In age of terror, U.S. fears tunnels pose bigger threat

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.

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 4½ 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.