The Smack Track

by Ian McPhedran

  ‘That was an interesting situation,’ Morrison says. They first sighted the group at night, via imagery sent back from the helicopter. ‘We were looking at it at about two in the morning going, “What is it?” and the best we’d come up with at that stage was, “It looks like a couple of guys on jet skis!” And then [we saw] these big box type containers which we thought were big narcotics tubs or something that they were towing out.’

  So they thought, ‘Right, this might be a narcotics transfer.’

  Morrison continued reviewing the imagery and the more he saw the more he became concerned about it. He thought, ‘No – this is something else, something is going on here.’ He told everyone ashore what was going on and he then made a decision. ‘There’s no use going in at night, I’m going to come in at first light and investigate.’

  In the morning they planned it, briefed the team and then he came close in at first light. ‘As soon as I got there I realised that this was the guys whose trawler had been hit by another ship five days previously. They had tubs that they’d cut in half, and they’d got into the tubs and tied them all together, and there was one little dinghy.’

  They had been floating there for five days waiting desperately for someone to pick them up, but nobody had. ‘I think ships had been sailing past and they didn’t want to get involved because if you get involved then you end up with all sorts of issues. They were Iranian, and they were just outside Pakistan’s territorial waters so they were in the Pakistani SOLAS region. I had a difficult situation, where if I brought them on board there were legal ramifications.’

  The main thing, he decided, was to look after their safety. He sent Darwin’s RHIBs out to take them some water, food and minor medical supplies such as Panadol. ‘At the same time, we’d gone through our headquarters, which had Pakistanis in it who called in Pakistan Search and Rescue. And they came out to the vessel and were able to then take them back. Because if you think about it, obviously when they get to Pakistan there are cross-border diplomatic channels that allow them to transfer people back and forth for that sort of thing. Whereas for us, if we board them, then we’d essentially have them on Australian soil and we’d have to take them somewhere. How do we get them into Iran? It was a complicated issue, so I resisted as much as I could bringing them on board, although at one stage we were considering it. But we went, “No, no, no.” I had all my backup plans. I had mattresses and everything down in my hangar and stuff ready to go, but my main aim was to try and get them to Pakistan so I could then get them across to Iran. So that was the first one.’

  Occasionally the lines between international law, diplomacy and morality can be blurred. A major moral dilemma occurred for then Lieutenant Commander James Lawless during his deployment as XO in HMAS Melbourne in 2010.

  Primarily based off the coast of Somalia conducting counter-piracy operations in the internationally recognised transit corridor (IRTC) between Saudi Arabia, Yemen and Somalia, the ship did not conduct as many boardings as other vessels. On one occasion the ship’s helicopter was on patrol and watching a suspected smuggling vessel when suddenly the large coastal dhow exploded and disintegrated.

  ‘The imagery showed people donning life jackets before a large hose, that we suspected was a fuel hose, was inserted into the bilge,’ Lawless recalls. ‘One person lit a match and there was a blinding white flash and a fireball. All the people were thrown into the water and incredibly no one was killed.’

  Melbourne rescued the men, many of whom suffered serious burns. A Pakistani officer was at that time commanding Combined Task Force 150, under which the Australian ship was operating, and fortunately a Pakistani warship was nearby. The rescued sailors said they were from Pakistan so the decision was taken to hand them over to the Pakistani ship and to treat the incident as a SOLAS matter rather than smuggling. Many of Melbourne’s crew, including James Lawless, were concerned about the fate of the men, given that under Pakistani law drug smugglers faced the death penalty.

  ‘I struggled with the idea and it took a long time for me to rationalise that incident,’ he says. ‘It didn’t sit very well with me and it was raised internally, but at the end of the day the captain made a call that was sound. That is the hard thing about command. The decisions are not always easy, they are not always black and white. There is a moral element.’

