Mission is Clear; Methods Are Evolving
By Greg Schneider and Sara Kehaulani Goo, The Washington Post
The vague, half-understood threat surfaced in the far reaches of America’s intelligence network. It made its way to a secret room in New Jersey’s Pine Barrens, outside Atlantic City, where a small crew of specialists charged with protecting U.S. air travel decided it was real enough to act upon.
Terrorists, the tip said, might target a specific commercial flight number within 48 hours. There was no information on which airline. So the Federal Air Marshal Service identified a dozen scheduled flights with that or similar numbers. By the next day, they had rousted armed marshals from the East Coast to Honolulu to get them aboard each of the planes.
The day passed without incident. The tip may have been a false alarm, or premature. Or perhaps it will turn out that would-be hijackers are being deterred by the rapid growth of the air marshals as the newest federal police agency, the first such force dedicated solely to stopping terrorism.
A little over a year ago, the service had a $4 million budget and 33 armed officers who flew on international flights to prevent hijackings. Today there are thousands of marshals, and the Transportation Security Administration, which oversees the service, expects to spend more than $1 billion by the end of 2003 getting them trained and deployed on U.S. flights here and overseas.
That explosive growth has taken place largely in secret while public attention has been focused on the effort to confiscate tweezers and hire new screeners at airport security checkpoints.
Government officials say that the air marshals, along with a computerized passenger-profiling system now in the works, are at the true heart of the effort to make air travel more secure. So far, there is no evidence the service has foiled any attacks. Marshals have made only about a dozen arrests in the past year, none related to terrorism, officials said. But the force is organized around the belief that it is just a matter of time before the next hijacking attempt.
The frantic push to hire and train as many as 800 marshals a month has forced the service’s leadership to cope with some serious start-up problems. Some marshals complained that poor scheduling left them fatigued from overwork. One lost his gun in flight, and two others left ammunition clips aboard planes. Others say that corners were cut on training and that some recruits were given passing grades on simulated hijacking courses even though they kept shooting the flight attendant.
Still others say it remains unclear whether they should behave in flight like plainclothes police officers, quick to help out in a jam, or more like covert operatives.
The job itself is uniquely difficult. Waiting hour after hour, flight after flight for any sign of trouble can be a challenge to anyone’s powers of concentration, air marshals say. The trick is to maintain the appearance of an ordinary traveler, maybe reading a book or magazine, while keeping all senses alert. “You can hear a seat belt click. If your feet are on the floor and someone gets up, you feel it,” said a 26-year-old marshal who used to work as a customs inspector. “I know the sounds of the beverage cart.”
Thomas Quinn, the director of the Federal Air Marshal Service, acknowledges the difficulty of the job and says that building the service has had rough patches. A Clint Eastwood look-alike and former Secret Service agent, Quinn, 56, used to run a protection agency for foreign dignitaries and celebrities. After the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, he was lured away from plans to indulge his interests in boats and motorcycles (he sometimes takes road trips with country singer Lyle Lovett, an old friend), taking over the agency last January.
Now Quinn pens inspirational messages on folded pieces of paper that he carries in the breast pocket of his European-style suits, pulling them out to read to his troops during visits to field offices around the country. In these early days of the agency, what Quinn calls “attitude” is crucial to keeping the far-flung air marshals on mission. He tells them it separates “amateurs” from “professionals.”
“Although they may look the same to the casual observer, amateurs and professionals are very different,” he reads from his notes. “Professionals analyze; amateurs never do. Amateurs blame management; professionals look for ways to do better -- even if they have less-than-adequate supervision.” Trailers and Garages
Temporary trailers surround the air marshals’ small 1950s-style central command post near Atlantic City. A converted garage with duct tape over the windows is now the main dispatch office, filled with ringing telephones and staffers making schedule changes on black Dell computers, a large American flag on one wall. One computer screen shows a map of the world measled with yellow dots, each one representing a U.S. plane in the air, real-time. At the moment, there are 6,191. Sixty seconds later, 6,208.
With about 25,000 commercial aircraft landing or taking off in the United States every day, even the expanded air-marshal operation can cover only a fraction of all flights. For security reasons, the agency doesn’t want to publicize the exact number of marshals.
The service relies on intelligence information to cut its job down to size. Computer programs prioritize daily flights, based on factors such as where they take off or land, times of day, and any special events that might attract terrorist attention, such as a presidential trip or the Super Bowl. While the air marshals covered only about 15 percent of the top-priority flights last January, today they fly on half of them, an intelligence official said.
Next to the dispatch office, through a door marked both “Restricted Area” and “Never Forget, Never Forgive,” is the center’s small intelligence room, staffed by eight people on a rotating round-the-clock schedule. They are not air marshals but are on loan from the TSA’s intelligence office in Washington. They talk with other government agencies to troll for tips, as well as monitor CNN and read Web sites and foreign newspapers. They pull the criminal record of a suspicious passenger if an air marshal requests it.
