L.A. GIRDS SOFT SPOTS AGAINST TERRORISTS.

Byline: BETH BARRETT Staff Writer

In the five years since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks shattered the nation's security and innocence, $1 billion has been plunged into efforts to protect Los Angeles County's 10 million residents from a similar catastrophe.

New surveillance technologies. More sophisticated intelligence strategies. Cutting-edge equipment. Beefed-up security around potential targets. Model command centers. Extra investigators. Improved law enforcement cooperation, coordination and communication. Stockpiles of medical supplies.

Despite the unprecedented scramble to make the region safer, few doubt another attack on the scale of Sept. 11, 2001, will be attempted.

``It's not the earthquakes and fires that we really need to be ready for. ... That's not where our weakness is,'' Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa told the Daily News last October, just three months after his inauguration. ``I think it's biological and chemical terrorism -- and the dirty bomb.''

Villaraigosa said Friday that in the past year, the region and city have more aggressively funded counterterrorism measures, and he's grown more comfortable with the security umbrella.

``You can never completely protect -- or prevent a terrorist strike against -- a city,'' he said. ``But I think we've made huge strides, and that gives me a huge deal of satisfaction in knowing we've engaged in the necessary preparations to keep our city safe.''

But experts and enforcement officials acknowledge that while defenses have become stronger since 2001, vulnerabilities remain widespread.

Federal funds are inadequate and bogged down in bureaucracy. And local officials estimate they still need more than $600 million for more safeguards.

``It's like the advent of a new disease, except it's even worse. You're not facing the natural rhythm of life ... but groups of people whose focus is on innovative ways to attack us,'' said Deputy Mayor Maurice Suh, who oversees federal homeland security grants for the area.

Trickling down

While California has received $1.4 billion from the federal government since the attacks, much of the money was bottled up until three years ago.

Los Angeles County has received about $233 million of $1.2 billion that had been allocated through fiscal 2005, and it is to get $80.3 million more this year.

There are other pots of homeland security money doled out to the region's law enforcement agencies, airports, seaports and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

City and county agencies have ponied up millions of dollars to protect sources of water and power. The city's Department of Water and Power alone has spent $202 million, with $280 million more budgeted over the next five years.

Under a plan for the city, Villaraigosa has set aside more than $3 million for security and intelligence efforts. And then there are the hundreds of millions of dollars spent by local, privately owned businesses to secure their properties.

Meanwhile, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's infrastructure bond proposal on the November ballot includes $100 million for seaport security statewide, including Los Angeles and Long Beach ports.

``The country is unquestionably safer, and that spills over into Los Angeles,'' said Jack Riley, a homeland security expert with the Rand Corp. ``We have done a much better job of disrupting the (terrorist) organizations, eroding or degrading some of their human capital. We've captured or killed some very important terrorists. We're doing a much better job of keeping them out of the country.''

But many of the pieces in L.A.'s terrorism shield have chinks in them.

Suh said dozens of items on the city's wish list remain only partially funded.

Patchwork

Years after vowing to create an interoperable communications system for all emergency agencies in the Los Angeles and Long Beach region, officials said in a federal grant request this year that they still need an estimated $400 million for it.

Currently, the region depends on a system that patches agencies' radios together in a time-consuming process.

``It takes precious minutes to create interoperability,'' said Los Angeles Police Department Deputy Chief Mark Leap, who commands LAPD's Counterterrorism and Criminal Intelligence Bureau.

Tens of millions of dollars also are needed to make data collected by various agencies easier to share and analyze, Leap said.

And connecting regional intelligence centers throughout the state would cost an additional $20 million or so.

Other equipment is on order in L.A., including a vehicle loaded with computers, cameras, maps and high-tech gadgets that can send detailed real- time situation reports from the field.

Limits on using federal dollars to hire personnel have placed strains on the city's general fund to pay salaries and benefits for counterterrorism officers and support staff.

