“We used seven people for the actual boarding. While we [the Monsoon] blocked them from making a run toward (Mexico’s) territorial sea, our small boat came up on them. I’m not even sure they saw it. I mean, it had to look impressive as we pulled up with all our guns manned and loaded. We knew some of those guys with them were their bodyguards and knew what we were going to do if any of them pulled a weapon. They didn’t. So we detained eleven people, eight adults and three children. It was unfortunate the kids were exposed to this, but pretty soon we had them on Sony PlayStations and were feeding them candy.”
I asked about the fishing. “I think they had one hooked when we boarded,” he said. Later one of the boarders tells me they’d actually just lost a blue marlin when they were arrested and so were already in a bad mood. Either way, it was a victory for America and for that fish.
• • •
E
ven before former commandant Paul Yost volunteered the Coast Guard for the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs in the 1980s, its cutters were chasing down maritime smugglers. Before the rise of the cocaine cartels, it was marijuana smugglers in the Caribbean.
“We were chasing old shrimp boats piled high with marijuana. The best tactic was just to be downwind of them,” former Coast Guard commandant Jim Loy recalls of his time chasing pungent loads of ganja in the 1970s.
Where the big cutters used to display marijuana leaves representing their seizures, they now display snowflakes representing tons of coke they’ve busted.
“Last summer everyone was getting a case,” Cmdr. Mark Ogle, head of the Pacific Tactical Law Enforcement Team, tells me. “Nothing big, but a ton here, a ton there. Then we got the submarine case [a fishing trawler hauling a steel-hulled semisubmersible containing 3.5 tons of coke]. Just our seizures [PACTACLET’s] have been $2.7 billion in two years. That’s some real money.” He grins.
We go in the back room of one of his unit’s single-story yellow cinder-block buildings located inside the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego.
Past Iraqi and Colombian flags and photos of burning drug ships and heavily armed boarding parties are half a dozen buff young guys in their twenties listening to thrash metal music under a wall-sized Dutch flag. They’d just spent much of the last year on a Dutch warship busting drug runners in the Caribbean. Their only complaint: too many sandwiches on Dutch ships. Those who ride with the British grouse about all the curry and potatoes.
In the Caribbean, where the distances are relatively short and a drug runner can deliver a load, sink a boat, and fly home within twenty-four hours, there are “more runs but fewer tons” of coke being smuggled. In the eastern Pacific, go-fasts, fishing boats, and coastal freighters out of Colombia and Ecuador may travel thousands of miles out past the Galápagos Islands to try to bypass U.S. antidrug patrols. They’ll then work their way north up a ladder of fueling vessels, or “floating gas stations,” to Mexico, where the drugs are offloaded and taken by land (and sometimes by tunnel) across the U.S. border. Because of the added logistical costs involved, the drug cartels tend to run larger loads in the Pacific.
“We’d captured two go-fasts in two days and to build the [legal] case wanted their fueler,” recalls Chief Mark Quinlan of Miami’s TACLET South. “Generally these [fuel ships] are fishing vessels with radar on board, so we had to do a UNB, an unannounced nighttime boarding. So we climb down the ladder [off the Navy frigate De Wert], my team and a Navy coxswain and swimmer/engineer, into this small boat in the middle of the ocean six hundred miles west of Ecuador.
“There were two- to four-foot seas, and here we are heading sixteen miles over the horizon at night. We’re driving for two and a half hours and we’re soaked and we’re miserable. We’re sitting on the RIB’s [rigid inflatable boat’s] sponsons [pontoons] hanging on to the ropes. We couldn’t use our [night-vision] goggles as we got near because they were covered in salt. We came up on the port aft section [of the target vessel], and this Navy coxswain was good. He pulled up and stuck it against the boat, and we all leaped over the rail. The gunwales were so low in the water, there was so much gas on board, that the deck was almost awash.
