CENTRAL ASIA, BALKANS SWEEP A FIRST FOR DEA

Operation Nets Drugs By the Ton, Arrests By the Thousands

WASHINGTON - A broad narcotics sweep involving 25,000 law-enforcement
officers and coordinated by the Drug Enforcement Administration across 15
countries of Central Asia and the Balkans has resulted in the arrests or
detentions of thousands of suspects, federal officials said last week.

The sweep this summer, from June 10 to July 11, netted more than 3,700
pounds of heroin and nine tons of other narcotics.

For years, the agency has conducted multi-national actions in Latin
America, but this operation was the first to cover the Balkans and Central
Asia, the officials said.

The sweep, involving police, customs and border officers of 18 countries,
was coordinated in three phases by regional command centers in Bucharest,
Romania, and Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, with the assistance of about 40 officers
of the Drug Enforcement Administration. The agency also supplied
communications equipment for the operation.

One official, Steven W. Casteel, the drug agency's chief of intelligence,
said the lessons learned from the cooperative operation were more important
than sheer numbers.

"Statistics are poor, if any, help in determining the correct actions to be
taken in policing or as a measure of success," Casteel said.

Instead, Casteel, who has been in drug enforcement for 30 years, is
concentrating on what he can learn about trends in global drug-smuggling
enterprises.

"I am a big believer in trans-national policing," he said in an interview
at the enforcement agency's headquarters, overlooking the Pentagon. "You
can talk about al-Qaida and other forms of terrorism, but the biggest
threat anywhere in the world isn't terror; it's organized crime."

Casteel said he was especially interested in the seizure of 1.7 tons of
toluol, a solvent derived from petroleum that is used in purifying cocaine.
Speaking about the importance of seizing the toluol aboard the Turkish
freighter Selene in the Ukrainian port of Kerch on the Black Sea, he said,
"Indirectly, we saved ourselves."

"Cocaine purities are going down," he said, adding that the toluol was to
be sent to Latin America, the principal source of cocaine for North America.

The Selene had false papers, he said, "Like changing license plates on a
stolen car."

The seizure of 56 pounds of heroin June 6 at a border crossing between
Greece and Albania also caught his attention. It was not the largest in the
sweep this summer, but he said it showed that Greek, Turkish and Albanian
officials were working together.

That was significant, he said, because it meant law enforcement agencies
were cooperating in a region where there are numerous ethnic rivalries.

He said the emphasis at the Regional Center for Combating Transborder
Crime, in Bucharest, was on identifying choke points on the main Balkan
routes used to move narcotics to Western and Northern Europe.

At the center in Bishkek, law enforcement officers from Kyrgyzstan,
Kazakhstan, Russia, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan worked together.

The Bishkek operations were devised not only to catch smugglers, American
officials said, but also to learn the methods of Central Asian and Afghan
heroin traffickers, the routes traffickers used, the involvement of
militant groups in drug trafficking, prices and purity levels.