Loopholes leave U.S. borders vulnerable

As terrorists have done before them, the hijackers of Sept. 11 took advantage of a cornerstone of American society - opening itself to foreigners.

By SYDNEY P. FREEDBERG
© St. Petersburg Times,
published November 25, 2001

They used aliases and posed as tourists. They faked out diplomats abroad and zipped through inspections at U.S. airports. Once within our borders, they melted into the melting pot.

Then they killed.

Like millions of foreigners who come to the United States each year, the 19 hijackers who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks on America entered through the front door, on legal visitors' visas.

They exploited a litany of loopholes in the system:

Several didn't need an interview for permission to come here.

One claimed he was coming to study English, but never showed up at school.

Three claimed they were coming for business or pleasure, but enrolled in flight schools instead.

Two were later placed on a terrorist watch list, but no one could find them.

Two were allowed to stay after their visas expired.

Two, maybe more, apparently traveled on stolen passports, and all 19 managed to get U.S. Social Security cards.

Inadvertently, the U.S. government rolled out a welcome mat for all of them.

While American bombers pound Afghanistan, foreign terrorists and criminals can slip into the United States through a chaotic patchwork of immigration laws and procedures. While commandos hit Taliban caves one by one, an overworked corps of visa processors, customs agents and immigration inspectors struggle on the real front line in the war against terrorism.

"We must defend all our borders," says Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, a longtime critic of U.S. immigration policies. "Air, sea and land. North, south, east and west. It has to be a seamless garment, or the terrorists are going to seek to come in through the weakest link."

But as the government belatedly moves to plug holes in the system, some experts wonder if it is up to the job.

"They're taking baby steps in the right direction, but only baby steps," says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, a research institute that has long pushed for stricter controls.

A system of contradictions

The people who run the system are caught in the cross-fire of competing missions.

At overseas embassies and consulates, which issue visas, American diplomats have a balancing act: They must promote U.S. commerce and travel in their host countries while ensuring security for the American people.

At the Immigration and Naturalization Service, which enforces the law, inspectors smooth the way for new citizens even as they try to deport growing numbers of illegal aliens.

Members of Congress and presidents, Democrat and Republican, have a history of mixed immigration messages as well.

Before Sept. 11, President Bush was considering an amnesty for millions of illegals, mostly from Mexico. Now, while insisting that America is still a welcoming country, his administration is cracking down on foreign visitors.

America rose to greatness by accepting outcasts from Europe, but the government began closing the door in the 1880s, when the number of Chinese immigrants soared. In 1965, Congress returned to more liberal policies, prompting a historic surge of immigrants -- an estimated 27-million, including illegals, to date.

In the 1980s, even as the system strained to absorb new arrivals, a powerful alliance of business and travel executives and ethnic groups pressed for looser policies.

Krikorian and other critics say that special interest groups eager for low-paying foreign workers have undermined immigration control by thwarting efforts to control the borders.

In 1986, Congress chipped away at the borders. Lawmakers ordered a trial program to let foreign visitors from designated countries into the United States for up to 90 days without a visa.

The visa is a screening mechanism to keep out criminals and terrorists. Law enforcement agents consider it the single most important tool for homeland security.

The government extended and expanded visa-free travel, which was a resounding success for the American economy, providing a golden stream of tourists, jobs and money. But it also provided an avenue for terrorists.

In the early 1990s, lawmakers continued to pass business-friendly migration policies.

Under one provision, they eliminated the so-called "ideological exclusion," making it harder to exclude people simply because they hold radical views.

Under another provision, Congress imposed a 45-minute time limit on the INS to inspect each planeload of arriving international travelers. The measure cut down on airport waiting times. But it also put growing pressure on airport immigration inspectors, who often find themselves with only a minute or so per passenger to catch impostors and potential terrorists.

Early red flags

Investigators raised concerns about the leaky system in 1993, after Islamic fundamentalists drove a bomb-laden truck into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center. The explosion killed six people, injured 1,000 others and caused more than $300-million in damage.

Consider this:

Six months before the attack, Ramzi Yousef, the ringleader, arrived in New York from Pakistan on a false Iraqi passport. He came without a visa but was allowed to stay after claiming political asylum. The INS released him because it didn't have space in a detention facility.

Mohammed Salameh, who rented the yellow Ryder van used in the bombing, came on a six-month tourist visa issued in Amman, Jordan, in 1988. He applied for legal residency and was turned down, but was still able to live for years in Jersey City, N.J., as he appealed that decision.

Eyad Ismoil, who drove the van with the bomb into the tower garage, came on a student visa in 1989, then dropped out after three semesters at Wichita State.

Yousef's traveling companion, Ahmad Mohammed Ajaj, tried to get in on a fake Swedish passport. But he got caught after airport inspectors found bombmaking manuals in his luggage. Sentenced to six months in prison for passport fraud, he still helped plan the bombing by sending messages to fellow conspirators.

The four plotters, plus two others, each got 240 years in prison. (Another suspect, an American named Abdul Rahman Yasin, is still on the run.)

After the bombing, the State Department mounted a sweeping effort to counter visa and passport fraud.

It shored up its out-of-date watch list of people who should not be granted visas.

Federal inspectors cracked down on aliens as the INS mushroomed -- from an agency with a $1.2-billion budget and a staff of 18,000 to almost a $5-billion budget and staff of more than 33,000.

At Congress' behest, the agency spent much of the money to stem the flow of border crossers wading across the Rio Grande from Mexico.

Yet for every step the government took, the terrorists stayed one step ahead. The 3,728-mile northern border, crossed by 100-million people a year, was still porous, an attractive entry point for terrorists.

In some spots, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., recently complained, the only nighttime security is a fluorescent orange cone along a wooded road.

"The nice (travelers) put them back after driving through," he said.

Despite a growing squad of document detectives zeroing in on fake passports and phony ID rings, Osama bin Laden and his foot soldiers found master forgers and travel agents to arrange high-quality fraudulent papers for their operatives.

Or they used connecting flights to America from busy gateway cities such as London, knowing U.S. immigration inspectors tend to give less scrutiny to visa-free travelers.

As federal agents increase scrutiny of foreign visitors, investigators worry that terrorist groups will try to enter the United States by corrupting public employees.

Last month, Glenn A. Fine, the Justice Department's inspector general, told a Senate subcommittee about six fraud schemes in which INS personnel got caught accepting bribes or falsifying official documents to let foreign aliens stay in the country.

Visa Express

Although the INS has taken much of the heat since Sept. 11, many of the problems began at two U.S. State Department offices in Saudi Arabia. That's where 15 of the 19 hijackers took the first step in their quest to enter the United States.

Federal agents are investigating whether any got their official papers under false pretenses.

Some of the hijackers got tourist visas to come here after reportedly honing their explosives skills at terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

The U.S. government opened the door for at least two -- and possibly as many as nine -- who used stolen passports, said Gaafar Allagany, chief of the information department at the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

And in May 2001, Hazma S.A. Alghamdi, also known as Hamza Alghamdi, arrived with a U.S. stamp of approval even though Finland turned him away. The Fins concluded after a background investigation that he lied on his visa application.

Investigators say Alghamdi, who lived in Delray Beach last summer, helped hijack United Airlines Flight 175 and crash it into the south tower of the World Trade Center.

"All of those people's names were run through our name check system," Mary Ryan, an assistant secretary of state, told a congressional panel last month. "We had nothing on any of them."

Ryan said the consular officers who granted the visas did nothing wrong. But before Sept. 11, the State Department's Office of Inspector General found that obtaining visas by fraud was "a constant problem" because of poorly trained officers, lax supervisors and "serious management deficiencies."

In 1996, a consular officer in Jerusalem approved a visa for Lafi Khalil to stay in the United States briefly en route to Ecuador. The officer later told investigators that the interview and review of his visa application took about three minutes. She didn't ask Khalil for his address in Israel, his ticket to Ecuador or how he would support himself. He didn't even sign the visa application.

Seven months later, police arrested Khalil and a fellow Palestinian in Brooklyn after a tip that they planned to bomb the New York City subway system.

"The '90s were a terrible, terrible decade for the State Department," Ryan said. "I think consular officers around the world are stretched just about as thin as they can possibly be. We do not have the personnel resources that we need to do the job the way it should be done."

Several former visa officers blame a culture that puts efficiency and foreign policy above U.S. security -- a charge the State Department denies.

Michael Springmann, a consular officer in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, from 1987 to 1989, said he issued more than 100 visas to unqualified applicants after pressure from his State Department bosses.

"Keep the Saudis happy," Springmann said he was told, apparently because they are America's biggest supplier of crude oil.

He said he later learned that visas went to terrorists recruited by the CIA and bin Laden to train in the United States for the war against the then-Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

"There is a strong fellowship between the U.S. and Saudi Arabia that sees through different eyes when it comes to Boeing, military installations and oil deals," added Michael Wildes, an immigration lawyer who has represented Saudi defectors and terror suspects.

After the Persian Gulf War in 1991, the visa situation became murkier. FBI agents complained that their Saudi counterparts hampered investigations into terror attacks, including a 1996 bombing on Dhahran that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. The Americans also suspected that the Saudi monarchy was doing little to root out terrorism on Saudi soil and to stop anti-American threats.

Yet, instead of tightening visa requirements, the U.S. government made it easier for Saudi visitors to come to America. Under a program called U.S. Visa Express, introduced four months before the Sept. 11 attacks, Saudis were allowed to arrange visas through 10 travel agencies -- often without coming to the U.S. Embassy or consulate for interviews.

Before Sept. 11, critics say, people from other Middle Eastern countries had a far tougher time getting visas.

The State Department counters that it approved Visa Express because Saudis were not known for using fraudulent travel documents and had a good record of complying with visa requirements.

