Was a Greek Tragedy Thwarted?

A year and half before the Olympics returned to this ancient city, a burly FBI agent from Mississippi stepped off a plane here and began looking for trouble.

Jim McGee’s job was to keep terrorists from attacking the Games. Given Greece’s location, porous borders and history of political violence, he feared the worst.

“There was chatter that Al Qaeda recognized the Olympics were coming and that this was a target,” said McGee, an 18-year FBI veteran and counterterrorism specialist.

He did not feel any better after getting acquainted with his Greek counterparts. He soon realized they did not share his sense of urgency.

McGee was the FBI’s advance man for more than 500 federal agents, diplomatic security personnel, Special Forces troops and Energy Department scientists -- by far the largest U.S. security force ever assembled abroad for an international event.

Unseen by spectators and millions of television viewers, unknown even to many of the Olympic athletes, the army of operatives prepared for mayhem even as they tried to prevent it.

With the Greeks, they simulated hostage-takings and bombings. They combed through top-secret intelligence, looking for signs that an attack might be imminent. If they did not prevent it, they stood ready to respond with bomb technicians, evidence collectors and medical personnel.

Throughout, they fretted that public places in the teeming Greek capital were dangerously exposed. But in the end, nothing happened.

Had all those agents been chasing phantoms? Had the $100-million security operation been a waste? Or had it deterred an attack?

The nature of the war on terrorism is that McGee and his colleagues may never know.

“What didn’t happen here,” McGee said, “is the story.”

Getting Started

When McGee landed in Athens in January 2003, half a foot of snow was on the ground. As the FBI’s Olympic security coordinator, it was his job to imagine the worst, try to prevent it and be ready to respond if disaster struck anyway.

McGee’s specialty is security planning for high-profile events -- presidential inaugurations, international summits, World Trade Organization meetings. But he had never taken on anything this big. With its widely scattered venues, thousands of athletes and throngs of spectators, an Olympics is considered the ultimate security challenge.

McGee spent his early months in Athens immersed in meetings with Greek authorities, assessing their resources and capabilities. He read hundreds of pages of classified intelligence every week. He flew regularly to Stuttgart, Germany, to consult with officers of the U.S. European Command, whose ships, troops and aircraft would respond to a major attack.

McGee, 47, learned that the Hellenic Police and other Greek counterterrorism units responded the same way -- with massive force -- to virtually any incident, whether it involved hostages, a bomb or a white powdery substance.

“It is like having a fire department on every call roll everything from the station, whether it is a skyscraper or a small building on fire,” McGee said. He urged the Greeks to calibrate their response and keep personnel in reserve to secure a crime scene or deal with secondary attacks.

Joining McGee was Ray Mey, who had worked security at four previous Olympics and was the FBI’s planning-and-operations chief at the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City.

Like McGee, Mey, 50, was once head of training and operations for the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team. Now, he shuttled between Athens and his office in Utah. The more time he spent in Greece, the more pessimistic he became.

“My initial thought was that this was insurmountable,” Mey said. “I knew the amount of work they had to do to make the Games safe and I wasn’t sure they were up to the task.”

In the summer of 2003, McGee’s wife and four school-age daughters left their home outside Gulfport, Miss., to join him in a rented house in Filothei, an upscale suburb of Athens. By then, McGee had concluded that the FBI would need 120 agents -- nearly 10 times the number sent to the 2000 Summer Games in Australia.

From the outset, it was understood that the Hellenic National Police and Greek Coast Guard would secure nearly 70 sports venues and other potential targets throughout Greece. The U.S. role was to provide intelligence, advice and crisis response in the event of an attack.

“With the Greeks, it was very, very important to make it clear from Day One that this wasn’t about us, but how you guard against vulnerability at the Olympics,” said Thomas Miller, the U.S. ambassador in Athens.

McGee’s plan called for a command post on the grounds of the American Embassy and a tactical command center closer to Olympic Stadium. The State Department would provide half a dozen mobile decontamination trailers in case of chemical, biological or radiological attack.

FBI agents would be embedded in Greek police units to enhance communication. And an elite 42-member FBI counterterrorism force, based in Los Angeles, would be flown to Greece.

The bureau routinely dispatches agents to collect evidence at the scenes of foreign terrorist bombings. This was different: The FBI was sending an entire Rapid Deployment Team abroad as a precaution. The agents, including explosives experts, hostage negotiators and marksmen, would be kept out of sight on the island of Crete, a 40-minute flight from Athens.

About 100 State Department security agents would safeguard U.S. athletes. More than 200 Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos, under NATO auspices, would respond to an attack anywhere in Greece.

But in McGee’s mind, the most important part of the plan involved training. The only way to secure the Games, he believed, was to give the Greeks as much instruction as they would accept and, in the process, build relationships.

McGee brought experts from the United States to conduct seminars on such things as rescuing shipboard hostages and responding to chemical and biological attacks.

In March, five months before the start of the Games, an annual NATO training exercise in the Mediterranean was broadened to test Olympic security preparations.

Greek and other security forces responded to a string of scenarios -- an airliner hijacking, kidnappings, multiple bombings and an attack with weapons of mass destruction. The exercise exposed grave weaknesses.

During one simulation, U.S. and Greek counterterrorism forces rescued hostages from mock terrorists armed with explosives. But then Greek investigators moved in before receiving assurance that the crime scene had been secured.