“So all eight of us jump onto the boat at the same time. There was this head [latrine] at the end of the boat, a curtained shack, and this guy stuck his head out, so two of my guys took him down. I went to the engine room with another guy [to see if the boat had been scuttled or set afire, as their crews are instructed to do if boarded], but it was empty. Four of my guys were going up the port side to the bridge and past the crew cabin when one of the crew woke up and reached out of the porthole and grabbed at one of our rifles and knocked the magazine out of the weapon, so two of our guys dealt with him, and the other two secured the bridge and called me on the radio. It took us one minute and twenty-eight seconds to gain control of that ship.
“There were nine people aboard. It was a 67-foot-long wooden trawler with two tanks of gas; one held seventeen hundred gallons and the other twenty-eight hundred. We had to search for a while before we found the fuel port in the crew quarters. There were triple bunks, and under one of the bottom beds was this port [gasoline pipe] and two electric leads. The fuel pump was disassembled around the boat, but all the parts were painted red—the hoses, flange, wires—so that an idiot could put it together, which is what we did.” He grins. “It even had a gas-pump-style handle. We took fuel samples to compare with the go-fast boats we’d seized. Then we uncuffed our one suspect at the head and let him finish up his business.”
Lt. JG Todd Taylor tells of another unannounced nighttime boarding, in December 2005, in which one life was saved but two lost.
“We had a team of eight and two Navy officers. We were approaching an 80-foot fishing boat eight hundred miles south of the Galápagos at 3:30 A.M. There were two dogs aboard, a sheepdog type and a Doberman, and they came to the side of the boat as we approached and were barking and snapping at us. We probably emptied fifty ounces of pepper spray at them. Finally they took a break, and we climbed aboard.
“It was a high freeboard, because I’m about six-three, and I had to raise both my arms to pull myself up and over with my full kit [about sixty pounds of gear]. As we came on board, the crew started coming out on deck and lying down with their arms raised. One of them told us there were eight people on board, and my team took control of the bridge without any resistance.
“I went into the engine room, and there were these four wooden plugs that had been pulled to scuttle the ship and also this pump on deck that was pumping water into the ship so that I was waist deep when I got there. I found debris, garbage, and stuff floating around the room, and we got the pump reversed, so the water was now pumping out.
“The Navy was two miles off, and they sent a small boat team to start dewatering the boat and try to keep it afloat. I went back on deck and counted seven people and got the interpreter to ask the guy who said there were eight about the missing man, and this is ten minutes into it, and he says, ‘Well, the master dove over the side when you boarded.’
“It was about dawn, just getting light, and the Navy coxswain begins to search in the direction we’d come from and finds him six miles behind the boat treading water and brings him back to us. So he’s a lucky guy even if he is in jail today.
“We were still searching, and the Doberman wouldn’t allow one of my guys access to this space and was attempting to bite him, and so he shot the dog in the shoulder, and it ran to the back of the boat, laid down, and died.
“We got on that boat at 3:30 A.M. and kept it afloat till we could offload the eight detainees and twenty-one thousand pounds of cocaine we found on board which took about one and a half hours moving these 244 double-sized bales onto small boats. They even put a Navy diver in the water to try to patch it [the drug vessel] from below, but thirty-six minutes after we left the boat it filled with water and sank.”
I ask what happened to the second dog.
“The Navy captain said no way we could bring it on his ship.
We’d locked it in the master’s cabin, and it went down with the boat.”
I ask why they didn’t at least shoot the dog rather than let it drown. He says they have to account for any shots discharged. I suggest putting a dog down humanely ought to be considered a justifiable use of force.
• • •
W
hile not allowed to shoot dogs, specially trained Coast Guard snipers are allowed to use .50 caliber rifle fire from helicopters to shoot out the engine blocks of fast-moving boats during high-speed ocean pursuits. This is done by the Helicopter Interdiction Tactical Squadron (HITRON) based out of Jacksonville, Florida. They pioneered the service’s Airborne Use of Force doctrine in 1998, deploying eight aircraft on Coast Guard cutters in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific. Until recently these were Sting Rays, sleek Italian helicopters built by Agusta Aerospace and leased by the Coast Guard along with civilian contractor/mechanics who went out on the cutters but didn’t fly. Each aircrew included two pilots and a gunner who’d fire warning shots from an M-240 machine gun in front of an escaping drug boat and then, if peppering the water in front of it with hot lead failed to stop it, would shoot its outboards with a laser-mounted .50 caliber sniper rifle.
