History > 2012 > USA > Drugs (I)

To Smuggle More Drugs,

Traffickers Go Under the Sea

September 9, 2012
The New York Times
By MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT
and THOM SHANKER

KEY WEST, Fla. — For more than 24 hours last September, a Coast Guard helicopter and speedboat pursued drug traffickers and their contraband across the Caribbean Sea. Finally they caught up with the improbable vessel, the latest innovation in the decades-old drug war. It was a submarine.

The low-slung, diesel-propelled vessel, painted a dark shade to blend with the water, was believed to be carrying several tons of cocaine. But after the submersible’s crew scuttled the vessel and abandoned ship, the Coast Guard was able to salvage only two 66-pound bales of narcotics.

This is the new challenge faced by the United States and Latin American countries as narcotics organizations bankroll machine shops operating under cover of South America’s triple-canopy jungles to build diesel-powered submarines that would be the envy of all but a few nations.

After years of detecting these craft in the less trafficked Pacific Ocean, officials have seen a spike in their use in the Caribbean over the last year. American authorities have discovered at least three models of a new and sophisticated drug-trafficking submarine capable of traveling completely underwater from South America to the coast of the United States.

The vessel involved in the September chase was an older model that was only semi-submersible. That model presents a silhouette above water barely larger than a kitchen table, but requires a snorkel to bring in air for the diesel engine, which has a range of about 3,000 miles. The three newer, fully submersible vessels already captured were capable of hauling 10 tons of cocaine and, by surfacing at night to charge their batteries off the onboard diesel engine, could sail beneath the surface all the way from Ecuador to Los Angeles.

With the use of these craft on the rise, American officials say they fear that the trafficking networks are moving away from so-called fast boats, the high-powered fishing and leisure boats that can carry about a ton of cocaine and are easier to spot, to semi-submersible and fully submersible vessels that can surreptitiously carry many more tons of drugs, which are unloaded in shallow waters or transported to shore by small boats.

More troubling for American officials is their belief that these vessels could be used by terrorists to transport attackers or weapons, though they emphasize that no use of submersibles by militants has been detected.

Drug networks historically were organized to combine the tasks of production, transportation and distribution, and they have seen little reason to cooperate with terrorists. But these new advanced submarines are built in some cases by independent contractors who may be more willing to sell the vessels to anybody offering the right price.

“These vessels are seaworthy enough that I have no doubt in my mind that if they had enough fuel, they could easily sail into a port in the United States,” said Cmdr. Mark J. Fedor of the Coast Guard, who commands the cutter Mohawk, the 200-foot vessel whose fast boat and helicopter interdicted the submersible in the Caribbean last September.

In addition to the Coast Guard ships and aircraft patrolling the seas, the American effort includes a sophisticated command center that combines intelligence from across the United States government and from nations in the region, which are increasingly cooperating to battle cocaine trafficking.

This growing American counternarcotics effort is part of a larger shift to new missions for the nation’s security and intelligence agencies after a decade spent focused on the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That mission to sort and analyze intelligence on drug trafficking and then coordinate the response occurs around the clock behind the walls of an interagency task force in Key West, which sent the intelligence report to Commander Fedor’s ship and coordinated its response.

The intelligence report, based on surveillance from a Coast Guard plane over the Caribbean and intelligence tidbits from nations in Latin America, said the submersible had left Colombia headed for Honduras.

Although the craft was 300 miles away, the Mohawk was the closest American vessel to it. So Commander Fedor immediately ordered his 100 crew members to direct the ship off Honduras to intercept the craft.

Cocaine-filled submarines and semi-submersible crafts “are the Super Bowl of counternarcotics,” Commander Fedor said. “When you hear one is moving, you say: ‘Wow. Game on.’ ”

After a day’s travel, the cutter got within a few miles of the craft and deployed the cutter’s fast boat and a helicopter.

