Relive the dramatic moments from the The Last Voyage of the Pong Su that were caught on police and news cameras at the time.
Teng and Lee under surveillance
Undercover Australian Federal Police discreetly film Kiam Fah Teng and a then-unknown man they would later identify as 'Chin Kwang Lee' outside Melbourne Central shopping centre in April 2003.
The AFP began following the pair after a tip-off that Teng had been acting suspiciously around Melbourne's Crown Casino.
Pong Su - Teng under surveillance
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Pong Su - Teng under surveillance
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Pong Su - Teng under surveillance
Kiam Fah Teng arrived in Australia in March, 2003.
Smoking in the main street of Lorne
On-shore party member, Teng, is filmed by police outside a real estate agent's office on Mountjoy Parade, Lorne on April 11, 2003. Donna Venables, who was working as a receptionist at the agency at the time, says she refused to rent Teng a holiday home after he indicated he wouldn't need linen on the beds.
"I just thought they were a bit dodgy, so I had an instinct not to lease them something in the end," she says in the first episode of podcast series.
Pong Su - Teng outside Lorne real estate agency
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Pong Su - Teng outside Lorne real estate agency
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Pong Su - Teng outside Lorne real estate agency
Plain-clothed AFP officers watched and filmed Teng in Lorne's main street in 2003.
Anonymous contact
Police watch and film the onshore duo, Teng and Lee, for many days trying to understand their plans. The pair frequent the Geelong pier area on Western Beach Road, Geelong and on April 12 are filmed using a public pay phone. Lee, Teng and Lam also had a series of pre-paid, disposable “burner” phones while communicating with each other and to contacts overseas.
They registered them using false names like Andy Tan, Tony Liew, Terry Lam and John Thompson.
Teng at Geelong pier
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Teng at Geelong pier
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Teng at Geelong pier
On-shore party member Kiam Fah Teng is watched by undercover Australian Federal Police agents near the Geelong pier on April 12, 2003.
Sighting the 'ghost ship'
April 15, the night of the heroin drop, is the first time onshore Australian Federal Police agents sight the Pong Su. Footage taken with a thermal imaging camera that night shows the heavy ocean swell pushing the ship around, very close to land.
Thermal imaging camera spots the Pong Su
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Thermal imaging camera spots the Pong Su
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Thermal imaging camera spots the Pong Su
One of the first instance where Australian authorities visualise the North Korean ship just off the Great Ocean Road coast on the night of the heroin import.
First confirmed sighting of the heroin
At 1.22am on April 16, 2003 – just hours after the bungled heroin drop at Boggaley Creek – a covert AFP officer enters the underground car park at the Grand Pacific Hotel in Lorne. Teng and Lee have disappeared to their rooms upstairs, leaving two heroin packages in full view inside their rented van –which are filmed by the officer.
“Looking in the car, you could see that there's two blue tarpaulin sort of packages wrapped in a fishing net," says Agent Des Applebly in episode four.
"We realised that that would likely be drugs, highly likely to be drugs but the argument then that started was, how much?”
The early morning arrest
Early on April 16, the AFP devise an arrest strategy for Chin Kwang Lee and Kiam Fah Teng. They deflate one of the tyres on the duo's rented van, assuming the culprits will need to change the tyre and could be caught with their hands on the heroin that is stored in the boot of the car.
“And as it has happened, one of the two comes out to the Tarago and he has a look at the front tyre and decides that he's going to drive it anyway," recalls Agent Appleby.
Video shows the moments after a short pursuit of the vehicle whereby the AFP jammed it, forcing it to stop. They film the men, handcuffed and face-down on the road, while officers tear open one of the packages to reveal dozens of blocks of wrapped parcels of heroin.
"It's a dead person": grim beach discovery
With Lee and Teng in custody, police turn their attention to combing the crime scene at the beach. At Boggaley Creek they find the washed up rubber dinghy and two life jackets strewn on the shore. They film their search, rolling away rocks and lifting seaweed, in the hope of finding more heroin.
But they find something else instead.
