It’s only 9 a.m. But for the 20 staffers on hand, this is midmorning. Most have been on the job for two or three hours, including Ridge, who started with a 7 a.m. daily briefing from the directors of the FBI and CIA, then met with the president, as he does every morning when both are in town.
Three leather chairs down from Ridge, Michael Byrne seems concerned about watering down the status of special-security events. A redheaded former New York City fireman who was the New York regional director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) on September 11, Byrne, 47, runs Homeland Security’s Response and Recovery group. The best course, he tells Ridge and the group, is to get the Secret Service positioned to consult with anyone but to keep the number of fully designated events strictly limited. The Derby probably won’t make the grade, but, says Byrne, “we can offer a continuum of help depending on what they need.”
“OK,” says Ridge. “But we should see if we can set up a program so that we offer this consulting in some kind of organized way. Let’s get the NCAA, NASCAR, the NFL and the rest in here on a regular basis.”
Byrne later says that within two hours of the meeting he had spoken with the Secret Service special agent who’s on loan to his office and to the Secret Service’s deputy director, and “we got an organization in the works that will now do this.”
Ridge’s team of about 80 is an odd mix. Those involved in what he calls his “mission-critical” outreach to state and local officials, Congress and the private sector typically worked for him in Pennsylvania, where he was governor until he resigned last October when President Bush asked him to come to Washington. Others are policy wonks who have been writing and lecturing about terrorism and weapons of mass destruction for years.
Like Byrne, everyone else has experience in the trenches. Bruce Lawlor, 54, who runs Homeland Security’s Protection and Prevention group, is a taciturn Army general. He and Byrne have recruited a staff from all over the government–from the Army Corps of Engineers, to the departments of Agriculture, Defense, State and Commerce (to deal with “economic consequence management”), to the FBI and the Secret Service.
What seems to bond this quickly assembled team is their zeal. Watching them come to work when it’s still dark and leave when it’s dark again suggests what the White House complex and its people must have been like in the weeks after Pearl Harbor. In fact, Byrne says that he found himself staying up one night recently rereading the sections of Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book “No Ordinary Time” that deal with America’s buildup following Pearl Harbor. “That’s the situation we’re in,” he says.
Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean Washington welcomed Ridge and his troops.
Parachute a high-profile new agency into the center of the capital’s power structure and the knives are bound to come out, the assumption being that whatever power the new guys are going to have will have to come from somewhere–and someone–else. Those whose turf is threatened will fight back, reinforced by the press pundits they leak to who love “process” stories about who’s not as important as his title says he is. So the scuttlebutt on Ridge in Washington, as reflected in several Beltway press assessments of him so far, is that he’s a good guy but lacks staying power, that his close relationship with the president isn’t enough to make up for his lack of a cabinet department to run or a budget to set.
“Washington may have the view that I’m constantly in a bureaucratic struggle,” counters Ridge, “but it’s not like I’m Pac-Man trying to gobble up everything in sight. I’m relaxed about this because, first, I do have an ace up my sleeve, which is the president’s authority, and I may or may not have to play it. But what’s equally important is that I do not have, nor does the president want me to have, operational authority over anything, nor do I seek it. If this office stays under the radar and makes everyone else look good, that’s the optimal situation…”
As for his lack of budget authority, Ridge says, “No cabinet member has budget authority. The president doesn’t have budget authority. Members of Congress are the ones with budget authority.”
In fact, Ridge does have the authority–more than those who run cabinet departments–to set the budget that goes to Congress. For the powerful White House Office of Management and Budget has functioned as his staff rather than his monitor. “The president made it clear from the beginning that when it came to Tom Ridge, we were supposed to be his budget office,” said OMB Director Mitchell Daniels Jr. “Which is not the way things usually work… Our people were assigned to him.”
Ridge really does seem relaxed, even serene, about his ability to do a meaningful job. Maybe for good reason. He’s organized 22 nitty-gritty, multiagency groups on topics ranging from biopreparedness to food security to irradiation awareness that have been quietly grinding out change at conference tables throughout the Old Executive Office Building. Much of it isn’t visible yet, and they’re working against a backdrop of buildings full of people who are not used to fast change. (“It took a year during World War II to get the time to build ships cut in half,” says Byrne.) But they do seem to be getting things done. And what’s most intriguing is that they’re doing it not by grabbing operating power but by doing judo on the bureaucracy that would oppose them–turning ideas, funding and operating control over to the agency best suited to take the lead in a given area.
“The other day,” says Byrne, “a guy at Health and Human Services, who’s in a group we put together to develop standards for local emergency forces to do first-responder training drills, paid me the greatest compliment. He said that what we do is put wind in the sails of the people who have wanted to get stuff like this done for a long time.”
