FAMS

Working at thirty five thousand feet in the air, they were having some problems, medical problems, up and down three or four times a day, just like the flight of tennis and the pots, and it's not really healthy for you. This is nine eleven. Two decades later, I'm Steve Gregory in Los Angeles. The Federal Air Marshal Service or FAMS, got a big boost following nine eleven. There was funding available. There was a scramble to hire qualified agents and open

up field offices around the country. Frank John Sandy was brought on board right after nine eleven to run the field office in Los Angeles. He was the special Agent in charge. So where were you on nine eleven? So I was on the UH. I was assistant Special Agent charge on the former President for detail in Beaver Creek, Colorado, and uh, we're we always had a TV on for for intel and news in the command post, and it came on early in the morning, and that's that's when

we saw it. So we immediately it was pretty shocking for everybody. We watched it several times before we realized this was really happening and it was an attack as opposed to an accident, right, because initially that's what we thought it was. We I mean, you know, President Ford was in his eighties and his mid eighties by then, he was no longer really a threat to anybody. His what he knew and all. But they have Secret Service protection until the day they die, the President of first Lady.

And we thought, gee, this this will be a possibility maybe for some terrorists to kidnap former presidents. That was

on my mind. So of course we we swung an act and we put a we He lived in a cul de sact, so we blocked the cul de sac with vehicles, and he lived in a private community, so of course we notified the security of the community and the local security and Eagle Veil said, if he's anything suspicious, any individual suspicious, anybody looking for President Ford or any asking any questions like that, we need to know right away.

And of course we brought some long rifles out on post, so we kind of beefed up the weapons that we had. So what was the jump for you from doing the detail for President Ford to Air Marshal Well, I had my twenty years on and that's the minimum amount to retire, and I was thinking about retirement as a Secret Service, as a Secret Service agent, and uh, it just happened to be that Tom Quinn, who was who I knew from the Secret Service. He was fairly high up in

the organization. He was going to be the first director to Federal Air Marshal Service, and he had called some of us that he knew. Yeah, so he he said, look, we're gonna we're gonna open up offices all over the country. We're looking for people. Of course, it are well equipped to handle security. I mean that's what we've done security. We do criminal investigations too, but half of half our job is protection. So it made sense. So he took

he took a lot of the senior agents. I was one of them, and we were sent out to these different air marshall post. I took l A because it was the closest one to UH where Ford lived. He was in Colorado at the time, but his main home was in Palm Springs. So I said, just send me to the closest place. He said, well, it's actually not in l A. It's a It's at the Altra Marine Corps air station. And I had the thing for a second,

and I remember leaving there in nineteen seventy two. It was my last station after I come back from Vietnam. And I remember leaving there in UH September seventy two, and as I'm leaving the gate, leaving the Marine Corps after four years, remember turning around looking at gate and I said, I'll never see this again. Twenty five years later, here I am going back in the air as an

air marshal. I would have never guessed that. How quickly after nine eleven did this ramped up air marshall service happened? They were, They were ramped up in a couple of months. They had. They hired a Savene agency to hire air marshals. We had to through a lot of interviews to hire how many we needed to hire. It was thousands. The numbers confidential how many we hired, but you had to interview thousands and thousands of people. So this AGEC came

in and started doing those interviews. Meanwhile, headquarters are starting to ramp up, starting to come up with their divisions, and they were starting to plan what's going to happen when these air marshals are go through the academy. Was I think it might have been ten weeks or something like that, depends on your background. Somewhere longer, somewhere shorter. After while, everybody went through the full academy, but the beginning we wanted to get people in those seats. It

was paramounts. So actually before El Toro we were it wasn't me. I wasn't there yet. But those thirty three air Marshals two were sent to each field office to start things going. Initially during the only ones that had any experienced with with all that. So they were working out of hotel room to hotel rooms, and the air Marshans would come in, they pick up their schedule for two weeks, their flight schedule, and off they would go. When they were done to two weeks schedule, they would

come back pick up another schedule for two weeks. So when you went through the training, had you talked to anyone on how how different it was? I mean, what were the new things you had to look out for? Now you had thig tanks going all over the country and people sat down and they had a chance to see what happened, how was how was the nine eleven hijackings pulled off? And so what they did was they came up with all these ideas. Number one is you

