Inside the hunt for deathtrap narco-subs that smuggle £120m of cocaine each and flood Britain with cocaine
The sleek submarines, each painted cobalt blue to match the ocean, cut through choppy waters at remarkable rates.
Zipping from south America to Europe, each one is designed to carry the maximum amount of weight possible, and as a result can carry a maximum of three people who are trapped inside for weeks at a time with one job in mind.
Cartels are now on the offensive in the war against drugs, and have been spending heavily on their research and development to come up with their latest innovation - narco subs.
Authorities estimate that each vessel costs around $1million (£750,000) to make.
They aren't armed, instead relying on camouflage to evade detection from investigating authorities whose resources are already stretched thin.
The submarines are made deep in the jungles of south America, where cartels rule and are accountable to no one thanks to dense thickets hiding their activities.
'Narco submarines are being built in rivers and mangroves. That's why, for example, the Amazon river in Brazil, is perfect. As soon as you open Google Maps, you realise it's a labyrinth of islets and mangroves and tributaries', Javier Romero, a local journalist, told the Wall Street Journal.
'You can hide a shipyard, then you can build it, put it into the water, and with the cover of darkness you launch it into the night.'
The first was spotted in European waters in 2019, and revealed how far ahead trafficking gangs were in the cat-and-mouse game that the war on drugs has become.
One that was recently caught by Spanish authorities was believed to have travelled over 4,000 miles from Brazil to Europe over the course of 27 days, highlighting the sophistication of these machines.
Romero said: 'It was evidence that there is no control over the issue. The bad buys are way, way, way ahead of the good guys.'
So far, at least three narco-subs have been caught near Spain, though authorities estimate that as many as 30 may have avoided detections.
Galicia, Spain, has long been considered to be the perfect hub of trafficking.
Its rocky coastline means there are countless nooks and crannies for drugs to be pushed onto land, before they're send to distributors.
And for decades, the region has had significant cultural ties with Latin American cartels, meaning the human infrastructure need
Though these vessels are a new phenomenon in Europe, they have reportedly been used for decades in South America.
One vessel caught by drug cops was said to have been carrying 3,000kg of cocaine.
According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), this submarine was carrying nearly £249,000 worth of cocaine into Europe.
As a result, port authorities across Europe are being overwhelmed by cartels. The continent takes in 90million shipping containers each year, and authorities are only able to search between two and 10 percent of containers that sit in their ports.
Last year, Royal Navy commandos stormed their first 'narco sub', seizing two-tonnes of cocaine.
Royal Marines based on patrol ship HMS Trent made the historic bust during a patrol in the Caribbean.
The secret underwater submarine is used by drug cartels to ferry huge quantities for narcotics around the world.
Powered by twin electric engines, the stealthy boats can glide undetected under the waves, carrying up to six-tonnes of drugs.
A boarding team made up of Royal Marines from 47 Commando, specialist sailors and US Coast Guard personnel, clambered aboard the vessel in waters 190 nautical miles south of the Dominican Republic.
The crack team of operators seized 2,000kg of cocaine, striking yet another huge blow to the Caribbean drugs trade. It is one of the largest seizures by British personnel of recent years.
The bust is the eighth carried out by Portsmouth-based HMS Trent, which has stropped £750m of drug reaching Britain in just seven months.
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Daily Mail
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How Freddie Forsyth wrote The Day Of The Jackal in 35 days - and based his novels on his life as an MI6 spy. But after passing away eight months after the death of his wife of 30 years, did he die of a broken heart?
