Authorities in awe of coated Kevlar ® Supersubs drug runners

Photo: Christoph Morlinghaus

The noise of helicopter blades echoed across the jungles of Northwestern Ecuador. Commandos antinarcotics in three helicopters looked in marshland below, scanning for any sign of activity. Police had received a tip from a gang of Colombian drug traffickers had created a website of moonlighting here, in a dense swamp 5 miles south of the border of Colombia. And whatever the traffickers were building, the informant had warned, was truly huge.

For decades, Colombian drug runners have exercised their trade with devilish ingenuity, staying a step ahead of authorities by coming up with one innovation after another. When false-panels pickups and bulldozers began designing tunnels suspected in U.S. checkpoints, the cartels and their Mexican partners built with air conditioned under the border. When border agents began rounding too human mules, a group of Colombian heroin smugglers surgically implanted in purebred puppies. But the persistently effective most of the drug corridors has also been one of seeing — semi-submersible cruise ships or towed are slightly below the ocean surface and may contain a ton or more of cocaine.

Assembled in secret shipyards along the Pacific coast, was nicknamed drug subs by the press, but they are unable to swim or maneuvers as real submarines. In fact, they are often just cigarette boats draped in wood and fiberglass are scuttled after a single mission. Yet, despite their limitations, these semisubmersibles are notoriously difficult to control. Us and Colombia officials estimate that the cartels have used them to ship hundreds of tons of cocaine from Colombia in the past five years alone.

But several years ago, the intelligence agencies began hearing that cartels had made a breakthrough: they were building some sort of midseason in the jungle. According to the rumors persisted, the Ghost ship was a submarine honest, fully functional with vastly improved interval — nothing like the disposable water coffins Colombians have used since the 1990s. U.S. police officers began to think of it as sort of a Loch Ness monster, says an agent: ' never seen before, never taken one before. But we knew that he was out there. "

Finally, the Ecuadoreans had sufficient information to launch a full-fledged raid. On July 2, 2010, a group of search — including those three police helicopters, an Ecuadorian Navy armed patrol boats and 150 police officers and sailors — washed ashore near the Colombian border. When a boat patrol happened in some barrels abandoned in a forest Glade outside the Rio Molina, posse moved into finding a astillero or shipyard Selva, with spacious workshops, kitchens and bedrooms for 40. The raid clearly had stopped the workday — pots of rice breakfast were still on the stove.

And there was something else abandoned hastily in a narrow estuary: a submarine camouflaged 74-foot — almost twice as long as a city bus — with twin propellers and a conning Tower 5 foot, ran aground on its side at low tide. "It was amazing to find a submarine as well," said Rear Admiral Carlos Albuja, who oversees the Ecuadorian Naval operations along the Northwest Coast. "I'm not sure that he built, but they knew what they were doing".

A cellar load sub arc can contain up to 9 tons of cocaine, worth about $ 250 million.
Photo: Christoph Morlinghaus

Four hundred miles away, the u.s. Embassy in Bogota, Jay Bergman received the news with a sense of vindication. As superior officer in the Drug Enforcement Agency in South America, Bergman had followed the chatter about a midseason rumors for years — even when their colleagues remained deeply skeptical. But any satisfaction felt was less with the implications of the discovery. Drug cartels continued to grow more sophisticated. If the DEA and other agencies had hoped to remain, they would have to find out how traffickers built the sub, how to prevent them from building more, and — more important — how to detect other that might already be out there. Bergman "this is a quantum leap in technology," says about a breakfast of eggs and strong Colombian coffee in a hotel of Bogota. "That puts some formidable challenges.

The first step of the Government of the United States was a stern assessment for snorkeling. Staff of the Centre of technical analysis of Farragut — a branch of the US Office of Naval Intelligence that helps the Pentagon to assess the capacities of the battleships North Korea and the Russian nuclear subs — descended into Ecuador. During two days, the team broke all aspects of construction of the ship. They examined the hull with an electron microscope and energy dispersive x-ray to determine its composition. They pored over the technical capabilities of Chinese sub engines to calculate its range. And they studied the maximum amount of time that the crew would have to breathe underwater, without the aid of CO2 scrubbers, before they would be forced to the surface.

The Group summarized its findings in a 70-page white paper — marked FOUO, for official use only — which transmits a grudging respect for engineers and craftsmen who were able to build something as navigability in the middle of a swamp. "The streamlined hull, propulsion system diesel-electric and fuel ballast system design that all show a significant level of expertise and knowledge of submersible operations," he says. The hull, found he was made an expensive and exotic blend of Kevlar and carbon fiber, tough enough to withstand the pressures of the ocean modest but difficult to Trace in the sea. As a classical German submarine, the drug-running submarine uses diesel engines on the surface and electric batteries when submerged engines. With a crew of four to six, it has a maximum range of 6800 nautical operating on the surface and can go for 10 days without refueling. Replete with 249 lead-acid batteries, the giant can also travel silently underwater up to 18 hours before recharging.

The most valuable resource, however, is the cargo compartment, can contain up to 9 tons of cocaine – a street value of about $ 250 million. The precious cargo vessel ferries this using a GPS chart plotter with lateral scanning capabilities and a high-frequency radio — Tooly essential to guarantee deliveries on time. There is also a periscope electro-optical and an infrared camera mounted on the conning Tower — Visual AIDS that complement miniature two Windows in the cockpit improvised.

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