\Kim Jong- Il needed cash, not millions, billions. His nuclear program was bleeding money. His country was starving. And legitimate trade barely covered half the bills. So the dictator of North Korea did what any desperate man with an army, a navy, and zero morals would do. He became the biggest drug lord on the planet.
And in April 2003, he made one catastrophic mistake. He sent his product to Australia. Now, most countries would have intercepted the shipment, made some arrests, held a press conference, and called it a win. Australia Australia chased that ship for 4 days through storm force seas. scrambled a warship on Easter weekend by pulling sailors out of family barbecues and then sent in the most elite operators in the southern hemisphere to do something that military textbooks said could not be done.
And when it was all over, when the courts had their say and the cells were emptied, the Australian government did something so outrageously theatrical, so perfectly Australian that it sent a shockwave all the way to Pyongyang. What you’re about to hear involves a midnight drug drop that went horribly wrong on a dark Victorian beach.
A body that has never been identified. A crew of 30 men who lied about everything. A Korean Workers Party official hiding in plain sight on a cargo ship. And a finale involving two fighter jets and a pair of,000 lb bombs that turned the whole story into a message no regime on earth could misread. This is the Pong Soo incident.
And I promise you, no matter how much you think you already know, you have not heard it told like this. Stay until the end because the biggest twist in this story is not where you expect it. Easter Sunday, the 20th of April, 2003. Somewhere 90 nautical miles northeast of Sydney Heads, a rusted North Korean freighter called the Pong Soo is plowing through heavy swells at full steam, running for international waters like a cornered animal.
On the bridge, 30 crew members are sweating through their uniforms, not from the heat, but from the warship riding their wake. HMS Stewart, an ANZAC class frigot bristling with weaponry and carrying some of the most dangerous men in the southern hemisphere, has just radioed a message so blunt it needs no translation. This is an Australian warship.
I intend to board you. Within minutes, a Seahawk helicopter tears through the salt laden air above the Pong Soo deck. Black clad operators from Australia’s special air service regiment slide down fast ropes onto a pitching steel surface that is rising and falling like a carnival ride designed by a madman.
Three rigid hull inflatable boats slam against the freighter hull simultaneously and more operators scale the rusted sides with grappling hooks and rope ladders. The bridge is secured in 7 minutes flat. 30 North Korean sailors find themselves face down on their own deck, hands zip tied, staring at the boots of men who just did something their own government told them was physically impossible.
The Pong Su Kim Jong-il personal narcotics express has just been boarded in conditions that would make most navies on this planet refuse to even attempt the operation. And the bloss who pulled it off, they did not even bother to cancel their Easter plans, they just postponed them. But this was not some random act of maritime cowboys looking for a fight.
The seizure of the Pong Soo was the culmination of weeks of intelligence gathering, a botched drug drop on the Victorian coast, an international political firestorm, and a 4-day ocean pursuit that stretched from the great ocean road to the waters of Newcastle. It was a story that connected the poppy fields of Southeast Asia to the nuclear ambitions of Pyongyang.
from the shady back alleys of organized crime syndicates to the pristine beaches of the Australian coastline. And at its center stood a rusted hulk of a ship that had no business being anywhere near Australian waters, crewed by men who were not merchant sailors in any meaningful sense of the word, carrying a cargo that would have flooded Australian streets with enough poison to generate $160 million in misery.
This is the full story and it starts not with the boarding but with the regime that sent the ship in the first place. North Korea by the early 2000s was not merely a rogue state with nuclear ambitions. It was according to multiple intelligence agencies and defector testimony a criminal enterprise masquerading as a country.
The regime of Kim Jong-il operated on a simple and brutal calculus. The economy was shattered. Legal exports brought in roughly $1.1 billion per year, while imports cost nearly double that figure, leaving a shortfall of almost a billion annually. The per capita gross domestic product sat somewhere between 750 and $1,000, a figure so low it barely registered on international charts.
The nuclear program alone was estimated to consume over $200 million a year. Somebody had to pay for the warheads, and the starving population of North Korea certainly could not do it through legitimate trade. The answer was drugs, and not smalltime trafficking either. At least 50 documented incidents in more than 20 countries, many involving the arrest or detention of North Korean diplomats themselves, linked Pyongyang directly to the international narcotics trade.
North Korean embassies around the world were expected to be self-sufficient and to funnel hard currency back to the central government by any means necessary. Diplomats were caught carrying heroin in Scandinavia. State-owned ships were intercepted loaded with methamphetamine bound for Japan and Taiwan. Intelligence estimates suggested the regime was earning anywhere from $500 million to $1 billion annually through illicit activities.
a staggering figure that included not just drugs, but also counterfeiting of American currency, arms trafficking, and the production of counterfeit consumer goods so sophisticated that even the United States Secret Service called North Korean fake $100 bills, the best in the world. The regime was not dabbling in crime.
It had industrialized it, but the drug operation had a particular elegance to it that set it apart from ordinary trafficking networks. North Korea controlled the entire pipeline. Opium was cultivated on state-run farms in the mountainous Hamyong and Ryang provinces with the village of Yona serving as one of the primary production centers directly sanctioned by the Kim family.
Front companies such as the Ryuong Corporation operating under the Korean Workers Party Foreign Relations Department held vast tracks of land for the sole purpose of growing poppies. These companies had no import or export quotota restrictions, no oversight, no accountability to anyone outside the inner circle of the regime.
Experts from the Golden Triangle, that infamous opium and heroin production zone spanning Myanmar, Thailand, and Laos, were reportedly hired by Pyongyang to supervise the refining of raw poppies into high-grade heroin. The product was then distributed through a network of state-owned vessels, diplomatic couriers, and criminal intermediaries spanning half the globe.
And this is where the Pong Soo enters the story. But the ship itself deserves a closer look before we trace its fatal journey to Australian waters. The Pong Su was a 3,743 ton ocean freighter 106 m from Bao to Stern registered not in North Korea but in Tuvallu, a tiny Pacific island nation whose flag of convenience could be purchased for a modest fee and asked no questions.
On paper, the Pong Soo was just another aging cargo vessel shuffling between Asian ports. In reality, it was a floating extension of the Kim regime criminal apparatus. When Australian authorities finally got their hands on the ship and tore it apart, they discovered something remarkable. The Pong Soo had been extensively modified for long range voyages.
Its fuel tanks and provision stores were so large that the vessel could theoretically circumn the entire globe without ever needing to dock at a port. For a ship supposedly engaged in routine regional trade, this was the maritime equivalent of finding a suitcase with a false bottom. Nobody builds that kind of endurance into a frighter unless they plan to go places where they do not want anyone to know they have been.
The voyage that would end in the ship seizure began in late February 2003 when the Pong Soo departed the North Korean port of NO. Its first stops were the Chinese ports of Tanjin, Shingang, and Yanti, where the crew loaded roughly 5,000 tons of feldspar, a mineral used in glass making, ceramics, and paint. A perfectly legitimate cargo for a perfectly legitimate voyage.
Except the Pong Soo did not stay on its declared route. After partially unloading the Feldspar, the ship advised Chinese authorities that it was returning to NO. Instead, it diverted to J May Do, a small North Korean port where it remained for only a matter of hours. During this brief and clearly pre-planned stopover, additional parcels were loaded aboard along with two new passengers who would join the ship crew for the next leg of the journey.
One of those passengers was a man identified as Tar Song Wong, who claimed to be a Chinese national of ethnic Korean descent. The prosecution would later argue he was actually the individual listed on ship records under the name Kim Sun Bomb, though even that was likely a pseudonym. Tar Song Wong was not a sailor.
He was a key operative in an international heroine trafficking syndicate with connections stretching from Pyongyang to Southeast Asia. And his presence aboard the Pong Soo was the clearest possible signal that this voyage had nothing to do with Felspar and everything to do with what had been loaded in those few secretive hours at J May do.
The next port of call was Jakarta, where the remainder of the Feldspar cargo was unloaded, removing even the pretense of legitimate trade. From Jakarta, the Pong Sue sailed to Singapore, and it was here that the crew manifest was quietly adjusted to show 32 crew members, even though only 30 were actually aboard. The discrepancy was deliberate.
Two spaces had been left open on the manifest so that the ship could unofficially collect two additional operatives identified later as Yao Kim Lam and Kiam Farteng who were already residing in Australia and who would form the shore reception team for the drug delivery. The planning was meticulous. The syndicate had operatives prepositioned on Australian soil months before the ship even left North Korea.
