HMS Dragon (D35): Eighteen Tonnes of Drugs Seized, Then a Cameo in a James Bond Film

Built on the Clyde

HMS Dragon was built by BAE Systems Naval Ships at Scotstoun on the River Clyde, ordered in December 2000, laid down on 19 December 2005, launched on 17 November 2008 and sponsored by Mrs Susie Boissier, and commissioned on 20 April 2012, a Type 45 destroyer displacing between 8,000 and 8,500 tons, capable of over 30 knots and carrying a crew of 191 with accommodation for up to 235. Her sponsor was Mrs Susie Boissier, wife of the then Deputy Commander-in-Chief Fleet, who cut the ribbon at the launch and would return to the ship eight years later for a rather livelier occasion involving a ceremonial sword and two twelve-foot Welsh dragons.

The dragons are not decoration and the name is not new. The last ship to carry it, HMS Dragon (D46), was a Danae-class cruiser launched on the Clyde in December 1917 and lent to the Polish Navy during the war, and she is still where the Royal Navy left her. As ORP Dragon she went in with Force S off Sword Beach on D-Day and shelled the Colleville-sur-Orne battery. On the night of 7 to 8 July 1944 she was hit by a Neger, a German one-man weapon that was really two torpedoes bolted together, the pilot sitting in a perspex bubble on top of the upper one with a live torpedo slung beneath, unable to dive and with very little prospect of getting home. It killed thirty-seven of her people. She was past repairing, so on 20 July she was towed off Courseulles-sur-Mer and sunk on purpose, to become part of the Gooseberry 4 breakwater sheltering the invasion beaches. The Poles were given her sister HMS Danae instead, which became ORP Conrad on 4 October 1944, and that story is told in the article on HMS Danae (D44). The previous Dragon is still lying off the Normandy coast, doing the last job she was given.

Shadowing the Russians

HMS Dragon sailed with the American carrier group led by USS Nimitz in the Arabian Sea in 2013, and exercised with RAF Typhoon fighters in the Persian Gulf that same year. In 2014, she deployed north of Scotland specifically to track the Russian warship Vice-Admiral Kulakov, and took part in Atlantic Patrol Tasking duties, visiting South Georgia and the Falkland Islands before transiting the Panama Canal.

She returned to Russian-tracking duty in 2016, shadowing two Russian corvettes through the Atlantic Ocean and the Bay of Biscay, exactly the kind of routine but properly important surveillance work that has occupied Royal Navy destroyers with growing frequency as Russian naval activity near British waters increased through this period.

A Rescue at Sea

On the night of 9 February 2017, a rogue wave struck the 60ft racing yacht Clyde Challenger, some 500 nautical miles out in the Atlantic, snapping her mast clean off at deck level and leaving all fourteen crew stranded far from help. An RAF C130 Hercules found her the next morning after a distress beacon triggered at eight o'clock the previous evening, and passing merchant ships tried and failed to close the gap; HMS Dragon, diverted from a routine tasking, sprinted through the turbulent seas at 30 knots for twenty hours to reach her, arriving at half past two that afternoon.

"We got hit with a rogue wave coming in the opposite direction," said the yacht's 66-year-old skipper, Roy Graham. "It hit us and knocked us over and dragged the crosstrees into the water, which dragged the mast into the water and snapped it at deck level." With only three hours of daylight left and the yacht too damaged to be towed home, HMS Dragon launched both of her sea boats to lift all fourteen sailors to safety, then gave them hot food, medical checks and a chance to call home before the abandoned Clyde Challenger was later scuttled as a hazard to navigation.

A Record Haul of Narcotics

HMS Dragon's Middle East deployment began on 17 September 2018, when she sailed for Operation Kipion in the Gulf and Indian Ocean, and her first major success came on 26 November, intercepting a dhow on the notorious "Hash Highway" smuggling route and pulling 148 bags of hashish, 3,048 kilograms of it, from her holds. Boarding officer Lieutenant Laurie Williams called it "one of the largest recent finds within this region", and it came only days after Dragon became the first Royal Navy destroyer to work alongside F-35 Lightning jets in the Middle East.