  9

  Not just coffee

  Darwin’s first patrol in 2014 proved to be an action-packed couple of weeks. After rescuing the shipwrecked Iranians, the frigate went up into the Red Sea, where on 7 March she seized 650 kilograms of hash from a skiff. Nine days later, on the night of 15–16 March, they made a huge haul of a further 3012 kilograms of hashish, also from a skiff, up in the Gulf of Aden.

  It started when the ship’s Seahawk helicopter spotted a dhow that was manoeuvring suspiciously. The ship started shadowing the vessel.

  ‘So I … sprinted out, intercepted the dhow and pretended I was just passing,’ Morrison recalls. ‘I just kept on a steady course of speed when two ships are passing and actually we were doing normal stuff like PT so he wouldn’t think I’m manoeuvring around him. I just went right past him and then I just sat over the horizon, so he can’t see me but I can track him. He stopped, I came in and then – this was at two in the morning – started manoeuvring around him to work out what he was doing.’

  At that time, the helicopter wasn’t up because Morrison had used up all the flying time he was permitted. They kept watching the dhow from the ship and at about 4 a.m. it suddenly turned around and started going back the other way.

  ‘I realised, “I think I’ve witnessed a sea transfer here!”’

  But he had no other information to go on. He suspected that drugs had been moved from the dhow to a skiff, but they had not been able to actually see the transfer.

  ‘Skiffs are very small so they’re very hard to [see]’, he explains.

  This was an important development because Darwin was not just there to intercept narcotics. The higher command had asked Morrison to try to work out how the smugglers were transferring narcotics to shore. The theory was that they were using skiffs, but they did not know where the small boats came from and where they landed the drugs.

  Morrison checked out Google Earth and various maps and looked along the coastline until he spotted two little ports on the coast of Yemen that he thought were likely places.

  ‘The skiff would come out of Yemen and meet a dhow to then take [the hashish] into Yemen,’ he says. ‘And then it would go across the land in Yemen, which is very much lawless and at war, and then across the Red Sea into Sudan and then from there it’s distributed.’

  He did not know which of the two small ports the skiffs would head for, but he strongly suspected one of them. He plotted a course that could intercept a vessel that might be heading to either port. Darwin was sprinting as fast as it could on one turbine so as to conserve fuel; the radar operators were scouring the ocean and at last he got a call saying, ‘Okay, we’re just crossing the contiguous zone [twenty-four miles out in international waters] – and we’ve just picked up a high-speed vessel doing eighteen knots.’ It was, indeed, a skiff.

  ‘So I went, “Excellent,” put on my second gas turbine and went in, and then I had to keep manoeuvring around him to stop him from getting into the territorial sea,’ Morrison says. ‘In the end, he stopped when I still had nine miles to run. He was trying to get away from me, just kept turning and so I just kept manoeuvring around. When I realised that he was going around in circles I thought, “Eventually he’s going to run out of fuel before I will,” and I just kept doing that. And then I requested warning shots, got warning shots, did the warning shots and he stopped.’

  The firing of warning shots was in itself something new for drug interdictions. Morrison had routinely used warning shots and escalation of force during the patrol-boat people smuggling operations north of Australia. During preparations for Darwin’s tour he had asked whether it was likely that they would need to fire wa
rning shots to stop narcotics smugglers and whether they should train accordingly.

  ‘Everyone said, “No, you won’t need to do that.” And I was the first after many years to request warning shots – and it took a long time to get it because I hadn’t trained [for it]. I kicked myself in the end for not training it! But that’s all right, lesson learnt. Whilst we were doing that operation I just had to carefully monitor and orchestrate the whole activity.’

  They used the Steyr 556 rifle. ‘The warning shots are all about escalation, so you start with the smallest weapon, just because it’s making a noise. Eventually I could have gone up to the 12.7 mm or the 50 cal – that makes a lot more noise – and shoot the water. Rules of engagement [for] the operation would only probably permit warning shots. We wouldn’t be shooting people for narcotics.’

