Most of Darwin’s hugely expensive combat systems have never been used in anger, but each element must be regularly tested and ready for war. So must the operators, who are kept on their toes with regular calls to ‘action stations’ to test readiness and response times.
When the ship is called to ‘action’, all on board are focused on their job. Crew members, wearing flame-retardant headwear, move quickly through corridors and along the decks to reach their designated positions. Fire crews and damage control teams man their equipment ready to move in an instant to douse flames or repair damage to vital equipment. Fire and damage control exercises are taken extremely seriously and woe betide any crew member who doesn’t meet the minimum performance standards. They will do it again and again until they get it right because out here in the middle of the ocean you can’t dial 000 and ask for help. During this frantic period, I am the sole person on board without a job to do, so I just try to stay out of the way.
A constant challenge for O’Gorman’s weapons technicians is to keep the ‘gates’ open between modern-day software and the older hardware on the ship.
After the major refit and arduous work-up, Darwin set sail from Australia on 30 December 2015 fully equipped for whatever hostilities the Middle East Region might throw at her. The ship first visited Thailand and Indonesia before steaming to India for the Indian International Fleet Review where Darwin was among a group of ninety warships at anchor in the port of Visakhapatnam.
The frigate arrived in the Gulf region on 11 February 2016. First came a few days’ briefings and more specialist boarding operations training with US Coast Guard teams in Bahrain. Then, at last, they were into their patrol cycle under Operation Manitou, the Australian government’s contribution to the ‘multinational combined military force efforts to promote regional maritime security, stability and prosperity’. It was the ship’s seventh deployment to the Middle East and the sixty-second rotation of an RAN vessel in the region since 1990.
The first few months of Darwin’s 2016 patrols were quite disappointing for the crew. The one exception was a huge weapons haul on 5 March. Since then, they have conducted many boardings but found no drugs or weapons. Now the frigate is more than halfway through her deployment and as she steams further into the Indian Ocean the frustration and disappointment is palpable on the faces of the ship’s company.
Henry tries to put a positive spin on it, saying each boarding is worthwhile. ‘We’re up to about twenty-five boardings – a lot, because of where we are in the season for the smuggling. There’s a transition to the southwest monsoon season [rougher weather] and there’s a reduced number of smugglers, so we’ve boarded a couple that were northbound and empty. But even that is a good boarding to do because we’re understanding the pattern of life, how they’re operating and getting to know them more, to make it easier for a southbound [interception] when they do have drugs on board.’
He says that while these boardings will lead to more intercepts later on, it is not just about getting the drugs. Deterrence is a major component in the fight against the drug trade’s funding of terrorism. ‘Even boarding when we know they haven’t got something is still a deterrent. They know we’re out there doing the job.’
Darwin has been working with Combined Task Force 150, which was Australian-led during the first part of the deployment. She has visited Muscat, Bahrain again, and Dubai for a rest and recreation visit.
‘We’ve just done the visit to Dar es Salaam,’ Henry says. ‘We’ll have visits to Seychelles and Muscat before we leave the area and hand over to Perth on the 24th of June making our way home via Singapore.’
He explains that the ship is currently engaged on Operation Shirikisho, which means ‘unity’ in Swahili. It is led in Bahrain by the United Kingdom, now in command of the combined task force, while Darwin is operating at sea with the French ship FNS Nivôse and a French maritime patrol and reconnaissance aircraft.
‘It is about trying to maximise coverage against the smugglers towards the end of the season down here at the southern end of the distribution track,’ Henry says. ‘The patrol box is drawn up with CTF-150 in the most likely areas of intercept. So the idea is that it’s known tracks that they’ve been taking or where we expect they may be going. It’s constantly evolving so you can’t sit in the same spot every year – because obviously as they get pinched in one spot they’ll move to somewhere else.’
