FAA, Airlines Stalled Major Security Plans

Federal bureaucracy and airline lobbying slowed and weakened a set of safety improvements recommended by a presidential commission--including one that a top airline industry official now says might have prevented the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, created in 1996 after TWA Flight 800 crashed off Long Island, N.Y., recommended 31 steps that it said were urgently needed to provide a multilayered security system at the nation’s airports.

The Federal Aviation Administration expressed support for the proposals, which ranged from security inspections at airports to tighter screening of mail parcels, and the Clinton administration vowed to rigorously monitor the changes.

But by Sept. 11, most of the proposals had been watered down by industry lobbying or were bogged down in bureaucracy, a Times review found.

For instance, the commission, headed by then-Vice President Al Gore, wanted airlines to screen all passengers with computerized profiling systems to detect potential terrorists.

The airlines did not oppose the idea, but the FAA moved slowly and is still developing a rule requiring carriers to use the system. Profiling has been employed voluntarily by many airlines but is not applied to all ticket-holders.

Carol Hallett, president of the Air Transport Assn., the airline trade group, said this week that better profiling might have kept the hijackers off the planes that they crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field.

“In our hearts, everyone must realize that failure to use the [profiling] techniques that are available today may be directly responsible for the events of Sept. 11,” Hallett said in a speech to the Travel Industries Assn. in Atlanta.

Within days of the terrorist attacks, the White House demanded a report from the FAA on the status of the White House commission recommendations.

The FAA’s response, delivered Sept. 16, said 25 of the 31 proposals had been “completed.” But in elaborating, the memo revealed that few of the safety measures were in place and working as planned. Most were still in development; some remained entangled in interagency squabbles and bureaucratic delays.

The memo provoked dismay and anger among White House officials, according to a knowledgeable source.

“It’s a governmental failure,” said Gerald Kauvar, staff director of the Gore commission. “We specifically said the FAA had to change, and they’ve proved resistant to change.”

The FAA, asked for a response, issued a statement saying that the security improvements had been slowed by “often conflicting and time-consuming” federal rule-making procedures and by efforts to protect civil liberties.

Nonetheless, the statement said, “work has progressed over the years . . . with a sense of urgency and resolve.”

The FAA memo, reviewed by the Times, said that as of Sept. 16, the Sunday after the attacks:

* The agency was still collecting research on how to keep intruders from slipping past airport perimeter fences and into restricted areas.

* The FAA had not launched an effort to assess the vulnerability of the nation’s 450 commercial airports to terrorism. Instead, the agency was conducting studies to determine the best way to spot security weaknesses.

* Various measures to improve detection of explosives in baggage were bouncing from agency to agency. Two commission recommendations regarding mail shipments on passenger planes had met resistance from the U.S. Postal Service, which worried that security-related delays would drive away customers.

* The FBI was still working on a plan to protect civilian planes from surface-to-air missiles.

* The FAA was negotiating with intelligence agencies to give airline officials access to confidential information about potential terrorists and plots.

Recommendations Were Not Entirely Unheeded

Before the Sept. 11 attacks, the FBI knew that two men with suspected ties to accused terrorist Osama bin Laden had entered the country, and agents were trying to find them. But authorities did not notify the airlines that the men were at large, and they were able to buy tickets and board the jet that slammed into the Pentagon.

Since the attacks, the FBI has distributed a lengthy watch list and the FAA has ordered airlines to check all passengers’ names against it.

The Gore commission proposals did not go entirely unheeded. The FAA expanded its use of bomb-sniffing dogs at airports. Congress appropriated hundreds of millions of dollars to buy bomb-detection equipment and hire more federal counter-terror agents.

In addition, the FAA memo said, the agency has complied with a commission proposal to submit a resolution to an international aviation group on improving global compliance with U.S. security standards.

President Clinton created the commission shortly after a mid-air explosion downed TWA Flight 800 in July 1996, killing 230 people. The disaster initially was thought to be the work of terrorists. Investigators eventually concluded that a buildup of fumes in the fuel tank caused the blast.

Nonetheless, the commission devoted much of its attention to terrorism. “People and places in the United States have joined the list of targets,” the final report said. “It is becoming more common to find terrorists working alone or in ad hoc groups, some of whom are not afraid to die in carrying out their designs.”

The commission sent 20 anti-terror recommendations to Clinton on Sept. 9, 1996, and 11 more on Feb. 12, 1997. Enacting all of the proposals, to create a layered system of protection, was urgent, the report said. It described the potential for terrorist attacks as “a national security issue.”

