MILITARY SEEKS BALANCE IN DELICATE MISSION: THE DRUG WAR

As Involvement Expands, Law and History Are Basic Guides

By: Jim McGee
Washington Post Staff Writer

FORT BLISS, Tex. Through night-vision goggles, the drug smugglers
resembled a pack team in an old Western movie: three riders and nine
horses, winding single file down a rugged ravine in the Coronado National
Forest near Nogales, Ariz.

U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers, watching the remote mountain pass from
two camouflaged observation posts in the trees, waited until the procession
had sauntered past before issuing an alert over a secure radio channel.

At Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, a U.S. Forest Service officer
sitting in the base command center jotted down the Green Berets'
information and relayed it to a National Guard OH58 helicopter crew, which
took off and headed for the ravine. Using an infrared radar system and map
coordinates provided by the Army, the helicopter crew soon spotted the
horses and riders. Within minutes, a posse of sheriff's deputies and Forest
Service officials driving Ford Broncos had arrested the smugglers and
seized their booty: 2,404 pounds of cocaine.

The Coronado Forest episode, which occurred last year, may have had more
dramatic sweep than most drug busts. But the case was typical in
illuminating the extent to which the U.S. military has become embedded in
the nation's drug war, as the Pentagon increasingly is drawn into domestic
police missions long considered the province of civilian law enforcement
agencies.

With little public fanfare and scant congressional scrutiny, the
military's domestic role has become broad and deep. Since 1989, when
Congress and the Bush administration formally ordered the military into the
drug fight, the Pentagon has spent more than $7 billion on counterdrug
operations. Last year, more than 8,000 active duty and reserve soldiers,
sailors and Air Force personnel a force almost equivalent to an infantry
division participated in 754 counterdrug support missions on U.S. soil
that led to 1,894 arrests.

Special Forces teams monitor the Rio Grande, Marines patrol the California
desert and Army intelligence officers watch for criminal activity from
investigative centers in Miami, New York, Los Angeles, Houston and
Greenbelt, Md. The Army squad that spotted the smugglers in Arizona was
part of Joint Task Force Six (JTF6), the Defense Department headquarters
that links the nation's military forces with domestic law enforcement
agencies. In promoting a partnership between military and civilian forces,
JTF6 circulates to police departments a 55page "Operational Support
Planning Guide" marketing the use of Green Beret units, Navy SEAL teams and
Marine reconnaissance patrols.

Many supporters of the military's involvement in drug enforcement, citing
the threat to the nation's social and economic order, believe the
Pentagon's role should be even greater. "I think it should be getting
larger," said Rep. Bill Zeliff (RN.H.), chairman of the House Government
Reform and Oversight national security, international affairs and criminal
justice subcommittee. "We should use the military. It all boils down to: Do
we want to declare war on drugs or don't we?"

For some military commanders, counterdrug operations provide useful
training while making soldiers feel that they're involved in a vital
mission. Civilian law enforcement officials are generally grateful for the
technological acumen and professional competence the armed forces provide,
particularly with sophisticated surveillance and communications systems.

"Even if there was an argument that someone else ought to be doing it,"
said retired Gen. Barry R. McCaffrey, director of the Office of National
Drug Control Policy, "the fact that (the military) is there argues for it
being used."

But others are wary of entangling the armed services in an openended task
that isn't central to the primary mission of preparing to fight foreign
enemies.

"Right now the military is very well respected by the American people and
we certainly don't want to do anything that would lead people to question
that respect," said Air Force Col. Henry L. Hungerbeeler, secondincommand
of JTF6.

The billions spent mustering the military for antidrug duty has yielded
an uncertain dividend. The availability of cocaine, heroin and marijuana in
U.S. cities has not decreased, according to federal drug officials. And
critics contend the military has edged toward a legal threshold that has
been a singular feature of U.S. civilmilitary relations for more than a
century: a general ban on military involvement in routine domestic law
enforcement.

