NIAGARA, N.Y., Feb. 8 (UPI) -- Border Patrol Agent Richard Warwas of Falfurrias, Texas, is bent against the cold, snow-flecked wind, as he watches the giant freight train slowly approaching over the International Railway Bridge.
Where Warwas was born and normally works, the Texas-Mexican border, a "cold snap" takes the temperature down to 50 degrees, and the temperature has averaged 80 degrees. But on this late January day, he is standing on the shore of the Niagara River, 600 yards from Canada, on a slate gray afternoon with an 18-degree temperature reading. The wind chill factor makes it feel like 5 above zero.
"Goretex," said a visitor "can really protect you against the wind."
"The only thing I like about Goretex," Warwas grumbles, "is the TEX."
But Warwas is there by his own choosing. He volunteered to be in a group of Texas Border Patrol agents sent to serve along the Canadian border in the wake of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 as the government desperately tried to seal the 4,000 miles of land and water separating the United States from Canada.
At the time that the 19 airline hijackers flew the planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, there were fewer than 500 Border Patrol agents out of a national force of 9,000 deployed along the Canadian border.
The bulk of the rest, more than 8,000, were, like Warwas, stationed along the border of Mexico, trying to interdict the hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens from Mexico and the largest land narcotics route in the world.
Warwas' assignment, along with seven other agents, is to search slowly moving freight trains as they enter and leave the United States. He is looking for illegal aliens on the incoming freights and possibly fleeing terrorist suspects on the outgoing ones.
The agents fan out on both sides of the train, this one a 60-car freight moving at about 5 mph. Alan Marshall, the largest Border Patrol agent in the team, standing well over 6 feet and husky to boot, is given the precarious assignment of climbing to the top of a rickety signal tower so he can shine a hand-held spotlight down into the freight cars and grain gondolas as they pass. Marshall directs the engineer in the locomotive by hand-held radio.
Warwas's assignment underscores the enormous complications and contradictions of protecting a nation with 7,500 miles of land and inland water borders with Canada and Mexico where 11.2 million trucks and 2.2 million rail cars cross into the United States each year.
Teams of six or seven officers working on a virtually around-the-clock-basis are required to clear these relatively few trains. When these cars continue toward a rail yard in Buffalo, N.Y., the Border Patrol will be assured that there are no aliens hiding under or around the outside of the cars or in empty gondolas.
If the car is closed with a Canadian Customs seal, the agents don't open it and have no idea whether people or even a nuclear bomb is hidden inside. The U.S. Customs Service won't verify the closed cars are safe until they are well within the United States.
Cargo checking is the job of the Customs Service, but manpower shortages make a Customs check at this point impossible. Customs mounts a strobe lit-video device on the Canadian side, which shows them the rail car numbers as they pass. They can check these against pre-filed manifests and choose cars to actually spot-check when the train reaches the yard near Buffalo.
Halfway through the train today was a tank car marked "chlorine."
Chlorine is so hazardous that it is shipped in both Canada and the U.S. under specific rules for loading and unloading. Whether this car had been tampered with, contained explosives or any other hazard, would not be discovered, if at all, until Custom's inspectors looked at it in the rail yards in the United States and close to a population center with hundreds of thousands of people.
Several miles south of the rail bridge is the 75-year-old Peace Bridge, one of the two busiest vehicular land crossings in the United States, stretching more than a mile from Fort Erie, Ont., to Niagara Falls, N.Y.
More than 6.5 million private cars and 1.4 million commercial vehicles cross this bridge annually along 12 traffic lanes.
Within hours of the Sept. 11 attack, the bridge went to Level One alert, causing historic backups. The American Trucking Association, which represents 30,000 trucking companies nationwide, reported 24-hour delays at some crossings and as much as 4 hours to 5 hours for commercial vehicles over the Peace Bridge.
Considering that one-third of all trucks that enter the United States annually traverse the Peace Bridge and three other bridges between Ontario and the United States, the hasty border alerts were part of what Coast Guard Cmdr. Stephen E. Flynn, an expert on world trade, called a "self-imposed embargo" on American trade.
"Nineteen men wielding box cutters," he wrote recently in Foreign Affairs, "ended up accomplishing what no adversary of the world's sole superpower could ever have aspired to: a successful blockade of the U.S. economy."
Flynn reported in his article that the "rule of the thumb in the border-inspection business" is that it takes five inspectors three hours to conduct a thorough physical inspection of a loaded 40-foot container or an 18-wheel truck.
Figuring that nearly 4,000 truck and commercial vehicles cross Peace Bridge each day, Flynn's estimate shows that even in the first days after Sept. 11, achieving that kind of search would be impossible without commerce coming to a standstill.
U.S. Customs Chief Inspector Michael Comerford told United Press International that he and his men are still maintaining Level One security at the bridge, but have managed without major backup through a process of increased manpower and the good judgment of experienced inspectors.
Experience allows inspectors to check trucks where there are anomalies in the paperwork, the credentials of the driver that provoke them to pull a truck out of line, first for a more thorough check of the exterior and then, if necessary, for a complete unloading of the cargo in a series of bays at the plaza on the New York side.
No one UPI interviewed along the Canadian border said any of these methods would guarantee against a terrorist or dangerous device gaining entrance, but Comerford and others say there is simply not enough manpower or time to do anything more thorough.
It has been the job of Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge and his 100-person staff to try to devise a plan to secure America's borders without stifling the trade that has made the U.S. economy the most powerful and profitable on Earth.
Privately, key sources in Ridge's office admit that the land borders still have them stumped, particularly finding a way of securing of the U.S.-Canadian border.
One key idea for both Canada and Mexico is in a sense extending the border of the three countries, making North America sort of a single trading zone. In effect, U.S. Customs officers would be actually working in Canada and Mexico, clearing cargo at the point of origin and sealing the truck for smooth, unhampered entry into the United States.
Last month, Customs Commissioner Robert Bonner announced that a binational working group is studying this process, but other Customs experts think the idea is too complex. It means that armed U.S. Customs officers would have to be able to enforce U.S. law in a foreign country (Canadian Customs officers are not armed).
"What happens," asked one veteran Customs officer, "if you check a load abroad and find something in it? Can the shipper just back off and say he doesn't want to send it to the United States? Has he violated any law?"
Lots of other people in Customs and the trucking business believe that computers can effect greater security by sifting out trucking companies and shippers that are regular users of the border, certifying the loads and drivers as safe, and also freeing Customs to concentrate on trucks and shipments.
"A high percentage of the trucks and goods," Comerford said, "are repeaters. There are 1,000 shippers that handle two-thirds of all the truck-borne cargo imported into the United States."
The Canadian government was studying a similar proposal that would allow some 7,000 trucks each day to pass U.S. border without inspection. In late January, The New York Times said Bonner rejected this notion and it had sparked a dispute with Ridge's office.
"We're looking at increased security against terrorists at the border," Bonner told the
Times, "but I don't think the Canadians are looking at it the same way."
At present, the Customs Service is still a paper-driven agency, which has really little advance notice of trucks arriving for entry into the United States.
But once it completes a new computer system now under construction, a manifest of the truck's load, driver's identity and credentials could be in the hands of the Customs at U.S. crossing points before the truck left its point of origin.
Martin D. Rojas, who is in charge of border transit issues for the American Trucking Association, claims that the companies are ready to cooperate. Most major shippers are already using electronic communications, he said. Moreover, large shippers are already working diligently on ways to be sure loads are not hijacked or tampered with.
"The trucking industry loses $10 (billion) to $12 billion a year to theft," he said.
Next: On the river
