On the eve of a new millennium, as the nation girded for the most unusual New Year’s observance in its history, federal authorities expanded their investigation of an Algerian man charged with smuggling explosives into the United States.
FBI agents in New York announced the arrest of Abdel Ghani and said he planned to travel from the Pacific Northwest to Chicago and other places with Ahmed Ressam, who was arrested in Washington state Dec. 14, allegedly with a car full of explosives. The two planned to raise money for an unidentified terrorist organization, authorities said.
At the same time, federal prosecutors in Burlington, Vt., announced that Lucia Garofalo, a Canadian woman arrested in Vermont on Dec. 19, and Ressam had been linked to an Algerian terrorist organization, the Armed Islamic Group, known by its French initials, GIA.
Federal officials questioned and detained dozens of people from New York to San Francisco on Thursday as they dug for new information on Ressam. Most of those were held on immigration violations.
“These are not suspects. These are people we believe will have some information that can help us,” an FBI spokesman in Washington said.
The Ressam investigation played out against the backdrop of a nation already on high alert for computer-related problems. The fear is that older computers, keyed to internal clocks that record only the last two digits of the year, will be confused when 1999 shifts to 2000 and will read the new year as 1900.
Thursday amounted to the closing act in one of the biggest technological dress rehearsals in history, a worldwide vetting of billions of lines of programming code in computer networks, right down to some laptops, to screen for possible problems caused by the changing of the year.
No one is certain exactly what that might mean, but the assumption over the past two years has been that vital data links controlling everything from financial transactions to heart monitors in hospitals to Internet chat rooms might shut down.
Concern about Y2K, short for “Year 2 Thousand,” has, among other things, generated panic among survivalists who packed their remote havens with dried food, fresh water, weapons and ammo, and profit for consulting companies that sprang up to fix problems and assure businesses that everything will be OK.
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Anxiety about potential terrorist attacks, prompted by warnings against travel from the State Department, heightened security announcements from police departments all over the nation, and details of the Ressam probe added more uncertainty to the millennial eve atmosphere.
But some of the concerns about a Y2K panic have not occurred.
The Federal Reserve Board reported Thursday that although a wildly successful Christmas season kept cash machines hot everywhere over the past month, there is still plenty of money available in automated teller machines. Banks also are packed with some $200 billion in new currency.
An anticipated run on ATMs in Chicago never materialized, and machines around the Chicago area remained flush with cash as the New Year approached, according to Stephen Cole, president and CEO of Cash Station Inc.
Although Commonwealth Edison declared itself Y2K compliant six months ago, utility executives and regulatory officials were doing final checks at the utility’s command center in Joliet on Thursday.
At 6 a.m. Friday, they were to begin monitoring the electric grid in New Zealand as midnight tolled there. That would give Commonwealth Edison and the rest of the world’s utilities an early look at what might happen and how well technicians have addressed the potential Y2K problems.
Illinois, which has spent $137 million to prepare for the arrival of the New Year, will have 9,000 workers on duty to address holiday weekend problems.
“We’re facing the unknown,” Gov. George Ryan said. “Not every problem on New Year’s Eve will be related to Y2K, but we will have the personnel in place to deal with emergencies if they occur.”
After two years of preparation, the federal government Thursday wasn’t taking any chances. It announced the closing of seaports on both coasts for the New Year’s weekend, and the Federal Aviation Administration said it was repairing last-minute bugs in the computer software that helps control the nation’s air traffic.
The Defense Department said it was closing down some computer operations to protect against holiday hackers, a move that also led the Agriculture Department to shutter some of its information pages on the World Wide Web.
The Transportation Department said dozens of U.S. and foreign seaports would be closed not only as a precaution against Y2K problems but also because traffic is generally so light during the holiday weekend that not much shipping will be interrupted. The Coast Guard announced that about 24 of the world’s 16,000 cargo ships have been “red-flagged” and will be barred from American ports because they are not safe.
