Guarding the Coast, and More

Four miles out in the Atlantic Ocean, 6-foot waves are hammering the pilot boat, slathering its windshield in foam and rocking it like a roller coaster car. Petty Officer 2nd Class Jeremy Zimmer of the U.S. Coast Guard is about to go to work, stepping into the unknown with only a pistol to protect himself.

The launch draws alongside Stena Clipper, a freighter arriving from the Dominican Republic. A rope ladder dangles down 25 feet to the sea from an open hatch in the rusting hull. Zimmer, a husky 27-year-old from Ohio, is assigned to lead a boarding party up the swaying ladder and into the ship. He wants to make sure it hasn’t been commandeered by terrorists and that a pilot can safely guide it into port.

A smiling, mustachioed face peers down from the foreign vessel, but Zimmer has no way of knowing what, or who, he will find once he’s aboard. “In the worst-case scenario,” he says, pointing to the portable radio he carries along with a 9-millimeter Beretta semiautomatic pistol, “we can alert the station, and tell them we got a big problem here.”

Of all of the country’s armed services, none in the last few months has reoriented itself more speedily or radically than the Coast Guard. Founded by the young republic to enforce tariffs and protect oceangoing commerce, the Coast Guard today finds itself on the front lines of homeland defense, charged with protecting the country’s 95,000 miles of shoreline, its ports and waterways.

Now, when it comes to the prime mission, “the name says it pretty much: Coast Guard,” said Gabriel Gervais, 23, a petty officer 2nd class from Bradenton, Fla.

With the accent on keeping lives and property safe from terrorism, assets and personnel are being diverted from more traditional duties such as environmental protection and staunching the flow of cocaine, marijuana and other illegal drugs into the country.

According to Rep. Frank A. LoBiondo (R-N.J.), chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the agency, missions related to national security--which once accounted for 2% of the service’s budget--have been gobbling up more than half the resources.

Even before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the smallest of the five branches of the military already was stretched thin. Many of its ships and aircraft were aging, with most small rescue craft deemed “not ready for sea” by inspectors. “Coasties” stationed at small search and rescue stations were working an average of 84 hours a week. For years, budgets had not kept pace with mounting expenses.

The Coast Guard, in the words of Adm. James M. Loy, the current commandant, was like a knife “dulled by complacency and overuse.”

But the organization’s ability to adapt quickly to changing demands is a point of particular pride. Over more than two centuries, the Coast Guard and its ancestors have pursued ships laden with contraband, maintained lighthouses, chased Prohibition-era rumrunners, rescued boaters in distress, enforced regulations on fishing and tried to halt the inflow of illegal immigrants by sea.

Today’s commandant likes to paraphrase a congressman who declared, “If the job is hard and wet, give it to the Coast Guard.”

That happened almost immediately Sept. 11, when Rear Adm. Richard E. Bennis, Coast Guard captain of the port in New York, implemented a plan to evacuate Manhattan by ship that, in terms of sheer numbers, dwarfed the Royal Navy’s rescue of the British Army at Dunkirk during World War II.

With New York’s bridges and tunnels hurriedly closed after the attacks on the twin towers, about half a million people were transported by a motley flotilla of tugboats, ferries and other craft to the outer boroughs and New Jersey. It was his single proudest moment in the Coast Guard, said Loy, a 38-year veteran. But the flexibility and capacity for quick reaction, he says, were typical of the service whose motto is Semper Paratus--”Always Ready.”

At the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., in the fall, a war game was hurriedly put together to prepare future officers for new threats. Data for the port of Los Angeles/Long Beach, the nation’s busiest, were entered into computers. An attack by terrorists using a helicopter spewing poison gas and a commandeered tanker was simulated. Senior cadets and officer candidates managed to keep the port open, but the gas attack succeeded, and a Coast Guard cutter was sunk.

‘A Lot of Adrenaline Moving’

“I think we got a lot of adrenaline moving that morning,” Lt. Cmdr. Joe Vorbach, assistant professor of international relations, said of the exercise. This semester at the academy, he is teaching a course on terrorism, complete with readings from the Koran and information about what differentiates mainstream Islam from its extremist offshoots.

