Is Customs Losing the War in Air to Drug Smugglers?

When Richard Lawrence Peterson, a 68-year-old, thrice-convicted drug smuggler, flew his twin-engine Cessna 320 into U.S. airspace from Mexico on a winter evening in late 1986, he took precautions befitting an accomplished contrabandist and World War II Army Air Corps pilot. He was flying low and without lights in an area west of Calexico known as the Laguna Salada, where surrounding mountains render ground radar useless against low-altitude fliers.

His mission: Drop off more than 700 pounds of Mexican marijuana to accomplices waiting in two pickup trucks at a remote airstrip along the California-Nevada border. And then get out, quickly.

It didn’t quite work that way.

A Customs Service jet, equipped with radar and night-vision devices and based at North Island Naval Air Station, spotted the Cessna’s entry above Imperial County, and followed the aircraft to its landing site, where help was summoned. Soon, high-powered searchlights from a Customs Service Blackhawk helicopter illuminated the ebony evening like a night game at Yankee Stadium, and agents armed with automatic weapons alighted from the chopper into the desert night and made the bust.

“Everything worked like it was supposed to in this case,” recalled Brian L. Simon, a Customs Service special agent who was at the scene.

If only it were that way every time.

Radar Umbrella Full of Holes

The Peterson case was, in fact, one of the relatively few successful recent aerial interdictions along the U.S. border in California, where, authorities acknowledge, the lack of radar coverage and, to a lesser extent, insufficient aircraft and personnel, leave the area highly vulnerable to airborne drug traffickers arriving from Mexico. Despite vows that the situation should improve by adding more radar and other equipment in coming years, critics are skeptical about the abilities of the Customs Service to keep up with ever-adaptable smugglers, who

routinely fly below the porous radar umbrella and rig their craft with extra fuel tanks and other features allowing them additional time in the air before landing on dry lake beds, roads and small airstrips on the U.S. side.

As pressure mounts for expanded use of military equipment to fight the drug “war,” congressional scrutiny of Customs air operations is increasing.

“There is virtually no capability to catch low-level aircraft,” said U.S. Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Coronado), who has studied the issue.

Frank Kapitan, director of the Customs Service’s Aviation Operations Division in Washington, acknowledged in an interview that an experienced smuggling pilot is unlikely to be caught entering the United States from Mexico--a nation that has gained in popularity as an entry point for traffickers since U.S. authorities put the squeeze on traditional routes through south Florida, the Caribbean and Bahamas. The many radar “blind spots” along the U.S. border work to the advantage of knowledgeable smugglers.

“If he (the smuggler) knows what he’s doing and he wants to fly across, the odds are pretty small that he’ll get detected,” conceded Kapitan, whose division, with a current budget of about $175 million, includes about 100 aircraft and 800 personnel nationwide, deployed mostly along the nation’s southern borders.

In fact, Peterson and his three accomplices, all of whom have since pleaded guilty to various smuggling-related charges, may well have avoided detection themselves during their flight in December 1986, had an informant not tipped federal authorities beforehand of their planned clandestine crossing. The tip alerted officials--and authorities are now able to cite the case as a “model” of air interdiction.

The reality, however, is that there has been only a handful of such aerial interdiction cases in the past year along the border in California, despite daily patrols of Customs Service aircraft based at North Island in Coronado and March Air Force Base in Riverside County. The entire U.S.-Mexico border, stretching for almost 2,000 miles, is pierced regularly by unknown numbers of aircraft ferrying tons of marijuana, cocaine and heroin into the United States.

“Customs was never designed to combat an aerial invasion,” said Hunter, who has been at the forefront of the congressional effort to deploy more military resources to assist in the interdiction program. “Customs simply does not have the equipment, the personnel or the wherewithal to repel this aerial invasion.”

Using figures from various sources, Hunter estimates that between 10 and 27 “drug planes”--mostly small aircraft, flying at night--penetrate U.S. airspace each day, primarily mostly through the nation’s southern borders, from Florida to California. Their success rate is more than 90%, Hunter maintains.