The commission called on the Transportation secretary to make an annual public report on the government’s progress in enacting the measures. Rodney Slater, who served in that post until the Clinton administration ended in 2000, filed one update, in 1998. Norman Y. Mineta, his successor under President Bush, has been in office for only nine months.

Slater, in an interview, said: “We did monitor all the recommendations of the Gore commission.”

He pointed to one area of partial success: persuading Congress to provide $100 million a year for sophisticated equipment to detect explosives in luggage. “We really engaged the Congress on that matter at every turn,” he said.

But the devices, used selectively to screen suspicious baggage, are used at a fraction of their capability, investigators have found.

An assistant inspector general of the Department of Transportation told the Senate last year that the machines, which cost $1 million each and are capable of examining 225 bags per hour, were checking fewer than 225 per day.

The commission also recommended that the federal government set standards for and license the private companies hired by airlines to operate airport security checkpoints in passenger terminals.

The companies generally pay minimum wage. Turnover among the workers who run metal detectors at major airports averaged 126% per year during the late 1990s, an FAA survey found.

The push for standards advanced last year when Congress mandated 40 hours of training for screeners. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), among others, continued to press for federal licensing of security companies by September 2000.

The FAA prepared a regulation setting standards for the security companies. The airlines objected to some of the standards, citing the potential financial harm to their industry.

“We appeal to you to consider the economic and administrative burden,” Shan L. Sparks, security director of Nevada-based Casino Express Airlines, wrote to the FAA.

Alaska Airlines’ security manager expressed concern about “the increase in charges that a new Certified Screening Company will pass onto the industry.”

The Office of Management and Budget recently approved the FAA rule. The FAA plans to publish the final version soon in the Federal Register, the final step before it takes effect.

In its Sept. 16 memo to the White House, the FAA explained the delay in acting on the commission recommendation by saying that “the rule-making was a significant and involved proposal that took time to consider industry comments.”

Kauvar, the Gore commission staff director, said the Air Transport Assn. (ATA) also resisted a proposal to match each checked bag with a boarding passenger. Bags not matched to a passenger would not be loaded. The idea was to minimize the chances of someone planting a bomb in a plane’s cargo hold.

The industry predicted long delays and persuaded the commission to soften its recommendation and call for spot checks. The FAA requires spot checks but says it is moving toward a system of matching all luggage with passengers.

Fingerprinting: A Question of Cost?

The ATA also objected to the commission’s call for fingerprinting and background checks of all security screeners and airline employees with access to secure areas.

The issue has been a sore point with the industry group for years. In 1992, the ATA hired William H. Webster, former director of both the CIA and FBI, to testify at a congressional hearing after a 1990 commission suggested the precaution.

Rep. James L. Oberstar (D-Minn.) said he was flabbergasted when Webster visited him later. “I looked him square in the eye and asked, ‘Would you be taking this position if you were still director of the FBI?’ ” he recalled.

Webster, in a recent interview, said he based his opposition on the time and expense involved in fingerprint analysis, but he added that technology has improved since then. “I was trying to keep them from spending the money in the wrong place,” he said.

The FAA did require background checks, but only for job applicants with gaps in their employment histories.

In 1996, the Gore commission revived the earlier recommendation, calling for background checks for all security screeners. Last year, Congress mandated such vettings, but the investigators have caught security companies at major airports falsifying background checks.

Herding other agencies into line poses another problem for the FAA. The agency needed the U.S. Postal Service’s cooperation to adopt new bomb screening measures for mail shipped on planes. The Postal Service has long resisted the idea.

In 1979, a bomb in a mail parcel detonated in the cargo hold of an American Airlines plane, igniting a fire. There were no injuries.

The Postal Service and the FAA signed an agreement to screen parcels or hold them for 24 hours before placing them on planes. But postal officials quickly deemed the agreement unworkable.

“And as time passed, I guess the threat passed and the memorandum collapsed,” postal official Kenneth M. Hearst testified for an earlier commission--appointed in 1990 by President Bush after a bomb exploded aboard Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, killing 270 people.

Postal Service Posed Problems

Postal officials voiced concern that X-raying or opening packages would invade customers’ privacy. More recently, the FAA memo says, the primary objection has been that security-related delays might give customers a reason to turn to private delivery services, which do not use passenger planes.

