Global Policy Forum

By Jeff Goodell

Alain Boucar flips open a passport and holds it under an ultraviolet light. A background image of Belgium's royal palace, faintly printed on the page, vanishes. ''See that?'' he says. He holds another Belgian passport under the spooky purple light. The image on this one is printed in a special reactive ink. It glows brightly. ''The first one's a complete counterfeit,'' he announces.

Boucar is the director of the antifraud unit for the Belgian federal police. A genial 44-year-old, he works in a small, plain office in Brussels that is strewn with dozens of passports. It's only 10 a.m., but it has already been a busy day -- there has been an urgent call from an Interpol agent in Berlin, and another from a security officer on a Dutch cruise ship. Each wanted information from Boucar about suspicious Belgian passports. Every few minutes, a uniformed cop wanders through with a question about a suspect document. ''No good,'' he says with disgust upon being handed an Italian ID card. Lousy fakes annoy Boucar; they are not worthy of his connoisseur's eye.

Boucar's colleague Thierry Descamps steps into his office. He is holding a fax. Descamps nods to the phone and mentions the name of a Belgian police officer on the antiterrorism task force.

Boucar grabs the phone and his face becomes suddenly serious -- the inner cop emerges. While Boucar listens on the phone, he turns to his computer and calls up a database nicknamed Braingate, which is the Belgian police's repository of 1.4 million stolen and fraudulent documents from all over the world. The antiterrorism cop is calling about two Sri Lankans, Nicolas Sebastianpillai and Varunalingam Arudthevan, who were arrested in Faro, Portugal, on Sept. 12, en route to New York. They were traveling on Belgian passports -- stolen ones, that is. (Portuguese security detected a fake stamp on their passports and contacted the Belgian police, who found the passport numbers in Braingate.) Interpol investigators soon began aggressively pursuing suspected links between the men and the Tamil Tigers, the violent Sri Lankan terrorist group. Now the antiterrorism cop wants to know how they got their hands on these Belgian passports.

Boucar punches in the numbers of the passports confiscated by the police in Portugal: EC 503103 and EC 503104. Boucar learns that these two passports were stolen in March, in transit from Belgium to Madagascar: a batch of 25 blank passports was lifted out of a supposedly secure diplomatic pouch. Of all forms of passport fraud, this is one of the most frightening. Only the very best counterfeits make it past airport security. But authentic blank passports, when filled out correctly, are extremely difficult to detect. Virtually the only way to trip up a person traveling on an authentic passport is if he makes an error filling it out or if the passport number turns up in a database of stolen documents. That's why Braingate is so invaluable; without it, the Sri Lankans might well have made it all the way to New York.

Boucar searches Braingate for more information. He tells the cop on the other end of the line that he can find no evidence that the other 23 passports stolen in the same batch have been used by terrorists -- or anyone else, for that matter. Of course, that doesn't mean they haven't been, Boucar tells me. It just means nobody has been caught yet trying to use them. In fact, they have almost surely been sold on the black market, providing two dozen fresh opportunities for terrorists to sneak across international borders.

These 23 passports, Boucar admits, are hardly the only Belgian passports circulating on the black market. In fact, his country has quietly become the global capital of identity fraud. According to the Belgian police, 19,050 blank Belgian passports have been stolen since 1990. This is probably some kind of record, although other problem countries, like Italy, Argentina and South Africa, refuse to confirm numbers.

All these Belgian passports were not stolen in a few grand heists. Rather, small stashes were grabbed from various town halls, embassies, consulates and honorary consulates. Sold on the black market for as much as $7,500, they have subsequently been used by human traffickers, sex traffickers, gun runners and drug dealers, not to mention terrorists.

Indeed, for terrorists making excursions outside the Middle East, Belgian passports are often the document of choice. Ahmed Ressam, the Algerian convicted of plotting to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in 1999, trafficked in a number of false passports, at least one of which was linked to a theft from a town hall in Belgium. And the two members of a Qaeda cell who assassinated the Northern Alliance leader Ahmed Shah Massoud just before Sept. 11 traveled from Brussels to London to Karachi on stolen Belgian passports.

