Twenty-four days before the Opening Ceremony of the 2002 Winter Olympics, the FBI’s counterterrorism unit sent a memo to its agents in Utah.
The FBI had received a tip from an employee at a cell service provider that a customer had racked up a $103,597 phone bill by making calls to Egypt, Yemen, Nigeria and Saudi Arabia, as well as calls to and from Salt Lake City. The employee was worried the calls could be part of terrorist activities.
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The employee sent her tip by email, and the text was included in the FBI memo.
"While I could lose my job for providing you with this information, I’m too much of a patriot to remain silent," the employee wrote to the FBI. "I hope this information is useful in any investigation you deem appropriate to pursue. Thank you and God Bless America."
The tip is recounted in 1,200 pages of FBI documents concerning security at the Salt Lake City Olympics, which the FBI code named "Wasatch Rings." The FBI recently provided the pages to The Salt Lake Tribune in response to a Freedom of Information Act request.
The pages include a letter from Mitt Romney, who was president and CEO of the Salt Lake Organizing Committee and is now campaigning for the Republican nomination for U.S. president. The March 16, 2000, letter to then-FBI Director Louis Freeh is more personal than professional. Romney thanks Freeh for meeting with him and U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch and commends Freeh for his integrity and leadership.
FBI files on the 2002 Olympics - Section 1
"I’ve enclosed a photo from our last Christmas card to show you what happens to a house full of little boys when they grow up," Romney wrote. "As you can see, two of mine are married and one couple has already brought us a granddaughter. The advent of a female birth should give you hope that someday a little girl can push her way through all the male chromosomes."
Romney and his wife have five sons. Freeh and his wife have six.
In the final paragraph of the one-page letter, Romney invites Freeh to return to Utah to see the Olympic venues.
"Then again," Romney wrote, "you might actually be closer to our cabin in New Hampshire: There’s plenty of room for your boys and mine over at Lake Winnepesake."
It appears Romney was referring to Lake Winnipesaukee, the largest lake in New Hampshire.
The Wasatch Rings file begins with a memo dated June 16, 1995, advising FBI officials that the International Olympic Committee had awarded the Games to Salt Lake City earlier that day. Through the 1,200 pages, FBI agents and supervisors discuss their plans for keeping the Games safe from terrorists — foreign and domestic — and what they deemed as threats along the way.
The FBI was in charge of investigating any terror threats against the Olympics and was to plan for and to take command if a crisis struck the Games. The pages sometimes contain painstaking detail, including about 35 pages from 1999 discussing new windows being placed in University of Utah dormitories, which served as athlete housing during the Games. Other documents offer only vignettes of the preparation.
There are memos requesting that FBI agents receive training on how to operate snowmobiles, memos saying that the distances between game venues would require extra SWAT teams that could be stationed near the venues, and a memo about how a certain type of detector would be ineffective at warning authorities about an airborne biological attack.
Even before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, agents were discussing potential deadly scenarios that might occur during the Olympics, said Dave Tubbs, who retired from the FBI in 2000 to be the executive director of the Utah Olympic Public Safety Command.
"We had planned for almost anything you can conceive of," Tubbs told The Tribune, "including flying a plane into the opening and closing ceremonies."
Tubbs is now the Grand County justice court judge.
FBI files on the 2002 Olympics - Section 3
The documents demonstrate how Sept. 11 and the anthrax attacks that began days afterward enhanced, but also threatened to detract from security at the Salt Lake City Olympics. In one memo dated Dec. 21, 2001, the FBI field office in Washington, D.C., said it remained busy guarding against threats to the Capitol and requested to retain a HAZMAT team and bomb technician that had previously been earmarked to go to Salt Lake City.
The Washington field office "regrets any difficulty this creates for Salt Lake," the memo said. The request was approved, and Olympic security had to find replacements.
Ray Mey, an FBI agent who was transferred to Salt Lake City in 1998 to help coordinate security, said in an interview last month that he attended a meeting in Washington shortly after 9/11 where he stressed the Olympics had to remain a priority for the federal government.
"There was a jockeying around of resources, but in the end, because of all the state and federal resources, we had this thing covered," said Mey, who retired from the FBI in 2006 and lives in Park City.
In responding to the Freedom of Information Act request, the FBI withheld 300 pages for various reasons, including national security concerns. The disclosed pages were often redacted.
FBI files on the 2002 Olympics - Section 4
In the case of the $103,597 phone bill, the FBI ordered agents in Denver to make contact with the tipster and report additional findings to the Salt Lake City office. The provided pages offer no indication that the bureau ever located the suspicious account holder. The identity of the tipster and customer are redacted.
On Oct. 13, 2001, Ogden police stopped a rented car carrying two Russian men, according to the documents. The men said they were employed by a company that was seeking lodging for their clients, who planned to attend the Games. The men had a digital camera with pictures of Olympic and tourist sites in Ogden, Salt Lake City and Park City. Ogden police let them go but forwarded the information to the FBI.
The FBI documents go on to say that the Russian Olympic delegation claimed to not know the men or their clients. An FBI counterintelligence investigation could not verify the story told by the two men or identify their company.
Another recently retired FBI agent, Dan Roberts, told The Tribune that every tip law enforcement received was investigated.
"There were scary things that were out there at that time that were followed up on aggressively," said Roberts, who retired in June as an assistant director of the FBI.
Olympic Games in other cities also are discussed in the FBI memos, particularly the 1998 Games in Nagano, Japan. FBI and Utah law enforcement wanted a public safety plan in place prior to the Nagano Games so Utah organizers could attend the Nagano Games and judge whether plans for Salt Lake City would work.
But a memo dated May 29, 1997, says Utah law enforcement wasn’t able to send as many observers as it wanted to Nagano due to the lack of transportation and housing in Japan.
Money also comes up in the documents. The FBI field office in Salt Lake City made multiple requests to headquarters for additional funding to help plan and coordinate the Games. In 1996, the field office thought then-U.S. Sen. Bob Bennett had earmarked $3 million in planning and startup costs. It turned out that money was supposed to go to Ogden so the city could upgrade its communications systems.
It’s estimated that Olympic security — from paying local police to F-16 fighter jets which patrolled airspace — cost between $300 million and $400 million. The Wasatch Rings documents say 1,400 FBI employees were deployed for the Games.
The Salt Lake City Olympics did not suffer a terrorist attack or any other major safety problems. The documents reveal someone in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, called in a bomb threat against the Olympics on Feb. 15, 2002, as the Games were about half completed. On Feb. 18, an FBI squad put on their bomb suits and investigated a backpack left on a trash can on Main Street in Park City. No explosives were found.
The Closing Ceremony was Feb. 24. The final pages in the file were written about two weeks later by supervisors at the Salt Lake City FBI office recommending awards for specific personnel — agents, auto mechanics, computer specialists and secretaries — who gave outstanding performances during the Games.
Mey acknowledges luck also kept the Games safe. No venue meant for thousands of people can be completely secure, he said, yet no terrorist attempted an attack.
"Better to be lucky than good," Mey said, "but we were good, too."
Twitter: @natecarlisle
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