Lt. Greg Mouritsen went from flying Black Hawks for the Army to Sting Rays for HITRON. “Actually the mission’s not that different. This is the only non-SAR-capable mission in the Coast Guard,” he explains. “Generally when we run into these boats we fire on them. They generally stop. They know we’re not shooting to kill, but if I knew you were going to shoot out my outboard and there’s going to be shrapnel and it’s fifteen feet from where I’m standing at the console, I’d stop.”
Bosun’s Mate Mark Collison tells of finding a Caribbean go-fast dead in the water at two in the morning. His LEDET team snuck up on and surprised the three men on board who had earlier escaped from a HITRON helicopter. One of them had a bloody tourniquet around his thigh where metal fragments from one of their shot-up outboards had penetrated above his knee and exited just below his buttocks.
“I had my EMT look at the injured guy. We then put them on our boat, and one of our guys got on their boat, but coming back it sank in six-foot seas. It was a pretty good chop, and our communications had gone down, so we decided to pick our way toward where we thought our ship [the USS Ticonderoga] was, and three hours later we finally made contact.”
In other cases, drug runners being pursued by HITRON have died flipping their boats at 40 and 50 mph trying to evade capture.
In 2007, HITRON’s Sting Rays were replaced by upgraded Dolphins. With the use of this standardized Coast Guard helicopter, more aircrew men and women are now being trained to function as snipers.
• • •
T
he Coast Guard has also committed five Dolphins to National Capitol Region (NCR) security flights over Washington, DC. Based out of Air Station Atlantic City and flying out of Reagan National Airport under the command of NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, they’re equipped with hailers and side-mounted electronic message boards, essentially flying billboards to warn off small aircraft that stray into or intentionally enter restricted airspace over the Capitol. Filling the gap between what high-speed Air Force F-16 fighter jets can identify and what Secret Service agents with Stinger missiles can stop from the roof of the White House, NCR aircraft are supposed to identify a threat early on and, if it proves real, back off and let the Air Force do the actual shootdown.
The Cuban Connection
Since joining the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, the Coast Guard has expanded its own use of live fire to include boat crews firing shotgun slugs into the outboard motors of migrant-smuggling go-fasts. To date, only boats filled with Cubans have been fired upon. Haitians and Dominicans know that if caught by land or by sea they will be deported home and so tend to surrender when confronted by U.S. authorities. Since 1994, however, the United States has had a “wet foot/dry foot” policy that allows Cuban migrants leaving the island by boat to claim refugee status only if they make it onto U.S. soil. If caught at sea they will be returned to Cuba. Previously all Cuban migrants were given special refugee status as part of the United States’ Cold War confrontation with Cuba.
Wet foot/dry foot was the result of a 1994 Clinton administration deal with Fidel Castro to end the huge surge of maritime migrants the Cuban government was permitting to leave the island. It ended when the United States increased the number of legal entry visas to twenty thousand a year but made it harder for Cubans without visas to gain access by sea. Since then wet foot/dry foot has had the same impact on immigration policy as “don’t ask, don’t tell” has had for gay members of the military.
In 2006, in a peculiar example of how this ongoing policy can be interpreted, fifteen Cubans landed on the old Seven Mile highway bridge in the Florida Keys that runs next to its modern replacement. Since some of the old bridge’s spans are missing and the Cubans were unable to walk to shore, the Coast Guard ruled they were not technically on U.S. soil. They loaded them on a cutter and sailed them back to the Cuban port of Bahia de Cabañas, where the majority of Cuban migrants caught at sea are repatriated.
