SUBMARINE LINKS COLOMBIAN DRUG TRAFFICKERS WITH RUSSIAN MAFIA

Officials Believe That The Vessel Was A Joint Effort Between Cartels And
Ex-KGB Spies. They Worry That The Partnership Includes Intelligence Trading.

BOGOTA, Colombia -- They should have been friendlier to the neighbors.

The three foreigners first raised suspicions in the Andean mountain village
of Facatativa because they never smiled or waved. Then people noticed that
they always had food delivered and seldom emerged from the warehouse where
they worked.

Finally, someone called the police. Officers, shocked by what they
discovered when they entered the warehouse during a predawn raid Sept. 7,
made two phone calls: one to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
office here and another to the Russian ambassador.

Thanks to the offended villagers, law enforcement officers had found a
100-foot submarine under construction, the first tangible evidence of a
long-suspected alliance between the latest generation of Colombian drug
traffickers and the Russian mafia.

That partnership concerns security experts, who worry that Colombian drug
traffickers may be getting more than hardware from their Russian
associates. They could be buying intelligence and counterintelligence
services from spies who learned their trade in the notorious KGB, warned
Frank J. Cilluffo, a researcher at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies in Washington.

Law enforcement officials believe that the submarine was being built to
smuggle up to 10 tons of narcotics--a testament to the ingenuity of drug
traffickers and, perhaps, to the strength of combined forces.

Together, Russian and Colombian organized crime groups make a formidable
team. "Colombian cocaine trafficking groups generate billions of dollars in
revenues each year, resources that increasingly have been used to purchase
the best talent and technology available on the market," noted one
international antinarcotics organization's report on the submarine incident.

And in the post-Soviet world, many Russians have entered that market. "In
Russia today," Cilluffo observed, "anything and everything is for sale."

Even the technology to build submarines.

Russians were linked to the Colombian submarine by Russian tools, manuals
written in Russian--using the Latin rather than the Cyrillic alphabet--and
evidence that two of the foreigners who had made villagers suspicious were
Russian, law enforcement and diplomatic sources said. The third man
apparently was an American, and U.S.-made tools also were found, they said.

No one was at the warehouse when police raided it, and no arrests have been
made.

Soon after the sub's discovery, a Colombian newspaper quoted the Russian
police attache here as saying, "It's one of ours." He later denied that
statement through a spokesman.

Still, only Russia and the United States have submarine-building
technology, although the know-how is licensed to manufacturers in other
countries, Russian Embassy spokesman Dimitri Belov said.

In 1995, the Cali cartel unsuccessfully tried to buy a used Russian
submarine larger than the one under construction, according to court
documents filed in Miami. Colombian police intelligence documents state
that during the previous three years, the Cali cartel had been supplying
cocaine to Moscow and St. Petersburg through the Solntsevo gang, one of the
most powerful organized crime groups in Russia.

"Russian groups negotiated with the Cali cartel to pay for various drug
shipments with arms that were later sold in Central America and to
subversive groups in Colombia," according to the intelligence documents.

"This is at least a 10-year evolution that has reached greater and greater
heights as it has evolved," Bruce Bagley, an Andean specialist at the
University of Miami, said of the alliance between Russian and Colombian
organized crime. Russians distribute Colombian cocaine in Europe, launder
drug money through their banks in the Caribbean and supply guns for the
prolonged multi-sided civil war that kills an average of 3,000 Colombians a
year, he said.

The discovery of the submarine is the first solid clue that a close
partnership exists between Colombia's new, smaller cartels and the Russian
mob, a collective term that covers at least 250 organizations. Law
enforcement officers believe that the submarine project was a cooperative
effort among several small groups that shared the estimated $25-million
cost of building it, much as they spread the risk for major drug shipments.

The submarine case also has provided a chance for Colombian, U.S. and
Russian law enforcement officials to work together against that criminal
alliance.

"The submarine is the first case in which we have been invited to
participate, and that is an achievement," the Russian Embassy's Belov said.
"Up to now, there has been a lot of talk but very few facts."

In 1997, there were reports that Marxist guerrillas in Colombia had Russian
tanks. A year later, they were said to have Russian trainers and, the
following year, a Russian airplane. "None of that information was ever
confirmed," Belov said.

Only two Russians have been arrested in Colombia on drug-related charges in
the past three years, he said, and each of those cases involved less than
half a kilo of cocaine.

The Russian ambassador sent two diplomatic notes and once even visited the
former chief of Colombia's national police, Gen. Jose Serrano, to demand
that he either provide proof of Russian mafia involvement in Colombia's
illegal drugs and arms trade or stop talking about it, aides to both men
confirmed.

For that reason, sources in Colombia are reluctant to discuss the
connection between the two organized crime groups. But experts on organized
crime who live outside Colombia say it was inevitable that the Russians and
Colombians would do business together.

Each side had what the other needed. The Colombians were deft at growing
coca and processing and distributing cocaine, but they were weak in getting
the profits back into Colombia, said a former DEA agent who asked not to be
identified because he is still a target of drug traffickers.

Russians had access to casinos and offshore banks throughout the Caribbean
that could be used for money laundering. They also could provide a back
door into the European drug market that would allow Colombians to expand
their business, he said. What some of Russia's best-connected agents needed
was money, and the Colombians had that in abundance.

In the early 1990s, said J. Michael Waller, a researcher at the American
Foreign Policy Council in Washington, "The [Russian] Finance Ministry was
not coming up with the funds needed to run an intelligence service."

Drawing on the expertise gained from running heroin out of Afghanistan in
the 1980s, he said, members of the Russian intelligence service began
smuggling drugs in earnest. Embassy spokesman Belov said he was "not aware"
of any such activity by the now-defunct KGB.

A Colombian police intelligence report noted, "The great power of the
Russian criminal organizations stems in large part from the fact that the
majority of them are made up of ex-agents of the secret services such as
the KGB."

Experts outside Colombia consider that an understatement. "This took place
with the knowledge and tacit approval of the leadership of the intelligence
service," Waller said.

"In order to keep talented personnel, the KGB had to look the other way
while their experts did business on the side," he said.

Adding to the problem, he said, is a structure that lacks accountability.
The Russian intelligence services include a category of agents called
"active reserve," he said.

"They go about daily lives while operating as intelligence officers,"
Waller said. "There is no way to draw the line" between their intelligence
activities and their business dealings, whether legal or illegal.

Cilluffo noted: "You have to put Russian crime in the perspective of a
toxic blend of crime, business and politics. It's not easy to see who is
the puppet and who is the master."

Because former and, perhaps, current intelligence service agents are
involved, he warned, the Colombian traffickers can rely on them not just
for hardware but also for information. Besides submarine technology, they
also may be providing counterintelligence consulting to stymie
counternarcotics efforts, he said.

The United States should consider the implications of this alliance as it
prepares to send helicopters to the Colombian army as part of its
$1.3-billion package of mainly military aid, the experts cautioned. "Black
Hawks and Hueys," Bagley noted, "could be quite vulnerable to a
technological escalation."