want to prevent that from happening again. Of course, then you want to go beyond that. So the hardened cockpit door was one of them. Of course, it took months and months and maybe even years to get some of this stuff done for all the aircraft, especially the doors. Meanwhile, what the flight attendants were doing until they could get that completed, The flight attendants were moving their drink cards when the when the party had to come out to go to bathroom. On certain you know air flights, they

didn't have them a pick bathroom. They would come out with the flight attendants. If they didn't have some of those planes they had these metal screens that could come down. But the ones that didn't have that, they would push the cart in between the passengers and the cockpit and laboratory, so at least someone who have to jump over and a flight attendant would stand would stand there. And that's

that's what they had at the time. How many flights did you go on as an air marshal I started as the air I started the air marshal in charge. I took about twelve flights just to see what it

was like. I took out European trip, I took an Asian trip, and I took some domestic trips just to get a feel for his like to sit in that seat and and observe what they were supposed to observe and see the reaction of the the flight crew, the pilot because some of these, you know, you go to foreign countries, you're met by customs in these foreign countries or by other law enforcement. We're trying to smooth it

out the whole process. Meanwhile, we had foreign air marshals coming into our country and we would assist them in coming through our customs and things like that, hotel rooms and and things like. They're coming to a country in a city they've never been to before, so we would smooth and things out for them. And they assist us on the other end. So I guess I never really

thought about that our countries having their own air marshals. Yeah, of course, and we some countries couldn't afford it, and we told them that we would be their air marshals. That never came to fruition, but we've had. We had the Japanese, the Germans, the Canadians, the Mexicans, French, all the major countries that have airlines. Uh, they would come into our country, you know, on on their on their flagged airlines, and we only went on our flag airlines,

United American Delta, all of them. So that's kind of how we went. And we sat in discussions with them. Everybody has their own idea kind of weapons you're gonna use, whether you use weapons, you don't use weapons, with kind of tactics, where your CD is going to be. We sat with a lot of these other agencies, different countries, and we pulled our thoughts together and that's what we did.

It was truly global effort. Oh yeah, absolutely, And and even I even worked at the airport for a while, and we also went out to other airports, not the air marshals, but the fsd S and t s A went out to other airports that didn't have the the wherewithal the United States has, and we help with their security at the airport because if they're going to be the one screening our passengers were coming into New York and all, we want to make sure they're doing it properly.

December twenty nine, two thousand three, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge talks about the first time the newly created Color Threat System changed colors and how the air marshals would help. Just over a week ago, the United States government raised the national threat level from an elevated to a high risk of terrorist attack and as we know, we're commonly

known referred to us from code yellow to code orange. First, let me say that Homeland Security officials at all levels of government, federal, state, and local, continue to work around the clock to protect our country. We know we know from experience that the increased security we implement when we raise the threat level, along with the increased vigilance that occurs, can help disrupt or deter terrorist attacks, and it continues

to be the case. I wish that all Americans could have the benefit of seeing firsthand what I have the opportunity to see, and that is the scope of the response undertaken by all segments of law enforcement, public safety, and government at all levels, as they have quickly and effectively ramped up comprehensive protective measures around the entire country. It is because of their good efforts that we are without doubt better prepared to deter or to respond to

a terrorist threat than ever before. Now, with all the recent talk okay about air travel, it is understandable that some still question the safety of flying. Let me reassure you that in the two and a half years since September eleven, our aviation system has risen to new heights of security and will continue to take additional steps to

increase protection. Today, I am announcing the Department of Homeland Security has issued aviation emergency amendments to further enhance security relating to both passenger and cargo aircraft flying too flying from and over the United States. Specifically, we have requested that international air carriers, where necessary, place trained armed government law enforcement officers on designated flights as an added protective measure.

