United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

This week's terror-preparedness drill in the Pacific Northwest involves a lot more than what South Sound papers are reporting, and so far the papers in Seattle are ignoring the exercise altogether. -- An investigation by UFPPC's Jim O. Madison[1] has turned up quite a bit of information about Washington State's little-known "fusion center," WAJAC — a developing national security facility that (unless we're mistaken) has never been been described by the media....

TACOMA, Washington -- Although spectacular terrorist attacks on Seattle are the kick-off for a large-scale terrorism-preparedness drill now underway in the Pacific Northwest, the Seattle Times and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer have reported nothing about the "national level exercise," which will continue next week.

On Saturday, the News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) published a front-page article on what it called a "six-day national emergency management exercise now underway at Camp Murray, Fort Lewis, and other Northwest sites," supposedly to "help prepare the Northwest for the 2010 Winter Olympics in British Columbia."[2]

News Tribune reporter Mike Gilbert didn't name the exercise (National Level Exercise 2-08, or NLE 2-08) or very many of the "local, state, and federal agencies -- particularly the state and federal military" involved. He didn't say how many persons are being mobilized. And he didn't explain what is "national" about it, either.

In particular, the News Tribune reporter didn't mention that part of the scenario for the disaster-preparedness exercise involved "a Category 4 hurricane [that] slams into the East Coast," as Air Force Times reported Thursday.[3]

This part of the scenario means that also in play are top-secret Continuity of Operations (COOP) activities -- government plans for maintaining a functioning federal government that were first devised in planning for a nuclear attack during the Cold War. (In a recent book, author James Mann has described how in Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney have acted as team leaders in a secret "extralegal and extraconstitutional" COOP program to set up three teams able to "proclaim a new American 'president'" and assume command of U.S. in the event of nuclear attack [Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (Viking, 2004), pp. 138-45].)

For more on this dimension of the NLE 2-08 exercise, which includes a "COOP Hot wash" (a review of COOP plan operations) and a "Credible Threat Against NCR" (NCR = National Capital Region"), and which involves a considerable portion of the national security apparatus, including Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in Tampa, Florida, see here.

Further to the south, the Olympian (Olympia, WA) was a little more informative, naming the exercise and giving a fuller description of the disaster scenario in a short article. But like Mike Gilbert, reporter Christopher Hill omitted any mention of the East Coast hurricane and continuity of operations.[4]

An Apr. 28 article in the Eastern Oregonian also said nothing about the national dimension of the exercise.[5]

The Olympian called the exercise "unique," but in fact such exercises are increasingly common.

On the weekend of April 12-13, an exercise called Operation Sudden Impact that participants called "unprecedented" took place in a six-county region of Memphis, TN, and involved large numbers of arrests and the seizure of computers belonging to local businesses. Yet like NLE 2-08, it received no national media coverage.

One goal of these exercises may or may not be to put a little-known national system of "fusion centers" through its paces. Dozens of fusion centers have been set up around the United States with funding from the Dept. of Homeland Security. They "work in conjunction with the military arm of the DHS, NORTHCOM," according to an April 2008 article in the Washington Post.

Washington State's fusion center is WAJAC, the Washington Joint Analytical Center, located in the Seattle division of the FBI and made up of a central anti-terrorism intelligence analytical center and nine regional intelligence groups located through the state.

In March, the web site Security Management posted a long account of the "rapidly growing national network of state, regional, and urban intelligence fusion centers," focusing on WAJAC as a "success story."[6]

According to SM's Joseph Straw, "Nearly all of the country’s more than 40 centers were established between 2003 and 2007, and as many as 15 more are planned." The fusion centers gather information not only from government sources, but also from "private sector partners."

Straw provided an account of Washington State's "Statewide Intelligence Network," divided into nine "regional intelligence groups (RIGs)."

WAJAC gets $2.4m annually from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program (LETPP), and employs five "civilian intelligence analysts" (mostly "retired law enforcement personnel, former military intelligence specialists, and veteran analysts from the region’s multi-jurisdictional High-Intensity Drug-Trafficking Task Force") along with "four sworn law enforcement officers: two Seattle Police Department detectives, another from the King County Sheriff’s Department, and one from the Bellevue Police Department."

