by Greg Schneider and Sara Kehaulani Goo, The Washington Post
When a gunman opened fire at a Los Angeles International Airport ticket counter on July Fourth, the nation’s new agency in charge of airport security got its first chance to swing into action.
Instead, it said the shooting was outside its jurisdiction.
After bullets sprayed across the crowded holiday terminal, leaving three dead, the agency’s director at the time, John Magaw, looked on helplessly as his spokesmen dismissed the attack as a matter for local police and the FBI.
By that holiday, with the nation on edge about a terrorist attack, Magaw had lost control of the Transportation Security Administration. He had run the high-profile, multibillion-dollar agency far astray from what Congress and the Bush administration had said they wanted, alienating everyone from local airport operators to commercial-airline pilots.
The agency couldn’t keep up with the twin demands of creating itself and devising a system for stopping terrorists.
Internally, there was tension over the agency’s mission, with a growing core of leaders steeped in law enforcement at odds with political forces demanding customer service. Magaw and his deputies clashed with key members of Congress and the White House over budgets and left airport managers around the country feeling shut out.
The fact that the agency was flat-footed on the day of the most violent attack on U.S. aviation since Sept. 11 underscores how, after nearly a year of building a federal agency to take over airport security, few broad changes have taken place.
A handful of airports are beginning to see tidily uniformed federal screeners at checkpoints. But the agency has struggled to keep up with hiring, and many airports still use the same private screening companies that were in place a year ago.
The government has ordered sophisticated bomb-detection machines to scan luggage, but the program is behind schedule. What’s more, cargo security has not been substantially improved.
Random searches
At ticket counters and gates, airline and security employees paw through travelers’ intimate belongings in suitcase searches. But choosing a passenger for such scrutiny is often random. The government is developing a computer system to identify people with questionable backgrounds, but now it is dependent on antiquated software that assumes terrorists book flights by paying with cash, buy one-way tickets or catch flights at the last minute.
Transportation Secretary Norman Mineta, whose department oversees the agency, tried to remedy the situation less than two weeks after the July Fourth shootings by firing Magaw.
But there were many forces gnawing at the ambitious effort to create the biggest new government agency since World War II, an effort that will consume about $6.5 billion this fiscal year alone.
With its full fury directed at preventing further terrorist attacks, Congress resolved last fall to take a new approach to aviation security. Every past security rule that had been beaten down by the airlines or airports would not only be reinstated but enforced by deadlines.
Flimsy cockpit doors needed to be secured. All checked luggage would be scanned for explosives. Airport screeners would be given incentives to do their jobs well. Flight attendants and pilots would get training to deal with hijackers.
Fitting the bill?
Magaw, a 67-year-old former head of the Secret Service, seemed to fit what Congress wanted in a leader of the new agency: a powerful, independent-minded administrator.
But Magaw immediately began building a law-enforcement-flavored empire that was reluctant to answer to outsiders. Much of his management team came from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Secret Service. And many of the federal security directors — the officials at every airport who are to coordinate and enforce the central security plan — were former police chiefs, Secret Service agents and military officials.
Aviation experts watched the parade of appointments with gathering horror.
“They’re hiring guys with no experience in airports or aviation,” said Douglas Laird, a consultant and former head of security for Northwest Airlines.
Airport managers, in particular, were worried about how massive changes in security procedures would affect their terminals. Many agreed with James Wilding, head of the agency that runs Dulles International and Reagan National airports, who viewed the agency as infuriatingly slow to make decisions, considering the deadlines it faced.
“If you only have 13-1/2 months, you kind of can’t afford to spend half the time on the paperwork,” he said.
But Magaw argued that he needed time to get the organization in place before spending billions of public dollars.
In a recent interview, Magaw said that with the financial fate of a major industry — the airlines — at stake, he thought a tough approach was warranted by the extreme threat of terrorism. He hired lots of people with law-enforcement backgrounds, he said, because they would need such experience and credibility with agencies such as the FBI when the next attack came.