His gripping thrillers made him one of Britain's most popular and successful writers. But the extraordinary life of Frederick Forsyth, who has died aged 86 after a brief illness, was every bit as exciting as the novels that made his name and earned him a fortune. He turned his adventures as a journalist and as a Cold War spy with MI6 into a string of bestsellers. As an author he brought a meticulous reporter's eye for detail, transforming the thriller genre with a series of novels including The Day Of The Jackal, The Odessa File and The Dogs Of War. The books – in all there were more than 25 – were a publishing phenomenon. He sold more than 75million copies in more than 30 languages. The most iconic of the film adaptations was the 1973 movie The Day Of The Jackal, starring Edward Fox as the eponymous assassin hired to kill French president Charles de Gaulle. It was remade last year as a blockbuster Sky Atlantic TV series starring Eddie Redmayne. 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I kissed her one last time.' The woman he affectionately referred to as his CO (Commanding Officer) died just as The Day Of The Jackal was being reborn with Eddie Redmayne. The red-carpet premiere was only two days after his wife's passing and Freddie went alone. That he should have passed away just a few months after her will lead some to wonder if he died of a broken heart. He might never have discovered fame and fortune as a writer at all but for a capricious RAF officer who ended his dream of being a fighter pilot. Born in Ashford, Kent, in 1938, he flew fighter jets during his National Service. But when the senior officer told him there was no guarantee he would stay in the cockpit, he set out to see the world. He dealt with loneliness by immersing himself in adventure stories. Among his favourites was Ernest Hemingway's book on bullfighters, Death In The Afternoon. He was so captivated that – aged 17 – he went to Spain and started practising with a cape. 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The Guardian
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Frederick Forsyth obituary
Frederick Forsyth always claimed that when, in early 1970, as an unemployed foreign correspondent, he sat down at a portable typewriter and 'bashed out' The Day of the Jackal, he 'never had the slightest intention of becoming a novelist'. Forsyth, who has died aged 86, also became well known as a political and social commentator, often with acerbic views on the European Union, international terrorism, security matters and the status of Britain's armed forces, but it is for his thrillers that he will be best remembered. Forsyth's manuscript for The Day of the Jackal was rejected by three publishers and withdrawn from a fourth before being taken up by Hutchinson in a three-book deal in 1971. Even then there were doubts, as half the publisher's sales force were said to have expressed no confidence in a book that plotted the assassination of the French president General Charles de Gaulle – an event that everyone knew did not happen. The skill of the book was that its pace and seemingly forensic detail encouraged readers to suspend disbelief and accept that not only was the plot real, but that the Jackal – an anonymous English assassin – almost pulled it off. In fact, at certain points, the reader's sympathy lies with the Jackal rather than with his victim. It was a publishing tour de force, winning the Mystery Writers' of America Edgar award for best first novel, attracting a record paperback deal at the Frankfurt book fair and being quickly filmed by the US director Fred Zinnemann, with Edward Fox as the ruthless Jackal. Forsyth was offered a flat fee for the film rights (£20,000) or a fee plus a percentage of the profits – he took the flat fee, later admitting that he was 'pathetic at money'. The 1972 paperback edition of The Day of the Jackal was reprinted 33 times in 18 years and is still in print, but while readers were happy to be taken in by Forsyth's painstakingly researched details (about everything from faked passports to assembling a sniper's rifle), the critics and the crime-writing establishment were far from impressed. Whodunit? A Guide to Crime, Spy and Suspense Stories, published in 1982, by which time Forsyth's sales were well into the millions, declared rather loftily that 'authenticity is to Forsyth what imagination is to many other writers', and the critic Julian Symons dismissed Forsyth as having 'no pretension to anything more than journalistic expertise'. It was a formula that readers clearly approved of, with the subsequent novels in that original three-book deal, The Odessa File (1972) and The Dogs of War (1974), being both bestsellers and successful films. Novellas, collections of short stories and more novels were to follow. These included The Fourth Protocol (1984), which had a cameo role for the British spy-in-exile Kim Philby and was also successfully filmed, with a screenplay by Forsyth and starring Michael Caine and a pre-Bond Pierce Brosnan and, against type, The Phantom of Manhattan (1999), a sequel to Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera. Nothing, however, was to match the impact of The Day of the Jackal and when a Guardian journalist spotted a copy in a London flat used by the world's most wanted terrorist, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, or 'Carlos', in 1975, the British press dubbed him Carlos the Jackal, with no need to explain the reference. Born in Ashford, Kent, Frederick was the son of Phyllis and Frederick Sr, shopkeepers at 4 North Street – his mother's dress business operated on the ground floor and his father sold furs on the first floor. He was educated at Tonbridge school, where supportive teachers and summer holidays abroad ensured that Frederick excelled at French, German