Dragnet of the Pacific

Coast Guard Magazine, March, 2005 by Roger Gayman

The Coast Guard is the lead federal agency for maritime drug interdiction and shares the lead responsibility for air interdiction as well, making it a key player in fighting the flow of illegal drugs to the United States. The Coast Guard's mission is to reduce the supply of drugs as close to the source as possible, by denying smugglers the use of air and water routes through a six million square mile area transit zone that includes the Caribbean, the Gulf of Mexico and the Eastern Pacific Ocean.

The Coast Guard's 11th District is responsible for counter drug operations in the largest of the target areas: the Eastern Pacific.

The vast Eastern Pacific is about the same size as the continental United States. To meet the challenge of patrolling this vast area, the Coast Guard coordinates closely with other federal agencies and Central and South American nations to disrupt and deter the flow of illegal drugs. The sheer amount of space for smugglers to sneak through makes it hard to come up with a reliable strategy for stopping them. Therefore, the Coast Guard must rely heavily on partnerships with the Departments of Defense and Justice, and foreign governments.

"To be successful, maritime drug interdiction requires robust interagency collaboration," said Cmdr. Kelly Hatfield, the 11th District's chief of law enforcement and intelligence.

In the Eastern Pacific, the investigative team of Operation Panama Express, which includes the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Middle District of Florida, the FBI, the DEA, the Joint Interagency Task Force South and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, uncovers useful intelligence information. JIATF South, based in Key West, Fla., fuses hot investigative intelligence with other sources of intelligence, and uses the information to detect and monitor smugglers. When Coast Guard and Navy units under the tactical control of JIATF South find a suspect vessel, the interdiction phase begins.

At this point, just before conducting a boarding or other law enforcement actions, these units request a shift of tactical control to the 11th District. If both JIATF South and the district concur with the boarding recommendation, the district assumes tactical control for the interdiction and apprehension phase.

"The legal authority to board suspected smuggling vessels is determined primarily by the nationality of the vessel, not by the persons aboard," said Lt. Benjamin Janczyk, a counter-drug officer for the 11th District. He said that although "on-scene units must have reasonable suspicion that the vessel is involved in illegal transportation of drugs in order to board the vessel," the United States must first negotiate a bilateral agreement with the suspect vessel's nation. These agreements grant authority to the United States to take limited counter-drug law enforcement actions.

In fiscal year 2004, the Coast Guard seized a record-breaking 241,713 pounds of cocaine, worth approximately $7.7 billion. The previous annual record was 138,393 pounds. To put this historic achievement in context, the Coast Guard spent 11 percent of its total operating on drug interdiction; before September 11, 2001, hours spent on drug interdictions equaled 23 percent of its total. Drug interdictions consumed 18 percent of the Coast Guard's budget before September 11, 2001 and it was only 12 percent in both the fiscal year 2004 and the 2005 requested budgets.

"The bottom line is that better intelligence and increased interagency and international cooperation have resulted in increased seizures," said Rear Adm. Kevin Eldridge, commander of the 11th District.

On Sept. 5, 2004, the USS Curts arrived in Key West, Fla., to offload more than 75,000 pounds of cocaine seized in five interdiction cases in the Eastern Pacific, with a value of more than $2.3 billion. The drugs were seized by Department of Defense and Coast Guard units working for JIATF South and the 11th District, and included the first and third largest seizures in Coast Guard history. A LEDET embarked aboard the USS Curts made the largest discovery Sept. 17, consisting of more than 30,000 pounds of cocaine from the fishing vessel Lina Maria, approximately 300 nautical miles west of the Galapagos Islands.

Sept. 23, a Coast Guard LEDET embarked aboard the USS Crommelin discovered 26,379 pounds of cocaine aboard the fishing vessel San Jose approximately 650 nautical miles southwest of the Galapagos Islands. As a result of the Coast Guard's interagency partnership and efforts, more than 75,000 pounds of cocaine never reached the United States, and 31 smugglers were turned over to federal authorities for prosecution by the U.S. Attorney in Tampa, Fla.

The cooperation of foreign governments continues to be a key to the Coast Guard's success in drug interdiction. On several occasions last fiscal year, the 11th District engaged in a close cooperation with Central and South American governments, including Colombia, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Panama. In the case of the fishing vessel Lina Maria, a quick response from the Cambodian government, confirming suspicions that the vessel was not Cambodian flagged, enabled Coast Guard law enforcement teams to move forward quickly to execute the drug seizure. Likewise, the bilateral agreement between the United States and the government of Belize allowed the Coast Guard to board the Belize-flagged fishing vessel San Jose quickly and seize the drugs on board.