Go Inside a Drug Submarine With the Narco Sub Godfather
Posted by Alex_Pasternack on Sunday, Jul 04, 2010
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Forget turbo props, Samsonite suitcases and underwear refashioned with hidden pockets. Today the most dedicated and upstart drug smugglers are going underwater, smuggling drugs across borders with narco subs.
Yesterday, a homemade diesel powered submarine was discovered in a small stream in Ecuador, not far from the border with Colombia, in a joint Drug Enforcement Agency-Ecuadorean operation. One man was arrested, in what officials say was the most advanced narco sub yet discovered.
Last year, we took our video cameras to Columbia to meet Dr. Miguel Angel Montoya, a former trafficker who spearheaded one of the original narco sub projects for the Cali cartel. (The video, above, was just featured on CNN.com this week; read an interview with Montoya here.)
The design, based on torpedos, attached simple radio devices to compartmentalized tubes that the cartel hitched to modest towboats. If a marine patrol became suspicious, the device was simply jettisoned and retrieved by a backup cartel boat tracking its signal. Made of fiberglass, the ship is nearly impossible to detect via sonar or radar, and very difficult to spot visually.
A “serious development”
The camouflaged vessel found yesterday, nine-feet-high from the deck plates to the ceiling and stretching nearly 100 feet long, features a conning tower, periscope and air-conditioning system. This wasn’t the first time a narco sub has been seized: The Colombian Navy has intercepted, sometimes with help from other countries, 39 submersibles, including six in 2009, thwarting “the transportation of more than 30 tons of cocaine abroad.”
But the newly discovered ship is the most developed yet, according to the DEA, and was intended for trans-oceanic drug trafficking, perhaps even to North American shores.
“The submarine’s nautical range, payload capacity, and quantum leap in stealth have raised the stakes for the counter-drug forces and the national security community alike,” said DEA Andean Regional Director Jay Bergman. “This is the final frontier for the maritime drug traffickers. We remained completely incredulous until the last minute.”
“Good cops never underestimate their enemy or the ingenuity of the adversary,” he said. “But seeing is believing and that is what this day is.”
As Montoya told us last year, he still doesn’t believe that international customs agents will ever thwart the well-funded research-and-development efforts of international drug smuggling outfits.
He may be wrong. But the narco sub concept is already at least a decade old. What have they thought of next? Does the DEA have any experts on teleportation?
See our article about narco subs on CNN.com this week, read Wikipedia on narco subs, and check out a slideshow of China’s own non-drug-smuggling DIY inventors. And there’s always a more legitimate undersea adventurer, Dennis Chamberland
AP. PHOTO: APFiled under:
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