WHAT'S PROTECTED: CONFUSION BETWEEN TARGET LIST, GRANTS.

Byline: Sean Holstege Staff Writer

What do the La Brea Tar Pits and the Golden Gate Bridge have in common? Both rank high on California's list of terrorist targets.

The FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force office in San Francisco and the U.S. Secret Service office in Sacramento? In the bottom 20 of a 624-target list.

A major Los Angeles freeway interchange appears high on the list, but no other interchange anywhere in the state qualifies, according to the classified list of potential targets reviewed as part of a newspaper investigation. The location of the interchange was withheld for security reasons.

How California ranked those targets and why officials largely ignored the list as they doled out money to protect the public against a terrorist attack is a story of expediency and hip-shot planning and a lack of clarity about the mission.

``I wouldn't put much stock in that list. That list is SWAG, a scientific, wild-assed guess,'' said George Vinson, a former FBI agent who served as Homeland Security Adviser under Gov. Gray Davis and was the chief architect of California's counterterror plans. ``It was put together quickly.''

Two weeks after 9-11, the Davis administration established the California Anti-Terrorism Information Center, or CATIC. It was the first state terrorism center in the country.

With a broad definition of terrorism, CATIC set about pigeonholing and ranking possible targets. The state relied on a military assessment method, nicknamed CARVER, to evaluate threats in war zones and turned to the California National Guard for advice.

Analysts looked at how critical, accessible, recognizable and vulnerable a target was, how quickly it could recuperate and how widespread the attack aftermath would be. Each factor got a score and the target with the biggest total score topped the list.

In a February 2003 list, nine of the top 10 targets were transportation facilities - ports, airports and bridges. The other was the tourist icon Disneyland.

The 624-target list, which later grew by about 20 sites, featured power, water and transportation facilities, popular tourist destinations, plus key government facilities and tall buildings - all obvious sites.

But CATIC's rankings are also littered with errors, including sites located incorrectly, and quirks such as ranking the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District's Transbay Tube lower than Harris Ranch, the Interstate 5 beef mecca.

Before 9-11, the FBI played a pivotal role in identifying potential terrorist targets under President Clinton's Decision Directive 63 signed in 1998. The directive established the National Infrastructure Protection Center and ordered the FBI to fuse the work of federal agencies and private industry to identify targets and threats by 2003.

Paula Wendell was tapped to run the center's Key Asset Program. She's now an assistant special agent in charge at the FBI's San Francisco division.

But 9-11 changed everything. The new Department of Homeland Security took over the role, but experts describe a system that is poorly coordinated at all levels.

The FBI, for instance, has counterterrorism analysts who sift through leads about plots all day long but the agency has no direct say in what to protect.

On the other end, the people protecting targets locally are not the people with the best knowledge of what terrorists might be planning.

``Public attention tends to shift as our political leadership careens from one threat to another,'' longtime Rand terrorism expert Brian Jenkins said.

Instead, he urged the government to ``watch what terrorists do.''

``For al-Qaida, they have a playbook. They do the same thing over and over and it becomes a core competency, like boat bombs.''

Into the breach stepped CATIC.

Analysts came up with more than 600 priority targets, some as obscure as 20-screen cineplexes, others as vast and impossible to defend as Yosemite National Park. An attack on any was plausible, and the list's sense of priority withered.

Locals had ideas of their own.

Targetless Madera County worried about pesticide storage at farms and propane tanks at mountain homes.

Ventura County has eight targets on the state's list but locals came up with more than 100, most of them government buildings.

Vinson and California Office of Homeland Security Deputy Director Michael Levy said locals know best. They designed the homeland security grant system to reflect that.

``I didn't believe the state ought to make that determination,'' Vinson said. ``We shouldn't be meddling that deep into what they're doing, as long as they're getting good equipment.''

Michael Levy, thumbing through California's homeland security grants, said the state is moving toward assigning grants to the places with targets.

``You're not going to see grant managers who know where the targets are. It's not coordinated,'' Levy said. ``Do I think we'll get to that point? Yes. But we're not there yet.''

Sean Holstege is a reporter for the Oakland Tribune.