2: Narco Terrorism & The Forever War

Narco Warriors is taking a summer break, but Season 2 is coming in the autumn, and it's bigger than ever. Lindsay Charlton previews what's ahead: the scale of today's drug trade, what modern law enforcement is actually doing (and whether it's working), and a special episode diving deep into legalisation, with voices on both sides of the argument. If you're new to the show, all 21 episodes of Season 1 are available now on Apple, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. These are the Narco Warriors.

You probably walk past it every day without knowing... Every drug empire produces one thing above all else: cash. Mountains of it. The International Monetary Fund estimates that between two and five trillion dollars is laundered around the world every year - and at least half a trillion comes from the drug trade alone. But how do you clean dirty money? From the black market ‘peso exchange’ to purpose-built deposit windows at high street banks, offshore shell companies, and cryptocurrency: the methods have evolved, but the goal never changes. In this episode, we follow the money with three men who spent careers tracking it: Terry Burke, former head of security at the Bank of England; Martin Dubbey, former UK customs drug liaison officer; and Phil Matthews, who worked the money trail from Washington alongside the DEA, FBI and CIA. And the answer to where the money hides might surprise you. It could be the nail bar on the corner. The barber shop you walk past every day. It could be your high street.

This is what it means for British drug liaison officers who live with the beast. By the mid-1990s, a small and largely unknown cadre of British customs officers were living and working at the heart of the global cocaine trade. Not in surveillance vans in south London, but in Colombia, sending their children to school in armored cars, carrying sidearms for protection, and running informants in a country where the choice for many was simple: “lead or silver.” In this episode, insider Steve Reynolds takes us inside the Drug Liaison Officer network at its most intense. The brutality of the Cali and Medellin cartels, and the operation that put seven and a half tonnes of cocaine on the front pages of every Spanish newspaper. A record that stood for more than 25 years. Joining Reynolds are Narco Warriors resident experts Phil Matthews and Graham Honey, two of the most senior figures ever to run Britain's drug intelligence operations abroad. These are the Narco Warriors. New Episodes every Monday.

In April 2026, Europol announced the interception of eight vessels in the Atlantic. Eleven tonnes of cocaine were seized, and 54 people were arrested. They called it a cocaine highway - a sophisticated network moving drugs from Latin America to Europe, deliberately circumventing major ports to avoid detection. It sounded new and unprecedented. But it wasn't. 25 years earlier, a team of British and American investigators ran one of the most ambitious international drug enforcement operations ever mounted against the South American cartels. They called it Operation Journey. And this is the story told by the people who lived it. Graham Honey was the British customs investigator who coordinated the operation from a desk in London, running weekly intelligence meetings that combined the DEA, U.S. Customs, British intelligence, and the Royal Navy. He spent two years of his life helping build the case. Nigel Brooks was the U.S. customs special agent who became Graham's closest transatlantic ally. He ran the intelligence operation from Houston, protected a source whose life depended on secrecy, and held back pressure from his own side to blow the operation early. Alberto Morales is the commissioner in charge of the drug unit of the Spanish National Police. He's been fighting the Galician cocaine networks since 1999, the same coastline where Operation Journey's shipments were headed. He explains why Spain is only the door, not the destination. And Luis Navia, one of the men they were hunting, who helped build a shadow shipping network out of Greece, and evaded law enforcement for years. His undoing would eventually come down to one glass of water… Operation Journey netted 22-thousand kilos of cocaine, and dismantled one of the most powerful cocaine trafficking organisations in the world. But did HM Customs really get the credit it deserved? These are the Narco Warriors. New episodes every Monday. If you want to go deeper on Operation Journey, Luis Navia's full story is told in his book Pure Narco, written with Jesse Fink.

He spent 10 years living as someone else. He infiltrated heroin gangs, cocaine cartels and cannabis networks. Now, thanks to a hit Netflix drama, the world is finally getting to know one of Britain's most extraordinary undercover officers. “Guy” talks to Narco Warriors about the art of the “legend”, the golden rules of undercover work, and the operations that took him from the streets of West London, to meeting Pablo Escobar's cousin, via a boat that sank in the English Channel. His unbelievable story is also chronicled in The Betrayer: How An Undercover Unit Infiltrated The Global Drug Trade, written by Guy and Peter Walsh, which inspired Legends. These are the Narco Warriors. New episodes drop every Monday morning.