Pubdate: Sun, 25 Aug 2002 Source: Deseret News (UT) Copyright: 2002 Deseret News Publishing Corp. Contact: http://www.desnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/124 Author: David Binder, New York Times News Service Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin) MULTINATIONAL DRUG SWEEP NETS THOUSANDS OF SUSPECTS WASHINGTON -- A broad narcotics sweep involving 25,000 law enforcement officers and coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Administration across 15 countries of Central Asia and the Balkans has resulted in the arrest or detention of thousands of suspects, federal officials said last week. The sweep this summer - from June 10 to July 11 - seized more than 3,700 pounds of heroin and 9 tons of other narcotics. For years, the agency has conducted multinational actions in Latin America, but this operation was the first to cover the Balkans and Central Asia, the officials said. The sweep, involving police, customs and border officers of 18 countries, was coordinated in three phases by regional command centers in Bucharest, Romania and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, with the assistance of about 40 officers of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The agency also supplied communications equipment for the operation. One official, Steven W. Casteel, the drug agency's chief of intelligence, said the lessons learned from the cooperative operation were more important than sheer numbers. "Statistics are poor, if any, help in determining the correct actions to be taken in policing or as a measure of success," Casteel said. Instead, Casteel, who has been in drug enforcement for 30 years, is concentrating on what he can learn about trends in global drug smuggling enterprises. "I am a big believer in transnational policing," he said in an interview at the enforcement agency's headquarters, overlooking the Pentagon. "You can talk about al-Qaida and other forms of terrorism, but the biggest threat anywhere in the world isn't terror, it's organized crime." The seizure of 56 pounds of heroin on June 6 at a border crossing between Greece and Albania also caught his attention. Though it was not the largest in the sweep this summer, he said it showed that Greek, Turkish and Albanian officials were working together. That was significant, he said, because it meant that law enforcement agencies were cooperating in a region where there are numerous ethnic rivalries. He said the emphasis at the Regional Center for Combating Transborder Crime, in Bucharest, was on identifying choke points on the main Balkan routes used to move narcotics to Western and Northern Europe. At the center in Bishkek, law enforcement officers from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan worked together. The Bishkek operations were devised not only to catch smugglers, American officials said, but also to learn the methods of Central Asian and Afghan heroin traffickers, the routes traffickers used, the involvement of militant groups in drug trafficking, prices and purity levels. - --- MAP posted-by: Jackl