Air Marshals’ Future Full of Questions

The date was Sept. 11. Vowing to combat “the menace of air piracy,” the president announced that specially trained, armed federal agents would be deployed on airliners.

That president was Richard Nixon, and the year was 1970, when a series of violent hijackings around the world shook the confidence of air travelers.

Thirty-one years later, President Bush also has turned to air marshals to protect the skies. By the time of the World Trade Center and Pentagon attacks, the nation’s corps of marshals had shrunk from a high of about 2,000 to a mere 32. And on Sept. 11, 2001, they were in the wrong places--assigned to selected high-risk international flights, not domestic flights like the transcontinental routes targeted by Al Qaeda.

Even though the program is now being rapidly expanded to perhaps 2,000 or more marshals--the number is classified--odds remain low that any given flight will have plainclothes marshals aboard.

It would take 120,000 marshals or more--men and women who usually work in teams--to cover the 30,000-plus daily flights in the United States, security experts and former government officials said. Such a program could easily cost more than $10 billion a year. Budget figures for the current program are classified.

“What the government is doing is promoting a program to make people feel good,” said Douglas Laird, a former security director for Northwest Airlines, who thinks Bush should find a better way to spend taxpayers’ money. “Security is best ensured before the plane departs. I’d rather have marshals help on the ground than have them on the plane to shoot it out with someone--at that point, it’s too late.”

Others are concerned that the marshals will again face budget cutbacks as soon as the perception of a threat recedes. Indeed, there was an attempt to shut the program down as recently as the early 1990s. And some worry that the current fast-paced expansion could compromise high standards.

Advocates of the program say air marshals can be an effective part of a many-layered security strategy.

“I always maintained, and still do, that it has a deterrent effect,” said O.K. Steele, a retired Marine Corps general who headed the Federal Aviation Administration’s security branch in the early 1990s. “Terrorists would never know whether they would have to confront marshals. To be able to overcome them, they would have to put more people on a flight. And when they put more people on, they’re exposing themselves to detection by other means.”

The FAA, which runs the marshals program, has little to say about it, citing a security need to keep its operations secret.

Thousands of applicants are vying for air marshal jobs that will pay $35,100 to $88,800 a year, depending on qualifications and experience. (Hundreds of agents temporarily on loan from other federal agencies--such as customs, the Border Patrol and the Drug Enforcement Administration--are filling in for now.)

In the newly expanded program, marshals are covering domestic as well as overseas routes. Flights to certain airports--such as Washington’s Reagan National--are more likely to have them aboard, as are some transcontinental flights.

Recruiting women is a priority.

Prospective marshals must have superlative shooting skills, be no older than 40 and pass several training courses and a background investigation for top-secret security clearance.

Veterans of the program say it also helps to possess an unnatural ability for staying awake--and alert.

“It’s very difficult to remain focused on those long flights,” said Don Tyson, a former Navy SEAL who flew as a marshal from 1985 to 1992 and is now retired in the Southwest. “When you’re talking New York to Tokyo, sometimes you’re up 20 hours with no sleep. . . . You read a lot of books.”

The image of an air marshal as a lone, dark-suited agent hunkered down somewhere near the cockpit door could not be further from reality, Tyson said. For one thing, a single marshal would be little more than a sitting duck with a badge. One terrorist could flush him out and another could take him down.

“Obviously, you’ve got to have more than two people,” Tyson said. “You blend in with the passengers. You are dispersed throughout the aircraft.” Big, compartmented planes such as Boeing 747s would require a squad of marshals.

On a mission, the marshals arrive well before takeoff to meet with airline security and the flight crew. The plane’s captain--not the marshals’ team leader--remains the commander of the flight.

Once airborne, marshals can communicate by various means, including asking flight attendants to pass a note tucked in a prearranged page of a magazine.

Being a dead-sure shot is the single most important qualification for an air marshal, Tyson said. “We had the highest shooting standard of any federal agency, bar none,” he said. A combination of speed and accuracy is prized.

A plane’s aluminum skin is fragile, and a high-altitude shootout could lead to sudden, catastrophic decompression of the cabin. Air marshals use special ammunition that is less likely to pierce metal. Because many passengers could be hurt by volleys of gunfire in a cramped cabin, marshals also train continually to make the first shot count.