Commander Fedor said that as they approached the submersible he was on the radio with the intelligence task force, getting up-to-the-second information on what the submersible was doing. He had similar conversations two weeks later as his ship was chasing another sophisticated submersible and had to fire on it to stop, a mission also set into motion by the intelligence fusion center in Key West.

Inside the command center, officially known as Joint Interagency Task Force-South, the Departments of Homeland Security, Justice, State and Defense are joined by intelligence agencies and liaison officers from more than a dozen nations to analyze threads of information on drug trafficking. The 600-person task force is in charge of cuing ships, aircraft and counternarcotics units on the ground for interdiction missions up and down the hemisphere.

The task force’s commander, Rear Adm. Charles D. Michel of the Coast Guard, said that drug interdictions for 2012 are already up more than 50 percent from a year ago. He attributed that to a counternarcotics coalition assembled at Key West that is trying innovative and aggressive measures to cut off drug traffickers leaving South America.

The current mission, called Operation Martillo, focuses on setting up interdiction “boxes” in two zones off the coast of South America where the drugs start their voyage, and two more just offshore of the favored transshipment points in Honduras and Guatemala, where the drugs are divided up into smaller shipments and harder to track.

Admiral Michel said that while the task force consists mostly of Americans, the end game is “getting to prosecution,” which requires working “by, with and through the local partners” in Central and South America.

In 2011, interdiction missions coordinated by the joint task force captured 129 tons of cocaine en route to the United States — more than five times the cocaine seized over the same period by operations in the United States, where agents and officers stopped about 24 tons of the drug.

Even so, three-quarters of potential drug shipments identified by the task force are not interdicted, simply because there are not enough ships and aircraft available for the missions. “My staff watches multi-ton loads go by,” Admiral Michel said.

Joint Interagency Task Force-South has been one of the United States government’s best-kept secrets, although it does exhibit a flair for dramatic symbolism — if you know what to look for.

Whenever the headquarters contributes intelligence to guide a mission that successfully interdicts a large cache of cocaine, a flag is raised in the yard. On the banner is a large image of a cocaine snowflake with a larger red “X” across the center.

    To Smuggle More Drugs, Traffickers Go Under the Sea, NYT, 9.9.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/world/americas/drug-smugglers-pose-underwater-challenge-in-caribbean.html

A New Front Line in the U.S. Drug War

May 31, 2012
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE, CHARLIE SAVAGE and THOM SHANKER

This article is by Damien Cave, Charlie Savage and Thom Shanker.

WASHINGTON — After several villagers were killed on a Honduran river last month during a raid on drug smugglers by Honduran and American agents, a local backlash raised concerns that the United States’ expanding counternarcotics efforts in Central America might be going too far. But United States officials in charge of that policy see it differently.

Throughout 2011, counternarcotics officials watched their radar screens almost helplessly as more than 100 small planes flew from South America to isolated landing strips in Honduras. But after establishing a new strategy emphasizing more cooperation across various United States departments and agencies, two smugglers’ flights were intercepted within a single week in May, a development that explains why American officials say they are determined to press forward with the approach.

“In the first four months of this year, I’d say we actually have gotten it together across the military, law enforcement and developmental communities,” said William R. Brownfield, the assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs. “My guess is narcotics traffickers are hitting the pause button. For the first time in a decade, air shipments are being intercepted immediately upon landing.”

With Washington’s attention swinging from Iraq and Afghanistan — and with budget dollars similarly flowing in new directions — the United States is expanding and unifying its antidrug efforts in Central America, where violence has skyrocketed as enforcement efforts in the Caribbean, Colombia and Mexico have pushed cocaine traffic to smaller countries with weaker security forces.

As part of those efforts, the United States is pressing governments across Central America to work together against their shared threat — sharing intelligence and even allowing security forces from one nation to operate on the sovereign soil of another — an approach that was on display in the disputed raid. But reviews from Central America include uncertainty and skepticism.

