Unfriendly skies: courageous federal agents are warning against airport security weaknesses that existed prior to 9/11--and still exist today.

Bogdan Dzakovic is one of America's elite warriors in the fight against terrorism. Incredibly, he is being punished for telling the truth about our nation's continuing dangerous vulnerability and for exposing federal agencies and bureaucrats that are putting the public at risk. If federal officials had heeded his repeated warnings prior to the catastrophic attacks of September 11, 2001, that terrible tragedy might have been averted and thousands of lives very well could have been saved.

The larger tragedy, says Dzakovic, is that the same official mind-set that invited the 9/11 calamity continues to persist--despite the expenditure of billions of dollars on homeland security, and despite official claims that security procedures have dramatically improved. In his testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Special Agent Dzakovic warned that if current patterns of official behavior continue, "we are doomed to suffer more and more 9-11 tragedies. It is only a matter of time."

These dangerous behavior patterns, he said, constitute "three strikes against public safety." They include: "Lack of personal accountability for all levels of government service; repression of government professionals exercising the freedom to warn of security breakdowns caused by mismanagement; and abuses of secrecy as an excuse to cover up the government's own misconduct." According to Dzakovic, they are endemic at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA), the branch of the Department of Homeland Security that now has authority over airports, ocean ports and other transport facilities and modes of transportation.

At the time of the 9/11 attacks, Dzakovic was a 14-year veteran of the Security Division of the Federal Aviation Administration. He started off his FAA career as a field agent and Federal Air Marshal, then served as a Team Leader in the Air Marshal program. Since 1995, he had served as a Team Leader of the FAA's Red Team, which conducted undercover tests on airport security through simulated terrorist attacks.

"We were extraordinarily successful in destroying U.S. Flag commercial aircraft and killing large numbers of innocent people in these simulated attacks," he told the 9/11 Commission on May 22, 2003. "This occurred with such regularity and ease," he continued, "as to present a frightening picture of the sorry state of aviation security on a worldwide basis, including our domestic airports."

It was Special Agent Dzakovic's job to think like a terrorist and to expose security weaknesses so that they could be corrected. He was very good at his job. The problem was (and is, even after 9/11) that despite all the hi-octane talk from officialdom about stepping up aviation security, very little effort was made to fix the outrageous failures that were an open invitation to terrorists and a virtual guarantee of future catastrophe.

"Although we breached security with ridiculous ease up to 90% of the time," Dzakovic told the commission, "the FAA suppressed these warnings. Instead we were ordered not to write up our findings (in some cases) and not to retest airports where we found particularly egregious vulnerabilities to see if the problems had been fixed. Finally, the agency started providing advance notification of when we would be conducting our 'undercover' tests and what we would be checking."

Unheeded Warnings

All of this was before the 9/11 attacks. Dzakovic had become so certain of impending disaster from a terrorist attack and so frustrated with the continued official denial and cover-up at FAA that he decided to try other channels. In May 2001--months before the fateful attacks--he personally delivered a copy of a videotape exposing incredible security lapses at Boston's Logan International Airport to the office of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

The videotape was a copy of an investigative report aired on May 6, 2001 by Boston's WFXT Channel 25, a Fox-TV affiliate. With the help of Brian Sullivan, a recently retired FAA Risk Management Specialist, and Steve Elson, a retired FAA Red Team leader, WFXT reporter Deborah Sherman conducted tests of security at Logan International. Using a hidden camera, the Fox team recorded 65 serious security failures and violations, providing dramatic visual validation of the reports by Dzakovic, Sullivan and other whistleblowers of the dangerous laxity, negligence and incompetence of those responsible for security at Logan.

