DRUG SWEEP THE FIRST OF ITS KIND

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 nine 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 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 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 agency's headquarters, overlooking the Pentagon. "You
can talk about al-Qaeda 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 law enforcement
agencies were cooperating in a region with 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.