Blimps No Longer ‘Cops’ Patrolling Latin Drug Flow

As drug fighters, they were ugly and unwieldy--nearly twice the size of the Goodyear blimp.

Tethered to 10,000-foot cables, the U.S. government’s high-tech radar blimps were also difficult to maintain. They were vulnerable in bad weather. One even had to be shot down when it tore loose from its moorings several years ago.

But their sheer bulk was also a plus: A Bahamian official likened the unmanned airships to a highly visible cop on the beat.

U.S. and Bahamian law enforcement officials say the aerostats that searched the sky for suspicious-looking aircraft were one of their most effective deterrents to drug smuggling in the strategic Bahamas just off U.S. shores--the oldest and most direct cocaine route between South America and the United States.

Law enforcement officials here say the Pentagon’s decision to yank them down three years ago has left them without a key tool to detect and deter the tons of U.S.-bound cocaine that are again moving through these islands.

Some of the people on the front lines of the drug war are not impressed with the blimps’ vaunted replacement, a more advanced radar system that they say is fundamentally flawed.

The law enforcement officials are grappling with a resurgence in cocaine traffic throughout the Caribbean, including the Bahamas--which has the strongest U.S. counter-narcotics presence in the region. Several attribute the increase, at least in part, to the decision to remove the three radar blimps that were stationed here.

“The traffickers have their intelligence as well,” said the Bahamas’ assistant police commissioner, Reginald Ferguson, whose government has worked more closely with the United States in the drug fight than perhaps any other on the globe and whose nation has been one of the war’s biggest successes. “They know the aerostats are gone, and that adds some incentive for them to try to run through here again.

“Because we lost the aerostats, it’s all pretty much guesswork,” he said.

Added William Mitchell, the special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Administration office in Miami, which is responsible for the Bahamas: “The traffickers are rediscovering the Bahamas, and, in doing so, they realize that the aerostats are no longer there.”

Clearly, the lack of the radar blimps is not completely to blame.

Producers Returning to Caribbean Routes

Mitchell and other DEA officials say the resurgence of drug smuggling in the Bahamas is part of a general trend. Colombian cocaine producers, tired of the high cost of doing business with now-powerful Mexican drug cartels and corrupt police, are returning to their traditional routes and allies in the Caribbean.

What is more, a senior Pentagon official defended the aerostats’ removal by stressing that they were replaced with better technology even before they were taken down in December 1994.

The new system, the Pentagon insists, monitors the Caribbean region more effectively than the blimps, which monitored only a small patch of airspace.

The new system bounces signals off the ionosphere--the outer part of Earth’s atmosphere--to give U.S. authorities operating radar screens in Riverside County in Southern California and in Key West, Fla., a top-down view of all aircraft moving north from South America. The Defense Department touts the system as a great success.

“In fact, the new system is working better,” said the Pentagon official, who asked not to be named.

He cited statistics showing that only 80 to 100 proven drug flights passed over the Caribbean in 1998, compared with as many as 400 each year before the new system went online in April 1993; it is unclear from those numbers, however, how many drug flights are getting through undetected.

But U.S. drug enforcement agents, radar technicians and Bahamian police officials responsible for monitoring and curbing the drug flow here assert that the new radar system has fallen far short of their expectations.

“I don’t think it’s working as they had anticipated,” said Ferguson, who is in charge of all criminal investigations in the Bahamas. “It is not always covering the area, and it will only provide coverage if we have prior intelligence information. . . . We know a lot of shipments are getting through.”

The reason, according to Joe Maxwell, who heads the U.S. Customs Service’s Air Interdiction Coordination Center near Riverside is that the new system “has a very elementary flaw in it, and that is that it can’t identify any target. . . . They can see something, but they don’t know if it’s ducks, a Boeing 727 or what.”

It also cannot even estimate the altitude of a suspected drug aircraft, the Pentagon concedes.

Maxwell’s center at March Air Force Base is on the front lines in Washington’s high-tech war on drugs. Technicians at dozens of computer and radar screens sort through an average of 4,000 aircraft a day that are detected by U.S. satellites, spy planes, ground-based radar and the new, over-the-horizon system in the Caribbean.

