Security Measures: a Winning Effort

In the long years of preparation for the Los Angeles Olympics, many feared that the Games would be ruined by a terrorist incident or some other security breach. Those fears were expressed not only by the public but also in some quarters at the organizing committee as well.

Yet in the end, security became one of the triumphs of the Games.

There was no incident, and, perhaps just as important, the Olympic leaders resisted those who would have made the precautions a show of force. The real triumph was that in a time of great tension in the world, of frequent terrorist episodes and just 12 years after the Munich killings had dealt a severe blow to the Olympic movement, the Los Angeles Games were able to unfold in so mellow an atmosphere.

Thousands of people had worked with great care to that end. More than $80 million was spent on security at all levels. Yet despite the success that was achieved, there was never a feeling of relaxation about the situation.

On the contrary, there were plenty of occasions to stir fears:

--Ten days before the Games, a gunman walked into a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, 130 miles south of Los Angeles, and shot 21 people to death, wounding 19 others.

--The night before the Games began, a man drove his car onto the sidewalk in Westwood, not a mile from one of the Olympic villages, and mowed down pedestrians, killing one and injuring 48.

Those incidents were not related to the Olympics, but they prompted Edgar Best, the Olympic committee’s security director, to make some psychiatric inquiries.

“We had an onboard psychologist, and I recall having discussions with him after the (San Ysidro) incident,” Best said.

“What really concerned me was when the incident occurred thereafter (near) UCLA. Again I went to him, and I had a discussion about the copycat syndrome, and he said, ‘You’re right on.’ He said, ‘I am very concerned about that. You may see this developing right now.’ “So, now, we were really holding our breath on (the) Opening Ceremony. Had this now triggered that kind of a syndrome?

“So, that was probably the worst way we could have entered into the Olympics, having those two very serious security incidents, one right after the other, with a psychologist telling me, ‘You may now have the copycat syndrome in effect.’ ”

The next day at the Opening Ceremony, with a crowd of 90,000 within range, there was an occurrence that went unreported at the time but for an hour had the Olympic leadership and the security forces in a high state of alarm.

There was a bomb scare involving the torch-lighting apparatus.

After the Games were over, David Wolper producer of the Opening Ceremony, gave this account:

“Ed Best comes to me and says, ‘I don’t think you can light the torch, Wolper.’

“I said: ‘What do you mean?’

He said: ‘Because we have a bomb scare. The door to the torch, the lock has been broken, and if you look over there,’ which I did, this was 15 minutes before opening ceremonies, I saw the bomb squad was scampering over the thing. The ceremonies are about to start, and they’re telling me I can’t light the torch.

“The whole world’s looking, I can’t light the torch.

“I walked down the aisle and saw Peter (Ueberroth). I said, ‘Peter, don’t change expression, but I’m about to shock you. I’ve just been told by Ed Best that we can’t light the torch because there’s a bomb scare.’

“And Peter goes: ‘Oh, geez!’

“I said: ‘That was my opinion.’

“I go back to my (area), I call down my art director. ‘Prepare a piece, something that Rafer (Johnson) can hook the torch to. We may not be able to light the torch. Don’t tell Rafer. I’ll let you know as we go on.’ We were two hours away from (the lighting).

“About an hour later, they came by and said: ‘It’s been cleared. Everything will work, don’t worry about it.’ And the following day, I found out that ABC had to get a wire, and they couldn’t find the guy with the key, so they broke the lock to do a piece of television wiring.”

There were no copycats, and there was no bomb. But that didn’t mean that there weren’t plenty of responsible people on edge about what might happen.

Despite the edginess, in their cooler moments Best and the Los Angeles Police Department’s commander, William Rathburn, who probably had more to do with the details of Olympic security than any of the federal people or anyone else, had long before concluded that the chances were against terrorism at the Games. They told everyone who would listen, but they sometimes wondered how many were listening.

Best said that killing the Israeli athletes at Munich had backfired on the Palestinian cause and that they and other would-be terrorists might well have decided that attacking Olympic targets was counterproductive. He repeatedly said that, with all the terrorist incidents occurring in the world, it was significant that there had been no fresh episode of terrorism at any Olympics.

