Visa system in need of upgrades to trap terrorists

Foreign Service officers have prevented hundreds of suspected terrorists from entering the country. But to function effectively at this time of heightened security, the State Department's Bureau of Consular Affairs needs to make major improvements in the way it staffs its offices, implements improvements in technology and shares information with other agencies, observers say.

Before citizens of most countries can enter the United States, either temporarily or on a permanent basis, they must first apply for a visa at an American embassy or consulate. There, officers of State's Bureau of Consular Affairs review applications and interview visa candidates, deciding whether to let people into the country. American consular officers granted visas to at least some of the 19 terrorists who, on Sept. 11, hijacked four planes, destroyed the World Trade Center, severely damaged the Pentagon and caused an airliner to crash in Pennsylvania.

The primary anti-terrorist device at the hands of consular officers is State's Consular Lookout and Support System, a database of the names of people who should be kept out of the United States because of their criminal backgrounds, previous visa denials or links to terrorists.Most of the information in the database comes from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which declassifies intelligence and law enforcement information and enters it into the lookout system.

It's not yet clear whether federal agencies had information about the Sept. 11 hijackers that would have caused consular officers to deny them visas. A bureau spokeswoman said the Justice Department and FBI provided the State Department with a list of most of the alleged hijackers after the attacks. The bureau found that consular officers had checked all of the names of the alleged hijackers through the lookout system before issuing them visas, meaning State didn't have any information tying them to terrorist groups.

From 1987 to 1997, consular officers detected 722 suspected terrorists as they applied for visas, according to State Department statistics. Immigration and Naturalization Service and Customs Service agents intercepted another 196 terrorists at U.S. border points from 1991 to 1997 using State Department tips entered into the automated Interagency Border Inspection System, State officials said.

