Catching Thunder

by Eskil Engdal

  4 The descriptions of the work leading up to Interpol’s Project Scale are based on a large number of documents and reports, as well as interviews with people who participated in the work: Tor Glistrup, Gunnar Stølsvik and Eve de Coning from the Norwegian fisheries authorities, Stuart Cory from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the USA, Alistair McDonnell from Interpol’s Project Scale, Gary Orr from the Ministry from Primary Industries in New Zealand and Glen Salmon from the Australian Fisheries Management Authority.

  5 As a fisheries officer on isolated South Georgia in the 1990s, Alistair McDonnell had seen how overfishing in the British maritime zones in the South Atlantic was on the verge of obliterating the toothfish stock. At its peak, the annual catch amounted to 100,000 tons of toothfish. Three fishing vessels were put under arrest by the British authorities before the fleet of trawlers and longline fishing vessels gave up.

  7 THE ICE

  1 The bay was named after the general manager of the “Whalers Mutual Insurance Association” (Hvalfangernes Assuranceforening), Olaf Prydz. It was mapped for the first time in 1935 by the Norwegian whaler Klarius Mikkelsen on the ship Thorshavn. The following year the bay was explored extensively by a Norwegian expedition led by the whaling ship owner Lars Christensen, who outfitted nine scientific expeditions to the Antarctic. Christensen himself was on four of them.

  2 Malaysia Airlines’ Flight 370 was on the way from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on 8 March 2014 carrying 227 passengers and 12 crew members when it suddenly disappeared from radar screens above the Gulf of Thailand. At least 57 ships and 48 aircraft took part in the rescue operations, which were carried out in an enormous geographic region. A few days after the airplane disappeared, the authorities announced that the Boeing 777 aircraft had probably crashed some place in the Indian Ocean west of Australia. It wasn’t until 17 months later that the first piece of wreckage from the crashed plane was found, a part of the wing that washed up on the coast of the French island of Réunion.

  3 AMSA’s search and rescue incidents 2013–2014: www.amsa.gov.au/search-and-rescue/amsas-role-in-search-and-rescue/search-and-rescue-stories/2013-14/index.asp (accessed 28.09.2016).

  8 VESTURVON

  1 The story about the Vesturvon is taken from a number of newspaper articles that appeared in the Norwegian newspaper Sunnmørsposten in 1969, the website Vagaskip.dk and the authors’ interview with one of the ship’s first shipmasters: Jóhan Páll Joensen from the Faroe Islands.

  2 Alec Gill (2003): Hull’s Fishing Heritage. Wharncliffe Publishing.

  9 THE PIRATE CAPITAL

  1 This information was found in the archives of the Coalition of Legal Toothfish Operators, Inc. (COLTO), during a visit to their secretariat in Perth, Australia, June 2016. COLTO is the interest organization for the legal fishing fleet, and the members represent 90 per cent of the legal fishing of toothfish.

  2 From 2000 to 2003 according to Interpol, the Thunder was owned by three different companies, each of which had a connection to ship owners in Spain: Vistasur Holding, Southern Shipping Ltd. and Muñiz Castiñeira S.L.

  3 On 22 September 2006 the Thunder was blacklisted by CCAMLR. During the years leading up to Sea Shepherd’s finding the Thunder at the Banzare Bank in December 2014, the ship was observed at least 19 times around Antarctica or on its way to or from the Southern Ocean by surveillance planes, patrol vessels and legal fishing vessels. It was also inspected or refused entry by port authorities in Malaysia and Indonesia on five occasions.

  4 Glen Salmon interviewed by the authors on Skype, 31 August and 1 September 2016.

  5 Salmon’s anonymous voyages along the coast of Malaysia were the start of a collaboration which would culminate in the end of “The Bandit 6”. 11 nations in Southeast Asia and Oceania, including Australia and Malaysia, are part of the regional cooperation RPOA-IUU (The Regional Plan of Action to Promote Responsible Fishing Practices Including Combating Illegal, Unreported and Unregulated Fishing), which was established during a large-scale Minster conference in Bali in 2007.

