Suicide Flights Seen as Threat to ’96 Olympics

Five years before the World Trade Center towers toppled, U.S. authorities had identified crop-dusters and suicide flights as potential terrorist weapons, taking elaborate steps to avert an attack from the air during the 1996 Summer Olympic Games in Atlanta.

In an extraordinary aerial dragnet, launched quietly that summer and kept largely under wraps ever since, Black Hawk helicopters and U.S. Customs Service jets were deployed to intercept suspicious aircraft in the skies over the Olympic venues, officials said. Agents monitored crop-duster flights within hundreds of miles of downtown Atlanta.

Law enforcement agents also fanned out to regional airports throughout northern Georgia “to make sure nobody hijacked a small aircraft and tried to attack one of the venues,” said Woody Johnson, the FBI agent in charge of the Atlanta office at the time.

While no one suggests that the Olympics security precautions could have been a blueprint to prevent attacks, the revelations raise questions about whether more could have been done in the ensuing years to tighten aviation security. The aftermath of Sept. 11 has brought calls for increased airport security, tighter restrictions on crop-dusters and closer monitoring of foreign students who attend U.S. flight schools.

“In hindsight,” said Johnson, who retired from the FBI in 1997, “it’s probably one of those things you think about at the time and then you move on to the next operation.”

The Atlanta experience also points out the difficulty of stopping a determined terrorist: An attack took place, but on the ground. A bomb was detonated at a crowded Olympic concert, despite tightened security. One person was killed, 100 were injured and the prime suspect, a home-grown extremist, remains at large.

At the time, there was no specific threat from any particular terrorist group, said Steve Simon, who was the National Security Council’s senior director for transnational threats during the Olympics. Concerns were based in part on a classified 200-page FBI “Terrorist Threat Assessment” on the 1996 Olympics distributed to federal, state and local law enforcement officials before the Games. The document made no mention of Osama bin Laden or his Al Qaeda network in a list of potential terrorist organizations, according the former federal officials familiar with the report.

Describing the Games as “an excellent opportunity for terrorists,” the threat assessment analyzed an estimated 80 nations, including Afghanistan, where Bin Laden had recently relocated. The report described that nation as a haven for terrorist training camps, along with neighboring Pakistan.

The FBI, federal prosecutors and intelligence officials already had identified Bin Laden as a growing terrorist threat to the U.S. They also knew that at least one terrorist sympathetic to Bin Laden’s anti-American cause, a Pakistani who trained in terror camps in Pakistan and at flight schools in the United States, had planned to hijack a U.S. airliner and crash it into CIA headquarters in Virginia.

In fact, the federal grand jury that ultimately indicted Bin Laden in New York in 1998 for conspiring to destroy U.S. national facilities, launched its probe of him and Al Qaeda in June 1996, just a month before the July 19 Olympic opening ceremony in Atlanta. The Saudi Arabian government already had revoked Bin Laden’s passport, and, just two months before the Games, the U.S. succeeded in pressuring Sudan to expel him as a security threat.

“We certainly knew that Al Qaeda was interested in getting biological weapons and chemical weapons [at the time],” added another former NSC official, who asked not to be identified. “The problem was not so much weaponization as distribution. That’s what crop-dusters do. It was fairly obvious.”

But Johnson, the former FBI official, said that when planning security for the 1996 Games, he had no specific information about Bin Laden and his organization, or about the alleged kamikaze plot.

“We were just thinking about possibilities of what bad guys could do,” he said. “What if someone takes a private airplane and puts explosives in it or loads it with gas and crashes it into the stadium? We didn’t have any history of anything like that. They were just precautionary measures.”

Kent Alexander, who was the U.S. attorney in Atlanta in 1996, said security officials played out a litany of potential terrorist threats in field exercises and “tabletop” scenarios during the final months before the Games.

“There was a parade of horribles we went through,” Alexander said.

Simon, the former NSC official, said that crop-dusters loaded with chemicals and suicide flights were among the government’s concerns.

“It was clear that the Games were vulnerable to attack from the air--either by an aircraft flown into the stadium or a crop-duster overflying the site and spreading a chemical and biological weapon,” he said. “We jumped through hoops to keep crop-dusters away.”

