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world class security and world class customer service. This is nine eleven, two decades later. I'm Steve Gregory in Los Angeles. Congress gave officials with the newly created agency one year to achieve its security objectives. On November two thousand two, the t s A reached a major milestone. Here's the press conference at Reagan Washington National Airport with Transportation secret

Erry Normanetta and Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge. Now Rich was just an advisor to the President at the time because the Department of Homeland Security didn't yet exist. Well, good morning, everyone, Thank you for joining us this morning. Nearly one hundred years after the miracle of flight began. We are here today to celebrate another historic milestone in aviation.

Tomorrow tomorrow, every one of our nation's four hundred and twenty nine commercial airports will be staffed and secured by professional screeners. More than forty four thousand dedicated men and women have been hired, trained, and deployed to screen passengers and ensure the safety of our skies. Each has received more than one hundred hours of classroom and on the

job training for this important responsibility. The bottom line, the Department of Transportation, under the extraordinary dnership of their Secretary Normanetta, Deputy Secretary Michael Jackson, and Admiral Looy, will successfully meet the one year deadline said by President Bush when he signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act on November two

thousand one. Within ten days of the passage of that legislation, I can recall Secretary Monetta coming to the White House for the Oval Office with a blueprint for building this unprecedented new agency. The Transportation Security Administration began in January with a mission statement and about a dozen employees, and

look where we are today. Now shortly, I'll have the privilege of introducing Secretary Manetta, and he can chronicle what I consider to be one of the most extraordinary organizational achievements they've seen in this town in a long, long time. And again to the Secretary and do Michael Jackson into the Admiral in all of the hard working men and women at the Department of Transportation and t s A, we say congratulations on a job, very, very well done.

I might add that Norm's team not only beat the deadline, they beat expectations. I remember watching the television and the talking heads, listening to the talking heads and reading all the journalists and all the opinion leaders who said there's no way, as the secretary, you can possibly meet this deadline. No way. But we are here today to prove that they were wrong. However, we might us temper our pride and this achievement, knowing terrorism is a permanent threat and

our airports on enduring vulnerability. We have seen the lenks. Terrorists will go to penetrate airport security. They are just as determined to destroy innocent lives as we are determined to protect them. And make no mistake, we must be ever vigilant because they will try again. That is why we must now take the next historic step in securing

our homeland. I'm going to take this opportunity to encourage the Senate of the United States today and tomorrow to complete their work on the new Department of Homeland Security. We will enable us to unify our homeland security responsibilities under one department with one primary mission, the protection of American citizens and their way of life. Having one department will make it easier for us to build partnerships with state and local god from it with the private sector,

including the aviation industry. This is absolutely critical if we are to find solutions to our most pressing security challenges. We all understand that airlines are critical, vital arteries of our global economy. The right brothers would be astonished to learn that eight million flights, near least six million passengers and twelve billion dollars in freight go through US airports annually, and I'm confident that this new agency will continue to look for ways to improve service as it seeks to

improve security. In time. I suspect we will employ twenty one century technology biometrics, smart cards, and other forms of positive identification, as well as even more sophisticated explosive detection systems. And of course, we rely on the training in the efforts, the instincts, and the experience of the forty four thousand men and women who work at T s A to make sure that on a day to day basis, we use good old fashioned common sense at every gate, at

every airport around this country. Admiral Roy likes to talk about some of the rules that add to passengers stress levels without reducing the risk, and I suspect in time you'll eliminate or modify all of those as well. In this new era, we must all think a new We must keep in mind passengers daily routines as we provide them with this new measure of protection. I'm confident we can do this. In fact, early results suggest that up to of passengers are being screened in ten minutes or less,

and that's great news for the traveling public. So today is a milestone, but it is not an ending. New and important deadlines boom ahead. Meeting those deadlines will not guarantee that we are one secure from terrorism, but based on the progress to date, we can look forward to a far, far safer future. Mr Secretary, you have built a terrific model here. I remember that first meeting in the Oval Office. I remember the Mission Statement, a very

complex piece of legislation. A lot of people inside and outside government. I just really didn't think you'd be able to build this structure, train forty thousand folks and get them all deployed within the year time frame because of your leadership, surrounded yourself with some great people who have identified earlier, and you've got the commitment from those four thousand men and women who volunteered to help you secure

the airlines and our skies. You did it. So just on a personal note, I think it's important to recognize what an extraordinary job Secretary Normanetta has done. He was passionate about meeting the deadlines, getting these individuals trained on time, deployed on time, made a commitment to the President that he could get it done. He could meet those deadlines. So we celebrate the success of this organization and extraordinary accomplishment a great public service. Is my great pleasure to

introduce to you our Secretary of Transportation, Normanetta. Norman Tom, thank you, thank you very very much for that very kind introduction. Governor Ridge. Last fall, President Bush turned to an extraordinary leader to head up the Office of Homeland Security, Governor Tom Ridge. As many of you know, I've known Tom since two when we served in the House of Representatives, and we did a lot of things together, and so

I know of his capabilities. And Tom has done an outstanding job since his start just over a year ago, and there will be much more that he will accomplish in the days and the years ahead. Tom, I am grateful for your friendship and your counsel and advice, and the strong support that you have given to our important

security mission at the Department of Transportation. One year ago, President Bush stood in this room and signed the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, and with the stroke of that pen, the Transportation Security Administration, otherwise known as t s A was created m And at the time of the signing, America was still suffering from a widespread fear of flying.

