CHENAULT LIVES

Now Charlotte was seriously concerned. “I told the captain immediately. Immediately! It was a 757 aircraft again. And when I checked the aircraft number, I discovered it was the same aircraft number as I’d put in my report [14 months] before. Aircraft number 5428, I was not comfortable with that. There are, I think, thirty-something 757’s in the carrier’s fleet. I said to myself, this is the same plane and it’s similar writing in a different place. It’s been over a year.”

Charlotte reported the incident to the captain. She pointed out the similarities and the differences between what she’d witnessed previously and the situation she was witnessing now. The captain told Charlotte the writing wasn’t something to worry about. But Charlotte was not convinced. Using her cell phone camera, she photographed the evidence. This time, when she filed a second safety report through the airline’s reporting system, Charlotte demanded an answer. She wanted to make sure someone was looking into this second, suspicious incident involving the air carrier’s planes. In her report, she checked the box that would notify her union.

No answer came. Not from the airlines corporate security and not from the union. Not from Homeland Security or the FBI. If one is a coincidence, two begins a pattern. Flight attendant Charlotte Smith was officially alarmed.

What is Federal Protocol For Reporting Suspicious Behavior?

After 9/11, Congress signed into law the Homeland Security Act of 2002 and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was born. Of the five major functions of DHS outlined in the Bill, the first function is “information analysis.” To prevent another terrorist attack inside the United States, the authors of the Bill determined that no single function of DHS is more important than information gathering and analysis.

Indeed, many of the 180,000 DHS employees would be the eyes and ears in the field. Homeland Security agents would gather information and send it up the chain of command. That information would be assessed and analyzed and, if appropriate, sent further up the chain. Section 203 of the Homeland Security Act establishes the Homeland Secretary’s “entitlement” to information. Unless the President himself directs otherwise, DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff is entitled to all information gathered in the field.

One of the few areas where people in the civil sector are obligated to provide information to the federal government occurs in the aviation domain. Airline crews are required to report suspicious behavior in the field to federal officials. Even in a post 9/11 world, this was not always the case. In the early days of Homeland Security, airline reporting procedures were vague and directed to airline corporate security. This made for a gap in aviation security. Former FAA security chief, Billie Vincent, explains why this system was flawed: “I would doubt that any U.S. airline security departments have the capability or the training to detect any level of surveillance.” And so the security hole was plugged.

The way the hole was fixed was by tasking the Federal Air Marshal Service (FAMS) with the job. In 2003, the FAMS briefed airline corporate Security Directors on how to instruct flight crews to report suspicious incidents. The new protocol is for airline crews to contact the Department of Homeland Security via the newly created email address xxxxxxxxxx@dhs.gov.

From a Federal Air Marshal Service directive made available to The Aviation Nation:

Reporting of Suspicious Incidents

Briefing to Airline Corporate Security Directors

Airline Corporate Security Directors will inform their personnel of the following:

• All reports will be vetted and forwarded to the National JTTF [Joint Terrorism Task Force] for appropriate analysis and investigation

• Follow-up investigation will be coordinated with the local FAMS Field Office, airport police agency and local FBI JTTF or FBI Field Office

This directive to airline corporate Security Directors couldn’t have been more clear: raw data gathered in the field needs to go to federal law enforcement agencies. It’s the job of federal law enforcement, not the airlines, to decide what raw data mandates further investigation and what does not. Federal law enforcement agents, trained in analysis, are the ones equipped to do the job.

But Charlotte, like an overwhelming number of the more than fifty flight attendants I’ve interviewed in the past two years, was never made aware of the email address to DHS, and did not know she was supposed to report suspicious incidents directly to the Federal Air Marshal Service. She’d been trained only to file a report with the airline’s Flight Attendant Safety Reporting System, or FASRS – which is exactly what she did.

