Agent Sall, dark-haired with lively blue eyes, gray slacks, and a black shirt that could only work in Miami, claims that a week earlier off Key West a Cuban woman draped her infant child over the cowling of a go-fast boat’s outboard engine so it wouldn’t be shot out. A few migrants have tried to set themselves afire, knowing that if they’re taken to a mainland hospital they get to stay.
There have also been a number of documented incidents of Cubans violently resisting arrest at sea, trying to fight off Coast Guard boarders with spear-like fish gigs, clubs, and hatchets.
“We have maybe fifteen to twenty attacks on Coast Guard members a year [on the water], but now we make federal assault cases, and recently one perp got ten years in prison, so that’s something,” Sall says, appearing satisfied. “For the smugglers it’s not about the migrants, it’s organized crime. You get thirty people in a 30-foot boat, that’s a three-hundred-grand [$300,000] load, and unlike drugs, you get caught and maybe have your wrist slapped, though that’s beginning to change . . . Right now there are more boats stolen in Georgia and Florida than the rest of the country combined. Within eighteen months of starting one investigation, we recovered forty boats worth over five million dollars.
“The typical organization is involved in stealing boats, smuggling migrants, and maybe committing Medicare fraud. They’ll make up phony stickers for the outboard engines or use real numbers from another engine. I tracked one number and called it up, and it’s a guy in Washington state, and he says, ‘Yeah, that’s my engine number and it’s on the engine of my boat sitting here in my yard.’ That was from a case out of Jacksonville. Or with boats they’ll change the HIN number—that’s the Hull Identification Number, like a VIN number on a vehicle—and then they’ll register it with the state so when you look it up it comes back as legal. So they steal a boat, use it for a smuggling run—not a lot of start-up costs there—then sell it to a friend, report it stolen, collect the insurance, and ’round it goes.”
Frustrated with the smugglers, the Coast Guard Investigative Service initiated Operation Triple Play.
“The majority of landings have been on the Keys, so we tried to deny them the Keys as an operating area,” he explains. “We brought in fifteen to twenty agents from around the country and had a profile—I know that’s not a good word, but it wasn’t ethnic. It was, say, a 30-foot go-fast boat with three outboards and no fishing gear aboard [being towed by a twenty-four-year-old Cuban in a Hummer]. We’d get with state and local police, and they’d enforce statutes on registration and brake lights and see if the driver had a valid license. We had boats stopped with sixty-five-gallon gas cans, and we pulled one back to the Coast Guard station in Miami, and none of the three guys with the boat was the owner, so we asked them to call him. He shows up in this SUV, and we tell him you can’t have all this gas on the boat, so he loads three hundred gallons of gas in the back of his Chevy Tahoe and puts his boat on the hitch and drives off. We called the Dade County sheriff to say there was this bomb driving down the highway, but they didn’t care.”
During its four months of operation, Triple Play led to a lot of traffic citations and brake light tickets, a couple of fishing violations, and the recovery of dozens of stolen boats and engines.
Still, most of the active confrontations—and several migrant deaths— have taken place not on land but at sea, partly as a result of the Coast Guard’s increased use of force.
In the summer of 2007, the Wall Street Journal reported on the case of Amay Machado Gonzalez, a twenty-four-year-old newlywed who was one of more than two dozen migrants on a go-fast boat that was trying to outrun two Coast Guard vessels and a helicopter. When a Coast Guard gunner shot two copper slugs into one of the outboards, the boat made an abrupt left turn before stalling out. It was during that turn Amay hit her head against the side of the boat in what would prove to be a fatal injury, the third fatal head injury of a Cuban migrant resulting from a high-speed ocean chase within a year.
Right before the Coast Guard opened fire, over the sound of sirens wailing and engines roaring, Amay had turned to her new husband, Agustin, and said, “Pray for me, my love, because I’m praying for you.” A moment later, she lay dying in the bottom of the boat.
The Coast Guard blames deaths such as Amay’s on the human smugglers trying to avoid arrest, and, as with high-speed police chases on land, so does the law. Three U.S.-based Cubans involved in smuggling Amay and the other migrants were sentenced to twelve years in prison, two of them for contributing to her death.
