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February 10, 2002

How to Fake a Passport

By JEFF GOODELL

lain Boucar flips open a passport and holds it under an ultraviolet
light. A background image of Belgium's royal palace, faintly printed
on the page, vanishes. ''See that?'' he says. He holds another
Belgian passport under the spooky purple light. The image on this one
is printed in a special reactive ink. It glows brightly. ''The first
one's a complete counterfeit,'' he announces.

Boucar is the director of the antifraud unit for the Belgian federal
police. A genial 44-year-old, he works in a small, plain office in
Brussels that is strewn with dozens of passports. It's only 10 a.m.,
but it has already been a busy day -- there has been an urgent call
from an Interpol agent in Berlin, and another from a security officer
on a Dutch cruise ship. Each wanted information from Boucar about
suspicious Belgian passports. Every few minutes, a uniformed cop
wanders through with a question about a suspect document. ''No
good,'' he says with disgust upon being handed an Italian ID card.
Lousy fakes annoy Boucar; they are not worthy of his connoisseur's
eye.

Boucar's colleague Thierry Descamps steps into his office. He is holding a fax. 
Descamps nods to the phone and mentions the name of a Belgian police officer on the 
antiterrorism task force.

Boucar grabs the phone and his face becomes suddenly serious -- the inner cop emerges. 
While Boucar listens on the phone, he turns to his computer and calls up a database 
nicknamed Braingate, which is the Belgian police's
 repository of 1.4 million stolen and fraudulent documents from all over the world. 
The antiterrorism cop is calling about two Sri Lankans, Nicolas Sebastianpillai and 
Varunalingam Arudthevan, who were arrested in Faro, P
ortugal, on Sept. 12, en route to New York. They were traveling on Belgian passports 
-- stolen ones, that is. (Portuguese security detected a fake stamp on their passports 
and contacted the Belgian police, who found the p
assport numbers in Braingate.) Interpol investigators soon began aggressively pursuing 
suspected links between the men and the Tamil Tigers, the violent Sri Lankan terrorist 
group. Now the antiterrorism cop wants to know
how they got their hands on these Belgian passports.

Boucar punches in the numbers of the passports confiscated by the police in Portugal: 
EC 503103 and EC 503104. Boucar learns that these two passports were stolen in March, 
in transit from Belgium to Madagascar: a batch of
 25 blank passports was lifted out of a supposedly secure diplomatic pouch. Of all 
forms of passport fraud, this is one of the most frightening. Only the very best 
counterfeits make it past airport security. But authentic
 blank passports, when filled out correctly, are extremely difficult to detect. 
Virtually the only way to trip up a person traveling on an authentic passport is if he 
makes an error filling it out or if the passport numbe
r turns up in a database of stolen documents. That's why Braingate is so invaluable; 
without it, the Sri Lankans might well have made it all the way to New York.

Boucar searches Braingate for more information. He tells the cop on the other end of 
the line that he can find no evidence that the other 23 passports stolen in the same 
batch have been used by terrorists -- or anyone els
e, for that matter. Of course, that doesn't mean they haven't been, Boucar tells me. 
It just means nobody has been caught yet trying to use them. In fact, they have almost 
surely been sold on the black market, providing t
wo dozen fresh opportunities for terrorists to sneak across international borders.

These 23 passports, Boucar admits, are hardly the only Belgian passports circulating 
on the black market. In fact, his country has quietly become the global capital of 
identity fraud. According to the Belgian police, 19,0
50 blank Belgian passports have been stolen since 1990. This is probably some kind of 
record, although other problem countries, like Italy, Argentina and South Africa, 
refuse to confirm numbers.

All these Belgian passports were not stolen in a few grand heists. Rather, small 
stashes were grabbed from various town halls, embassies, consulates and honorary 
consulates. Sold on the black market for as much as $7,500,
 they have subsequently been used by human traffickers, sex traffickers, gun runners 
and drug dealers, not to mention terrorists.

Indeed, for terrorists making excursions outside the Middle East, Belgian passports 
are often the document of choice. Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian convicted of plotting to 
blow up Los Angeles International Airport in 1999,
trafficked in a number of false passports, at least one of which was linked to a theft 
from a town hall in Belgium. And the two members of a Qaeda cell who assassinated the 
Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud just
 before Sept. 11 traveled from Brussels to London to Karachi on stolen Belgian 
passports.

