OPERATION CARIBBE
CANADA’S MISSION: CHOKE OFF THE FLOW OF COCAINE AND OTHER DRUGS ACROSS THE EASTERN PACIFIC
Canada’s mission: choke off the flow of cocaine and other drugs in the eastern Pacific Ocean
“IF YOU GOT BAD NEWS, YOU WANT TO KICK THEM BLUES …” Eric Clapton’s “Cocaine” rattles out of speakers in cabins and messes throughout HMCS Yellowknife. It’s 0700 hours. April 20, 2019. “Don’t forget this fact, you can’t get it back …” In the galley, Yellowknife’s cooks started preparing breakfast at 0500 hours. Food is a morale booster on a ship, so it’s uniformly good and uniformly plentiful — eggs the way you want them, bacon or sausages, toast. Before too long, throughout the 55.3-metre Canadian maritime coastal defence vessel, there’ll be the clunk of heavy sea boots on metal gangways and a crowd will be gathering at the counter in the flat (as the navy calls corridors) outside the galley.
“She don’t lie, she don’t lie, she don’t lie, cocaine …”
The music fades away, and two decks up on Yellowknife’s bridge, navy Lt. Anna Childerhose, the ship’s 24-year-old navigator and the officer of the watch, announces the ship’s location and the weather. She caps it off, as she does each morning, with an excruciating joke. (Example: “Did you hear about the shy pebble? It wanted to be a little boulder.”) Then, in a return to naval tradition, the shrill sound of a boatswain’s pipe rings out followed by the words, “Hands to breakfast.”
“COCAINE” ISN’T EXACTLY
the song you’d expect to jolt you awake on a naval vessel. But they auction off the choice of wake-up song on Yellowknife as a charity fundraiser, and Clapton’s raucous ditty won this time. That aside, it is an excellent one-word answer to the question of what has drawn Yellowknife more than 3,000 nautical miles south from its home port of Esquimalt, B.C., to the warm waters off Guatemala and around the Galapagos: cocaine. That and a host of other drugs
Together with its sister ship Whitehorse, Yellowknife has been patrolling these Pacific waters far from the shipping lanes since March, looking for vessels smuggling drugs north. Together with an Aurora patrol aircraft, the two ships make up Operation Caribbe, the Canadian contribution to a much larger, 14-nation endeavour to choke off the movement of drugs in the eastern Pacific and the Caribbean. The year 2019 marked the 13th year that Canadian naval vessels headed south on these patrols.
It is largely guesswork, but an estimated 40 per cent of the cocaine produced annually (about $34-billion worth) heads north from South America each year. It goes mostly to
the United States, but make no mistake, cocaine is a Canadian problem too; Canada ranks second in per capita cocaine use globally, and in 2014 alone, the highly addictive stimulant was a factor in 297 deaths. Organized crime is deeply involved in its distribution and sale in Canada, as well. But fighting Canada’s cocaine problem starts in the waters off Guatemala.
These are busy days for the Royal Canadian Navy. In late April 2019, while Yellowknife and Whitehorse were operating off Central America, the patrol frigate HMCS Regina was involved in similar work in the Gulf of Aden and other Middle Eastern waters as part of Operation Artemis, Canada’s contribution to the anti-smuggling and anti-terrorist multinational Combined Task Force 150. In June 2019, the Canadian government announced that a Canadian patrol frigate would be joining Operation Neon, the international operation enforcing sanctions against North Korea. The past few years have seen Canadian ships and submarines operating off West Africa, in the Black Sea and the Baltic, in the Mediterranean and the western Pacific, and closer to home in the Arctic. When Joseph Schull wrote his definitive history of the Royal Canadian Navy in the Second World War, he called it Far
Distant Ships — that’s an apt description of the navy today.
SCATTERED AMONG
the Canadians in their black pants and matching black T-shirts in the breakfast line are a handful of men dressed in sandcoloured camouflage uniforms that would look at home in the Iraqi desert. These are members of the eightperson United States Coast Guard law-enforcement detachment, whose job is to board and search any suspicious vessels. In the words of Lt. Rhys Davies, the ship’s operations officer,
Yellowknife functions as the “bus to drive the police around.”
Why not Canadians? “We don’t have the treaties with the partner nations that would allow us to do this work,” says Yellowknife’s skipper, Lt.-cmdr. Donald Thompson-greiff. The USCG can search any vessels
Yellowknife finds and has the power to
detain such ships and their crews. This division of labour might seem clumsy in theory, but it works well in practice. Just the previous week, on April 14, near the end of Yellowknife’s previous nine-day patrol, the ship had stopped a fishing vessel that the USCG sailors then boarded and searched for hours. Although they didn’t uncover any cocaine, the vessel’s crew seemed extremely sketchy about what they were fishing for, or indeed, how to fish at all. They were taken into harbour by the Costa Rican coast guard and subjected to what is called a “destructive search.” The ship proved to have 1,040 kilograms of cocaine hidden onboard.
