Clinton vs. The Mossad

Mega..?

It was well known that there was an Israeli spy inside the Clinton White House. But Clinton ordered the FBI to cease searching for the mole, code-named "Mega". It is now known that "Mega" was not just Mossad spy but top Mossad agent in America. The cancellation of the hunt for "Mega" occurred at the same time Clinton warned Monica Lewinsky that their phone conversations were being recorded. This strongly suggests that Clinton was "persuaded" to call off the FBI's hunt for "Mega" with the threat of a recorded phone sex session being made public.

When Clinton brokered the Irsaeli-Palestinian peace negotiations between Yitzakh Rabin and Yasser Arraft, all three acquired, in the eyes of some, the status of Enemies of the State (of Israel).

Most Israeli lawmakers and politicians distance themselves from the Jewish extremists calling for the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin over the Oslo peace accords. However, Likud Party leader Benjamin Netanyahu actively curries their favor. On the floor of the Knesset, he often attacks Rabin for giving away “parts of our homeland.” After one particularly fiery speech, thousands of right-wing protesters gather in Jerusalem’s Zion Square, where they put of posters of Rabin wearing a Nazi SS uniform, display banners calling Rabin “Arafat’s Dog,” and chant, “Death to Rabin! Nazis! Judenrat!”—a particularly odious epithet referring to the “Jewish councils” that were forced by the Nazis to expedite the transfer of Jews to concentration camps. 

Housing Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer is horrified by the frenzy of the mob, and tells Netanyahu, who is orchestrating the demonstration, “You’d better restrain your people. Otherwise it will end in murder. They tried to kill me just now.… Your people are mad. If someone is murdered, the blood will be on your hands.… The settlers have gone crazy, and someone will be murdered here, if not today, then in another week or another month!” 

Netanyahu ignores the warning, and, basking in the chants of “Bibi! Bibi! Bibi!,” takes the podium, where he is optimistically introduced as the next prime minister of Israel. [UNGER, 2007, PP. 139-140]


October 6, 1995: Oslo II Agreement Leads to Assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Rabin 

 
Israel’s Knesset approves Oslo II (see September 13, 1993), a complex set of agreements between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) on the future of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. 

For Israeli law student Yigal Amir, this is the last straw. 

He has already made three half-hearted attempts to assassinate Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, but as of now he commits himself to carrying the deed through. For his part, Rabin continues to ignore warnings (see Early 1995) from Israeli intelligence and media reporters alike trying to alert him to the danger he is in from radical fundamentalists. [UNGER, 2007, PP. 140]


November 4, 1995: Israeli Prime Minister Rabin Assassinated

The sheet with the lyrics to the ‘Song of Peace,’ stained with Rabin’s blood. [Source: Knesset]

Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin is assassinated at a rally in Tel Aviv. Over 100,000 people have gathered in Kings of Israel Square to support Rabin and the Oslo peace process (see September 13, 1993 and October 6, 1995). 

The rally is designed to be light-hearted, in contrast with the angry, combative rallies staged by radical conservatives to oppose the peace agreements (see October 1995). Rabin gives a short radio interview before leaving the stage at the rally, and tells listeners, 

“People have their personal security but they do not have doubts that the path of peace should be pursued.” 

Rabin’s wife Leah is asked if her husband is wearing a bulletproof vest. “Have you gone crazy?” she replies. “What are we, in Africa?… I don’t understand the ideas you journalists have.” 

Meanwhile, law student Yigal Amir is sitting on a concrete flower planter in the parking lot. 

A guard notices Amir and whispers into his microphone, 

“For God’s sake. What’s that dark guy doing down there? Is he one of us?” 

When Rabin walks by Amir to go to his car, Amir pulls out a gun and fires three shots. Two hollow-point bullets strike Rabin in the chest, severing major arteries and destroying his spinal cord. The third strikes Rabin’s bodyguard in the arm. 

“It’s nothing!” Amir shouts. “It’s just a joke! Blanks, blanks!” 

Police seize Amir; the wounded bodyguard rushes Rabin to the hospital, where he is pronounced dead 90 minutes later. When the police inform Amir that Rabin has died, he tells them, 

“Do your work. I’ve done mine.” 

Turning to an officer, he adds, 

“Get some wine and cakes. Let’s have a toast.” 

Someone later goes through Rabin’s pockets and finds a bloodied piece of paper with the lyrics to a popular tune, “The Song of Peace,” copied on it. Rabin had joined in singing the song at the rally. Author Craig Unger later writes that aside from the personal tragedy of the assassination, 

“In part because of his legacy as a great Israeli military commander, no one in Israel was, or ever could be, a more forceful figure than Rabin in promoting the peace process. As a result, his murder was a devastating blow to the Oslo principle, the principle of land for peace.” 

[UNGER, 2007, PP. 141-143; KNESSET HOMEPAGE, 2008]




FBI Probed Israeli White House Espionage During Clinton Term


By J. Michael Waller and Paul M. Rodriguez

InsightMagazine.com Archive (5-29-00)

A foreign spy service appears to have penetrated secret communications in the Clinton administration, which has discounted security and intelligence threats.

The FBI is probing an explosive foreign-espionage operation that could dwarf the other spy scandals plaguing the U.S. government. Insight has learned that FBI counterintelligence is tracking a daring operation to spy on high-level U.S. officials by hacking into supposedly secure telephone networks. The espionage was facilitated, federal officials say, by lax telephone-security procedures at the White House, State Department and other high-level government offices and by a Justice Department unwillingness to seek an indictment against a suspect.

The espionage operation may have serious ramifications because the FBI has identified Israel as the culprit. It risks undermining U.S. public support for the Jewish state at a time Israel is seeking billions of tax dollars for the return of land to Syria. It certainly will add to perceptions that the Clinton-Gore administration is not serious about national security. Most important, it could further erode international confidence in the ability of the United States to keep secrets and effectively lead as the world's only superpower.

More than two dozen U.S. intelligence, counterintelligence, law-enforcement and other officials have told Insight that the FBI believes Israel has intercepted telephone and modem communications on some of the most sensitive lines of the U.S. government on an ongoing basis. The worst penetrations are believed to be in the State Department. But others say the supposedly secure telephone systems in the White House, Defense Department and Justice Department may have been compromised as well.

The problem for FBI agents in the famed Division 5, however, isn't just what they have uncovered, which is substantial, but what they don't yet know, according to Insight's sources interviewed during a year-long investigation by the magazine. Of special concern is how to confirm and deal with the potentially sweeping espionage penetration of key U.S. government telecommunications systems allowing foreign eavesdropping on calls to and from the White House, the National Security Council, or NSC, the Pentagon and the State Department.

The directors of the FBI and the CIA have been kept informed of the ongoing counterintelligence operation, as have the president and top officials at the departments of Defense, State and Justice and the NSC. A "heads up" has been given to the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, but no government official would speak for the record.

"It's a huge security nightmare," says a senior U.S. official familiar with the super-secret counterintelligence operation. "The implications are severe," confirms a second with direct knowledge. "We're not even sure we know the extent of it," says a third high-ranking intelligence official. "All I can tell you is that we think we know how it was done," this third intelligence executive tells Insight. "That alone is serious enough, but it's the unknown that has such deep consequences."

