More And More, a Real War

By Ed Magnuson

Like the lowly garbage barge that no nation would accept, the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy last week was sailing off Pensacola, Fla., 1,500 miles short of its original destination: the coast of Colombia, where it was assigned to detect drug-running planes and boats. News leaks that the Kennedy and an accompanying task force were heading for South America triggered an outcry from Latins already upset about the U.S. invasion of Panama. After George Bush telephoned Colombian President Virgilio Barco to apologize for the "misunderstanding," the Kennedy's picket duty was aborted.

The controversy over the Kennedy highlights Washington's enthusiasm for enlisting the military in the escalating war against drugs, as well as concerns that the Administration is using a sledgehammer to swat at mosquitoes. But U.S. officials insist that the Kennedy's mission was only to plot patterns of suspicious air and ship traffic off Colombia. That information would help position a network of mobile land radars, supplied by the U.S. but eventually operated by Colombians. Then the Kennedy task force would leave.

The Bush Administration still hopes to get the aircraft carrier under way before the President travels to Cartagena, Colombia, next month for a drug- policy meeting with Barco, whom Washington admires for his gutsy fight against the drug lords. The mistaken reports of a broad U.S. blockade of Colombia sparked a resignation threat from Barco's Foreign Minister. Said a Pentagon officer about Barco's embarrassment: "We almost shot a friendly."

The deployment of a carrier task force is just one of several proposals to expand the military's antidrug role that Defense Secretary Dick Cheney is expected to approve when the controversy subsides. Among the others:

-- Mobile ground radar stations would be sent to Bolivia and Peru as well as Colombia. Governments in all three countries insist that only local forces, not Americans, would operate this equipment. In the same Andean nations, Special Operations Forces would increase their training of local antidrug teams in jungle combat, night operations, map reading and intelligence. The three countries are expected to get a contingent of 200 troopers and Green Berets to augment the small groups already in place. Bush last summer approved a National Security directive permitting such American trainers to accompany foreign teams on drug raids.

-- Air Force AWACS (Airborne Warning and Control System) planes would patrol drug routes along the Gulf of Mexico. At the same time, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) near Colorado Springs, would use its ground and air radar stations -- designed for early warning against a Soviet missile attack -- to relay intelligence on any drug movements to law-enforcement agencies.

-- U.S. ground forces may be ordered to stage exercises on the U.S. side of the Mexican border to intimidate traffickers -- without, Washington hopes, antagonizing the Mexican government. Some of these units could expand the present military help being given to the U.S. Border Patrol, Customs agents and local police watching for smugglers. The Pentagon's $70 million budget for antidrug programs involving National Guard units in all the 50 states may be increased.

The Defense Department's new willingness to risk involvement in the battle against drugs is a reversal from its position that the armed forces are not equipped or trained for such duty. The military went along only reluctantly in 1988, when Congress, fed up with Pentagon foot-dragging, designated the Defense Department as the lead agency for "detection and monitoring" of drug smuggling. Now with the Soviet threat receding and Congress calling for defense cuts, the Pentagon welcomes any new mission. Says a Capitol Hill cynic: "The military sneered at drug interdiction -- until they saw the budget crunch coming."

Beyond the ineffective and brief Operation Blast Furnace, in which U.S. helicopter crews carried local raiding parties into Bolivian jungles to shut down a few coca laboratories in 1986, U.S. troops have done little antidrug work abroad. The Navy has permitted Coast Guard officers aboard its ships along likely drug routes to make arrests if they come across smugglers. Some 75 U.S. military and police advisers are in Colombia on antidrug training missions.

The military involvement in the drug crusade has been growing within the U.S. A joint military task force in Fort Bliss, Texas, has assigned 100 Army and Marine troops to support civilian agencies that patrol the border with Mexico. While the troops are not expected to engage smugglers, the danger was dramatized last month when four Marines working with Border Patrol officers near Nogales, Ariz., got into a nighttime firefight with drug traffickers on horseback. The smugglers fled, abandoning 573 lbs. of marijuana. No Marines were hurt.

National Guard units from California, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona have joined in border stakeouts, searching cargo at crossing points and ports, eradicating marijuana fields and providing helicopter lifts for law- enforcement agencies. At Nogales a score of Arizona Guardsmen have helped Customs triple inspections of tractor-trailer rigs heading north.

Though Cheney's initiatives will add much needed support and equipment to the badly overextended interdiction efforts, the Pentagon's initial misgivings about its drug involvement were well founded. Troops trained to locate and destroy hostile forces are less effective at the more delicate task of tracking and arresting smugglers, which more often depends on good police work. In 1984 the U.S. Navy set up sea checkpoints off Colombia in an antidrug maneuver dubbed Operation Hat Trick. The operation was cut short, according to a U.S. military officer, because the results did not seem to justify the costs. Nor does the military have much of an interdiction success record: in Viet Nam it was never able to close the primitive Ho Chi Minh Trail; quarantining 88,000 miles of U.S. shoreline is at least as daunting.

In a sense, the resourceful smugglers are emulating the Viet Cong by shifting to low-tech means of evading high-tech interception. Large cargo planes and big ships carried marijuana in the 1960s, and light planes were favored in the 1970s and early '80s. Today's traffickers prefer tramp steamers out of Haiti, rattletrap tomato trucks out of Mexico and the large shipping containers that move through all U.S. ports and border crossings. Last year, through the use of a new computerized profiling system, authorities made huge cocaine seizures from containers. Of the 8 million containers arriving in the U.S. by truck or ship in 1989, only 3% were checked by inspectors. If military forces were to search a large percentage of such shipping, commerce would be choked and the outcry would be thunderous.

Beyond the practical problems, U.S. military involvement in the antidrug battle looks like Teddy Roosevelt's Big Stick policy to many Latin Americans. And in Peru and Colombia, where antigovernment guerrillas work in tandem with the drug gangs, Americans escorting local narcotics teams could well become targets. The military involvement in a drug war thus risks slipping into a shooting war over South American politics, a development that few Americans, North or South, would welcome.

With reporting by Elaine Shannon and Bruce van Voorst/Washington