MULTINATIONAL DRUG SWEEP NETS THOUSANDS OF SUSPECTS

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 arrest or
detention of thousands of suspects, federal officials said last week.

The sweep this summer - from June 10 to July 11 - seized more than 3,700
pounds of heroin and 9 tons of other narcotics.

For years, the agency has conducted multinational 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 transnational 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."

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

That was significant, he said, because it meant that 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.