January 11, 2004

IN the days of relative calm before the nation went to "code orange" last month, Asa Hutchinson, the Bush administration's point man for border protection, was being briefed once a day on whatever terrorism threats were lurking.

But the anxiety level ratcheted up substantially in mid-December when intelligence officials began picking up ominous tidbits indicating that a big attack might be in the works. Once the country went to orange, or high alert, on Dec. 21, Mr. Hutchinson's daily updates became almost hourly. Everything from the status of grounded Air France flights to suspicious passenger names and fragments of classified terror data flew past his desk.

"It's all been a little bit surreal, just because of the level of intensity we've seen in these last few weeks and the urgency of it and the drama as it unfolds,'' said Mr. Hutchinson, an under secretary at the Department of Homeland Security. "There's a constant pressure mentally because you realize people's lives are at issue - not just their safety, but their convenience when you have hundreds of people sitting on a runway for hours."

The events of the last three weeks - the code orange alert, grounded planes, fighter plane escorts, warnings of hijackings and, on Friday, a stand-down to a nationwide code yellow - have been a jolting reminder for many Americans about their own fragile sense of security.

Indeed, in a war perhaps unlike any other the United States has ever fought, waged largely on its own turf against an enemy that is invisible and without a state, the quandary Mr. Hutchinson faces is one the entire country has wrestled with in the last few weeks: How far can America go to make itself feel safe again? And how much are Americans willing to give up in the way of freedoms and convenience to get there?

For every new border protection program - like the fingerprinting of many foreign visitors, initiated last week - civil libertarians and Arab-American groups express concern about ethnic profiling. For every dire government warning about the threat of terrorism, skeptical allies raise questions about the strength of the intelligence the United States has used to justify its concerns. And for every plane grounded by the threat of terrorism, travelers or airline officials want to know who is going to foot the bill.

A study by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in fact, placed the cost of the stepped-up security for the code orange alert at a billion dollars a week. Tom Ridge, the secretary for homeland security, said he believes the final cost will end up being much lower than that, but he acknowledged that the potential toll on people day to day is a real concern.

"We always want to put safety first, but we also want to minimize the inconvenience," he said last week in moving the country back down to a yellow alert.

The last three weeks have seen a spasm of aggressive initiatives by the Bush administration to secure the borders and help quell rising public concerns. Officials issued an emergency order demanding that foreign carriers put armed marshals on planes, if necessary. They sent military fighter planes to escort overseas flights thought to be at risk.

They began fingerprinting and photographing tens of thousands of foreign visitors. They picked three companies to develop military antimissile technology to protect airliners. And they gave local police forces more than 1,000 radiation detection devices to help spot possible threats at events over the holidays, like the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans and the Rose Bowl in Pasadena.

The result, administration officials said, is that the public should rest easier knowing the country is safer from terrorists today than it was before Sept. 11, 2001.

But not everyone is convinced. In a report released Thursday by the World Economic Forum and Gallup International, a majority of Americans surveyed - 53 percent - said they feel the country is less safe today than it was 10 years ago.

"What I see doesn't give me any sense of comfort," said Charles G. Slepian, an aviation security specialist who is chief executive officer of the Foreseeable Risk Analysis Center, a private group in New York.

"What I see is an admission that the government doesn't trust the security measures we have, and we've had to start doing things like grounding planes and denying landing rights because we're unprepared for the threats we've seen the last few weeks," he said.

If there is a sense of skittishness on the part of counterterrorism officials, it is because they say the threats are both real and growing. In the nightmares they see, the next big attack on American soil could come from almost anywhere: a hijacked international airliner crashed into a power plant or a landmark; a radiological "dirty bomb" detonated on a downtown street; a crude nuclear device smuggled into a port; or perhaps a crop duster loaded with dangerous chemicals.

American officials regard Al Qaeda as a foe that is as crafty as it is dangerous. Expeditions in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, for instance, revealed translations of American newspaper articles that discussed security vulnerabilities in federal government buildings. And Al Qaeda has proven resilient as well, with its agents suspected in a series of recent attacks despite the capture of numerous leaders.

To combat the threat, American intelligence has become increasingly aggressive in collecting bits of terrorism information from around the world - eavesdropping on suspected extremists, checking e-mail, assessing trends. The aim, officials say, is to avoid the types of missed warning signs that preceded Sept. 11.

The more information that is developed, the more skittish officials are likely to become. With the United States pumping an additional $41 billion into counterterrorism and homeland security this year, its efforts have no doubt produced a surge in threat reports for officials to assess - the same type of reports that led the Bush administration to raise alert levels last month.

But some critics wonder whether the whole process has become a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy, with an apparatus that has an incentive to report terrorist threats, based on solid information or not.

"Fear is a tough thing to combat," said Timothy Edgar, an American Civil Liberties Union official who believes some of the Bush administration's principal counterterrorism measures have gone too far. "The idea that we're facing very specific threats against the United States has gotten a lot of people upset. But the reality is that it's very hard for any of us to judge why we went to code orange in the first place."