SHADOW WOLVES USE OLD WAYS TO PROWL BORDER

In an era of unmanned drones, night-vision goggles and wireless
sensors, Sloan Satepauhoodle scours the desert along the Mexican
border for drug smugglers in the old ways.

She is a tracker, a former Secret Service agent and customs inspector
in Washington who traded in her desk and computer to work "intel" in
the desert, employing sign-cutting -- or tracking -- skills once used
by her Kiowa ancestors to hunt animals.

Satepauhoodle (pronounced SAY-paw-who-dle) roams this vast Indian
reservation in a four-wheel-drive pickup, armed with an M-4 rifle and
a .40-calibre semi-automatic pistol. Her job: to look for the tiniest
sign that a smuggler has been around and then go after him.

A thread or fibre on a branch in a thicket could mean a backpacker
carrying burlap-wrapped bales of marijuana on his back bumped against
the brush. Flat, smooth, shiny tracks indicate smugglers with scraps
of carpet tied around their shoes to disguise their prints. A wide,
flat indentation of the sand under a tree suggests that a smuggler set
down his load of marijuana to rest.

Faint V-shaped lines embedded in a footprint? "Vibram boot. Some
smugglers like them," Satepauhoodle said as she walked into a patch of
choya cactus and greasewood trees in search of more. "Let me check it
out."

High-tech has arrived at the border, but low-tech is very much in use
by a special group of federal agents whose sign-cutting skills are
being used in the fight against drugs. They are called Shadow Wolves,
a small all-Native American group of drug interdiction officers that
includes three women. Satepauhoodle, 40, is one of them. Her Kiowa
name means "Kill the Bear" or "Fuzzy Bear," depending on the
pronunciation and the context in which it is used.

Since 1972, the Shadow Wolves unit has worked for the U.S. government
in the Tohono O'odham Nation, a reservation the size of Connecticut
that straddles Arizona and Mexico and includes 120 kilometres of
border. The tribe originally gave the U.S. government permission to
post these officers on its land with the stipulation that they be at
least one-quarter American Indian and enrolled in a federally
recognized tribe. The original Shadow Wolves unit was all Tohono
O'odham, but today more than half a dozen tribes are
represented.

That stipulation is what attracted Satepauhoodle to the unit. She grew
up in southwest Oklahoma, in the midst of Kiowa and Caddo tribal trust
land, then attended Notre Dame University, where she was one of three
Native Americans on campus. An American studies major, she thought she
would pursue a career in research.

Her path into the Secret Service began at a recruiting booth at the
1990 National Conference of American Indians. She worked in
intelligence for eight years in the Secret Service's protective
division, then moved to the U.S. Customs Service as an inspector. In
1999, she saw an interagency job posting for the Shadow Wolves unit,
which was then part of customs.

It was a job and a way to reconnect.

"I had been working for the federal government for 10 years and had
never worked with Indian people, and here I would get to do such an
interesting job with all Indian people," Satepauhoodle said.

She started in the special unit in July 2001, spending the first six
months tagging along with seasoned colleagues who taught her the
ancient art of tracking. She made her first drug seizure exactly a
year after she started, following shiny carpet scuff marks for four
hours through the desert until she found 138 kilos of marijuana
wrapped in burlap, at a likely pickup point for smugglers.

"It was such a feeling of accomplishment," Satepauhoodle recalled. "I
never had a feeling like that on any other job."

The 14-member Shadow Wolves unit now works under U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement and seized an average of 45,000 kilos of marijuana
annually in recent years, in an area that has become the hottest
marijuana-smuggling spot along the border. In the past six months, the
Shadow Wolves have seized almost 22,000 kilos on the Tohono O'odham
reservation.

Smuggling marijuana from Mexico through the reservation is an
"epidemic," said Tohono O'odham Police Chief Richard Saunders, whose
own officers seized almost 9,000 kilos in the past year. Not only is
the reservation's location along the border a factor, but with many
members of the tribe without jobs and living in poverty, there is
incentive to accept money from smugglers to stash narcotics in their
homes or to drive bales of marijuana to nearby Tucson, he said.

"They are paid sometimes as much as $10,000 or $15,000 to haul several
hundred pounds of narcotics and so they get hooked on that quick, easy
money," Saunders said. "However, I'm telling the community that you
actually have a greater chance of getting caught now than you ever had
as a result of increased resources, networking with other law
enforcement, intelligence-sharing and task force assignment."

That includes the Shadow Wolves who "play a critical part in our
overall border strategy," said Rodney Irby, a special agent in the ICE
Tucson office who helps supervise the unit.

"When you combine what they do with what the Border Patrol does and
what ICE investigations does, it's kind of a three-tiered-layer
approach to border security."

But it is one of the lesser known, given the official and public focus
on securing the U.S.-Mexico border to stop illegal immigration. ICE is
currently recruiting Shadow Wolves to fill the congressionally
authorized complement of 25 members, both to fortify the drug
interdiction team and to keep up with requests from foreign countries
that want their border guards trained in the art of tracking.

In recent years, members of the Shadow Wolves have trained border
guards in more than a dozen countries, including Lithuania, Latvia,
Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. This week, Satepauhoodle and
the two other female members of the Shadow Wolves will be in Macedonia
to train border police.

"I'm working in a job that's unique in the world. There's no other
office that does what we do and how we do it," Satepauhoodle said.