A senior government official who would go no further than to admit awareness of the FBI probe, says: "It is a politically sensitive matter. I can't comment on it beyond telling you that anything involving Israel on this particular matter is off-limits. It's that hot."

It is very hot indeed. For nearly a year, FBI agents had been tracking an Israeli businessman working for a local phone company. The man's wife is alleged to be a Mossad officer under diplomatic cover at the Israeli Embassy in Washington. Mossad - the Israeli intelligence service - is known to station husband-and-wife teams abroad, but it was not known whether the husband is a full-fledged officer, an agent or something else. When federal agents made a search of his work area they found a list of the FBI's most sensitive telephone numbers, including the Bureau's "black" lines used for wiretapping. Some of the listed numbers were lines that FBI counterintelligence used to keep track of the suspected Israeli spy operation. The hunted were tracking the hunters.

"It was a shock," says an intelligence professional familiar with the FBI phone list.

"It called into question the entire operation. We had been compromised. But for how long?"

This discovery by Division 5 should have come as no surprise, given what its agents had been tracking for many months. But the FBI discovered enough information to make it believe that, somehow, the highest levels of the State Department were compromised, as well as the White House and the NSC. According to Insight's sources with direct knowledge, other secure government telephone systems and/or phones to which government officials called also appear to have been compromised.

The tip-off about these operations - the pursuit of which sometimes has led the FBI on some wild-goose chases - appears to have come from the CIA, says an Insight source. A local phone manager had become suspicious in late 1996 or early 1997 about activities by a subcontractor working on phone-billing software and hardware designs for the CIA.

The subcontractor was employed by an Israeli-based company and cleared for such work. But suspicious behavior raised red flags. After a fairly quick review, the CIA handed the problem to the FBI for follow-up. This was not the first time the FBI had been asked to investigate such matters and, though it was politically explosive because it involved Israel, Division 5 ran with the ball. "This is always a sensitive issue for the Bureau," says a former U.S. intelligence officer. "When it has anything to do with Israel, it's something you just never want to poke your nose into. But this one had too much potential to ignore because it involved a potential systemwide penetration."

Seasoned counterintelligence veterans are not surprised. "The Israelis conduct intelligence as if they are at war. That's something we have to realize," says David Major, a retired FBI supervisory special agent and former director of counterintelligence at the NSC. While the U.S. approach to intelligence is much more relaxed, says Major, the very existence of Israel is threatened and it regards itself as is in a permanent state of war. "There are a lot less handcuffs on intelligence for a nation that sees itself at war," Major observes, but "that doesn't excuse it from our perspective."

For years, U.S. intelligence chiefs have worried about moles burrowed into their agencies, but detecting them was fruitless. The activities of Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard were uncovered by accident, but there remains puzzlement to this day as to how he was able to ascertain which documents to search, how he did so on so many occasions without detection, or how he ever obtained the security clearances that opened the doors to such secrets. In all, it is suspected, Pollard turned over to his Israeli handlers about 500,000 documents, including photographs, names and locations of overseas agents.

"The damage was incredible," a current U.S. intelligence officer tells Insight. "We're still recovering from it."

Also there has been concern for years that a mole was operating in the NSC and, while not necessarily supplying highly secret materials to foreign agents, has been turning over precious details on meetings and policy briefings that are being used to track or otherwise monitor government activities.

The current hush-hush probe by the FBI, and what its agents believe to be a serious but amorphous security breach involving telephone and modem lines that are being monitored by Israeli agents, has even more serious ramifications. "It has been an eye opener," says one high-ranking U.S. government official, shaking his head in horror as to the potential level and scope of penetration.

As for how this may have been done technologically, the FBI believes it has uncovered a means using telephone-company equipment at remote sites to track calls placed to or received from high-ranking government officials, possibly including the president himself, according to Insight's top-level sources. One of the methods suspected is use of a private company that provides record-keeping software and support services for major telephone utilities in the United States.

A local telephone company director of security Roger Kochman tells Insight, "I don't know anything about it, which would be highly unusual. I am not familiar with anything in that area."

U.S. officials believe that an Israeli penetration of that telephone utility in the Washington area was coordinated with a penetration of agents using another telephone support-services company to target select telephone lines. Suspected penetration includes lines and systems at the White House and NSC, where it is believed that about four specific phones were monitored - either directly or through remote sites that may involve numbers dialed from the complex.

"[The FBI] uncovered what appears to be a sophisticated means to listen in on conversations from remote telephone sites with capabilities of providing real-time audio feeds directly to Tel Aviv," says a U.S. official familiar with the FBI investigation. Details of how this could have been pulled off are highly guarded. However, a high-level U.S. intelligence source tells Insight: "The access had to be done in such a way as to evade our countermeasures =8A That's what's most disconcerting."

Another senior U.S. intelligence source adds: "How long this has been going on is something we don't know. How many phones or telephone systems we don't know either, but the best guess is that it's no more than 24 at a time as far as we can tell."

And has President Clinton been briefed? "Yes, he has. After all, he's had meetings with his Israeli counterparts," says a senior U.S. official with direct knowledge. Whether the president or his national-security aides, including NSC chief Sandy Berger, have shared or communicated U.S. suspicions and alarm is unclear, as is the matter of any Israeli response. "This is the first I've heard of it," White House National Security Council spokesman Dave Stockwell tells Insight. "That doesn't mean it doesn't exist or that someone else doesn't know."

Despite elaborate precautions by the U.S. agencies involved, say Insight's sources, this alleged Israeli intelligence coup came down to the weakest link in the security chain: the human element. The technical key appears to be software designs for telephone billing records and support equipment required for interfacing with local telephone company hardware installed in some federal agencies. The FBI has deduced that it was this sophisticated computer-related equipment and software could provide real-time audio feeds. In fact, according to Insight's sources, the FBI believes that at least one secure T-1 line routed to Tel Aviv has been used in the suspected espionage.

The potential loss of U.S. secrets is incalculable. So is the possibility that senior U.S. officials could be blackmailed for indiscreet telephone talk. Many officials do not like to bother with using secure, encrypted phones and have classified discussions on open lines.

Which brings the story back to some obvious questions involving the indiscreet telephone conversations of the president himself. Were they tapped, and, if so did they involve national-security issues or just matters of the flesh? Monica Lewinsky told Kenneth Starr, as recounted in his report to Congress, that Lewinsky and Clinton devised cover stories should their trysts be uncovered and/or their phone-sex capers be overheard.

Specifically, she said that on March 29, 1997, she and Clinton were huddled in the Oval Office suite engaging in a sexual act. It was not the first time. But, according to Lewinsky as revealed under oath to the investigators for the Office of Independent Counsel, it was unusual because of what the president told her. "He suspected that a foreign embassy was tapping his telephones, and he proposed cover stories," the Starr report says. "If ever questioned, she should say that the two of them were just friends. If anyone ever asked about their phone sex, she should say that they knew their calls were being monitored all along, and the phone sex was just a put on." In his own testimony before a federal grand jury, Clinton denied the incident. But later - much later - he admitted to improper behavior and was impeached but not convicted. U.S. District Court Judge Susan Webber Wright found him to have obstructed justice. Curiously, Starr never informed Congress whether the Lewinsky tale was true. For that matter, according to Insight's sources,Starr never bothered to find out from appropriate agencies, such as the FBI or the CIA, whether the monitoring by a foreign government of the president's conversations with Lewinsky occurred.