Despite the high standards, Steele and others familiar with the history of the program say they are not aware of any instance in which federal air marshals foiled a hijacking.

In more than six years of service, Tyson said, he came close to drawing his gun just once. It was on a U.S. airliner about to leave Cairo for Paris in the late 1980s. Airline security alerted Tyson, who was the team leader, that a suspicious passenger, termed a “high selectee,” would be boarding.

The young Arab man had purchased a one-way ticket with cash, and his face was still reddish from having recently shaved his beard. He was assigned a seat near one of Tyson’s fellow marshals. The passenger appeared nervous. While the plane was still on the ground, he suddenly got up and headed for the lavatory with a bag.

With the marshals shadowing him, the passenger was challenged by a flight attendant. He said he had diabetes and needed to inject himself with insulin. The attendant asked him to do it in the galley, where crew members could observe. Tyson moved in, ready to draw his 9-millimeter commando-style pistol. A female marshal covered him.

“I wanted to be able to face him head-on when he opened the bag,” Tyson said of the man. “If he would have pulled out anything resembling a weapon, I would have double-tapped [shot] him in the head.”

But it didn’t come to that. The man raised a chorus of loud complaints, and airline security hustled him off the flight before it took off. Tyson continued on to Paris and later learned the man was not considered a terrorist suspect.

Such armed encounters are unsettling to many aviation professionals because of the potential for lethal misunderstandings. “Most countries do not allow any weapons on aircraft,” said Laird, the former airline security director. “The use of sky marshals has many critics in the worldwide aviation community.”

Relatively few countries employ marshals, among them Israel, Jordan, Iran and Egypt. All of these countries have a much smaller airline industry, which means they require far fewer marshals. The history of the U.S. program shows mixed results and an on-again, off-again commitment by the government.

Even before President Nixon’s 1970 declaration, the FAA had placed part-time, armed officers on some Florida flights to deter hijackings to Cuba. But the hijackings to the Communist-ruled island continued in the late 1960s until other measures, such as metal detectors at airports, were adopted.

The number of marshals peaked during the 1970s, and the program was scaled back as hijackings dropped off. Then, in 1985, two Lebanese Shiite terrorists commandeered a TWA jet from Athens. They severely beat, then executed, U.S. Navy diver Robert Stethem, a passenger on the flight.

The Reagan administration then decided it was time to resurrect--and reform--the marshals program. At the time, they were called “sky marshals,” and one of their chief duties involved escorting Mariel Cuban convicts on special flights back to the island. The new program envisioned the marshals as airborne counter-terrorist forces and changed their name to federal air marshals.

“Don’t call them sky marshals,” said Tyson, who helped develop training and tactics for the reformed program. “All the ‘sky marshals’ did was ferry homesick Cubans.”

Yet by 1993, as security at foreign airports improved, the need for marshals was questioned. Cathal Flynn, a retired Navy admiral and then head of FAA security, said he was called to a White House meeting early in the Clinton years. Other federal law enforcement agencies were concerned about the possibility that marshals could get into a shootout with their agents.

“In my view, the value of continuing the program outweighed these concerns,” Flynn said. The National Security Council agreed with him.

Now, even with the backing of Bush and millions of new dollars flowing in, former officials say the future of the air marshals remains uncertain. The rapid buildup could undermine standards, such as shooting qualifications for marshals and the team approach. Without a dramatic “success story,” such as a thwarted hijacking, some wonder whether government budget-watchers may once again question the program’s value.

“My basic assessment is that I don’t know that we are going to be able to train that many people to the same high standards we were doing with the lesser numbers,” said Steele, the former Marine and FAA security chief. “How do we get the same quality?”

Billie H. Vincent, FAA security director from 1982 to 1986, said it’s time to take another look at the rationale for the marshals and their mission. He advocates also using them to train and supervise a volunteer corps of armed pilots--”pilot air marshals.” That would greatly expand the number of flights covered and provide an ongoing mission that could bring stability to the marshals program, he said. However, arming pilots remains a controversial idea.

Meanwhile, marshals may not be on every flight, but it seems that passenger volunteers are. They can claim credit for subduing Richard Reid, who boarded a Miami-bound plane in Paris with explosives in his sneakers. In other cases, passengers have helped control travelers who turned out to be more unruly than dangerous.

Observed Laird: “With the attitude present in today’s fliers, I don’t think there is any real need for marshals.”