Here’s a snapshot of how Ridge, Byrne and the others have been doing that, drawn from some of what they were up to on Tuesday, Feb. 26, and Wednesday, Feb. 27.
THE COLOR OF FEAR
Ridge says that from the day he came to town, he was aware that “the threat alerts we were issuing were vague and confusing.” So now at that same Feb. 26 morning meeting, there’s stage fright about an upcoming announcement (planned for the week of March 11) of a new system that features five categories of alerts, by color: green (for no threat), white, yellow, orange and red. The Department of Justice, not Ridge’s office, will be in charge. Attorney General John Ashcroft will now take threat information coming from the various intelligence agencies and put it in context; each color will mean that certain criteria (credibility of source, number of sources, specificity of time or place) have been met. As the system is developed and absorbed by federal, state and local agencies, they’ll all be asked to gear their own protection plans to the colors. For example, the National Parks Service or the Miami police will have a procedure for a national orange alert that’s different from a yellow alert. Ashcroft might also declare a different color status for, say, bridges and tunnels, or for a particular state or region. Ashcroft will “consult with” Ridge to change colors; if there is any disagreement, they can bring the issue to the Homeland Security Council, a group of national-security officials, chaired by the president, on which Ridge and the attorney general serve.
“The key thing here,” Ridge tells the staff, “is to manage expectations. We know we can’t provide the clarity and sense of security that we would like to project.”
“We can’t rehearse the questions we’ll get too many times,” says Ridge’s deputy, Steve Abbot, a retired four-star Navy admiral and Rhodes scholar, who on Sept. 10 had reported for work in Vice President Dick Cheney’s office to head a task force on organizing against the threat of terrorism. “We still have some issues that we have to wrestle to the deck,” Abbot adds. Among them is a final decision on the actual colors (still undecided at press time).
PROFILING STUDENTS
Members of the International Student Tracking working group, representing 13 federal agencies, are taking turns slinging jargon and acronyms. Nearly six months have elapsed since the September 11 attacks, and that seems to have allowed some in the room to fall back into business as usual. A woman from the Immigration and Naturalization Service reports, matter-of-factly, that it’s going to take until Oct. 1, 2003, to get all colleges and universities online with a database that will allow the government to make sure that those with student visas are actually enrolled as students.
The discussion shifts to a sure-to-be-controversial plan that started working its way through Ridge’s staff in early January. The idea is to prevent foreign students from particular countries from enrolling in certain types of sophisticated science courses. There are lots of reasons it might not work and shouldn’t be tried. Won’t singling out students this way be the starkest form of racial profiling imaginable? How can the courses be targeted? (It turns out the Education Department already has a system of classifying courses.) What will be the legal authority? (Maybe education could be deemed an “export.”) How will enforcement work?
The man at the head of the conference table, Brian Peterman, is thinking more about the solution than the reasons why one will be hard to find. On September 11 Peterman, 51, was a Coast Guard admiral stationed in Miami, “chasing thugs and drugs,” as he puts it. Driving home one evening the week after the attacks, he heard President Bush announce the creation of an Office of Homeland Security, and, he says, “I decided I had to try to be involved. I know borders. I know how to protect them, and now there was a much more important reason to protect them.”
The low-key Peterman barely shows his frustration with the woman from INS. But he didn’t suddenly move his family up from Florida to preside over business as usual.
There is no chance that she and others in this room won’t soon feel the heat to get that data project done a lot sooner than two Octobers from now. And despite all the questions raised, Peterman is determined to come up with a plan to keep potential enemies who want to make bombs or bioterror weapons from going to school on us. Abbot has established a regimen of e-mail progress reports to enforce deadlines. A week before, when Peterman chaired a group assigned to create as a high priority a system to track immigrants who overstay their visas, he discovered that INS and the State Department were not moving quickly enough and had missed a relatively minor deadline. A string of e-mails quickly made their way to Abbot and Ridge, who took the matter to higher-ups in those agencies. The program is now nearly back on schedule.
Smarter Borders
Sporting an air force one lanyard to hold his ID, Richard Falkenrath is the kind of young (32), self-important staffer who seems better cast for “The West Wing” TV show than he does for Ridge’s team, where flash rarely matches zeal. Then again, he’s got quite the resume. A Ph.D. who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School, Falkenrath has been writing for years about nuclear and biological terrorism, so much so that when the attacks came on September 11 and Abbot started thinking about how to organize a staff, he suggested to someone that they hire the guy from Harvard who’d written all those articles and coauthored the bible on the subject in 1997, “America’s Achilles’ Heel.” It turned out that Falkenrath was down the hall, having taken a job at the National Security Council. Now he’s doing budgets and the strategic-policy paper that Ridge will present to the president this spring, as well as the diplomatic and organizational side of border protection.
