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Colombia: The Submarine Next Door
New York Times (NY)
Sunday 03 Dec 2000 Website: http://www.nytimes.com/ Author: Kirk Semple THE SUBMARINE NEXT DOOR Way up in the Andes and 440 miles from the sea, suspected drug runners in Colombia built a most unlikely vessel to transport their wares. The neighbors didn't see a thing. Last July, eavesdroppers for the Colombian national police intercepted a series of radio conversations that Col. Jaime Enrique Bonilla describes as "very strange." "They were saying things like, 'Bring the flour for the party tonight,' and 'The foreigners are ready,"' recalls Bonilla, who oversees the division of the police force that operates in the mountainous central state of Cundinamarca, which includes Bogota. "They didn't use names. Lots of farmers communicate with one another using radios, but they always use names. When people don't use names, that concerns us." Fourteen leftist rebel groups are based in Cundinamarca, and investigators suspected they were overhearing coded conversations about arms trafficking, cocaine processing or preparations to attack a village. Technicians determined that the signals were coming from a region west of Bogota, high in the Andes, where most of the country's roses, carnations and pompons are grown. They homed in on a village called Cartagenita, a poor farming community of brick-block houses dominated by a factory that produces flour to make arepas. Undercover cops went to work in the area, and after several weeks they zeroed in on an unmarked warehouse behind a high wall fronting the region's main road, a well-traveled corridor that connects Bogota and Medellin. The warehouse, topped by an aluminum roof, abuts a busy Texaco gas station and a three-story house. "They asked what it was for and I told them: metal ornamentation," recalls Pablo Neira, whose family owns the warehouse as well as the adjacent gas station and house. Neira accompanied the police as they first inspected the building. "We knocked," he says. "No one was there. So we looked through a hole in the door and saw a big metal tank." The investigators thought they had located the headquarters of a stolen- gasoline ring, a major coup. They began a stakeout of the place. But it appears they'd already blown their cover. After several days, no one returned, so the team closed in. What was on the other side of the door would turn out to be much stranger than they ever imagined. The interior of the warehouse was about the size of a tennis court and contained three enormous steel cylinders. Two were sealed at one end, the other was open. Each was 10 1/2 feet in diameter and between 24 feet and 27 feet in length, sprayed with maroon paint. In several places on their smooth surfaces were mathematical computations and technical glyphs scratched in chalk and marker. One diagram depicted a Dr. Seuss-like array of tubing topped with a cartoonish puff of smoke. The cylinders rested on a carriage system atop wheels and railroad ties, apparently for easy shifting. The room was cluttered with tools, mostly conventional stuff: hammers, screwdrivers, pliers, wrenches, drills, sanding devices, protractors, paintbrushes. More sophisticated pieces of technology included a welding unit, a soldering machine, a Taiwanese drill press and a compressor. Video cameras monitored activity inside the warehouse and around its perimeter. Several nudie posters adorned one section of a wall and, according to police, 8 to 10 mattresses had been left behind along with a cache of canned food. In a corner was a weight-lifting apparatus draped in plastic sheeting and, in an adjoining bungalow with direct access to the warehouse, police found some free weights, an abdominal exercise machine and a Rottweiler. The police also found several pieces of paper with phrases in Spanish and Russian. "They were everyday phrases," Colonel Bonilla says. "How are you?' 'Hello.' 'Good-bye.' 'What can I offer you?"' Other documents revealed the names of two Russians. The property owner produced a lease, which, according to investigators, was signed in April 1999 by an American citizen. At first, the police weren't sure what they were looking at. "It was something very odd," Bonilla says. "It wasn't a normal gas tank." But they had a theory, one that was hard to believe, so they called in an official from the Colombian Navy's headquarters in Bogota. Capt. Ismael Idrobo of the Colombian Navy knew what they had found: a half-built 78-foot submarine wedged in a warehouse, a mile and a half above sea level and a 440-mile drive from the nearest ocean port. "The guy who designed it knew exactly what he was doing," he says. "It took imagination and a lot of experience." Colombian law-enforcement officials were practically giddy about their discovery. Within a few hours of the raid, the national police announced that they had uncovered "a submarine factory in the service of narcotrafficking," and that "it is believed a sector of the Russian mafia is behind this sophisticated system." The national police said that an investigation was under way to identify "the international narcotrafficking network, author of this project." Their enthusiasm was understandable. Colombian cops have grown accustomed to being on the losing side of the drug war. About 90 percent of the world's cocaine and an increasing percentage of its heroin now come from inside the country's borders, and the task of stemming that flow has become ever more difficult. Smuggling techniques have evolved in frighteningly sophisticated ways; cocaine and heroin are concealed in the intestinal tracts of animals, children and the elderly, in musical instruments, food (real and fake), cement posts, prosthetics, tar, lumber, sculptures, bottles of wine and liquor, the handles of shoe-polishing brushes, brand-new horse saddles, children's toys, silicon bags surgically inserted in a woman's thighs and even in cadavers. Law-enforcement efforts are further hindered by leftist guerrillas and right-wing paramilitary forces who protect coca crops and trafficking networks. With one stupendous piece of evidence -- but no suspects they could put their hands on -- investigators had to fill in the picture with educated guesswork. There was some precedent for the case. In the mid-90's, government forces intercepted two homemade fiberglass minisubs and two more under construction. But even the largest of these vessels was less than half the size of what the Cartagenita submarine would have been. With a strong double hull, it could have descended to depths of 100 meters -- deep enough to evade many sonar devices -- and could travel 2,000 nautical miles and remain 