Filling in the Holes on a Porous Border

MORSES LINE, Vt. — For years, the routine did not vary. Three times a week, the clunky blue car from Quebec pulled through this obscure border station, bound for Burlington, Vt. Three times a week, the lone agent on duty blithely waved the passengers on.

But life at the northern frontier has changed since Sept. 11.

“Hotel, hotel, X-ray, 1-3-2,” U.S. Customs agent Glen Gurwit called out last week so his partner, Melanie Vici, could run the license plate through the computer. The trunk was opened, Gurwit peered in and the vehicle was sent on its way.

“You ladies have a nice evening, now,” Gurwit told them.

These days, even visitors coming down from Canada for their regular bingo game in Vermont face heightened scrutiny at a 4,000-mile border that long was legendary for lax security.

Worried about the porous nature of a boundary that allowed easy passage to legal and illegal visitors alike, U.S. and Canadian officials last week announced a border action plan to speed commercial traffic while bolstering safety at one of the world’s largest land borders. That effort comes on the heels of a U.S. Justice Department decision the week before to send 400 National Guard troops to the northern frontier.

No wall separates the two friendly domains, and scores of official entry points are no more imposing than this bump in the middle of a two-lane road. About 70% of border traffic between the two countries uses six major crossings, and until the National Guard troops were dispatched, only about 400 U.S. agents watched over the northern frontier.

The decision to coordinate visa policies, expand the presence of binational law enforcement and increase the sharing of intelligence stems from growing concerns that terrorists could be entering North America through Canada--a country with notoriously liberal immigration policies. In turn, officials feared dangerous political insurgents could slip into the United States through Canada.

“Canada seems to be a haven for those people, terrorists,” said Ed Mewett of Farnham, Canada, who often makes the crossing here as he drives to his hunting club in St. Albans, Vt., with licensed firearms. “So it’s good. I don’t mind any of this. They can go through the car any time as far as I’m concerned.”

Early reports to the contrary, none of the Sept. 11 hijackers entered the United States via Canada. Authorities say all 19 came in through U.S. ports of entry. But as recently as two years ago, a Montreal woman linked to a group of Algerians who plotted a bombing in the U.S. was captured as she attempted to walk across the border in rugged terrain just miles from Morses Line.

Among the big fears along the northern frontier, terrorism now tops the list.

“You’ve got organized crime and terrorist cells in Montreal, a city just north of here, and we’re dropping bombs,” said area Port Director Craig W. Jehle. “That’s worry No. 1.”

From his office at Highgate Springs, a bustling border crossing along Interstate 89 about 15 miles away, Jehle said the attention to the U.S.-Canadian border is long overdue: “This is something that the rank and file thought should have been done years ago.”

With border stations mobilized to highest alert status, Highgate Springs agent Steve Pike said every vehicle is manually examined. Behavioral cues are carefully noted. Because of Sept. 11, he said, the era of selective inspection has faded into frontier history.

“If you were my mother,” Pike said, “I’d check you.”

Here in the backwoods, presiding over a Customs house so quaint that a rotary-dial telephone hangs from the wall, Gurwit said he was heartened by the belated official recognition that the northern border is more than a perfunctory point of passage. But, he cautioned, “I don’t want to see a typical government response of dumping money without giving us proper tools.”

Maybe the new attention will bring improved technology and training to go with it, Gurwit said. Maybe, said Vici, the influx of National Guard troops and the U.S.-Canadian accord will enable veteran border staff to brush up on their craft.

“I was in school in ‘86,” said Vici, 50. “I probably received maybe one-half day on terrorism.”

Built in 1934 on a hill ceded to the U.S. government by a thoughtful farmer, the Morses Line station typifies the small, sleepy entry ports that dot the U.S.-Canadian border.

Before Sept. 11, passing into the U.S. at Morses Line was so effortless that it was known as a cattle crossing. Anyone, it seemed, could wander right over the border.

Growing up in nearby Franklin, Vici remembers visiting the families of border officials who lived year-round in the little dwelling.

When Gurwit, 54, came to work at Morses Line in 1974, the road in front was still unpaved. There were crank telephones in town--such as it was, a settlement that now encompasses just four homes and not one business.

With time, security at Morses Line was reduced to a lone customs agent whose habit of shutting off the lights and placing orange traffic cones in the road at closing time was described with amazement and derision at recent congressional hearings.

The orange-cone legend also made its way into government reports that as early as 1994 began calling for improved law enforcement along the northern border.