These USCG law enforcement experts are polite, if a little distant. They are not to be photographed directly — even a shot of an identifiable tattoo could put them at risk. Their guardedness may seem a bit much, but it is understandable. The people who run the cartels that smuggle drugs are known to go to extreme lengths to protect their businesses. They hold grudges and will seek revenge. (Similar rules cover the Canadians, but only during an operation — any news reports released by the Department of National Defence during a mission mention no names and show no faces.)
FLYING FISH RACE
alongside one of Yellowknife’s rigid hull inflatable boats as we bump over the turquoise water away from the ship. It’s April 21 and we are three days out from Puerto Quetzal, the Guatemalan container port that serves as Yellowknife’s temporary home base. Carrying five of us — the coxswain who controls the boat, the commander of the coast guard detachment, a boatswain from Yellowknife, a photographer and me — the RHIB is headed for a large yellow ocean data acquisition system buoy. These buoys are scattered across the Pacific, recording data about wave height, water temperature and so on. This particular one sits at 4.584° N and 95.301° W in more than 4,000 metres of water and about 500 kilometres (nearly 300 nautical miles) northwest of Isla Isabela, the largest of the Galapagos Islands. In the Florida Keys, buoys such as this are often used as a drop-off point for drug smuggling — smugglers weight their cargo and attach it underneath, so another boat can come by and pick it up later.
As the RHIB slows, the USCG officer scans the buoy for anything unusual. Then the Ye l l o w k n i f e boatswain takes a Gopro camera mounted on a long stick and dips it into the water. The RHIB slowly
The people who run the CARTELS go to extreme lengths to protect their businesses. They hold grudges and WILL SEEK REVENGE.
circles the buoy while the camera lets them look under it. The water here is clear — a school of pale fish is clearly visible three to five metres down, sheltering under the buoy. But no suspicious packages.
The old Breton fisherman’s prayer, “O, God, thy sea is so great and my boat is so small,” sums up the biggest challenge Yellowknife faces in tracking drug smugglers at sea. The overall area that the broader project is concerned with is, says Thompson-greiff “roughly the size of the continental United States.” Yellowknife is assigned a much smaller section of that, but even then the ship can’t be everywhere at once.
To help, Yellowknife’s operations room receives a steady stream of information culled from naval and law enforcement sources. All these keep the ship up to date on any “vessel of interest” that may be moving through
Yellowknife’s search area and guide the Canadian ship to new potential targets. The captain is briefed on this information twice daily.
Our world may feel increasingly crowded, but at sea, here at any rate, it seems astoundingly empty. Frigate birds and boobies follow the ship, dolphins leap and play alongside, and it’s possible to see spouting whales and basking sharks from the bridge wings, but there is very little evidence of people. At night, to make the ship harder for potential targets to spot, Yellowknife patrols with its running lights and the normal interior bridge lights turned off. The transponder on the ship’s automatic identification system, which automatically broadcasts Yellowknife’s identity, is also shut down. Standing on the darkened bridge, cruising along at about 13.5 knots, with just one or two tiny pinpricks of light visible on the radios, and the great spray of the Milky Way overhead, you do feel that, yes, the sea is very great indeed — and Yellowknife, very small.
PERCHED ON THE EDGE of a table off to the side on Yellowknife’s bridge, Leading Seaman Dan Cramer carefully winds yellow and black cord around the shaft of a small canoe paddle that he holds with its blade braced on his upper thigh. Separating the sections of zigzagging cord are smaller woven ornamental bands in white line, what are known as Turk’s heads.
Cramer, who originally hails from Winnipeg, is creating a gift that the ship’s company of Yellowknife will present to their American counterparts at the end of this mission. Cramer is a boatswain, a sailor who handles the ship’s most purely “nautical” tasks. These include mooring the ship, working with the lines used to secure it at dockside, refuelling at sea and working with the ship’s crane. Boatswains are also in charge of the ship’s small boats and its small arms — all guns up to the .50 calibre machine guns. The fancy work that Cramer is doing is no longer officially taught as part of their trade, but he and his fellow boatswains keep it alive.
This sort of ropework helps to pass the crew’s limited downtime, as do watching DVDS in the messes and working out in Yellowknife’s small “gym,” actually three or four exercise machines and a collection of weights at the rear of the bridge. Another popu
lar pastime (at least for male crew members) is growing mustaches. These began sprouting when Yellowknife left Esquimalt, and they’ll be shaved off at the end of the deployment. For now, the junior ranks mess looks like it’s been overrun by a gaggle of Tom Selleck impersonators.
Yellowknife is a small ship by naval standards (at 134 metres, the Royal Canadian Navy’s patrol frigates are almost three times as long), but it was in ships much the same size — the wartime corvettes — that the navy made its name battling Hitler’s U-boats.
A sailor transported across time from one of those ships to Yellowknife would find that a good deal has changed. The crew’s ethnic composition is very different from what it would have been 75 years ago. The ship is also a quarter female. That is more than in most of the navy’s ships, and the result of the large number of reservists on board — about onethird of the crew overall. The ship’s company comes from right across Canada and calls such towns as Brampton, Ont., Surrey, B.C., Wainwright, Alta., Quebec City and Saskatoon home. Westerners predominate, perhaps not surprising for a ship based in Esquimalt.
