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How to Hijack a Ship
3.6k Plays2 years ago
In the penultimate installment of the first season of the podcast, we discuss the threats to global shipping posed by piracy, state actors, and other dangers with two members of the Encyclopedia Geopolitica team. Cormac Mc Garry is an Associate Director at the specialist risk consultancy Control Risks, where he heads up their maritime security intelligence and analysis services. Most of his work involves helping shipping companies and others in the maritime community be prepared for security issues they may face from piracy and armed robbery at sea to drug smuggling, war and terrorism. He previously worked in the National Maritime College of Ireland as a research project manager and has also worked across the spectrum of risk management consulting, having worked in East and West Africa before being currently based in France. Anthony Clay is a former US Navy Surface Warfare Officer, serving all over the world, with specialties in security and operations. He is currently serving in a civilian role as a strategic planner for the DoD.
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Transcript
Podcast Introduction
00:00:06
Speaker
Welcome to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica.
Overview of Dangerous Acts and Risks
00:00:12
Speaker
In each episode, we sit down with leading experts to talk about dangerous acts, organisations and people. We examine historical cases, as well as the risks these subjects currently pose. From assassinations and airline shootdowns, through to kidnappings and coups, we'll examine each of these threats through the lenses of both the dangerous actors behind them and the agencies around the world seeking to stop them.
00:00:38
Speaker
In the interest of operational security, certain tactical details will be omitted from these discussions. However, the cases and threats which we discuss here are very real.
Host Introduction and Maritime Security Focus
00:01:06
Speaker
I'm Louis H. Passant, the founder and editor of Encyclopedia Geopolitica. I'm also a doctoral researcher at the University of Loughborough in the field of intelligence and espionage in the private sector. In my day job, I provide intelligence to corporate executives on complex geopolitical and security issues.
00:01:20
Speaker
So today we're discussing how to hijack a ship, and in a slight break from formatting, rather than having external experts, this time we're using two members of the Encyclopedia Geopolitica team. But nonetheless, they are very credible experts on this topic. Our first expert, Cormac McGarry, is an Associate Director at the Specialist Risk Consultancy Control Risks, where he heads up their Maritime Security Intelligence and Analysis services.
00:01:44
Speaker
Most of his work involves helping shipping companies and others in the maritime community be prepared for security issues they may face from piracy, armed robbery at sea, to drug smuggling, war and terrorism. He previously worked at the National Maritime College of Ireland as a research project manager and has also worked across the spectrum of risk management consulting, having worked in East and West Africa and is currently based in France.
00:02:06
Speaker
Our other expert Anthony Clay is a former US surface warfare officer serving all over the world with specialties in security and operations. He's currently serving in a civilian role as a strategic planner for the Department of Defense in the US. So we'll start with some intro questions. Cormac, tell us how did you get into the field of maritime security? This isn't a field many people probably know exists. Well precisely a lot of people don't know what exists and I'm often asked that question why
00:02:36
Speaker
or what brought me into the field of maritime security. But the rather boring answer to that is similar to a lot of people in any industry around the world. I simply grew up in an area where the maritime industry was extremely visible and played a huge part in the local community's economy. And it's vibrant history. And that place was the port of Cork and the southern tip of the Republic of Ireland.
00:03:03
Speaker
Growing up watching ships going past literally my family home brought me to a natural path and to my career. And I guess coming out of university, literally looking across the water to the National Maritime College of Ireland, it was a natural place to start my professional career. And that kind of combined with some experience in the military, it was actually in field artillery as a reservist, together with an academic background in international relations,
00:03:32
Speaker
and an obvious interest in security kind of combining to give me that pathway into maritime security, which is indeed a rather peculiar specialty, which I've learned over my career. And Anthony, obviously being in the Navy will have worked and interfaced with the maritime security domain very directly, but tell us about your experiences in the maritime security space.
00:03:57
Speaker
So as a young officer, you're trained in a wide variety of specialties. And I was a surface warfare officer, ship driver. So I found myself in the security world, protecting my own ships for years and years and years.
00:04:11
Speaker
through the years, I advanced into roles where I was coordinating security, both port security in and around major commercial ports, dealing with commercial ships, US flagged and otherwise, and then later on actually planning out how other ships and other units would provide security towards these ships.
Insights into Ship Hijacking Models
00:04:33
Speaker
So as today's topic is how to hijack a ship, the first question for Cormac is how do hijackings usually unfold? Is there a particular type of vessel that's most vulnerable to this? We often hear about oil tankers, but why not cruise ship hijackings? When you mentioned the word hijack in the shipping context, specifically when you mentioned the word piracy, the image that comes into people's heads is that don't work in our sector in the maritime community.
00:05:00
Speaker
The image that comes into people's heads is usually the kind of Jack Sparrow of the Pirates of the Caribbean ilk, which, to the frustration of my colleagues, is not actually a movie series I've seen. And people often think back to the gilded age of piracy of old. What they tend not to think about is modern piracy or modern hijackings in the form of terrorism as well. So how do they actually unfold? The kind of standard bearer for that in modern maritime security history is the Somali piracy model.
00:05:30
Speaker
which we'll talk about in a second, I guess. But as to how they unfold, something that a lot of people have difficulty imagining is just how difficult it is to actually hijack a ship. A lot of people aren't aware of the sheer size of the ships that are sailing on our oceans. Just to put that into context, if you imagine some of the big oil tankers that were hijacked around the Horn of Africa area about 10 years ago,
00:05:59
Speaker
or even just, let's say, the container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal last year, which everybody kind of knows popularly. That ship alone is so big that if you were to put all those containers that it was carrying approximately 20,000, if you were to put them on a train, that train would have to be 75 kilometers long. So imagine hijacking that train. Now imagine doing that on a massive ship, which is basically just a floating building moving between borders on sea.
