DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION

U.S. COAST GUARD

STATEMENT OF

VICE ADMIRAL JOHN E. SHKOR

COMMANDER, COAST GUARD ATLANTIC AREA

ON

THE DRUG SMUGGLING PROBLEM IN THE CARIBBEAN

BEFORE THE

SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIMINAL JUSTICE OVERSIGHT

COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY

UNITED STATES SENATE

MAY 09, 2000

Good morning, Mister Chairman and distinguished members of the Subcommittee. I am Vice Admiral John Shkor, Commander of the Coast Guard Atlantic Area. Thank you for the opportunity to appear before you today to discuss the Coast Guard’s efforts with regard to the Drug Smuggling Problem in the Caribbean.

The Coast Guard is the lead agency for maritime drug interdiction and shares lead agency responsibility for air interdiction with the Customs Service. As the only Armed Service with law enforcement authority, and the only Federal agency with broad enforcement authority on the high seas, the Coast Guard is on the front line daily in the maritime drug interdiction fight. Our opponent is well-financed, agile, and ruthless in pursuing his single-minded purpose. Illegal drugs thus remain a scourge on our society, and continue to pose a significant enforcement challenge. According to the Interagency Assessment of Cocaine Movement, in calendar year 1999, 512 metric tons of cocaine flowed from source countries – primarily Colombia – en route to the United States market.

The National Drug Control Strategy calls for a balanced array of demand and supply reduction programs. The Coast Guard provides crucial law enforcement essential to reducing supply. However, supply reduction requires both source and transit zone operations. Emphasis on Source Zone operations is, of course, vital to achieving our national goals. The operative metaphor, as I understand it, is that, "We must shoot the archer, rather than the arrows."

The Coast Guard’s role with respect to maritime and air operations is against smugglers operating in the Transit Zone. From that perspective I want to review my goals, which come from the National Drug Control Strategy. Goal Four requires us to shield America’s frontiers from the scourge of drugs, and sets out clear performance measures. Those measures call for us to reduce the rate of illicit drug flow through Transit and Arrival Zones by 10 percentage points by 2002 and 20 percentage points by 2007 as measured against the 1996 base year.

Our transit zone interdiction operations are, of course, a necessity. They provide a balance to source zone operations that recognizes we must sustain the interdiction shield in the transit zone until that archer in the source zone can be permanently stopped.

In the Transit Zone, we must maintain a credible presence in high-threat areas, assign assets to respond to all actionable information, and conduct combined operations with our foreign law enforcement counterparts. These activities involve both surface and air assets. In addition, we must maintain an agile and flexible end-game capability that is credible and able to respond to intelligence cueing. We have taken steps to improve our end-game capability with initiatives such as Deployable Pursuit Boats, Maritime Interdiction Support Vessels, and Operation NEW FRONTIER, which includes Airborne Use of Force and Over-the-Horizon cutter boats.

In calendar year 1999, more than 40 percent of the cocaine detected leaving South America destined for the United States was shipped through the Caribbean Transit Zone. About 90 percent of the cocaine flow moves by maritime means, and in the Caribbean, over 80 percent of the time the traffickers’ choice of conveyance is by "go-fasts" – typically 30- to 50-foot, multi-engine boats which carry 500 to 1,500 kilograms of cocaine in each trip. This method of conveyance is agile and responsive to smugglers’ changing needs, and poses a significant challenge for our slower and less maneuverable vessels. Clearly then, the Caribbean Transit Zone requires significant attention and a focused application of concerted effort.

In the Caribbean Transit Zone, the highest threat region is Puerto Rico, followed by Haiti, then Jamaica, and the Western Caribbean. While we are maintaining some Coast Guard presence in the waters around Haiti, we see that around 40 percent of the cocaine transshipment activity into Haiti is via non-commercial air and is currently beyond Coast Guard Atlantic Area’s ability to influence. The Drug Enforcement Administration and Joint Interagency Task Force East are studying this issue under the direction of the U.S. Interdiction Coordinator.

Based on the threat, nearly all of my available counterdrug effort is focused on the Caribbean Transit Zone. In fiscal year 1999, nearly 90,000 cutter operating hours, and over 16,000 aircraft flight hours were applied against the Caribbean threat, amounting to nearly one-third of the hours available from these assets for all missions within Coast Guard Atlantic Area.

We continue to seek innovative solutions in expanding our efforts in the transit zone. Operation New Frontier – the Use of Force from Aircraft combined with Over-the-Horizon cutter boats using night vision goggles, has been a tremendous success, stopping all six of the go-fasts engaged. The Maritime Interdiction Support Vessel has sailed to the Caribbean with Deployable Pursuit Boats that can match and exceed the speed of the smugglers’ go-fasts. And we have been able to upgrade aircraft sensor packages to improve our ability to acquire and track smuggling vessels.

I thank the Congress for its support in funding our new 87-foot Coastal Patrol Boat fleet. That initiative has allowed us to reposition the homeports of a number of our more capable 110-foot Patrol Boats further south to place them closer to the counterdrug threat, reducing patrol transit time and resulting in more "steel on target."