A short time later, a flotilla from the “Conch Republic” (a hard-drinking faux nation based in Key West) sailed out to the highway bridge and claimed it as their territory, since no other nation seemed to.
Dry-footing is a much quicker way to U.S. residency than joining the Cuban lottery for a U.S. visa or applying from a third country. I know of one Cuban scientist who, in order to escape the economic hardships of life in Cuba, got a travel permit to Mexico, where he snuck across the U.S. border. From San Diego he rode a bus to Miami. Once there he put on an old pair of cut-off jeans and went to the beach, lying in the sun for twelve hours till he was severely sunburned. He then slipped into the water, swam offshore, and swam back, splashing around loudly, announcing that his raft had sunk and demanding political asylum, which he got. He didn’t know he could have simply asked for it at the Mexican border.
A far more serious result of the wet foot/dry foot policy has been the growth of between twenty and thirty criminal gangs of smugglers (often new arrivals themselves) who charge $10,000 per person to get people into the United States. They’ll pull up on a Cuban beach, jam thirty or more people onto a 10-meter cigarette boat, and then head for Florida at breakneck speed, not bothering to stop if confronted by the law.
While a majority of Cuban refugees still come in what the Coast Guard calls “rustic vessels” or “chugs” (as in chug-chug) that can range from a raft of innertubes to a ’59 Buick with pontoons (intercepted in 2004), the go-fasts represent a newer, more dangerous mode of transport.
S
itting in the Coast Guard Investigative Service office at an old communications station in south Miami, I watch a black and white FLIR (forward-looking infrared) video shot from a Coast Guard Falcon jet. It shows a large speedboat bumping across open water.
“We were looking for him for two days [based on intelligence tips] and found him five minutes from shore with a Black Hawk in pursuit,” Special Agent in Charge Jon Sall tells me as the scene unfolds.
The boat slows down only slightly before running up on a sandy beach amid high-end estate condos and manicured palm trees. It’s Miami’s Fisher Island, one of the local retreats for wealthy celebrities. You see twenty-five whitish figures spilling out of the boat, running across the deck of a condominium owned by wrestling entrepreneur Vince McMahon. At the same time, a Black Hawk helicopter appears in the foreground of the video, hovering menacingly next to the beached boat. A man from the boat pulls another whitish figure, that appears to be a woman, off the vessel. She stumbles, and they take off into the dark between the condos. Two gunmen jump from the Customs and Border Patrol helicopter and begin to examine the beached and abandoned $130,000 boat. The video ends. The Cubans get to stay.
I look at a map on the office wall that shows the waters around Puerto Rico, including a flyspe
ck island forty miles to its west. Mona Island is a barren, waterless U.S. wildlife refuge, but since it’s easy for Cubans to get permits to visit the Dominican Republic, which is close to Mona, a growing number have begun arriving on the island from there.
They risk the treacherous Mona Passage in order to land and claim their right to “political asylum” from the local ranger, who is otherwise kept busy counting iguanas. Dozens of Cubans are thought to have drowned attempting this journey. The Coast Guard spends a lot of time trying to block landings here or else delivering food and water to desperate, dehydrated Cubans who made it ashore.
Recently, however, the Coasties have been able to reduce traffic in the Mona Passage by 50 percent with new biometric technology. They use handheld satellite-linked scanners to transmit photos and fingerprints of people they’ve picked up on the water to a U.S. criminal and immigration database. Getting instant “hits” back, they are able to sort out the smugglers for prosecution. This has discouraged other smugglers from using this route. This Biometrics at Sea Program has now been extended to the Florida Straits.
Agent Sall shows me a couple of recent photos taken by a U.S. Wildlife ranger on the Marquesas Keys Refuge, only thirty miles west of Key West, where twenty-eight people were dropped off. They’re mugging happily, smiling and waving to the camera, knowing they’re now on U.S soil, a fact that gives no similar joy to millions of Mexican, Haitian, Dominican, Chinese, and other migrants who once in the United States are still forced to work as “illegals” in America’s low-wage underground economy.
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