00:06:28
Speaker
Imagine trying to get on board that ship while it's moving, potentially in rough seas. You don't even have to think of criminality or terrorism to see how difficult that is. Just go to any port in any country and watch the people who work in the port, specifically pilots who tend to board commercial ships to help them navigate through ports. Just see how difficult it is for those very, very well-trained experts to just get on a ladder and get on board that ship.
00:06:56
Speaker
Now try and do that when the ship is actively resisting or when there's naval forces deployed in the area to actively try and stop you. It takes a very, very high degree of capability to actually hijack a ship, which is one of the reasons it doesn't happen that often relative to other kind of global crimes. When we talk about hijacking of a ship in terms of the intent and capabilities of a group, one of the
00:07:23
Speaker
kind of textbook cases. One of the famous cases in the maritime security world was the hijacking of the Akili Loro in Egypt in 1985. And that was a case of terrorism in which four members of the Palestinian Liberation Front, led by a man called Abu Abbas, managed to hijack a cruise ship, a relatively small cruise ship. So not the size of the modern super cruise ships that we're now used to.
00:07:51
Speaker
They hijacked the ship primarily for the purposes of seeking the release of 50 prisoners that were largely being held in Israel. How did they hijack that ship? It wasn't as complicated as you might think. They essentially got on board, managed to hide their weapons, got on board posing as passengers. And that was before a certain code of international security was introduced much more recently in 2004.
00:08:16
Speaker
Fast forward to more recently, and we talk about Somali piracy quite a lot in our field. Somali pirates, they went to sea largely around the year 2009 is when they started reaching their peak. They went out to sea to hijack ships. What was driving them there was a lot of issues around illegal fishing that was happening in their waters, weak institutions on land in Somalia that were failing to enforce the law.
00:08:45
Speaker
economic and socio-economic degradation that was pushing these fishermen out to sea towards criminality as well in abundance of weapons and the expertise to actually go out to sea and do that very difficult thing that I was talking about. Somali pirates established a whole model of how to hijack a ship and in short what they would do is they would often go out with what we would call a mothership
00:09:12
Speaker
which would be a relatively big boat, usually a dow, which is a traditional kind of Middle Eastern boat designed for carrying smaller quantities of cargo. That dow would carry the fuel, carry weapons, ammunition, various other support material that would then then be able to feed two faster boats that would approach a large ship. And as they approach the large ship,
00:09:39
Speaker
they would usually use long ladders or grapple hooks to get themselves onto the deck of the ship. And again, in some cases, you got to remember here that these ships, they're sailing sometimes pretty fast. Once they realize there's pirates on approach, they will increase speed. The swell on the sea could be pretty big. And these pirate groups are trying to keep alongside the ship itself, which is pretty difficult than trying to
00:10:04
Speaker
launch a ladder or grapple hook over the edge, then trying to climb up that rope or ladder. And then once they're on board, they would usually have two speedboats with multiple personnel on each speedboat. And then once they're on board, they would seek to get up to the bridge of the ship and effectively try and take control of the ship by threatening the officers on board.
00:10:27
Speaker
There's a whole system of security measures that these ships would often employ against them, which we can talk about later. But once they get control of that ship effectively, they would force the officers on board to sail the ship back towards Somalia itself. And from there, they would be able to negotiate the release of the ship, the cargo, and the crew itself. And they got pretty good at that. And there was fundamentally no real defense measures out there, primarily in the Gulf of Aden area, which
00:10:55
Speaker
which allowed Somali piracy to really proliferate. And they really established that kind of standard bearer of how to hijack a ship. Now, as to the question, what types of ships? You said we often hear about oil tankers. One of the reasons for that is because the Gulf of Aden and broader Indian Ocean region where Somali pirates were practicing. Obviously, that's, you know, it's at the exit point of the Gulf where
00:11:22
Speaker
Middle Eastern oil and gases flowing out of. So a lot of the most valuable ships sailing in that area would be tankers laden with oil product. And Somali pirate groups actually got to a point where they knew that they could hijack vessels that were sailing westwards, knowing that these would be tankers that would be actually laden with fuel, which means that they would be slower. It also means that they would sift lower in the water, so it would be easier to get on board them in terms of the height between the water and the deck.
00:11:51
Speaker
And of course they would have a much more valuable cargo on board, which would make the financial reward for their crime more appealing. But it wasn't just tankers, it was vessels of all types. And in other areas of the world where we see criminal hijackings, you do tend to see multiple vessel types being targeted, but often it is oil tankers because of that cargo, which can either be negotiated for its release, or it can be sold off into the black market, which is what we
00:12:17
Speaker
saw a lot of in the Southeast Asia region, specifically in the South China Sea, where hijacking was a big problem really up until about three years ago.
00:12:26
Speaker
So you've described really quite a difficult engagement here attacking a ship. So I suppose the question I would have is, you know, money might not be enough to motivate all these types of attackers. So Anthony, question for you is, what motivations would someone have to attack a ship beyond money? Clearly, money is the primary factor in most of these situations, and it's varying degrees of money. So in the Somali pirates, there's a large history of
00:12:52
Speaker
you know, the local warlords that control the pirates themselves, you know, basically take a, you know, take a large share out of that and keep the pirates as sort of indentured servants until they pay off debts.
