The last word: Terror’s watchmen

Chan Browne is standing in his girlfriend’s kitchen, packing a lunch for his girlfriend’s daughter. He wants to get it right. Strawberry jelly, not grape, with peanut butter and wheat bread, cut in rectangles, not triangles.

It is dark out still, but Browne’s fiancée has left for work. Browne, a thickly built federal air marshal, picks up a pen: Jamie, Have a good day. Do well in school. He folds the note and closes the 7-year-old’s lunchbox.

On the counter, his BlackBerry begins to dance. As usual, something is wrong.

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0650 Hours: Improper Selectee Screening (Chippewa County, MI):

On a runway at the Chippewa County airport in northern Michigan, on Mesaba Airlines Flight 3042, a man is sitting in seat 4C, waiting for takeoff. He shouldn’t have been allowed on the plane.

The man is a selectee, a person flagged by the government as one who might pose a “direct threat” to U.S. aviation. The selectee’s boarding pass had been printed with a special mark. At the checkpoint, a guard was supposed to divert the man for additional screening. The guard blew it.

For Browne and the others who work on the Watch Floor at the Freedom Center, a counterterrorism compound in Northern Virginia, the passenger at Chippewa in 4C triggers the first adrenaline uptick of the day. Browne’s shift won’t begin for another seven hours, but the 44-year-old special agent is tracking alerts and incidents on his BlackBerry because soon enough they will be his.

The Freedom Center opened in an unmarked building in August 2003. Its mission: to prevent another 9/11. The center responds to threats to mass transit, bridges, railways, vehicles and roads, pipelines, postal and cargo shipping, ports, and, above all, aviation. One minute, a report comes in about a mysterious truck abandoned on railroad tracks in Delaware. The next, a note is discovered on a ferry in North Carolina: There are bombs on this boat. The next, a 78-year-old Egyptian woman in a wheelchair is trying to board a plane in Nashville with eight boxes of razor blades in her bra.

Browne’s boss, Kent Jeffries, describes the requisite mind-set: “You treat every incident, like, Is this the next 9/11? No? Good. Move on.”

One lesson of al Qaida’s simultaneous strikes in 2001 is the importance of communication. Though run by the Department of Homeland Security, the Watch Floor houses representatives from the Department of Defense, Department of Transportation, Secret Service, Capitol Police, FBI, and Federal Aviation Administration. Data from more than 450 federalized airports and 19,000 general aviation airfields feed into the Watch Floor. Analysts try to connect unusual events as they unfold across the country, to spot trends, to stop an emerging attack. In the fall of 2005, for example, over the course of two weeks, passengers on three different flights stood up in the aisles and fainted. Was it a probe? Were terrorists testing airline preparedness, or were the serial faintings a coincidence?

If things do go bad, or at least seem to, men in Air Force uniforms take action, scrambling fighter jets, as they did on a recent afternoon when a Cessna flew into restricted airspace over Washington.

Over his 13 months in the job, Browne has developed a sense about the threats, when they’re everyday oddities, and when they might be real. At Chippewa, a flight attendant escorted the selectee out of seat 4C, for additional screening. The guard who missed the special selectee mark spent the rest of his shift in remedial training.

On this quiet Tuesday, Browne isn’t yet alarmed. He admits to “a doomsday outlook,” though. “There’s an underlying, unknown anxiety and stress in those of us who deal with terrorist threats,” he says. “We know we’re getting farther away from 9/11 and closer and closer to the next attack. It’s only a matter of time.”

When he watches Jamie step onto her school bus at 8:30, he can’t help but worry.

0847 Hours: Firearm Detected During Checkpoint Screening (Memphis):

Every day, on average, American airport screeners find two guns. In this case, a man trying to board ExpressJet’s Flight 2704 is carrying a loaded .32-caliber Kel Tec pistol. He says that he “forgot the firearm was in his bag.”

“Normal business,” Browne thinks, clicking the “FIREARM” message on his BlackBerry. He laces up his sneakers and goes out for a run.

1125 Hours: Suspicious Selectees on Flight to Las Vegas. ... 1225 Hours: Passenger Arrested After Behavior Detection Officer Referral (Minneapolis).

Anticipating the start of his shift, Browne starts his “pregame warm-ups,” rehearsing threat scenarios in his head.

Arriving at the Freedom Center before 2, Browne rolls past a guard and a metal fence trimmed with barbed wire. Inside, he buzzes himself beyond a “SECRET” sign. His fiancée, Kathy White, works in a nearby office, booking flights for air marshals. But Browne’s mind has already turned to the Watch Floor. The big room hums, windowless and dim. Along one wall, digital clocks glow red, ticking in 10 time zones. A colleague sums up the day: “Vanilla.” Browne knocks wood, then settles in beside command duty officer Chuck Phucas at the head of the pod. All is quiet.

“Too quiet,” says Kent Jeffries, hovering behind them.

Just then, a call comes in from USAirways, area code 704. A passenger on Flight 1736, Charlotte, N.C., to Indianapolis, said he saw a weapon on another passenger.

“I checked him,” says Mike Jimenez, hurrying over. Jimenez, an investigator with the fastest fingers on the floor, says he often has two minutes—no more—to determine if a person is an immediate threat. “He’s on a watch list for terrorists. Short, 170 pounds, possibly Muslim.”

The profile fits a potential threat, except for one thing. The man on the watch list, Jimenez says, is “the man who said he saw the weapon.” Browne stands up.

“What kind of weapon?” Jeffries says.

“The butt of a gun,” says Phucas, who is getting details from a watch officer.

