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Foot Soldiers on the Homeland Security Front

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Times Staff Writers

In an office with a view of the Capitol dome, Jim Rice pulls a thick binder from a shelf.

“This is my war book,” he says.

Inside, there’s a chart showing how to safely detonate a car bomb. Turn the page and there’s a list of symptoms from exposure to nerve agents.

There are after-hours phone numbers for immigration authorities, translators and canine handlers. Need a Farsi expert at 2 o’clock in the morning?

Rice sniffs out terrorist threats. An FBI special agent, he helps lead a law enforcement team that acts as Washington’s main line of defense against terrorism. Every day, they’re running down dozens of leads, foot soldiers in the homeland security effort.

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It is a line that is being drawn from New York to Los Angeles. Much as it has fought the wars on drugs, the FBI is looking to special task forces of federal, state and local agents to help win the war on terrorism.

But in this costly and painstaking battle, it’s tough figuring out whether you are gaining on the enemy.

Streaming into the command center here in recent weeks have been tips about a Middle Eastern man sketching a picture of the Fairfax County jail in northern Virginia, and a tenant whose apartment is furnished with a mattress and a telescope squarely aimed at one of the monuments.

Lately, there have been 15 to 20 alleged sightings each day of a Saudi who recently made the FBI’s “Be on the Lookout” list; one caller thinks the suspect is his barber.

Virtually none of the leads pan out. But they are all meticulously run down. “In this city, everything is a terrorist act until we prove it is not,” Rice said. Even parking violators “run the risk of us dismantling your car.”

The squad is part of a post-Sept. 11 experiment known as the Joint Terrorism Task Force. The FBI has formed similar ventures in every region of the country.

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The idea is to put representatives from federal, state and local law enforcement agencies in the same office, with orders to share intelligence and cooperate. It sounds easy, though historically, local police departments and their federal peers have not been the best of friends.

The hope is that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, which some critics attribute to a breakdown in communication between law enforcement agencies, are changing attitudes.

More than half of the 66 task forces have been formed since Sept. 11. New York has had a task force since 1980, Los Angeles since the 1984 Summer Olympics.

Every day, they field calls, examine information, check with sources and dispatch help. One task force covering Nebraska and Iowa helped solve a Midwestern version of the Unabomber case last year in which a college student planted pipe bombs in mailboxes across five states.

Another launched a yearlong investigation that led to the February indictment of a University of Idaho graduate student who allegedly raised money for an Islamic charity that advocates terrorism.

Even when the squads don’t make arrests, the new cooperation goes a long way toward quickly investigating potential threats.

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Just days after the war began in Iraq, a police officer spotted someone at Los Angeles International Airport who seemed to match the description of a long-sought terrorist.

Before moving toward an immediate arrest, the officer contacted a command post where FBI agents huddled with counter-terrorism analysts and, after reviewing classified intelligence reports, determined there was no need to make an arrest.

“In normal cases, that process could have taken hours. In this case, it took a matter of minutes,” said Anna Winningham, an FBI supervisory special agent in Los Angeles.

In New York, an anti-terrorism unit responded with helicopters and bomb squads last month when a morning jogger spotted three men scaling a steel tower of the Williamsburg Bridge that links Manhattan and Brooklyn.

The incident turned out to be a drunken prank.

“I’ve been doing this a long time, and there was a time when nobody would communicate with each other,” said Denis Flood, a Defense Intelligence Agency counter-terrorism officer attached to the command post in Los Angeles, where 120 agents, officers, analysts and other specialists work.

“Now we are all sitting in the same room and talking to each other,” he said. “I never thought I would see that in my lifetime.”

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Flood begins his workday by tapping into a Defense Department computer for classified data that might affect Los Angeles, from CIA dispatches on terrorist threats to Pentagon updates on the war in Iraq.

He passes along the information to the local task force -- and vets information that the task force gives him with his Defense sources.

Information collected on the streets of Los Angeles is transmitted to the Pentagon command center in Qatar instantaneously. “It goes from Los Angeles to Doha in a matter of seconds,” he said.

