Nation Moves On, Safer if Uncertain

Twelve months ago, the United States had done so little to protect itself from terrorists that airlines routinely left cockpit doors agape and Saudi Arabian travel agents issued U.S. visas.

Shocked by Sept. 11, the nation reacted with a reflexive outpouring of energy and alarm not seen since the dawn of the Cold War, with its threats of communist subversion and nuclear holocaust.

Security initiatives were launched of every shape and kind. And today, while gaping holes remain in anti-terrorist defenses, Americans are significantly safer, especially in air travel, than they were when 19 Al Qaeda agents could claim more than 3,000 lives in a single morning.

In the nation’s response to Sept. 11, that was phase one.

Now comes phase two, and it will be harder--a race against time and ourselves.

“We’ve succeeded in raising the bar for anyone with hostile intentions toward Americans, American infrastructure or American transportation,” says Gerald Kauvar, who headed the President’s Commission on Aviation Security in the mid-1990s.

Over the next decade, demands for government spending on terrorism could exceed $600 billion. By comparison, the entire Apollo space program that put men on the moon cost only $140 billion in today’s dollars. The Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb cost $200 billion.

Spending $600 billion on homeland security would almost certainly mean prolonged federal deficits and reductions in popular government programs. In the private economy, less money would be available for new technology and other productive investments of the kinds that helped fuel record prosperity after the Cold War.

But experts say change is necessary. The nation is not as safe as it needs to be in many areas, including cyber-terrorism and bioterrorism, areas that intelligence suggests Al Qaeda has been exploring.

A Matter of Choices

As a result, with money clearly limited and other priorities reasserting themselves, phase two is about choices: tough apples-and-oranges choices between competing security needs, such as your neighborhood nuclear power plant versus my airport or hospital.

“I don’t think we can just keep pouring it on,” warns William H. Webster, former director of the FBI and the CIA. “If we overload the system with high-cost, nonproductive devices, we’re more likely to see the system fall away.”

Increasingly, homeland security must compete with the other things Americans also need and want: economic growth, better schools, prescription drug benefits for the elderly and the old freedom to live without government interference.

If decision-makers do not begin to weigh competing needs more carefully and consider where best to spend limited resources, money and public support could decline before the essential work is finished.

That would leave a patchwork of partial defenses, all the more dangerous because they would encourage a false sense of security and offer little more real protection than a flood wall with sections missing.

So far, government action has been driven primarily by public pressures and doing what came easiest.

“There was a lot of low-hanging fruit you could pluck rather easily, and we’re certainly in the process of doing that,” says David Langstaff, head of Veridian Corp., which does high-tech security work for the CIA and others.

But most of what remains to be done is more challenging, and it comes with higher economic and social costs.

For example, the new Transportation Security Administration has been so preoccupied with air travel that it has paid relatively little attention to the far bigger challenge of securing the 6.5 million cargo containers that sail into the heart of America’s port cities each year.

Similarly, while state and federal officials have been busy drafting plans for meeting bioterrorist attacks, most of the 3.5 million police officers, firefighters, emergency medical technicians and other first responders have received no more than what one federal official called “basic awareness classes.”

The pattern of good but incomplete beginnings can be seen almost everywhere.

More than half the 30,000-plus screeners who check passengers and carry-on luggage at airports now work for the federal government, not rent-a-cop firms. They meet higher qualification standards. They are also finding a dismaying number of guns in carry-on luggage, most belonging to police officers and others authorized to carry weapons who forgot to check them properly.

Weapons Get Through

Nonetheless, tests by federal agents this summer succeeded in sneaking guns and explosive devices past the screeners 25% of the time, on average.

Rep. John L. Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House aviation subcommittee, says it will take an additional three years to make commercial aviation safe.

Similarly, the Coast Guard spends seven times as many hours on harbor security as it did a year ago. Its new national vessel movement center in Martinsburg, W.Va., gets data on cargo and crews of incoming ships 96 hours before they reach U.S. ports, instead of 24 hours.

That should help uncover potential problems, because the center has improved access to intelligence files and the State Department’s hugely expanded watch list.

But the information from in-bound ships is too often incomplete, delivered on blurry faxes or written in languages most agents cannot read. Legislation to require electronic reporting awaits action by Congress.

Changes at the Border

Border controls are also tighter, with more money and more agents for the Customs Service and Border Patrol in the pipeline. Customs now staffs every border crossing 24 hours a day; previously, its stations on remote highways often closed at night, leaving orange traffic cones to deter illegal entry.

Customs agents can also call up computer images of individuals who received visas overseas and compare those with faces presenting themselves for admission; this real-time checking at Los Angeles International Airport nailed a 34-year-old Ghanaian with a visa issued to a 60-year-old and a 30-year-old Indonesian woman whose visa was rejected by the computer because it had originally been issued to a man.

On the other hand, customs continues to struggle with data systems that are outmoded and incompatible. So do others.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III recently admitted that he was shocked at how antiquated the agency’s information storage, retrieval and sharing systems were. “We are way behind the curve,” he said.

Overhauling the FBI’s systems will take three years, at least.

This means there’s still no guarantee that intelligence and other information needed to foil terrorists will reach those who need it in time.

In Congress, pieces of the proposed Department of Homeland Security are spread out on the tables of assorted committees.

Despite the still-patriotic flavor of public rhetoric, down in the trenches interest-group politics is reviving.

Many hospitals have quietly resisted a plan to designate specific treatment centers for biochemical attacks and to prepare them accordingly. They fear such a designation could frighten away patients, disrupt business during an emergency and expose the institutions to new costs.

