Steve Quayle News Alerts

Feb. 25, 2003
By Steve Johnson, MSNBC

Nearly 18 months after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and despite repeated warnings of the threat to American ports, U.S. officials still have no way of identifying the hundreds of cargo ships currently plying U.S. coastal waters. And critics say efforts to fix the problem have been bogged down in resistance from shippers, with even a watered-down solution still a year and a half away.

“WHAT BOTHERS me is I still see inaction,” said Capt. Ed Page, former Coast Guard captain of the Port of Los Angeles-Long Beach and now vice president of the Maritime Information Services of North America, a non-profit group of maritime-related companies. The MISNA group wants all large cargo vessels equipped with gear that would use an Inmarsat satellite to automatically tell security officials the ship’s name, course, speed and location.

But so far the International Maritime Organization (IMO), which regulates international shipping, is not willing to go along. Instead, in a new directive published in January, the agency is giving ship owners until the end of next year, 2004, to install a short-range system that will identify ships within 20 to 25 miles of the U.S. coast — but not in the open ocean.

‘When the Exxon Valdez [oil tanker spill] occurred, the Coast Guard said to hell with IMO, we’ll come up with our own regs. We should say you have to play by these rules. We want to know where you are.’ — ED PAGE, Vice president, Maritime Information Systems of North America

Whether the broader system — similar to that used to track commercial airliners — will ever be adopted is still in doubt. “The intelligence community would like to have that capability,” said Anthony Regalbuto, former acting director of port security for the Coast Guard and now head of the agency’s office of policy and planning for port security. “At the IMO, that may be negotiated differently. They may try to limit [use of the gear] to within a certain coastal range.”

Some shippers are worried that competitors could use the satellite data to their advantage; others argue that terrorists themselves could abuse the system to find their targets. MISNA’s Page argues that those problems could be solved by encrypting the data and giving only certain government security agencies access to it.
“This is a very, very inexpensive system,” Page argued.

The necessary equipment would cost $2,500 per vessel to install, according to Page, and $2.50 to $3 per day to operate. Since many of the vessels are already required to have satellite communication systems for safety, the only outlay would be the negligible operating cost, Page said.

He wants the United States to ignore the IMO and adopt the regulations unilaterally. Those vessels that install the gear would get favored treatment in U.S. ports. “When the Exxon Valdez [oil tanker spill] occurred, the Coast Guard said to hell with IMO, we’ll come up with our own regs,” Page said. “We should say you have to play by these rules. We want to know where you are.”

THE THREAT

No one doubts the threat to the United States from rogue vessels, both from the ships themselves and from their possible cargo. Officials worry that terrorists could sink a large vessel in the locks of the St. Lawrence Seaway, for example, or open the tanks and pour oil into New York Harbor, or ram the pillars supporting the Golden Gate Bridge with a ship loaded with highly explosive liquefied natural gas. Even worse, weapons of mass destruction — chemical, biological or nuclear — could be hidden in just one of the 6 million containers that enter the United States each year via ship.

The Coast Guard is the first line of defense, trying to identify suspicious vessels far from the U.S. coastline. But the Coast Guard has no way to do that, short of physically stopping and boarding each of the 6,000 large cargo vessels that visit the United States each year, an impossible task.

Unlike the commercial aviation industry, there are no ‘ship traffic controllers’ keeping tabs on each ship, nor is there even a comprehensive radar system showing what is off the U.S. coastline. Existing radar covers less than 2 percent of the U.S. coast.

Unlike the commercial aviation industry, there are no “ship traffic controllers” keeping tabs on each ship, nor is there even a comprehensive radar system showing what is off the U.S. coastline. Existing radar covers less than 2 percent of the U.S. coast.

The Coast Guard and the U.S. Customs agency are trying to locate potential threats by requiring ship owners to provide more information on their vessels and by working to inspect them as they load their cargo overseas.

Foreign vessels are required to notify the Coast Guard 96 hours before arriving in the United States, providing the names of all crew members, destinations, ports of call en route to the United States and cargo. The data is entered into a database, crew names are cross-checked against lists of known terrorists, and cargo and destination are checked for anything unusual (such as a load of palm oil going to a port that normally doesn’t receive such a cargo).

The Coast Guard then physically boards and inspects suspicious ships, before they enter port. “It’s a tremendous challenge just being able to sort the good from the bad,” said Brian Kelley, Coast Guard fellow with the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

The worldwide shipping industry is vastly different from commercial airlines. Ownership of vessels is often shadowy — a majority of the world’s cargo vessels fly the flags of Panama and Liberia, countries with lax regulations that are notoriously lenient in allowing owners to hide their identities.

And while the crew manifest, cargo and destination information is helpful, it is also easy to mislead authorities. The largest number of crew members worldwide comes from the Philippines, with 200,000 sailors, followed by Indonesia, with 80,000 — both countries with active radical Muslim insurgencies, and potential sympathies for anti-U.S. terrorists.

STOP TERRORISTS OVERSEAS?

The U.S. Customs department is trying to weed out rogue ships or cargoes before they leave foreign ports, to thwart terrorists before they get close to U.S. harbors. But the task facing the agency is daunting. Even in the United States, where Customs has broad authority, a study of 12 ports done in 2000 found numerous security problems, including widespread theft from container vessels by organized crime groups and an estimated 200,000 stolen automobiles secretly shipped out of the country.

‘Will we ever have a radar system that’s going to give us the same domain awareness we have for air transportation? That remains to be seen how much our country and other countries are willing to pay for it.’ — ANTHONY REGALBUTO, Head of Coast Guard's office of policy and planning for port security

And even if a ship is successfully inspected overseas, there is no way for U.S. officials to track large numbers of vessels as they make their way to the United States. “The gap is that once we inspect these vessels, and say they have a load on a trip to Los Angeles, no one is watching to see if they stop along the way,” said the MISNA’s Page.

The United States can use satellites and spy planes to keep track of a handful of specific ships. “But you’ve got thousands of blips out there,” said Page. “Ninety-nine percent are good guys — if you can identify the blips, you can sort the needle from the haystack.”

So why aren’t there rules requiring all ships to carry identification gear?

The Coast Guard’s Regalbuto says ultimately the issue is one of money. “Will we ever have a radar system that’s going to give us the same domain awareness we have for air transportation? That remains to be seen how much our country and other countries are willing to pay for it,” he said.

Shipping industry officials stress that their concern over the cost of maritime security measures is important. “People still don’t want to pay more or accept delays,” said Frank Keane, general manager of the Port of Albany, N.Y. “There has to be the flow of cargo, the flow of trade.”

But terrorism experts say any successful major terrorist attack against U.S. ports would dock cargo ships worldwide and cripple the economy. And it would force the shipping industry to adopt the same proposals for reform that it is now resisting.

http://www.msnbc.com/news/877139.asp?0cv=NA01