By James Kitfield
National Journal
PORT OF MIAMI, Fla. — As the Royal Caribbean cruise ship Majesty of the Seas glides through a narrow channel bound for the waters of the Caribbean, Coast Guard Boatswain’s Mate 2nd Class Bill Dennis and his crew power their 41-foot skiff through the behemoth’s wake like a pilot fish shadowing a whale. The Coast Guard boat quickly and firmly warns off any recreational boaters who stray into an invisible 100-yard perimeter around the cruise ship. The shipboard revelers certainly approve of the security escort; from their pool deck 10 floors above the water’s surface, they wave tropical drinks and shout encouragement down to the Coast Guardsmen following in their wake.
Ever since arriving at the Port of Miami, which is the nation’s busiest cruise ship embarkation point, the passengers aboard the Majesty of the Seas have been wrapped in a new security envelope that would have been unthinkable before Sept. 11, 2001. In the water, Coast Guard escorts were instituted; on land, the cruise ship terminals and adjacent parking garages were redesigned to funnel ticketed passengers through tighter security checkpoints and to discourage loitering by nonpassengers. A computerized gate security system, with identification badges and special permits for terminal and port employees, was also installed.
Meanwhile, Coast Guard security teams periodically patrol the terminals on foot, overseeing the private-security firms that screen passengers and cargo much the way airport screeners do. Everyone here has remained on “threat level three” since Sept. 11, an alert status that was formerly associated only with bomb scares. Furthermore, as part of a new “sea marshals” program, armed Coast Guardsmen routinely escort many of the local pilots who guide cruise ships and other large vessels into and out of the Port of Miami. If the port were to receive intelligence suggesting it was the target of a specific threat, the security presence would be increased, and most likely would include one of the Coast Guard’s new Maritime Safety and Security Teams. These units are essentially water-borne SWAT teams, each with four fast-response boats and heavy tactical weaponry.
Port authorities credit the increased security measures — along with cut-rate cruise packages — for helping to entice cruise passengers and tourists back to a South Florida whose economy depends on them as its lifeblood. Yet the security improvements haven’t come cheap. Port of Miami officials estimate they will need $24 million to implement all the needed security upgrades, and say they must double or even triple the port’s $4 million annual security budget. Since Sept. 11, Florida has already spent more than $30 million on seaport security measures statewide, and officials are pleading for increased federal help and a share of the $93.3 million in port security grants that Congress authorized last year. Even before the attacks, the American Association of Port Authorities estimated the cost of upgrading security at the nation’s 301 ports of entry at more than $2 billion.
And yet for all the improvements, a palpable unease troubles those charged with securing the Port of Miami against terrorist attacks. Operators of other U.S. ports, as well as many officials in Washington, share this sense of insecurity. In recent congressional testimony, Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta called improving security at the nation’s ports his top priority, and the House and Senate have already passed maritime security bills, the differences between which will be ironed out in conference this summer. Indeed, on June 24 President George W. Bush spoke at Port Elizabeth, N.J. — whose port authority lost 75 employees in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks — to tout the importance of ongoing improvements in port security. When the secretary of the Bush administration’s proposed new Department of Homeland Security takes office, his or her first priority will almost certainly be the further plugging of what many experts call the most glaring gap in America’s defenses — the seaports.
“After the 9/11 attacks, the government’s primary effort was rightfully focused on the aviation sector, but now I think we as a nation need to take a very hard look at our ports,” Adm. Thomas Collins, commandant of the Coast Guard, told National Journal. “When you look at the sheer volume of cargo that comes through our ports, you quickly realize that they have a very, very high value to our economy. And our continuing concern is that U.S. ports and waterways remain very vulnerable.”
The immensity of the mission is obvious here beneath the cool sea spray that coats Bill Dennis and his fellow “Coasties” as they lead the Majesty of the Seas out of the port. Up close and from sea level, the giant ship seems like an indelible part of the landscape. When the liner begins to move with improbable speed and power through the water, the rest of the world suddenly seems to take a step backward. The ship’s hull is so immense that as it passes by, its displacement sucks boats nearly off their moorings on both sides of the narrow channel.
“She’s a big one, about a thousand feet long,” Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Ron LeBrec says with a pensive expression, as he waves to passengers at the rail far above. If the cruise is sold out, he says, the ship will be carrying roughly 5,000 passengers and crew. “Basically that’s a World Trade Center tower lying on its side in the water, moving at 20 knots.”