After the Games, Best, a former FBI man, said: “I firmly believe that the Olympics as they are now constituted do not create such a good target for terrorists as people would think. If the Olympics are such a great theater for terrorism, why hasn’t it recurred?”

Best and Rathburn, in their numerous public statements, consistently played up the security precautions that would be taken and played down the threat. Not everyone was so careful.

There was a tendency on the part of some law enforcement officers and a few newspapers and magazines to speculate about the possibilities of violence or sabotage. In January of 1982, for example, Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates caused a stir when he released a report suggesting the existence of a Soviet plot to slip criminals and terrorists into Los Angeles disguised as Russian Jewish immigrants.

Later, Gates acknowledged that there was little basis for making such a suggestion. He finally said it was mere supposition by his detectives. After he was rebuked by the president of the Los Angeles Police Commission for the release, he played the matter down and it never surfaced again.

But there were other instances of public officials stirring up concerns.

Some Los Angeles County Sheriff’s officers suggested at one point that street gangs might agree on a truce so they could prey on Olympic tourists. Gang experts in other departments said that would be totally out of character, and after a one-day flurry of headlines, that suggestion also disappeared.

Similarly, in a speech in Albuquerque, the director of the FBI, William Webster, suggested that Armenian terror groups could strike in Los Angeles during the Games.

Behind the scenes, security officials had some increased concern about terrorism after the Soviets had proclaimed their boycott. They reasoned that with no Soviet team present, the Soviets might want to prove the validity of the argument they had been making, that Los Angeles was too dangerous for an Olympics. No one suggested that the Soviets would be so stupid as to try to do it themselves, but there was some fear they might arrange it.

Best said that when he and Ueberroth went to a meeting of the International Olympic Committee at Lausanne, Switzerland, after the boycott had been declared, he had advised Ueberroth to “make it clear to (the Soviets) that if (terrorism) does occur, we are going to hold you responsible. We are going to look deeply behind the issue and if we find you behind it, we’re going to tell the world about it.” He said that Ueberroth had indeed given such a warning.

Press secretary Amy Quinn said that when Ueberroth and Harry Usher returned from the 1980 Moscow Games, they talked of having been overwhelmed by the thousands of security men there. In the vast Lenin Stadium for example, with its 103,000 seats, 1 out of every 10 persons in the stands was a security officer.

“They felt that what other countries did as normal procedure would be devastating in terms of image here in Los Angeles,” she recalled.

Ueberroth said: “The problem with an idea to a security agency is if they don’t do every single thing, if there’s a problem, they’re later accused, ‘Why didn’t you do X? Why didn’t you build a big umbrella to cover the whole stadium in the shade?’

“Well, I think that the Games are for the athletes, and anything can be overdone, and so we tried to reason with law enforcement. We took a strong stand for the ambiance of the Games.”

There were estimates that Moscow had 230,000 police assigned to its Games. By contrast, Montreal had about 17,000 security men, including many Canadian troops.

Los Angeles, according to Best, had a peak force of slightly more than 15,000, including, at various times, from 6,000 to 10,000 unarmed private security. In short, the peak armed Olympic security force in Los Angeles amounted to only about 5,000.

These figures were not publicized at the time because the Los Angeles authorities became sensitive to their relatively small number. On the one hand, they didn’t want an overwhelming presence, but on the other, they wanted any potential troublemakers to think there were more than there were.

Important differences arose between the committee and the Los Angeles Police Department over the security precautions.

One of the differences involved the committee’s resistance to the department’s desire to put up a fence between the Coliseum crowds and the field of play.

The department’s desire to have more police officers on the grounds of the USC and UCLA Olympic villages than the committee wanted was another constant source of friction.

Rathburn, the police Olympic security commander, had little sympathy for the committee’s position in either case. “I suggested on more than one occasion that we put a fence around the entire field of play (at the Coliseum) so that it would be very difficult for someone to have gotten from the stands onto the field,” he said.

“That was rejected. Harry personally rejected that. Peter personally rejected that, and the last time I brought it up was probably less than two weeks before the Games.