Government leaders in Honduras, who came to power in a controversial election a few months after a 2009 coup, have strongly supported assistance from the United States, but skeptics contend that enthusiasm is in part because the partnership bolsters their fragile hold on power.

More broadly, there is discontent in Latin America with United States efforts that some leaders and independent experts see as too focused on dramatic seizures of shipments bound for North America rather than local drug-related murders, corruption and chaos.

“Violence has grown a lot; crimes connected to trafficking keep increasing — that’s Central America’s big complaint,” President Otto Pérez Molina of Guatemala said in an interview. He added that the drug cartels were better organized than they were 20 years ago and that “if there are no innovations, if we don’t see something truly different than what we have been doing, then this war is on the road to defeat.”

Mr. Pérez Molina, a former general, has been criticized by American officials for proposing a form of drug legalization, but he argues that his goal is to create discussion of new ideas: like compensating Central American countries for the drugs they confiscate, or creating a regional court for organized crime.

In the area of Honduras called the Mosquito Coast, where the two recent operations occurred, residents have simpler demands. “If you’re going to come to the Mosquito Coast, come to invest,” said Terry Martinez, the director of development programs for the area. “Help us get our legitimate goods to market. That will help secure the area.”

American officials say they know that interdiction alone is not enough. The number of United States officials assigned to programs that are designed to strengthen Central America’s weak criminal justice systems has quadrupled, to about 80 over the past five years.

And the United States Agency for International Development has, since 2009, helped open more than 70 outreach centers for young people, offering job training and places to go after school, officials report.

“If your drug policy is an exclusively ‘hard side’ negative policy, it will not succeed,” said Mr. Brownfield, a former ambassador to Colombia. “There has to be a positive side: providing alternative economic livelihoods, clinics, roads — the sorts of things that actually give poor communities a stake in their future so they do not participate in narcotics trafficking.”

Despite the shift that officials described, federal budgets and performance measures outlined in government documents show that the priorities of the drug war have not significantly changed. Even as cocaine consumption in the United States has fallen, the government’s antidrug efforts abroad continue to be heavily weighted toward seizing cocaine.

Most financing for the Central American Regional Security Initiative has gone to security and interdiction work, according to a recent Congressional report.

“The problem is that the budget doesn’t match the rhetoric,” said John Carnevale, who served as the director of planning, budget and research for the Office of National Drug Control Policy from 1989 to 2000. “The budget that is currently being funded for drug control is still very much like the one we’ve had for 10 or 12 years, or really over the past couple of decades.”

American officials counter that interdiction efforts include programs to increase the professionalism of local police units. And increasingly, Central American governments are helping to train one another’s forces, using common equipment, and sharing counternarcotics intelligence. United States agencies are also combining their efforts in new ways. Officials say the May 11 raid near the town of Ahuas — and another one earlier in May in Honduras, during which there was also a firefight but no one is believed to have been killed — illustrated that joint effort.

The May 11 raid started with Colombian intelligence passing along a tip about the plane to a joint intelligence task force under the American military’s Southern Command, which has its headquarters in Miami.

A surveillance aircraft from the United States Customs and Border Protection agency then tracked the plane as it landed, leading to a raid that was carried out by four State Department helicopters. They flew out of one of three new forward operating bases built this year by the American military’s Joint Task Force-Bravo in Honduras.

Guatemalan pilots flew the aircraft — after overcoming some resistance from Honduran officials — because Honduras lacks qualified pilots. The helicopters carried a strike force of Honduran police officers who had been specially vetted and trained by United States Drug Enforcement Administration agents, several of whom are part of a special commando-style squad that was on board as advisers.

The helicopters struck around 2 a.m., after about 30 men had unloaded 17 bales of cocaine from the plane into a pickup truck, which had carried it to a boat in the nearby Patuca River. Men working on the boat scattered as the helicopters swooped down, and a ground force moved in.