Until this fall, Belgium's passport troubles were little noticed. The Massoud murder, 
however, exposed the country's problem to the world. It was a huge embarrassment for a 
small, chronically insecure country that has bee
n working hard to cast itself as one of the economic and political capitals of the New 
Europe. After Sept. 11, Belgian investigators immediately began tracking down clues. 
The passports used by the Massoud assassins, Bouc
ar discovered, were stolen in two separate break-ins: one at the Belgian consulate in 
Strasbourg, France, on June 26, 1999, when 45 passports were stolen, and another a few 
months later, on Nov. 11, 1999, when 20 were sto
len from the Belgian Embassy in The Hague.

The Belgian police are now desperately trying to tighten up security. But even if they 
succeed, Boucar will be busy for years to come. Terrorists are too determined and the 
desire for fake passports is too great. Moreover
, thousands of stolen Belgian documents remain circulating around the world. Boucar 
looks up from his computer and gives me a weary look. ''Since Sept. 11,'' he says, 
''it has been chaos around here.''

Belgium is, at first glance, a most unlikely spot for chaos. But its longstanding 
reputation as a sleepy gateway between France and Northern Europe is precisely what 
has made it attractive to criminals. ''Brussels is at t
he crossroads of Europe, and an enormous amount of human traffic passes through it,'' 
says Jonathan M. Winer, a former State Department official and an international-crime 
expert. ''As a result, Belgium is the place where
 all sorts of crime seems to settle: drugs, human trafficking, prostitution and 
identity fraud.''

To get a feeling for this criminal nexus, all you have to do is take a walk along the 
gritty boulevards around the Gare du Midi in Brussels. The neighborhood's main 
thoroughfare, Boulevard Maurice Lemonnier, is known to l
ocals as Kandahar Lane. Spits of glistening meat turn in the windows of restaurants, 
and Middle Eastern music blares from CD shops. The whole neighborhood feels wired to 
another world: cabins du telephone offer cheap, unt
raceable communications; Internet cafes let you surf the Web anonymously for two euros 
an hour; travel shops advertise weekly bus-and-ferry service to Tangier.

According to investigators, it was here at the Dar Salaam hotel that Richard Reid, the 
accused ''shoe bomber,'' recently spent 10 days plotting to blow up an American 
Airlines jet. (As if to underscore Belgium's reputatio
n as the back office of terrorism, when Reid was arrested, a map of Brussels was found 
in his jacket pocket.) The Dar Salaam is more flophouse than hotel, with lots of old 
linoleum and chipped paint and a cafe on the grou
nd floor that is jammed with Arab men smoking and drinking tea. A few steps away is 
Marrakech, an Internet cafe where Reid apparently made arrangements to pick up 
explosives.

On the same block is another terrorist landmark: Le Nil, the restaurant where, on 
Sept. 19, Belgian police officers found chemicals that had supposedly been stored 
there by members of a Tunisian network linked to Al Qaeda
. Investigators suspect that the chemicals -- 220 pounds of sulfur and 16 gallons of 
acetone -- were going to be used to build a bomb to blow up the United States Embassy 
in Paris.

Just across another boulevard from the Dar Salaam is a row of shadowy bars and hotels 
that face the southern side of the train station. This is the end of Arab turf and, 
according to the Belgian police, the beginning of a
 neighborhood controlled by the Albanian mob. The bars and hotels here all have a 
forsaken look and all seem to be populated by desperate Eastern European men. Here the 
games are human trafficking, sex trafficking and fal
se documents. ''If you want a passport, this is where you begin to make inquiries,'' 
says Herman Lefief, a Belgian investigator.

The process is never quick, especially if you are a foreigner or unknown to the 
sellers. Luk Alloo, a Dutch television journalist who recently purchased a 
middling-quality counterfeit Belgian passport for $1,500 as part o
f an undercover investigation, spent three months working similar mob-controlled bars 
in Antwerp before he found anyone who trusted him enough to get him a passport. ''They 
never keep anything on the premises,'' Alloo say
s. ''They have connections, who have connections, who have connections. It's an 
elaborate operation.''

