Former Customs Agent Diane Kleiman has a message for America: If Osama bin Laden wants to execute another 9/11-style attack that this time may kill tens of thousands of Americans, it won't be as tough as most of us now believe.
Despite two years of tightened airport security, a massive new bureaucracy dubbed the Transportation Security Administration, dead-bolted cockpit doors and thousands of new sky marshals, Kleiman has identified a dangerously weak link in the security chain that none of the above will fix.
Since 1999 - two years before the 9/11 attacks - she's been sounding the alarm about massive security breaches at America's airports, lapses that, luckily enough, have been taken advantage of so far only by Caribbean drug rings.
Four years ago Kleiman was a rookie Customs agent fresh from her previous job as a prosecutor in Queens, when she discovered that airport workers at JFK were not merely negligent when it came to airport security but, at least in one case, actually complicit in a Haitian drug-smuggling ring.
Working with a DEA agent who tipped her to the drug trafficking and helped guide her investigation, she eventually gathered enough evidence to pinpoint a suspect.
When Customs inspectors nabbed Kleiman's Haitian drug mule, he was carrying over 46 pounds of cocaine.
But the most troubling part of Kleiman's bust had less to do with her target than who his accomplice was. Sitting on the plane right behind the Haitian drug suspect: an American Airlines employee with a key to all the airport exit doors.
"This was a really big deal," Kleiman told New York Magazine last summer. "We got not only the drug smuggler but an employee involved in the internal conspiracy as well."
But what should have been a moment of supreme professional triumph quickly turned into a career disaster when her superiors at Customs ordered Kleiman to pretend that the bust was the result of a random search - and launched a cover-up of other details that pointed to a deeply corrupt bureaucracy bent on camouflaging a massive a security breakdown at JFK.
Kleiman was eventually fired after on-the job verbal harassment, anti-Semitic taunts and a threat against her mother's life failed to persuade her to resign. She currently has two lawsuits seeking redress for unwarranted dismissal.
But more importantly, the ex-Customs agent says that because virtually none of the security lapses she identified at JFK have been corrected, Americans are still vulnerable to another 9/11-style attack using the same method employed by the drug ring she busted.
During her short time at JFK, Kleiman discovered that baggage handlers, maintenance workers, food service employees and ground personnel - many of whom have never had a background check and who may even be in the country illegally - enjoy virtually unfettered access to aircraft.
Meanwhile, Mr. and Mrs. John Q. Passenger are subjected to everything from casual patdowns to strip searches every time they so much as get near an airplane.
"You had these illegal aliens working for the airlines - and they were smuggling in drugs. My concern became, what else are they putting on the plane?" Kleiman told NewsMax.
Kleiman's warning about airport security hit home in spades in November, when headlines reporting a far more extensive JFK drug smuggling ring exploded in New York newspapers.
"A team of baggage handlers at Kennedy Airport operated like a well-oiled machine in receiving massive deliveries of drugs on the tarmac over the past decade," reported the New York Post on Nov. 25.
"The feds have charged 25 accused members of a drug-smuggling ring with bringing in at least 400 kilos of cocaine and hundreds of pounds of marijuana over the past 14 months alone," the paper said. It was the biggest drug bust ever at a U.S. airport.
"The defendants' status as airline employees gave them unfettered access, unlimited opportunity and the ability to act with virtual impunity," U.S. Attorney Roslynn Mauskopf told reporters at the time.
Since November's massive coke bust, Kleiman's concern has grown to encompass the lack of reaction from politicians, some of whom have made a second career out of complaining that the Bush administration has shortchanged America on homeland security.
Over the Christmas holiday, ABC News in New York covered her story, in a broadcast that caught the eye of someone in the office of Sen. Charles Schumer.
The case seemed tailor-made for Schumer, a go-getter Democrat who's made port security one of his biggest public concerns. Adding fuel to Kleiman's warnings, the nation's terrorist alert status had just been elevated to condition Orange, and U.S.-bound flights from France and Mexico were being halted over terrorist concerns.
But for reasons still unclear to the Customs whistle-blower, Schumer's office balked. A scheduled press conference to showcase Kleiman's concerns was postponed, then dropped.
Schumer's New York colleague, Sen. Hillary Clinton - who's also made homeland security a cause celebre - has yet to show any interest in Kleiman's revelations.
One possible problem with her case that might cause Democrats like Clinton and Schumer to avert their eyes: Kleiman's story reflects badly on then-Customs Bureau chief Ray Kelly, a Clinton administration appointee who is now New York City's police commissioner.
Meanwhile, the former Customs agent continues to work with the offices of Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, both of whom have acknowledged the seriousness of Kleiman's warnings. But neither has much influence in New York, where concerns about another terrorist attack are most acute.
As she waits for officials in New York and Washington to repair America's weakest security link, Kleiman has taken her message to talk radio.
Her story stunned legendary talk host Barry Farber, who interviewed Kleiman last month on the Talk Radio Network.
Farber later told NewsMax, "Here she was, a law-school graduate with good experience as a prosecutor, who enters the Customs Service assuming her teammates are the honest eyes and ears of the United States.
"And instead she falls into a witch's brew of corruption, insider criminality, bureaucratic turf superseding national security. Diane's story shows that weapons of mass destruction could enter America as easily as drugs and illegal aliens."
Appearing on WOR's Bob Grant Show in December, the former Customs agent-turned-modern-day-Paul Revere warned: "New York is in trouble. We're targets. And if we don't start doing something now, we're going to have another disaster."
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