Customs Service officials, defending the air interdiction effort, characterize such estimates as guesswork. They note that, in the fiscal year that ended last Sept. 30, the nationwide program resulted in the seizures of 23,000 pounds of cocaine, 170,000 pounds of marijuana, 66 aircraft and 74 ground vehicles; 250 suspects were also arrested. However, most of those numbers reflect law enforcement action in the East, particularly the Florida-Caribbean area, as comparatively few aerial interdictions took place along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Federal authorities also cite the deterrent effect of the Customs Service patrols, which, officials say, force many traffickers to land their loads in Mexico and attempt to bring them into the United States via land.

“What’s happening is that they’re stopping south of the (border) fence, because they’re aware we’re up there,” said Joe Maxwell, who directs air operations in the western United States for the Customs Service from his office at March Air Force Base.

Others, noting the ample supply of illicit drugs on the streets, aren’t convinced. They see an alternative: Greatly escalated use of additional military aircraft, such as the sophisticated AWACS reconnaissance planes, to patrol the southern border, providing enhanced radar and chase capabilities. That proposal, which has gained widespread support in Congress during the election-year anti-drug fervor, has met intense opposition from the Reagan administration, including from Defense Secretary Frank Carlucci, who has voiced concerns about its potential effect on military preparedness and strictures against Pentagon involvement in law enforcement.

The military is ill-equipped and ill-trained to do what is essentially police work, according to administration officials, who note that monitoring a single-engine drug aircraft flying at 500 feet is quite a different mission from tailing supersonic Soviet MIGs at 30,000 feet. Various studies have shown that the military’s limited involvement in aerial interdiction to date has been exceedingly costly and largely ineffective.

The debate will undoubtedly continue to rage in Washington, but, meantime, the Customs Service will likely maintain its lead role in interdicting airborne drug smugglers. The Coast Guard also flies interdiction routes, but its resources are concentrated in the south Florida, Caribbean and Bahamas areas.

12 Customs Service Planes

Responsibility for airborne patrol of the border area in San Diego and Imperial counties rests largely with about a dozen Customs Service aircraft based at North Island and March Air Force Base. The craft make daily sweeps over the rugged border terrain from San Diego to Yuma, attempting to detect “intruders” who may be ferrying illicit drugs. Patrols try to isolate the smuggler aircraft in the relatively isolated border area, before the planes blend into the sea of air traffic farther north.

The Riverside facility, which is being greatly expanded, is one of three so-called command, control, communications and intelligence centers nationwide, all jam-packed with sophisticated electronic gear that is designed to sort out legal from illicit air and marine traffic. The 24-hour centers have access to military, civilian and other radar, along with flight plans and other information filed with the government, that assist in interdiction.

The San Diego air branch, housed in modest offices at North Island, is one of eight such branches nationwide.

“Smuggling’s been going on since the time of Marco Polo,” noted Customs Service pilot Harry T. Coates, 60, a retired Air Force pilot who served in the Korean and Vietnam wars.

On a recent late afternoon, Coates and his co-pilot, James Nauman, 31, a former Life Flight pilot in Long Beach, took off on their daily patrol from North Island along with Rod Moore, 58, another retired Air Force pilot, who served as the flight’s “air interdiction officer.” Moore’s role: To monitor and control radar and infrared equipment that is designed to detect smuggling craft. As the airplane soared above the border, Moore sat at his console and manipulated electronic dots on screens like a practiced video-game operator.

The trio, armed with automatic weapons and bullet-proof vests should an encounter occur (although such occurrences are infrequent), ascended in one of Custom’s key weapons: the executive-type, turbo-prop Piper Cheyenne, known as CHET (for Customs High Endurance Tracker), which can cruise aloft for up to 8 hours and is outfitted with radar and an infrared system that allows the crew to see in the dark. The craft’s distinctive Pinocchio-like snout houses detection gear.