00:13:05
Speaker
In the other parts of the world, it's a little different from that. There's a lot more of a commercial aspect to the piracy where it's organized gangs similar to the drug trade where they will go and they will take ships and they will either break apart the cargo and sell a piecemeal or negotiate to return the ship to the shipping company.
00:13:26
Speaker
One of the more interesting sides of that too is they also get into some of the illicit trades that happen at C2. In the case of the Somali pirates, they're frequently, not frequently, that's not a fair characterization, but there is a weapons trade that goes from different sources around the
00:13:45
Speaker
around the world to Yemen to support the Houthi revolution. And they will occasionally stumble into ships that have weapons on board or drugs. There's a large drug trade through there. So they can turn these around and sell them on to other terrorist customers. And so you mentioned this being a frequent problem. So I suppose to Cormac, my question is, how frequent exactly are hijackings and attacks on ships? How often is this happening?
00:14:15
Speaker
It ebbs and it flows. One of the things when we talk about maritime security risk, we do have to think about it at a global level because of the nature of the maritime sector. It is by its very nature global. A shipping company doesn't have to worry about one specific area. There's very few international shipping companies that only work in one area. Most shipping companies are sending their fleet in and out of every country you can imagine. So to answer the question, how frequent are hijackings specifically?
00:14:45
Speaker
right now in the last, let's say three years, almost zero actually, particularly with Somali piracy that reached its peak between 2009 and 2012. And there is a bulwark of security measures in place to keep it suppressed. And that system of security measures have been very, very successful to the point that since 2012, Somali piracy has been very effectively suppressed.
00:15:12
Speaker
and its frequency almost zero. There have been moments, particularly of note in 2017, there was a slight resurgence of Somali piracy, but it was nothing compared to their heyday of 2009 to 12. In those years of Somali piracy's heyday, at the height of their success, at any one time they were holding over 500 mariners in captivity. And while
00:15:39
Speaker
You know, this threat was made popular in the popular mind by movies like Captain Phillips, for example. If you just think about 500 mariners being held captive and how actually ignored that problem was by most of the world, just think how would we talk about 500 airline pilots being held captive in some place. You know, it's kind of a result of something that in the maritime community we call sea blindness.
00:16:05
Speaker
where the vast majority of the public are just very unaware of what's happening in the maritime community, even when there are massive issues like this. And at that height of Somali piracy, it was actually costing the maritime industry. Well, the maritime community was costing about $2 billion a year to fight piracy and keep it suppressed. That figure comes from a very great group of people that were called Oceans Beyond Piracy, which annually published reports on the cost of piracy.
00:16:35
Speaker
it's an astonishing cost $2 billion, which does include the commercial cost as well as the cost of naval response. But fortunately, those measures are in place and they have actively very suppressed some anti-piracy. The same can be said roughly of some of the other high-risk areas for criminal hijackings like in the South China Sea, a lot of good efforts from international maritime authorities, agencies, as well as
00:17:00
Speaker
national agencies very successfully suppressed a lot of the hijacking issues in Southeast Asia. But to broader question here beyond hijacking, security risk in the shipping world goes way beyond hijacking. And what actually worries most security professionals in the shipping world on a day-to-day basis is the more common occurrences of things like stowaways, which is when someone just manages to get on board your ship in order to move across borders illegally.
Contemporary Maritime Threats
00:17:29
Speaker
they can have a massive cost on the ship owner who has to deal with potentially turning the ship around, which can cost hundreds of thousands a day in terms of the hiring costs of the vessel, in terms of fuel, labor costs for the crew, etc. Stowaways are actually a day-to-day very real major risk in the maritime community that those outside the maritime community very rarely speak about.
00:17:52
Speaker
There's also issues like theft and robbery, which are much more kind of lower key. They involve things like just stealing items from ships, like rope to paint cans is something I see on an almost daily basis. And these attacks do happen. I call them attacks, but things like robberies and thefts, they do happen on a daily basis. You know, at Control Risks, we record roughly 500 incidents a year of this type that affects ships.
00:18:18
Speaker
the vast majority of them are things like those thefts and robberies on ships and ports and anchorages around the world. And then there's the more high impact attacks, and these are the ones we do here in the media. They're relatively infrequent compared to those low impact events like thefts. But we are talking about things like, for example, most listeners will probably have heard of the attacks that happened
00:18:43
Speaker
in 2019 off the port of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates, where four internationally flagged tankers were at anchor, you know, just resting at anchor and were subject to explosions rather suddenly. And what happened to those tankers is very, very likely there was limpet mines placed on them that were detonated. And the
00:19:10
Speaker
intent behind that is very, very geopolitical. That's where that gets really interesting for Encyclopedia Geopolitica. Those four tankers and a number of other tankers that were attacked after those events in May 2019, there have been a number since in the area roughly around the Strait of Hormuz that that rough area, they have been heavily linked to geopolitics surrounding Iran and its adversarial relationships
00:19:39
Speaker
between the United States and the US's Gulf Arab allies. Most recently, Iran's relationship with Israel has seen multiple commercial ships being subject to attack on the high seas. So these go on, and they don't really impact your average person on a day-to-day basis. But they just show us that there are actors out there with the intent to attack ships, often to such an extent that they don't actually want to cause widespread damage
00:20:08
Speaker
in the case of those tankers being attacked around the Strait of Removes and Gulf of Amman area. A lot of the intent behind those attacks was to seek limited damage for geopolitical means rather than, for example, to shut down the Strait of Removes completely, which would have been an absolutely devastating international incident. I'd like to add a little bit on that with regards to the ships near Fajara in the United Arab Emirates.