We continue to negotiate a series of bi-lateral maritime counternarcotics agreements with foreign governments to enable more effective and efficient coordination with interdiction forces. A tribute to the success of these efforts is the recent signing of an agreement with the government of Honduras, bringing the total number of bi-lateral agreements with Transit Zone nations to twenty-two. These agreements help maximize the effectiveness of our cutters by reducing the time they spend waiting for authorization to either board suspect vessels or to enter the territorial seas of signatory nations in pursuit of suspect trafficking vessels. The Caribbean Support Tender, that the Administration requested and Congress authorized, has already begun its work of providing maintenance and logistics support in the Eastern and Central Caribbean to lay the groundwork for improved performance by their regional maritime services. Our multilateral efforts have made significant progress toward effective cooperation with our Caribbean neighbors who are working with us to deny safe havens to drug smugglers who routinely violate the national sovereignty of these nations.

Last year, with my full encouragement and support, the U. S. Interdiction Coordinator made a decision to raise the priority of counterdrug efforts against the movement of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific. Joint Interagency Task Forces East and West, and Coast Guard Pacific Area, made a number of record seizures and proved that effort effective. Thus, we have demonstrated effective interdiction can be accomplished in both oceans.

My primary counterdrug focus in Atlantic Area for the upcoming year is on Puerto Rico, where the smuggling infrastructure is well developed, entrenched, and historically successful. Roughly half of all cocaine flow to the U.S. in 1999 came through the Caribbean. About half of that Caribbean flow is destined for Puerto Rico. Therefore, one-fourth of all cocaine destined for the United States is being shipped via the 110-mile long island of Puerto Rico. The utility of this route to the smugglers is evident by the fact that although we have been more effective seizing drugs along this route than any other route in the Caribbean, it is still the route with the highest flow.

Cocaine flow into Puerto Rico, the U. S. Virgin Islands, and their approaches has increased nearly threefold over the past two years. While the amount seized by interagency efforts has risen, the percentage of that amount compared to the flow has decreased slightly. The end result of these two factors is that significantly more drugs are successfully arriving in Puerto Rico for further transport to the mainland United States.

The profit margin in drug smuggling is high - indeed, the smugglers treat their quarter-million dollar go-fast boats as consumable items - and the smugglers’ long-term transit strategy appears robust enough to survive periodic shifts in routes. As such, the drug trafficking organizations will continue to successfully operate if we simply repeat history and cause them to shift between Haiti and Puerto Rico. Credible law enforcement actions must disrupt the transportation and distribution of cocaine - forcing them to abandon that route. We are working with the Interagency to develop a systematic approach to attack this re-emerging threat and to collectively force smugglers away from Puerto Rico with a desired result of cutting the Puerto Rican throughput in half. As mentioned earlier, the traffickers’ infrastructure in Puerto Rico is well established and increasing at sea interdictions alone will not result in long-term behavioral changes. Our focus is to engage in cooperative interagency efforts to achieve breakthrough-level results, through linking interdiction and investigation to permanently dismantle smuggling organizations.

As our efforts over time are successful in this regard we would expect a shift to Haiti and Jamaica as smuggling activity in Puerto Rico becomes prohibitively risky to traffickers. Thus we also need to support continued interagency planning to deal with increased smuggling through Haiti and Jamaica. We must be quick to shift to the emerging threat, while remaining mindful that any time traffickers sense a lessened resistance in Puerto Rico, they will return to that preferred route.

To deal with cocaine movement into Haiti we are trying to remove the reason for the trafficking organizations to ship it there in the first place. Most of the secondary flow from Haiti goes to Puerto Rico, a part of the U.S. Customs Zone, and to a lesser extent, to southern Florida. By attacking that secondary flow effectively, I believe we can reduce the primary flow into Haiti.

The appropriate tactical strategy position to address Haiti then takes three parts. First, attack the secondary flow into Puerto Rico with a closely coordinated interagency response that maximizes the effect of combined resources. Second, sustain the highly effective Miami River Operation to reduce the secondary flow into southern Florida via Haitian coastal freighters. And third, influence Venezuela to open their airspace to United States tracker aircraft to enable effective end-games against the aircraft currently delivering cocaine to Haiti and returning home with virtual impunity.

Congressional support of the President's fiscal year 2001 budget request is essential for the Coast Guard's Deepwater Capability Replacement Project. Without it, the Coast Guard's ability to contribute to national drug interdiction efforts in the long-term, as well as meet the demands of our many other missions that protect the interests of the United States on the high seas, will be significantly impeded as our major assets face obsolescence and retirement over the next twenty years. Our fiscal year 2001 budget provides for investments in the use of aviation assets, and force multipliers such as deployable law enforcement detachments, intelligence collection, and international engagement. We need your continued support.

The record seizures the Coast Guard has enjoyed this past year are noteworthy and commendable, but they do not tell the whole story. Increased cocaine flow challenges us each and every day. Your support has enabled us to begin to close the gap through improved sensors and equipment, and to increase Coast Guard and interagency end-game effectiveness. More remains to be done.

To achieve the goals of the National Drug Control Strategy, we must have the right arrows in our quiver – arrows that can be loosed in the counterdrug fight without diminishing our ability to carry out our other assigned missions. The Deepwater Recapitalization Project will address our operational capital needs for the future. Operational enhancements and readiness-related budget initiatives within the President’s budget will provide us enhanced capabilities and will permit the most effective use of resources for all our missions.

The Office of National Drug Control Policy estimates that annual illegal drug profits are nearly ten times the Coast Guard’s annual budget, and we know they are using that ill gotten gain to invest in current and future operations against our national interests. We have the talent, expertise, and technology to deliver extraordinary interdiction results – what we need are resources equal to the job ahead. Funding the Coast Guard at levels requested by the President will permit us to deliver what is needed in this fight.

Thank you for your support and for the opportunity to discuss this important issue with you today. I will be happy to answer any questions you may have.