Weak Points Seen in U.S. Bid to Fortify Its Missions

U.S. Embassy guards here were quick to act when they spotted a man videotaping the ornate three-story building from across the street in leafy Zrinjevac Park.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was arriving the next day. Security experts knew that the embassy, which hugs a busy downtown intersection, was vulnerable to the same kind of terrorist truck bombs that gutted two U.S. embassies in East Africa in 1998. Yet plans to build a safer embassy outside Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, remain just that: plans.

So Croatian police detained the man, a local tailor, while U.S. intelligence agencies checked their records. Ten days later, the CIA station in Tel Aviv cabled back: The “tailor” was Hamed Zayegh, an activist in the militant Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine.

Albright’s Feb. 2 visit here was uneventful. But the previously undisclosed surveillance by a terrorist group highlights a deeper problem: Although some progress has been made, critics say a massive U.S. effort--sparked by the 1998 embassy bombings--to boost security for U.S. diplomats and facilities overseas is moving far too slowly, even as the number of threats continues to rise.

The General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, warned last month that the State Department is at least a year behind schedule in carrying out major upgrades of buildings and anti-terrorist equipment at more than 100 overseas posts.

Others, such as retired Adm. William Crowe, who headed panels that studied the bombings in Kenya and Tanzania, complain that the Clinton administration is spending too little too late--and on some of the wrong solutions.

“I’m not satisfied,” said Crowe, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and later U.S. ambassador to Britain. “They’re not doing what they need to do.”

Among his complaints: The State Department is spending $50 million to apply shatter-resistant film, like Mylar, to embassy windows. But Crowe’s report last year specifically warned that film-covered windows aren’t safe. It called instead for stronger frames and special laminated glass, which is much more expensive.

“In Africa, the killer was glass,” Crowe said. “Nearly everyone was killed by slivers of glass. Mylar doesn’t stop something like that.”

Bin Laden Reportedly Seeks American Target

At the same time, intelligence officials and terrorism experts contend that Osama bin Laden, the exiled Saudi millionaire who allegedly orchestrated the African attacks, still seeks to bomb another U.S. embassy. They say Bin Laden loyalists have placed under surveillance U.S. missions in the Middle East, West Africa and Central and South Asia.

“Bin Laden still wants to hit us again,” said a senior U.S. intelligence official in Washington. “There’s no doubt. It’s just a matter of timing and opportunity.”

Nor is Bin Laden alone. The State Department has logged more than 3,000 threats or potential threats from groups and individuals aimed at U.S. diplomatic facilities or personnel overseas in the past 18 months--double the previous rate.

“We’ve had threats on every continent,” said David G. Carpenter, assistant secretary of State for diplomatic security. “There are elements targeting us. There are elements surveilling us.”

The State Department temporarily closed at least 70 embassies or other facilities in the year after the bombings, and more since then, because of terrorist threats or civil disturbances. U.S. missions were shuttered early this month, for example, in Oslo; Sao Paulo, Brazil; and Harare, Zimbabwe.

To be sure, the State Department has significantly improved security since huge truck bombs devastated U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Aug. 7, 1998. The blasts killed 224 people, including 12 Americans, and injured more than 5,000.

Using $1.5 billion in emergency funds from Congress, the department devised plans to reinforce walls, build blast barriers and otherwise shield many of its 262 overseas facilities. The Sandia National Laboratories were hired to research even stronger walls, columns and fences.

Almost every overseas post is getting bomb-detection equipment, light armored vehicles and emergency radios. Extras include sniper posts and X-ray machines for scanning suspicious packages. About 20 embassies have bought or rented nearby properties--from a gas station in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to an entire city street in Budapest, Hungary--to create buffer zones.

Although U.S. law requires government agencies to buy American, the State Department obtained a waiver to purchase 65 armored BMWs from Germany for U.S. ambassadors and other senior diplomats. The reason: Cadillac, the only American supplier of armored sedans, is retooling its assembly line.

The department even plans to distribute what it calls “user-friendly” gas masks to all U.S. diplomats and their families in case of biological or chemical attacks.

More important, perhaps, the department has hired and trained at least 4,000 local guards and undercover agents to investigate suspicious activities outside embassy gates. Although several countries, including China, have refused to cooperate, the program already is active at 154 posts.

“They are not passive,” Carpenter said of the new guards. “If there’s a hotel, they watch to see if anyone suspicious checks in. If it’s an apartment, they check who’s there. We are trying to be as aggressive as we can outside the embassy walls as we are inside, without offending the host government.”