L.A. city government alone has spent $54 million on LAPD officers who handle counterterrorism, emergency response and related matters since the bureau Leap commands was created in 2003.

Taxpayers footed $6 million more in early 2003 for protective gear for emergency responders.

Critics say seaport screening of cargo remains haphazard, A $70 million state-of-the-art container inspection facility at Terminal Island is under design and several years from completion.

``I think it's largely a drop in the bucket,'' said Jon Haveman, a contributing editor and researcher at the nonprofit Public Policy Institute of California.

Five years after the worst terrorist attack in U.S. history, key counterterrorism investigation operations are just now being pulled together with a fraction of full staffing.

The new Joint Regional Intelligence Center in Norwalk -- intended as a model of around-the-clock intelligence gathering, sharing and analyses among seven Southern California counties -- is a little over halfway to its staffing goal of 62 analysts.

About 10 LAPD officers are assigned to the Norwalk center -- a $5 million cooperative venture of the FBI, LAPD, Sheriff's Department and other law enforcement agencies throughout the region. The LAPD plans eventually to assign 22..

Planners envision around-the-clock staffing of the joint center, but analysts had to be called in last month because it wasn't open late at night when word first surfaced about a foiled terrorist plot to blow up U.S.-bound jetliners in Britain.

``All equals''

Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton supports the center concept, saying its emphasis on broad sharing of intelligence is revolutionary.

``There is no one entity that is over the other. They are all equals in that room,'' Bratton said. ``That's a reflection of the importance that we're placing on the gathering of intelligence, the analysis of it across jurisdictional lines.''

Meanwhile, Operation Archangel -- a more than $10 million effort to identify and protect hundreds of potential terrorist targets in the region -- has been operating with about 15 people, or just one-third of full staffing.

Since 2001, the LAPD has ``temporarily'' assigned 73 officers to its counter-terrorism efforts and is looking for funding to hire permanent replacements in their former jobs.

LAPD Lt. Tom McDonald, in charge of Operation Archangel, said practicality and manpower play a major role in determining security for potential targets.

``The reality of it is, it becomes sort of a jack-of-all trades, master of none. So we have to focus on that which is the most important to us and most valuable to deploy the limited resources we have,'' McDonald said.

Funding increased

But Bratton notes that overall federal funding for L.A. has increased, and he defends the progress law enforcement officials have made.

``We've come such a phenomenally long way in such a short period of time,'' Bratton said in a July interview.

``To that extent, I'm sitting here feeling very comfortable where we are in trying to protect one of the highest-priority terrorist targets in this country, if not the world -- that we're much further along than we were four years ago,'' he said.

Bratton said Southern California's history of natural disasters has honed interagency emergency response capabilities. And for nearly 30 years, state rules have required agencies to operate under a unified command structure during disasters -- a history now paying off in terrorism interdiction.

``As a case in point, right now up in Hollywood at the Kodak Theatre, there's a couple of bomb threats that have come in from Saudi Arabia ... about a suicide bomb. And with that intelligence, the ability to analyze it, we're following up on that,'' Bratton recently said.

Ultimately, officials determined there was no real threat. The LAPD bomb squad, fire officials, sheriff's deputies and other first responders turned it into a training exercise while tourists sipped lattes and kids with ice cream strolled the landmark complex.

John Miller, the FBI's assistant director in Washington, D.C., said counterterrorism measures in the last half-decade have boosted security across the nation and Southern California.

But Miller, who as a journalist interviewed al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan in 1998, said evolving terrorism tactics demand more sophisticated intelligence gathering, analyses and cooperation.

``What you're seeing is a shifting in the post-9-11 paradigm. ... As al-Qaida has been decentralized by the successes of the international intelligence communities, ... the more diffuse threat is growing up out of our own streets,'' he said.

``Al-Qaida has gone largely from being an organization to a state of mind.''

beth.barrett(at)dailynews.com

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Security gains and gaps

SOURCE: Daily News research