Recently, staffers have been checking in with officials at the U.S. Embassy in Caracas, gauging the level of political unrest in Venezuela to see whether flights there merit extra protection. When a Venezuelan politician flew to Washington a few weeks ago, angry passengers caused a disturbance, so air marshals made sure they covered the politician’s flight home.
It’s rare for intelligence staffers to get information about possible danger to a specific flight. Instead, they help the air marshals concentrate on 25 airports judged to be the most likely terrorist targets. That list is updated regularly, but officials said it changes very little.
Washington, for instance, has one of the highest concentrations of covered flights because the seat of government makes it an obvious terrorist target. New York sees a lot of air marshals, and high-profile events such as a presidential visit to the Army-Navy football game or huge spectacles such as the Super Bowl also attract air marshals’ attention.
Blending In
When marshals are assigned to a flight, they follow a standard procedure, like the one employed one recent busy weekday on a US Airways flight out of Reagan National Airport. Two marshals dressed in business suits and heavy coats walked up to the ticket counter, standing a few feet apart but pretending not to know each other.
Each carefully slipped his credentials to a ticket agent, who showed no reaction. Tickets in hand, the air marshals passed unnoticed through the crowd to a nearby elevator, which carried them below the terminal. They reemerged at the gate, having bypassed the security checkpoint. An airline employee escorted them directly to the plane. None of the flight’s 124 passengers, eager to get out of Washington before an ice storm hit, seemed to notice.
On board, the air marshals made a quick search of the plane, looking everywhere for suspicious items, including under the seats and inside the lavatories. They told the flight crew to treat them like ordinary passengers and were in their seats when people began filing in.
The federal air marshals -- who call themselves FAMs (rhymes with “yams”) -- come in all shapes and sizes, though they are predominantly white and male. About a quarter of the marshals are minorities, but only about 4 percent are women.
The marshals invent cover stories each time they fly, trying not to be too elaborate. One young-looking female marshal sometimes tells chatty seatmates she’s in first class because her father works for the airline.
The marshals are briefed by intelligence officers on what to look for as they travel, and how various groups behave in ways that might seem strange to Americans.
“When you’re taking off and a Hispanic American does a sign of the cross, that’s okay. But if a Middle Eastern-looking person puts a blanket over their head and starts bobbing back and forth, the FAM is like ‘My God, what is it?’ We talk them through that: ‘It’s okay, it’s just another religious act,’ ” said an intelligence staffer who goes by the nickname Gonzo.
Learning when and how to act is tricky because the air marshals operate in such a sensitive environment. Over the summer, passengers on a Delta Air Lines flight to Philadelphia complained after two air marshals drew their guns to quell what they said was unruly behavior. One of the passengers, an Indian American doctor, threatened to file a lawsuit saying he was detained because of his skin color.
Officials have defended the actions of the marshals in that case but say that, overall, the cultural briefings -- along with sheer experience -- have helped air marshals use better judgment in deciding when to intervene on flights. “Early on, FAMs reacted a bit early or prematurely,” an intelligence official said.
The number of reports filed by the marshals about suspicious behavior on flights or in airports also has fallen off. In a little more than a year, marshals made about 1,000 such reports. Activity peaked at about 140 reports in July and dropped to about 90 in September.
Still, some air marshals remain unsure about their precise role. Are they like intelligence operatives, maintaining their cover except in the extreme event of a terrorist attack? That seems to be the point of the service’s official motto, “Invisus, Inauditus, Impavidus” -- unseen, unheard, unafraid.
Or should they reveal themselves in less dire situations, say, reviving a sick passenger or helping the crew subdue a rowdy drunk? In training, the marshals are taught a wide variety of skills, including how to use a first aid kit and how to supervise an evacuation.
At a recent training event at the air marshals’ New Jersey facilities, one marshal noticed Quinn’s assistant standing nearby and approached him. “I’m confused,” the marshal said. “Are we supposed to be covert or not?”
Technically, the marshals are covert, Quinn said in interviews, but he added that he prefers the term “discreet.” The marshals are known to the flight crew, and they don’t have to stick to their false identity in an emergency.
Since Sept. 11, 2001, air marshals have either had their cover blown by nosy passengers or identified themselves in flight 294 times, with such instances peaking in June and leveling off since.
They also have filed 192 reports saying they believed they were being “probed,” or tested by potential terrorists, but those reports are on the decline as well. It is hard to say how many of those fears were warranted. In one incident, an air marshal on a flight noticed a male passenger staring at him. He surreptitiously called and told his partner to watch to see whether the man followed him through the terminal. Sure enough, the suspicious passenger trailed the air marshal all the way to baggage claim, where the partner got a local police official to intervene.
“Hey, man, it’s okay,” the passenger said, according to the intelligence official. “I just thought he was cute.”
Too Much, Too Fast
In the rush to grow so quickly, the agency got ahead of itself, officials concede. In March and April, there were more air marshals on hand than managers could schedule on flights, said Greg McLaughlin, the service’s deputy director.
