Busting the Fish Laundry
Besides dealing with oil and gas, the Coast Guard’s other big environmental responsibility is protecting living marine resources. A 2003 study in the science journal Nature reported that 90 percent of large open-ocean fish, including big tuna, sharks, and billfish, have been wiped out by industrial overfishing since 1950. A 2006 study predicted that if present trends continue, edible species of marine wildlife will be commercially extinct by 2048, a projection confirmed by a 2008 UN report.
In 1976, the Magnuson Fisheries and Conservation Act (now called the Magnuson-Stevens Act) established a two-hundred-mile exclusive fishing zone around the United States and its territories banning foreign fishing vessels. Seven years later, in March 1983, President Ronald Reagan, in one of the most significant but least noted acts of his administration, expanded on this precedent, declaring a two-hundred-mile Exclusive Economic Zone for all marine resources, in effect creating a new wilderness frontier for the United States.
Along with patrolling the EEZ’s North Pacific boundary line to keep out Russian factory trawlers, Coast Guard representatives sit on eight regional fisheries councils that establish fishing quotas and regulations on federal waters from three to two hundred miles offshore and also help state fish and game agencies enforce the law within their three-mile state waters.
In Rio Vista, California, deep in the serpentine wetlands and sloughs of the Sacramento delta, I spend a day on a 25-foot RBS (Response Boat Small) with a Coast Guard party and a Fish and Game agent doing joint fisheries and boat safety inspections at the height of the striped bass and sturgeon season. The sturgeon we measure look like scaly relics from the age of the dinosaurs (which they are). We also tow a couple of fishermen whose motor has conked out on them.
More often the Coast Guard does boardings of commercial fishing vessels at sea to make sure rules are followed on how much and what kind of fish or shellfish is taken, how many days at sea are allowed, and what type of gear is used. It also protects the fishermen by making sure they have the right lifesaving equipment onboard.
With many species of commercial fish collapsing, even as prices continue to rise on the global seafood market, tensions on America’s fishing grounds can run high. I remember going to a New England Fisheries Council meeting where closures to protect endangered cod in the Gulf of Maine were being discussed, much to the annoyance of the fishermen in attendance.
“If you’re going to send armed terrorists aboard my boat, they’re going to get an answer, ’cause I’m looking at death through defiance before I go out and put up with this foolishness any longer!” fisherman Dave Marciano warned from the public mike, staring hard at the Coast Guard representative to the council.
“Funny thing is two years ago they saved his ass when his boat broke down,” another fishermen later tells me.
“With fishermen it’s a love-hate thing,” Chief Louis Bevilacqua, the company commander in Cape May, suggests, recalling the time he was on the cutter Rush on a fisheries patrol off Alaska during crabbing season. “We rescued this one crew whose boat was sinking, brought them back to Dutch Harbor, and then found out they were illegal immigrants and busted them.”
Zeke Grader, executive director of the Pacific Coast Federation of Fishermen’s Associations, the largest commercial fishing group on the West Coast, thinks the relationship is good but threatened. “There’s a great deal of respect [for the Coast Guard], especially with search and rescue in coastal communities like Fort Bragg and Eureka [California],” he says, “but when you have leaders in Washington, DC, giving orders for them to focus on drug interdiction or this War on Terror, you just have to be sure they don’t neglect their traditional roles. If you do it right, if you have a relationship with fishermen, it will help you get your job done, but then you get this strange stuff out of Washington with all the homeland security where it almost becomes fascistic.”
The two times you can be sure U.S. fishermen have no complaint with the Coast Guard is when they’re doing search and rescue or when they’re going after high-seas drift-net pirates.
P
robably the most destructive method of fishing ever devised by humans is pelagic (open ocean) drift-net fishing. In the 1980s, a thousand-ship fleet from Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea decimated marine life in the North Pacific with near-invisible plastic monofilament drift nets called “walls of death” that stretched over thirty miles in length and hung thirty-five feet down into the water. While fishing for squid they managed to kill everything else in the water column, including tens of millions of seabirds, seals, sunfish, swordfish, sharks, sea turtles, dolphins, and small whales.
Investigators from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration soon discovered that about 10 percent of the fleet was also targeting high-seas salmon despite a treaty between the United States, Canada, Russia, and Japan that these fish were only to be taken when they returned to their home rivers.
In the winter of 1989, the Coast Guard spotted a Taiwanese fishing vessel drifting in the shipping lanes four hundred miles off the coast of Washington. They towed the fire-scorched derelict into Port Angeles, where it sat dockside for several days with toxic fumes spewing from its interior. Eventually they were able to send a boarding team below deck. What they found there would make a hagfish gag: In the freezer was the eight-month-old rotting corpse of a crewman, his neck broken, his body roped to a mattress. Slimy fish remains filled the rest of the hull. Genetic sampling of the scales and tails showed the fish were U.S. salmon taken at sea. They never were able to determine exactly what happened aboard that drift-net boat or how the man came to die.
That April, the cutter Jarvis was patrolling in Arctic fog four hundred miles north of the drift-net squid-fishing boundary when they got a radio call not to “run over our net!”
