35 tunnels under border discovered since 9/11..some with phone service

[MORTARDUDE]

http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/...l-terror_x.htm

In age of terror, U.S. fears tunnels pose bigger threat
By William M. Welch, USA TODAY
SAN DIEGO ? Special Agent Frank Marwood was showing a visitor the half-mile long, 80-foot deep smuggler's tunnel his agents discovered beneath the U.S.-Mexican border at Otay Mesa when his cellphone interrupted.

A U.S. immigration agent stands in a tunnel found in January stretching about a half-mile, 80 feet underground near Otay Mesa, Calif.
By Sandy Huffaker, Getty Images

An agent was reporting in with a startling new find: another tunnel, this one shorter and more crudely built, but big enough to provide yet another subterranean port of entry into the USA.

These are busy days for the men and women who guard the nation's border ? particularly for the team of federal agents charged with rooting out border tunnels.

The tunnel Marwood learned of last month was the 35th federal agents have found since Sept. 11, 2001, when terrorist attacks gave a new urgency to the search.

While drug smuggling and illegal immigration have long been border concerns, the threat of international terrorists entering the USA by burrowing under the border has made the effort to detect tunnels a national security priority.

"Of course they could" be used by terrorists, Marwood says of the tunnels his team unearths. "The potential is there, and that makes it unacceptable."

"It's a transnational threat," says Lt. Col. Steve Baker, an Army engineer who is part of a military effort to support the tunnel search. "You don't know that they're just bringing drugs through there."

No federal law prohibits building such tunnels. On Wednesday, a group of senators and House members introduced a bill that would make it a federal crime punishable by up to 20 years in prison to build or finance such tunnels. Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., said she pushed the idea after Marwood gave her a tour of the tunnel here.

"What I found was amazing: a sophisticated tunnel, with lights, ventilation, pumps and a concrete floor," she said. "This really illustrates the danger ? that smugglers will use these tunnels to subvert our border checkpoints, trafficking drugs, humans and weapons under the border."

Marwood, 54, is deputy special agent in charge of the San Diego office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security. He is also in charge of the ad hoc task force of half a dozen agents from ICE, the Drug Enforcement Adminstration and the Border Patrol who have been detailed to work together to find and stop the tunnelers.

Agents from the three agencies agreed to set up the team three years ago and operate out of an office in a nondescript building among the many featureless industrial buildings and warehouses near a border crossing at Otay Mesa.

The team was created not on orders from Washington but out of concerns from agents. The Border Patrol officers were discovering tunnels when their trucks sunk into the dirt after the ground had collapsed over shallow passages.

The discovery in January of the sophisticated tunnel brought attention to the team's efforts and the remarkable string of discoveries over the past 4? years.

The big Otay Mesa tunnel ? with 220-volt cables and pumps for water drainage ? likely took more than a year to build, Marwood said. It required sophisticated engineering and moving hundreds of truckloads of dirt. The money it would take to build it suggests it was financed by drug smugglers, he says.

Agents brought in sniffing equipment to test the tunnel for radiation and biohazards. They were relieved when the tests suggested no nuclear, chemical or biological weapons had been conveyed.

The tunnel discoveries raise the question, however, of how such large-scale construction projects can go undetected in a technological age when sonar and other methods can spot mineral veins or treasures of ancient civilizations.


By David Maung, AP
A Mexican federal agent crawls through a hidden tunnel that started in an abandoned house in Tijuana, Mexico, July 8, 2004.


Detection is complicated by varying types of soil. Don Steeples, professor of geophysics at the University of Kansas, says soils with clay or high groundwater tables resist use of ground-penetrating radar. Some tunnel detection efforts measure the seismic waves from ground blasts and look for echoes that indicate underground cavities.

"There are technologies that should be able to be made to work in this environment," James Sabatier says. An acoustic scientist at the University of Mississippi, Sabatier recently hosted a scientific meeting with military and other researchers on the problem of tunnel detection.

The tunnel team is getting help from the U.S. military and its Joint Task Force North, based at Fort Bliss in Texas, which helps law enforcement agencies combat drugs and terrorism. Baker says a group of volunteers from all branches of service are trying out several technological systems to detect tunnels.

The most promising technique right now is gradiometry, which measures deviations in the Earth's gravitational forces to detect underground voids. The group is also testing ground-penetrating radar and seismic techniques.

"We don't have a silver bullet," Baker says. "There's no one single method that is 100% all the time in every condition we run into."

The technology is not foolproof. It has produced a lot of bad leads, such as false readings that prove to be underground drainage, natural cavities in the earth or sometimes nothing at all, ICE spokeswoman Lauren Mack says.

The most effective way to find border tunnels has been old fashioned police work: informers, tips, surveillance.

"We rely on intelligence to get us close to our target areas and then use our equipment to confirm or deny if we have a subterranean crossing point," Baker says.

There remains hope that technology will help put the tunnels out of business.

"Obviously we're working toward being able to find them before they're completed as opposed to just finding them after they are completed," Marwood says. "All of us would like the technology to be farther along than it is."

Charlie did it, so why can't they.