Super Bowl Monday_ From the Persian Gulf to the Shores of West Florida - Adam Lazarus [72]
. . . You didn’t hear a lot, but the people were concerned.”
The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s antiterrorist SWAT team—armed with machine guns—patrolled around and atop the stadium. In total, more than twenty-five hundred police and private-security personnel also stalked the area. Tampa Police, U.S. Army, and U.S. Coast Guard helicopters waited near the stadium in case unauthorized aircraft flew by the area. So did a U.S. Customs Blackhawk helicopter, the same model that soared across deserts in the Middle East. Even the Goodyear Blimp was denied access to all airspace within five miles of the game.
“A black helicopter came out of the north sometime in the second or first quarter,” recalled Steeg. “Everybody was worried about what it was and they couldn’t get ahold of the pilot to identify what it was. The story that I was told is that the SWAT guys zeroed and were ready to shoot the guy and all of a sudden the door opens up and they realize it was a guy with a camera. Or else they would have shot the guy down. They were deadly serious to say the least.”
Inside Tampa Stadium, as the broadcast team of Al Michaels, Frank Gifford, and Dan Dierdorf learned after a relaxing Saturday evening dinner together with their wives, the safety measures in place bordered on morbid.
“The three of us go into this room, and there’s some representative from the Tampa Police there,” Dierdorf recalled. “There’s also representatives of the FBI and one of the people there was from the Tampa SWAT team.”
The joint security team informed Gifford, Michaels, and Dierdorf of the FBI’s plan should terrorists attempt to take them hostage and hijack ABC’s live coverage. Throughout the entire game, atop the luxury boxes at Tampa Stadium, snipers were in position, aimed directly at the broadcast booth.
“They proceed to give us a little mini-lesson on how to be a hostage,” Dierdorf said.
On how to let all the air out of your lungs, collapse your shoulders, and shrink and try to make yourself as small as possible. It was during the middle of that that I’m looking at Al, and I’m looking at Frank and well aware that I am noticeably bigger. You can give me all the lectures in the world about how to make yourself smaller, there’s a limit there.
So I’m thinking to myself, I can just hear them at the press conference: “That Dan was a hell of a guy. It’s a shame that he just happened to be so much bigger than the two of us.” I’m not gonna lie . . . that was sobering.
Another contingency plan affected far more people than those three celebrities in the broadcast booth. The Super Bowl, the quintessentially decadent American extravaganza, seemed a likely target should Hussein’s public call inspire terrorism.
“It was pretty hard not to get the sense that we were going to have something happen,” said Dr. Ricardo Martinez, the NFL’s senior medical advisor. “Not necessarily inside the stadium, but I couldn’t believe that somebody was going to let that [game] go by without making their point. My belief was that it would be something outside the stadium.”
In addition to patrolling the sidelines during Super Bowl XXV in order to direct any emergency responses among fire, police, medical, FBI, and the like, Dr. Martinez had another daunting task that week in Tampa. It was his job to acquire the antidote should a terrorist attack involve sarin (or nerve) gas.
That area of Florida was known for drug trafficking: planes coming in and out all the time underneath the radar. You got an airport one hundred yards, two hundred yards away [from Tampa Stadium]. All they have to do is put some stuff in the back of a plane, fly up, and fly in. That’s a very real threat. When you talk about sarin, this is not a nuclear weapon. You can make this chemical; you can buy versions of it most anywhere. We use this type of chemical to kill roaches. . . . It’s not like this is a really