U.S. 'Terror' List Still Lacking Inability to Distinguish Friend
From Foe Called Embarrassment
By ROBERT BLOCK, GARY FIELDS and JO WRIGHTON Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
Three days before Christmas, the Federal Bureau of Investigation's attache at the American Embassy in Paris gave French police a list of six names and information gleaned from U.S. intelligence intercepts, indicating that terrorists linked to al Qaeda were planning to hijack an Air France jet and crash it somewhere in the U.S., most probably California.
After 48 hours of discussions with anxious U.S. officials, including Secretary of State Colin Powell, the French government grounded three Air France flights bound for Los Angeles, and French agents detained the passengers whose names matched those on the FBI list.
According to French officials, what they uncovered wasn't an international terrorist plot, but a huge case of mistaken identities: one name matching that of the leader of a Tunisian-based terror group turned out to be that of a child. Another "terrorist" was a Welsh insurance agent.
Another was an elderly Chinese woman who once ran a restaurant in Paris. The remaining three were French citizens. Extensive interrogations in the presence of officials from the U.S. Transportation Security Administration revealed nothing sinister, French officials said. Notwithstanding, American war jets have been following suspect flights coming to the U.S. from France in recent days, and Washington has demanded greater aviation security from French officials.
Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge praised the French response as a textbook example of international cooperation, but antiterrorism experts say misidentifying terrorist suspects is an embarrassment to U.S. intelligence and in the long run could serve to undermine global antiterror efforts. It is not the first time that U.S. law enforcement has asked foreign governments to move against people who were wrongly identified.
A similar but unpublicized incident took place over the summer in Australia. And over the past few days, passengers from flights from other countries, including Britain and Mexico, have been prevented by American agents from getting off planes and subjected to intensive re-screening. In each case the terrorist alerts prompted by suspect names have turned out to be false alarms. On Thursday and Friday, British Airways canceled two Heathrow-to-Washington flights and delayed another flight headed in the other direction due to security concerns.
A Dozen Different Databases
As America continues to ratchet up an increasingly aggressive stance toward inbound foreign flights, a big question is, why can't the world's most technologically advanced power distinguish between a terrorist hijacker and a harmless tourist with a suspicious name?
The reasons are complicated, but a key one -- according to congressmen, law-enforcement officials and antiterrorism experts -- is that the U.S. still doesn't possess the most basic tool required to fight international terror: an accurate, up-to-date watch list of suspected terrorists and their supporters. U.S. agencies are continuing to work from at least 12 different, sometimes incompatible, often uncoordinated and technologically archaic databases.
The lack of a unified, accurate and meaningful terrorist watch first surfaced after the 1993 bombing of New York's World Trade Center. Calls for a better system were raised when it emerged that two of the bombers, Sheik Rahman and Ali Mohammed, were on an FBI watch list but still managed to get visas because the State Department and the old Immigration and Naturalization Service didn't have access the FBI data.
After Sept. 11, 2001, the establishment of single watch list was considered vital to keeping terrorists from gaining access to the U.S. as well as to better coordinate the international struggle against al Qaeda. But nine months ago, the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, found that efforts to consolidate the numerous watch lists spread across nine different agencies were going nowhere and the lack of a single master list was constraining efforts to protect and control U.S. borders.
President Bush has on several occasions expressed his commitment to creating a consolidated list that would better target America's enemies and, in the process, greatly reduce the chances of misidentification and the confusion that it causes. To that end, the White House, the Central Intelligence Agency, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security agreed in September to establish the Terrorist Screening Center, or TSC, an interagency body that would create, maintain and control a master terrorist database.
According to the memorandum signed by Mr. Ridge, Secretary of State Powell, CIA director George Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft, the TSC would be run by the FBI using the State Department's watch list, known as TIPOFF, as the backbone of a new database that would integrate all other existing databases into a new state of the art system. In forging a new list, TSC operatives would weed out duplications and obsolete data, and remove people who in the past had been wrongly identified as terrorists or who had the misfortune to share the same name as suspected enemies of the state. The TSC would also work to employ new technologies to include markers and data such as fingerprints, distinguishing scars, birthmarks, credit-card accounts and other details to help distinguish the real suspects from harmless namesakes.
On Dec. 1, the TSC opened its doors in the Washington suburb of Crystal City, Va., under the direction of Donna Bucella, formerly of the Transportation Security Administration. The FBI Counterintelligence Division had written law-enforcement agencies across the country announcing that the TSC would "serve as the single point of contact for law-enforcement authorities requesting assistance in the identification of subjects with possible connections to terrorism." It cautioned, however, that the center's initial capabilities would be "limited."
'Hollow Box'
The TSC was never consulted when U.S. intelligence picked up information about the potential Paris hijacking last week, including the names of suspected terrorists. According to FBI officials and congressional staff recently briefed by Ms. Bucella on TSC operations, the center has yet to make any headway integrating all the lists. Problems ranged from the lack of a dedicated budget to ongoing failures to obtain the cooperation of several agencies to share their information with the center. While the TSC is staffed to take calls from police requesting basic background checks, Homeland Security officials say work on a unified database capable of living up to expectations is a process that is still months and possibly years away. According to one Democratic congressional aide who attended the briefing: "In reality, all that's been created is a hollow box."
The FBI has declined requests to speak about the TSC for the record. But agents familiar with the operation, as well as with the intelligence and scenario surrounding last week's flight cancellations, said that had a single database system been developed as envisioned, it might have provided critical pieces of intelligence and biographical information, and could have potentially spared the U.S. the embarrassment of confusing a terrorist leader with a small child.
One senior FBI official, however, defended U.S., actions taken last week in Paris. "We've said all along that you're going to have situations where the person we have [information on] isn't the person we're looking for. It's not like names are unique," the official said. "From our perspective, nothing went wrong. We had intelligence and acted on it. In law enforcement, sometimes when you check an allegation out, it's not true."
France has said that last week's events won't influence French willingness to cooperate with American warnings in the future. "The risk is too great not to take every warning seriously," said Marie Masdupuy, spokeswoman for the French Foreign Ministry in Paris.