Experts Say Olympic Security Plans Must Be Ready For Unforeseen Problems

VANCOUVER, B.C. – A famous 19th-century German general said no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, a maxim that described warfare but could easily apply to another deeply complex human endeavour, the Olympics.

Helmuth von Moltke wasn’t suggesting plans were useless but that they have to take unforeseen events into account.

When it comes to the Games, that’s especially true of security arrangements, where the stakes can be much higher than a traffic tie-up or a botched TV broadcast. The massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics demonstrated that.

Security officials for the upcoming Vancouver Winter Games are aware they have to be ready for the unexpected.

“We just have to take it day by day, not get complacent and do the best job that we can to make sure that it’s the most successful and safe Games that we can put on,” says Vancouver police spokesman Const. Lindsey Houghton.

The Olympics are perhaps the most complicated regularly staged event on Earth and despite Munich and the post 9-11 mentality, its multi-layered aspect can create frictions.

Prof. Scott Decker, director of Arizona State University’s criminology school, studied Olympic security arrangements at close quarters at the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games and the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

At Atlanta, Decker learned the all-powerful organizing committee intervened to reduce the sensitivity of the airport-style magnatometers used to screen spectators heading into the opening ceremonies.

It was apparently taking too long to clear the 78,000 attendees. Officials worried the spectacle would be delayed, pushing the climactic torch-lighting by boxing great Muhammad Ali out of the prime-time TV window.

“People weren’t getting in; the lines backed up and the ACOG people … came and told the security venue commander you will lower the magnatometers and you will move people into the Games,” Decker recalls.

“So the Atlanta Games hadn’t even formally begun and the security plan was ditched.”

Don Mischer, who produced the Atlanta opening ceremonies as well as the opening and closing ceremonies at Salt Lake, says Games openings have always faced problems getting people seated on time.

“Rather than the level on the mags, what we have found is that the number of mags have not been sufficient enough to get the people into position,” he says from Los Angeles.

“What will happen in those instances is somebody will suddenly realize that we’re in trouble and then they need to expedite the security process and do it as safely as they can.”

Security sometimes trumps showbiz.

Mischer says the ceremonies included a finale with a specially-written song backed by a pyrotechnic display.

But as the show was being broadcast to the world, Atlanta police abruptly vetoed the fireworks.

“Apparently something went wrong and some people drifted into the fallout area,” says Mischer.

“All of a sudden when we started yelling for pyro, nothing happened. Those are the kind of things that happen.”

Time and again, past Olympics have provided examples of how things can go sideways.

At Salt Lake City, the U.S. Secret Service brought in a radio-communications system that the Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office had already demonstrated would not work in the city’s mountainous terrain.

“The federal communication connection did not function well, not only in the mountain venues, it didn’t function in the downtown venues,” says Salt Lake Police Chief Chris Burbank, who commanded the sprawling downtown Olympic venue in 2002.

“My plan was the federal people were paired with local people who had radio access that worked, so we never put them out of communication.”

The problem underscores the need for fallback plans, says Burbank, who consulted on Vancouver’s early security planning.

“I don’t care what it is, especially when you talk technology, you have the chance that it could go down,” he says.

“If you don’t have a backup or an option … you are really impacted to the point it cripples or compromises your security.”

Decker was observing in Salt Lake’s Olympic security command centre when President George W. Bush arrived in town. The supervisor had a near meltdown when the presidential motorcade abruptly left its planned route.

“The Secret Service drove President Bush down the wrong street,” says Decker.

It’s not clear what prompted the shift.

“It was just a change of plans, which the Secret Service does,” says Burbank.

Whatever the reason, someone apparently forgot to tell the command centre boss.

Perhaps one of the strangest incidents at Salt Lake was the prospect that Utah residents – just five months after the 9-11 terror attacks – expected to be allowed to take their guns into some Olympic venues.

The state allows its citizens to carry concealed weapons with a permit and Utah’s legislators, backed by a vocal gun-rights lobby, refused to suspend those rights for Olympic events taking place on state property.

Decker contends it led to a showdown between the state and the International Olympic Committee, including an ultimatum three months before the Games that could have seen them cancelled.

Burbank says it never got that far but admits there was friction.

“What happened was at any of the venue sites we simply declared it a federal security area and you can’t carry firearms,” he says. “That superseded state law and that made it very easy on many of the venue sites.”

Police fenced in a nine-square-block area encompassing the main medal-awards venue and two official celebration locations and screened everyone coming in.

Perhaps the biggest security let-down at recent Games was the Centennial Olympic Park bomb blast in Atlanta that took two lives and injured dozens of others.

The bomb, placed by an anti-abortion militant, was hidden in a backpack left in the park used for concerts and other free events.

After the attack, Olympic security guards and U.S. Border Patrol agents began searching people coming into the venue, measures that have carried over into official festival sites at Vancouver.

Even at the main Atlanta venues, security was not air-tight.

The stadium used for the opening and closing ceremonies featured a secret underground tunnel from the grandstand that led to the centre of the field where performers could enter and exit during the show. It was apparently unguarded.

“I was walking in there one day with a group of my choreographers and I ran into a boy scout troop in uniform going through the tunnel,” Mischer remembers. “I don’t know how they found it.”

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