Rejected

Legislators last conducted such a review following the investigation of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. That probe revealed that a key conspirator in the attack was able to move freely into and out of the United States despite his known terrorist ties. The revelation prompted Congress to grant the consular bureau authority to collect fees, thus helping to fund the development of a computerized system that tracks whether consular officers have checked each visa application against a terrorist lookout system. Now, following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, Assistant Secretary of State Ryan and others are raising questions about how the bureau issues visas.

The questions are complicated by the fact that the bureau, like the Internal Revenue Service and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, must juggle the competing roles of law enforcement and customer service. The bureau needs to make it easy for millions of law-abiding, economy-boosting foreign tourists, business travelers and students to visit the United States, while making it difficult for terrorists and criminals to get in. Critics say the bureau, facing a ballooning workload that leaves little time for careful scrutiny of suspicious applicants, favors service over enforcement. Observers also point to holes in the agency's anti-fraud technology and to lack of cooperation between the bureau and agencies such as the CIA, FBI and INS, which could provide visa officers information about potential terrorists.

In an article in the March 2001 Foreign Service Journal, retired Senior Foreign Service Officer David T. Jones said the Bureau of Consular Affairs was doing its best to cope with its workload by providing more support personnel for consular officers and by more effectively allocating the visa-processing workload. He also credited the agency for introducing machine-readable visas, which include photographs, codes and watermarks that make them difficult to counterfeit.

Still, Jones made a prescient observation: "Visa issuance must become more careful than ever-or State will share the blame for the next successful terrorist bombing. Preventing such acts is now a real national security concern."

Menial Processing

Before citizens of most countries can enter the United States, either temporarily or on a permanent basis, they must first apply for visas at American embassies or consulates. There, consular officers review applications and sometimes interview visa candidates, deciding whether to let them in. American consular officers granted visas to at least 15 of the 19 Sept. 11 terrorists.

Former Foreign Service Officer John Martin says consular officers work hard to keep up with the growing demand for visas. Martin is now director of special projects for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a Washington-based group that supports immigration restrictions. In fiscal 2000, consular officers issued more than 9 million temporary visas-1 million more than were issued in each of the previous four years. By 2005, the bureau anticipates the number of visas issued could rise to 12 million a year. About 900 Foreign Service consular officers augmented by 2,500 foreign nationals and 236 other consular associates and agents handle consular affairs abroad.

The bureau's Visa Waiver Program allows citizens in 29 countries to enter the United States without a visa. That program reduces the processing burden by millions of visa applications each year. It also means that terrorists who figure out how to get illegal documents in any one of those countries can more easily get into the United States. The State and Justice departments, after Sept. 11, sent joint teams to review antifraud procedures in six of these 29 countries.

Despite the visa waiver program, the number of temporary visas issued-including those for tourists, business travelers, students and temporary workers-is on the rise. More and more travelers from Asia and developing countries are coming to the United States. Most temporary visas are valid for several years in part because the State Department wants to reduce the need to process frequent reapplications. The increasing workload has put pressure on consular officers to speed processing of visa applications. Visa processing tends to be viewed as a job for inexperienced junior officers, because it gives them a chance to practice their language skills and meet foreign citizens. Nonetheless, junior officers view visa processing as menial work.

Consular affairs officers "have felt like they are forced to be working in a factory output-type situation," Martin says. Recent reports by State's inspector general and outside reviews show that consular facilities in many locations are decrepit, lines for visas are long and visa officers are exhausted. As a result, turnover is high.

"Overseas consular officers and anti-fraud units continue to face staffing shortages," former State Department Inspector General Jacquelyn Williams-Bridgers told the House Government Reform Committee in 1999. She said anti-fraud officers lacked adequate training, some having been thrown into their jobs with no guidance and no documented procedures. "At the sixth highest ranking fraud post, the anti-fraud unit consisted of a part-time junior officer in a rotational position and a newly hired, inexperienced Foreign Service national investigator," she said.

A Bureau of Consular Affairs spokesman says the State Department is hiring more and more consular officers. The spokesman also says consular officers are well-trained. "There is not a single consular officer who hasn't had sufficient training to do [visa work]." In addition to anti-fraud seminars during their basic studies, consular officers attend regular anti-fraud conferences where they are taught detection techniques. During their training, consular officers spend a day with INS agents to learn other fraud-detection skills. Once at their posts, the officers learn how to verify the authenticity of a country's passports and other forms of identification. The bureau also distributes a monthly publication that alerts consular officers to the latest methods of visa fraud.

Sharing Data

Foreign Service officers have prevented hundreds of suspected terrorists from entering the country. To keep out terrorists, consular officers use the Consular Lookout and Support System, a database that includes people with criminal backgrounds, previous visa denials or links to terrorists. Most of the information in the database comes from the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, which declassifies intelligence and law enforcement information and enters it into the lookout system.

