Security will be major league

WASHINGTON – On the eve of the Super Bowl and Olympics, the top U.S. intelligence official cautions that the events will be major attention magnets and says all security precautions possible have been taken to prevent terrorism.

“Look, these are both very important, widely attended events to which there is a great deal of public attention,” National Intelligence Director John Negroponte said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“But by the same token, an enormous amount of effort has gone into the planning the security of these events and preparing for any possible eventuality.”

More than 65,000 people are expected to attend Sunday’s Super Bowl in Detroit. The Olympics in Turin, Italy, are expected to draw 1 million.

Negroponte said that FBI Director Robert Mueller recently returned from a trip to review security measures for the Olympic Games, which start next week. While Mueller reported the precautions were excellent, Negroponte said, “there is no guarantee that somebody won’t try to carry out some kind of untoward act.”

Previous Olympic Games have been targets of attacks.

At the 1996 Atlanta Summer Games, serial bomber Eric Rudolph exploded a knapsack at the Centennial Olympic Park to embarrass the U.S. government for sanctioning abortion. One woman died, and more than 100 people were injured.

Eleven Israeli athletes were taken hostage by the Palestinian group Black September at the 1972 Munich Winter Olympics. A rescue attempt left 11 Israelis, five terrorists and a policeman dead.

Negroponte said vigilance and preparation have helped keep the United States attack-free since Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet he said an attack from a decentralized jihadist cell – such as the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the London transit attacks last July – remains a concern. “I don’t think we can rule out the possibility that some such threat might materialize here in our country,” he said.

Negroponte said al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahri, are operating in more difficult circumstances than pre-Sept. 11. But “we are not certain where he is,” Negroponte said of bin Laden. “I think it’s been a while since we had a fix on that.”

Negroponte, who became the nation’s first intelligence chief in April, spoke from his temporary office one block from the White House. With only one narrow window, the head of the nation’s 15 spy agencies has plenty of wall space for pictures of the five Honduran children he adopted as the U.S. ambassador there from 1981 to 1985.

Negroponte and his staff will move to more permanent accommodations at the Defense Intelligence Agency’s new building in southwest Washington next month.

His job takes him to the White House almost daily for presidential intelligence briefings, which cover issues from avian flu to the Palestinian parliamentary elections.