A Crystal Ball for Intelligence Needs

The Coast Guard's ICC and MIC

By PHILLIP THOMPSON

Phillip Thompson is a Marine Corps veteran and a senior fellow with the Lexington Institute, a public-policy research group in Arlington, Va.

A container ship carrying a French registration prepares to pull into the port of New Orleans. The captain radios his intentions and faxes the appropriate documentation to the port authorities: the cargo his ship is carrying, his port of origin, and information about the crew.

Port officials review the documents and compare the information against their computerized databases. A crew member's name is flagged by the computer. Their suspicions aroused, the officials flash the name to Washington, where an intelligence analyst confirms the name as one of several aliases used by a terrorist wanted internationally. Orders are sent back to New Orleans to apprehend the man immediately.

An FBI team is assembled and, as the ship pulls into port, the agents board the vessel and confront the captain, who is unaware of the real identity of one of his crew. He hands over the terrorist, who is led away in shackles to await his day in court.

Assessments and Projections

This fictional scenario may sound like a soon-to-be-released movie about the high-tech world of CIA intelligence, but in this case the analysts of the Coast Guard's Intelligence Coordination Center (ICC) are the heroes. Preparing for an eventuality such as the one just described is only one of the myriad functions of the center, based in Suitland, Md., where it is co-located with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI). ICC develops intelligence for Coast Guard planners that drives policy, budgets, and manpower requirements for the multimission service.

The center also takes on responsibility for various "special projects," said Michael Baker, a chief of the center's counterdrug intelligence section. One such project, an assessment of the threats the Coast Guard will most likely face over the next 20 years, was instrumental in developing the requirements for the service's "Deepwater" program, an innovative recapitalization effort designed to replace and/or upgrade Coast Guard cutters, aircraft, and other hardware resources over the next two decades. That assessment, published as a booklet titled "Threats and Challenges to Maritime Security 2020," spells out in detail current trends in immigration, pollution, climatic changes, piracy, drug-smuggling, and terrorism. Appendices detail projections for each, giving the Coast Guard a clear vision of what challenges lie ahead.

Other ICC assessments, Baker said, help determine how much funding the Coast Guard will need and how it should be used. One example of such an assessment--most are classified--is a study on the evolution of drug-smuggling techniques and a projection of what methods and tactics smugglers are most likely to employ in the coming years. This data helps the Coast Guard determine what type of helicopters and cutters would be most useful, and how many of each will be required, to accomplish its counternarcotics mission.

Assymetrical Capabilities

The ICC began in 1984 as an outgrowth of the Coast Guard's own internal investigative service, said Baker, a Coast Guard veteran who served as the boarding officer aboard a 270-foot medium-endurance cutter. As the so-called war on drugs escalated, investigators were pulled into various law-enforcement missions, particularly in the waters off south Florida. This assignment resulted in the Coast Guard being more heavily involved in interagency intelligence development and assessment.

As more and more Coast Guardsmen were assigned to intelligence-related operations, the Coast Guard established the ICC in order to develop its own intelligence production capability. The center served as the service's only intelligence node--performing strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence functions--until the early 1990s, when a more expansive organization was established to give the Coast Guard's area commanders direct access to an intelligence staff. The ICC passed off its operational functions to the area command-ers themselves, and many of its tactical functions to smaller staffs throughout the Coast Guard.

Although the ICC had its genesis in the drug war, its current responsibilities span nearly the entire spectrum of national security. This is not surprising, given two facts: (1) the end of the Cold War has given rise to "asymmetrical threats" that can come in the form of attacks on information-technology systems, terrorist attacks, and/or the use of weapons of mass destruction; and (2) the Coast Guard's decades of experience in maritime safety, law enforcement, and national security make it uniquely capable of meeting and defeating such asymmetrical threats, particularly in a maritime environment.

A Broad Spectrum of Missions

Today's Coast Guard does far more than rescue errant boaters. Coast Guardsmen also are involved in the interdiction of illegal migrants and drugs in the Caribbean, fisheries enforcement in the Pacific, and port security functions in the Persian Gulf; they also are routinely assigned to overseas deployments with the Navy. Each of these mission areas represents an avenue by which an asymmetrical attack may develop. Some are obvious--the drug trade, for example--but others are more subtle, such as the enforcement of fishery regulations. Surprisingly to some, perhaps, the preservation of U.S. fishing grounds has national-security implications. This is because the global demand for fish is growing even as the planet's fishing supply dwindles. This, in turn, increases the instances of poaching by foreign fishermen, who can easily slip into the waters of the U.S. Economic Exclusion Zones (EEZs). In the past two years alone, the Coast Guard has been involved in at least two confrontations with Russian fishing boats that trespassed into the U.S. EEZ. In both cases, tensions escalated to dangerous levels when Russian ships converged on the scene as Coast Guard boarding crews were preparing to take the poachers in tow.

