The attack on New York and Washington challenged Customs, turning its world upside down in ways it had never envisioned. Customs had pivoted quickly before, and its enforcement units, in particular, were adept at accommodating their tactics to the shifting strategies employed by international drug cartels, child pornographers, and money launderers. But on the morning of September 11, when the top of the North Tower smashed though the center of 6 WTC, the impact demolished more than the NY/SAIC office. At that moment, Customs knew that many of its assumptions about the agency's primary mission, its challenges, and its future had been dramatically altered as well.

Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

"It's almost impossible to track the first response of individual offices or to say 'these were the first on the spot'," says Commissioner Bonner. "Every division and office within Customs, every employee at Headquarters and in the field, off-duty officers watching television at home knew immediately, and without anyone telling them, that we were on high-alert. People knew exactly where they were needed, and what Customs needed them to do-fight terrorism."

9/11: attack on two fronts
The war on terrorism has many fronts. When terrorists slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, their immediate goal was to kill Americans, depositing the nightmare images into our national memory. The attack was about something else as well, about Wall Street, the airline industry, shipping and freight-forwarding, trucking, the retail market, tourism, manufacturing, and countless other businesses and markets along the chain. Al Qaeda understood that sabotaging the U.S. economy could destroy us as well, in ways that might be less immediate but just as deadly. The best way to do that was by shutting down the infrastructure on which global trade depends.

After 9/11, Customs had to meet multiple challenges head-on: to partner with defense and other law enforcement agencies to ensure national security, and to work with industry to guarantee the integrity of the supply chain and the tons of cargo arriving at U.S. ports every year. Another direct hit on U.S. citizens or installations, or a post-9/11 erosion of the global trading system-triggered by gridlock at the borders or explosives hidden in containers- was an option Customs couldn't entertain.

Stopping terrorism without stopping trade
On September 11, Customs scrambled to respond to the physical destruction and loss of life in New York and Washington; at the same time, the Office of Field Operations faced another dilemma: commercial traffic at the borders was paralyzed.

On the U.S./Canadian Border, trucks loaded with critical parts the "Big Three" automakers, Ford, Chrysler and GM, needed to keep "Just in Time" inventories stocked and manufacturing plants in business weren't moving. By the afternoon of September 11, the airline industry was already out of business, for how long no one was sure, and the automobile industry, another major linchpin in the U.S. Economy, was in trouble.

For OFO, the dilemma was complicated: how to secure the "longest unguarded border in the world" in ways that wouldn't impair the movement of legitimate trade. In an average day, more than a billion dollars in trade moves through U.S. and Canadian ports, 25 percent of it across the Ambassador Bridge between Detroit and Windsor.

Photo Credit: Gerald L. Nino

Customs Inspector in port of Peach Arch, Blaine, Wash., searches a trunk in wake of September 11th.

The congestion on the Ambassador Bridge began to peak on September 12. Right after the attack, the wait averaged 8 to 12 hours. The next day, a lot of truckers just stopped counting. Kevin Weeks, Director of the West Great Lakes CMC, and his team met with representatives from Chrysler, GM, and Ford. The situation was dire. Manufacturing had slowed to dangerous levels. Some plants had even shut down. Customs, industry, bridge-owners, and shipping companies sat down in Weeks' office in Detroit to create one-of-a-kind, wartime strategies to avert economic disaster. And it worked.

They reached out to a local barge operator, a businessman who's transported other types of cargo across the lake for years, and together, Customs and the bargeman put together a deal: he would ship auto parts and other critical components the industry needed on an extended schedule, from 8 a.m. to 12 midnight. Customs also worked out an arrangement to free up the Ambassador Bridge: when traffic into the U.S. backed up, Customs would open up 3 of the 4 bridge lanes to carry traffic from Canada. When traffic into Canada needed to move, 3 of the 4 lanes would open in the opposite direction.

At one point, the bridge company escorted a convoy of trucks carrying JIT inventory across the bridge from Detroit to Windsor. Customs designated a special lane to handle the convoy, streamlining the inspection process. Customs counseled disconcerted shippers to move cargo onto rail systems. At the same time, Customs used its own aircraft to transport inspectors from other locations to the Ambassador Bridge, supplementing round-the-clock shifts with its own personnel until the National Guard sent 45 more guardsmen to support Customs personnel.

