The pretty European tourist caught the US Customs officer's attention. Miami International Airport was air-conditioned and the customs area was very cold, but the arriving German traveller was perspiring heavily. The agents noticed she was trembling. Her luggage was checked clean but the young woman was still frightened. A woman customs inspector gave her a hand pat down search and again the Hamburg woman passed without a problem. But why was she so nervous?
To find out, agents took her into a room containing the new end of the road for smugglers. Inside was the Rapiscan body scanner that can see anything. She was asked to place her feet wide apart over two marked places on the floor, was scanned in a front view and then asked to turn around for a rear view.
A customs officer looking in a computer screen said: "Bingo". The woman, who had just been electronically stripped of all her clothing and hair, immediately confessed and was arrested. On her head, held by tape to the top of her shaved skull were 14 one carat diamonds, believed to be from Holland. They were held inside a rubber cap on her skull covered by a wig. She had passed the hand search and would never have been caught if she hadn't been stripped "more than naked" by the new electronic body scanner which allows no secrets.
A man from South America was caught carrying a drugged boa constrictor snake wrapped around his waist. Others had undergone close-ups of body orifices and been discovered carrying drugs.
It's a whole new ballgame, said an airport customs officer. Miami Airport is fast becoming a place smugglers are trying to stay away from. "We now can see everything. There is no way now to get through with contraband." Airport officials won't say, but it's estimated that two or three smugglers are caught every day. The body imaging system uses reflected X-ray energy to produce images of objects concealed under a person's clothing. The beam does not remain stationary on any part of the body and is called a body scan. The amount of X-ray dosage, say operators of the machine, is equal to the amount a person receives on a five-minute airplane flight at 35,000 feet. US customs keeps an image of the body scan whenever it spots contraband, and it can be used in a court as evidence.
The new advance in body searching has come about quickly because of charges by some people that they had been unfairly chosen for body searches because of their beauty, colour or racial heritage. The most widely known case involved US superstar Diana Ross, who was held for five hours at Heathrow airport last year after she allegedly placed her hand over a British woman customs officer's chest in retaliation for the way she had been searched.
Now American civil liberties groups are calling for a stop to the new machines which are in place in Miami, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Florida director of the American Civil Liberties Union, Howard Simon of Miami, complained that the scanner has a joy stick driven zoom option that allows the operator to enlarge parts of the image. "This machine can also be used for the vulgar pleasure of customs agents while tracking so-called contraband. Nobody is safe."
According to the vice-president of Rapiscan, Peter Williamson: "The image quality of our machine allows for easy detection of contraband hidden anywhere on a person. You are not looking at an actual nude person, rather a white statue without a clear face. "But people tend to hide contraband in private places."
Operators of the machine do not get to study the details and contours of a person's private parts. But scanning private areas is necessary because that's one of the places where people hide contraband.
Smugglers are obviously worried, and new methods of getting drugs into the Miami gateway to the US are already in use. Customs agents seized $50 million of cocaine in early February inside the keel of a ship coming in from Haiti.
A few years ago, Miami International Airport was considered one of the most dangerous airports for tourists arriving in the US, but it is now one of the safest in the world and is being studied by other airports. A new type of passenger gate allows large numbers of passengers through in record time. It has 10 doors marked with changing lights - red to stop, green to go - and television monitors above, recording the faces of travellers and showing how baggage is checked for contraband or explosives. There is also a special door on the gate for wheelchair travellers. Another machine electronically looks inside pieces of luggage. Squads of armed airport police roam the airport on bicycles and can be anywhere within minutes. Bomb-sniffing dogs check unattended packages.
But the machine which strips the clothing off people is the most innovative of all and should be in most major airports of the world, including those in Ireland, within the next few years.
Someday soon, Diana Ross will be able to go through Heathrow Airport well observed, as befits a superstar, but untouched by human hands.