Dave Eberhart, NewsMax.com
Monday, July 1, 20002

Those deep, deep cartel pockets are buying drug lords a potpourri of hi-tech computer gear and other gadgetry, including cutting edge encryption software, digital money laundering at secret websites, computer-generated maps of surveillance plane routes, mini-submarines, and signals intelligence that allows cartel killers to zero in on the telephone pagers worn by targets for assassination.

The bottom line of such high powered counter-measures: despite America’s expensive and wide-ranging war on drugs, cocaine shipments to the U.S. from Colombia leaped to a staggering 450 tons last year – twice the level of four years ago, according to information gleaned by Business 2.0 from the Colombian Navy.

In the July issue, author Paul Kaihla describes an eye-opening bust in the Colombian city of Cali. Narcs reinforced with troops overrun the first floor of a condominium, but rather than a cache of drugs they find a $1.5 million IBM mainframe computer.

Although the DEA, which now has the hardware, has been mum on just what the big hunk of hardware contains in its memory chips, Business 2.0 has ferreted out reports that the computer was conducting a mole hunt within Jose Santacruz Londono’s Cali cocaine cartel.

The custom software of the seized computer was designed to cull calls from the cartel’s own people to the Cali phone exchange listings of any and all American and Columbian narcotics officials -- including U.S. diplomatic, military, and DEA personnel.

According to what a top Colombia security advisor told Business 2.0, the system identified at least a dozen cartel informants, who were swiftly liquidated.

The man behind much of this high-tech-abetted crime, say authorities, is Archangel Henao, who is reportedly in charge of most illegal happenings at the Colombian port of Buenaventura, a dangerous place where the local narc enforcement chief operates under a perennial sentence of death.

Hi-tech Network

Henao’s former top IT man, Nelson Urrego, was busted in 1998, and since then an amazing story of a computerized network command center has come to light. According to Business 2.0, the network extends across the Caribbean and the upper half of South America.

A key feature of the network: high-end radio and computer gear that send a constant flurry of guarded radio messages though a 12-base station network, as well as e-mails to laptop computers aboard drug-smuggling aircraft. The encrypted traffic not only warns pilots of when it is safe to take-off and land but also creates digital manifests of loads dropped and retrieved.

According to authorities, one of Henao’s crowning techno achievements is a private website that tallies U.S. dollars from the Henao network of distributors across the U.S. The automation continues with black market moneychangers bidding on the collected cash and the eventual conversion of what is sold into Columbian pesos.

"A trafficker can bid on different rates – ‘I’ll sell $1 million in cash in Miami,’” a treasury agent told Business 2.0. "And he’ll take the equivalent of $800,000 in pesos for it in Columbia.”

$3 Billion Per Year Laundered

Treasury investigators estimate that the website turns as much as $3 billion a year.

And the sophisticated hardware is not all computers.

The chief of the Colombian Navy says that the Cali cartel has graduated from so-called "mini-subs” to larger, more seaworthy craft. There is even intelligence that the cartel paid cash for an old Soviet sub in the early 1990s.

The modus operandi for the subs includes using the clandestine vessels to sneak cocaine shipments aboard toxic waste freighters.

However, Henao has more ambitious plans – using a fleet of subs capable of traveling as far as 2,000 miles to deliver drugs right to the shores of Southern California.

Corroborating this intelligence is the seizure a couple of years ago of a 78-foot cartel submarine outside Bogota.

"This is a technological war,” summed up one Colombian official.

And it’s also all in the family.

For years, cartel leaders have been packing their sons off to the U.S. to get top-flight technological educations at engineering and aerospace colleges and schools.

Back in Colombia, these journeymen take up leadership positions, harnessing American technology to not only maintain, but expand the American illegal drug market to some chilling unknown horizon.

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