"If Customs hadn't responded with the kind of cooperation and creativity you saw on September 12," says Weeks, "the impact on both the U.S. And the Canadian economy could have been catastrophic."

Customs client reps keep industry alive
On September 12, the calls started. Importers, exporters, brokers, and freight forwarders with offices in or close to the World Trade Center had lost information they needed to feed into the Customs Automated Commercial System (ACS)-the electronic bridge Customs has built between the trade and its customers.

Countless business people, their employees, and their customers stood to lose billions in revenue and wages as the aftermath of 9/11 reverberated through the trading system. At the same time Customs personnel were working to salvage agency resources at 6 WTC, Customs client representatives, trade support staff for ACS, raced to help companies rebuild operations and communication links.

Some companies went low-tech, filing paperwork manually, and Customs talked them through until off-site backup systems went online. When a company had no back-up system and no way to retrieve information, Customs client reps were there, doing whatever it took to help them rebuild from the ground up. "Without this kind of help," says one New York importer, "I would have been out of business. We didn't even have a telephone. But the message we got from Customs was all about action, not words."

Hands across the border
At Headquarters, the minutes after the attack played out in other ways. "Denis Lefebvre, the Assistant Commissioner for Operations, Canadian Customs, called me within an hour of the attack," recalls Bill Heffelfinger, Assistant to the Commissioner, Office of Border Coordination. "I was very moved by his immediate and unconditional offer to do anything they could do to help. They made good on that promise too-less than a month later, we had a shared border plan in operation."

Commissioner Bonner and Canadian Customs Commissioner Wright met in Washington, D.C., in a fast-moving attempt to craft a new kind of U.S./Canadian partnership. The Ottawa Framework materialized, an anti-terrorism strategy that eventually provided the underpinnings for the Ridge/Manley Declarations, a 30-point plan loaded with substantive anti-terrorism strategies designed to protect legitimate trade from terrorist infiltration.

John Heinrich, Deputy Commissioner for OFO, says Customs "finest hour" came directly after the attack, when everyone was hunkered down waiting for the next shoe to drop.

"Think about it," says Heinrich. "For the first time in history, U.S. airspace was empty, closed down. Federal buildings in D.C. were closed. The streets were empty, restaurants were vacant, plays on Broadway were canceled. No one knew if there would be another attack, or where that attack might happen. But our inspectors didn't stop or close shop. They were doing their jobs, walking up to every car, every conveyance, every person, and looking them straight in the eye. Their job was never more dangerous than it was after 9/11, but they didn't blink."

The same courage materialized on the southwest border. While companies across America were shutting down and sending employees home, inspectors at the port of San Ysidro sprang into action. They shut down 24 lanes of traffic, and began a painstaking search of 42,000 cars.

"We began doing 100 percent searches of all the vehicles, checking compartments, trunks, and hoods," says San Ysidro Port Director Oscar Priciado.

Immediately after 9/11, drug seizures dried up-inspectors didn't find a single load of illegal drugs. Nevertheless, dealers needed to move their products. That's when inspectors encountered a phenomenon they dub "the Terrorist Dividend"-the crackdown on the border drove up the seizure rates for drugs. Traffickers stymied by the tight security in place after the attack were desperate to move their merchandise, but when they did, Customs inspectors on high alert grabbed it. Crossing the border meant making it through the eye of a needle, a process that allowed inspectors and agents to scrutinize passengers and vehicles with unrelenting thoroughness.

President issues marching orders
In March, President Bush toured the El Paso port of entry where Customs inspectors showcased the new technologies they'd acquired to fight terrorism on the southwest border.

Photo Credit: Gerald L. Nino

President Bush, with Commissioner Bonner, at Customs El Paso port of entry. During a tour of the port, the President gained a first-hand look at technologies Customs uses to fight terrorism.

"President Bush was very engaging and appeared to be impressed with the tools and technology we use to defend our nation's borders, and the dedication and commitment of our officers," recalls Port Director David Longoria.

Back in Washington, D.C., the President declared, "We can't let terrorists shut down the world economy."

