Paul Iverson/Caller-Times Customs P-3 aircraft prepares to take off on a mission at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi. More Photos »

Blanket radar makes trafficking drugs by air hard in S. Texas

Officials: Most smugglers land in Mexico and bring drugs to the U.S. by land

By Jeremy Schwartz

The biggest seizure in maritime history began with a U.S. Customs flight out of Naval Air Station Corpus Christi.

The crew of the P-3 Orion radar plane was dispatched to the eastern Pacific Ocean in April to look for a mid-size fishing vessel that intelligence sources said might be carrying drugs. After scouring the ocean and encountering numerous vessels that didn't match the description they had been given, they finally spotted a 152-foot fishing vessel with no visible fishing equipment and far afield of usual fishing lanes.

They maneuvered the plane over the vessel, the Svesda Maru, to get a look with their binoculars.

"All we knew was that it was a suspect vessel," said Randy Harper, flight engineer on the P-3. "We didn't know if it had nothing on it or if it was the motherlode, which it was."

13 tons of coke

After the crew called in the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard, officials found 13 tons of cocaine buried beneath ice and fish. The seizure made headlines across the country, but the Corpus Christi Customs crew's role went unnoticed in the press.

"We're sort of like offensive linemen," said Jim Litz, pilot of the Svesda Maru mission. "Our names don't get mentioned in the paper, but we do a lot of the grunt work."

Largely hidden from public view, the U.S. Customs Service operates the Surveillance Support Center at NAS Corpus Christi, a $30 million-a-year operation with 137 employees and $500 million in assets, including six radar planes. Its planes play a large role in the effort to eradicate drug production in Colombia. And the center is growing. Along with the addition of a new hangar, four new radar planes are coming to Corpus Christi in March.

A second surveillance center in Jacksonville, Fla., has four planes.

Wild West of the air

The Corpus Christi station does just a tiny percentage of its work along the Mexican border in South Texas. The skies above the border, officials said, are protected by a shield of deterrence in the form of blanket radar coverage.

Unlike the "willy nilly" 1970s and 1980s, when the air above the border was a Wild West version of drug-running airplanes, agents say increased radar coverage keeps smugglers from trying the air route. While there are sporadic reports of planes dropping loads into rural ranches, Customs officials say most air smugglers land in Mexico and bring it over by land.

"Back in the '70s they could fly through unimpeded," said Douglas Garner, commander of the Corpus Christi station. "There was nothing to stop them or even detect them."

Colombian focus

But a radar saturation of the border, in which each plane crossing is picked up on radar at a Customs center in Riverside, Calif., has made smugglers think twice, officials say. Air smuggling has largely been abandoned in favor of land and water routes.

Customs will use its resources in the Gulf of Mexico, but only when needed for special missions. Instead, as much as 90 percent of the station's resources are dedicated to missions in South America, and especially Colombia, where it provides radar detection to the Colombian military of flights originating there, Garner said.

Under the nation's current drug interdiction policy, as represented by the military operation Plan Colombia, forces are mobilized at the source of drug production. Garner said that fits into the Corpus Christi station's goal of using intelligence to go on the offensive instead of responding to smugglers.

Since the accidental shooting down of a plane filled with missionaries over Peru in April, in which a Peruvian military plane gunned down the plane after CIA officials mistakenly identified it as being involved in drug smuggling, drug interdiction flights over Peru and Colombia have been suspended.

And since Sept. 11, the station's P-3 radar planes have been drafted by the Pentagon for radar and tracking missions over the United States and are performing 25 percent of the country's domestic radar surveillance, said Garner.

Garner said at least one of the center's planes is on alert or airborne at all times, but would not say how the center's new duties would affect its drug interdiction mission.

The long chase

The station also does periodic missions to the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean, where its radar planes troll for suspicious planes and vessels like the Svesda Maru.

Once airborne, the Customs Service's P-3 radar plane becomes the eyes and ears of the drug war. Its radar is capable of 200,000 square miles of coverage, and it works by picking up the electronic squawk, a FAA-assigned code, of passing planes. If a plane doesn't send out such a squawk - as most drug smuggling planes don't - the crew in the P-3 radios ground control to find out if the plane has filed a flight plan. If not, the P-3 locks on and begins its pursuit, some of which have lasted 19 hours.

Agents also look at other variables such as how low the plane is flying, if it's leaving or entering a known drug area or flying without its lights at night.

If possible, the crew calls in a slick, or a P-3 without the radar dome, which flies behind the plane and gets the tail number. Pilots, the officials say, can't see the plane flying directly behind it.

That is then relayed to a central database at Customs' Air and Marine Interdiction Coordination Center in Riverside, Calif., to find out if the plane had been suspected of drug smuggling.

Waiting on the ground

Ground authorities, police or military, are informed and hopefully waiting when the suspect plane finally lands. The P-3 also can coordinate Black Hawk helicopters and speedboats to assist the bust, especially if the drugs are dropped to a go-fast boat.

Agents say they can identify up to 100 targets on a 10-hour trip, but that only one out of every four or five trips results in a chase.

"It's a constant game of cat and mouse," said officer and pilot Gary "Suds" Sudhoff. "They try to guess where we are going, and we try to guess where they're going.

"It's up to us to anticipate what they'll do."

Contact Jeremy Schwartz at 886-3618 or schwartzj@caller.com

November 20, 2001