Her third and fourth hauls followed in a single 48-hour window that December: sailors and Royal Marines boarded two dhows in deteriorating weather, at one point calling in Dragon's own Wildcat helicopter to help ferry nearly 10,000 kilograms of hashish back to the ship before midnight. "To achieve two major drugs busts in under 48 hours is a massive achievement for the team," said Lieutenant Jonathan Bennett, one of the boarding officers involved, of a haul worth more than £75 million and the single biggest seizure in the history of the Combined Maritime Forces.

Three more busts through the winter, including 49 kilograms of heroin in February and over 2,000 kilograms of hashish found during a night-time Wildcat sortie in March, set up the eighth and final seizure on 17 March 2019: 2,540 kilograms of hashish, much of it hidden beneath a fishing boat's fuel tanks. It fell to the smallest member of Dragon's boarding team, Engineering Technician Thomas Jones Leah, to crawl into the gap and haul the bags out by hand. "It was dark down there and pretty disgusting, full of water and slimy," he said afterwards. "There was very little space beneath the fuel tanks."

By the time HMS Dragon sailed home to Portsmouth in April 2019, seven months of counter-narcotics work under Combined Task Force 150 had netted 17,786 kilograms of hashish, 455 kilograms of heroin and 9 kilograms of crystal meth: more than 18 tonnes of narcotics in total, worth over £145 million, and the greatest drugs haul recorded by a single Royal Navy unit. "It's not just the Dragons who made it happen," said her Commanding Officer, Commander Michael Carter-Quinn, on returning home. "We are one big Dragon family and they are as much the heroes as the women and men onboard."

A Brush With Hollywood

The twelve-foot red Welsh dragons painted on each side of her bow, a badge no other Royal Navy warship carries, were removed during a 2011 refit and stayed off for five years until a fundraising campaign brought them back. Their return was marked properly: on 8 July 2016, HMS Dragon was rededicated at Portsmouth Naval Base in front of hundreds of guests, with two Typhoon jets from her affiliate 11 Squadron RAF performing a flypast overhead, while her original launch sponsor, Mrs Susie Boissier, returned eight years on to cut the celebration cake with a sword alongside the ship's youngest sailor, 18-year-old Able Seaman Nathan Levers.

It was that same unmistakable red dragon that caught Hollywood's eye. In September 2019, HMS Dragon put to sea off the Faroe Islands to film her own cameo for No Time to Die, Daniel Craig's fifth and final outing as 007, though the cast themselves never set foot on the islands; their scenes on the clifftop village of Trøllanes and the nearby Kallur lighthouse, on the island of Kalsoy, were shot separately and stitched together digitally with the destroyer's own footage. In the finished film, Dragon appears launching a missile strike on the villain's island lair, a scene dramatic enough that the Ministry of Defence had to clarify no weapons were actually fired during filming and the whole sequence was created with CGI, standing in for a real Sea Viper system whose Aster 30 missiles genuinely can down a target more than 70 miles away, just not quite in the way the script called for. Dragon's ship's company were guests at the film's premiere to watch their own cameo, and her connection to the film became public knowledge the same week Daniel Craig himself was appointed an Honorary Commander in the Royal Navy, in September 2021.

Ongoing Service

In May 2025, fresh out of a major refit and engine upgrade, HMS Dragon returned to front-line duty in style. During Exercise Formidable Shield off the Hebrides, she became the first Royal Navy warship to intercept a supersonic missile: a modified Sea Viper round burst from her silo and accelerated to four times the speed of sound in two and a half seconds, pulling G-forces no human pilot could survive to destroy a corkscrewing, weaving target simulating the kind of advanced anti-ship missile now in wide use. "Not only does it prove that Dragon's world leading air defence capability functions as it should following an extensive maintenance period, but it also proves our ability to integrate and operate alongside NATO allies and partners," said her Commanding Officer, Commander Iain Giffin. She remains in active service with her home port at Portsmouth, a career that has, in fourteen years, encompassed everything from tracking Russian warships and record-breaking drug interdiction to a dramatic mid-Atlantic rescue and a supporting role in one of cinema's most enduring franchises.