The areas they are about to enter have been decided by negotiation between four nations. ‘We’ve got the French out here with us; ourselves; the British; and CTF-150 has a multinational staff – there’s a Saudi officer as their chief of staff and some Saudi staff in there. So we’re all collaboratively working to come up with these patrol boxes and we’re adapting them each day, based on where we think things are going and the weather conditions.’
As we chat, the skipper receives numerous updates from the ops room and elsewhere on the ship, as well as several visits from crew. His is a 24/7 job and apart from the occasional respite handover to Tina Brown, Henry is in command and available at all hours of the day and night throughout the seven-month deployment.
Life in a warship during operations is busy for the entire crew, but there is a level of stress for the captain that is only obvious at close quarters. Most of the ship’s company can snatch a decent rest at least every few days, but the boss seldom has more than a few hours’ shut-eye before he is woken for an update or a decision.
Henry knows that operational command of a major fleet unit will be the pinnacle of his navy career. He also understands that the stresses and strains, the highs and the lows are all part of the job and that his absence from home will pass quickly.
‘To be given the opportunity to command a ship, to represent Australia, to lead close to 230 people – every day is Christmas Day,’ he says. ‘The worst day out here would be much better than sitting at a desk ashore somewhere. That’s the mindset you’ve got to have.’
Meanwhile, Darwin is steaming into some reasonable weather in the shadow of Madagascar, but to the southeast Nivôse is in a sea-state five with a four-metre swell. ‘There won’t be any smugglers down there at the moment. They just won’t be operating in that. So Nivôse is going to move closer to us later today.’
It is also a matter of balancing where they think the smugglers will be with all the operational requirements, including the need to keep the ship’s aircraft flying.
‘It’s hard to get aviation fuel for the helicopter down here in East Africa, and luckily for us the German replenishment ship as part of Operation Atlantic is coming through,’ says Henry. ‘We’re rendezvousing with her on 19 May, and we’ll be replenishing aviation fuel from her. So it’s constantly evolving.’
At 3 p.m., Chief Boatswain (pronounced ‘bosun’) or ‘buffer’ David ‘Bowie’ Bowden puts trainee boat crews to the test in choppy seas. It is vital to have numerous crews trained and ready to operate the frigate’s RHIBs from the moving ship in all sea-states for boarding or rescue operations. The ‘L’ plate crews are called upon to repeatedly drive the bucking craft in close to the ship’s ladders and away again.
For the trainees at the helm and on the ropes in the RHIB, it is crucial that they can instantly respond to the buffer’s commands while keeping their vessel out of harm’s way.
Manoeuvring a five-metre inflatable boat alongside a large warship steaming at fifteen knots or more in high winds and two-metre seas while soaked to the skin is not an easy task. Miscalculations or mistakes can be fatal or expensive, so learner crews are put through their paces as often as possible. When boarding operations reach high intensity, the more trained boat crews available, the better.
Each morning at 8 a.m. Henry has a chat with the Commanding Officer of Nivôse and every few days has a CO-level chat with the rest of the task force. In an ideal world, intelligence feeds into that planning, the aircraft locates the suspect vessel, and Darwin intercepts it and sends in a boarding party. But it doesn’t always happen like
that.
‘Weather conditions may mean that you don’t detect it by aircraft – it still might be the ship that detects it,’ Henry says. ‘There may be no intel to feed into it. We may not know that the smuggler’s there and so you may still just run across them using ship sensors. We did a boarding last week where we’d had aircraft up and the weather conditions meant it was difficult for their systems to detect [dhows], when they’re trying to maximise the coverage area. We’re talking wooden dhows that are sometimes only thirty to forty feet long. It’s not something that’s easily detectable.’
Darwin’s own lookouts, standing on the gun direction platform, saw the dhow first.
