In Depth

Dennis Treece and Massport: Safe Harbor

From Boston's Logan Airport to the city's waterfront shipping facilities, Massport CSO Dennis Treece patrols an anxious perimeter.

By Lew McCreary

April 01, 2003 — CSO — In that crystalline late summer day in 2001, when the modern meaning of "homeland defense" was being invented in four hijacked airplanes, Massachusetts Port Authority, or Massport, the public agency that runs Boston's Logan International Airport and other port facilities, was widely regarded as a patronage-riddled dumping ground for political burnouts. That this fact was once deemed harmless is a relic of more innocent times.

In the wake of 9/11, a commission impaneled by then-acting Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift recommended a thorough overhaul of Massport. Included in the list of action items was the creation of an executive security positionsomeone who would oversee all security strategy and decision making across the numerous functional units with operational authority for the various aviation, maritime and port infrastructures that fall under Massport's control.

The aftermath of 9/11 was not pretty. You could make a case (and many did) that Logan was really no worse than any other big, busy airport when it came to security. But whether things that should have been foreseen were missed, whether procedures that should have been followed were disregarded, Boston still wore the stain of what happened. If you lived in the region, you watched the unseemly finger-pointing play out in the papers and on the local news. And even though Dennis Treece, now Massport's director of corporate security, was then working in Atlanta for Internet Security Systems (ISS), he believes that the stain is part of a working reality that brings an ultra level of seriousness to the security mission.

"There isn't a Massport employee who doesn't remember what it was like to be here on 9/11," says Treece. "That was an emotional lesson that will never be forgotten."

With some fanfare, Treece was recruited in a national search. (And proving that nothing lies beyond the scope of symbolic gestures, the search firm Russell Reynolds Associates, in cooperation with Massport, donated the $66,000 placement fee for Treece's position to the Massachusetts 9/11 Fund.) Treece moved from Atlanta late last September. So daunted is helike many transplants to Bostonby the harebrained local traffic flows, he averts the risks of driving to work by instead taking public transportation. "It's underground most of the way," he says. "So, unfortunately, I don't get to memorize any landmarks."Fanfare for the Uncommon ManWhat Massport gets in Treece is 32 years of security experience, much of it spent in military intelligence in such places as Bosnia, Germany, Kosovo and the Persian Gulf (where he regularly briefed Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf on terrorist activities during Operation Desert Storm). In the mid-1990s, he went to work for the CIA, applying his experience in military theaters to help the agency improve its support of combat operations. Most recently, he spent two years at ISS designing the global threat operations center that monitors and defends against attacks on customers' information networks.

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