Protecting ports: cooperation key to expanding coast guard's reach.

BOSTON--Cmdr. Thomas Miller, chief of the prevention department at the Coast Guard's Boston sector, sits in a corner office with a view of the city and the port.

To his right is the North End district, where tourists dine in Italian eateries and stop to see the church where lanterns signaled Paul Revere to begin his famous midnight ride.

To his left, container ships and liquefied natural gas tankers ply the harbor. They cruise past skyscrapers and million dollar condominiums that line the water's edge.

Protecting the nation's ports from a terrorist attack has been a priority for the Department of Homeland Security since 9/11. The "home" task largely falls to the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection, while the Navy handles the "away game."

"Information flow and interagency cooperation and interoperability are really starting to come together," Miller says. "It's not to say that we're there, but we're moving down the right path."

Gathering information on who and what is approaching U.S. waters--also known as maritime domain awareness--is key to the overall goal of protecting the United States, Department of Homeland Security leaders have said. Officials want to know with certainty what ships are coming, and who and what is aboard. DHS has installed more than 670 radiation detection monitors at its ports of entry, but as Boston harbor illustrates, if a weapon of mass destruction enters a densely populated area, it may already be too late.

Boston's port is the oldest operating continually in the Western Hemisphere. It is home to the Conley Terminal, which handles 1.5 million tons of containerized cargo annually, a fishing fleet, and a growing cruise ship industry, which sees about 100 port calls per year. Logan International Airport, across the channel from the downtown skyline, sits on the water's edge. Passing by each day within sight of the skyscrapers are container ships and oil and liquefied natural gas tankers.

In Washington, policy makers have two initiatives underway to further expand the gathering of intelligence on ships as they make their way to ports. The national plan to achieve maritime awareness calls for an inter-agency group to write a concept of operations to determine how to best identify threats as early and distant from U.S. shores as possible.

Rear Adm. Joseph Nimmich, Coast Guard assistant commandant for policy and planning, who serves on that group, says that simply finding and tracking vessels is relatively easy.

"It's really what's on that vessel [and] who's on that vessel. The lessons of 9/11 have taught us that the vessel itself may become a weapon depending on who is on board," he says at a Navy League conference.

The concept of operations should be finished by the end of this summer, Nimmich says. When that is completed, a second group will look at an investment strategy: However, the groups' work will not come to fruition until the 2009 budget process, when Congress will decide what parts of the investment strategy to fund, Nimmich adds.

In the near term, the Defense Department's Northern Command and the Coast Guard are organizing a maritime domain awareness "community of interest."

Northcom has formed several such communities to tackle the longstanding problem of overcoming barriers to network-centric communications, which prevent different agencies or computer systems from sharing information. For ports, the problem may be even more acute. In Boston, the Coast Guard, CBP, along with city, state and port authority police all patrol the harbor.

Navy Rear Adm. Nancy Brown, Northern Command director of architectures and integration, says the community will concentrate on existing technologies to achieve its goals of making Web-based data easily available to all interested parties.

The automatic identification system (AIS) will be the first data collection system to be tested. AIS is a beacon system administered by the Coast Guard that requires all commercial ships 65 feet or longer to broadcast information such as speed, rate of turn, heading, and longitude and latitude every three seconds. It has been described as "air traffic control" for the seas. The vessel's destination, call number, estimated time of arrival at port and other data are broadcast every six minutes.

AIS was chosen because the system is relatively new, and the data already uniform, Brown says at the conference. AIS began operations Dec. 31, 2004.

"Everybody is collecting information, but how can we post it in a form that anybody who needs it can pull it, can view it and understand it in the same way?" Brown says.

The community of interest hopes to have a Web-based system up and running by September or October. Cargo, crew and passenger data collection will be added later, she says.

The Navy has a "superb capability to track and find vessels," Nimmich says. But it doesn't have the authority or capability to know what's on the boat.

"There are tremendous amounts of open source, self-reported information out there that we all need to have access to," Nimmich adds.

In Boston, Miller says the traditional barriers to inter-agency communication are coming down.

A local area maritime security committee was formed and meets about four times per year. Its representatives include officials from the Coast Guard, CBP, city and state police, Boston's homeland security department, and members of the port industry.