Sherman's video camera showed repeated penetration of security by Fox "passengers" with metal knives that should have been easily detected. The video also showed that common lead-lined film bags--which prevent the airport x-ray machines from seeing the contents of the bag, as well as anything lying beneath the bag--were routinely passed through without inspection. Former FAA Special Agent Steve Elson pointed out to Fox viewers that these bags could just as easily contain knives, guns or explosives as film. All in all, the Logan screeners had worse than a 90 percent failure rate. Adding to the drama, by simply watching airline employees go in and out of secure doors, Deborah Sherman was able to learn the secret combinations to all the doors of a particular airline on that concourse and demonstrated how she was able to use those button codes to gain access to sensitive areas.

On May 7, 2001, the day after WFXT aired its report on Logan, Brian Sullivan sent a letter to Senator Kerry's Washington, D.C., office urgently requesting that he investigate the failures exposed by the television station. The letter warned that Logan was ripe for a "coordinated attack" involving multiple flights. "It is time for the truth to be known," Agent Sullivan wrote, "before an incident occurs."

"With the concept of jihad, do you think it would be difficult for a determined terrorist to get on a plane and destroy himself and all other passengers?" Sullivan asked Kerry. "Think what the result would be of a coordinated attack which took down several domestic flights on the same day. The problem is that with our current screening, this is more than possible." In fact, he warned that, "considering current threats, it is almost likely."

"We don't have to wait for a tragedy to occur to act," Agent Sullivan's letter reads. "There are simple, cost-effective means to improve the system now." He warned that it was useless to depend on the Department of Transportation's Office of Inspector General (DOT OIG), since it had repeatedly proven itself complicit in the agency's ongoing cover-ups. "The DOT OIG has become an ineffective overseer of the FAA," he charged. "Scathing reports have been developed on airport/airline security and FAA facility security. Still, the culture continues to perpetuate itself and managers have been promoted up the chain, despite the fact that they've supported this facade of security and abused line agents who dare to speak the truth."

What was Sen. Kerry's response to these revelations of gaping security holes in his backyard? Bogdan Dzakovic says that he did not hear back from Kerry or anyone else on his staff. Agent Sullivan did receive a six-sentence letter from the senator--three months later--acknowledging receipt of the video. In the letter, dated July 24, 2001, Sen. Kerry said he had passed the video on to the Transportation Department's Inspector General, the same DOT OIG that Sullivan had cited in his letter as being a key part of the problem. In other words, Senator Kerry was passing the buck. Yet, in his campaign commercials Kerry has claimed to have "sounded the alarm on terrorism years before 9-11."

President Bush's loyalists have been quick to cite Kerry's letter and his failure to investigate the Logan deficiencies as proof of his irresponsibility in national security matters. However, what the Bush partisans fail to mention is that Sullivan and Dzakovic also have repeatedly hit brick walls with officials in the new Bush administration.

A month after the 9/11 attacks, Dzakovic filed a Whistleblower Disclosure with the federal Office of Special Council (OSC). The OSC directed Norman Mineta, President Bush's secretary of transportation, to report back on Dzakovic's charges. What did Secretary Mineta do? The same thing that Sen. Kerry had done months before: turn the investigation over to the same OIG that whistleblowers bad been complaining was part of the cover-up!

If U.S. officials weren't paying attention to America's security (or lack thereof), our enemies certainly were. Mohammed Atta, the operational ringleader for the 9/11 hijackers, spent considerable time in the months before the attack casing Logan International Airport. Al-Qaeda hideouts raided after 9-11 yielded copies of U.S. government reports on our deplorable airport security that had been translated into Arabic. The terrorists were studying our vulnerabilities, while our officials were pointedly ignoring these same weaknesses. Logan had been cited repeatedly and fined for failing to pass security tests. On September 11, two flights hijacked at Logan brought down the Twin Towers in New York.

The FAA has been absorbed into the TSA, and much of the FAA management that was responsible for the horrible plight of U.S. aviation security has been promoted. In his testimony before the 9-11 Commission, Bogdan Dzakovic stated that despite the fact that the federal government has lavished billions of dollars on the TSA, he is in agreement with other aviation security whistleblowers who insist that our airports "are not safer now than before 9-11." "The main difference [between then and now]," he said, "is that life is now more miserable for passengers."

