The Smack Track

by Ian McPhedran

  ‘So we got permission to do a destructive search, which means that we cut a hole, and we had to cut through several layers. It was like a big layer of foam and then there was wood and then there was metal. You’ve got to cut through all that to get in to get it and then once we’ve cut it all open then the locals, the crew showed us a little tiny passage in through here, which they could fit in – we couldn’t get in and get it out. They’d send one guy in and he’d push it all out and same on [the other] side. So that was the six tonnes – and they came in and helped us get it all out, and then we went in and checked it and made sure we got it all.’

  It was the ship’s twenty-third boarding on this deployment and the eighth that had yielded narcotics. Darwin stayed in theatre until 20 July 2014 before steaming home after a record-breaking deployment. In all, the ship seized twelve tonnes of illicit narcotics valued at more than $2 billion during her six-month deployment. This included 1674 kilograms of heroin and 10,696 kilograms of hashish.

  11

  Eye on the prize

  Commander Catherine Hayes was well armed with tips from Terry Morrison when she became the first woman to ‘drive’ an Australian navy warship in the Middle East Area of Operations – the Anzac Class frigate HMAS Toowoomba.

  Under her command, the ship took over from Darwin in August 2014 at a time of high-intensity operations. Counter-terrorism narcotics interdictions were well underway and Australian naval boarding and search tactics and procedures were well honed.

  Toowoomba’s area of operations was roughly the size of Australia’s land mass and stretched from the Horn of Africa down to the northern part of Madagascar. The ship’s tour of duty coincided with the monsoon season, making it especially difficult. Nonetheless, Toowoomba did exceptionally well with three major interdictions, the first of which nearly equalled Darwin’s record single haul of hashish.

  They had sailed out of Muscat in Oman and were just off the Makran coast.

  ‘It started out as this guy in a fishing dhow who was a bit suspicious, so we tracked him for a while,’ she recalls. ‘The guys went on board and they said, “He has this weird brand-new fridge, like a freezer. It’s got a false floor. Can we drill a hole?” So they put in a little hole, had a look, nothing in there, and then [the master] said, “Oh, my engine is broken.” He was hanging around as if everything was broken.’

  The boarding party left and returned to the ship. ‘We went away from him for a while, just to watch what he was doing. We knew there was something wrong and we went away and boarded some other dhows.’

  She had realised that it was important for her team to gain boarding experience early in the patrol. ‘You need to get your first go at it under your belt. So my theory was, we board to get rid of all of the “firsts” and then we can get on with doing our job and we did lots of boardings really quickly.’

  This gave them experience in verifying the dhows’ paperwork and fulfilling the UN requirements, but they found nothing by way of drugs during those boardings. They kept an eye out for the original dhow.

  ‘We just kept watching him,’ she says. ‘The weather was turning a bit warm. We had our aircraft, so it would go and check on him and update where all the vessels were in our area. It only covered so much in the area and we lost him for a little while’.

  They even turned back into Port Muscat to look for him. ‘And then he reappeared and we were like, “Oh, hello my friend, and where are you going now?”

  He started sailing south and Toowoomba followed. The weather turned bad, but the frigate’s crew kept asking, ‘Boss, can we board him?’

  She had to hold them back. ‘We can’t get you on board – I’m going to end up with you all in the water. That’s just a disaster. We’re just going to follow him.’

  They tracked him for five days.

  ‘Every morning without fail, I’d go to the bridge. I’d get up in the morning and have my coffee and hope the weather’s better,’ she recalls.

  And every morning the boarding team said, ‘Can we go today, boss?’

  ‘Sorry, guys, no.’

  They were so eager that they started to suggest boarding by the more adventurous methods in their repertoire, including fast-roping from the ship’s helicopter onto the dhow.

  She said, ‘Have you seen [the sea]? You’d fast-rope yourself into the water. That’s not happening.’