“Whose net?” they radioed back after identifying themselves. At that point the Taiwanese fishing boat Cy Yang cut loose five miles of drift net and fled. When the Taiwanese government finally gave the Coast Guard permission to board the vessel three days later, they’d thrown their catch overboard, though scale samples again showed they’d been taking salmon. Soon the Coast Guard was shooting helicopter video of pirates throwing thirty- and forty-pound salmon overboard while being chased across the ocean.
By then NOAA undercover agents were receiving offers of hundreds of tons of hot salmon in what came to be known as the “fish laundry.” Agents negotiated directly with a Taiwanese smuggler for an at-sea delivery of a thousand tons from one of the pirate fleets for $1.3 million. The NOAA agents and the Coast Guard then set up the first high-seas federal sting in history.
In the summer of 1989, a transport ship, the Red Fin, sailed out of Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians with undercover agents on board. After two weeks at sea, they rendezvoused with the pirate drift-net fleet. As two of the Taiwanese captains were coming aboard, the High Endurance Cutter Morgenthau that had been lying in wait just over the horizon came surging into view, its Klaxon sounding. Then two big C-130s from Kodiak came thundering out of the clouds, adding to the cacophony, dropping smoke bombs around the startled pirates.
The Taiwanese made a run for it. As the Morgenthau and Red Fin gave chase, the crew of one of the boats threw netting over the side to try to foul their propellers. When that failed they rammed the Red Fin amidships. “It was like a Wild West chase on the high seas,” one of the Red Fin’s crew later recalled. While the Red Fin was forced to give up the chase after two and a half days, the Morgenthau continued to pursue the pirate ship Sung Ching for ten days before finally receiving Taiwanese government permission to board it forty miles off the coast of Taiwan. On board they found 110 metric tons of illegal salmon.
Activists from Earthtrust, Greenpeace, and other environmental groups had spent years complaining about the destruction of the Pacific ecosystem being wrought by drift nets and showing disturbing underwater video of dead sharks, seals, birds, and other creatures entangled in the nets. However, it was the
busting of the multimillion-dollar “fish laundry” that lent the force (and monetary motivation) needed by the United States, New Zealand, and others to successfully push for a UN-sanctioned global ban on high-seas drift nets that finally went into effect in 1993.
That global ban also set a precedent that suggests other destructive methods of fishing such as bottom trawling and longlining might yet be banned while there are still wild fish left in the sea. It was certainly a huge victory for ocean stewardship, one that even many Coast Guard fisheries enforcement officers don’t know about.
In the years since 1993, the service has continued to chase down drift-net pirates. Recently there’s been a small resurgence of this now illegal activity in the western Pacific by mainland Chinese fishermen. The Coast Guard has helped counter this by working in close alliance with the Chinese Fisheries Law Enforcement Command (FLEC) and also has had FLEC observers ride on some of its cutters out of Kodiak.
T
he cutter Morgenthau, which took down the Sung Ching drift-net pirates, was first commissioned in 1969 and saw duty off Vietnam, not unlike some of the fathers of Coast Guard personnel serving aboard her today.
By the late 1990s, many of the Coast Guard’s older cutters and aircraft were beginning to break down. It was ranked fortieth oldest of the world’s forty-two naval fleets, only slightly more up-to-date than the Mexican and Filipino navies. Some cutters and tenders had been under way since World War II.
The leadership of the Coast Guard under Adm. Jim Loy realized that, with the exception of its newest class of buoy tenders, all of its deepwater assets (those that operated more than fifty miles offshore) were going to reach obsolescence around the same time. They thought they might take a common approach to replacing them and hopefully create a streamlined, cost-effective method to provide themselves needed new platforms for the early part of the twenty-first century. More than a decade and several billion dollars later, this has not proved to be the case.
CHAPTER 11
Deepwater
“I may have some protective feeling for Lockheed Martin, but as a board member
I’m pretty proud of what we’ve done.”
—FORMER COAST GUARD COMMANDANT ADMIRAL JAMES LOY
“I did not want a [Coast Guard] crew to come in harm’s way somewhere down the
road when I could have done something about it.”
—FORMER LOCKHEED PROJECT ENGINEER MICHAEL DEKORT
TESTIFYING BEFORE CONGRESS
It started on YouTube. At least that’s where public awareness that there might be major problems with the Coast Guard’s twenty-year, $24 billion Deepwater program first surfaced.
In a ten-minute video, a long-faced, uncomfortable-seeming man with a ginger and gray beard sat in front of a file drawer in his bedroom reading a statement about how the newly extended 123-foot Island class cutter that Lockheed Martin had worked on had faulty security cables, blind spots on its video surveil-lance, and external infrared cameras that were vulnerable to bad weather.
“Why YouTube?”
“I tried taking it to the Washington Post and the Associated Press, but their ‘experts’ told them I was a nutcase. So I’d heard of YouTube, knew it existed, and I took a shot,” says forty-two-year-old Michael DeKort. At six-seven and rail thin, he has an intense topic-focused manner that reminds me of other corporate whistle-blowers I’ve interviewed.
