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From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

Wednesday, September 11, 2002

Larry Cox's passenger traffic yesterday was about 94 percent of what it had been a year ago, a near recovery that was reflected in similar statistics across the country for air travel and hotel occupancy. However, discounts on air fares were now so steep that the airlines were struggling mightily even if Cox wasn't.

Waits at airport security checkpoints in Memphis were down to five to ten minutes, and Cox was now so impressed by what he'd been told of TSA's plans for rolling out the federalized screeners -- they were now scheduled to arrive in two weeks -- that he was confident that things would keep moving as smoothly, only with what he now conceded would be better security. He wasn't so sure about what would happen when TSA tried to implement the bomb screening of checked luggage in time for that December 31 deadline. Yet, based on what he had now seen of TSA's performance and their plans for implementing the program in Memphis, and on the confidence he had in Wiley Thompson, the Memphis federal security director, he was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt on that, too.

Cox's thermostats were still set at 66 degrees for cold weather and 75 degrees for warm weather to save money on heat and air-conditioning. The hiring freeze was still in effect. And he still feared what he knew was going to be a brutal shakeout in the airline industry. But, as he put it, "We were a lot better off down here than I thought we would be last September 12. Back then, I just couldn't see how we were going to get out of this."

Kevin McCabe sat all morning at a meeting at the Coast Guard regional headquarters debating what to do about that ship giving off the weak radiation signals now being held a few miles offshore. He thought it was a bit of overkill, because the signal was so weak and because he knew that traces from lots of material, such as ceramic tile, could be causing it. But the FBI and the Coast Guard wanted to check it some more, and with an orange alert in place, he understood that.

A few hours later a new piece of equipment from the Energy Department was brought in and declared the ship safe.

But McCabe was already on to another type of threat that the bosses in Washington were worried about. They had just found out that last July a team from ABC News, led by highly regarded correspondent Brian Ross, had begun a project to smuggle a fifteen-pound container of what ABC called "depleted uranium" through seven countries, starting in Austria, going through Eastern Europe and into Turkey, and then onto a container on a ship that had arrived in McCabe's port on July 30. Tonight, ABC was going to report, according to its press release, that it had smuggled "the kind of uranium that -- if highly enriched -- would, by some estimates, provide about half the material required for a crude nuclear device and more than enough for a so called dirty bomb." In fact, ABC had smuggled it right past McCabe and his inspectors. The broadcast, scheduled for an ABC News September 11 prime-time special, would contain an August interview with McCabe. During the interview, McCabe had demonstrated how well his radiation detectors and VACIS machine worked, never having any idea that ABC's Ross was going use it as a setup for his report that in practice McCabe's procedures and equipment didn't work at all.

However, because ABC had also just done an interview with Customs chief Bonner, in which Ross told him about the uranium and then gave him the precise information about the shipment, McCabe and others at Customs were now able to pull the records of what had happened. The version of the story contained in these records was quite different from the one ABC was preparing to tell.

It turned out that the Customs computerized risk analysis system had performed exactly as it was supposed to. Based on the countries it had been in, the fact that the designee was not a name familiar to Customs, and the number of countries it had traveled through, the container in which Ross's suitcase (which was packed in a wood crate) was hiding had, in fact, been targeted as one of only six containers out of 1,139 containers on the ship to be given special attention. Thus, it was selected for a VACIS inspection and radiation detector screening. The radiation detector had signaled nothing -- because the uranium had been so depleted that, by ABC's own admission, it had almost no radiation content. In fact, it was less radioactive than what the detector would find in the earth's natural soils, and could certainly not be used to make any kind of bomb. As for the VACIS inspection, the VACIS crew had zeroed in on the container and concluded that it presented no threat, because it showed no unusual density patterns.

When Customs' press relations people argued these points this afternoon to ABC, the network's response was that they had used depleted uranium so as not to endanger anyone, but that had the uranium not been depleted it could have been shielded in a lead container, which would have rendered McCabe's radiation detectors useless. That was perhaps true, but in that case the VACIS machine would have detected the lead, because of its unusual density, and been suspicious of it enough to hand-search the container. Moreover, undepleted, real uranium simply was not the material that ABC had smuggled in.

Another ABC argument was that even if McCabe had singled out the container, he had only done so after it reached port. By then if it had been a real bomb it could have been detonated. Again, that hadn't been the point of ABC's experiment. Indeed, McCabe and everyone else conceded that the same could be said of any cargo now arriving in the U.S., which was why they were posting inspectors at foreign ports and pushing to develop broad-area radiation detectors that could be mounted on bridges and other places outside the ports. If that had been the point of the story, then why all the footage and talk about the material being allowed to pass through the port and onto a truck that made its way into New York, the Customs people argued.

ABC went ahead with its prime-time broadcast, though it did remove the term "nuclear material" from the script, and did include a rebuttal from Bonner (which ABC countered with the argument that it could have shielded real uranium in lead, and that a terrorist could detonate a device before McCabe had a chance to inspect it). But a Customs press release responding to the broadcast was effective enough that the media pickup of ABC's scoop was relatively muted.

McCabe was cheered by the whole episode, though frustrated by ABC's conduct. Contrary to its claims, the network's report had demonstrated that at least this time he and his team had picked out the proverbial needle from the haystack for extra attention, determined that it was not a threat, and allowed it to proceed.