These directives, of effective immediately are part of our ongoing effort to make air travel safe for Americans and visitors alike. All Americans should know now that we are at a Code orange state of alert. Additional meaningful security measures have been put in place all across the country. I've been talking with retired Federal Air Marshal Frank don Zanti, who was the Special Agent in charge for the Los Angeles

Field Office. Wasn't there an issue about the fact that you look like air marshals and that you look like cops or agents, and that you had to start really working on blending in more. That's true, and it was for a lot of reasons. One is, we hired people young, young people, mostly physically fit, so they kind of stood out as a typical businessman. We tried to we wore suits some flights, like you got flights from Washington, d C. To New York, or some flights from l A to

San Francisco. Businessmen would dress up in suits. Times they would take their tie off, but they'd have suit on. They fly up, go to a meeting, and fly back there in suits. So we tried to put air marshals in suits on those flights. We had flights in l A A lot. A lot of my flights went to Hawaii. We had ha wine shirts on. So we tried to blend in, but you had fairly young guys and girls physically fit looking around instead of reading books and on. We tell them, okay, you can read a book, but

don't get too involved in a book. You can read, you can watch a movie, don't get too involved in a movie. And because your job is to be circumspect and see what's going on, So what people would do is they would look at people that were that were looking at them. And so you know, we we learned over time how to blend in, and it took and it took a while. As the program itself has it stayed.

This robust isn't a federal air marshal program, but it's part of the t S A right, right, you know, we we left t s A for a while and went went to Customs. But because we wanted to be an air marshal being for tection all the time for twenty years, that's tough to do to be an airplane up and down. So we're trying to think of a way to get him involved in something else, like the Secret Service. We did fifty percent protection, fifty percent investigations.

So we thought if we if we got involving customs. They could do maybe six months or a year or two years of flying, then a couple of years doing investigations. Well, we never were quite accepted by customs. They didn't want people coming in for two years of leaving for two years, so it never quite panned out that way. So, you know, we did some other things. We got them involved in airport security. So we had liaison people, which I actually

did for ten years at Long Beach and john Wyn Airport. Uh. We're involved with the local police, state police, and airport police and we helped them do assessments, security assessments. When the air marshalls had come through, we would handle them and and issues like that v I p s would come through, would help them through security. So we did

a lot of a lot of things like that. The other thing we had people in all fifty Joint Terms and Tests Force by the FBI, so we had people embedded air marshals and that are doing FBI investigations that were related to airline safety and airport safety. So we had fifty people doing that and we also had a person in headquarters JTTF in Washington, d C. So we wrote it did through these positions and I would get him off off the airplanes. Of course, they could always

go to the academy teach the academy. There was administrative jobs and headquarters. We had administrative jobs at the l a X office, scheduling and things like that. We had our own training program so they could do that. So that went on. We did a sleep study because we found out that they were having some problems, medical problems, up and down three or four times a day, just like the flighted tendants and the polis, but their job

was a little different. Unlike flighted tendants, they had to sit down most of the time, more like a pilot and it's not really healthy for you. So and then they couldn't sleep. He had the six hours sometimes three hours change in time. So they did a six month sleep study and they came up with a way to do change scheduling a little bit and do something. So I mean it has changed. It's it's gotten a little better in that respect, but the training is just as robust.

If anything, it's it's probably better. We've we've learned things. They have a fairly long academy and we have we have good quarterly training that we still do every office has an airplane mock up where you could induce smoke into it. You can, you can rock and roll it, you can, you can get you have a p A system and we have airline seats in air and we run scenarios and they come in their quarterly and they run scenarios with with blank guns, and we run different

scenarios over and over and over again. So the program itself is still very much alive and well from the time you started to the time you retired. During your tenure there, how many risks were averted or how many attacks might have been averted, It's hard to say. I would say, just just by m your presence, you probably have heard a lot of attacks. You know, the rowers, they're always going to hit the weakest link, and aviation at the time was the weakest link, and no one,

no one had your as your nation. I think that could be done like that, so once you know, I mean everything that we've been doing, the air marshals and the doors you had mentioned, and of course the screening was a big part of it. All the screen that we're doing now at the airports. When the tear US knew that we're putting money and effort into that there they were kind of sidetracked into something else. I mean, we always thought it could happen again, but as the

years went by, they thought their softer targets. And so we had the shoe bomber, if you remember, we had the underwear bomber, and then we had um We had some bombs that were going to be placed in the in the luggage compartment. So as we harden everything up, they just found other places, other venues to go. And so as far as the air marsh is actually stopping something on board, it's it's almost nil. But it's like anything else in security, you never know what you stopped.