WAJAC has "unrestricted access to FBI computer systems," and "all of WAJAC’s analysts and law enforcement personnel [have] top secret clearances."

Straw reported that "the intelligence operations of the Seattle Police Department and the King County Sheriff’s Department, which together cover the Seattle metropolitan area, [are slated to] move into the floor below WAJAC." "[E]ven the smallest law enforcement agencies from every region in the state . . . participate in the fusion system."

WAJAC issues "daily intelligence bulletins to RIG-7 law enforcement officials, combining national and international open-source material, items drawn from bulletins issued by the country’s 42 other state and regional fusion centers, and law enforcement sensitive material from within Washington State."

The Boeing Company, Straw reported, is seeking "to place a full-time company intelligence analyst at WAJAC," despite "legal hurdles."

As examples of WAJAC's work, Straw reported two incidents: the detection of "a local golf course groundskeeper struggling amid a state ban on gopher traps" who "poured homemade, heavier-than-air chlorine gas into their holes," and the detection of a still unidentified "pair of men riding ferries in the region, acting suspiciously, and snapping photographs" who were made the object of a media manhunt despite the lack of any illegal behavior last summer.

It is interesting to note that the role of WAJAC was never identified in last summer's reporting on the incident.

Archival web searches indicate that WAJAC's existence has never been mentioned by the News Tribune (Tacoma, WA) or the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, and has only been mentioned once, without explanation, by the Seattle Times (on Sept. 2, 2007).

--Jim O. Madison can't sleep at night and is a member of United for Peace of Pierce County (WA).

It’s just after 4 p.m. when Maj. Gen. Tim Lowenberg, top general of the Washington National Guard and the state’s senior homeland security official, gets the call at Camp Murray.

There’s been an explosion near the Coleman Ferry Dock in downtown Seattle. A section of the Alaskan Way Viaduct has collapsed.

Even as Lowenberg is notifying the governor and extending an offer of help to the Seattle mayor, there comes word of a second blast. This time it’s a chemical tanker truck, detonated at the site of the first explosion.

Coincidence? More likely a terrorist attack, timed to inflict widespread casualties among the police and firefighters at the scene.

Hard to imagine a nastier scenario for the six-day-long national emergency management exercise now underway at Camp Murray, Fort Lewis, and other Northwest sites.

It’s part of a five-year, post-Katrina program of major drills aimed at improving the way local, state, and federal agencies -- particularly the state and federal military -- work with each other in natural and man-made disasters.

Washington was chosen for the exercise, in part, to help prepare the Northwest for the 2010 Winter Olympics in British Columbia. The state took part in similar national exercises in 2003 and 2007.

Emergency managers in the Pacific Northwest already enjoy a “culture of collaboration,” Lowenberg told about 100 military and civilian officials assembled for a senior leaders’ workshop held Friday at Camp Murray as part of the exercise.

If something like Hurricane Katrina or 9/11 ever struck Western Washington, the people seated around the room would be the ones to direct the response.

Lowenberg said the exercise and training “will allow us all, I hope, to leave here today confident that we can say to citizens who are looking to us for leadership . . . ‘Count on us; depend on me.’”

But even flawless competence on their part, it was plain to officials Friday, might not be a match for some of the consequences of a disaster like the one playing out in the exercise.

“The more you dive in, the more you realize you have to dive in even farther,” said Cindy Zehnder, chief of staff to Gov. Chris Gregoire and one of the participants.

For instance, in this simulated case, a toxic plume of methyl isocyanate -- the gas that killed at least 3,800 in the 1984 industrial accident at Bhopal, India -- lingers over much of downtown Seattle and First Hill. Perhaps 10 percent of the 130,000 people in the area may die.

Residents are told to “shelter in place” -- get to the upper floors of their buildings because the gas is heavier than air.

The area bordered by Interstate 90 to the University of Washington, and Elliott Bay to Lake Washington, becomes a no-go zone for all but emergency vehicles.

Four major hospitals, including Harborview Medical Center, the region’s primary trauma facility, are in the hot zone. All the patients there before the blasts will have to be moved -- but where? Officials said the region has no way of handling that many patients all at once.

By the second day, likely all medical attention would be directed toward those sickened by the gas, leaving little to no care for other patients, said Dan Banks, an official with the state Department of Health.

