The first boat calls the safety boat to report a contact on their starboard side. “Looks like they’re coming into our line of fire.”
The safety boat gets on the radio and contacts the distant white ship.
“This is the [Coast Guard] Cutter Dependable,” comes the reply.
“Could you go to channel A-3, please.”
“A-3, roger.” They switch to a secure channel.
“We are off your port bow. A 240 exercise is being conducted,” the safety boat reports.
“Roger. What’s your range?”
“We’re about three to four miles off.”
“Roger. We’re four-point-five to five miles, and we’re gonna continue north by northwest, so we should be well out of your way.”
“Thank you and roger that.”
The ride back into shore is less thumpy. I look forward to tomorrow, when I’ll be riding flat water with what I think of as the “traditional” Coast Guard.
B
ack in Manhattan, I take the IRT from 125th Street to Chambers, then a shuttle bus in the rain past Trinity Church, where Coasties carefully cleaned the grave of Alexander Hamilton after 9/11. I ride the ferry to Staten Island’s St. George Terminal and catch a 6:00 A.M. cross-island ride with Jim McGranachan, past tank farms and rail yards full of black chemical cars and over a high span to the Bayonne, New Jersey, Ocean Terminal.
Inside, across a gunmetal gray channel from the big gantry cranes of the Port of Newark, is the New York Aids to Navigation Station with its black-hulled tugs, buoy tenders, and icebreakers. Here I’m introduced to the six-man crew of the Coast Guard Cutter Line, a 65-foot small harbor tug.
A classic multimission boat, built in 1962 in North Carolina, it’s part of the Coast Guard’s little-known “black hull fleet,” which maintains the nation’s navigational aids, buoys, and lighthouses.
Senior Chief Ross Fowle is in charge, MK (mechanic) 2 Charlie Wells, a big ginger-haired thirty-three-year-old Irish guy with a thoughtful fleshy face, is his XO. Kevin Thomas, Brian Leghorn, Dan Wishnoff, and Sean Cody make up the rest of the crew. Before heading out they do a premission GYR (“gar”), the standard green-yellow-red risk assessment.
On a scale of 1 to 10, they collectively rate Supervision a 2, Planning a 3, Crew Selection a 3, Crew Fitness 2, Environment (lousy weather) a 5, and Event and Evolution Complexity a 4, for a total of 19. They don’t want to go over 25, though if someone were drowning they’d modify the formula and find a way to save him.
We make our way up the channel within sight of the Statue of Liberty and enter the harbor headed toward Manhattan. Along with their Ports, Waterways, and Coastal Security (PWCS) patrolling, they’ve been asked to fix one of their twenty-five assigned ATONs, this one a four-pole marker in Flushing Bay by LaGuardia Airport. One of its red day boards has apparently been knocked off. In the winter months, they’ll head up the Hudson River behind a big icebreaker and clear channels into the smaller river port towns.
This is the third time “Senior” Ross Fowle and Charlie Wells have worked together. Their first time was in Tactical Law Enforcement, riding aboard U.S. Navy ships.
“I was on the Thomas S. Gates, and we seized the motor vessel Love and found three thousand kilos of coke on board,” Fowle recalls, “but then their engineer snuck down to the engine room and opened all these valves, and this 270-foot coastal freighter starts sinking. We were able to keep it afloat long enough to take off some drugs for evidence, along with all the people, and then the Gates sank it using its five-inch guns. Since it was the MV Love, the ship’s PA began playing the theme song from The Love Boat as they were firing the guns.”
I ask Charlie, the son of a New York fireman, how he ended up in the Coast Guard. “I was a summer lifeguard at Jones Beach, and we had a loss, a death, and I remember this orange helicopter coming over the water with guys jumping out of it, and I said, ‘Who are they?’ and my dad said, ‘That’s the Coast Guard,’ so I joined.”
We cruise past Governors Island just off lower Manhattan. “This would have been a perfect operating base on 9/11,” Charlie grouses. Like many in the Coast Guard, he regrets the service’s decision to give up the old harbor fortress in 1996. “I was here on 9/11, and it would have been a lot easier. Instead we launched our boats from Sandy Hook [New Jersey],” he recounts. “I went in a 21-foot RHI (rigid-hull inflatable) and our 41 and 47 [-foot] boats set up a security zone and were transporting firemen and other emergency workers. We had to use radar to get through the smoke. I lost my uncle and a number of friends, four guys I went to school with, that day. I got a day off to go to the funerals, but our other guys kept working thirty days straight.”