What happened next remains under investigation in Honduras. Officials say a second boat approached and opened fire on the agents on the ground. They and a door gunner aboard the helicopter returned fire in a quick burst.

But rather than hitting drug traffickers, villagers contend, the government forces instead hit another boat that was returning from a long trip upriver — killing four unarmed people, including two pregnant women. While the D.E.A.’s rules of engagement allowed agents to fire back to protect themselves and their counterparts, both United States and Honduran officials insist that no Americans fired.

Broader questions remain. Even if the air route to Honduras is shut down, as long as the United States — and, increasingly, Africa and Europe — remains a lucrative market for cocaine, traffickers will continue to seek a way to move their product.

United States officials say they are already bolstering efforts in the Caribbean, anticipating another shift in direction for drugs.

Charlie Savage reported from Washington; Damien Cave from Ahuas, Honduras

and Mexico City; and Thom Shanker from Forward Operating Base Mocoron, Honduras,

and Washington. William Neuman contributed reporting from Cartagena, Colombia.

    A New Front Line in the U.S. Drug War, NYT, 31.5.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/01/world/americas/honduran-drug-raid-deaths-wont-alter-us-policy.html

Police Chief Killed in New Hampshire Drug Raid

April 12, 2012
The New York Times
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

GREENLAND, N.H. (AP) — A man opened fire on police during a drug bust Thursday night, killing a New Hampshire police chief just days from retirement and injuring four officers from other departments. Early Friday, the shooter remained holed up in the home with a woman, police said.

The shooting devastated Greenland, a town of 3,500 near the seacoast that had just seven police officers including Chief Michael Maloney, 48, who was due to retire in less than two weeks.

"In those final days, he sacrificed his life in public service as a law enforcement officer in New Hampshire," Attorney General Michael Delaney said early Friday.

Maloney had 26 years of experience in law enforcement, the last 12 as chief of the Greenland department. Two officers were shot in the chest and were in intensive care early Friday. Two others were treated and released, one with a gunshot wound to the arm and the other with a gunshot wound to the shoulder. The four injured officers were from other area departments and were working as part of a drug task force.

John Penacho, chairman of the town's Board of Selectman, said Maloney was married with children.

"It's a blow to all of us. You're stunned. It's New Hampshire, it's a small town," he said. "We're stunned. I mean all of us. It's an unbelievable situation."

Jacqueline DeFreze, who lives a half-mile down the road from the house where the shooting happened, said she was devastated by reports that the chief had been shot. She'd planned to attend a surprise party for his retirement.

"I'm a wreck. He was just the greatest guy," said DeFreze, a fourth-grade teacher in nearby Rye. "He's kind-hearted, always visible in the community."

Early Friday, streets around the home were blocked off and officers stood at roadblocks in the pouring rain.

State police and officers from many departments responded after the initial call around 6 p.m. Delaney said he couldn't provide much other information about the shooting.

"We do have an active armed standoff at a home and we're simply not going to provide any information right now that may jeopardize that situation," he said. "We are working with federal state and local law enforcement to try to obtain a peaceful resolution."

Gov. John Lynch was at Portsmouth Regional Hospital, where the officers were taken. He asked residents to pray for the injured officers and Maloney's family.

"My thoughts and prayers and those of my wife, Susan, are with the family of Chief Michael Maloney. Chief Maloney's unwavering courage and commitment to protecting others serves as an example to us all," he said.

The tree-lined street, closed off by police, features single-family homes and duplexes. The shootings took place at 517 Post Road, a 2-bedroom, 1½ -story structure that's listed as owned by the Beverly Mutrie Revocable Trust, according to tax assessor records.

The Portsmouth Herald reported in February 2011 that Cullen Mutrie, 29, was a resident of the home on 517 Post Road and had been arrested and charged with possession of anabolic steroids.