Insight has learned that House and Senate investigators did ask questions about these matters and in late 1998 were told directly by the FBI and the CIA (among others) that there was no truth to the Lewinsky claim of foreign tapping of White House phones. Moreover, Congress was told there was no investigation of any kind involving any foreign embassy or foreign government espionage in such areas.

But that was not true. In fact, the FBI and other U.S. agencies, including the Pentagon, had been working furiously and painstakingly for well over a year on just such a secret probe, and fears were rampant of the damage that could ensue if the American public found out that even the remotest possibility existed that the president's phone conversations could be monitored and the president subject to foreign blackmail. To the FBI agents involved, that chance seemed less and less remote.

The FBI has become increasingly frustrated by both the pace of its investigation and its failure to gain Justice Department cooperation to seek an indictment of at least one individual suspected of involvement in the alleged Israeli telephone intercepts. National security is being invoked to cover an espionage outrage. But, as a high law-enforcement source says, "To bring this to trial would require we reveal our methods of operation, and we can't do that at this point - the FBI has not made the case strong enough." Moreover, says a senior U.S. policy official with knowledge of the case: "This is a hugely political issue, not just a law-enforcement matter."

'You've Got the Crown Jewels'

If spies wanted to penetrate the White House, a facility widely considered the most secure in the world, how might it be done? For that matter, how might any agency or department of government be penetrated by spies?

"Actually, it's pretty easy if you know what you're doing," says a retired U.S. intelligence expert who has helped (along with other government sources) to guide Insight through the many and often complicated pathways of government security and counterespionage.

Access to designs, databases, "blueprints," memos, telephone numbers, lists of personnel and passwords all can be obtained. And from surprising sources. Several years ago this magazine was able to review from a remote site information on the supposedly secret and inaccessible White House Office Data Base, or WHODB (see "More Personal Secrets on File @ the White House," July 15, 1996).

Despite the spending of additional millions to beef up security when the White House installed a modern $30 million computerized telephone system a few years ago, communications security remains a big problem. Whatever the level of sophistication employed, there are soft underbellies that raise significant national-security problems. And potential for espionage, such as electronic intercepting of phone calls, is very great.

Calls to or from the White House dealing with classified information are supposed to be handled on secure lines, but it doesn't always happen. Sometimes, according to Insight's sources, despite the existence of special phones at the White House and elsewhere to handle such calls, some don't use them or only one side of the call does. An Insight editor recently was allowed for demonstration purposes to overhear a conversation placed over an unsecured line involving a "classified" topic.

Carelessness always has been a problem, but former and current FBI special agents say that under the Clinton administration the disregard for security has been epidemic. Many officials simply don't like the bother of communicating on secure phones.

In another instance, Insight was provided access to virtually every telephone number within the White House, including those used by outside agencies with employees in the complex, and even the types of computers used and who uses them. Just by way of illustration, this information allowed direct access to communications instruments located in the Oval Office, the residence, bathrooms and grounds.

With such information, according to security and intelligence experts, a hacker or spy could target individual telephone lines and write software codes enabling the conversations to be forwarded in real-time for remote recording and transcribing. The White House complex contains approximately 5,800 voice, fax and modem lines.

"Having a phone number in and of itself will not necessarily gain you access for monitoring purposes," Insight was told by a senior intelligence official with regular contact at the White House. "The systems are designed to electronically mask routes and generate secure connections." That said, coupling a known phone number to routing sequences and trunk lines would pose a security risk, this official says.

Add to that detailed knowledge of computer codes used to move call traffic and your hacker or spy is in a very strong position. "That's why we have so many redundancies and security devices on the systems - so we can tell if someone is trying to hack in," says a current security official at the White House.

Shown a sampling of the hoard of data collected over just a few months of digging, the security official's face went flush: "How the hell did you get that! This is what we are supposed to guard against. This is not supposed to be public."

Indeed. Nor should the telephone numbers or locations of remote sites or trunk lines or other sundry telecommunications be accessible. What's surprising is that most of this specialized information reviewed by Insight is unclassified in its separate pieces. When you put it together, the solved puzzle is considered a national-security secret. And for very good reason.

Consider the following: Insight not only was provided secure current phone numbers to the most sensitive lines in the world, but it discovered a remote telephone site in the Washington area which plugs into the White House telecommunications system.

Given national-security concerns, Insight has been asked not to divulge any telephone number, location of high-security equipment, or similar data not directly necessary for this news story.

Concerning the remote telecommunications site, Insight discovered not only its location and access telephone numbers but other information, including the existence of a secret "back door" to the computer system that had been left open for upward of two years without anyone knowing about the security lapse. This back door, common to large computer systems, is used for a variety of services, including those involving technicians, supervisors, contractors and security officers to run diagnostic checks, make repairs and review system operations.

"This is more than just a technical blunder," says a well-placed source with detailed knowledge of White House security issues. "This is a very serious security failure with unimaginable consequences. Anyone could have accessed that [back door] and gotten into the entire White House phone system and obtained numbers and passwords that we never could track," the source said, echoing yet another source familiar with the issue.

Although it is not the responsibility of the Secret Service to manage equipm= ent systems, the agency does provide substantial security controls over telecommunications and support service into or out of the White House. In fact, the Secret Service maintains its own electronic devices on the phone system to help protect against penetration. "That's what is so troubling about this," says a security expert with ties to the White House. "There are redundant systems to catch such errors and this was not caught. It's quite troubling.=8A It's not supposed to happen."

Insight asked a senior federal law-enforcement official with knowledge of the suspected Israeli spying case about the open electronic door. "I didn't know about this incident. It certainly is something we should have known given the scope of what's at stake," the official says.

Then Insight raised the matter of obtaining phone numbers, routing systems, equipment sites, passwords and other data on the telecommunications systems used by the White House: How hard would it be for a foreign intelligence service to get this information? "Obviously not as hard as we thought," a senior government official said. "Now you understand what we're facing and why we are so concerned."

That's one reason, Insight is told, the White House phone system is designed to mask all outgoing calls to prevent outsiders from tracing back into the system to set up taps. However, knowing the numbers called frequently by the White House, foreign agents could set up listening devices on those lines to capture incoming or outgoing calls. Another way of doing it, according to security experts, is to get inside the White House system. And, though it's considered impossible, that's what they said about getting the phone numbers that the president uses in his office and residence.

Like trash, information is everywhere - and often is overlooked when trying to tidy up a mess.

- PMR and JMW

http://www.insightmag.com/archive/200005306.shtml

'So What, It's Only Israel!'

There is a tendency in and out of government to minimize the impact of Israeli espionage against the United States because Israel is a friendly country. That overlooks the gravity of the espionage threat, says David Major, former director of counterintelligence programs at the National Security Council. "This 'don't worry about allied spying, it's okay' attitude is harmful," he warns. "The U.S. should expect that the rest of the world is bent on rooting out its national-security secrets and the secrets that could subject its leaders to blackmail." Minimizing or excusing "friendly spying," he argues, only discourages vigilance and encourages more attacks on U.S. national security. "I'm not outraged by nations that find it in their interests to collect intelligence but by our unwillingness to seriously pursue counterintelligence."

Major, now dean of the private Center for Counterintelligence and Security Studies, asks: "What price should Israel pay for this? My predictions are that there will be no impact whatsoever. Do we put our heads in the sand or do we take it as a wake-up call?"