Breakthrough strategies support trade, combat terrorism
After 9/11, supply chain security became a priority for Customs and the Administration, and the public-private partnerships the agency had been building gradually before the attack gained added momentum from new legislation and a timeline determined by terrorist threats.

Photo Credit: Gerald L. Nino

Governor Tom Ridge at C-TPAT launch announces, "This program is important because it strengthens the security of our borders while speeding up the flow of legitimate goods."

On November 27, at the U.S. Customs Trade Symposium in Washington, D.C., Commissioner Bonner announced the creation of C-TPAT, an "umbrella" plan that builds even further on private-public partnerships. C-TPAT is a breakthrough for everyone involved: customs organizations, governments, shippers, importers, brokers, freight-forwarders, and countless working people whose livelihoods are linked to the processing of trade.

Customs advised industry partners who agreed to comply with a long and solid checklist of security precautions they can count on the agency to do its part to keep their cargo moving. Shippers, brokers, and importers rushed to join, driven both by patriotism and a Customs pledge that terrorist threats aren't likely to destabilize the operations of compliant companies.

Commissioner Bonner told shippers and importers he believes C-TPAT will reverberate through the international supply chain. C-TPAT is more ambitious than any Customs-industry program launched to date: it's goal is to guarantee the integrity of every cargo container bound for the U.S. from the moment the container is packed to the minute it arrives at its final destination.

Approximately 19 million cargo containers enter the U.S. every year. Before 9/11, Customs depended on technology and partnerships with shippers and importers to supplement the efforts of 13,000 inspectors. It's an arrangement that's grown over the years, a reciprocal effort that, before September 11, was moving along at a steady pace.

Bonner responded to the post-9/11 emergency with a plan called CSI, the Container Security Initiative. The new anti-terrorism strategy puts U.S. Customs officers in foreign ports where they examine U.S. bound cargo before it leaves the dock. Customs started with the "top twenty" foreign ports, locations that process almost 70 percent of goods bound for the U.S. The initiative is right on time, a critical signal that the Customs intends to protect the world's trading system as well as our own national security.

Photo Credit: James Tourtellotte

Commissioner Bonner describes the Container Security Initiative to the World Customs Organization, who unanimously supported CSI principles.

CSI became a reality when U.S. Customs inspectors arrived in Vancouver, Montreal, and Halifax. Other governments added their ports to the list-Antwerp, Bremerhaven, Hamburg, Le Havre, Rotterdam, and Singapore-reaching for this opportunity to keep their exports moving. Bonner met with heads of foreign Customs organizations and with the international trade community, advancing the use of technology, "SMART cards," and radiation and chemical detectors to winnow out high-risk shipments.

On the northern border, Customs initiated FAST, a strategy that uses technology and industry partnerships to streamline the cross-border movement of low-risk freight carriers. NEXUS came on line as well, a program offering casual travelers the same cross-border efficiencies FAST offers commercial traffic.

A little less than a year after the attack, Commissioner Bonner proposed an AirNEXUS Program to help the airline industry regain ground. The initiative is modeled on the program designed for travelers moving through ports of entry; its goal is to reassure and protect passengers who want to fly, and to send a positive message to the aviation industry and the world: terrorism won't keep U.S. planes or U.S. citizens out of the sky.

Enforcement's rapid response
"The events of September 11 triggered situations no one could have anticipated," says John Varrone, Assistant Commissioner, Office of Investigations. "No amount of training could have fully prepared us to respond to the attack and its larger implications, but every man and woman in the Office of Investigations moved out to meet the threat and to counter it."

Minutes after the attack, Customs went to Alert Level 1. At Headquarters, members of OI's executive staff were moving closer to a television screen. That morning, Customs law enforcement saw what the nation saw, a first plane, maybe an accident, and like everybody else, the men and women of America's Frontline reached for the simplest explanation-a random collision in a city hundreds of miles away.

The second plane, and then the Pentagon, and then the field in Somerset County, Pa., pushed everyone out of real time and into one of those moments you talk about for the rest of your life. It didn't last. Agents understood at once that the country was under attack, and years of training quickly swept them past what was happening and toward what had to happen next.