Those fears were among a number of factors in the Federal Aviation Administration’s decision to clamp strictly enforced flight bans around key Olympic sites during the Games, according to Johnson and other former officials. FAA and private aviation sources stressed that such flight restrictions are commonly used to control air traffic and safety during such major events.

From July 6 through the end of the Games on Aug. 11, the FAA banned all aviation within a one-mile radius of the Olympic Village that housed the athletes. It also ordered aircraft to stay at least three miles away from other sites beginning three hours before each event until three hours after each event.

“The FAA believes this regulation is necessary for the security of the venues, safe operation and management of aircraft operating to, within and from these areas,” the agency declared in the special regulation it published in the Federal Register in February 1996, which called the Atlanta Games “the largest single, peacetime event in the history of the world.”

Asked why the FAA wasn’t more specific about the potential for an aerial terrorist threat, Johnson said, “I think they were using language like that because we felt it was such a remote possibility.”

Private aviators and civilian airport officials were more concerned about the volume of traffic.

Scott Fuller, who managed the suburban Gwinnett County Airport that summer and served on the Olympics aviation committee, said it was clear that the FAA flight restrictions were based on “terrorist threats--though nothing specific, as far as we knew. The biggest concern that we had was parking space for all the planes we expected to come in.”

After the Sept. 11 hijackings, authorities grounded crop-dusters, based on evidence uncovered from the investigation into the suicide attacks. There were reports that Mohamed Atta, the suspected hijacking ringleader, twice had visited a South Florida crop-dusting operation expressing interest in learning about the aircraft. Another suspect arrested shortly before the attacks had “a significant amount” of crop-duster information on his computer, according to Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft.

On Lookout for All Crop-Dusting Aircraft

Authorities are trying to identify and locate every crop-dusting airplane in the United States, according to David Tubbs, a former FBI agent who headed the bureau’s office in Kansas City, Mo.

While no air attack materialized in Atlanta, some officials who were among the inner circle of Olympics security planners were left wondering why such serious concerns at the time did not translate into tighter aviation security after the Games, including airports, crop-dusters and flight schools.

“I don’t know why it never went up to a higher national command level to talk about after the Games,” Johnson said.

A 1998 presidential directive established a special category specifically for massive public events, formalizing the closer ties between local law enforcement and federal authorities that grew directly out of the Atlanta experience.

Known in the industry as agricultural aircraft, crop-dusters are basic, single-engine, propeller-driven planes, and are used to spray millions of acres of agricultural land throughout the United States.

Representatives of the crop-dusting industry and private aircraft owners and pilots in Washington have lobbied against additional regulation.

Jim Callan, executive director of the National Agricultural Aviation Assn., said he had no idea crop-dusters were targeted during the Atlanta Games and saw no reason for alarm now. The members of his trade association believe no further restrictions are needed, he said.

“Not anything even remotely like that,” Callan said. “In the history of agricultural aviation, there had never been a terrorist act. An agricultural aircraft has never been hijacked. Not even a hint of it.”

Callan’s group has led a public campaign asserting that crop-dusters have been unduly maligned since the government’s post-Sept. 11 grounding orders. The aircraft, he and other industry sources say, are not the ideal bioterrorism weapons that federal authorities suspect.

But in testimony before the House Judiciary Committee in late September, Ashcroft justified the crop-duster grounding orders: “The FBI assesses the uses of this type of aircraft to distribute chemical or biological weapons of mass destruction as potential threats to Americans.”

Greater Airspace Cushion Sought

Former FBI agent Tubbs now is a point man in making such terrorist-threat assessments. He heads the security team for an even greater challenge: the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, staged this time in the shadow of a war on terrorism.

Tubbs said he has asked the FAA to shut down all operations at Salt Lake City International Airport during opening and closing ceremonies.

“We asked for a greater restricted airspace, considerably greater than Atlanta,” Tubbs said, adding, “Crop-dusters won’t get close because no airplanes will get close.”

*

Times staff writer Josh Meyer contributed to this report.