The morning meeting started out like most. There were the usual administrative announcements and personnel concerns. Being a flying operation, the maintenance chief provided the aircraft status report.
But the final announcement marked this group's daily gathering as something unusual: "The detachment got a go-fast with sixty bundles yesterday evening and then scored a second go-fast with seventy-six bundles this morning." It would seem the news that two specialized boats with more than 6,800 pounds of pure cocaine aboard had been seized would bring cheers; instead, the reaction was subdued. As one pilot observed, "That's three tons of drugs that won't be getting into the United States."
It was good hunting, to be sure, but that is what US Customs and Border Protection, or CBP, crews at Cecil Field, Florida, near Jacksonville, and at a sister unit at NAS Corpus Christi, Texas, do for a living. Flying two types of modified P-3 Orion long-range maritime patrol aircraft, they are this country's first line of defense in the war on drugs.
"Our job is long-range detection and coordination. We are a communications platform. We clear the airspace and keep separation with other boats in the area. We are also the on-scene commander when an endgame with a smuggler plays out," says Tiny, the operations officer at Surveillance Support Branch-East, or SSB-East, the CBP unit at Cecil Field. [As a security precaution, surnames of CBP personnel are not used in this article.]
In 2005, SSB-East crews assisted in the seizure or disruption of 168,000 pounds of illegal drugs, mostly cocaine with some marijuana and heroin. "Eighty-four tons was a new record for us," notes Bill, a P-3 pilot. "Cocaine has a street value of about $9,000 per pound. Heroin goes for $40,000 per pound. So, we stopped roughly $1.8 billion dollars worth of drugs from entering the United States."
Trafficking spiked at the end of last year and is continuing its rise into 2006, as almost 66,000 pounds of drugs have been intercepted since fall.
The Drug War
Illegal drugs coming into the United States is not a new problem. In 1887, Congress passed a law banning the shipment of opium from China. In 1971, then-President Richard Nixon officially declared drug abuse "public enemy number one." A little more than a decade later, with increasing violence surrounding the drug trade in South Florida and the rise of the powerful Medell’n cocaine cartel in Columbia, then-President Ronald Reagan expanded the fight. Efforts were directed at stopping drug distribution in the United States and, by working with — and in — other countries, interdicting the drugs.
The flow of illegal drugs from South America is so pervasive that many other countries have joined in the drug war. A number of US federal agencies, including the Coast Guard, the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and even the military services, are involved. CBP, the result of the merger of the US Customs Service and the US Border Patrol under the Department of Homeland Security, remains an essential participant in the drug war as Customs has been tasked with stopping the movement of illegal goods into this country since 1789.
The integrated and coordinated air and maritime force of the CBP, known as its Air and Marine Operations, or AMO, has grown considerably since its humble beginnings. "In the early 1980s, Customs had some dedicated aircraft, but frequently flew a rag-tag collection of aircraft that had been seized carrying drugs," recalls C. R., a Cecil-based P-3 detection system specialist, or DSS, who formerly worked at the Miami Air Branch.
The AMO now consists of thirty-five air units around the country, with 500 pilots and 250 aircraft, including specially equipped AS350 A-Star and Black Hawk helicopters and Citation, King Air, and Cessna 404 aircraft used for the actual arrest of drug smugglers close-in. The P-3 crews track the smugglers well beyond US borders.
The Customs Service began operations with one ex-US Navy P-3A in 1984. Since then, its P-3 fleet has grown to sixteen aircraft: eight Long Range Trackers, or LRTs, and eight airborne early warning, or AEW, aircraft called Domes. SSB-East, established in 2000 primarily to expand counterdrug operations into the eastern Caribbean, operates three P-3B LRTs and three P-3B Domes. What is now SSB-West, established at Corpus Christi in 1987, operates five of each type of aircraft. The entire CBP P-3 operation has accumulated more than 130,000 flight hours without a mishap.
The Domes are used to detect and track air or sea surface targets. Once a target is located, the Dome crew also serves as the command and control platform for the intercept. Originally — and still often referred to as Slicks — the LRTs are used to track and keep the target under surveillance and assist in the actual takedown of the smuggler. "Basically, the LRT operates low, and the Dome operates high," notes Bill. "Whenever possible, we send out a Double Eagle, or one LRT and one Dome, on a mission. It is an effective force."
"We like to see drug runners with their hands up," notes Tiny. "When we started taking the fight to the smugglers in the 1980s, eighty to ninety percent of the drugs came directly into the United States. Now less than one percent does. Air traffic with drugs into the United States has nearly ceased. But the smugglers have adapted. Today they mostly use boats, which can carry more drugs and are harder to detect and track."
Motivated By Money
"Drug running, I hate to say, is a highly professional industry," notes C. R. "The smugglers are well organized, well financed, and have an established logistics network. They are cold-blooded, ruthless people. Human life means nothing to them. Making money is the only thing."
Much like an established delivery service, the smugglers usually have a schedule to keep and will go to just about any length to get their product to market. In one recent case, a smuggler was caught using a fishing trawler to tow a submersible capable of carrying more than ten tons of drugs.
The go-fast boat is today's tool of choice for smuggling drugs. These ocean-going vessels, forty-five to sixty feet long with Fiberglas or wooden hulls to reduce radar return, are powered by four 250 hp outboard engines. They can carry a couple of tons of drugs, usually cocaine wrapped up in sixty-five pound bundles. "With a go-fast, it is guilt by association," notes C. R. "You usually can see the bundles on deck, or they are carrying extra fuel barrels for more range. Their speed and location also points the finger at them. They are pretty recognizable."
Seventy-five percent of the world's cocaine comes from Columbia, but it is a long trip from the processing plant to a transfer point in Mexico. "If we find a fishing boat away from the rest of the fleet or with no fishing nets or gear, it is probably a logistic supply vessel for go-fasts. They're vessels that are out of place. A diesel-powered ship carrying gasoline barrels on deck is a big tip-off," says C. R.
Private aircraft are still an important element in the distribution network. "We see lots of aircraft landing in Mexico or Haiti, with laborers running out with gas cans, and other laborers rushing out to remove the drugs," says Tiny. "We've seen a plane land, unload, refuel, and take off in about five minutes."
In one currently common scenario, waterproof bundles of drugs are dropped from an aircraft near a waiting go-fast, gathered, and loaded. If the go-fast makes it to a dock, the drugs are then transferred to a waiting truck.
Detecting And Intercepting
Before the endgame gets played out and the smugglers are arrested and taken to the US Federal District Court in Tampa, where most of SSB-East's cases are tried, much has happened. "It's very expensive to go out and look for smugglers cold. We don't have enough resources to put up a barrier and catch everything," notes Tiny. "The trend for us is to act based on intelligence collected from a wide variety of sources."
A Double Eagle will be launched based on expected activity in a particular area or when operators at a Relocatable Over-the-Horizon Radar, or ROTHR, pick up an aircraft taking off that is not sending a transponder signal. SSB-East's area of responsibility is the Caribbean and the Bahamas, El Salvador, and points south. Most of the targets they go after are picked up by ROTHR sites in Virginia or Puerto Rico. SSB-West's operations cover the western Gulf of Mexico, Central America, and the eastern Pacific around Columbia. Most of their targets are detected by the ROTHR site in Corpus Christi.
The APS-145 radar, with its antenna mounted in the rotodome on top of the fuselage of the CPB AEW aircraft, gives the crew a 360-degree, 250-nautical-mile search capability. This radar can cover 200,000 square miles from the surface to 100,000 feet altitude and can detect a three-square-meter target at 180 nautical miles. Crews routinely detect go-fasts at ranges out to seventy-five nautical miles. Although it is the same radar as on the Navy's E-2 Hawkeye, the APS-145 has been modified for CBP use to allow the DSSs to configure their console based on specific missions or intelligence.
Joint Interagency Task Force-South, based at NAS Key West, Florida, has tactical operational control over US assets involved in drug interdiction. After receiving track information from the Dome crew, JIATF-South controllers decide if the target is a legitimate flight. "We have had cases in which we were tracking aircraft following the smuggler profile exactly only to learn from JIATF-South that the aircraft belong to other agencies," notes Will, another DSS.
The information is also passed to the LRT, which then uses the eighty-mile search range of the nose-mounted APG-66(v5) air-intercept/sea-search radar (the same radar as on an F-16, but with a larger dish) to go after the target. Once found, the LRT crew will either fly right behind a suspect aircraft — most aircraft don't have rearview mirrors — or will fly circles around a boat just out of visual range of the suspected smugglers.
In the LRT, the three DSS operators are seated at a three-station console running down the left side of the fuselage that uses a Windows-based computer system to run the intercept. "When we have a case, the DSS in position one, which is closest to the cockpit, will manage the tactical situation, read the map, and handle communications," notes Will. "The DSS in position two, in the middle, usually manages the radar. The position three DSS manages the optics and runs the videotape recorders. We record everything and write a detailed mission summary because everything we see and do while airborne becomes evidence."
The optics on the LRT are the retractable Wescam Model 20 electro-optical infrared detection system, or EOIR. The EOIR has a narrow field-of-view black-and-white camera, a wide field-of-view color camera, and an infrared search and track system used to positively identify the target, day or night. "We once got a radar hit off a small object at fifteen miles out and then used the narrow field camera from several miles closer in to determine it was a TV screen floating in the water," notes C. R. "Because everything goes in the mission summary, we had a semi-serious discussion of whether it was a twenty-seven or thirty-two inch screen."