Because of its radar and infrared capabilities, the Cheyenne can provide some coverage in mountain-shrouded passages that are favored by smugglers, such as the Laguna Salada area of Imperial County. But the Cheyenne, along with Customs Cessna Citation jets that are also in wide use, have a major limitation: The aircrafts’ radar only looks forward, meaning they cannot detect smuggler aircraft to their rear. Drug traffickers, whose sophistication and technological innovation has grown along with that of the Customs Service--one convicted smuggler recently was found to have purchased night-vision goggles for more than $6,000--are undoubtedly aware of this fact.

On a recent two-hour patrol flight above the mountains, desert and farmland of the U.S.-Mexico border area of California, the sleek Customs Service Cheyenne tracker piloted by Harry Coates encountered half a dozen or so other craft, but all turned out to be legal--including a Border Patrol airplane. It was another uneventful evening.

“All the crooks are staying home tonight,” Coates concluded, as he guided his aircraft back toward North Island, hopeful that the smugglers weren’t passing to the aircraft’s rear.

Federal authorities are taking several steps to rectify the radar shortcoming, although 24-hour radar coverage of the borders is still in the future. The Navy recently provided Customs with two E-2C Hawkeye aircraft, AWACS-type planes with radar capable of sweeping 360 degrees. The agency has also purchased other aircraft with bolstered radar capability. However, such planes are costly--one aircraft on line may cost $30 million--and there are still precious few to go around.

Apart from aerial radar, the Customs Service is proceeding with construction of additional ground radar units, and, perhaps most significantly, the launching of radar-equipped blimp-like “aerostats”--actually huge balloons that hover at up to 12,000 feet, providing radar coverage of low-flying aircraft. One of the devices, which cost $18 million each, was put into operation last month at Fort Huachuca in southern Arizona. The eventual plan is to post aerostats at intervals up and down the border.

But detection, radar’s role, is only one part in what officials refer to as a “triad” of forces to be employed against airborne drug traffickers. U.S. authorities are also building up the campaign’s other two components: interception, by addition of new aircraft, such as the Cheyennes, with limited radar but excellent tracking capabilities; and apprehension, by the purchase of equipment such as Blackhawk helicopters, including the two now based at March Air Force Base, which carry armed interdiction teams to smugglers’ landing sites.

Once such a complete system is in place, possibly within the next two years, Customs Service officials voice confidence that the skies above the southern border will be largely sealed from drug fliers.

“I believe that we’ll make a substantial impact on airborne drug smuggling, so much that that 70 to 80% of the airborne smugglers will get out of business,” Kapitan predicted.

Others are not so sanguine, despite the onslaught of high-technology detection equipment. For one thing, the Customs Service has long been a prime target of budget-cutters, who may not be so inclined to add costly equipment and personnel once the election-year appetite for drug-interdiction wanes.

Also, air interdiction rarely goes as smoothly as the Customs Service would like. In one case in November, 1986, an airborne smuggler, who later turned out to be carrying 1,208 pounds of cocaine, was able to evade a Customs Service stake-out at a San Bernardino County dry lake bed and eventually land, safely and undetected, at a military airstrip near Yuma, where he spent the night sleeping after stashing the cocaine in some bushes. The next day, the smuggler, awakened by a military officer, was allowed to purchase fuel and leave the tightly guarded base. The smuggler remained a free man until the cocaine, one of the biggest loads ever found in Southern California, was discovered by accident a week later and was traced back to him.

Maddened by such tales, many lawmakers seem hesitant to wait several years until more hardware comes on line, especially when they see the ample array of under-used military craft that, they believe, could immediately be put to work along the nation’s borders. “We’re in the position of a platoon sergeant who has people overruning his perimeter, and is told he’ll get some new men in 1992,” said Rep. Hunter. “We have to have a perimeter along the southern border of the United States.”