And how do you evacuate a dense urban center like Seattle -- especially if it must take place quickly?

Dolph Diemont, an official with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, said the region lacks a coordinated local, state, and federal evacuation plan.

“At what point would you take over the Tacoma Dome?” asked one official. The likely answer? Almost right away.

Evacuees would even demand shelter for their pets -- a potentially huge emotional issue. After Katrina, responders estimated that as many as 30 percent of evacuees there refused to leave their homes without their dogs or cats, said Tom Fletcher, a consultant who led one of Friday’s workshops.

Roger Hieb of the state Emergency Management Division said that also was true in the floods that struck Lewis and Thurston counties last December.

“Many of our jurisdictions have been looking at that as a serious issue,” Hieb said.

In the first hour after Thursday’s simulated explosions, the Department of Homeland Security elevated the threat condition in Washington to red -- shutting down air and ground transportation. The Coast Guard mandated the same for maritime traffic.

The result: a stranglehold on the region’s economy. No ships into and out of the ports. No flights. No trucks on the highways.

Lowenberg said planners here have to be prepared to ask the federal authorities to relax some of those restrictions if necessary.

“There’s every possibility that bad judgment on the part of one or two people in Washington, D.C., despite the best intentions, could have a profound impact on all segments of our efforts here,” he said.

Even in the first hours after the attacks, officials said they need to begin to think about recovery -- what they will need to do to quickly reopen transportation routes, to get the ports open again, to decide which trucks are the first to get moving again.

Kurt Hardin of the state Department of Emergency Management said planners from the start need to be thinking about how they’re going to get people back to work and kids back in school.

Over the weekend and into Monday and Tuesday the exercise will test the working relationship between Washington’s National Guard units and active-duty military commands that might be called in to deal with a disaster.

Initial response teams from the Washington Guard will give way to active-duty units working under the U.S. Northern Command -- the lead federal military command responsible for providing assistance to civilian authorities in emergencies.

Gen. Victor E. Renuart Jr., commander of the U.S. Northern Command, and Lt. Gen. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, and a slate of other senior U.S. military brass are in town to observe the event.

At Leschi Town, the urban training facility at Fort Lewis, Guard troops set up chemical decontamination centers Friday and prepared to “treat” an onslaught of “injured” role players.

The event is the annual training exercise for a 250-member Guard team of medical, communications, and chemical decontamination troops that would be called out in such an emergency.

Even Steven Spielberg never imagined this: Several terrorist attacks hit Washington state at the same time as a giant chemical spill in Oregon, while a Category 4 hurricane slams into the East Coast and American airspace is endangered across the map.

That’s the setup for National Level Exercise 2-08, a disaster response exercise planned for May 1-8 run by North American Aerospace Defense Command and Northern Command. The Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Homeland Security Department, U.S. Transportation Command, the National Guard and Canada Command will all be involved.

The exercise will test the agencies’ ability to work together in preparation for and reaction to a wide variety of natural and manmade disasters. Most of the action will take place in Washington state and Oregon.

The state is participating in a national-level training exercise to hone the response of local, state and federal agencies in the event of a catastrophic human-caused or natural disaster.

The exercise is unique because it enables local and state officials to work with federal agencies -- the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the federal Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Northern Command, the joint military organization responsible for homeland defense.

"It gets us prepared for these large-scale events," said Rob Harper, spokesman for the state Emergency Management Division. "This is an opportunity that doesn't come along too often for us to do that."

The exercise, known as National Level Exercise 02-08, started Thursday and concludes next week.

Fort Lewis will host a scenario Monday where attackers have blown up a chemical plant near the Alaskan Way Viaduct in Seattle and a secondary blast kills numerous first responders.

The two other scenarios that will be played out in the Northwest are the release of toxic chemicals at the Umatilla Chemical Depot in northeast Oregon on Monday, and the simulated crash of a tanker truck carrying 4,000 gallons of a deadly liquid in Whatcom County on Tuesday.

The state will activate its emergency operations center for three days as part of the exercise, Harper said. Citizen-soldiers from the Washington National Guard will participate.

Harper said while the scenarios are centered on human-caused disasters or terrorism, the training will improve the response and coordination of officials to natural disasters, such as a earthquakes, floods or a volcanic eruption.

