Flying the Confused Skies

By Brian Bennett, SALLY B. DONNELLY, Amanda Ripley

Homeland security secretary Michael Chertoff tried to explain last week why air security has been given greater priority than protecting mass transit on the ground. "A fully loaded airplane with jet fuel ... has the capacity to kill 3,000 people," he said. "A bomb in a subway car may kill 30 people." That brought an outcry from many city officials. But it shouldn't reassure anyone that all the security problems in the air have been solved. Take the troubled no-fly list of the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).

One problem, it seems, is that federal agencies can't agree on who belongs on the list and who doesn't. On July 8, Air France Flight 050 on its way from Paris to Chicago was forced to return to Paris when it was discovered that a passenger was on the no-fly list. Even though the man, who is of Middle Eastern descent, had flown out of the U.S. with no problems a month earlier, the TSA boasted of its quick action. "It's actually a success story for us," said Lauren Stover, a TSA spokeswoman. "[The flight] turned around, but it never even got close to U.S. airspace."

There was only one hitch: waiting for the man in Chicago's O'Hare airport were FBI agents who were tracking his travels as part of an investigation and wanted to interview him. The FBI had to appeal to the TSA to get the man off the list, and the next day he flew to Chicago. The investigation is still under way.

The incident points up the lack of communication between the two agencies. "Investigations are being compromised by the TSA notifying people we don't want to know we're pursuing," says an FBI agent. But the FBI can't always blame the TSA. FBI agents were tracking Umer and Hamid Hayat, the father and son from Lodi, Calif., who were arrested June 5 on suspicion of being linked to al-Qaeda. (They have pleaded not guilty.) Hamid was also on the TSA's no-fly list and could not return to the U.S., where the FBI was waiting to question him. But it turned out that an FBI agent in Sacramento had placed his name on the list. His name was removed, and he was allowed to fly--into the hands of waiting FBI agents. --By Brian Bennett, Sally B. Donnelly and Amanda Ripley