Security Extraordinary for Month-Long Tournament
by Doug Struck, Washington Post
SEOUL - Park Jun Young hasn’t been home in three days. Sleep is a stranger. He and his staff, he says, are “working until blood comes from our pores.”
The police official planning security for the World Cup soccer tournament sits at his desk and flips through a 230-page manual of hypothetical scenarios, an anthology of fright: hostages held, a hijacked ferry . . . car bomb . . . poison gas . . . anthrax . . . suicidal airline pilot.
These possibilities don’t really worry Park; security forces have practiced for them all. It’s the unknown scheme in the mind of a terrorist that worries him. The events of Sept. 11 have transformed the World Cup into a taut-nerved test of terrorism preparations and counter-intelligence, with grim consequences for failure.
The 32-team month-long tournament, which is expected to attractas many as 3 million fans in South Korea and Japan, opens Friday under extraordinary precautions.
• Above the stadium at every game in South Korea, fighter jets will circle and radar will sweep the sky. Intruding planes that do not heed warnings to leave the area will risk being intercepted by jets -- or shot down by surface-to-air missiles mounted outside the stadiums.
• Lower altitudes will be prowled by helicopters, watching for things such as hang-gliders mounted with bombs or remote-controlled model planes carrying explosives.
• On the ground, fans will be vetted through metal detectors, their identities spot-checked against a name printed on each ticket. Trained dogs will sniff their bags for bombs. Parked nearby, vans with biological and chemical detectors will sample the air.
• Naval ships will patrol the coastlines. Divers already have plumbed the waters for bombs. In the locked cockpits of Korean airliners overhead, crew members have been issued stun guns to thwart hijack attempts. At airports below, customs officials are looking for anyone on a list of 6,800 persons with possible terrorist connections. Untold numbers of plainclothes agents will mix in the crowds at stadiums.
• Security at Japan’s Narita airport, already on “emergency” alert since Sept. 11, will be beefed up. The capital’s main gateway will be protected by 2,000 police and guards, its runway ringed by six miles of ultraviolet sensors, watched by 100 surveillance cameras and 27 guard posts, and equipped with two sophisticated “Aegis” explosives detection units costing nearly $1 million.
• Every day -- and sometimes twice daily -- South Korean police now search 4,800 high-rise buildings, subway stations, construction sites and American-owned or frequented facilities that could be targets. They search trash cans, toilet stalls and basements for bombs. In Japan, authorities have put a police cordon around the country’s nuclear plants.
What was to be a month-long celebratory athletic event to promote international fellowship has become a massive security operation. It involves tens of thousands of police and military in dozens of nations, at a cost of millions, commanding the resources of intelligence agencies across the globe.
“For Korea, things changed after September 11. The key to the World Cup became security,” said Park, a superintendent at the South Korean National Police Agency. “Hosting is important, but security is the main focus now.”
Although the event has never captured mainstream popularity in the United States -- the fact that this year’s games are being played in the early-morning hours U.S. time isn’t expected to help -- the rest of the world is likely to be transfixed by the matches.
Although the vast majority of sporting events, including the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics earlier this year, are held without incident, Park and other authorities are aware of the exceptions. The 1972 Munich Olympics saw 11 Israeli athletes killed after terrorists stormed the Olympic village. A bomb planted near a concert at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics left two dead and 100 injured. And the last World Cup, in France in 1998, may have come much closer than most realized to tragedy.
Algerian terrorists there planned to attack American players at one of three scheduled games, and Osama bin Laden “funded and helped organize the plan,” according to Adam Robinson, author of the biography “Bin Laden: Behind the Mask of the Terrorist.” Belgium authorities uncovered the plot, and made a sweeping series of arrests just three weeks before the match.
Park said he thought the plot was the product of French-Algerian tensions, not sponsored by Al Qaeda. But “we are studying to see if any of that can happen here.”
