The Next Generation of Cocaine-Smuggling Drug Submarines

The latest models come with A/C, shark paint jobs and quick-scuttle technology to easily sink the ship (and the drugs inside them)

Sinking the Submarine The U.S. Coast Guard released this photo of a sinking self-propelled semi-submersible that U.S. and Honduran officials interdicted in north of Honduras on March 30, 2012. The splotch you can see on the sub was actually water on the photographer's lens. Courtesy U.S. Coast Guard

Drug smugglers will resort to any number of creative DIY solutions for bringing their illicit goods to the United States, from marijuana catapults to mega-tunnels. But a new fleet of diesel-powered, fully submersible narco-subs could be the bane of law enforcement’s existence.

Far from the rickety, barely-submerged metal husks first discovered a few years ago, the latest fiberglass models come equipped with air conditioning, shark paint jobs and quick-scuttle technology, to easily sink the ship and the drugs inside them. The subs would be “the envy of all but a few nations,” as the New York Times describes them.

Intelligence officials first heard of drug-smuggling subs in the 1990s, but the vessels didn’t start getting serious attention until 2006, in the eastern Pacific Ocean. In November of that year, the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted a semi-submersible they dubbed “Bigfoot,” because officials weren’t sure it existed until they saw it. Now, federal authorities have seized at least 25 such ships in the Pacific.

But new versions are cropping up in new locations. Drug submarines hadn’t been spotted in the Caribbean until August of last year, but now they are growing in number, according to the Times. There have been five interceptions in the Caribbean so far, according to the Coast Guard.

In a raid last August, Coast Guard officers intercepted 15,000 pounds of cocaine, worth $180 million, in a sub captured off the coast of Honduras — the first time a submarine was intercepted in the Caribbean. That was a semi-submersible model, made of fiberglass and wood and painted to blend in with the sea surface.

The government has since captured three newer, fully submersible models, which can haul 10 tons of cocaine and conceivably travel beneath the surface all the way from Ecuador to Los Angeles, according to the Times.

The semi-submersibles are typically a little less than 100 feet long, and can carry four or five crewmembers and up to 10 metric tons of drugs, the Coast Guard says. Officials estimate they’re very cheap to make, costing about $1 million and capable of moving $150 million to $180 million in cocaine per load, according to the Miami Herald.

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former U.S. drug czar and a SOCOM commander, told the Herald this spring that the first subs were far from advanced — he evoked memories of the Monitor and the Merrimack, the wooden subs from the American Civil War. “It was Colombian, they had two Russian engineers, probably just unemployed sub guys helping to design the thing,” McCaffrey told the newspaper. “I thought it was the silliest thing I ever heard of in my life.”

Nowadays, things are definitely different: The newer, more sophisticated subs are probably built by independent contractors, who more than likely would sell them to the highest bidder. This has counterterrorism officials worried, the Times says. The subs are built in the thick jungles of central America, where they would be hard to detect via aerial surveillance.

But sometimes they can be found in their drydock states. In 2010 Drug Enforcement Agency, the and the Ecuadoran military seized a submarine that had been built and hidden in the jungle. That twin-screw, diesel electric-powered sub was about nine feet high from the deck to the ceiling, according to the DEA. It was about 30 meters (98 feet) long and described as “sophisticated,” even containing its own air conditioning system. That sub never set sail, but the discovery in Honduras pointed to a potential Caribbean fleet. Now it sounds like a growing trend.

Drug Submarine: This narco-sub was seized in Ecuador in 2010, according to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency. 

U.S. plans more drone flights over Caribbean

WASHINGTON - After quietly testing Predator drones over the Bahamas for more than 18 months, the Department of Homeland Security plans to expand the unmanned surveillance flights into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico to fight drug smuggling, according to U.S. officials.

The move would dramatically increase U.S. drone flights in the Western Hemisphere, more than doubling the number of square miles now covered by the department’s fleet of nine surveillance drones, which are used primarily on the northern and southwestern U.S. borders.