13 days at sea with a crew of five, says Captain Idrobo. By Idrobo's calculation, the sub was 50 percent completed and had already cost at least $5 million. He figures the designers planned to cart the craft out to the coast "naked" - -- no motors, no electronics, no propeller, no periscope -- and then assemble it there. But which coast? The Pacific is closer to Bogota and has calmer waters, and the coast isn't as closely monitored or densely populated as the Caribbean shoreline. On the other hand, the Caribbean offers access to smugglers' hideaways in the islands and a direct route to Europe. The submarine probably would have ferried its load to a drop point -- a hidden port or at sea -- and smaller, speedier boats would then distribute the cargo. The former Colombian national police director, Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, among others, says he believes that the submarine was financed by a consortium that intended to smuggle out cocaine and return with arms, dirty money, maybe even escaped convicts or guerrillas. Since the breakup of the monopolistic Medellin and Cali cartels, narcotraffickers have operated in smaller organizations and looked for ways to spread the risk, sometimes by pooling shipments. In a recent 2.5-ton cocaine haul in Venezuela, for instance, the police discovered that 12 different traffickers were involved. Maj. Juan Carlos Montero, a former director of the investigative arm of the national police, offers another theory: the builder of the sub is not a narcotrafficker himself. "He builds the submarine, then sells the service," says Montero. "He doesn't sell the drugs, he doesn't know where the cargo is going. He just rents out the submarine to a variety of people." As for the two Russians, police speculate they were providing the technological know-how. Their shadowy presence has stoked suspicions that Russian crime organizations are developing strong contacts with Colombian narcotraffickers and leftist rebels. Such talk has made the Russian Embassy in Bogota very defensive. "We still don't have evidence of the presence of Russian criminals in Colombia," says an embassy spokesman, Dimitri Belov, who adds that there are only about 450 Russian residents in the country. "There are a lot of rumors, a lot of noise, but it always turns out to be an exaggeration." Serrano, who was head of the Colombian national police from 1994 until earlier this year, admits that evidence of Russian criminal pres-ence in Colombia is thin, adding, "The Russians have been scared to come to Colombia because they are easily detected and because they have respect for the Colombia mafias and their violence." But he and other law- enforcement officials in Colombia and the United States say they've tracked a short but irrefutable history of Russians trading arms for Colombian narcotics. In the last several years, the Colombian national police have seized shipments of AK-47's, grenades and ammunition manufactured in former Soviet-bloc countries. There has also been a huge and suspicious surge in telephone traffic between Colombia and Russia. One of the most celebrated intersections of Russian and Colombian criminal interests also concerned a submarine. In 1997, Ludwig Fainberg, the Russian owner of a Miami strip club, was indicted for trying to negotiate the purchase of a Soviet-era Russian submarine and eight Mi-8 military helicopters on behalf of Colombian drug barons. According to an assistant United States attorney in Miami who developed the case, the submarine was going to travel to a point off the coast of the United States. Then drugs, packed into capsules attached to buoys, would be fired through the submarine's torpedo tubes and float at sea until speedboats made the pickup. Fainberg, who went by the nickname Tarzan, eventually pleaded guilty to racketeering. In the afternoon following the Cartagenita raid, the police were optimistic. "Hopefully by tonight we'll have captures," Leo Arreguin Jr., head of the Colombia office of the United States Drug Enforcement Agency, told me at the warehouse as he and other officials climbed around the submarine and posed for pictures. But so far, there have been no arrests. In fact, Colombian authorities have yet to declare that a crime has been committed. It is illegal to operate a submarine in Colombian territorial waters without design approval and an operational license, but there is no law prohibiting the building of one. Neighbors claim to know very little of what was going on at the warehouse, except to say that it was a nuisance. "Soldering, hammering, sanding, sometimes as late as 1 or 2 in the morning," says Jorge Perdomo, who until recently operated a small cafeteria at the adjoining gas station. "They didn't let us sleep!" But the workmen kept to themselves, and Perdomo and his wife had very little contact with them. Their story roughly matched the ones I was told by four gas station employees as well as by a local smith and by a man from the nearby town of Facatativa who supplied drinking water to the complex. (The tradesmen's names and numbers were scrawled in pen on the inside wall of the warehouse.) "The people working in there were very hermetic," says Pablo Neira. Neira and others say they usually saw no more than about four or five people on site. The foreigners, possibly as many as 10 over the course of a year, by one gas station worker's recollection, would arrive and depart in new-model four-wheel-drive utility vehicles; the Colombian laborers would take public buses and sometimes spend the night in the warehouse. They said a woman with an accent that identified her as from the Caribbean coast of Colombia cooked for the men in the bungalow. The American was tall, fit, spoke decent Spanish and "never showed any fear or worry," says Neira. The gas station workers say they never made contact with any other foreigners. And a man who for the past five years has been selling hot food under a tarp across the road from the warehouse says he saw the same people -- Colombian laborers, the American -- entering and exiting the site for "about three years," not just the year and a half reflected in the lease. He asked that his name not be used, excused himself and hustled off down the road. "There are things you can say and there are things you can't say," confided one gas station employee. "If I get involved, something could happen to me." That's how it is in a country where nearly all crimes go unpunished and a good, clean, untraceable murder can be ordered for less than $50. You can build your own submarine and ensure that your next- door neighbors never know. Or at least never tell.
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