  If Morrison had not been given permission to shoot, he says he would have just kept manoeuvring around the skiff to stop him getting into territorial waters. Darwin’s RHIBs were in the ‘cradle’ ready to go. ‘I got two “burst fires” out and he stopped and we were on him, boarding him in two minutes. Three thousand kilos of hashish.’

  There were four crewmen on board, all Yemeni. The aim was just to talk to them at first. ‘The narcotics is very well packaged and quite often you’ll see them in rice bags or coffee bags. These were in coffee bags.’

  The Yemeni crew indicated, ‘Oh no, it’s just coffee.’

  ‘Okay, no worries. We’ll just test that coffee’.

  ‘And obviously, it was hashish,’ Morrison says. ‘Then we got approval to seize it.’ It was packed in twenty-kilogram sacks – 151 of them altogether.

  ‘[The master] was obviously very concerned for his livelihood – it’s very much a matter of life and death so he requested some sort of recognition. I said to him, “Yeah, no worries.” So I wrote him a receipt for 3000 kilograms of hash and signed that and gave it to him. Back then, it was before the Maritime Powers Act changed. [The Act] now requires us to do that anyway; it changed when I was on that patrol. At the end of the day he’s paid to go out there, intercept or rendezvous with a vessel, take on narcotics and sprint back and that’s all he does. He’s not a big player. I don’t think he’s getting paid very much. I hope that the receipt note was able to assist him, and the people there could understand that he didn’t sell it on to someone else.’

  Nowadays, the Australian Government certificate that is handed to the skippers of the boats that have been intercepted is a much more official looking document than Morrison’s improvised receipt. ‘Hopefully that helps them and maybe even prevents them from wanting to do it but it also tells their kingpins that they’re not on-selling it, they’re not doing anything that is bad.’

  He is well aware of the ruthless nature of the drug lords when it comes to protecting their trade and the vulnerabilities of the crews of the smuggling vessels and their families back home.

  ‘But you can only do so much,’ he says. ‘I guess I have thought about that and other things and in the end I’ve just put that aside. That’s a part of doing business, the business that we’re in and hopefully that would put a dent in some of that transfer, which may prevent more people getting involved in it and more narcotics on the streets and all that sort of stuff.’

  Overall it was a twenty-two-hour operation, starting with sending the aircraft out, and he says there were lessons learnt. ‘But I was pretty happy and probably the most important thing, [and] one of the big reasons why I was there was I was able to show direct evidence of how they offload the narcotics on to the skiffs and which port that they were going to in that skiff.’

  That intelligence was vital to establishing where the hash highway led, and also the route of the smack track. ‘We’ve become much better at it.’

  He says it was a matter of building up a picture from the intelligence that had been gleaned from the many boardings from 2008; working with people, finding information, sitting down and analysing it and bringing it all together to come up with the theories. ‘And then we were there to try and intercept but also prove those theories in some regard. It’s a lot of years of painstaking work to do that.’

  The action-packed tour of duty continued. On 11 April 2014, Darwin provided aero-medical evacuation assistance to a fisherman who had suffered a heart attack on board a French fishing vessel, Cape Saint Vincent, approximately 300 nautical miles off Tanzania. They airlifted him by helicopter to Darwin and from there he was evacuated to Dar es Salaam, again by helicopter.

  The next day, Darwin detected a dhow and after shadowing it overnight conducted an eleven-hour boarding on 13 April, resulting in the seizure of 188 kilograms of heroin.

  ‘That was our first heroin seizure that was hidden,’ Morrison recalls. ‘There were probably a couple before that where we had the one boarding team out and they couldn’t find anything and they said, “Oh there’s nothing here,” and we pulled out. But there was enough what we call tripwires, enough intelligence there, enough things there.’

  ‘Tripwires’ are indications that drugs are on board. The first step is to get on board and establish the bona fides of the vessel. They try to find out where it originates; where it is sailing from; where it is going; and what stories the crew tell.

