Coast Guard team protects nation's busiest ports.

BOSTON -- THE 25-FOOT, RED-AND-GRAY U.S. Coast Guard response boat sped across busy Boston Harbor, zipping past ships of all sizes, from small sailing vessels to giant liquefied natural-gas containers.

As it approached foreign-flagged ships, the heavily armed boat slowed for a close look, with one of its crewmembers manning an M-240 7.62 mm machine gun on the foredeck.

The boat's crewmembers are part of Marine Safety and Security Team 91110, a small, specially trained unit assigned to help protect the city from terrorist attack.

The 76-person unit, known as MSST Boston, is one of 13 such organizations established at major ports along the nation's coastlines since the 2001 assaults against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

MSSTs are quick-reaction forces whose mission is to provide security for their homeports and to deploy nationwide in response to emerging threats against other high-priority waterside targets.

The Boston team has helped provide waterborne security for such national events as September's United Nations World Summit in New York City; the 2005 Superbowl in Jacksonville, Fla.; the G-8 Summit in Brunswick, Ga.; the most recent Democratic Party national convention in Boston, and the Republican one in New York, said the team's planning officer, Lt. Thomas Ottenwaelder.

Other MSSTs have traveled further afield, providing port security in places such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Two teams--one based in New Orleans, La., and another from Galveston, Texas--participated in relief operations after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

MSSTs are patterned after two other kinds of highly mobile Coast Guard organizations with very, different missions--port-security units and law-enforcement detachments. Port-security units help protect Navy assets in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere around the world, and law-enforcement detachments carry out drug-interdiction missions from Navy vessels, primarily in the Caribbean Sea and waters along the Pacific Coast of the Americas.

The MSSTs are trained and equipped specifically to fill security gaps at strategic U.S. seaports. MSST Boston was stood up in 2003.

Boston was selected as a site, because it is the leading city in New England--hub of a metropolitan area of 5.8 million people stretching from Maine to Connecticut. Every year, the city's teeming port terminals handle more than 1.3 million tons of general cargo, 1.5 million tons of non-fuels bulk cargo and 12.8 million tons of bulk fuel cargo. In 2005, 101 passenger ships are scheduled to call.

Like all MSST personnel, the Boston team members hone their skills at the Coast Guard's Special Missions Training Center, which is located on the Marine Corps's Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. They learn how to:

* Deploy rapidly to supplement U.S. military forces and homeland-security personnel anywhere around the country or the globe.

* Establish and enforce safety and security zones around ships, docks and other likely targets in order to limit the possibility of attacks.

* Respond to maritime terrorist or criminal acts in an effort to minimize resulting disruptions.

* Conduct high-speed maritime intercepts.

* Board and search any suspicious vessel and seize any potential contraband.

It's important for the public--and the rest of the Coast Guard--to realize that MSSTs are focused on maritime security, and not the service's traditional missions, such as boating safety, fisheries enforcement, and search and rescue, team members said.

In Boston, those responsibilities usually are handled by Coast Guard Station Boston, which was reestablished in 2003 after having been downsized during a 1996 realignment.

For the MSST, "search and rescue is not our primary mission," said Cooper, the executive officer. It's tertiary."

One exception is during natural disasters, such as Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. "One of our missions is to respond to natural disasters," O'Neill said. "Search and rescue is part of that."

MSST Boston includes several elements with specific assignments, explained the operations officer, Lt. Michael P. O'Neill. Two waterside detachments specialize in waterborne security. A maritime law-enforcement and force-protection unit focuses on boarding suspicious vessels. A dive team conducts underwater searches near ships and piers for explosives, narcotics, concealed human beings and other contraband.

The team has six divers, all graduates of the demanding Navy dive school in Panama City, Fla., said the divers' supervisor, Petty Officer Ron Cooper. They are required to complete a challenging six-week course, which includes scuba-diving techniques, diving medicine, recompression-chamber operations and salvage.

"When we find explosives, basically we just mark them and let somebody else take it from there," Cooper said. The team frequently calls in Navy explosive ordnance disposal technicians from Little Creek, Va. or Newport, Rhode Island. "We also may call the Rhode Island Sheriff's Department. They're the closest [EOD] asset."

The divers typically operate in pairs as a "buddy" system, Cooper said. "The only time we go down alone is when we're going after a stricken diver," he said. Even then another diver stands by on the surface to render aid, if needed.