How much terrorism all this effort prevents is unclear. According to FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III, more than 100 terrorist plots worldwide have been foiled since Sept. 11. But that includes cases principally handled by agents overseas and their foreign counterparts, where the task forces played little or no role.

The investigations aren’t always victimless.

This month, a federal judge in Denver ordered the release of two Pakistani men in a rebuke to the local terrorism task force, which was seeking to hold the pair on immigration charges because of suspected terrorist ties. The judge found that the men posed no danger, and that the government’s case was built largely on evidence that the men had volunteered to prosecutors.

The cost of such programs can be enormous. And in an era of tight budgets, dispatching a law enforcement veteran to work on one of the task forces full time means that something else important isn’t getting done.

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“This is a nice way to make us less toothy in going after business,” said an investigator with the Environmental Protection Agency, which recently started putting representatives on the terrorism task forces.

But FBI officials say they are doing what the public demands.

“We do follow up on a lot of things that on the surface may not look like terrorism,” said Brian Boetig, an FBI special agent who oversees the terrorism task force in Washington. But “if a citizen feels compelled to pick up the phone and call us, I think we have an obligation to follow up.”

Washington, in fact, is something of a sitting duck, or “target-rich” in FBI vernacular.

Besides the familiar landmarks, there are 1,300 federal buildings and 175 embassies. There are also memories of Sept. 11, an unsolved anthrax attack and a deadly sniper episode.

It all translates into a steady stream of phone calls every day -- even without the war in Iraq.

With an abundance of law enforcement agencies -- even the National Zoo has its own police force -- the terrorism task force is the second-largest in the country, even though the region it covers is the smallest by far.

Arrayed in a war room are desks for the Secret Service, the criminal investigative units of the Navy and Air Force, and the State Department diplomatic security service, to name a few.

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The Internal Revenue Service, which tracks antigovernment groups opposed to paying federal income taxes and maintains a list of “potentially dangerous taxpayers,” is also here, with a sign over its cubicle: “Only an Accountant Could Catch Al Capone.”

Together, they check out tips and feed leads to other investigators, including separate FBI squads that investigate state-sponsored terrorism or to local cops tracking run-of-the-mill street crime.

The local police officers on the task forces also act as go-betweens with their federal counterparts, so it can be a two-way street.

In Washington, Rice oversees a quick-response unit, including specialists in chemical weapons, a bomb squad, a dive team, sharpshooters and paramedics, among others. His own background is forensic toxicology.

The “threat du jour,” as he puts it on a recent afternoon, is a bulletin from headquarters warning of the risks of terrorist attacks on bridges and gas stations.

Lately, the daily log also has included the report of a person on the 14th Street Bridge, which has no pedestrian walkway, and an unattended van outside Union Station with large vats of a suspicious liquid in the rear. Both were false alarms.

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So was the report of the Middle Eastern man sketching a picture of the Fairfax County jail. He was Latino and interested in the facility because his wife is an inmate there. And the tip about the tenant with the telescope and mattress? It was made up.

In another case, the investigative team rolled into action early one morning after a homeless man discovered an unattended suitcase in an alley blocks from the White House.

The man reported it to a security guard, who after seeing the suitcase at a doorway marked “Temple Entrance,” phoned the FBI.

Rice called in his bomb technicians, who X-rayed the package and found wires and batteries that suggested the possibility of a timing device for a bomb. Authorities blocked off the street and evacuated local buildings.

When the bomb squad secured and opened the suitcase, it revealed a “ham sandwich” -- FBI vernacular for a false alarm. Inside was a voltage meter, acetylene torch and plumber’s putty.

The homeless man, it turned out, had stolen a toolbox off the truck of a sheet-metal worker.

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The “temple” was the headquarters of a fraternal organization.

The whole episode consumed three to four hours and disrupted the morning rush hour. But Rice defended the approach.

Pulling another text from his shelf on crisis management, he read a favorite quote: “Competitive emergency forces,” he said, “cannot be created after the emergency occurs.”

*

Schmitt reported from Washington and Krikorian from Los Angeles.

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