The monitors worked, and the CBP personnel did their jobs by the book. But then they fell for the ruse: The GAO agents produced counterfeit NRC documents indicating they were authorized to bring the material across the border. The customs agents did not have the means to check the authenticity of the documents.
Would tightening procedures for selling radioactive materials via mail or for authenticating NRC documents at our borders necessarily stop terrorists from getting the materials for a dirty bomb into the United States? No. Our border remains wide open in other ways.
I asked Kutz why someone couldn't take a four-wheel-drive vehicle loaded with radioactive material across the desert where there are no monitors. "We never tried that before, but it's possible" he said.
Yet, even that might not be necessary for an enterprising terrorist. Not all official ports of entry on the U.S.-Mexico border are equipped with radiation portal monitors.
Eugene Aloise, the GAO's director of natural resources and environment, testified in the Senate subcommittee with Kutz. He tracked the Department of Homeland Security's efforts to deploy radiation portal monitors at U.S. ports of entry. As of December, when he finished his study, he told the subcommittee, DHS had deployed only 22 percent (670 of 3,034) of the radiation portal monitors it intend eventually to deploy at all U.S. entry points. Since October 2000, it has spent only $286 million on the project.
As of December, Aloise testified, CPB could screen 62 percent of containerized shipments into the United States and 77 percent of all private vehicles. On the Mexican border, it could screen 88 percent of commercial trucks and 74 percent of private vehicles.
There are 25 vehicular ports of entry along the Mexican border where DHS intends to eventually deploy 360 radiation portal monitors, Aloise told me. As of December, it had deployed 244. But, as of December, did all 25 Mexican border entries targeted by DHS have some radiation portal monitors, I asked. "No," he said.
When DHS was in the process of installing portal radiation monitors at 18 points of entry it had targeted on the Canadian border (where the project is now complete), Aloise told me, regular truck drivers bypassed ports that had monitors for those that didn't. "DHS had put up some portal monitors at a point of entry, a northern land border," he said. "A couple of miles down the road, there was a land border with no portal monitors. The truck drivers quickly found out which one had them, and which one didn't, and went to the one that didn't, because it was one less thing they had to do."
If you were a terrorist trying to bring radiological material across the Mexican border, I asked Aloise, why wouldn't you just drive through a port of entry where we don't yet have portal radiation monitors?
"You're right," he said.