00:20:36
Speaker
So I happened to be fairly closely involved with that at the time. And while it was initially perceived as some sort of a piracy level thing, that was straight geopolitics between Iran and the United States. The United States uses Fujara as a port for resupply.
00:20:55
Speaker
And it was a message that Iran could have some degree of say in our area. And so it kind of brings about like, whereas terrorism is typically politically driven and can have economic side effects to it, on the piracy side, it's much more economically driven with the possibility of having political side effects.
00:21:15
Speaker
States sponsored piracy is definitely a historical thing with a lot of discussion actually happening right now with regards to the conflict in Ukraine with Russia possibly using some pirate type tactics towards grain supplies coming out of Ukraine and the international community supporting things like blocking Russian shipping from conducting trade as well.
00:21:38
Speaker
So it's kind of a weird crossover between politics, terrorism, and economics. That's really interesting. And I especially want to come back to this idea of sea blindness. I think you've both given us a lot to think about the scale and impact of these types of threats. But before we do that, I just have to ask, Anthony, given that you've operated in this part of the world and this is a kind of gray zone tactic we've seen actors such as Iran employ,
00:22:07
Speaker
Given that modern computer systems manage so many aspects of a ship's operations, how vulnerable are they to potentially hacking a steering or navigation system? A cyber attacks an issue? Could you hijack a vessel from the other side of the world and make it run aground?
00:22:25
Speaker
In our modern world where we assure our use to highly connected lives, where we are on systems with our own personal computers that dial into our corporate systems and you can have a really networked
00:22:40
Speaker
a really easy entry into a large-scale network through a very small node, being a personal computer, a cell phone, what have you. It's a little different with most ships. Granted, in the mainline commercial world, most of their ships are between two and about 10 years to 15 years old, and then they always want to increase. You're talking about Evergreen and Maersk and
00:23:06
Speaker
but the large-scale shipping companies, they want to increase their size, increase their speed, increase their efficiency. Well, when those ships move on, they go to smaller shipping companies and it's kind of like the trade of a used car. You have your first shiny one and it gets passed on to a good second user and by
00:23:27
Speaker
A couple of years on, it's with an 18-year-old kid who barely knows how to drive. That's kind of how these ships are as well. The lower tier ones are the ones that are usually higher priority for hijacking or piracy because they're smaller, they're slower, they have poor built-in defenses, so they're easier targets.
00:23:48
Speaker
In the case of the computer side of things, those ships are also relatively immune. They don't necessarily have an integrated system for driving the ship that connects the navigation to the steering to the engines. In newer ships, they do have that. In most cases, most of these newer ships, you drive from a console that's a joystick and
00:24:11
Speaker
Most of the time you just press a button and the whole thing does it for you and you don't have to touch the ship's wheel or the throttles to go anywhere. It just drives you there and then you only take control when you're in a congested environment coming into or out of report. That said, those are typically not integrated
00:24:28
Speaker
onto the broader computer systems, which are connected to the internet. Most of these modern ships do have internet connections. They go through satellites and it's not the best internet connection in the world, but it's there. But those are typically on isolated systems that are firewalled from the navigation system. I guess it's more the other way, the navigation systems, the engineering systems, the firefighting systems are all separate and contained on a standalone network that
00:24:57
Speaker
doesn't typically have reached back to the internet. So getting a way to hack into these requires a multi-level step. It has been tested before. It has been successfully done before. Typically, it requires somebody on the ship to be able to install something into the operating system that itself gains internet connectivity. On the technical side of that, the new build ships, as Anthony was saying, are being built with more modern navigation equipment.
00:25:27
Speaker
One of the areas that we see the cyber world impacting shipping, we don't really see it have a massive impact in terms of, you know, breaking a ship up or sinking a ship or devastating supply chains, et cetera. We do see quite commonly something that's called AIS spoofing. AIS is the automatic identification system, which in short is a kind of transponder system that ships are obliged to carry.
00:25:56
Speaker
They're open source software. It's freely accessible for most people to just Google the name of a ship and kind of see where it is in the world. And something that's happened over the last decade or so is people just being able to spoof where those AIS locations are. And some of the more kind of comical ones is you can go to some of these marine traffic websites where, you know, they'll see that they've arranged the ship positions into a word that says pond or something like that.
00:26:24
Speaker
It's largely kind of comical, but what is the real world impact of that is that a crew on a ship, a capable crew on a ship, you know, if their AIS position is being spoofed outwardly, a capable crew can usually kind of adjust to that. Where it gets really kind of threatening is when a cyber threat actor starts messing with GPS.
00:26:49
Speaker
There's multiple ways to do that. The easiest ways is simply to block GPS signals, but there have been some cases where GPS itself gets spoofed and you have a system on the bridge, which is kind of modern electronic chart display information systems, where the crew on the bridge of a ship might see on their chart that they're in one place, but effectively they're being GPS spoofed to make it appear that they're in one place when really they're in another.