Salt Lake officials spent $300 million on security that was designed to be as inconspicuous as possible. Still, U.S. military jets flew over major events such as the Opening Ceremonies and layers of security were evident at building access points. Many long lines developed as the checkpoints slowed foot and automobile traffic, but no major incidents disrupted the Games.
Japan’s national police chief, Setsuo Tanaka, is hoping for a similar result. He has urged his officers to “stake their dignity” on a secure World Cup tournament. As many as 7,700 will be out in force for every game in Japan. Some prefectures have asked retired policemen to come back to help fill empty police boxes. In Korea, the National Police say they will put 13,000 on duty for each game.
“Counter-terrorism is on the front burner,” said Supt. Makoto Hamura, an anti-terrorism expert at the Japan National Police Agency.
American athletes are the most visible targets. Security was so tight for the arrival of the U.S. team in Seoul May 24, the scene seemed from an action-genre movie: Helicopters hovered overhead as players were hustled through a corridor formed by hundreds of national police, whisked by motorcade through halted rush-hour traffic, and then delivered by SWAT-team members carrying automatic rifles into the private elevator of their hotel.
The police task at this World Cup is particularly complicated. The 64 games are spread between two countries and 20 cities. And in the midst of it are some 90,000 American servicemen and 65,000 dependents, all potential targets, in and around bases throughout South Korea and Japan.
The U.S. military bases have stepped up their security and in Korea encouraged a “buddy system” when soldiers are off base. But officials here say protection is tight enough they are urging soldiers to go to the games.
“We believe our troops and dependents and families are as safe here as anywhere in the world,” insists Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, in charge of security for the U.S. forces in Korea.
The Koreans also have asked the U.S. military for help. While emphasizing their backup role, the Americans are bringing an AWACS plane here and have rescheduled four training exercises to coincide with the World Cup.
The terrorism threat is drawing the South Korean, Japanese and American military into an event that used to be the purview of police.
“We had never really conceptualized terrorism before,” said Col. Kang Chang Seek, a spokesman for the South Korean military Joint Chief of Staff. “Our role will be more multi-level, more complex.”
Less visibly, intelligence agencies also are deeply involved. While loath to be specific, Korean and Japanese officials say CIA participation has been intense, and intelligence forces of dozens of other countries have been asked to share their files and track potential suspects.
“Our goal is to disrupt them before they get to their target,” said Kwon Chin Ho, a South Korean National Intelligence Service official dispatched to head the World Cup security headquarters.
The global gathering with so many journalists makes it “a very attractive target,” Kwon said.
“Islamic terrorists think of publicity and psychological effects, so these big events become a target,” agreed Osamu Miyata, an Islamic studies expert at Shizuoka Prefecture University in Japan.
But others say an attack in an Asian nation does not make political sense.
“Arab and Muslim extremists want to make this an East-West conflict,” said Lee Jung Hoon, a political analyst at Yonsei University in Seoul. “Their targets are Israel and the U.S. Do they want to expand the field of their enemies in Asia?
“If it happened here, Koreans would be outraged,” Lee said. “It would be like Vietnam revisited. We’d be sending in the forces.”
In Japan, some critics have grumbled that police are more worried about a few English soccer hooligans than the threat of terrorist attack, and have been slow to prepare.
It is a Japanese trait to think “if we just kept our heads down, we will be okay,” said Toshiyuki Shikata, a professor of crisis management at Teikyo University. “The idea that something might happen does not come to the Japanese mind.”
Japan does not have a good record of reacting to unplanned events, proven by the 1995 sarin gas attack and Kobe earthquake. But Japan is an intensely homogenous society where both foreigners and deviations from the norm are watched with suspicion, and it would be a difficult place for non-Japanese terrorists to operate.
South Korea, a more hurly-burly place hosting the American team in the first round, is different. That is why Park, at his headquarters,studies his plans through the night, as a big digital clock above his desk counts down the days, in large red lights, until the World Cup.
“Terrorism is a surreal ground,” he said. “You can’t expect when, or where, or how. And that’s what we have to prepare for.”