Feds to Patrol Skies, Parades Over Holiday

July 3, 2002 -- The U.S. government has recently received a high volume of intelligence it considers reliable, including intercepted contacts between known al Qaeda operatives, which helped prompt the high level of alert for the Fourth of July holiday, ABCNEWS has learned.

"There's been a real spike in the intelligence collected by the intelligence community regarding threats, possible operations against the United States," said Vince Cannistraro, a former chief of operations for counterterrorism with the CIA who is now a consultant for ABCNEWS. "And the level of this information is of higher quality than it was just a few months ago."

Among intelligence and law enforcement officials, the level of concern appears just as high as it was in the days just after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

U.S. combat jets "will be flying over several American cities and randomly throughout the nation," White House spokesman Ari Fleischer said. And the White House's special Homeland Security Coordination Center, created in the months after Sept. 11, will double its staffing to monitor the nation's Independence Day celebrations.

Still, the message U.S. officials want to get out to Americans for the holiday is simple: Go out and have fun, but be careful.

"The president of the United States would encourage the American people to gather, to celebrate, to enjoy America's independence," Fleischer said. "The law enforcement community of the United States will do the worrying. They will take care of the precautions, and that's true at the state, the local and the federal level."

Every Police Agency on Alert

U.S. intelligence officials described the new intelligence information as reliable. However, the intelligence contained no specifics on time or place of terror threats, and officials therefore say there are no plans to boost the nation's color-coded alert level from yellow — the midpoint of the five-color system — to orange.

Nevertheless, the FBI has told every police agency in the country to be on alert, and will monitor festivities with a heavy presence at celebrations across the country. SWAT teams, bomb squads and hazardous materials units will be on standby in most major cities.

Officials at about 2,100 local public celebrations will have direct lines to federal officials at the White House's coordination center, which will be bolstered by liaisons from the FBI, Secret Service, Federal Emergency Management Agency and Department of Health and Human Services, The Associated Press reported. In addition, regional command posts were being set up in other major cities.