Others observe that Israel has passed stolen U.S. secrets to America's adversaries. The government of Yitzhak Shamir reportedly provided the Soviet Union with valuable U.S. documents stolen by Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. "It's the security equivalent of herpes," says a former U.S. antiterrorism official now at a pro-Israel think tank who requested anonymity. "Who gets it [beyond Israel] nobody knows.... Once we let it happen, the word gets out that 'you can get away with this.'"

Who Killed John O'Neill?

O'Neill Versus Osama

Most of the victims of the September 11 attack seemed tragically random -- they were just going to work. Not John O'Neill. Until last August, he'd been the FBI's top expert on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, a lead investigator of the USS Cole and African embassy bombings. Leaving the Bureau in frustration, he'd taken a job he thought of as retirement: World Trade Center security chief. But when he died it became clear: His own life contained as many mysteries as his enemy's.

By Robert Kolker


Memorialized: A table at Elaine's.
(Photo: Jessica Burstein)

Monday night, we're going out, and I'll show you what you've been missing, ex-FBI agent John P. O'Neill told his friend Jerry Hauer. On O'Neill's overloaded social calendar, Mondays were reserved for Elaine's, where he was a charter member of the famously clubby crime-fighting crowd that included such legends as Bill Bratton and the late Jack Maple. His street cred carried a lot of weight, even with that group: For most of the past decade, O'Neill had been the FBI's foremost expert on Osama bin Laden. He'd been the public face of the New York field office since 1997, leading the investigation into the African embassy bombings and last year's USS Cole attack in Yemen. But his bluff, aggressive style had apparently alienated some of his superiors, and his career had stalled.

Jerry Hauer, the city's first terrorism czar under Rudy Giuliani, had just helped guide O'Neill to a soft landing in the private sector -- chief of security for the World Trade Center. The job, which could reach $300,000 with bonus, had cushioned the blow considerably. So for O'Neill, Monday, September 10, was a night to celebrate.

A typical night out with O'Neill had three or four stages. This one started with drinks at Windows on the World with his friend Robert Tucker, a former Queens assistant D.A., talking about whom he might hire at the World Trade Center. They moved on to a front table at Elaine's, where, as usual, he was noticed. "I knew he had left the FBI, so I grabbed him and said, 'John, are you okay?' " says Wallace Millard, a cop turned security expert who spotted him from a neighboring table. "He said, 'Wally, I'm the best. I've got a job that pays me three times what I got.' "

Hauer joined the party at 9:30, and they chatted about what they knew -- terrorism, security, the '93 attack on the Trade towers, the years when Hauer and O'Neill had worked closely together on bio-terror-defense strategies, the likelihood of another assault on the city. Weeks earlier, O'Neill had told one friend, "They'll never stop trying to take down those two buildings."

And as he led the charge out of Elaine's to Stage 3 at the China Club, his friends remember John O'Neill looking over and saying, "At least on my watch, I can say that there was never a terrorist attack in New York City."

'We were laughing that morning," remembers Valerie James, his girlfriend of eleven years. For once, John was in his own eleven-year-old Buick LeSabre, not a Bureau car, so he was permitted to drop her off at her job as sales director for the fashion line Sunny Choi.

He'd made it home from China Club at 2:30 -- typical -- but he was up now, and happy, and ready to take her to an 8:15 meeting she had for Fashion Week before heading to his office on the thirty-fourth floor of the north tower. "He was in a really good mood that day," James says.

James heard about the attack on the radio; it wasn't until 9:17 that a call finally came from John.

"There are body parts everywhere," he shouted. "Do you know what hit it?"James said the radio said it was a 747.

"I'll call you in a little bit," he said.

O'Neill also spoke to his 29-year-old son, J.P., who had taken the train in to visit his father at his new job but had made it only as far as Saint Vincent's Hospital. "As soon as you make it down here," he told him, "call me and I'll come and get you."

One FBI agent remembers talking with O'Neill in the lobby of Tower One, helping the Bureau and the Fire Department set up a command center. O'Neill asked him if they really got the Pentagon. He was last seen walking in the general direction of Tower Two minutes before it collapsed. His body was found a week later; it isn't clear where exactly he died. But what's not in question, at least among those who knew him, is that even before the second plane hit, O'Neill must have understood who had done it.

"I'm sure he knew who was responsible," says Teddy Leb, a friend and fan of O'Neill's who heads a foundation for law-enforcement officers. "I know that he must have been mad as hell. He must have been thinking, How in the world could we have allowed this to happen?"

In death, John O'Neill has become something bigger than he was in life -- a human embodiment of unheeded warnings. Here was a man who had studied and understood bin Laden, the cycles of his attacks, the escalation of the deaths, but whose arguments weren't followed up by government action. This had much to do with bureaucratic inertia, but it also, undoubtedly, had something to do with O'Neill -- his aggressiveness, his charisma, the fact that he didn't fit the mold of the standard-issue FBI agent.

For him, the real job started after five; his friends were his contacts, his contacts his friends. He was the only agent who could be found smoking Dominican cigars with De Niro on Tommy Mottola's yacht one night and introducing Scotland Yard spooks to the China Club's VIP level the next. He'd invariably be dressed in dark-blue pin-striped Burberry suits with white shirts and ties, his jet-black hair slicked back, his feet in size 91/2 Bruno Magli shoes, his ear to his cell phone, his hands fiddling with a BlackBerry with intelligence contacts organized by country -- Saudi Arabia, Yemen, England, Spain, France -- many of whom he'd escort to Elaine's when they came to town.

Those friends brought him intelligence that no one else in the Bureau could nail down. "You could see that come home to roost in the investigations," says U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White, whose summary arguments in the embassy-bombings case against bin Laden and others are packed with evidence that O'Neill unearthed. "John went at it comprehensively, yielding things from people in London or people in Yemen we never otherwise would have gotten."

His expertise on bin Laden was unquestioned. He took that expertise personally, and had no trouble correcting anyone, above or below him. "He was the paramount, most knowledgeable agent we had in the FBI, probably in the government, with respect to counterintelligence matters," says Louis Freeh.

"The answer would often be 'Check with John O'Neill,' " says Janet Reno. "When I walked into the room and saw John O'Neill there, I was always pleased, because I always knew I would get a reasoned analysis. He had a powerful command."

It was a life he'd chosen. As a kid, growing up in a fourth-floor walk-up in Atlantic City, O'Neill fixed in on Efrem Zimbalist Jr. in The F.B.I..

He worked part-time at FBI headquarters while at a community college in Virginia, then at American University, then at George Washington University, where he went for a forensic-science master's, all while working as a fingerprinting clerk and tour guide.

He joined the Bureau in the seventies, tracking governmental fraud, white-collar crime, and organized crime in Baltimore and as the field-office chief in Chicago. In 1995, he was reborn again when the Bureau brought him back to Washington as the section chief for counterterrorism. It was there that he became an expert in Islamic-fundamentalist extremism. And when he came to New York in 1997, it was the realization of plans he and James had made years earlier in Chicago. O'Neill, ever the striver, wasted no time recasting himself as a New York operator, buddying up with people like Jerry Hauer and Howard Safir, local law-enforcement leaders who weren't natural allies with the FBI until O'Neill came along.