  ‘They were just so keen,’ she says. ‘And I remember talking to the bosses – the Pakistanis were our boss ashore – and saying, “I’m just going to tail this guy.”’

  As commander, she knew that she had to hold back. ‘You want to go too but you have to wait. And the thing is, he wasn’t going anywhere. We were so close to him. He must have been looking over his shoulder thinking, “They’re still there.” Every morning, “I wish this warship would go away.” We could predict where he was going to go and he came all the way down.’

  After five days sailing south he turned to the right and starting heading north towards the Yemeni island of Socotra, which sits between Yemen and Somalia near the Gulf of Aden.

  ‘I thought this was our chance,’ she recalls. ‘If he gets into the lee that’s created to the north of Socotra Island he will get a bit of abatement in the weather and we’re going to get on board. I said, “Right, let’s predict that.” So we started working it out and all the moons aligned. He did what we imagined.’

  As he headed towards Somalia they were able to keep him in international waters. ‘So, that morning we got the guys on board and they did all of the requirements to verify his flag or otherwise. Once that was completed I could get authorisation to do full searches, and we started searching. They went straight down to that refrigerator and said, “Someone’s patched the hole, right.”’

  When they had first boarded the dhow he must have gone into the Makran coast to load his cargo, which he then stashed in the gap under the fridge.

  ‘Someone had sealed it. It was perfect – perfectly fibre-glassed in, a very good job.’

  Even if they had not previously boarded the dhow and spotted the gap, she thinks they would have twigged that that was the hiding place. ‘I think the guys would have searched because it was, “There’s a gap – why is there a big gap?” And if you look in, you expect insulation, not a void.’

  They asked, ‘Can we put in a hole?’ So they did. Then, ‘There’s something here now!’ So they cut a bigger hole. Then, ‘No, no, we need to cut a bigger hole.’

  Finally, they could reach in with their bodies. ‘There are hessian bags in here!’ First one hessian bag, then two – ‘Oh, there’s something!’

  It tested positive for hashish.

  ‘Okay, this is a decent find,’ she says. ‘And then the boys started pulling the stuff out and it was, “How many bags now?” They kept coming and coming and they were saying, “This is awesome, we’re pulling out all this stuff.” The gap was probably two feet and some of the big boys were getting down on their bellies and having to push through the fibreglass, which is really bad, to pull the bags out. They were covered in the stuff.’

  They kept pulling it out and piling it up. ‘I’m saying, “How many now? Oh God!” They just kept going and going and going and the bags were twenty-kilo bags so they were quite hefty. And they didn’t finish pulling them all out until quite late in the evening. I’m thinking, “It’s going to take us forever to move this stuff from there to our ship.”’

  The two boarding teams, led by lieutenants Kane (Stephan) Stuart and Neil Partridge, swapped over during the process.

  ‘And then at night we pulled them all off,’ she says. ‘I said, “Everyone needs to get their heads down because tomorrow’s going to be a big day. We’ve got to process all this stuff.”’

  She ordered six hours’ rest and put a holding team on the dhow to keep watch on the narcotics and the crew. It took the entire next day to bring the bags back to the ship. ‘We just ran the boats backwards and forwards and brought the stuff back and laid it out. The enti
re flight deck was filled with it.’

  Meanwhile the crew of the dhow kept to themselves, which was typical behaviour.

  ‘Most of the time, they were the guys who were just moving cargo so they were quite compliant,’ she says. ‘Sometimes some of them will tell you [information] but most of the time they don’t say anything. They’re trying to make a living and obviously they get big money compared to what they would normally do for fishing or their normal trade … I often wonder how they feel when they go home – are they going to have these guys come and find them? But I guess they know that’s part of the game.’

  Once the haul was on board Toowoomba the next step was to unpack every bag and, weigh, photograph and catalogue it as evidence. Samples were also taken.

  ‘Yeah, a long process,’ she says. ‘It’s really hot and then everyone is so excited – the whole ship’s got a buzz.’