Until recently, many of those connections eventually led to a little bar about two 
miles away on the Chausee de Ninove in the Anderlecht district of Brussels. Anderlecht 
is a gritty landscape of warehouses, falafel joints
 and muffler shops, but the bar itself is a cheerful enough place; there's a pool 
table in the center of the room, and video machines blink quietly against one wall. 
But according to the Belgian police, this bar was -- an
d may still be -- the base of operations for an Albanian mobster whom Belgian cops 
refer to as ''M.'' (For legal reasons, they will not allow his name to be published.) 
From his bar stool, M. ran what investigators say wa
s one of the largest organized stolen-passport rings in Europe.

M. bought and sold thousands of blanks on the black market. His prices ranged from a 
few hundred dollars for an easy-to-get Albanian passport to $5,000 or more for a newly 
stolen Belgian or French passport. Investigators
have also linked M. to dozens of break-ins at embassies and consulates in Germany, the 
Netherlands and France.

According to the Belgian police, M.'s network is typical of the complex link between 
organized crime, passport fraud and terrorism in Belgium. One afternoon in the lounge 
of the Belgian federal police building, an investi
gator named Daniel Traweels draws me a picture to help me visualize how it works. He 
sketches four circles across the top of the page, labeling them P for prostitution, H 
for human trafficking, D for drugs and T for terro
rism. Below, Traweels draws four more circles, identifying them as Romanians, 
Albanians and other Eastern Europeans who specialize in burglary and document 
manipulation. In the middle, he draws another circle and connects
 the circles above and below to the center; he labels it M.

''It's a network,'' Traweels explains. ''He is the middleman. The circles on the top, 
the buyers, they are of every race: Chinese, Russian, Arab. We have Jewish mobsters 
who work with Arabs, Arabs who work with Albanians,
 North Africans who deal with Jews. There is no prejudice in this business.''

But there is specialization, Traweels explains. The Africans are mostly involved in 
money laundering. The Moroccans are involved in car-jackings, robberies. The Eastern 
Europeans, especially the Albanians, are expert burg
lars and safecrackers. These patterns rarely vary. Arabs don't get involved in 
burglary, nor do terrorist cells attempt large-scale passport theft. ''They leave the 
dirty work to the experts,'' Traweels says.

Belgium's troubles with stolen blank passports really began only in 1995. At the time, 
Europe was in the midst of a push toward the creation of a unified state -- the 
European Union. As part of this transformation, Europe
an leaders decided to do away with almost all border controls within Western Europe. 
In theory, this was meant to simplify travel and, like the introduction of the euro 
currency, promote the idea of Europe as a coherent e
conomic power. In practice, the lack of borders has also benefited criminals.

A network of Albanians, many of them fleeing the war in the Balkans, found that 
Belgium was an ideal place to set up shop. Many of them got involved in importing 
human beings, especially young girls they could force into
prostitution. For that, they needed passports. Although counterfeit documents were 
readily available in Bangkok -- one large counterfeiting operation was run by an ex- 
K.G.B. agent in Thailand -- the quality was often poo
r. Eventually, many of these Albanian outlaws, including M., discovered that instead 
of counterfeiting passports, it was much easier (and more profitable) to steal blanks.

The Belgians made it particularly easy for them. The country's long history of 
provincial rule -- it didn't become an independent nation until 1831 -- meant that the 
mayors of tiny communities enjoyed enormous power. One
of their perks of office was the ability to distribute passports; for decades, blank 
Belgian passports were stored in the 600 or so town halls around the country. Often, 
security amounted to nothing more elaborate than a
locked door.

In 1996 alone, 3,600 blank passports were stolen, bit by bit. In some cases, the 
thieves had to drill their way into a heavy safe to get to the passports -- and if 
they couldn't crack it, they ripped the safe right out of
 the wall and carted the whole thing off. In other cases, like a break-in at a town 
hall in Tongeren, the thieves simply helped themselves to a safe key that had 
thoughtlessly been left in a desk drawer. Usually there wer
e no witnesses; the burglars left their tools behind, but little else, making the 
crime difficult to solve -- especially by the local cops, who, as one Belgian federal 
police officer put it, ''were not terribly worried ab
out the loss of a hundred passports -- they just ordered more.''

Ultimately, it was pressure from the United States that finally persuaded the Belgians 
to crack down. Back in 1991, Belgium had been admitted to the United States 
visa-waiver program, which allows citizens from 29 friendl
y countries to enter this country without applying for a visa. But the fact that blank 
Belgian passports were being carted off by the truckload alarmed officials in the 
States. (The United States does not have a problem w
ith passport theft; fewer than 50 blanks issued since 1990 remain unaccounted for.)

