Tracking RAIDER: How Long-Term Vessel Behavior Uncovered a Pacific Drug Operation

At a Glance

• RAIDER, a 41-meter vessel, resurfaced in late 2025 after years of dormancy.
• Within weeks, it changed identity and flagged under Togo – a known low-oversight registry.
• Windward flagged the vessel as a moderate border risk before it reached the Pacific.
• French authorities seized 4.87 tonnes of cocaine aboard the vessel in January 2026.
• No legal charges were filed, but the case highlights why historical behavior is critical to interdiction.

How a Dormant Vessel Triggered a Major Seizure

In January 2026, French naval forces interdicted the MV RAIDER, a 41-meter pontoon vessel, in French Polynesian waters, seizing nearly five tonnes of cocaine, with an estimated value of nearly $150 million. Although the vessel was released without charges, its risk profile illustrates how maritime intelligence can surface elevated risk patterns before illicit activity escalates.

Windward tracked RAIDER’s reappearance after a long dormancy. After disappearing in August 2021 in the Honduras EEZ, the vessel resurfaced in November 2025 with a new name, MMSI, and Togo registration. Our system flagged it as a moderate border risk just two weeks later based on identity manipulation, irregular routing, and weak ownership structure.

Behavioral Indicators That Preceded the Interdiction

Prior to the interdiction, RAIDER exhibited a series of behavioral indicators associated with elevated trafficking risk, including:

• Reactivation after a multi-year dormancy, breaking continuity in vessel activity history.
• Flag hopping and identity changes, consistent with deceptive repapering behavior.
• First-time transit through the Panama Canal, deviating from prior operational patterns.
• Limited and opaque ownership documentation, increasing attribution and enforcement ambiguity.

These patterns don’t necessarily confirm criminal activity, but they raise operational risk. Furthermore, when combined, they signaled that the vessel warranted closer scrutiny before reaching the Pacific.

Why Multi-Source Intelligence Matters

In environments where vessels change identity, flags, and patterns over months or years, static monitoring falls short. Risk doesn’t always stem from what a vessel is doing today, but from what it’s been allowed to do over time. That’s where multi-source intelligence becomes essential. 

Windward’s platform fuses multiple independent data sources to deliver operational clarity, including:

• AIS gaps and spoofing patterns to detect attempts to manipulate location data or obscure real-time movements. 
• Satellite imagery, including synthetic aperture radar (SAR), electro-optical (EO), and radio frequency (RF) detections to validate presence and activity regardless of visibility, weather, or AIS status. 
• Document and registry validation to verify the legitimacy of claimed flags, identify provisional or low-oversight registrations, and flag inconsistencies in vessel identity. 
• Historical behavioral modeling to identify anomalies in routing, repapering cycles, and port activity compared to expected operational patterns. 

In cases like RAIDER, layered intelligence can create a full picture of risk before a vessel enters high-consequence waters. For governments and enforcement teams, this kind of insight supports a more proactive posture, improving visibility into long-term behavioral risks that may otherwise go undetected.

Lessons for Maritime Security Teams

RAIDER is a textbook case for why long-term vessel behavior matters.

It wasn’t one datapoint that raised alarms, but rather a full behavioral arc of dormancy, reactivation, identity shifts, irregular routing, and weak ownership signals. Each event might have seemed routine in isolation, but together, they built a risk profile that supported early interdiction.

Cases like this show the value of tracking behavioral changes over time, especially when individual data points may appear routine in isolation.

For security and enforcement teams, it reinforces the need to monitor continuity, identity, and movement history, especially when legal documentation appears valid.

Behavioral intelligence isn’t just about detecting what a vessel is doing now – it’s about understanding what it’s done, what’s changed, and what that means for what happens next.