Last year, ABC reporter John Miller, the Joey Bishop of the crime-fighting Rat Pack, was sitting alone in a Middle East cantina when he heard O'Neill's swaggery voice boom from behind him, "So is this the Elaine's of Yemen?"

Of course, not every late-night phone call was Bureau business. He had a wife in Linwood, New Jersey, Christine O'Neill, whom he'd married in 1971, though the two had been living apart since he moved to Chicago in 1991. There was the girlfriend, Valerie James, he'd lived with in Chicago and now here, and the children from both relationships who all looked to him as a father. The liaisons didn't stop there. "He was living with Valerie, he had another girlfriend in Washington, and he was dating someone else here in New York," says one close friend. "Before his death, they didn't know about each other."

Among his New York friends, some jaws dropped in astonishment that the widow at O'Neill's New Jersey funeral was not Valerie James. (Christine O'Neill would not comment for this story.) "There are people here who knew him for six years but never knew he had a wife and kids in Atlantic City," James tells me. "I was talking with my friend about it, and he said, 'Let's not forget, John was a spy.' I mean, in the FBI he reinvented himself into this other person -- which is why I think he compartmentalized his life."

James says that O'Neill kept other secrets: the overwhelming debts he'd racked up living a James Bond life on a Bureau salary; a plan, complete with legal papers, to divorce his wife. But is her John O'Neill the real one? Given what James has learned about him since his death, she isn't quite sure.

"I honestly believe the main mistress in John's life was the Bureau," says Pat D'Amuro, a longtime deputy in New York. "There are times when we talked, and he wondered if that was the right decision."

As early as 1995, long before the embassy bombings and the Cole attack made Osama bin Laden a household name, O'Neill made the case up the FBI food chain and in Congress that the nation's greatest threat came from the Islamic-fundamentalist groups that were emerging from the Taliban's takeover of Afghanistan. "John had this scenario that's going on now figured out eight years ago," says an old FBI colleague, John Blaha. "That this is the way it is, and this is the way it's gonna have to be resolved."

In the 20-20 hindsight of September 11, O'Neill's confidential briefings in the mid-nineties "were right on, in terms of these kinds of people and what they could potentially do to us," says Robert Blitzer, a former deputy of O'Neill's. "Just the scope of their infrastructure in the U.S. -- and inherent to that is the fact that they could go operational at any time."

Unlike his colleagues, he went public with his opinions. In 1996, he told a conference of private-security managers about new groups that had beaten the Soviets in Afghanistan and who "can assemble quickly and can quickly disperse and are extraordinarily hard to track." The following year, he called the Islamic-fundamentalist victory in Afghanistan a watershed moment: "They beat one of the largest standing armies in the world at that time, which gave them a buoyed sense of success -- that they could take on other countries like the U.S." O'Neill's deafening clarity, however, often translated better outside the office than in the FBI. He wanted to command, direct, control, and manage everything he was responsible for, and inevitably he pissed off many of the wrong people.

"There was occasionally controversy that swirled around John," says Barry Mawn, his superior in New York. "I mean, John for the most part didn't suffer fools. And either by his direct words or maybe expressions, I think he made some people feel uncomfortable, like he was challenging them."

"He had elbows -- he'd press his point very hard," says Mary Jo White. "Others might have been more diplomatic -- but less effective when it matters."

On July 4, 1998, Jerry Hauer was riding in his car up First Avenue near 20th Street, not far from O'Neill's apartment in Peter Cooper Village, when he spotted his friend walking down the street in short pants. Hauer told his driver to slow down; he thought he'd give John some grief about showing off his knees. "How's it going?" Hauer said.

O'Neill wasn't in the mood. He leaned into the car window. "My friend's causing trouble again," he said.

"Who?"

"OBL," O'Neill said softly. "This guy's a problem."

One month later, simultaneous bombs near the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killed 224 people. As soon as the bombings took place, O'Neill was on the phone with colleagues, calling bin Laden the prime suspect. "John was really the first to say that maybe Al Qaeda was responsible for that," confirms the New York field-office director at the time, Lew Schiliro. "The coordination it took to hit both embassies four minutes apart, the idea of a cell operating in Kenya, their ability to strike at relatively unprotected embassies, the nature of the explosives that they used -- pretty much at the outset he had a strong belief that they were behind it."

And when it came time for Mary Jo White to expand her World Trade Center indictments to include the embassy-bombing suspects, Schiliro says, O'Neill was there to connect the dots. "The evolution from the World Trade Center to Ramzi Yousef, who was arrested in Pakistan, and the plot in the Pacific to plant explosives in twelve U.S. airliners -- and his connecting to bin Laden. When the bombings happened, John was a student of this, and he brought a lot of information to bear on it."

Last year, when Schiliro left the New York field office to be replaced by Barry Mawn, O'Neill was furious about being passed over. In his mind, he clearly outclassed most of his counterparts in Washington. He would travel with Louis Freeh to Saudi Arabia; they'd stay home. He'd be in Yemen within hours of the Cole bombing; they'd work the phones. Inside the Bureau, his impact never registered the way it had with others.

In this wildly altered political landscape, all sides are trying to lay claim to John O'Neill's legacy; he's a Rorschach test. If you lean toward the right, like some of his New York friends, you believe O'Neill quit in a fury when the diplomats neutered him. David Cornstein, who ran Finlay jewelers and now is chairman of the New York Olympic Games commission, used to tailgate with O'Neill at Giants and Jets games. "We concurred," he says, "that the country after the Cold War had really fallen a bit asleep, and there was a liberal movement toward more and more civil rights, and the country wasn't observant enough to realize that the world had changed and our view of the way security should be should change, too."

But if you lean to the left, like the French authors Guillaume Dasquié and Jean-Charles Brisard, who feature a July interview with O'Neill in their new book, Ben Laden, La Vérité Interdite, you've outed O'Neill as a sort of smoking gun -- a man who they say all but confirmed in his final months that George W. Bush's oil-industry-bred administration was so worried about alienating Saudi Arabia that it decided to negotiate with the Taliban rather than go after it. Before September 11, they argue, the United States' primary goal was to build a pipeline in Central Asia -- tapping oilfields in Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, through Afghanistan and Pakistan to the Indian Ocean.

In July, over drinks at Elaine's, O'Neill began to open up to Brisard about his frustrations, which, it turned out, stretched back to the 1996 investigation of the Riyadh army-base bombing. O'Neill made several trips to Saudi Arabia, one with Freeh, but witnesses were executed before the FBI could question them. (Brisard was also impressed by O'Neill's social clout. Elaine Kaufman herself and James Woods came by and said hello. "I had the feeling he knew everyone in the city," he says.)

O'Neill complained about the inability of U.S. diplomacy to obtain anything from King Fahd. He told the Frenchman that "every answer, every key to dismantling the Osama bin Laden organizations are in Saudi Arabia."

He ran into another diplomatic barrier last year in Yemen, after the Cole bombing. Within days of arriving, he'd knocked heads with the ambassador, Barbara Bodine. While the FBI was interrogating witnesses, the State Department was trying to coax Yemeni diplomats into pledging not to support terror. The conflicting agendas, combined with O'Neill's determination, were explosive. He wanted his agents to carry automatic weapons, like their Yemeni counterparts; she insisted they carry smaller arms, like diplomats. By the time Barry Mawn arrived, Bodine was calling O'Neill an outright liar. O'Neill's comments about the ambassador, friends say, weren't printable.

