By Geoff Fein
The Coast Guard’s intelligence program benefits from a unique opportunity to take its law enforcement role and combine it, where legal, with its national intelligence activities, a top Coast Guard official said.
For example, the Coast Guard’s Field Intelligence Support Teams (FIST) are located in most of the nation’s major ports. FIST provides law enforcement intelligence only and they have no national intelligence responsibility or authority, James Sloan, assistant commandant for Intelligence and Criminal Investigations, told Defense Daily in an interview last year.
But information in FIST field intelligence reports, for example, on suspicious activities or on vessels coming into U.S. ports that are of concern to the Coast Guard can be used to satisfy national intelligence requirements, Sloan noted.
“Those reports go to our Maritime Intelligence Fusion Centers, where a reports officer will look at them and determine what is legally accessible in the report to satisfy a national intelligence requirement,” he said.
The combination of law enforcement and national intelligence is something incredibly important to the future of the nation’s defense against asymmetrical attacks, Sloan added.
One example is the Drug Enforcement Agency’s (DEA) entrance into intelligence community (IC). Sloan thought the DEA should become a member from the outset, because terrorists are unlikely to reinvent the way in which people, money, contraband and weapons are smuggled into the country. “The DEA seems to have a pretty good handle on it as does the Coast Guard when it comes to maritime routes,” he said.
“Our combination of all of that serves the Coast Guard very well,” Sloan added.
Sloan spent almost a decade as a state and local law enforcement officer. He knows the frustrations local law enforcement feels from having the federal government come in and not share information.
“That has dramatically changed,” he noted, “because it is required to change.”
Since 9/11 information sharing has probably become the most significant agenda item that’s been on the intelligence and law enforcement plate, Sloan said.
“I think there is still some rough edges around who is responsible for information sharing,” he added. “I think we have come along way in three or four years.”
As far as the Coast Guard is concerned, the service can’t exist without sharing information, Sloan said. “Principally by receiving information from others.”
For example, the FIST in New York is run by a Coast Guard lietenant commander and is made up of the Coast Guard Criminal Investigative Service (CGIS), the Navy Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI), the New York City Police Department, New Jersey State Police and the DEA, Sloan said.
Additionally, there are Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection components, he added.
“They are naturally going to share information because it’s in everybody’s interest,” he said.
There are also 56 Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) that have a maritime nexus, Sloan noted.
“The Coast Guard is responsible for 95,000 miles of shoreline, which includes all inland rivers, so we have JTTFs with a maritime nexus all over the coastal and inland river waterways,” he added. “And we have Coast Guard Investigative Service agents assigned to everyone of those JTTFs for the purpose of information exchange.”
The Coast Guard is also working closely with the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to improve information sharing among the nations intelligence agencies
The Coast Guard has a system in place called the System of Record Notification. It will allow every sector in the Coast Guard to combine all of the databases that are appropriate for intelligence sharing, Sloan explained.
“We developed that. We relied very heavily on the expertise of our counterparts, not the least of which is the Navy.”
Another concern for information sharing, and particularly as it relates to foreign governments, has been the issue of security clearance, Sloan noted.
One of the things we decided to do is to increase the number of foreign disclosure officers so we can more rapidly assess what can be delivered and can’t be delivered to a foreign counter part,” Sloan said.
Concern with security clearance could become he Achilles’ heel of information sharing, he added.
“We have made great strides lately by processing state and local police chiefs for security clearance, which is long over due,” Sloan said. “Thus we have an opportunity to share with them.”
“We have to make certain that we can get information to the people who really need it, and there is some judgment on that, no question,” Sloan said. “But if we write the release and we recognize our responsibility to share as opposed to [saying] ‘you don’t have a need to know,’ we will chip away at that problem.”