Earlier this month in Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina, for example, the local “surveillance-detection” team photographed a white Nissan that was across from the embassy’s front wall twice in one week. Local police later stopped and identified the Sudanese driver and his passengers.

A day later, April 8, another team spotted a man they described as “acting suspicious and out of place.” They said he walked repeatedly past the warehouse for the U.S. Agency for International Development in Sarajevo, apparently studying it, before climbing into the same white Nissan.

Embassy officials quickly ordered increased patrols around all U.S. facilities in the city. No suspects have been detained, but the incident remains under investigation.

Despite the initial progress, huge problems remain. Though construction of heavily fortified facilities has begun in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, that work is the exception.

The State Department identified seven other “high-risk” embassies and consulates for emergency relocation or replacement after the African bombings because the buildings were too close to public streets or otherwise considered tempting targets for terrorists.

The list includes missions in Istanbul, Turkey; Doha, Qatar; Kampala, Uganda; Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo; Tunis, Tunisia; and Zagreb. So far, only the embassy in Doha has moved. Relocations of the rest are still in various planning stages.

The risk in Istanbul was reinforced in June when Turkish police shot and killed two men carrying pistols and a shoulder-held antitank rocket launcher into a building across from the U.S. Consulate. The pair later were identified as members of a local leftist group.

Improvements at Embassy in Croatia

In Zagreb, where the embassy sits on a busy downtown corner, officials have installed metal grilles on windows, planted heavy bollards in the sidewalk and posted cameras to monitor traffic. About 60 Americans work in the building, which has been a U.S. mission since World War II.

Officials say a new embassy, costing an estimated $66.8 million, will be built about eight miles away in a cornfield near Zagreb’s airport. But groundbreaking won’t begin until next year.

“There’s a lot of red tape,” said a U.S. Embassy official in Zagreb, who asked not to be named. “I know it won’t be finished when I leave in two years.”

Patrick F. Kennedy, assistant secretary of State for administration, vigorously defends the department’s construction program. The GAO report that says his projects are behind schedule and over cost mischaracterizes his budgets and schedules, he insists. “The GAO’s figures are wrong,” he said.

Jess Ford, associate GAO director, stands by the report. “They felt we were being critical,” he said. “That wasn’t our intent. It was meant to be a status report.”

But others are openly critical. A report in November by the independent Overseas Presence Advisory Panel warned that “88% of all embassies do not meet security standards” set in 1985. That is mostly because only a handful of posts have a recommended 100-foot buffer zone on all sides to prevent potential attackers from coming too close.

Similar scathing conclusions came in the January 1999 report from panels headed by retired Adm. Crowe. They called for spending about $1.5 billion a year for 10 years to improve embassy security.

The Clinton administration, however, initially asked Congress for only $36 million for new construction this year. After fierce criticism by Crowe and others, it raised the request to $300 million. Congress approved that, as well as $267 million for security operations this year.

The administration plans to request $1.06 billion for security-related construction and operations next year, and about $1.5 billion a year after 2004, officials say.

That’s too slow, argues Riley Sever, spokesman for the American Foreign Service Assn., which represents 23,000 active and retired foreign service officers. He says his members are “disgusted.”

“The administration just doesn’t want to spend the money,” Sever complained. “The foreign service community really feels our security has a low priority.”

There’s another problem: Some experts fear that efforts to “harden” embassies may backfire by forcing terrorists to choose easier, less protected targets, such as embassy housing complexes, schools and tourist sites.

“We call it the cascading threat,” said Daniel Benjamin, a former White House counter-terrorism official. “If ‘hard’ targets are too hard, terrorists will seek to attack soft targets.”

That’s what happened in December in Amman, Jordan, where the U.S. Embassy is a virtual fortress. Local police, aided by U.S. intelligence, apprehended a suspected Bin Laden cell that allegedly planned to bomb or attack tourist buses, hotels, border crossings, archeological ruins and other sites popular with Western tourists.

Some officials cite the Jordanian case, as well as other thwarted attacks on U.S. facilities, as evidence that the current strategy is working. Since 1998, five U.S. citizens have died in terrorist-related violence, all in Africa, but none were specifically targeted as Americans.

“Not one American [diplomat] has been killed by terrorists in the last year and a half, a time when there are more threats than ever before,” said Carpenter, the assistant secretary of State for diplomatic security. “The U.S. government is doing something right.”