00:27:18
Speaker
That presents navigational risks. It means that the ship has a higher risk of running into another ship or running aground. Again, a capable crew will often spot this and be able to go back to the old ways of sailing to work their way around it, where it gets to an even deeper level where we see cyber threat actors messing with something called dynamic GPS. And that's where they can start messing with propulsion controls and start actively messing with the actual navigation of the vessel, which
00:27:49
Speaker
It's relatively rare, i.e. in the commercial world. I don't personally hear about that much, but it's very, very heavily linked to geopolitics again. And we do see it in areas where you have geopolitical flashpoints. And of no surprise, we see it in the Black Sea. We saw it in the Black Sea for quite a long time before February 2022. There's reports that this is happening in the Taiwan Strait. There's also a lot of reports over the years that this kind of cyber
00:28:18
Speaker
interference was happening to ships around the Scandinavian borders in the Arctic, the Scandinavian Arctic borders with Russia, etc. And they tend to be very, very geopolitical in nature. Where the fear comes in in the commercial world is whether you could use these means to, let's say, get multiple ships in a place like
00:28:38
Speaker
English Strait or the Suez Canal to fool them into thinking they're in one place when they're actually in another and then they start crashing into each other and suddenly you shut down global supply chain choke point or bottleneck. Or if you can mess with the ship's ballast management and you make the ship think that its ballast is on one side or another and you could theoretically kind of crack a ship in half. That's where you get into the kind of serious physical risk of cyber interference.
00:29:06
Speaker
is probably something we're going to see more of, you know, as ships continue to modernize. And it's certainly something that the shipping community and the international shipping agencies are taking very seriously.
00:29:18
Speaker
So before we take a break and then go on to talk about how we protect against these kinds of risks, you know, you talked about sea blindness before and given so much of the world's trade flows through shipping and you're all seeing the impacts at the moment of breakdowns of global supply chains, what sort of risks exist that could be disrupted through the system or could disrupt the system through individual vessel hijackings? Just to elaborate on that term, sea blindness is
00:29:46
Speaker
One of the statistics you'd often hear from us in the maritime community is that between 80 and 90% of everything you consume, that means the milk and cereal you had for breakfast, the avocado you had for lunch, the computer screen you're looking at right now, the audio device that you're listening to this podcast on, at some point that was almost guaranteed to be on a ship. Our modern supply chains, our ability to just have things,
00:30:14
Speaker
is completely reliant on international shipping to do that the way it does. For us to be able to do things as cheap as we do, to get things done as quick as we do, we're wholly dependent on international shipping for that. Now, you could also say that 90% of everything you consume was also on a truck to get to you in that last mile of the supply chain, which is very, very true. And we totally rely on road traffic. But the thing is, think of all the electronics around you right now. We're all sat.
00:30:43
Speaker
relatively in Europe, I think. But all those electronics, most of them didn't come from here. They probably came from China. A truck is not going to be able to get that stuff from China to here. You need a ship to do that. The avocados from South America and Central America, they're not coming on a truck. They're not coming on a railway. They're certainly not coming on through aviation, where it would just cost way, way, way too much.
00:31:08
Speaker
They're coming to us on ships. And the kind of lack of knowledge around that is what we call sea blindness. And in the security sense, that means people being very unaware of the vulnerabilities in that system then. So to your question, like what are the risks that could disrupt the system beyond individual hijackings? There's many scenarios. There's issues like Somali piracy becoming as endemic as it did, threatening supply chains through the Gulf of Aden, which it very much did.
00:31:35
Speaker
required massive international response, massive response from commercial shipping as well as international naval forces, the international governmental community. Somalia itself, the risks that could disrupt the system is an endemic security threat like that re-emerging, whether it's off Somalia or somewhere else in the world. We have had a more modern problem like that, for example, in the Gulf of Guinea, which is a threat very specifically to West African supply chains, not so much globally.
00:32:03
Speaker
Beyond individual criminal, financially driven hijackings, you can take the impact of those risks, take that back into the terrorist world. If you imagine, let's say, the Suez Canal blockage last year, one megaship, a gigantic container ship carrying 20,000 containers, accidentally got stuck.
00:32:26
Speaker
Throughout the world, it created some funny memes, but we are literally paying for the impact of that ship getting stuck right now. It's not the cause of inflationary problems right now that we have, but it is one of a sequence of issues largely happening in the maritime world that have led to the record levels of inflation we have right now, what is commonly called the cost of living crisis in much of the world right now. You had the blockage of the Suez Canal. You also had China's response to zero COVID.
00:32:55
Speaker
It's zero COVID policy response, which resulted in parts of some of its megaports getting shut down. They never actually shut down their megaports. They just impacted some of the labor in some parts of those megaports. And a number of those happening plus the blockage of the Suez Canal, plus a bunch of other less heard of issues have resulted in this very global problem. And again, the food crisis right now largely stemming from Russia and Ukraine.
00:33:26
Speaker
That is a shipping problem. Unable to get ships out of Ukraine via the Black Sea, that is a shipping problem. So again, if you extend that to think of risks to the system, what if bad actors get their hands on the intent and capability to create these disruptions? So what if instead of the Suez Canal blockage being an accident, you actually see multiple vessels being hit by a threat actor, that becomes a different issue to deal with. It could have a bigger impact
00:33:54
Speaker
going back to that cyber question, what if some of these mega ports, such as Shanghai in China, Rotterdam in Europe, what if they're hit by a very devastating cyber event that effectively shuts them down? So those are the kind of more systemic risks that can manifest from risks within the maritime sector.
00:34:16
Speaker
I want to dovetail on what that last point right there and kind of linking back to the previous question is I think the bigger threat to maritime trade when it comes to affecting flow from ships to the consumer is actually the port. So in the case of these major ports, most of them are very heavily automated with humans doing a very small amount of the work that's done.
00:34:46
Speaker
offload and move this cargo from the ship to a truck to get to the end user and those are highly networked and those are the ones where they're the critical node that is easily tacked in a cyber environment that i think is the.
00:35:06
Speaker
the critical thing that could sever maritime trade. But it's not just that. I mean, the ports are a system of systems. You have people and trade unions and the vessel control systems which are, you know, manage who comes in and out of when.