More Puzzling Words on the Aircraft Lavatory Walls, And More Still

August 19th, 2006 was a particularly anxious time for flight crews. Nine days earlier, British Metropolitan police and MI5 broke apart a terrorist airplane mega-plot, one in which as many as 10 UK-US bound airplanes were to be blown up, simultaneously, mid-flight over the Atlantic ocean. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security put the aviation domain on “red-alert” — the first time since 9/11. Tension was high with federal officials warning the public that as many as five terror suspects were still on the loose. The air carrier’s planes were named as being targeted in the foiled terror plot.

That day, Charlotte was working flight 577, a Chicago to Sacramento flight. This is from her official FASRS report of the flight:

The reporting procedure for a Federal Air Marshal when receiving raw data is explicit. According to documents shown to The Aviation Nation, protocol requires an air marshal to report suspicious incidents — either by an electronic Surveillance Detection Report (SDR) or by a written Mission Report — which gets forwarded to an air marshal working in the Joint Terrorism Task Force – or JTTF. That JTTF air marshal, in turn, has three direct reporting chains of command:

• The FBI Supervisor
• The Federal Air Marshal, Special Agent-in-Charge
• The Federal Air Marshal Service Investigative Branch

By having three streams into which the raw data can flow, the system of checks and balances is in place. No single person is tasked with the immediate decision of deciding if raw field data is or is not worthy of further analysis or investigation.

Another Crew Member Finds Suspicious Writing

Charlotte continued to do her job with perseverance, commitment and with the safety and security of the airline passengers in mind. And so now, while doing her job, Charlotte carried with her the photographs she’d collected of the puzzling and suspicious writings on the aircraft lavatory component walls. Charlotte began to ask other flight attendants to be on the lookout for this kind of writing as well. One of the flight attendants Charlotte asked was Jane Green**, a flight attendant for seventeen years.

Jane told me in our interview:

“Charlotte showed me her pictures, I made a mental note. Every time I was assigned to check the bathrooms, I did with extra care. December 29th [2006] it was flight #9915, a 737B. I was in the aft right lav, refilling the Kleenex box. I pull down, pull out and there I see,

CHENAULT LIVES.”

Jane was so surprised when she too found the cryptic message, she asked her flying partner to take a picture of the words with his cell phone as well. “You had to be looking for it to see it,” Jane explained.

Now Jane was alarmed. Of the air carrier’s fleet of 741 planes, Jane was shocked to find the writing on one of her assigned flights. But the incidents of suspicious writing did not stop there. Twelve days later, on January 10 [2007], Jane was working an international flight on one of the airline’s wide-bodied 777 aircraft.

“It was the last minute, right before landing and I was re-stuffing the tissue box. It was the forward lav, left side I was working in. I had to literally pull the compartment panel down, stick my hand up there to get the box to change. There’s metal up there inside, and the tissue box is housed upside down. I’m tugging on it, I literally have to crane my neck around to see the tissue box, I’m almost upside down and I see it, ‘CHENAULT LIVES.’ Then it says, ‘ZATU.’”

The next time Jane was flying with Federal Air Marshals, she told one of the air marshals what she’d found. “The air marshal laughed at me,” Jane explained, “‘You’re paranoid,’ he said.”

I asked Jane if she thought the strange writings could be explained as being graffiti. Jane said, “The average graffiti artist wants his or her work seen. This writing is hidden to everyone but the person who is looking for it. You have to pull something open to find it. You have to literally turn your neck upside down. When I pass under a bridge and I see, ‘I love Suzie,’ I think, that’s graffiti. You don’t think of ‘ZATU’ hidden behind a bathroom component wall as being just graffiti.”

Chenault: A Google search of the word “Chenault” by itself sends you to the Chenault Family National Association, an organization dedicated to perpetuating the understanding of the Chenault family lineage. Originally spelled “de Cheneau,” the family has an interesting crest — one that, like the flag of Islam, bears an icon of a red crescent:

Zatu: One Google search for “Zatu” delivers a Spanish Wikipedia entry about a popular rap star whose real name is Saturnino Rey. Translated into English the word “Rey” becomes “King.” But “Zatu” has another meaning in the ancient, Middle Eastern world. Another search of “Zatu” delivers the Dictionary of Islam from Answering-Islam.org.uk. There, you learn that “Zatu” means the road to Iraq.