Tempting Targets
From the Coast Guard’s local headquarters on nearby Causeway Island, Capt. James Watson can see the top decks and smokestacks of the giant cruise liners as they migrate out to sea. During high season — the winter months — as many as five of the huge ships are moored at one time, bow-to-stern, in the Port of Miami. That’s roughly the cruise ship industry equivalent of having the U.S. Navy’s entire Pacific Fleet docked at Pearl Harbor.
Across the channel, Watson can also see mountains of 40-foot-long metal cargo containers stacked under towering pierside cranes; they are just a few hundred of the estimated 6 million such containers that enter U.S. ports each year. Inspectors personally examine only a few of the containers and their contents. In May, Senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, confirmed a classified Coast Guard intelligence alert that 25 suspected Islamic extremists were thought to have entered major seaports in California, Florida, and Georgia this year by hiding in cargo containers and walking away undetected, dressed as stevedores. No one is discussing what may have become of the extremists.
As commander of the Marine Safety Office in Miami, Watson finds himself mentally trading places with the terrorists, trying to view his port through the skewed prism of someone bent on mayhem and destruction. The Port of Miami had once seemed like nothing so much as a giant and efficient sorting hub on the conveyer belt of the global economy; now Watson is forced to see it as an amalgam of potentially inviting targets.
“Before Sept. 11, my primary focus was on crimes such as drug smuggling, stolen goods, and illegal immigration,” said Watson. “Ever since the attacks, however, we’ve been looking hard at ourselves and wondering if we’re the next target. If we are being cased by terrorists, what are our greatest vulnerabilities, and where should we put our limited resources to patch our most obvious weaknesses?”
Because Florida is home to the two largest cruise ship ports in the world — Miami and nearby Port Everglades, in Fort Lauderdale, together process 6 million passengers a year — that appraisal quickly led the Coast Guard to look closely at cruise ship operations. Cruise ships are basically floating cities that run on regularly published schedules, have mostly foreign crews, and present attractive targets to terrorists intent on inflicting mass casualties. In analyzing their ports’ vulnerabilities, Watson and his team also had to consider the giant fuel-tank farm at nearby Turkey Point, as well as the nuclear power plant at Port St. Lucie on Hutchinson Island.
Unfortunately, after Sept. 11, almost no terrorist scenario concocted by port officials seems too far-fetched. The recent Hollywood movie The Sum of All Fears, for instance, depicts terrorists smuggling a nuclear weapon into the Port of Baltimore in a cargo container. They later set off the device and destroy virtually the entire city. When the movie became the nation’s No. 1 box-office hit, the U.S. Customs Service took the unusual step of holding a press conference on June 3 to assure a nervous public that safeguards against such a scenario were in place. According to the Customs Service, it has recently outfitted its inspectors with 4,000 personal-size radiation detectors, with another 4,500 on order.
As everyone in the port security business knows, however, screening procedures depend heavily on reliable ship manifests and specific intelligence to identify “high-risk” containers. These are hardly givens, in an overloaded and antiquated system that generates anywhere from 30 to 40 different documents for each container shipped. Customs is able to screen only 2 percent to 3 percent of the large cargo containers that enter the United States.
In its recent study Protecting the American Homeland, the Brookings Institution in Washington took the threat seriously enough to warn that “a ‘doomsday scenario’ attack on the maritime industry, using nuclear devices concealed in a shipping container, could cause damage and disruption costing the economy as much as $1 trillion.”
Beyond shipping containers, the waterfront presents plenty of other opportunities for terrorists. Acting on information reportedly gleaned from al-Qaeda suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the FBI in June began a nationwide canvass of U.S. scuba diving shops. That search was based on intelligence reports that al-Qaeda operatives were taking scuba training in order to launch a bombing spree against ships, power plants, bridges, and other shoreline targets. When an errant barge struck a bridge over the Arkansas River in Oklahoma on May 26, maritime officials were also forced to consider the security of the nation’s 5,000 towboats and 33,000 barges, many of which carry explosives and toxic chemicals over 25,000 miles of rivers and coastal waterways. The Arkansas River accident collapsed the bridge, killing 14 people and severing Interstate 40, a major east-west transportation artery.
Al-Qaeda’s tactics on Sept. 11 also raised worries that terrorists might try to turn ships themselves into weapons of mass destruction. Last September, that threat led Boston Harbor to deny entry to a tanker carrying liquefied natural gas, out of fear that terrorists could ignite a blast that would obliterate the city’s densely populated waterfront.
