Britain Cancels More Flights

British authorities canceled more overseas airline flights Friday in response to continuing intelligence warnings of terrorist threats. As they warned that more air traffic disruptions are likely, U.S. officials rejected suggestions that the string of cancellations over the New Year’s holiday may have been an overreaction.

U.S. officials said they had acted because credible intelligence information suggested that Al Qaeda operatives were considering hijacking specific flights, and not because of what proved to be faulty efforts to match names of passengers with terrorist suspects.

The heightened security alert is not expected to end soon, officials said, emphasizing that air travel may be disrupted again if they have evidence that an attack may be planned.

“I think that this is our new reality, because our actions are completely and utterly decided by intelligence,” said Michael Mason, who heads the FBI’s Washington field office.

“I’d like to say that the threat will go away. But it is not going to.”

Officials on both sides of the ocean stressed that they considered the extraordinary decisions to cancel so many flights over the last several days to have been appropriate, even though no arrests of suspected terrorists have been made. The decisions were made against a background of heightened evidence that Al Qaeda may be readying a long-delayed second attack against the United States.

“I’m human. I have a family. I understand the hardship that these actions with the flights can produce,” Mason said. “But I would rather be dealing with angry passengers than picking through debris.”

With the New Year’s holiday over, Mason expressed guarded optimism and relief about the intelligence community’s response to suspected efforts by Al Qaeda operatives to hijack commercial airlines to use as weapons.

“I am feeling pretty good about what has happened so far,” he said.

Nonetheless, British Airways canceled its Flight 223 from London to Washington on Friday for the second day in a row because of security concerns. That same flight had been detained on the tarmac at Dulles International Airport on Wednesday evening, also for security reasons. British Airways Flight 217 from London to Washington was delayed Friday while passengers underwent additional screening.

Another British Airways flight, from London to Saudi Arabia, was canceled for today; that same flight had been canceled Wednesday. And a Riyadh-London flight was canceled for Sunday.

Aeromexico Flight 490 was canceled two days in a row over the holiday weekend for security reasons.

A U.S. official speaking on condition of anonymity said it would be correct to assume that intelligence agents “have some information that points to specific flights, not just cities.”

These comments addressed complaints from some officials in Europe over recent days that the cancellations of some of the flights were based on faulty intelligence and cases of mistaken identity. American officials may have overreacted, these European officials suggested.

Fueling such sentiments were news reports that when intelligence officials raised concerns about the name of a particular passenger on the manifest for an Air France flight from Paris to LAX on Christmas Eve, the passenger turned out to be a 5-year-old child.

But the U.S. official stressed that the flights were canceled because of intelligence information about those specific flights, not because names on the manifest appeared to match names in terrorist databases.

France’s top law enforcement official, Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, also defended a decision to cancel six Los Angeles-bound flights from Paris during the Christmas holidays.

“We share the analysis of the American services that we are living in a period of tension that requires intense vigilance,” Sarkozy told reporters during a visit to Charles de Gaulle Airport to review security measures.

“I prefer to act too fast than too late. When a friendly country asks for us to reinforce security measures on our side, no one can reproach them [for] that. I prefer that we be criticized for too many safeguards than for not enough safeguards,” he added.

The FBI’s Mason noted that British Airways Flight 223 into Dulles International Airport was intercepted by F-16 fighter jets Wednesday evening because intelligence officials were warned of a possible security issue only one hour before the flight was scheduled to land.

“All of our actions are dictated by intelligence reports ... and sometimes it can be sketchy,” Mason said. “They don’t say there is a bomb in the cargo hold on this flight or that. So you scramble the jets as a safeguard.”

While declining to discuss the intelligence that raised security concerns on that flight, Mason said it was clearly different than the information developed weeks ago that led the FBI and other U.S. agencies to focus on specific Air France and Aeromexico flights bound for LAX over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays.

U.S. officials have previously disclosed that Air France Flight 68 from Paris and Aeromexico Flight 490 from Mexico City were specifically identified in intelligence reports, from multiple sources, as possible holiday targets for Al Qaeda. The flights were subsequently canceled when authorities reviewed passenger lists and were concerned because some names were identical or close to those of suspected terrorists.