The newspaper reported that the steroids were found in the home when officers went to confiscate guns after Mutrie was arrested on domestic assault charges. According to a police affidavit, the steroids were found in Mutrie's living room on July 24, 2010, but were not verified by the state crime lab until Jan. 18.

The town's schools will be closed Friday, because law enforcement officers are using the elementary school as a staging area.

Asked what the town will do to help residents cope with the tragedy, Penacho said "We'll do whatever we need to do."

Now split by I-95, the town is one of the oldest settlements in the state.

___

Associated Press Writers Norma Love in Concord

and David Sharp in Portland, Maine, contributed to this report.

    Police Chief Killed in New Hampshire Drug Raid, 12.4.2012,
    http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/04/12/us/ap-us-officers-shot-nh.html

U.S. Agents Aided Mexican Drug Trafficker

to Infiltrate His Criminal Ring

January 9, 2012
The New York Times
By GINGER THOMPSON

WASHINGTON — American drug enforcement agents posing as money launderers secretly helped a powerful Mexican drug trafficker and his principal Colombian cocaine supplier move millions in drug proceeds around the world, as part of an effort to infiltrate and dismantle the criminal organizations wreaking havoc south of the border, according to newly obtained Mexican government documents.

The documents, part of an extradition order by the Mexican Foreign Ministry against the Colombian supplier, describe American counternarcotics agents, Mexican law enforcement officials and a Colombian informant working undercover together over several months in 2007. Together, they conducted numerous wire transfers of tens of thousands of dollars at a time, smuggled millions of dollars in bulk cash — and escorted at least one large shipment of cocaine from Ecuador to Dallas to Madrid.

The extradition order — obtained by the Mexican magazine emeequis and shared with The New York Times — includes testimony by a Drug Enforcement Administration special agent who oversaw a covert money laundering investigation against a Colombian trafficker named Harold Mauricio Poveda-Ortega, also known as “The Rabbit.” He is accused of having sent some 150 tons of cocaine to Mexico between 2000 and 2010. Much of that cocaine, the authorities said, was destined for the United States.

Last month, The Times reported that these kinds of operations had begun in Mexico as part of the drug agency’s expanding role in that country’s fight against organized crime. The newly obtained documents provide rare details of the extent of that cooperation and the ways that it blurs the lines between fighting and facilitating crime.

Morris Panner, a former assistant United States attorney who is an adviser at the Center for International Criminal Justice at Harvard, said there were inherent risks in international law enforcement operations. “The same rules required domestically do not apply when agencies are operating overseas,” he said, “so the agencies can be forced to make up the rules as they go along.” Speaking about the Drug Enforcement Agency’s money laundering activities, he said: “It’s a slippery slope. If it’s not careful, the United States could end up helping the bad guys more than hurting them.”

Shown copies of the documents, a Justice Department spokesman did not dispute their authenticity, but declined to make an official available to speak about them. But in a written statement, the D.E.A. strongly defended its activities, saying that they had allowed the authorities in Mexico to kill or capture dozens of high-ranking and midlevel traffickers.

“Transnational organized groups can be defeated only by transnational law enforcement cooperation,” the agency wrote. “Such cooperation requires that law enforcement agencies — often from multiple countries — coordinate their activities, while at the same time always acting within their respective laws and authorities.”

The documents make clear that it can take years for these investigations to yield results. They show that in 2007 the authorities infiltrated Mr. Poveda-Ortega’s operations. Mr. Poveda-Ortega was considered the principal cocaine supplier to the Mexican drug cartel leader Arturo Beltran Leyva. Two years later, Mexican security forces caught up with and killed Mr. Beltran Leyva in a gunfight about an hour outside of Mexico City.

As for Mr. Poveda-Ortega, in 2008 he escaped a raid on his mansion outside Mexico City in which the authorities detained 15 of his associates and seized hundreds of thousands of dollars, along with two pet lions. But the authorities finally captured him in Mexico City in November 2010.

