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Securing Seattle during the 1999 WTO Riots and Millennium Bomber Apprehension
Seattle’s 62 year-old Mayor Paul Schell was already reeling from the World Trade Organization (WTO) Third Ministerial Conference riots November 30 to December 3, 1999, when, only 11 days later (December 14), he received word that US customs authorities at Port Angeles (Washington state) had detained an Algerian named Ahmed Ressam following discovery of a trunk load of explosives in his car. Ressam was in custody but many questions remained about his intended target—was it Seattle’s famous Space Needle? As chief law enforcement authority of Seattle, Schell had to make a decision as to whether to hold Seattle’s millennium celebration at midnight on December 31, 1999. He said no but offered a compromise. How did he come to this decision?
1. The WTO Riots Crisis Schell, a real estate developer born in Fort Dodge Iowa, became Seattle’s 54 th mayor on January 1, 1998. As host of the WTO Conference, he hoped to “establish Seattle as a global political player. Unparalleled prosperity in the 1990s…had catapulted the Pacific Northwest into the first ranks economically. WTO, it was hoped, would accomplish the same politically.”* (p.2)
The WTO, an international voluntary-membership organization created on January 1, 1995, to replace the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), serves as a negotiating forum for discussions of new and existing trade rules, and as a trade dispute settlement body. The WTO promotes economic globalization and free trade, which some groups view as biased toward multinational corporations and wealthy nations, i.e., the US, European Union and Japan. Some groups accuse the WTO of causing member states “to adopt WTO treaties undemocratically or to the detriment of their citizens or ecologies.”** The conglomerate of groups of protesters that rioted in Seattle were a diverse mix including union members angry about jobs going overseas, environmentalists angry about global businesses’ damage to world ecosystems, and anarchists angry about capitalism.
Kirsten Lundberg in “Threat of Terrorism: Weighing Public Safety in Seattle” writes: “Violence broke out early as anti-globalization protesters, many drawn by a first-ever appeal over the Internet, used tactics police had not seen before, such as blocking intersections by chaining themselves together under sleeves of concrete, making it difficult to separate them. They threw objects through plate glass windows, starting with those of the internationally recognized Starbucks coffee-store chain. They succeeded in closing a portion of downtown and prevented WTO delegates from attending opening ceremonies.” *(p. 2) Mayor Schell, who wanted to project the long-cherished image of a “gentle Seattle” to visitors, directed his police force to minimize any show of force on the WTO’s opening day. But when protesters became violent, he rapidly changed his tactics to manage the situation. Police appeared in battle gear, the National Guard was mobilized, and extra supplies of tear gas were airlifted in and directed against the protesters when local supplies ran out. By the conclusion of the WTO conference, the protesters had caused over $20 million worth of widespread damage to stores, company headquarters, media trucks and city buses, and freeways. Many protesters were arrested but most charges were eventually dropped. The Seattle City Council, which already had a strained relationship with the mayor, began to investigate Schell’s performance in managing the WTO conference and related riots. After everyone went home from the WTO conference, Schell painted an upbeat picture of what had happened: “It’s been a long, hard seven days. Once things began to heat up on Tuesday, I found myself leaping from discussion to discussion: from the White House to the Direct Action Network; from Director-General of the WTO to the President of the AFL-CIO; from community and business leaders in Capitol Hill and downtown to members of the City Council. “My thanks go to many, many people for their help in de-escalating what could have been a much worse situation. Several thousand delegates and media from 135 nations convened for the Ministerial. 