However, Wall Street Journal reporter Robert Block suggests there’s no evidence that harsh methods like shooting out the engines of go-fast boats result in any greater success. More than half the Cubans who attempt to sneak into the United States still make it.
S
o why is the U.S. Coast Guard so actively involved in maritime drug and migrant interdiction in the first place? It’s because, as a multimission maritime agency, the Coast Guard has both U.S. Title 10 (military) and Title 14 (law enforcement) authority. The other armed services are prevented from carrying out any domestic law enforcement under the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. As a result, the Coast Guard gets to enforce criminal statutes that the Department of Defense cannot.
One effect is that when an at-sea drug boarding is about to take place, the Coast Guard ensign is raised over the Navy warship carrying its team, and that ship officially becomes a Coast Guard vessel. This is something the U.S. Navy generally doesn’t like to talk about. During migrant pulses like the Mariel boatlift of 1980 or the Haitian and Cuban boatlifts of 1994 and 1995, Navy ships have also functioned as Coast Guard holding pens.
Today the Coast Guard’s mixed law enforcement and military authority is viewed by the Department of Homeland Security as a way to ramp up its domestic firepower in the War on Terror. Unlike other military helicopters flying over our cities and ports, the Coast Guard’s HH-60s and HH-65s wouldn’t require a federal declaration of martial law to open fire. This is one reason they’re now equipping all Coast Guard helicopters with Airborne Use of Force capability.
Aerial Gunners
The rotors whir, and AC steam begins to run like a waterfall in the space between the cockpit and the main cabin. Struts up, we roll down the runway as the blades roar, and suddenly we’re shooting up like a fast freight elevator two hundred feet above the air station. We head out over the water with a breeze blowing through the open door, over the bay and marinas full of sailboats, running past Harbor Island and the channel and the big North Island Navy air base and out past the Coast Guard lighthouse at the tip of San Diego’s Point Loma. It’s a beautiful blue ocean afternoon for flying.
Ten minutes into the flight, Sector Control announces an EPIRB—an emergency position-indicating radio beacon—signal has been picked up. On a small monitor linked to a rear-tilted camera, I see the other HH-60 peel away to respond. Looking out the side window, I can see it flying toward shore above a gray-hulled Navy frigate.
“25 and 37 have broken formation. 25 returning to San Diego to investigate,” the Coast Guard pilot announces on the radio.
“Sector understands. Out.”
“Ninety-nine percent of the time it’s a false alarm, but we always treat them as the real thing until we know better,” Capt. Chip Strangfeld explains from the front of our craft.
A few minutes later, we hear a call between 25 and base.
“Believe we located the source. We’re over North Island [Naval Air Station], and the signal is coming from the hangars.”
“From the hangars, is that correct? Over.”
“Correct. That double dome area.”
“Thank you. Please stand by.”
Shortly, 25 is released to rejoin us.
The light is fading as we circle over the Navy firing range on San Clemente Island, having chased a state Fish and Game boat out of Horseshoe Cove. I can see blue waves breaking along the rugged marine terraces to one side, an improvised shooting range on the other. Randy, ly
ing in the open door, takes aim with his M-14 EBR. The high-tech 7.62 mm rifle, all composite, steel, and laser sight, is tethered to the side of the door with the same type of woven lanyard you might have found on a nineteenth-century revenue cutter. We hover about twenty-five feet off the ground fifty yards out from four paper targets of male torsos on wooden supports, each spray-painted 1 through 4.
“Ten shots from fifty yards, then ten shots from one hundred,” Travis Marsh, the thickset blond gunnery mate, instructs over the ICF internal radio line that plugs into our helmets.