The State Department evacuated 350 diplomatic workers and their families who had asked to leave Russia, doubting the Russian government’s assurances that it had updated its creaky, Soviet-era computers and was ready for the Y2K challenge.
Special teams of U.S. and Russian military monitors will work throughout the holiday making certain weapons computers programmed during the coldest years of the Cold War don’t malfunction or cause false alerts and missile-attack alarms.
Jane Garvey, administrator for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the agency had discovered a minor problem in its crucial HOCSR computers, which process flight plan and radar data for controllers; repairs were completed early Thursday.
“We’re continuing to test right up to the last moment. We erred on the side of caution,” said Garvey. “The patch is in. It has been fixed. It is a very, very minor issue.”
Besides reiterating that there have been no specific terrorists threats, there was little the government could do to assure Americans that they will not be the targets of violence on New Year’s Eve.
It was clear from Thursday’s developments in the Ressam case that the government is pushing its investigation hard, trying to discover whether Ressam was a single “mule” moving explosives into the country or was part of a larger network of terrorist bombers.
When he was arrested in Washington state, Ressam’s car contained sophisticated timing devices, hundreds of pounds of the chemical urea and a military liquid explosive that is a key component in plastic explosives, officials said.
The FBI alleged that Ghani, the Algerian arrested Thursday, traveled to Seattle under an assumed name to meet Ressam but returned to New York after Ressam’s arrest. Ghani was charged in a federal indictment with concealing his support for Ressam’s efforts to violate U.S. explosives laws and with conspiring with others to traffick in and use fraudulent credit and bank cards.
The indictment alleges Ressam was under orders to take the explosives-laden vehicle to a parking lot, then walk away. Someone else was to retrieve the vehicle.
Federal authorities released no information about how the explosives might have been used, but as a precaution, Seattle canceled its New Year’s Eve bash. One unconfirmed assumption has been that terrorists planned to use millennial celebrations in the U.S. as targets.
Thursday’s arrests came in New York and Massachusetts. Other suspects, some of them Algerians, were under questioning elsewhere. In Boston, one man was arrested after he fled his workplace, chased by police with their guns drawn.
Earlier Thursday, FBI director Louis Freeh met with top Canadian and U.S. intelligence officials and said the two governments were working closely to ensure cooperation on law enforcement and intelligence questions.
“While no specific development prompted today’s meeting, these continuing high-level discussions reflect the importance both countries place on seamless law enforcement and intelligence efforts related to Y2K and terrorism issues,” the FBI said after the meeting.
One law-enforcement official told The Associated Press, “This is an effort by the FBI primarily, with other law-enforcement agencies, basically to get information from anybody who may have had any connection to Ressam.”
In Burlington, Vt., federal prosecutors revealed some of what investigators found as they presented court documents to support their argument that Garofalo should not be released on bail and should remain in prison until she is tried on immigration charges.
Assistant U.S. Atty. Tristram Coffin accused Garofalo of “working to assist terrorist organizations.”
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The court documents linked Ressam and Garofalo to the GIA, an Islamic fundamentalist faction in Algeria that has been accused of bloody attacks during the current insurgency, for bombings in France in 1995 and 1996 and an airplane hijacking in 1994.
Although the U.S. government refused to disclose the sources for much of its information, French intelligence agents have been tracking the GIA for years and are said to have been looking for Ressam for questioning before he was arrested in the U.S. on Dec. 14.
Garofalo was arrested on Dec. 19 with another Algerian man, Bouabide Chamchi, and held on immigration-related charges. Federal authorities said that two years ago, Garofalo arranged with Said Atmani to buy her an airline ticket to travel to Germany to hire a lawyer for her husband, Yamin Rachek, an Algerian expelled from Canada after he presented a false passport.
The U.S. attorney said Atmani is believed to be a documents forger for the GIA. He also was at one time a roommate of Ressam.