Coordinated Crew
"The P-3's ability to stay on station a lot longer than any other aircraft is a big advantage," says Tiny. Short-range missions are usually less than eight hours. The crew consists of two pilots, one flight engineer, and three DSSs. Long-range missions are longer than ten hours. On those flights, an extra pilot, flight engineer, and DSS are aboard to allow the crew members to get up, use the lavatory, get a drink out of the full-sized refrigerator, fix a meal in the microwave, and sit at the table. Four rest bunks are located at the very back of the fuselage.
The coordination between the flight deck crew and DSSs is one reason the CBP operation is successful. "We have people who don't rotate out every two years," says Colt, the newest P-3 pilot, but who's been with CBP since 2003. "On the flight deck, the pilots lessen the chatter by talking directly to each other instead of getting on the intercom. The operators in the back deal with JIATF-South and other air assets. We concentrate on safety of flight. There is very close crew coordination."
"The way we work is really beautiful," adds Paul, a flight engineer who is also SSB-East's training officer. "The pilot is the mission commander, but everybody has an input: 'Maybe the bad guys did this. Maybe they did that.' Experience plays a big part.
"The pilots and flight engineers — many with more than 10,000 flight hours — come from the Navy," Paul continues. "They are ready to go when they arrive. Because of the digital cockpits in our aircraft, the training syllabus is little different from the Navy's. The DSSs are either air traffic controllers or have E-2 or E-3 AWACS backgrounds." Both the LRTs and the Domes have digital cockpits similar to that of a 737-800 airliner. The pilot also has a monitor that repeats what the DSSs are seeing.
Officially called Air Interdiction Agents, but kiddingly referred to as gun-toters, the pilots are also badged law enforcement officers. "Pilots go through five months of school at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the same basic training the Marshals Service and the Secret Service get," notes Colt. "We learn the law, law enforcement tactics, how to serve warrants, and what our authority is. Weapons training is extensive. We carry H&K .40-cal. pistols and have to keep current with them. At first, it's a little different carrying a gun in the cockpit, but you get used to it."
The CBP P-3 operations are relatively small, with roughly ninety people at Cecil Field and 143 at Corpus Christi. In addition to experience and training, they also know each other well from spending considerable time deployed together. "The drug war is also politics," observes Tiny. "I can name fifteen places we've operated from. Countries ask us, or depending on the situation, we ask them, if we can fly from their bases or airports. We are a visible sign that a country is actively engaged in the fight."
Operating from places such as Bolivia, Grand Cayman, Costa Rica, El Salvador, or Belize, CBP crews often take host nation controllers on missions. Many times the host nation forces conduct the endgame. "Our crews also have to be diplomats," notes Tiny. "We have to interact with everybody from a private guarding the aircraft, to a US ambassador, to a prime minister."
The Takedown
"When we are tracking a bad guy, crew members sit at the monitors for three or four hours straight," notes C. R. "They don't want to give up their seat at the console when the intercept is going down." Tiny adds, "A crew deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, once tracked a smuggler to Canada. After the takedown, they landed in Vermont having only packed tank tops and shorts. They had to make a run to Wal-Mart to get winter clothes."
When the endgame plays out, the crew can talk directly to the law enforcement officers making the bust. "Having seen the entire chase from the P-3 is a big advantage," says C. R. "And we can communicate with everyone from the DEA to the Fish and Wildlife Service to arrest the smugglers."
The communications suite on both the LRTs and the Domes is extensive. Each CBP P-3 has two secure UHF satellite communications radios, five UHF/VHF radios, two VHF-FM radios, and a Customs-specific secure-capable, high-frequency, over-the-horizon radio called COTHEN. If DSSs can't get the word out over the radios, they can always pick up the onboard Iridium satellite telephone to communicate to agencies on the ground.
A smuggler in a go-fast will usually try to outrun a Coast Guard cutter, or the CBP version of a go-fast called the Midnight Express. "But the game's over when the helicopters get there," notes Tiny. If necessary, the law enforcement or Coast Guard crew in the helicopter or boat will disable the go-fast by shooting the boat motors.
"Even if they dump their load, it's a victory for us," notes C. R. "With our optics, we can literally see the smugglers hang their heads when they know they are caught. And if we could have champagne on the aircraft, we'd break it out."
"Flying and not finding anything can be frustrating," Colt concludes. "We forget the other long days when we see the endgame go down. On those days we feel like we are making a real difference."
Jeff Rhodes is the associate editor of Code One.