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard and CBP are leveraging each other's unique capabilities, while maintaining their traditional roles, Miller says. The Coast Guard maintains an eye on boat safety and hazardous materials aboard ships to prevent accidents or someone from using chemicals as an improvised weapon of mass destruction. CBP specializes in halting contraband, by analyzing cargo manifests to look for anomalies that may require boarding a vessel before it reaches port. The two agencies tap into each others' databases, and carry out joint boardings at sea, Miller says.

Commercial vessels are currently required to transmit their manifests, crew lists and other specifications 96 hours prior to arrival. The only exceptions are ships departing from nearby Canadian ports, which must do so 24 hours in advance.

Improving the ability to analyze manifests and gather intelligence on vessels will be key to expanding maritime domain awareness, Coast Guard officials say at the conference.

Miller points to drug interdiction as one threat where intelligence gathering and inter-agency cooperation can make a difference. Smugglers have used powerful magnets to attach contraband underneath ships originating out of South American ports. These so-called "parasitic devices" are presumably employed without the knowledge of the captain. Boats arriving from ports with such a history are red flagged. State police dive teams are called in to inspect the hulls.

While upgraded databases, communication systems and architectures such as AIS expand maritime domain awareness, personal contacts have been one of the most visible improvements since 9/11, Miller says. State, local and federal agencies now know whom to call, and what capabilities their counterparts can provide.

"The relationships here in Boston are very good. And I think you could go to any port in the ]United States] and find things moving along that track, with a few exceptions here and there," Miller says.

RELATED ARTICLE: Gas tankers prompt tight security.

BOSTON--Three specially designed tugboats yank I the hulking pale green liquefied natural gas tanker from its dock near Boston Harbor.

More than 1,000 feet long, with an odd color and sets of pipes sticking out the top, it's apparent that this is no ordinary ship.

And with three Coast Guard boats, and four others from state, city and port authority law enforcement agencies surrounding it, this is no ordinary departure.

Bringing up the rear is the Pendant, a 65-year-old, 65-footIong ocean-going tugboat, and one of the oldest platforms in the service's inventory that pulls double duty in the winter as an icebreaker. Today, she is serving as the command and control center for the 10-boat security operation.

Chief Warrant Officer 3rd Class Donald Tucker pulls out a pair of binoculars and scans the harbor.

"There's not much boat traffic," he says. "That makes my job a little easier."

Escorting the LNG tankers in and out of the harbor is serious business. Every five to seven days, the Coast Guard is called on to provide security for the ships carrying fuel from Trinidad and Tobago in the Caribbean. Although this tanker is mostly empty, the procedure is the same here and at other U.S. ports that handle LNG shipments. The fear is that a terrorist will attempt a USS Cole-type attack by ramming an explosive laden boat into its side.

The city, state and port authority boats guard the outer perimeter, while two Coast Guard tactical response boats, each armed with an M240 machine gun, serve as a last line of defense at port and starboard. The tugboats carry water hoses capable of shooting 10,000 gallons of water per minute in case of fire. "We don't do warning shots in the port of Boston," Tucker says. "lf we're going to shoot, we're going to shoot to kill."

Liquefied natural gas is not as flammable as its gaseous state, and there has never been a major accident with a LNG tanker on the water, but regulations call for tight security whenever such vessels arrive in a U.S. port.

Cmdr. Thomas Miller, chief of the prevention department at the Coast Guard's Boston sector, says protecting the gas shipments is a top priority in Boston. "There's no other place in the United States that has an LNG tanker that's going right through a metropolitan area."

Most small boat operators in the harbor know not to sail too close to the ships. Doing so will result in a three-month license suspension. Recently, one water taxi operator, who was too involved in a cell phone conversation to take notice of Tucker's hails, steered his boat too close and breached the security zone. He found himself out of work for go days.

As the tanker slowly makes its way toward the harbor islands, a small boat speeds on a parallel path. It does not respond to Tucker's calls, and he dispatches one of the state police boats to intercept. The boat stops to let the tanker pass.

A few minutes later, the security operation ends, and the tanker is left alone to make its journey back to the Caribbean.

--STEW MAGNUSON