Quotes of the Day
Michael Duell was not unhappy about the long flight. No jangling cell phones, no nagging e-mails. Plus, it was New Year's Eve, so no Dick Clark. "I find these flights very relaxing," says the engineer, 45, from Oakton, Va. "I actually get a lot of work done." This particular British Airways flight, arching across the Atlantic from London's Heathrow to Dulles airport outside Washington, was wonderfully unremarkable. Only the people on the ground watching it land would have seen the two F-16 fighter jets gliding behind the plane.
It was not until the end of Flight 223 that Duell noticed anything unusual. "We didn't go to the terminal. We just stopped on the tarmac, maybe a quarter of a mile away. And we just sat." And sat. The crew instructed passengers to keep their phones off and their passports in hand. Anyone who needed to go to the bathroom was escorted by a crew member, who waited at the door. Men in dark jackets milled around outside, and the plane was roped off with yellow police tape. Finally, after an hour and a half, the 247 passengers were shepherded in small groups onto the floodlit tarmac and into mobile lounges. Officials checked their passports and bags, questioning a few passengers more intensely than others, and five hours after landing, Duell met his wife. She had been waiting for him in the terminal, wondering with dozens of others what had become of Flight 223. "British Airways did a fine job," says Duell. "My only issue is that we weren't told anything. There was a dearth of information."
|
|
||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||
Clarity was not forthcoming. Flight 223 would be canceled the next day and the day after that. A U.S. official told TIME that intelligence suggested terrorists may have wanted to blow up Flight 223 or crash it into a building in Washington. More than a dozen other flights to or from Paris, London, Los Angeles, Washington, Riyadh and Mexico City were scrapped in a week and a half, starting on Christmas Eve. It was a strange period of aviation lottery that may become more commonplace as authorities continue to hunt, with imperfect information, for would-be al-Qaeda hijackers. All told, at least 27 flights were canceled, detained, rerouted or tailed by fighter jets — ready, as a last resort, to shoot down the planes should they deviate from their courses. We may never know whether an attack was prevented. What is clear is that U.S. officials had gathered what they believed to be extremely disturbing intelligence; equally clear is that their ability to confirm such intelligence remains lacking.
A rash of anxiety began working its way through Washington in early December, when a source overseas whom U.S. officials consider well placed indicated that al-Qaeda may have been planning a spectacular hijacking to coincide with Christmas. Then that generalized fear got starkly specific: messages mentioning Air France flight numbers and routes (but not dates) were electronically intercepted by U.S. intelligence. As the initial warnings were corroborated, the Bush Administration decided to raise the nation's terrorism alert to high from elevated — to orange from yellow. The accumulation of intelligence "got everybody as scared as I've seen them," says a Bush Administration official. "Each time in the past, there have been differing views about raising the threat level. This time there was no dissent."
Meanwhile, passenger lists for Air France flights scheduled around Christmas included about a dozen names that were "of interest," says a U.S. intelligence official. Most notable was a name matching that of a Tunisian jihadist who holds a pilot's license. On Christmas Eve six Air France flights between Paris and Los Angeles were summarily canceled. "The Americans came to us with extremely detailed and explicit intelligence information," says a French official. "The Americans felt with so many questions still looming, the safest thing would be to cancel the flights — an opinion we shared. It's as simple as that."
Even before the U.S. warning, the French had been worried about a holiday-season attack. Plainclothes members of an elite branch of the French police were installed on international flights that were considered sensitive. But so far, French officials have nothing tangible to show for the abundance of caution. The passenger suspected of being a Tunisian radical turned out to be a child who coincidentally shared the same name. Likewise, the British Airways flight to Dulles — a route that had also been mentioned in electronic chatter — netted no arrests.
The mistaken identity was a reminder that it is hard to screen passengers based on names alone. Because full Arabic names are often complex and because there is no standard way of romanizing Arabic, one name can be rendered in English many different ways. What's more, though U.S. officials have been calling for the creation of a single watch list that would integrate suspicious-person lists across all relevant agencies, it has yet to happen. This is despite the fact that two of the 9/11 hijackers traveled that day although they were on a watch list. Just last month, a federal law-enforcement source told TIME, a passenger on the Transportation Security Administration's no-fly list flew on a foreign carrier from Europe and landed in one of America's biggest airports. Only afterward was he informed by a U.S. officer that he would not be allowed to fly to the U.S. again.
For all its failings, however, a jittery homeland defense may be better than a sleepy one. Despite strained relations between Washington and Paris over the war in Iraq, it was a French official who made the best case in defense of the Americans last week. "It's interesting how people still love to talk about missed signals before Sept. 11 and second-guess U.S. authorities' failures to see it coming. Yet the same people are now asking mocking questions about how unnecessary these ongoing measures may be," says the official. "That's the problem in the post — Sept. 11 world. The only certainty is that you can never be too careful."
- Amanda Ripley