Pirates

Two ships full of Somali pirates spotted a cargo ship in the Indian Ocean, 250 nautical miles off the Somali coast. Ready to pilfer, plunder and otherwise pirate a bountiful booty, they set toward the cargo ship under the dark of night, AK-47s ablaze. That is, until they got close enough to see that their cargo ship full of riches was in fact a French Naval vessel, full of armed soldiers.

What then proceeded is something of a Monty Python skit. The sailors, some of whom had directed commando operations to free French hostages taken by the pirates, chased one of the boats for over an hour. When boarded the ship they found that the boat of would-be thieves jettisoned their water, food and weapons, pretending to just be a bunch of guys hanging out on a dinghy at night on the Indian Ocean.

The other boat escaped and has yet to be found.

Olivier Amalvict/AFP/Getty Images 

For the last year, one question has been at the core of the piracy debate: Who or what made the Somali pirates into the real, armed, threat that they are? Chaos on land? Opportunity at sea? Poverty all around? Or the latest theory, from an Al Jazeera report: Western defense contractors trained them.

Before piracy spun out of control, Al Jazeera reports, contractors such as the Hart Group trained a Somali Coast Guard force in the semi-autonomous Pundtland region -- where piracy thrives. Those skills, one Somali tells the Al Jazeera reporter, were later helpful in hijacking ships and training others in his newly learned sea-faring ways. 

Sounds like a big "oops" for the contracting world... though any experience helping the "other side" hasn't deterred them much from working to stop the pirates. Remember when Blackwater said they would help fight pirates? Better yet, about how winning a lucrative "ransom and release contract" for handsome $500,000 each.

Yesterday I mentioned the "hijacked" cargo ship Arctic Sea had been carrying weapons from Russia to the Middle East. Now, the BBC reports that the editor of a Russian maritime journal who proposed the theory has been forced to flee:

Mr Voitenko - who was among the first to cast doubt on official explanations about the ship's disappearance - told the BBC it was nonsense to suggest pirates had been involved.

Instead he suggested the ship may have been carrying a secret shipment of weapons as part of a private business deal by state officials.

Speaking to the BBC from Turkey, Mr Voitenko said he had received a threatening phone call from "serious people" whom he suggested may have been members of Russia's intelligence agency, the FSB.

The caller told Mr Voitenko that those involved in the mysterious case of the Arctic Sea were very angry with him because he had spoken publicly, and were planning on taking action against him, he said.

"As long as I am out of Russia I feel safe," Mr Voitenko told the BBC. "At least they won't be able to get me back to Russia and convict [me]."

 

Guess he hit a nerve.

While I would take any new reports about the hijacking of the Arctic Sea with a heaping barrelful of salt, some of the latest theories are at least interesting.  In an interview with Time this week, the European Union's rapporteur on piracy said Israeli intelligence likely intercepted the ship, which was carrying a secret shipment weapons to the Middle East:

[H]e says only a shipment of missiles could account for Russia's bizarre behavior throughout the monthlong saga. "There is the idea that there were missiles aboard, and one can't explain this situation in any other way," he says. "As a sailor with years of experience, I can tell you that the official versions are not realistic."

Kouts says an Israeli interception of the cargo is the most likely explanation. But this theory, which some Russian analysts put forward in the days after the Arctic Sea was rescued and which Kouts agreed with in his interview with TIME, has been vehemently denied by Russia's envoy to NATO, Dmitri Rogozin, who says Kouts should stop "running his mouth." 

The theory is supported by the fact that Israeli President Shimon Peres made a surpsie visit to Moscow the day after the ship was rescued. 

Not so fast say repoters from Israel's YNet, who find the admiral's theory implausable. According to their anonymous sources, the Arctic Sea made a stop in Kaliningrad -- a Russian military outpost popular with arms dealers -- before picking up its stated cargo of timber in Finland: 

Sources say the Arctic Sea docked in Kaliningrad in June to undergo various repairs. The same sources say a deal was previously struck between Russian and Middle Eastern businessmen, agreeing on the sale of some of the S-300 missiles located at the port.

Some sources claim the Russian military's weapons industry was implicated in the deal and transferred a number of new missiles, including the X-500, to the port to be included in the sale. However the Kremlin was uninvolved, and apparently the deal was carried out in secret between businessmen from the private sector. 

After the deal was executed, an intelligence agency whose identity so far remains unexposed learned of the ship's departure with the weapons in tow towards Algeria, a country located on a regularly used route for the transfer of weapons to Iran and Syria. The intelligence agency then transferred an anonymous tip to the Russian authorities, according to the investigation. 

According to Russian sources the "hijackers", who in actuality were Russian intelligence officers, remained on the ship and reported to their superiors that they had found the missiles on board. On August 12 Russia announced it had sent naval officers to rescue the vessel and its crew.

The sources say the period of time between the hijacking and the Russian rescue mission was due to the Kremlin's desire to capture the ship away from the eyes of the media, in order to avoid an embarrassing incident that may have harmed its relations with Iran and Algeria. 

Again, I'm not endorsing any of these theories, but the story just gets more fascinating.

Ricky LOPEZ/AFP/Getty Images

 

Remember the missing cargo ship that had all of Europe in an uproar earlier this month? Turns out it may never have been missing after all:

President Medvedev sent the Russian Navy to find the Arctic Sea after it apparently disappeared while passing through the English Channel en route to Algeria from Finland. However, the Foreign Ministry in Moscow now says that Russian and international agencies had monitored the ship throughout its strange three-week voyage.