We head up the East River, passing under the BMW—the Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Williamsburg bridges. Through the chill mist we pass a towboat and a crane barge. On the barge is a 70-foot commercial fishing boat lying on its side. Its broken rails and crushed doors suggest it sank and was hauled up off the bottom.
“Sixteen miles to LaGuardia. Maybe we’ll get to work the aid while we still have this break in the weather,” Senior suggests hopefully. Five minutes later it’s pouring again and visibility has dropped below a quarter mile.
I admire the tug’s old beveled compass and metal steering wheel, which contrast with its newer digital charting, radar, and communications gear. The Medium Response Cutters that are replacing older 41-foot utility boats don’t even have wheels; instead they have throttle controls built into their armrests and can be docked using a computer mouse.
Charlie takes the helm and talks about his seven-year-old daughter who’s doing fractions and an emergency fire call he went on last night (he’s also a volunteer fireman) where they responded to a house full of carbon monoxide and rescued a woman who was foaming at the mouth.
We pass the Domino Sugar refinery and a big Con Edison power plant opposite a petroleum fuel tank farm on the Brooklyn side, both rated as critical infrastructure to be watched by the Coast Guard. We cruise on past the United Nations. They show me the apartment building that Yankee pitcher Cory Lidle’s plane ran into in October 2006. The burn marks where it impacted are still being worked on.
At Ward’s Island we turn into Flushing Bay, moving past the big prison barge by Rikers Island. The rain continues in a steady downpour.
They call the airport so its security response force doesn’t go after us while we’re fixing the marker. “Most of our talk and everything now is homeland security,” Senior notes while dropping anchor. “It’s kind of become an industry really.”
They lend me a Mustang suit and a bill cap. Charlie, Kevin, and Brian dress out, with Kevin and Brian strapping on climbing harnesses and ropes. Then they prep the 17-foot skiff secured in a cradle on the back of the boat, lifting it over the side on the Line’s small crane. I climb over the side and join them in the flat-bottomed craft, stepping over a big red triangular board.
Kevin helps Charlie get the Johnson outboard started, and we shoot off around a muddy bend and along runways where jets are taking off in the cold pelting rain. Charlie is driving, wearing a black skullcap and goggles, while Kevin is checking the navigation map. With the thump and biting chill and white furrowed wake rolling behind us, I’m suddenly reminded of a similar moment riding a Zodiac with Chilean marines in Antarctica.
“I love the smell of fish,” Kevin remarks as the winds shift and a pungent piscine odor hits us. We nose up against a rocky isle with a four-post metal tower supporting large red navigation signs. Kevin and Brian leap onto the slippery rocks as Charlie holds the boat in close. They take the big red triangle board from the bottom of the boat. Kevin attaches a line to the tower’s slick ladder and climbs up to a raised platform. Brian follows, handing him the sign. They then angle and attach it with a battery screwdriver. The twelve-degree outward angle of the sign “keeps the birds from crapping on it,” Charlie explains. We head back to the Line, jumping the wake from a passing tug and garbage scow.
Back aboard, we si
t around the galley table drying out as Senior gets us under way. Charlie talks about when he was boarding freighters in the Persian Gulf with his Tactical Law Enforcement team and “the Iranians were always pushing us.” Brian puts on a sweatshirt that reads USCG LINE—SLOW BUT STEADY. They reheat some Chinese food and down carrots and chips.
H
eading back down along the east side of Manhattan, Charlie tells me about his early career involvement in a famous migrant smuggling case, the Golden Venture back in June of 1994.