Falkenrath is meeting with his staff to go over preparations for Ridge’s trip the following week to Mexico, where he’ll start talks on a “smart border” program that will parallel a 30-point program he negotiated with Canadain January.
Falkenrath also thinks that creating smart borders starts in Washington. In January he prepared a paper making the case for consolidating the Justice Department’s Border Patrol and Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Transportation Department’s Coast Guard and Treasury’s Customs Service. When Ridge circulated the paper to relevant cabinet and sub-cabinet officials, it was quickly leaked to the press. The resulting stories included the predictable anonymous quotes from people in those affected agencies opposing it and saying it was going nowhere. Ridge’s lack of real power had now seemingly been exposed.
“The border proposal was dead even before it arrived here,” says U.S. Rep. Jane Harman of California, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Homeland Security Subcommittee, and who thinks Ridge’s office “lacks power and focus.”
“It’s not dead,” Ridge said last month. “We circulated a paper for discussion and it’s being discussed… We’ll get it done.”
Consolidating these border activities has been talked about for years, but if Ridge handles this according to the pattern he has established so far, he’ll get it done by letting some of the key combatants win–probably by giving consolidated power to Justice, while putting someone from Treasury (the highly regarded Customs chief, Robert Bonner) in charge.
No matter how the blocks get moved, the troops involved in border security are already getting religion. A good example is the Port of New York and Newark, where only a fraction of the 7,000 cargo containers arriving daily can be inspected without freezing global commerce. Yet a nuclear or biological device making it into a port would dwarf the human and economic toll of the September 11 attacks. Earlier in February, inspectors there were already showing off the new intelligence they were receiving from the Navy and Coast Guard related mostly to ships leaving ports in Asia and the Middle East. (One false alarm last month about warheads occasioned a tense, at-sea search late one Saturday night.) And one of the port’s veteran inspectors–who for years has doubled as the in-house expert on how cargo-container seals can be breached by bad guys–was proudly talking about getting a call that morning for advice from someone in the secretary of Transportation’s office who’s in a group that Peterman has set up to develop cargo containers that can be sealed after U.S. Customs agents inspect them in a foreign port. (If the seal is broken a signal might be sent to a satellite that can then alert the Coast Guard to stop the ship at sea.)
“I heard there was a container study going on at Transportation that we knew nothing about,” says Customs Director Bonner. “So I called Tom and got him to turn it into a joint group, with his guy”– Peterman–“leading it. Tom’s office really is helping to pull all this together.”
ON THE SAME FREQUENCY
Byrne meets with executives from a company who claim they have the magic bullet on interoperability–the term used for getting radios from different emergency services that converge on a mass disaster (city A’s police department, county B’s firefighters) to talk to each other. “My idea of music from God is interoperability,” says Byrne. “I’m obsessed.”
For good reason: as a fireman, Byrne answered the call for the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993–and a communications snafu sent him 34 floors up to rescue people in Tower 1, when they were in Tower 2. He also has several friends from the Fire Department who were lost on September 11 because they never got word to leave the Twin Towers.
Getting interoperability technology into the president’s new budget for the year that begins this October was part of a larger effort to support first responders–the millions of local police, fire, medical and other emergency workers across the country, whom Ridge calls “our front line in this war.” There’s $651 million in new funds for first responders that’s already been allocated for the current budget year, and $3.5 billion for the budget that starts in October. That’s all part of $38 billion in projects that Ridge got added to the October budget.
Pulling The Right Levers
Susan Neely, the Homeland Office’s public-affairs director, is working past dinnertime reviewing a brochure called Guidance for Preventing Distribution of Airborne Contaminants Within Buildings. It’s been drafted by a team of federal agencies, along with a heating- and air-conditioning industry trade group. Read it and you, too, will now wonder how the outside air vents in your office building are protected, or whether the air in the lobby (where terrorists can most easily gain access) mixes with the air that flows to the offices above.
The brochure is a good, if simple, example of how Ridge’s office wants to get the private sector involved. “Remember when the SEC encouraged companies to disclose their Y2K protections and vulnerabilities in their prospectuses?” Ridge says. “We intend to do that with terrorism… If companies have to talk about what they’re doing they’ll do more… There’s also the insurance companies. If we help them on best practices and encourage them, they’ll push their customers.”
“If he does that, he’ll make a lot of progress,” says Jules Kroll, who runs Kroll Associates, a leading corporate-security firm that is already working with insurance companies on rating the security of their clients’ buildings and facilities. “It sounds like this guy is prepared to push the right levers,” he adds. So far, that’s a good summary of what Ridge is doing on a lot of fronts.