The YouTube video got a lot of attention at Lockheed and the Coast Guard’s Deepwater office. Then the Navy Times ran a story, followed by the Washington Post; then the 123-foot boats started buckling at sea. Now here we are talking in a hallway outside one of a series of Deepwater congressional hearings taking place in the spring of 2007.
Deepwater’s problems have become the focus of a major exposé in the New York Times, NBC’s “Fleecing of America” has done a segment, 60 Minutes filmed this hearing for a scathing report they broadcasted, and with the Democrats back in control of the House and Senate, outsourcing of government jobs and private contractor waste, fraud, and abuse have become the focus of congressional oversight hearings for the first time in six years. These range from the $13 billion in cash shipped to Iraq at the beginning of the war that was never accounted for to the Coast Guard’s Deepwater program that was managed and run by Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, the same defense contractors who made their money from the aircraft, boats, ships, and electronics they planned, designed, built, and delivered. Deepwater was also a program that deeply divided the Coast Guard against itself, with dissenting voices being ignored in favor of the contractors.
“I saw a meltdown in the organization when all this happened, and I thought, ‘We’re not taking the eye off the ball [again],’ ” Coast Guard Commandant Thad Allen later tells me.
How, I wonder, did the 2005 Heroes of Katrina end up having to dig out from a multibillion-dollar acquisitions fiasco two years later, getting pilloried both in the press and by Congress?
I
’ve just arrived at the hearing after running across Capitol Hill from a Coast Guard budget hearing in the Senate Russell Building overseen by Senator Maria Cantwell of Washington state, chair of the Commerce Subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries, and Coast Guard.
She and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Ted Stevens of Alaska, Bill Nelson of Florida, and Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey questioned Admiral Allen about the 2008 budget that flatlined for the final year of the Bush administration at $8.4 billion.
“We have to have a budget that is adequate with even more demand in the future,” Cantwell says.
“I take no objection to your statement, ma’am,” Allen replies. He will come back with a $9.3 billion proposal for ’09 that addresses many of the committee’s concerns about the need for more ship inspectors and safety officers. Most of their questioning, however, focuses on Deepwater.
Senator Snowe, a longtime champion of the Coast Guard, tells the commandant, “It’s difficult to review the budget without recalling the flaws with the Deepwater program . . . So let’s make sure the mismanagement of the past is not repeated in the future. The Coast Guard must get back on track, and this announcement [that the Coast Guard will now take direct charge of the program] is an appropriate and long overdue step . . . The spokeswoman for ICGS [Integrated Coast Guard Systems, the management team run by the contractors] said there was not a significant change in this announcement. Is it a major change or not?”
“There is a fundamental change that I discussed with the two CEOs [of Lockheed and Northrop],” Admiral Allen tells her.
“I hope so!”
“That’s what I intend, Senator,” he says with a nervous barking laugh that suggests how hard it can be when one alpha personality has to defer to another.
“We also want to know what happens with the cutter that’s now been jettisoned.” She was referring to eight 123-foot boats that were decommissioned after it was found they were at risk of breaking up and sinking in seas over six feet.
“There’s no doubt in our mind that the 123 means we have to have recourse to contractual or legal action,” he tells her.
“I think this is a travesty.”
“I think there was a misestimation,” he says and goes into the technical aspects of the Slinky-like hull stresses and deck buckling you get when you stretch a narrow-beamed greyhound of a 110-foot cutter to 123 feet.
“Did you find it shocking?” Snowe wants to know.
“Absolutely,” he agrees, “and we are proceeding with our investigation of this.”
“I can’t see the contractor not taking responsibility. It’s unfathomable,” she continues, like a leopard seal with a dead penguin, unwilling to let it go.
• • •
T
he Deepwater hearing on the House side is being held in Room 2167 of the labyrinth-like Rayburn Office Building by the Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, overseen by Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland. It has
been going on since 2:00 P.M. and will continue past midnight with some twenty-five members of Congress coming and going.
They want to find out why the 123 failed, why communications cables were not properly sheathed to prevent eavesdropping or properly fireproofed, why the composite hull design for a Fast Response Cutter was too slow and heavy, why the first big National Security Cutters are not being built to meet their projected thirty-year life span yet nearly doubled in price, and why much of this information has been withheld from Congress.
Cummings is questioning DeKort, the whistle-blower, about his early concerns with the 123 program.
“How high did you take your concerns?” “I took the matter to the CEO and board [of Lockheed] on at least two occasions. I was told my allegations were baseless.”
“Did you ever contact the Coast Guard directly?”
“I contacted the group commander of boats in Key West, also a lieutenant commander on the commandant’s staff [Commandant Thomas Collins, 2002–6]. I was told ‘thank you,’ that was the response I got . . . I was lead system engineer for the 123s’ C4ISR [command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance]. When I came on board everything was pretty much locked in . . . I was told, ‘We have a design of record.’ ”
“What were your major concerns?”
“Putting equipment on a Coast Guard vessel that won’t survive the elements, that can be eavesdropped on, that can burn, that creates blind spots. Had these [first eight] boats not cracked, all forty-nine boats [contracted for] would have been delivered [in that condition].”
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