Pubdate: Mon, 08 Jun 1998 Source: Associated Press Author: James Anderson, Associated Press Writer U.S. FIGHTS TO STOP DRUG SMUGGLERS ABOARD THE U.S. COAST GUARD CUTTER DALLAS (AP) -- On the front line of the war on drugs, Seaman Chris Taylor casts a fishing line into roiling waters from the stern of his 380-foot ship. ``It breaks up the monotony of the patrol,'' the 26-year-old native of Nashville, Tenn., said with a laugh. ``Sometimes we'll get a couple hundred pounds of dolphin and take them in and they'll grill them up.'' A couple hundred pounds of cocaine would be better. But neither drug smugglers nor fish -- at least on this day -- are biting. The Dallas, command ship for an ambitious drug interdiction effort in the Caribbean, hadn't made a bust in weeks. Welcome to ``Operation Frontier Lance,'' a 3-month-old, $2.5 million effort to stop South American smugglers from using Haiti and the Dominican Republic to ship cocaine into Puerto Rico and the southeastern United States. Capt. James W. Underwood, the Dallas' commander, admitted he faced an uphill battle against nimble smugglers who use hard-to-detect speedboats to crisscross the Caribbean -- the route for 40 percent of the cocaine that reaches the United States. ``Getting real solid intelligence would be fabulous,'' he sighed. A favorite strategy of smugglers has been to focus on Puerto Rico. Since it is a U.S. territory, drug smugglers can proceed to the American mainland without dealing with customs or borders. When U.S. agencies began cracking down around Puerto Rico last year, traffickers shifted 100 miles west to Hispaniola, the underpoliced island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic that lies about halfway between Colombia and Florida. Some gangs staged nighttime airdrops in isolated parts of Haiti, too. Once in Hispaniola, smugglers wait for the right moment to spirit shipments via speedboat across the narrow Mona Channel into Puerto Rico -- or even to the U.S. mainland. Under Frontier Lance, U.S. intelligence tries to track ships and planes while U.S. Navy and Coast Guard officers direct as many as a dozen ships swarming around Hispaniola -- American, Dominican, occasionally British. In all, U.S. officials believe they intercepted about one-third of the estimated 430 tons of cocaine shipped from South America to the United States last year. It's not entirely clear whether the new operation has made a serious difference, admitted A.P. Bennett, a combat systems officer on the Dallas, which is based in Charleston, S.C. Since March 1, the Coast Guard has seized only 1 1/2 tons of cocaine and eight smuggler boats and arrested 27 people. The Coast Guard says it seizes a global average of $1.5 million worth of cocaine and marijuana a day. The chief of U.S. anti-drug efforts, Barry McCaffrey, claims cocaine shipments into Puerto Rico have dropped from as high as 14 tons a month last year to seven tons. Yet the street price in Puerto Rico remains relatively constant, at $8,600-$11,400 a pound, said William Santiago, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent in San Juan. McCaffrey said chasing the smugglers farther from Puerto Rico is a victory in itself, by making it more difficult for them. Some have moved as far west as the Central American nation of Honduras, where the Coast Guard has seized more than three tons of cocaine this year. Smugglers have even organized illegal trips of boat people to divert the Coast Guard, Dominican newspapers reported. ``It's a constant game of move, countermove,'' said Commodore John W. Young, commander of the U.S. Navy's Destroyer Squadron Six based in Pascagoula, Miss. Occasionally, there are flashes of excitement: - --In March, following an 18-hour chase, a Colombian speedboat crashed into rocks near Haiti. The Coast Guard recovered 200 pounds of cocaine; the boatmen escaped. - --In April, a Coast Guard ship fired across the bow of a speedboat during another 18-hour chase back south to Colombia, where the Colombian navy finally arrested the smugglers. - --Off Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an engine room fire on the 31-year-old Dallas slightly injured two sailors. For the 170-odd men and women on the Dallas, most days are devoted to routine: ship maintenance, fire drills, launching helicopters, watching videos, catching fresh air on deck. Over three recent days, the Dallas rarely crept above 9 mph while cruising off the cloud-shrouded Haitian island of Gonave. An anticipated drug shipment never materialized. Lt. Ernesto G. Rubio gazed from the ship, lights out as it prowled, under a nighttime sky dotted with stars. ``If we're deterring them, then I guess we're doing what the American taxpayer is paying us to do,'' he said. - --- Checked-by: Melodi Cornett