--Christian Hill covers Lacey and the military for the *Olympian*. He can be reached at 360-754-5427 or chill@theolympian.com.

The Chemical Stockpile Emergency Preparedness Program and the Oregon and the Army's Umatilla Chemical Depot are preparing for the first three-day emergency drill to be coordinated with other chemical drills in the northwest. CSEPP's drill will take place May 5 through May 7, involving Umatilla, Morrow, and Benton counties in Washington and Oregon.

"This will probably be our biggest exercise ever, in this area," said depot spokesman Jim Hackett.

The drill will start on Monday, May 5, with a simulated chemical emergency at the Umatilla Chemical Depot. Depot spokesman Jim Hackett said other emergencies may be attached to the original one, but he, like other parties involved, is not sure exactly what the emergency will be until it happens.

"A lot of things are going to go -- it's going to be an interesting event," Hackett said.

The exact time of the exercise start is not known. CSEPP urges people to pay attention to the sirens and the test exercise messages as part of their overall emergency preparedness. Westminster chimes will sound in Umatilla and Morrow and Benton Counties when the exercise begins.

During the early stages on the first day, Morrow and Umatilla and Benton counties will sound their public sirens and alert people through test exercise messages via tone alert radios and highway reader board messages, as well as sending Emergency Alert System messages to local radio and television stations.

Highway advisory radio systems will also be used. Oregon Army National Guard soldiers will be doing various exercise activities during the three-day exercise.

Having the drill last three days will increase the amount of response and planning needed for the exercise.

"We haven't had an event like that at the depot, but we've been doing a lot of drills over the years," Hackett said. "Ours is basically going to be like an annual CSEPP exercise, like we've had in previous years, except it will go into the recovery stages, testing our ability to handle recovery activities inside and outside the depot. It's designed to use a lot more planning if we ever had an event."

The first day will focus on initial emergency response -- as Hackett said, like in CSEPP drills in other years -- and the following two days will focus on reentry and recovery drills.

"It's largely going to be setting up planning groups to handle what is simulated or thrown at them," Hackett said.

That might include setting up joint information centers, fielding mock media calls, and working with other organizations or local officials to keep things running smoothly. It would also include solving on-the-ground problems such as plans to evacuate people from homes who may have sheltered in place and determining when it's safe for people to reenter an area.

In addition to the extended drill, the exercise will coordinate with other drills and organizations in Washington state and nationally.

"This is a unique thing for CSEPP to link it together with the national exercise," Hackett said.

The other drills will be conducted in the Seattle and Bellingham, Wash., areas starting May 1. CSEPP will also link with officials in Salem and Washington state, along with Environmental Protection Agency and health officials. A Service Response Force commander appointed by the Army will be in the area to assist in reentry and recovery activities. Federal, state, and other observers will watch the drill and provide their comments on improvement after the drill is completed.

"You have to imagine a lot of things that might occur because of a release," Hackett said. "A lot of this is simulated -- it's made up -- but its made up for a purpose: To improve the efficiency and response so we're ready to handle something that might occur."

Washington State's fusion center offers a model for melding intelligence from multiple public and private sources.

While government is notoriously slow to implement change, one post-9-11 reform has bucked the trend: the rapidly growing national network of state, regional, and urban intelligence fusion centers. At the centers, teams of analysts crunch data and produce refined intelligence to help stakeholders address all hazards and all crimes. Nearly all of the country’s more than 40 centers were established between 2003 and 2007, and as many as 15 more are planned.

The rapid expansion has not come without growing pains, however. Administrators continue to define roles, set best practices, and secure permanent funding. And the centers have had some trouble involving private sector partners, who remain hesitant to share proprietary information with the government.

One center that is serving as a model for others is the Washington Joint Analytical Center (WAJAC) in Washington State. It “has been one of those great success stories in terms of pulling people together and getting them to shed their parochial interests to share information,” says Washington State Emergency Management Division (EMD) Director Jim Mullen, whose agency works with the center.

Most states began the march toward intelligence fusion only after 9-11. But law enforcement agencies in Washington State, as in a few other regions, were already on their way, having adopted the emerging discipline of intelligence-based policing. As the term implies, the process calls for collection and close analysis of a broad base of information to track and solve crimes or, ideally, to prevent them.

In the late 1990s, the Intelligence Committee of the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Chiefs of Police (WASCP), which enjoys quasi-governmental authority under state law, began pushing an intelligence-based approach to law enforcement. After 9-11, that effort broadened into a push for a statewide

Integrated intelligence initiative, which, with the support of the FBI, the Washington State Patrol (WSP), and then-Gov. Gary Locke’s Committee on Terrorism, led to the establishment of WAJAC in 2004. The center came under the operational command of the WSP, but administered through WASCP. Its board of directors consists of six state police chiefs and the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Seattle field office. WSP Chief John Batiste is the board’s current chair.

The state was divided into nine regional intelligence groups (RIGs), each of which is charged with assigning personnel to review regional law enforcement activity and forward reports to WAJAC in Seattle, together forming the Statewide Intelligence Network.

As with many fusion centers, one of WAJAC’s major challenges was to find the resources it needed to carry out its operations. WAJAC has had considerable success in this regard. In some cases, it gets assistance from its partners. For example, the FBI’s Seattle field office donates the space occupied by WAJAC, while the sworn officers posted to WAJAC and the state’s nine RIGs are on loan from and paid by their own law enforcement agencies.

WAJAC sought to fund its civilian analyst positions with U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Law Enforcement Terrorism Prevention Program (LETPP) grants. The state now funds its analysts with $2.4 million in annual LETPP support, says WAJAC commander WSP Lt. Randy Drake. Those grants, however, require WAJAC to hire analysts as contractors, not as regular, salaried staff.

While officials have been frustrated by some federal grant restrictions, at least one funding restriction ultimately served a useful purpose. Seattle and King County officials sought to fund their RIG as a freestanding, metropolitan fusion center using DHS Urban Area Security Initiative (UASI) grant funds. However, UASI funds cannot be spent on real estate, which prevented the RIG from using the money to establish a new center.

Due to that restriction, the Seattle Police Department has moved its homeland security function into loaned space at the FBI building adjoining WAJAC, with plans to develop an independent city fusion center at the site.

While stakeholders say that institutional pride led some city officials to resist the move at first, the funding restriction left them little choice. Now, officials say, they realize that co-location with the FBI is a plus as it places federal, state, and city officials in the same building, enhancing cooperation and increasing information sharing.

Getting the funds in place was critical to obtaining qualified staff. Of 18 civilian intelligence analysts employed in the Statewide Fusion System, five work at WAJAC, alongside four sworn law enforcement officers: two Seattle Police Department detectives, another from the King County Sheriff’s Department, and one from the Bellevue Police Department. The Washington Military Department has detailed one of its own analysts to WAJAC, with a second planned, says Drake.

WAJAC’s nonsworn analysts come from a variety of backgrounds, but consist primarily of retired law enforcement personnel, former military intelligence specialists, and veteran analysts from the region’s multi-jurisdictional High-Intensity Drug-Trafficking Task Force, he says.

There’s a truism in real estate that the three most important factors are location, location, location. According to WAJAC stakeholders, one of the operation’s strongest suits is indeed its location. The center is located in the headquarters of the FBI’s Seattle Field Office, just one floor below the offices of the Washington State Joint Terrorism Task Force (JTTF), and the regional FBI Field Intelligence Group (FIG).

WAJAC staff can move freely between their space and that of the JTTF and FIG upstairs, and enjoy unrestricted access to FBI computer systems. The combined operation is slated to expand further when the intelligence operations of the Seattle Police Department and the King County Sheriff’s Department, which together cover the Seattle metropolitan area, move into the floor below WAJAC, says David Gomez, FBI assistant special agent in charge of the Seattle field office.

While the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI have weathered heavy criticism for failure to recognize each other’s security clearances, the FBI has circumvented the problem here by issuing all of WAJAC’s analysts and law enforcement personnel top secret clearances, says Gomez.

WAJAC’s workload breaks down into two basic areas: Daily analysis and response to field requests.

Daily analysis. Information streams in from multiple sources, including RIGs, the federal government, other states, and open sources.