He also thought that was what lawmakers wanted. “It was very clear they wanted us to ... really come in and set some strict standards,” Magaw said. “Public service, courtesy, but at the same time security because of the tragedy.”
One of the defining challenges facing the Transportation Security Administration and airports this year is the congressional mandate that every piece of checked luggage be screened for bombs by Dec. 31. That meant managers had to figure out ways to get huge numbers of massive bomb-screening machines into their airports. In some cases, it would mean knocking down walls and reinforcing floors.
Some airport managers begged for permission to tackle the problems on their own or even to use alternate technology. Dallas-Fort Worth offered to spend $200 million on its own to set up a bomb-detection system if the agency would approve it quickly. But the agency’s top administrators said they didn’t want to rush into approving one system before they understood the complex problem nationwide.
As the agency put off buying machines, it became less and less likely that factories could produce a sufficient number by year’s end. Only two companies — L-3 Communications and InVision Technologies — were certified to make such machines in this country, and neither had built more than 14 machines per month.
Likewise, contracts for training passenger screeners and for remaking airport checkpoints were pushed back, week after week.
Not only did airport directors feel ignored, they also felt bullied. In one oft-cited incident, the manager of the Orlando, Fla., airport found himself threatened with arrest when he tried to enter his own parking garage after it had been taken over by one of the agency’s contractors.
As tensions rose, Magaw agreed in May to meet with airport managers at their national convention in Dallas. The managers were relieved, thinking they would finally learn how the agency planned to get the bomb-screening machines into their terminals and who was going to pay the billions of dollars it would cost to equip all 429 U.S. commercial airports. But his speech was not what they expected.
Aided by a big-screen display on the Transportation Security Administration’s management structure, Magaw “spent five minutes of his presentation on the TSA logo,” said Todd Hauptli, a top lobbyist for two groups representing airports. “It was painful.”
The basic bomb-screening questions remained unanswered.
In April, Magaw accompanied Mineta to the Cabinet Room for a formal budget presentation to President Bush. Mineta did most of the talking, outlining proposals for staffing, technology and money.
When he finished, White House budget director Mitchell Daniels Jr. spoke up. Those numbers, Daniels said, were off target. He questioned Mineta’s assumptions about how many employees and machines the agency needed. Magaw looked on in rising fury as Daniels used charts to systematically undercut Mineta’s proposal.
Bush tried to defuse the tension. “You know, I like debate,” the president said, Magaw remembered later. “You guys go back, rework this. We’ll talk next week.”
When the president left, Magaw approached Daniels with barely controlled rage and reprimanded him for making the transportation secretary look foolish.
Word of the facedown spread quickly among agency management. It illustrated two things, several sources said: Magaw’s instincts as a protector and lawman, and his tin ear for managing political relationships. The gatekeeper of the administration’s budget, money the agency desperately needed, was not a person to antagonize.
Similarly, Magaw had failed to connect with Congress. His inability to explain the delays in hiring and buying bomb-detection machines began to irritate the same people who once praised him.
A chill with Congress
He received harsh lectures from members who didn’t understand why the agency’s budget request ballooned to $4.4 billion and why it wanted to hire people whose jobs weren’t specified in the law — such as ticket-takers, criminal investigators and exit-watchers. The $410,000 cost of outfitting executive offices didn’t help, either.
Lawmakers’ questions about the number of employees infuriated agency insiders. Last year, Congress determined that the new agency would need about 30,000 people to take over checkpoint-screening duties. Then Congress further required the agency to scan all checked luggage for bombs, doubling the number of employees needed. But many lawmakers remained fixed on the original number of workers.
The salary criticisms also stung. Agency officials originally thought they would get whatever resources they needed for their mission. Starting from scratch, Magaw thought he argued that he had to pay for quality.
But the agency did a poor job communicating its intentions to Congress. Magaw said he didn’t want to talk numbers until he felt they were solid, even though he knew his refusal to justify expenditures was working against him.