In the Secret Service, we never knew how many assassination attempts we stopped. We we know of like one maybe, and it was Hinckley. Hinckley when he was interviewed by the Secret Service after his shot Reagan, they said, you know, they talked him for quite a while and they said, did you was he the first president you were an assassinated?

Says no, I I tried to assassinate Jimmy Carter and he goes wine and he goes when and we went we reviewed film that the media took at the at the sites that he was outdoor sights, and there he was, he was about five rows back at a speech Jimmy Carter gave and he had that same far away look at his face, and he said, I never got close enough that I felt I could take a shot at the Jimmy Carter. And so you just don't know when you when you think about that, you really don't know

what you stopped. We just we found that out after he was successful the second time, but he he had tried. It wasn't that only that one time, but as other times he said he had tried, he just could never get close enough. What were some of the biggest challenges about making this in an effective program? First of all, the infrastructure. I told you we started out the hotel rooms.

Then we moved to El Toro and we moved into the tower at El Toro, the aircraft tower there, and there was some there was some rooms there, and there was no furniture there in any office equipment. We borrowed a lot of that from that was in storage because the El Toro was under that brack program based realignment program that was back then, so they had all this equipment there. So we needed all this equipment. We brought a lot of that in. There was a problem with

drinking water at El Toro. You couldn't drink the water. If you remember that we had super super funds back then. A lot of the military bases were drunk, were dumping toxic chemicals that leads through leached into the groundwater. So we had to bring in water, bottled water. We had to bring in porta potties. So it was it was all of that and then and then getting people out the right flights, determining what flight say should be on.

That was that part was done in headquarters, trying to look at the trying assess the and the intel we had and where this threat was. There's twenty five thousand flight legs a day in the United States, twenty five thousand we had to cover, so you could imagine you can't cover them all, so someone we had to decide which ones we were going to cover, and and scheduling was was a monstrosity trying to schedule that any people. Then you had flight delays for a mechanical flight delays,

weather flight delays. Yet fans that were sick, how do you how do you how do you operate all this as all these moving parts, and then the intel was was NonStop, especially the beginning. I was getting calls too and three o'clock in the morning about incidents that occurred overseas. They were just waking us up and get us the intel. And I remember one time I got some information on Remember when some molty pirates were out there taking over ships. They've made a movie about it. So I get a call.

It wasn't two o'clock in the morning, but I got it. I got a rather rather long email on Somali pirates hijacking ships. I said, well, what does that have to do with L A X Airport? And hey, go, this is our intel people. We were told to give you everything because remember connecting the dots, and they were afraid that they weren't going to tell something we needed to know. So okay, I guess there's there's a lead from from hijacking ships the hijacking air plane. So we got everything,

and it was just we were inundated with intelligence. In the beginning. It slowed down a little bit, I think because the intel slowed down, and you know, over the years, but it was incredible just dealing with the intelligence. Did you like the work. Oh, of course I did, because I you were busy that first year a year and a half. We're working twelve hour days. Like I said, we're getting phone calls, we're getting woken up. You really felt like you were doing something useful. And we always

saw another attack was imminent in the beginning. So yeah, I did enjoy it. I enjoyed The Air marshals were very dedicated. They they had signed up for this because they figured they were gonna they're gonna have to deal with somebody fifty thousand feet. So these are motivated people. And it was great working with motivated people because then when they went in it went into training, they were paid attention. They always did their best in training. It

was it was nice being around them. I heard that pilots can opt to carry a weapon. Yes, do you know about that? And I'm not sure exactly when that came into being, but that was that was one of the things that that Blue Panel came out with, is is the arm the potots? Because remember they broke down the door into the cockpit, So either some would happen to the Air marshals were they become neutralized, or most likely they would be the hijackers will be on a flight.

