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On guard: Scotland's border patrol at Major Freight Ports
Hours before the ferry even docks, special branch, customs and immigration have already agreed their "targets".
Men and women in hard hats and high-visibility luminous jackets, hi-tech scanner equipment, sniffer dogs and a Cyclamen van complete with blue flashing lights, are strategically placed around the concrete concourse waiting; each component primed to intercept illegal goods ranging from counterfeit and smuggled tobacco, foreign meat and Class A drugs to, in the case of the van, radioactive materials.
This is Rosyth Freight port, Scotland's gateway to the Continent - the only direct ferry link to Europe which police and politicians warned could cause an avalanche in illegal smuggling. So far, their premonitions have not come to pass.
It is a bitterly cold October morning and we're behind the scenes to see how many smugglers have been caught and what Gordon Brown's vision for a unified border agency might hold in the future.
In July, Mr Brown spoke of a new "highly visible" uniformed border force, which would "strengthen the powers and surveillance capability of our border guards and security officers" by bringing together the borders and immigration agency, customs and the UK visas overseas operation.
This week marks the end of the national pilot for joint border management and a report is expected to be completed by the Home Office in the next few days.
Rosyth Freight port has been designated as an area of best practice where staff from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Special Branch and Borders and Immigration work together as seamlessly as possible.
"The aim is to work as effectively as possible, to ease transit for legitimate, honest businesses and travellers and intercept and deter smugglers," said Andy Lumb, acting head of detections in Scotland for HMRC.
Each of the agencies shares intelligence about organised criminal networks, and analyses and discusses the booking profiles and transit patterns of the vehicles and passengers on board.
At the early morning briefing we are told which lorries they have selected for scanning and which they plan to tailgate - which means opening up the back of the lorries and sending sniffer dogs and staff inside.
The aim: to intercept all illegal goods entering the UK and act as a deterrent to organised crime.
The freight ferry comes in three times a week holding about 150 lorries and scores of passengers.
A complex contra-flow system ensures that drivers, passengers and hauliers are forced to circle past teams of specialist officers trained to detect suspicious demeanours and irregular cargos.
"We have a target selection team which looks at all the profiles," said Colin Fraser, a senior detection officer with HMRC. "The classic suspicious profile is the last-minute, cash paid ticket. Demeanour and visual profiles play a huge part as well. Organised criminals target the areas they see as the weakest. Once we make a major seizure they change their modus operandi but we are always trying to keep ahead of them and the joint-enforcement approach helps."
The dogs are trained to find cash, Class A drugs and tobacco.
The £350,000 scanner van acts as an enormous X-ray machine. As the boom swings over the top and side of the vehicle, images are fed back to an officer in the control booth. Using computer images, she strips back certain sections looking for hidden compartments, modified wheel-arches and unexplained changes in density.
The machine unveils a ghostly skeleton of each of the trucks selected, the frame of the chassis, the inside of the tyres, even the driver's sandwiches, are visible.
It was right here at Rosyth freight port that the shadows of five immigrants inside the belly of one of the trucks appeared as an eerie apparition on the screen.
Five people from India and Pakistan are thought to have crept inside the vehicle in Zeebrugge - a discovery never made public.
In 2003, another van with a secret compartment for carrying illegal immigrants was seized. The three-tonne van, which had come from Albania, also contained 15 suitcases, half of them filled with clothes and children's toys.
Earlier that year, four stowaways who had hidden in a lorry were arrested after trying to escape by scaling the ferry terminal's perimeter fence.
And in June 2002, a coach of Lithuanians posing as tourists were deported after they were found to have false passports.
Customs does not have human trafficking on its targets but is usually the first body to encounter such activity at the ports around the UK and will immediately share the information with Borders and Immigration.
In addition, Special Branch will often be seeking targets for different reasons to customs - perhaps outstanding warrants or violent crime - but all the agencies are now working together.
Mr Lumb said: "There is no point having three agencies intercepting the same passenger for three different reasons."
"The way we work has changed tremendously and is all based on intelligence and risk assessment.
"The Cyclamen van is a direct response from the Home Office to the risk assessment which indicates that somewhere in the system there could be a nuclear or radiological attack in the future.
"We are intelligence driven rather than the old scarecrow approach we used to use.
"It is true that some 50 years ago we had more officers in more ports.
"But back then we had no computers, no scanners and no dogs."
Ultimately, we find nothing illegal in the freight ferries, but staff are still buoyed by the fact that on Mr Brown's recent visit they spotted a false compartment in a 40ft goods vehicle and seized thousands of cigarettes.
As Mr Lumb points out, the organised criminal networks behind the smuggling operations are all multi-commodity. They smuggle tobacco one day and drugs and people the next, and as hundreds of thousands of trucks sail in and out of the UK's ports each year, it makes sense for the teams intercepting them to be working together as closely as possible.
Success stories
Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs last year used scanners across the UK to detect some: 295 million illegal cigarettes 10.9 tonnes of rolling tobacco 7.2 tonnes of cannabis 15kg of cocaine.
Using the mobile X-ray scanners officers also found 210 illegal immigrants hidden away.
Customs seized some 736 rifles and handguns, 586 stun guns, and 4274 knives and other offensive weapons.
More than half the cigarettes and tobacco seized was found to be counterfeit. Only 18% were UK brands.
Scotland has one of the highest prevalence rates of counterfeit tobacco offered for sale of anywhere in the UK.
75% of shopkeepers in Scotland are aware of smuggled tobacco being sold locally.
Counterfeit cigarettes are mainly produced in the Far East and Eastern Europe. On average they contain five times the levels of arsenic and lead as normal cigarettes.
