Difficult Terrain

In March 2003, as U.S. forces in Kuwait and the Persian Gulf were finalizing plans for the invasion of Iraq, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge was marshaling forces on the home front for Operation Liberty Shield, a wide-ranging effort to prevent Osama bin Laden from making good on his public threat to bring the war in Iraq home to Americans.

Liberty Shield was a multiagency offensive to protect critical infrastructure, secure the food supply and defend the United States from terrorist infiltration. It lasted about 30 days. Among the many security enhancements enacted at the time, federal law enforcement officials flew increased aerial surveillance missions, especially along the northern border, where surveillance had been limited. During the operation, federal officials say they spotted 27 small aircraft crossing into the United States from Canada without clearance. Fifteen of those aircraft eventually were identified; 12 were not. Apparently none of the planes was intercepted. "Any one of these could have been carrying weapons of mass destruction," Reps. David Obey, D-Wis., and Martin Olav Sabo, D-Minn., pointed out in a joint statement last fall, when they urged greater funding for homeland security.

For years, smugglers have flown small aircraft across U.S. borders to transport contraband-mainly high-grade marijuana grown in western Canada, but also cigarettes, currency, undocumented people and firearms-law enforcement officials in several agencies say. Increased security along the southwest border with Mexico largely has shut down cross-border aerial smuggling there, but it's anybody's guess as to what's coming into the United States from the north, says one senior federal law enforcement official involved in an interagency effort to improve security along the Canadian border. "We really don't know the scope of smuggling on the northern border, because we haven't had the resources or the will, frankly, to look at it," this official says. "Only now are we just starting to get serious about this problem."

"You don't realize how open that northern border is until you go up there and spend some time," says Dennis Lindsay, deputy assistant director for operations in the Office of Air and Marine Operations, a division of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm. Since Sept. 11, officers with Air and Marine Operations have been spending a lot more time on the northern border. Before then, most of its 1,100 members had been focused on interdicting smugglers moving drugs into the United States from Mexico and the Caribbean. After Sept. 11, the division devoted more resources to protecting the air space over U.S. cities and opened branch offices in Bellingham, Wash., and Plattsburgh, N.Y. The northern branches were staffed with personnel on temporary duty, but late this summer, those offices will become permanent. Homeland Security also plans to open three more branch offices on the northern border, although those offices have not been funded in the agency's budget.

"As we move to the northern border we will be in a position to better see the number of aircraft coming across the border," says Lindsay. "We know they're there. We're not able to verify them because we're not there in force yet."

A Herculean Task

"We don't want to just deter, we want to dismantle," says Lindsay. To operate effectively on the northern border, intelligence will be critical, he adds. "If we just do random air patrols, we're going to run airplanes into the ground, we'll have huge gas bills, and our results for flight hours will go way down, and that's not effective."

The Air and Marine Operations Center in Riverside, Calif., which is staffed by personnel from multiple law enforcement agencies, receives data from 128 radar facilities throughout the United States, and then feeds that data to its pilots as needed. By September, the office will be receiving feeds from about 300 facilities, with a total capacity for 450. It offers the most vivid picture of air activity in the country, say staffers, even better than the Federal Aviation Administration's view. Because it is the only law enforcement organization with the technical capability and skilled personnel able to track smuggling in the air and on water, respond with its own air and maritime assets and arrest suspects, Air and Marine Operations brings considerable punch to the northern border.

Ken Tuttle, a criminal investigator with 17 years' experience in Air and Marine Operations, will direct field operations in the Plattsburgh office. "I think we have some distance to go before we have a complete threat analysis on the northern border," he says. Nonetheless, he believes the office will be able to put a significant dent in smuggling and add greatly to officials' knowledge. Initially, the biggest challenge will be to stand up the new permanent office and attend to myriad administrative and management details, while continuing critical operations, he says.

Eventually, Air and Marine Operations officials expect each northern border branch will be equipped with a Pilatus PC-12 multipurpose fixed-wing aircraft, which was developed specifically for the agency's anti-smuggling law enforcement operations, as well as boats and two helicopters.

Developing relationships with all the other federal, state, local and Canadian agencies that play a role in border security will be vital, says pilot Mark Beaty, the new field operations director for the Bellingham office. While agency officials say they intend to have liaison officers working with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, no formal steps have yet been taken. In the meantime, the administrative challenges of establishing the permanent office, arranging for hangar and office space, and managing personnel moves have been daunting, Beaty says. "It's going to take a herculean effort to get it all done, but we will do it," he says.

"This is an excellent opportunity for all of us," Beaty says, who until July was working on southwest border issues in southern Arizona. He was in line to become deputy director of the counternarcotics Joint Interagency Task Force South in Key West, Fla., when he was offered the Bellingham post. The opportunity so appealed to him that he accepted the job before even visiting Bellingham, which no doubt will offer a different way of life from the one he enjoys in Arizona. "I wanted to stay active operationally," he says. Because the Bellingham office, like the one in Plattsburgh, will have a bare-bones staff, Beaty likely will have plenty of opportunities to continue flying.