But Australian intelligence was not asleep. The operation that would eventually bring down the Pong Soo carried the code name Operation Sorbet and it was already in motion before the freighter crossed the equator. Australian Federal Police had been conducting surveillance on at least two individuals who had entered the country in March 2003 from China along with a third person of interest.
The AFP knew something was coming. They just did not know exactly when, where, or how big it would be. The answer arrived on the night of the 15th of April, 2003 along the dark and remote coastline near Bogali Creek, close to the seaside town of Y River on the great ocean road in Victoria. This stretch of coast is famous for its dramatic cliffs, pounding surf, and isolation.
It is a beautiful place in daylight and a treacherous one after dark. It was also a spectacularly poor choice for a clandestine drug landing, but the syndicate apparently valued remoteness over practicality. Just after midnight, the Pong Soo dropped anchor approximately 250 m offshore. Torch signals were exchanged between the ship and the shore team, waiting on shore.
A rubber dingy was lowered over the side, loaded with packages of heroin, and set out for the beach. What happened next was a disaster for the smugglers that almost looked like dark comedy, if the consequences had not been so deadly. The surf was rough, the dingy was small, and the landing attempt went catastrophically wrong.
The inflatable capsized in the breakers, spilling its cargo and its twoman crew into the churning water. One of the crew members, an East Asian man whose identity has never been established to this day, did not survive the ordeal. His body was discovered the following day on the beach at Bogali Creek, partially covered by seaweed lying near the overturned dingy.
He had been part of a twoman landing party from the Pong Su, and his passing remains one of the unresolved threads of this entire saga. The second crew member somehow made it to shore alive, but was left stranded. Unable to get back to the ship, he simply remained in the area, apparently hoping for rescue that never came.
Meanwhile, the shore reception team had managed to salvage most of the cargo from the surf. Two men loaded approximately 50 kg of pure heroin into their vehicle and drove to a nearby hotel, apparently believing that the worst was over. They were wrong. Australian federal police and Victorian police had been watching the entire operation unfold.
On the morning of the 16th of April, the two suspects were apprehended as they left their hotel. 50 kg of pure heroin, representing what was at that point one of the largest single drug seizures in Australian history, was recovered from their possession. A third suspect was arrested later that day in nearby Jalong.
The second man from the Dingy Landing party was picked up in the Bogali Creek area shortly after. But the real prize was still floating offshore and it was about to run. When the crew of the Pong Soo realized that the shore operation had been compromised, the ship captain made a decision that would turn a drug smuggling case into an international maritime incident.
Instead of complying with Australian authorities orders to proceed to the nearest port, the Pong Soo hauled anchor and made a break for it. The captain pointed the bow east towards Bass Strait and the open waters of the Tasman Sea, apparently believing that if he could reach international waters, the Australians would have no jurisdiction and no stomach for a confrontation with a vessel flagged to a foreign nation.
He was wrong on both counts, but he did not know that yet. The chase began on the 16th of April and would last four extraordinary days. The first vessel to take up pursuit was a Tasmanian police launch which tailed the Pong Soo through Bass Strait. The police vessel radioed instructions for the freighter to turn towards Melbourne, but the captain ignored every transmission.
When challenged directly, his response was characteristically defiant. He announced simply that he was going to Sydney as if he were a tourist choosing his own itinerary rather than a fugitive fleeing a major narcotics investigation. The Victorian and New South Wales water police joined the pursuit, harrying the Pong Soo flanks as it plowed northeast along the Australian coast.
But the freighter had a critical advantage. At nearly 4,000 tons, the Pong Soo dwarfed the police launches. In deteriorating sea conditions, the smaller vessels could not safely approach for a boarding action. The weather was turning ugly, swells were building, wind speeds were climbing, and the Pong Soo kept running.
By the 17th of April, it was clear that police vessels alone could not stop the freighter. The situation had escalated beyond the capacity of law enforcement and into the realm of military intervention. A decision was made at the highest levels of the Australian government to deploy the Royal Australian Navy.
The closest suitable warship was HM Stewart, an ANZAC class frigot based at Fleet Base East Garden Island in Sydney. There was just one problem. It was Easter weekend. Most of Stuart crew were on leave, scattered across Sydney and beyond, enjoying one of Australia few guaranteed long weekends. What followed was a remarkable demonstration of the kind of improvised urgency that defines military operations in the real world.
Far from the neat planning cycles of peaceime exercises, a crew, recall, was activated. Sailors were pulled from family barbecues, dragged out of holiday plans, and raced back to Garden Island. Because Stuart did not have enough of her own crew available, sailors were scred from other ships in port, a patchwork compliment assembled in hours rather than days.
Simultaneously, special forces personnel were being mobilized. operators from both TAG West, the tactical assault group drawn from the Special Air Service Regiment in Perth, and TAG East, drawn from the Second Commando Regiment at Holsworthy Barracks in Sydney, were alerted for deployment. A Seahawk helicopter was flown in from the Naval Air Station at Nora to provide the airborne assault platform.
Clearance divers from the Royal Australian Navy were attached to the boarding force. The entire package was assembled, briefed, embarked, and underway in a time frame that would have been impressive for a planned exercise, let alone a hastily organized realworld operation over a public holiday. Stuart put to sea and began closing the distance to the Pong Soo, which by now was well to the north, having passed Sydney heads and continuing its stubborn run up the New South Wales coast.
The police launches continued to shadow the freighter, but their role was increasingly one of observation rather than interdiction. In the heavy seas, they could not do much more than keep the Pong Soo in sight and report its position. The real action would be left to Stuart and the special forces team aboard her.
But the political dimensions of the pursuit were almost as intense as the maritime ones. The timing could not have been worse or perhaps more revealing depending on your perspective. The world in April 2003 was a very different and very nervous place. The September 11 attacks were barely 18 months old. The Bali bombings of October 2002, which had taken the lives of 88 Australians, were still raw and bleeding.
The United States had invaded Iraq just weeks earlier. And North Korea, the country whose flag effectively flew over the Pong Su, was making the entire planet extremely anxious. Kim Jong-il had recently withdrawn from the global nuclear non-prololiferation treaty and had issued public warnings to Washington that any retaliatory military action could trigger a third world war.
United States President George W. Bush had placed North Korea squarely in his infamous axis of evil alongside Iraq and Iran. In May 2003, the very month the Pong Soo crisis was playing out, US Secretary of State Colin Powell told the United States Senate that North Korea involvement in drug trafficking into Australia was proof that Kim Jong-il regime thrived on criminality.
So this was not just a drug bust. It was a geopolitical flash point. A North Korean vessel, almost certainly operating under orders from the regime, had been caught delivering heroin to the Australian coast. Australia was a close ally of the United States, deeply embedded in the war on terror.
And now it had a North Korean problem, sitting in its own territorial waters. The diplomatic stakes were immense. Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer summoned the North Korean ambassador and lodged a formal protest. Behind closed doors, the conversations were presumably even more pointed. But the Pong Sue captain either did not know or did not care about the diplomatic firestorm raging on shore.
He kept running. By the fourth day of the pursuit, the freighter was approximately 35 nautical miles southeast of Newcastle, still heading north and showing no signs of stopping. The weather remained atrocious. Stuart and the police launches were working in heavy seas that made any approach to the freighter dangerous.
F111 strike aircraft from the Royal Australian Air Force were circling overhead. A not so subtle reminder to the Pong Soo crew that Australia was taking this very seriously indeed. But the captain continued to ignore all communications. At one point, having his radio operator claim that the crew were asleep and the ship engines were inoperative.
A lie so transparent it bordered on insult. The Australian authorities patience had reached its limit. On the morning of Easter Sunday, the 20th of April, HMS Stewart closed the distance to the Pong Soo and delivered its final ultimatum. The response from the freighter was a sudden and miraculous resurrection of its supposedly broken engines.
The Pong Soo turned its bow towards Sydney, a belated gesture of compliance that fooled nobody. The decision to board had already been made. And here is where the story reaches the moment that would define the Pong Soo incident in the public memory and in the classified annals of Australian special operations, the boarding itself.
The plan was simultaneous assault from air and sea. A Seahawk helicopter from HM Stewart would hover over the Pong Soo deck and deliver operators by fast rope, while three rigid hull inflatable boats would launch from Stewart and approach the freighter hull for a simultaneous over-the-side boarding using grappling hooks and rope ladders. The concept was simple.
The execution in the conditions they faced was anything but. The seastate was brutal. Waves were running at 5 to 6 m, high enough to obscure the inflatable boats from view as they descended into the troughs between swells. The wind was gusting at more than 40 knots. The Pong Soo itself, nearly 4,000 tons of rusted steel, was rolling and pitching unpredictably, its deck rising and falling by meters with each passing wave.
For the operators in the inflatable boats, approaching the freighter hull was like trying to park a motorcycle next to a moving train in a thunderstorm. Bon miscalculation, one rogue wave and a boat full of special forces operators would be crushed between the inflatable and the steel hull of the freighter. The helicopter insertion was arguably even more dangerous.
The Seahawk pilots had to hold a hover position directly over the Pong Soo deck, matching the ship movement while being buffeted by crosswinds that threatened to push the aircraft into the freighter superructure. The rotors were spinning within meters of the ship masts and aerials. For the operators waiting to fast rope, the challenge was a matter of physics and timing.
They had to slide down the rope and release at precisely the moment when the deck beneath them was rising on a wave, reducing the effective drop height. Released too early when the deck was falling away, and the drop would be the equivalent of jumping from a second story window onto a moving steel platform, released too late, and the deck would slam upward into them.
These were not theoretical risks. They were the cold, calculated realities that every operator on that mission understood and accepted before they clipped onto the rope. This was not a training exercise in calm waters with safety boats standing by. This was a live boarding of an uncooperative foreign vessel in open ocean in storm conditions with the possibility of armed resistance from a crew that included, according to intelligence assessments, trained North Korean military and intelligence personnel. The assault went
in at 0734 on the morning of the 20th of April. The seahawk came in fast and low over the Pong Soo stern, fighting the windshare and the spray. Operators fast roped onto the deck in a sequence that lasted seconds but felt like a lifetime. Simultaneously, the three inflatable boats reached the freighter hull, and additional operators went over the side using ladders and hooks, hauling themselves up the rusted flanks of the ship while the ocean tried to pull them off. 7 minutes.
That is how long it took. At 0741, the bridge of the Pong Soo was secured. The entire vessel was under Australian control. All 30 crew members were detained, gathered together, and confined to the galley area. Not a single shot was fired. Not a single operator was injured. The crew of the Pong Soo, who had spent 4 days running from the Australian authorities and who had been operating under intercepted radio instructions from Pyongyang to resist, surrendered without a fight.
The sheer audacity of the assault, the fact that anyone had actually attempted a helicopter insertion onto a moving ship in those seas, appears to have broken their will to resist before it even began. They had been told that no force on Earth would attempt a boarding in those conditions. They were wrong. Hm. S.
Stewart took the Pong Soo undertoe and brought it into Sydney Harbor, where it was initially morowed at Garden Island Naval Base. Evidence collection teams swarmed aboard, photographing, cataloging, and preserving everything they could find. The ship logs, radio equipment, navigation charts, and crew quarters were all examined in exhaustive detail.
Intercepted communications revealed that Pyongyang had been in direct radio contact with the ship throughout the pursuit, issuing instructions to resist the Australian authorities. This was not a rogue operation by a freelance captain. This was a state directed narcotics mission and the evidence trail pointed straight to the heart of Kim Jong-il government.
But the heroine itself posed a puzzle. When the Pong Soo was finally searched, stem to stern, no drugs were found aboard. The 50 kgs seized on shore was all that had been recovered from the botched beach landing. The question of where the remaining supply had gone became one of the central mysteries of the investigation.
The answer came in May 2003 when police acting on GPS coordinates recovered from a seized navigation device discovered three more 25 kg packages of heroin buried near Y River. An additional 25 kg package believed to have been lost or buried during the chaotic beach landing has never been found despite searches that continued for years afterward.
The total confirmed seizure stood at approximately 125 kg of pure heroin, making it one of the largest heroin busts in Australian history. At current street valuations, that quantity would be worth vastly more than the original estimate of $160 million. The investigation that followed the seizure was vast in scope and international in reach.
The four men arrested on shorefaced charges of aiding and abetting the importation of a commercial quantity of heroin. All four eventually pleaded guilty and received sentences ranging from 22 to 24 years imprisonment. Their backgrounds revealed the truly international nature of the syndicate.
Cam Farteng was a Malaysian national who had taken the job as a drug courier to repay debts to lone sharks. Yao Kim Lam claimed to be a Chinese national from Shenyang. in prison. He would later tell a fellow inmate that he and Tarong Wong were from the same village, either part of the ethnic Korean community in China or from a North Korean settlement near the Chinese border.
When Lamb was released on parole in 2019, he was issued a North Korean passport under the name Rim Hakmong, considered yet another pseudonym, and deported to North Korea. Taong Wong himself received 23 years. When he too was released in 2019, he was also issued a North Korean passport and deported to Pyongyang. The third shore operative, Wii Kit Tan, had an even more colorful criminal past.
He had previously been arrested and jailed in Denmark for heroin trafficking before escaping from a Danish prison in 2001 and fleeing to Bangkok. He had entered Australia using a stolen passport. The crew of the Pong Soo presented a different legal challenge. All 30 men were arrested and charged with narcotics trafficking.
The most significant individual found aboard was an official of the governing Korean Workers Party who according to Australian media reports had previously served as a senior envoy at North Korea embassy in China. His presence on a drug freighter was the single most damning piece of evidence linking the operation directly to Kim Jong-il government.
Under questioning, the crew maintained a united front of denial that was almost impressive in its audacity. They insisted the Pong Soo was privately owned by something called the Pong Soo Shipping Company, a fictitious entity. They claimed no connection to the North Korean state. They said they had never seen the men who brought the heroine ashore.
They asserted that their voyage had been undertaken to pick up a cargo of luxury cars from Melbourne on behalf of a Malaysian company that upon investigation turned out not to exist. And they claimed they had stopped off Bogly Creek solely to conduct engine repairs. A story that crumbled under the weight of the evidence. 27 of the 30 crew members were discharged in March 2004 by a magistrate who found insufficient evidence for them to stand trial individually.
The remaining four officers, including the captain, faced a full trial in the Supreme Court of Victoria. The prosecution case rested on the argument that the officers could not have allowed their ship to be positioned where it was at the precise time and location of the drug delivery without knowing the true purpose of the voyage.
The prosecution deliberately did not allege official involvement of the North Korean government as an institution, focusing instead on the culpability of the individual officers. On the 5th of March 2006, the jury returned not-uilty verdicts on all charges against the four officers. It was a result that stunned prosecutors and delighted the defense.
The officers were subsequently deported. The verdict did not, however, diminish the broader significance of the case. On the 2nd of March 2004, the United States Department of State had already released a report explicitly using the Pong Soo incident to link Kim Jong-il government to international drug trafficking.
The evidence was, in the words of one American narcotics adviser to Congress, almost uncontroversial. Whether or not the individual officers could be proven to have known about the heroine, the ship was North Korean. The operation bore all the hallmarks of state direction and a party official was found aboard. The dots connected themselves.
But the Pong Soo story has one final chapter, and it is the one that Australians remember best. After the seizure, the Pong Soo was brought to Sydney Harbor and morowed at Garden Island Naval Base. From there, it was moved to Snails Bay, where it sat for over 2 years, slowly rusting and costing Australian taxpayers an estimated $2,500 per day in maintenance and security, roughly $90,000 per month.
The ship had been declared unseaorthy by Australian authorities who cited structural deterioration and operational hazards. It could not be sailed back to North Korea even if anyone had wanted to return it. The Australian government formally notified Pyongyang that the vessel would not be repatriated. So, what do you do with a 4,000 ton rusting symbol of North Korean state sponsored narcotics trafficking that is eating nearly $100,000 a month of taxpayer money.
If you are the Australian government in 2006, the answer is gloriously, spectacularly simple. You blow it up. On the 23rd of March 2006, the empty hull of the Pong Soo was towed out to sea off the New South Wales coast. Two Royal Australian Air Force F-111 strike aircraft, the legendary Swingwing bombers known affectionately as the Pig screamed in low over the water and delivered two GBU10 Paveway 2 laserg guided bombs, each weighing roughly 97 kg.
The first bomb struck the Pong Soo amid ships. The second hit moments later, the old freighter, the ship that had carried Kim Jong-il heroine halfway around the world, the ship that had run from the Australian Navy for 4 days, the ship that had been boarded in a storm by men who simply did not care about the odds, broke apart, and sank beneath the waves of the Tasman Sea in a spectacular eruption of fire, smoke, and twisted metal.
