The actual boarding was indeed a low threat operation and the MV Sham’s crew was compliant. Everything went smoothly as the Australians used the ship’s ladder to climb aboard. The boarding party was divided into two-person teams with each team having set duties to perform. For example, the engineering team checks the ship’s machinery, the search team conducts a thorough search and the crew control team guards the crew who are normally mustered in the cafeteria.
As the team leader, Keitley talked to the MV Sham’s captain and checked his logs and manifest. Because she had been boarded just a week earlier, the process was straightforward. The only issue was the crew’s frustration because their vessel was riding so far out of the water that she couldn’t access seawater to supply their fresh-water maker.
‘The crew was also due out for rotation, they were running low on supplies, they didn’t have fresh water so they were kind of a little bit weary and wary of us,’ Keitley recalls. But despite the obvious strain on the crew he was happy that the situation was secure.
‘The boarding party was on board, our RHIBs were in the water with two people in them to keep an eye on things, so if anything unexpected came up then they’d radio us,’ he says. ‘They were also there in the event that we had to get off in a hurry – worst case scenario jump-off – and then they’d come in and pick us up.’
About thirty minutes into the boarding, the team’s communicator on the bridge noticed a fast speedboat heading in their direction.
‘That kind of caught my attention and we watched this thing come in at a great speed,’ says Keitley. ‘As it got closer it was clear that it was coming our way and that there were armed people on board coming straight for us.’
Known as ‘Boghammars’ after their Swedish builder, the skiffs operated by the Iranian religious forces are modified with weaponry to create improvised naval fighting vessels. Some resemble ski boats, but they have one key difference – they are armed with man-portable missile systems or have rockets or heavy machine guns mounted on board. The skiffs form part of the Islamic group’s overall fleet of 1500 vessels that are manned by 20,000 men. The IRGCN has been a constant threat to shipping entering and leaving the Gulf since it swarmed into existence with the outbreak of the Iran–Iraq War in 1980, so the skiff’s arrival was an ominous sign.
The vessel initially targeted the Australian RHIBs in a very aggressive fashion, aiming weapons and threatening with rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and machine guns as they ordered the crews to surrender.
‘They were yelling and hollering and chasing them around,’ says Keitley. ‘It was, I’m hesitant to say comical, but it just looked really weird because our guys were doing their best to get away from these guys and they just ended up chasing each other around almost in figures of eight.’
A second Iranian boat arrived soon afterwards and his mind turned swiftly to the capture of the Royal Marines. When more vessels converged on the scene it looked to Keitley as if many of the Iranians crewing the skiffs had come straight from a coffee shop – as if they had received the alarm, picked up their guns, and jumped into their speedboats. During the hours to follow he also noted several different types of uniforms and that quite a few men on the skiffs were clad in leather jackets and thongs.
‘That really preys on your mind,’ he says. ‘Just how disciplined are they? What exactly do they want? What is it going to take for them to kick off? These are the questions racing through your head at a million miles an hour while you’re down there watching them yelling and screaming and actioning their weapons.’
Keitley decided that attack was the best form of defence and he gave as good as he got, telling the Iranians in no uncertain terms to ‘fuck off’. After a short period, Adelaide’s two RHIBs were ordered to break away from MV Sham and return to the ship. Back on the frigate, the ops room was incredibly busy with calls coming in and out and rescue plans being drawn up and revised. As a former warfare officer, Stephen Bowater, who had joined the navy as a fifteen-year-old cadet, was called in to assist with the planning. This was somewhat unusual because normally the XO, who is responsible for the daily routine of the ship, stays clear of the operations room and lets the skipper, Operations Officer and Principal Warfare Officer get on with fighting the battle.
While plans were being made to extract the Australian boarding party, the replacement merchant crew for MV Sham simply waltzed on board the ship and past the Iranians as if nothing was happening. From that moment on the situation became very tense.
