The major targets know well who they are, and won’t discuss security preparations for fear of inviting attack. But it’s no secret in the security industry, now busier than ever. Arms makers and symbols of American cultural imperialism, from media moguls to fast-food giants, are at high risk, warns Cherkasky. Chuck Vance, head of Vance Security in Washington, says his office is deluged by U.S. multinationals that fear a second wave of assaults.
Personal safety is no longer a worry only for top brass. The September 11 hijackers made no distinction between the CEO and the janitor, so security is being tightened for all employees, as well as entire corporate campuses. Clients want the latest technology. They demand that trained guards be flown to hinterland cities. Some even want walls tested for blast resistance. Money is no object. “Most of our time is spent calming people down,” says Robert Oatman, an ex-cop who trains bodyguards through R.L. Oatman & Associates in Maryland.
American companies are now studying every detail of their defenses. A vulnerability survey can cost up to $50,000 for a CEO with an office, several homes, a car and a yacht, or much more to review an entire company. Often, security specialists say, they must find a tactful way to explain to nervous CEOs that they are not big enough fish to be targeted by international terrorists and do not need $75-an-hour armed bodyguards. “Guns and businessmen do not go well together,” says Christopher Grose, a director at Control Risk Group in London. “The main aim is not to get into trouble in the first place.”
The details of September 11 showed that little things saved lives. Jerome Glazebrook, who has managed security for Henry Kissinger and Salman Rushdie, says you start by knowing where top people are at all times. After September 11, a large company hired Glazebrook to review its four-inch-thick “crisis-management manual,” which turned out to be 10 years old and full of nonworking phone numbers. The security chief took early retirement.
Companies are starting with basic changes in operations. They are rethinking whether they really want to post photos of executives on the Web, or to identify their parking places out front. They are looking at better lighting and higher fences. They are starting to enforce existing security rules against having top executives fly together. Evacuation plans are taking on a new urgency, particularly in centers of Islamic unrest. How, companies are asking, do we get our people out of Indonesia if commercial and charter flights are suspended?
The mood in Europe is calmer. Security is already tight, the legacy of high-profile CEO assassinations and kidnappings conducted over the years by drug lords, mafiosi and local terrorists. “We’ve lived with IRA terrorists for years,” says John Legge, managing director of Whitehall Security Services in London, who says his clients have made no noticeable changes, except to counteract the threat of anthrax in the mailroom. German CEOs have routinely employed bodyguards, armored cars and metal detectors since the 1989 murder of a Deutsche Bank president. Lord John Browne, CEO of British energy giant BP, says he has required no major security upgrade since September 11. Anders Dahlvig, CEO of Swedish furniture maker IKEA, has recalled expats from Pakistan and given employees the right to refuse business trips. But he has not curtailed his own travel plans so far.
It’s not clear just how tight security will get, or should get. Some experts see a rapid evolution from easily faked photo IDs to smart cards–embedded with details (favorite color, sports team) likely to be known only by the holder–and iris scans. In this view, corporate lobbies are likely to become as tight as airports, with metal detectors and sophisticated camera arrays. Oliver Vellacott, CEO of London-based IndigoVision, which makes the software for digital cameras used in airports and robots, says, “Big Brother is turning into Big Mother, the benign watcher.” Others are not so sure. William Hawthorne, head of a Boston security firm that bears his name, is skeptical of “a new model of risk,” noting the continued prevalence of old threats: street crime, workplace violence, kidnapping. In the post-September 11 world of terror, that sounds oddly reassuring.