The video footage of the sinking was released publicly. It was not subtle. It was not meant to be. It was a message delivered in the universal language of high explosive to Pyongyang and to every other regime or syndicate that might consider using Australian waters as a delivery route for their product.
The message was clear. We found your ship. We chased your ship. We boarded your ship in a storm that should have made it impossible. We arrested your crew. We seized your drugs. And when we were done with your ship, we blew it to pieces with,000b bombs. Come back anytime you like. The Pong Soo incident left a lasting mark on Australian defense and law enforcement policy.
The operation exposed significant gaps in Australia maritime surveillance and interdiction capabilities, particularly for vessels that were not destined for official ports. Australian agencies had possessed data on the Pong Soo presence within the exclusive economic zone, but had failed to act with sufficient speed, allowing the smuggling attempt to proceed until local police actions forced the issue.
The operational shortcomings highlighted the need for enhanced inter agency coordination in border protection and the lessons learned influence subsequent reforms aimed at strengthening maritime drug interdiction across federal, state and military jurisdictions. For the Special Air Service Regiment and the tactical assault groups, the boarding of the Pong Soo became a defining moment in their operational history.
TAG West and TAG East had operated together on a realworld mission in conditions that pushed the boundaries of what was considered operationally feasible. The fast rope insertion onto a rolling freighter deck in heavy seas. The simultaneous over the side boarding from inflatable boats. The 7-minut seizure of the entire vessel without a single casualty.
All of it became a benchmark for maritime counterterrorism and shipboarding operations that is still studied and referenced within special operations communities around the world. The SASR itself has a long history of maritime operations dating back to 1980 when the regiment was first directed to develop an offshore capability focused primarily on the threat of terrorist seizure of Bas Strait oil rigs.
That maritime DNA combined with the regiment legendary selection process, its culture of improvisation under pressure and its institutional refusal to accept that any operation is too dangerous to attempt was precisely what made the Pong Soo boarding possible. Any other outfit might have looked at the sea conditions, the weather forecast, and the size of the target vessel, and decided to wait for calmer seas.
The SSR operators did not wait. They went. There is a final irony to the Pong Soo story that deserves mention. The ship that Kim Jong-il regime sent to flood Australian streets with heroin ended up costing the North Korean government far more than any profit the drug shipment could have generated. The heroin was seized. The operatives were arrested and imprisoned for decades.
The ship was confiscated and eventually destroyed. The diplomatic fallout was severe with Australia lodging formal protests and the United States using the incident as public evidence of North Korean state criminality. The exposure of a Korean Workers Party official aboard the vessel made global headlines and hardened international opinion against the regime at precisely the moment when Pyongyang was trying to navigate the nuclear crisis without additional provocation.
Kim Jong- sent a ship to make money. He lost the ship, lost the drugs, lost the operatives, lost the diplomatic argument, and gained nothing but a spectacular piece of video footage showing his vessel being blown apart by Australian fighter bombers. The men who boarded the Pong Soo in that Easter storm probably did not think about any of that as they slid down the ropes onto the pitching deck.
They were thinking about the job. Secure the bridge. Control the crew. Do not fall off the ship. And when it was done, when the 30 North Korean sailors were zip tied and sitting on the deck of their own vessel, staring at the boots of Australian special forces operators who had just done the impossible in 7 minutes. The blo from the SASR probably thought the same thing every digger has thought after every job since Gallipoli. Right.
What is for lunch? The Pong Soo sits on the ocean floor now somewhere off the coast of New South Wales. A rusted monument to the stupidity of thinking you can run drugs into Australia and get away with it. The men who boarded her have never been publicly identified. Their names do not appear in newspapers or on medals lists. They went back to their barracks, had their Easter dinner a few days late, and got on with the next job.
Because that is what the SR does. It does not celebrate. It does not brag. It just gets it done. Whether the mission is in the deserts of Afghanistan, the jungles of East Teeour, or the storm-lashed deck of a North Korean drug freighter 90 mi off the Australian coast on Easter Sunday morning, the Pong Soo tried to run. Australia said no.
And a handful of quiet professionals in black kit proved once again that there is no storm fierce enough, no sea rough enough, and no ship fast enough to outrun the bloss who wear the sandcoled beret.