How Wong was arrested
After the onshore party were arrested, another man was found hiding in the scrub after more than 40 hours. Ta Sa Wong, one of the men who'd brought the heroin ashore in a rubbery dinghy from the Pong Su, was discovered and eventually arrested by Tim James from Victoria's search and rescue division.
"As I peered through the undergrowth, I could see colour, which I took to be a person laying doggo in the undergrowth," he says in episode four. Tim returned to the scene later in the night with a colleague to recreate on camera how he found Wong.
Wong in custody
After 40 hours hiding in the Great Ocean Road hills, a malnourished and exhausted Ta Sa Wong is brought into custody. A police officer films Wong's arrival at the police station, ordering him to turn around and show the rubber tubing holding up his trousers.
"He was ridiculously cold, hungry, scared," says case officer Celeste Johnston. "He was apprehensive. He wasn't sure of what was going on as far as how he would be treated. But as soon as he was given some food and a warm drink and some water, he was very, very grateful."
Pong Su: Ta Sa Wong's arrest
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Pong Su: Ta Sa Wong's arrest
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Pong Su: Ta Sa Wong's arrest
After his capture on Boggaley Creek
"Nah mate, he's making a run for it": chasing the Pong Su
When the Pong Su suddenly powers away from Boggaley Creek on April 16, she appears to be heading out into the South Pacific Ocean, towards New Zealand.
So a police boat from Tasmania, the Van Dieman, is called in to shadow her. But suddenly, the 100-metre cargo ship changes course and heads up the NSW coast. The pursuit is then passed from Tasmanian water police to their NSW counterparts, who film their frustrated attempts to stop the ship.
A warship, a helicopter and fastboats: the SAS storm the Pong Su
After four days of pursuing the Pong Su, the Australian Special Air Service squadron and the frigate HMAS Stewart are sent in to board the ship. In shocking sea conditions, SAS troops rappel down ropes from a hovering Seahawk helicopter, while others in fastboats climb up ladders thrown up over the edge of the ship.
Dramatic boarding of the Pong Su
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Dramatic boarding of the Pong Su
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Dramatic boarding of the Pong Su
Just after dawn on Easter Sunday 2003, heavily armed Australian special forces troops boarded the Pong Su, which they had been chasing for four days.
Master Sun's heart problems
During the dramatic capture of the Pong Su, her captain, Master Song Man Sun, suffers a medical episode. While his crew are under guard by heavily armed soldiers, the captain lays on a faded couch in the ship's bridge and is treated by Australian army medicos for a heart problem – filmed by AFP officers taking evidence on board.
A tour of the drug ship
As the Pong Su is steered back into Sydney Harbour, AFP agents scour every corner of the ship, filming her rooms, engines and control rooms.
"Walking through the vessel every cabin had two pictures of the "Dear Leader" and and his father and they were in pristine condition," says Agent Appleby in episode five.
"They were in pristine condition, so every cabin had two huge pictures probably some at least about a metre by a metre, huge."
Pong Su - Onboard a North Korean drug-smuggling ship
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Pong Su - Onboard a North Korean drug-smuggling ship
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Pong Su - Onboard a North Korean drug-smuggling ship
When authorities boarded Pong Su, they filmed what conditions were like on the boat that had just off-loaded 150kg onto the Australian shore.
Counting cash
Video taken by police while on board the Pong Su, and later during the processing of the crew in Sydney, shows that some crew members were carrying large sums of American cash. Some had as much as $US2000, which is an unusually large amount of money for the average North Korean.
The crew under guard in cafe quarters
With Australian authorities now in charge of their ship, the Pong Su crew are gathered into the eating area of their ship and put under the guard of black-clad, SAS soldiers with rifles.
Tim Curtis, one of the soldiers who we went aboard, noted the differences in body language amongst the crew.
“There were some of those kids were not like the others, they were what were very clearly just merchant seamen and sort of really scared shitless by the whole process," he says.
"And there were a couple that we thought were a bit more steely-eyed, a bit more, I guess, disciplined and less intimidated by the whole process."
'Transmitting so fast": Morse code from North Korea
“Most modern ships have satellite communications – well the Pong Su didn't," says Tim Curtis, commander of the Australian Special Air Service squadron. "It had a high-frequency radio system. And it was constantly receiving Morse code."