Isolation was an occupational hazard. During her job interview, Vici said she was asked just two questions: Was she afraid of the dark? Did she mind working alone?

“I thought that was bizarre,” she said, “until I came here.”

The spot is so lonely that whenGurwit turned off the lights and stepped outside, miles and miles of forests and farmland vanished into blackness. The two-lane road that connects Quebec and what the signs here call “L’Etat du Vermont” also disappeared.

Before the agents on duty can stop them, cars with their lights off can slip right by at night, Vici and Gurwit said.

A border agent must not only describe the speeding vehicle as well as record its license plate but also determine if the car turned left or right at the fork in the road a quarter of a mile from the customs station.

The task is also complicated by a farmhouse that straddles the border, technically occupying U.S. soil. The teenagers in the house are a magnet for other teenagers, who love to race by at night, lights off.

Luckily, area farmers also help out, reporting suspicious footprints or snowmobile tracks.

“It’s good to be aware that there are strangers in your area,” said Jean Richard, town treasurer in Franklin, about 10 minutes away. The land Richard and her husband live on hugs the Canadian border, and residents from both countries think nothing of walking across the border to visit their neighbors, Richard said.

“I’ve always wondered about how easy it was to go back and forth,” she said.

Land here is sparsely populated, and commercial development is nonexistent. Provided the aspiring immigrants bring a compass and wear good shoes, the thick woods offer a potential path for illegal passage into the U.S.

No one knows how many people have crossed into the United States this way. But two years ago, Border Patrol agents were able to arrest Lucia Garofalo, 35, on several immigration charges after she tried to cross through the woods.

Telephone records linked her with Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian who was convicted in a failed plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport. Ressam was arrested in December 1999 after crossing from Canada to Washington state with bomb-making parts in the trunk of his rental car. She pleaded guilty to immigration charges after prosecutors determined she had no knowledge of terrorist activities.

Since Sept. 11, a pair of agents from customs, the Immigration and Naturalization Service or the Border Patrol has rotated in and out of Morses Line to keep the station operating 24 hours a day.

For the 60 or so U.S. government agents based out of Highgate Springs, the increased workload has brought a bonanza in overtime pay. Rotating among eight entry points along the border between Canada and the western part of this state, Gurwit said that since Sept. 11 he has raked in more than $10,000 in overtime. Normally, he said, he might earn that amount over an entire year.

Before Sept. 11, Gurwit happily spent his days at Morses Line listening to Vivaldi and screening maybe two to three cars per hour at this time of year. Now, to keep agents on their toes, border guards bounce from the isolated checkpoints to their region’s busy central hub at Highgate Springs, the major crossing point for cars traveling between Boston and Montreal.

Smugglers, terrorists and other undesirables study the practices at border stations and adapt as quickly as changes are made, Port Director Jehle said. Still, the local Customs chief said the tougher policy since Sept. 11 already has produced a half-dozen major drug seizures--more than were accomplished all of last year.

High-quality hydroponic marijuana is the smugglers’ import of choice, Jehle said. Annually in Canada, at least 800 tons of the drug are produced, almost all of it destined for the U.S. With its considerable potency, the Canadian marijuana can command $6,000 per pound.

Drugs such as Ecstasy, OxyContin, cocaine and heroin also make their way across the border, often in the backpacks of drug traders who pass as hikers.

Government reports show that undocumented workers also cross the northern border in alarming numbers. The burgeoning international population in Montreal, 60 miles north of Morses Line, makes the presence of possible terrorists at this border seem more real than ever since Sept. 11.

Scores of terrorist organizations are believed to operate in Canada, long a haven for political refugees. U.S. authorities believe the Algerian community in Canada may have been a recruiting ground for Osama bin Laden’s network.

Yet at Morses Line, such threats seem distant and improbable. Gurwit and Vici said they know probably 25% to 50% of the travelers who cross regularly through their station. Cars pass from the rural area in French-speaking Quebec to buy cheaper gasoline, visit Grandma or borrow English-language books from U.S. libraries, the agents explained. Then there are the bingo buffs, an especially genial group.

As for political troublemakers, no one has yet shown him a bomb or a revolutionary tract, Gurwit said.

“I don’t think we’ve seen terrorists,” the big, bearded agent said.

And if they did?

Well, said Vici, “it used to be that if they blasted their way in, you’d have one dead agent. Now you’d have two.”