A dive tender plans each mission and is on hand to monitor the operation, communicating with the divers and with the diving supervisor and using a stopwatch to keep track of how long the divers have been underwater. The divers are wired for sound so that they can hear and talk with the tenders on the surface and vice versa. If electronic communications fail, they fall back to using ancient technology, pulled hand signals on a rope linking the divers with topside, Cooper said.

Much of the underwater surveillance is done with a small, remotely operated vehicle, called the VideoRay Scout, explained Bosuns Mate 1st Class Kevin DeBoth.

The VideoRay, manufactured by VideoRay LLC, of Phoenixville, Pa., is 14 inches long and equipped with video cameras fore and aft. One camera shoots in color, the other in black and white. The images currently are captured in a video recorder, but within a month or so, the system will record to a laptop computer, DeBoth said.

"It's a lot more cost effective than relying just on divers," he noted. "You even can send it down with the divers to record what they see and do."

Learning how to use the device, however, has been a challenge. "You can learn the basics within four days," De Both said, "But it takes a lot of hours to learn how to maneuver it precisely. We've hung it up a few times."

The divers deploy with all of their gear--including 11 air tanks--loaded into four 20-foot-long trailers that can be hauled by trucks or loaded onto ships or HC-130 Hercules transport aircraft.

The maritime law-enforcement and force-protection unit, or MLEFP, traveled back to the Special Missions Training Center this summer for a five-week course in advanced boarding tactics and marksmanship, O'Neill said. This training was more sophisticated than the basic instruction that all MSST members receive when they join a team. "It's more focused, much more in depth," he said. "They're honing their skills through repetition, in the hands of some very skilled instructors."

It's important that those skills be sharp, O'Neill said, because "their business is boarding."

Getting the MLEFP members to the vessels that they must board is part of the job of the waterside detachments, which operate the team's boats.

MSST Boston is equipped with six Defender-class response boats that can be deployed on trailers, Coast Guard cutters or Navy ships, or HC-130s, Ottenwaelder said. The boats were among approximately 700 of such craft that the Coast Guard bought, beginning in 2003, from Safe Boats International, of Port Orchard, Wash., for a total of $145 million.

The team can deploy the boats quickly, he noted. "We have deployed cross-country within hours of notice. Locally, we can do it within minutes."

The boats rarely operate alone, explained the unit's executive officer, Lt. Eric M. Cooper. "We deploy no less than three boats at a time," he said. "We can have four boats in the water 24 hours a day, seven days a week."

Each boat is powered by two 225 HP engines, enabling them to crash through ocean waves at speeds in excess of 40 knots. Despite the engines' power, "they're nice and quiet," said Chief Bosuns Mate Paul Wells, head of the team's Waterside Detachment 2. "They're four-stroke engines, not like the old two strokes. We put a lot of wear and tear on them, and they can take it."

The team includes two waterside detachments of 24 Coast Guardsmen operating three boats per detachment, Wells noted. Each boat has a crew of three. "We're all cross-trained for tactical missions. Each crewmember can do the others' jobs."

All also are trained to operate their boat's weapons, Wells said. Each craft is equipped with machine guns, mounted fore and aft, with an M-16 7.62 mm rifle and two 12-gauge shotguns stored inside the cabin on easily accessed racks. One of the shotguns is configured to fire buckshot. The other uses less-than-lethal rounds. In addition, crewmembers are armed with M-9 9 mm pistols.

"We're fully qualified with all weapons," Wells said.

Keeping skills sharp amid a busy deployment schedule is "the tricky part," he said. Training is conducted during the brief times between deployments.

One exercise Wells planned to run soon involved boat tactics. "I'll have [the boat crews] set out a security zone."

Such zones are established to protect likely targets from attack. Examples include liquefied natural gas container ships or storage facilities, where explosions could cause a major disaster. Entering a security zone or moving around within it without prior permission is prohibited.

In the exercise, response boats are assigned to patrol the perimeters of the zone.

"After I get the boats in place, I'll be back in five minutes, make a run at them and see how they do," Wells said. After the exercise is over, "we'll debrief them," and discuss what went right and what went wrong.

The crews have to be diplomatic when enforcing the zones. A boat rushing toward a target "may not be a terrorist getting ready to attack," Wells said. "It may just be a bunch of tourists wanting to take a close look. We have to explain--nicely--that this is a security zone, and they have to keep away."

Team members are required to maintain a constant state of readiness, said Bosun's Mate 3rd Class Dylan Skidmore. "We have to be ready to deploy at a moment's notice and be gone for an undisclosed amount of time," he said. Once, he said, he received four days' notice for a nine-month deployment. "You learn to keep everything, all your finances, simple."