“Of course, the dry cargo carrier with a displacement of more than 7,000 tonnes was never missing. Its movement was being followed and its co-ordinates were being reported from several sources, including our foreign partners,” the ministry said.

This might have been something they could have shared with the other half dozen navies searching for the vessel.

It's still not exactly clear what, besides its stated cargo of timber, the ship was carrying or why it was hijacked. But the story gets stranger:

The saga also took a bizarre new twist when the ministry disclosed that the ship’s captain had tried to pass off the Arctic Sea as a North Korean vessel when it was intercepted by the Russian Navy. This is the first time that investigators have implicated the crew in the mystery.

The ministry said that the captain “unexpectedly claimed” to be in charge of a ship called the Chongdin 2 that was carrying timber from Cuba to Sierra Leone. Russian diplomats in Pyongyang checked with North Korean officials and were told that the Chongdin 2 was docked at a port in Angola at the time.

“In view of this information, the command of the Russian Navy decided to examine the ship and the examination confirmed the surmise that it was the Arctic Sea,” the Foreign Ministry said. It gave no indication of how the captain knew of the other vessel’s existence or why the Navy was unable to identify the Arctic Sea from its markings.

Who gets caught and then claims to be from North Korea???

European coast guards are currently investigating the hijacking and disappearance of a ship in what could be the first case of piracy in modern European history. The Independent reports:

The Arctic Sea, a Maltese registered, Latvian-owned ship with a 15-strong Russian crew, vanished with its £1m cargo at the end of July on its way from Finland to Algeria.

British coastguards were the last people known to communicate with the ship on 29 July as it passed along the Channel but it wasn't realised at the time that anything was wrong.

It is now thought that when the UK's Maritime and Coastguard Agency (MCA) was in radio contact with the ship that the person speaking to them was either a hijacker or a member of the crew with a gun pointed at his head.

The circumstances surrounding its likely hijacking are as puzzling as its current whereabouts. Swedish authorities were told by the Finnish shipping line operating the vessel that on 24 July the Arctic Sea had been boarded by eight to 10 heavily-armed men while it sailed through the Baltic Sea. The crew, three of whom were injured, were tied up and the black-clad and masked men, who purported to be narcotics police, searched the ship.

After 12 hours the intruders left and, supposedly, allowed the vessel to continue on its journey having damaged the communications equipment. But after reaching the Portuguese coast, having sailed along the Channel to get to the Atlantic, the Arctic Sea disappeared from the radar and hasn't been seen since. Its destination had been the Algerian port of Bejaia which it was scheduled to reach on 4 August with its valuable cargo of timber.

No one is exactly sure when was the last time a hijacked ship managed to slip through the English Channel. The Swedish, Finnish and Russian coast guard's are all investigating the Arctic Sea's disappearace.

Modern piracy is typically thought of as a crime associated with failed states like Somalia that don't have the resources to patrol their own coasts. It now appears that half a dozen wealthy, stable European countries -- most of whom actively participate in anti-pirate operations in the Gulf of Aden -- allowed a major act of maritime piracy to happen right under their noses. 

Wondered why those pirates have dropped out of the news lately? Could be little more than the bad weather, says the Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) patrolling the Somali coast. And now, good weather is on the way. The international forces offshore are warning of "an anticipated increase in piracy incidents when the southwest monsoon ends in the coming weeks."

Really? Bad weather is what's winning even with "30 ships and aircraft from 16 nations" fighting the pirates?? Believe it. Fighting pirates takes the kind of whollistic assault that only a monsoon can bring and the military will struggle to -- no matter how many ships.

The root of the trouble is still on land, and there's no good news to report there, either. So pirates are in our future for a while yet. But at least with the launching of the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet Facebook page, you'll be able to watch it unfold in living color... 

U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist First Class Eric L. Beauregard/Released

The Economix  blog at the New York Times describes a new book on the economics of pirates -- The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates by Peter Leeson. Who knew such a perfect confluence of the interesting and the awesome existed?

It focuses on the heyday of piracy in the late 17th and early 18th century -- back when the Barbary pirates spurred the young United States to its first military engagement, off the coast of Tripoli. The NYT summarizes: 

During this age, there seem to have been between 2,000 and 3,000 pirates, which is large relative to the Royal Navy (which had 13,000 seamen) but small relative to the number of movies subsequently made about piracy. The pirates were, unsurprisingly, youngish men (generally in their mid-20s) from England or its colonies. The majority of mischief that has been done throughout history has been done by young people with XY chromosomes. Their ships were often quite large, containing crews that could reach 200 souls, and the profession was lucrative. While merchant seamen earned 25 pounds a month (about $6,000 in current currency), a pirate could earn 4,000 from a single conquest. Mr. Leeson reports that some pirates were earning 100 pounds a month.

Admittedly, piracy was dangerous, but so was all seafaring. Maybe my children are showing good sense in their attraction to the piratical lifestyle. Those high wages meant that, unlike the British navy, pirates rarely had to rely on conscription. Although captured pirates often claimed to be serving against their will, in reality, pirate ships rarely had trouble finding voluntary recruits.

And, it turns out Leeson, a professor of capitalism at George Mason, is a pirate expert...lots of interesting studies linked on his (hilarious) website.