HOW SAFE IS SAFE?

By Richard Lacayo

MARVETTE CRITNEY WAS A little uneasy when she went to work Thursday at a federal office building in Washington. Still dwelling on the images from Oklahoma City, the 26-year-old management analyst for the Internal Revenue Service had decided not to put her four-month-old son in the new irs day-care center. Even for herself, working in a federal office building suddenly seemed like a risky proposition. But as the morning went on, she managed to put those thoughts out of her mind. Then the alarm went off.

In her windowless basement office, she heard the abrupt clanging of the building's fire alarm and a message on the public-address system to evacuate. This was not a drill. "People were running everywhere," says Critney. "I wondered if this was connected to the Oklahoma bombing. All I could think of was my two sons. What would they do without their mother?" After she and her co-workers rushed out of the building, they learned that the emergency was not a fire but a bomb threat. That was when it occurred to Critney that she might not be any safer outside the office than she had been in it. "Every car parked in front of the building--I wondered if there might be a bomb in it," she said.

In the aftermath of Oklahoma City, many Americans found it hard to avoid looking at their surroundings in an unsettling new light, in which any abandoned package might be a grenade, any car a bomb. The possibility of domestic terrorism, first raised by the World Trade Center bombing and then dismissed as a big-city phenomenon, may finally be driven home. For some time to come Americans will be struggling with questions that were supposed to draw no closer than Jerusalem or Belfast or, at worst, Manhattan. Just how much can they do to make life safer from terrorist attacks? And to accomplish that, how much should they be willing to give up in convenience, money and the freedoms they take for granted?

The most immediate change in procedures took place at federal buildings. In Denver, uniformed guards were posted at day-care centers, and downtown parking meters around the U.S. courts complex were cloaked with red covers, banning curbside parking. In Nevada, Forest Service officers went on alert, patrolling in pairs out of concern about attacks by radical anti-environmentalists. In Washington, where the Library of Congress removed the Gutenberg Bible from its glass case and locked it in a basement vault, police distributed flyers to federal office workers that suggested questions they might ask callers who phone in bomb threats. In Newark, New Jersey, police blocked off the streets around government buildings.

Though only a few cities, including New York and Los Angeles, have joint task forces that combine federal and city law-enforcement agents to head off terrorist attacks, local police in several other cities were meeting last week with federal investigators. The goal: combing their own intelligence files and strengthening their contacts with street informants who can give them early leads on potential trouble.

The first calls were also being heard to give more power to police to investigate suspected terrorists before they can act. After paying a visit on Saturday to Oklahoma City and gravely surveying the wreckage, House Speaker Newt Gingrich said the FBI should get expanded power to infiltrate paramilitary groups, and Congress should make it easier to bring charges against people who have knowledge of terrorist plots, even if they are not directly involved. "What a free society has to do," he said, "is draw a very sharp distinction between free speech and criminal activity."

The Clinton Administration has already been stepping up preparedness for potential terrorism. After the World Trade Center bombing, the White House became deeply concerned that the next attack might involve chemical weapons or even a nuclear device that escapes from the fractured Soviet arsenal into terrorist hands. Next month the Administration plans a huge, secret exercise to test how well the U.S. can detect and intercept a nuclear device that terrorists might try to slip into the country, intelligence sources say.

But for the majority of Americans the most visible counterterrorist activities will be improvements in ground-level security. The World Trade Center, where the 1993 bombing killed six people and injured 1,000, provides a glimpse of what security measures the future may bring for other facilities. Except for the rooftop observation platforms and the restaurant just below, the towers are no longer open to the public. More than 350 private-security officers now patrol the main concourse and other areas and admit only employees who hold photo identification cards or have been issued special passes. Dozens of new security cameras peer down. Parking in the underground garage where the bomb detonated is now restricted to law-enforcement officials and those tenants with monthly permits. To block speeding vehicles, 6,000-lb. concrete planters now border the plaza like pillboxes on Omaha Beach.

Making buildings safer, however, is expensive. In the two years since the World Trade Center bombing, the cost of security there has more than tripled, to about $25 million annually. That doesn't include the $60 million cost of new security systems that will begin to come online in 1997. Given their concerns about common street crime, however, Americans probably wouldn't tolerate the diversion of any sizable portion of police budgets to antiterrorist pursuits. "The demand is for 911 service, for more radio cars," says Denver police chief David Michaud.

Even if they are willing to make the sacrifice in dollars, whether Americans will give up long accustomed personal liberties is another question. At the World Trade Center, routine inspection of employees' bags and briefcases has been rejected as too intrusive. "There are certain personal civil liberties that people should be able to enjoy," says Charles Maikish, who oversees the Center for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. "It's a commercial complex, not a military installation." Memories are still fresh of the FBI's unbridled COINTELPRO operations in the 1960s and '70s, which targeted antiwar groups. "If we panic, we shall wind up demonizing ethnic groups and letting our law-enforcement agencies become as self-serving and corrupt as was J. Edgar Hoover's,'' says the philosopher Richard Rorty. "Britain has been coping with terrorist bombs for a generation without much retrenchment of civil liberties. If they can do it, we can too.''

Indeed, since the Irish Republican Army began its bombing campaigns in the early 1970s, London has struggled to deal with terrorism. Downing Street, where the Prime Minister's residence is located, is now closed off by iron gates and car barriers. In the Underground system and many other public places, litter baskets-an easy place to plant bombs-have been removed. In July 1993, after the ira exploded two bombs in London's financial center, the 1-sq.-mi. district called the City, officials threw a "ring of steel" around the area. Smaller streets have been closed off at one end, channeling traffic down just seven main arteries where police conduct random checkpoints and high-resolution cameras record license plates and drivers. Private businesses have also been encouraged to install cameras that sweep the streets, until nearly every square inch of the neighborhood is now surveyed. "We may not be able to stop all terrorist activities," says Michael Cassidy, a top planning official for the City, "but terrorists know they will be caught if they attempt anything."

Britain's antiterrorism fight also required changes in the nation's law as embodied in the 1974 Prevention of Terrorism Act. It gave police wider search powers than their counterparts enjoy in the U.S. It also permits them to detain suspects for seven days without charge, which would probably violate the habeus corpus provisions of American law.

Yet despite such precautions, London is still vulnerable. In July a well-dressed woman succeeded in parking an Audi near the Israeli embassy, just down the street from Kensington Palace. Though she was questioned by a security guard, he accepted her claim that she was visiting a friend in the neighborhood. She hurried away, and soon after, the car exploded.

In fact, government agents in the U.S. and abroad score many blows against terrorism that for security reasons are never made public. On Friday, President Clinton proudly recalled that "there was one recent incident with which I was intimately familiar, which involved a quick and secret deployment of a major U.S. effort." Not all such mobilizations, however, produce dramatic results. While some assumed Clinton was referring to a rumored attempt by the Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo to release poison gas at Disneyland in California, Justice Department officials later denied there had been such a plot. In fact, sources told Time, the President was talking about a tip from the Japanese government in March that prompted officials to plan a raid against an office of the cult in Manhattan. An Air Force C-141 took off from Andrews Air Force Base loaded with agents, lawyers and chemical-weapons specialists. But then the operation hit a legal snag. A federal judge refused to issue a search warrant for the raid, so it was called off. A Time reporter who visited the office soon after the proposed raid found only an elderly woman named Subha, who explained, "We are just Buddhists."

--Reported by Shahnaaz Davidson and Douglas Waller/ Washington, Sharon E. Epperson and Andrea Sachs/New York, and Barry Hillenbrand/London