Sunday, December 11, 2011

To catch a pirate: The British ex-servicemen battling to protect international shipping from the clutches of Somali pirates

They once served in Iraq and Afghanistan, but now former British soldiers are facing another deadly battle – trying to stop the terrifying surge in hijackings off the east coast of Africa

As the sun beat down on the deck, the four ex-SAS marine-security guards nervously scanned the Gulf of Aden. The rusty grain carrier they were protecting had almost completed its perilous short hop from Oman to Djibouti. And yet they’d just become more agitated.

Minutes earlier, the Djibouti police had boarded the ship to take charge of their AK-47s, because they were in Djibouti waters without the correct permits. The guns would be taken to the port armoury to be locked in packing cases stamped with the security firm’s logo. That meant the British team were now guarding, unarmed, a multimillion-dollar target, in the most dangerous seas in the world, the Somali-pirate-infested waters around the Horn of Africa. Just then the dots in the distance turned into the sight they’d been dreading.

‘Fifteen minutes after the Djibouti police took our weapons, over the horizon came a whole load of fishing boats,’ says Matt, who served in the SAS before leaving 20 years ago to work in the highly secretive – and lucrative – ex-special-forces industry known as ‘The Circuit’.

‘About 25 of them: a flotilla. Until they get close, you can’t tell if they’re just fishermen or pirates. Then the guys at the front pulled out their weapons. And we knew what we were dealing with.’

The men in the skiffs weren’t fishermen, but pirates from neighbouring Somalia, wielding Kalashnikovs and rocket-propelled-grenade launchers.

For both the guards and the pirates, the stakes were desperately high.

Maritime-security analyst Tim Hart monitoring pirate activity in the waters around the Horn of Africa

Over the last three years, ransoms for commercial vessels in the Indian Ocean have risen from $300,000 to as much as $10 million and beyond. (The ransom for Paul and Rachel Chandler, kidnapped from their yacht off the Seychelles in October 2009, was a reported £620,000.)

For a Somali pirate, the prize for a successful capture of a vessel can now be up to $40,000 per man, a fortune in a country where the average income is around $600 a year and there are few jobs anyway after two decades of civil war.

Matt and his colleagues were earning good money too, but now potentially faced an unpleasant death.

‘The pirates have made it pretty clear that the consequences for any guards they capture will be dire,’ says Nick Day, a former Special Boat Service (SBS) officer and CEO of Diligence, a corporate intelligence and security firm that deals in maritime security.

‘The pirates haven’t signed up to the Geneva Convention.’

The skiffs kept zooming towards the grain ship, their powerful outboard motors enabling them to do over 25 knots. The half-a-dozen or so pirates in each skiff were equipped with ladders and makeshift grapples for climbing onto the boat. They’d probably been tipped off by the police that the guards were now unarmed.

Had they still had their guns, the guards would have held them up to show the pirates they were armed. Each company has rules of engagement based on those learned in the military.

‘Our background is in Northern Ireland,’ says Matt. ‘If they still keep coming, we move on to aimed shots. I fire into the outboard motor.’

How the pirates' area of operations has expanded over the past few years

The guards called in the situation on the radio, alerting any nearby vessels that they were being attacked by pirates, hoping that one of the dozen or so international warships that patrol the high-risk area of the Indian Ocean might actually be within reach. But it was a thin hope: the area is vast.

Then they got the crew into the citadel, a safe room at the heart of the ship in which they could lock themselves away but still steer. A hijacking is always about the crew – they’re what the shipowner pays the ransom for. The ship and the cargo are covered by insurance.

‘We fired flares at the pirates, but they kept on coming,’ continues Matt. ‘There wasn’t much else we could do. They obviously knew our guns had been taken, and they’d have got through the citadel doors with an oxyacetylene torch in five or six hours.’

The ship had already been ‘hardened’ with loops of razor wire to deter a pirate attack, following guidelines laid down by the International Maritime Organisation.

But, as Nick Day puts it, ‘if you’re being paid $40,000, it’s worth spending a few hours cutting through razor wire. And these guys have all the time in the world.’

Then, just as the pirates came within range, on the horizon appeared a French warship.

‘Frankly it was just pure luck,’ says Matt. ‘If the warship hadn’t appeared, we wouldn’t have been able to stop them.’

Instead, the pirates swirled around and fled back over the horizon.

A few years ago Matt and his team would have been driving along the dusty roads of Baghdad or Kabul, but now The Circuit also encompasses the sea.

For arguably the greatest threat to world security at the moment is the epidemic in piracy off the Horn of Africa, a key crossroads in the global shipping lanes.

What started a decade ago as poor Somali fishermen protecting their tuna from huge foreign trawlers taking advantage of their country’s anarchy has turned into a guerrilla business war with global consequences.

