DRUG CONTROL CHIEF WON'T LET PENTAGON JUST SAY NO

Tangle With Defense Department Tests
McCaffrey's Power to Coordinate Federal Policy

When Barry R. McCaffrey took charge of the White House drug control office
last year, he set out to lift its sagging bureaucratic standing. He
enlarged the staff, asserted his authority as the administration's primary
spokesman on drugs and developed a plan to slash illicit drug use in half
over the next 10 years.

Now, in perhaps the clearest test of McCaffrey's power, the retired
fourstar Army general is challenging not an enemy drug cartel but an
allied federal department his former employer, the Pentagon.

An inveterate crusader with a reputation for boldness and a penchant for
publicity, McCaffrey has refused to certify a draft of the Pentagon's
fiscal 1999 budget, calling the $809 million earmarked for counterdrug
work inadequate. His decision earlier this month marked the first time
since creation of the antidrug office nine years ago that a governmental
department was denied certification.

The move effectively leaves the dispute to President Clinton and his White
House budget advisers to resolve, placing the president in an awkward
position: Does he side with his drug control policy director, thereby
affirming McCaffrey's authority to influence drug spending levels
throughout the government? Or does he side with his secretary of defense,
William S. Cohen, who has branded McCaffrey's insistence that the Pentagon
spend an additional $141 million excessive and misguided?

For McCaffrey and his aides, the struggle is much more than a budgetary
wrangle.

"You can view what's going on now as a test of the office's role, a test of
its ability to assert its statutory interagency leadership," said a senior
aide to McCaffrey. "That's the crux of the matter."

For Cohen and his staff, stunned by and resentful of McCaffrey's efforts to
make the disagreement public, the central issue is whether the Pentagon can
and should play a greater role in combating narcotics.

Already hardpressed to finance a rising number of peace operations, and
short of funds for a new generation of weaponry, the Pentagon insists it
cannot afford to spend any more on counterdrug activities. Besides,
defense officials said, trafficking routes for narcotics into the United
States have changed in recent years, with fewer drugs being ferried by
aircraft and more by small, islandhopping boats across the Caribbean or by
land across the U.S.Mexican border.

"When the primary threat was by air, Pentagon radar could help," said a
senior defense official involved in the counterdrug effort. "But as you
shift to a greater maritime threat, it becomes less of a Defense Department
issue and more of a civilian law enforcement and intelligence one."

A 1993 decision by Clinton to refocus antidrug operations placed less
emphasis on interdicting shipments into the United States and more on
assisting South American countries where the narcotics are produced. The
change in strategy prompted the Pentagon to cut its Caribbean transit zone
operations by about half and reduce its overall counterdrug spending by
about a third.

McCaffrey contends the policy shift should not have occasioned a drop in
total defense funding for drug programs. By contrast, he notes that
antinarcotics spending by other federal departments including State,
Treasury, Justice, Transportation and Health and Human Services has
risen substantially.

Specifically, McCaffrey has asked the Pentagon to add funds to help expand
interdiction efforts in Mexico, the Andean region in South America and the
Caribbean. He also wants more money to augment intelligence and
construction assistance provided by National Guard units along the
southwestern U.S. border.

In response, defense officials say their counterdrug programs in Mexico
and the Andes are about as much as governments there can absorb or Congress
will allow. They say the Caribbean problem is more the responsibility of
Customs and Coast Guard authorities. And they say the National Guard
already consumes about onefifth of the department's drug budget.

This is not the first time McCaffrey has tangled with the Pentagon. Within
weeks of taking office, he ran into Pentagon resistance to a request for 30
military detailees to help rebuild the White House drug staff from about 40
people to 150. Ultimately, McCaffrey received the military personnel.

But this time the dispute between the retired general and the Defense
Department threatens not only to embroil the president, but stir fresh
debate on Capitol Hill about the Pentagon's participation in combating
narcotics. While the defense committees historically have shown little
interest in widening the Pentagon's counterdrug role, substantial
bipartisan support exists elsewhere in Congress for drawing U.S. forces
more into the drug fight.

In response to McCaffrey's complaint, Senate and House members have written
Cohen urging him to boost defense funding for counterdrug activities.

"Having support from the Department of Defense is absolutely critical to
our collective efforts to reduce drug abuse," said one letter from Reps.
Rob Portman (ROhio), the assistant majority whip, and Benjamin A. Gilman
(RN.Y.), chairman of the International Relations Committee.

"We agree with Gen. McCaffrey's determination that the Defense Department's
fiscal year 1999 request of $809 million is inadequate," said another
letter signed by Sens. Charles E. Grassley (RIowa), Dianne Feinstein
(DCalif.), Paul Coverdell (RGa.) and Bob Graham (DFla.).

It was Congress that established the drug control office in 1988 to manage
the federal government's $16 billion in antidrug expenditures and
coordinate the activities of more than 40 agencies and departments engaged
in fighting the narcotics trade.

To ensure the office had clout, Congress gave it authority to review and
"certify" all government drug budgets as fulfilling the president's
published national objectives.

Until this month, the mere threat of decertification had been enough to
prompt agencies to increase antidrug spending when told by the drug office
that they were falling short.

Hoping to avoid a clash with the Pentagon, McCaffrey met privately with
Cohen in September to outline his concerns. McCaffrey said he was
compelled to take the extraordinary step of decertifying the Pentagon after
Cohen's staff appeared to ignore his pleas.

Ironically, as a former head of the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees
counterdrug and other U.S. military operations in Latin America, McCaffrey
is no strong advocate of involving the military more deeply in the drug
war. He is convinced that neither the military nor the police can solve
America's drug problem, which he has likened to a cancer, the challenge
being to manage it so that it does as little damage to the body politic as
possible.

But McCaffrey also has made clear his intent to ensure that his drug office
has sufficient powers to coordinate federal antidrug efforts, and in that
light, his challenge to the Pentagon serves a political point.

"What's important to us is that other agencies understand they need to
engage in a dialogue with us," said another senior McCaffrey aide.

Senior White House budget officials said they are holding talks with staff
members from the drug office and the Pentagon in an attempt to resolve the
dispute soon.