Catching a terrorist in flight

Astride his lawn tractor in the shade of a sugar maple, Donald MacCullum points to the spot down Lake Road where the German terrorist was captured. In 1978 Kristina Berster tried to slip into the United States by walking down this quiet country lane and into northwestern Vermont. Later linked to a group that preceded the notorious Baader-Meinhof gang, she was carrying a forged Iranian passport.

Alien smugglers don't give Mr. MacCullum much cause for concern, however. Usually they speed past his farmhouse late at night.

''We never see anything,'' he says - except headlines in the next day's newspapers.

MacCullum's great-great-grandfather was a Tory sympathizer who fled with his family to this spot during the American Revolution.

Growing up along the border, he remembers when none of the crossings in these parts were guarded. Canadians going into the US simply stopped by the immigration offices in the border towns.

''Prohibition changed everything,'' he says.