Dzakovic reminded the commission that "not one person has been disciplined for mismanaging an agency [the FAA] that operated in a manner that was [according to the OSC] 'a substantial and specific danger to public safety,' contributing directly to the nearly 3,000 deaths on 9-11 as well as turning this country upside down. "Instead of being held accountable, he said, "many of these same managers have been promoted within TSA and are key players in how TSA executes its missions. Those managers that didn't transfer to TSA are still with FAA, and are managing the FAA internal investigations/security mission and its hazardous materials mission in precisely the same way as it mismanaged its previous aviation security mission."

And what about the FAA personnel who had done their jobs properly and had tried (in vain) to institute reforms that might have prevented 9/11? They received demotions instead of promotions. As Agent Dzakovic told the 9/11 Commission: "During most of 2002, my primary job was punching holes in paper and putting orientation binders together (and other menial work) for the hundreds of newly hired TSA employees." He told THE NEW AMERICAN that, as far as his supervisors were concerned, he could report to work and read novels, play video games or twiddle his thumbs. Instead, he used the time to study terrorism and security issues. "My current job," he says, "is even further removed from keeping bombs, weapons and terrorists off planes." Now the TSA has Bogdan Dzakovic, one of our nation's top counterterrorism and aviation security experts, playing flunky to new trainees fresh off the street.

Smothered With Secrecy

The TSA is also attempting to silence Dzakovic and fellow whistleblowers through what Dzakovic charges are illegal secrecy policies. He told the 9/11 Commission:

   In fact, the final report into my
   charges is illegally being kept secret,
   off the public record. The law
   only permits publicly withholding
   classified information from reports
   into whistleblower charges. There
   was no classified information in the
   [Inspector General] report, but FAA
   refused to let the Special Counsel
   have it without a promise to maintain
   secrecy because the report has "sensitive
   but unclassified" information.
   This is a new concept, which allows
   information to have the secrecy status
   of being classified without any of the
   corresponding procedural checks and
   balances. This free ride is used for information
   whose contents don't justify
   being marked as classified. It is
   ironic that a report confirming public
   safety threats from abuses of secrecy
   is being kept secret.

The Bush administration has crafted even more troubling secrecy rules. Dzakovic told the 9/11 Commission that "secrecy enforced by repression is being institutionalized through another new concept of unclassified secrecy called 'Critical Infrastructure Information (CII),' which can be virtually anything provided by industry to the Department to assist in the 'War on Terrorism.'" He explained the perils of this secrecy in his May 22 testimony: "If an employee blows the whistle with this unclassified CII evidence, it is a criminal act subject to immediate termination from the government, and up to a year in jail. This new CII form of secrecy was passed as part of the Homeland Security Act. If it had been law when I blew the whistle, I could have been fired and be sitting in jail, instead of being vindicated and testifying today."

However, the 9/11 Commission was not interested in the genuine concerns brought up by experts such as Bogdan Dzakovic. He is mentioned as a witness in the commission's report (in the appendix, on page 441), but none of his important testimony is included. Neither did the commission show any interest in holding anyone accountable, something that virtually all security and law enforcement experts insist is absolutely essential if the lapses that led to 9/11 are to be fixed. Instead, the commission has fixated on building a larger, more centrally controlled police/intelligence bureaucracy, under the control of a federal intelligence czar.

On September 13, Bogdan Dzakovic joined several other federal whistleblowers at a press conference in Washington, D.C., to dispute the commission's findings and recommendations. (See, "Experts Challenge the 9/11 Report," in the October 4 issue of THE NEW AMERICAN.) He recounted much of the testimony that he had given the commission but that had disappeared down the panel's memory hole. The press conference, organized by former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds, included whistleblowers from U.S. Customs, FBI, FAA, CIA and TSA--all of whom told similar horror stories of abysmal security and institutional corruption, cover-up and retaliation against agents who take seriously their oaths to uphold the law and defend our citizens.