At the time of writing, so far this year there have been 228 attacks by Somali pirates, 26 successful hijackings and 450 people taken hostage – an increase on last year. There are currently 11 ships and 194 crew members being held in the pirate anchorages off the coast of Somalia.

The last vessel to be captured was the Taiwanese fishing ship Chin Yi Wen, taken last month off the Seychelles with a crew of 28 on board; unusually, they managed to overpower the pirates the next day.

Before that, on October 31, a Greek chemical tanker, the Liquid Velvet, was seized in the Gulf of Aden with a crew of 21 Filipinos and one unarmed Greek security adviser; his fate is as yet unknown.

In September pirates attacked a French couple in their yacht in the Gulf of Aden – Christian Colombo died and his wife was kidnapped, before being freed by commandos from the Spanish warship SPS Galicia (see top picture).

Matt’s predicament – having to protect, unarmed, a multimillion-dollar vessel against a flotilla of desperadoes – is typical of those faced in the region.

The world’s navies face a difficult battle to control the pirates. The high-risk area of the Indian Ocean is patrolled by just a handful of Western warships operating under an alphabet soup of organisations: Nato, EU NAVFOR (European Naval Force) and the U.S.-led Combined Maritime Forces. The Chinese, Indians, Russians and Iranians also have a few ships patrolling the area.

No one is in overall command, and in any case, according to one source ‘it’s like having a police car patrolling an area the size of France’. Any pirate activity is reported to the EU’s MSCHOA (Maritime Security Centre – Horn of Africa) and the US MARLO (Maritime Liaison Office), who pass the information on to merchant ships.

As a result of all this confusion, just as in Iraq in 2003, private-security firms have stepped into the breach.
‘Over 20,000 ships pass through the Gulf of Aden each year,’ says Nick Maddalena of British shipping-insurance broker Seacurus.

That’s about ten per cent of the global shipping trade, including vessels carrying oil, chemicals, cars and motorbikes from Japan, and goods from Chinese factories destined for Britain – everything from TVs to the plastic toys in Christmas crackers.

‘Between 15 and 25 per cent of them are carrying armed security. We give significant discounts for kidnap and ransom insurance if they do – that’s providing it’s a reputable company, and its people are ex-services.’

Over 60 per cent of those guards are British, according to SAMI, the Security Association for the Maritime Industry, founded this May to help regulate the sector. Our elite forces – the SAS, SBS, Royal Marines and Paras – are recognised as the world’s best, hence they’re leading the counter-piracy surge.

The whole question of carrying armed men on merchant vessels, however, is more complicated under international law than employing them in Iraq was.

‘Iraq is a country; they could pass laws,’ says Nick Day. ‘This is happening in international waters.’
Many countries don’t allow armed men on their merchant ships – including, currently, the UK, which for years has been operating a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy.

The law, however, is about to be changed: in October David Cameron announced that British-flagged vessels will be allowed to carry armed guards. But the guns still have to be brought on and off ships, requiring a mass of permits from the different countries they might visit.

‘Given that you can get an AK-47 for about $200 in most big African towns,’ says one security man who didn’t want to be named, ‘and it costs about $1,000 per weapon to do it legally, and then there’s all the forms, coastguard licences etc, a lot of people think it’s easier to buy weapons illegally and drop them down to Davy Jones’s locker when you get out of the danger area.’

A couple of enterprising firms are now thinking of setting up floating armouries in international waters, so security teams can hire guns from them and return them at the end of their trip.

This is lucrative work. According to industry sources, a maritime-security company can hire an armed four-man team out for £6,000 a day.

For a typical ten-day transit through the high-risk part of the Indian Ocean, each guard will earn £4,000 – not bad for getting a tan and doing some tuna fishing. For though the danger of pirates is very real, of the 20,000-odd ships traversing the danger zone last year, only about 1.5 per cent were attacked, with less than a quarter of those captured.

If 15 per cent of the 20,000 ships crossing use security, then that’s at least 3,000 transits. A conservative fee of £60,000 for each ten-day transit means the market is worth around £200 million.

The president of Protection Vessels International, ex-Royal Marine Dom Mee, recently said his firm was thinking of increasing its workforce from 750 to 1,000. PVI, which only hires ex-Royal Marines with over five years’ service and already operates its own floating armouries, guards around 180 ships a month – about 50 per cent of the market.

As with all gold rushes, the anti-piracy boom has attracted people who don’t necessarily have the right credentials – hence the founding of SAMI, which currently has 81 members.

‘These are companies who see a need for not only regulation, but also a check for quality,’ says SAMI’s Steven Jones, who spent a decade in the Merchant Navy.

