As Crime Spans Globe, Interpol Is Catching Up

When police in Luxembourg arrested a Nigerian national suspected of trafficking in heroin from Thailand last year, they believed that they had a workaday case of small-time smuggling. Purely as a matter of routine, they passed the information along to Interpol headquarters here.

Interpol analysts put the report together with data from other sources, and an unexpected picture snapped into focus: a huge drug ring operating in more than 30 countries across Africa, Central America, Asia, Europe and North America.

Acting on Interpol’s evidence, police arrested additional suspects, including an alleged Nigerian drug lord now awaiting trial in Denmark. Moreover, Interpol’s work provided new material for an investigation of what a U.S. law enforcement agent describes as the drug world’s hottest and most successful new method of distributing its products: the international postal system.

“They are smuggling through the mail such amounts as 500 grams at a time, small compared to the huge amounts the cartels are used to shipping at one time,” the U.S. agent said. “But altogether, tons and tons are being mailed.”

Key to Interpol’s success in the Luxembourg case were its vast computer database and its ability to link seemingly unrelated suspects from airline flight records, telephone numbers, criminal records and code names.

Such sophisticated crime detection may be just what most Americans would expect from an international law enforcement agency that gave rise to “The Man From Interpol,” the James Bond-style television series that began in 1960.

For most of Interpol’s history, however, the reality has been far different.

Until relatively recently, Interpol--or, formally, the International Criminal Police Organization--was best known among law enforcement experts for its outdated technology, labyrinthine bureaucracy and unreliable protection of sensitive intelligence information.

“Frankly, it was embarrassing and not quite relevant to the needs of law enforcement around the world,” says Peter J. Nevitt, a former British police official who directs Interpol’s information and technology department.

Interpol was so far behind the curve technologically that it was still using Morse code as recently as a few years ago to communicate with some member countries in the developing world.

Only after a decade of sometimes painful reform was Interpol turned into a formidable instrument for combating global crime.

Some experts say its newfound capabilities may be on the line when Interpol’s member nations choose a new chief, perhaps as early as this year. The candidates as of now are Michel Richardot, head of the French police academy, and Ronald K. Noble, U.S. Treasury undersecretary for enforcement during the first Clinton administration.

Under the leadership of a veteran police official from Scotland Yard, Interpol has brought its technological capabilities up to date, streamlined its operations and tightened its security.

Now, more than 150 of Interpol’s 177 member nations are linked by computer in the world’s most extensive law enforcement communications network.

By the end of 1998, Nevitt said, all Interpol members will be connected to “the world’s first qualified, fully equipped international communications network, capable of sending messages throughout the world in 120 seconds.”

As a result of these and other changes, Interpol now enjoys considerable trust and cooperation from law enforcement agencies in the major countries that once paid lip service to the idea of the organization but in reality kept it at arm’s length.

Indeed, with international crime increasing sharply as the economy goes global, many experts regard Interpol as vital in bringing not only drug smugglers but also such transnational criminals as fraud artists, money launderers, pedophiles and computer crooks to justice.

Political fugitives also find their way onto Interpol’s radarscope. In November, as a result of an Interpol request from Bangladesh, agents from the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service arrested A. K. M. Mohuiddin Ahamed in Los Angeles in connection with the 1975 killing of the country’s president, Sheik Mujibur Rahman, and various other officials during a military coup.

Interpol traced Ahamed to Los Angeles, where he was arrested at an INS office while seeking an extension of his U.S. visa. After his arrest, Ahamed, a former Bangladeshi ambassador to Iraq who arrived in the United States in July 1996, acknowledged being involved in the killings.

After an appeal for political asylum was denied, Ahamed posted a $15,000 bond in Los Angeles and was set free. The INS is now seeking to deport him.

Interpol has also played a key role in locating missing persons, especially children. It was Interpol agents, for instance, who located 8-year-old Crystal Leann Anzaldi, who had disappeared from her San Diego home when she was 14 months old.

The girl was found in Puerto Rico in October, living with a woman who claimed to be her mother, after Interpol agents investigating a case of suspected child abuse matched her with a picture they found on an Internet site operated by the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

A Shadowed Past, Hard-Won Reform

The Vienna-based International Criminal Police Commission, Interpol’s predecessor, was essentially a European organization, one of whose bureaus had the ominous task of handling “the Gypsy nuisance.”

When Germany overran Austria in 1938, it moved the agency to Berlin and turned it into an arm of the Gestapo, with its files available for tracking down Jews, Gypsies and homosexuals.

After the war, police officials meeting in Brussels revived the ICPC, renamed it the International Criminal Police Organization and moved its headquarters to Paris.

They chose “Interpol” as its telegraphic address, and the word became synonymous with the organization.

For many years, however, although it occasionally provided data that helped law enforcement agencies around the world, Interpol languished under the tight control of the French, who operated it as though it were part of the French government bureaucracy.

Fenton Bresler, a British attorney and longtime student of Interpol, wrote in a 1992 book of “the dead hand of the French bureaucracy,” the “widespread dissatisfaction with the increased slowness of the organization” and “its shortage of modern equipment.”

