Authorities in Awe of Drug Runners' Jungle-Built, Kevlar-Coated Supersubs

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Authorities in Awe of Drug Runners' Jungle-Built, Kevlar-Coated Supersubs


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The clatter of helicopter blades echoed across the jungles of northwestern Ecuador. Antinarcotics commandos in three choppers peered at the mangroves below, scanning for any sign of activity. The police had received a tip that a gang of Colombian drug smugglers had set up a clandestine work site here, in a dense swamp 5 miles south of Colombia’s border. And whatever the traffickers were building, the tipster had warned, was truly enormous.

For decades, Colombian drug runners have pursued their trade with diabolical ingenuity, staying a step ahead of authorities by coming up with one innovation after another. When false-paneled pickups and tractor-trailers began drawing suspicion at US checkpoints, the cartels and their Mexican partners built air-conditioned tunnels under the border. When border agents started rounding up too many human mules, one group of Colombian smugglers surgically implanted heroin into purebred puppies. But the drug runners’ most persistently effective method has also been one of the crudest—semisubmersible vessels that cruise or are towed just below the ocean’s surface and can hold a ton or more of cocaine.

Assembled in secret shipyards along the Pacific coast, they’ve been dubbed drug subs by the press, but they’re incapable of diving or maneuvering like real submarines. In fact, they’re often just cigarette boats encased in wood and fiberglass that are scuttled after a single mission. Yet despite their limitations, these semisubmersibles are notoriously difficult to track. US and Colombian officials estimate that the cartels have used them to ship hundreds of tons of cocaine from Colombia over the past five years alone.

But several years ago, intelligence agencies began hearing that the cartels had made a technological breakthrough: They were constructing some kind of supersub in the jungle. According to the persistent rumors, the phantom vessel was an honest-to-goodness, fully functioning submarine with vastly improved range—nothing like the disposable water coffins the Colombians had been using since the ’90s. US law enforcement officials began to think of it as a sort of Loch Ness Monster, says one agent: “Never seen one before, never seized one before. But we knew it was out there.”

Finally, the Ecuadoreans had enough information to launch a full-fledged raid. On July 2, 2010, a search party—including those three police helicopters, an armada of Ecuadorean navy patrol boats, and 150 well-armed police and sailors—scoured the coastline near the Colombian border. When a patrol boat happened on some abandoned barrels in a clearing off the Río Molina, the posse moved in to find an astillero, or jungle shipyard, complete with spacious workshops, kitchens, and sleeping quarters for 40. The raid had clearly interrupted the workday—rice pots from breakfast were still on the stove.

And there was something else hastily abandoned in a narrow estuary: a 74-foot camouflaged submarine—nearly twice as long as a city bus—with twin propellers and a 5-foot conning tower, beached on its side at low tide. “It was incredible to find a submarine like that,” says rear admiral Carlos Albuja, who oversees Ecuadorean naval operations along the northwest coast. “I’m not sure who built it, but they knew what they were doing.”
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Four hundred miles away, at the US embassy in Bogotá, Jay Bergman received the news with a sense of vindication. As the US Drug Enforcement Agency’s top official in South America, Bergman had followed the chatter about a rumored supersub for years—even as his colleagues remained deeply skeptical. But any satisfaction he felt was undercut by the implications of the discovery. The drug cartels continued to grow more sophisticated. If the DEA and other agencies hoped to keep up, they’d have to figure out how the traffickers built the sub, how to prevent them from building more, and—most important—how to detect others that might already be out there. “This is a quantum leap in technology,” Bergman says over a breakfast of eggs and strong Colombian coffee at a Bogotá hotel. “It poses some formidable challenges.”

The US government’s first step was a stern-to-snorkel assessment. Agents from the Farragut Technical Analysis Center—a branch of the US Office of Naval Intelligence that helps the Pentagon assess the capabilities of North Korean battleships and Russian nuclear subs—went down to Ecuador. Over two days, the team broke down every aspect of the vessel’s construction. They examined the hull with an electron microscope and energy-dispersive x-ray to determine its composition. They pored over the technical capabilities of the sub’s Chinese engines to calculate its range. And they studied the maximum amount of breathing time the crew would have underwater, without the aid of CO2 scrubbers, before they’d be forced to surface.

