Detecting Border Tunnels

Authorities in San Diego have found a tunnel under construction beneath the U.S.-Mexico border:

SAN DIEGO – Mexican authorities, acting on information provided by federal investigators from the multi-agency San Diego Tunnel Task Force, conducted enforcement actions Wednesday targeting a sophisticated, but still incomplete underground passageway that originates in Tijuana, Mexico, and extends more than 860 feet into the United States.

The tunnel, which measures just under 1,000 feet in length overall and reaches a depth of 90 to 100 feet, did not have an entry point in the United States. The passageway has lighting, electrical and ventilation systems and is equipped with an elevator. When Mexican authorities entered the passageway Wednesday morning on the Mexican side, they encountered more than a dozen individuals who were subsequently taken into custody. All of those arrested are believed to be Mexican citizens.

Initial reports indicate the tunnel has been under construction for approximately two years. So far, there have been no arrests in the United States, but the investigation is ongoing.

The press release credits the inter-agency San Diego Tunnel Task Force, which “uses an array of high-tech equipment and intelligence information to pinpoint the location of underground passageways along the border in the region.”

To date, federal authorities have discovered more than 120 cross-border tunnels along the Southwest border. (The photo above is from 2007)

Truth is, these discoveries are typically the result of good, old-fashioned police work, not technology, according to a recent Science Daily story:

“All of them have been found by accident or human intelligence,” said Ed Turner, a project manager with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Science and Technology Directorate (S&T). “None by technology.”

The problem of detecting underground tunnels has frustrated geologists since the 1960s when the Vietcong used them to devastating effect during the Vietnam War. In the 1970s, tunnels were discovered (through intelligence) in Korea’s DMZ. In the 1990s, the Southwest border kept the problem alive, although not a priority.

The terrorist threat, however, has opened the floodgates of money for tunnel detection.

Among the groups at work today on the problem include major defense contractors, the intelligence community, the Department of Homeland Security, numerous components of the Defense Department and unspecified “international partners.”

Technologies under development include a seismic acoustic sensors, infrared sensors and robotics.  Tunnel detection systems are being tested on the ground and the air — aboard helicopters and unmanned drones.

The military’s Joint Task Force North conducted nine tactical missions last year to find underground tunnels using some of these technologies.

Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico and NORTHCOM worked with the San Diego Tunnel Task Force to test advanced acoustic technologies in Otay Mesa in 2006 and 2007, according to this PowerPoint presentation.

As even a cursory look at PowerPoint makes clear, the sensor data is extremely difficult for the layperson to understand, a problem that was underscored last year when the Department of Homeland Security put out a call for a tunnel detection system that is “simple to understand.”

Lockheed Martin is testing ground-penetrating radar in a trailer towed by a truck as part of DHS’  Tunnel Technologies Detection Project.

DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, has a Cross-Border Tunnel program to root out underground hiding places that can be exploited by terrorists.

An even spook-ier effort is the Counter Tunnel Operations Working Group, which included the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and intelligence community. The group is under the rubric of the inter-agency, anti-terrorism Technical Support Working Group.

At a 2006 Army seminar on tunnel detention, one researcher summed up the state of affairs:

Despite the longstanding effort in the geophysical community under heavy public funding, there is a dearth of success stories where geophysicists can actually claim to have found hitherto unknown tunnels.

From the Middle East to the Middle West

Leave it to a bunch of Somali pirates to underscore how what happens on the west coast of Africa directly affects people in the United States.

The Greek-owned supertanker hijacked by Somali pirates over the weekend was headed for a deepwater port known as LOOP.

Most crude oil from the Middle East comes via massive tankers too large for New Orleans to offload oil. The hijacked Maran Centaurus is a 300,000-ton vessel, holding 2 million barrels of oil. 

LOOP (Lousiana Offshore Oil Port) can handle ships more than twice as big.

About 1 million barrels of foreign crude — 10 percent of all U.S. imports — flow through LOOP every day.

Here’s how the oil flows from the Middle East to the Middle West:

  1. Tankers connect to a buoy 18 miles off the coast of Louisiana.
  2. An underwater pipeline moves oil a mile and a half to an offshore terminal.
  3. Four 7,000 horsepower pumps send oil ashore.
  4. At Fourchon, Louisiana, another massive pumping station sends the oil another 25 miles inland.
  5. The oil arrives at a network of underground salt caverns that can hold 50 million barrels of oil.
  6. From the caverns, the Locap pipeline channels oil 53 miles to St. James, Lousiana.
  7. At St. James, there’s a link to Capline which moves oil to Patoka, Illinois.
  8. The Chicap pipeline runs from Patoka to the Chicago suburbs.
  9. From there or at several points along the way, it’s refined and trucked to you!

