"El Al's Tight Security Methods Are Now Envy of Other Airlines"

Wednesday, September 26, 2001    

El Al's Tight Security Methods Are Now Envy of Other Airlines 
Methods of Israeli Carrier May Benefit Others -- If They Can Be Copied
By JONATHAN KARP 
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL


TEL AVIV -- Within hours after hijacked airliners slammed into the World
Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, calls started pouring in to David
Hermesh, president of El Al Israel Airlines. Carriers from "all over the
world," he recalls, wanted advice from the industry's acknowledged
leader in security.

Two days later, El Al was the first airline allowed to make an
international flight out of the New York metropolitan area, and it
deployed extra planes for 16 fully booked trips between New York and Tel
Aviv in a 48-hour span. Now, as the world's biggest airlines pare
operations, lay off staff and ground part of their fleets, El Al --
after a year of belt-tightening -- is looking to lease as many as three
planes to handle increased demand.

Born of a 30-year battle against hijack and bomb threats, El Al's
vaunted security system -- combining high-technology machines with the
intuition of trained agents who interview passengers, often aggressively
-- has become the reference point for aviation's new world order. The
renewed focus on security has granted El Al a respite from one of its
worst financial years ever: Palestinian unrest that started last
September has reduced tourist arrivals to Israel by 60%, bleeding the
unprofitable state-owned carrier.

Mr. Hermesh isn't banking on an immediate turnaround. El Al's surge in
demand will be short-lived, he says, and as air travel declines
world-wide, El Al's only advantage will be that "the decline in
passengers won't be as high for El Al as for other airlines." Moreover,
competitors are likely to start emulating El Al's security techniques.
"The benefit that El Al has now is not going to remain for a long period
of time," Mr. Hermesh says. "The industry is going to close the gap."

El Al hopes to profit from the transition. For years, the airline
offered its advice free of charge when solicited by friendly governments
or airline partners. Mr. Hermesh, a 55-year-old retired
brigadier-general brought in last year to shore up El Al's finances
ahead of privatization, decided to create a unit to train security
agents at foreign airlines. The idea began to gel before the Sept. 11
terrorist attacks in the U.S. "We didn't think that demand would be as
high as it will be now," he says. "It has accelerated, of course."

Replicating El Al's system won't be easy or cheap, and it will require a
new mindset in the U.S. After all, El Al is small, flying only as many
people in a year as United Airlines carries every two weeks. Israel's
enemies are less diverse than America's, making it easier to compose
risk profiles of passengers. And the Israeli government subsidizes the
high security costs.

Still, "El Al is the model because of its layers of security procedures
and determination to prevent attacks at all costs," says Moshe Cohen, a
former El Al security officer who runs Renful Aviation Security, a
London consulting firm. "Unless you have procedures that deal with each
risk in isolation and then implement, test and audit your operations,
you won't have an effective system."

El Al began introducing undercover sky marshals after the first -- and,
so far, only -- successful hijacking of an El Al plane, to Algeria in
1968. Today, each flight features one or two armed agents, who have
become increasingly less conspicuous. In the early days, El Al crew
members dubbed the sky marshals "2C" because an agent always sat in that
seat.

The airline also modified cockpit doors, adding a special lock and on
some planes a double door so the cockpit would never be exposed to the
passenger cabin. Former El Al employees say pilots are instructed not to
open the door in a crisis. On Sept. 6, 1970, Palestinian hijackers
commandeered several planes; only El Al was able to foil the plan in
midair. Uri Bar-Lev, the captain of the flight, between Amsterdam and
New York, refused to open the cockpit door even though one steward had
been shot and the hijackers were holding a gun to a stewardess's head
and two hand grenades.

"It never crossed my mind that to save the passengers I had to open the
cockpit. On the contrary, I thought about how to prevent the hijacking,"
the pilot recalled in an article published Monday. The crew and
passengers overpowered the hijackers.

Even before that flight left Amsterdam, Mr. Bar-Lev had demanded the
removal of two suspicious passengers -- who promptly boarded and
hijacked a Pan American flight. El Al's airborne precautions are
designed as a fallback to the more important security screening on the
ground.

El Al's preflight measures, which the airline declines to discuss, blend
technology with psychology. The carrier has invested in sophisticated
million-dollar scanning machines, which visually slice up luggage the
way a CAT scanner probes the brain. Other airlines have started using
the same devices but, to save time, don't take as many images of each
suitcase as El Al does, says Mr. Cohen, the aviation consultant. El Al
also places cargo in a decompression chamber before loading it on
freighters, lest a bomb be configured to blow up in midair.

But the keystone of El Al's security is the interview. Well before
passengers arrive at the airport for their flight, El Al security agents
scour passenger manifests for names on watch lists and check information
about when reservations were made and how tickets were paid for, to
identify potential high-risk passengers. Then examiners, usually Israeli
university students, question passengers to compile a quick risk
profile, ranging from a naive type who may be unwittingly carrying a
bomb, as was the case with a pregnant Irish woman in 1986, to a person
deliberately plotting sabotage.

The interrogation can be aggressive and personal, and the examiners look
for mannerisms and factual discrepancies in deciding whether to inspect
the passenger and his or her luggage more intensively. Unlike U.S.
airport security, El Al interviews every passenger, focusing on the
person first, luggage second, says Isaac Yeffet, who headed El Al
security between 1977 and 1984 and now consults on aviation security in
New York.

El Al's profiling might smack of discrimination in the U.S. Palestinians
and other Arabs are almost always asked to step aside for more-thorough
questioning and searches. Aviation experts say that, like human agents
in the intelligence world, preflight interviews are an indispensable
security tool.

The challenge is to train examiners and screeners well and keep them as
motivated as El Al's staff. Several Israelis have tried to export El
Al's model, with mixed results. Huntleigh USA Corp., for instance,
provides security for United at Boston's Logan International Airport,
from which the United jetliner that hit the World Trade Center departed.
Huntleigh is a unit of ICTS International NV of the Netherlands, a
Nasdaq-listed company founded and run by former Israeli intelligence
agents. It has said it is taking steps to provide more training.

Mr. Yeffet says the Federal Aviation Administration should demand
airport screeners be fired for failing a single inspection, as El Al's
policy requires, instead of imposing fines on their companies.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hermesh says El Al is rolling out yet more, unspecified
technology to bolster airport security and make the check-in process
less unpleasant. Even amid the current adversity, the government next
month plans to propose selling 100% of El Al, and Mr. Hermesh is trying
to smooth the airline's many rough edges.

"We are very well-known for security and safety. We are not known for
good service," he says. "We have to improve it and show we have changed.
This is the time to do it."

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