U.S. Authorities Fear Drug Routes Are Shifting to West

South America’s cocaine smugglers are moving their U.S. operations westward in an attempt to catch American drug interdiction forces off-balance, according to military and law enforcement officials.

The most brazen example of the shift showed up on U.S. radar screens in April, when U.S. Customs Service scanners spotted an unprecedented five-plane convoy of Colombian drug planes taking off to the west and heading over the Pacific Ocean on the way to Mexican landing sites within striking distance of the U.S. border.

While there is no indication yet that the smugglers have begun using the new route directly to penetrate the United States, authorities concede that the drug lords’ ploy is posing a major challenge to U.S. enforcement efforts. With previous drug smuggling operations concentrated primarily in the Caribbean, America’s drug war defenses have been skewed badly out of balance, with far more resources allocated to the Atlantic staging area than to the Pacific back door.

A new Pacific-based military task force established here last year primarily to guard against heroin smugglers at sea has had to call for help from an Air Force base in Oklahoma simply to obtain the AWACS radar planes needed to patrol the new cocaine hot spot off Baja California.

The makeshift arrangement may already be showing the strain. In the April 19 assault, only a lone AWACS aircraft was available to scramble after the five drug-smuggling planes, and it lost track of three of them when the convoy split up over the Gulf of California.

The American plane did help guide Mexican authorities to the two remaining planes. But U.S. officials warn that their already-limited resources are being stretched thin: The sophisticated Oklahoma-based radar plane was running short on fuel, and no reinforcement was available.

“He was low on gas, and he had to head home,” a counternarcotics official shrugs.

But now, with the military taking the lead role in America’s effort to detect and monitor narcotics traffic worldwide, the shortcomings in U.S. surveillance in the Pacific raise new questions about the Pentagon’s ability to adapt to new enemy tactics.

Despite the steady increase in smuggling traffic, the Alameda-based Joint Task Force 5 controls no AWACS (Advanced Warning Airborne Command System) aircraft at all and has only one four-ship naval task group that is dedicated to drug interdiction--all this in a territory that covers 100 million square miles of ocean from the West Coast to India.

By contrast, the permanent lookout in the Caribbean includes four Puerto Rico-based AWACS planes and at least two Navy task groups, which stop and search dozens of suspicious-looking vessels each month. The unit received more than $30 million in supplemental financing this year--providing it with nearly double the funding that its Pacific counterpart receives.

In his headquarters on the shore of San Francisco Bay, the Joint Task Force 5 commander, Coast Guard Adm. William P. Leahy, insists that his superiors at the Pacific Command have given him all the tools he needs to do the job. But the crusty admiral warns that “if we don’t push back the cocaine and look out to the west of us,” heroin will be flooding in as well.

Other military experts agree. In the current issue of Proceedings, a leading Navy journal, Navy Cmdr. William J. Lahneman noted that the ability of the joint task force to undertake significant anti-drug surveillance “depends on its ability to obtain permanent control of a number of suitable platforms.”

Thus far, the Navy officer noted with understatement, “allocations have been small.”

And other military officials familiar with the region say the mounting pressure from the south has already caused the Pacific-based task force to limit its scope, concentrating most of its missions on a handful of anti-cocaine patrols off the coast of Mexico.

In its first year of operations, the four-ship task group--which constitutes the military’s primary force for interdicting heroin shipments--has stopped fewer than 20 suspect vessels. None was carrying drugs.

The Hawaii-based Pacific Command declined to provide details of the operations on grounds that its missions are classified. Leahy says only that the stop-and-search operations--which were carried out in international waters off the United States and Mexico--focused on vessels that met a “profile” for drug smugglers or were targeted by intelligence information.

But Leahy points out that U.S. personnel have been intercepting more drug vessels--with four operations in the last month alone. And he argues that the improvement in military intelligence efforts is enabling enforcement officials to keep tabs on heroin shipments even during periods when ships and planes are concentrated on cocaine smugglers.

“I have assets that don’t float or fly. . . .” Leahy said. “We’re responding to whatever we have to respond to.”

The admiral conceded that task force operations have not been stepped up at all in recent months. That appears to contradict what the Pentagon earlier this year announced as a major upsurge in anti-drug sailing and steaming hours in the region. The Pacific Command refused--for security reasons--to provide more details on where intensified operations are taking place.

Critics are concerned that a beleaguered task force may have too little time to focus on vessels carrying heroin from South Asia’s Golden Triangle, where a recent explosion in opium production has already sent shipments to the United States soaring.