Some member nations, including the United States, believed that French domination undercut Interpol’s status as a truly international body. The French even managed to have inserted into Interpol’s constitution a line stipulating that the secretary-general “should preferably be a national of the country in which the seat of the organization is situated.”

Not until 1985, when the United States led a rebellion against French domination, did Interpol elect Raymond Kendall of Scotland Yard to be its first non-French secretary-general since the war.

A French newspaper referred to Kendall’s election as an “Anglo-American takeover.”

Kendall moved Interpol’s headquarters to an ultramodern, six-story glass structure along the Rhone River in Lyons and initiated a $25-million high-tech development program.

With aid from the United States and several other governments, Interpol contributed about $5.5 million worth of computers, modems and other gear to more than 100 countries.

Today, the building’s high-wire fence, guards, locks and metal detectors reflect more than tighter security. They symbolize the changed attitudes within the organization.

Even the headquarters’ winding hallways contribute to Interpol’s new focus. The walls are lined with photographs, each bearing a color tab: red for murderers, terrorists and persons wanted for other major crimes; blue for persons about whom Interpol or a member nation seeks a location and additional information; green for persons suspected of involvement in international criminal activity; yellow for missing persons; and black for an unidentified corpse.

Interpol’s “red notices,” which signify that a member nation seeks the suspect’s apprehension and extradition, have contributed to the arrest of several of the world’s most wanted. Among them: “Carlos the Jackal,” the Venezuelan terrorist nabbed in Sudan in 1994, and Ira Einhorn, known as the “hippie killer,” who had been convicted of murdering his girlfriend in Philadelphia in 1977.

Einhorn was arrested last June in a farmhouse in southern France after information his Swedish wife provided for a driver’s license was spotted by an agent on an Interpol database. But a French court set him free last month rather than extradite him to the United States, where, according to his French lawyer, the American justice system would not have treated him fairly.

A red notice posted in July at the request of British authorities got even quicker results. The subject was a bartender wanted in connection with the murder of his pub’s owner.

Interpol’s Washington office, tracking financial records, traced the man to Colorado and alerted the Colorado Bureau of Investigation to a man with a glass eye and an Australian accent.

Hours later, a highway patrolman recognized the suspect after stopping him for going 90 mph on a motorcycle in rural northeastern Colorado.

“That’s the kind of case that shows the value of instantaneous communications and cooperation that Interpol brings to international law enforcement,” said John Imoff, a 22-year FBI veteran who heads Interpol’s Washington office.

While red notices may not always be the reason, many of their subjects soon find themselves in custody.

“Fifty percent of them are apprehended within two years,” said Serge Sabourin, Interpol’s communications director.

The United States provides names of suspects and fugitives for red notices that frequently result in arrests in other countries. But unlike most member nations, the United States does not consider the notices provided by other countries to be sufficient legal justification for arrests unless it has an extradition treaty with the country posting the notice.

This is primarily because some Interpol member countries do not have legal systems that meet American standards of fairness and due process.

That, in turn, sometimes means that people living in the United States and accused of serious crimes abroad are immune from arrest.

A prime example is Roger E. Tamraz, a naturalized American citizen and international oil financier who lives in New York and is a central figure in the Democratic fund-raising scandal.

He has been a fugitive from Lebanese authorities since 1989, and an Interpol red notice seeks his arrest on charges involving a $200-million bank embezzlement.

“We know where he is. We just can’t arrest him because we don’t have an extradition treaty with Lebanon,” an Interpol agent in Washington said.

Quiet Successes, Lingering Problems

In June, after FBI agents tracked down Mir Aimal Kansi in Afghanistan and arrested him for the 1993 shooting deaths of two people outside CIA headquarters near Washington, the CIA, the FBI, the State Department, Afghan informants and Pakistanis were all credited with playing roles in his apprehension. No mention was made of the red notice issued by Interpol’s Washington office.

The case was typical. Though much more effective than it used to be, Interpol remains far removed from the world of derring-do. Its role in most cases, even major ones, usually escapes public attention.

In fact, Interpol agents have no power to make arrests and do relatively little work in the field. Instead, they spend tedious hours poring over hundreds and thousands of documents, photographs and fingerprints, trying to put together the pieces that will help the police of member nations make arrests, solve crimes and find missing persons.

The Interpol general secretariat in Lyons operates with a $30-million budget supplied by member nations that are assessed on a sliding scale, depending upon their size and ability to pay. It has a staff of about 320. Although about 45 nationalities are represented, almost 200 of the staffers are French.

Eighty staff members, including nine Americans, are law enforcement agents assigned by their countries to Interpol headquarters.

Interpol’s Washington office, one of the organization’s national bureaus located in and financed by its 177 member countries, has a permanent staff of 85, plus officers from 13 federal agencies, including the FBI, the Secret Service and the Drug Enforcement Administration.

Though Interpol is seldom in the spotlight, Kendall started a “10 Most Wanted List,” patterning it after the FBI’s. Imoff called the list “an excellent tool” for focusing international attention on major criminals.

