COLOMBIAN DRUG SUBMARINE MYSTERY FASCINATES POLICE, LOCALS

FACATATIVA, Colombia - As Police Puzzle Over A Submarine Built To Smuggle
Drugs, Some Have Admiration For The Scheme

Lt. Javier Uribe, a policeman with a buzz cut and a good dose of curiosity,
peered through a hole on the rusted metal door of the warehouse. In the dim
light he spotted what looked like huge metal containers.

For weeks, Uribe had been on the trail of thieves who were digging down to
underground pipelines and stealing gasoline. He figured the fuel was being
stored in the warehouse, and mounted a stakeout.

Four days later, on Sept. 6, no one had yet shown up, so the police broke
into the place.

They were dumbfounded by what they found.

The huge metal cylinders were not storage tanks at all - they were sections
of a submarine. Once completed, it could have ferried some 150 tons of
cocaine to the United States and elsewhere with almost no risk of being
detected.

Colombian and American law enforcement officials swarmed in on helicopters
to investigate and also to marvel at the sheer audacity of the scheme: to
build a submarine 8,000 feet high in the Andes Mountains and then,
presumably, truck it at least 210 miles to the ocean, section by section.

And do it all in secret.

A lanky "gringo" who called himself Steve Smit rented the warehouse, in a
cow pasture in the Bogota suburb of Facatativa in April 1999. Smit told
Manuel Neira, the owner, that he wanted to use it for a welding shop. Soon
after, four or five Colombians started working there.

Manuel's brother Pablo lives next door to the warehouse in a dilapidated
house. He owns two buses that he rents to schools, and when he needed to
repair them, he would trudge over to the warehouse to borrow tools.

At first the workers obliged, but they never let him peek inside the
warehouse. After several visits, they finally scratched a message on the
door: "No se presta herramienta" - We don't lend tools.

"Steve was a little antisocial," the bespectacled Neira recalled in an
interview. "I mean, he was polite and spoke Spanish well, but he let you
know he didn't want to strike up a friendship."

Nor did he make any attempt to explain the sound of hammering and the hiss
of welding torches that emanated from the red-brick warehouse.

For good measure they kept a Rottweiler on the premises. Passers-by
sometimes heard the workers call his name, Lucas.

Every weekday, 13-year-old John Alvarez and his buddies would walk past the
warehouse on their way to school and wonder about the hammering and the
shadowy men coming and going. A car repair shop? If so, where were the
broken-down cars? All the boys saw were expensive new SUVs and sedans being
driven by the warehouse workers.

According to Pablo Neira and employees of a nearby Texaco station, the work
sometimes went on around the clock. Other times, the warehouse was silent
for days.

The workers brought in their own food and booze in bulk, had their own cook
and installed four security cameras on the roof. Investigators say
Russians, including perhaps the sub's designer, were among those working at
the warehouse.

Among papers police found was a list of handwritten words in Russian and
their Spanish equivalents: cigarettes, capsules, Russian, oil.

The Russian angle was not entirely a surprise to the investigators. Russian
mobsters are increasing their operations in Colombia, especially in drug-
and gunrunning. Several years ago, Colombian drug lords even tried to
obtain a Russian military submarine from corrupt Russian officials, using a
go-between in the United States.

The workers in the warehouse recorded their expenses meticulously on
notebook paper, from liquor, wine and cookies to $1.30 for 50 screws,
complete with the hardware store receipt.

Pinup calendar girls and greasy tools were found scattered on work benches,
along with welding equipment from Russia and the United States, and a
system of pipes and valves from Britain .

Looming over everything was the bullet-nosed sub, 100 feet long - nearly
the length of three New York City buses. It looked like a reddish metallic
whale sliced into three segments.

The submarine had rudders, but no propeller had yet been installed.
Investigators think it was within months of being completed. Authorities
believe a computerized navigation system was being assembled elsewhere.

Navy Capt. Fidel Azula is Colombia's longest-serving submarine skipper.
Pictures of Colombia's German- and Italian-built submarines decorate his
office in the Defense Ministry in Bogota.

Azula loves submarines, and doesn't disguise his admiration for the men who
were building the perfect smuggling device and managing to keep the whole
project secret.

"Even our military doesn't have the capacity to build a submarine," said
the 20-year submarine veteran.

It probably would have taken a crew of five to run the sub, Azula said. He
believes it would have been capable of traveling deep enough to elude U.S.
Coast Guard cutters and other security measures.

"Submarines are almost impossible to detect unless you have intelligence
that they will be in a particular place," he said.

The smugglers could have released their load of drugs from a hatch without
ever surfacing. The load would have popped up on the surface for pickup by
a boat.

The sub's design is innovative, Azula said. Instead of ballast tanks in the
front and rear, this one had a double-walled hull.

Water would have flooded the outer hull through a series of holes, causing
the submarine to dive. Pressurized air could have drained the hull to make
it rise.

Azula is still trying to figure out exactly how the system worked, and
would love to have a chat with the designer, who obviously knew what he was
doing.

"It's not easy to make a resistant hull, and to make the flanges on the
parts of the sub form a perfect seal," Azula said. "It requires very
special skill and equipment."

The sub builders bought much of their equipment from hardware stores in
downtown Bogota, according to copies of receipts obtained by The Associated
Press.

Employees of the shops don't recall who bought the items, but hero- worship
them all the same.

"Imagine, that they did this. It is ingenious," exclaimed Esperanza Lara,
who runs the Campana shop that sold welding materials to the sub builders.

Azula is sure that with so much drug money in play, someone, somewhere,
will try again.

But is this the first? Could there be another submarine, not yet
discovered, running silent and deep with loads of Colombian cocaine?

"We don't know, but I hope there isn't. I hope this was the first one,"
said Leo Arreguin, chief of U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's
operation in Colombia.