Pubdate: Thu, 03 Aug 2000 Source: Miami Herald (FL) Copyright: 2000 The Miami Herald Contact: One Herald Plaza, Miami FL 33132-1693 Fax: (305) 376-8950 Website: http://www.herald.com/ Forum: http://krwebx.infi.net/webxmulti/cgi-bin/WebX?mherald Author: Carol Rosenberg HIDDEN OUTPOST IN KEYS UNITES FORCES IN GLOBAL ASSAULT ON DRUGS U.S. And Foreign Military Units Share Intelligence To Combat Smuggling. KEY WEST -- Call it Washington's war room in the campaign to combat cocaine smuggling. Nestled on the U.S. Naval Air Station not far from Margaritaville, some 290 U.S. military personnel and federal agents run a semi-secret nerve center. Its mission: Scour the seas and skies to the south for traffickers -- aircraft dropping bundles into Haiti, speedboats streaking around the eastern Pacific -- and share real-time crime-stopping intelligence with partner countries. Since January 1999, the Joint Interagency Task Force East has claimed a role in the regional confiscation of 134 metric tons of illegal drugs, in the destruction or seizure of 80 aircraft and vessels linked to smuggling and in 300 arrests, mostly abroad. The tally: an estimated $6.3 billion in cocaine taken from the market. Proof, boasts the task force commander, that extraordinary regional cooperation in the decade-old effort is taking its toll on the drug trade from the jungles of South America. From a rare glimpse inside the operation, other recent trends: Radar, overflights and seaborne surveillance have made air drops more risky, forcing drug runners increasingly to the seas. So "first and foremost" among counter-drug challenges these days, said Coast Guard Rear Adm. David S. Belz, are the smugglers' "go-fast" boats that can elude detection and swoop around Caribbean cays in stop-and-go northward smuggling routes. "They are stealth targets. They don't respond to traditional radar intercepts and they work at night," said Belz, whose operation is part of the Southern Command in Miami. Cuba is considered a collaborator in the war on drugs. The U.S. and Cuban coast guards share a long-established system of alerting each other to occasional sightings of suspected drug-running boats that try to charge north through the Windward Passage. No aircraft have been detected using the island as a transshipping spot, said a U.S. military officer, speaking on background. But just last month Cuba alerted U.S. authorities to a suspected drug-running boat south of Guantanamo. The Cuban coast guard made chase, causing the smugglers to ditch some bundles of cocaine overboard, but U.S. forces north of there never intercepted them. Commanders, however, consider Haiti a significant soft spot. Surveillance shows that this is an increasingly popular part of the trade route, favored by small aircraft that streak north from Colombia's drug-producing areas. Unifying Policy But U.S. authorities complain that they have no policing partner there to intervene on the ground -- even when the command center can provide real-time reports on a drug plane's arrival in Haiti. In the cocaine cowboy days of the 1980s, the United States had a fragmented counter-drug strategy. Federal agencies sought to intercept cocaine shipments offshore or to disrupt distribution systems inside the United States. Envoys and other U.S. agents used aid and diplomatic relations to encourage Latin America to crack down on the trade. Today, advocates of the interagency approach say their system, first conceived in 1989, fuses federal and foreign policy -- as well as domestic agencies and military services that for years were on the fringe of the so-called war on drugs. The Pentagon, limited by law from active involvement in law enforcement, contributes ships and airborne tracking systems to gather intelligence while the Coast Guard and other agencies conduct actual operations. Nations Cooperate Close contact with countries in the so-called "Source Zone" are key to the strategy, too. Six Latin American countries -- Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela -- each post liaison officers at the Key West command center to at times dispatch forces back home to suspected targets detected by the U.S. network. "Heck, Peru and Ecuador were in a shooting war" not so many years ago, and today they exchange liaison officers, one senior officer in Key West boasted. Using U.S. intelligence, they collaborate to crack down on drug trafficking. In five months alone the Colombians were able to confiscate or destroy 12 suspected drug-running aircraft, Belz said, thanks to a Puerto Rican component of an Over the Horizon Radar system that went on line in February. Task force members include 89 uniformed members of the armed forces plus Customs and drug agents, civilian analysts and support personnel. In a military culture that is mostly foreign outside the Pentagon, a Marine works for a Coast Guard two-star and a U.S. Army soldier works alongside an Air Force officer. Their latest resources include: Multicomponent radar that can see deep into South America. Controllers can get a birds-eye view of the entire region -- then transmit video to give partner nations real-time visibility into their own territory. At least 10 Coast Guard, Navy and foreign vessels that cruise mostly Caribbean waters to deter, if not interdict, drug-running vessels. The Netherlands and Britain also contribute ships. Eleven aircraft, ranging from fighter jets to slow reconnaissance planes that, military officers say, can switch on night-vision technology to literally watch a small plane's door open at midnight over a remote section of Haiti as someone kicks out cocaine bundles. The aircraft -- from the Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force -- can fly out of three low-profile U.S.-run airstrips in Manta, Ecuador and the Dutch colonies of Aruba and Curacao. Called "Forward Operating Locations," these are staging platforms created by the Southern Command to regain reach it lost with the U.S. withdrawal from Panama. Soon, Belz said, Southcom should finish negotiations on a location in El Salvador to give their operations a fourth site and an even deeper reach into the eastern Pacific. COOPERATION For military and civilian planners, the forward operating locations illustrate the regional approach of a drug-control strategy that relies on interaction with host nations. "I don't think we can get the job done by ourselves," said the admiral, who called drug smuggling "a transnational threat. They respect no boundaries and we're required to respect all of them." That's why they use a multiagency, multinational strategy with the United States providing intelligence from Key West to "Source Zone" nations. In one such case, radar detected something speeding north off the Colombian coast on Jan. 16. Key West controllers dispatched four aircraft, including an F-16, to identify it by the time it reached Haiti. Armed with U.S. intelligence, Colombia destroyed the aircraft on the ground soon after its return. Officers in Key West said they were satisfied from their visual tracking that the aircraft, which filed no flight plan and didn't respond to radio communication, was engaged in illegal drug trafficking. - --- MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager