Tranquil Winter Olympics Serving as Blueprint for Security Operations

Security operations at the Winter Olympics proved so successful in avoiding major disruptions or violence that law enforcement officials have already begun using the Salt Lake City model as a blueprint for major events.

In the face of post-Sept. 11 fears about the safety of the 1.6 million people who attended the Games, authorities combined a new organizational structure, aggressive intelligence-gathering, advanced technology and a phalanx of more than 10,000 military and civilian personnel to produce an event marked by only a few small security hitches.

“We were very happy that the Olympics went off so well,” FBI Director Robert S. Mueller said Friday. The security model for the Utah Games is one “that we wish to replicate, not just in the future Olympics,” but in other major national and global events, he said.

The wall of security erected by about 60 federal, state and local law enforcement agencies over the last four years was tested repeatedly during the 17 days of the Olympics without buckling. Among the incidents recounted by officials in Washington and Utah who led the operation:

* Eighteen errant pilots and would-be sightseers flew into a vast no-fly zone above Salt Lake City in the weeks before and during the Games, only to be warned away or escorted out by F-16 military jets.

* A man whom authorities described as mentally disturbed tried to scale a fence at one athletic venue but was quickly apprehended after he was spotted by security video cameras and personnel on the scene. And several adventure-seekers on foot and snowmobiles who wanted a closer look at the Olympic terrain were escorted away after infrared and thermal technology detected them crossing into restricted areas.

* The public, warned by President Bush himself to watch for anything unusual, flooded Salt Lake City authorities with more than 600 tips about “suspicious” packages--bags left unattended, for instance, or a lunch pail discarded in a trash can. Police checked out all the tips and didn’t find any threats that were credible, said David Tubbs, a retired FBI agent who headed the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command.

* And federal officials received several reports from domestic and foreign sources about suspected terrorists “possibly” targeting the Olympics, according to a U.S. intelligence official who asked not to be identified. With the CIA taking a bigger role in Olympic-related security than in years past, officials moved to determine whether the reports were credible and concluded that the safety of the Games was never compromised.

A few 11th-hour slip-ups may have marred efforts to score a perfect 10 in the security operation.

On the last day of the Olympics, two Secret Service agents buying souvenirs at a shop mistakenly left behind paperwork that included details on security arrangements for Vice President Dick Cheney’s appearance at the closing ceremony hours later. The shop owner called authorities to report the lost papers but couldn’t get anyone to pick them up.

That same day, an explosion at a power substation near Salt Lake International Airport cut power to about 30,000 residences after someone apparently evaded round-the-clock security and planted an explosive device. The FBI does not believe the explosion was the work of terrorists, or even that the Olympics were a specific target, because the damaged circuit breaker did not provide power to Olympic sites and no one has claimed responsibility.

Neither the Secret Service blunder nor the explosion affected planning or operations for the closing ceremony, officials said. And overall, “we never dealt with any type of situation where we felt we were under attack,” said Mark Camillo, Olympic coordinator for the Secret Service, one of the lead federal agencies in the security operation.

There were only about 20 arrests made during the Games at venue sites, nearly all of them for drunk and disorderly conduct and other minor offenses. “For an event this size, that’s a phenomenally low total,” Tubbs said.

Camillo and many others in the security operation believe that the security detail massed for the Olympics effectively deterred terrorists or anyone else who might have been looking to cause trouble. Authorities picked up on one report, for instance, that an animal rights group scuttled its plans to disrupt a rodeo attraction during the Olympics.

Salt Lake City “just wasn’t an attractive target because of the level of security we had,” Camillo said.

Even before Sept. 11, law enforcement officials realized that the global spectacle of the Olympic Games made them a particularly inviting target for terrorists. The shadow of past Olympic tragedies hung over the Games--the 1972 murders of 11 Israeli athletes in Munich, Germany, and the still-unsolved 1996 bombing in an Atlanta park that killed one person and injured more than 100 others.

Mindful of the events in Atlanta, federal officials vowed to ratchet up security for America’s next appearance on the Olympic stage.

In 1998, President Clinton gave the federal government the lead in planning security for Salt Lake City, with the Secret Service, the FBI and the Federal Emergency Management Agency ordered to work closely with local and state officials in Utah to ensure safety.

The aim, which authorities said was achieved in Salt Lake City, was to better designate assignments and avoid the chain-of-command problems encountered in 1996.

“In Atlanta, there was confusion. The bomb went off, and the question was, ‘Who’s in charge?’ ” said Don Johnson, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the Salt Lake City office. “We tried to work out those issues here.”

With the new framework laid out early in the planning process, the money soon followed. Federal officials devoted $310 million to security at Salt Lake City--more than triple the federal outlay for the Atlanta Games six years ago.

But as well-prepared as security officials thought they were, the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon forced them to rethink some of their basic assumptions.

“Sept. 11 was really a shot across the bow for us,” said Maj. Stuart Smith of the Utah Department of Public Safety, who was deputy director of the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command. “It sent the message that we’re certainly not immune [to attack] and that the level and scale could be far beyond what anyone imagined.”

Federal, state and local authorities scrambled to rewrite security measures.

They scrapped some nonsporting events considered potentially vulnerable. They secured an additional $30 million in federal funds. After an inspection by U.S. Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, they committed 50 additional security officers to patrol outlying gathering spots like the one where the Atlanta bomb exploded.

They tightened the protocol for dealing with biological and chemical attacks after the October anthrax mailings. And they paid particularly close attention to the threat of an air attack, creating a much bigger no-fly zone, with a radius of 45 miles.

“We had enough aircraft out there at any given time to intercept within a minute or two any incursion into the airspace and to identify any aircraft within 200 miles,” Smith said.

Seeking to ensure the safety of Bush, Cheney and dignitaries from around the world, authorities relied heavily on technology. In addition to infrared and thermal equipment to detect intruders, officials developed advanced computer models to track and collate data on suspicious activities, and they made occasional use of digital recognition equipment--a controversial method of photographing crowds and matching the scanned images to those of suspects.

One key to the success of the security operation, all agreed, was how closely federal agencies worked with their state and local police counterparts. The FBI and other federal agencies are often regarded as arrogant by local law enforcement, but in Salt Lake City, complaints of federal heavy-handedness were almost nonexistent, and 27 members of the state safety command were given top-secret clearance to track threats, officials said.

Sen. Robert F. Bennett (R-Utah), who attended the Games, said Salt Lake was “a perfect blueprint” for how events of such a huge scale should be protected, a sentiment that he said Homeland Security Director Thomas J. Ridge shared with him.

“People will be paying close attention to what happened in Salt Lake--or more importantly what didn’t happen in Salt Lake--because it demonstrates what can be accomplished when you have this degree of coordination between local, state and federal law enforcement,” Bennett said.

“The reaction I was getting from the folks who ran the command center was ‘Senator, this is boring,’ ” Bennett added. “And in the security business, boring is good.”