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.