00:35:24
Speaker
Most people are more familiar with air traffic control. That exists in a very computerized form for ports coming in. A ship at sea is relatively safe, and you can always take over the controls and drive it. A competent mariner is not going to run his ship into another ship. It happens, but it's usually a case of a whole bunch of failures stacked in a row.
00:35:47
Speaker
a sailor is not going to let their ship be driven by a computer into another ship or the ground, typically. But if they can't get into a port, if there is no window for them to pull in, if the scheduling for the tugs doesn't happen, then nothing happens. That ship doesn't get in, the stuff doesn't get offloaded, the avocados coming from Mexico spoil in the container. And that is where
00:36:13
Speaker
when you start looking at how many systems are required that do rely on computers, that do rely on human networks and cell phone networks and all of these other things, those are the nodes that can break all of this in a very short time.
00:36:30
Speaker
So you've both given us a number of very high profile threats we need to think about here, and it's very clear there are systemic threats that need to be accounted for. So after the break, we'll talk a little bit about how we counter those threats. How do we keep shipping safe? How do ships stay safe?
Mitigating Shipping Threats
00:36:47
Speaker
How do we keep the avocados flowing?
00:36:57
Speaker
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00:37:34
Speaker
So before the break, we talked about this being a pretty significant risk to just the global economy, to geopolitics in general. So now let's spend a bit of time to talk about how we can protect against these threats. How can we mitigate them? So I think the really obvious question here is, Cormac, does shipping companies think about these sorts of threats? I'm guessing going by your job that this is something they do discuss and that they do take seriously.
00:37:59
Speaker
Like any sector or industry, you have a spectrum of companies and their relationship to risk management. You do, of course, have companies who send their crews pretty blindly into high risk and don't do anything about it. At the other end of the spectrum, you have shipping companies who go above and beyond and protect their crews and protect their cargoes, protect their clients.
00:38:23
Speaker
And regarding hijacking specifically, there is actually a very, very effective system of measures that an individual ship can take to protect itself against something like a Somali pirate group, for example. It's a very proven set of security measures that were kind of constructed by the shipping industry and the maritime community itself. Those measures are deployed on a daily basis, particularly in areas like the Gulf of Guinea.
00:38:50
Speaker
of West Africa and the Horn of Africa area around the Indian Ocean. One thing that the shipping industry is very notable for is it has a very high risk tolerance compared to many other sectors. You will always find a shipping company, you will always find a ship, you will always find a crew willing to go into an area as long as trade is to be done.
00:39:20
Speaker
And in terms of that risk aversion, just remember that the people at sea on those ships just think about what they do day to day. You know, we're sat here on our desks, worried about air conditioning, probably joining heatwave in France. The people that are bringing these supplies to us on their ships day to day, they are facing hurricane force winds, massive swells, their desks and their beds are being turned upside down literally sometimes.
00:39:51
Speaker
the weather they face. They are subject to a huge range of accidents on these ships. Just think about the building your office where you work now. Imagine if that was tumbling around all the time. So the individual mariners day to day, they're used to risk, primarily safety risks. So that kind of feeds up to the corporate level when companies are deciding whether to send their ship into a high risk area. They also have this kind of
00:40:17
Speaker
extraordinary risk tolerance, which is a good thing because if they didn't have it, it would really reduce the opportunities for trade we have in the world. A brilliant example of that very presently is the Black Sea itself, where the conflict between Russia and Ukraine effectively shut down shipping out of Ukraine. Now, that wasn't for want of ships willing to go into Ukraine. That was because the conflict situation effectively shut down those ports. Ukraine literally made the decision to shut down its ports
00:40:45
Speaker
in the Gulf of Odessa. So in effect, there was actually nothing for the ships to trade. And then around July, August, 2022, as a result of quite tense geopolitical diplomatic negotiations that involved Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, and international agencies, maritime agencies, there is now a system in place as of August, 2022.
00:41:12
Speaker
where ships can go into those Ukrainian ports in the Gulf of Odessa and take advantage of a system that is kind of known as the humanitarian grain corridor. I won't go into the details of that system, but ships doing that are still engaging in pretty high risk.
00:41:33
Speaker
the agreement under which those ships are now going into Ukraine and they are going in there successfully. That agreement is very much subject to the trajectory of the conflict in Ukraine. So those ships make no doubt about it. They're engaging in pretty high security risk, but they're still doing it. And they take that decision because trade is to be done. Now, those ships, do they go in there with any actual knowledge of the risk they're facing? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't.
00:42:03
Speaker
if they know about the risks they're facing, they'd often have quite qualified security managers or they'll engage in external consultancy to help them deal with that risk. Another good example is going back a bit further into history during the Iran-Iraq war. An element of that became known as the tanker war, where both countries were kind of targeting commercial fleets and targeting oil and gas coming out of the Gulf through the Strait of Removes. Upwards, I may get this number wrong, but I think somewhere around
00:42:30
Speaker
between 25 and 35 commercial tankers were hit by missiles at that time, but the shipping industry just continued trading. It just shows the level of risk tolerance that they have, but there's also so many examples of how the shipping industry and community still actually takes those risks very, very seriously. Because if indeed they didn't
00:42:50
Speaker
they would not have business to do and us as consumers would start to suffer. Let's talk about practicalities then. It's very clear that these risks are still being broached by these shipping companies. Anthony, let's talk about the sort of security ships have. What can a ship do if it finds itself under attack by hijackers or another actor?
