Interesting article by the novelist Frederick Forsyth in the UK Sunday Times. I've long thought that this was the single greatest threat to the US from a 'rogue nation', and he's put it very concisely.
From the Sunday Times October 29, 2006 (
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2092-2426361,00.html):
The terror next time: it's not a plane, it's a boatFrederick Forsyth
When I began to look at terrorism around the world for a new project, it was not long before I found that the prospect of in-air sabotage of transatlantic airliners was but one of the nightmares with which the Wests anti-terrorist agencies wrestle on a daily basis. The unrevealed and undiscussed horror is the burgeoning world of marine terrorism.
Megadeath coming at us from the sea is envisaged as a seemingly normal and legitimate merchant ship, maybe a tanker but not necessarily, stolen by Al-Qaeda and staffed with a suicidal crew, bearing inside her hull a simply devastating cargo, quietly cruising into the very heart of a city before detonating.
Such an outrage, the subject of daily study by experts on marine terrorism and their colleagues in the hazardous cargoes division, could easily match the death toll of 9/11. For the last wild, unpoliced and lawless frontier on this planet is not what or where you might think.
The place where there is no viable, enforceable law is the sea. For one thing, it is simply vast. Were you to put put every square inch of the worlds landmass together, it would only cover one seventh of the planets surface. The other six-sevenths are the oceans. And on those oceans a vessel can simply lose herself. Or be caused by others to vanish.
Do ships disappear at sea, never to be seen again? Yes, all the time, and they are not all sunk. Far from it. Those who think piracy ended with Captain Kidd should take a swig of strong coffee. Piracy today is a bigger industry than any Blackbeard could ever have envisaged.
Despite mans pride in his laws, controls, paperwork and technology, he cannot begin to rule life on the sea. Even to attempt a first minimal control would need a collective effort costing many billions of dollars to operate, and so far the willpower needed to make that effort is not readily visible. If it ever comes it will, amazingly, be provoked by the rise not of piracy but of terrorism.
Let us first consider the formalities. Every ship in the world is supposed to have a name and be registered with some authority somewhere in the world, a procedure that generates the ships papers. And ships belonging to reputable owners, based in reputable countries, chartered to reputable customers and carrying reputable cargoes secured by reputable agents indeed do just that. But that is only half the story.
There are about 44,000 merchant ships out there somewhere, and let us not even attempt to count the leisure craft. Most of the merchant seamen no doubt fit into the reputable category described above. But several thousand do not.
Greed and rapacity have led to the creation of a weird and shady underworld where licence fees are optional, taxes avoided, safety margins ignored and controls a fiction. In that world the crook is a normality and the terrorist a dangerous newcomer.
At the heart of the underworld is the flag of convenience. Long ago two countries, Liberia in west Africa and the swampy Central American republic of Panama, discovered that reputable countries were charging shipowners a tidy sum to register their vessels. These two countries pioneered the cheap flag of convenience .
A nominal payment, no supervision of the ships state, the safety of the crew or legitimacy of the cargo. Within a few years each country had on paper and on water a huge merchant fleet that would never dream of visiting its port of registration. Into this fog of uncheckability went formalities such as the actual ownership of the flag-of-convenience (FOC) vessel.
Then came the companies registered in countries that practised total banking secrecy, consisting of no more than a brass plate on the wall. There are now close to 30 FOC countries and the same number of no-questions banks (NQBs) located in so-called offshore hideaways. Some FOC countries do not even have a coastline; some NQB hideyholes are little more than coral atolls.
Thus the MV Attila may be registered in the island of ABC in Micronesia but apparently owned by XYZ Shipping Lines, which is really only a brass plate in an NQB banking resort. It could make your head spin. But inquiries are useless. The brass plate belongs to a dubious law firm that knows nothing and XYZ Shipping banks with an outfit called RST Banking Services on another coral atoll.
RST Banking may know a bit but will say nothing and no one can force it. Behind it all, who owns that freighter? Who knows? Who cares? Its cargoes are handled by an agency, its staff and crew salaries arrive via cyberspace and it steams across the world from port to port picking up and delivering merchandise.
In cases of thoroughly disreputable vessels, the captain may have no valid masters ticket, or a forged one; and the crew may be impoverished wretches drawn from the slums of the Far East who are little more than marine slaves. But they trade that in for a snug home, food and enough salary in cash to afford the occasional prostitute while on shore leave. Not a nice life? Have a good look at some of the slums of the Third World.
But supposing the MV Attila is secretly owned by Al-Qaeda. Could it be? That is the disturbing new dimension.
Every year, almost every month, in various parts of the world but mainly along the Malacca and Sunda straits and round the Celebes Sea, legitimate freighters disappear. There is no secret about what happens. Helpless and slow, they are boarded by sea dacoits (bandits) from faster vessels, taken over and hijacked.
Why that part of the world? Partly because dacoits of land or sea are a traditional form of local crime; partly because there are a score of coasts so dense in jungle and so unpoliced that an entire ship can disappear into a creek and become invisible from any search by sea or air.
Later, reflagged, repapered, repainted, reregistered and recaptained and crewed, she can resume her trading life, but now working and making profits for the Mr Big who commissioned her hijacking in the first place and secured her for nothing. And a complaint from the previous and legitimate owner? Prove it. If worst comes to worst, the miscreants can vaporise in an hour, untraceable behind the paperwork.
It is not the criminality that keeps the lights burning late in the offices of the Wests counterterrorism agencies. It is the nightmare of the invisible ship, the suicide crew, the deadly cargo and the unsuspecting destination.
