Coast Guard team protects nation's busiest ports.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold
• Position: MARITIME SECURITY

BOSTON -- THE 25-FOOT, RED-AND-GRAY U.S. Coast Guard response boat sped across busy Boston Harbor, zipping past ships of all sizes, from small sailing vessels to giant liquefied natural-gas containers.

As it approached foreign-flagged ships, the heavily armed boat slowed for a close look, with one of its crewmembers manning an M-240 7.62 mm machine gun on the foredeck.

The boat's crewmembers are part of Marine Safety and Security Team 91110, a small, specially trained unit assigned to help protect the city from terrorist attack.

The 76-person unit, known as MSST Boston, is one of 13 such organizations established at major ports along the nation's coastlines since the 2001 assaults against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

MSSTs are quick-reaction forces whose mission is to provide security for their homeports and to deploy nationwide in response to emerging threats against other high-priority waterside targets.

The Boston team has helped provide waterborne security for such national events as September's United Nations World Summit in New York City; the 2005 Superbowl in Jacksonville, Fla.; the G-8 Summit in Brunswick, Ga.; the most recent Democratic Party national convention in Boston, and the Republican one in New York, said the team's planning officer, Lt. Thomas Ottenwaelder.

Other MSSTs have traveled further afield, providing port security in places such as Port-au-Prince, Haiti, and Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Two teams--one based in New Orleans, La., and another from Galveston, Texas--participated in relief operations after Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast.

MSSTs are patterned after two other kinds of highly mobile Coast Guard organizations with very, different missions--port-security units and law-enforcement detachments. Port-security units help protect Navy assets in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere around the world, and law-enforcement detachments carry out drug-interdiction missions from Navy vessels, primarily in the Caribbean Sea and waters along the Pacific Coast of the Americas.

The MSSTs are trained and equipped specifically to fill security gaps at strategic U.S. seaports. MSST Boston was stood up in 2003.

Boston was selected as a site, because it is the leading city in New England--hub of a metropolitan area of 5.8 million people stretching from Maine to Connecticut. Every year, the city's teeming port terminals handle more than 1.3 million tons of general cargo, 1.5 million tons of non-fuels bulk cargo...