40,000+ protesters took to our streets in demonstrations that were, for the most part, peaceful. The President of the United States, the Secretary General of the United Nations, the US Trade Representative, half the US Cabinet, and 40 Congressmen all attended the conference. “In the end, the right to free speech was upheld, thousands expressed their disagreements with the WTO, and the business of the conference was carried out in full. No one was killed. No one was seriously injured. “…With an authorized organized labor march of over 35,000 going on at the same time, the mass effort to intentionally break the law by clogging streets and blocking entry to the WTO meetings meant that our public safety resources were seriously strained. “When a third group began to damage property and commit other acts of violence, our police officers were forced to choose protection of human life over protection of public property. I commend them with all my heart. Given the situation they found themselves in and the size and emotional intensity of the crowd they faced, our officers behaved with heroic restraint, professionalism, and courage…” *** 2. The Millennium Bomber Apprehension Crisis Ahmed Ressam was a petty thief and drifter born near Algiers, Algeria. He was the thin, ulcer-prone oldest of five male and two female siblings. His father, Belkacem Ressam, worked as a government chauffeur in return for fighting to secure Algeria’s independence from France in 1962. Ahmed drifted to Marseille, France in 1992, and from there to Corsica, and then to Montreal, Canada, using a false identity, fraudulent documents, and stolen money, clothes and credit cards. Canadian immigration policy, which is “perhaps the most liberal in the world,”**** provided Ahmed with 15 months of welfare checks ($550/month) as he (unsuccessfully) applied for political asylum. Although Ahmed rarely attended Islamic services in Algeria, he did so in a Montreal mosque because it was a good place to meet people. There he met two men, Fateh Kamel and Hannachi who had trained at Osama bin Laden’s Khalden camp in Afghanistan. Soon Ahmed was in Afghanistan learning to fire handguns, AK-47s, and rocket-propelled grenade launchers, and how to make explosives and fight as an urban warfare warrior. During his stay, he received recruiting lectures from HAMAS and Hezbollah and contracted malaria. A French detective tipped off the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) about the “cell” to which Ahmed belonged upon his return to Montreal. As a result, Ahmed’s apartment was wiretapped by CSIS agents who nevertheless viewed the men there as a bunch of pathetic boys holding “terrorist Tupperware parties.” ****
Ahmed began his preparations to bomb Los Angeles International Airport at the new millennium. He bought his supplies, assembled components, and decided to place the LAX bomb near a crowded security checkpoint. On November 17, 1999, Ressam and a friend, Dahoumane, flew from Montreal to Vancouver, British Columbia, where they rented a green Chrysler 300M sedan and a room in a motel. There they made HMTD, an unstable explosive made from hexamine, citric acid and hydrogen peroxide, and military-grade explosive found in C-4 plastique, using hexamine and red nitric acid. Dahoumane returned to Montreal and Ressam drove his rented car laden with explosives in the trunk onto the M.V. Coho ferry from Victoria, BC, to Port Angeles, Washington. When the Coho arrived in Port Angeles just before 6 p.m., US Customs Inspector Diana Dean determined that the final car’s driver was acting “hinky” (her words)—jittery, nervous, sweating. She asked him turn the car off, pop open the trunk, and step outside. Another Customs inspector unscrewed the fastener to the spare-tire compartment and discovered several green bags filled with white powder, four black boxes, two pill bottles and two jars of brown liquid (which later was determined to be a highly unstable relative of nitroglycerin that could have blown everyone up). Ressam attempted to flee on foot, but was captured and handed over to the Port Angeles police. Who was this Ressam who went by the fake name of Benni Noris? By 11 pm that night, 34-year-old FBI agent Fred Humphries, who spoke French, received a call to interview the detainee. Humphries determined that the French spoken by “Noris” was not Quebecois French; rather it sounded like the French of an Algerian language instructor Humphries had had while in the Army. Bob Houston, head of Seattle counterterrorism, assigned Humphries to his first terrorism case, which rapidly became international in scope. Meanwhile Mayor Schell and his office learned about the Ressam detention three days later (December 17, 1999) by reading the newspapers. Deputy Mayor Maud Smith Daudon called US Attorney Kate Pflaumer for information. Daudon was concerned that on December 31, Seattle was expecting 50,000 people to celebrate New Year’s Eve in the Seattle Center, which houses the Space Needle. The Space Needle, a private enterprise, had been booked for a private party of 1,000 a decade earlier. Was the Algerian bomber planning to explode the Space Needle? Pflaumer provided some details, including that Ressam had a reservation at a Seattle motel near the Space Needle.