Also potentially worrisome to counternarcotics officials is that traffickers may begin using the new Pacific route to fly cocaine directly into the West Coast, as they once did into the Southeast and Southwest.

That hasn’t happened yet. An estimated 70% of U.S. cocaine supplies is routed through landing strips in northern Mexico. But the shift still represents a fundamental step in sending the flights on an arduous journey up the long--and remote--west coast of Mexico.

The diversionary ploys by the smugglers aren’t new. Drug traffickers frequently have been able to change their tactics more quickly than the United States has been able to respond.

Smugglers who in the early 1980s plied the waters and airways of southern Florida found an alternative staging area in Bahamian keys after they were driven offshore by an American law-enforcement crackdown. When Colombian cartels later diverted drug flights toward new access points in northern Mexico, American anti-drug forces were still concentrating on interdiction in the Caribbean.

Officials say the latest shift westward may signal a new wave of increasingly sophisticated and long-range smuggling operations in the region.

“It’s not quite a true flip-flop,” says Paul F. Nelepovitz, the Customs Service liaison to Joint Task Force 5. “But it’s a significant increase with a significant decrease on the other side.”

Despite stepped-up surveillance near Colombia by the Panama-based U.S. Southern Command, the region remains out of routine range of American military patrols--particularly the Air Force AWACS, which are the military’s most effective weapons against airborne smuggling.

Part of the reason for the gap is that, mainly because of Mexican political sensitivities, U.S. drug enforcement patrols have not been as aggressive in patrolling the area around Mexico. So delicate is the situation there that U.S. officials even refuse to provide any details about patrols conducted in international airspace off the Mexican coast.

And, with no AWACS planes regularly on station on the Pacific Coast, the task force must plead with the Colorado-based North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) in Colorado for even temporary use of the plane based in Oklahoma, which itself is several hours’ flying time from the coast.

The Customs Service has an alternative advanced radar plane, the P-3 AEW, equally far afield in Corpus Christi, Tex., that has been permitted to take a shortcut to the Pacific through approved Mexican air corridors. But there are some suggestions that the Mexican government recently revoked that permission.

As a result, U.S. commanders now rely primarily on less-effective Navy E-2s based at North Island Naval Air Station in San Diego for the offshore sweeps designed to track Colombian flights as they make their way up the Mexican coast.

And even when luck is with them, drug raiders often find that the paucity of resources can limit their options severely--as it did on April 19, when the radar operators aboard a Customs Service P-3 AEW based in Panama first spotted the five-plane drug convoy leaving Colombia.

According to NORAD officials, drug force commanders dispatched a borrowed AWACS operating over San Diego to a position south of Baja California, where its radar soon picked up the track of the oncoming Colombian planes.

The AWACS plane maintained its vigil as the targets headed over the Gulf of California, still flying in a tight group. The cluster broke apart as the planes neared Hermosillo, in mainland Mexico, and the AWACS relayed coordinates that guided a joint team of Mexican authorities and U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents to their landing site. The take: two planes and nearly 3,000 pounds of cocaine. NORAD officials say the other three planes were “lost”--disappearing from the 250-mile-radius radar and presumed to have landed.

But other military officials suggested that the AWACS, now short of fuel and unable to call in reinforcements, was unable to conduct a full search--unintentionally enabling the quarry to get away.

Leahy insists there could have been “many reasons” for the lapse, but another official is not as politic. “Let’s put it this way,” he said, “if there had been as many AWACS out West as in the Atlantic, they might well have had better luck.”

U.S. ANTI-DRUG TASK FORCES

Atlantic Pacific Joint Task Force 4, Joint Task Force 5, Key West, Florida Alameda, California AWACS surveillance planes 4 0 Extra funding $30.6 million $1.2 million Ships at sea 10 4

Source: U.S. Department of Defense

Cocaine: The Westward Shift Cocaine smugglers have begun shifting much of their trade westward to the Pacific in an attempt to expoit American vulnerabilities along the West Coast, military and law enforcement officials say. U.S. Air Force radar operators were stunned in mid-April when their screens showed an unprecedented five-plane convoy of Colombian drug planes taking off to the west and heading over the ocean on the way to Mexican landing sites with striking distance of the U.S. border. While military AWACS aircraft are permanently based in Puerto Rico to combat Caribbean smuggling, the military was not prepared for the Pacific Coast activity.