  6 In Glen Salmon’s archives there are more than 50 reports from the Australian surveillance planes and patrol boats that have observed suspected toothfish pirates in the Indian Ocean and in the Southern Ocean. The reports have been shared with the authorities in Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, where the fishing vessels usually slipped in on quiet days on the weekends. The Australian authorities have also sent more than 60 formal letters to countries where the blacklisted vessels are flagged and where the crews come from. The letters were sent from Australian embassies and consulates to nations such as Nigeria, Spain, Mongolia, Chile, Russia, Tanzania and Honduras. (Source: Glen Salmon.)

  10 THE STORM

  1 Matthew Fontaine Maury (1806–1873) was an American naval officer, hydrographer, historian, oceanographer, meteorologist, cartographer, author and geologist. In 1855 he wrote Physical Geography of the Sea, the first comprehensive book on oceanography.

  2 In the Antarctic convergence zone cold water from the Southern Ocean meets warmer water from the southern regions of the Pacific Ocean, Atlantic Ocean and Indian Ocean. The phenomenon is found throughout the entire Antarctic at approximately 58 degrees latitude. The cold water sinks below the warm water and the mingling of water types produces abundant marine life, particularly the Antarctic krill, which is the most important food for penguins, whales, fish and birds. Due to the enormous amounts of krill in this area, the Antarctic krill is referred to as “the most successful animal on earth”.

  11 THE SECRET CHANNEL

  1 Alistair McDonnell and Mario interviewed by one of the authors in Lyon, 9 August 2016. Due to the nature of his job as an intelligence agent, Mario does not want his surname made public.

  2 At this time, fisheries officers and legal professionals from Australia, New Zealand, Norway, Canada and the USA took part in the telephone conferences.

  3 Interpol is the police’s global headquarters for collaboration across national borders. The need for such a central agency arose simultaneously with the emergence of commercial air traffic and private motoring. Suddenly it was simple for criminals to escape across national borders. The precursor to the Interpol of today was established in Vienna in 1923, but the organization was hijacked by Hitler, who appointed Nazi generals as presidents, including Reinhard Heydrich, one of the architects behind the Holocaust. After the war Interpol was relocated to Paris and later to Lyon, where the organization now has its global headquarters. Interpol has 190 member nations. Only the UN has more. Interpol has no authority over the member nations and to ensure the organization’s political neutrality, Interpol is not to become involved with crime of a political, military, religious or racial nature.

  4 Specialists on digital investigation from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police were involved in Project Scale from the beginning. They participated in Interpol’s first fisheries crime operation, Operation Stingray, and in Operation Spillway – the search for the Thunder and the Viking.

  5 Interpol’s work to combat fisheries crime is two-fold. Project Scale, the group of investigators and analysts who are led by Alistair McDonnell, is based in Lyon. Project Scale is supported by an expert group of inspectors, legal professionals and bureaucrats who are not employees of Interpol, but whose daily activities are carried out in ministries and directorates in their respective nations. The expert group is called the Fisheries Crime Working Group and is headed by the Norwegian Gunnar Stølsvik. The nations that played the most active part in the chase for the Thunder were Norway, Australia, New Zealand, USA, South Africa, Canada and eventually Nigeria.

  6 Tor Glistrup interviewed by the authors in Bergen, 26 May 2016.

  12 THE LONGEST DAY

  1 Roald Amundsen (1912): Sydpolen. Den norske sydpolsfærd med Fram 1910–1912. Jacob Dybwads forlag, Kristiania.

  2 Approximately 100,000 British and German soldiers took part in the unofficial Christmas c
ease fire on the Western Front in 1914. Gifts were exchanged and dead soldiers lying in no-man’s land were buried. In several places football matches were also played, which later came to be a kind of symbol of humanity in an inhumane war. A young corporal in the 16th Bavarian reserve infantry regiment strongly disapproved of the cease fire. His name was Adolf Hitler.

  3 On 4 June 1989, the People’s Liberation Army marched on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, to quash the students demonstrating for greater freedom and democracy. The estimates of the number killed in Beijing on that day range from 241 to 5,000.

  4 John Wesley Carlos from Harlem, New York was one of the founders of the Olympic Project for Human Rights (OPHR), which demanded that Rhodesia (today called Zimbabwe) and the apartheid regime of South Africa be banned from Olympic participation in Mexico in 1968. They also demanded that the IOC president step down and that more Afro-American coaches be hired. After winning the bronze for the 200 metres, during the award ceremony he wore black socks and a black glove that he raised into the air in solidarity with impoverished Afro-Americans in the USA. The IOC president responded by throwing Carlos off the American team and banning him from the Olympic village. When Carlos returned to the USA, where the civil rights struggle was raging, both he and his family received death threats.