It’s not as if terrorists haven’t targeted ships before. Coast Guard and port authority officials are sensitive to the lessons of al-Qaeda’s October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, when suicide bombers on a small craft laden with explosives killed 17 U.S. sailors and nearly sank a state-of-the-art Navy destroyer as it refueled in Yemen. That attack mirrored deadly tactics used by the Tamil Tigers terrorist group in Sri Lanka. If such an attack were to occur while a cruise ship was taking on fuel from a barge, or while a petroleum tanker was off-loading fuel, the results could be catastrophic.
Likewise, the 1985 attack on the cruise ship Achille Lauro in the Mediterranean remains a cautionary tale for U.S. maritime authorities. In that incident, Palestinian terrorists commandeered a cruise ship after smuggling weapons aboard. The Palestinians took 413 passengers hostage and killed Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly and wheelchair-bound American whose body they dumped into the sea.
“The Achille Lauro taught us that if we can’t keep people from smuggling weapons onto a cruise ship, then we’re not doing a good enough job,” Watson said. “In a similar fashion, the USS Cole bombing forced us to ask ourselves whether we could defend vulnerable civilian vessels in our port from a similar attack. I don’t believe we were doing a good enough job before, but a lot of the new measures we’ve taken, in terms of perimeter patrolling and establishing security zones, were a response to the possibility of a Cole type of attack.” And that’s why, on this May day, the Majesty of the Seas had a Coast Guard escort as it steamed out of Miami.
Transnational Muck
Soon after taking a sabbatical from his career as a Coast Guard officer to study innovative ways to stem the flow of illegal drugs into the United States, Cmdr. Steve Flynn began to worry. It seemed to him that the much-touted “war on drugs” was focusing on a symptom rather than on the darker and more troubling heart of the problem. The phenomenon of liberalized trade, and the increasingly rapid movement of products and people through the global trading system that sustained America’s unprecedented prosperity in the 1990s, was, Flynn observed, “value-neutral.” Quite simply, thanks to the growth of “globalization,” the system moved contraband and law-breaking people just as quickly and nearly as effortlessly as it moved their legitimate counterparts.
Whenever Flynn voiced his alarm that this “transnational muck” was increasingly infiltrating the system — whether it was the tons of cocaine seized in the Port of Miami, the dead bodies of illegal Chinese immigrants found in a cargo container in Seattle, or the terrorist captured by chance at a border crossing in Washington state — the inevitable reply was that these problems were an unavoidable cost of doing business in a global economy.
“The powers-that-be treated these problems like retailers treat shoplifting: It was regrettable, but the costs were far outweighed by the benefits of this incredibly open and efficient global trading system,” said Flynn, now a senior fellow for national security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City. “On the other hand, I came to view the illegal drug trade, in particular, like the dye that doctors run through your circulatory system to check on the state of your arteries. I concluded illegal drugs were telling us that the global circulatory system that underpins our economy was due for a heart attack.”
In Flynn’s view, cardiac arrest occurred on Sept. 11. Because the nation was understandably consumed in the weeks following the tragedy with the unprecedented loss of life, many Americans simply missed how rapidly the U.S. economy was brought nearly to its knees by the government’s sudden blockade of people and goods coming into the country. Just days after the attack, for instance, DaimlerChrysler and Ford Motor Co. announced they were shutting down numerous car assembly plants for lack of crucial parts produced in Canada and purposely delivered on a “just-in-time” basis to keep expensive inventories to a minimum. The Canadian parts were stuck in 18-hour traffic jams at the newly tightened border.
After a number of oil tankers were barred from U.S. ports, experts began to warn that the Northeast could run out of fuel and heating oil. The threat was real because oil refineries had also shifted to a “just-in-time” business model that left them with very little storage capacity or excess reserves of refined fuel. Fears were so high in the days after Sept. 11 that a knife attack on the driver of a Florida-bound Greyhound led to the cessation of national bus service and the closing of the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City. Agricultural crop-dusting planes were grounded, meanwhile, out of fears they could be used to spread chemical or biological weapons. According to Flynn, Los Angeles was within days of running out of drinking water because the Transportation Department halted train shipments of chloride, a hazardous material critical to water treatment.
“After the 9/11 attacks, the twin nightmares I had always dreaded came true,” said Flynn. “Our adversaries used our open system to wage war on us at home, and we reacted by blockading our own economy in a very heavy-handed and disruptive way. Now I worry that we’re in even more danger than prior to the attacks, because everyone who didn’t understand our vulnerability before now has a blueprint for how to turn off the spigot of global commerce.”
In any inventory of the weaknesses in the global trade system that terrorists might try to exploit in the future, says Flynn, ports are likely to top the list. The reason is simple: Fully 95 percent of international goods come into the United States through its seaports, and seaborne trade accounts for 25 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product.