Last year the estimated revenue loss from wine cross-border shopping was £150m compared to £100m in lost revenue from spirits.
Men and women in hard hats and high-visibility luminous jackets, hi-tech scanner equipment, sniffer dogs and a Cyclamen van complete with blue flashing lights, are strategically placed around the concrete concourse waiting; each component primed to intercept illegal goods ranging from counterfeit and smuggled tobacco, foreign meat and Class A drugs to, in the case of the van, radioactive materials.
This is Rosyth Freight port, Scotland's gateway to the Continent - the only direct ferry link to Europe which police and politicians warned could cause an avalanche in illegal smuggling. So far, their premonitions have not come to pass.
It is a bitterly cold October morning and we're behind the scenes to see how many smugglers have been caught and what Gordon Brown's vision for a unified border agency might hold in the future.
In July, Mr Brown spoke of a new "highly visible" uniformed border force, which would "strengthen the powers and surveillance capability of our border guards and security officers" by bringing together the borders and immigration agency, customs and the UK visas overseas operation.
This week marks the end of the national pilot for joint border management and a report is expected to be completed by the Home Office in the next few days.
Rosyth Freight port has been designated as an area of best practice where staff from Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Special Branch and Borders and Immigration work together as seamlessly as possible.
"The aim is to work as effectively as possible, to ease transit for legitimate, honest businesses and travellers and intercept and deter smugglers," said Andy Lumb, acting head of detections in Scotland for HMRC.
Each of the agencies shares intelligence about organised criminal networks, and analyses and discusses the booking profiles and transit patterns of the vehicles and passengers on board.
At the early morning briefing we are told which lorries they have selected for scanning and which they plan to tailgate - which means opening up the back of the lorries and sending sniffer dogs and staff inside.
The aim: to intercept all illegal goods entering the UK and act as a deterrent to organised crime.
The freight ferry comes in three times a week holding about 150 lorries and scores of passengers.
A complex contra-flow system ensures that drivers, passengers and hauliers are forced to circle past teams of specialist officers trained to detect suspicious demeanours and irregular cargos.
"We have a target selection team which looks at all the profiles," said Colin Fraser, a senior detection officer with HMRC. "The classic suspicious profile is the last-minute, cash paid ticket. Demeanour and visual profiles play a huge part as well. Organised criminals target the areas they see as the weakest. Once we make a major seizure they change their modus operandi but we are always trying to keep ahead of them and the joint-enforcement approach helps."
The dogs are trained to find cash, Class A drugs and tobacco.
The £350,000 scanner van acts as an enormous X-ray machine. As the boom swings over the top and side of the vehicle, images are fed back to an officer in the control booth. Using computer images, she strips back certain sections looking for hidden compartments, modified wheel-arches and unexplained changes in density.
The machine unveils a ghostly skeleton of each of the trucks selected, the frame of the chassis, the inside of the tyres, even the driver's sandwiches, are visible.
It was right here at Rosyth freight port that the shadows of five immigrants inside the belly of one of the trucks appeared as an eerie apparition on the screen.
Five people from India and Pakistan are thought to have crept inside the vehicle in Zeebrugge - a discovery never made public.
In 2003, another van with a secret compartment for carrying illegal immigrants was seized. The three-tonne van, which had come from Albania, also contained 15 suitcases, half of them filled with clothes and children's toys.
Earlier that year, four stowaways who had hidden in a lorry were arrested after trying to escape by scaling the ferry terminal's perimeter fence.
And in June 2002, a coach of Lithuanians posing as tourists were deported after they were found to have false passports.
Customs does not have human trafficking on its targets but is usually the first body to encounter such activity at the ports around the UK and will immediately share the information with Borders and Immigration.
In addition, Special Branch will often be seeking targets for different reasons to customs - perhaps outstanding warrants or violent crime - but all the agencies are now working together.
Mr Lumb said: "There is no point having three agencies intercepting the same passenger for three different reasons."
"The way we work has changed tremendously and is all based on intelligence and risk assessment.
"The Cyclamen van is a direct response from the Home Office to the risk assessment which indicates that somewhere in the system there could be a nuclear or radiological attack in the future.
"We are intelligence driven rather than the old scarecrow approach we used to use.
"It is true that some 50 years ago we had more officers in more ports.
"But back then we had no computers, no scanners and no dogs."
Ultimately, we find nothing illegal in the freight ferries, but staff are still buoyed by the fact that on Mr Brown's recent visit they spotted a false compartment in a 40ft goods vehicle and seized thousands of cigarettes.
As Mr Lumb points out, the organised criminal networks behind the smuggling operations are all multi-commodity. They smuggle tobacco one day and drugs and people the next, and as hundreds of thousands of trucks sail in and out of the UK's ports each year, it makes sense for the teams intercepting them to be working together as closely as possible.
Success stories
Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs last year used scanners across the UK to detect some: 295 million illegal cigarettes 10.9 tonnes of rolling tobacco 7.2 tonnes of cannabis 15kg of cocaine.
Using the mobile X-ray scanners officers also found 210 illegal immigrants hidden away.
Customs seized some 736 rifles and handguns, 586 stun guns, and 4274 knives and other offensive weapons.
More than half the cigarettes and tobacco seized was found to be counterfeit. Only 18% were UK brands.
Scotland has one of the highest prevalence rates of counterfeit tobacco offered for sale of anywhere in the UK.
75% of shopkeepers in Scotland are aware of smuggled tobacco being sold locally.
Counterfeit cigarettes are mainly produced in the Far East and Eastern Europe. On average they contain five times the levels of arsenic and lead as normal cigarettes.
Last year the estimated revenue loss from wine cross-border shopping was £150m compared to £100m in lost revenue from spirits.
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