Cocaine Traffic to U.S. Finds Holes in High-Tech ‘Fence’

From land, sea, air and outer space, a score of federal agencies now employ billions of dollars in high technology to try to track and intercept hundreds of tons of cocaine that feed an illegal U.S. drug market worth an estimated $38 billion a year.

Still, despite the most sophisticated surveillance technology on the globe--from U.S. Navy radar scanning the sky to “backscatter” X-ray systems on land--Pentagon contractors, analysts and narcotics agents say the drug-smuggling cartels in Mexico and South America consistently have found holes in the United States’ high-tech anti-narcotics fence.

In the seven years since the U.S. government intensified its global surveillance efforts, the Pentagon says it alone has spent about $7 billion on anti-drug programs, much of it for the United States’ counter-narcotics arsenal.

But this is the bottom line, U.S. government statistics show: Although U.S. drug agencies seize more than 100 tons of cocaine each year--partly through technology and partly through intelligence--the price and quantity of cocaine available in the United States have remained virtually unchanged.

Here, The Times has found, are some flaws in the technology:

* Radar systems in Virginia and Texas bombard the ionosphere 30 miles above the Earth with powerful signals that give U.S. military analysts a view of potential drug-smuggling planes in 2,000 miles of airspace south of the border.

The system was installed to intercept South American cocaine moving through Mexico and the Caribbean into the United States. It cost about $150 million to build and bring on line; U.S. taxpayers pay $1,500 an hour to operate it.

But ROTHR--the Relocatable Over the Horizon Radar--has a huge blind spot over northern and central Mexico, where most drug planes now land. It “sees” only a tiny part of the Pacific Ocean. And veteran U.S. drug agents say smugglers can fly from the Pacific into Mexico unobserved with as much as 15 tons of cocaine at a time.

* At sea, a billion-dollar U.S. nuclear attack submarine in the Pacific electronically shadows suspect trawlers and container ships. In the Caribbean, Coast Guard patrols scan the horizon with state-of-the-art radar originally designed to pinpoint Soviet submarine periscopes. Both the sub and the patrols search for drug shipments headed for the U.S. or Mexico.

But Mexico has 28 poorly regulated major commercial ports, and there are 13 U.S. ports classified by U.S. Customs as “high threat” for smuggling. Customs does not have state-of-the-art port inspection equipment to sift through thousands of craft, packed with millions of containers, plying the high seas around the U.S. each year. U.S. drug agents say large cocaine shipments are getting through by sea.

* On land, a prototype “backscatter” X-ray machine bombards a suspect 18-wheeler truck with radioactive particles at a border station in Otay Mesa. The $3-million system--built with Pentagon technology designed to detect Soviet missile warheads in trucks--hunts for drugs in hidden compartments. U.S. Customs plans to buy 10 of them--at a total cost of $38 million--to establish a high-tech network aimed at preventing large drug shipments through a dozen major U.S. crossing points.

But the scanner isn’t powerful enough to see inside densely packed cargo in the trucks. U.S. drug agents say Mexican smugglers know this and have adjusted. Now, agents say, tons of cocaine still get through to the U.S. by land.

Taken together, the flaws have led some veteran narcotics agents at the front line of the drug war to join the ranks of independent analysts who advocate refocusing more of the United States’ billions in the counter-narcotics effort--shifting them from attacking the cocaine supply to reducing demand through treatment and education programs in the United States.

“The military is saying, ‘Stop the flow of drugs.’ But if 70% [of the cocaine] goes through Mexico and 95% of that gets through [to the U.S.], then stopping the flow is a failure,” said one longtime U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agent, citing the agency’s own widely published statistics on the cocaine flow.

“The more we seize, the more they produce--further evidence that the flow policy is a bust. In 30 years of anti-drug work, I can tell you that law enforcement is not the answer. You’ve got to reduce the demand. [If not], we [the DEA] will always have job security.”

A detailed analysis by the Rand Corp. commissioned by the U.S. Army and the White House and published two years ago confirmed that view. It showed it would be at least 20 times more cost-effective to spend money on cutting U.S. demand through domestic drug-treatment programs than on attacking supply in South America and trafficking in Mexico.

The Pentagon’s response was to hire another think tank. A Pentagon spokesman said a second, soon-to-be-released study shows the military’s “efforts in source nations are a lot more cost-effective than the demand-reduction measures we’re taking here.”

Barry R. McCaffrey--the retired four-star general who has been President Clinton’s drug czar since December--favors a compromise. McCaffrey, who oversaw major South American interdiction efforts in his most recent post as chief of the U.S. Southern Command in Panama, readily acknowledges shortcomings in America’s high-tech drug war. But he stressed during two recent visits to Mexico City that some counter-drug systems work well and that others now in development are promising.

Still, he concluded: “Interdiction won’t stop drug introduction into the United States.” America, he said, must refocus on reducing demand at home.

He said the United States should keep some high-tech surveillance and interdiction programs overseas. But he also said there is an “incoherence” in coordinating intelligence and research and development programs to combat wealthy, powerful cartels that always seem to be one step ahead.

He noted, for example, that a network of satellites, Navy radar, P-3 Orion spy planes and even Airborne Warning and Control System [AWACS] planes has blanketed the skies from the Andean Ridge to the U.S. southern border.

“We’re watching very closely. . . . But we’re spread pretty thin. Does it work perfectly?” McCaffrey said. “Of course not.”

U.S. analysts and drug agents cited another example of the traffickers’ ability to stay ahead of U.S. high technology and intelligence--despite a program that was billed as one of the most successful interdiction efforts.

