It doesn't give you much submerging room, but it also makes it stealthy. Absolutely.ĬONAN: And the Kevlar coating, yeah, as you say, it's not titanium-hulled.
However, if you need to go underwater, you can ride underwater for 18 hours at a clip, and it has a range of 6,800 nautical miles, which is, you know, pretty incredible.ĬONAN: Or enough to go from that part of Ecuador to San Diego and back. This one can only go to a depth of 62 feet, which is not very far and really doesn't give them much of a margin of error. What is different here is that this is a submarine. So if you happened by it or you're looking from high above, you can see some part of it coming out of the sea. POPKIN: It's very hard to pick up on radar, and the key thing is it can't dive. But if it's wood, it's hard to pick up on radar. They have to, obviously, have an air supply.ĬONAN: Yeah. POPKIN: It is, and I mean, not to take anything away from that construction and that engineering, that's been going on for more than 15 years, where they started with these cigarette boats that they would convert into semi-submersible vessels, which really means that they're almost completely submerged but they ride just under the waves, and part of the boat is visible. This is something on an entirely different scale. Those previous vessels were, well, sort of semi-submerged, just a little bit of the boat on top and used for one-way trips to crash land and bring hundreds, maybe thousands of pounds of cocaine in per trip. On that day, about 150 Ecuadorian navy and police members were crashing through the jungle - it's a very remote area with mangrove forests - and they - I can't say they stumbled upon it, because they had pretty good intelligence, but they found, lying on its side at low tide, a 74-foot long fully-functioning submarine that has really changed the equation for interdiction of drugs in that area.ĬONAN: Now, let's be precise. They thought maybe it exists, but we've seen proof of it yet. POPKIN: Well, the DEA had been looking for a long time and, as you said, Neal, hearing rumors about an actual fully-functioning submarine that might have been built near Colombia, Ecuador, and - but they considered it like Bigfoot. What happened on that day - the day that changed the dope - the drug smuggling game? JIM POPKIN (Writer, Wired Magazine): Thank you.ĬONAN: And let's start with July 2, 2010. In the current issue of Wired magazine, Jim Popkin describes this Loch Ness monster of the drug trade: a sophisticated Kevlar-coated submarine built in the swampy jungles of Ecuador that would have been nearly impossible to detect. Authorities did find primitive submersibles designed for one-way trips up the Pacific Coast, but the whispers spoke of something far more ambitious: a full-sized super sub with the range for round trips and the capacity for tons of cargo. Mexico, for transport into the U.S."įor years, rumors circulated that drug cartels planned to build and operate submarines to smuggle cocaine past the Coast Guard. The cartels are willing to spend that kind of time and money, because at the end of the day, you can ship $250 million dollars worth of cocaine to. "Like an old World War II sub, when it goes under, you can barely hear it," Popkin says. It had the capacity to haul up to nine million tons of cocaine, and, coated with Kevlar and carbon fiber it is difficult to track. "It can ride underwater for 18 hours at a clip," says Popkin. "They built this without the use of electricity, bringing the parts in essentially by canoe-like boats, several at a time for over a year," Wired magazine's Jim Popkin tells NPR's Neal Conan. In July 2010, Ecuadorian authorities found such a vessel: a 74-foot long, fully functioning Kevlar-coated submarine, discovered in a remote swamp near the Colombian border. Authorities did find primitive submersibles designed for one-way trips to Mexico, but the rumors spoke of something far more ambitious - a full-sized "super sub" with the ability to make extensive round trips, carrying tons of cargo. Drug Enforcement Agency heard rumors that drug cartels were building submarines to smuggle cocaine up the Pacific coast. The kevlar-coated submarine, pictured at the naval command headquarters in Guayaquil, Ecuador, after Ecuadorian police found it in a remote jungle in July 2010.įor years, the U.S.
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