There were no air marshals, although I think the passengers would have intervened. But let's say all that went went to the side. If they broke down the door of the cockpit, they still had the the potots armed. So we trained then we gave him a couple of weeks training and uh, there was limitations on what they could do, what they should do, and all they had they had standard operating procedures. I'm not going to go into those,

but you know they were given ther s ops. They had training by us and then and then have recurrent training. And we thought that worked great because these were a lot of former military people. They're very adept at what they do. These are these are thinkers of course, and so you know, you give them should and they could handle the mission. So that with that worked out good for us. And we worked with them along the way and and I thought it a good program. Is still

going on? Was this voluntary? Were they totally voluntary? But they didn't they didn't get pay They actually went on their own time to our training. But the airlines they wanted them to do it, but they weren't willing to pay them. To do it, So we gave the weapons. There are weapons belong to the federal government. We game credentials. Are they peace officers? They kind of our peace officers in when they're in that cockpit, they have that status,

but not outside the cockpit, not outside that plane. Their authority leads when they leave that plane. So in theory, there's this federal police program that's in the sky, right, that's separate of the marshall program. So you probably have the largest civilian police department. It's very large, and I'm sure that's classified to it's it's large, larger than what do you think. And they had their credentials and all

because they carry that weapon. It is concealed and it's it's done the right way and it's there, and uh yeah, they don't have any authority off that plane like the federal air marks. Of course, they're federal officers to have authority all the time twenty four by seven. And they carrey. They can carry their weapons off duty. The potits can't. What is the threshold of intervening for for an air marshal.

Is it only when there's an imminent threat to the plane as in a hijack, or is it an unruly passenger. You know, we're trying not to get involved into small stuff if they and if it has to do with flight safety, if they're assaulting often you know, flight attendants and things like that. We're actually comes to the point because now I'll tell you a lot of times passengers are going to intervene before the air marshals do anything, because we're not gonna jump in any situation half cocked.

We're always going to look at things and see what's going on. We don't want to be roused into something, so we're not we're not jumping out of that seat doing anything in a hurry. We're looking around, We're communicating with each other. We may even communicate with the flight attendants and the and the and the captain and say, here's what's going on. What do you have. We want to know everything that's happening, not just one small incident.

So we'll hesitate to get involved in small stuff. But anything has to do with the air worthiness of that airplane, that's what we're going to get involved in it. But like I said, after some thoughtful thoughtfulness, before we get involved in anything like that, do you want to share any close calls whether it was you or someone on your team. We've we've always had an early pastor of things like that. But to be honest with you, we've had people We've had We did have an incident in

Miami was the Miami Office. It was fairly early on. There was a passenger traveling from South America to Miami. They they were gonna move on. I think they stayed on that flight and they were moving on to another another city stop, and apparently one of the passengers had a backpack on and he was mentally ill you might say he had mental condition, and he was off his meds, and he started pacing around the air raft. Uh, and he started to unraveled. The plane was still on the ground.

Pastor was still coming on board, embarking debarking, and he the air marshall saw this was going on. He stood up. They told him to sit down. He started walking around, like I said, and then finally he started walking. He started leaving the plane. If I if I remember, well, he had his backpack on the front and he kept going inside his backpack almost like it looked like he may have been a suicide bomber. And he was acting insane. You might want to say, just acting very unusual, and

he wouldn't obey any orders, so you are marshals. This I think went on for a couple of minutes. Finally said take your hands out of your backpack. Take your hands out of your backpack because there's an airplane. They're refueling that airplane. So you can imagine what that would

have been like if he had an explosive there. And he refused to do that, and he started walking back to the aircraft and the air marshals interposed himself between him and the aircraft and he said, you're not coming back on, and he started coming on and they shot him and they killed him. So that that was an incident. And of course he didn't have anything in a backpack. He was mentally ill and he's off his medication. The

air marshall looked cleared. It was a big investigation by I think it was Dade County, Macho, Dade County, uh, and they were cleared, but he just wouldn't he wouldn't stop, and he was he was getting ready to get back on that airplane and they just couldn't do it. Unfortunate incident. So that was the biggest incident we had coming off of your tenure as a Secret Service agent and then your ten year as a federal air marshal at least as a sack. Are we safer today than we were

twenty years ago in the air? I could. I could speak to that sure. And a lot of the stuff we covered already with T s A. I mean, we have a whole organization, that's what they're dedicated to air safety, but not only air safety. It gets to the the airports themselves, the screening, all the assessments that are done at the airports. We worked together very closely over here.