  It came to 5.6 tonnes of hashish. Naturally, they all wanted to see what such a huge haul looked like, but for obvious reasons the general ship’s company could not be allowed to walk among it. So her officers said, ‘Okay, you can all go up the back, on top of the hangar, and look down on it.’

  By that stage most of the boarding party had their heads down and the disposal team took over. Because hashish is oily, they first had to drain it before throwing it overboard so that it would dissolve in the ocean.

  ‘I went down there and helped them out,’ she says. ‘They’re down there putting one kilo at a time [overboard] yelling out “One Ferrari, ha ha ha!” Or “This is my house!” This plant material is worth so much money. I don’t know what it would be worth if you broke it down and sold it in Australia.’

  They had to follow strict evidentiary processes before disposing of the drugs.

  ‘Obviously, evidence of packaging indicates where it came from and what source it is,’ she says. ‘So they do all the processing as they normally would with any police operation and try and collect as much evidence as they can.’

  Considerable effort had been made to disguise the bags.

  ‘It’s really well packaged,’ she says. ‘So it’s quite interesting. You go, “I’m holding a kilo.” It’s bizarre – “This is twenty kilos of hashish.”

  Police officers back in Australia were stunned to hear of such an enormous haul. ‘Some of the police are like, “How much? I haven’t seen that much in my entire career!” But it’s obviously a different part of the supply chain.’

  At the end of the operation her boss said to her, ‘That was excellent tactical patience.’ It was the first time she had heard the term. The sense of satisfaction was tremendous and the crew could hardly wait to do it all again.

  ‘When’s the next one?’

  ‘Okay, slow down, everyone go and put your heads down, it’s quiet time now.’

  Then they headed back to Dubai for maintenance, but first they caught up with the Australian cricket team, which had arrived to play one-day matches.

  ‘We did their opening ceremony,’ she recalls. ‘They came on board, which was good. The boys loved that.’

  She gave a speech, saying, ‘We judge our successes by how many hundreds of tonnes of narcotics we’ve interdicted and at the moment we’re in the thousands. I hope that the successes of the Australian cricket team are measured in hundreds of tonnes too.’

  The coach, Darren Lehmann, joined the banter.

  Although that was their first and biggest haul, she thinks the most rewarding aspect was the way they tracked the dhow for so long.

  ‘It wasn’t just a, “Look, there he is.” Our planning worked. Whether it was through luck or good planning, it worked.’

  Cath Hayes is a modest, straight-talking yet quietly spoken officer who joined the navy aged eighteen after a classic family upbringing in Diamond Creek on the outskirts of Melbourne.

  Her mother had always had a romantic vision of the navy, borne of memories of her own older brother, Carl, dressed up in his smart naval uniform. So when, after an exciting ‘digger for a weekend’ visit to Puckapunyal, Cath announced she was going to join the army, her mother demurred.

  ‘Oh, how about we look at the navy – they have nice uniforms!’ her mother said, reminiscing about Carl arriving home ‘in this lovely uniform with these lovely young men’.

  ‘Oh dear,’ Hayes says with a laugh. ‘I think as a young teenager she would have remembered that! I think that I always wanted to do something that’s a little bit outside of the box and something a bit adventurous.’

  After some research, she went into the navy’s recruiting office in St Kilda. To her amazement, she had just sat down when all the recruiters got up and left the room. Bemused, she popped out to the car where her mother was waiting for her.

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘Well, they all ran away,’ Cath said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know whether this is a good idea any more,’ said her mother. ‘Maybe it’s not as romantic as I thought’.

  But the recruiters soon returned. It was 17 January 1991 and the coalition had just bombed Iraq in retaliation for Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait.

  ‘So here I am in their recruiting office, and our navy was potentially out there alongside their coalition partners in the Gulf,’ Hayes recalls. ‘This was navy involved in the biggest show in town at that time and they were, I think, quite excited and apprehensive. They were very typical of sailors – “Wow, there’s actually conflict going on and our ships could be there.” And funnily enough, less than fifteen years later, I was in that same location doing operations, because navy had been doing operations ever since.’