“Seaports are the mega-nodes in the global commerce network, and the bad guys already know how to exploit them for drug running and cargo theft,” said Flynn, who notes that cargo theft at U.S. ports rose from an estimated $1 billion in 1990 to more than $12 billion in 2000. With the amount of cargo entering the United States projected to double over the next decade, that figure will likely grow dramatically. If authorities learned that on a particular day, terrorists were using or imitating the cargo theft rings involved in port crime to smuggle a weapon of mass destruction into the United States, says Flynn, screening all of the millions of 40-foot cargo containers in the system on that day would take about six months. And, he says, each five-person Customs Service inspection team would take three hours on average to complete a thorough inspection of one container.
“During that half year, global commerce would all but grind to a halt,” Flynn said. “So if our economy is as important to America’s strength as the Bush administration insists, that scenario should keep the director of Homeland Security and the secretaries of the Treasury, Commerce, State, and Defense departments awake at night. Their challenge is further complicated by the fact that if we single-mindedly focus on port security as a solution, it will just displace the threat [to] somewhere else in the international transport system.”
Over There, Not Here
As a small craft maneuvers alongside the cruise ship SeaEscape, a door in the hull of the larger ship opens near the waterline. On cue, a rope ladder drops, and a local pilot from Port Everglades climbs nimbly down, accompanied by an armed team of Coast Guard sea marshals.
While he’s on the bridge of the SeaEscape — a Russian transport converted into a floating casino and now based in the Bahamas — the local pilot assumes full operational control. Although the pilot is unfailingly polite to the bridge crew, following every “All ahead full!” or “Stop port engine!” with a clipped “Please,” there is no question who is in command of the ship. As if to underscore the point, the Coast Guard sea marshals stand silent sentry on the bridge. The screening criteria are classified, but some combination of factors in the Coast Guard’s threat assessment matrix has flagged the SeaEscape for a sea marshals’ escort out of port.
The armed escorts are part of the Coast Guard’s post-9/11 strategy that calls for controlling the movement of “higher-risk” vessels more closely, for protecting critical port infrastructure, and for providing an adequate law enforcement presence in U.S. ports to respond to possible emergencies.
By far the most far-reaching aspect of the new strategy, however, is its emphasis on increasing what the Coast Guard calls “Maritime Domain Awareness.” Essentially, Maritime Domain Awareness entails keeping better track of what craft are headed for U.S. shores before they get here. And this forward strategy is a concession to the fact that once a weapon of mass destruction, a cargo container of terrorist stowaways, or an illegally commandeered ship enters a U.S. port, it’s probably too late.
“If you look at the security issue as a continuum that runs from awareness of the threat, to possible prevention, and on to emergency response and consequence management, what we saw on 9/11 was all on the right side of that equation in terms of dealing with the horrible consequences of a terrorist act already committed,” said Coast Guard Commandant Collins. “By investing in technologies and capabilities that give you greater clarity and visibility of the maritime environment, we hope to be able to predict what’s coming at our ports and shorelines long before it gets here. That will hopefully allow us to avoid another Sept. 11.”
The early emphasis in that effort has been to push the first line of defense away from U.S. shorelines. The Coast Guard and other agencies would then have more time to react to potentially dangerous vessels and, if necessary, to intercept them at sea rather than in congested port areas strewn with high-value targets. The Coast Guard has thus increased from 24 hours to 96 hours the advance warning that ships must give before entering U.S. ports; ships need to file their crew and cargo manifests that early too.
Last fall, Congress also made the Coast Guard a formal member of the intelligence community, able for the first time to tap into national intelligence assets such as spy satellites. The move also gives the Coast Guard the ability to help direct the CIA’s overseas spying efforts so the Guard can glean advanced warning of potentially threatening vessels approaching U.S. shores. This national intelligence interface will likely improve with the establishment of a Homeland Security Department, which envisions a 1,000-person Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection Division to analyze intelligence data on potential threats.
By far the most far-reaching reforms are being contemplated by an interagency Container Working Group that is studying ways to establish a reliable “chain of custody” for all cargo. Such a chain would include certification that a container was packed in a secure environment; that it was sealed so that its contents could not be tampered with while under way; and that it was transported under the control of a certified and responsible shipper. Many of the working group’s expected recommendations are already contained in the maritime security legislation passed by the House and Senate. The recommendations include requiring foreign cargo ships bound for the United States to carry special transmitting devices to signal vessel movements and to provide vital information on passengers, crew, and cargo; requiring cargo and cruise ships to electronically transmit passenger and crew manifests before arriving in U.S. ports; and allowing the Coast Guard to turn away any vessel coming from a foreign port deemed to have “lax security.”