In a sense, the current focus mirrors the Coast Guard’s origins in uncertain times. In “The Federalist Papers,” Alexander Hamilton suggested that “a few armed vessels, judiciously stationed at the entrances of our ports, might at small expense be made useful sentinels of the laws.” In 1790, the Revenue-Marine, the agency’s direct forerunner, was founded, with no more than $10,000 authorized to build 10 ships.

Since autumn, to better enable today’s Coast Guard to serve as the country’s oceangoing sentinel, the Bush administration has requested $464 million in emergency funding. The service plans to double the amount of resources devoted to port safety and security, and to add 5,000 active-duty personnel over the next three years in its largest uptick in staffing since World World II. It now has 35,000 men and women on active duty--fewer than the New York City Police Department.

Simultaneously, the agency is in the throes of a modernization program, begun before Sept. 11, to replace aging vessels and aircraft. By some estimates, the Coast Guard possesses one of the six largest naval armadas in the world, but is the 41st oldest. The average age of its large ships is 28 years. Some cutters patrolling off Alaska date back to World War II.

“They, more than any other service, have been underfunded for modernization and recapitalization, and are simply at the end of their rope,” said Daniel Goure, a military analyst and vice president of the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va.-based public policy think tank.

“They need more money, more manpower and more modern assets,” LoBiondo added.

In the months after the attacks, the workweek for the men and women based at the Coast Guard station at Fort Lauderdale, one of the agency’s largest and busiest, soared to as much as 120 hours. Time on the water has doubled, Coasties stationed there said, and that leaves less time for repairs and maintenance.

Crews in 41-foot utility boats now escort Navy warships that call at Port Everglades to and from the open sea. The aim is to prevent a repeat of the Oct. 12, 2000, suicide bombing in the harbor of Aden, Yemen, that crippled the guided missile destroyer Cole and killed 17 of its crew.

Protecting ports from dangers that might be posed by inbound shipping also has become a priority. That is why armed Coast Guard sea marshals regularly accompany pilots when they go aboard. “You can imagine what would happen if a shipload of oil or natural gas blew up in New York Harbor or near the New York or New Jersey shore,” Goure said. “It would be a near nuclear explosion.”

Once up Stena Clipper’s ladder, Zimmer and the rest of the boarding party are welcomed by the ship’s Polish captain and first mate, who offer them coffee and soft drinks. Accompanying pilot Cheryl Phipps, the armed Coast Guardsmen take up stations on the bridge. The delicate chore of maneuvering the 485-foot vessel from the open sea to a dock at Port Everglades can now begin. In the last seven months, under the largest port security operation since World War II, the Coast Guard has sent sea marshals onto more than 2,000 vessels; 6,000 ships have been escorted in and out of port, and more than 35,000 port security patrols and 3,500 air patrols have been conducted.

Cruise Ships See Beefed-Up Security

So far, “it looks like the terrorists haven’t been using the maritime mode to transport either weapons of mass destruction or terrorists,” said Capt. Tony Regalbuto, acting director of port security at Coast Guard headquarters in Washington.

However, the case of the man they have nicknamed “Container Bob” still is very much on the minds of Coast Guard officials. In October, Italian police opened a cargo container on a Canada-bound ship arriving from Egypt and arrested a 43-year-old suspected Al Qaeda member found inside. Reports at the time said the container was equipped with a bed, toilet and provisions for a long voyage. The suspect was carrying a laptop computer, two cell phones, a Canadian passport and documents identifying him as a certified airplane mechanic.

“Container Bob,” whose real name was Riizak Amid Farid, disappeared while free on bail.

At the Port of Miami, the Coast Guard also is overseeing beefed-up security measures imposed since Sept. 11 on the cruise ships that regularly set sail for the Bahamas, Puerto Rico and other island destinations. Every piece of passenger luggage is X-rayed and food and other supplies are screened by dogs before being loaded.

“Now all provisions going into a ship are sniffed for explosives and weapons, from lettuce to cantaloupes to Christmas trees,” said Lt. Steve Lang, 39, port security supervisor.

