Interpol Hopes Terror Investigators Keep in Touch

When Ronald K. Noble became the first American to head Interpol a year ago, he inherited an international police agency that worked 9-to-5 five days a week. If police from one of Interpol’s 179 member nations needed information at night or on weekends, they were out of luck.

Noble also found that there was no international database for stolen or phony passports, which are often used by terrorists, and that immigration officials worldwide do not routinely consult Interpol’s registry of criminals and terrorists wanted by police.

Now, three months after the Sept. 11 attacks made terrorism the focus of international law enforcement, Noble is struggling to carve out an anti-terrorism role for his agency. At a time when terrorism is a global problem attacked separately by dozens of nations, criminal justice experts say the need for a central clearinghouse like Interpol is crucial.

“At times, we feel like the Maytag repairman. People don’t call us because they believe there’s no need to call us,” Noble, a former federal prosecutor and ex-chief law enforcement officer for the U. S. Treasury Department, said from his spacious office overlooking the serene suburbs of Lyons. “But there is a need to call us.”

Interpol, formed in 1923 to facilitate cross-border police cooperation, would seem a natural command center for police anti-terror efforts. But a mandate to avoid politically motivated crimes and the reluctance of national police to fully share sensitive information have left Interpol on the fringes of the anti-terror fight, some criminologists say.

Noble is working to change that.

The driven, energetic son of an African American Army sergeant and a German mother, Noble, 45, has put Interpol headquarters on a 24-hour, seven-day work schedule. He has added Arabic to Interpol’s three official languages (English, French and Spanish) in an attempt to bolster the agency’s expertise in the Arab world. And he has set up a task force to funnel information about the Sept. 11 attacks from member nations to the FBI.

Michael Levi, a professor of criminology at Cardiff University in Wales who studies international law enforcement, gives Noble credit for re-energizing Interpol and streamlining a moribund agency modeled after the notoriously bureaucratic French civil service.

Interpol’s analysis of crime trends and data is highly regarded by police officials, he says.

The agency offers state-of-the-art expertise on fingerprinting, money laundering and victim identification. Those resources have aided international investigations of crimes against children, including a case in which Interpol officers in London and Washington cooperated to arrest a British sex offender just after he arrived in the United States to meet a 15-year-old girl he had contacted online.

But Noble still has to overcome a meager budget, competition from the nascent Europol police agency, and the tendency of some police to bypass Interpol and deal directly with their counterparts in other nations. Levi says Interpol can contribute to anti-terrorism efforts through its databases and its communications network.

“Prior to Sept. 11, I don’t think Interpol had much of an anti-terrorism role,” Levi said. “But there is a role for Interpol in that these [terrorist] groups are involved in drug trafficking, weapons trafficking, fraud and crime. So Interpol’s data set can be very important.”

Frank Spicka, Interpol’s assistant director for anti-terrorism, says that since Sept. 11, he has noticed a new “collective sense of responsibility.” Intelligence services are more willing to share information “in a timely fashion with the rest of the law-enforcement community to prevent the next terrorist attack,” he said.

Some nations are still reluctant to share sensitive information because states such as Libya, Iran, Iraq and Syria are Interpol members; only North Korea and Afghanistan among major nations are not members. Interpol says nations can designate which countries should have access to their information.

During his 13 months as secretary-general, Noble has focused on strengthening Interpol’s core function--to provide timely information and analysis to police agencies. But he is also trying to persuade member nations to contribute information to build international databases for travel documents, and for criminal and terrorist suspects.

Most countries maintain their own database of known or suspected criminals and terrorists, Noble said. But they don’t routinely check Interpol’s notices of wanted people, and there is no mechanism for consulting other countries’ data banks of police suspects.

In the U. S., he said, “what we’re making sure of is that people entering the U. S. aren’t wanted by the U. S. But if they are foreigners wanted by other countries, we risk missing them.”

The Sept. 11 terrorists were not listed by Interpol as wanted criminals, Noble said. But even if they had been, he said, it’s not likely that U. S. immigration officials would have seen their names because they don’t typically check the Interpol list.

Part of the problem, he said, is a “lack of political will” from member countries more concerned about supporting their own police. Interpol relies on member nations for its annual budget of $28 million and for much of its headquarters staff. When it comes to fighting terrorism, member nations tend to rely on their own police and on trusted allies in other countries.

Since Sept. 11, Interpol has issued 55 Red Notices--”all-points bulletins for the world,” as Noble calls them--for people suspected of links to the attacks. The notices provide a valuable service, criminologists say, because with a single stroke, Interpol can alert police worldwide who otherwise might not be aware of a suspect.

So far this year, the agency says, more than 1,400 suspects have been arrested or found as a result of an Interpol notice. (Interpol itself does not arrest criminals or suspected terrorists, or conduct its own investigations.)

U. S. agents working drug cases in Latin America use Interpol as a conduit for requesting arrests in corruption-plagued countries to ensure that the requests reach trustworthy officials, said a former high-ranking American anti-drug agent.

Similarly, countries opposed to U. S. policies can avoid direct cooperation with U. S. law enforcement by channeling information or requests through Interpol, said Stanley E. Morris, the agency’s chief of staff.

Because terrorists rely on stolen or counterfeit passports to travel and change identities, Noble said, providing a global database of travel documents is essential. Credit card companies can instantly check whether a card is valid or has been reported stolen, he said, but immigration officials usually can determine only whether passports from their own countries are valid.

“If we don’t do the little things now, like having countries share data about fraudulent identity documents and known criminals and terrorists, then we’re going to continue to have a long-term [terrorist] problem,” he said.

Levi, the criminologist, said about 70% of the agency’s message traffic is to or from Europe or North America, leaving holes in Interpol’s coverage of the Middle East, Asia and Africa. And only the wealthiest nations can afford to send specialists to Interpol headquarters--where only 54 countries are represented--or build strong Interpol offices in their own countries.

Even so, improved coordination with U. S. agencies in recent years has enhanced Interpol’s reputation among Western law enforcement organizations, said the former U. S. anti-drug agent.

Noble says Interpol is focusing on Al Qaeda terror cells in Europe, some of which have been broken up by police through cooperation among European nations.

“Al Qaeda is dead,” Noble said.

He predicted, however, that the remnants of Al Qaeda will simply change the name and try to direct and expand “sleeper cells” of terrorists trained in Afghan camps and now living in Europe and elsewhere, plotting attacks against Western targets.

“And that’s why it’s important for us to identify these people,” Noble said.