Until this fall, Belgium's passport troubles were little noticed. The Massoud murder, however, exposed the country's problem to the world. It was a huge embarrassment for a small, chronically insecure country that has been working hard to cast itself as one of the economic and political capitals of the New Europe. After Sept. 11, Belgian investigators immediately began tracking down clues. The passports used by the Massoud assassins, Boucar discovered, were stolen in two separate break-ins: one at the Belgian consulate in Strasbourg, France, on June 26, 1999, when 45 passports were stolen, and another a few months later, on Nov. 11, 1999, when 20 were stolen from the Belgian Embassy in The Hague.

The Belgian police are now desperately trying to tighten up security. But even if they succeed, Boucar will be busy for years to come. Terrorists are too determined and the desire for fake passports is too great. Moreover, thousands of stolen Belgian documents remain circulating around the world. Boucar looks up from his computer and gives me a weary look. ''Since Sept. 11,'' he says, ''it has been chaos around here.''

Belgium is, at first glance, a most unlikely spot for chaos. But its longstanding reputation as a sleepy gateway between France and Northern Europe is precisely what has made it attractive to criminals. ''Brussels is at the crossroads of Europe, and an enormous amount of human traffic passes through it,'' says Jonathan M. Winer, a former State Department official and an international-crime expert. ''As a result, Belgium is the place where all sorts of crime seems to settle: drugs, human trafficking, prostitution and identity fraud.''

To get a feeling for this criminal nexus, all you have to do is take a walk along the gritty boulevards around the Gare du Midi in Brussels. The neighborhood's main thoroughfare, Boulevard Maurice Lemonnier, is known to locals as Kandahar Lane. Spits of glistening meat turn in the windows of restaurants, and Middle Eastern music blares from CD shops. The whole neighborhood feels wired to another world: cabins du telephone offer cheap, untraceable communications; Internet cafes let you surf the Web anonymously for two euros an hour; travel shops advertise weekly bus-and-ferry service to Tangier.

According to investigators, it was here at the Dar Salaam hotel that Richard Reid, the accused ''shoe bomber,'' recently spent 10 days plotting to blow up an American Airlines jet. (As if to underscore Belgium's reputation as the back office of terrorism, when Reid was arrested, a map of Brussels was found in his jacket pocket.) The Dar Salaam is more flophouse than hotel, with lots of old linoleum and chipped paint and a cafe on the ground floor that is jammed with Arab men smoking and drinking tea. A few steps away is Marrakech, an Internet cafe where Reid apparently made arrangements to pick up explosives.

On the same block is another terrorist landmark: Le Nil, the restaurant where, on Sept. 19, Belgian police officers found chemicals that had supposedly been stored there by members of a Tunisian network linked to Al Qaeda. Investigators suspect that the chemicals -- 220 pounds of sulfur and 16 gallons of acetone -- were going to be used to build a bomb to blow up the United States Embassy in Paris.

Just across another boulevard from the Dar Salaam is a row of shadowy bars and hotels that face the southern side of the train station. This is the end of Arab turf and, according to the Belgian police, the beginning of a neighborhood controlled by the Albanian mob. The bars and hotels here all have a forsaken look and all seem to be populated by desperate Eastern European men. Here the games are human trafficking, sex trafficking and false documents. ''If you want a passport, this is where you begin to make inquiries,'' says Herman Lefief, a Belgian investigator.

The process is never quick, especially if you are a foreigner or unknown to the sellers. Luk Alloo, a Dutch television journalist who recently purchased a middling-quality counterfeit Belgian passport for $1,500 as part of an undercover investigation, spent three months working similar mob-controlled bars in Antwerp before he found anyone who trusted him enough to get him a passport. ''They never keep anything on the premises,'' Alloo says. ''They have connections, who have connections, who have connections. It's an elaborate operation.''

