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From After: How America Confronted The September 12 Era

Prologue: September 11, 2001

Kevin McCabe's office in Elizabeth, New Jersey, was drab, even by government standards. Except for the view. It had a heart-stopping vista of the New York skyline. McCabe ran the squad of seventy U.S. Customs Service inspectors who checked all the cargo that comes into the port of New York, which includes piers in Elizabeth in New Jersey and Staten Island and Brooklyn in New York. From his window in Elizabeth, it looked as if he could throw a football across to lower Manhattan.

September 11 was McCabe's first day as the chief inspector of the Contraband Enforcement Team. He'd been acting chief for a year, and his official promotion had come through late in the afternoon the day before.

McCabe, a stocky, perennially cheerful forty-two-year-old veteran of the endless Customs war on drugs, got to the office at about 8:00 and sheepishly took the congratulatory handshakes from the staff for his long-awaited change in title. He was sipping coffee and talking on the phone at 8:46 when he saw the first plane hit the World Trade Center. Because he had seen how big the plane was, he thought it might be an attack. He flipped on the television, then called the Customs office in New York, which was at the Trade Center, to find out what was going on. Eighteen minutes later, while still on the phone, he heard a CNN reporter say another plane had hit. He whirled around in his chair, looked out the window, and saw the second tower on fire. Now he knew for sure.

McCabe got up and looked out not only at the two towers engulfed in black smoke, but at the acres of piers and staging areas right below him. There were perhaps a thousand cars just shipped in from Japan and Korea, ready to be trucked out. There were 7,000 or more trailer-truck-sized cargo containers -- holding everything from furniture to fabric to computers to lemons and limes -- that had arrived from all over the world in just the last twenty-four hours.

"I figured," McCabe remembers, "that we were under attack, probably from some group in the Middle East, and I had no way of knowing for sure what was in any of those containers."

McCabe and everyone else at Customs quickly sealed the port. Nothing was allowed in or out. All land entrances were patrolled. The Coast Guard was called in to close off the water entrances.

Then McCabe and his troops began their own exercise in racial profiling. Every one of those forty-foot-long containers that had originated in or stopped at ports in the Middle East or North Africa was identified and moved to one side of the port -- some 600 containers in all, each destined to be hoisted onto a tractor trailer truck and dispersed across the East Coast. Over the next week, each container would get the treatment that Customs usually reserved for only a fraction of the cargo coming in from the drug-exporting countries of South America. They'd be scanned by a giant X-ray-like machine and, if need be, searched by hand after that.

It was, McCabe would readily admit, "as much an emotional reaction as a practical one. We felt we had to do something."

It was not something he could keep doing for long. There was no way they could search more than 2 or 3 percent of the 7,000 to 9,000 containers coming in every day without so delaying these shipments that commerce all over the world would be paralyzed. Worse, these searches didn't deal with the real problem -- which was that the same kinds of people who had flown the planes into the buildings could ship a nuclear or biological device into the port, and, as McCabe now figured, it wouldn't be like drugs where nailing a big stash on the docks occasioned high-fives all around. If this stuff even got to the docks, it would be a catastrophe.

What are we going to do, McCabe thought that afternoon as he looked across those thousands of containers at the smoke where the towers had been.

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