Source: New York Times (NY) Contact: http://www.nytimes.com/ Pubdate: Sun, 20 Sep 1998 Author: Christopher Wren U.S. DRUG CHIEF SEEKS OVERHAUL OF STRATEGY AT BORDER WASHINGTON -- U.S. border inspectors searched slightly more than a million commercial trucks and railway cars entering the United States from Mexico last year. They found cocaine stashed in cargo compartments on only six occasions, said Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the White House director of drug-control policy. He cites the dispiriting statistic in pressing for an overhaul of the strategy for stanching the flow of illegal drugs into the United States. Slightly more than half of the cocaine smuggled into the United States, and much of the heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines, comes through Mexico. McCaffrey is proposing that interdiction operations along the 2,000-mile-long southwestern border be coordinated by a single federal official, who would assume responsibility for all counter-drug efforts by a half-dozen government departments and no fewer than 22 federal agencies. But McCaffrey, who holds Cabinet-level rank as the administration's top drug-control official, is getting a cool response from other government institutions like the Justice and Treasury departments, where spokesmen said last week only that his proposal was under review. Several officials who follow drug policy in Washington said that the proposal failed to spell out whom a new border drug "czar" would report to and who would control actual operations. Some departments and agencies fear that the proposal could infringe on their authority and their budgets. McCaffrey presides over a federal drug-control budget exceeding $16 billion this year, but actual allocations are proposed and controlled by the departments and agencies involved. McCaffrey said in an interview that his proposal harbors no hidden agenda. He said that more efficient cooperation and superior technology were needed to interdict illegal drugs at the southwestern border and its 24 ports of entry and 39 other sanctioned crossing points. "This isn't a big deal," McCaffrey said. "It's organizing 39 places so that manpower, technology and intelligence make it very risky to smuggle things that are, by weight, more valuable than gold." For the proposed border czar, McCaffrey said he envisioned a politician, lawyer or law-enforcement professional who speaks Spanish, is highly regarded in the border community and favors close cooperation with Mexico. He did not mention any names. Buying more sophisticated radar, scanning and night-vision equipment, he said, would cost a fraction of the $2 billion that the government already spends annually to combat border smuggling. "I'm not talking about the Marshall Plan," McCaffrey said. "I'm talking about better organization." More than 11,000 U.S. inspectors, agents and other officials are deployed along the border with Mexico. But their resources are strained by the cross-border traffic that has burgeoned since the North American Free Trade Agreement was carried out nearly five years ago. Such traffic amounted to 254 million crossings by people, most of them in 75 million cars, and 3.5 million trucks and railway cars entering the United States from Mexico in 1996. Information about border smuggling is so fragmented and incomplete, McCaffrey said, that it leaves some drug operations running blind. "Whether we and the traffickers end up at the same point is all too often left to luck and gritty, individual police work," he said in a speech in El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 26. A draft summary of McCaffrey's proposal, which has been sent to some members of Congress as well as to other government officials, identified some specific obstacles to be overcome in fighting drug smuggling along the border: * Communications systems used by different agencies are sometimes incompatible, leaving them isolated or relying on "jerry-built solutions" to keep in touch with law-enforcement operations working the border. * Agencies collecting intelligence often fail to share it with other organizations that are in a position to catch drug smugglers, and sometimes cannot reach everyone in their own ranks in time to stop a drug shipment. * Efficient technology for screening vehicles for smuggled drugs without a time-consuming physical search is seriously lacking. * Only three devices capable of scanning trucks for hidden compartments are deployed along the border. "Traffickers quickly adjust to the construction of such devices and shift drugs elsewhere," the summary said. As a result, the report said, the number of cocaine seizures at checkpoints and traffic stops last year was less than half the number made in 1995. Cocaine seizures as a result of investigations were only one-quarter of those in 1995. On Wednesday, Attorney General Janet Reno picked a federal attorney in New Mexico, John J. Kelly, as her representative for the southwest border region. Reno created the post in 1995 to coordinate the efforts of the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Border Patrol, which all fall under the Justice Department. This arrangement does not include the Customs Service, which conducts most border inspections, and the financial crimes units of the Treasury Department, which tracks money laundering. The State Department and the Pentagon run their own anti-drug programs in Latin America. The Department of Transportation watches cross-border traffic and supervises the Coast Guard. Conscious of looking tough on drugs in an election year, Congress disregarded other advice from McCaffrey. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved its version of a new Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act, which calls for an 80 percent cut in the flow of illicit drugs into the United States by the end of 2001 and authorized $2.6 billion that has yet to be appropriated. In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate Caucus on International Narcotics Control, McCaffrey called the target of 80 percent "completely unrealistic." He has set a target of a 10 percent reduction for the same period. - --- Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson