State Security Chief Ready to Face Home-Grown Terrorism

As an FBI agent, George Vinson brought down all sorts of terrorists: Armenian Justice Commandos in Los Angeles, an assassin hired by Saddam Hussein to kill a critic in the San Joaquin Valley and various white supremacists and hatemongers.

It was Vinson’s SWAT team in 1984 that engaged in a two-day shootout with bank robber and neo-Nazi leader Robert Mathews in Puget Sound, finally prevailing when Mathews burned to death in a fire caused by cases of his own ammunition.

In the 1990s, he organized the FBI’s first Pacific Rim team of specialized agents to investigate hacker break-ins of highly confidential business and government computer networks. Among other things, the team broke up a scam on the Internet that threatened to cost credit card companies more than $1 billion.

Now, after retiring from a 23-year FBI career in 1999 as a counter-terrorism expert, Vinson is California’s first homeland security chief: the eyes and ears of Gov. Gray Davis on all matters relating to protecting 34 million Californians and the world’s sixth-largest economy against terrorism.

Working With a Staff of One

He is the first in the California chain of command to receive highly sensitive information from national Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and other top-level federal authorities. And he brings to the job not only a lifetime of battling “bullies,” as he calls them, but antennae for domestic terrorists who might hope to exploit the international attacks.

“I’m hard-wired for this stuff,” the wiry, closely cropped 57-year-old former agent said.

With a borrowed staff of only one assistant, Vinson regularly briefs Davis, coordinates with the recently established California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, and meets with state, local and federal officials from law enforcement, public health and emergency response agencies, trying to knit together a unified approach in case terrorists strike.

It’s a high-energy approach that doesn’t surprise Vinson’s former colleagues.

“He was always a step ahead of you in trying to anticipate,” recalled Andrea Zulberti, head of worldwide operations for Barclays Global Investors, where Vinson was director of corporate security before accepting the state position.

Never Retired Completely

Although he left the FBI, Vinson never retired completely from law enforcement. In addition to the Barclays job, he worked briefly as a white-collar crime investigator for the accounting company Deloitte & Touche.

But friends discovered that Vinson was eager to return to the business of fighting terrorism, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks. And Davis was looking for a security expert.

At the urging of California Highway Patrol Commissioner D.O. “Spike” Helmick and others, Davis chose Vinson over three other candidates for the $118,000-a-year post. In November, Vinson quit his nearly $200,000-a-year position at Barclays to accept the offer.

“He was sure he wanted to get in there and do the job,” said longtime friend Bill Carlson, a retired CHP deputy commissioner.

But Vinson’s wife of 37 years, Carolyn, wondered why he would take a severe pay cut and give up the “cushy job” at Barclays, Vinson recalled. “This [state] job was pulling at my heartstrings,” Vinson told her.

“Money is not that important to me,” he said.

‘Nimble and Flexible’

Scarcely settled into a windowless cubbyhole office in the governor’s suite at the Capitol, Vinson, who reports directly to Davis, said he rejected offers of a bigger staff and insisted that his assignment be as free from bureaucracy as possible.

“We have got to stay as nimble and flexible as the terrorists,” Vinson said in an interview at his office. Standing on a bookshelf behind him was a statuette of a stereotypical G-man in a fedora and trench coat, hefting a submachine gun.

As he sizes up California’s vulnerability to attack and its ability to prevent and recover from one, Vinson said home-grown cults of hate and violence may seek to exploit Sept. 11 for their own advantage.

Vinson said he is satisfied that law enforcement is keeping close tabs on domestic terrorist organizations even as the country focuses on Al Qaeda. But he told a recent conference of high-tech executives that “if we are not careful, we could open up a little slice of heaven for these guys.”

He identified the home-grown threats as white supremacists, skinheads, neo-Nazis and other ultra-right-wing zealots.

Under the pretense of patriotism and supporting the war against terrorism, such groups might conceivably launch campaigns against Middle Eastern people, Vinson said.

If that doesn’t work, he said, “they will go back to targeting all the other people they hate: Catholics, Jews, Hispanics, Asians. You name it.”

Vinson’s concern resonated with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., an independent national leader in tracking American hate organizations.

“We absolutely cannot forget the domestic radical right, which is capable of the same kind of attacks as the Al Qaeda. In some quarters, they have contemplated biological and other attacks capable of killing many thousands of people,” said Mark Potok, spokesman for the center.

Vinson said extreme right-wing organizations in the U.S. share a common core of ideology: an adherence to the racist and anti-Semitic beliefs of an international movement known as “Christian Identity.”

Notions of ‘Chosen People’

Among the tenets of Christian Identity, according to the Anti-Defamation League, is the notion that Anglo-Saxons were descended from the 10 Lost Tribes of Israel and that whites of the United States and Britain, not Jews, will receive the biblical promises of the “chosen people.”

Vinson said that the movement professes to believe in a fundamentalist brand of the Christian faith but that that is a cover for acquiring power at the expense of genuine religions and racial and ethnic minority groups.

Vinson arrived in the governor’s office as the unanimous pick of a wide range of law enforcement officers, officials said. But he has at least one prominent critic, Ira Winkler, an author and highly regarded Internet security expert.

Corporate Espionage a Huge Problem

In a critique, Winkler assailed remarks Vinson made about corporate espionage in an interview with TechTV, an online industry publication. At the time, Vinson was chief of the FBI’s computer crime unit based in San Francisco.

In the interview, Vinson described corporate espionage as a huge problem that was getting worse even as corporations worked to protect their proprietary information.

He said that the problem was so big that companies “have trouble getting their arms around it” and observed that “any type of technology you build to protect a system seems to be able to be defeated.” He added, however, that systems are “getting more and more secure.”

But in a subsequent edition of TechTV, Winkler accused Vinson of making a “dangerous” suggestion that could be interpreted by tightfisted corporate executives to mean they had already “done enough for security” and would do no more.

He claimed Vinson left corporate America “feeling hopeless,” in the fight against computer crimes. Winkler said if he were a “CEO and the FBI told me that computer crime was too big for me to handle, I would believe them. I would give up in despair.”

Vinson was reared in Sacramento. He spent 10 years with the CHP as a motorcycle officer and high-speed driving instructor before joining the FBI in 1976. “He was kind of in love with driving fast,” recalled his pal Carlson.

As a young patrolman, he attended college at night and earned a degree in education. Vinson said he got the degree as insurance against possible disability or unemployment.

At the FBI, he was assigned to posts in Washington, Phoenix, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and Fresno.

In 1990, Vinson was chief of the FBI’s obscure “Middle East Counter-Terrorism” program, based in Fresno. The San Joaquin Valley includes large blocs of immigrants from the Middle East. The region also is home to secret U.S. military facilities.

Foiled an Assassination

It was as chief of the Fresno office that Vinson confronted an assassin who had been ordered by Saddam Hussein’s government to kill a Modesto-area radio station operator named Sargon Dadesho. Dadesho was an unflinching critic of the Iraqi government.

As the U.S. was preparing the Operation Desert Storm war against Iraq, local police and the FBI learned that Andri Khoshaba, a onetime chauffeur at the Iraqi Embassy in Washington, had been hired for $50,000 to kill Dadesho.

“It was incredible down in the valley to hear that Saddam Hussein had sent a couple of guys to clip this guy,” Vinson recalled.

But one of Saddam’s men changed his mind and became an informant for the FBI. He then was wired to collect evidence against Khoshaba. Somehow the informant’s role was discovered and he became an immediate candidate for death himself, Vinson recalled.

“Right in the middle of it, agents had to go in and rescue him,” Vinson said. “And, we had to take down [Khoshaba] in a hurry.”

But in a controversial action, the U.S. attorney later ordered Khoshaba released. Khoshaba fled to Baghdad, but returned to New York in 1991 and was rearrested. Eventually, he pleaded guilty to one charge in a multi-count indictment in the Dadesho case and served four years in prison.

“I don’t like bullies,” Vinson said. “Criminals are just bullies.”