Special agents in OI and Internal Affairs began to talk about evacuation. "If Washington was destroyed and the government was decapitated, then the critical business of Customs would still need to be conducted," says Rick Mercier, Executive Director, Investigative Programs, Northern Border Issues. "One idea involved moving staff to an off-site Customs Command Post, but Washington's streets and bridges were jammed with pedestrians and cars. We were here to stay."

John Varrone was named Acting Commissioner, and the first thing he did was call a crisis management meeting. Assistant Commissioners gathered in the Customs Situation Room, where Customs personnel were already monitoring radar feeds transmitted by Customs Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center (AMICC). The President of the United States ordered the grounding of every plane in U.S. airspace. Screens covered with "blips," each one representing some kind of aircraft, began to empty, but reports filtered in that as many as 11 aircraft could still be in the air, commandeered by terrorists and headed for U.S. targets.

Inspectors and agents ratcheted up security along more than 7,500 miles of land border and 95,000 miles of seacoast. They dramatically increased inspections at more than 300 ports of entry. And then, in what has been called "a defining moment for Customs," Roy Surrett, Acting Executive Director for Intelligence, rushed into the conference room with passenger lists for the four aircraft that had already gone down. There, on the table, were the names of the victims and the hijackers. It had been only 45 minutes since the attack.

Customs intelligence delivers results
"We delivered the kind of intelligence no other agency but Customs could have produced," says Mercier. "It was an extraordinary piece of work."

A year later, Customs still has a special place at the table. Special Agent Mike Vanacore says, "We've never had a better relationship with the FBI, or with the people there who are in charge of interdicting Weapons of Mass Destruction. We've established a strong presence with the Strategic Information and Operations Center, the FBI's Command Center. The government realizes that Customs is a major player in the war on terrorism."

Customs immediately forwarded the passenger lists to the FBI and the intelligence community. A Crisis Management Team at Headquarters began to implement a Continuity of Operations Plan (COOP), and within minutes, a Customs agent was on-site at FBI Headquarters, a few blocks away. An hour after the attack, every available Customs agent, analyst, and inspector was on call for round the clock duty in the Customs Situation Room, where data continued to come in from numerous services, including the AMICC in Riverside, Calif.

Air and marine interdiction center takes lead role
AMICC stood at the center of the action on 9/11, and on the day of the attack, the Center's expertise at targeting drug planes allowed analysts in Riverside to launch an operation whose scale and urgency dwarfed anything they'd done before. In minutes, the Center's reach shot across the United States, into remote pockets of the nation, and into large-scale, sophisticated information systems off-limits until that morning.

AMICC began to access simultaneous radar feeds from locations across the country, working with the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the Department of Defense (DOD), and NORAD to identify aircraft on unauthorized flight plans. Its mission in those first frantic moments was to sweep the skies over the U.S. clean, leaving nothing up on radar except the hijackers.

They didn't miss a beat.

First responders
On other fronts, in Customs offices across the nation, special agents were answering an immediate call for federal air marshals. In some places, employees didn't even have time to pack. In New York, where Customs officers witnessed the devastation first-hand, volunteers lined up for any and every kind of duty.

They said "yes" to tours as federal air marshals, no questions asked, not even "how long will I be gone?" They became part of the ad hoc "bucket brigade" at Ground Zero, working with NYPD, NYFD, the Secret Service, and the FBI to uncover "turf" that now belonged part and parcel to every high-wire worker on top of the rubble. They manned emergency phone lines day and night, worked inhuman schedules-agents looking for colleagues and clues about the identities and locations of terrorist cells, inspectors at the air and land ports who say this isn't overtime, this is their duty, their response to an enemy they now know can appear anywhere at any moment.

Customs volunteers reported to Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island later in September and begin a marathon recovery effort, sifting through tons of debris that arrived on barges from Ground Zero. Some volunteers came straight from FLETC; the rest from offices and disciplines throughout Customs. Many depended on their own initiative and the unconditional kind of cooperation that tragedy makes possible. They lived in tents, worked in Tyvek, prayed in a makeshift chapel.

Customs restructures
In October, Customs created a new Office of Anti-terrorism and Commissioner Bonner appointed William Parrish as its director. Parrish is a former Marine officer who commanded US Marine Corps Security Forces. This unit consisted of approximately 4,000 specially trained anti-terrorism personnel. Following the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996, Parrish led a special AT unit into Bahrain and established security for the Naval facilities. After arriving at Customs, Parrish engaged key interagency organizations to ensure Customs was appropriately represented and to guarantee that information moved swiftly and intact through Customs offices and partner agencies.