“Commence firing.” The pilot makes the call. Randy takes aim. Even with the helmet’s ear protectors, there’s still a loud series of pops and static whines on the headset, along with air pressure pulses, orange muzzle flashes, and a whiff of cordite that’s quickly washed away through the open door. “Cease firing.” The Jayhawk pulls back and a little up till we’re hovering thirty-five feet off the ground. Randy clears his weapon. A video camera on the helicopter’s nose zooms in to show close-ups of the plywood-backed targets so Travis can count the hits. We tilt up and pull back to one hundred yards for another ten shots. Randy puts his weapon away in its case.
Next it’s Tyson Finn’s turn. He has to unravel his radio line from his safety line before taking a kneeling position in the open door and blasting away at fifty yards. After “Cease firing,” the chopper backs up, and he fires another clip at a hundred yards. Randy scored fifteen, Tyson ten. Seventeen out of twenty is required to pass this shooting qualification. The radio tells us the shooters on the other helicopter scored thirteen and seventeen. One out of four has qualified on the daytime shoot.
As twilight turns the desert scrub of the island to gold and ocher, Randy turns on the weapon’s laser sight and walks its red dot across the ground, up to the target, and “between the legs.” Between the helicopter’s vibrations and his point-and-shoot style of firing from the hip, the laser dot is bouncing around like a firefly on methamphetamine. Each shot’s impact sets off a spout of dust on the slope behind the targets.
“This is my second time on this course, and I don’t think I’ve even qualified,” Travis, now the aerial gunner, assures the others as he blasts away from a cross-legged lotus position in the door.
After the cease-fire order, a blue light is turned on in the cabin and all the spilled brass cleaned up. We then land, and I accompany Travis and Randy through the cactus, sand, and shrub, following his flashlight beacon to the targets. Most of the shots are bunched low. Travis sprays glue on the targets and covers them with new paper torsos from a cardboard stash box nearby. Randy follows with a staple gun, then relabels them 1-4 in black spray paint. We hike back to the HH-60 and remove cactus stickers that have bunched on the sides and bottoms of our shoes. “One guy didn’t and got a cactus spine stuck in his ass when he squatted down in the cabin,” Travis warns.
By the time we lift off again it’s pitch-black. On the next run, the pilots and shooters are wearing night-vision goggles attached to their blue helmets. All I can see is the muzzle flashes as Randy fires into the darkness . . . Pop, pop, pop, pop, pop.
“You hit nine out of ten,” Travis announces. He must see my look of disbelief and reaches over to let me look through his night-vision-rigged helmet.
I put it on and see the rugged landscape of the island transformed into a globe-shaped lime-colored world that reminds me of the psychedelic rock posters of my youth. There’s a bright white targeting dot that, unlike the ruby red laser dot, is only visible to the night-vision goggles’ wearer. Also, this dot’s much larger, pea sized rather than pin sized.
Tyson is still kind of herky-jerky, letting the uneven weight of the weapon and the copter’s vibrations jump the dot around when he gets the white pea into the body mass of the target. He proves better at a hundred yards.
Someone asks what I think about their stealthy night-vision targeting system. I say I think I’d still rather be the guy on the ground hidden in the rocks shooting back at a big, noisy orange helicopter hovering just off the ground.
We land a final time and load the wooden target frames and shooting supplies onto the helo. The low-slung interior of the HH-60 now looks like a pickup on a trash run.
“We need more training,” Travis admits at the end of our four-hour flight. The station’s last range training was in February, and it’s now September. The Coast Guard is in the process of arming its entire helicopter fleet with belt-fed M-240 machine guns and ride-along shooters.
“It makes no sense in post-9/11 to not have this capability,” reasons Capt. Chip Strangfeld, our pilot and San Diego’s sector commander. “Others think that’s what we have the Department of Defense for, but the National Guard and DOD are not there right away, while we are on the scene and operating above America’s waters every day.”
“We’ll put ballistic armor on the floor and armored plates under the pilots’ seats and on the sides,” Travis explains. “We’ll have M-240 mounts and also a FRIES bar, which is a big bar and pole for fast rope descents [for tactical teams]. The idea is to have it as a modular package so we could reconfigure the cabin in an hour with armor and the M-240.”
Travis was one of the first nine flight mechanics to be trained as aerial gunners at the Coast Guard Aviation Training Center in Mobile, Alabama. “We started training in January ’06,” he tells me. “Actually on Martin Luther King weekend.”
Walking the DOG
Coast Guard stations, sectors, and districts, I’ve quickly come to notice, are very reflective of the areas they operate in. So it doesn’t surprise me that in a Navy town like San Diego, the Airborne Use of Force doctrine is being eagerly embraced. Coast Guard aviators in Kodiak, Alaska, on the other hand, a place famed for its larger-than-life search and rescue cases, are concerned about the extra workload after being chosen as the second station to be trained and armed for Airborne Use of Force. “I’m now doing more AUF training than SAR training,” Kodiak flight mechanic John Inman tells me.
I
n July 2007, most of the service’s paramilitary units, including the Tactical Law Enforcement Teams, Marine Safety and Security Teams, and Maritime Security Response Team were put together to form the Deployable Operations Group, or DOG. The DOG also includes the Environmental Strike Teams, Port Security Units, Naval Coastal Warfare Squadrons, the International Training Division that works with other nations’ coast guards, and several dozen scuba divers. The DOG staff is working to add additional assets like the Patrol Forces deployed in the Persian Gulf, the HITRON helicopter squadron, and the Redeployment Assistance Inspection Detachment (RAID) that helps the military load sea cargo for shipment to and from places such as Afghanistan via the Port of Karachi, Pakistan (Hint: Remove the U.S. flag and ARMY STRONG decals from your shipping containers).
Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen, who has been thinking about “adaptive force packages” and “deployable commands” since 2001, envisions the Coast Guard functioning as “a three-pronged force with shore-based operations, maritime operations, and deployable operations.”
Tom Atkin is the very tall, Hollywood-handsome one-star admiral put in charge of the DOG. “We will respond to all threats and all hazards all the time,” he says, quoting a Coast Guard slogan. “It could be a hurricane or a security threat. What we’re doing is laying out lots of scenarios, writing plans [with a staff of 147], reaching out to DHS and other partners so as events unfold, they roll with us.”
Of course, some partners are famous for their inability to roll with others. The FBI, after working with the Coasties on various counterterrorism and port security task forces, established their own Maritime SWAT Teams, then located them in all the same ports as the Coast Guard’s MSSTs.
More recently the DOG has, without irony, provided dog handlers and other assets to the Transportation Security Administration for airport sweeps and in turn got support from TSA and CBP (Customs and Border Protection) during a heightened security watch over Seattle’s commuter ferries, which carry
ten to twelve million passengers a year.
The multiagency operation, labeled Sound Shield, was launched after two young Middle Eastern–looking men were seen “acting suspiciously” on area ferries. Even though a ferry crewman took their pictures, which were then distributed to law enforcement and shown on local TV, the authorities were unable to locate them for questioning. Almost a year later, they contacted the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon. Portuguese software consultants who’d been attending a business conference in Seattle, they now feared they might be picked up as terrorists if they returned to the United States. They explained to the FBI that they had never been on big ferries that carried vehicles before, and that was why they were on the car deck taking pictures, to show their friends back home. “It was perfectly normal [behavior] once we knew what was going on,” an FBI agent concluded.
W
hile the Coast Guard works to expand its interagency collaborative efforts, it’s historically been able to confront most challenges on its own. Mark Ogle, the PACTACLET chief who’s moved on to the DOG staff, recalls deploying to St. Croix in the U.S. Virgin Islands after Hurricane Hugo devastated that island in 1989.
“We were just supposed to show the flag. We got three-quarters of a mile off the coast [on a 110-foot cutter] and two guys, two reporters, swam out to us from the beach with a waterproof capsule containing the names of seventy people barricaded in the center of town. They were under siege. So four of us went into the beach in an RIB [raft] with M-16s. We were given keys to cars and drove into town, where we found the local police and National Guard were looting. When the storm was approaching they’d opened up the jail and let out all the criminals, and now people had broken into the liquor shops and gun stores, and it was a real scene. We reached the people who were trapped.”
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