"He always had a singular focus on the people he sent into harm's way," says Freeh, who wouldn't comment directly about Bodine. "I'm sure he ruffled a couple of feathers doing that. In Yemen, he would call me literally in the middle of the night and say, 'Boss, I'm not comfortable with our situation here.' "

When O'Neill came back for Thanksgiving, James was shocked to see him exhausted and twenty pounds lighter. He never returned: Bodine told Freeh that O'Neill wasn't allowed to. One more irony came after September 11. The FBI returned after Bodine left her job, and according to Mawn, Yemeni authorities were so moved by O'Neill's death that they began cooperating with the investigation again.

The scuffle with the ambassador made the papers. And before long, O'Neill's press coverage got worse. On August 19, the Times printed that he was under investigation. A year earlier, he'd attended a retirement seminar in Tampa, left a conference room to make a call, and come back to find his briefcase had been stolen. It turned up in a nearby hotel without his lighter and cigar cutter, but still with some classified documents that he shouldn't have taken from his office. O'Neill had reported it to the police and the Bureau right away. Under normal circumstances, this never would have been made public. But O'Neill thought he knew why it had.

"He thought the leak might have come from Washington," says Mawn. That same month, O'Neill told Mawn and others that Dick Clarke, the president's terrorism czar at the National Security Council, had asked O'Neill whether he wanted his name put forward to succeed him.

"It would be a powerful position," Mawn says. "That person would have direct contact with the FBI and turn around and influence top Cabinet people, and possibly even the president. So if I was somebody who didn't like him, it would be because he is getting into a position of power that could possibly get back to the Bureau to do things his way."

But it didn't matter. After Yemen, O'Neill had started seriously thinking about getting out. Part of that was financial pressure. "He was frustrated and angry," James says. "And he needed to make money."

The other part was the bed he'd made himself. Louis Freeh's No. 2, Tom Pickard, had told him point-blank that after the briefcase incident, there'd be little chance of his getting Mawn's job in New York -- the only Bureau post he really wanted.

"I told him he had a tough row to hoe to get it," says Pickard, who retired at the end of November, and whom Jerry Hauer believes was the biggest roadblock in O'Neill's career. When it came to field-office-chief candidates, he said, "Janet Reno particularly insisted that there were no blemishes on that person's career. I think John shone best when there was a crisis. He'd put in phenomenal hours, he was completely dedicated, he wasn't distracted by anyone else. I don't know if he would have thrived on the day-to-day, 'What are we gonna do about the budget?' business. John was more of a take-charge, action guy."

On Saturday, September 8, Valerie and John attended a wedding at the Plaza -- a class reunion of old FBI men and cops. John was beaming the whole evening, and he and Valerie danced nearly every song. Valerie says that people turned to them and said, "God, if this is what retirement does . . . "

Three weeks later, there was another reunion -- O'Neill's funeral. The service in Atlantic City -- could it have been otherwise? -- was brimming with ironies. The service demanded four-star security for Louis Freeh, Mary Jo White, and a host of FBI brass -- an official place of honor given to a man who had just left the Bureau in frustration. It also featured Christine O'Neill as the widow. O'Neill's son and daughter rarely saw their father in his final years, while James's children, Jay and Stacy, were left wondering more about the man they called their father. Jay even called O'Neill "Dad" in a speech at the Elaine's wake a few days later, to the surprise of some people there.

His biological family got his memorial flags from the Bureau. Resentful about being overlooked, Stacy pinched two that the Bureau had sent to Elaine's. She's been asked to return them. She hasn't.

"I'm the one who has to reinvent myself now," Valerie James told me one afternoon recently, poking at a salad near her office in the fashion district. "My psychiatrist says I can't go on with my life if I keep talking about him, but I feel like I have to honor his memory."

She'd wanted to leave him in the fall of '99. He wasn't as much fun as he was in Chicago. The strain of the job, the embassy-bombing investigation, was getting to him. Her kids adored him, but it was not working for her, she told him. The late nights without her also had something to do with it. "He promised that when he left the FBI, he'd clean up his life," she said.

When I asked what that meant, she smiled. "Being a little straighter of a guy," she said.

The secret girlfriends aren't so secret anymore. James doesn't speak directly about them. Still, she doesn't have any illusions about the man she just lost. "John was all about his job," she said. "I don't know if John was a genius, but you look at smart people like Jack Kennedy, they don't necessarily lead Ward and June Cleaver lives. It doesn't necessarily mean they're bad people. I'll say this, though: Knowing everything I've learned since he died, I would do the last eleven years over again exactly as I did. And so would my kids. I know because I asked them."

Her John was different from everyone else's. "You see, to me, he wasn't the FBI," she said. "He was my lover and my friend." It's just that the end he met brought the many different lives he led crashing down, finally, together.

"It was a complicated death," she said, "for a complicated man."

Kroll and Associates : The CIA of Wall Street

WORLD TRADE CENTER
Jul 1, 1997 12:00 PM, By CAROL CAREY

On a snowy February day in 1993, a rented van carrying a bomb was driven into one of the World Trade Center's public parking garages and parked. After lighting the bomb's fuse, the van's driver and a passenger escaped into a car driven by another conspirator. The bomb went off a short time later, causing death, destruction, a mass evacuation and a sense of terror that has reverberated throughout big building security ever since. The terrorists succeeded, in part, because New York's World Trade Center was then an open-building environment typical of most public office complexes in America.

Today, before anyone can gain access to the World Trade Center's sub-grade parking garages, they must meet a host of security requirements and pass through a system of access control devices that makes extremely unlikely the recurrence of a blast such as the one that rocked the complex, killing six people and injuring 1,000.

Now, only monthly tenant parking is allowed in the underground garages, and drivers must "register" along with their vehicles. They can enter and exit the parking lots at six strictly controlled access points, where their presence is:

* recorded by surveillance cameras; * detected by vehicle ground loop detectors; * controlled by manned, bullet-resistant guard booths, motorized gate arms and anti-ram barriers; and * read by proximity card and electronic vehicle identification (EVI) tag readers.

And that's just for starters. If a vehicle stalls, or fails to arrive at its assigned parking space within a predetermined amount of time, a special program will alert the main security command station as well as satellite command centers.

If the vehicle proceeds right to its assigned parking area, it will pass still a third security station and another EVI reader that regulates parking lot capacity loading and vehicle reallocation when one lot is full.

If the security system picks up an irregularity, the vehicle will not be able to enter or exit the underground parking complex.

Would-be terrorists will find it no easier to gain access by foot. Tenants and employees have to put their photo ID/proximity cards on turnstiles to gain entrance to the four buildings in the complex - the Twin Towers and Buildings 4 and 5 - managed by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. All visitors must wait to be issued time- and date-sensitive visitor badges with magnetic stripes that indicate clearly which floors or buildings they are authorized to enter.

Not even the mail chutes are easily accessible; they have been fitted with narrow steel slots to preclude the depositing of large packages and bulky letters that could contain bombs.

Sitting on 16 square acres in downtown Manhattan at the foot of the Hudson River, the World Trade Center complex - the largest commercial office complex in the world - consists of the Twin Towers and five additional buildings, including the Marriott Hotel and the U.S. Customs Building. Towers 1 and 2 and Buildings 4 and 5 are protected by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey's partially completed security plan to install an integrated vehicle and lobby access control, intercom and CCTV security system. The complex has 30,000 to 40,000 tenants and employees and admits thousands of visitors each day.