History of Neglect

In September 2001, about 1,600 Customs and Immigration inspectors monitored traffic at major border crossing points; now there are about 3,000. Between the official ports of entry for trade and travelers, 368 Border Patrol agents minded the border before the attacks. Today, about 1,000 agents patrol the northern border, one for every four miles of territory. By way of comparison, 10,000 Border Patrol agents serve on the southwest border, which is half the size of the northern border. Such limited presence has made it impossible to reliably assess the level of illegal activity taking place on the northern border, several sources say.

In addition to adding personnel on the northern border, the Homeland Security Department has added technology-remote sensors, night-vision cameras and other devices to detect illegal intrusion into the United States. Still, those devices and the people available to act on the data they generate are far from adequate. Essentially, the border remains wide open to anybody determined to cross it, several officials told Government Executive.

Further complicating security, no single agency is responsible for securing the border. Fifteen states, several federal agencies and countless local governments enforce the law on these lands, and they often fail to work together effectively. Much of the land is privately held, and cattle trails and unimproved logging roads are far more prevalent than highways. More than 1,000 miles of the border cross federal land-wilderness areas, national parks, national forests and tribal land, where federal law enforcement officers generally cannot operate without express permission from American Indian tribes.

Tribal sovereignty creates additional challenges, which were illustrated in 1998, when the Immigration and Naturalization Service led a joint U.S.-Canadian law enforcement operation to break up a Chinese-immigrant smuggling ring operating out of the Akwesasne Mohawk Territory, which straddles the border between New York and Ontario and Quebec. The smuggling ring, which involved some tribal members, exploited weaknesses in the multijurisdictional administration of law on tribal lands. The St. Regis Mohawk Reservation in New York has been the focus of a number of smuggling operations in recent years.

In the Dark

In a June report, the General Accounting Office (now the Government Accountability Office), reviewed border security operations in Arizona and Washington and found that while there were pockets of coordination at the field level, there was insufficient cooperation among agencies at the national level (GAO-04-590). Incredibly, in 2003, Border Patrol developed detailed threat assessments for areas along the Mexican and Canadian borders without tapping the expertise of agencies responsible for managing much of that land-50 percent of the land along the southwest border and 25 percent along the northern border. Nor did Border Patrol share its assessments with the relevant agencies. None of the land management agency officials GAO interviewed was even aware of the existence of the threat assessments.

Not only could law enforcement officials on federal lands contribute valuable information about threats and incidents in their jurisdiction, but they also have vital knowledge of the complex terrain. The Border Patrol's threat assessments were not informed by any analysis of incident reports compiled by land management agencies.

"Most of the threat assessments for sectors along the Canadian and Mexican borders do not list land management law enforcement agencies under their listing of law enforcement agencies," GAO reported. "As one land management official pointed out, in his opinion, this oversight is an indication that Border Patrol does not coordinate its activities with law enforcement agencies and does not see them as full partners."

In addition, staffing and resources at land management agencies, including the Agriculture Department's Forest Service and the Interior Department's National Park Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Land Management and Bureau of Indian Affairs, have been outpaced by the increasing levels of illegal activity on the borders, GAO reported. For example, officials with the Bureau of Indian Affairs told GAO the tribal police department with the St. Regis Band of Mohawk Indians, which has "serious, long-standing illegal activity that is border-related," needs $600,000 to combat smuggling, but the administration's 2005 budget does not include such funding.

Officials with the Office of Management and Budget told GAO that many of the funding requests land management agencies have proposed are not consistent with their missions. "From the land management agency officials' perspective, the distinction between border security and resource protection is not always clear," GAO noted.

Perilous Precedents

In 1997, federal agents arrested Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer in Brooklyn, later found to be a conspirator in a plot to bomb the Brooklyn Bridge and perhaps the New York subway system. He was apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol agents three times as he tried to enter the country illegally from Canada. Twice he returned voluntarily to Canada, but the third time Canadian officials refused his re-entry. U.S. officials detained him for a while before he was released, apparently due to a lack of detention space, pending a deportation hearing. In 2000, the Justice Department inspector general reported that Border Patrol agents operating on the northern border routinely released undocumented immigrants because there was not enough detention space to hold them.

In 1999, an alert Customs inspector in Port Angeles, Wash., stopped Ahmed Ressam because he looked unusually nervous. When inspector Diana Dean asked to look inside the trunk of Ressam's car, he bolted. He was quickly apprehended, and the high-grade explosives found in his trunk were confiscated. Officials later determined that he planned to blow up Los Angeles International Airport in what became known as the Millennium Plot. One of his accomplices, Abdel Hakim Tizegha, had entered the United States from Canada illegally.

Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based nonprofit nonpartisan group advocating stricter immigration controls, says the U.S. immigration system is dangerously broken. In the spring 2004 issue of The National Interest, a quarterly journal of international affairs, Krikorian states the obvious: "If our immigration system is so lax that it can be penetrated by a Mexican busboy, it can sure be penetrated by an al Qaeda terrorist. Since there is no way to let in 'good' illegal aliens, but keep out 'bad' ones, countering the asymmetric threats to our people and territory requires sustained, across-the-board immigration law enforcement. Anything less exposes us to grave dangers."