  13 THE SHIPMASTER

  1 Alberto Zavaleta Salas interviewed by the authors in Lima, 17−19 April 2016.

  2 The description comes from the red list of threatened species published by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). www.iucnredlist.org/details/183775/0 (accessed 26.09.2016).

  3 The descriptions of Chimbote’s decline have been taken from several sources. The most important is the authors’ interview with Alberto Zavaleta Salas and the report “Looting the Seas”, a prize-winning investigative journalism project carried out by International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) and published by the Center for Public Integrity in 2012. Various sections of the report have been cited in a number of newspapers. www.publicintegrity.org/environment/natural-resources/looting-seas (accessed 28.09.2016).

  4 The Kunlun has been mentioned in debates and speeches made in the Australian parliament several times. The first case the authors know of was on 10 September 2003, when Senator Kerry O’Brien from Tasmania asked the Minister for Agriculture and Fisheries Ian Macdonald whether the Australian authorities had succeeded in preventing the Kunlun, which at that time was named the Dorita, from landing its illegal toothfish catch in Japan, Hong Kong, China, Mozambique and Kenya. Minister Macdonald replied that the Australian authorities had tried, but that Japan, Hong Kong and Kenya had accepted fish from the vessel. Out of the five nations, only Mozambique confirmed having refused toothfish from the Dorita.

  5 Most of the observations of “The Bandit 6” (and other suspected pirates) on the way to and from Antarctica are available to the public on the website of RPOA-IUU, a regional collaboration for combating illegal fishing in Southeast Asia and Oceania. http://rpoa-iuu.org/index.php/iuu-vessel/iuu-vessel-list.html (accessed 28.09.2016).

  6 The authors have communicated with Shipmaster Juan Manuel Núñez Robles on the Yongding using a chat program and over the phone several times in the spring of 2016.

  7 The crew of the Viking posted this photo of the Christmas party on Facebook.

  14 DESOLATION ISLAND

  1 The article “Poaching Vessel ‘Thunder’ Deliberately Avoids French EEZ While Sea Shepherd Continues Gillnet Retrieval” published on Sea Shepherd Global’s website, 27 December 2014. www.seashepherdglobal.org/news-and-commentary/news/poaching-vessel-Thunder-deliberately-avoids-french-eez-while-sea-shepherd-continues-gillnet-retrieval.html (accessed 28.09.2016).

  2 During the Bob Barker’s search for the Thunder, Project Scale sent 51 messages to 49 different countries through Interpol’s secure communication channel I-24/7, according to the head of Project Scale Alistair McDonnell. Based on the two ships’ position and speed, Interpol officers were able to calculate when the ships could be at a port or within a country’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ), which extends 200 nautical miles out from the coast. When the Thunder and the Bob Barker approached the Kerguelen Islands, it was the first time they were near an EEZ.

  3 The seafarer Binot Paulmier de Gonneville, born in Dieppe, travelled in 1503 from Honfleur in Normandy towards southern waters and claimed to have discovered an unknown country, a six weeks’ sail east of the Cape of Good Hope. It has later been assumed that this was either Madagascar or the areas around Ilha de Catarina in Brazil. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a widespread belief in France that de Gonneville was the person who had discovered Australia.

  4 The confiscated pirate ship the Osiris, named after the god who watched over the kingdom of the dead in ancient Egypt, was among the vessels sent out to guard these waters. On 23 August 2013, the Osiris also found the Thunder while she was fishing illegally in a CCAMLR zone between the French Crozet Islands and the South African Prince Edward Islands, but since the Thunder was fishing in international waters, the vessel was not boarded.