According to Hermon J. Banks, manager, life safety and security programs, "It's like a small city."

That city's calm was shattered on February 26, 1993, when the terrorists' bomb exploded on the Basement 2 level at 12:18 p.m., disintegrating the concrete floors of the B1 and B2 levels and creating a crater that consumed five underground floors, instantly setting more than 200 cars ablaze, and releasing smoke that, within minutes, was drawn up through elevator shafts to the top of both 110-story Twin Towers. More than 30,000 employees and thousands of visitors had to be evacuated, and the rescue operation lasted 12 hours. In addition to six fatalities, the loss of an unborn child and a thousand injuries, the property damage was estimated at more than $300 million.

The towers and their 100-plus acres of office space were fully reoccupied a mere six weeks later due to a much heralded effort by scores of engineers and employees. But what has taken longer than repairing and reoccupying the damaged building has been revamping and reinventing its security infrastructure. Never again

Despite its size, strength and sophistication, the World Trade Center did not have an automated access control system before the blast. Most public office buildings in America do not. But that trend is likely to change, now that the "It can't happen here" mindset has been replaced with the determination that "It won't happen here again" - at least not at the World Trade Center.

Once time had begun to dull the shock, grief and sadness of the blast and its tragic consequences, Port Authority security and safety personnel found that pride, sensitivity and a singleness of purpose had become part of their routine. No breach of security or safety was too small to respond to instantly or to take seriously. When a uniformed security officer turns someone away from the visitor's desk because he lacks proper credentials, she does so with a clear, courteous explanation, but without apology.

When her supervisor directs visitors lined up behind a plant-filled barricade to the next available desk where their credentials will be checked, he does so with the authority of a traffic cop standing in the middle of a major thoroughfare. People, not cars, are passing through, but the safety of the small city depends on their being deployed according to strict procedures.

"After the bombing, we had the top security consultants in the nation, Kroll Associates, do a complete security analysis for us, and we followed their recommendations," says Douglas G. Karpiloff, program manager, security systems for the WTC. A 26-year veteran of the Port Authority, Karpiloff, a Certified Protection Professional, was general manager of tenant services after the bomb went off. He is responsible for the overall facility management of the $50 million security improvement program: $15 million in completed interim improvements and $35 million for permanent improvements, from the 250 multi-ton perimeter planters that prevent vehicles from crashing into the buildings, to the network of fiber optics and copper that will connect the redundant PCs and their multi-task, multi-user operating system to the lobby, parking and perimeter access control systems, alarms, intercom and CCTV systems.

Karpiloff is also under contract to the Federal Protective Service and has completed an overall threat assessment and security master plan for the Ronald Reagan Center, the largest building complex in Washington, D.C., after the Pentagon. He has developed restrictive parking policies for other sensitive government buildings in Washington, and he helped major building owners in Denver upgrade their security in preparation for the Oklahoma City bombing trial.

He is a man with a mission who speaks with pride of the innovations and subtleties of the WTC's security system.

"We've developed a real team approach to security here," he explains. "Our outstanding engineering department, with Fred Ng and Paul Salvatore, oversees final design and field construction with support from their consultant, Analytical Systems Engineering Corp. Our information systems department, with Vic Guarnera, works on the software systems side of the house. My second-in-command, George Tabeek, and I concentrate on delivering a working system that balances security and tenant needs. Hermon Banks focuses on day-to-day operations, supported by Mike Hurley, manager of fire prevention, life safety and emergency services."

Fire prevention and life safety Each of the four buildings the Port Authority oversees has a stand-alone Class E Pyrotronics fire safety system with its own PC-based file server and operating system. The system controls the complex's smoke detectors, which, upon sensing smoke, emit a small electronic signal that is sent to a local control device, or alarm, which transmits a coded signal to the computer that tells fire officials where to respond. The signals are sent to on- and off-site alarm monitoring stations.

Hurley, a 17-year veteran of the Port Authority, is responsible for all aspects of fire prevention, life safety, emergency preparedness, fire command, code enforcement, training and fire department liaison.

"The fire system is designed to provide us with an alarm from the individual smoke detectors that automatically transmit to the fire command stations staffed by deputy fire safety directors," says Hurley. "They then notify emergency response personnel in the building, as well as the New York City Fire Department. Each smoke detector and sprinkler head is assigned an 'address' so we know exactly where the alarm originates from. There are satellite fire command stations in each of the buildings."

According to Hurley, the Port Authority and WTC are unique because they have their own police force and emergency response personnel, who serve as an in-house fire brigade. The fire brigade has pre-positioned crash carts with Scott air packs and fire fighting equipment so they can begin fire suppression activities even before the fire department arrives.

The fire system includes a PC, associated software, a board that identifies manual pull stations for each floor and a public address system. The alarms, smoke detectors, sprinklers and P/A systems are all integrated, and each of the four buildings has a totally independent system.

"Our design philosophy is that no single event will be able to take us down as a facility," says Hurley.

To avoid the type of total power outage that occurred during the 1993 bombing, backup life safety and power systems have been put in place. A new operations center will contain backup for the security command center, and the security command center will contain backup for operations center functions, including alarms, intercoms and elevator controls.

"All the stairwells now have battery-pack lighting and photoluminescent paint on the floor and hand-rails," says Hurley. "Every door sign is photoluminescent and also in Braille, exceeding city requirements. At the minimum, if our power went out and all backups failed, the stairways would glow in the dark."

Every effort has been made, however, to ensure that all power will not go out again, as it did during the bombing, leaving the complex in darkness.

"We have our primary power source, our emergency diesel generators and our battery packs," says Karpiloff, "but we have something new as well: We've run a power line through the PATH system from New Jersey to New York to use as a backup for electricity. We are the only commercial building in New York City with such a system."

The parking access control system The parking access control system at the WTC was manufactured and installed by Ensec Inc., Boca Raton, Fla. The Enworks EN2000 system has a redundant host configuration and supports full function work stations. It is designed to integrate vehicle and driver access control, alarm monitoring and the parking security intercom.

HID proximity card readers and Amtech Smart Pass Readers read drivers' proximity cards and Auto Vehicle Identification (AVI) tags on car windshields. The system is meant to be "failsafe," ensuring that both the driver and the vehicle together are authorized to gain entry to the parking garage, a feature about which Karpiloff is particularly excited.

"The person and the vehicle are enrolled as pairs," he explains. "The driver is registered for a particular vehicle. When the proximity card reader and the AVI reader information match, the system opens the gate and allows the vehicle to enter from the street. Once the vehicle and driver are in the environment, we check further to make sure they have arrived at the assigned location."

But before the vehicle even enters the parking garage, vehicle ground loop detectors - loops of signal wire that set up a radio field - pick up the vehicle's presence and work in conjunction with the AVI and proximity card readers to transfer relevant information to that particular parking lot entrance.

Also included in the system is a series of Delta Scientific Corp. anti-ram hydraulic barriers. When the system allows entry, the gate arm goes up, and the anti-ram devices go down below the surface. If a vehicle is denied access, the anti-ram barriers go up, and the gate arm does not allow entry.

