The case study about the arrest of 7 drug traffickers by Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and Homeland Security Investigations (HIS) agents is a perfect case that required collection of information, processing it to get intelligence, and using it to catch the criminals. In this case, the seven criminals, who were part of a cartel involved in trafficking contraband goods, were arrested in Phoenix after a successful multi-agency intelligent gathering that enabled the security agents to understand their movements. Most of those who were arrested are those in senior leadership positions, and some of them are closely related to drug lords serving jail terms in various prisons in the country.
As presented in this case, the biggest gap in the information available for the security agents was how these criminals concealed their contraband goods and how they did their warehousing. The DEA, ICE, and HIS agents started tracing the activities of these criminals as early as 2014. However, it was not until 2016 that a successful arrest of these criminals was made. According to Murphy, drug traffickers are often perfect when it comes to concealing their operational procedures (78). Arresting such criminals when they are engaged in their activities may be easy, but understanding how their cartel ring operates is very challenging (Goldman 55). Once some of them are arrested, their replacement is easily found, which means that the flow of contraband goods into and out of the country is not affected.
These three agencies were able to overcome this challenge by coordinating their activities very closely and sharing their intelligence. As Gerdes says, it is often very challenging to arrest the top leadership of a drug cartel (112). The recent arrest of senior leaders of this group means that the agencies were able to get the right information about the operational procedures of this gang something that Dulles says is not easy to do (82).
The most problematic phase of implementing the intelligence that was gathered was how to lure these leaders into a trap. Drug traffickers, especially those who are lucky to become part of the top leadership, are always very cautious in almost everything they do. They do not trust even those whom they consider close friends because of the possible betrayal that is often common among them (McCue 72). This team had to be patient, very keen, and smart in monitoring their every move to finally make the arrests.
There are several very interesting facts learned about the intelligence cycle based on this exercise. The first one is the need for patience. It took a lot of patience on the part of the security agents to track the activities of these criminals and finally make successful arrests of the top leaders. Another important fact is the need to share information and to launch a unified attack on the criminals (Tipton, Tipton, and Corroney 45).
The three agencies had to work very closely with one another in gathering intelligence and in the implementation process to bring the criminals to book. Finally, it is also clear that when gathering intelligence, it may be necessary to infiltrate the ranks of the cartels to get reliable informant. The informant may help in gathering facts about the exact activities of the criminals, making it easy to arrest them.
Works Cited
Dulles, Allen. The Craft of Intelligence: America’s Legendary Spy Master on the Fundamentals of Intelligence Gathering for a Free World. Guilford, Conn: The Lyons Press, 2006. Print.
Gerdes, Louise. Espionage and Intelligence Gathering. San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 2004. Print.
Goldman, Jan. The Central Intelligence Agency: An encyclopedia of covert ops, intelligence gathering, and spies. New York: Cengage, 2014. Print
McCue, Colleen. Data Mining and Predictive Analysis: Intelligence Gathering and Crime Analysis. Boston: Butterworth-Heinemann, 2006. Print.
Murphy, Christopher. Competitive Intelligence: Gathering, Analysing and Putting It to Work. Aldershot, England: Gower, 2005. Print.
Tipton, Scott, David Tipton, and Joe Corroney. Intelligence Gathering. San Diego, Calif: IDW, 2008. Print.