Military Delayed Raid on Border Drug Tunnel

WASHINGTON —  The joint Customs Service-military mission that last month unearthed an elaborate drug smugglers’ tunnel under the U.S.-Mexican border was launched only after an urgent request for the action had been held up in the Pentagon bureaucracy for six weeks, The Times has learned.

The delay, during which shipments of cocaine apparently continued to pour through the passage into Arizona, is typical of problems that have hamstrung a high-profile Administration effort to use the military to help interdict drugs along the border.

Active-duty military response is so slow that the Border Patrol and other agencies now turn to state National Guard units when they need assistance quickly, according to U.S. officials involved in counternarcotics efforts.

“They announce that drugs are a major national security threat and then this takes six weeks?” one incredulous official asked. “What the heck is going on here?”

Other Administration officials defended as necessary the laborious procedures that require the Joint Chiefs of Staff to approve virtually every mission conducted by the new Joint Task Force Six in the sensitive border region.

They conceded, however, that it should have taken far less time for the military to make available the $18,000 worth of seismic detection equipment that ultimately provided a breakthrough in finding the sophisticated underground tunnel.

The slow Pentagon response on the high-priority project raises questions about the effectiveness of military assistance in the anti-drug effort, federal officials said.

Although the armed services recently have expressed a new-found eagerness to enlist in the war on drugs, some officials said that the sluggishness in the tunnel case appeared to reflect a lingering lack of enthusiasm of the kind dominant in military circles only a year ago.

Customs Service officials said they had no way to measure how much cocaine passed through the tunnel between mid-March, when frustrated agents in Arizona asked the military for assistance in finding the passage, and late April, when the equipment finally arrived on the scene.

But Thomas McDermott, the Customs agent in charge of the inquiry, said that investigators believe the tunnel was “a major artery” for northward-bound drugs. On May 11, only days after pinpointing the northern end of the passage, federal agents intercepted more than a ton of cocaine in a single tunnel shipment.

A Pentagon spokesman, Maj. Doug Hart, said that he had not been authorized to explain why the Defense Department took six weeks to respond to the request.

“Nobody thought there was a delay,” he said. “It went through regular channels.”

Stanley E. Morris, deputy director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, said that the long lag was unfortunate. But he added that top-level Defense Department review is necessary to guard against missions that might unnecessarily anger the Mexican government or deplete military stocks.

“We’re sort of damned if we do and damned if we don’t,” Morris said. “In this case, I’d rather be damned if we don’t.”

A congressional committee headed by Rep. Charles B. Rangel (D-N.Y.) plans to summon federal officials for closed briefings on the matter next week. Customs officials, who refused to provide details about Pentagon involvement, said that their correspondence with the military officials had been conducted in a series of classified cables.

Informed sources said that the seismic detection equipment is regarded as sensitive because it is being developed under a classified contract to help the military detect tunnels built by North Korea beneath the U.S.-patrolled demilitarized zone into South Korea.

But the sources said that the weeks of bureaucratic delay were caused primarily by accounting disputes, with Defense Department officials unable to agree on which federal account was to be billed for the use of the Pentagon equipment. It was variously judged to be a military training mission, which would have been paid from one Defense Department account, a research experiment billable to another or a Customs Service responsibility.

“People at the border wanted to do it, and people in Washington wanted to do it,” one Administration official said. “But we had to get the funding right.”

The Customs Service learned of the cross-border tunnel from a confidential informant last November but could find no evidence of its existence by using conventional methods. In early March, the agency learned of the seismic detection device under development and asked the new military border task force, JTF-6, for help.

The task force, one of three recently established military anti-drug commands, operates along the Southwest border from California to Texas. It conducts reconnaissance and provides equipment to assist law enforcement agencies in counternarcotics efforts.

The sources said that the Custom Service’s request--clearly labeled as urgent by agents in Arizona--was passed up the chain of command from the task force, which is based in Ft. Bliss, Tex., to the U.S. Forces Command in Ft. McPherson, Ga. From there, it went to the Pentagon, where it was examined by at least half a dozen officials before being approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest level in the military command structure.

Orders then were passed downward through the U.S. Material Command, and arrangements were made to move equipment and operators from the Colorado School of Mines, which is developing the technology, to the remote Southwest border town of Douglas, Ariz.

Decision-making was further delayed by “a number of glitches,” one official said. The source refused to elaborate, saying that the matter was under investigation by a federal agency.

Counternarcotics officials said that the scrutiny was unhappily typical of a process in which the Pentagon, required by Congress to assist law enforcement agencies in anti-drug efforts along the border, rarely responds to a request in fewer than four weeks.

“The process is very time consuming right now, but we are working with (Defense Department) people to streamline things,” said Brian Pledger, the senior tactical coordinator of Operation Alliance. That operation, a multiagency federal team based in El Paso, Tex., relays requests for assistance to the military.

Phil Reidinger, a spokesman for JTF-6, noted that the military task force was formed only last January and has conducted only a dozen full-fledged missions, including its participation in the tunnel operation. “We’re still early on the learning curve,” he said.

Some counternarcotics officials contend that the team will only be effective if it is permitted quickly to deploy reconnaissance teams along the border when warned through intelligence channels of a possible drug shipment.

“We can do quick-time stuff,” said Col. Thomas C. Carter, deputy commander of JTF-6, in an interview. “As folks become more and more comfortable with what we’re doing, I think it won’t have to go up to Joint Chiefs of Staff level.”

But other officials noted that, even if its reins are loosened, the task force is permitted by law to operate only on public lands, which comprise just 300 miles of the 1,900-mile U.S.-Mexico frontier. Any military patrols along the rest of the border must be conducted by the National Guard.