Catching the Visa Express: The awful program that allows Saudis to skip into the U.S - program allowing residents of Saudi Arabia to get US visas at travel agencies National Review, July 1, 2002 by Joel Mowbray Three Saudis who were among the last of the 9/11 homicide hijackers to enter this country didn't visit a U.S. embassy or consulate to get their visas; they went to a travel agent, to whom they submitted only a short, two-page form and a photo. The program that made this possible, Visa Express, is still using travel agents in Saudi Arabia to fulfill this vital role in U.S. border security. Shortly after 9/11, the Bureau of Consular Affairs (CA), the agency within the State Department that oversees visa issuance as well as embassies and consulates in foreign nations, directed its offices around the world to "take a hard look at their current visa operations and see if there are any measures that could be taken to further strengthen the process." An obvious target for this review should have been Visa Express, which allows residents of Saudi Arabia, including non-Saudi citizens, to apply for non-immigrant visas at private travel agencies. After submitting the short form and photo to a travel agent, applicants simply wait to receive a visa in the mail. Most Saudi applicants never come into direct contact with a U.S. citizen until stepping off the airplane onto American soil. One senior CA official describes the program as "an open-door policy for terrorists." It's striking that three 9/11 hijackers entered the U.S. through Visa Express, because the program was established just three months before 9/11. And that's not the only reason Visa Express has raised serious concerns among security experts. Take a sample month: The U.S. consulate in Jeddah interviewed only two of 104 applicants, rejecting none. The month in question? The first 30 days after 9/11. Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world that enjoys such privileges when it comes to visas. (In some other nations, partial versions of Visa Express are available -- but to very few applicants. Twenty-eight countries -- almost all in Western Europe -- participate in Visa Waiver, which permits travel to America without a visa.) So Visa Express is on the chopping block, surely? Not even close. The U.S. embassy in Saudi Arabia breathlessly promotes the program. The embassy's website proclaims that "applicants will no longer have to take time off from work [and] no longer have to wait in long lines under the hot sun." Use of the program is not simply encouraged; it is expected of applicants. In December 2001, assistant secretary for consular affairs Mary Ryan boasted in an internal memo that CA "has been fully involved in the campaign against terrorism." Despite her claims, little has been done to try to close this particular "open door" for terrorists. Last October, the embassy assured Saudis that the U.S. had "not changed its procedures or policies in determining visa eligibility as a result of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001." And internal actions at CA indicate that nothing has changed since. Senior CA officials concede that reform of Visa Express is not being seriously considered. The Visa Express program is a symptom of deeply rooted problems in the bureau, which is charged with a unique, and conflicting, pair of goals: to provide public diplomacy on the front lines and to screen out potential terrorists before they reach our shores. In the past decade, CA has done a solid job achieving the former objective, but it has come at the expense of the latter. "Mary Ryan has chosen diplomacy over law enforcement," complains Nikolai Wenzel, a former consular officer in Mexico City. CA is fully aware of the contradictoriness of its aims. In a cable outlining model practices for consulates, Ryan lists the elements of an interview that follows a visa application. "An interviewing officer must be alert to, and investigate, fraud indicators without unduly offending a potentially bona fide applicant. Achieving all this in a few minutes' interview is not easy." A "few minutes" is typically 2-3 minutes, and that's only for a relative handful of applicants who initially are turned down for a visa. Ryan refers to the visa window as the "face of the embassy," providing "front line diplomacy." Foreign Service officers (FSOs), who staff consulates, are inundated with messages about politeness and courtesy, and their job-performance reviews focus primarily on those factors, not on their ability to screen out terrorists. This "courtesy culture" has been intentionally nurtured by Ryan in her nine years as the head of CA. She continually stresses the importance of "fundamental fairness" - - for foreigners, even those who don't meet the relatively low standards for receiving a visa. In loosening the visa-application process, Ryan may have crossed lines established by Congress. Wenzel flatly states: "Mary Ryan's instructions are in direct violation of the law." He points to the intense pressure placed on FSOs to grant visas in the absence of a compelling reason to refuse an application: "The burden of proof is supposed to be on the applicant under the law, but the reality in the field was just the opposite." 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - Next Ryan's tenure has been marked by a steady decline in the number of applicants subjected to interviews. "It used to be most people were interviewed; now it's about one-fifth," notes Jessica Vaughan, a former consular officer in Belgium and Trinidad and Tobago. The new policy followed at most consulates is that an interview is conducted only if an application is red-flagged, and thus refused, on the first check. An application can be set aside for follow-up for a number of reasons, such as suspicious reasons listed for travel (an eight-month vacation for a lower-middle-class Mexican, for example) or the presence of the applicant's name in the lookout system, a composite database of 5.7 million people on various watch lists. A June 2001 cable from Ryan clearly states the current policy: "No refusals without an interview." The same cable goes on to say that visa applicants must be given "every reasonable opportunity to establish eligibility to receive a visa." Every refused applicant is entitled to an oral and written