The Americans had promised aerial fire support in the form of two special forces helicopter gunships fitted with twenty-millimetre mini guns capable of firing 10,000 rounds a minute. The British also had a chopper in the air that was carrying a sniper armed with a .50 calibre weapon. But like many military plans, the one drawn up by the war fighters on board Adelaide for the extraction of the boarding team didn’t last long. It was based on aerial fire support but just before launch the ship was advised that neither the American nor the British helicopters would be permitted to fly within fifteen kilometres of MV Sham because of the risk from rocket-propelled grenades. They were concerned that the slow-moving helos would be sitting ducks for the Iranians and their RPGs.
‘We are not authorised to attempt an extraction,’ the Americans said. In addition, American patrol vessels could not get within about four kilometres of the MV Sham because of the risk of shallow water.
Frustration was mounting on board Adelaide. Australian authorities had direct contact with senior Iranian officials, and a coalition special-forces unit in Kuwait was on standby to respond if necessary. Meanwhile, on board MV Sham, Andrew Keitley watched the Iranian flotilla grow. To his horror, he noticed through his binoculars that one skiff even had a twelve-barrel 107-millimetre rocket launcher mounted amidships. The Iranians were becoming more aggressive and demanding that the Australians surrender as they circled the ship in a menacing fashion, probing for a way to get on board.
‘They just took up a loose position circling around us,’ Keitley recalls. ‘To my mind, they were actively looking for a way to get on board, so what I did is, obviously, let all our guys know what was going on. I had them split up in their teams at points where they were hidden but could see what was going on. So essentially we had an all-round lookout.’
He also knew the Iranians had video cameras and he did not want images of Australian sailors being taken prisoner all over global television networks.
Keitley and the team had transformed the ship into a ‘citadel’. On many merchant vessels, the citadel is a secure part of the ship, for example the engine room, where the crew can lock themselves in and still operate the vessel during a pirate attack. On MV Sham the boarding ladder had been stowed, all entry points were closed and the deck was high enough to prevent easy access from the water. Still, Keitley wondered whether the Iranians would have grappling hooks or would be able to climb aboard using other means.
‘I firmly believe they were looking for any chance they could to come and grab us,’ he says. ‘I don’t think they were there just to suss it out, just to come by and observe what we were doing. They were actively trying to get us off the boat; they were actively trying to get themselves onto the boat. There was no way in hell I was going to let any of them on board.’
As they circled the cargo ship the Iranians pointed their weapons at the Australians in a highly aggressive manner. ‘One of the guys with a long gun was lying down in the boat in a firing position so he was there the whole time. Every time I walked out onto the bridge to communicate or look around I was very aware that potentially I had a rifle pointed at my head, which is kind of weird. We had a female within the group and she told me later that she was seriously considering cutting her hair off to look like a boy if we got captured. So, there were a lot of things going through everyone’s minds.’
The Iranians’ constant demands for the sailors to surrender or allow them to board the ship were met with some equally blunt responses. At one point
, Andrew Keitley lost his temper.
‘These guys were within yelling distance so I yelled, “Just fuck off,” you know, “Just get out of here, leave us alone, just go,”’ Keitley says. ‘In my mind, we had the moral high ground. We’re here, we’re doing the right thing so just leave us alone.’
Throughout the incident, he was acutely conscious that he did not want to be the one to make a rookie error that would embarrass the RAN and the Australian government and people.
The stalemate had been dragging on for about four hours when the Iranians tried a fresh tactic. They commandeered a cargo dhow and attempted to steer it in close to MV Sham so they could leap aboard like old-school pirates.
‘Their freeboard was at the same level as ours so all they would have had to do was step across and that just crystallised the situation perfectly for me. It was one of those moments where everything crowds into your mind with all the possibilities at once and it’s just, “Right, what do we do? How do we get out of this? What’s going to happen next?”’
As the sun started sinking and the cargo dhow was approaching, the tension was building for Keitley. ‘These guys are about to come on board. What do you do? Do you fight them? Do you surrender to them? Having a gunfight is just not an option because we’re not at war with Iran, there are no hostilities, they’re not a declared enemy and it’s not a movie or a video game, so if people start shooting, people are going to die. The other option is, “We’re all going to get captured and taken back to Iran.” So, a lot of shit got real in those couple of minutes.’