But the high-tech aircraft have had limited success spotting drug runners in the open ocean. The drones have largely failed to impress veteran military, Coast Guard and Drug Enforcement Agency officers charged with finding and boarding speedboats, fishing vessels and makeshift submarines ferrying tons of cocaine and marijuana to America’s coasts.

"The question is: Will they be effective? We have no systematic evidence on how effective they are," said Bruce Bagley, who studies U.S. counter-narcotics efforts at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, Fla.

Despite that, a new control station will arrive this month in Corpus Christi, Texas, allowing Predators based there to cover more of the Gulf of Mexico. An additional drone will be delivered this year to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s base in Cocoa Beach, Fla., for operations in the Caribbean.

The Federal Aviation Administration already has approved a flight path for the drones to fly more than 1,000 miles to the Mona Passage, the strait between Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic.

"There is a lot more going on in the deep Caribbean, and we would like to know more," said a law enforcement official familiar with the program who was not authorized to speak publicly. The official said drones may be based temporarily at airfields in the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

The Predator B is best known as the drone used by the CIA to find and kill al-Qaida terrorists in Pakistan and Yemen. An unarmed version patrols the U.S. borders searching known overland smuggling routes.

On the ocean, however, there are no rutted trails or roads to follow. And the Predator cannot cover as much open water as larger, higher-flying surveillance aircraft, such as the Global Hawk.

"I’m not sure just because it’s a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) that it will solve and fit in our problem set," the top military officer for the region, Air Force Gen. Douglas M. Fraser, said recently.

Fraser’s command contributes ships and manned surveillance airplanes to the Joint Interagency Task Force South. Last year, the task force worked with U.S. agencies and other countries to seize 119 metric tons of cocaine, valued at $2.35 billion.

For the recent counter-narcotics flights over the Bahamas, border agents deployed a maritime variant of the Predator B called a Guardian with a SeaVue radar system that can scan large sections of open ocean. Drug agents can check a ship’s unique radio pulse in databases to identify the boat and owner.

The planned drone flights are partly a response to demands from leaders in the western Caribbean to shift more drug agents, surveillance aircraft and ships into the area, as cartels have switched from the closely watched U.S.-Mexico border to seaborne routes. In the last four years, drug seizures in the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico have increased 36 percent, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

"As we tighten the land borders, it squishes out to the seas," said the law enforcement official.

Over the last several years, however, drug-war personnel have been diverted from the Caribbean to the southwestern U.S. border. In Puerto Rico, for example, 1 out of 8 DEA positions is vacant.

The increase in drug traffic has contributed to an unprecedented rise in homicides in Puerto Rico, a major transit point for cocaine moving from Central America to northeastern U.S. cities. In 2011, the homicide rate hit a historic high of 1,136, with 8 out of 10 killings related to drug trafficking.

"We need help fighting this battle along the Caribbean border to protect U.S. citizens there being buffeted by violence," Puerto Rico’s Gov. Luis Fortuno told a congressional panel this week.

Despite budget cuts in other areas, Customs and Border Protection has requested $5.8 million to push its drone operations farther into the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico.

But test flights for the Guardian showed disappointing results in the Bahamas, according to two law enforcement officials familiar with the program who were not authorized to speak publicly.

During more than 1,260 hours in the air off the southeastern coast of Florida, the Guardian assisted in only a handful of large-scale busts, the officials said.

One of the most recent occurred early Dec. 22, when a Guardian trained its infrared eye on a sailboat heading toward the south shoreline of New Providence island in the Bahamas. Photographs of the sloop and grid coordinates were relayed by the U.S. embassy in Nassau. The Royal Bahamas Defense Forces found no drugs, but arrested 23 men, five women and a boy. The passengers were believed to be migrants from Haiti.

The head of an interagency drug task force based in the Bahamas called the mission a "great case" in an internal e-mail obtained by the Los Angeles Times. The mission proved "what we all suspect to be the case with a piece of equipment that has such promising capabilities and potential," wrote U.S. Coast Guard Cmdr. Louie C. Parks Jr.

But federal officials who received the laudatory message said it only underscored that such success stories have been extremely rare.