“I was watch stander at Rockaway [Station] and the U.S. Park Police called saying there was a fishing boat with seventy-five people on board, and that didn’t make sense. I grabbed our truck and drove over to the beach—it was less than five minutes away—and saw this 200-foot freighter [the Golden Venture] and people jumping into the water. There were some Park Police and NYPD, and initially we were handcuffing people like it was a law enforcement thing, but when more people started dropping off the ship, I called on the radio and we drove back to the station and got life rings and lines and started pulling people out of the water. We did medevacs for four or five who were in cardiac arrest. A fireman came up and said, ‘Can we get a helicopter to get people out?’ and handed me a phone, and someone says, ‘Who is this?’ I say ‘Coast Guardsman Charles Wells,’ and he says, ‘This is Fire Captain Charles Wells,’ and it’s my dad!” He grins at the memory. “He asks how it is, and I say it’s pretty wild, ’cause it was chaotic at that time. I called in the Coast Guard helicopters, and I think six people died, but we got the rest who were critical out of there and to the hospitals.”
We go up the Hudson River to a sports complex where the Sanibel, a 110-foot cutter from Group Woods Hole, is moored up. They call Dan Wishnoff to the wheelhouse because he’s fresh from Cape May boot camp and has never seen a 110. We then head back down to the Battery, checking the currents and looking for a dock where they can drop me off. They bring the cutter in close to Pier 16 and hand me a life jacket. I put it on, hop onto the pier, return the jacket, and shake hands good-bye. They back out into the channel. I climb a fence and duck into the shopping mall at Pier 17 to get out of the rain.
Moments before, an NYPD patrol boat had cruised past us. “Since 9/11 they’re doing more SAR and the Coast Guard more homeland security, and I got a huge problem with that!” Charlie, the dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker, complained. “Our job is search and rescue!”
For a rapidly growing force within the Coast Guard, however, the job and the mission are not primarily about saving lives anymore but about arming up for violent confrontations in the maritime domain.
CHAPTER 5
Gunners
“That movie Navy SEALS, there’s the scene where one of them says, ‘If I wanted to
play it safe I’d have joined the Coast Guard.’ That irritated me.”
—CDR. MARK OGLE, PACIFIC TACTICAL LAW ENFORCEMENT DETACHMENT, USCG
“Homeland Security officials and the Coast Guard say they’re enforcing the law and
accept no responsibility for the casualties.”
— WALL STREET JOURNAL STORY ON CUBAN MIGRANTS KILLED DURING HIGH-SEAS CHASES
On the day Al Qaeda attacked the United States, the Coast Guard had about three hundred full-time armed responders, mostly Tactical Law Enforcement Teams (TACLETs) going after drug runners and an antidrug Helicopter Interdiction Squadron called HITRON. Aware of a change in focus, they quickly renamed their mission CNT—Counter Narco-Terrorism.
Today’s Coast Guard has over three thousand armed responders, including Tactical Law Enforcement Teams, Maritime Safety and Security Teams, Boarding and Security Teams, Port Security Units, and a two-hundred-strong and growing Maritime Security Response Team (MSRT), a kind of SEALs Lite, designed to board potentially hostile ships in U.S. waters and beyond.
“It’s like we were always the bridesmaid and now we’re the bride,” says the otherwise extremely macho John Daly, CO of Tactical Law Enforcement Team South in Miami.
Coast Guard gunners now train at their own Special Missions Training Center on the Marine Corps base at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina. Here a small team might shoot off a hundred thousand rounds in a week, practice special boat tactics with armed pairs of 25-foot Defenders, or enter and clear a “kill house” or simulated “ship in a box,” made of stacked shipping containers. They also train on how to quickly dump their body armor and other heavy gear if they end up in the water. Tactical flying has also become a specialty at the Aviation Training Center in Mobile, Alabama, where tactical aircrews have begun practicing for joint air/surface counterterror operations. In Chesapeake, Virginia, the Maritime Security Response Team has its own elaborate weapons training facility where its Direct Action Teams hone their ability to “neutralize enemy personnel.” MSRT even has its own small air wing in Elizabeth City, North Carolina. Establishment of additional MSRTs is being considered for the West Coast, the Gulf Coast, the Great Lakes, and the Mississippi River.
Coast Guardsmen can also now apply to become Navy SEALs and retain their active-duty status in the Coast Guard (this is the only service career option not open to women). The template for today’s increasingly militarized post-9/11 Coast Guard can be found in the service’s decades-long participation in the “War on Drugs.”