On Fire for the Truth

Retired FAA Red Team Leader Steve Elson attended the whistleblower press conference and is one of the 25 signatories to the statement they issued. He did not speak at the conference, but THE NEW AMERICAN interviewed him later at his home in Virginia. Steve Elson is a man on fire, and America can be thankful that he is committed to, in his own words, "honoring the oath that I took "to support and defend' my country and 'provide for the common defense.'" "That oath," he notes, "has no expiration date." He has stayed on the job at his own expense, even after retiring. With more than 30 years in special warfare, covert operations and counterterrorism--from Southeast Asia to Western Europe and Latin America--he is not a man to be intimidated. Nor does he suffer fools (or traitors) lightly. When it comes to defending this country, he is as serious as a heart attack. "There is no excuse for what happened on September 11," he says angrily. "The terrorist threats out there were well known, as were our vulnerabilities. All of this talk and debate about what specific intelligence we had [about the 9/11 attacks] is really a diversion. So many of us had been screaming for years and producing report after report documenting that our borders, our airports and seaports were completely wide open, that our security was a farce."

When Steve Elson discusses security and counterterrorism issues, you know he knows what he's talking about. As a Navy SEAL, Elson says he is fortunate to have worked with some of the best special operations people in the world. Between 1987 and 1989, he served as the operations officer and then executive officer of the Navy SEALs' famous anti-terrorist "Red Cell." It was the job of the Red Cell to pose as terrorists or Soviet commandos to penetrate and expose the security weaknesses of our ships, military bases and other facilities. Elson's unit proved too successful in its operations, often to the embarrassment of military and government officials. From 1995 to 1999, he employed these same skills with the FAA, where he logged thousands of hours evaluating and testing airport ramps, perimeters and terminal checkpoints. Much of that time was spent as leader of an FAA Red Team, which mimicked his Navy Red Cell experience.

Elson says he resigned from the FAA, angry and disgusted, because "I was convinced that the FAA was going to get a lot of people killed." Those in charge refused to take seriously the repeated proof of egregious security failures. He points to a 1998 vulnerability study of San Francisco Airport. "Out of 450 attempts to breach their security, what percentage of attempts do you think succeeded?" he asks. The answer: "As the report shows, 99.11 percent. That's another way of saying virtually 100 percent failure, from a security perspective."

Having determined that working within the system was useless, Elson decided to apply pressure from without. While continuing as a consultant for police and security agencies, he began hooking up with television news stations to produce investigative exposes of the airport security crisis. In addition to the Fox expose of Boston's Logan Airport mentioned above, he has advised on and appeared in nearly 20 other similar airport "stings" with NBC, ABC and CBS affiliates across the country. Many of these tests documented failure rates of 80-100 percent.

Perhaps the most astonishing video "sting" was captured by Denver's Channel 4 News (CBS) at Denver International Airport. The news footage first showed a licensed explosives specialist blowing up a car. Then the specialist was shown taking the same explosive substance that had just demolished the vehicle and lavishly smearing it on his belt, shoes, luggage and laptop computer. A TSA official interviewed by the station said it would be "very difficult" to get any explosive through their airport. But the explosive-laden passenger and his luggage sailed through undetected, even though his laptop was swabbed by airport screeners and put through the explosive analyzer machine.

Elson's television exposes have reached millions of viewers and brought pressure to bear on politicians and federal officials. But he doesn't kid himself into thinking that we've turned the corner. He heatedly disputes claims by authorities that aviation security is better today than it was pre-9/11. "I've flown through a number of major airports recently and have witnessed most of the same old problems," he told THE NEW AMERICAN. "I agree with Bogdan [Dzakovic] that TSA is leaving us wide open to another 9/11-size attack. And shooting the messenger--which is what they are doing by attacking conscientious whistleblowers--is not going to fix this crisis. It will only increase the chances that we'll get hit bigger and harder next time."