00:43:11
Speaker
So this has been a regular level of increase of capability through the commercial sector for the last decade or so, since it really started getting bad in 2007, 2008. Initially, there was some really rudimentary, like putting barbed wire on the rails as they're going through high threat environments. They're manning fire hoses. Fire hoses actually work pretty well if you're trying to climb up a ladder or a rope to board a ship. Being sprayed by a fire hose makes it very difficult.
00:43:41
Speaker
Those are still used, the actual physical restraints there. But it's become a lot more programmatic from the get-go. So there are training that ships go through prior to going through high-thread areas. So they will learn maneuvers, they will learn techniques. And then when they're going through the areas, they will transit at basically the best speed they can make, the fastest they can go. It's harder to reach a moving target.
00:44:05
Speaker
The boats, particularly we're talking Somali pirates here, they use 30 to 40 foot skiffs that move very quickly, but they're not great in heavy seas. These big 300,000 ton ships that they're trying to board can go in any and all seas however fast they want to go. So speed is their friend. Additionally,
00:44:30
Speaker
if they're engaged by pirates, they can maneuver. And so they will do big S turns. So again, it's not necessarily like to avoid it. Like you think avoiding road hazards in your car, because when you start putting a rudder over on these ships, you slow way down. What it does do though, is it creates big wakes and large waves for these little boats to have to deal with. And again, hitting that moving target as they're going through the sea,
00:44:59
Speaker
to try and get a ladder up to climb up. So it just makes it more difficult. On top of that, there's security forces that have come into play here. So companies will hire private security companies, kind of think Blackwater sort of thing, but not quite as much baggage. But they will come out with their own weapons, their guns and ammo, and they will set up
00:45:20
Speaker
in placements around the ship and provide their own defense. And, you know, in the same way that most warships do the same thing as they're going through high threat areas as well. So manning up with 50 caliber machine guns and the like.
00:45:35
Speaker
And then of course, in the case of the Horn of Africa, the Somali pirate threat, you also have a significant military presence. So you have task force 151, which is run by the combined maritime force, which is a organization of
00:45:54
Speaker
a variety of militaries, including a bunch of the Gulf states, United States, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, and sometimes France plays, sometimes Egypt plays, and a bunch of other countries that I didn't name will send ships, a single ship or a couple of staff officers, and they coordinate a bunch of the response to piracy there.
00:46:17
Speaker
Interestingly, separately and kind of alongside, China has over the last decade routinely sent ships to conduct counter-piracy missions in that area, kind of working parallel. And so there's a bit of a working together while working separately relationship between the combined maritime force and the Chinese that are there with usually one or two ships. So in the case of
00:46:46
Speaker
When they find themselves under attack, what they do is it's a process where they will make reports usually to their own company. They will make a report to whatever local authorities there are nearby and they can start their evasive actions.
00:47:03
Speaker
assuming everything doesn't go according to plan, goes awry, they also have the ability to basically withdraw to a central spot that is protected, commonly called the Citadel. And so they can still operate the ship just with less capability, less ability to see outside clearly and less specific controls, but they can still do a lot of the operation while they're in a heavily fortified space on the ship.
00:47:32
Speaker
Most ships keep their engine rooms locked, even if it's just a padlock. So it allows them to keep a bit of physical security in between them and
Global Response and Industry Vulnerabilities
00:47:43
Speaker
the attacker. But all of those calls and trying to get response forces from wherever they might be coming from gives them just a little bit more protection, allowing that response time.
00:47:55
Speaker
So say a ship was attacked and boarded in international waters, a scenario that our researchers for this episode have insisted we refer to as die hard at sea. What sort of response would we expect to see from the international community, especially giving the overlapping jurisdictions at play? We've got ships flying flags of convenience. We've got owners in one country, potentially passengers and crew from another nationality. Does everyone just sit back and wait for the US Navy SEALs or the British SBS? How does that response work?
00:48:25
Speaker
So it's really, really case dependent based on, like you said, the flag, whether it's a real flag or a flag of convenience, just for a little definition sake for, for people that don't maybe know a flag of convenience is where a company is headquartered in one country.
00:48:43
Speaker
But due to taxes and regulations and things like that they go to another country where they can register their ship and it's a whole lot cheaper and don't have to meet so many requirements so places like.
00:48:59
Speaker
Panama and Liberia are two of the biggest ones. And so you'll have a lot of ships that are flagged by those countries and a few others. So in those cases, it's definitely a little bit more squishy technical term. So with a US flagged ship, if one of those gets taken over, the cavalry is coming or the Navy in this case. So there will be a response from US military assets. They will probably bring something like
00:49:28
Speaker
Seals to do a boarding and to retake the ship back over in a the case of a more conventional commercial ship it's really dependent on where they're out in the world and what forces are there to respond so if they're
00:49:44
Speaker
off the Horn of Africa. They have CTF 151 who can respond and there are ships there that will respond in the case of a lot of other places that might be local authorities. So in the Strait of Malacca, it could be Singapore or Malaysia that responds.
00:50:03
Speaker
If there is a US person on board or a British person on board or a French person on board, typically those countries will send responses to be able to go and do whatever is necessary to ensure their freedom. But there is no real standard. This is how you respond in case of X, do Y. If I can jump in on that to completely agree with Anthony, it's very, very much case by case.
00:50:31
Speaker
very much dependent on all those details and characteristics of a specific vessel. Two very contrasting case studies, one that's much more recent within the last two or three years was the vessel Nave Andromeda. She was a Liberian-flagged ship that was boarded by the British SBS in the English Strait. She was due to call into an English port, and the headlines of the day were that the SBS
00:51:01
Speaker
intercepted a hijacked ship, et cetera. In actual fact, what had happened on the ship was that a small number of Nigerian stowaways had gotten bored. So, you know, terming them hijackers, even though technically what they did was actually a hijack, they did start threatening the crew and if kind of effectively got control of the vessel, it would be a long shot to call them hijackers in the sense that we talk about Somali pirates, for example.
