JFK TERROR PLOT: the airport; Book exposed flaws

A scene in James C. Kaplan's book, "The Airport," an inside look at Kennedy Airport, seems all too prophetic today.

In the book's latest edition, published 12 years ago, Kaplan writes of touring the airport's 4,900 acres with a Port Authority police captain who admits that the airport's extensive fuel farms often were successfully penetrated by undercover security officers.

So it came as no surprise to Kaplan and other aviation experts interviewed yesterday that terrorists could think of Kennedy's jet-fuel supply tanks and pipelines as a ripe target.

"The people I talked to at the time who were involved with airport security were very concerned about terrorism," Kaplan said yesterday. "They talked about protecting the fuel farms."

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon may have exposed passenger screening as the aviation industry's Achilles' heel, but the physical characteristics of airports themselves - and Kennedy in particular - make them vulnerable to terrorists.

"They all have security questions, but Kennedy - it's gigantic," Kaplan said, referring to the airport's size. "There are a lot of wetlands, marshlands. It's hard to police."

And just as the trade center was a cloud-scraping symbol of capitalism and commerce, so is Kennedy an icon among the country's busiest international airports, Kaplan noted.

"It's the main entry point into the U.S. for so many people," Kaplan said. "It's New York, which is always a highly symbolic target."

Echoes of another security problem - the screening of airport workers - that Kaplan said he found in researching his book also were present in the alleged plot that authorities said yesterday they had squashed. One of the men arrested was a former airport worker.

"There were a lot of guys there wearing ID patches that shouldn't have been," Kaplan said, but added that much at Kennedy could have changed since his book was published, especially with security enhancements after 9/11.

"They caught these guys," he said. "So clearly they're doing something right."

Billie H. Vincent, a former security chief for the Federal Aviation Administration, said the alleged plot reminded him of Israel's aerial assault on Lebanon last summer, when Israeli jets bombed the airport's fuel farms and airport runways.

The Israeli military said that taking out the airport denied Hezbollah a central hub for weapons and supplies.

Destroying Kennedy's jet-fueling system would be a body blow to the aviation industry, Vincent said, forcing international and cargo flights to shift to other airports.

In 2005, 40.8 million passengers came and went through Kennedy, as did 1.7 million tons of cargo and more than 83,200 tons of air mail, according to the Port Authority.

Elliott Sneiden, an airline consultant, said a successful attack would send Kennedy reeling - but only for the short term.

"I think that you have a short-term dislocation of an extreme nature, for like a week," Sneiden said. "And then immediately the industry starts adjusting. It's a very flexible industry."

Staff writer Sophia Chang contributed to this story.

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