DRUG CARTEL INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS

Excerpted from: ERRI DAILY INTELLIGENCE REPORT-ERRI Risk Assessment Services-Monday, August 25, 1997-Vol. 3 - 237

DRUG CARTEL INTELLIGENCE OPERATIONS
By Steve Macko, ERRI Crime Analyst

The title of this report may confuse the reader. Some might think that this report will discuss law enforcement intelligence operations against illicit drug traffickers. That would be an incorrect assumption. This report will deal with drug traffickers intelligence operations against law enforcement. The drug lords are said to be spending fortunes on the latest technology to spy on and elude authorities. They are even allegedly hiring former intelligence officers from a number of countries to work for them.

At a recent four-day conference, one U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration special agent said, "Drug traffickers have the best technology that money can buy. And they hire people from the intelligence community in some countries to operate it for them or teach them how to use it."

The drug lords have an added advantage over government agencies -- they have tons of cash and there are no rules on how they can spend it.

The DEA agent said, "The cartels are ahead of us a lot of the time in having state-of-the-art technology because they can just go out and spend what it takes as soon as it is available. We have to get contracts, take bids, get approval."

The United States, of course, has an impressive array of a network of spy satellites, AWACS radar surveillance planes and paid informants at its disposal.

The drug traffickers can also intercept telephone calls, set up electronic surveillance inside of trucks and encrypt their cellular phone calls so that they cannot be decoded by law enforcement authorities.

One Pentagon official pointed out that the drug lords also spend millions to bribe government authorities all over the world. In Colombia, many members of the constitutional congress were paid off several years ago by drug traffickers who wanted to make it impossible to extradite them from Colombia.

It is a known fact that electronic surveillance devices have been found in the offices of Colombian government officials and prosecutors.

The Pentagon official spoken to for this report said that law enforcement will have a new tool that the drug lords will have a difficult time countering -- it's a device that can actually sniff out drugs. You point the device at something and it will tell you if there are drugs there. But the device is still experimental.

The Pentagon official said, "It costs millions and millions of dollars. There are only a very few of them. The problem is that they can cover only a very small area at any one time and to build one that could cover a whole ship's container would cost too much. There are millions of containers a year coming into this country and a lot of them have drugs in them."

Right out of a page of a James Bond novel, with a twist, the drug traffickers have their own "M" department people, such as brilliant chemists whose sole job it is to find ways to foil detection of smuggled drugs.

U.S. Air Force Colonel Sam Reed, the new director of counternarcotics operations at the U.S. Southern Command, said, "They do things like make a bathtub out of material that contains cocaine and then they break it down and extract the cocaine in the United States." They also are able to make furniture with fiberboard containing cocaine and then extract the drugs chemically.

(ERRI Analysis Note: These extensive intelligence-gathering efforts by the drug cartels may necessitate additional counter-intelligence operations on the part of local, state, and federal agencies. Cartel surveillence of local and state officers has been reported in the both the Southwestern and Southeastern parts of the United States, even to the point of following officers to their residences and placing tracking devices on LE vehicles. Additional caution by all counter-drug field operations personnel is urged as this "surveillence war" continues to increase in intensity. - C. L. Staten, ERRI Sr. Analyst)

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