How some of this information is obtained is almost as complicated as the analysis process itself. The problem is that DHS is pushing its Homeland Security Information Network (HSIN) database and portal, to the consternation of veteran state and local law enforcement officials. They are already comfortable with the Department of Justice’s Regional Information Sharing System (RISS), and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service’s Law Enforcement Information Exchange (LInX). LInX is widely used in states like Washington where Naval investigators collaborate heavily with state and local authorities. WAJAC seeks to take a holistic approach by taking advantage of all available databases, says Drake.

WAJAC issues bulletins to state or regional officials and, in some cases, to the general public, as analysts spot threats and trends from the data.

WSP handles distribution of the refined intelligence. In an emergency response, for example, EMD Director Mullen says that he does not deal directly with WAJAC, but relies on the WSP officer posted to the state’s emergency operations center to provide him with current intelligence.

Field requests. Second, WAJAC regularly takes requests for analysis from state and local law enforcement agencies in the field, in keeping with the center’s all-crimes, all-hazards approach. The requests for analysis primarily come from investigators seeking to spot trends in areas like drug crime, gang activity, or theft.

Drake chuckles at the suggestion that outsiders may envision the center as a humming, Hollywood-style situation room, dimly lit by massive flat-screen televisions and computer monitors. “It’s actually much more boring that what you see on "24." It’s mostly cubicles,” he says.

The analysts, however, could not do their jobs without some high-tech software tools.

WAJAC’s analysts process most of their data using three data analysis and visualization software programs, Drake says: COPLINK, along with intelligence analysis applications from Pen-Link, Ltd., and i2 Inc. RISS also comes into the mix.

COPLINK is designed to link data across different government databases. But Drake says the center’s analysts have found RISS to be more useful. RISS provides a national connectivity “backbone” offered by no other system, says Drake. This allows even the smallest law enforcement agencies from every region in the state to participate in the fusion system.

The key to success for regional analysts is a strong relationship with local officials, RIG-7 Intelligence Analyst Shawn M. Mahood says. And one way to build that relationship is to ensure that communications go both ways. To avoid a common source of frustration among his local counterparts, Mahood makes sure to distribute intelligence down to locals, rather than just sending theirs “up” to Seattle.

Mahood drafts daily intelligence bulletins to RIG-7 law enforcement officials, combining national and international open-source material, items drawn from bulletins issued by the country’s 42 other state and regional fusion centers, and law enforcement sensitive material from within Washington State.

Nationally, the private sector has shown a reluctance to share information with fusion centers (see “Fusion Centers Should Work with ISACs [2],” Homeland Security, November 2007). But WAJAC is getting cooperation from one large player that may help to establish a national framework.

As WAJAC coalesced in the years after 9-11 alongside JTTF, former Seattle FBI Assistant Special Agent in Charge Scott Crabtree was “adamant” about getting Washington State’s major private sector entities involved, says Richard E. Hovel, Boeing’s senior aviation and homeland security advisor.

Boeing, the country’s largest aircraft manufacturer and second-largest defense contractor, was one of those entities. Boeing builds jetliners at plants in Renton and Everett, the latter home to the world’s largest building at 472 million cubic feet.

The idea met with trepidation within Boeing, Hovel says. But passage of the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 convinced management of the need for an Information Sharing Environment linking the government, including states and fusion centers, to the private sector. It wanted to help make that happen.

Boeing’s goal is to place a full-time company intelligence analyst at WAJAC. But that’s easier said than done. Company officials, the Seattle FBI office, and officials representing WAJAC, including the Washington State Attorney General, have worked at length to cross the legal hurdles needed to do so.

The myriad parties to the arrangement have developed a memorandum of understanding, while Boeing itself has applied for coverage under the Support Anti-terrorism by Fostering Effective Technologies (SAFETY) Act of 2002, which offers liability protection to companies providing products or services in support of domestic counterterrorism.

The difficulty of engaging the private sector is evident. Boeing had a leg up because of its specific sector. All of its corporate security officials already have the required security clearances, explains Hovel, “so we didn’t have to climb that hill.”

Even so, the company and state officials have yet to get all the permissions ironed out to get a Boeing person into the WAJAC facility.

Should those efforts succeed, Boeing and its government counterparts hope to create common templates that other companies and fusion centers can use to create memoranda of understanding and SAFETY Act applications. The templates, Hovel says, could be posted on llis.gov, the DHS Web portal for lessons learned and general preparedness information sharing.