Efforts to strengthen border security in the Pacific Northwest by using a few hundred National Guard troops collided with Canadian sensitivity about putting soldiers on the world’s longest undefended border, and even more with parochial concerns in the Pentagon.

The Guard troops did not arrive until April, even though the Pacific Northwest is where customs agents in 1999 intercepted a car laden with explosives, its driver intent on bombing LAX.

Harbor security is in danger of bogging down in a dispute over who pays.

America’s loosely controlled seaports are an open invitation to mega-terrorism. Smuggling a “dirty” bomb into a U.S. city in a cargo container and using conventional explosives to spread radioactive waste or biochemical toxins ranks high on lists of “nightmare scenarios.”

High-Tech Tracking

Effective defenses against such attacks require new technology to track cargo and detect tampering. Shippers have to be willing to live with burdensome and costly security measures.

In Congress, where more federal spending raises the specter of tax increases or budget deficits, there’s support for user fees.

But the American Assn. of Port Authorities, knowing how cost-conscious global markets are, says: “Homeland security is like national defense. It should be paid for through general government funding, not user fees or taxes.”

Being a good soldier can be costly for politicians too.

After Sept. 11, Baltimore Mayor Martin O’Malley boosted police protection for potential targets, created a city Security Council and teamed up with Johns Hopkins University to chart medical data that could pinpoint a biochemical attack.

But police overtime and other costs helped give Baltimore a $10-million deficit. Some suggest O’Malley overreacted.

“I don’t know what the alternative was,” O’Malley says. “I wouldn’t have been able to sleep at night if we weren’t doing everything we possibly could.”

But he’s bitter about one thing: So far, despite talk of partnership, Washington has not helped financially. “We haven’t gotten a dime, not one dime,” he says.

Why not? In part because Washington has focused on helping local governments prepare for the future and has been reluctant to pick up payroll and other costs of day-to-day operations.

At a large level, O’Malley’s experience reflects the overriding fact that anti-terrorism must compete for money and attention with other needs and wants, both in Washington and at the grass roots.

Moreover, history makes it clear that, no matter how pressing the emergency or how pure the cause, Americans do not always put aside self-interest in favor of the common good.

American soldiers starved at Valley Forge because Congress refused to levy the taxes needed to feed them. In the War of 1812, the governor of Maryland declined to use his militia against British troops marching to burn the Capitol. Enterprising businessmen in the North and South, including Gen. Ulysses S. Grant’s father, traded with the enemy during the Civil War.

Against such a background, it’s no surprise the war on terrorism is buffeted by competing pressures.

Also, more is at stake than the selfish interests of narrow groups. In today’s global economy, with its emphasis on fast turnarounds and narrow profit margins, heightened security can impose extra costs that have big ripple effects.

Time spent in port is the biggest cost in ocean shipping, notes Robert J.S. Ross of Clark University in Worcester, Mass. He predicts any measures to increase harbor security that would threaten even modest delays will be fiercely resisted.

“We’re on the hinge, and we’re deciding in favor of commerce,” he says.

Reassessing Threats

Adding to the challenge of phase two, security experts are taking a second look at risk assessments performed in the months immediately after the attacks. What they found might be alarming:

Water supplies were initially judged relatively safe, because chlorine treatment kills most biological pathogens and the volumes of water are so immense that poisoning them seemed impracticable.

But “the wrong people have been answering the question,” says Edward J. Jopeck, a former CIA analyst who does risk assessments at Veridian. “If you ask the chemists and biologists, the answer is quite different.”

Today, toxins and delivery methods defy the traditional wisdom.

The vulnerability of major dams may have been underestimated as well. “You’re not going to do it by driving a Winnebago filled with explosives onto the top of a dam,” says Jopeck, who is working with operators of large dams. But other forms of attack could be devastating.

“I could do it,” one security specialist says, declining to be quoted by name.

A recently seized Al Qaeda computer contained technical software for simulating the destruction of a dam. And terrorist groups include at least some members trained in the best U.S. engineering schools.

Similarly, while the Year 2000 rollover raised awareness of cyber-security before Sept. 11, experts are troubled by how little some executives in government and the private sector understand the huge computer systems on which much of modern life depends.

“If you wanted to attack the critical infrastructure of the United States in 1940, you had to have an army. Today, you need a computer, access to the Internet and a few tools from hacker sites,” says Phillip E. Lacombe, a senior Defense Department aide in the Reagan administration and head of the President’s Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection in the mid-1990s.

“We found an electric power grid that was going to put its SCADA system on the Internet,” he says, referring to the computer-based “supervisory control and data acquisition” systems that lie at the operational heart of everything from power grids to transit systems and office towers.

Cyber-attacks, and thus attacks on critical institutions that have become dependent on computers, can be mounted from literally millions of locations around the world. At the same time, hacker tools are becoming more powerful, more widely available and easier to use.

“We are safer,” Lacombe says, describing the increased efforts on cyber-security and the larger effort to combat terrorism, “but it’s a never-ending story. You don’t get to stop doing this.”

That’s why experts say the next phase of the struggle is even more critical than the 12 months just past. The challenge now is to build effective anti-terrorist protection into the nation’s many systems--relying less on official alerts and heightened public awareness.

In the long run, heightened awareness is a weak defense against a phantom menace such as terrorism. In the words of Columbia University terrorism analyst Richard Betts: “It’s impossible to stay perched on the balls of your feet indefinitely.”

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Times staff writers Josh Meyer and Jube Shiver Jr. contributed to this report.