Likewise, illegal immigration--and, more importantly, the smuggling of humans--provides an often impenetrable cover for terrorists or other enemies of the United States. But, because illegal migration is not a defense-related issue, intelligence can be hard to come by. However, the Coast Guard ICC tracks migration trends and from those trends develops intelligence that can be shared with other government agencies, such as the Justice Department and the U.S. Customs Service.

Commandant Adm. James M. Loy calls the Coast Guard's intelligence focus "maritime domain awareness," and Baker said it's catching on elsewhere in the government. "The level of awareness for national decision-makers is higher than it has ever been before," he said. "We work very closely with the State Department and the Navy Department. The threat has become so diverse it's hard to tell who the bad guys are. We don't have a clear enemy anymore."

Preventing Surprises

The ICC, staffed with about 50 Coast Guardsmen and civilians, functions primarily as an arm of Coast Guard headquarters, but it is only one node in the service's intelligence community. Each of the Coast Guard's two area commanders--Pacific and Atlantic--has an intelligence staff that provides operational-level intelligence. The staffs also provide a great deal of input to the ICC in the development of strategic intelligence.

"No one person is the expert in the Coast Guard," Baker explained. "Assessments are done with the Pac' and 'Lant staffs to develop the best information possible."

For practical purposes, the Coast Guard uses operational-level intelligence to focus on the movement and allocation of its limited seagoing assets. The Atlantic Area staff reviews past operations, for example, monitors current operations, and develops estimates based on a given year's drug-interdiction trends on where and how to best deploy Coast Guard assets. The staffs also conduct their own threat assessments based on their area's priorities--e.g., drugs, fisheries, and illegal migrants.

These operational-level threat assessments are important, Baker said, because a failure to understand the regional situation can have devastating consequences. The 1980 Mariel boatlift from Cuba, for example, was a wake-up call for Coast Guard intelligence staffs. "The Coast Guard was so surprised by the Mariel boatlift that we have planned and planned and planned so that we don't get surprised again," he said.

The staffs now develop the information needed to help agencies anticipate if and when another such incident may occur. At the same time, contingency plans involve several other government agencies to ensure that, in the event of another mass migration, the United States is prepared to cope with unforeseen transportation, water, shelter, and medical requirements. Tabletop exercises are held every three years to practice coordination among the Coast Guard, the Justice Department, Florida state agencies, and a number of other federal agencies.

A Frustrating Rendezvous

On the tactical level, the Coast Guard operates the Maritime Intelligence Center (MIC) in Miami. Run by Coast Guardsmen--with liaison officers from the other services and other government agencies also participating--the MIC develops the same type of intelligence as the ICC itself: hard data on where drug smugglers are so that Coast Guard crews can interdict them.

"They [MIC personnel] are the ones who say, 'There's a boat leaving the Bahamas in four hours,'" Baker said.

With a staff of about 30, the MIC works in concert with Joint Interagency Task Force East in Key West, Fla., which is responsible for operations in the eastern and northern areas of the Caribbean. But, while JIATF is a joint staff with multiservice responsibilties, the MIC focuses only on Coast Guard missions in the central and western Caribbean.

In addition, a handful of intelligence analysts in Puerto Rico serve as the "eyes and ears" of the MIC with regards to illegal migration and smuggling in the Caribbean. Because it is charged with keeping an eye on various Caribbean chokepoints and the Florida Straits, the MIC develops information that determines where Coast Guard assets should be dedicated for regular patrols.

"The MIC handles diverse missions from law enforcement to national-security issues in addition to drugs," Baker said.

Even with all these assets, the development of accurate usable intelligence can be extremely frustrating, given the difficulty of coordinating among several agencies expeditiously enough to apprehend a suspect. One law-enforcement patrol by a Coast Guard cutter operating out of San Juan, P.R., last summer demonstrates the point.

The cutter, working with onboard Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents and its own headquarters in Puerto Rico, planned to arrest a suspect when his boat cleared customs in St. Kitt. The DEA agents were communicating, via cell phone, with a colleague aboard the suspect's boat, but the lack of constant surveillance left the Coast Guard crew guessing as to the boat's exact location as the cutter's captain radioed reports back to San Juan. The reports had to be coordinated with other agencies, some of which were in Washington, D.C.; in the end, the suspect got away, even though the crew searched a pre-planned rendezvous point for hours.

"Drops of Mercury"

As the service's operational demands increase, so does its need for highly developed intelligence. Baker said the ICC is in the process of "slowly expanding" the number of civilian analysts in the center, a move that began in the mid-1990s as part of an effort to retain the "corporate knowledge" that might have been lost because of the frequent turnover of Coast Guard personnel. Because the Coast Guard has no specific intelligence designators, its analysts come primarily from the service's operating forces and are assigned elsewhere after a two- or three-year tour in ICC.

Continuity is extremely important in a world of ever-growing threats in the wake of the Cold War. Baker used a "mercury" analogy to liken the evolution of the monolithic Cold War threat to the broader spectrum of threats the services face today.

"You start out with one drop of mercury," he said. "But if you put your thumb on it, suddenly you have 12 drops."