Australia, Britain and the US have quite different national rules of engagement (ROE) when it comes to applying military force in the Middle East. The official versions are shrouded in secrecy, but in general terms it is understood that the American ROE are more aggressive than the British, while Australia sits somewhere in between. In this case, the rules of engagement were clear. If Keitley, his team or their equipment were in imminent danger they had the right to defend themselves and shoot first.
‘It’s an absolute lesson of leadership that I was taught on the spot,’ he says. ‘Regardless of your ego, regardless of what you think you need to do, regardless of how you see this playing out, you’re in charge of people’s lives and that has huge repercussions. I honestly thought we were gone. I thought, “You know what, they’re going to capture us here and that’s it.”’
Fortunately, push never came to shove thanks to the low tide and shallow water. The dhow ran aground about twenty metres off the port side of MV Sham. The Iranians finally issued an ultimatum that if the Australians were not off the ship by sunset then they would be boarded regardless of the consequences.
Without air support from the Americans or British, the command team on Adelaide knew that the only way they could rescue the team was with the ship’s helicopter. To do that they would have to shift from coalition command to Australian national command and after a quick call to CTF 633 headquarters (then located in Baghdad) the command shift was authorised.
XO Bowater says the plan was for Sandman to do a dummy run to test the Iranian reaction.
‘If you kill five people on a helo it’s a lot better than killing twenty people on a helo,’ he says of the choice no military officer ever wants to make.
Fortunately, there was no hostile fire on the dummy run so on the second run the bird landed and in two lifts flew them back to the frigate. Once safely back on their ship the young sailors had what Keitley calls their Top Gun moment. ‘When we had everyone together on board and safe there were just high fives and back slaps all round. It was a massive relief.’
Bowater says it was Keitley’s calm professionalism that saved the day for the Australians. If the Iranians had boarded the vessel, the team would have thrown their weapons – two shotguns and their personal nine-millimetre pistols – into the sea and calmly surrendered, so his actions in keeping them at bay without a shot being fired was extraordinary.
For his exceptional leadership in action, Andrew Keitley was awarded the Distinguished Service Medal (DSM), which is Australia’s sixth highest military honour. He is the only non-officer in the RAN to be granted the award.
Adelaide’s flight commander, Lieutenant Commander Tony Johnson, also received a DSM for his leadership during the drama. Keitley paid tribute to the courage of the helicopter crew who all agreed to risk their lives and run the gauntlet to lift their shipmates off the stranded vessel.
Stephen Bowater admits that he and the rest of the command team – and indeed the entire RAN – were not prepared for a hostage drama. ‘It was just shock because we hadn’t trained for it, we’d never war-gamed it, we’d never expected our boarding party to be captured by the IRGCN. I mean, we weren’t even looking at it – they were not on the radar.’
That all changed after Adelaide’s close call. Since then, each crew member deploying to the region has been provided with resilience and conduct-after-capture training.
As the years went on, there would be more incidents in this volatile area. Another group of fifteen British sailors were taken prisoner in March 2007. Like the Australians, they too were searching a merchant vessel when revolutionary guard skiffs surrounded it and claimed it was inside Iranian waters. The humiliated sailors were released eleven days later. In 2016, ten American sailors spent a night in Iranian custody after their two boats strayed into Iranian waters. The Royal Navy and the US Navy were severely embarrassed by these incidents and by the images of their sailors being paraded before the cameras with their hands on their heads.
5
Boardos
Ever since the first Australian Task Group arrived in the Gulf region under Operation Damask 1 in September 1990, boardings, or ‘visit and search’ operations as they were known, have been the bread and butter of the navy’s mission.
The Royal Australian Navy had been boarding foreign fishing vessels in northern Australian waters for decades, but the Gulf mission presented a Pandora’s box of boarding opportunities.
