S.F. airport flunked
secret security test

WASHINGTON – Undercover agents acting as terrorists managed to break through security points at San Francisco International Airport 99 percent of the time during a 1998 sting, reveals a confidential memo of a Federal Aviation Administration meeting.

Yet top FAA officials here took "no corrective action," an FAA whistleblower agent complained, even though agents were able to sneak even machine guns past screeners.

WorldNetDaily.com, in an exclusive Dec. 19 article, published a redacted version of the shocking memo, with the name of the airport and names of FAA and airport officials blacked out. The full memo can now be revealed.

The team conducting the sting at San Francisco airport – which the memo refers to by its FAA code name, "SFO" – was caught only four times in 450 attempts to work its way past different security points to get to secure areas, such as baggage docks, ramps and the planes themselves, the memo says.

As a result, the team "rated SFO as highly vulnerable to terrorism and bombings in all security areas," the memo said. "On domestic flights, [the penetration] score was even higher than on international" flights.

The sting was caught on videotape and shown to FAA managers in Washington and the Transportation Department inspector general, according to a former FAA special agent and former member of the agency's elite Red Team, which conducts mock attacks against airports and aircraft.

"The video and reports were then buried, and no corrective action was taken," said Steve Elson, who left the FAA in 1999 after he says headquarters ignored his and other field agents' repeated security warnings.

Undercover agents posing as passengers were able to get past San Francisco checkpoint screeners manning metal detectors seven times with guns tucked under their belt-buckles, the memo says. At least once, an agent was able to sneak a machine gun through the portal by hiding it under a jacket.

Also, laptops concealing guns and bombs made it through X-ray machines without alarming screeners.

The team penetrated ramp security just as easily, managing to get through gate and other secure doors 19 times, and then walk around jetliners, where agents "could easily have placed a bomb on board," according to the memo. They also were able to climb inside the back of a Sky Chefs truck "and place anything they liked [on] the catering carts."

What's more, they managed "to get to the airlines baggage area without anyone checking carefully enough that their IDs were false," the memo said. And they "managed to place bombs in passengers' baggage that was about to be loaded [on] aircraft."

The memo, titled "FAA meeting on vulnerability assessment of SFO airport," was written on Oct. 1, 1998, by Irma Soderholm, a British Airways employee at the time. She was summarizing remarks made by Carl Mosby, FAA's security manager at San Francisco airport, during a Sept. 24, 1998, meeting at the airport, which was attended by various airline employees.

Mosby introduced Victor Vella, a former FAA security official from Washington, who explained that the sting was part of a vulnerability study of different U.S. airports commissioned by the FAA.

Elson says another major airport in the Pacific Northwest was tested and the team came up "with the same abominable results."

San Francisco is one of the airports that flunked a similar test by Transportation's inspector general in 1993, Elson notes.

Attempts to reach Mosby, now the airport's acting representative for the Transportation Department's newly created Transportation Security Administration, were unsuccessful. His office voice-mail recording said his mailbox was full and could not accept any new messages.

On Oct. 20, Carol Spear, British Airways' manager of customer service out of San Francisco, forwarded Soderholm's memo to Joseph Macri, another British Airways employee.

"FYI – concerning reading," she said. "Let us know what you need us to do."

Soderholm's memo has several typos and other errors in it, the most glaring being the reference to a "Mac2 machine gun." There are MAC-10 submachine guns and M-2 machine guns, but no "Mac2" machine guns.

Elson's claims of high-level negligence are backed up by another FAA special agent, a 14-year veteran of the agency's security division here.

In 1998, Bogdan "John" Dzakovic, now working as an FAA Red Team leader, says he and other agents completed "extensive testing" of screening checkpoints at a large number of domestic airports.

"We were successful in getting major weapons – guns and bombs – through with relative ease, at least 85 percent of the time in most cases," he said last week at a congressional whistleblowers' forum on national security. "At one airport, we had a 97 percent success rate in breaching the screening checkpoint."

"No action was taken to remedy this security problem," he added. "And we have never been back to any airport to test security in this manner."

Dzakovic charged that "individuals who occupied the highest seats of authority in FAA" – including FAA Administrator Jane Garvey – "were fully aware of this highly vulnerable state of aviation security – and did nothing."

Garvey and other top FAA managers have denied ignoring security warnings and have argued that the Sept. 11 hijackers did not exploit weaknesses in airport security.

Still, the inspector general has agreed to investigate Dzakovic's whistleblower charges.

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