PORT OF ENTRY NOW MEANS POINT OF ANXIETY

Late last month, the commandant of the United States Coast Guard met
with leaders of the International Maritime Organization on the banks
of the Thames in London to propose sweeping changes in the way the
world conducts international shipping.

Concerned about terrorism after Sept. 11 and all too certain that
United States ports and others around the world were vulnerable to
sabotage, Adm. James M. Loy laid out a blunt, far-reaching plan for
the organization's 162 member nations: conduct background checks on
the crews of every major cargo vessel, create a reliable system of
identifying exactly what is being shipped in the millions of anonymous
metal boxes the size of railroad cars, and spend the necessary amounts
to protect the ports.

What happens to the admiral's ambitious proposals will not be known
for months, but the problems they are meant to address -- the inability
of the United States to safeguard its more than 100 seaports or to
monitor effectively the billions of tons of cargo that pass through
them -- have been painfully apparent for decades, according to
government officials and private industry experts.

Only about 2 percent of the cargo arriving at United States ports is
thoroughly searched, chiefly because of a lack of personnel and the
demands of carriers and their customers.

The ports, attractive targets for terrorism, are poorly protected and
are patrolled by a Coast Guard whose budget has been stretched thin.
Moreover, the creative attempts to eliminate the threats have produced
spotty results.

Indeed, a litany of errors and shortcomings at the ports has been
detailed for years in government reports and Congressional testimony
and reflected in the very real experience of a failed, decades-long
effort to stop drug smuggling through the ports.

The holes in the net, in fact, can be glaring. Last year, a New Jersey
man pleaded guilty to criminal charges related to smuggling a 60-ton
armored riot-control vehicle through a West Coast port. Five to ten
million pounds of chemical chlorofluorocarbons -- air-conditioning
fluid that is banned from import to the United States -- is smuggled
into the country every year, experts estimate. And the special program
set up by the Customs Service to inspect suspect ships has largely
failed because it could not even get accurate information on what the
ships were supposed to be carrying and did not have the high-tech
equipment and personnel to conduct the searches.

"The security challenges are enormous," Admiral Loy said last week,
recalling the talks about the country's and the world's ports. "Are
they secure? I am afraid my answer to the question is no."

He is hardly alone in his pessimism.

"The system for the detection of contraband is inadequate," said
Raymond W. Kelly, the former commissioner of the Customs Service who
will be the next police commissioner in New York. "And that can
include anything from drugs to the tools of terrorism."

Those tools, government officials have come to fear, can range from a
small amount of chemical explosive to the makings of a radioactive
bomb.

Not surprisingly, officials in government and the shipping industry
say, the Sept. 11 attacks have produced yet another push by
legislators to beef up security and crack down on criminals operating
in and around the country's ports, many of which are near highways,
rail lines and airports.

Interviews with law enforcement and industry experts suggest that the
only way to envision secure ports is to re-examine the entire way
international shipping functions.

United States cargo trade has doubled in the last 10 years and is
expected to do so again in the next decade.

Admiral Loy, a career seagoing officer who became Coast Guard
commandant in May 1998, has said the only way to ensure that it is
safe is to take apart the transportation system from "stem to stern"
and reassemble it.

A feel for the dimensions of the problem can be gained almost any day
on the docks in Red Hook, Brooklyn. On one recent morning, another
giant ship came to rest, this one from Egypt via the United Arab
Emirates. A customs inspector, Michael Hegler, and his crew stood
there, dwarfed by the brightly colored cargo containers stretched for
hundreds of feet along the ship.

Beyond this ship, there are thousands more, maybe 10,000 a year, that
come in and out of New York's harbor. Last year, more than three
million containers landed on the Brooklyn docks, each weighing roughly
13 tons.

Nearby, in the shelter of an old warehouse, more customs inspectors
and national guardsmen were pulling apart two container boxes, one
from Pakistan bearing pudding mix and another from India filled with
40- pound bags of basmati rice. Searching for contraband or worse,
they do the work of laborers, lifting the bags, loading them on a
skid, and carting them away to load some more. Searching one box can
take all afternoon.

The containers were being searched because something looked wrong. An
electronic scan by a $1 million machine aroused suspicion, but it
turned out that the rice and pudding were only packed differently in
one spot.

Mr. Hegler and those like him will be here every day -- on Christmas,
too, he said -- "because that is the day they think we probably won't
be here, and they might try to put something past us."

Mr. Hegler is earnest, but not optimistic.

The metal boxes his inspectors were searching seem like simple crates,
but their introduction in 1956 was a revolution in the process of
shipping vast amounts of goods across the ocean. The boxes, which can
be easily shifted to railroad cars or trucks, account for more than 90
percent of all cargo arriving from overseas.