‘We’d even had the aircraft up flying earlier in the day, the French had had their aircraft up – and it was just the good old-fashioned “Mark One eyeball” [human eye] that spotted it,’ Henry says. ‘So, we then went and investigated and boarded. So yeah, in the ideal world, early detection by aircraft, ship will then come in and board and we then go through the process under the Law of the Sea to be able to do a boarding, which is effectively establishing the statehood of the vessel. If we can’t establish it, then that allows us to then conduct searches.’
4
A close call
Long before the Royal Australian Navy’s focus turned to pirates and drugs, Australian sailors were confronting complex and potentially deadly situations throughout the Middle East Region. Iran’s fanatical religious Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy (IRGCN) has been harassing Australian warships ever since the Hawke government gave the green light for RAN ships to move through the Strait of Hormuz.
By far the most dangerous interaction between an Australian fighting ship and Iran’s maritime revolutionary guard took place on 6 December 2004 when a boarding party from the frigate HMAS Adelaide was menaced by a large hostile force close to Iranian territorial waters.
In this tense and potentially disastrous incident, the Adelaide’s boarding team commander, navy clearance diver Petty Officer Andrew Keitley, found himself and his thirteen-member team stranded on a Lebanese merchant ship in the northern Arabian Gulf with two interpreters, surrounded by a force of aggressive, heavily armed speedboats crewed by Iranian religious fanatics.
Adelaide, under the command of Commander Bruce Victor, was on patrol as part of a combined task force to secure Iraq’s two offshore oil terminals, Khor Al Amaya Oil Terminal (KAAOT) and Al Basrah Oil Terminal (ABOT). Situated at the northern end of the Gulf just off the Shatt al-Arab waterway that divides Iraq and Iran, the two terminals generate about eighty per cent of Iraq’s total revenue.
In April that year, when the frigate HMAS Stuart was on guard duty, a terrorist attack on KAAOT had been foiled when an explosives-laden skiff was intercepted by a RHIB from the US Coast Guard patrol vessel USS Firebolt. The skiff blew up, killing three American sailors. A young Australian, RAN Leading Seaman Ben Sime, who was the sensor operator/crewman on Stuart’s Seahawk helicopter, was awarded the Medal for Gallantry after he leapt from the chopper to try to save a gravely wounded US sailor. A visit to the ship by Prime Minister John Howard, who was in Baghdad for Anzac Day, was cancelled following the incident.
Two months later, the IRGCN had generated global headlines when, on 21 June, they captured six British Royal Marines and two British sailors in the Shatt al-Arab waterway for allegedly straying into Iranian waters. The British had been training Iraqi river patrol units.
Adelaide had replaced Stuart in the Gulf in August 2004 and tensions were still running high when Keitley and his team were ordered to search the Lebanese-flagged vehicle carrier MV Sham. The merchant ship, which had run aground in the Shatt al-Arab waterway, was known by the Australians as a ‘frequent flyer’ because they had boarded her several times already. She was the lead vessel of six merchant ships that had grounded during severe tides and storms in the volatile waterway. Their presence was causing the US high command considerable angst.
Adelaide’s GPS and charts clearly showed that MV Sham was inside Iraqi waters, which meant that the Australians could board her without interference. But that was not how Iran’s Islamic naval guardians saw it.
Andrew Keitley joined the navy in 1988 from his hometown of Warburton just outside Melbourne. Now a Chief Petty Officer, he began his navy career as a quarter master gunner, and his first sea posting was in the guided missile destroyer HMAS Perth. After qualifying as a ship’s diver, he decided to change streams to become a navy clearance diver. It was in that capacity that he found himself in command of the boarding team on board Adelaide.
Divers bring a broad skill set to the boarding role, and most RAN boarding teams include at least one clearance diver who is qualified in advanced weapon skills, close order combat, fast roping and boat handling. Their high levels of agility and fitness enable them to adapt to most situations.
‘We are a kind of niche capability that captains can bring onto their ship and rely on, or really lean on when the going gets tough as well,’ Keitley says.
