Hide and Seek
Written by Mark Fitzgerald
CGF 2010 Volume: 2 Issue: 3 (July)
The U.S. Coast Guard Is The Only Branch Of
Armed Forces That Has The Legal Authority To
Board Foreign Vessels And Arrest Criminals.
On the high seas of the Eastern Pacific Ocean this year, the Coast Guard cutter Dallas seized a shipment of cocaine weighing an estimated 5,250 pounds from a Mexicanflagged fishing vessel. The shipment was concealed in a hidden compartment that was built into the vessel’s fuel tanks. It took three days for the Coast Guard—under the authority and jurisdiction of Mexico—to find the contraband. Afterwards, the Mexican Navy sent a ship to take control of the 82-foot vessel, drugs and crew, all of whom are Mexican nationals.
“This seizure is an example of the cooperation and collaboration between the U.S. and Mexico, as both nations work together to combat illicit drug trafficking,” said Lieutenant Commander Rick Foster of the Eleventh Coast Guard District in Alameda, Calif. To counter expanding drug smuggling threats, the Coast Guard depends on a variety of assets, including helicopters, high endurance cutters and the national security cutter, Bertholf, as well as advanced detection and monitoring technologies such as Lockheed Martin’s wide-area vessel surveillance systems and ORBCOMM’s low earth orbit satellites.
Go-fast boats are the vessels of choice for a large number of smugglers because they are difficult to detect by radar. Stealthy and fast, these boats have long and narrow planforms and planing hulls designed for great speeds. As detection capabilities have improved, various drug cartels have been using self-propelled semi-submersibles (SPSSs), craft designed to move through waters mostly submerged, with little more than the cockpit and exhaust pipes above the surface. These vessels are hard to spot and particularly difficult to detect with radar, sonar and infrared systems.
“The main issue with SPSSs is that the surface signature that it gives off is minimal,” explained Coast Guard counter drug specialist Lieutenant Paul St. Pierre. “These are very difficult to see, but we’ve been able to equip a lot of our maritime patrol aircraft with enhanced radar systems that are able to pick up small disturbances like this on the surface. This has made it a lot easier in the last couple of years to detect these SPSSs moving through the transit zone.”
An area larger than the size of the contiguous United States, the transit zone extends over 600 million square miles. Typically smugglers do not attempt to bring drugs directly past the U.S. maritime border. They usually move shipments by boat over the Pacific to Mexico and then to the U.S. over the southwest land border. An estimated 1.2 million pounds of cocaine enter the U.S. each year. Currently the U.S. has 36 agreements with partner nations across Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa and small countries in the South Pacific. “Without those agreements, we would be dead in the water,” said St. Pierre. “Nothing would ever get done.”
STOP, BOARD, SEARCH
Let’s say there is an embarked Coast Guard law enforcement detachment team on a U.S. naval warship in the Eastern Pacific Ocean. The team is composed of about a half-dozen guardsmen: boarding specialists, a precision marksman and a controller. And let’s say that while on patrol in a small boat about 200 miles off the coast of Panama, the boarding specialists get a call from a U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) aircraft informing them that a go-fast vessel is moving quickly in the direction of the U.S. naval warship. The Coast Guard boarding specialists then travel as fast as they can towards the naval warship, which has also been informed of the situation by the CBP aircraft and is now moving to try to intercept the go-fast. Meanwhile, the controller and precision marksman take off on a helicopter stationed on the warship. They spot the go-fast and confirm that there appears to be four men and contraband, possibly cocaine, onboard. They get permission from the Eleventh Coast Guard District to warn the go-fast crew to stop. The controller shouts through a loudspeaker: “Stop your vessel. Stop your vessel.” But there is no compliance. The go-fast is moving at about 40 knots, and the crewmembers begin to throw bales of contraband overboard. The marksman fires a round of warning shots. No compliance. Then the marksman aims at one of the go-fast’s four engines. He takes one out. And then another. Finally the go-fast stops.
About 10 minutes later, the small boat and boarding crew arrive on the scene. The boarding officer steps onto the go-fast and asks for the leader, who steps forward and says the vessel and crew are from Colombia. But the go-fast does not have any registry information, and the crewmembers do not have passports. This information is conveyed to the Eleventh District, which contacts the Colombian government for confirmation. The government says it can neither confirm nor deny the information.
“At that point, the vessel and crew are considered to be stateless, and we’re able to enforce U.S. law,” noted St. Pierre. “Normally it takes anywhere from a week to two weeks to transfer them to people in the Drug Enforcement Agency, who bring them back to the U.S. for prosecution. But the people who make the determination as to where and when we’re going to prosecute are folks within the U.S. Department of Justice.”
LAW ENFORCEMENT
According to the U.S. Drug Trafficking Vessel Interdiction Act, which was enacted in September 2008, it is now a “felony for those who knowingly or intentionally operate or embark in a self-propelled semi-submersible that is without nationality and that is or has navigated in international waters, with the intent to evade detection.” Prosecution under this law could mean a prison term of up to 20 years.
“This law has helped us out tremendously,” added St. Pierre. “Before it was enacted we would have no case, nothing to prosecute on, because if no drugs were recovered then there was no evidence. But now under this law, it doesn’t matter; we can still prosecute.”
Last year, the U.S. Coast Guard seized over 160 tons (352,860 pounds) of cocaine, a quantity that marks the third highest year for cocaine removals in Coast Guard history, according to a summary report by the Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General. This represents about 15 percent of the cocaine moving via non-commercial maritime means towards the United States. In 2010, the Coast Guard expects to do even better, aiming for a removal of more than 18 percent of this flow.
“Right now, the average wholesale value per kilogram of cocaine is about $31,000,” recognized St. Pierre. “So if you figure that a smuggler will try to move about six metric tons, which is 6,000 kilos, the total wholesale value on that is $186 million.”
That’s a whole lot of incentive. But is it worth the risk? The drug cartels aren’t going to go away, conceded St. Pierre. As the Coast Guard has improved its interdiction strategies, the smugglers have turned to other covert maneuvers. Territorial seas extend 12 miles under international law and can be exploited. “They load up their go fasts and skirt the coast all the way up to Mexico or even Honduras,” he explained. “We have to get permission to come in, but often the government with jurisdiction tells us they’ll send their own patrol boats to intercept them. This takes time and the smugglers know that. The coastline there is really broken up—you have multiple inlets and small islands and a lot of jungles, so it’s very easy for these guys to ride just two or three miles off the coast, and there are plenty of places for them to hide along the way.” ♦