‘There are quite a lot of people who’ve seen the business opportunity. They may have a military background, but our concern is, do they have the credentials for maritime security? This isn’t just land that’s blue.’
‘Nearly everyone claims to have something to do with the Special Boat Service,’ says one angry ex-SBS officer.

‘They’ve all opened up offices near Poole, the SBS HQ, in order to sound authentic. Just like people opened offices near the SAS HQ at Hereford during the Iraq boom.’

Tales abound of guards who aren’t up to the job. Phil Campion, an ex-SAS trooper whose memoirs, Born Fearless, came out in September, told me he was nearly captured because his team’s lookout was seasick.

As pirates hooked the ship with their grappling iron, he managed to drive them off, despite being unarmed, by throwing a fridge full of Coca-Cola into their skiff.

‘They were taking in water and being dragged by us, so they cut the grappling iron loose and slipped away.’

Somalia’s deadly combination of lawlessness and a rigid clan structure means that pirates can operate with impunity, knowing that captured vessels and crews will be safe in their anchorages off the coast of Somalia for the months it takes for a ransom to be paid. They’ve stumbled upon a gold mine – piracy is now such big business that it attracts its own investors.

‘There’s a stock market in Mogadishu,’ says ex-SAS soldier John Davidson of Rubicon Advisors, who has spent years working in the region.

‘You put in $12,000 to equip a six-man skiff with food, weapons and fuel. $200 buys an AK-47. Your return is something like tenfold if they hijack a boat – the pirates aren’t on a daily rate. That’s why it’s so successful. Now there’s evidence of international investors from the Middle East.’

Pirates also reinvest their earnings, and widows have been known to ‘invest’ their husbands’ AK-47s.

‘This is all about business,’ says security provider Nick Day.

‘From the Dubai-based businessmen bankrolling the pirates through to the shipowners. For them the calculation is distance relative to time cost. These ships can have running costs of up to $100,000 a day, but obviously factors such as fuel cost depend on speed. They can go more slowly with security on board, or hammer through the Indian Ocean without it.’

Shipowners have tried to escape the pirates by routing their ships further and further from the African coast, but the pirates have just followed them out to sea. Ships have been taken as far east as Karachi, on the coast of Pakistan. Even if vessels are routed round the Cape of Good Hope instead of via Suez – adding weeks to journeys – their safety isn’t assured, as piracy is now on the increase off the shores of West Africa too.

‘The pirates use mother ships to extend their range, either fishing boats or ships they’ve captured,’ says Tim Hart, an analyst at Maritime & Underwater Security Consultants, whose London office is on HQS Wellington, a former World War II sloop moored alongside Victoria Embankment.

Here, Hart points out pirates on an interactive electronic map of the world. He flicks from year to year, so the pirate attacks can be seen spreading east and south.

‘They’re getting as far as India, 3,000 miles from Somalia. They just keep pushing until they find a vessel. They’ve even been using captured supertankers as mother ships.’

So far no ship with armed security has been taken, but sources say it’s only a matter of time. ‘And then someone’s going to get killed,’ says one counter-piracy chief.

‘The violence can only escalate.’

In fact, in another attack on the same day as the Liquid Velvet hijacking, off Dar es Salaam, the pirates were only beaten off after a 30-minute firefight with armed guards.

The anti-piracy boom isn’t just confined to maritime security.

Once a ship is captured, British ex-military-personnel skills are also at a premium in hostage negotiation and ransom delivery. When the CEC Future was taken in November 2008 in the Gulf of Aden, with a crew of 13 on board, Per Gullestrup of Danish firm Clipper, the ship’s owner, used a

‘You only have one concern: it’s the crew. They’re human beings,’ he says. ‘The rest is just money. We’re insured if we lose a ship with cargo.’

Gullestrup first knew his ship had been taken when the captain pressed an alarm button.

‘Then we lost contact. We can track our ships on a satellite monitor and we could see the ship was moving erratically.

‘A couple of days later, one of the officers called his relatives on the satellite phone on the ship and said he’d been taken hostage. The pirates had made him call. His family contacted us.’

The CEC Future had been sailed by the pirates to the coast of Somalia. Nato surveillance photographs showed sad rows of ships tethered a mile or so apart.

‘The pirates don’t ring the company until they reach the coast of Somalia,’ says a British negotiator, who learned his skills in the SAS and doesn’t wish to be named.

‘The three ports they usually use are Hobyo, Garacad or Harardhere. They stay about a mile out.

‘You get the call. You deploy to where the risk-management centre is. Ninety-nine per cent of the time it’s the company’s HQ.’

Ransom negotiators are paid about $2,000-3,000 a day, and a negotiation can last for months. The CEC Future was held for 71 days.