Ryan told Congress she didn't know if any of the Sept. 11 hijackers gave false information on their visa applications, though she said there is no evidence of forgery.

State Department spokesmen deny a link between any of the terror suspects and the Visa Express program. They also say there is no indication the hijackers had a connection to Abdulla Noman, an alleged visa vendor who worked for the U.S. Commerce Department in the consulate in Jeddah.

Noman was charged earlier this month with accepting bribes to arrange visas for Saudi nationals entering the United States.

"He was the go-to man for people getting false visas in Saudi Arabia," Assistant U.S. Attorney Howard Zlotnick told a magistrate in Las Vegas. "It's no secret that the individuals on Sept. 11 came from Saudi Arabia with visas. The nature of that crime clearly poses a risk to the community until the FBI investigates who he provided visas to."

Missing links

A "colossal intelligence failure" led to the hijackings, the State Department's Ryan told Congress.

"We cannot be the outer ring of border security if we don't get information on people who seek to harm our country from intelligence and law enforcement agencies," she said, pointing a finger at the FBI for refusing to share information on possible terrorists.

Fine, the Justice Department's inspector general, noted that a 1999 audit had revealed a series of missing links in the FBI's handling of information. Agents sometimes forgot to enter important information into their database, and even when the information was there, they sometimes failed to find it.

There are dozens of computerized government watch lists designed to flag and stop criminals, terrorists, smugglers, extremists and visa violators. But the computer systems sometimes aren't programmed to talk to each other or can miss a terrorist simply if his name is translated with multiple spellings.

For weeks following the attacks, the INS had trouble figuring out the visa statuses of some of the hijackers because of different spellings on flight manifests and varying dates of birth.

Though the INS dismissed many of the complaints, auditors had been especially critical, before Sept. 11, of the agency's handling of information. Michael Bromwich, a former Justice Department inspector general, said the INS systems were so archaic and questionably managed that his investigators couldn't tell if a $2.6-billion technology upgrade was on schedule, within cost limits, or worked.

The names of four hijackers were apparently known to federal agents, but the information never made it to the right people in time. The New York Times reported that terror suspects Ahmed Alghamdi and Satam Al Suqami had been linked by a previous U.S. Customs Service investigation to al-Qaida operatives. In addition, Nawaf Alhazmi, also known as Nawaq Alhamzi, and Khalid Al Mihdhar, who had four aliases, were placed on a watch list after the CIA connected them to bin Laden.

But even the most complete watch list won't catch a killer who sneaks across a Canadian field. The most solid intelligence at home won't stop a terrorist whose homeland refuses to share information about suspect travelers. And U.S. officials say that in many foreign countries, law enforcement checks would be useless.

"You can buy them," Ryan said in her congressional testimony. "There's little purpose in trying to check the background of people who can, in effect, pay to get a clean police certificate."

Once within our borders, foreigners get lost in America.

Many of the Sept. 11 hijackers blended in by building new identities with different names and dates of birth. They paid ID salesmen $50 or $100 for fake addresses or phony driver's licenses, which they could use as identification to board planes. They collected bank records and residency forms.

All 19 managed to get our national identifier -- a Social Security card. The Social Security Administration says that six hijackers may have "fraudulently obtained" the cards.

The INS readily admits it has no system to track foreigners, no way of knowing whether visitors admitted on visas actually leave the country.

Under the current procedure, an airport immigration inspector completes a form for each arriving visitor, showing how long that visitor is allowed to stay. On the departing flight, airlines are supposed to collect the other half of the form and send it to the INS. But they often don't collect the forms, or foreigners forget to turn them in. In any event, there often is no trace of their departure.

The Justice Department said last week that two suspects, Nawaf Alhazmi and Satam Al Suqami, had become illegal after their visas expired. A third, Hani Hanjour, had a visa to study English, but failed to show up for class in Oakland, Calif.

"Just kind of disappeared in the country," Ryan said.

In 1996, Congress ordered the INS to set up a system to track aliens entering and leaving the country. A second nationwide data base would have kept track of foreign students.

Special interests derailed the systems. The Chamber of Commerce, Canadian officials, U.S. diplomats, immigration lawyers and travel executives complained that an entry-exit system would create long lines at the borders and slow commerce in border cities like Detroit.

Likewise, education groups objected to the foreign-student database because it could financially cripple some universities and stigmatize students.

But even with tracking systems, the INS admits it couldn't keep tabs on all the foreign visitors. With only 1,950 agents nationwide (fewer than the District of Columbia police force), they don't normally go after people on lapsed visas. They focus instead on aliens who commit more serious crimes.

"There are lots of priorities out there," Michael Becraft, acting deputy commissioner of the INS, told a congressional committee. "We have terrorists. We have criminal aliens. And we have had to prioritize in the past because we just don't have enough folks to go around."

-- Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Caryn Baird contributed to this report.

© 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

Contact the Times | Privacy Policy
Standard of Accuracy | Terms, Conditions & Copyright