The Transportation Department promised the White House last spring that it would hire and deploy a certain number of marshals by July 31. To make it happen, Quinn got $481 million in emergency funding -- up from the service’s $4 million budget the year before -- and he has requested $623 million for 2003.
In processing so many new hires, the service cut back its specialized training program, a move that alarmed some insiders. Where pre-Sept. 11 air marshals received 12 continuous weeks of training, new recruits with no federal law enforcement experience got 61/2 weeks, though they attended six days a week instead of five. Recruits from agencies such as the FBI or Secret Service who already had basic training got as little as seven days of marshal training.
A source familiar with the situation worried that the program began graduating too many recruits who didn’t meet the original marksmanship requirements.
“The training, initially, was a little more in-depth. . . . It would be adequate for the first few months,” said the source, who requested anonymity. But as pressure mounted to deploy more people, “we couldn’t fail anyone. They would still graduate them [even if] they couldn’t hit a target. It didn’t make sense to me. Some guys had problems” with shooting the mock flight attendant in simulation exercises, the source said.
Officials with the air marshals service said that they had no choice but to compress the training, and that they believe they did not cut any crucial corners, eliminating such unnecessary components as driver training. The service has started bringing air marshals back to Atlantic City for an additional four weeks of training so they are all at the same skill level, a process that will take at least a year.
Once out of training last summer, some young recruits were frustrated by the actual job. Many were put in regional offices across the country with no managers, little communication with headquarters and no reliable way to request a day off.
They were scheduled on grueling 10-day missions. While many were attracted to the service’s $56,000 average salary package, a number complained that they had expected quick promotions and pay raises that never materialized.
Some air marshals began to complain that their demanding schedules were hurting their ability to function because they were constantly fatigued and had little time with their families. One marshal based in Washington said that at one point he would commonly get home from a flight at 11 p.m., then repack and leave at 3 the next morning for another flight.
“Pilots cannot fly more than 80 hours a month. Here we are doing 50 hours a week. Where does that put the level of safety and security?” the air marshal said.
The combination of discontent and disorganization reached its peak in August, when 62 air marshals quit the service for various reasons. Since that time, Quinn and other officials say, they have tried to fix the flaws that were elbowed aside in the rush to get up and running. The General Accounting Office and the Transportation Department’s inspector general both are looking into their progress.
A Falling Attrition Rate
For the most part, air marshals have stuck with the service and attempted to work through the problems. The number of resignations declined to 22 in November, and the overall attrition rate for the past year is 5 percent.
Although air marshals are still expected to report immediately when called to duty, Quinn says he is trying to make it a “FAM-centered” program that cares about family life. He has hired senior managers in each of the agency’s 21 field offices, many with long backgrounds supervising units at the Secret Service or other federal law enforcement agencies. In October, most air marshals began getting their schedules a month in advance, and now they can request time off. Quinn eliminated the 10-day missions.
The director is counting on technology for further improvements. Soon, each air marshal will have a handheld computer with a wireless Internet link and will be able to file reports instantly from the field. A central database will catalogue them, looking for trends. Quinn hopes that will expand the agency’s role, allowing air marshals to recognize and disrupt terrorists who are scouting airports or aircraft for future attacks.
And on a new secure Web site, air marshals will be able to sign on and find a photograph of their next partner, handy to have in an organization where many have never met co-workers in their own regional offices.
Some who almost gave up on the agency last summer and fall now say that conditions are better and morale is improving -- but that there’s a long way to go.
Whatever his skills as an administrator, Quinn has a lawman’s flair -- polished by his years around presidents and celebrities -- that appeals to many employees. He travels to the agency’s regional offices carrying a message of “quiet professionalism,” urging his charges to let patriotism and duty outweigh personal complaints about the inconveniences of the work. Quinn has been unhappy that some disgruntled air marshals have spoken out in articles in USA Today.
Squinting dramatically over the tops of his silver-rimmed reading glasses, Quinn likes to spin a yarn about an old Indian chief telling his grandson that all people have two wolves battling inside them, a good wolf and a bad.
The one that wins, the chief says, is the one you feed. “Feed the good wolf,” Quinn tells his people.
One air marshal based in Atlanta said he was furious several months ago when he heard that Quinn had been dismissing marshals with complaints as “amateurs.” But after Quinn spoke at a training session recently and spent 21/2 hours taking questions, the marshal’s view changed.
“To see where he plans to go, and to hear it, helped me. We always look at things from our point of view, and we’ve got to understand we’re a small part of it,” the marshal said. Quinn “earned a lot of respect from me,” he said, adding: “I spoke with my wife and said, ‘I owe him an apology.’ ”
Still, the Atlanta marshal said he has applied for other jobs. “I think it’s a little early to run out on it and give up hope. I’m being patient. I said I would give it a full year. Most everyone I talked to is giving it a full year.”