Not only would implementation of such a system require a far greater overseas presence by U.S. Customs and maritime inspectors — they are already working in Canada and Singapore and soon will be in Holland — it would also require the international trade community to adopt a whole new dynamic in global trade, one that would weigh security on a par with efficiency and speed. Although such a system would transcend national boundaries and raise questions of sovereignty, former Coast Guard Commandant Adm. James Loy proposed codifying many of the cargo security measures, at a November 2000 meeting of the International Maritime Organization in London. The idea was greeted with a unanimous vote of approval by the organization’s general assembly.
“Cargo transparency is a tall order because this is a dynamic, global-trading system with a lot of international stakeholders involved,” Collins said. “While I don’t think efficiency and security are mutually exclusive, achieving both will require a different mind-set where we focus as much on exports as we do on imports. Wouldn’t it be wonderful, however, if we had an accurate understanding of a ship’s crew and cargo before it ever left Rotterdam or Hong Kong? One of the ways the world has changed since 9/11 is that we all have to incorporate those kinds of security considerations into our business practices if we want to preserve our way of life.”
A Model Port
The Port of Miami, in some ways, is lucky. It is included in the Coast Guard’s Seventh District, which encompasses the southeastern United States and Caribbean Basin and for years has been the major front in the war against illegal drugs and illegal immigrants. Because of that history, the port has had a head start in adopting many of the security reforms that are likely to be mandated for all U.S. ports should the maritime security bills passed by the House and Senate go through a conference committee successfully, as expected, and reach the president’s desk this summer.
The state of Florida has been helpful too, and a little ahead of the game. After an Interagency Commission on Crime and Security in U.S. Seaports issued a report in 2000 warning of inadequate security at the nation’s seaports, the Florida Legislature enacted many of the panel’s recommendations, including establishing interagency “port security committees” to coordinate the activities of some 20 different federal, state, and local agencies. The committees have been meeting almost nonstop since Sept. 11.
How rapidly such port security measures could be adopted nationwide, however, will depend heavily on federal funding. Congressional Democrats have slammed the Bush administration, for instance, for threatening vetoes of two emergency spending bills passed since Sept. 11 because they contained additional money for port security grants. Port officials have collectively requested about $700 million in federal grants for critical security needs.
In the meantime, the short-term fixes have undoubtedly increased security at the Port of Miami. But the Coast Guard’s Watson wonders aloud whether they are enough. He wonders whether his port is, in military parlance, sufficiently “hardened” to resist or divert a terrorist attack.
“We have definitely raised the security bar in our ports, and I don’t feel like we’re a soft target. But to judge how hard we are compared to other targets — or whether the entire transportation network as a whole presents a soft target — you would have to get into the mind of the terrorists themselves. At the end of the day, my hope is that the terrorists will look at the Port of Miami and decide that we’re just a little too hard, compared to other potential targets.”
According to White House sources, the U.S. Congress plans to suspend any reorganization of the FBI and CIA until it completes on the proposed homeland security department, the Washington Post reported today (see GSN, June 28).
Senate Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) has decided to wait to make any changes to the FBI and CIA, according to the Post. The committee is expected to produce the legislation that would create the homeland security department.
“I think it’s so controversial that it might delay and obstruct the passage and creation of the new department,” Lieberman said last week during a committee hearing.
The suspension will make the new department dependent on the two agencies for gathering domestic intelligence, according to the Post. It will also delay any plans to remove the domestic intelligence-gathering mission from the FBI and transfer it to a new internal security service, the Post reported.
Lieberman said he envisions the homeland security department as mainly an “aggressive, agile and demanding ... consumer of intelligence,” that is would operate without its own “operational or collecting capability.” Lieberman is also expected to give the new department the authority to access raw intelligence data and to order the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence agencies to collect specific information, according to the Post.
The joint House of Representatives-Senate intelligence committee plans to examine whether a different domestic intelligence-gathering system is needed (see GSN, June 5), said Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Bob Graham (D-Fla.). There are three areas that need to be examined to determine whether a new approach is necessary — the potential targets of surveillance, the legal methods that would be used to gather information and the control of collected information, Graham said.
“We’ll have to come back and have the national debate over intelligence gathering,” he said.
An FBI agent recently said he has questions over the new bureau rules to allow field agents to begin a counterterrorism investigation without pre-approval from headquarters.
“I’m worried about six or seven years from now when there are five or six Arab-American members of Congress and they call me before some committee to grill me on my actions against their people,” the FBI agent said (Walter Pincus, Washington Post, July 2).
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