USCG: More Clout

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More Clout

In the aftermath of 9/11, Coast Guard Intelligence fills a unique and growing niche within the 15-member intelligence community

By Sue A. Lackey
Sea Power
August 2005

Broader Mission

The Coast Guard is the newest member of the U.S. intelligence community, with a dual mission in law enforcement and national intelligence.

The service's Maritime Intelligence Fusion Centers are models of interagency distribution of intelligence.
Coast Guard intelligence personnel do not specialize and are rotated throughout the service.

After years in the shadow of its larger military counterparts, U.S. Coast Guard Intelligence [CGI] finds itself today with a bigger budget, broader mission and growing influence within the intelligence community.

“We are unique within the intelligence community, we sit on both sides of the wall,” said Capt. Patrick J. Nemeth, head of the Coast Guard Office of Intelligence Plans and Policy. “We have a law enforcement mission and a national intelligence mission. Because of that, we have all the authorities that all those different agencies do, combined.”

Officially inducted into the 15-member national intelligence community by Congress in December 2001, the Coast Guard is subject by law on certain issues to the Director of National Intelligence. The service also is a member of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and submits its intelligence budget under the aegis of the department.

Because of its unique mission and role as guardian of the nation's ports, CGI escapes conflicts over budget and authority with the other intelligence agencies, such as the CIA, FBI and military intelligence, which often occupy overlapping military or international jurisdictions.

“No one can really overlap or move into our area,” Nemeth said. “No one else is doing what we do. The closest agency we align with is the Navy. In the intelligence program, we don't have to get into the trenches and argue about who does what and how to do it, because we're the only ones doing our mission set.”

Although the Coast Guard is one of the nation's military services, its primary mission involves a federal law enforcement mandate: protecting the nation's economic interests and preventing crimes committed on domestic waterways, including smuggling, illegal fishing, human trafficking and piracy. It also has a limited international mission to protect domestic shipping interests.

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the Coast Guard has taken the lead in securing the nation's ports from acts of terrorism. In that role, Coast Guard Captains of the Port must address maritime threats that affect the jurisdictions of other agencies. Depending on the threat scenario, the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), DHS, Joint Terrorism Task Force, Customs and Border Patrol, Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Office of Naval Intelligence [in the case of threats to the fleet in U.S. waters] may be involved alone or jointly.

Far from seeing this as a tactical nightmare, CGI uses its larger counterparts as operational assets.

“We don't see this as a bad thing. The more partners we have, the better,” Nemeth said. “This is one of the strengths of the Coast Guard. From the intelligence perspective, if I can solve a problem without having to move a Coast Guard ship or airplane, that's a great success. I've saved the Coast Guard those resources.”

But along with the budgetary benefits, the sudden emphasis on intelligence has created organizational problems for the service. Unlike the other services, the Coast Guard has no rate for intelligence and training has been problematic. Once trained, personnel eventually will be rotated on to other billets, and their institutional ability lost to CGI. Conversely, personnel trained in another specialty may bring a new focus to intelligence collection and analysis, and, once trained, go back into the fleet with an increased awareness of intelligence issues.

“I've seen so many of my best people come from outside an intelligence background,” said Capt. Bill Davidson, head of the Coast Guard's Maritime Intelligence Fusion Center–Atlantic in Dam Neck, Va. “Some of my best people are corpsmen or cooks. A lot of what we do is based on the creativity of the watch-standers, and mostly junior officers. You'll find a petty officer second or third class who just comes up with a new way to do it. That creativity is important.”

The 2-year-old intelligence fusion center is a product of CGI's increased funding. It is a technology-driven center that collects, analyzes and disseminates tactical intelligence on ship movements, mariners, migration, smuggling, high-risk vessels, port security and threat assessments on an area stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the mid-Atlantic, and from Boston to the Caribbean. Utilizing only a seven-man team rotation, the fusion center functions as one of two nerve centers of maritime intelligence in operation 24 hours a day. The other, located in Alameda, Calif., monitors the Pacific region.

The Virginia center produces daily intelligence briefings and teleconferences for each of the five Coast Guard districts in the Atlantic region and with the Navy fleet. The fusion center posts its data on a secure government Internet location that is available instantly to all other members of the intelligence community, bypassing rigid interagency barriers that have impeded intelligence flow in the past.

“There was a tacit recognition that the service is unique in that it has a foot in both the military and law enforcement camps, and there was acknowledged value to that which had not been formalized by being a member of the intelligence community,” said Adm. James Loy, a former Coast Guard commandant and DHS deputy secretary.

“The Coast Guard network on the waterfront and in the approaches to the territorial U.S. all of a sudden became extraordinarily valuable. There [were] collection, analytical and distribution opportunities there to enhance our total national security and intelligence capabilities,” he said

But CGI had to scramble to bring the intelligence fusion center up to speed with inexperienced personnel.

“It was painful at first,” said Cmdr. Larry Prevost, the fusion center's director of Intelligence Operations. “Normally you can rely on your chiefs to run things, but I found myself training my own chiefs. We were starting from ground zero. There was no time to grow people within the system.

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“Virtually none of our initial crew was able to get any advance training prior to reporting. As a result, no more than 20 percent of the reporting crew had any experience. We had to conduct on the job training en masse and capitalize on skill sets and experience from other Coast Guard communities to make this happen,” he said.

CGI considers the Coast Guard's small size and the multiple skill sets of its personnel to be an asset on which it must capitalize in order to fulfill and expand its intelligence mission.

“Every sailor is a collector,” Nemeth said. “We expect every Coast Guardsman who goes overseas to tell us what they see that may impact the United States.”

Port threat assessment teams may see things that indicate which vessels are of high risk to the United States, for example, or personnel on liberty in the Caribbean may gather information about illicit drugs.

Davidson also sees the need for an increased human intelligence presence in the ports.

“That's one of the places we can get a free flow of information from other agencies,” he said. “We need that field information, the real-time information that's coming directly from the collector in the port. The more people we have in the ports that can interact with the locals, the other agencies, the commercial companies, the better our quality of information is.”

CGI has placed analysts with the National Counterterrorism Center, and at the Human Smuggling and Trafficking Center. It has also expanded its cooperation with the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), with the Navy's blessing. At the Intelligence Coordination Center (ICC), co-located with ONI in Suitland, Md., CGI works closely with naval intelligence personnel to process the huge volume of intelligence from both services, domestically and abroad, and forms it into the cohesive whole that comprises maritime domain awareness. Though affiliated with the Department of the Navy, the ICC serves as a central tasking center for maritime intelligence collection requirements, and may utilize resources throughout the intelligence community to fulfill those requirements.

“One of our biggest problems is the integration of that data,” Davidson said. “There is an enormous amount of information already available out there, but the quantity of information is beyond the number of analysts available, so we are looking at artificial intelligence to recognize automatically when certain scenarios pop up — vessels in a closed fishing ground, vessels out of normal shipping lanes, a search-and-rescue issue or a counterterrorism issue.”

CGI's current strength is approximately 800, compared to less than 200 when the service first joined the intelligence community. CGI estimates at least 60 percent of the service's drug seizures are intelligence driven, as are almost all of its alien smuggling cases.

CGI is not an investigative agency, and shies away from long-term, deep-cover investigations such as those conducted by the FBI and DEA. Nemeth foresees no future challenge to his service's intelligence niche, or the unique role of the Coast Guard.