It could have been any kind of fence. You know, just something, some physical barrier to keep people from just walking right from the stands. I don’t think anyone would have ever noticed it. Just a wire fence. It wouldn’t have been anything offensive.”

As for staffing at the villages, Rathburn said bitterly: “I really believe that had they had their way, they would have sacrificed the security of the Games.”

He said that the police and the committee had “a big confrontation over deployment” in the Olympic villages. “We had given them our estimate of about 150 police officers per village, per shift. We ended up deploying roughly 125 per village per shift.

“They came back after reviewing that, and told us it was their assessment we only needed just under 50 per village per shift.

“You wouldn’t see 50 police officers,” Rathburn said. “You hardly saw 125 police officers at a time. Fifty, you wouldn’t see. You would have no security in effect.

“And immediately after that, we clearly reached an impasse. Peter and Harry ordered their security to not discuss security deployment with us any more from that point forward. For several months right preceding the Games by a very short period, we had no discussions with the Olympic committee over deployment of personnel. None whatsoever.

“They could not tell us what they planned to do in terms of deploying private security, nor could they discuss what we planned to do.”

Rathburn said: “I don’t think I would ever describe their attitude as being cooperative.”

As it turned out, no fence was erected at the Coliseum, and the number of police in the Olympic villages was 125 a shift. Rathburn said it was the desire to save money that dictated the committee’s positions.

Committee officials said that wasn’t the case. They said it was a question of ambiance consistent with safety.

As for the number of police within the Olympic villages, Best said that at one point, while Rathburn and Gates were proposing 150 a shift in each village, their operations people favored as many as 200. That shocked both Usher and Ueberroth, he said, and was an illustration of what often happens within police agencies planning security operations.

“You’ve got this situation where if you’re a commander or a captain and I now say you’re responsible for a village, you’re going to take a look at that, and you are going to protect your professional reputation. You’re going to put in there a pretty good sized force.”

As it turned out, Rathburn and Gates reduced the numbers suggested by their operations people, then the committee leaders talked them down a little further, to 125.

According to the contract signed by the committee with the city, Gates would have been legally entitled to decide on his own how many police to station at the villages and then bill the committee for them. But, in practice, the number was negotiated.

Conceding that money was a factor, Best said it was important “to realize that police officers, even a handful of them, had tremendous financial impact. When you take their salaries and you put them in . . . for 30-some odd days, when you talk about 125 police officers, you’re talking about a lot of impact.”

At the same time, he contended that the committee leaders never would have sacrificed essential security for financial reasons.

Best said he had told Ueberroth and Usher: “If we have a serious incident here, I will guarantee you that everything in this organizing committee will be opened to public scrutiny, and if it ever becomes known that we cut costs on security for no other reason than we wanted to do it, we would have a real problem.”

In any event, he added, he was sure that Ueberroth in particular had a strong conviction about providing sound security.

He had a different impression of Usher. “I don’t think (he) is deeply understanding of law enforcement and its problems or the way they do business or operate,” Best said.

The actual out-of-pocket sum that the Olympic committee paid for Los Angeles police security services, according to a city report, was about $11.7 million. The rest of the money to defray the total $23.4 million in police costs came from a 6% tax on the sale of Olympic tickets and a half-cent hotel bed tax that had been adopted by the City Council several years before the Games. The ticket tax could not be considered a committee expense, since all persons buying tickets had to add the 6% to their ticket orders. All the committee had to do was to pass it on to the city.

The Los Angeles police expenses finally amounted to about $2.5 million less than the committee had agreed to, laying to rest the argument frequently made by committee officials that the police would spend every cent that was authorized.

Mayor Tom Bradley said he had supported Ueberroth, Usher and Best on the question of force levels within the villages. “They wanted too much of a police presence,” Bradley said of the police. “They wanted more than would be required, and what we finally came up with was that they wanted to start out with a certain level of police presence . . . and I said, finally, ‘All right, I’ll go along with your request, but I want you each and every day to update for me how you’re using these people and when you think you can afford to cut back.

