DRUG-SUB CULTURE

THE CRAFT FIRST surfaced like something out of a science-fiction
movie. It was November 2006, and a Coast Guard cutter spotted a
strange blur on the ocean 100 miles off Costa Rica. As the cutter
approached, what appeared to be three snorkels poking up out of the
water became visible. Then something even more surprising was
discovered attached to the air pipes: a homemade submarine carrying
four men, an AK-47 and three tons of cocaine.

Today, the 49-foot-long vessel bakes on concrete blocks outside the
office of Rear Adm. Joseph Nimmich in Key West, Fla. Here, at the
Joint Interagency Task Force South, Nimmich commands
drug-interdiction efforts in the waters south of the United States.
Steely-eyed, gray-haired and dressed in a blue jumpsuit, he showed me
the homemade sub one hot February afternoon like a hunter flaunting
his catch. "We had rumors and indicators of this for a very long
period beforehand," he told me, which is why they nicknamed it Bigfoot.

This kind of vessel - a self-propelled, semisubmersible made by hand
in the jungles of Colombia - is no longer quite so mythic: four were
intercepted in January alone. But because of their ability to elude
radar systems, these subs are almost impossible to detect; only an
estimated 14 percent of them are stopped. And perhaps as many as 70
of them will be made this year, up from 45 or so in 2007, according
to a task-force spokesman. Made for as little as $500,000 each and
assembled in fewer than 90 days, they are now thought to carry nearly
30 percent of Colombia's total cocaine exports.

These subs are the most ingenious innovation in the drug trade. But
as Joe Biden told Congress last July, that's not the only reason they
pose "a significant danger to the United States." In late January, a
Sri Lankan Army task force found three semisubs being built by Tamil
rebels in the jungles of Mullaitivu. "With this discovery the [Tamil]
will go down in history as the first terrorist organization to
develop underwater weapons," the Sri Lankan ministry of defense declared.

Nimmich said, "If you can carry 10 tons of cocaine, you can carry 10
tons of anything."

Bigfoot isn't just a trophy. It's a reminder of the ever-escalating
cat-and-mouse game of drug interdiction. Before the subs, the battle
focused on fishing vessels and "go fast" boats. In 2006, improved
intelligence and radar detection from helicopters and cutters helped
remove a record 256 metric tons of cocaine from what is estimated to
have been more than a thousand metric tons that moved through the
U.S. and Central and South American transit zones that year. But that
led to the next wave of smuggling vessels. "Like any business, if
you're losing more and more of your product, you try to find a
different way," Nimmich said.

Early drug-sub experiments date back to the mid-1990s. In 1995, an
emigre from the former Soviet Union was arrested in Miami after
trying to broker the sale of an old Soviet sub from the Russian mafia
to the Colombian cartels. In 2000, the Colombian police found Russian
documents scattered in a warehouse in a suburb of Bogota alongside a
half-built, 100-foot-long submarine capable of carrying 200 tons of cocaine.

Building a fully submersible submarine is complicated and indiscreet,
requiring highly skilled workers and a manufacturing facility that's
too big to be easily hidden. The alternative: semisubmersibles that,
though considerably smaller than the sub found in the warehouse, can
carry five times as much cocaine as a common fishing vessel. Nimmich
said the rise of semisubs has been traced to two unnamed men, a
Pakistani and a Sri Lankan, who in early 2006 provided plans to the
Colombians for building semisubs quickly, stealthily and out of
cheap, commonly available materials. One of the biggest concerns when
making a drug sub is that a laborer will reveal its location before
the work is done. For this reason, the 15 or 20 people brought in to
build a craft remain on site for the duration. They set up a campsite
in the dense brush, relying on generators for electricity and make
the ships by hand. When I asked Nimmich if he was impressed by their
craftsmanship, he arched a brow and said: "You ever try to build
something in your backyard? They're building these in the jungles."

AT THE BEGINNING of last September, a 44-year-old fisherman named
Padro Mercedes Arboleda-Palacios left the town of Buenaventura for a
two-day trip upriver into the Colombian jungle. After staying in a
small hut for several days, he was led by four men with rifles on
another boat to a vessel in the woods surrounded by six armed guards.
It was el ataud, the coffin, the nickname Colombians gave to semisubs
after a few were rumored to have disappeared at sea.

The subs' dangerous reputation hasn't stopped crew members - a
captain, a navigator and two workers like Arboleda-Palacios - from
taking the job. "Generally they don't have much of a criminal
background," Adam Tanenbaum, an assistant federal public defender who
has represented several drug-sub crew members, says. "They don't do
it because they're in criminal life. They're doing it to survive."
Arboleda-Palacios hadn't worked on a drug boat before, but when a
friend said he could make $3,000 at it, he accepted.

In early September, according to the lawyer who would later represent
him and shared his story with me, Arboleda-Palacios squeezed into the
cramped boat. He and the three others stood in the middle section,
the navigation room - barely 12 feet across by 6 feet wide. There was
GPS gear, a couple of mattresses on benches and a splintery wooden
steering wheel from a fishing boat. The engine was in the stern. Two
hundred and ninety-five bales of cocaine, weighing more than seven
tons and with a street value of $196 million, were crammed into the
bow. Packages of dry noodles and bottled water were the crew's only provisions.

