Mock Terrorism : Coast Guard ‘Bad Guys’ Test Coastal Defenses

Four days after American warplanes bombed Tripoli, about the time Moammar Kadafi promised that a horde of holy warriors would seek vengeance, the Southern California coast came under attack.

Saboteurs in black wet suits and scuba gear slipped into the water off Long Beach, surfacing at defense and commercial targets, including the U.S. Naval Station and Naval Shipyard on Terminal Island and Union Oil’s supertanker dock. Enemy forces mined coastal waterways and, in a variety of disguises, carrying an assortment of weapons and devices, infiltrated strategic facilities throughout the Long Beach-Los Angeles Harbor.

This invasion went largely unreported in the media. But the U.S. Coast Guardsmen assigned to the 82-foot cutter Point Divide in Newport Beach know the details of the attack. They were there. They were “the bad guys.”

Last week the Point Divide was back at its base in Newport Harbor. Lt.(j.g.) Michael Parks, commanding officer of the cutter, and his superiors at the Coast Guard’s 11th District Headquarters in Long Beach, talked about the simulated invasion--officially titled the Joint Service Maritime Defense Zone Exercise--and what the Coast Guard is doing to guard the coast against the real thing.

The Coast Guard operates under the U.S. Department of Transportation in peacetime and merges with the Navy in time of war or by order of the President, Parks said.

However, as Coast Guard Vice Adm. John D. Costello wrote in the August, 1985, issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s publication Proceedings: “. . . Our strategic supply lines depend on a surprisingly small number of critical ports . . . those ports’ vulnerability to mining, sabotage or direct attack give an enemy the potential to interdict a large volume of shipping with a modest force commitment. This is too attractive a possibility for an enemy to overlook, or for the United States to fail to counter.”

Increasingly aware of that vulnerability, the U.S. secretaries of the Navy and Transportation signed an agreement in 1984 creating Maritime Defense Zones on the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and giving Coast Guard commanders responsibility for planning and coordinating coastal defense and overseeing a joint force of Navy and Coast Guard personnel.

The exercise last month was the first test in Southern California waters of the new defense zone, according to Capts. Edward Grace, chief of the Marine Safety division, and Terry Lucas, chief of the Operations Division for the Coast Guard’s 11th District, which extends from the Mexican Border to Point Conception, just above Santa Barbara, and 1,000 miles into the Pacific.

Lucas and Grace took pains to explain that the maneuvers had been in planning since last September--that it was purely coincidental that they occurred the same week the United States bombed Libya. Still, people around Long Beach Harbor who missed the public announcements of the exercise might have thought for a moment that the retaliation Kadafi promised was at hand.

As Grace and Lucas told the story--remaining tight-lipped about aspects of the operation that remained classified--the main thrust of the simulated attack began Friday evening, April 18.

Around 4 p.m. about 300 “bad guys,” called the Orange Force, began a series of terrorist assaults against 1,700 Navy, Coast Guard and Coast Guard auxiliary Blue Force troops (and a few soldiers on loan from the Army). Over the next 48 hours, a total of 83 events occurred under the scrutiny of controllers who had plotted the various scenarios.

On that Friday evening, for example, a seaman reported for duty at a Navy ship. His identification card had been stolen, he said, but he did have his security records. Ship guards grew suspicious when they noticed that the man’s sea bag didn’t contain everything regulations require. With the seaman detained on the quarterdeck, sailors pored over his records and discovered discrepancies. The seaman turned out to be an Orange terrorist. Score one for the Blue.

That same evening, though, a security guard stopped a civilian cleaning crew entering Coast Guard headquarters in Long Beach and demanded identification. The crew vouched for the unfamiliar face among them, saying he was “the new man on the crew” and had not yet received his identification card.

“He went in and started cleaning up, emptying wastebaskets,” Lucas recalled. After a few minutes, however, the impersonator--who had talked the custodial crew into the deceit--slipped off and planted a little red “device” on the eighth floor. Headquarters theoretically bit the dust.

“That’s the type of treachery that can go on anywhere,” Lucas said.

Wedding Used as Cover

Even more treacherous were the bad guys who got wind of a bona fide wedding at the naval station on Saturday. Some retired sailors and other people waiting to enter the base that day already had witnessed what they thought was the capture of Libyan terrorists, when security personnel lined an Orange team up against a wall, frisked them and took them into custody, Grace said.

When a neatly dressed couple arrived later, and explained that their names should be on the list for the wedding party--that, no kidding, someone had made a dumb mistake in leaving their names off, the security guards were suspicious. But the couple were adamant, and even showed the guards their wedding gift. The guards let them pass.

“They were not a part of the wedding,” Lucas sighed.

The wedding gift was a big hit, though. Simulated kaboom ! Score major points for the bad guys.

