Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON – The breakup of an alleged terrorist bomb plot in Canada late last week has raised new fears that the next terrorist attack could come from the north.

The 4,000-mile border between the United States and Canada is twice as long as the one with Mexico, but it’s guarded by fewer than 1,000 Border Patrol agents – one-tenth of the force in the Southwest. Vast stretches of unpatrolled terrain offer potential terrorists an easily accessible gateway into the United States.

“Do the math,” said T.J. Bonner, a San Diego agent who serves as the president of the National Border Patrol Council, a 10,500-member union that represents nonsupervisory Border Patrol agents. “We’re very vulnerable out there.”

While boosting border enforcement and national security have emerged as central elements of the immigration legislation that’s moving through Congress, attention has centered on the porous Southwest border, where more than 1 million illegal immigrants are arrested annually.

But some lawmakers are calling for a harder look at the northern border after Friday’s arrests of 12 men and five juveniles who allegedly had stockpiled three tons of ammonium nitrate fertilizer to carry out terrorist bombing attacks in Canada.

Timothy McVeigh used two tons of the highly destructive chemical substance in the 1995 attack that demolished the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 168 people.

Although the suspects appeared to be targeting sites in Canada, including the Parliament building in Ottawa, investigators fear they’d established a U.S. link with two terrorism suspects in Georgia who may have been plotting attacks in the United States, but that remains unconfirmed.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the government’s chief national-security agency, has estimated that as many as 50 terrorist organizations and 300 individual terrorism suspects have bases of operations in Canada. Active groups, the agency said, include Shiite and Sunni Islamic extremists, the Irish Republican Army and all major Sikh terrorist organizations.

“We’re aware that there is a terrorist infrastructure within Canada, no different than within the United States and other countries, that contains a variety of elements ranging from fundraisers, ideological support, to direct membership,” said Ben Venzke, who heads the IntelCenter, a private contractor that does counterterrorism support work for the U.S. government.

“Despite all of the security measures and procedures put in place to stop terrorists” from crossing the border, Venzke said, “it is extremely difficult. Even if you do the best possible effort, there are still going to be a fair number to get through.”

Even before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the northern border had a reputation as a potential open door for extremists who’d settled in Canada to take advantage of its liberal immigration policies. One Canadian officer was quoted as describing the country as “Club Med for terrorists.”

In December 1999, authorities arrested Ahmed Ressam after he drove from Canada to Washington state in a rental car packed with bomb-making material, which he’d planned to use to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve. He later was sentenced to 22 years in prison.

In 1997, Ghazi Ibrahim Abu Maizar, a would-be suicide bomber who planned to detonate a pipe bomb in a New York subway station, crossed illegally into the United States three times, once by bus and twice by hiking across, according to news accounts. Several of the Sept. 11 hijackers also crossed into the United States from Canada.

The scramble to toughen national security after Sept. 11 prompted a nearly threefold increase in Border Patrol agents at the U.S.-Canada border, from 340 in 2001 to 980 by this year, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

U.S. officials also doubled inspectors at the 89 ports of entry, from 1,615 to 3,391, expanded cooperative law-enforcement operations with Canada and have increasingly employed sensors, cameras, aircraft and marine patrols.

Even so, law enforcement authorities acknowledge the immense challenges of patrolling a 3,987-mile stretch that cuts along 12 states, traversing waterways, mountainous terrain and dense forests.

Some illegal crossers have been known to enter the United States on snowmobiles. Others fly across unpatrolled airspace or simply walk down deserted farm roads.

Smugglers also exploit the remote terrain, transporting drugs and human cargo. In recent months, agents with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement have smashed smuggling rings that transported Asians, Pakistanis and Eastern Europeans.

“I don’t care how much technology you have up there, you’ll still have trouble getting agents to respond in a timely fashion,” Bonner said. “There’s vast stretches that make it very difficult, depending on the season. For the well-trained, determined crosser, it’s actually an advantage for them.”

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