A Shaky Operation Alliance

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"We shall fight you on the land, on the sea and in the air, and we shall never surrender." With that Churchillian warning to smugglers, Deputy Commissioner Michael Lane of the U.S. Customs Service formally accepted two E- 2C Hawkeye radar planes from the U.S. Navy in San Diego. The ceremony was designed to showcase the high-tech weapons the Reagan Administration has committed to its war on illegal drugs. Making a similar pitch in Houston, Customs Commissioner William von Raab invited some 65 Texas lawmen to inspect a sophisticated new communications center for coordinating surveillance against smugglers. Alive with radar screens, computers and scrambled-speech telephones, the Blue Fire command post will eventually anchor a "radar picket line" along the porous 2,000-mile. border with Mexico, the passageway for one-third of the drugs entering the U.S.

The two ceremonies this month were part of the fanfare that has accompanied Operation Alliance, the sweeping antidrug effort launched last August with tough speeches by Vice President George Bush and Attorney General Edwin Meese. The multiagency border interdiction program would include the addition of hundreds of new personnel, the purchase of up to seven aircraft-spotting radar balloons, the use of four Hawkeye surveillance planes, the modification of four older P-3 Orion radar aircraft for border watching and the transfer of six Black Hawk helicopters to chase drug-running planes. State and local police were to receive grants from a separate $225 million fund authorized by Congress.

To many of the lawmen who work the border, the high expectations raised by Operation Alliance have been belied by the program's shaky start-up. Since the kickoff, there have been few significant increases in the number of federal agents deployed in the Southwest by the Customs Service, Drug Enforcement Agency and Border Patrol. The radar picket line is at least two years from completion, and other promised equipment has yet to be delivered. The Administration has even proposed eliminating promised federal funds for state and local police in next year's budget. "The Government isn't really serious about stopping drugs," charges a veteran Customs officer in southeast Texas. "Something is damn wrong." Declares Leo Samaniego, sheriff of El Paso County: "I have no concrete evidence that Operation Alliance even exists." Asks Carlos Tapia, chief deputy sheriff in Cameron County: "Where's the money? We haven't seen any. We feel like the bastard son abandoned."

Many federal agents, as well as state and local police, complain that they are fighting smugglers without the paraphernalia they need, including night-vision devices, secure radios and electronic sensors to plant in remote airfields and along footpaths used by smugglers. The Customs Service in McAllen, Texas, has only one rubber raft to patrol a 170-mile stretch of the Rio Grande. Declares Silvestre Reyes, chief Border Patrol agent for the McAllen sector: "The crooks are better equipped than we are."