In March 1999 testimony before the House Government Reform Committee, then-State Department Inspector General Jacquelyn Williams-Bridgers said that the department's terrorist alert system had blocked more than 400 terrorists from entering the country since 1997. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, State Department officials implemented a computerized system to track whether consular officers had checked each visa application against the lookout system. Observers say the Bureau of Consular Affairs has improved its operations over the past decade, particularly after the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing revealed that the mastermind of that attack was able to come and go from the United States despite his known terrorist ties. But as the country examines its defenses following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, they say management improvements would make it even harder for terrorists to cross legally onto American soil. Menial Processing Former Foreign Service officer John Martin, now with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, credits consular officers for working hard to keep up with a growing demand for visas. In fiscal 2000, consular officers issued more than 9 million temporary visas-1 million more than were issued four years ago. By 2005, the number of visas issued may rise to 12 million a year. The increasing workload has put pressure on consular officers to speed visa applications. Visa processing tends to be viewed as a job for inexperienced junior officers, who get the chance to practice their language skills and meet foreign citizens during interviews. Junior officers view processing as menial work. Consular affairs officers "have felt like they are forced to be working in a factory output-type situation," Martin says. "One of the benefits of issuing visas that compensates for some of the tedium is having the opportunity to have conversations with visa applicants, to at least exchange pleasantries and learn a little about them. You also have a better opportunity to size them up. Those conversations should be routine, but they're very circumscribed in large visa output consular sections. That's been a lot of the morale problem." Conditions vary, but recent reports by State's inspector general and outside reviews show that consular facilities in many locations are decrepit, lines for visas are long and visa officers are exhausted. As a result, turnover is high. "Overseas consular officers and antifraud units continue to face staffing shortages," former IG Williams-Bridgers told the House committee in 1999. "High-fraud posts are not able to attract enough experienced consular officers, or enough full-time, experienced antifraud officers because these posts are generally in undesirable locations and have heavy workloads." In addition, the former IG said that training is inadequate-consular officers had to attend only four hours of antifraud training in 1999. "Officers did not have confidence in their ability to decide whether to approve visas and were routinely sending applications to the antifraud unit, overwhelming the antifraud officers with routine cases that should have been dealt with on the line," Williams-Bridgers said. The ex-IG said antifraud officers also lacked adequate training, some having been thrown into their jobs with no guidance and no documented procedures. "At the sixth-highest-ranking fraud post, the antifraud unit consisted of a part-time junior officer in a rotational position and a newly hired, inexperienced Foreign Service National investigator," she said. "Antifraud officers at posts we have visited want to perform their jobs effectively but were frustrated by the lack of guidance." A Bureau of Consular Affairs spokesman said the department is hiring more and more consular officers. The spokesman also said consular officers are well trained. "There is not a single consular officer who hasn't had sufficient training to do [visa work]," the spokesman said. In addition to antifraud seminars during their basic studies, consular officers attend regular antifraud conferences where they are taught detection techniques, such as how to recognize forged signatures. During their training, consular officers spend a day with INS agents to learn fraud detection skills. At their posts, the officers learn how to verify the authenticity of a country's passports and identification documents. The bureau also distributes a monthly publication alerting consular officers to the latest methods of visa fraud. Technology Troubles In an article in the March 2001 edition of the Foreign Service Journal, retired senior Foreign Service officer David T. Jones credited the Bureau of Consular Affairs for doing its best to cope with its workload by providing more support personnel for consular officers and by more effectively allocating visa work. He also credited the agency for introducing machine-readable visas, which include photographs, codes and watermarks that make them hard to counterfeit. Still, Jones made a prescient observation: "Visa issuance must become more careful than ever-or State will share the blame for the next successful terrorist bombing. Preventing such acts is now a real national security concern." After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the bureau promised to get its lookout system and machine-readable visa system in place in every overseas post, which it did over the following several years. But sophisticated terrorists may still be able to get into the United States by using aliases or putting their photographs into other people's travel documents. JB Fields, a computer specialist who worked at the State Department for 10 years, says the bureau could build biometrics-such as handprint, fingerprint, face recognition and eye scanning-and digital signatures into visas and passports to further reduce fraud. In fact, the INS is already using handprint technology to speed frequent international travelers through checkpoints, meaning the government is using advanced biometrics for the travelers it trusts the most, but not for the people it knows the least. "For the most sinister of our adversaries, [just] name-checking is ineffective," Fields says. The State Department's strategic plan for information technology includes a visa processing provision in which "biometrics will be used extensively, and the department will experiment with fully electronic travel documents," according to the plan. Secretary of State Colin Powell has expressed an interest in biometrics to his staff, but the department has yet to move seriously in that direction. "We are a ways away from any integration of biometrics into visas," the Bureau of Consular Affairs spokesman said. On Oct. 4, Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., and other senators introduced a bill that would require biometric technology in visas. "It could be a facial picture, it could be an iris identification," Bond said. "There are any number of systems that we would ask the attorney general to review and to implement-we'll know that the person who's coming in is the person who's been cleared to come in." Sharing Data Technology, including databases and interoperable computer systems, could also help the Bureau of Consular Affairs share information more quickly and closely with intelligence agencies, the FBI, Customs, Defense and the INS. "The most important gap that needs to be filled is information-sharing among federal agencies," says Martin. "One of the biggest problems that consular officers have overseas is that they do not get adequate feedback from the [INS] on persons who have received visas who then stay on illegally in the United States. In part, the problem is because the immigration service is doing very little interior enforcement activity at the present time so they don't have an awful lot of information. But they also need to do a better job of sharing what information they have with consular officers overseas." A 1997 General Accounting Office review found that representatives of various agencies stationed at U.S. embassies were often unwilling to share information or sit on committees aimed at sharing information about suspected terrorists. Law enforcement officials, for example, said that such efforts could compromise their work. The FBI has refused to provide information from its National Crime Information Center database to the State Department because the Bureau of Consular Affairs isn't a law enforcement agency. The Senate bill would force the FBI to share that information. "We would mandate that the FBI and other law enforcement agencies share with the State Department any information they have on potential terrorists coming into this country," Bond said. Congress is also likely to review the roles and organizational structures of the Bureau of Consular Affairs and INS. Some observers say visa processing should be pulled out of the State Department and into the INS. E. Wayne Merry, a senior associate at the American Foreign Policy Council, said Foreign Service officers have a service mentality, rather than a law enforcement approach. "This is and needs to be a very serious law enforcement function," Merry said. "As a 26-year veteran of the Foreign Service, I am skeptical the Foreign Service can inculcate its officers with a law enforcement mentality." In his March 2001 article, Jones also suggested that the Bureau of Consular Affairs and the Immigration and Naturalization Service be merged. "Visa issuance and entrance to the U.S. should be a seamless web," Jones said. Since Sept. 11, members of Congress have introduced at least five bills urging better visa technology and more coordination among the State Department and law enforcement and intelligence agencies.