By 1997, Belgium's troubles with stolen blanks had gotten so out of hand that United 
States officials threatened to kick the country out of the visa-waiver program. In 
1998, Belgian officials began removing blank passport
s from town halls and storing them in an ultrasecure building in downtown Brussels. 
Passports are now distributed by courier, in a system similar to America's.

But that didn't end Belgium's problems. Criminals like M. simply shifted their 
operations to Belgian consulates and embassies, which were equally insecure, and where 
hundreds of blanks continued to be stored. The old Belg
ian Embassy in The Hague, where one of the Massoud passports was stolen, was a typical 
case. By 18th-century standards, the charming brick town house is solid and secure. By 
21st-century standards, it's a joke: there are
no bars on the front windows, and the locks look as if they could be jimmied with a 
screwdriver. Belgium has 110 embassies and consulates worldwide, some more secure than 
others. It's no wonder that burglars find them so
inviting. Last year, the Belgian Embassy in The Hague was finally moved to a secure 
building across the street from a police station.

As for the stolen passports, they quickly vanish into the criminal underground. The 
506 Belgian passports that were stolen from the consulate in Cologne in August 1999 
have been found all over the world -- Madrid, Istanbu
l, Rotterdam, Lagos, Bangkok, Islamabad -- and have been used in a wide variety of 
crimes, from drug dealing to human trafficking. (Belgian authorities won't say if any 
ended up in the hands of terrorists.) The passports
stolen in Strasbourg and The Hague were used for illegal entry into Congo, China and 
Morocco; another was found in a house in Rotterdam where three men suspected to have 
links with Al Qaeda were arrested after Sept. 11.

In the case of M., the cops got lucky. Last January, while executing a search warrant 
in Brussels on an unrelated case involving a 31- year-old Romanian, they turned up a 
trove of passport-trafficking goods: typewriters,
scanners, immigration stamps for 56 countries, various identity documents (including a 
Spanish ID card, sans photo, filled out in the name of Bill Clinton) and some 150 
stolen blanks -- including 43 Belgian, as well as ot
hers from Sweden, Greece and Germany. Most important, however, they found documents 
and phone records suggesting that the Romanian was one of the main passport suppliers 
for M.

Investigators staked out the bar where M. conducted business. They logged his arrivals 
and exits; they tapped his cellphone. They concluded that his network included 50 to 
60 people in Belgium, France and the Netherlands.


But ultimately M. was too slick for them. After four months of surveillance, 140 
Belgian cops moved in last April to bust his operation. They hoped to nail not only M. 
but also several notorious passport thieves and safec
rackers. It didn't happen. Stashes of cash were found, but the police failed to 
uncover any major cache of forged or stolen documents. M. himself was clean; searches 
of his apartment and car turned up nothing more damning
 than a gun and a bulletproof vest.

M. was held in custody for two months, and he bragged to investigators that he had 30 
million Belgian francs hidden in an overseas account that they could never find. And 
they couldn't. In the end, M. was charged with not
hing more serious than consorting with a known criminal organization. Given the almost 
imperceptible speed of the Belgian courts, he will stand trial in two or three years. 
Until then, M. is back on the street and, presum
ably, back in business.

Alain Boucar is extraordinarily proud of Belgium's new high-tech passport. Flipping 
through one and pointing out its many security features, he's as giddy as a new father 
showing off his child: ''It's a very beautiful des
ign, don't you think?'' he says, holding it up to the light.

Indeed it is. Thanks largely to this new passport, which Boucar helped design and 
which was introduced last March, M.'s business probably isn't quite as breezy today as 
it was last year. By all accounts, it's one of the m
ost secure passports in the world. On the first page there's a graphic illustrating 
five key security features, including a laser-cut pinhole image of the passport 
holder, a watermark of King Albert II and an optically va
riable image of Belgium (which changes from green to blue depending on the viewing 
angle). ''Most border-control officers have one minute or less to look at a passport 
and determine if it is genuine,'' Boucar says. ''With
 this, at least they know what they're looking for.''

This new passport is a triumph for Belgium and a sign that it is taking its problems 
with passport fraud seriously. Even if characters like M. get their hands on blank 
versions of this passport, because of features like a
 digitized photo they will be much more difficult to fill in convincingly. Other 
countries, including the United States, are similarly upgrading their passports.