Until recently, many of those connections eventually led to a little bar about two miles away on the Chausee de Ninove in the Anderlecht district of Brussels. Anderlecht is a gritty landscape of warehouses, falafel joints and muffler shops, but the bar itself is a cheerful enough place; there's a pool table in the center of the room, and video machines blink quietly against one wall. But according to the Belgian police, this bar was -- and may still be -- the base of operations for an Albanian mobster whom Belgian cops refer to as ''M.'' (For legal reasons, they will not allow his name to be published.) From his bar stool, M. ran what investigators say was one of the largest organized stolen-passport rings in Europe.

M. bought and sold thousands of blanks on the black market. His prices ranged from a few hundred dollars for an easy-to-get Albanian passport to $5,000 or more for a newly stolen Belgian or French passport. Investigators have also linked M. to dozens of break-ins at embassies and consulates in Germany, the Netherlands and France.

According to the Belgian police, M.'s network is typical of the complex link between organized crime, passport fraud and terrorism in Belgium. One afternoon in the lounge of the Belgian federal police building, an investigator named Daniel Traweels draws me a picture to help me visualize how it works. He sketches four circles across the top of the page, labeling them P for prostitution, H for human trafficking, D for drugs and T for terrorism. Below, Traweels draws four more circles, identifying them as Romanians, Albanians and other Eastern Europeans who specialize in burglary and document manipulation. In the middle, he draws another circle and connects the circles above and below to the center; he labels it M.

''It's a network,'' Traweels explains. ''He is the middleman. The circles on the top, the buyers, they are of every race: Chinese, Russian, Arab. We have Jewish mobsters who work with Arabs, Arabs who work with Albanians, North Africans who deal with Jews. There is no prejudice in this business.''

But there is specialization, Traweels explains. The Africans are mostly involved in money laundering. The Moroccans are involved in car-jackings, robberies. The Eastern Europeans, especially the Albanians, are expert burglars and safecrackers. These patterns rarely vary. Arabs don't get involved in burglary, nor do terrorist cells attempt large-scale passport theft. ''They leave the dirty work to the experts,'' Traweels says.

Belgium's troubles with stolen blank passports really began only in 1995. At the time, Europe was in the midst of a push toward the creation of a unified state -- the European Union. As part of this transformation, European leaders decided to do away with almost all border controls within Western Europe. In theory, this was meant to simplify travel and, like the introduction of the euro currency, promote the idea of Europe as a coherent economic power. In practice, the lack of borders has also benefited criminals.

A network of Albanians, many of them fleeing the war in the Balkans, found that Belgium was an ideal place to set up shop. Many of them got involved in importing human beings, especially young girls they could force into prostitution. For that, they needed passports. Although counterfeit documents were readily available in Bangkok -- one large counterfeiting operation was run by an ex-K.G.B. agent in Thailand -- the quality was often poor. Eventually, many of these Albanian outlaws, including M., discovered that instead of counterfeiting passports, it was much easier (and more profitable) to steal blanks.

The Belgians made it particularly easy for them. The country's long history of provincial rule -- it didn't become an independent nation until 1831 -- meant that the mayors of tiny communities enjoyed enormous power. One of their perks of office was the ability to distribute passports; for decades, blank Belgian passports were stored in the 600 or so town halls around the country. Often, security amounted to nothing more elaborate than a locked door.

In 1996 alone, 3,600 blank passports were stolen, bit by bit. In some cases, the thieves had to drill their way into a heavy safe to get to the passports -- and if they couldn't crack it, they ripped the safe right out of the wall and carted the whole thing off. In other cases, like a break-in at a town hall in Tongeren, the thieves simply helped themselves to a safe key that had thoughtlessly been left in a desk drawer. Usually there were no witnesses; the burglars left their tools behind, but little else, making the crime difficult to solve -- especially by the local cops, who, as one Belgian federal police officer put it, ''were not terribly worried about the loss of a hundred passports -- they just ordered more.''