00:51:27
Speaker
that was quite a clear cut case that when she was coming in towards English waters, the British government responded, sent the SBS in, dealt with the situation like the SBS does, and that was that. What was the fate of the Nigerian stowaways? That's where it can get complicated because do they get prosecuted in the British court? Do they get immediately deported? Are they treated as immigrants? Are they treated as refugees? That's a whole other question.
00:51:52
Speaker
Another far more complicated example is again, going back to the beginning of our conversation, I mentioned the Akili Loro vessel that was hijacked in Egypt in 1985. Again, that was Palestinian Liberation Front hijacked the ship, amongst other reasons to get some prisoners released. During the episode, they executed an American citizen who happened to be Jewish, who horribly was executed on the deck while in his wheelchair.
00:52:19
Speaker
and the hijackers demanded that the ship be sailed to Syria. Syria rejected their request, so they were kind of stuck in limbo. They ended up going back into Egypt. Eventually, the hijackers kind of disappeared and got lost, but the United States, having had an American citizen just executed, they managed to intercept
00:52:43
Speaker
commercial airline that was carrying the hijackers and managed to intercept it with some fighter jets and force it to land in Italy. Why Italy? Because that's where the US had a NATO, I believe it was a naval base, maybe an air force base. When they landed in Italy to deal with these hijackers, an important thing to remember is that the Achilles-Lore was an Italian flag ship. So Italy claimed its own jurisdiction over the crime that happened on the ship.
00:53:11
Speaker
Israel were trying to claim some extradition because it was a Jewish person that was executed. The United States were obviously intervening because it was a US citizen and it was an international terrorist incident. When they actually landed the plane in Italy, the US special forces that had succeeded in this ended up having a standoff with Italian forces because Italy was trying to claim that it had jurisdiction over that base and the criminals.
00:53:40
Speaker
and it resulted in a diplomatic crisis called the, I think it was the Sigonella crisis, which I'd implore anyone to Google. It's quite a long read. It's a very interesting case of the complexity of dealing with crime at sea.
00:53:54
Speaker
Now in the case of most modern pirates that are captured, it's a very different story. It's actually similarly convoluted, though not quite as geopolitically sexy. So for most of the pirates that are picked up off the coast of Somalia, they are taken to
00:54:12
Speaker
Kenya for trial now there's some degree of uncertainty as to how rigorous these trials are or if they happen or If they just go immediately back to Somalia to start piracy again, and there's a lot of a lot of question there
00:54:27
Speaker
In the case of the ships that have been taken prisoner that the US has a lot of interest in, the US government will take these prisoners back to the US and they will be tried in court there and then they'll go spend years and years and years in prison in the US.
00:54:45
Speaker
Another weird aside is that this is still piracy and it does still fall under the law of the sea. So if you are found to be a pirate, you can be executed on site. And there are stories particularly of different militaries around the world who I will not name.
00:55:04
Speaker
of picking up pirates off the coast of Horn of Africa, taking them to the stern of the ship and putting a bullet in their head and throwing them over the side. So the penalties for piracy can be very significant to those conducting it. Not always the case. Sometimes they will just go to jail for a couple of years. Sometimes they'll be let free, but sometimes, you know, it's a watery grave.
00:55:29
Speaker
That brings us on to our final question here. You've given us a lot to think about in terms of risks here. I have to ask, as people who think about these risks all day long, what's something that keeps someone like you up at night? There's a lot of vulnerabilities in the maritime world, in the shipping sector, which I think would be wrong of us to talk openly about here.
00:55:53
Speaker
But in more general terms, something that I do worry about is a threat actor gaining both the intent and capability to attack a global maritime choke point somewhere like the Malacca Strait, Suez Canal, English Strait. The various methods that can be employed to interrupt traffic there for a period of time could do great damage to our global economy. We've seen it happen through accidents in the past year.
00:56:22
Speaker
My fear is that a threat actor would do it intentionally to more than one vessel at a time. I think my biggest worries are something that I already talked about is actually not related to the ships themselves, but the ports. The workers, the stevedores, the dock workers are all typically lower-class people that don't necessarily have the highest security screenings. They are cheap labor. Typically they are poorly educated.
00:56:53
Speaker
and they're not under the control of the shipping companies. They're more under control of the port themselves. And if you're talking about a port like Dubai or Shanghai or Bermerhaven, they're going to be a consistently high caliber there or a decently high caliber. But if you're talking about a lot of the smaller ports, particularly in places like the Gulf of Guinea, which we talked about earlier, or throughout Southeast Asia,
00:57:19
Speaker
they're not going to be the most rigorously screened and they're going to be much more open to exploitation by state and non-state actors. And that is where I see the biggest threat is coming either onto the ship that way, via stowaways or sabotage, or just thwarting the entire port's ability to do trade.
00:57:42
Speaker
Well, gentlemen, you've given us a lot to think about here, so all that's left to say is thank you very much for joining us. To our audience, you've been listening to How to Get on a Watchlist, the new podcast series from Encyclopedia Geopolitica. Today, we've been talking about how to hijack a ship. Our producer for this episode was Edwin Tran, and our researcher was Alex Smith. Thank you very much.
00:58:02
Speaker
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00:58:43
Speaker
911, what's your emergency?