Meanwhile, other areas traditionally under the Coast Guard’s purview have suffered. In February, Rear Adm. Jay Carmichael, commander of the 7th Coast Guard District--which encompasses the southeastern United States, Puerto Rico and the Caribbean--disclosed that monitoring of fisheries had dropped by 80%, and narcotics interdiction and the policing of marine polluters also had waned.

“This is a process over time to define a new normalcy for us,” Carmichael told a meeting of the U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy in St. Petersburg, Fla. That means finding the right formula in a changing world for the parceling out of ships and people.

“We really cannot allow them to forgo any of their missions,” LoBiondo said. “They can do it all if they have the resources.”

To better protect the nation from attack by sea, the Coast Guard now demands 96 hours’ notice, instead of 24, from arriving merchant vessels. But the web of protection is hardly perfect. Lists of crews and cargoes are supposed to be faxed to a Coast Guard office in Martinsburg, W.Va., so they can be checked.

At the moment, Coast Guard personnel must punch in the names on the manifests, a time-consuming process subject to typographical errors. Moreover, the government lacks a central database of suspected terrorists, so the Coast Guard must also pass along its lists to the FBI and other agencies for vetting.

“It’s a problem, because we want to screen 100% of the people,” Regalbuto said. The Coast Guard’s solution is to require arriving ships by September to e-mail the information to Martinsburg, so the names of people aboard can be shared instantly with all federal agencies involved in homeland defense.

The still unsolved problem that particularly concerns Loy is container traffic: 17 million of the big metal boxes arrive in the United States each year, 6 million by sea. According to Coast Guard estimates, fewer than 2% of those are examined. In a nightmare scenario that the nation’s defense planners must take into account, one of the opaque boxes easily could house a nuclear bomb or other weapon of mass destruction.

“I believe this to be the single biggest black hole we have,” Loy said. The Coast Guard has some strike teams equipped to handle chemical or biological emergencies, the admiral said, but it lacks the capability to detect the nuclear arms that Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network reportedly has been trying to acquire.

“What can we attach to a crane that offloads containers from a ship, so it turns yellow or starts squeaking” in the presence of radiation, Loy asked rhetorically. Other ideas being studied, the admiral said, include devices to continuously track them by satellite and sensors that would detect a box tampered with in transit.

At Miami’s port, amid what looks like a jumbled, multicolored mountain range of children’s giant building blocks, Petty Officer 2nd Class Joseph McCoy already is on the lookout for hazardous materials transported inside containers. “After Sept. 11, we went into a full-fledged mode of, ‘We’re here all the time,’ ” said McCoy, 30, of San Bernardino.

One recent morning, the petty officer and members of his team, wearing blue overalls, grabbed their white safety helmets and bolt cutters to crack open a gray, 20-foot container that was festooned with cautionary signs reading “Toxic,” and “Corrosive.” Documents accompanying the box showed it contained nitric, sulfuric and hydrochloric acids, as well as other dangerous chemicals. When the Coasties opened the container, plywood sheets came tumbling out, and cartons inside looked like they had been badly jumbled in transit.

“That’s two violations,” McCoy said: lack of proper blocking and bracing of cargo, and the mixing of flammable agents and oxidizing chemicals in the same container.

Security, Commerce Kept in Perspective

In all that it does, the Coast Guard must juggle the imperatives of national security with the vital necessity of keeping the sea lanes open for business. About 95% of U.S. overseas trade moves by water, and “the very last thing we want to see is some slowdown in commerce,” Loy said.

Under a new national maritime security plan, the Coast Guard wants to assess the degree of vulnerability to terrorist attack of each of the country’s 361 ports, so authorities can better develop countermeasures tailored to each. In this age of enhanced risk, container terminal owners and others in the private sector also have been alerted that they are expected to do and spend more to make their installations secure.

Coasties, who like to speak of the country’s seaboard as the nation’s longest frontier, admit that their assignment of keeping it secure will be a colossal, long-term task.

At Port Everglades, Petty Officer 3rd Class Travis Stone gazed one recent afternoon at a Danish freighter offloading containers and wondered what they might conceal.

“And that’s just one ship,” the 26-year-old Georgian said. “They come in and out every day like that.”