New York Times News Service - 10/15/05

NEW YORK -- In 1985, two confidential reports warned the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey that the World Trade Center's underground parking garage was an easy target for a car or truck bomb attack.

Six years later, those reports had been all but forgotten, a former trade center director, Charles Maikish, told a Manhattan jury Friday.

And in 1991, the Port Authority commissioned a new report, which found that the main threat to the trade center was from small package bombs in crowded areas.

This report rated the underground garage as a low-risk terrorist attack area, with a "vulnerability factor" of 7, compared with a rating of 350 for the concourse, where people shopped and walked to work.

Maikish, the trade center's director from 1990 to 1997, was cross-examined about the reports Friday during testimony in a negligence suit brought by victims of the terrorist attack at the trade center 18 minutes after noon on Feb. 26, 1993.

Terrorists drove a truck into the garage and set off a bomb, killing six people, injuring 1,000 and fulfilling the forecast in the 1985 reports.

The plaintiffs, including people hurt in the blast and owners of businesses that were destroyed or damaged, argue that the Port Authority had enough information to take precautions against a possible attack, like closing the garage to public parking and searching vehicles, as recommended in those reports.

The defense has said that the bombing was, as Maikish called it in his testimony, "a wake-up call," a type of terrorism that was unprecedented on American soil. The right precautions, the defense argues, seem obvious only in hindsight, with a mentality colored by 9/11.

"Did anybody ever show you any of these reports?" a lawyer for the plaintiffs, David J. Dean, asked Maikish, referring to the 1985 documents. One report was done by an antiterrorist task force within the authority, the other by an outside consultant.

"Prior to Feb. 26, 1993?" Maikish replied. "No."

"Did you ever ask for them?" Dean asked.

"I didn't know they existed," Maikish replied. "How would I ask for them?"

Maikish said his boss, Stanley Brezenoff, executive director of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, also did not know about the 1985 internal report until after the bombing. Maikish said he eventually learned that only five copies had been made, each marked to show the identity of the recipient.

Dean then asked Maikish if, when he became the center's director, he asked his predecessors for "what you've got on security."

"Mr. Dean, I don't remember," Maikish said. "That's 14 years ago."

When Dean pressed the point, Maikish said that when he took over, he received a briefing book in which thousands of reports on many issues had been distilled. The book, he said, did not include the 1985 internal report or the one done by the outside security expert, Charles Schnabolk, which also warned of the danger in the garage.

In 1991, as the Persian Gulf War raised fears of terrorism, the Port Authority commissioned a "Vulnerability Study," which identified two main threats: a small, hand-carried bomb with the explosive power of two pounds of TNT, and automatic and semiautomatic weapons.

The 1993 bombing carried the force of 1,500 pounds of dynamite.