I worked together with the Orange County shrif's department, had a great relationship with them and Long Beach Police Department at Long Beach now l a X It's LAWA is the main law enforcement agency there and we have a great relationship with them, and of course with the FBI and the A t F comes through there quite a bit, and Customs we have relationships with them. So we build relationships over the year. We're in the j T t F. Like I told you is we get all the intel

that they get. We're pulling together. So yeah, we have the air marshal program. We have all the other programs up and running. We have the connectivity, the Intel and all the upgrade they did to the aircraft themselves. Yeah, we're safer. Can I predict what's gonna happen now? I can't predict. I can just say we're doing a better job and we're safer than when were then. Absolutely. What about is a country? Well, I'll go back and this this isn't new with with some of these um bad

actors in our own country, U s. Citizens. This goes way back. I mean, it goes back to the Vietnam War and all that. If you want to do you remember all those groups that were back then. That has slowed down for a little bit. But then even in the nineties, you know, Timothy McVeigh and you had the different religious groups, we call them quasi religious groups. You had all kinds of issues like that. So we always we always looked at the internal threat. It was long

before things started unraveling. Now, these people have always been around, you know, a different locations. So we always thought that was because they're Americans, they have jobs, they know our culture, they're they're here and I think that's starting to come back again, you know. They so they say we decimated al Qaeda to some extent in some of these groups, all these different factions, the Red Brigade and all that.

It was an international operation. When all that that started to wane and then some of these local groups now were starting to come back again. And so to me, that's a little frightening. I know, the FBI is concerned about it, and it's there's a lot of talk about it that that kind of bothers me. Homegrown terrorists that we've been looking at that though, you know for quite

some time. Like I said, it goes way back, but it's been stepped up quite a bit, even even the I remember when I was in Vail, Colorado with President Ford, they had a group that it didn't want development of natural lands, so they burned down a ski resort outside of Ail, Colorado and things like that. So yeah, they anarchisted and all that. So it's always been there. I remember when nine eleven happened, everybody said, uh, we we never anticipated anything like that. Well it's not quite true

because in nineteen seventy four Robert Preston wasn't it. He's an army Uh he went to helicopter pot at school seventy four, and in February seventy four, he didn't make the program, so he didn't get his wings. They made him a U A helicopter technician. So he decided he's going to steal a helicopter. He's still a helicopter. He flew it around. They couldn't catch him. They were flying out the helicopters to catch him, and he won to show him how how good he could fly to helicopter,

and he flew around for quite a while. They couldn't They couldn't make him ground the helicopter. So he decided to ground to the south grounds of the White House, and as he was doing that, the Secret Service shot him and the arrested him after he landed his plane on the south ground. So we always we always knew there was an aviation s fret to the White House. And then in UH ninety four, and this is really strange.

Nine eleven nine September eleven nine four, Frank Quarter, who was mentally ill, flewis Sesna one fifty into the White House. He the only reason he didn't hit the White House is because he hit a big oak tree that had been there for a hundred years. He hit an oak tree, and the plane crashed and blew up and it was killed. I think he was twenty or thirty feet from the White House. He was mentally ill, so going back to them.

And then in ninety four when I was in a Secret Service, I was in a meeting with a lot of the higher ups in the Secret Service, and it came to Lady again. We worried about airplanes crashing into the White House, and so we we had a representative from a a local contractor come in defense contractor, and he talked about what kind of weapons we could put at the White House, any aircraft weapons, this kind of thing.

And we had a big key to discussion over that, putting in any aircraft weapon, that kind of those kind of weapons you know at the White House and Washington d C. With with the flight line only a couple of miles away, with the airplanes coming and going out of Washington d C Airport Reagan National and you know, those those rockets go several miles. So we had I'm not going to tell you what happened at the end of that now, I'm not gonna tell you what I'd

up doing at the time. And I and I and I and I'll be honest with you, I don't know what they did now. That was, that was thirty years ago. Coming up in episode six, the government failed to protect the American people. The United States government was simply not active enough in combating the terrorist threat before nine eleven.

The Final Analysis nine eleven, two decades Later, is produced by Steve Gregory and Jacob Gonzalez and is a production of the CAFI News department for I Heartmedia Los Angeles and the iHeart Podcast network. The views expressed are strictly those of the guests and not necessarily the hosts or employees of iHeartMedia.