  Hayes completed a science degree as a naval cadet at ADFA in Canberra. She threw herself into life at the academy and approached it as a big adventure.

  ‘I loved the whole team environment. You had good friends there and there was lots of sport and there were so many things you could be involved in,’ she recalls. ‘I was busy just getting into the military life. The academic piece of it, while it was important, certainly wasn’t my favourite part.’

  She does not recall any unsavoury experiences of bastardisation or harassment. ‘I think I would have remembered if there was something that really turned me off, and nothing did.’

  She became really hooked on the navy at the end of her first year when her class went to sea for the first time. The usual training ship, the old HMAS Jervis Bay, was being used as the ‘Mogadishu Express’, ferrying supplies and troops to the Somalia campaign. So instead of training in Australian waters the entire class was flown to Diego Garcia and from there to Singapore for ten days – the biggest adventure any of the new midshipmen had ever had.

  ‘I think that was a fantastic introduction for our whole year to travel and the opportunities and new sights,’ she says. ‘And the opportunities didn’t stop from there. There was a challenge all along the way, but I guess that’s part of the enjoyment – you get challenged and you succeed or fail or get tested and get tested again.’

  Her first full posting was in Darwin for two and a half years. The frigate spent six months in southeast and northeast Asia. She found it exciting. ‘I lived on the ship as well, so you can imagine. For the first ten years of my career I either lived on the base in a little cabin or on board the ships. It was a little team and we’d often go to movies and go out and enjoy the weekend together and that was fun. It’s like being in a dorm I guess [and] a good way to save money.’

  She made her way up the ranks and postings, including as a gunnery officer in the frigate HMAS Sydney in the Arabian Gulf in 2003. That was the year of the US-led invasion of Iraq, and Sydney was heavily focused on protecting the two key Iraqi offshore oil installations at the head of the Gulf. The job then changed to helping to enforce the UN-sanctioned blockade against Iraq and prevent the smuggling of oil and dates on dhows and tankers.

  ‘So that was very exciting and our teams conducted lots of boardings then,’ she says. ‘They worked really, really hard to try and hinder that smuggling.’
r />   The key maritime threat was the danger posed by waterborne attacks from small vessels after the terrorist attack on USS Cole.

  ‘Certainly, that was high on everyone’s minds,’ she recalls. ‘Most of the threat within Iraq from the heavy missiles had been neutralised [and] it was all about the risk of guerrilla warfare at sea.’

  Any small vessel might be carrying explosives that could be used to sabotage coalition ships. ‘It’s not always a threat that’s easy to see. You just don’t know what’s a threat or not a threat, so you have to be suspicious of everything until you prove that it’s not a threat.’

  The boardings and quantities of contraband were markedly different from the drug hauls that would come later.

  Returning home around the middle of 2003 Hayes was posted to the amphibious ship HMAS Kanimbla for a number of operations, including providing humanitarian assistance off Aceh after the 2004 Boxing Day tsunami – a rewarding but extremely sad experience.

  ‘It was disastrous and catastrophic and lots of people lost their lives, but we felt that we were doing good,’ she says. ‘To see people who were just happy to be alive – it’s very humbling to see that they just survived with simple things and a smile when they’d had their whole lives taken away.’

  After a few months they returned to Singapore thinking they were on their way home. The ship’s company had packed up everything, stripped it all back, gone through the quarantine procedures and were all out celebrating when they were suddenly recalled to the ship. At first, they thought it was a joke but they soon discovered that there had been an earthquake on the North Sumatran island of Nias.

  ‘We had a whole heap of medical staff and equipment flown in,’ she says. ‘We had two helicopters and then we went around to Nias and at six o’clock in the morning we had decided to leave the aircraft in, doing some reconnaissance.’