Still, it will be years before these new passports make it into wide circulation. 
Until then, we're stuck with the old documents. As an example, I show Boucar my United 
States passport. ''How easy would it be for you to p
ut someone else's picture in here?''

Boucar examines it. It's a standard United States passport, issued eight years ago, 
with a laminated photo page. ''Five minutes.''

He sticks his thumbnail into a corner of the laminate, showing me how you can peel it 
back. (You can loosen the laminate by sticking it in the freezer or a microwave oven 
-- it depends on the type of laminate -- or, bette
r yet, by dissolving the adhesive with Undu, a product that is easily ordered on the 
Internet.) Boucar then points to the little blue emblem, called a guilloche, that 
overlaps the photo and the passport page and is suppos
ed to make the photo difficult to remove. ''You might see a little line here. But if I 
do a good job, you would not notice.'' Of course, that person would have to be around 
the same age, height and weight as me, but Bouca
r's point is well taken: doing a passable job of doctoring a typical passport is not 
very hard.

Boucar then explains the tricks criminals use to fill in stolen blanks: how they feed 
passports into laser printers, for example. Or how they can create a perfectly good 
dry stamp -- an inkless stamp that leaves an emboss
ed image on paper and is used to authenticate the passports of many countries -- by 
placing an old vinyl record over a passport marked with a real seal, then heating the 
record with an iron; the record is then pressed ont
o a fresh passport. Candle wax also works. As for ink stamps, they pose no challenge 
at all. Years ago, forgers would cut a fresh potato in half and use it to transfer a 
stamp from one passport to another. Today ''you jus
t scan the page of a passport into a computer, print it out, then take it to a copy 
shop,'' Boucar says. ''They'll make you a rubber stamp in two minutes.''

Boucar is something of a heretic in law enforcement circles, in which open discussion 
of such techniques is frowned upon, lest forgers get any new ideas. Boucar says that's 
nonsense. ''The forgers already know everything,
'' he says. ''It's the rest of the world that we must educate.''

Indeed, bearers of false documents often seem to know more about their business than 
many border guards. They know what kinds of questions will be asked by consular 
officers (for example, ''Who is the prime minister of Be
lgium?'') and what suspicious mannerisms to avoid. And experienced border-hoppers are 
experts at finding the weak link in the system. If Portugal is cracking down, they'll 
try entering Europe through Greece; later, they'l
l move on to Spain. They send patsies through first to test security. They know to 
carry bank statements (forged ones) and other supporting documents.

Still, even the best make stupid mistakes. They print out a blank stolen passport in 
the wrong typeface. Or they misspell a word. One of the biggest arrests connected with 
the Sept. 11 attacks came in Dubai, when a passpo
rt official noticed some sloppy forgery on the French passport of Djamel Beghal. 
Beghal was arrested and interrogated; information he provided led to the breakup of a 
large European terrorist cell, including the arrest in
 Brussels of Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian whom Beghal identified as the leader in a plot 
to bomb the United States Embassy in Paris.

In a perfect world, every traveler at every port of entry would get similarly close 
scrutiny. In the real world, however, that's impossible. The sheer volume of humans 
crossing borders every day -- some 30 million foreign
ers cross the United States' each month -- suggests that even where strict border 
controls are in place, not every traveler is going to get a careful look. What's more, 
immigration officers, like airline security personne
l, tend to be underpaid and underprepared for the complexity of their job. There are 
16 different versions of the United States passport alone in circulation. It takes a 
genuine passport scholar like Boucar to be able to
detect the difference between a real and a fake passport from, say, Uzbekistan, not to 
mention whether every entry and exit stamp is authentic.

As border traffic grows, then, often the only thing standing between a terrorist and 
downtown Manhattan is a database. The State Department and the I.N.S. share a vast 
system that contains, among other things, basic biogr
aphical information, like date of birth, of United States passport and visa holders. 
It also tracks blank stolen passports reported around the world as well as information 
about known terrorists and other high-level crimi
nals. Every time a person enters the United States at one of the major ports of entry, 
his passport number is checked by the database. (At least it's supposed to be.) The 
I.N.S. also has a separate database called the Loo
kout system, which is its own record of stolen passports and intelligence information.

These databases are useful tools, but they're still not foolproof. ''What you have to 
keep in mind,'' cautions Tom Furey, consul general at the United States Embassy in 
London, ''is the massive information overload.''