Even after the Sept. 11 attacks, the idea of tightening security raises hackles at the Postal Service. “We just can’t slow the mail to X-ray everything,” said Lori Groen, spokeswoman for the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, its law enforcement arm.

For now, no mail weighing more than a pound is flown on commercial jets. Senior postal officials are discussing further security procedures.

The Gore commission also wanted the FAA to conduct a comprehensive assessment of the nation’s airports, looking for weaknesses that terrorists could turn to their advantage.

The panel specified that the FAA should use procedures developed by Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico, which studies how to protect against chemical and biological attacks and other forms of terrorism. The airport assessments would be “a very labor-intensive effort, with physical inspections,” said Kauvar, the former commission staff director.

There was no reason to believe that the FAA would object to those marching orders. Top agency officials had testified to the 1990 commission that they had been using the Sandia model for more than a year at Baltimore-Washington International Airport and were pleased with it.

But seven years later, the FAA had changed its mind.

The Sandia procedures were “not developed to assess the complex security environment posed by public airports served by commercial air carriers,” the FAA statement said.

A Process Still in Refinement

The FAA already was using a 300-question risk survey that it developed in 1996, after Congress ordered the agency to evaluate security at two dozen airports.

But the Gore commission wanted a more rigorous review of all the nation’s airports, using the Sandia model. The FAA did not do that. Instead, it hired several private companies to experiment with different ways of assessing airport security. The FAA settled on an approach in December 1998 and is still refining it.

John Meenan, the ATA’s senior vice president for industry policy, said that the Sept. 11 terror attacks have not caused the association to rethink any of its positions on airport security.

“It doesn’t do any good to have a system that increases security but that basically stops our transportation network,” he said. “We’re trying to find a balance point. I know we get criticized for that.”

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Recommendations

The White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, created after the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996, made 31 recommendation for protecting commercial aviation against terrorism. Many of the proposals were weakened or stalled in red tape.

1. The federal government should consider aviation security as a national security issue and provide substantial funding for capital improvements.

2. The Federal Aviation Administration should establish mandated standards for security enhancements.

3. The U.S. Postal Service should advise customers that all packages weighing more than 16 ounces will be subject to examination for explosives and other threatening objects in order to move by air.

4. Current law should be amended to clarify the U.S. Customs Services authority to search outbound international mail.

5. The FAA should implement a comprehensive plan to address the threat of explosives and other threatening objects in cargo and work with industry to develop new initiatives in this area.

6. The FAA should establish a security system that will provide a high level of protection for all aviation information systems.

7. The FAA should work with airlines and airport consortia to ensure that all passengers are positively identified and subjected to security procedures before they board aircraft.

8. Submit a proposed resolution that the International Civil Aviation Organization begin a program to verify and improve compliance with international security standards.

9. Assess the possible use of chemical and biological weapons as tools of terrorism.

10. The FAA should work with industry to develop a national program to increase the professionalism of the aviation security work force, including screening personnel.

11. Access to airport controlled areas must be secured and the physical security of aircraft must be ensured.

12. Establish consortia at all commercial airports to implement enhancements to aviation safety and security.

13. Conduct airport vulnerability assessments and develop action plans.

14. Require criminal background checks and FBI fingerprint checks for all screeners, and all airport and airline employees with access to secure areas.

15. Deploy existing technology.

16. Establish a joint government-industry research and development program.

17. Establish an interagency task force to assess the potential use of surface-to-air missiles against commercial aircraft.

18. Significantly expand the use of bomb-sniffing dogs.

19. Complement technology with automated passenger profiling.

20. Certify screening companies and improve screener performance.

21. Aggressively test existing security systems.

22. Use the Customs Service to enhance security.

23. Give properly cleared airline and airport security personnel access to the classified information they need to know.

24. Begin implementation of full bag-passenger match.

25. Provide more compassionate and effective assistance to families of victims.

26. Improve passenger manifests.

27. Significantly increase the number of FBI agents assigned to counter-terrorism investigations and to crisis response.

28. Provide anti-terrorism assistance in the form of airport security training to countries where there are airports served by airlines flying to the U.S.

29. Resolve outstanding issues relating to identifying explosive materials.

30. Provide regular, comprehensive explosives detection training programs for foreign, federal, state and local law enforcement, as well as FAA and airline personnel.

31. Create a central clearinghouse within government to provide information on explosives crime.

*

Times staff writers Ted Rohrlich and David Willman, and researcher Robert Patrick contributed to this report.