In 1980, nearly eight million containers passed through United States
ports, according to the American Association of Port Authorities. A
decade later, the number increased to more than 16 million, of which
nearly 2 million were handled in the Port of New York and New Jersey.
Last year, American seaports handled more than 33 million containers.

The tremendous flow of goods means that everyone, from customs
inspectors and carriers to port officials themselves, is under
constant pressure to move material as quickly as possible. Lost time
is lost money.

"The important thing is balancing security with the ability to
continue the flow of commerce," said Richard D. Steinke, executive
director of the Port of Long Beach in California and head of the
American Association of Port Authorities.

Some people say the speedy movement of goods through the ports has
gone too far. Customs inspectors are often drowning in work and too
often have little idea what is in thousands of metal containers
passing through their ports each day.

Argent Acosta, a senior customs inspector, said that when he started
work at the Port of New Orleans in the 1970's, the office had 103
inspectors. Today, he has 29.

"At one time, we boarded almost every vessel," Mr. Acosta
said.

In fact, fighting terrorism is not a job the Customs Service ever had
the staff or the budget to perform.

"They are overwhelmed," said Charles E. Schumer, New York's senior
United States senator, who has made the issue a priority.

The most optimistic say the system is taxed but working, but others
describe a nearly impossible task.

"The volume is tremendous," said Mr. Kelly, who headed a presidential
commission on seaport crime and security last year. "And we don't have
the technology and we don't have the information to adequately check
substances that are coming across our borders, by land, sea and air."

Stephen E. Flynn, an expert on international shipping for the Council
on Foreign Relations, said that if inspectors at busy ports were to
search every container that landed on their docks, they would have to
check each one in 20 seconds.

The unachievable aim of checking every ship by opening every container
and visually inspecting the contents led the government to look to
computer systems that would try to predict which cargo containers were
likely to hold contraband. Specially trained inspectors began playing
a high-tech game, using information, like the specifications of a
ship's cargo and its port of origin, to decide what kind of problem it
presents. It was a crude kind of profiling, but it was at least a plan.

It was hobbled from the start, though, since nearly half the
information that inbound ships send customs inspectors is wrong,
according to internal studies by the Customs Service.

Experts also say that what information is supplied by the carriers
needs to be shared among the different federal agencies with
jurisdiction over the elements of the shipping industry: people, cargo
and vessels. Right now, the records are split among immigration
agents, customs inspectors and the Coast Guard. Those agencies keep
the information in separate databases and they do not communicate
efficiently.

The lack of information also lies at the heart of changes proposed by
Admiral Loy.

A step in solving the problem, Admiral Loy said, would be "gathering
the players together -- the brokers, the shippers, the people who work
the docks -- to look at the process from beginning to end."

The proposal with the best chance of success, experts say, is
theoretically simple but would be difficult to arrange: take the
inspection to overseas ports, before the ships ever begin their trips
to America.

As Customs Commissioner Robert C. Bonner told an industry group last
month, the idea is to push out America's security perimeter, a
proposal that is becoming increasingly popular among many in
government and private industry.

Some private groups, in fact, have already done it.

In 1997, losses from cargo theft drove a group of high-tech companies
to adopt a similar plan. Dan Purtell, the chairman of the Technology
Asset Protection Association, which negotiates with carriers to
prevent cargo theft, said it demanded that shipping companies seal off
cargo containers from the time they left overseas factories until
their arrival in the United States. They used electronic locks and
surveillance cameras to track the voyages.

To do business with organization members, including some of the
nation's largest computer companies, carriers had to allow independent
teams of auditors to spot-check their overseas operations.

"For some companies, the losses from theft are down 80 percent," said
Mr. Purtell, who is the investigations manager for Intel. "What we are
looking for is complete accountability for the product from start to
finish."

Many experts would like to expand that type of accountability
throughout the shipping industry. Their argument is that by the time a
cargo container gets to its destination, it is too late to begin
worrying about what is inside.

Richard M. Larrabee, director of port commerce for the Port Authority
of New York and New Jersey, thinks the crucial juncture is when the
cargo is packed. "Security standards have to be met where it is
packed," he said.

This year in New Orleans, that need became glaringly clear. A
container, labeled as empty, held oil exploration tools that became
radioactive during work in Africa. When customs officials opened the
container in the port, beeper-size radiation alarms on their belts
screamed a warning. The inspectors backed off and summoned a
decontamination team.

"Maybe the next people who open the container don't know about the
danger," said Mr. Acosta, the customs inspector. "If we don't look at
that ship, if we don't look at those empty containers, this is just
one of those empty containers that hits the road and goes off into the
United States."