On Watch

When threat levels rise, Kevin McAleenan, Customs and Border Protection's anti-terrorism chief, works to make Americans breathe easier.

Kevin McAleenan saw nearly four years of work come together in the hours after the London subway bombings in July. As director of the Customs and Border Protection bureau's Office of Anti-Terrorism, he orchestrates the bureau's response to elevated threat levels or specific intelligence, and coordinates with the rest of the Homeland Security Department. "When we went up to orange in the mass transit sector-boom-everything was just smooth," he says.

McAleenan has navigated through seven orange-level alerts since November 2001, when he arrived in Washington fresh from a Silicon Valley corporate law firm. "Before, it was . . . staying here all night and a couple key people just working the issue to death, that's how we got through it," he says. But the response after London was "seamless," he says. In a day, his office reviewed intelligence, presented response options to Commissioner Robert Bonner and, after getting the go-ahead, implemented the response in the field.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, McAleenan felt so strongly about getting involved in anti-terrorism that within weeks, he left the law job he'd taken to pay off his student loans and headed to CBP. He worked his way up to acting director of counterterrorism in 2003 and to director the next year.

Before Sept. 11, the border agencies focused on counternarcotics, spotting trade fraud and intellectual property rights violations, and preventing illegal border crossings. They had no anti-terrorism office and no uniform procedures for questioning suspected terrorists. McAleenan developed those protocols.

The protocols are working, Bonner says. One suspected terrorist turned away by CBP later perpetrated a large suicide bombing in Iraq. "We denied him admission," Bonner says. "Now why did that happen? That's partly Kevin and what he's done."

He also worked on programs to target inspections on high-risk containers at ports and procedures for determining whether materials that set off sensitive radiation detectors-which can send out alarms for anything from kitty litter or bananas to enriched uranium-are harmful.

But McAleenan is loath to take credit. "If you really want to know what I'm proudest of it's . . . building a team that comes in committed every day to the mission and understands that they're making a difference on a national level," he says.