“And Gates was faithful to that commitment. I got that report every day, and they quickly discovered they had more people than they needed. They began to cut back. At one point, they actually cut back to the point where Peter said, ‘Hey, that’s enough.’ ”

The most sensitive security arrangements at the Games were often made by the Los Angeles police, who were primarily responsible at the main Olympic villages and such key stadiums as the Coliseum, the Sports Arena, Pauley Pavilion and the McDonald’s swimming stadium at USC.

There were also large contingents of sheriff’s deputies from Los Angeles and adjacent counties, police from more than a dozen other localities, the FBI and Secret Service, as well as other security forces, either actively working or prepared to intervene if needed.

But the Los Angeles police were at the heart of the effort. Rathburn and his colleagues worked for five years on their plans, and he was proud of them.

For obvious reasons, many of the details of the security operations were not released at the time. Afterward, Rathburn said that the athletes’ villages at USC and UCLA were always the greatest concern, in part because the Munich attack had taken place at the Olympic village there and in part because everyone knew that the athletes would be together at the villages every night, housed by nationality.

There were, of course, intricate security precautions in many areas.

Leigh Zaremba in transportation, for instance, mentioned that not only did every athletes’ bus have a guard on board, and a radio to communicate with controllers, but also that the fleet itself was protected, even when it wasn’t moving.

At the villages, Rathburn said it was the Los Angeles police who came up with the fundamental concept of having, besides outer perimeter fencing, inner perimeter fencing around each housing location.

“Our thought was it would be very difficult to maintain the integrity of a perimeter which at USC was 3 1/2 miles, at UCLA was two miles,” Rathburn said.

“We tried to maintain the integrity of that outer perimeter, but recognizing, hell, there were a lot of areas large enough to land a helicopter in. You could have probably landed a small plane (on) the athletic field at UCLA or at Cromwell Field at USC. You could certainly hang-glide in. You could parachute in.

“We knew you could breach the outer security if you were really intent on doing it. So even if you did that, we were not ready to concede that they could get to the athletes. So, we required the Olympic committee to have a secondary perimeter fence. We had magnatometers (metal detectors) and X-ray devices to screen the baggage, not only at the outer perimeter entrances but also at the entrance to each inter-perimeter.”

The police also took special precautions with teams that they considered more likely than others to be attacked. Said Rathburn: “We developed a plan to put the Israelis on a certain floor in a certain building at the UCLA campus, because we had done a very, very careful survey of the whole village and we determined that was the best location, the most easily secured location. They were very receptive to that.

“Later, we decided to put the Turks on the other wing of the same floor of the same building.

“And the Israelis did not like that at all. They saw the Turks as having greater threat potential than they saw for themselves.

“It was interesting that early on, there had always been a lot of speculation at least that the Russians have a lot of responsibility for world terrorism, international terrorism, so it occurred to me one day that what we should do is wrap the Russians around the Israelis, in terms of housing them.

“You know, put them above and below and around the Israelis and it would help insulate the Israelis.

“We certainly considered it. The Israelis thought that was an excellent idea. The word we got back (through) the Olympic committee from the Soviets was that they wanted nothing to do with it.”

Officials at the committee said they thought it highly unlikely that any kind of wraparound arrangement would have been made, even had the Soviets sent their team.

Phil Brubaker pointed out that the Soviet team would have been so large that it would have occupied an entire dormitory, and Best remarked: “A lot of things were thrown out or cast out or suggested, but reason usually took hold after a while.”

The Soviets, incidentally, never reached the stage where they held the detailed security discussions with the police that the Israelis or the Turks had.

Best said that when Soviet delegations had visited Los Angeles the talks with them focused on their demands to anchor a ship during the Games in Los Angeles-Long Beach Harbor, to rent a chalet for rest and relaxation and to bring their athletes into California in their own planes.

Besides the torch-lighting bomb scare, there were some bad moments with a crowd crush at the Opening Ceremony. It ended up in some ways a flare-up of the federal-local security rivalry.

President Reagan’s appearance was always the occasion for considerable apprehension on the part of those charged with protecting him. At one time, when it was thought that the President should be close to the field, Robert Jani had envisioned him and his party sitting in a bulletproof, plexiglass bubble, either on one edge of the field itself or in the stands.

That was never a popular concept with the organizers because almost any bubble would have blocked off a number of regular seats.

