Olympic Sites Get Security Sweeps

With the deployment of thousands of police officers Thursday, Greece launched the most far-reaching security operation ever devised for the Olympic Games, a $1.2-billion plan designed to safeguard the first Summer Olympics since the U.S. terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

About 11,000 police and security personnel began moving into Olympic venues and other facilities in the first stage of what Greek authorities called a “lockdown” of sensitive sites. The security sweeps include bomb-sniffing dogs.

“For us, the Olympic Games start today,” Greece’s top law enforcement official, public order minister George A. Voulgarakis, said at a news conference at one of Athens’ central plazas, Omonia Square. “They start today for the Greek police, the armed forces and the coast guard.”

The opening ceremony of the Games will be in six weeks, on Aug. 13. By mid-July, nearly all Olympic facilities are scheduled to be under police watch. Officials said the presence of blue-uniformed police would increase markedly around venues, as well as subway stations and other transit hubs. In all, 70,000 security personnel will be deployed.

And yet, ongoing construction at the main Olympic complex raised questions about when that key facility would be secured.

Voulgarakis said the venue would be ready by Aug. 10, three days before the opening ceremony. He also said the construction rush that has become synonymous with Greece’s push to get ready for the 2004 Games would not compromise the security plan.

Security planners and Olympic officials have long maintained guarded optimism.

IOC President Jacques Rogge said, “Security is the responsibility of the Greek government, which has worked and continues to work with a number of countries to ensure that the Games are as safe as humanly possible. We have trust in them and know that they are doing everything they can.”

The chief of the Greek national police, Fotis Nasiakos, told a Greek parliamentary subcommittee last week that officials had “no reports” of a specific threat “from any terror group to the Games.”

Ronald K. Noble, the secretary-general of Interpol, the international police agency, said in a statement issued during a visit here Tuesday that Greek officials had made an “unfailing commitment to making these Games as safe as possible” and that Games-related queries to Interpol would get the “highest priority.”

But Noble also said, “The world is a dangerous place, and it is never wise or possible to predict that there is no threat to any event or any public place.”

After a review this spring, the number of security personnel was increased from 50,000 to 70,000, putting the ratio of security to athletes at roughly 7 to 1.

The estimated $1.2-billion cost is four times that spent on security for the 2000 Sydney Summer Games, reflecting concerns over terrorism, the U.S.-led war in Iraq and Greece’s geography, within easy airplane reach of the volatile Middle East and with long stretches of coastline that traditionally have gone unguarded. Voulgarakis has said the final cost is likely to be even higher.

NATO is to supply AWACS radar planes as well as ships and an anti-chemical unit. U.S. Marine Gen. James Jones, NATO’s top operational commander, met here Thursday with Voulgarakis and the Greek military general staff.

A key component of the security plan, a high-tech closed-circuit television and communication system, is due to come fully online in the next few days, officials have said. More than 1,400 cameras are to be installed on poles at Olympic venues and around the Athens area.

A Greek newspaper reported last weekend that a June 21 test of the system picked out, at random, a man standing on a dock at the port in Piraeus, about six miles south of central Athens.

Within three seconds, the newspaper reported, a photo of his head appeared on one monitor, a full-length frontal shot on another. Within five seconds, the system picked up sound of the man talking on a mobile phone. Within 17 seconds, his mobile-phone number and the number he had called showed up on monitors.

Another Greek newspaper reported Monday that officials had been monitoring sales of the fertilizer ammonium nitrate, which can easily be made into an explosive, as well as information about minivan rentals -- on the theory that a minivan could be turned into a moving bomb.

Suspects affiliated with Al Qaeda used vehicle bombs containing ammonium nitrate in an attack in November on synagogues and British targets in Istanbul, Turkey, and in an attack on Western tourists on the island of Bali in 2002.

The truck bomb that blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City in 1995 combined fuel oil with more than 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer.

The United States, Britain and Israel have been part of a seven-nation group advising Greek authorities on security for the last several years.

At the 1972 Munich Games, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and killed 11 Israeli athletes and coaches. Since then, the IOC has stressed that security must be “priority No. 1” at the Games.

Even so, terrorism concerns, combined with the chronic construction delays, have contributed to a lingering unease about the security of the 2004 Games.

As of last week, 1.95 million, or 37%, of the 5.3 million available tickets had been sold, according to Athens 2004 organizers.

Terrorism concerns have intensified in Europe since the March train bombings in Madrid, which killed 191 people and have been blamed on Al Qaeda.

A Greek terrorist group, which went by the name “17 November,” operated for years with impunity before 15 members were sentenced last year to prison terms. But a court ruling, made public in recent days, confirmed that some members were unknown and still at large.

On May 5, three bomb blasts damaged a police station near Athens, although no one was hurt.

Such blasts, which occur here regularly, are typically the work of local anarchists. This one, with precisely 100 days to go until the Games, constituted an acknowledged public-relations embarrassment for Greek authorities.

In an interview Wednesday in his office, Voulgarakis, a former Greek navy commando, lamented “this climate that has covered the Games” and what he called the “terrorification of people who may have wanted to come here and see the Games in the country of their origin.”

He also, however, sought to sound a note of assurance, saying of the Greek security plans: “We are concerned because we have to be concerned. We are alert because we have to be alert. Everything that might happen -- we [worry] might happen.”