Six weeks have passed since a confidential U.S. State Department memo critical of Greece’s chem-bio prep was leaked to an Athens newspaper. Since then the Greek military has assembled a team to respond to fallout from such an attack. But, according to the largest U.S. security contractor servicing the Games, Greece has yet to ink a contract to monitor and detect these threats. “There’s work to be done,” says David Tubbs, head of Olympic security for Science Applications International Corp. (SAIC), which has a $300 million contract from the Greeks to build and maintain the security “command and control” system. The system doesn’t coordinate chem-bio defense; SAIC is a bidder for that work, but last week the Greek minister in charge of Olympic preparation said he was generally unhappy with SAIC’s work. The Americans say progress has been slowed by the consensus requirements of the Games’ seven-nation security task force. “Everything takes a month and a half to get done and we don’t have too many month-and-a-halfs left,” says a senior American security officer. “That part’s scary to everybody.”
