Enemies at the gate

By Richard Greenberg, Adam Ciralsky, Stone Phillips

At the Santo Domingo airport in the Dominican Republic, a foreign visitor makes his way through the Immigration line. An agent swipes his passport through the computer.  Everything checks out. The official stamps the passport.  Another tourist has entered the country.   In this case, though, the traveler is not who he appears to be.  He is an undercover investigator.  His passport is real, but it has been issued under a false identity.  He has just demonstrated how easy it is to obtain and use fraudulent travel documents. 

Six years after 9/11, an NBC News undercover investigation has found that the black market in fraudulent passports is thriving.  On the streets of South America, NBC documented the sale of stolen and doctored passports, and travel papers prized by terrorists: genuine passports issued under false names.  For a few thousand dollars, an undercover investigator was able to purchase several entirely new identities from organized criminal networks with access to corrupt government employees.  The investigator obtained passports from Spain, Peru, and Venezuela and used the Peruvian and Venezuelan passports to travel widely in the Western Hemisphere, with practically no scrutiny.

Ronald K. Noble, Secretary General of the international police agency, Interpol, considers access to fraudulent passports "the Number One" global security problem with regard to terrorism.  "In every major terrorist attack that's occurred recently," Noble said, "you can find fraudulent travel documents tied or linked in some way."

Ramzi Yousef, the ringleader of the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, entered the United States on a stolen Iraqi passport.  Some of the al-Qaida terrorists behind the 1998 U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa relied on false papers, according to federal agents who worked on the case.  The same for the bombers in Madrid in March 2003 and London in July 2005, said Noble.

The 9/11 Commission reported that U.S. authorities recovered passports belonging to four of the 19 hijackers.  All of the recovered passports had "suspicious indicators" they had been fraudulently manipulated; two, the Commission concluded, were "clearly doctored." 

No one can say for sure how many people enter the United States every year with fraudulent papers.  But, according to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of such documents intercepted is on the rise, from 23,677 in fiscal year 2005 to 30,799 in fiscal year 2007.

Different methods
Fraudulent passports vary widely, from complete forgeries to authentic documents with false information on them.  Michael Everitt, who runs the forensic document lab for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said one of the most common techniques involves stolen passports used by people who look like the original passport holder.  "We call them imposters." If the photo on the passport looks enough like the imposter carrying it, then Everitt said, it’s "pretty tough to tell."

NBC News Doctored passport from Trinidad

A more sophisticated method involves doctoring a stolen passport, inserting a new photo and replicating special security features.   But if the work is not meticulous, then inspectors are more likely to catch the forgery.  A forensic examiner at the ICE lab showed NBC News a passport from Trinidad that had a counterfeit security seal. A banner along the bottom of the photo was off-kilter and a slightly different size, and at least one of the words it contained was blurred.

Border inspectors have a much harder time detecting passports known as stolen blanks, according to Everitt, real documents taken from official stock before they have been filled out.  Illicit brokers buy them from corrupt officials or steal them, then customize them.  

Milorad Ulemek, who assassinated Serbian Prime Minister Zoran Djindjic in March 2003, used a stolen blank passport to create an alias, and then crossed borders 26 times with the document before the assassination, according to Interpol chief Noble.

Of all the types of fraudulent passports, what concerns authorities the most is a genuine passport issued by a government agency under a false identity.  The British government unwittingly issued two passports to al-Qaida operative Dhiren Barot under two different false names.  Barot recently was sentenced to life in prison for plotting attacks in the U.K. and the U.S.

Passports like those obtained by Barot are virtually undetectable, according to Henry Crumpton, a CIA veteran who retired earlier this year from the top counterterrorism post at the U.S. State Department.  Al-Qaida is "fairly sophisticated" at producing its own forgeries and "getting better," Crumpton said.  But terrorists are also turning to organized crime groups for help, added Crumpton, now a fellow at the East-West Institute, an international think tank.  "This is one of the worries and trends that we've seen for several years: the growing collusion between terrorist groups and criminal networks."

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