The air traffic controllers had released the plane for takeoff. “They let the bird go,” says Phucas. He tells an officer: “Put it up on the tracking board.”

USAirways 1736 blips white across the computerized U.S. map. A systems search reveals that the pilot is armed. Ground agents in Charlotte had screened the two passengers, but, even so, one of Browne’s officers calls the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force to meet the plane at the gate when it lands. Jimenez, the investigator, gulps water from a gallon bottle as he scours databases for clues.

Then, a call comes in from a Transportation Security Administra­tion official in Miami. “A man ran away at a checkpoint,” Phucas says, relaying notes from the call.

“Probably an illegal immigrant,” says Jeffries. “That doesn’t excite me. We’ve had people bolt away because they can’t take their $40 lip gloss.”

“He was tackled by law enforcement,” says Phucas. “He was Lebanese.”

“What?” says Jeffries.

A recent intelligence brief had highlighted the Lebanese group Hezbollah, noting: “Tactics include hijacking commercial aircraft and in-transit ambushes.” In Miami, the Lebanese man had presented a fake U.S. passport with a Hispanic name. The guard was suspicious and referred him to secondary screening. When the secondary screener reached for the man’s bag, the suspect snatched his passport and ran.

“We have two things now,” Jeffries says, ever cool: a passenger in Charlotte who says he sees a gun; a passenger in Miami who flees. Are they related?

“Start a white board,” says Phucas.

An officer named Lee starts typing, black letters crawling across a large screen at the front of the room. Browne starts pacing.

Jimenez pulls up a picture of the Miami suspect online, along with his real passport from Lebanon. He discovers in a commercial database that the suspect had bought his American Airlines ticket as well as tickets for two other men. Like him, the two men were flying from Miami to Los Angeles that afternoon, though, notably, on a different airplane.

Jimenez pulls up a diagram of the Miami airport. Something about the chase bothers Browne. The Lebanese man had fled the terminal. As police approached him, he jumped from a parking ramp, shattering his arm as he landed. Yet even with a broken limb, the suspect continued to struggle.

“Why so extreme?” Browne wonders. Abandon a bag? Leap off a ramp? Browne says to an agent, “Send out an alert notification page.”

The text message blasts out to all American airports, in case—though

it’s very unlikely—something similar is happening, somewhere.

1510 Hours: Passenger Arrested After Behavior Detection Officer Referral (Los Angeles/LAX):

“The exact situation just happened in L.A.,” says Jeffries’ deputy, Andrew Hosey. “A passenger took off.”

Fifteen minutes had passed since the Lebanese man in Miami had fled. Now, a man in Los Angeles had been referred to secondary screening for suspicious behavior. The man dropped his bag on the X-ray conveyor belt and ran.

The tiniest of frown lines pinches Jeffries’ brow. “Was he Lebanese?”

“Jeanne Meserve is going to go live on CNN about it.”

“Was he Lebanese?” Jeffries repeats.

“I don’t know,” says Hosey.

Browne orders another blast notification page, this time about L.A. In his mind, he is “bleeding between Code Orange and Red.” Security directors from airports across the East Coast bombard the Freedom Center with questions. At La Guardia Airport in New York City, a TSA employee fires off an e-mail: What about Miami, is there a connection?????? Jeffries contemplates this: “Major airports on either coast, large aircraft like 9/11. Is it a probe, or is this an actual attack?”

“Get back on the phone with L.A.,” Phucas orders the officer who took the L.A. report. “Don’t let them off the phone till I say so.”

Jimenez clatters away at nine systems, racing to link the men in Miami and L.A.: Warrants? Border crossings? Did they share a P.O. box? Rent an apartment together? Jimenez’ face turns warm. Then it gets hot. The Miami man has a fake California driver’s license.

On the Watch Floor, the usual murmur is gone. When Browne looks up at the electronic U.S. map, at the Charlotte-to-Indianapolis flight pulsing across state lines, he thinks that armed terrorists might be on board, that the checkpoint running might be a diversion, that the terrorists have companions on other flights, and that any minute the entire map could light up with tiny, white planes.

A simple thought flashes through his mind, “Here we go again.” The terrorist attack he expected.

Browne takes a breath and tells one of his agents, Denny Spencer, in a calm, authoritative voice: “Alert all federal marshals transiting Miami and L.A.”

The next hours are excruciating.

1516 Hours: Secure ID Violation (Dallas–Forth Worth). ... 1653 Hours:

Suspicious Individual (Newark).

Finally, at a quarter past 11 at night: Passenger Arrested Las Vegas.

“The guy in L.A. is a doper!” a voice calls from the Watch Floor.

“Where?” Browne says, turning to Spencer. “Who are you talking to?”

“Los Angeles. The guy was nervous about flying, so he smoked pot,” says Spencer. “No apparent nexus to terrorism.” The events in Miami and Los Angeles are not related.

“Stand down!” Browne tells his officers. He takes a deep breath. So do his agents.

Later, it emerges that the Charlotte passenger was not on a terrorist watch list after all. There had been an error in spelling his common name. Soon enough, the case in Miami also closes out. Law enforcement officials pulled the leaper’s two companions off their flight and found 10 credit cards and three cashier’s checks totaling more than $1 million. The carry-on bag the first man had abandoned contained cocaine.

“That guy made me almost mess my pants today,” Phucas says. “I’d throw him off [that] parking ramp myself.”

Browne is more subdued. As his shift winds down, he eats soup at his desk and calls his girlfriend at home.

“We thought we had something today,” he says. “How’s Jamie?”

From a longer story published by The Washington Post Magazine. ©2008 by The Washington Post Co. All rights reserved.