Says Parrish, "The goal of combating terrorism must be to deter the attack by making the terrorist believe that we have simply made it too difficult for him to succeed. Information and intelligence are key."

Adds Roy Surrett, Director, Special Operations/Anti Terrorism, "Minutes after the attack, Customs Intelligence locked onto every avenue that could have pointed federal law enforcement to the attackers, their accomplices on the ground, or a second wave getting ready for another assault. Before 9/11, 85 percent of our efforts were directed toward drug interdiction. After 9/11, 100 percent of our energy was focused on anti-terrorism."

A year after the attack, Surrett's people are still working 24/7 to gather the intelligence data anti-terrorist organizations need. And the office is succeeding by using many of the same strategies used to track down drug smugglers.

Find the money
Operation Green Quest requisitioned space in Customs Headquarters in October, and an expert financial crimes team began to strike at organizations suspected of funneling money to terrorist organizations. Special Agent Marcy Forman was named Director of Green Quest, and the operation hit the ground running.

The task force fanned out across the United States, seizing millions of dollars from franchises of Al-Barakaat, a money-transfer network based in the Persian Gulf. They snatched a Fed Ex package stuffed with $1 million inside on its way to the Mideast, a suitcase with $624,000 sewn into the lining-also bound for a terrorist source country-and $16 million from a miscellaneous assembly of criminals intent on smuggling it through airports, seaports, and border crossings.

Nine months later, Forman's multi-agency task force has seized more than $22.8 million in smuggled currency and monetary instruments from reaching terrorist or any other criminal organizations. According to Forman, instinct accounts for the group's success; they had years of experience tracking dirty money. "Operation Green Quest," she says, "draws on the same techniques we've used in the past to track money launderers smuggling drug proceeds. The difference is that after 9/11, we targeted countries known to harbor or produce terrorists, and we focused on shipments to or from those locations."

What also makes Green Quest different is the arsenal of expertise the operation brings to the government's anti-terrorism campaign, a staff drawn not just from Customs, but also from the IRS, DOD, DOJ, IRS, ATF, the Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, OFAC, FinCen, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, and the FBI.

For Assistant Director Jerry Robinette, the operation translates into an opportunity Customs has long deserved: "Customs finally had an appropriate forum to demonstrate a very special talent. For Customs, pursuing financial crimes has always been an end in itself; for other agencies, it's more often been a means to an end. Customs has taken the lead in Green Quest because in the end, the real passion to go after the money has always belonged to this agency."

Customs hires a record 2,500
Congressional hiring initiatives in response to the terrorist attacks resulted in the most aggressive hiring posture for Customs in years. Normally each year, Customs replaces about 400-500 inspectors and 100-200 agents who leave the agency-now, Customs Quality Recruitment (QR) team was faced with bringing on board during FY02 more than 1,600 inspectors and over 700 agents.

"The QR team responded rapidly; they quickly re-engineered hiring procedures and reached out to applicants across the country particularly on the northern border, with great success-we met our recruitment goals and are prepared to meet them again in FY03," says Robert M. Smith, Assistant Commissioner for Human Resources Management. "This was only possible because we had a team effort with the active support of OI, OFO, and Internal Affairs staff."

Between May and July, QR representatives traveled to key northern border locations to conduct on-site screening and drug testing, leading to over 1,100 "same-day" tentative selection letters, and expedited clearances. The team has already made several thousand offers to additional applicants to prepare for FY03.

OTD: playing the numbers
On September 11, 2001, Dr. Marjorie Budd, Assistant Commissioner for Training and Development, was off-site at a conference in Glynco, Ga. With her are all her senior staff and OTD managers from the field. Ironically, they were there to put together a training plan for the next fiscal year. Less than an hour into the meeting, after they learn of the attack, Budd and her staff know it's time to go back to the drawing boards.

For OTD, the next days and weeks are about numbers, big numbers. Almost immediately, the office began to offer anti-terrorism training to Customs personnel across the country, quickly developing and implementing new courses, registering and graduating classes in weeks instead of months. Inspectors and canine officers are trained to detect weapons of mass destruction, to ferret out bombs, to interdict the biological and chemical weapons the press has latched onto as part of a "what if" scenario making headlines around the world.