Regional giants Starbucks Corporation, Amazon.com, Inc., and Alaska Airlines have also expressed interest in working with WAJAC, Gomez says. But officials are currently focused on Boeing, and success there could pave the way for other firms, says Drake.

Not every company will want to have the same physical presence that Boeing seeks, but they may want to attend briefings either regularly or as situations arise. To accommodate those needs, the FBI field office has set up space adjoining WAJAC.

WAJAC’s work is far from theoretical. The Seattle area is considered a high-risk terrorist target because of its population size, its importance to the American and global economy, its status as a major international travel and maritime trade hub, and its location close to a foreign border.

WAJAC is on the lookout for signs of any threats to these assets. Two examples illustrate the effort and how it is working.

One concerns Analyst Mahood, a former physical security specialist for the FBI in Seattle. He pores over local 911 center call logs and police reports, looking for notable incidents and larger patterns of traditional criminal behavior. He also looks out for what he calls “pre-operational indicators” of possible terrorist activity.

Mahood cites the example of an unremarkable police report filed by a young officer who had been called to an area dollar store early in 2007 on a report of suspicious activity. The store clerk told him that a man had come to the store on consecutive days to purchase large quantities of liquid chlorine bleach and ammonia. The young and relatively inexperienced officer saw nothing to be concerned about. He filed a report and closed the case.

For Mahood, however, the two substances were a red flag. Combined, they could produce deadly chlorine gas which had been used in suicide bomb attacks by Iraqi insurgents. Mahood filed a report with WAJAC about the pattern of suspicious activity.

Luckily, the plot turned out to be more Caddyshack than al Qaeda. The purchaser of the chemicals was a local golf course groundskeeper struggling amid a state ban on gopher traps. To eliminate the pests, he poured homemade, heavier-than-air chlorine gas into their holes.

“There wasn’t anything to it, but it’s the kind of thing that I’m looking for,” Mahood says.

The second example concerns the ferries that carry 26 million people every year between Seattle, surrounding towns, and the Olympic Peninsula across Puget Sound. The Department of Justice considers the ferry system one of the country’s top potential maritime terrorist targets, while a 2004 FBI analysis of suspicious activity determined that of 153 incidents over three years, 19 were “likely or extremely likely” to have involved terrorist surveillance, according to the the *Seattle Times*.

Then, last year, area authorities received at least 15 reports of the same pair of men riding ferries in the region, acting suspiciously, and snapping photographs, Gomez says.

FBI agents and a handful of WAJAC analysts who are former detectives took to the field and interviewed witnesses, including ferry crews and staff. The investigators further benefited from the work of one of the ferry’s skippers, who engaged the men in innocuous conversation, Gomez says. The skipper also surreptitiously snapped some photos of the suspects with a digital camera.

After analyzing the data, state, and federal investigators “anguished” over what to do with it, Gomez says. On Aug. 20, they decided to issue a public press release on the case, featuring two photos and requesting the public’s help in identifying the men, stating that the pair “exhibited unusual behavior, which was reported by passengers.” The release went on to note that, “While this behavior may have been innocuous, the FBI and WAJAC would like to resolve these reports.”

The news media’s degrees of cooperation varied; local broadcast stations and national outlets including Fox and ABC news broadcast the photos. The *Times* printed the photos along with a story based on the FBI release, while its competitor, the *Seattle Post-Intelligencer* (P-I), wrote an article but did not print the photos.

Their article stated that “The *P-I* elected not to publish the photos, citing civil liberties and privacy concerns, which editors felt outweighed the newsworthiness of the images.”

The bulletin has not yet resulted in identification of the two men, but “the concept was working,” Gomez says. “We decided to err on the side of being cautious.”

Long-term plans for WAJAC include support for the 2010 Winter Olympics, to be held just over the border in Vancouver, Drake says.

As with other homeland security efforts, Washington State’s effort is still young, but it is off to a strong start not just because of funding or technology, but because of sheer will, says Eric Holderman, former executive director of King County Emergency Management and now a private consultant with ICF International. “I think it’s still just getting going, but it has worked based on the fact that people are willing to get together and put aside their petty differences,” he says.

Gomez agrees, noting, “It’s a work in progress.” And they have both the work and the progress to show for it.