Ultimately, it was pressure from the United States that finally persuaded the Belgians to crack down. Back in 1991, Belgium had been admitted to the United States visa-waiver program, which allows citizens from 29 friendly countries to enter this country without applying for a visa. But the fact that blank Belgian passports were being carted off by the truckload alarmed officials in the States. (The United States does not have a problem with passport theft; fewer than 50 blanks issued since 1990 remain unaccounted for.)

By 1997, Belgium's troubles with stolen blanks had gotten so out of hand that United States officials threatened to kick the country out of the visa-waiver program. In 1998, Belgian officials began removing blank passports from town halls and storing them in an ultrasecure building in downtown Brussels. Passports are now distributed by courier, in a system similar to America's.

But that didn't end Belgium's problems. Criminals like M. simply shifted their operations to Belgian consulates and embassies, which were equally insecure, and where hundreds of blanks continued to be stored. The old Belgian Embassy in The Hague, where one of the Massoud passports was stolen, was a typical case. By 18th-century standards, the charming brick town house is solid and secure. By 21st-century standards, it's a joke: there are no bars on the front windows, and the locks look as if they could be jimmied with a screwdriver. Belgium has 110 embassies and consulates worldwide, some more secure than others. It's no wonder that burglars find them so inviting. Last year, the Belgian Embassy in The Hague was finally moved to a secure building across the street from a police station.

As for the stolen passports, they quickly vanish into the criminal underground. The 506 Belgian passports that were stolen from the consulate in Cologne in August 1999 have been found all over the world -- Madrid, Istanbul, Rotterdam, Lagos, Bangkok, Islamabad -- and have been used in a wide variety of crimes, from drug dealing to human trafficking. (Belgian authorities won't say if any ended up in the hands of terrorists.) The passports stolen in Strasbourg and The Hague were used for illegal entry into Congo, China and Morocco; another was found in a house in Rotterdam where three men suspected to have links with Al Qaeda were arrested after Sept. 11.

In the case of M., the cops got lucky. Last January, while executing a search warrant in Brussels on an unrelated case involving a 31-year-old Romanian, they turned up a trove of passport-trafficking goods: typewriters, scanners, immigration stamps for 56 countries, various identity documents (including a Spanish ID card, sans photo, filled out in the name of Bill Clinton) and some 150 stolen blanks -- including 43 Belgian, as well as others from Sweden, Greece and Germany. Most important, however, they found documents and phone records suggesting that the Romanian was one of the main passport suppliers for M.

Investigators staked out the bar where M. conducted business. They logged his arrivals and exits; they tapped his cellphone. They concluded that his network included 50 to 60 people in Belgium, France and the Netherlands.

But ultimately M. was too slick for them. After four months of surveillance, 140 Belgian cops moved in last April to bust his operation. They hoped to nail not only M. but also several notorious passport thieves and safecrackers. It didn't happen. Stashes of cash were found, but the police failed to uncover any major cache of forged or stolen documents. M. himself was clean; searches of his apartment and car turned up nothing more damning than a gun and a bulletproof vest.

M. was held in custody for two months, and he bragged to investigators that he had 30 million Belgian francs hidden in an overseas account that they could never find. And they couldn't. In the end, M. was charged with nothing more serious than consorting with a known criminal organization. Given the almost imperceptible speed of the Belgian courts, he will stand trial in two or three years. Until then, M. is back on the street and, presumably, back in business.

Alain Boucar is extraordinarily proud of Belgium's new high-tech passport. Flipping through one and pointing out its many security features, he's as giddy as a new father showing off his child: ''It's a very beautiful design, don't you think?'' he says, holding it up to the light.

Indeed it is. Thanks largely to this new passport, which Boucar helped design and which was introduced last March, M.'s business probably isn't quite as breezy today as it was last year. By all accounts, it's one of the most secure passports in the world. On the first page there's a graphic illustrating five key security features, including a laser-cut pinhole image of the passport holder, a watermark of King Albert II and an optically variable image of Belgium (which changes from green to blue depending on the viewing angle). ''Most border-control officers have one minute or less to look at a passport and determine if it is genuine,'' Boucar says. ''With this, at least they know what they're looking for.''