  5 Due to shrinking quotas and poor revenues for the shipyard’s law-abiding fleet, the family Vidal from Ribeira in Spain decided to bank on the fishing of toothfish, in that they had recognized its enormous financial potential. First, the family formed a partnership with a French company that had the licence to fish toothfish around the Kerguelen Islands, but Vidal’s skilled fishing captains found so much fish that the French company saw no reason to share the profits in the following season. When they dissolved the partnership Vidal decided to fish in French waters nonetheless. The Arvisa, the Vidal syndicate’s first toothfish vessel, was caught, fined and later confiscated by the French authorities. Later also the Vidal ship the Apache, formerly the Caroline Glacial and owned by Norwegians, was confiscated near the Kerguelen Islands. In 2005 the French had chased the last pirates out of their waters. A Vidal ship escaped. The tiny and nimble Dorita would many years later up end up on Peter Hammarstedt’s “The Bandit 6” poster under the name the Kunlun.

  15 THE PHANTOM SHIP

  1 At the authors’ request, Lloyd’s List did a search for the Thunder’s IMO number on 16 March 2016. The seven-digit IMO number, assigned by Lloyd’s Register Fairplay, is unique for each ship and is to follow the ship throughout its entire lifetime, also through reconstructions and change of name, shipyard or flag state.

  2 Taken from Paul Watson’s Facebook page. Published 30 December 2014. www.facebook.com/paul.watson.1426/posts/10153382700863362 (accessed 28.09.2016).

  3 Candidate for mayor Rune Ellingsen of Røst, Lofoten referred to Paul Watson as a “terrorist” and “warlord” in an interview with Avisa Nordland 10 June 2015. www.an.no/kommunevalg/rost/ordforerkandidat-pa-linje-med-al-qaida-og-is/s/5-4-108295 (accessed 28.09.2016). Paul Watson responded to Ellingsen’s comments in an interview with the same newspaper, published on 1 July 2015, with the following question: “Does Ellingsen think this is a James Bond movie?” www.an.no/nyheter/planter-og-dyr/skipsfart/tror-ellingsen-at-dette-er-en-james-bond-film/s/5-4-120047 (accessed 28.09.2016).

  4 On 2 December 2014, the day before the Bob Barker sailed from Hobart to search for “The Bandit 6”, the article by researchers Indi Hodgson-Johnston and Julia Jabour from the University of Tasmania “Sea Shepherd’s toothfish mission bites off more than it can chew” was published on the website The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/sea-shepherds-toothfish-mission-bites-off-more-than-it-can-chew-34856 (accessed 28.09.2016).

  5 Stuart Cory interviewed by the authors by telephone, 22 September 2016. Cory is a special agent at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in the USA.

  16 THE WALL OF DEATH

  1 The descriptions of what took place on the Thunder before, during and after the chase are to a large degree based on long interviews with crew members who were on board, and the crew’s explanations to, respectively,
the Thunder’s insurance company and the authorities of São Tomé and Príncipe. Those who have told us about the journey wish to remain anonymous out of fear of reprisals on the part of the ship owner.

  2 After the pirates understood that the Australian authorities had them under aerial surveillance, the majority chose to avoid the Sunda Strait between Sumatra and Java and instead take the long way around up the Strait of Malacca and around the northern end of Sumatra on the way to the Southern Ocean. In this manner they hoped to avoid being seen by the Australian P-3 Orion aircraft. But the four-engine aircraft have a long range and sophisticated surveillance equipment and many were detected nonetheless. (Source: Glen Salmon.)

  17 THE WORLD RECORD

  1 G. Bruce Knecht (2006): Hooked: Pirates, Poaching, and the Perfect Fish. Rodale Books.

  2 The Viarsa 1, owned by the company Viarsa Fishing Company, was an anagram for Vidal Armadores SA, the parent company of the family syndicate Vidal in Ribeira, Spain.

  3 The polite rejection Sea Shepherd later received from the editors of the Guinness Book of World Records informed them that there is a condition of notification of the intention to set a new record before actually doing so.

  4 The Antillas Reefer tried in 2008 to acquire a licence for fishing tuna in Mozambique, but while the authorities of the country were processing the application, the vessel poached large quantities of shark. When the ship was taken, there was shark meat, shark oil, shark liver, shark fins and shark tails for a value of five million dollars in the cold storage rooms. The ship and the catch were confiscated and after a lengthy court battle the Vidal company that owned the Antillas Reefer was sentenced to pay a fine of 4.5 million dollars, money that Mozambique has never received. The Antillas Reefer was owned by the company Gongola Fishing JV (Pty) Ltd, controlled by the Vidal family syndicate in Ribeira, Spain.