raffy
Nov 23, 01, 2:21 am
Source: SFGate.com
Before the World Trade Center attack, before the world had heard of Osama bin Laden, before the Taliban even existed, there was Leon Klinghoffer.
An American tourist in a wheelchair, Klinghoffer, 69, was a passenger aboard the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985 when it was hijacked off Alexandria, Egypt, by members of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The hijackers murdered Klinghoffer and tossed his body overboard.
Now, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, cruise ship passengers are asking:
Could it happen again? Or, could suicide bombers blow a hole in the side of a cruise liner, as they did to the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen last year?
Not likely, say experts in cruise ship security. The cruise industry has implemented and refined a wide array of anti-terrorism measures since the Achille Lauro hijacking and has put new measures into effect since Sept. 11.
Divers are checking under the water line for bombs, the Coast Guard is enforcing a safety zone around ships in port and trained police dogs are sniffing luggage for explosives. One line, Princess Cruises, even maintains onboard security squads of Gurkhas, the legendary soldiers from Nepal.
"We are operating in a fashion that is beyond any of the other public modes of transportation that I'm aware of," said Michael Crye, president of the International Council of Cruise Lines, which represents 16 lines operating 90 ships.
When William Gohdes of Indian Head Park, Ill., boarded the Golden Princess on Sept. 25 for a transatlantic cruise from Barcelona to Fort Lauderdale, "it was obvious there was more security getting aboard and on the ship itself than we normally had seen. They ran you through everything to get on board. You had to show (identification) to two or three people before you could even get close to the ship."
Indeed, security was so high that the Golden made a U-turn at sea when a check of the manifest revealed that two passengers had not reboarded after the last port call in the Azores. Fearing the missing passengers had left behind a bomb, the Golden returned to port. The crew discovered that the two had simply ended their vacation midway through the cruise, without informing anyone on the ship.
Heightened security measures, though, aren't apparent to everyone. Chicago options trader Mike Benson said security on his Oct. 4 Disney Cruise Line cruise didn't seem any different than sailings he had taken on Princess or Carnival prior to Sept. 11. In fact, if security had been beefed up since the terrorist attacks, Benson said, "it was totally unobtrusive."
That's the point, say cruise-line officials.
"We want it to be relatively seamless, not to overburden passengers with inconveniences," said Stein Kruse, senior vice president of fleet operations for Holland America.
The cruise industry believes it's far ahead of the airline industry in security, because it's been working hard on these issues since the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking.
"The cruise industry has done a lot to harden the lines against the potential of attacks," said Kim Petersen, a former director of security for Princess Cruises who now heads the Maritime Security Council, a nonprofit Fort Lauderdale-based organization created in 1988 to address terrorism and maritime crimes. "So it's not as if the events of Sept. 11 were a wake-up call.
This has been addressed for a lengthy period of time."
Large and relatively slow-moving, cruise ships would seem to be vulnerable targets for terrorists. But their size and pace give them several important advantages over airplanes, say security officials. While an airplane might be able to carry a single sky marshall, a cruise liner can easily hold an entire armed security team. And the time ships spend in port, security officials say, allows them to thoroughly X-ray everything and everyone that comes aboard - something airlines are still unable to do.
Although they will not go into specifics, cruise lines say they have added sophisticated electronic devices to their existing security arsenal and are working closely with local, state and federal agencies, plus law enforcement officials both at home and overseas, such as Interpol.
The Coast Guard has increased the frequency and vigilance of armed patrols around cruise ships, is on a heightened state of alert at 300 ports and has extended its underwater surveillance in some of them. The mobilization effort "is the largest since World War II," said Commander Jim McPherson from U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington.
The increased scrutiny includes thoroughly vetting passenger and crew manifests, which are cross-checked with law enforcement and immigration databases. To gain the time needed for these checks, "we've changed the rules, " McPherson said. "Official notification (before entering a port) used to be 24 hours; now it's 96 hours. Twenty-four hours didn't give us enough time to check with other intelligence agencies."
The Coast Guard has established a 100-yard safety perimeter around ships entering and exiting U.S. ports. "Port safety is now the Coast Guard's highest priority, and we look at cruise ships as very important," McPherson said. "In Miami, for example, we made the decision to put armed officers on the bridge and in the engine room on every ship that comes in or out of the port."
The Coast Guard is taking its mission seriously. Recently, it delayed a Carnival ship from entering the port of Miami when an inspection of the port's security revealed improper procedures (unrelated to the ship). The Coast Guard would not permit the ship to dock until the port corrected the lapse.
Cruise lines are taking a harder look at everything that comes on board their ships. Since the late 1980s, routine security measures have included, among other things, screening boarding passengers through metal detectors and handheld luggage through X-ray machines. Now, said Royal Caribbean International's Michael Sheehan, "everything is being screened in one way or another, whether it's X-rays, metal detectors, human searches or canine teams, as well as other methods we're not delineating."
Several lines, including Royal Caribbean, already use electronic photo ID systems. At boarding, a passenger's image is automatically pulled up on a computer screen, greatly reducing the chances of a terrorist posing as a passenger to gain access to the vessel.
"People are being kept away from docks, for the purpose of limiting access, " Sheehan said. "It's a question of restricting anybody from being near a ship who has no business being there."
Provisions also undergo more scrutiny. The cruise line council's Crye noted that searches scrutinize everything "from paper goods to lettuce." Asked what security teams might be looking for in the lettuce, Crye said without irony, "Anything that's not lettuce."
Passengers face tighter restrictions on what they can carry aboard. "I don't think anybody is going to take over a modern cruise ship with a steak knife," said Holland America's Kruse. But should you reboard in, say, Alaska carrying a newly purchased souvenir native cutting tool, Kruse cautioned, you can expect it to be confiscated until cruise end.
Recently, according to Crye, a state's attorney - "who had about as good a credential as you can have" - tried to board a cruise ship with a licensed handgun. The weapon was confiscated and "his vacation was interfered with."
Another passenger's carry-on bag, which had sat on a lawn that had just been fertilized, was sufficiently permeated with the chemical nitrates to set off security alarms, said Crye.
As a second line of defense, most major cruise lines have long carried an onboard contingent of security officers, led by a trained military veteran - often a master at arms out of the British Navy. No team is more formidable than Princess Cruises' Gurkhas, the fierce Nepalese fighters who traditionally serve with the British Army. Aboard ship, they're typically inconspicuous. They wear the same garb as regular crew, although a keen eye may notice that their epaulets bear a crossed-knives insignia. "They look like all other officers, but typically have 15 years of exceptional and meticulous military training," said the Maritime Security Council's Petersen, who set up the unit while he was at Princess. "They have a quiet resolve that can prove quite lethal."
But is there anything onboard security teams can do to prevent an attack like the one that crippled the Cole and killed 17 men last year?
"In the ultimate scenario, there isn't a way you can prevent that from happening - whether its a Navy, cargo or cruise ship," said Holland America's Kruse. But, he noted, tragic as that suicide bombing was, it failed to sink the vessel.
Before the World Trade Center attack, before the world had heard of Osama bin Laden, before the Taliban even existed, there was Leon Klinghoffer.
An American tourist in a wheelchair, Klinghoffer, 69, was a passenger aboard the Italian cruise liner Achille Lauro in 1985 when it was hijacked off Alexandria, Egypt, by members of the Palestine Liberation Organization. The hijackers murdered Klinghoffer and tossed his body overboard.
Now, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, cruise ship passengers are asking:
Could it happen again? Or, could suicide bombers blow a hole in the side of a cruise liner, as they did to the Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen last year?
Not likely, say experts in cruise ship security. The cruise industry has implemented and refined a wide array of anti-terrorism measures since the Achille Lauro hijacking and has put new measures into effect since Sept. 11.
Divers are checking under the water line for bombs, the Coast Guard is enforcing a safety zone around ships in port and trained police dogs are sniffing luggage for explosives. One line, Princess Cruises, even maintains onboard security squads of Gurkhas, the legendary soldiers from Nepal.
"We are operating in a fashion that is beyond any of the other public modes of transportation that I'm aware of," said Michael Crye, president of the International Council of Cruise Lines, which represents 16 lines operating 90 ships.
When William Gohdes of Indian Head Park, Ill., boarded the Golden Princess on Sept. 25 for a transatlantic cruise from Barcelona to Fort Lauderdale, "it was obvious there was more security getting aboard and on the ship itself than we normally had seen. They ran you through everything to get on board. You had to show (identification) to two or three people before you could even get close to the ship."
Indeed, security was so high that the Golden made a U-turn at sea when a check of the manifest revealed that two passengers had not reboarded after the last port call in the Azores. Fearing the missing passengers had left behind a bomb, the Golden returned to port. The crew discovered that the two had simply ended their vacation midway through the cruise, without informing anyone on the ship.
Heightened security measures, though, aren't apparent to everyone. Chicago options trader Mike Benson said security on his Oct. 4 Disney Cruise Line cruise didn't seem any different than sailings he had taken on Princess or Carnival prior to Sept. 11. In fact, if security had been beefed up since the terrorist attacks, Benson said, "it was totally unobtrusive."
That's the point, say cruise-line officials.
"We want it to be relatively seamless, not to overburden passengers with inconveniences," said Stein Kruse, senior vice president of fleet operations for Holland America.
The cruise industry believes it's far ahead of the airline industry in security, because it's been working hard on these issues since the 1985 Achille Lauro hijacking.
"The cruise industry has done a lot to harden the lines against the potential of attacks," said Kim Petersen, a former director of security for Princess Cruises who now heads the Maritime Security Council, a nonprofit Fort Lauderdale-based organization created in 1988 to address terrorism and maritime crimes. "So it's not as if the events of Sept. 11 were a wake-up call.
This has been addressed for a lengthy period of time."
Large and relatively slow-moving, cruise ships would seem to be vulnerable targets for terrorists. But their size and pace give them several important advantages over airplanes, say security officials. While an airplane might be able to carry a single sky marshall, a cruise liner can easily hold an entire armed security team. And the time ships spend in port, security officials say, allows them to thoroughly X-ray everything and everyone that comes aboard - something airlines are still unable to do.
Although they will not go into specifics, cruise lines say they have added sophisticated electronic devices to their existing security arsenal and are working closely with local, state and federal agencies, plus law enforcement officials both at home and overseas, such as Interpol.
The Coast Guard has increased the frequency and vigilance of armed patrols around cruise ships, is on a heightened state of alert at 300 ports and has extended its underwater surveillance in some of them. The mobilization effort "is the largest since World War II," said Commander Jim McPherson from U.S. Coast Guard headquarters in Washington.
The increased scrutiny includes thoroughly vetting passenger and crew manifests, which are cross-checked with law enforcement and immigration databases. To gain the time needed for these checks, "we've changed the rules, " McPherson said. "Official notification (before entering a port) used to be 24 hours; now it's 96 hours. Twenty-four hours didn't give us enough time to check with other intelligence agencies."
The Coast Guard has established a 100-yard safety perimeter around ships entering and exiting U.S. ports. "Port safety is now the Coast Guard's highest priority, and we look at cruise ships as very important," McPherson said. "In Miami, for example, we made the decision to put armed officers on the bridge and in the engine room on every ship that comes in or out of the port."
The Coast Guard is taking its mission seriously. Recently, it delayed a Carnival ship from entering the port of Miami when an inspection of the port's security revealed improper procedures (unrelated to the ship). The Coast Guard would not permit the ship to dock until the port corrected the lapse.
Cruise lines are taking a harder look at everything that comes on board their ships. Since the late 1980s, routine security measures have included, among other things, screening boarding passengers through metal detectors and handheld luggage through X-ray machines. Now, said Royal Caribbean International's Michael Sheehan, "everything is being screened in one way or another, whether it's X-rays, metal detectors, human searches or canine teams, as well as other methods we're not delineating."
Several lines, including Royal Caribbean, already use electronic photo ID systems. At boarding, a passenger's image is automatically pulled up on a computer screen, greatly reducing the chances of a terrorist posing as a passenger to gain access to the vessel.
"People are being kept away from docks, for the purpose of limiting access, " Sheehan said. "It's a question of restricting anybody from being near a ship who has no business being there."
Provisions also undergo more scrutiny. The cruise line council's Crye noted that searches scrutinize everything "from paper goods to lettuce." Asked what security teams might be looking for in the lettuce, Crye said without irony, "Anything that's not lettuce."
Passengers face tighter restrictions on what they can carry aboard. "I don't think anybody is going to take over a modern cruise ship with a steak knife," said Holland America's Kruse. But should you reboard in, say, Alaska carrying a newly purchased souvenir native cutting tool, Kruse cautioned, you can expect it to be confiscated until cruise end.
Recently, according to Crye, a state's attorney - "who had about as good a credential as you can have" - tried to board a cruise ship with a licensed handgun. The weapon was confiscated and "his vacation was interfered with."
Another passenger's carry-on bag, which had sat on a lawn that had just been fertilized, was sufficiently permeated with the chemical nitrates to set off security alarms, said Crye.
As a second line of defense, most major cruise lines have long carried an onboard contingent of security officers, led by a trained military veteran - often a master at arms out of the British Navy. No team is more formidable than Princess Cruises' Gurkhas, the fierce Nepalese fighters who traditionally serve with the British Army. Aboard ship, they're typically inconspicuous. They wear the same garb as regular crew, although a keen eye may notice that their epaulets bear a crossed-knives insignia. "They look like all other officers, but typically have 15 years of exceptional and meticulous military training," said the Maritime Security Council's Petersen, who set up the unit while he was at Princess. "They have a quiet resolve that can prove quite lethal."
But is there anything onboard security teams can do to prevent an attack like the one that crippled the Cole and killed 17 men last year?
"In the ultimate scenario, there isn't a way you can prevent that from happening - whether its a Navy, cargo or cruise ship," said Holland America's Kruse. But, he noted, tragic as that suicide bombing was, it failed to sink the vessel.