Schell convened the first meeting on December 23, 1999 to which he invited 25 people to brief city officials about the Ressam situation. Schell had been criticized for failing to solicit City Council advice on how to manage the WTO disaster, so he made sure that many people were involved with the Ressam case. Three assistant chiefs of police were present because their chief was retiring January 1, 2000. Also present were the fire chief, FBI Special Agent in Charge Mandigo, US Attorney Pflaumer, and Seattle Center Director Anderson. Mandigo and Pflaumer gave “assurances from a federal point of view that we had no knowledge of any specific information that would indicate that Seattle or the Space Needle was a target of terrorist activity.”* (p. 10) Mandigo added: “Of course, always throwing in the caveat that we can’t tell you what we don’t know. But we have no knowledge of any specific plans…The only information we had, once he was arrested, of any intentions that he had was the he had a reservation at the Best Western motel by the Space Needle.” (p. 10) However, neither Mandigo nor Pflaumer could tell the mayor what to do. One assistant police chief (Bryant) argued for going ahead with the New Year’s plans. He had served as nighttime director of the Emergency Operations Center during the WTO meeting and was in charge of the Year 2000 security planning, and thought that the city would set a poor precedent by canceling the millennium event because of the apprehension of Ressam. Seattle Center officials also wanted to go ahead with the scheduled event. On December 27, Mayor Schell called a smaller meeting of 10-15 people, including police, fire, FBI, and council members. Again the mayor asked for Mandigo’s assessment and again Mandigo said that “we were fairly satisfied that we did not have any known presence of somebody associated with Ressam left, or any unknown activity about any planned terrorist acts or anything in Seattle.” (p. 18) Both Pflaumer and Mandigo, when asked whether they would take their children to the Seattle Center on New Year’s Eve, said no. Another assistant police chief (Pirak) said the mayor had a difficult decision to make: “It was either promote the city, and show everybody that we’re proud to be here and we’re going to celebrate—or public safety. I’m thinking that this was a perfect opportunity to hurt a whole bunch of people, and it’s especially delicious because a government agency is sponsoring this thing….To me, it was a much bigger risk for people from a public safety standpoint that it was from a public relations standpoint. My recommendation was: ‘As hard as it is, I think that public safety needs to take precedence.’” (p. 18) That same day, Mayor Schell made his decision: “ Seattle’s New Year’s Eve celebration would be cancelled, but only the evening activities. Seattle Center would remain open as scheduled until 6 p.m., when the entire campus would be cleared. The Space Needle’s fireworks would proceed, but spectators would have to gather outside the Seattle Center to watch them.” ***** (p. 1) Schell added: “This is already an unprecedented, unpredictable New Year, and we did not want to take changes with public safety, no matter how remote the threat might seem….The FBI can’t assure us there is no risk….At a time when the city is recovering from WTO and heightened anxiety, adding another layer of uncertainty was not a prudent thing to do. Obviously there are those who would say we are caving into terrorism, but I’m concerned with the safety of our citizens.” ***** (p. 5) New Year’s Eve day went off without a hitch. Editorial Note: Anyone want to be a mayor after reading this? Sources: *“Threat of Terrorism: Weighing Public Safety in Seattle.” By Kirsten Lundberg for Arnold Howitt, Director of the Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2002). Available for modest charge at: http://www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/. ** “World Trade Organization: Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Trade_Organization. *** “ Seattle Mayor Paul Schell—What a Week” by Paul Schell, December 6, 1999. Full speech available online at: http://www.labournet.net/docks2/9912/wto32.htm. **** “The Terrorist Within” Chapter 7: Joining Jihad. Seattle Times. Available online at http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/news/nation-world/terroristwithin/chapter7.html. ***** “Threat of Terrorism: Epilogue.” By Kirsten Lundberg for Arnold Howitt, Director of the Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University (2002). Available for modest charge at: http://www.ksgcase.harvard.edu/. |
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