According to the newly obtained documents, Mexico agreed to extradite Mr. Poveda-Ortega to the United States last May. But the American authorities refused to say whether the extradition had occurred.

“That’s how long these investigations take,” said an American official in Mexico who would speak only on the condition that he not be identified discussing secret law enforcement operations. “They are an enormously complicated undertaking when it involves money laundering, wires, everything.”

The documents, which read in some parts like a dry legal affidavit and in others like a script for a B-movie, underscore that complexity. They mix mind-numbing lists of dates and amounts of illegal wire transfers that were conducted during the course of the investigation.

One scene described in the documents depicts the informant making deals to launder money during meetings with traffickers at a Mexico City shopping mall. Another describes undercover D.E.A. agents in Texas posing as pilots, offering to transport cocaine around the world for $1,000 per kilo.

Those accounts come from the testimony by a D.E.A. special agent who described himself as a 12-year veteran and a resident of Texas. There is also testimony by a Colombian informant who posed as a money launderer and began collaborating with the D.E.A. after he was arrested on drug charges in 2003. The Times is withholding the agent’s and the informant’s names for security reasons.

In January 2007, the informant reached out to associates of Mr. Poveda-Ortega and began talking his way into a series of money-laundering jobs — each one bigger than the last — that helped him win the confidence of low-level traffickers and ultimately gain access to the kingpins.

A handful of undercover D.E.A. agents, according to the documents, posed as associates to the informant, including the two who offered their services as pilots and another who told the traffickers that he had several businesses that gave him access to bank accounts that the traffickers could use to deposit and disperse their drug money.

In June 2007, the traffickers bit, asking the informant to give them an account number for their deposits. And over a four-day period in July, they transferred tens of thousands of dollars at a time from money exchange houses in Mexico into an account the D.E.A. had established at a Bank of America branch in Dallas.

According to the testimony, the traffickers’ deposits totaled $1 million. And on the traffickers’ instructions, the informant withdrew the money and the D.E.A. arranged for it to be delivered to someone in Panama.

Testimony by the informant suggests that the traffickers were pleased with the service.

“At the beginning of August 2007, Harry asked my help receiving $3 million to $4 million in American money to be laundered,” the informant testified, referring to one of the Colombian traffickers involved in the investigation. “During subsequent recorded telephone calls I told Harry I couldn’t handle that much money.” Still, the informant and the D.E.A. tried to keep up. On one occasion, they enlisted a Mexican undercover law enforcement agent to pick up $499,250 from their trafficking targets in Mexico City. And a month later, that same agent picked up another load valued at more than $1 million.

The more the money flowed, the stronger the relationship became between the informants and the traffickers. In one candid conversation, the traffickers boasted about who was able to move the biggest loads of money, the way fishermen brag about their catches. One said he could easily move $4 million to $5 million a month. Then the others spoke about the tricks of the trade, including how they had used various methods, including prepaid debit cards and an Herbalife account, to move the money.

The next day, the informant was summoned to his first meeting in Mexico City with Mr. Poveda-Ortega and Mr. Beltran Leyva, who asked him to help them ship a 330-kilogram load to Spain from Ecuador. The documents say the shipment was transported over two weeks in October, with undercover Ecuadorean agents retrieving the cocaine from a tour bus in Quito and American agents testing its purity in Dallas before sending it on to Madrid.

The testimony describes the informant reassuring the traffickers in code, using words like “girlfriend” or “chick” to refer to the cocaine, and saying that she had arrived just fine. But in reality, the testimony indicates, the Spanish authorities, tipped off in advance by the D.E.A., seized the load shortly after its arrival, rather than risk losing it.

Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from Mexico City.

U.S. Agents Aided Mexican Drug Trafficker to Infiltrate His Criminal Ring, NYT, 9.1.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/09/world/americas/us-agents-aided-mexican-drug-trafficker-to-infiltrate-ring.html