As the exercise continued, as mine sweepers swept up the dummy limpet mines the bad guys had dumped into simulated shipping lanes and “joint force intelligence” gathered information and continued surveillance of suspicious vessels, teams of Seals (the Navy’s elite sea, air and land force) carried on a jihad of make-believe mayhem. Termed “swimmers,” the Seals used a variety of craft--including private boats belonging to Orange Force Coast Guard auxiliary--to launch their attacks.

As an enemy vessel, the Point Divide was in the thick of the action day and night, creating “diversionary tactics,” and--in the cutter’s two high-speed inflatable boats--slipping Seals into the water for missions, then fishing them out again.

Pressed for details of his crew’s role, Parks, who is clearly indoctrinated in the World War II slogan “Loose Lips Sink Ships” wouldn’t give much more than name, rank and serial number.

“Our job was to disrupt the Blue Force as much as possible, and I think the Point Divide held up its Orange County tradition and did a good job as the Orange Force,” Parks said. “I can’t go into how we did that, other than that we did do it, and fairly successfully.”

Role Downplayed

Park downplays the role his crew and cutter--the only joint force presence in Orange County--might play in fighting off any real terrorist horde lurking off the coast. For the most part, he said, the 82-foot cutter goes about its business conducting the sort of peacetime activities for which the Coast Guard is known.

The Point Divide averages about 50 search and rescue missions a year, and in recent weeks, the crew saved a floundering 44-foot trimaran north of Point Dume and towed to safety a 35-foot urchin boat adrift in eight-to-10-foot seas on the backside of Catalina Island. The boat also is involved in marine safety inspections, environmental protection and policing activities--including enforcement of customs, immigration and fisheries statutes--and participates in the federal drug interdiction program, which has combined the resources of various agencies in the battle against drug trafficking.

As for the war on terrorism, “basically our awareness has been heightened to be observant of anything suspicious . . . ,” Parks said. “We haven’t changed our defense condition (a term for the military’s warfare readiness status), but we have heightened our physical security and our awareness.”

Parks said some possible terrorist targets along the Orange County coast have been identified. “But I’m not at liberty to discuss what they are.” His cutter has not increased its patrol activities, and so far no one has contacted the Coast Guard to report suspicious activity along the coast, Parks said.

“If we did get a call like that we’d contact the district operation center (in Long Beach). . . . “ Navy and Coast Guard intelligence, working with other law enforcement and military agencies, would then coordinate a response, he said.

But Parks doubts his crew is likely to get a message saying, “There are terrorists on this vessel, go out and seize it.”

“Unfortunately, I think (it’s more likely) you’re going to be involved in normal operations and come across the vessel. That’s why the training that we do receive from our law enforcement role is so important.”

That training included anti-terrorist instruction from FBI SWAT teams during the 1984 Olympics-- when the Point Divide patrolled the yachting venues along the coast and guarded foreign dignitaries such as King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden--and ongoing instruction as part of the drug interdiction program.

That training was put to a real test last May when the fishing boat Ocean Joy, observed unloading 10 tons of marijuana in Los Angeles Harbor, attempted to outrun the Point Divide. “The vessel didn’t stop when we hailed it and made all attempts to stop it, and we were forced to fire warning shots with one of our .50-caliber machine guns,” Parks said. “As we were preparing to use disabling fire, the vessel stopped in the water.”

Southern California boaters are sometimes annoyed that the Point Divide’s crew is armed when it cautiously boards their vessels for routine inspections, he continued. “But you never know when you walk on board a vessel what you have, what is waiting for you. . . .”

Easier Being Bad Guy

That his own team of “terrorists” apparently was able to blow much of Long Beach Harbor and the Port of Los Angeles into oblivion doesn’t worry Parks much. “It’s always easier being the bad guy in exercises,” he said. “ . . . The deck is stacked against the good guys, which is good for our training. The Blue forces have an uphill battle from the start.”

Real terrorists would not have the insight and advantages the Orange Force had, he said. But he added, “I would never underestimate the ability of a terrorist. Because of their desire and zeal, I wouldn’t put any limit on their efforts. And if you don’t underestimate them, hopefully you won’t be caught off guard. . . . I think we’re correct in placing so much emphasis on maritime defense zone training.”

Sitting in an office in Long Beach, with a panorama of shipyards and refineries behind him, Capt. Lucas had a similar evaluation of the exercise. Even with constraints, such as an agreement not to use sonar--the sound of which would have driven any “swimmers” out of the water--Lucas said that “as the exercise progressed, we became very very effective.

“If this were the real thing, those Seals would have never gotten in the water. There’d be different rules of engagement and . . . we would meet them far in advance, before they got to the port . . .”

Still, Lucas concedes, the exercise proved that as far as stopping terrorists goes, “we’re not good enough.”

“But we’re going to be.”