Drug Gunners
“We were hundreds of miles off Latin America when we came upon this unmarked go-fast boat. It was dumping bales of coke as it tried to escape. We fired warning shots across its bow, but it still wouldn’t stop,” says Lt. John Kousch, recalling the time he was in charge of a LEDET, a Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachment, in the eastern Pacific. “After about forty-five minutes, and after it almost came into contact with our ship [the Navy frigate USS Boone] three rounds of disabling fire were fired into its rear engine compartment. Then it came to DIW—dead in the water—status, and one of the go-fast’s crew jumped overboard. We picked up the guy in the water and boarded the vessel, and my guys went down below and found the drug rep had committed suicide, had blown the back of his head off. Over the next two to three hours, calculating set and drift, we were able to use the [Boone’s] helicopter to search and recover the bales of cocaine that were now spread over miles of ocean. There was approximately three tons of it.”
The eastern Pacific is where most of the Coast Guard’s big cocaine busts now take place, including a twenty-one-ton seizure from the Panamanian freighter Gatun in March 2007, the largest-ever coke bust at sea. Recent smuggler tactics have included liquefying cocaine and hiding it in their fuel tanks and using semisubmersible submarines to transport it.
Another time Kousch and his team were trying to secure the flooding engine room of a 65-foot fishing vessel, the Simon Bolivar, when it slammed into their Navy frigate, smashing its own bow while leaving only superficial scrapes on the warship. A Navy rescue and assistance (R&A) team was able to keep the drug boat afloat long enough for the Coasties to do a space accountability search and find the secret compartments hiding five or six tons of cocaine that was intended to go down with the ship.
Eight-man LEDET teams (there have only been a few women) operate as part of Tactical Law Enforcement teams in San Diego (PACTACLET) and Miami (TACLET South). A Chesapeake, Virginia–based TACLET North and an MSST unit were reorganized as the counterterrorist Maritime Security Response Team in 2004.
Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachments ride aboard U.S., British, Dutch, and other allied warships and military oilers for thirty to sixty days at a time, mostly in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. There they pursue and board suspected drug vessels, sometimes sneaking up on them in small boats in the open ocean at night. They also spend part of their time working as trainers with the Iraqi navy and other armed forces in the Persian Gulf.
Among their two hundred or so members, they account for half the cocaine seized by the U.S. Coast Guard, which is more than all the cocaine seized by the DEA, FBI, Customs Service, and all local and state police combined. In 2007, the Coast Guard seized
a record-breaking 355,000 pounds of cocaine (over 160 metric tons) with an estimated street value of $4.7 billion.
Of course, the Coast Guard was also highly effective at chasing down rumrunners during Prohibition. That didn’t stop Americans from drinking a sea of alcohol brought in by cagey smugglers like Capt. Bill McCoy, whose product was so admired by the public it came to be known as “the real McCoy.”
Less attractive are some of today’s smugglers, people like Francisco Javier Arellano-Felix, the head of a ruthless Mexican drug cartel known for its intramural executions, the accidental murder of a Catholic cardinal, the torture-murder of several drug agents, and a half-mile-long drug tunnel it excavated between Tijuana and San Diego. In August 2006, Arellano-Felix, then thirty-seven, fell into a fish trap laid by the Coast Guard and DEA. He took his family and friends (including two alleged cartel assassins) on an offshore fishing holiday aboard the U.S.-registered 43-foot yacht Dock Holiday (a play on the name of a famous American gunman). They left the port of Cabo San Lucas not realizing they were being observed. Nearby an undercover DEA “sports fishing boat” operated by a couple of Coast Guard agents was watching, waiting, and passing secure message traffic north.
The Monsoon is an angular, lethal-looking 179-foot coastal patrol boat, one of eight the Navy lent the Coast Guard after 9/11 (it still has use of four). The Monsoon spent weeks offshore with a LEDET team waiting for Arellano-Felix to decide to go after that big trophy fish beyond Mexico’s twelve-mile territorial sea. They waited so long they had to drop most of the team ashore, as they were scheduled for duty in Iraq.
“It was an on and off operation,” the Monsoon’s CO, Lt. Cdr. Troy Hosmer, admits. “We were south of Cabo and starting to patrol back north when we [finally] got word [that the Dock Holiday was headed out to sea]. The opportunity was just right. I think part of how it went down is we have a gray hull that looks like the Navy [as opposed to Coast Guard white]. They probably thought we were the Mexican navy when we stopped them and got on board.
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