and Russian. At the age of 16, he enrolled on an RAF flying scholarship course that brought him a pilot's licence by the age of 17 and eased his way into the RAF proper for his national service, where he obtained his pilot's 'wings' and flew Vampire jets as the youngest pilot in the service. However, when he failed in his ambition to be posted to a frontline squadron, he opted for a change of career and in 1958 entered journalism as a trainee with the Eastern Daily Press in their King's Lynn office. In the autumn of 1961 he set his sights on Fleet Street, and his fluency with languages (which now included Spanish) got him a job with Reuters press agency. In May 1962, he was posted to Reuters' office in Paris, where De Gaulle was the target of numerous assassination attempts by disaffected Algerians. The experience was not lost on Forsyth, but before he could put it to good use in The Day of the Jackal, there were other journalistic postings, a war to survive and a non-fiction book to write. The Reuters' office in East Berlin was a plum posting for any journalist in 1963 as the cold war turned distinctly chilly, despite the attentions of the East German security services. However, when he returned to Britain in 1965 for a job as a diplomatic correspondent with the BBC, it was Broadcasting House rather than East Berlin which he found to be 'a nest of vipers'. Forsyth's relationship with the BBC hierarchy was antagonistic from the start and deteriorated rapidly when he was sent to Nigeria in 1967 to cover the civil war then unravelling. Objecting to the unquestioning acceptance of Nigerian communiques that downplayed the situation, by both the Foreign Office and the BBC, Forsyth began to file stories putting the secessionist Biafran side of the story as well as the developing humanitarian crisis. He was recalled to London for an official BBC reprimand but returned to Nigeria as a freelance at his own expense to cover the increasingly bloody war and to write a Penguin special, The Biafra Story (1969). He returned to Britain for Christmas 1969, low on funds, his BBC career in tatters and with nowhere to live. On 2 January 1970, camped out in the flat of a friend, he began to write a novel on a battered portable typewriter. After 35 days The Day of the Jackal was finished, and fame and fortune followed. In 1973 he married Carrie (Carole) Cunningham, and they moved to Spain to avoid the rates of income tax likely to be introduced by an incoming Labour government. In 1974 they relocated to County Wicklow in Ireland, where writers and artists were treated gently when it came to tax, returning to Britain in 1980 once Margaret Thatcher was firmly established in Downing Street. By 1990, Forsyth had undergone an amicable divorce from Carrie, but a far less amicable separation from his investment broker and his life savings, and claimed to have lost more than £2m in a share fraud. To recoup his losses, Forsyth threw himself into writing fiction, producing another string of bestsellers, although none had the impact of his first three novels. He was appointed CBE in 1997 and received the Crime Writers' Association's Diamond Dagger for lifetime achievement in 2012. In 2016 he announced that he would write no more thrillers and that his memoir The Outsider (2015), which revealed that he had worked as an unpaid courier for MI6, or 'The Firm' as he called it, would be his swansong. He acquired a reputation as a rather pungent pundit, both on Radio 4 and in a column in the Daily Express, when it came to such topics as the 'offensive' European Union, the leadership of the Conservative party, the state of Britain's prisons and jihadist volunteers returning from Middle Eastern conflicts. He was an active campaigner on behalf of Sgt Alexander Blackman, 'Marine A', who was jailed for the murder of an injured Taliban fighter in Afghanistan in 2011. Forsyth maintained that Blackman had been made a scapegoat by the army from the moment of his court martial. In 2017 the conviction was overturned. Often concerned with military charities, Forsyth wrote the lyrics to Fallen Soldier, a lament for military casualties in all wars recorded and released in 2016. Forsyth was not the first foreign correspondent to take up thriller-writing. Ian Fleming had led the way in the 1950s, with Alan Williams and Derek Lambert carrying the torch into the 1960s. The spectacular success of The Day of the Jackal did however encourage a new generation, among them the ITN reporter Gerald Seymour, whose debut novel, Harry's Game, was generously reviewed by Forsyth in the Sunday Express in 1975. Years later, Seymour remembered the impact of Forsyth's debut, The Day of the Jackal: 'That really hit the news rooms. There was a feeling that it should be part of a journalist's knapsack to have a thriller.' Despite having declared Forsyth's retirement from fiction, his publisher Bantam announced the appearance of an 18th novel, The Fox, in 2018. Based on real-life cases of young British hackers, The Fox centres on an 18-year-old schoolboy with Asperger syndrome and the ability to access the computers of government security and defence systems. For Christmas 1973 Disney based the short film The Shepherd, a ghostly evocation of second world war airfields, on a 1975 short story by Forsyth. The following year The Day of the Jackal was reimagined by Ronan Bennett for a TV series with Eddie Redmayne taking the place of Fox. Later this year a sequel to The Odessa File, Revenge of Odessa, written with Tony Kent, is due to appear. Forsyth will be a subject of the BBC TV documentary series In My Own Words. In 1994 he married Sandy Molloy. She died last year. He is survived by his two sons, Stuart and Shane, from his first marriage. Frederick Forsyth, journalist and thriller writer, born 25 August 1938; died 9 June 2025
