Manning The Bridge

By Elaine Shannon

A sinewy man with a shaved head and a black LIVE TO DRIVE biker shirt guides his 18-wheeler across the Ambassador Bridge from Windsor, Ont., to Detroit. He pulls into the U.S. customs yard, braking next to a National Guard tent festooned with last year's Christmas lights. It's July 1, one of the hottest days of the year, and the stagnant air at the foot of the bridge--the busiest commercial border crossing in North America--is thick with the smell of diesel and hog.

Three National Guard soldiers open LIVE TO DRIVE's trailer and poke about his cargo as a customs inspector, his navy shirt defiantly crisp in the pounding heat, peers at the paperwork and peppers the man with questions. The driver answers stoically, in halting English. Scrap aluminum. Picked it up in Quebec, due at a recycler in Missouri. Heading down I-75, hoping to get there tonight. The inspector appraises the man's story and body language and waves him on for final processing.

Ben Anderson, 55, chief inspector for commercial operations at the Ambassador Bridge, is watching from about 15 ft. away. "Inspectors typically have 25 to 30 seconds to make a judgment about whether a driver is telling the truth," he says. "A lot of what we do is just common sense. It's looking for things that are out of place, a story that doesn't make sense, or if he's evasive or won't look you right in the eye." Since Sept. 11, the Customs Service has been on a Level One alert--the most rigorous inspection regimen and one that, in the first days after the attacks, caused 25-mile, 16-hour-long backups at the Ambassador Bridge. Those delays shut down auto assembly lines from Flint, Mich., to Hermosillo, Mexico--and put Anderson and his 45 inspectors under relentless pressure to keep the commerce flowing while letting neither terrorists nor weapons of mass destruction across the border.

It's your basic, impossible 24/7 task. Fortunately, 31 years with Customs in Detroit has taught Anderson a thing or two about spotting liars. He is a classic American character with a deep faith and a laconic style inherited from his coal-miner father. Colleagues saw zero change in him after Sept. 11. "Doing it over 30 years, he doesn't get rattled," says his friend Bill Wisman, chief inspector for passenger-vehicle operations at the bridge and the Detroit-Windsor tunnel. "All I've seen in him," says his wife Linda, "is greater determination." On April 26, Linda awoke around 4 a.m. to find Ben sitting up talking on the phone. A suspicious briefcase had been left in the middle of the parking lot. "Call the bomb squad," Anderson said. "I'll be right in." Before she had wiped the sleep from her eyes, he was up and dressed and heading downtown. By the time he arrived, the bag was cordoned and the bomb dogs were circling it. They didn't alert. The bag contained only paperwork. "In these times," Anderson says, "you don't assume anything will turn out to be a false alarm."

Everyone who works at the Detroit crossings knows that just one lapse could let a crate of AK-47s or Semtex, a cache of anthrax spores or nerve gas, even a dirty bomb or a "nuke-in-the-box"--a stolen nuclear warhead--into the American heartland. "We don't even talk about what happens if something gets through," says Anderson. "Every day, we say we're going out there and stop everything." It's a far more serious business than when he signed on as a customs inspector in 1971, and his employment interview consisted of two questions: Do you have all your limbs? And when can you start? The agency's mission then was "protect the revenue," which means collect taxes.

Today the inspectors wear radiation detectors so sensitive that they go off near anybody who has had a medical test using radioisotopes. They carry Glock semiautomatic pistols and are trained to deal with chemical and biological weapons. But there is no end to the number of hiding places in the trucks, vans and cars snaking across the bridge, each waiting for an inspector to play a 25-second game of Spot the Liar.

One-quarter of all U.S. trade with Canada comes across this four-lane bridge--6,000 trucks a day, one every 12 to 15 seconds, laden with lumber, steel, semiconductors, machinery, furniture, chemicals, produce, livestock and Canadian-made auto components for 41 GM, Ford and Chrysler assembly lines within a day's drive of Detroit. The task of policing the traffic is complicated by the area's large Middle Eastern population. Some customs officials say privately that if Ahmed Ressam--the al-Qaeda explosives courier arrested in Port Angeles, Wash., in 1999--had crossed the border at Windsor-Detroit, he would probably have made it through, which means that his target, Los Angeles International Airport, would probably now be rubble.

Customs inspectors are used to seeing Arab-American and Arab-Canadian truck drivers and, Anderson says, don't single them out but rather look for anomalies in their shipping documents, route or cargo. There are unsettling signs, however, that al-Qaeda has been recruiting in the Windsor and Detroit areas. In late July, Canadian authorities handed over to the fbi a 20-year-old Canadian citizen of Kuwaiti heritage. Investigators said Mohammed Mansur (Sammy) Jabarah admitted traveling to Singapore last October to help mount an aborted plot to blow up the U.S., British, Israeli and Australian embassies there. And last week a federal grand jury in Detroit indicted four local Arab men with conspiring to support radical Islamic terror attacks against the U.S., Turkey and Jordan.

The dueling needs of security and commerce have forced Customs and the major automakers to rush into service a paperless reporting system called the National Customs Automation Program (NCAP). General Motors, which developed the software, is sharing it with its rivals; the system transmits to customs computers advance information about trucks and drivers dispatched from Canada to the U.S. When the driver arrives at the inspection booth, he simply hands over a bar-coded document, gets scanned and, if everything matches, goes on his way. GM is experimenting with truck-mounted transponders to beam the data to the customs booth while the truck is still on the bridge. Under the old system, Anderson explains, a truck could take 1 1/2 hours to clear. "With NCAP, we can process it with one bar code," he says. "That's a huge time saving."

About two-thirds of the trucks that approach the bridge are hauling for big companies like GM and get some kind of fast-track treatment. But that leaves 2,000 trucks a day to be scrutinized because their drivers and owners aren't known to Customs. "The better job we can do of identifying the low-risk companies and carriers," says Anderson, "the more we can concentrate on those we're not familiar with." A few of the highest-risk trucks--the ones that arrive without proper documents, say--are offloaded and searched. But that takes hours and is practical for only the most suspicious cargoes. So in December, Anderson's unit acquired a Star Wars gizmo called the Vehicle and Cargo Inspection System (VACIS), which bombards truck containers with gamma rays to produce an incredibly detailed image of what's inside. The VACIS, which takes 45 seconds to scan one trailer, is ideal for finding hidden compartments and has helped Anderson's team find everything from drug stashes to smuggled coconut milk. Overall, seizures on the bridge have escalated sharply since September. The take includes 550 lbs. of primo marijuana, more than 5,000 ecstasy tablets and 13 million tablets of pseudoephedrine, which is used to make methamphetamine--but so far, no terrorists or terror weapons.

That doesn't mean the inspectors can let down their guard. Though they still work 12-to-16-hour shifts in relentless heat and bitter cold, they have logged fewer sick days than before the national crisis. "They're tired and they've made a lot of personal sacrifices, but they continue to demonstrate the same dedication today as they did on the 11th of September," says Anderson. Anderson's own closet-size cubicle inside the small brick customs office is a spartan place purged of distractions except for photos of Linda and their daughter, 23, and son, 19. Taped to the wall is a tattered cartoon of a happy dragon picking his teeth. The caption reads: "No matter how hard you work, no matter how right you are--sometimes the dragon wins." The cartoon has been on Anderson's wall for 15 years. But since 9/11, he won't believe its message. The dragon can't win, not even once.