London is as good a place to see the strengths and weakness of this system as 
anywhere. The embassy there is one of the busiest in the world, issuing about 175,000 
nonimmigrant visas a year to travelers from 188 different
 countries. It also issues 25,000 passports a year, mostly to United States citizens 
whose passports have been lost or stolen. I recently spent an afternoon in London 
watching the consular officers interview visa applican
ts, and I learned that the State Department's database is pretty good when it comes to 
basic information -- detecting, for example, whether an applicant's birth date matches 
his name, or determining if someone is lying ab
out whether he has ever visited the United States before. Also, if he is traveling on 
a passport that was stolen, say, six months ago in a country that the United States 
has good relations with, he will probably be caught
.

But I also learned that there is a whole lot this database won't reveal. If a person 
has been convicted of a serious crime in another country, for example, it probably 
won't show up in the database. I watched one consular
 officer turn away a man who wanted to visit the United States after learning that the 
man had recently been convicted in England of sexually molesting his 8-year-old 
stepdaughter. The only reason the consular officer kne
w about it, however, was that the man brazenly told him about it when he was asked if 
he had ever been convicted of any crimes. Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th 
hijacker, recently indicted on six counts of conspirac
y, was on a terrorist-watch list in France but was nonetheless able to enter the 
United States without question.

When it comes to stolen passports, the situation gets even more complex. To begin 
with, not every country shares information about stolen passports with us. And even 
when they are reported, there is a time lag between whe
n the passports are stolen and when they are reported stolen. In the Massoud case, 
Belgian authorities sent out a fax on the break-in in The Hague six days after the 
burglary; the alert about the Strasbourg theft didn't g
o out until almost six weeks after the break-in. In theory, the passport numbers 
should have been entered into databases immediately -- most people sophisticated 
enough to travel on a blank stolen passport know it needs t
o be used quickly. However, one antifraud investigator in the State Department says he 
was not aware of these stolen-passport numbers until ''the middle of the summer'' -- 
nearly a year after the passports were stolen.

The closer you look, the scarier it gets. One example: Alain Boucar says that his 
database lists the numbers of 24,851 blank stolen Italian passports. Jim Hesse, a 
chief intelligence officer for the I.N.S., says that the
United States Lookout system lists about 6,000. Why the discrepancy? Are there 18,000 
stolen blank Italian passports drifting around out there that the United States 
doesn't know about? Or is Boucar's database wrong? Bouc
ar insists that his numbers are accurate; Hesse trusts his. The only people who really 
know for sure are the Italians. ''We do not discuss stolen passports,'' a spokesman at 
the Italian Embassy in Washington says.

Given these discrepancies, it's no surprise that the United States visa-waiver program 
has come under fire since Sept. 11. At a Senate hearing in October, a Justice 
Department official testified that during a review of a
random sample of 1,067 passports stolen from visa-waiver countries, the Justice 
Department found that almost 10 percent had been used to enter the United States 
successfully. More than half of the stolen passports were no
t listed in the I.N.S.'s Lookout database.

Of course, that's our problem, not Belgium's. It's easy to forget that when it comes 
right down to it, even a country like Belgium, with which the United States has a long 
and amicable relationship, sees this issue throug
h an entirely different lens. Politically, Belgium now takes passport fraud seriously 
because it reeks of political corruption and bumbling bureaucracy -- not exactly the 
image the country wants to project. But practicall
y, the loss of a few hundred passports here and there is hardly a matter of grave 
concern. After all, the people who usually use these passports are not coming into 
Belgium to wreak havoc there.

Their crimes, whatever they are, are usually committed elsewhere. Like terrorism. It's 
chilling how often it is pointed out to me in Brussels that although terrorists may be 
passing through Belgium -- or using Belgium as
a base of operations, or assuming Belgian identities to slip into other countries -- 
they aren't killing people or blowing up buildings in Belgium. ''Strictly speaking,'' 
boasts Glenn Audenaert, the plain-spoken chief of
the Belgian federal police, ''Belgium does not have a problem with terrorism. You have 
a problem with terrorism.''



Jeff Goodell is the author of ''Sunnyvale: The Rise and Fall of a
Silicon Valley Family.''


Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company
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sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'�with its many half-truths, mis-
directions and outright frauds�is used politically by different groups with
major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought.
That being said, CTRLgives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and
always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no
credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply.

Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
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