The art of the hunch
In a world beset by anxieties about bioterrorism, hijackings, and nuclear piracy, a "hunch" can trigger some fine investigative work. When Customs Inspector Diana M. Dean focused on the last car off the ferry at Port Angeles in Washington, something told her she should take a closer look at the driver.

America was getting ready to celebrate the Millennium and law enforcement officials were worried about terrorist activities from groups inside and outside the U.S. But there was no reason to think anything might happen at Port Angeles, no official intelligence or suspicions. Inspector Dean stopped the driver anyway. "Something," she says, "wasn't right." The driver said his name was Benni Noris, he was from Quebec, and he had the papers to prove it. As it turned out, the driver had too many papers - a Canadian passport, eight credit cards, and two driver's licenses. The driver's photo appeared on both licenses - the problem was one belonged to Benni Noris and the other belonged to Mario Roig.

Inspector Dean's "intuition" was suddenly substantiated by hard evidence. Benni Noris turned out to be Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who U.S. law enforcement officials now believe received his training in Osama bin Laden's terrorist camps. Small arms, explosives, assassination techniques, and bioterrorism - Ressam turned out to be expert in them all. Most disturbing, however, was evidence uncovered by a former official with the Canadian Security Service which suggests Ressam had also experimented with ways to generate cyanide gas and release it into air intakes of government buildings. Today, of course, Ahmed Ressam is behind bars, put there via the "sixth sense" of an alert Customs inspector in Blaine, Wash.

Teaching intuition
The question law enforcement keeps asking is whether the kind of "intuition" that led Inspector Dean to target Ahmed Ressam can be taught or acquired. In Richland, Wash., Customs trainers and other experts from the Department of Defense and the scientific community are teaching foreign border guards how to use devices that detect materials used to make nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons, and how to identify the "red flags" that should trigger greater security. "A big part of it is helping to develop their intuition," says William Cliff, Director of the International Border Security Training program at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

The international program is a collaborative effort between U.S. Customs, the Department of Energy, the Department of Defense, and other agencies. And the effort is working. Soon after Uzbeki border guards trained at PNNL completed their training and returned home, they were able to seize radioactive material from an Iranian truck en route from Kazakhstan to Pakistan. Bulgarian border guards trained at PNNL went back to Eastern Europe and seized highly enriched uranium hidden inside a bicycle tire pump - material that might have been used to develop a nuclear bomb.

The mind knows before you do
What does any of this have to do with "hunches"? A lot. Experts agree that, in most cases, "hunches" are just the first stage of a longer, and very logical, process. "Whatever doesn't look right" to observers like Inspector Dean is actually the recognition of some subtle disturbance in a perceptual pattern that even the sharp-eyed inspector might not have been able to pinpoint. But her mind instantly knew "something" was there, some wrinkle that needed straightening out and explaining.

If a "hunch" is right, confirmation usually comes in the form of continuing, more recognizable disruptions in the pattern - a suspect's nervousness or anger when he's stopped for questioning, his aberrant behavior when he flees the scene, and finally, the incontrovertible evidence, provided by the suspect's faked identity papers, that something illegal is going on. The analyses of illegal materials or substances provided by devices like the ones developed at the PNNL lab constitute the final step in an investigative process triggered by "something" no one can quite explain - or dismiss.

Sixth sense or common sense?
After 31 years with Customs, District Director Sidney A. Reyes retired in 1990, but not before his famous "sixth sense" for discovering contraband had made him a legend within the agency. "It wasn't a 'sixth sense,'" says Reyes. "It was common sense."

The former District Director says he made a seizure the first day on the job at JFK, and another one at the end of that first week. "The inspectors who made seizures most frequently used their own selectivity system, just like the one Customs officially adopted years later," says Reyes. We didn't stop every passenger and ask him or her every question on the list they gave us. We looked over the passengers and selected the ones we wanted to talk to, and we didn't waste our time on the others. But then, we had human intelligence and could recognize the same 'selectivity' criteria now employed by artificial intelligence or technology."

Whatever Sidney Reyes had, there was no question that it worked. Reyes' Customs awards cover the walls of his house in Winchester, Va., and no matter how he may protest, odds are his "legend" will never die. Like Inspector Dean and many of her colleagues on the borders, Sidney Reyes appears to have been blessed with an "early warning system" in his brain, a sensitivity to subtle changes in established patterns that others tend to miss. Instructors are trying to sensitize students to "signals" that most of us would find imperceptible, and they are succeeding. In an age when attacks come without warning, the kind of prescience that Sidney Reyes and Diana Dean have demonstrated - their uncanny ability to sense "something wrong" before the rest of us know what's happening - is a skill that needs to be understood and passed on.