American Antiterror Inspections Will Begin at 3 European Ports

ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands, June 28 – As part of its effort against terrorism, the United States has secured permission to station specially trained American customs officials in three large European ports in the coming weeks. The aim is to learn more about cargo heading for the United States and to screen sea containers for possible weapons of mass destruction, a United States Customs Service spokesman said.

The agreement, announced here this week, will first involve the ports of Rotterdam in the Netherlands, Antwerp in Belgium, and Le Havre in France. Talks are under way with five other European ports, in Germany, Italy and Spain. A similar arrangement is already in place in Canada with the ports of Halifax, Montreal and Vancouver.

Eventually, customs officials hope to extend the system to the 20 ports around the world that send the largest volume of cargo to the United States. Those 20 ports, said the customs spokesman, Dean Boyd, jointly account for almost 70 percent of the 5.7 million containers shipped by sea to the United States each year.

As part of the European agreement, American inspectors will be given access to shipping manifests before vessels reach any of the three ports. If any part of the cargo is deemed suspect, the containers will be scanned, inspected or even unpacked by the local port authorities before heading to the United States.

The first five American inspectors will arrive in the coming weeks in Rotterdam, the world's largest port, a Dutch official said. Rotterdam was the first European harbor to agree to the arrangement, which was signed here on Tuesday by Robert C. Bonner, commissioner of the United States Customs Service. Belgium signed on to it on Wednesday, and France today.

A spokeswoman for Dutch customs, RenÈe Wesdorp, said Rotterdam's port had its own system of risk analysis for the more than 400 million containers that pass through in a year. But that system will now be expanded by the efforts of the American inspectors, who bring their own computer database to the task.

"We're basically fine-tuning the system," Ms. Wesdorp said. "We'll start with a six-month pilot project and then see if it's useful to continue."

Security experts say the American inspection campaign, however broad-based it may become, is only a small step in the very large effort to prevent terrorism. But spot scanning, while perhaps comparable to searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack, has proved its benefits in the past, said Tie Schellekens, spokesman for the Rotterdam port. In just their random checks, Rotterdam customs officials find 500 to 600 containers a year that hold hidden weapons, drugs, forbidden chemicals, cigarettes and other smuggled goods.

People have also been found. In October, Italian customs discovered an Egyptian man suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda in a container bound for Canada. The police said at the time that he had false identity documents and maps of various airports with him.

"Once you put a container in a scanner, you can definitely see a human being," Mr. Schellekens said. "We've been able to see birds, down to their little bones."

United States military and customs officials who visited Rotterdam to prepare the agreement earlier this year told their Dutch counterparts that terrorists had explicitly cited the global trade system as one of their targets. But the American officials noted that the system, more than being just a target, was also a crucial vehicle for terrorism. About 90 percent of world trade moves by container, and officials think that the explosives used to attack the American Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 had almost certainly been shipped by sea.

"We are working to sign on as many ports as possible," Mr. Boyd said. "These are all bilateral agreements that take time."

American customs officials have told their Dutch counterparts that goods coming from ports that do not join the American inspection agreements may be delayed when they arrive in the United States.