Customs has no "what if." The men and women learning to distinguish between a vial of headache medicine and a tube of something much worse won't let it happen.

Now OTD's top priority is protection and detection, training inspectors need to recognize the strategies of terrorists intent on smuggling dual technologies, chemical precursors, and component parts in and out of the United States. Inspectors focus on interdiction techniques on the U.S. border, but they also learn how to target and seize shipments overseas, playing out preemptive strategies that could head off disaster long before it hits home. Budd's office forms a partnership with the OFO and the OI, developing practical training that simulate real-life encounters with terrorists and their weapons of mass destruction.

With Customs aggressive-and successful-campaign to recruit and hire hundreds of new inspectors and other personnel, OTD began to work overtime to accommodate four times the number of recruits it was used to training every year. OTD and the Office of Anti-Terrorism brought managers and supervisors back to the classroom as well, challenging them with tabletop crisis scenarios-a car bomb on a busy bridge, the release of nerve gas in a crowded airport, a container of radioactive material discovered in a dockyard. Field exercises in emergency situations come next: dress rehearsals for the real event.

"I doubt Customs has ever mounted a training effort of this dimension in so short a time," says Budd. "But the determination of our staff, and the sense that we were on the front lines just as surely as anyone else, drove this office to outperform itself."

New legislation makes partners of Congress and Customs
The airline industry was hit hard by 9/11. Americans were reluctant to fly; the downturn in airline ticket sales began to filter through the economy at large, and both the government and the public realized the time had come to face what could be serious economic repercussions. After extensive discussions with the airline industry and Congress, President Bush signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, a signal that the Administration will not allow 9/11 to limit the freedom of travel or to sabotage the economy.

The new law requires the recently formed Transportation Security Administration to recruit, hire, and train more than 30,000 new federal employees, "passenger-screeners" slated to be on the job at the nation's 429 commercial airports by Nov. 19, 2002. For Customs, the new security force promises important opportunities to ID terrorists before they even enter the United States.

The Office of Field Operations created the Office of Border Security, a 24/7 unit with access to information across the government. Commissioner Bonner pushes for mandatory airline participation in the Advanced Passenger Information System.

He got what he asked for, and soon APIS became more than an incentive for airlines to work with Customs on a voluntary basis: after 9/11, APIS became a critical enforcement tool, a new weapon for Customs personnel who still remember the day U.S. aircraft were transformed into flying bombs. APIS works like this: airline personnel electronically transmit data on every passenger on every aircraft to OBS analysts on take-off. By the time a plane lands, Customs knows who's on it and what their presence on U.S. soil could mean to the country.

OFO pushed for another important change as well. Before 9/11, the radiation pagers that some inspectors carry were called "health and safety devices," prophylactics intended to prevent dangerous exposure to radiation. After 9/11, OBS redefined the radiation pager-like APIS, its purpose changed. The radiation pager became another enforcement tool, a device capable of warning Customs personnel that radioactive materials may be moving through a port. Customs decided to provide a radiation pager to every Customs inspector at every port: 4,000 of the devices were already in the field, and 4,500 more are on the way.

Shield America
In December, Customs Office of Strategic Investigations launched Shield America, an ambitious effort to engage U.S. manufacturers in the struggle to keep weapons of mass destruction, dual-use technology, and technological components out of the hands of America's enemies. Special Agent Mike Vanacore and his team began to reach out to thousands of businesspeople across the country, enlisting Americans moved by the events of 9/11 in the campaign to strengthen export control.

"We've gone out and talked to hundreds of manufacturers since 9/11," says Vanacore. "One of the differences is now manufacturers really want to be a part of Shield America. Our job is to teach them how to help us, to make genuine partners out of companies that produce dual-use technology and component parts terrorists need to launch more attacks."

The Shield America team, which has already prevented the export of nuclear trigger devices bound for Iraq and F-14 parts headed for Iran, started to focus on perils making headlines in the press-biological and chemical threats.

Also in December, Commissioner Bonner hailed the newly-signed Ridge/Manley Agreement and Smart Border Plan as the first, critical step one in a long-range, layered strategy to secure the global trading system. He called new technology, biometric identifiers, and new ways to share information critical deterrents to terrorism.

