “At some point, it becomes all of our responsibility.”

Specifically, Furlow said that individuals should keep an eye out for suspicious activity and report it to law enforcement officials.

To that end, the Marriot hotel company has started employee awareness training programs at its locations. The chain has installed measures such as metal detectors and reinforced glass at high-risk areas throughout the world, but the employee training is the core of its security plan, according to Alan Orlob, the company’s director of corporate security.

“The housekeeper cleaning a room who finds diagrams of the hotel should report it,” he said.

Finding the balance

The biggest difficulty in defending soft targets stems from the desire to preserve the openness that is at the core of American society. At locations like hotels and shopping malls that revolve around comfort and convenience, it is difficult to imagine encountering metal detectors and bomb sniffing dogs.

“Nobody wants or expects a lockdown in shopping malls or hotels,” Zarate said.

Still, experts agree that there needs to be a balance between convenience and security.

Tom LaTourette, a physical scientist specializing in the science of public safety, recently released a report outlining security measures that can be adopted in shopping malls to protect against attacks. If every security option outlined – including metal detectors, bomb sniffing dogs, mandatory coat checks and vehicle inspections – were adopted, the threat of an attack would be reduced by a factor of twenty, LaTourette concluded.

Though he conceded that these measures might also deter customers and tenants, LaTourette said that that dynamic could change with a shift in public perception of threats.

“If people begin to view the threat of an attack on a shopping center as real, suddenly they’re drawn to a location with increased security and the liability becomes an asset,” he said.

Chris Furlow said that people should not alter their plans out of fear of an attack.

“The bottom line is we live in a dangerous world,” said Furlow “We are dealing with a thinking enemy and there are many threats. But we can’t just huddle in fear.”

Mac and Jan Taylor have heeded that advice. For them, the horror of those days in Mumbai cannot dampen their desire to see the world.”

“You take your chances,” Mac said. “It’s part of traveling.”