The engine upgrade in that sentence deserves unpacking, because it is the single largest engineering story of the class. What went wrong with the Type 45s' original propulsion, and why it went wrong in exactly the hot water they were most often sent to, is set out in the article on HMS Daring (D32). The fix, the Power Improvement Project, is brutally simple in principle: take out the two original diesel generators, which between them made about four megawatts, and put in three new sets making 3.8 megawatts each. A destroyer that could previously limp on four megawatts of diesel if her gas turbines quit can now run on more than eleven. Dragon reached her refit milestone in February 2024 and was back at sea the following year; as of December 2025 she, Dauntless and Daring were the three ships through the programme, with all six due to be done by 2028 and Duncan going in at her next docking period. It has taken longer to fix the class than it took to build it, which is an uncomfortable sentence and also a true one.

The intercept itself is worth explaining, because four times the speed of sound in two and a half seconds is only half the trick. Anything can go fast in a straight line. The difficulty with a modern anti-ship missile is that it does not fly in a straight line; it weaves, and it does so in the last few seconds when there is no time left to correct. Aster deals with that by not steering the way missiles normally steer. Alongside the usual fins it carries a ring of small lateral thrust nozzles set around its centre of gravity, a system the French call PIF-PAF, and instead of banking the missile and waiting for the airflow to push it round, the nozzles simply shove the whole body sideways. The result is up to sixty G of lateral acceleration applied almost instantly, and it works at altitudes where the air is too thin for fins to be much use at all. That is why Dragon could hit something corkscrewing at supersonic speed, and why no aircraft could have done the same job: the missile is doing things no airframe with a person in it would survive.

East of Suez, 2026

HMS Dragon slipped out of Portsmouth Harbour on 10 March 2026, hundreds of well-wishers lining the seawall, after conflict between Iran and a US-Israeli coalition erupted with startling speed and threatened British interests on Cyprus. Defence Secretary John Healey said what would normally be six weeks of preparation work was completed in six days flat, and Commander Iain Giffin told his ship's company: "We are trained for this, we are ready for this, we have the equipment and people." A single Iranian-backed drone struck RAF Akrotiri in the early hours of 2 March, with two more intercepted the same day, the clearest sign yet of the threat Dragon had been rushed out to counter.

The deployment wasn't entirely glamorous. A fault in her freshwater system left the crew rationing showers and drinking water, and rather than steaming straight for Cyprus, Dragon spent much of April alongside at Souda Bay in Crete for repairs and a three-day NATO confidence check that calibrated her sonars, radars and electronic warfare systems, some 920 kilometres from the island she was meant to be defending. She reached the Cypriot port of Limassol on 22 April, by which point Prime Minister Keir Starmer had already committed the UK to jointly leading, with France, a multinational coalition to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, and military planners from more than thirty nations had met at Northwood to start drawing up the plan.

On 12 May, Defence Secretary John Healey and his French counterpart Catherine Vautrin co-chaired the new coalition's first meeting of defence ministers from more than forty nations. The following month, Dragon escorted RFA Lyme Bay and two German naval vessels south through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea to the UK's logistics base at Duqm in Oman, and went on to work alongside the French Carrier Strike Group led by the nuclear-powered carrier Charles de Gaulle. On 21 July, she ran live-fire gunnery drills of her own in the Arabian Sea, testing her Phalanx close-in weapon system and 30mm guns, exactly the readiness work a Sea Viper-armed destroyer needs if called on to help secure one of the world's most critical oil chokepoints, through which around a fifth of the world's crude oil normally passes.

New Commanding Officer in Kenya

HMS Dragon sailed from Duqm on 29 July and made her way to Mombasa in Kenya, where she and RFA Lyme Bay took a routine maintenance and resupply stop, their first proper break after nearly five months deployed, most of it inside an active conflict zone and well within range of Iranian long-range drones at the otherwise more austere Omani bases of Duqm and Salalah. On 5 August, in a handover ceremony onboard, Commander Graeme Hazelwood took command from Commander Iain Giffin, who addressed his ship's company one last time to warm applause: the same officer who, fifteen months earlier, had stood on Dragon's bridge to celebrate her historic supersonic missile intercept now handed her on with the Strait of Hormuz still closed and the job still unfinished.

Homeward Bound From East of Suez

The coalition operation to reopen the Strait of Hormuz, for which Dragon had been held ready since the spring, never came about. By September 2026, after some five months on duty east of Suez, most of it in the Indian Ocean, senior Royal Navy sources confirmed that her mission in the Middle East was over. On 20 September she entered harbour at Valletta, Malta, on her passage home, and she was expected back in Portsmouth in early October.

This is a live article which will be updated when more information is available.