FBI

Eyes turn to Boston over security breach

By Judy Rakowsky, Globe Staff, 9/12/2001

With the US increasing security across the country, FBI agents as well as law enforcement was visible, especially around New York City and Washingt on D.C. (AP PHOTO)

s the nation wonders how hijackers managed to commandeer not one, but two, planes from Boston yesterday morning and crash them into New York's World Trade Center 15 minutes apart, attention will focus on the dozen FBI agents here who each day sift through terrorist threats to determine which are real and which are bogus - or at least less immediate.

Unsubstantiated reports yesterday that Saudi terrorist Osama bin Laden had warned in recent weeks that his operatives would stage a major assault against the United States prompted questions about whether anyone knew that yesterday's terror was coming.

''I don't know that our guys screwed up ... [but] they shouldn't be able to get [weapons] on two planes on the same day,'' said Philip Heymann, a Harvard Law School professor and a specialist on terrorism. ''You have to regard it as a major intelligence failure.''

FBI Supervisory Agent Thomas Powers, who oversees Boston's joint terrorism task force, could not be reached for comment yesterday, and all inquiries were referred to Washington.

But Richard S. Swensen, former special agent in charge of the Boston FBI office, said the real challenge is determining which threats are credible.

''Those people are saying those things all the time,'' Swensen said. ''It's a matter of separating the wheat from the chaff. There's so much information coming in all the time.''

Heymann, a top Justice Department official in the Clinton administration, speculated that it would be too risky for the hijackers to have smuggled weapons for both planes through metal detectors.

He theorized that the hijackers may have had help from ground crews. He estimated that as many as 50 people were involved.

Boston prides itself in its multiagency terrorism task force comprising law enforcement and public safety organizations from the federal, state, and local level. It meets monthly and practices for terrorist attacks. It had a drill planned for this weekend based on a biological or chemical attack, said Richard Serino, chief of emergency medical services for the city.

''I can't imagine there was anything that could have been done to prevent this from happening,'' said Kathleen O'Toole, a former state public safety secretary.

The FBI is the only law enforcement agency with the authority to investigate terrorism. But its agents function in a world of supersecrecy, interacting with groups that are even more so: the Central Intelligence Agency and military intelligence operatives.

It is up to FBI counterintelligence agents, the only investigators in the bureau who routinely face random lie detector tests for leaks, to develop informants and monitor unusual movements of foreign nationals.

Yet when the FBI helped round up a number of Algerians on immigration offenses in late 1999 amid growing concern about terrorist plots linked to the millennium, the bureau came under fire from civil liberties advocates.

The arrests were made a year after two of bin Laden's trusted agents had left Boston after living in the area for several years.

After Logan International Airport was identified yesterday as the place where two of the hijacked flights had originated, FBI agents swarmed through the airport, but the antiterrorism squad did not.

They remained in the FBI command center in downtown Boston, tracking leads from all over the world.

This story ran on page A22 of the Boston Globe on 9/12/2001.
© Copyright 2001 Globe Newspaper Company.