(Greg Krikorian - Los Angeles Times) Two miles out from the nation's busiest seaport, Petty Officer 1st Class Tom Ryan gives the order to board a giant container ship bound for Los Angeles.
The
Sealand Intrepid, Singapore-registered and longer than three football fields, is carrying a load of general cargo. But its last stop was Panama, a hot spot for stowaways.
One by one in choppy seas, Ryan's
four-man Coast Guard crew climbs a 20-foot rope ladder and a 20-foot gangway to board the vessel. Wearing bulletproof vests and armed with 9-millimeter pistols, two sea marshals comb the ship and two head for the bridge
to secure the vessel.
On average, this scene is repeated six times a day, seven days a week at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, which handle 45% of the nation's container cargo. Sea marshals board
container vessels, oil tankers, cruise ships, even commuter boats as part of a nationwide Coast Guard program launched after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
For all the concern about safety at the
nation's airports, counterterrorism officials and other experts say the nation's ports may now present an even greater threat. Since Sept. 11, they have received far less security funding than airports, yet they
continue to process far more cargo ? more than 9.5 million containers a year.
During this fall's presidential campaign, Democrat Sen. John F. Kerry repeatedly warned about the safety of the nation's ports,
telling voters that only 5% of all incoming cargo was inspected.
Homeland Security officials denied Kerry's charge. They said they screen 100% of containers as part of a new "layered" system of defense
that begins overseas, where foreign shippers must provide full cargo and crew manifests 24 hours before loading any ship bound for the U.S.
But after these manifests are examined, mountains of shipping
intelligence are sifted and ships are tracked as they cross oceans, only about 6% of the containers arriving at U.S. ports are classified as high risk and examined using X-ray machines, officials said. Locally, about 6%
of the containers scanned by X-ray are further inspected by hand.
With about 12,000 containers a day arriving at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, this means officials scan about 720 containers and inspect
roughly 43 by hand daily.
"Even though there were manifests, some of us got the sense we really didn't know what was coming and going," said Dale Watson, former FBI head of counterterrorism and now an
executive at Booz Allen Hamilton Inc. "It was a huge problem."
Randy Parsons, the FBI's chief counterterrorism official in Los Angeles and six surrounding counties, echoed Watson's concern. "If you
look at where we are today, there has been notable improvement in terms of security at the ports," he said. "But it is just such an enormous target in terms of the volume of cargo and the numbers of employees
and the crews and the ships moving in from foreign lands."
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