A half mile from here, burnt walls at the Pentagon were a visible reminder of nine eleven, and at airports throughout the country, long lines of nervous Americans watched as screeners, ill prepared and ill equipped for the new wartime reality, struggled to check passengers. National Guard troops patrolled our airports, and the press and the public wondered if adequate security could ever be restored. President Bush sent legislation to Congress

proposing the creation of the Transportation Security Administration. Congress soon passed t s A legislation, and the President's signature set in motion the largest peacetime mobilization in our nation's history. Nico Melendez was hired by the t s A and January of two thousand two, just forty five days after the t s A was created, he was the agency's

first public affairs spokesperson. On the morning of nine eleven, I was working for a small consulting firm in Arlington, Virginia, and my main client was the director of Surface Warfare Pentagon.

I had a nine thirty meetings scheduled with my client in the Pentagon, but because all of us in the office we're watching the events in New York City on TV, we got delayed, so ultimately the meeting was obviously canceled, but we were all heading over to the Pentagon for a meeting that day, and the people that we were supposed to meet with actually are the ones that started jumping out of window. Was in catching people trying to

evacuate the Pentagon. So it was very near and dear to me and my family because fifteen minutes later I could have probably been in that building. How did you get attached to the t s A. Well, shortly after nine eleven, I was approached by a colleague of mine who worked at the Department of Transportation, and the t s A had been created on November two thousand and one, a short two months after the events of nine eleven, and this colleague of mine asked me if i'd be

interested in the job at Department of Transportation. So I submitted my my resume and my application and I got I got a job offer working in the Office of the Secretary. So I started on January three of two two and a couple of weeks later, I was asked to be the first public affairs representative for this new agency t s A, which frankly, at that time I had never really heard about, I didn't know much about, and it was only about forty five days old when

I started working for them. So what was your understanding this agency would do and what its function was? After learning about the agency working at the Department, they were going to be the new federal mechanism for security, providing security at our nation's airports, to screen passengers and cargo, and provide for the secure movement of both of those things. Did you know out of the shoot, kind of the scope and the responsibility this agency was going to take on.

I don't. I don't really think that anybody knew the scope and the responsibility of this agency was going to take on. You know, twenty years later, I looked back and think, how did we how did we even do that? You know, when we started the agency, I remember it was it was a laugh to us that nobody really had any sense of how many airports there were in this country. Nobody had a sense of how many screeners there were in this country because it was a completely

different structure back then than it is today. So the scope of the of the mission, while it continued to change almost on a daily basis, the guidelines that we were given by Congress or something that I don't think anybody anticipated, not even Congress themselves. What was security like for air travel twenty one years ago as opposed to what it is today? Yeah, you know, I remember going through airports and it's it's almost funny when you think

about it now. I remember going through an airport checkpoint and you walk up to the magnetometer or the metal detector, and I take my keys out of my pocket, throw them up in the air and catch them on the other side, and you just stroll through. But it was that quick, It was that insincere. But when we were created in two thousand one, while the FA had oversight responsibility for security in our nation's airports, there was no guide book, There was no instruction manual on how security

was supposed to be performed. The airlines were responsible for paying for these security firms, and as is most cases in business, you always go for the lowest bidder. So at an airport that has five or six terminals, you could have five or six different security companies providing security at each terminal, and the turnover rate of those screeners, in some cases we found to be as high as a hundred and fifty. People would leave the job as quickly as they got there. So the training was lacking,

the concentration was lacking, and the predictability was lacking. So when we got in, nobody knew. There was nowhere that we could find any documentation of how many screeners there were in our nation's airports because it was so many different companies, there were so many different airports, so many different airlines paying all these people we kind of had to start from scratch and determine what's a good number of screeners. Do you think the general public is good

at this now? Do you think we have it finally or do you think there's still a lot that the public needs to know. Well, you know, in the early days of t s a are, our goal was to be unpredictable. We didn't want the bad guys to be able to gain the system, so we kept it unpredictable from one airport to another. But now it's very predictable, so we've kind of fallen into what was there before.

While the training is consistent from airport to airport, screener to screener, the entire screening mechanism is rather predictable, So we've kind of fallen back into where we were, but with people who have made this a career rather than the the attrition rates that we used to experience. So the agencies created you're kind of figuring things out. There's a big learning curve. It sounds like now you're trying

to hit your stride a bit. What were some of those growing pains and big challenges overall for you as not only spokesperson that is an employee of this new agency. I think that the biggest growing pain, that the biggest challenge that we had was the expeditious nature in which we had to carry out this mission. And what I mean by that is on September tenth, two thousand one, for instance, less than five percent of all check bags

were screened for explosives. Well, Congress created this law, the Aviation and Transportation Security Act, that required all bags to be screened for explosives by December thirty one, two thousand two. So they gave this brand new agency about fourteen months to identify the types of technology, purchase the technology, get industry to produce the technology, and build the machines, deployed them,

and find places to put them. Well, some of these machines required a lot more energy than was available to us through electric outlets at the security checkpoints. So in some cases we had to restructure the entire electrical mechanism that that provides power to these machines, and we had

to do it in fourteen months. And that was curculian effort because at the time, there were only a couple of companies that made the technology that we needed to put into the airport, and a lot of people today will remember back twenty years ago, when you walked into an airport lobby, we had the big, huge baggage screening machines sitting in the lobby that therefore displaced passengers out into the street. So it was a real it was a real trying time because airport managers were not happy

that we had these big machines and the terminals. Passengers weren't happy, and Congress wasn't happy because we weren't doing it fast enough. But we had to figure out a way to do it, and at the same time, we were trying to hire fifty thousand people to go in airports frankly all over the world because the reach of t s A goes from the Northern Marianas Islands all the way down to Port Puerto Rico. So it was it was a huge effort, and the biggest problem was

the time that we had to do it. There's been a lot of criticism against this agency. You know, a lot of people have said that maybe they feel safer, maybe they don't, and they've equated t s A employees to you know, just going through the motions. How have you, as a spokesperson be able to defend your agency and sort of counter that sort of negative stigma. I think I always had to put the agency with the backdrop of the mantra never forget. It seems that as the

American public, we have a very short attention span. Is as we all say, we'll never forget, We'll never forget. But when I worked for T. S A. It was very clear to me that a lot of the traveling public very quickly forgot. You know, they were calling for a better airport security on but a year later, those same passengers were upset with the lines they had to stand in, with the invasive screening protocols, with the different

machines that we had in the airport. So the challenge was informing people, reminding them, and keeping them aware of the fact that the reason we're there was to prevent another nine eleven. And I think that was the biggest hurdle that we had, is is keeping the attention of the American public on what we were doing and why we were doing it. What do you think we're lessons

learned or something. If you could go back and you wish the agency would do it differently, I think that if we if we could have worked with Congress um a little better in that first year to maybe extend some of the timelines or change some of the requirements that they put in the law. If we hyped hire fifty people in a twelve month period and have them trained and ready to go, mistakes are going to be made,

you know. I remember very early in two thousand, two thousand three, we had to have fire like four screeners at one airport because the baggage or the background checks came back and we found something in their background. So we took a black eye because we hired these people, but we had to hire them fast. So the goal was to get them on the line and then finish the matriculation process, and then once a matriculation process completed, then we would clean our clean our roles. But that

was a that was a black id our agency. We hired a lot of people that had something in their background. We didn't want them, the federal government didn't want them, passengers didn't want them. But we needed people to fill these spots, and we just hired people quickly, and we spent a lot of money. We spent a lot of money on technology, We spent a lot of money on restructuring, airports. We spent a lot of money getting people to where they needed to go because it was an unpresented time.

Had we had more time, could it have been done more efficiently and more effectively, Probably, But we had a fourteen month deadline to meet and we were being beat up from the very beginning that we weren't doing it fast enough. His air travel safer today than it was years ago. I think security is more effective. I think that we have people in place that know what they're

doing and know what they're looking for. And I think that from the time that I was there, we knew that the bad guys were probing our system, trying to figure out a way to get in. We know they're out there. We know that in caves in Afghanistan or caves in Pakistan they have found information about the airline industry and about T s A operations and what we're doing. So I think that the having this organization in place, it's good for the traveling public, is good for our government,

is good for commerce. But we always we're always going to need to fine tune it to make sure that they stay on the cutting edge and make sure they keep their eyes on the ball. Finally, is our country safer today than it was twenty one years ago? I

think ebbs and flows, I really do. I think that going back to the mantra of never forget, we have a short attention span, and with the border issues that we have and not knowing who's coming through the border, with people being disingenuous about their desire for their constitutional rights.

In one perspective, you have passengers saying why don't you be more like Israel where they don't have a constitution and they can screen all of their passengers the way they want to to us, where we implement body scanners and they say it's violation of their constitution, but then they want us to profile. It's just disingenuous to say what you want and then be opposed to the things that we put in place because we're trying to make

the system more effective. So I think as a country we are, we are more secure, but it adds and flows, you know, from month to month, day to day. We just need to do a better job of remembering why we're doing what we're doing. Coming up in episode four, there was an extreme focus on are we going to

be hit again? Will there be another nine eleven Securing the Homeland nine eleven, two decades Later, is produced by Steve Gregory and Jacob Gonzalez, and is a production of the KFI News department for I heart Media Los Angeles and the I heart Podcast Network. The views expressed are strictly those of the guests and not necessarily the hosts or employees of I heart Media.