The blips are checked instantly against scheduled flights to identify potential drug smugglers flying from South America toward the U.S.

Coordinates of suspicious aircraft are passed on to U.S. and Bahamian drug agents on the ground, who then deploy aircraft and vessels to investigate.

New Radar Lacks Continuous Coverage

In a detailed analysis Maxwell sent to the Defense Department two years ago--and recently updated--he concluded that the Pentagon’s new radar system, “by its very design and operational limitations, is not capable of providing continuous full-area coverage with precision tracking capabilities required for intercept and interdiction efforts.”

The system, he added, was designed during the Cold War “to track and provide course and speed of bomber-sized targets. Very few smugglers use bomber-size general aviation to smuggle drugs.”

The new radar, he added, “does not actually provide surveillance over the entire area as advertised.”

“Aerostats,” Maxwell concluded, “remain by far the most cost-effective way to meet the border radar surveillance requirement. . . . Basically, it is the Customs Service’s first line of defense against the air smuggler.”

The report concluded that the new radar system costs four times as much per hour to operate as the aerostats--$2,000 versus $500.

Maxwell, a staunch aerostat proponent who disagreed with their replacement from the start, called their removal “probably the principal reason for the resurgence” of trafficking in the Bahamas.

Without the aerostats, he said, the islands and their vast territorial waters have become something of a black hole because the new system cannot fix the precise position of an aircraft in the region.

The Defense Department official acknowledged the flaw, but he insisted that the new radar system gives agents the ability to track suspect aircraft from their source for the first time.

“The aerostats,” he said, “didn’t get anybody.”

Blimps a Deterrent Even With Problems

Maxwell’s analysis also echoed the view of most Bahamian police and government officials that the aerostat’s greatest asset is its imposing presence--an argument the Pentagon official acknowledged was true.

“Aerostats are an effective deterrent whether operational or not,” Maxwell’s paper concluded. “Even if only operating at 50% availability due to maintenance or weather-related problems, the deterrent effect is 100%.”

Bahamian Tourism Minister Cornelius A. Smith agreed: “With the removal of the balloons, the traffickers believe this area became open territory for the transfer of drugs from the south to the United States.

“The Americans claim the aerostats became obsolete, but I believe they served as a deterrent. They were like a policeman. You drive down the street, and you see a policeman, you slow down. You don’t know whether he’s working or not.”

William Weeks, deputy director of the Bahamas’ National Drug Council, added: “Their ability to spot planes was not that good, but they added a strong deterrence.”

John Rolle, who has been the Bahamas’ customs comptroller for the past 25 years, said he understood the Pentagon’s technological reasons for abandoning the aerostat network here.

“Why reach back for a Model T when you can buy a 1998 Thunderbird?” he said. “But as far as our government is concerned, having the Model T is better than having nothing at all.”

Despite the increase in drug smuggling, Rolle added, “the trafficking problem today still isn’t as bad as it used to be. What bothers us is the increase.”

The nation boasts the most effective drug-rehabilitation and demand-reduction program in the region, begun after cocaine traffickers turned these islands into a drug nightmare just over a decade ago.

“When it comes to drugs, the Bahamas are one of the real success stories in the Caribbean,” a European diplomat in the region said.

“And the Drug Council has had one of the region’s greatest successes in reducing demand. No one wants to see that reversed.”

Weeks attributed the National Drug Council’s success to the government’s early acknowledgment of the Bahamas’ drug problem and to a concerted effort by church leaders, educators, psychiatrists and an army of volunteers who together sharply reduced drug-addiction rates.

But such victories in the drug war are fragile, Weeks conceded. His nation, he said, was remiss in concluding several years ago that its drug problem was solved.

Although the smuggling resurgence has yet to show itself in increasing addiction rates here, “what we’re seeing is an increase in crime, and I personally believe it’s drug-related,” he said.

With or without the aerostats, Weeks concluded: “I think we’ll see drugs coming through this country for some time to come.”

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Fineman was recently on assignment in the Bahamas.