Dubbed “Operation Green Clover,” the U.S. military program provided radar data to the Peruvian and Colombian armies last year that let them shoot or force down trafficker aircraft, attacking the southern air bridge that connects Peru’s coca-growing areas with processing labs in Colombia. U.S. officials credit this operation with knocking the bottom out of the coca market in Peru, what one former McCaffrey aide called “the most significant disruption of the cocaine trade in 30 years.”

But according to the U.S. government’s own reports, traffickers since have compensated by moving drugs by foot and by boats along a vast river maze and by shifting their air and ground routes east into Brazil. The State Department’s most recent report on the international narcotics trade concluded that Peru’s coca cultivation and production actually increased last year. So in April, the Pentagon upgraded Green Clover into a more advanced version called “Operation Laser Strike” to try to plug the holes.

This case illustrates a big “intelligence gap,” a conflict between traffickers’ wiles and the high-tech methods of the United States’ anti-drug programs, some U.S. counter-narcotics officials say. They insist that America should press harder to improve its sources of information in the cocaine-producing and -trafficking countries--especially Mexico.

“Intelligence is the entire key to the whole . . . thing,” said Don Ferrarone, station chief for the DEA in Houston, a city that has become a major hub for cocaine coming into the U.S. from Mexico. “To emphasize technology as a silver bullet is wrong. We spend billions for technology and very little for [intelligence] sources. It should be the reverse. Technology should be layered upon intelligence.”

But officials from both law enforcement and the Pentagon privately concede that intelligence efforts between Mexico City and the southern U.S. border yield very little of value.

Several DEA agents elsewhere have identified additional holes, citing the Navy ROTHR system. It bounces radar signals off the ionosphere from ground stations in Chesapeake, Va., and Kingsville, Texas, giving analysts a 24-hour, all-weather ability to detect aircraft flying at any altitude. ROTHR grew out of a Cold War system designed to inform U.S. battleship captains of the precise location of Soviet aircraft. The system’s biggest advantage, its supporters say, is its wide area of coverage--the entire Caribbean and northern part of South America--for a relatively low cost.

That $1,500-an-hour cost is a fraction of what it would take to keep AWACS craft in the air for equivalent coverage, noted Capt. Craig Quigley, public affairs chief for the Navy Atlantic Command. As for its effectiveness, the system’s supporters point to statistics showing that it has contributed to 219 of 288 successful air interdictions in the Caribbean and cocaine-producing countries in its three years in operation.

But drug enforcement agents have raised serious questions about how well ROTHR tracks passenger jets, which, U.S. intelligence has learned, have been converted by cartels into cargo craft to carry multi-ton shipments into Mexico. There, the drugs have been unloaded onto trucks and boats destined for the United States.

The U.S. military’s radar coverage of Mexico is the subject of a behind-the-scenes debate among several federal agencies engaged in counter-narcotics efforts, but there is mounting evidence that some cargo jets have eluded ROTHR. Several U.S. officials believe the system’s computer program may be “sorting out” fast-moving drug jets--failing to identify and track them as potential targets.

Then there is EPAC--a military acronym for the Eastern Pacific Air Corridor. It is, some senior agents and analysts say, the biggest, most dangerous hole in the United States’ high-tech drug fence. It is one of three air corridors traditionally used by Colombian cartels to move cocaine headed for the U.S. into Mexico.

And it is now the corridor that DEA agents say is most heavily used to get around ROTHR.

The last three cocaine cargo jets that U.S. intelligence agencies later learned came into Mexico between November 1994 and November 1995 flew through the Pacific corridor and into clandestine strips in the radar hole over northern Mexico, delivering at least 17 tons of cocaine that eventually reached the U.S. market. Pentagon officials dismiss those flights as “oddities.” They insist that the U.S. deploys radar ships in the Pacific to try to cover the radar blind spot.

But, noting the vast territory in the Eastern Pacific corridor, a Pentagon air specialist conceded: “EPAC, by its very nature, is difficult to cover. No matter how far out we put a ship, you can always go further west.”

DEA sources were harsher in their assessment. “Coverage of EPAC is a joke,” said one agent. “There aren’t any assets out there to detect them. Planes come in routinely without detection.”

The agent said cocaine-smuggling jets and other large cargo planes fly west from Colombia over the Pacific, then veer north and finally back to the east into Mexico.

“Some of these planes have extended range of 8,000 miles,” the agent said. “They’re flukes when they’re caught. No one knows they’re coming in. The Pentagon’s air coverage is highly exaggerated. . . . They’re catching about as many planes coming through EPAC as they’re getting drugs coming over the border. They find DC-6s in northern Mexico all the time, and nobody knows how they got there.”

The agent--and other critics of the air-surveillance system--also cited the case of a French-made Caravelle jet. It was carrying at least 10 tons of cocaine when it landed in a dry lake bed in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur in November. The jet apparently flew through the Eastern Pacific radar hole and touched down without detection.

“We were really caught by surprise,” conceded one Pentagon official who monitors such flights in Panama. “There was no prior intelligence to speak of.”

In fact, U.S. law enforcement agencies said the first hint they had of the flight came only after fishermen alerted authorities in Mexico that Mexican federal and state police were chopping, burning and burying the plane after it burst its nose wheel during landing.

A subsequent Mexican and U.S. investigation showed the jet belonged to Colombia’s Cali cartel and was delivering a load of pure cocaine to Mexico’s Tijuana cartel, which had enlisted corrupt Mexican law enforcement agents to unload and destroy the crippled aircraft.

“I wonder how many others there are that we don’t know about,” one longtime DEA official said, “or ones that are still buried in the sand.”

Times staff writer Fineman reported from Mexico City; special correspondent Pyes reported from Washington.