explanation for the reasons behind the refusal. Depending on the consulate, up to one-fifth of rejected applicants overcome the refusal and secure a visa by providing additional documentation or proving credible in an interview. Vaughan suspects that the dramatic reduction in interviews is part of a larger plan by Ryan: "[Her] ultimate goal is to make it possible for consular officers to get through the day without seeing any applicants or having to say no to anybody." This cynical view is at least partially borne out by Ryan's own words. The head of CA has made no secret of her desire to eliminate the interview requirement wherever possible, stating in a CA cable that this is a "very worthy goal. Surprisingly, though, Ryan strongly believes that interviews are essential to the visa process. Well, sort of. "When it comes to judging credibility, there is simply no substitute for a personal interview," she wrote in a 2001 cable. The memo goes on to instruct consular officers to "rely primarily on the interview itself, and only minimally on supporting documentation." Her missive praises interviews, however, not as a way to keep out bad guys, but as a way to avoid keeping out "qualified aliens who may have appeared weak on paper, but could have overcome [that appearance] with a strong showing of credibility." She never discusses the possibility that interviews could screen out applicants who look strong on paper but are not credible in person. CA is also very concerned about the system's convenience for applicants. Ryan explains that the intent of CA's policy is to "permit waiver of the interview when it is clear that the alien is eligible for the visa and an interview would be an unnecessary inconvenience." But eliminating interviews is not considered a wise move by law-enforcement experts, who place a premium on the value of face-to-face contact. "It's not foolproof, but at least interviews give you a much better chance of keeping out dangerous individuals," says former CIA director Jim Woolsey. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - Next Even when CA does turn its attention to border security, it tends not to focus on keeping out the most dangerous applicants. "If you're a drug smuggler from Sweden, your chances of getting in are almost 100 percent. If you're a perfectly responsible, God-fearing person from Guatemala, your chances of getting in are maybe 10 percent," says Wayne Merry, a former consular officer. CA doesn't hide its policy regarding the role of money in determining visa eligibility. CA spokesman Ed Dickens casually admits that countries with high refusal rates almost always "have lots of poor people." Focusing attention on the poor might make sense when battling an epidemic of illegal nannies flooding homes in the Hollywood Hills, but it seems an unwise strategy when it comes to screening out terrorists. "What's absolutely stunning is that even 9/11 didn't change the way consulates operate. It's still business as usual," fumes a senior CA official. The role of money in the visa process is especially pronounced in Visa Express, because CA's written policy is that "if the travel agency is reasonably satisfied that the traveler has the means to buy a tour 'package,' there will be little further evaluation of the applicant's qualifications." In other words, anyone able to flash a wad of cash -- something any al-Qaeda operative could do -- is automatically eligible for a visa. Applicants are still primarily screened for their likelihood of trying to get a minimum-wage job once in America, not for any potential security threats they might pose. Although a poor person can be denied a visa on poverty grounds, someone with a history of advocating terrorism cannot be refused for, well, advocating terrorism. U.S. law prevents denial of a visa to a person simply because he has a history of advocating terrorism; an applicant may be rejected only if he has actively aided a terrorist organization, or if he gives a reason -- aside from actually advocating terrorism -- for the consulate to believe that he might commit a terrorist act. (The recently enacted Enhanced Border Security and Visa Reform Act failed to address this issue.) Visa Express also faces logistical challenges. The name and date of birth of all applicants are entered into a computer and checked against the lookout database; the search parameters are intentionally set wide, so that anyone in the system with a similar name or date of birth registers as a possible match. An FSO must then scroll through the list and determine whether one is a match to the applicant. An example: In Saudi Arabia, the name Muhammed al-Wahabi, the Arab equivalent of John Smith, with a date of birth around 1977, could result in up to 100 potential hits for the FSO to scroll through. To fully appreciate the complexity of this task, one must factor in the time element: FSOs in Saudi Arabia process anywhere between 40 and 80 applications per day, and conduct an additional 10 to 20 interviews. State Department spokesman Christopher Lamora claims that "it is not technologically possible to issue visas to people whose names appear in the system and fail to clear the system." In the literal sense, Lamora's statement is correct, but a name can clear the system if the FSO simply doesn't spot the match to an applicant. A classic example of human error occurred in a South Asian nation, where a young woman was refused on her first two visa applications. On her third try, she filled out the two-page form in exactly the same fashion, save for one detail: She changed her date of birth by two years. It worked. The FSO processing her third application missed her on the list. This human error occurred less than four months ago. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - Next Even in the absence of human error, the software faces major, and often insurmountable, hurdles in tracking Arab names. There is no single transliteration system from Arabic to English, which means that any Arabic word, including a name, can have a dozen or more correct English spellings. Think Osama versus Usama, or Yasser versus Yasir. And those are the easy ones. Consider an Arabic name with a personal name, an honorific, a patronymic, a lakab (usually a religious name denoting a personal virtue), a nickname, an occupational name, and a hisba (derived from one's residence or place of birth), or any combination thereof, and you can start to appreciate the difficulties facing the software. Furthermore, this screening process is conducted by junior-level officers with little experience. FSOs responsible for visa screening are new to the Foreign Service, typically young, often unmotivated, and almost always under-trained and under-prepared. Consular officers who check visas are derisively referred to within the Foreign Service as "visa-stampers." It's a mandatory stint for every FSO -- a two-year paying of dues. Compounding the potential for errors in Visa Express is the de facto deputization of private Saudi travel agents. These gents -- who have no formal relationship with consulates and operate with very little oversight -- are expected to handle some of the consulate's workload. "The consular officer is relying on the travel agency to screen out obviously unqualified applicants," notes one CA cable. Even the most clearly dangerous applicants have a way to slip past the guardians: sheer fraud. Abdulla Noman, a Yemeni citizen and Saudi resident who worked at the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, admitted last month that he had sold between 50 and 100 visas, from September 1996 until last November, when he was arrested. Officials have not yet been able to locate all the people who obtained visas through Noman. U.S. officials caught Noman because he worked directly for the consulate; it's not as easy to catch the travel agents. With mounds of reporting (some in this magazine) exposing Saudi Arabia as a breeding ground for anti-American fanaticism and radical Islam, the natural question is why the Saudis have been singled out for the special treatment of Visa Express. At least some of the blame must rest on Ryan's "courtesy culture," which was directly injected into the consulate there by Thomas P. Furey, who was consul general in Riyadh from summer 2000 through fall 2001, and who was responsible for implementation of Visa Express. Furey, a confidant of Ryan, is well known within CA for his trademark expression: "People gotta have their visas." Of course, the official line on why Saudi Arabia received Visa Express is that it is a trustworthy source of qualified visa applicants -- an argument that seems less compelling in the wake of 9/11. State Department spokesman Lamora said that Visa Express was instituted because of "a traditionally low visa-refusal rate and incidence of fraud among Saudi applicants." This justification is in keeping with unofficial, but observed, guidelines at CA. According to a senior CA official, the typical practice is that so-called "third-party screening" is not implemented on a large scale in countries with refusal rates of 6 percent or higher. CA has reported that the refusal rate for Saudis is a scant 3 percent -- justifying the existence of the Visa Express program. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 - Next hose numbers, however, are very misleading, if not outright false. According to a consular document from Riyadh, the overall refusal rate for Saudi national and third-country-national (TCN) applicants was 24 percent. The document showed a refusal rate for TCNs of 30 percent, and for Saudi nationals of over 10 percent. The CA press office vociferously denied the statistics -- until, that is, it was presented with the summary of a document obtained from an unnamed source at CA. The press office now concedes -- for the first time -- that the overall refusal rate for Saudi nationals and TCNs is 23 percent. The only remaining point of contention is the breakdown of refusal rates for Saudi nationals and TCNs; CA still maintains that the refusal rate for Saudi nationals is 3 percent. But even if CA's figures on Saudi nationals are correct, the bureau is still violating its own internal protocol by granting Visa Express to a country where nearly one-fourth of applicants are refused. Former CIA director Woolsey recommends that "at the very least [Visa Express] be thoroughly reviewed, and most likely overhauled." One -- unlikely -- option would be to scrap the program altogether as a way to alter our relationship with the Saudis. "This is a policy statement we're making by granting easy visas, and it would make an even greater statement if we stopped the program," asserts a senior administration official. Any system that replaces Visa Express would have to be designed with some simple facts in mind. Adam Garfinkle, editor of The National Interest, is quick to note: "The entire Saudi society generates attitudes that are inherently anti-American. That's just the way it is. At the same time, the Saudi government has sought very close ties with the United States. Ultimately, these two things are incompatible." As for the president's plan to create a new cabinet-level department for homeland defense, it's likely to have only a marginal impact on the operations of Consular Affairs. Although the administration blueprint suggests that the new agency will eventually oversee visa procedures, the State Department insists that it "will continue to administer the visa application issuance process." Even if the new agency successfully wrested control of visas from CA, the shift in authority would take years. Nor would the new fingerprint-and-photograph tracking of visitors and immigrants recently announced by attorney general John Ashcroft have an immediate impact on Visa Express. The tracking is already in place for people coming from five Middle Eastern nations -- Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, and Syria -- but there are no indications Saudi Arabia will make the list anytime soon. Even if Saudis were subjected to this treatment, however, only identity fraud would be curtailed. People with clean records but malicious intent would face no additional hurdles. And the systemic problem with the visa process reaches far beyond Saudi Arabia. "The entire culture at CA must change before reforms will mean anything," says a senior CA official. Mary Ryan's "courtesy culture" is inherently inimical to the types of reforms necessary to keep out terrorists. It -- and she -- must go. COPYRIGHT 2002 National Review, Inc. COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group end - mpg Cached/copied 04-26-07 |