I looked out to sea,
and I could see the size of the waves through the moonlight,
and I thought, “Someone’s going to die tonight.”
Dead person.
Holy shit!
The
the biggest heroin smuggling attempts into Australia ever.
Pong Su, if you do not stop or alter course,
we will use all measures necessary to stop you.
What makes it so interesting
is that it had the rogue state of North Korea
right at the center of it.
Almost 20 years after the
there's still secrets emerging about this case,
about who was involved and how things happened.
It was different...
different to the ordinary.
[INVESTIGATORS]
I’m Richard Baker. I’m a journalist with
and I’m the creator and the host of
The Last Voyage of the Pong Su
My name is Detective Superintendent Des Appleby.
I was the lead investigator for Operation Sorbet,
which was the North Korean bulk carrier the
I’ve been a member of the federal police for the past 31 years.
So the
down on the Victorian Great Ocean Road,
which is a spectacular bit of coastline.
Where the action took place was near a town called Lorne.
It's a popular tourist town,
but normally there’s only about 2,000 people living there.
It all started with the arrival of three Asian guys in Australia
who the police here, the federal police,
had some information about.
We found out last year [they] had a human source or a mole in it—
someone who, for their own reasons, decided to reach out to
the Australian federal police officer stationed in Bangkok at the time
and actually tipped them off as to what was about to go down.
We received some information that there was some people
down at the Crown Casino in Melbourne that were acting suspiciously.
The police referred to them as the shore party,
so they were the guys who were going to receive the drugs from the ship
and then say that they were distributed to all the end customers.
So we mounted a surveillance operation.
We do what we call physical surveillance,
so we follow people around.
We also do electronic surveillance.
We can bug your phone, we can bug your computer,
we can bug your hotel room, your vehicle.
It was really, really rough and heavy weather
when the North Korean crew on the
decided that it was time to get those drugs ashore.
And so around midnight,
they lowered two blokes over the edge in a little rubber dinghy,
and 150 kilos of heroin split up into six packages.
The police had been sitting on the shore party.
On that bug, we actually listened to them talk about
their girlfriend coming ashore,
and that was their code for the heroin.
You say, “Your boyfriend doesn’t turn on his phone.
How am I going to bring your girlfriend?”
We then saw them come back to the Lorne area
and basically sit in a hotel room.
These guys eventually went off to bed about 2:00 in the morning
[and] are actually careless enough
just to leave these packages of heroin
kind of lying in the back of the car.
We waited till the next morning
and then did an intercept of the vehicle and located the heroin.
You can actually hear Des’ voice when they video and open the package.
He says--
Merry Christmas.
And then we went back to the scene where the transfer happened.
We located some items concealed under kelp.
And then a further search,
we located a body under kelp that had been buried on the beach.
Dead person.
Holy shit.
Unfortunately for the two guys in the dinghy,
only one of them made it to shore alive.
The other one had drowned,
and he smashed his head on some rocks.
And then the heroin was strewn around the beach,
and that scene is actually captured in the listening device,
and you can actually hear those guys voices talking about,
“One is dead, one is dead,”
and the heroin being so heavy to carry.
It’s just incredible. Incredible audio.
What’s the situation?
Motherfucker. One guy died, you know?
Can you hear me? Hello?
So, the next step was to prepare and try and board the vessel,
[which] presents itself as quite logistically difficult to do.
They refused to stop,
they refused to assist,
and they were disposing of items over the side
when they saw the police boat.
So we knew then that we needed to get extra resources.
Royal Australian Navy got called in,
and a frigate had to go out loaded with 20 special forces troops.
They did this most amazing boarding
in heavy seas off the coast of New South Wales,
where some of the SAS taken and hover above the
in a helicopter that’s just like--
The wind is really wild and the seas there,
and these guys rappel down the ropes.
Yeah, they assumed control pretty quickly of the ship at sea.
And so, we went on board.
They get the crew together.
And there’s some really haunting vision of the crew as well.
Some of the crew are quite elderly.
Can only imagine what was going through their minds
as these big Australian soldiers with automatic rifles
are just standing guard on their ship.
Once we got them off and processed them into the custody,
we then commenced a search of the vessel.
What they did find was a lot of messages,
and those messages had a range of instructions on them, like,
“Stop the ship. Prepare to fight. We will never surrender.”
We saw in every cabin there was very much
North Korea’s leader picture portrait up on the wall.
The crew all had these little badges of Kim Jong-il, the “Dear Leader.”
One of them in particular,
when he was asked to remove particularly that lapel badge,
he just went off.
He didn’t want to take it,
and he told the Australian immigration officer
that this was a piece of his heart.
There’s a lot of intelligence out there that links North Korea
to drug trafficking.
North Korea has had an international reputation
for being pretty devious and very creative about
the ways it can earn foreign currency
since the 80s, really.
The government there has looked to source US dollars or funds
for the regime.
Police did find one really interesting document
in [the] political secretary’s cabin,
and that was a declaration, if you like,
of basically what motivated these guys.
They were there to earn foreign currency
and to bring greater glory to their nation
in the aim of reunification.
The crew in the shore party were all arrested in April 2003.
Took probably close to three years
to get from that point where we were chasing the vessel down
to actually being before a jury.
When it gets to court, most of the crew, like, 26,
actually don’t get committed to stand trial.
The four that pleaded guilty, they were sentenced to
in the range of 22 to 24 years’ imprisonment.
So those who were put on trial from the ship
were the Captain, Captain Song,
the political secretary,
and two of the senior officers.
Ended with a bit of a surprise verdict,
which was not guilty.
-Hello.
Mr. Wong, Mr. Wong.
I’ve got Richard with me, my friend I told you about.
He just wanted to say hello, you know?
Hello, how are you?
Good. How are you?
Just as we were putting the final touches on the podcast,
I had a coffee with a guy I've known who had spent some time in prison
and was telling the Pong Su story in a podcast.
And he told me he knew two of the key guys,
they’d spent time in jail together.
And I actually got to speak to one of them, Ta Sa Wong.
And it was a really important thing to confirm
because actually, we were able to reveal that North Korea had owned up
that these two men who they had denied for 16 years
were North Korean citizens
because they wanted nothing to do with the
North Korea had actually issued these two guys with fresh passports
and said, “Yeah, you know what? They are.
They are us, and they’re coming home.”
And so they were deported from Australia towards the end of 2019.
To be honest, I just couldn’t, I couldn’t believe it.
Obviously, it was a great concern in my mind,
and in people who got to know them,
what was their fate when they went home.
And I was told that they would have been executed.
After this, we basically
had the
and then we towed it out off the coast of New South Wales.
The Air Force was very kind to come along
and used it as bombing practice,
and they blew it up using a couple of F-111s
and some smart bombs.
They sent it to the bottom.
I’m still learning more about the story,
in particular the tie-up between the North Koreans
and the organized crime syndicate.
It’s the ship that never sinks for me.
The sheer audacity of them actually coming down to Australia
and parked right next to the coast of Australia
and then sat there for a couple of days
trying to link up with a group.
It was just audacious.
They were bringing, essentially, six bags ashore.
We recovered five, and we believe one was lost at sea.
Yeah, the local rumor mill down there was running hot for ages
about sudden wealth, new cars,
new bikes in people’s driveways and things like that,
that some fishermen might have had a better day than they expected
when they went out that morning.