And finally, according to Ueberroth’s aide, David Israel, everyone breathed a sigh of relief when a White House advance party headed by Michael Deaver decided that the President should sit in a suite in what was usually the press box, high above the crowd on the rim of the stadium.

The Los Angeles police had so much security, both uniformed and in plain clothes, inside the stadium that Rathburn said Chief Gates had confidently told the Secret Service that in his opinion, the President could safely go down to the field to deliver the 16 words formally opening the Games.

Israel said that the committee “would have loved for him to go down on the field.”

But Reagan remained in his steel-plated box, behind tinted, bulletproof glass, only dimly visible to the crowd. A White House official claimed later that Ueberroth had privately told Deaver that it would not be appropriate for the President to go onto the field, because no other head of state had done that in opening the Olympics.

The anxiety of Reagan’s security force became obvious just before the ceremonies began. The Secret Service, to the apparent surprise of Police Chief Gates, set up metal detectors in some of the sections closest to where Reagan would be sitting. They happened to be in the paths of entry for many of the other VIPs, especially from the international Olympic community.

The result was a serious crush. One member of the executive committee of the organizing committee’s board of directors, William Robertson, became so agitated at the delays in getting into the stadium that he left and never saw the ceremonies.

Finally, the Secret Service saw that a nasty crowd situation was developing in one whole corner of the stadium. It closed down the metal detectors and the situation eased.

Rathburn said that long before the Games, the Secret Service had taken the position that if Reagan was going to attend the opening, everyone who entered the Coliseum--more than 100,000 persons if the performers and athletes were included--should be screened through metal detectors.

“We did some analysis and determined that it would take a minimum of 250 magnatometers to screen everyone in a timely manner and maybe as many as 450, and there weren’t that many magnatometers in the whole country,” he said.

“So clearly, it was not practical for us to try to do that.”

In an Olympic setting, he also pointed out, many people are wearing metal Olympic pins. He said he thought the Secret Service had abandoned any plan to use metal detectors.

Rathburn stopped short of accusing the Secret Service of trying to pull a fast one on the police in the matter and ascribed the surprise to a misunderstanding.

Some senior officials at the organizing committee were angry, however. One group vice president, Michael Mount, said: “I was ready to throw the Secret Service off the precipice. . . . They lied to us all the way.”

He said that the crush on the stairs was so serious that some persons could have been injured. “If a little old lady had fallen down those stairs, it would have been the end of those guys.”

John Argue, the Olympic board member who had been so important in getting the Games for Los Angeles, agreed with Mount, saying: “I was very unhappy with the Secret Service for the way they handled the opening. We got no press on it, but there were some very bad situations. . . . They totally overreacted.”

The Secret Service disagreed, and had a different version of what had happened.

Steve Harrison, the Secret Service’s Olympic coordinator, said that the use of metal detectors at a limited number of entrances should have come as no surprise to the police. At mid-staff levels, if not at Chief Gates’ level, he said the police had been made aware that the magnatometers would be used.

Harrison said that the Secret Service had become “a visible scapegoat” for the problems that occurred with the crowd.

He challenged the notion that the metal detectors had been solely to blame for the crush, and he named four other factors that contributed to it.

First, he said, a lot of people decided to remain outside the stadium until the last minute to observe the President’s arrival.

Second, members of a performing band occupied parts of entrances being used by the spectators, slowing their movement inside.

Third, he said, certain fencing erected by the Secret Service impeded the crowd flow outside the stadium on lower levels and forced persons trying to go from one part of the south side of the stadium--the President’s side--to the other to use an upper level concourse. That, in turn, became clogged and restricted rapid access up some stairways.

Finally, he said, the Olympic committee was using volunteer ticket takers instead of the Coliseum’s regular ticket takers, also slowing things down.

After all the worry, all the careful planning and all the bureaucratic infighting, the Games themselves were anticlimactic as far as security went.

There were, of course, some minor incidents. But Best said that of the 645 occurrences reported to security forces during the Olympic period--ranging from stalled athletes’ buses to thefts and vandalism--more than 70% were of such a minor nature that they were handled without involving regular law enforcement.