Two small, go-fast boats guided the semisub downriver and released
the ship into the sea. As it crawled at barely seven miles per hour,
water splashed over the porthole, making it all but impossible to see outside.

The captain called the base with his coordinates twice a day to get
directions to the rendezvous point. Miles off the destination coast,
a semisub is typically met by go-fast boats, which then take the
cocaine to shore. Once their trips are complete, the subs are
scuttled and abandoned - the cheapest and least conspicuous way to
dispose of them. The crew then get the rest of their pay and are
taken back home, if all goes well.

Two days after Arboleda-Palacios set out in the sub, his crew lost
communication with the base. So they cut their engine and waited for
contact as they drifted at sea.

IN THE DRUG-SUB hunt, one of Key West's top figures is a 28-year-old
Naval Intelligence officer who spent years in the Navy on nuclear
subs and is unabashedly earnest about taking on the cartels. "It
sounds corny," he told me, "but I want to help make a better society."

The officer, whom the government does not want identified because it
says doing so might jeopardize future missions, was standing atop the
rocking surface of Bigfoot II, the only working semisub that has been
captured, which now resides at the Joint Interagency Task Force
South. The 59-foot-long ship bobbed off the docks of Key West like
something from the world of "Mad Max." Two fat pipes in the aft
twisted up from the flat top. There was a small square section raised
in the middle with a thin rectangular window on each of the four
sides. A hatch revealed the cramped navigation quarters inside that
reeked of diesel - along with a snarl of cables and a faded wooden
wheel for steering.

As Arboleda-Palacios was drifting elsewhere at sea last September,
the U.S.S. McInerney spotted Bigfoot II 350 miles off the
Mexico--Guatemala coast. When the McInerney crew boarded the vessel,
the smugglers inside Bigfoot II reversed direction to try to knock
them into the sea. But the McInerney crew broke in and found four
Colombians and 6.4 tons of cocaine worth $107 million inside.

Catching, let alone spotting, the drug subs is difficult. The Naval
Intelligence officer compared it to patrolling the entire country as
a sheriff with three cars. "So if there's someone in Texas holding up
a 7-Eleven, and somebody's in Baltimore mugging somebody," he said,
"you have to move."

The cocaine packed inside provides a built-in ballast, giving the
boats, which are painted the color of the ocean, about a foot of
freeboard above the surface. With little or no steel, the
fiberglass-and-wood boats have a low radar signature. Some semisubs
use lead pads to shield the hot engines from the military's infrared
sensors. Bigfoot II is among the newer models that have piping along
the bottom to allow the water to cool the exhaust as the ship moves,
making it even less susceptible to infrared detection.

"It's amazing what they can build in the mangrove swamps," the
officer said, as he walked across the ship. "They take basic
ingenuity and engineering and sculpt it to meet their needs." He went
on to say, "To underestimate their intelligence is a mistake."
Indeed, military and civilian researchers are racing to improve
detection capabilities. In February, the officer spent a week driving
Bigfoot II through the waters around Key West to test sensors used to
identify the vehicles.

Daniel Stilwell, an engineer at the Autonomous Systems and Controls
Laboratory at Virginia Tech, told me he is doing work for the Office
of Naval Research on a small robotic boat that may one day be able
"to operate 1,000 miles upriver and find the drug subs before they're
ever deployed." But the Navy declined to reveal more. "Providing
clues about new capabilities would encourage the traffickers to make
tailored improvements that oppose these efforts," Peter Vietti, a
spokesman, said.

THREE DAYS AFTER Bigfoot II was seized, another semisub was detected
at sea, and the Coast Guard cutter Midgett was sent to intercept it.
"It was like '20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,' " said the boarding
officer of the Midgett.

The Midgett crew seized Arboleda-Palacios and the other smugglers,
along with the cocaine, though the sub sank as they did so.
Frequently, drug subs are scuttled by crews facing capture, taking
the legal evidence down with the ship. But confiscating the drugs is
no longer as crucial as it once was. The Drug Trafficking Vessel
Interdiction Assistance Act, which became law in October, now allows
the United States to prosecute someone for merely being on board a
semisub. Earlier this month, the first semisub crew members were
convicted under this law (Arboleda-Palacios was sentenced under older
drug laws to 108 months). Such a law does not exist in Colombia. But
Colombia's defense minister, Juan Manuel Santos, told me that one is
in the works and could be enacted as early as June. He said the
country is also looking to ban certain plastics used in semisub
production. "We're trying to detect small factories of these
semisubmersibles," he said. "We have to be also as audacious in terms
of inventing a way to detect them."

Legal and technical audacity may be required. As John Pike, a defense
expert and the director of GlobalSecurity.org, told me, "If Al Qaeda
decided they wanted to attack the homeland, or Iran decided they can
attack the American homeland, this might be the way of getting in."
Then he added, "This is the 21st-century equivalent of German U-boats."

How semisubs will evolve is difficult to predict, Nimmich said as we
walked outside his office. Nearby, workers were putting up American
flags and bleachers to celebrate an anniversary: the task force had
been fighting the drug wars for 20 years. At some upcoming
anniversary, it may be fighting fully submersible subs far
underwater. Nimmich wouldn't put it past the cartels. "If I was in
their business," he said, "it would be a technology I would be exploring."

The crew quarters of Bigfoot II, which was captured last September,
had a repurposed wooden steering wheel from a fishing boat, above.
Cocaine was stored in the bow, opposite page.