In real life, the consequences could have been tragic: A secondary explosion might have killed or wounded many of the investigators. Evidence could have been hopelessly compromised.

“It was overwhelming,” McGee said. “No country on the planet could have succeeded in that exercise. But that was the purpose: to strengthen their capabilities and see what they would do, and when they would call in NATO resources.”

In March -- the same month as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization exercise -- the bombings of four commuter trains in Spain killed nearly 200 people. Four months earlier, extremists had bombed two synagogues, the British Consulate and a British-owned bank in Istanbul, killing more than 60 people.

To some of the FBI veterans, terrorists seemed to be sending a message: They had “bracketed” Athens, attacking to the east and then to the west. Some feared the Games would be next.

Elements in Place

By late July, three weeks before the start of the Olympics, all the elements of McGee’s plan were in place.

Steve Tidwell, head of the FBI’s Critical Incident Response Group, its premier counterterrorism strike force, arrived to command the FBI’s forces. The bureau opened a command post next to the U.S. Embassy.

Five days before the Aug. 13 opening ceremonies, the Rapid Deployment Team from Los Angeles landed on Crete in a military jet laden with 4 tons of equipment. The leader was Herb Brown, a 17-year FBI veteran who had spent weeks coordinating tactics with U.S. and Greek military officials.

At the U.S. Navy support base at Souda Bay on Crete, members of Brown’s team held daily classes for U.S. and Greek soldiers, schooling them in the grim art of recovering body parts, explosive fragments and other evidence from the scene of a bombing.

Energy Department specialists, meanwhile, set up radiation detectors at half a dozen locations, including Athens International Airport. Scores of U.S. personnel walked through the city with hand-held monitoring devices.

At athletic venues, experts from the Pentagon and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention placed sensors capable of detecting chemical and biological weapons.

Reports that some foreign security agents would carry firearms while on Greek soil prompted controversy on the eve of the Games. To avoid a rift with the Greeks, U.S. officials agreed that American law enforcement personnel would do their jobs unarmed.

Some veteran counterterrorism agents were not pleased. “If a bus with 50 American athletes gets hijacked and you have two State Department personnel aboard who aren’t armed, all you’ve done is handed over two more hostages,” said one.

FBI agents obeyed the prohibition against carrying weapons -- but many ensured their guns were close at hand, in vehicles and in office footlockers.

As the start of the Games neared, the tension was thick. “I think everyone will feel more relaxed once we get past the opening ceremonies,” Brown said.

FBI agent Bobby Chacon, 41, who had been in Athens for six months, longer than any agent other than McGee, seemed particularly anxious.

On Sept. 11, 2001, he had flown over New York City as the World Trade Center burned. He and three other agents, en route to an assignment in Chicago, could see plumes of smoke rising from the twin towers.

If Al Qaeda had a scheme to attack the Olympics, said Chacon, it could have been in the planning stages for years, just like the 9/11 hijackings.

“The Greeks are taking the position that everything is fine,” Chacon said two days before the opening of the Games. “Does it give you concern? Sure. But what can you do?”

A week into the Olympics, with no hint of trouble, many of the agents remained uneasy.

“This is wrong,” Tidwell recalled thinking. “We are not hearing anything. It is going too smooth. This is the quiet before the tornado hits.”

Mey shared his concern.

Sitting at a restaurant in bustling Syntagma Square, not far from the Greek Parliament, Mey could not help but imagine the carnage that would result if terrorists struck at that bustling plaza or in the crowded streets of the Plaka in the shadow of the Acropolis.

“Right now, at any given time in Athens, you probably have 200,000 Americans walking around. Tourists, athletes, media,” Mey said somberly midway through the Games. “If a bomb goes off in Plaka, do you think you are going to kill Americans? Of course you will.”

During the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, he had assembled 200 two-member undercover surveillance teams to monitor busy streets and other “soft targets.” The Greeks did nothing of the kind, Mey said.

Mey told an FBI agent embedded with Greek police to raise the possibility of closing the Plaka to vehicles. “If this was Centennial Park at the [1996 Atlanta] Olympics or the Gaslamp District in San Diego during a Super Bowl, we would fence off the entire area from traffic,” he said.

The Greeks declined. “They say, ‘Life must go on,’ ” Mey said. “You’ve got to love the Greeks. They wait until the last minute for everything ... and seem to be pulling it off.”

He paused. “But you don’t know your vulnerability until something happens.”

The end of the Games brought a palpable sense of relief. There had been no attack, and the agents might never know why.

Nagging Questions

FBI officials are certain the U.S. security effort helped make the Olympics a harder target for terrorists. But they also came away with the nagging sense that their hard work and planning weren’t the only reasons.

“This is not to detract from the effort here, but now I am not so sure this was a target,” Mey said two weeks after the Olympics. “Because I think if the terrorists had wanted to hit us, they could have. I don’t think any place in the world is safe.”

McGee said he thought Al Qaeda didn’t strike for a simple, strategic reason: “They figured: Why create another enemy at this point?”

What didn’t happen in Athens will continue to preoccupy him until February 2006, when the Winter Olympics begins in Turin, Italy. McGee will fly there next week to start the security planning.

“With nothing happening [in Athens], I wonder whether that will create some false sense of security about the Olympics in Italy,” McGee said. “Will people question the amount of money spent here and ask whether it was worth it? Will we be complacent? I hope not.”