But for that wartime sailor, a lot would be recognizable, too. Lunch is still called dinner, and dinner is called supper, and every morning there is soup at 1000 hours. Dessert is known as duff, garbage or gash. Boatswains still play their pipes before announcements, and sailors such as Cramer keep the old seafaring traditions alive. And in a melding of millennial fashion and naval tradition, tattoos are common, too. Leading Seaman James Vaughan boasts a full rigged ship on his shoulder, with the ships he has served on listed underneath. Master Seaman Robin Moncrief lifts her sleeve to show off a mermaid toting a C7 carbine assault rifle. Walt Disney’s Dory swims behind her ear. And, yes, sailors still swear like sailors.
“THE SEA DOES NOT
reward those who are too anxious, too greedy or too impatient.” So wrote Anne Morrow Lindbergh in her environmental classic, Gift from the Sea.
For the past few days, Yellowknife has moved over its search area north of the Galapagos, sent hither and thither by the intelligence reports the crew have received. In that time, it has encountered but one other ship. Viewed through the greenish glow of night vision goggles, the target proved to be a genuine fishing vessel — net booms swung out, work lights on — going about its business.
Now, with time running short on its final patrol before heading home, it looks as if the sea is about to give
Yellowknife a reward. Around 1035 hours on April 23, Sub-lt. Wilson Ho, the officer of the watch, spots something on the ship’s S-band radar, the unit they use for short-range searching. Amid the radar screen’s ghostly clutter of clouds and seabirds, that dot’s persistence and movement tells him that it is, in fact, a vessel. On sighting, it turns out to be a whitehulled fishing boat, with gear piled at the back, about 30 metres long.
A little after noon, more than a dozen people crowd onto the bridge, everyone from the captain, seated in the elevated chair reserved for his use, to the commander of the USCG detachment to Petty Officer 2nd Class Chris Jenkins, the ship’s senior noncommissioned communicator, or yeoman of signals to use his grander title, who has arrived bearing a satellite phone. Yellowknife is about 270 nautical miles northwest of the Galapagos.
The temperature this morning stands a sodden 45 C. Outside on the bridge wings, the boatswains have covered the ammunition lockers with blankets and sprayed them with water to keep them cool. On the crowded bridge, the heat is approaching steam bath conditions.
Designed for service off Canada’s coasts, the ship’s ventilation system struggles with the heat and humidity
near the equator. Two small portable air conditioners give some feeble additional relief, but they are too little machine for too much work and are constantly popping circuit breakers.
No one says it, but the previous week’s triumphant bust is definitely there, floating in the humid air of the bridge. Will this be a repeat? A boatswain, clad in helmet and flak vest, stands ready at the .50 calibre machine gun mounted port side. A RHIB carrying the USCG boarding crew speeds toward the fishing vessel; another heads astern of
Yellowknife to check out the flagged buoys the boat had been dropping in the water. Usually they’re used to mark nets, but perhaps the ship had been dropping drugs for a later pickup. Moving slowly now through the swells, watched by a knot of men on the back of the fishing boat, the laden RHIB carrying the boarding party pulls alongside the fishing vessel. Then a female voice from
Yellowknife’s operations room announces over the PA that they’ve received a call from the USCG’S District 11, the search and rescue group that covers this part of the Pacific. The fishing boat’s captain has reported a suspicious vessel. None other than HMCS Yellowknife.
After calling questions to the men aboard the ship, the boarding party reports back that, while the fishing boat hasn’t caught anything yet, they seem to know what they’re doing and are likely legit.
And with that, the tension, but not the heat, on Yellowknife’s bridge dissipates. There will be no repeat of last week’s success.
YOU CAN’T HIT IT out of the park every time. That has never been the nature of navy life — not in the Battle of the Atlantic and not now. You pursue the wrong ship, and somewhere out there perhaps a real smuggler is getting away.
As they head back to Puerto Quetzal, this mission is a last hurrah for HMCS Yellowknife’s crew. After they return home to Esquimalt in early May, the ship will be going into a refit in July that is expected to last up to a year. After three years in command, Lt. Cmdr. Thompson-greiff will be moving on, taking a desk job in Ottawa. Navy Lt. Childerhose is off to take the fleet navigating officer course, to learn how to guide the big patrol
frigates. Leading Seaman Cramer will be headed to HMCS Nanaimo. The rest of Yellowknife’s 36 permanent crew will scatter across the navy.
A few days earlier, talking in his cabin, Thompson-greiff acknowledges the challenges they face in doing their job. “We know that we don’t stop any more than 10 per cent of the drugs out there,” he says. It’s frustrating, but the 1,040 kilograms that Yellowknife seized will make a difference. Pulling up a file on his computer, he outlines the effect that stopping even one tonne of cocaine has: it’s $10 million to $20 million in forgone profits for the drug cartels and a half dozen fewer fatal drug overdoses. In Central America, it also means that a lot of people who would have died as a result of the trade won’t.
As Yellowknife will be reaching home, on the other side of Canada, HMCS Goose Bay will be heading south to take up the patrol — the latest in a long line of “far distant ships.”
See more photos from Operation Caribbe at cangeo.ca/ma20/caribbe.