Popular Mechanics (South Africa)
THE NEW TECH OF DRUG SMUGGLING
Innovative submarine bring millions of dollars of cocaines to the U.S.
High tech goes underwater
WET MANGROVES line the many rivers that meet the ocean along Colombia’s Pacific coast. The dense tropical canopy they create makes for stifling heat – and the perfect cover from prying US satellites. For the past 25 years, drug smugglers have hidden entire manufacturing operations here beneath these trees. These aren’t drugmanufacturing operations, though – they’re making submarines. Deep in the jungle. And for the first time ever, they’ve gone electric. Last summer, the Colombian military captured a drug sub powered by smaller, quieter electric engines and a complement of more than 100 batteries.
At the building sites, smugglers ferry in thousands of kilos of materials, a labour force, and, sometimes, Russian submarine designers. They construct subs up to 30 m long, typically made of wood, wood fibreglass, fibreglass and Kevlar to avoid radar detection, and each capable of transporting as much as eight tons of cargo. If cocaine, that’s a street value of nearly R2,5 billion. The subs can cost R2 million to build and will often feature snorkels, radar, and even airconditioned sleeping quarters for at least a captain, navigator, and guard. Although a few are built with twin hulls and periscopes to allow them to submerge hundreds of feet, the majority travel just at or beneath the surface of the ocean, their blue-gray paint camouflaging them with the sea. To keep from showing up on thermal scans, some even have lead-lined heat shields and exhaust systems that are routed underneath the sub, giving the exhaust time to cool before it rises to the surface.
According to the Drug Enforcement Administration, Colombia produced as much as 910 metric tons of cocaine in 2016, a 32 per cent increase over 2015. By some estimates, one-third of that travels via these vessels. At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing in February, Adm Kurt Tidd, commander of US Southern Command, estimated that the US intercepts only about a quarter of the drug subs coming to the US – a number that has not improved in years. The main challenge, explains Erik Soykan of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), is not only finding these subs, but having someone close enough to catch them. “The subs are so low to the water that it takes an airborne radar system to detect them,” Soykan says. US Customs and Border Protection has more than a dozen such systems, but the area they must cover is vast: larger than the entire mainland United States.
“When we do get them on the radar, we can track them,” Soykan says. “The hope is that there’s an interdiction force on the water that is able to intercept. There are many times when we know they’re out there, there’s just nobody to go after them. That’s frustrating.”
Sometimes the Coast Guard cleanly intercepts a sub only to have all the drugs disappear. Smugglers will drag an unmanned vessel behind the main boat, 100 feet below the surface. Once discovered, they will sink the cocainestuffed drone so that another group can later track it down with encrypted transmitters, recover the drugs, and continue delivery.
The DHS, Soykan says, is making tech to fight drug subs and other smuggling innovations. He just can’t talk about it – much: “What I can say is that there is technology out there that allows you to listen to other radios. You put it on scan and listen to other people talking.” It’s a constant cycle of technological one-upping – with no end in sight.