This new passport is a triumph for Belgium and a sign that it is taking its problems with passport fraud seriously. Even if characters like M. get their hands on blank versions of this passport, because of features like a digitized photo they will be much more difficult to fill in convincingly. Other countries, including the United States, are similarly upgrading their passports.

Still, it will be years before these new passports make it into wide circulation. Until then, we're stuck with the old documents. As an example, I show Boucar my United States passport. ''How easy would it be for you to put someone else's picture in here?''

Boucar examines it. It's a standard United States passport, issued eight years ago, with a laminated photo page. ''Five minutes.''

He sticks his thumbnail into a corner of the laminate, showing me how you can peel it back. (You can loosen the laminate by sticking it in the freezer or a microwave oven -- it depends on the type of laminate -- or, better yet, by dissolving the adhesive with Undu, a product that is easily ordered on the Internet.) Boucar then points to the little blue emblem, called a guilloche, that overlaps the photo and the passport page and is supposed to make the photo difficult to remove. ''You might see a little line here. But if I do a good job, you would not notice.'' Of course, that person would have to be around the same age, height and weight as me, but Boucar's point is well taken: doing a passable job of doctoring a typical passport is not very hard.

Boucar then explains the tricks criminals use to fill in stolen blanks: how they feed passports into laser printers, for example. Or how they can create a perfectly good dry stamp -- an inkless stamp that leaves an embossed image on paper and is used to authenticate the passports of many countries -- by placing an old vinyl record over a passport marked with a real seal, then heating the record with an iron; the record is then pressed onto a fresh passport. Candle wax also works. As for ink stamps, they pose no challenge at all. Years ago, forgers would cut a fresh potato in half and use it to transfer a stamp from one passport to another. Today ''you just scan the page of a passport into a computer, print it out, then take it to a copy shop,'' Boucar says. ''They'll make you a rubber stamp in two minutes.''

Boucar is something of a heretic in law enforcement circles, in which open discussion of such techniques is frowned upon, lest forgers get any new ideas. Boucar says that's nonsense. ''The forgers already know everything,'' he says. ''It's the rest of the world that we must educate.''

Indeed, bearers of false documents often seem to know more about their business than many border guards. They know what kinds of questions will be asked by consular officers (for example, ''Who is the prime minister of Belgium?'') and what suspicious mannerisms to avoid. And experienced border-hoppers are experts at finding the weak link in the system. If Portugal is cracking down, they'll try entering Europe through Greece; later, they'll move on to Spain. They send patsies through first to test security. They know to carry bank statements (forged ones) and other supporting documents.

Still, even the best make stupid mistakes. They print out a blank stolen passport in the wrong typeface. Or they misspell a word. One of the biggest arrests connected with the Sept. 11 attacks came in Dubai, when a passport official noticed some sloppy forgery on the French passport of Djamel Beghal. Beghal was arrested and interrogated; information he provided led to the breakup of a large European terrorist cell, including the arrest in Brussels of Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian whom Beghal identified as the leader in a plot to bomb the United States Embassy in Paris.

In a perfect world, every traveler at every port of entry would get similarly close scrutiny. In the real world, however, that's impossible. The sheer volume of humans crossing borders every day -- some 30 million foreigners cross the United States' each month -- suggests that even where strict border controls are in place, not every traveler is going to get a careful look. What's more, immigration officers, like airline security personnel, tend to be underpaid and underprepared for the complexity of their job. There are 16 different versions of the United States passport alone in circulation. It takes a genuine passport scholar like Boucar to be able to detect the difference between a real and a fake passport from, say, Uzbekistan, not to mention whether every entry and exit stamp is authentic.

As border traffic grows, then, often the only thing standing between a terrorist and downtown Manhattan is a database. The State Department and the I.N.S. share a vast system that contains, among other things, basic biographical information, like date of birth, of United States passport and visa holders. It also tracks blank stolen passports reported around the world as well as information about known terrorists and other high-level criminals. Every time a person enters the United States at one of the major ports of entry, his passport number is checked by the database. (At least it's supposed to be.) The I.N.S. also has a separate database called the Lookout system, which is its own record of stolen passports and intelligence information.