  He says a recurring theme is, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘We’re going down to Tanzania.’

  ‘Oh yeah, what are you going to do?’

  ‘A friend has broken down, down there, and we’re going down to help him.’

  ‘Right, okay, so whereabouts is he?’

  ‘We’re not sure.’

  ‘Right, so where are you, how are you going to get that?’

  ‘Oh, he’s going to call us on the phone.’

  They try to conduct interviews in English but where necessary they bring an interpreter, or ‘terp’, onto the dhow. Darwin’s terp was a civilian who spoke both Farsi and Arabic; Morrison was always conscious of his safety. ‘Obviously one of the things we had to look after is that we’re sending these guys on these boats that are rickety, and rough seas, so we are always worried about that person because he’s not as well trained at the maritime domain. But they were invaluable as far as that information flowed. So we were able to work that out.’

  Whenever the fishermen’s stories did not add up, the Australians would know there was something suspicious going on.

  ‘It’s like any sort of policing,’ says Morrison.

  At first when they started their searches they tried to find physical features on the boats that were unusual. ‘The training that we had here was, you looked for things that were unusual. So we’d go, “Oh look, there’s new fibreglass here,” so we’d go and we’d drill there and, “Oh there’s new fresh paint there! We’ll go and do that.”’

  But Morrison started to realise that this in itself was suspicious. ‘I can’t conclusively say this, but I’m of the view that they were deliberate. These guys set that up.’

  He soon noticed that whenever they found drugs beyond those places that had obviously been repaired, the hiding spots looked deceptively grubby and old. ‘So we came up with another method which was not to jump at the areas that [seemed to] need it, but to search methodically through each compartment.’

  Because he had previously been Fleet XO he had had the responsibility for ships’ damage control. ‘We have these ships’ layouts. On all our ships, when we do fire-fighting and suchlike, we mark it all out.’

  So he said to his crew, ‘Right, make me a dhow DC [damage control] board.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I want to have a board, just a layout of a dhow.’ That was because they all had similar layouts. ‘I want to be able to draw on it and map out exactly where we’ve searched and what we’re searching, so they can tell us and we can monitor it from [the ship] so they can move through methodically.’

  So that is what they did. ‘And we’d go through the wheelhouse and the captain’s cabin and we’d go down into the engineering spaces
and move through the fish holds and all that sort of stuff and we’d search through that way,’ he says. ‘By doing that and rotating our people through we became successful.’

  Their success was due both to the methodical search and better understanding of where the smugglers were likely to hide the narcotics. ‘The methodical search allowed you to not jump at those shadows, so you followed through. Their modus operandi, their tactics, in my opinion, is to set up these areas that you go and expend all your energy on. And you go, “Nothing here to see – I’m getting off,” five or six hours later, which was what they did.’

  By rotating teams and using other tactics such as fibre-optic cameras they were able to achieve greater success. ‘So that’s where we started – with [our first 188-kilogram heroin haul] and then, from there, we kept going on to get much more successful.’

  10

  The River Phoenix

  Next came 24 April and a fourteen-hour boarding that yielded a big prize – the seizure of the largest single haul of heroin captured from a vessel on the high seas in Combined Maritime Forces history. It was a huge quantity – 1032 kilograms.

  ‘A lot of people got excited about this one,’ Morrison says drily.

  The enormous seizure also resulted in the invention of a novel contraption that would go down in naval folk history first as the ‘River Phoenix’ or ‘the Garbinator’.

  Darwin had sailed to the region expecting to be engaged mainly in counter-piracy operations, but by now it was clear that illicit drugs had become the main game. Due to the Syrian conflict and the rise of the ISIS terrorist group, an increasing amount of heroin that had previously been moved overland to Europe through Turkey and Iran and via the Balkans was now being shipped southwest on fishing dhows down the Indian Ocean to East Africa on the smack track.