After the flights were canceled, FBI agents were dispatched to Paris and Mexico City to pursue additional investigations of those passengers who were ticketed on the flights and whose names raised some concerns.

At the request of the United States, Mexico last week intensified pre-boarding searches of passengers and luggage at its international airports, began putting armed undercover police agents aboard selected U.S.-bound flights and permitted U.S. security agents to observe the screening procedures at airports.

Six U.S. agents -- four from the Department of Homeland Security and two from the FBI -- are stationed at Mexico City’s international airport, Mexican authorities said.

A Mexican police official said the new procedures required U.S. officials to screen and approve passenger lists in advance of each flight headed into or over U.S. air space. In some cases, the officials have asked Mexican airlines to recheck the identities of passengers ticketed aboard a flight before it was allowed to take off.

The exhaustive screening procedure, supervised by a Mexican interagency team headed by the Mexican Federal Preventive Police, has lasted up to 3 1/2 hours before each flight and resulted in long delays.

U.S. officials have specifically requested that foreign governments put air marshals on planes headed to the United States, according to a Homeland Security official who spoke on condition of anonymity. Decisions to have F-16 jets escort passenger planes in Washington and Los Angeles in recent days was another example of the increased counterterrorism efforts.

Although some French anti-terrorist investigators feel the U.S. overreacted by demanding the cancellation of the Christmas flights, they fully share the perception -- as Sarkozy said -- that the risk of terrorism has spiked.

European investigators say the menace seems particularly high in Britain, which was targeted by Al Qaeda in suicide bombings in Istanbul in November. British authorities have issued a number of warnings about potential attacks in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in recent weeks and days.

“I don’t doubt the Americans had some very specific information about those flights,” said a counterterrorist official in Italy, which tightened security at the Vatican over Christmas and came close to shutting down the Milan and Rome subways a month ago because of fears of an attack. “We are all on guard.”

Security analysts in Washington said European officials’ mixed reaction to the cancellations reflected their different assessment of their vulnerability to terrorist attacks.

“Europeans simply don’t feel like they’re a target the way that Americans do,” said Daniel Benjamin, a terrorism expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research institute, and a former National Security Council counterterrorism official.

Benjamin said that even though no one has been arrested and no particular plot revealed, he feels confident that security officials were not overreacting.

“In counterterrorism, it was always the case that you erred on the side of caution,” Benjamin said. “Now you’re going to err very, very heavily on the side of caution.”

Unfortunately, he added, the more flights that are canceled because of terrorist “chatter” the more likely it is that terrorists will realize that they have a new way to torment U.S. officials.

Although U.S. officials stressed that none of the assessments of risks posed by specific flights were made based on analysis of passenger lists, they conceded that terrorist data is very cumbersome to work with and that has resulted in delays of aircraft departing foreign countries for U.S. destinations.

There are several terrorist databases that were only recently consolidated at the Terrorist Screening Center in Washington. And efforts to integrate the data have been slow. The integrated database is not expected to be completed for several more months, a Homeland Security official said.

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Shogren reported from Washington, Krikorian from Los Angeles and Rotella from Paris. Times staff writers William Wallace in London and Richard Boudreaux in Mexico City contributed to this report.

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Travel woes

Flights that have been disrupted by terrorism concerns over the New Year’s holiday:

Wednesday

* British Airways Flight 223 from London to Washington was detained for several hours at Dulles International Airport as FBI and Homeland Security officials questioned passengers.

* Aeromexico Flight 490 from Mexico City to Los Angeles was canceled.

Thursday

* Aeromexico Flight 490 from Mexico City to Los Angeles was canceled.

* British Airways Flight 223 from London to Washington was canceled.

* British Airways Flight 222 from Washington to London was canceled.

* Air France Flight 3112, bound for Paris from New York, made an unscheduled landing in Canada to have its luggage checked.

* British Airways Flight 216 from Washington to London was delayed and passengers were screened again before the flight departed.

Friday

* British Airways Flight 223 from London to Washington was canceled.

* British Airways Flight 217 from London to Washington was delayed because passengers had to undergo additional screening.

Saturday

* British Airways Flight 263 from London to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, has been canceled.

Sunday

* British Airways Flight 262 from Riyadh to London has been canceled.

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Los Angeles Times