"The constitutional issue is the breakdown of the bright line that we have
traditionally maintained between the military and law enforcement," said
James X. Dempsey of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.
"There is a very strong claim that we are already pressing the outer bounds
of what is constitutionally desirable."

Even an ardent drug warrior like McCaffrey expresses wariness about
overstepping a legal tradition that has its roots in the Posse Comitatus
Act of 1878. The statute was a response to postCivil War abuses by
occupation troops in the South during Reconstruction. The law prohibits
Army involvement in domestic arrests or searches and seizures, a ban since
extended to the other services.

"The biggest limitation, it seems to me, is our constitutional and
political uneasiness with getting the armed forces involved in domestic law
enforcement," McCaffrey said in an interview. "Obviously we've got a law
against it Posse Comitatus Act. But also it makes us all very
uncomfortable to see uniformed military units getting heavily involved."

Military units are involved, however. Active duty forces are complemented
by thousands of National Guard troops, who have become the hidden support
strut inside federal law enforcement. Unless called to federal duty, the
National Guard is not covered by Posse Comitatus and has more latitude in
undertaking law enforcement missions. The Guard inspects cargo for U.S.
Customs, analyzes intelligence for the FBI and translates wiretap
intercepts for the Drug Enforcement Administration. The Guard now has more
personnel assigned to counterdrug activities than the DEA has special
agents on duty, according to Col. David Friestad, the Guard's counterdrug
coordinator.

Lawrence J. Korb, an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan
administration, argues that the openended nature of the military's
commitment is the greatest potential hazard. "It should (have been) a
temporary stopgap," Korb said, "but it's been institutionalized."

Moreover, there is new pressure to extend the military's domestic role to
counter terrorism. During the Olympics last summer, a Marine Corps
chemical, biological and nuclear warfare response team was deployed to
Atlanta. FBI Director Louis J. Freeh recently urged Congress to "to take
that infrastructure, which was specific to the Olympics, and expand it into
a much larger framework." Congress appropriated $350 million for the
Defense Department to begin training state and local authorities against
such threats.

Even early enthusiasts for a vigorous military role in the drug war, such
as Jon R. Thomas, former assistant secretary of state for international
narcotics matters, are uneasy about the drift.

"Where does it stop?" Thomas said. "Posse Comitatus was a real smart idea.
It was basically saying, look, we don't want the military with police
power."

POLITICAL EBB AND FLOW

For more than 20 years, enthusiasm for flinging the military into the drug
war has ebbed and flowed in Washington. In the late 1970s, the Carter
administration provided military assistance to source countries, such as
Mexico, to help eradicate marijuana fields, but left in place strict
prohibitions against more overt military involvement.

President Ronald Reagan, faced with a burgeoning cocaine trade, first
mustered the Pentagon for the drug war in 1981 by declaring international
drug trafficking a threat to national security and assigning his vice
president, George Bush, to head a drug task force that advocated extensive
use of military assets. The military's role grew slowly, however,
constrained by the Pentagon's discomfort with the new mission and modest
funding from Congress.

But in 1989 the concept gained new traction. President Bush ordered the
Pentagon to participate vigorously in the drug war and Congress more than
doubled the Defense Department's counterdrug appropriation, from $200
million in 1988 to $438 million in 1989. For fiscal 1997, Congress
appropriated $947 million, a 16 percent increase over the previous year.

Initially, the Pentagon favored a massive deployment of radar ships and
Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) planes to set up a virtual
blockade in the Gulf of Mexico. The operation led to some large seizures,
but proved expensive and had little impact on the availability of cocaine
in U.S. cities. The Colombian drug cartels boosted production and modified
their smuggling tactics.

