U.S. Forces Increase Surveillance On Mexican Cartels With More Spy Flights Along The Border

For the past two weeks, U.S. spy planes have conducted at least 18 surveillance missions in order to get intel on Mexican drug cartels. Current and former military officials told CNN that the figure represents a dramatic escalation in activity as President Donald Trump continues to direct the military to take on cartels and their drug and human smuggling operations.

As reported by the outlet, the missions were conducted over a 10-day period in late January and early February, with the majority of them flying over the southwestern U.S. and in international airspace around the Baja peninsula, according to open-source data and testimonies from three U.S. officials familiar with the missions.

The U.S. has historically conducted surveillance missions, but the frequency has gone from one a month around the southern border to the mentioned 18, according to one former military official with deep experience in homeland defense.

The Trump administration plans to use the military as the lead agency to tackle border security, but current and former U.S. officials say it remains unclear how the administration plans to leverage information it acquires. Some of them told CNN that the intelligence flights could be part of an effort to find targets for the U.S. military to strike itself, while others that it could be used to build a body of evidence for further foreign terrorist designations or even identify information that could be shared with the Mexican military.

At least 11 of the 18 flights were conducted by Navy P-8s, a plane with a sophisticated radar system that specializes in identifying submarines but is also capable of collecting imagery and signals intelligence.

One of the flights conducted on Feb. 3, which lasted six hours, used a U-2 spy plane, one of the military's most venerated reconnaissance aircrafts, which were designed during the Cold War for collecting high-altitude imagery of the Soviet Union. Current and former military officials with deep experience in counternarcotics work on the border said they could not recall a U-2 being used for this purpose before.

The sophisticated spy planes were sent out by the U.S. military to collect intelligence on Mexican cartels, with missions in California, Arizona and Texas. According to CNN reports, one of the missions looped around the Baja peninsula and passed near Sinaloa on Feb. 4, using an Air Force RC-135 "Rivet" aircraft that specializes in hoovering up communications from the ground.