Lessons of shoe-bomb incident

Airport-security personnel on duty Saturday must not have thought Richard Reid fit the profile of a well-drilled terrorist. Perhaps he looked too scruffy. He didn't carry a passport from any countries terrorists frequent.

But if the suspected "shoe bomber" aboard a transatlantic flight were not acting alone - a possibility authorities are now taking seriously - it means that terrorists are already finding ways to circumvent the profile that law enforcement has developed to trap them. It also means that preventing similar acts in the future will be even more difficult.

"People should be worried not so much about ... the upper echelons of Al Qaeda, but about the foot soldiers, like Reid," says Magnus Ranstorp, a terrorism expert at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. "Al Qaeda is not just governed from the top down; it's also from the bottom up. And detecting people like Mohammed Atta or Reid will be an even tougher law enforcement challenge."

Experts say that the tall, lanky

passenger on Flight 63 with plastic explosives in his hightops likely did not act alone. The explosives were too sophisticated for a drifter to obtain; more likely, he was a tester for a larger terrorist organization, they say.

"It's a classic evolution of criminal organizations: When you clamp down on one kind of drug carrier or operative, they reach out to others," says Mary Schiavo, a former inspector general at the US Department of Transportation.

Whatever the conclusion on this point, Mr. Reid is now Exhibit A for the need for law enforcement to expand its profiles.

Born in southeast London, the son of a Jamaican father and British mother, Reid scraped by in his early years selling drugs, breaking into cars, and mugging people, according to recent news reports. These activities led to time in juvenile detention, then jail. In prison, he became interested in Islam, and on his release in 1995, he took up study at a mosque in the Brixton section of south London, according to the mosque's leader, Abdul Haqq Baker. There, he may have met Zacarias Moussaoui, the suspected 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 attacks.

By 1998, Reid was moving with more radical Islamic groups, according to Mr. Baker. He grew a beard and changed his name to Abdel Rahim. Often, he would return to the Brixton mosque wearing flak jackets and disputing whether the teachings in the mosque were "pure Islam."

The changes worried Baker, who had already complained to police that radical elements were gaining control over many of the young men. "He was not stupid, but he was gullible, and he would not have been capable of having done this by himself," Baker told reporters.

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