Despite such improvements, some problems remain--most notably a residue of skepticism about Interpol’s ability to keep a secret, especially one involving hard-to-obtain confidential intelligence.

U.S. law enforcement agencies, particularly the FBI, have a long history of holding back such information in sensitive cases for fear of a breach of security.

Interpol spokesman Sabourin insisted that a nation can now guarantee the security of its information simply by requesting that the data not be distributed to specified countries or regions.

But the system for restricting distribution of data has not allayed security concerns entirely.

“The U.S. would be a fool to think it could send confidential information to Interpol and it would not get out to other sources,” a U.S. agent assigned to Interpol here said. “There are just too many outlets and ways for that to happen.”

Similarly, Interpol’s vast and varied membership is a strength in many cases, especially involving drugs. At the same time, the conflicting values and interests of some of its many members are obstacles to cooperative police work.

Countries’ ideas of what constitutes crime and how best to deal with it vary enormously.

The Dutch believe that legalization, not criminalization, is the answer to drugs, for example. “Terrorism” in the U.S. often is “freedom fighting” in Arab countries or Ireland.

With Libya, Iran and Iraq as members along with the United States and Israel, internal distrust can be rampant. During the Cold War, the Western allies coexisted in Interpol with the Soviet Union.

A provision of Interpol’s constitution forbidding it from intervening in any case of a political, military or religious nature was cited by some member states in the past to persuade Interpol to steer clear of terrorism.

However, in 1984, Interpol adopted a policy statement declaring that terrorism in many cases would be considered criminal activity subject to red notices, and Kendall made combating it a major part of Interpol’s mission.

“We have to be involved in these most horrible types of crime,” Kendall said.

“In terrorist crimes, if it’s strictly a local case, say involving an Israeli-Palestinian dispute, then we have no role,” Kendall said in an interview. “But if it occurs in Paris or London, it brings it into our orbit.”

The Road Ahead

Despite security concerns and mutual distrust among some member countries, U.S. agencies are finding it necessary to cooperate with Interpol more than they have in the past.

The FBI and Interpol are working more closely than ever before, said Imoff, the FBI agent in charge of Interpol’s Washington office. The value of collaboration is rising with the globalization of crime, he said, and Interpol’s Washington office is handling 6,000 to 9,000 messages a month seeking or providing information about international crime.

In fact, Interpol’s communications network, which handles about 2 million messages a year, has become so important to the U.S. strategy for combating global crime that the FBI has offered to give Interpol access to its massive--though technologically troubled--Integrated Automatic Fingerprint System, which has 34 million sets of fingerprints.

Interpol’s 13-member Executive Committee is studying the offer, and informed sources say they expect the plan to be approved within a year.

Interpol’s own database contains only about 100,000 sets of fingerprints.

The harder challenge on the horizon is picking a new secretary-general. With Kendall turning 65 this year and contemplating retirement even though his term doesn’t end until 2000, the French are already jockeying to regain control.

“The French always considered Interpol theirs, and they’re not happy a bit that a Brit is still in charge,” said a U.S. agent at Interpol headquarters.

The Executive Committee, at Kendall’s request, is searching for a successor. Only two candidates, both with strong ties to Interpol, have stepped forward--Richardot and Noble, who is bidding to become the first American to head Interpol.

Now a professor at New York University, Noble has served on Interpol’s Executive Committee and is an unpaid financial consultant to the organization. He considers Interpol “extremely valuable to international law enforcement and an essential tool in fighting global crime.”

Raymond W. Kelly, an Interpol vice president and Noble’s successor as Treasury undersecretary for enforcement, agreed that the organization is crucial in the fight against international crime, but he is worried that its resources are still largely unknown to many law enforcement agencies in the United States.

“We’ve got to do a better job of spreading the word about Interpol’s capabilities,” he said.

Noble would undoubtedly try to persuade law enforcement agencies in the United States to make greater use of Interpol’s resources and to be more cooperative in exchanging information. He believes that agencies in the United States can find ways to satisfy legitimate security concerns while getting over what he calls “a long-held feeling that we can only trust ourselves.”

“International crime is increasing dramatically because criminals are getting smarter and taking advantage of technological advances, while in many places law enforcement is falling further and further behind,” Noble said in an interview.

“But Interpol already has the infrastructure in place to make the difference, and ultimately Interpol will determine the world’s success or failure in fighting international crime.”

Nelson is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times.

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Global Police

As the economy becomes global, crime becomes international, and many experts believe Interpol is vital in bringing transnational crooks to justice. Here’s a look at the organization

Name: International Criminal Police Organization. The term “Interpol” is drawn from its telex identification.

Headquarters: Lyon, France.

Members: 177 nations

Budget: $30 million

Staff: About 320

History: Began as the International Criminal Police Organization based in Vienna. Was moved to Berlin in the late 1930s and became an arm of the Gestapo. After World War II, it was renamed and its headquarters moved to Paris. Offices moved to Lyon in the late 1980s.