2002: global games and international security
In February, 500 Customs officers traveled to Salt Lake City to provide security for the Winter Games, 2002 Olympics. AMICC provided airspace security, while the OI, OFO, and OIT worked 24/7 to guarantee the safety of athletes and spectators. Customs officers worked day and night with their counterparts from the Secret Service and the FAA. AMICC did more than 8,000 background checks on pilots and passengers flying into Salt Lake City and identified more than 300 people with criminal histories. Inspectors used Customs Intel to target suspicious outbound flights. The Aviation Operations Center honed in on 34 targets of interest, and the FAA announced it intends to prosecute 11.

Customs inspectors in Salt Lake City searched every aircraft, using high-tech equipment and low-tech know-how. They swabbed more than 1,000 planes for traces of chemical or biological weapons, used magnetic wands to search 6,000 passengers and crew, x-rayed every single piece of baggage, and passed samples on to Customs chemists, who reexamined material using isotope identifiers, an atomizer III, vapor tracers, and radiation detectors.

Aftermath
One year later, 6 WTC remains an empty space, but Customs is now an organization whose anti-terrorism mission extends beyond the walls of the buildings it occupies, across America, in the skies, on the water, and in a growing number of foreign countries, where Customs officers far from home undertake a lonely, hard, and critical duty.

Photo Credit: Gerald L. Nino

A lone Customs inspector on duty, securing America's border.

Customs offices and divisions with a full roster of assignments were transformed by the events of September 11, their missions reshaped in record time. New offices have also materialized since the attack on New York and Washington, staffed by Customs employees inspired by the idea that this may be the most important work they have ever done.

Full cooperation is now the norm between Customs and other law enforcement agencies at home and abroad. A new Department of Homeland Security promises to reshape Customs even further in coming months. And at Headquarters and in the field, Customs employees are standing up, on duty 24/7, ready to meet an enemy they have pledged never to forget.

Milestones 9/11/01 Customs goes to Alert Level 1 9/12 Customs devotes fleet of radar-equipped P-3 Advanced Early Warning Aircraft to support DOD efforts to secure airspace over the U.S. 9/14 Customs reassigns 380 inspectors to 19 international airports to strengthen heightened security measures implemented by the U.S. Marshals Service and the FAA. 9/26 Customs volunteer recovery teams begin work at Fresh Kills landfill, Staten Island, N.Y. 10/23 Commissioner Bonner establishes Office of Anti-Terrorism 10/25 Commissioner Bonner announces launch of Operation Green Quest 11/19 President Bush signs Aviation and Transportation Security Act into law, legislation that offers Customs new opportunities to identify terrorists before they enter the U.S. 11/27 Commissioner Bonner announces the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) 12/10 Customs launches Operation Shield America 1/17 Commissioner Bonner announces the Container Security Initiative (CSI) 1/24 Customs provides airspace security for 2002 Olympics Winter Games 3/1 Customs announces three-phase action plan to ensure international air carrier compliance with Advance Passenger Information System (APIS), as part of Aviation and Transportation Security Act signed into law by President Bush 3/25 Customs implements Ridge-Manley Smart Border Accord; Customs inspectors posted at Halifax, Montreal, and Vancouver as part of Accord 4/9 Customs launches anti-terrorism training for all inspectors 4/16 Customs launches Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT) 6/1 Customs launches NEXUS 6/4 Singapore agrees to join CSI 6/17 Commissioner Bonner raises Journeyman Level for inspectors, canine enforcement officers 6/25 Rotterdam becomes first overseas CSI partner, followed by Antwerp (6/26), Le Havre (6/28), Bremerhaven and Hamburg (8/1) 6/26 NEXUS program opens in Blaine, Wash. 8/2 Commissioner Bonner proposes AirNEXUS Program to protect air-traveling public 8/7 Commissioner Bonner announces new regulations requiring manifests 24 hours prior to lading of sea containers 8/27 Customs inspectors deployed to Rotterdam to begin screening cargo 9/9 President Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Chretien, with Commissioner Bonner, announce FAST (Free and Secure Trade) program as part of Ridge/Manley Accord