HIDDEN OUTPOST IN KEYS UNITES FORCES IN GLOBAL ASSAULT ON DRUGS

U.S. And Foreign Military Units Share Intelligence To Combat Smuggling.

KEY WEST -- Call it Washington's war room in the campaign to combat cocaine
smuggling.

Nestled on the U.S. Naval Air Station not far from Margaritaville, some 290
U.S. military personnel and federal agents run a semi-secret nerve center.
Its mission: Scour the seas and skies to the south for traffickers --
aircraft dropping bundles into Haiti, speedboats streaking around the
eastern Pacific -- and share real-time crime-stopping intelligence with
partner countries.

Since January 1999, the Joint Interagency Task Force East has claimed a
role in the regional confiscation of 134 metric tons of illegal drugs, in
the destruction or seizure of 80 aircraft and vessels linked to smuggling
and in 300 arrests, mostly abroad.

The tally: an estimated $6.3 billion in cocaine taken from the market.

Proof, boasts the task force commander, that extraordinary regional
cooperation in the decade-old effort is taking its toll on the drug trade
from the jungles of South America.

From a rare glimpse inside the operation, other recent trends:

Radar, overflights and seaborne surveillance have made air drops more
risky, forcing drug runners increasingly to the seas.

So "first and foremost" among counter-drug challenges these days, said
Coast Guard Rear Adm. David S. Belz, are the smugglers' "go-fast" boats
that can elude detection and swoop around Caribbean cays in stop-and-go
northward smuggling routes.

"They are stealth targets. They don't respond to traditional radar
intercepts and they work at night," said Belz, whose operation is part of
the Southern Command in Miami.

Cuba is considered a collaborator in the war on drugs.

The U.S. and Cuban coast guards share a long-established system of alerting
each other to occasional sightings of suspected drug-running boats that try
to charge north through the Windward Passage.

No aircraft have been detected using the island as a transshipping spot,
said a U.S. military officer, speaking on background.

But just last month Cuba alerted U.S. authorities to a suspected
drug-running boat south of Guantanamo.

The Cuban coast guard made chase, causing the smugglers to ditch some
bundles of cocaine overboard, but U.S. forces north of there never
intercepted them.

Commanders, however, consider Haiti a significant soft spot. Surveillance
shows that this is an increasingly popular part of the trade route, favored
by small aircraft that streak north from Colombia's drug-producing areas.

Unifying Policy

But U.S. authorities complain that they have no policing partner there to
intervene on the ground -- even when the command center can provide
real-time reports on a drug plane's arrival in Haiti.

In the cocaine cowboy days of the 1980s, the United States had a fragmented
counter-drug strategy. Federal agencies sought to intercept cocaine
shipments offshore or to disrupt distribution systems inside the United
States. Envoys and other U.S. agents used aid and diplomatic relations to
encourage Latin America to crack down on the trade.

Today, advocates of the interagency approach say their system, first
conceived in 1989, fuses federal and foreign policy -- as well as domestic
agencies and military services that for years were on the fringe of the
so-called war on drugs.

The Pentagon, limited by law from active involvement in law enforcement,
contributes ships and airborne tracking systems to gather intelligence
while the Coast Guard and other agencies conduct actual operations.

Nations Cooperate

Close contact with countries in the so-called "Source Zone" are key to the
strategy, too. Six Latin American countries -- Argentina, Brazil, Colombia,
Ecuador, Peru and Venezuela -- each post liaison officers at the Key West
command center to at times dispatch forces back home to suspected targets
detected by the U.S. network.

"Heck, Peru and Ecuador were in a shooting war" not so many years ago, and
today they exchange liaison officers, one senior officer in Key West
boasted. Using U.S. intelligence, they collaborate to crack down on drug
trafficking.

In five months alone the Colombians were able to confiscate or destroy 12
suspected drug-running aircraft, Belz said, thanks to a Puerto Rican
component of an Over the Horizon Radar system that went on line in February.

Task force members include 89 uniformed members of the armed forces plus
Customs and drug agents, civilian analysts and support personnel.

In a military culture that is mostly foreign outside the Pentagon, a Marine
works for a Coast Guard two-star and a U.S. Army soldier works alongside an
Air Force officer.

Their latest resources include:

Multicomponent radar that can see deep into South America. Controllers can
get a birds-eye view of the entire region -- then transmit video to give
partner nations real-time visibility into their own territory.

At least 10 Coast Guard, Navy and foreign vessels that cruise mostly
Caribbean waters to deter, if not interdict, drug-running vessels. The
Netherlands and Britain also contribute ships.

Eleven aircraft, ranging from fighter jets to slow reconnaissance planes
that, military officers say, can switch on night-vision technology to
literally watch a small plane's door open at midnight over a remote section
of Haiti as someone kicks out cocaine bundles.

The aircraft -- from the Coast Guard, Navy and Air Force -- can fly out of
three low-profile U.S.-run airstrips in Manta, Ecuador and the Dutch
colonies of Aruba and Curacao. Called "Forward Operating Locations," these
are staging platforms created by the Southern Command to regain reach it
lost with the U.S. withdrawal from Panama.

Soon, Belz said, Southcom should finish negotiations on a location in El
Salvador to give their operations a fourth site and an even deeper reach
into the eastern Pacific. COOPERATION

For military and civilian planners, the forward operating locations
illustrate the regional approach of a drug-control strategy that relies on
interaction with host nations.

"I don't think we can get the job done by ourselves," said the admiral, who
called drug smuggling "a transnational threat. They respect no boundaries
and we're required to respect all of them."

That's why they use a multiagency, multinational strategy with the United
States providing intelligence from Key West to "Source Zone" nations.

In one such case, radar detected something speeding north off the Colombian
coast on Jan. 16.

Key West controllers dispatched four aircraft, including an F-16, to
identify it by the time it reached Haiti.

Armed with U.S. intelligence, Colombia destroyed the aircraft on the ground
soon after its return. Officers in Key West said they were satisfied from
their visual tracking that the aircraft, which filed no flight plan and
didn't respond to radio communication, was engaged in illegal drug trafficking.