Specialist boarding teams began work in the Middle East during the blockade of Iraq before Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait triggered the first Gulf War. Almost all of the twenty Australian warships deployed during the ensuing twenty-seven years have dispatched boarding parties. Their jobs range from conducting crew and cargo checks on 300,000-tonne super tankers to arresting armed pirates and chipping ice from the stinking holds of twenty-metre-long rat- and cockroach-infested fishing dhows that are smuggling cargoes of oil, dates or, more recently, illicit drugs and weapons.
Speeding across an empty sea in a rigid hull inflatable boat and watching a speck on the horizon grow like magic into a massive oil tanker’s ten-metre-tall steel side is a unique and never-to-be-forgotten experience. Climbing up a ship’s ladder onto a vast deck that stretches for several footy fields also comes as a shock, as does a chat with an Indian skipper about the relative merits of Australian cricket teams. Is there an Indian anywhere in the world who doesn’t know who Ricky Ponting is?
Joshua Maher looks nothing like a hardened boarding officer from a navy warship as he sits dressed in civvies at the corner table of a trendy Canberra hotel coffee shop. Appearing very much the professional public servant, he is doing a stint as the ‘flag lieutenant’, or aide-de-camp, to the Defence Minister, Marise Payne.
It is difficult to reconcile his smart-casual demeanour with the tough navy officer risking his neck scaling the side of a stinking fishing dhow in rough seas on the hunt for drugs or weapons. His reputation as a ‘gun boardo’ (top boarding officer) was built on board Darwin under the command of the no-nonsense drug hunter Commander Terry Morrison during her previous tour of duty in 2013 and 2014.
By then the focus of Australian warships in the region had shifted from counter-piracy operations to the hunt for illicit narcotics and weapons that were helping to fund and arm terrorist groups.
Maher joined the Australian Defence Force Academy as an army cadet in 2006, but just before graduating in 2009 he deci
ded to switch to the navy. His first posting as a junior warfare officer was to the patrol boat HMAS Armidale based in Darwin on border protection operations.
‘That was my first exposure to boarding operations and some quite significant ones,’ he says. They included an incident in late 2009 when seventy-eight Sri Lankan asylum seekers on their way to Australia in an unseaworthy vessel were intercepted by both Armidale and the Australian Customs Service armed patrol boat Oceanic Viking. They were taken to Indonesia on the Customs ship to be put in a detention centre but refused to disembark. They were later determined to be genuine refugees.
‘That was quite a confronting experience. It was my first real exposure to border protection,’ Maher says. ‘I don’t think many people realise the pressure and the mental and emotional exhaustion it puts on sailors.’
He was posted to Darwin in 2012. The ship first deployed to Hawaii and then entered maintenance in 2013, beginning her work-up period for the Gulf deployment. By then a lieutenant, Maher began training as a boarding officer.
‘I’d seen boardings through my time on patrol boats, but this was the first time I had been there in the thick of it, running a team and starting to read up on what I needed to do,’ he says.
The first step for Maher to learn the necessary skills was a trip south to HMAS Cerberus for the session of general boarding training at the navy’s boatswain’s faculty. The week-long course teaches the basics of boarding, including the physical aspects of climbing onto a vessel at sea and simulating fast-roping (descending from a hovering helicopter by rope) onto a moving deck. The course also takes in the legal aspects of boarding including rules of engagement and the use of force.
The second week of training begins with live fast-roping from a real helicopter at the navy’s aviation base at HMAS Albatross. Fast-rope training is vital and it continues as each ship steams towards the Middle East.
‘If you tell yourself that that looks scary and you don’t think you’re going to be able to do it, you’re not going to be able to do it and I saw some of my sailors – they went, “Oh no, I can’t do that,” and they didn’t, they couldn’t,’ Maher says. ‘There are techniques in it and you’ve got to always have your own safety in mind, so if you think, “Oh, I’m not feeling confident today,” you’ve got to step aside. There is no safety rope. Everyone’s seen Black Hawk Down and if you fall off the rope there’s nothing to catch you but the ground. I used to be afraid of heights and I’m not any more.’
The Smack Track Page 6