The Most Expensive Road in the World?

The scale of corruption in Russia is so mindboggling that it’s difficult to comprehend.

You can get an idea by looking at the watches that Russian officials wear.

Another way is to look at the cost of one kilometer of road in Moscow.

The Fourth Ring Road is under construction in Moscow at a cost of 7.4 billion rubles per ($250 million) per kilometer, according to opposition leader Boris Nemtsov, who’s quoted in Radio Free Europe’s series on corruption in Russia:

“If you compare the cost of Moscow’s roads to the Large Hadron particle collider in Switzerland,” he says, “the collider is cheaper, as is the Channel Tunnel [between Britain and France], another grandiose construction project.”

It’s far, far cheaper to build a road in Afghanistan. The Big Dig in Boston, the most expensive highway project in the United States that rerouted a major highway into a tunnel under the city, cost $188 million per mile, according to this report. (.pdf)

According to an AP story, City Hall put the costs at an exorbitant $209 million per kilometer and blamed demolition of residential housing in areas adjacent to the new ring road.

Nemstov blames the problem on Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov and his inner circle.  Luzkhov’s wife is on Forbes magazine’s list of the richest people on Earth.

The “corruption market,” officials tell RFE/RL, is estimated at $300 billion a year. Russia’s GDP was about $1.6 trillion last year, the World Bank says.

Even the government’s own figures show that the average bribe has tripled over the past year to $32,000.

India to join NSA's eavesdropping program?

India and the U.S. will sign an intelligence sharing and counter-terrorism pact, The Times of India reports as PM Manmohan Singh begins his three-day state visit to Washington on Monday.

Details of the pact are not being disclosed yet, but such was the importance of the agreement that CIA Director Leon Panetta flew down to New Delhi last week to discuss details with his Indian counterparts before the fine print could be drawn up. The agreement could involve exchanging and stationing more intelligence personnel in the two countries, including mobile units, to facilitate better interaction.

The Times describes this as an “intelligence upgrade” involving unspecified ”technical means” supplied by the US.

An unnamed Indian official tells India’s DNA News:

“We are looking at an agreement that could involve exchanging and stationing more intelligence personnel in the two countries. We are also seeking technology to counter terrorism, the National Investigation Agency is looking at US equipment to trace the location of mobile phone calls,” he added.

America’s National Security Agency has an expensive programme that analyses calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity. It has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth.

Anwar al-Awlaki, infidel

 An insightful post on Jihadica reveals that Anwar al-Awlaki, a former San Diego imam who ministered to two of the Sept. 11 hijackers, was once denounced as an infidel (kafir) and part of a CIA plot.

Awlaki, a U.S. citizen who is said to live in Yemen, has been in the news lately because he was in e-mail contact with suspected Fort Hood shooter Maj. Nidal Hasan, whom he recently praised as a “hero.”

As I wrote earlier, Awlaki was the imam at the Rabat mosque in San Diego until mid-2000. Two future hijackers also attended the Rabat mosque.  The Sept. 11 Commission reported the two hijackers “reportedly respected Awlaki as a religious figure and developed a close relationship with him.”

One of Awlaki’s sermons at the Rabat mosque came to the attention of London-based jihadi Sheikh Abdullah al-Faisal, a radical imam who was imprisoned in 2003 for soliciting murder and eventually deported from the UK  for his links to one of the London Tube bombers.

This San Diego sermon so outraged al-Faisal that he devoted an entire sermon to it and ultimately declared Awlaki an infidel. One of al-Faisal’s followers can be heard in the recording suggesting that Awlaki should be killed.

Al-Faisal’s complaint about al-Awlaki is basically twofold: First, that al-Awlaki’s criteria for declaring takfir (unbeliever) was overly restrictive—someone would have to directly refute the Quran or blatantly denounce central tenets of Islam in order to receive that designation.  And, second, that al-Awlaki argued that only God should judge Muslims. Al-Faisal argues that this non-judgmental understanding of Islam is pushed by the CIA in order to limit violent activism.

Al-Faisal’s sermon is titled “CIA Islam – Sheikh Faisal’s Takfeer of Anwar Awlaki.” It’s available here.

For a would-be jihadi, this sermon should been a devastating blow. Yet, today it’s Awlaki who’s seen as the dangerous radical warping Muslim winds.

The lesson, Brian Fishman says, is not that Awlaki is a moderate but that “the world of jihadi ideologues is never as simple as it seems.”