Read shocking airport
memo Congress ignored

WASHINGTON – A former Federal Aviation Administration agent accuses key U.S. senators of failing to act on a 1998 memo that detailed security breaches at a major Western airport that he thinks were so alarming they should have triggered hearings and nationwide security fixes, such as those passed into law only after the Sept. 11 hijackings.

The agent says he showed the two-page memo to a top aide of Sen. John McCain during a meeting here last year, when the Arizona Republican headed a Senate panel overseeing commercial aviation. Thinking McCain never got wind of it, he says he followed up several
months later by personally handing a letter explaining the memo to McCain himself.

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WorldNetDaily has obtained a copy of the Oct. 1, 1998, internal document (page 1 and page 2), which details the findings of an FAA security sting operation that turned up shocking violations at an international airport west of Texas. The agent redacted the name of the airport for security reasons.

In the undercover sting, the team of FAA agents managed to:

• Break through different airport security points 446 times out of 450 tries, meaning the "bad guys" were successful 99.1 percent of the time.

• Access the ramp 19 times by slipping behind airline staff, who opened gate doors with their security cards.

• Walk around "unmanned, unguarded" planes, look inside aircraft holds and engines, and even sit in plane seats without being stopped, demonstrating the ease with which bombs or weapons could be placed on board.

• Climb inside the back of Sky Chefs' catering trucks and "place anything they liked" inside food carts.

• Plant bombs inside passenger luggage at the airline loading docks.

• Get past screeners with a submachine gun strapped behind an agent's back and concealed under his jacket.

• Get past screeners with a submachine gun strapped
  behind an agent's back and concealed under his jacket.

• Slip past screeners a bomb hidden inside a laptop computer.

• Plant bombs in passengers' handbags left unattended at terminal lounges located beyond security checkpoints.

The FAA rated the airport "highly vulnerable to terrorism and bombings in all security areas," the memo said. "On domestic flights, [the] score was even higher than on international" flights.

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Steve Elson, the former FAA airport-security inspector who showed the findings to McCain and others on the Hill, says another major airport failed a similar sting by the team. He says security vulnerabilities at the two airports are emblematic of most major airports across the country.

Though he admits such intruders would not go so unchallenged today, recent security fixes don't cover the ramp, where jetliners are still left unguarded overnight.

He says the memo "absolutely floored me" when he intercepted it at an FAA field office in 1998.

Elson, who starting in 1992 conducted stings for the FAA's so-called Red Team, left the FAA in 1999 in frustration over what he says was a disregard in Washington for security warnings from the field.

On March 6, 2000, he says he showed the memo to a top aide of McCain, who at the time chaired the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, during
an hour-long meeting in Room 253 of the Senate Russell Office Building. The panel oversees the FAA and the airlines.

Along with the memo, Elson says he gave Martha Albright, the then-committee general counsel, nearly 400 pages of other documents, including internal FAA
memos, in a large binder that he now calls "the big, blue book of death," because he thinks the Sept. 11 hijackings could have been prevented if airport
security warnings had been heeded.

After getting no response, and seeing no action in Washington, he personally handed McCain a two-page letter highlighting the 1998 memo at a Sept. 30, 2000, book-signing event just outside of New Orleans.

He says McCain never acted on it.

"I thought if I showed these people this memo, they'd jump up and go berserk," Elson said. "Not only did they not jump up, they just plain didn't give a [expletive]."

"Nothing ever happened," he added. "Yet that one document alone should have changed aviation security nationwide."

A McCain spokesman on the committee said the senator "has no recollection of it." He adds that Albright,
who no longer works for the committee, can't recall receiving the memo.

"I'm not denying it could have happened," said spokesman Mark Buse. "We just have no recollection of
it."

He says McCain was on a 30-day book tour in September 2000 and was swamped with all sorts of requests from
people.

"You have to understand, the senator is a very popular public figure and is handed hundreds of things," Buse
said.

Asked what McCain would have done with the memo if he had seen it, Buse said he would have given it to a staffer who, in turn, "would have forwarded it to the FAA, and let it take the appropriate steps to remedy the problems."

He says the former chairman would not have held hearings on the matter until after the problems were corrected, and only then to investigate why the problems had occurred in the first place.

Elson says the memo was sent out to airline personnel by teletype or cable. It details a meeting at the airport with an airline security manager and an FAA official from Washington.

For security reasons, Elson blacked-out the names of the meeting's participants, as well as the name of the airport.

"You don't tell bad guys where the bad airports are," he explained.

But he did say that it is a major international airport – "one of the biggest airports in the country" – and is located "west of Texas." He says security at the airport, though it was not recently built, "looks good on the outside" and even includes biometric fingerprint-scanning technology.

The same airport was one of five cited in 1993 for security problems by auditors working for the Transportation Department's inspector general, he says.

The violations were videotaped by undercover agents. The FAA planned to use the tapes in security instruction at airports.

"But the violations are so bad," Elson claimed, "they buried the videos in a safe at [FAA] headquarters" in Washington.

FAA spokeswoman Alison Duquette declined to comment on the memo, the videos or Elson, although she said she was "aware of him," having seen him recently on CBS' "60 Minutes."

Elson maintains that, particularly before Sept. 11, the FAA has been pressured by Congress to go easy on airlines and airports for security lapses, because Congress itself is pressured by lobbyists representing airlines focused on getting planes in the air to turn bigger profits. Tighter security delays flights, he says, and planes stuck on the tarmac are like money burning.

In hearings, McCain and other lawmakers have focused on airline delays, missed flights and lost baggage, and have largely overlooked security problems, Elson complained.

He says FAA agents and flight attendants have for years clamored for a ban on knives of all sizes and types and reinforced cockpit doors, as well as other security improvements, which were implemented only after the Sept. 11 tragedy.

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