Negotiators are cagey about their precise tactics.

‘But really it’s just like haggling for a carpet,’ the British negotiator tells me.

The key thing is not to speak directly to the pirates. Instead the shipping company uses one of its own as a middleman – but not a decision-maker – to stall for time. The pirate commander will have his own negotiator, who can work on several cases at once.

‘There are six well-known Somali negotiators. They have pseudonyms. I’ve come across the same guy more than once,’ says the British negotiator.

‘They always speak English. Some are former school teachers.’

Their new line of work is a lot more lucrative – the negotiator can be on ten per cent of the ransom. Communications are mostly done via mobile phone or the ship’s own system.

‘You demand proof of life. So you ask to speak to the captain and check the crew’s OK.’
Although the shipping companies are always keen to get the crew back – and the ransom is generally covered by insurance – you can’t agree too quickly, or the pirates will just raise the price.

In the meantime, the pirates will change the guard on the ship – the tough elite crew who capture the vessel will be replaced by guards who stay on board until the negotiation has ended.

The ‘A’ team, meanwhile, who drive 4x4s, wear dark glasses and can afford to chew lots of khat (an amphetamine-like leaf), relax for a few days before being sent out on another job.

Worryingly, some of these men will have been trained by ex-British special forces. A British security firm had a contract to train the Somali coastguard, back when the international community was trying to get Somalia to sort out its own piracy problems. Then the men weren’t paid, so they turned to piracy.

‘They inadvertently trained commando pirates,’ says fomer SAS trooper Phil Campion.

When a deal is reached, a written contract is sent.
‘I either fax it, email or scan it,’ says the British negotiator. ‘It’s part of the OFAC clearance (the US Office of Foreign Assets Control, which enforces a ban on U.S. dollars being paid to terrorists). The contracts say, “I, X, agree to pay Y this sum for the release of the vessel and the crew and cargo. This money is the ransom and the money will not be used or given to al-Shabab.”’

Al-Shabab are Somalia’s home-grown Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, who control much of the south of the country. Everyone involved in the piracy business swears blind, on the record, that no ransom money is used to fund terrorism.

‘But,’ as one security chief told me, and others echoed, ‘if I were an Islamic fundamentalist terrorist working in the Middle East with this gold mine on my doorstep, I know what I’d be doing.’

No one wants to admit it, though, least of all the pirates. As long as it’s just crime, the international community will continue its lukewarm approach. But if it were proved that piracy is raising money for terrorism, the U.S. Navy would almost certainly steam in.

Once the ransom has been agreed, the cash has to be delivered. The market leader is an East African-based firm – staffed, inevitably, by ex-British special forces – called Salama Fikira. The money is put into inflatable tubes and flown out to the ship.

‘The crew all come out on deck for proof of life,’ one ransom delivery man tells me. ‘It’s rather moving, actually. They all wave at you.’

Then the cash is dropped into the sea and the pirates scrabble to pick it up. Counting and dividing it up can take time.
‘We included a cash counter in our ransom,’ says Gullestrup, ‘but it still took them two days.’

The pirates and their commander are all on board to get their share.

‘It’s very businesslike,’ admits one shipowner. ‘We found receipts and books of invoices.’

Once the pirates are satisfied, they abandon ship, and the vessel will probably make its way to the nearest port of refuge, usually Mombasa. Often it’ll be in an appalling state.

‘The pirates bring their own food on board, like live goats,’ says Campion.

‘They slaughter them on board, so there can be blood everywhere. There’s always piles of khat leaves. They leave their bedding and everything behind, as they’ve just been paid a fortune.’

A solution to the piracy problem isn’t obvious. Warships can’t just pick up any suspected pirates they come across.

‘It’s not illegal to sail the Indian Ocean with a ladder in your boat and a fast outboard motor,’ says one exasperated Nato officer.

‘You really have to catch them in the act.’

The only legal way to seize pirates’ equipment is to have them ‘lend’ it to the warship.

If pirates are caught boarding a ship, then does their fate depend on the laws of the country whose boat captured them, or whose ship they were attacking? And where should they stand trial?

In the past pirates have often been set free – although footage exists of Russian marines blowing to smithereens the pirates they’d just sent back out to sea.
Increasingly, neighbouring states with tourist industries to protect, such as the Seychelles and Kenya, are offering to try the pirates.

‘The solution is to fix Somalia,’ says John Davidson. ‘Then the pirates have got other ways to make money.’

But that’s easier said than done, and until then, British security men will carry on scanning the horizon for pirate skiffs.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/moslive/article-2071108/British-ex-servicemen-battling-protect-international-shipping-Somali-pirates.html#ixzz1gFRkEecv

 

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