In a video taken inside the radio room, a petty officer from the warship HMAS Stewart attempts to translate rapid fire Morse code being received from North Korea.
Pong Su receiving morse code from North Korea
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Pong Su receiving morse code from North Korea
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Pong Su receiving morse code from North Korea
A petty officer from the warship HMAS Stewart attempts to translate rapid fire morse code being received from North Korea.
"If I don’t wear it I will die": North Koreans beg for pins
Authorities took the 30 crew members ashore for processing at Sydney Harbour's Garden Island naval base. In the process, every crew member had their possessions documented and collected.
"They all had pins of their leader, of Kim Jong-il, and Kim Il-sung on these little lapel pins. That was all they cared about,” says Detective Celeste Johnston.
This was all filmed by the federal police. In one video, a crew member pleads for his pins to be given back, telling the police officer and the interpreter they were like his heart and that he’d die without them.
Interviewing Jong Dok-hong
Police film their initial processing of Jong Dok-hong, 24, a crew member on his first voyage on the Pong Su who could read and write in English.
In 2004, a year after the dramatic capture of the Pong Su and while Jong Dok-hong and 25 other crew members were being held in immigration detention, he passed secret notes to Australian authorities effectively breaking ranks from the narrative the North Koreans were spinning.
In his initial processing video he playfully asks police if he can look at his own photo to ensure it "came out handsome".
Finding the missing heroin
Police suspected that one 25 kilogram package might have been lost when the dinghy bringing it ashore was crushed by a huge wave. But in the event one bag had been destroyed, that left another three out there somewhere.
“There was a huge search on to find it because it's still, at 75 kilos, it is the biggest ever seized in Victoria," says Agent Appleby in episode six.
Twenty-one days after the Pong Su appeared along the Great Ocean Road, police make a breakthrough.
Finding the missing Pong Su heroin
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Finding the missing Pong Su heroin
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Finding the missing Pong Su heroin
AFP officers retrace the steps that led to the discovery of missing parcels of heroin hidden in the Great Ocean Road scrub, weeks after the arrest of the on-shore syndicate.
A 'rust bucket' moored in Sydney Harbour
Chief investigator on the Pong Su case, Damien "Des" Appleby, describes how he "came to hate" the ship as she languished in Sydney Harbour during court proceedings.
"Sydney Harbour is the most expensive part of Australia to actually store a vessel, it cost $2500 a day throughout the whole time it was there," he says in episode eight.
Pong Su was a 'rust bucket' moored in Sydney
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Pong Su was a 'rust bucket' moored in Sydney
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Pong Su was a 'rust bucket' moored in Sydney
Chief investigator on the Pong Su case, Damien 'Des' Appleby, describes how he 'came to hate' the ship as she languished in Sydney Harbour during court proceedings.
The Pong Su destroyed
During the trial of Captain Song Man Sun, Political Secretary Choi Dong Song and Engineers Ri Man Jin and Ri Ju Chon, the rusty Pong Su had to be kept in Sydney Harbour as an exhibit. But once the trial was over in 2006, Australian authorities devised a plan to dispose of the ship.
Four F-111 strike bombers drop two 800 kilogram precision guided bombs on the 3500 tonne freighter as she drifted 140 kilometres off Jervis Bay on March 23, 2006.
What was left of the Pong Su sank quickly in the deep water.
Bombs dropped on the Pong Su
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Bombs dropped on the Pong Su
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Bombs dropped on the Pong Su
Four F-111 strike bombers drop two 800 kilogram precision guided bombs on the 3,500-tonne freighter as she drifted 140 kilometres off Jervis Bay on March 23, 2006.
From the archives: historic Pong Su-related TV news items
From the archives: the day the Pong Su was captured
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From the archives: the day the Pong Su was captured
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From the archives: the day the Pong Su was captured
After a four day chase on the high seas, the North Korean freighter was finally seized by Australian forces. Video: Channel Nine library.
- Pong Su searched for drugs
- Pong Su crew detained in Sydney
- Pong Su extradited to Melbourne
- Pong Su crew acquitted after committal
- Captain Song Man Sun returns to North Korea
- Senior Pong Su crew found not guilty