From 1987 to 1997, consular officers detected 722 suspected terrorists as they applied for visas, according to State Department statistics. INS and Customs Service agents intercepted another 196 terrorist suspects at U.S. border points between 1991 and 1997, using tips the State Department had entered into the automated Interagency Border Inspection System, State officials say.

It's not clear whether federal agencies had information about the Sept. 11 hijackers that could have caused consular officers to deny them visas. Officers denied about 1.5 million visas in 1998 for any of 50 reasons, including links to terrorist groups, criminal backgrounds or, most commonly, because applicants appeared likely to overstay their visas because they lacked families, jobs, or didn't own homes in their own countries. A bureau spokeswoman says the Justice Department and the FBI provided the State Department with the names of the alleged hijackers after the attacks. The bureau found that consular officers had checked all the names through the lookout system before issuing them visas, meaning State didn't have information tying them to terrorist groups.

In fact, Ryan blames the FBI, the CIA and other intelligence agencies for the breakdown that allowed the Sept. 11 terrorists to get into the United States. "It is a colossal intelligence failure, or there was information that wasn't shared with us," Ryan told the Senate panel in October. "What went wrong is we had no information on [the hijackers] from intelligence and law enforcement."

Ryan said that Mohamed Atta, the suspected leader of the Sept. 11 hijackers, got a visa in May 2000. But intelligence agencies know now, and possibly knew before May 2000, that Atta had met with operatives associated with Osama bin Laden in January 2000. "I'm surprised how much we learned in the immediate aftermath" of Sept. 11, Ryan told the senators.

Databases and interoperable computer systems could help the Bureau of Consular Affairs, FBI, Customs, Defense, the INS and intelligence agencies share information.

"The most important gap that needs to be filled is information-sharing among federal agencies," says Martin. "One of the biggest problems that consular officers have overseas is that they do not get adequate feedback from the [INS] on persons who have received visas who then stay on illegally in the United States. In part, the problem is because the immigration service is doing very little interior enforcement activity at the present time, so they don't have an awful lot of information. But they also need to do a better job of sharing what information they have with consular officers."

People who overstay their visas-and get caught-typically are barred from returning to the country for three to 10 years. Consular officers in 1998 refused visa applications to about 1,300 people who had previously overstayed their visas. The INS, however, doesn't keep track of people once they enter the country. An estimated two-fifths of the 5 million illegal immigrants living in the United States in 1996 entered the country on temporary visas, according to the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The INS' lack of data makes it more difficult for consular officers to enforce penalties for overstaying.

A 1997 General Accounting Office review found that representatives of various agencies stationed at U.S. embassies were often unwilling to share information or sit on committees aimed at sharing information about suspected terrorists. Law enforcement officials, for example, said that such efforts could compromise their work. The FBI has refused to provide information from its National Crime Information Center databases to the State Department because the Bureau of Consular Affairs isn't a law enforcement agency. In October, Congress passed a law requiring FBI to share the data with State.

Technology Troubles

Holes in the bureau's own anti-fraud systems could be closed. After the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the bureau got its lookout system and machine-readable visa system in place at every overseas post. But sophisticated terrorists may still be able to get into the United States by using aliases or altering other people's travel documents.

JB Fields, a computer specialist who worked at the State Department for 10 years, says the bureau could build biometrics-matches of handprints, fingerprints, faces and irises-and digital signatures into visas and passports to further reduce fraud. "For the most sinister of our adversaries, [just] name-checking is ineffective," Fields says. Ironically, the government now uses handprint technology not to reduce fraud, but to help the INS speed frequent international travelers through checkpoints.

The State Department's strategic plan for information technology includes a visa-processing provision in which "biometrics will be used extensively, and the department will experiment with fully electronic travel documents." Secretary of State Colin Powell has expressed an interest in biometrics, but the department has yet to move seriously in that direction.

On Oct. 4, Sen. Christopher Bond, R-Mo., and other senators introduced a bill that would require biometric technology in visas. Since Sept. 11, members of Congress have introduced at least five bills urging better visa technology and more coordination among the State Department and law enforcement and intelligence agencies.

Some observers say visa processing should be pulled out of the State Department and put into the INS. E. Wayne Merry, a senior associate at the American Foreign Policy Council, a Washington-based think tank, says Foreign Service officers have a service mentality, rather than a law enforcement approach. "As a 26-year veteran of the Foreign Service, I am skeptical the Foreign Service can inculcate its officers with a law enforcement mentality." In his March 2001 article, Jones suggested that the bureau merge with INS.

"Visa issuance and entrance to the U.S. should be a seamless web," Jones said.