GAO: Nuclear material could be smuggled undetected into U.S.

Officials from the Government Accountability Office (GAO) testified before Congress on three separate occasions describing security vulnerabilities that terrorists could exploit to enter the United States.

Washington Examiner’s Jim Kouri writes that according to a report obtained by the Terrorism Committee of the National Association of Chiefs of Police, the GAO’s first two testimonies focused on covert testing at ports of entry — the air, sea, and land locations where international travelers can legally enter the United States. In its third testimony, the GAO focused on limited security assessments of unmanned and unmonitored border areas between land ports of entry.

GAO investigators identified numerous border security vulnerabilities, both at ports of entry and at unmanned and unmonitored land border locations between the ports of entry. Kouri writes that in testing ports of entry, undercover investigators carried counterfeit drivers’ licenses, birth certificates, employee identification cards, and other documents, presented themselves at ports of entry and sought admittance to the United States dozens of times.

They arrived in rental cars, on foot, by boat, and by airplane. They attempted to enter in four states on the northern border (Washington, New York, Michigan, and Idaho), three states on the southern border (California, Arizona, and Texas), and two other states requiring international air travel (Florida and Virginia)

In nearly every case,” Kouri writes, “government inspectors accepted oral assertions and counterfeit identification provided by GAO undercover investigators as proof of U.S. citizenship and allowed them to enter the country. In total, undercover investigators made 42 crossings with a 93 percent success rate. On several occasions, while entering by foot from Mexico and by boat from Canada, covert investigators were not even asked to show identification.

As a result of these tests, GAO concluded that terrorists could use counterfeit identification to pass through most of the tested ports of entry with little chance of being detected.

The trouble with unmonitored areas of the border were different, but equally serious (the names of the states GAO visited for this limited security assessment have been withheld at the request of Customs and Border Protection officials). Kouri writes that

In four states along the U.S.-Canada border, GAO covert investigators found state roads that were very close to the border that CBP did not appear to monitor. In three states, the proximity of the road to the border allowed investigators to cross undetected, successfully simulating the cross-border movement of radioactive materials or other contraband into the United States from Canada.

Kouri writes that GAO concluded that CBP faces significant challenges on the northern border, and that a determined cross-border violator would likely be able to bring radioactive materials or other contraband undetected into the United States by crossing the U.S.-Canada border at any of the assessed locations.