Separate remote processors for alarms are integrated with the access control system and cause alarms to go off if a security breach is picked up.

"The remote processors support all the information necessary to control the vehicle and the driver, to handle any duress features we have installed, along with some 25 exceptions. They can handle more than 2,500 cardholders," explains Vic Guarnera, project manager for the information services department (ISD).

"In addition, all the alarms are sent back to a workstation, which is attached to the main file server. The person at the workstation responds to and analyzes the alarms, determines appropriate action, and may communicate with the person at the access or alarm point."

There are manned security booths at the entrance/exit points as well. "We have six ramps at which entry and exit can be reversed," says Guarnera, "and guards at those ramps provide extra security for the sub-grade parking area. Any alarm that sounds is displayed on the ramp monitor at the guard's booth as well as on a display event monitor in the parking security office where the clerk enrolls new parkers and vehicles or changes access requirements."

Remote processors for access control and alarms at the parking garages, and workstations at the guard booths, parking office, visitor centers and security command center and other areas, are connected to a main, redundant file server.

Guarnera says the Port Authority's ultimate objective for integration of the security system is to have the lobby and vehicle access control systems integrated together. That will first be accomplished by an interface between the parking and turnstile systems, and at a later date, they will be fully integrated.

"We are using an off-the-shelf environment as much as possible for the permanent operating system," he says. "It must be robust enough to support a system of this size with more than 100 turnstiles, 250 controlled and monitored doors and hundreds of CCTV cameras. It must be able to handle a database that reflects the 45,000 tenant/employee volume we have plus 5,000 to 6,000 visitors per day."

The system integration will allow the two systems to share information on a full-time, real-time basis by way of a channel or dedicated communications linkage. Alarms from the parking system will be integrated with alarms from the turnstile access control system, and one proximity card will be used for both parking and turnstile access control.

The CCTV system Construction is well under way on the installation of an expanded, upgraded CCTV system of covert and overt pan/tilt/zoom, alarm-point cameras. The camera system's American Dynamics matrix switchers will be able to function alone and will also be integrated with the PC computer system.

"We're putting in an upgraded, high-resolution, color CCTV system," says Karpiloff. "The parking entrances and exits and the visitor center areas are already under continuous CCTV monitoring, both covert and overt.

"We believe the expanded system will represent the first time a commercial building in the United States will have a detection system to pick up stopped vehicles at its perimeter. If a vehicle is parked and not moving, we will detect the lack of movement, which will activate the CCTV camera to point to exactly where the vehicle has been detected and record and transmit the information to command stations that can instantly dispatch police."

Karpiloff further explains that, while most CCTV systems are driven by the fact that something is taking place, i.e., a "positive" event, it was more difficult to locate hardware and software that would encompass "negative" events such as stationary vehicles. The video transmissions processed by the program will be wired directly into the multiplex switchers.

Apart from that unique feature of picking up "non-events" in the parking areas, the system generally will be action-activated.

"The camera may be in place but may not record unless something happens, such as a car driving through an area or a person walking past the camera, an event. All the perimeter security is set up like that," notes Hermon Banks. "We have found that guards will pay attention to the CCTV monitors far more effectively with this type of system than if they are simply on all the time."

Cameras, he says, are placed in critical locations within the complex, such as machine rooms, computer areas, visitor areas and other sensitive locations.

"High-powered, 400-line SVHS video recorders support the CCTV system," Karpiloff adds. "If someone tries to force a door or a gate, a video buffering feature, which stores images for a certain period of time, will have recorded the person even before he or she tries to force entry."

Visitor center, lobby and tenant access control Banks manages the complex's security programs, which include a contract guard force of more than 300 people. He has held his position for nearly three years, and was chosen after a nationwide search. A veteran of more than 21 years with the New York City Police Department, Banks went on to the New York City Health and Hospitals Corp.'s security division. As its assistant inspector general, he trained its police force, chaired its safety committee and managed life safety, among other responsibilities. Banks believes his experience with both security and life safety was a strong factor in his being chosen for the WTC job. The lobby access control system is not yet completely automated, but Banks points out that visitors must approach one of the visitor's desks in each of the four buildings, show their identification, and explain where they're from and who they're visiting. The present system records their destination, the date and time arrived, and archives the information for a year.

"I get a printout monthly of every visitor by tower, tenant and category - announced, unannounced and courier," says Banks. "I can recall the information at any time. In fact, I just had a request for information on a visitor from last spring, and someone is searching the database as we speak."

>From a PC in his office, Banks monitors the visitor's desks for managerial and security information such as how long it takes the operators to process visitors. He also examines reports generated by the database.

Tenants, employees, long-term visitors and contractors are using color-coded ID cards until the lobby access control system is fully automated.

Long-term visitors are issued a Polaroid ID3000 system card that is examined by guards upon entry and, when held under special lighting, reveals if there has been tampering.

"All tenant contact names are in a central database and we have issued photo IDs to tenants, employees, long-term visitors and contractors," says Karpiloff.

The lobby access control system will include Perey turnstiles. New, Motorola Indala proximity cards will be issued, which will be read by Motorola Indala readers when the holder places them just above the turnstiles. Visitors will be issued plastic photo ID cards with magnetic stripes that they will swipe through readers.

The contractors for the permanent security system are E.J. Electric and Electronic Systems Associates, both of New York. Securacom, Woodcliff Lakes, N.J., is responsible for system integration.

Also, ASSA of Brooklyn, N.Y., is installing a new key system. The UL437-approved, high-security cylinders and keys contain a proprietary keyway. Each cylinder and key has a bar code imbedded in it. A Qualisoft software control system for issuance of the keys includes remote, hand-held and fixed-location scanners that scan employee ID cards and then scan the key to make sure the key and the person match. All key rings are also weighed before daily distribution to make sure they have not been tampered with.

"We are re-keying all tenant premises in the complex, and all electrical, mechanical, structural and base building systems," says Karpiloff. "Bob Schutz, our chief locksmith, has the unenviable task of leading his men in the massive job of installing 8,000 new cylinders and issuing more than 75,000 new keys." Since the bombing, little has stayed the same at the World Trade Center. Before that devastating day, it was an open complex, closed only on weekends. Today, it is a closed complex, since eyes have been opened to the importance of access control.

Just prior to the September 11 attacks, Kroll Inc., with the guidance of Jerome Hauer, at the time the Managing director of their Crisis and Consulting Management Group, hired former FBI special investigator John P. O'Neill, who specialized in the Al-Qaeda network held responsible for the 1993 bombing, to head the security at the WTC complex. O'Neill died in the attacks.

Jay, John: Counter-Revolutionary Thought

"Those who own the country ought to govern it."
—John Jay

Madison, James: Counter-revolutionary Thought

"In England, at this day, if elections were open to all classes of people, the property of landed proprietors would be insecure. An agrarian law would soon take place.

If these observations be just, our government ought to secure the permanent interests of the country AGAINST INNOVATION.

Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests, and to balance and check the other. THEY OUGHT TO BE SO CONSTITUTED AS TO PROTECT THE MINORITY OF THE OPULENT AGAINST THE MAJORITY. The senate, therefore, ought to be this body; and to answer these purposes, they ought to have permanency and stability."

James Madison, Statement (1787-06-26) as quoted in Notes of the Secret Debates of the Federal Convention of 1787 by Robert Yates.