Three retired federal investigators who spent years warning about holes in America's aviation security before September 11, 2001, say the threat of another catastrophic terrorist attack on U.S. aircraft is real, and growing.
Bogdan Dzakovic led the FAA's Red Team, the unit created after the 1988 Pan Am Flight 103 bombing to test whether airport security could stop a terrorist. Steve Elson, a retired Navy SEAL turned FAA Special Agent, and Brian Sullivan, a retired Army lieutenant colonel and FAA Special Agent, joined him in 1999 to catalog the system's weak points. All three tried to force changes before the hijackings that killed nearly 3,000 people. None succeeded. In exclusive interviews with The Center Square, they warn the country still has not learned the lesson.
Dzakovic put the pre-9/11 record in blunt terms:
"What happened on 9/11 was not a failure in the system, it was a system designed for failure."
The Red Teams existed for one purpose: probe U.S. airport checkpoints the way a terrorist would. Agents smuggled inert weapons and mock explosives past screeners to measure how often the system caught them. The answer, Dzakovic told The Center Square, was almost never. The teams defeated security with a 95-percent success rate.
In testimony before the 9/11 Commission, Dzakovic described how Red Team operatives placed inert explosive-device components inside luggage that made it onto commercial aircraft 31 separate times. The FAA, he said, refused to implement the security measures the Red Teams recommended.
After the attacks, Dzakovic filed a formal whistleblower disclosure with the U.S. Office of Special Counsel, the independent federal agency that handles such complaints, submitting more than 500 pages of documentation. His core charge: the FAA "executed its civil aviation security mission in a manner that was a substantial and specific danger to public safety." One year later, the Office of Special Counsel agreed with his assessment.
Yet Dzakovic says none of the evidence he presented was included in the 9/11 Commission's final report. The Commission has not publicly addressed that claim.
Sullivan's warnings were even more specific. He repeatedly flagged security vulnerabilities at Logan International Airport in Boston, contacting both state and federal authorities. They ignored him. On September 11, 2001, ten of the hijackers boarded two planes after passing through security at that same airport.
Sullivan now points to the current geopolitical climate as reason for renewed urgency:
"The terror threat is real and ongoing, especially in light of the U.S. conflict with Iran."
He cited a warning issued by the Airline Pilots Association, which said in a 2025 press release that "aviation remains a primary target for terrorists who are constantly probing for weaknesses." Sullivan's conclusion is direct: U.S. leaders "need to get serious about the vulnerabilities in our aviation security system before our adversaries take advantage of them again."
The whistleblowers' frustration draws on a long, documented history of Islamic terrorist attacks targeting Americans and Western aviation, a pattern they say federal agencies were too slow to recognize and too bureaucratically rigid to counter.
Dzakovic described two events in the mid-1990s that convinced him the United States was a prime target. On December 24, 1994, four members of the Armed Islamic Group of Algeria hijacked Air France Flight 8969 out of Algiers. Their plan was to fly the aircraft into the Eiffel Tower. French special forces stormed the plane after it landed in Marseilles and killed the hijackers.
Weeks later, in January 1995, a fire in a Manila apartment led Philippine authorities to bombmaking materials and a laptop belonging to Ramzi Yousef and his uncle Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The laptop contained plans to plant bombs on 11 U.S. airplanes and detonate them simultaneously over the Pacific Ocean, the so-called Bojinka Plot. Yousef had already orchestrated the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, which killed six people and wounded hundreds. He was found, convicted in 1997, and sentenced to life in prison. Mohammed, described as al-Qaeda's former head of propaganda and the eventual mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, remains detained at Guantanamo Bay.
Those plots, Dzakovic said, made him "think like a terrorist" and realize the scale of the threat. Islamic terrorism patterns entering the aviation field "should have been a major eye-opener to U.S. federal law enforcement, security, and intelligence agencies," he said.
The record stretches further back. On April 18, 1983, an attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut killed 17 Americans, including eight CIA officers. Six months later, on October 23, a truck loaded with explosives was driven into U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 service members. In 1979, the Iranian Revolution led to 66 Americans being held hostage for 444 days.
And on December 21, 1988, Pan Am Flight 103 departed Frankfurt with a stop in London before exploding over Lockerbie, Scotland, 40 minutes into its flight. The blast killed 259 people on board, 190 of them Americans, and 11 Scots on the ground. Debris spread over 845 square miles in what the FBI called the largest crime scene ever. Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al-Megrahi was convicted in connection with the bombing and sentenced to life in prison in 2001 after a decades-long investigation. He was released eight years later.
Dzakovic, Sullivan, and Elson did not limit their warnings to mid-level bureaucrats. They brought their aviation security concerns directly to President George W. Bush's administration prior to September 11, to no avail. The three men eventually retired from federal service. Dzakovic co-authored a book, "Fortress of Deceit: The Story of a 9/11 Whistleblower," and their work was featured in an award-winning documentary, "Please Remove Your Shoes."
What remains unanswered is whether anything has materially changed. The whistleblowers are issuing the same warnings they issued a quarter century ago. The FAA's current response to their concerns is not on the public record. The Office of Special Counsel agreed with Dzakovic's assessment years ago, but whether that finding produced concrete reforms is unclear. No specific new security measures the whistleblowers are recommending have been detailed publicly.
The pattern is familiar: insiders identify the danger, file the paperwork, testify under oath, and watch the institutions move on. Nearly 3,000 people died the last time the government treated aviation security warnings as a bureaucratic inconvenience. The men who sounded that alarm are still sounding it, and still waiting for someone in charge to act.