Concluding that such massive interdiction was fruitless, President Clinton
ordered a shift of military counterdrug assets from transit lanes to
source countries. AWACS counterdrug flight hours in the Caribbean
plummeted from a peak of 5,265 in fiscal 1991 to 1,448 in fiscal 1996,
according to the U.S. Atlantic Command in Norfolk; the new strategy relied
more on "targeted interceptions" cued by military radar, such as the
RelocatableOvertheHorizon Radar (ROTHR) system originally designed to
detect attacking Soviet bombers.

This approach fostered a new network of interagency task forces, such as
the one occupying a new $13.5 million command center in Key West, Fla.,
which put military officers in seats next to federal agents. The modified
strategy has resulted in thousands of pilots, soldiers and military
commanders crosstraining in a civilian law enforcement specialty that is
increasingly viewed as a permanent part of the Pentagon's job. Of the
operations receiving Pentagon support in fiscal 1996, about half involved
military intelligence assets.

Such integration has occurred on a scale both small and large. In Utah,
125 soldiers work to translate telephone conversations garnered by DEA
eavesdropping, often on Colombian, Mexican or Nigerian suspects. Military
analysts from the Defense Intelligence Agency work beside their civilian
counterparts at DEA headquarters in Arlington. And at the investigative
center in Greenbelt, military intelligence officers assemble files on drug
gangs in Baltimore and analyze financial transactions by suspects in
Fairfax County.

The District of Columbia National Guard has four dozen fulltime soldiers
assigned to drug missions, such as intelligence analysis for the police
department and inspection duty at the Dulles Airport mail facility; another
30 Guard troops deploy portable highintensity lights intended to disrupt
street drug sales.

Some 50 Maryland Army and Air National Guard soldiers work full time on
counterdrug operations; they operate radios for the DEA, inspect cargo at
ports for Customs and fly four helicopters to help police look for
marijuana fields. More than two dozen members of the Virginia National
Guard help with similar missions, as well as tracking money laundering
operations from a Treasury Department financial crimes center.

"Once the military was told by the Congress and the president that this
was part of their mission," Dempsey said, "then they were institutionally
bound to make it permanent and pervasive."

A NIGHT OF SURVEILLANCE

Shortly before midnight on Sept. 6, Chief Warrant Officer Tommy Owens
spied a thin white line inching up the black scope of his radar screen
inside a classified U.S. Navy surveillance center near Norfolk.

Owens watched intently as the radar sweep scanned a 2 1/2 million
squaremile swatch of the Gulf of Mexico. The white line symbolizing a
small, unidentified airplane heading north from Colombia snaked across
Haiti and headed toward the Bahamas. At 2:50 a.m., Owens was sufficiently
suspicious of the mysterious aircraft which proved to be a Cessna
outfitted with extra fuel tanks to click on a special icon with his
computer mouse.

That simple gesture set in motion an intricate choreography of military
radar and military communications, military intelligence and military
aircraft. The Cessna's radar image was flashed over a secure military
network to two command centers, one in Key West, the other in Riverside,
Calif. As in dozens of similar missions over the past year, the operation
that unfolded demonstrated both the extent to which the military is an
integral player in counterdrug police actions and the routine,
elbowtoelbow interplay of civilian and military agencies.

Inside the Domestic Air Interdiction Coordination Center in Riverside,
Customs officer Larry Butts turned to an array of 28 screens that blends
the images of 60 military, intelligence and law enforcement radar systems
into a panorama of all air traffic bound for the United States. Within
minutes, a Navy radar plane on patrol in the Caribbean was homing in on the
Cessna.

Since the suspicious plane was outside normal commercial routes and had
not filed a flight plan, Butts decided to launch an interceptor. At
Guantanamo Naval Air Base in Cuba, a flight crew hustled out to a waiting
U.S. Customs P3 Orion aircraft. Within minutes the P3 was shadowing the
Cessna and transmitting another radar image to the Key West command center.

There, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Donovan Williams followed the Cessna's flight on an
8by 6foot color television screen. When the aircraft began to circle over
Bahamian waters as if to make a drop Williams alerted a DEA base in
the Bahamas, which launched a helicopter carrying DEA agents and Bahamian
police. But as the helicopter closed in, the Cessna abruptly turned north
again.

During the next 12 hours, the plane was tracked by a succession of Customs
radar surveillance aircraft, which continued to beam the radar image back
to Williams in Key West. When the Cessna veered past Maine toward New
Brunswick, further alerts were flashed to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police
in Ottawa.

Four F/A18 fighters soon lifted off from Bagotville Air Force Base in
Quebec. Without alerting the Cessna, the Canadian jets shadowed it to a
remote area 200 miles north of Ottawa where, officials allege, the airplane
began to drop large bundles into a lake.

In Montreal, heavily armed Mounties clambered into two military
helicopters and headed toward the lake. In the days that followed, the
Canadians would arrest nine suspects and seize 1,100 pounds of cocaine.

ON THE FRONT LINES

Fort Bliss, Tex., sits on a rocky, windswept plain near El Paso and is
home to JTF6, the military's counterdrug headquarters. After seven years
of operation, JTF6 is deeply embedded in the drug enforcement
infrastructure. The agency has a $24 million annual budget, more than 120
lawyers and action officers who monitor military deployments, and an Army
Special Forces company for quickreaction operations.

Last spring, that Green Beret unit conducted 37 domestic missions at a
total cost of $692,000, the highlights of which were the seizures of 360
pounds of marijuana in Arizona and a methamphetamine lab in California,
according to afteraction reports. Whether or not the relatively minor haul
of contraband was worth the investment of money and manpower, the work
remains dangerous. Hunters on two occasions have accidentally shot and
wounded soldiers involved in JTF6 missions.

JTF6 commanders say they enforce rules the Pentagon hopes will keep its
active duty forces out of harm's way, both physical and legal. Military
intelligence officers can help local police assemble a drug case, for
example, but cannot keep Defense Department files on U.S. citizens. Marines
concealed in camouflaged observation posts can spot drug traffickers for
the Border Patrol, but cannot make arrests.

Other military units around the country have grappled with legal nuances.
There has never been a prosecution for a violation of the Posse Comitatus
statute, although the military has been on the periphery of several highly
controversial domestic confrontations. Military advisers were present at
the FBI's 1973 standoff with members of the American Indian Movement at
Wounded Knee, S.D. More recently, Army Special Forces soldiers were on the
scene during the FBI's bloody raid in Ruby Ridge, Idaho. And National Guard
troops flew reconnaissance missions during the initial raid on the Branch
Davidian compound in Texas, then helped load tear gas launchers during the
final assault.

Whether combing through a drug dealer's bank records or watching for
terrorists in Atlanta, soldiers on domestic duty find themselves caught
between the deep American suspicion of the military "man on horseback" and
a yearning for domestic tranquillity.

"Americans have a tradition, born in England and developed in the early
years of our nation, that rebels against military involvement in civilian
affairs," Charles Doyle, a Congressional Research Service analyst, wrote
last year. "Striking the balance . . . has never been easy."

[end]

[SIDEBAR]

JOINING FORCES

An incident in the Coronado National Forest illustrates how U.S. armed
forces are being employed to aid in the capture of drug smugglers within
U.S. borders.

1 Shortly after midnight, Green Berets spot nine horses and three riders
carrying more than a ton of cocaine. Using a secure radio channel, they
alert the command center at Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson.

2 At the base, Greg Lelo, supervisory law enforcement officer with the
U.S. Forest Service, takes down the information, then joins a National
Guard flight crew waiting on the tarmac with an OH58 helicopter.

3 National Guard flight crew, using nightvision goggles, flies to the
coordinates. Lelo then uses infrared radar to locate the horses and riders.

4 From the air, Lelo radios directions to Forest Service police and
sheriff's deputies on the ground, who drive to the scene, surround the
smugglers, and seize the cocaine.