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All drug smugglers are motivated by the promise of great and fast financial gain. They are businessmen, after all. Even the lowest member of the smuggling organization stands to gain big rewards. In one case, a fisherman in a northern California coastal town made two smuggling runs a year. Each run consisted of a rendezvous with a mother ship about 175 miles from shore. He would then return to his town, and two men from another segment of the drug ring would offload the cargo of marijuana into a truck. The captain earned $50,000 for each run; his crew members earned $20,000 each.
A well-planned drug-smuggling operation with good security has an excellent chance of success, unless law-enforcement agencies receive prior intelligence information. The smuggling operations are usually sophisticated, while law-enforcement assets are limited and have a low level of effectiveness.
A drug smuggler’s methods depend largely on which drug the smuggler is attempting to land. Until recently, marijuana and hashish constituted the primary contraband. Within the last few years, however, cocaine smuggling by land, sea, and air has taken over. In addition to a wider range of drugs, the drug cartels now stockpile their products at the source, which enables them to ship year-round on a random basis without regard for the growing season.
The marijuana and hashish smuggled into the West Coast originate in the “Golden Triangle,” which is composed of parts of Thailand, Laos, Kampuchea, and Vietnam. These drug-smuggling operations take one of two forms. In one method, a large amount of marijuana or hashish is loaded aboard a moderate-sized merchant ship, which travels across the Pacific Ocean toward the United States along one of the busy, great-circle trading routes. When the ship is within 1,000 miles of the West Coast, she leaves the trade routes and heads for a little-traveled area 150 to 900 miles offshore. Once there, the mother ship unloads her illegal cargo in small lots to a number of U.S. fishing boats and pleasure craft that take their contraband into different U.S. ports. The use of many smugglers in small boats reduces risks both to each smuggler and to the other members of the smuggling hierarchy.
The second method uses a smaller vessel, such as an oceangoing fishing boat, to make the entire run from Southeast Asia to a U.S. port. Marijuana and hashish are hidden on board these vessels in imaginative and effective ways. In one such case involving the motor vessel Querube II, marijuana was hidden in a welded-shut compartment disguised as a fuel tank by the addition of a small tank in one of the hidden compartment’s corners. The “fuel tank” contained fuel and could be sounded in the traditional way. In another case, smugglers added an entire false bottom filled with marijuana to the engine room of a fishing boat. Smugglers using this method often spend a long time at various ports along their route to complicate surveillance efforts. While in port, they often repaint their vessels using different color schemes and change their vessels’ names to further confound law-enforcement efforts. They may also build false deck structures to mask their vessels’ true silhouettes.
Drug smugglers use a wide array of electronic devices to detect possible surveillance and interdiction efforts. To complement radios of various ranges and types, including satellite- capable ones, they use scramblers—encryption devices that prevent eavesdropping by anyone without the proper equipment and decoding material. Search radars and radio frequency scanners help smugglers detect approaching law-enforcement aircraft or ships. They also scan radio frequencies and gather their own intelligence information by monitoring law- enforcement communications channels, which are rarely scrambled. Law-enforcement officials are taking steps to reduce their vulnerability in this area.
Drug smugglers have even
Approximately 2,000 military working dogs are presently employed successfully throughout DoD, as well as by a number of federal agencies, and the Military Working Dog School maintains the capability to rapidly expand its output of trained dogs in a contingency situation.
If the Coast Guard used drug “sniffer” dogs to randomly search vessels, it would greatly increase the probability of detecting cleverly hidden caches of illegal drugs, such as the “six-pack of cocaine.” Moreover, the dogs’ ability to detect residual odors at previously used locations would help the Coast Guard identify potential drugrunning vessels. The knowledge that the Coast Guard was employing drug-sniffing dogs during searches would, in addition, act as a deterrent.
The funding necessary to expand the military working dog program would be efficiently spent: the organization for training the additional dogs already exists and is prepared to expand rapidly. The Navy’s use of drug-sniffing dogs on board ship has already proven the dogs’ value in a maritime environment. Although they have exhibited some weaknesses in this role, notably a degradation in their effectiveness after prolonged exposure to the noises
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case of detection, including criteria for aborting the operation. One captured document (depicted here) listed an area that the marijuana-laden small craft returning from the mother ship were to avoid because of a known Coast Guard and Navy presence. Such detailed plans enable smugglers to conduct major operations under virtual radio silence, removing one factor law enforcement forces tradi
Published operations orders for a 'Uajor operation. Closely resembling military operations orders, ihese documents described the unticipated chronology of events and included listings of primary and alternate radio frequencies, c°de names for main action offiCers and vessels, and diagrams depicting the manner in which contraband will be transferred from the mother ship. The plans listed contingency measures in
tionally could exploit.
Much more valuable per kilogram than marijuana or hashish, cocaine is smuggled in smaller lots, enabling smugglers to conceal amounts of substantial value in small compartments and devices. For example, one of the most popular forms of maritime cocaine smuggling is to hide a cocaine shipment in one of the hundreds of boxes in one of the truck-size containers on a large containerized merchant ship. Since each containerized ship holds hundreds of containers, the Customs agents ashore or Coast Guardsmen at sea have only a remote chance of discovering the cocaine unless they possess prior information of the shipment, including which container it is in. Moreover, the containers usually originate in different locations, and often sit in storage at various ports while awaiting further transportation, greatly complicating attempts to establish the identities of the smugglers involved.
Even a small boat provides a multitude of locations for hiding cocaine. For example, a kilogram of cocaine, worth between $10,000 and $20,000, can be concealed in a specially made six-pack of Coca Cola in one of the cabinets in the galley of a 35-foot sailboat. Without intelligence information highlighting that boat as a likely smuggling platform, the Coast Guard would be hard pressed to detect the hidden contraband in a routine search.
—W. J. Lahneman
and forced-air ventilation systems of large ships. The lack °f these phenomena on small boats, however, would actu- aUy improve the dogs’ performance over the Navy’s experience. On the other hand, the increased pitching and rolling of small craft in rough weather would decrease the ‘logs’ effectiveness. However, Coast Guard drug interdiction teams can overcome this problem by searching small vessels after they have entered the shelter of harbors or after they have moored or anchored.
More Focused Use of the Coast Guard Reserve for Drug Interdiction: The Coast Guard Reserve historically
has trained to support the service’s wartime mission. Accordingly, their training has stressed preparation for such missions as port security, Maritime Defense Zone (Mar- Dez) operations, and anti-sabotage measures. The Coast Guard recently released a study, the “Strategic Planning and Reserve Capability Study” (SPARCS), that addressed the future choices of the Coast Guard Reserve.
The panel recommended that Coast Guard planners “investigate ways in which Coast Guard reservists can contribute, to a greater degree, to the accomplishment of current Coast Guard objectives while maintaining
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oceedings / July 1990
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