These databases are useful tools, but they're still not foolproof. ''What you have to keep in mind,'' cautions Tom Furey, consul general at the United States Embassy in London, ''is the massive information overload.''

London is as good a place to see the strengths and weakness of this system as anywhere. The embassy there is one of the busiest in the world, issuing about 175,000 nonimmigrant visas a year to travelers from 188 different countries. It also issues 25,000 passports a year, mostly to United States citizens whose passports have been lost or stolen. I recently spent an afternoon in London watching the consular officers interview visa applicants, and I learned that the State Department's database is pretty good when it comes to basic information -- detecting, for example, whether an applicant's birth date matches his name, or determining if someone is lying about whether he has ever visited the United States before. Also, if he is traveling on a passport that was stolen, say, six months ago in a country that the United States has good relations with, he will probably be caught.

But I also learned that there is a whole lot this database won't reveal. If a person has been convicted of a serious crime in another country, for example, it probably won't show up in the database. I watched one consular officer turn away a man who wanted to visit the United States after learning that the man had recently been convicted in England of sexually molesting his 8-year-old stepdaughter. The only reason the consular officer knew about it, however, was that the man brazenly told him about it when he was asked if he had ever been convicted of any crimes. Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called 20th hijacker, recently indicted on six counts of conspiracy, was on a terrorist-watch list in France but was nonetheless able to enter the United States without question.

When it comes to stolen passports, the situation gets even more complex. To begin with, not every country shares information about stolen passports with us. And even when they are reported, there is a time lag between when the passports are stolen and when they are reported stolen. In the Massoud case, Belgian authorities sent out a fax on the break-in in The Hague six days after the burglary; the alert about the Strasbourg theft didn't go out until almost six weeks after the break-in. In theory, the passport numbers should have been entered into databases immediately -- most people sophisticated enough to travel on a blank stolen passport know it needs to be used quickly. However, one antifraud investigator in the State Department says he was not aware of these stolen-passport numbers until ''the middle of the summer'' -- nearly a year after the passports were stolen.

The closer you look, the scarier it gets. One example: Alain Boucar says that his database lists the numbers of 24,851 blank stolen Italian passports. Jim Hesse, a chief intelligence officer for the I.N.S., says that the United States Lookout system lists about 6,000. Why the discrepancy? Are there 18,000 stolen blank Italian passports drifting around out there that the United States doesn't know about? Or is Boucar's database wrong? Boucar insists that his numbers are accurate; Hesse trusts his. The only people who really know for sure are the Italians. ''We do not discuss stolen passports,'' a spokesman at the Italian Embassy in Washington says.

Given these discrepancies, it's no surprise that the United States visa-waiver program has come under fire since Sept. 11. At a Senate hearing in October, a Justice Department official testified that during a review of a random sample of 1,067 passports stolen from visa-waiver countries, the Justice Department found that almost 10 percent had been used to enter the United States successfully. More than half of the stolen passports were not listed in the I.N.S.'s Lookout database.

Of course, that's our problem, not Belgium's. It's easy to forget that when it comes right down to it, even a country like Belgium, with which the United States has a long and amicable relationship, sees this issue through an entirely different lens. Politically, Belgium now takes passport fraud seriously because it reeks of political corruption and bumbling bureaucracy -- not exactly the image the country wants to project. But practically, the loss of a few hundred passports here and there is hardly a matter of grave concern. After all, the people who usually use these passports are not coming into Belgium to wreak havoc there.

Their crimes, whatever they are, are usually committed elsewhere. Like terrorism. It's chilling how often it is pointed out to me in Brussels that although terrorists may be passing through Belgium -- or using Belgium as a base of operations, or assuming Belgian identities to slip into other countries -- they aren't killing people or blowing up buildings in Belgium. ''Strictly speaking,'' boasts Glenn Audenaert, the plain-spoken chief of the Belgian federal police, ''Belgium does not have a problem with terrorism. You have a problem with terrorism.''

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