U.S. SAYS SMUGGLERS 'OVERWHELM' BORDERS WITH RECORD COCAINE FLOW

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000707020002-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: December 2, 2011
• Sequence Number: 2
• Publication Date: August 8, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000707020002-7
ARTICLE
NEW YORK TIMES
8 August 1985
U.S. Says Smugglers `Overwhelm'
Borders With Record Cocaine Flow
By GEORGE VOLSKY
SpocW to T Now Yat rtmuu
IbAMI, Aug. 7 - Despite improved
vigilance by Federal and local agen-
cies, more cocaine than ever is enter-
mg the United States, law-enforcement
officials say. And they expect that im-
proved smuggling strategies and unre-
tirntinkgg demand will keep the record-flow coming.
The officials said Miami was the cen-
ter of cocaine traffic in this country,
adding that about three-quarters of the
cocaine intercepted nationwide last
year was seized in the Florida-Carib-
bean district of the Drug Enforcement
Administratioon. With a long coast and
thousands of unused airstrips, south
Florida has for years been the main
point of entry of cocaine into the United
States, which, according to recent
statistics, has seen a dramatic in-
crease in cocaine use at all social and
economic levels.
The officials, interviewed over
seVeral months, cited a shift from the
use- of large ships and airplanes fore
transporting cocaine to a wave of
smaller boats and planes. They say this
makes interception harder and, as one
official said, "overwhelms our inter-
diction resources."
Trying to counter this new transpor-
tation technique, Congress has appro-
priated funds for a fleet of 104 high-
speed boats to be stationed in south
Florida and manned by United State
Coast Guard and Customs personnel.
Cocaine In Artificial Yams
Concealment of cocaine has also be.
come more professional. For example,
it was by chance that agents of the
United States Customs Service discov-
ered 300 pounds of cocaine packed in-
side artificial yams in a freighter that
had just docked at the Port of Miami in
June. Agents said the artfully painted
fiberglass yams were almost impossi-
ble to distinguish from the real ones
they were mixed with.
"They're always ahead of us," Wil-
liam Rosenblatt, the top Customs Serv-
ice agent in the area,- said of cocaine
smugglers. "They scheme 18 hours a
day how to smuggle coke into the U.S.
We often work more than 10 hours
dairy, but what we basically do is to
react."
In Washington, a new report by the
General Accounting Office says the Na-
tional Narcotics Border Interdiction
System, a new program to coordinate
the seizing of drugs at the borders, was
spending nearly all Its energy on mari- i
juana and making almost no effort on
cocaine.
The officials interviewed suggested
that the effort against narcotics smug-
gling had been weak basically because
agents lacked detailed knowledge of
the inner workings of the international
drug business.
A Lack of Cooperation
Major-drug organizations are very
difficult to penetrate, they say. The
smugglers who have been arrested are
usually people in the low and middle
levels of drug smuggling rings, and
they refuse to cooperate with investiga-
tors because they fear reprisals by the
organization.
Officials here have complained that
over the last few years their resources
have grown only moderately while the
number of people working in drug syn-
dicates has more than doubled.
A result is that Latin American co
caine is increasingly available to sup-
ply what by all indications is a steadily
expanding demand for the drug in the
United States.
According to Congressional staff ex-
perts, national cocaine consumption,
which in 1984 was about 85 metric tons,
will exceed 100 tons this year. The Drug
Enforcement Administration esti-
mated consumption of cocaine at 34 to
45 Wetric tons in 1981, 45 to 54 metric
tons in 1982 and 50 to l 1 metric tons in i
1983.
Basing his statement on customs
service projections, Senator Lawton
Chiles, Democrat of Florida, said last
month that 20 percent more cocaine
would enter the Southeastern United
States this year than in 1984. "From
time to time there are suggestions that
we are beginning to win the war on
drugs," Senator Chiles said. "But in
Florida and in the Southwest we are
still in the trenches."
22 Kilograms Intercepted
These estimates contrast with the
situation in 1967, when a commission on
law enforcement appointed by Presi-
dent Johnson did not find cocaine con-
sumption a matter of concern. That
year agencies intercepted 22 kilograms
in all at a time when experts estimated
that seizures accounted for less than 10
percent of what was smuggled.
According to official reports, cultiva-
tion of coca leaves and their processing
into coca paste, from which pure co-
caine is refined, is taking place in Ar-
gentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Mexico,
Nicaragua and Venezuela in addition to
the traditional sources of the drug, Bo-
livia, Colombia and Peru.
To be sure, more cocaine than ever is
being discovered at the point, of entry,
or relatively shortly after arrival in the
United States. But larger cocaine sei-
zdres only suggest that proportionately
more is getting through, according to
law-enforcement officials.
"An analysis by the House Subcom-
mittee on Operations has concluded
that we are intercepting only 0.5 per-
cent of the drug coming by air and
about 5 percent of the sea shipments,"
said John P. Cusack, chief of staff of
the House Select Committee on Narcot-
ics.
"This is really frightening," he said,
"because it shows that we have made
no progress in detecting what is being
shot at us."
According to the Drug Enforcement
Administration, 4,400 kilograms of co.
caine was seized nationally in 1982,
7,390 kilograms in 1983 and 11,742 kilo-
grams in 1984. In the first six months of
this year, in south Florida alone over
13,000 kilograms of cocaine was seized,
more than in the entire country in 1984.
"Colombian traffickers - and so far
Colombia has been mostly what the co-
caine problem is all about - have per-
fected the drug transportation, distri-
bution and financing of operations,"
said S. B. Billbrough, assistant special
agent in charge of the D.E.A. district
office in Miami.
"They have realized that small
planes and boats are very difficult to
detect on the radar screens," Mr. Bill-
brough said. "Moreover, they use their
boats and planes more efficiently.
They have established refueling, trans-
shipment and repair facilities in the
Bahamas, Belize, Jamaica, the Domin-
ican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico,
Turks and Caicos and other smaller
Caribbean islands."
Traffickers have also become more
proficient in packaging, rapid loading
and unloading of shipments and in com-
munications. Mr. Cusack believes
many Americans are working for the
drug syndicates.
Mr. Billbrough said that even though
the United States had been pressing
foreign countries to step up their anti-
drug campaigns, "the extent of their
cooperation is not known."
"The problem in working with
them," he said, "is that drug business
has become an important part of their
economies. "
PAW
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2011/12/02 : CIA-RDP90-00965R000707020002-7