They boasted it was the safest city on earth ... then the bombers

Amid the blood and broken glass yesterday, Atlanta's Olympic dream was forever laid to rest.

Just days earlier, Major Jon Gordon, the city's head of Olympic security, had boasted: "Atlanta will probably be the safest city on the planet during the Olympics."

A crude pipe bomb in the Olympic City's Centennial Park exploded Major Gordon's conceit - another disaster in an Olympiad marred by incompetence and fearful mismanagement. And as numbed Atlantans and mortified Americans picked up the pieces and vowed that the Games would go on, the scale of the city's security calamity began to unravel.

Amid FBI fears that the bombers would strike again, it was revealed that the bomber gave police a 30-minute warning - but the park was not evacuated until it was too late.

And it was also revealed yesterday that American Vice President Al Gore had told organisers that he thought security should be tightened up after visiting the Olympics just hours before the bomb blast.

On paper, the security looked impeccable - 30,000 personnel mobilised in the largest peacetime operation in US history, costing pounds 200 million.

But things started to go wrong on the day of the opening ceremony.

Red-faced security chiefs confessed that an armed man had managed to talk his way into last week's celebrations, attended by Mr Clinton and dozens of world leaders.

The gunman had tricked guards and entered the arena wearing a security uniform. He was carrying a pistol and 11 rounds of ammunition.

The man taking much of the blame is Major Gordon, 45, who has been with the Atlanta Police Department for 23 years.

He visited Barcelona for the Summer Games in 1992, and went to Lillehammer, Norway, for the Winter Olympics two years ago to see how security forces coped.

It was never going to be an easy job, but Major Gordon was confident his men were up to the challenge.

But new disclosures are beginning to expose the true level of their incompetence.

It was revealed yesterday that the Centennial Park bomb was picked up by a policeman and placed in a metal dustbin just before it went off.

Horrified explosive experts said his act probably caused many more injuries because the metal would have fragmented into tiny pieces of shrapnel on detonation.

And Dutch volunteers at the Games warned earlier this week that inadequate and chaotic security measures meant competitors were risking their lives.

The 120 Dutch policemen, who took a month's holiday to volunteer their services, said the security situation was far more alarming than the outside world realised. "The Dutch police can't understand how athletes from countries like Israel, Iraq and Palestine dare to show up at the Games," one Dutch newspaper reported. "It is obvious to everybody that no one in the Olympic family is safe."

Atlanta police last night confirmed that they had received a warning before the blast - but missed capturing the caller by minutes.

The call was traced to a phone box just streets from the bomb.

Officers raced to the scene, but the caller had fled. Seconds later the bomb went off.

A police spokesman said: "We have a voice on tape, and we have finger- printed the call box. We are waiting to see what we have got."

The FBI, increasingly convinced that the TWA air disaster was also caused by a bomb, say the call before yesterday's horror was made by "a white male with an indistinguishable American accent".

FBI special agent Woody Johnson said that his department would be investigating why the park was not evacuated immediately after the 30- minute warning.

Meanwhile, Atlanta's mayor Bob Campbell vowed to reopen the Park - and was sticking to his opinion that Atlanta is "still one of the safest places on earth".

"As soon as it has been sanitised the park will reopen," Campbell said.

"Security will be tightened considerably. It will certainly make it more difficult, but ultimately the Games will go on.

"Despite the tragedy that has occurred, I still believe Atlanta is the safest place on the globe."

But if the Mayor is complacent, President Clinton is enraged.

He vowed to hunt down the Olympic bombers - and he called for the death penalty.

He said: "This morning was an evil act of terror ...aimed at the innocent people participating in the Olympic Games and at the spirit of the Olympics.""

He said it was "an act of cowardice that stands in sharp contrast to the courage of the Olympic athletes. We will spare no effort to find out who was responsible."

Asked if whoever carried out the attack deserved the death penalty, he said: "I support the death penalty for terrorism that leads to murder. I always have. "I believe that people who deliberately kill other people, particularly under circumstances that demonstrate this kind of cowardice ... deserve capital punishment. An act of vicious terror like this is clearly directed at the spirit of our own democracy. We cannot be intimidated by acts of terror."

The President's anger was echoed in London by Prime Minister John Major.

In a message to Mr Clinton he said: "I know the British people will share the anger of the American people at this dreadful desecration of the Olympic spirit, but they will also share their determination not to be deterred by this evil act." The search for the terrorists will begin among America's home-grown army of Right- wing fanatics and rednecks.

The bomb at the Olympics may be the latest blast in a "holy war" that is beginning to shake America's foundations.

It started with a man who thought he was God.

Self-proclaimed Messiah David Koresh and 80 of his followers, many of them women and young children, died in an attack by Federal agents at Waco, Texas.

The deaths at Waco, in 1993, echoed among the American Right as a call to arms and a hotch-potch of gun freaks, tax protesters, survivalists, white supremacists, military enthusiasts, religious nuts and Nazis rushed to form militias.

They believe they are in a fight to the death with their own government, which wants to take away their guns.

It reached a bloody crescendo in Oklahoma City in April 1995 when Timothy McVeigh, a man linked to the Michigan Militia, blew up the Federal Government building killing 169 people.

There are now more than 500 militia armies in the US, and they train daily for war with the government, with live ammo and real explosives.

In the end it was triple Olympic gold winner Michelle Smith who summed up the horror...

"Everyone has been touched by this awful news," the Irish swimming star said.

"What do medals mean at a time like this?"

Tom Johnston - Page 8

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