Phony Badges Fool ‘Secure’ U.S. Agencies Every Time

With bogus police badges in hand, the infiltrators set to work. From one guarded federal facility to the next, the undercover agents wandered hallways almost at will, fooling guards and making their way near the offices of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and other senior officials.

“We’re friends of Janet’s from Miami. We just wanted to say hello,” an agent posing as a plainclothes police officer told a secretary outside Reno’s door. The infiltrators--who were actually undercover agents on assignment from Congress--even managed to leave an uninspected rental van parked in the Justice Department’s central courtyard.

Testing the vulnerabilities of federal anti-terrorism measures, the undercover agents batted a thousand: They tried to get into 19 of the country’s most tightly secured buildings--the CIA, the FBI, the State Department and the Justice Department among them--and they succeeded all 19 times. In most cases, they carried guns and uninspected briefcases.

The results of the undercover operation, coming on the heels of a series of major security breaches at the State Department, show that many of the federal government’s most sensitive sites “are completely vulnerable to ‘terrorism on the cheap,’ ” said Rep. Bill McCollum (R-Fla.), head of the House Judiciary subcommittee on crime.

McCollum’s panel plans a hearing today examining the troubling security lapses. It will feature a videotape showing just how quickly the undercover agents were able to gain entry into supposedly secure sectors of the buildings, often without escorts or inspections.

“In a matter of 10 to 15 seconds, they were in,” said one person who has seen the video.

Embarrassed officials at several of the infiltrated departments said Wednesday that they are deeply concerned by the lapses, and the Justice Department said that it is already taking steps to beef up its security. It refused to detail those steps, however, because, spokeswoman Gretchen Michael said, “we don’t want to provide a blueprint for terrorists.”

The congressional investigation was spurred by a boom in the online sale of fake police badges, driver’s licenses, passports and other forms of identification. Some reasonably realistic-looking fake IDs can be bought directly on the Internet for as little as $10, while other online merchants sell the software to manufacture fake IDs at home in unlimited quantities.

The trend is worrying lawmakers who fear that it is becoming much easier for criminals to gain access to the tools of their trade.

Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), who looked into the problem, was able to put her face on a falsified Army Reserve identification card, a Connecticut driver’s license and a Boston University student ID, prompting her to call last week for tougher federal penalties for making and using fake IDs.

And Rep. Stephen Horn (R-Long Beach), worried about fake Los Angeles and Signal Hill police badges that have popped up in Southern California, has proposed legislation to make it a federal crime to traffic in real or counterfeit police badges.

But the security lapses exposed by the congressional undercover agents represent perhaps the most serious threat posed by the Internet ID business because they show how vulnerable many supposedly secure facilities are to terrorism and spying, officials said.

“I was shocked,” McCollum said in an interview. With a massive expansion of federal anti-terrorist security measures in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, “I would never have thought this could happen.”

At McCollum’s request, a team of investigators from the General Accounting Office--an investigative arm of Congress--began the undercover operation early this month. The agents acquired bogus New York Police Department and Drug Enforcement Administration badges and credentials--some of them castoff movie props, others manufactured through commercially available software packages or material downloaded from the Internet, the GAO agents said.

Over the next three weeks, the agents tried to get inside the 19 facilities, which included the Federal Aviation Administration and National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Sometimes they told guards that they were police officers there on official business. Other times, they simply tried to walk in unannounced.

Each time, the armed agents succeeded--getting inside the secure facilities without being screened or made to pass through standard metal detectors, the agents reported.

In a handful of visits, the agents were escorted through the building. Even then, however, the agents managed to go unattended to a restroom, carrying briefcases that McCollum noted were “big enough to carry large quantities of explosives.”

But in other cases, the agents said in a report to be delivered to the congressional panel today, “escorts were not required and our agents wandered throughout without ever being stopped.”

At the State Department, it took the agents two attempts to get past security guards.

The first time, the men--both former Secret Service agents--identified themselves as New York police officers in town for a law enforcement conference, saying that they were interested in pamphlets about narcotics interdiction, said David Carpenter, who heads the department’s Diplomatic Security Service.

“There was no one to escort them, so they went away,” Carpenter said. They returned several days later, however, and an escort took them to the seventh-floor bureau that handles drug trafficking--on the same floor as Albright’s executive suite.

“At some point, they got separated from the escort,” he said. “Either the escort has to take a phone call and they bug out or they simply say: ‘How do we get out?’ We don’t know what happened. But they weren’t escorted out. That allowed them to move around on their own.”

Once the State Department identifies the escort, Carpenter said, “that person will be subject to disciplinary action.”

At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., which unlike other federal facilities is closed to the public, the bogus cops faked out two sets of guards last week.

Although they had no appointment, they successfully talked their way past the guard post at the compound’s main gate and then got past the guard station inside the main CIA building. Both sets of sentries are supposed to check visitors’ identification and bags.

Mark Mansfield, a CIA spokesman, tried to downplay the intrusion while conceding that it is “a matter of concern.” He said Wednesday that the fake cops were permitted to visit only the CIA’s in-house museum and gift shop, both on the first floor.

“They were escorted by an armed security official at all times,” he said. “They were nowhere close to any sensitive information, nor were they close to offices of any senior officials.”