The other Marine Safety and Security Teams will be deployed later in the summer to their home ports of Houston, Long Beach, Calif., and Portsmouth, Va., after completing training at Camp Lejeune at Jacksonville, N.C., said Cmdr. Jim McPherson, Coast Guard spokesman in Washington, D.C.

Each 100-member team will run 30-foot boats - with top speeds of 40-plus knots - that are designed to be quickly placed on trailers and flown by military C-130s to other ports, where suspicious ships can be intercepted before they reach inner waters.

"The idea is, we're pushing the borders offshore," McPherson said. "If you have a vessel with a suspicious cargo - with chemical or nuclear or biological materials onboard - you don't want to bring it to port and open it up there."

The teams were formed in response to the Sept. 11 terror attacks.

The Virginia team is scheduled to arrive at Portsmouth Aug. 1, and the Houston and Long Beach teams are to arrive at their home duty stations Sept. 1. Two teams will be trained next year, though McPherson declined to reveal their home ports. The following year, as many as six teams will be trained.

"These MSSTs are going to be like our SWAT teams," McPherson said. "They're going to control the port, and they can also control the harbor and go out and control the vessels."

He said the teams would be deployed to potential trouble spots based on intelligence information. Coast Guard intelligence workers poring over the cargo, passenger and crew lists of the 10,000 vessels that make U.S. port calls each year will flag certain vessels or people, and a security team will fly in.

Ships are now required to give 96 hours notice for port calls, rather than the 24 hours before Sept. 11, making such intelligence checks easier, McPherson said.

The teams will be equipped with bomb-sniffing dogs. The dogs, along with their handlers, will be flown by helicopter to ships at sea, and will be lowered by cable to check for explosives.

The teams have been run through their paces for the past several weeks by Coast Guard trainers stationed at Camp Lejeune, a U.S. Marine Corps base. They have been firing live rounds through M-16s, as well as training with nonlethal grenades and nonlethal rounds fired from shotguns, McPherson said.

The Coast Guard is responsible for security at 361 U.S. ports, as well as on the country's 95,000 miles of coastline. McPherson said having the new security teams in place will allow the service to send its cutter ships farther to sea. They were pulled back following Sept. 11.

The Coast Guard already has some port security teams, but those are primarily made up of reserves who, when they are called up, are sent to guard port facilities overseas, McPherson said.

"This is going to be the opposite," he said. "We're going to take the term 'guarding the coast' literally now."

Last weekend, the Coast Guard contacted port officials nationwide to warn of possible attacks from scuba divers equipped with explosives. The FBI had issued a similar warning May 23, but McPherson said the Coast Guard warning was based on additional threat information. He declined to give details.

FBI agents continue to interview owners of dive shops nationwide. The agency is trying to determine whether al-Qaida operatives have been taking scuba training in order to blow up ships at anchor, power plants, bridges, depots or other waterfront targets.

Meanwhile, the Coast Guard last week made permanent a rule requiring boaters to observe a 500-yard protection zone around U.S. Navy vessels. Within that distance, boaters must go slowly enough that their boats do not create a wake.

In addition, no nonmilitary boat is allowed to come within 100 yards of a Navy vessel without authorization.

The rules change is in part to guard against attacks similar to the one on the USS Cole, bombed by a small boat in the Yemeni port of Aden. The attack in October 2000 killed 17 sailors.