U.S. DRUG CHIEF SEEKS OVERHAUL OF STRATEGY AT BORDER

WASHINGTON -- U.S. border inspectors searched slightly more than a million
commercial trucks and railway cars entering the United States from Mexico
last year. They found cocaine stashed in cargo compartments on only six
occasions, said Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the White House director of
drug-control policy.

He cites the dispiriting statistic in pressing for an overhaul of the
strategy for stanching the flow of illegal drugs into the United States.
Slightly more than half of the cocaine smuggled into the United States, and
much of the heroin, marijuana and methamphetamines, comes through Mexico.

McCaffrey is proposing that interdiction operations along the
2,000-mile-long southwestern border be coordinated by a single federal
official, who would assume responsibility for all counter-drug efforts by a
half-dozen government departments and no fewer than 22 federal agencies.

But McCaffrey, who holds Cabinet-level rank as the administration's top
drug-control official, is getting a cool response from other government
institutions like the Justice and Treasury departments, where spokesmen
said last week only that his proposal was under review.

Several officials who follow drug policy in Washington said that the
proposal failed to spell out whom a new border drug "czar" would report to
and who would control actual operations.

Some departments and agencies fear that the proposal could infringe on
their authority and their budgets. McCaffrey presides over a federal
drug-control budget exceeding $16 billion this year, but actual allocations
are proposed and controlled by the departments and agencies involved.

McCaffrey said in an interview that his proposal harbors no hidden agenda.
He said that more efficient cooperation and superior technology were needed
to interdict illegal drugs at the southwestern border and its 24 ports of
entry and 39 other sanctioned crossing points.

"This isn't a big deal," McCaffrey said. "It's organizing 39 places so that
manpower, technology and intelligence make it very risky to smuggle things
that are, by weight, more valuable than gold."

For the proposed border czar, McCaffrey said he envisioned a politician,
lawyer or law-enforcement professional who speaks Spanish, is highly
regarded in the border community and favors close cooperation with Mexico.
He did not mention any names. Buying more sophisticated radar, scanning and
night-vision equipment, he said, would cost a fraction of the $2 billion
that the government already spends annually to combat border smuggling.

"I'm not talking about the Marshall Plan," McCaffrey said. "I'm talking
about better organization."

More than 11,000 U.S. inspectors, agents and other officials are deployed
along the border with Mexico. But their resources are strained by the
cross-border traffic that has burgeoned since the North American Free Trade
Agreement was carried out nearly five years ago. Such traffic amounted to
254 million crossings by people, most of them in 75 million cars, and 3.5
million trucks and railway cars entering the United States from Mexico in
1996.

Information about border smuggling is so fragmented and incomplete,
McCaffrey said, that it leaves some drug operations running blind. "Whether
we and the traffickers end up at the same point is all too often left to
luck and gritty, individual police work," he said in a speech in El Paso,
Texas, on Aug. 26.

A draft summary of McCaffrey's proposal, which has been sent to some
members of Congress as well as to other government officials, identified
some specific obstacles to be overcome in fighting drug smuggling along the
border:

* Communications systems used by different agencies are sometimes
incompatible, leaving them isolated or relying on "jerry-built solutions"
to keep in touch with law-enforcement operations working the border.

* Agencies collecting intelligence often fail to share it with other
organizations that are in a position to catch drug smugglers, and sometimes
cannot reach everyone in their own ranks in time to stop a drug shipment.

* Efficient technology for screening vehicles for smuggled drugs without a
time-consuming physical search is seriously lacking.

* Only three devices capable of scanning trucks for hidden compartments are
deployed along the border. "Traffickers quickly adjust to the construction
of such devices and shift drugs elsewhere," the summary said. As a result,
the report said, the number of cocaine seizures at checkpoints and traffic
stops last year was less than half the number made in 1995. Cocaine
seizures as a result of investigations were only one-quarter of those in
1995.

On Wednesday, Attorney General Janet Reno picked a federal attorney in New
Mexico, John J. Kelly, as her representative for the southwest border
region. Reno created the post in 1995 to coordinate the efforts of the FBI,
the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Immigration and Naturalization
Service and the Border Patrol, which all fall under the Justice Department.
This arrangement does not include the Customs Service, which conducts most
border inspections, and the financial crimes units of the Treasury
Department, which tracks money laundering. The State Department and the
Pentagon run their own anti-drug programs in Latin America. The Department
of Transportation watches cross-border traffic and supervises the Coast
Guard. Conscious of looking tough on drugs in an election year, Congress
disregarded other advice from McCaffrey.

On Wednesday, the House of Representatives approved its version of a new
Western Hemisphere Drug Elimination Act, which calls for an 80 percent cut
in the flow of illicit drugs into the United States by the end of 2001 and
authorized $2.6 billion that has yet to be appropriated.

In testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the Senate
Caucus on International Narcotics Control, McCaffrey called the target of
80 percent "completely unrealistic." He has set a target of a 10 percent
reduction for the same period.

Checked-by: Joel W. Johnson