The group summed up its findings in a 70-page white paper—marked FOUO, for official use only—that conveys a grudging respect for the engineers and craftsmen who were able to build something so seaworthy in the middle of a swamp. “The streamlined hull, diesel-electric propulsion system, and fuel ballast system design all show a significant level of technical expertise and knowledge of submersible operations,” it states. The hull, they discovered, was made from a costly and exotic mixture of Kevlar and carbon fiber, tough enough to withstand modest ocean pressures but difficult to trace at sea. Like a classic German U-boat, the drug-running submarine uses diesel engines on the surface and battery-powered electric motors when submerged. With a crew of four to six, it has a maximum operational range of 6,800 nautical miles on the surface and can go 10 days without refueling. Packed with 249 lead-acid batteries, the behemoth can also travel silently underwater for up to 18 hours before recharging.

The most valuable feature, though, is the cargo bay, capable of holding up to 9 tons of cocaine—a street value of about $250 million. The vessel ferries that precious payload using a GPS chart plotter with side-scan capabilities and a high-frequency radio—essential gadgetry to ensure on-time deliveries. There’s also an electro-optical periscope and an infrared camera mounted on the conning tower—visual aids that supplement two miniature windows in the makeshift cockpit.
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<<<<CLICK LINKY at top of post for pages 2 and 3 ;P >>>>
 
Hoooooolllyyyy fuuuuuuck!

Now that's a sub! "Capable of holding up to 9 tons of cocaine".

And the DEA and FBI talk shit and take their pictures when they catch 50 kilos goin over the border. 50 kilos = 110 pounds. They all laugh and celebrate and proally crack a kilo open and get some hookers and kill them and cover it up, but that's besides the point. While they're doing that the sub holding 163 times more coke than their 50 kilo bust glides across the border and makes America happy, and I bet there's more than one.

The War on Drugs is about as effective as a 3-legged racehorse.
 
This is amazing. I am actually extremely impressed with the engineering going into building something like this.

Just another footnote of proof that the War on Drugs can't be fought effectively when people still do drugs and still pay money for drugs. If only the lawmakers would figure this out.
 
Yeah, exactly. The battery/diesel setup is actually pretty surprising as well (although its an old technology, as the article mentioned). I know the the traffickers have been using military-quality GPS and SSB radio communications equipment since the 1980s.

When will the DEA learn? That's the real question. Before you know it, these guys are gunna be building navies in the jungle.
 
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The fact that the feds are awed is a testament to the true arrogance of western and modern civilization.
 
Materials required for building submarines will soon be considered as drug precursors :-)
 
holy shite, I thought this was one of the IKEA subs that have been found in the past.
Waiting for the next innovation....
 
yea this just further shows me that the feds only see/capture between 1 and 5% of all the drugs that come into this country. How could one lowly dea agent actually feel like they are doing good for anyone? It makes me sad....
 
I saw the National geographic special on cocaine submarines; which was pretty interesting. T

he DEA has this big expentive super high tech ship that is used to track and catch cocaine subs at the expense of the tax payers. I rember at the end of the show they said it still has yet to catch a single cocaine submarine. WOW what a great use of tax payer money. 8)
 
Those pics are really cool. It's incredible how smart and technologically advanced the drug smugglers are, after all, they always gotta be one step ahead of the man. That sub looks like one that can maneuver and submerge like the ones the navy has.
 
NeighborhoodThreat said:
When will the DEA learn? That's the real question. Before you know it, these guys are gunna be building navies in the jungle.
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when you think about it.. the world economy being tilted toward the US, incomprehensible amounts of wealth accumulate here. with prohibition, a significant portion of that is directed to these foreign black markets that we spend money on fighting. especially due to the cost increase (10-100x) due to prohibition and the dollar's value.

i wouldn't be surprised if actual naval combat happens in the future.

btw, our leaders know all of this stuff. unfortunately, they're not actually the leaders, they're bought. it's all about the money (that is prohibition's historical and modern basis, as well, imo... class warfare)
 
i wouldn't be surprised if actual naval combat happens in the future.

btw, our leaders know all of this stuff. unfortunately, they're not actually the leaders, they're bought. it's all about the money (that is prohibition's historical and modern basis, as well, imo... class warfare)
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I like the way you think. Although the United States Navy still beats all other navies combined by an order of magnitude or something ridiculous like that. Time will certainly tell.
 
p.s., they have a fucking toilet in there.

^ i meant skirmishes. technology increases the individuals'/popular power relative to "the man"

(except when they keep info classified, in which case the tech is inaccessible)
 
Yeah exactly. I'm quite interested in the communications suite they've got setup in those things. I remember reading an article a few months ago about them using satphones, but it looks like they've opted for the traditional SSB radio setup. The GPS stuff isn't surprising either, but still, infrared cameras and all that? Quite high tech if you think about it.
 
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