As the petty officer in charge of a team that also included a female sailor, he had the capture of the Royal Marines firmly in his mind whenever he was operating close to Iranian waters. He employed great caution as Adelaide’s two RHIBs approached the MV Sham and began the boarding process.
The threat posed by the Iranians had come into stark focus for Keitley and the rest of the crew when Adelaide steamed through the strait to enter the Arabian Gulf in August 2004. It was the first time that many of the crew had gone to ‘action stations’ when it wasn’t just an exercise.
‘That was kind of a moment of, “Wow, we’ve arrived in the Gulf,” and things potentially were getting a little bit more real,’ he recalls.
The transit was also Keitley’s first sighting of the four-to-six-metre-long speed boats, mostly powered by twin outboard motors, manned by between two and six Iranian religious paramilitaries.
After arriving in the Middle East, Adelaide’s boarding teams had searched everything from 300,000-tonne super tankers transporting crude oil to twenty-metre dhows carrying cargoes of dates and charcoal. These were ‘low threat’ missions looking for contraband such as drugs or illegal oil shipments or for people who shouldn’t have been on the vessels. They also conducted counter-piracy or constabulary patrols to protect vessels likely to be targeted by pirates, and counter-terrorism security patrols to enforce exclusion zones around the oil terminals.
While the biggest security fears were of a terrorist attack or the ongoing threat of all-out war between Israel and Iran, it was the rag-tag IRGCN that posed a constant and challenging threat. In fact, just a few nights before 4 December, Adelaide had gone to action stations in response to the presence of skiffs in the area.
The XO in the Australian frigate was Stephen Bowater. Now a navy captain and in 2016 the CO of the HMAS Cerberus training establishment in Victoria, he recalls that the week before 4 December 2004 had been fairly tense due to intelligence reports about a possible attack.
‘In a ship’s life, a cycle if you like, you get to a point in your deployment where everything’s just perfect. It’s a sweet spot, it really is,’ he says. ‘We’d been doing things like refuelling a helicopter off the back of our ship at the same time as fuelling a patrol boat on the starboard side of the ship, while the port side of the ship was putting two boats in the water. That is twice as complex as anything we did in our workup, which we thought was horrific! But we just took it in our stride. We were nailing it.’
On the night of 3 December, a severe storm struck the area and, just after that, US army and navy special forces units flew all-night missions up and down the Iranian border on their way in and out of Iraq. This caused the Iranians to become ‘quite edgy’, Bowater says. So when a US commander ordered the Adelaide to board the MV Sham, the Australians were concerned and pushed back against the decision.
‘We said, “Look we don’t think it’s a good idea because they’re a bit edgy. You’ve been flying missions all night and we know she�
�s not a threat, we’ve boarded her four times in the last three days,”’ Bowater says. ‘The reply was “No, go and do it.” We found out later we were talking to an American reserve dentist who was watch keeping!’
So at 12.20 p.m. the boarding party set off in two RHIBs to cover the 10 kilometres of open sea to the grounded ship, which was located north of Adelaide’s position near the oil terminals. The Iranians had an observation post built into a huge crane known by the Australians as ‘the crane of death’ that had been sunk just inside their territorial waters during the Iran–Iraq war in the 1980s. From that post, which was manned around the clock, they could observe what was going on around the Iraqi oil terminals and keep an eye on coalition ships.
Keitley and his team were tasked to find out why the MV Sham had been in the one place for several days and what the situation was on board. The boarding team consisted of fourteen sailors and two Farsi interpreters, with the ship’s helicopter, codenamed Sandman, providing overwatch until they had boarded the ship and called ‘low threat’. Then the bird peeled away to other duties.
‘On our way up there we had to go fairly close to that crane, so they [the Iranians] would have been tipped off,’ Keitley recalls. ‘Obviously, a helicopter and two RHIBs packed with a boarding party, they definitely would have seen that – which may have been a combat indicator to them, that something was going on.’
The Smack Track Page 5