As 19 hijackers made their way along the concourses at three East Coast airports on Sept. 11, bent on executing the deadliest terrorist attack in history, they were subjecting the U.S. aviation security system to its most critical test.
At almost every step along the way, the system posed no challenge to the terrorists--not to their ability to purchase tickets, to pass security checkpoints while carrying knives and cutting implements nor to board aircraft.
The system worked the way it was intended, according to all the available evidence. For three decades, it has been preoccupied with looking for guns and explosives rather than for dangerous people. That, security experts and aviation professionals say, was its vulnerability. The terrorists did not breach the nation's airport security system; they slipped through its loopholes.
Nothing in Federal Aviation Administration rules and regulations--even assuming they were followed to the letter--would have prevented the hijackers from carrying out their baleful missions, considering what is known so far about the plot to hijack jetliners and suicide-dive them into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
"The absolute truth is I have not been informed of any breaches in security that took place on Sept. 11," said Susan Baer, general manager at Newark International Airport in New Jersey, where one of the hijacked planes took off. She echoed similar assessments by law enforcement and airline industry officials of the hijackers' success at also boarding planes at Boston and Virginia airports.
The governing assumption has long been that a hijacker's principal goal is to use the aircraft as a bargaining chip, whether for political purposes or to reach an unscheduled destination.
Until the very morning of Sept. 11, leaders of the security community had not focused on the threat that actually materialized: squads of lightly armed hijackers seizing airliners as instruments of suicide and destruction.
But an attack similar to this month's, if not on the same horrific scale, was not entirely unforeseen. On May 7, Brian Sullivan, a former FAA special agent at Logan International Airport in Boston, expressed his concerns in a letter to Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.).
"What protection is there against a rogue terrorist? And with the concept of jihad, do you think it would be difficult for a determined terrorist to get on a plane and destroy himself and all other passengers? . . . With our current screening system, this is more than possible, almost likely."