The agency also continued to suffer from internal fragmenting.
Mineta had helped start the agency by borrowing a group of experts from some of America’s leading companies — such as Intel, FedEx, Marriott International, and Fluor — to bring the whiz and flash of high commerce to government work. They operated almost around the clock, cranking out Powerpoint presentations, but often found their recommendations languishing as agency officials put off decisions.
Meanwhile, many former Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) security officials who transferred to the new agency felt stigmatized by the Sept. 11 events that had occurred on their watch. Some they felt their aviation experience was being ignored.
For example, although an FAA committee of industry experts was designing an employee-identification system to replace the hundreds of different badges used at airports around the country, the Transportation Security Administration convened its own effort. Confused contractors made presentations to both groups.
“There wasn’t enough time to write everything down,” one agency insider said. “If it’s not written down what you’re supposed to do, you’re toast.”
Feeling the pressure
Time was short to begin with, and mounting outside pressures just made things worse, from Magaw’s point of view. If the agency had been put into the Secret Service or the FBI, he said — organizations already set up to handle security — the work might have gone more quickly. Nonetheless, Magaw stuck to his methodical path even as he saw congressional backing slipping away.
Long lines in airports around the country only ratcheted up the pressure from lawmakers. “They go home every weekend, they hear customers complaining, airports complaining,” Magaw said. “So that was a terrible frustration for them, I know.”
The airports, united in their frustration with the agency, turned to a sympathetic group of frequent fliers: members of Congress. They found support for a proposal to extend the Dec. 31 bomb-detection deadline. The House has approved extending the deadline for a year, and the Senate is expected to consider the same measure soon.
Airline pilots, angered when Magaw rejected their proposal to carry guns in the cockpit, also turned to Congress — arguing the agency’s failures had left them unprotected. As political confidence in the agency plunged, lawmakers previously opposed to the idea of guns changed their minds.
As the scenes of chaos at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) disrupted July Fourth cookouts across the nation, the agency’s critics were given one more reason to believe the young agency was lost. Hesham Mohamed Hadayet, an Egyptian immigrant, killed two El Al employees before being gunned down by an airline security guard.
The FBI took over the inquiry, which it announced yesterday is now being investigated as possible terrorism, though Hadayet had no known links to any organization. At the time, the agency’s security director for LAX was sitting in Washington, D.C., appointed only two days before.
Nine days later, the House passed a bill to provide guns to pilots.
A few days after that, Mineta summoned Magaw to his office and demanded his resignation.
Politically savvy successor
Magaw later said he was surprised, but others in the agency said he shouldn’t have been. Just the month before, Mineta had signaled his displeasure by installing former Coast Guard commandant James Loy — a politically savvy, widely respected administrator — as Magaw’s deputy.
The day Mineta announced Loy’s hiring to a conference room of top agency officials, he emphasized that the agency was not intended to be a law-enforcement agency. It should provide security and customer service, Mineta said. It should be responsive to all the stakeholders in American air travel — from passengers to airlines to airport managers.
Loy has since replaced Magaw at the helm of the agency. The Transportation Department maintains that the agency’s mission has not changed, only that it will now be managed more efficiently and responsively. With roughly 15,000 screeners hired, the agency still needs 35,000 more workers by year’s end.
But the agency is, in some ways, starting over.
In his first few weeks on the job, Loy has traveled to airports across the country, learning the names of the airport managers in each city and trying to make amends. He is promising a more customer-friendly agency.
Along the way he has sweetened the pot by offering to relax certain small security rules that had irritated airlines and passengers. For instance, he has eliminated the prohibition on carrying cups of coffee through checkpoints.
Several larger policies decided by Magaw, such as the opposition to arming pilots, are now under review. The agency also is looking to develop a trusted-traveler program for frequent fliers, an idea pushed by airlines but opposed by Magaw.
Loy also has done something Magaw went down determined never to do: conceded that the agency can’t meet its big bomb-detection deadline.