‘The security situation made it difficult because you’re going to seek resources from an agency that’s fighting a war. These people are trying to survive getting blown up in Peshawar and Karachi – getting shot at, killed and then they wash the streets down and half an hour later they’ve got another piquet [guard post] up there with another set of police ready to get taken out again. So they were in a dire situation. Four hundred police officers are killed every year in Pakistan, some people I knew very closely so … it was chalk and cheese compared to the time before.’
Narcotics production and trafficking had also evolved significantly by 2010, as had the interdictions.
‘The anti-narcotics force to this day is run by, or led by senior army officers mainly from ISI [Inter Service Intelligence, Pakistan’s largest intelligence service]. They’re plugged in, linking with the liaison officers and also doing the work in countries, so they’ve got more fire power to be able to interdict.’
Few opium poppies are grown in Pakistan today, and the processing laboratories have all moved to Afghanistan, he says. ‘They [Pakistanis] can actually legitimately claim they are production free – “We’re a transit country, we’re not a producing country.” So that’s a big distinction that they make and they’re sensitive about.’
The drugs are transported down country from Afghanistan through various staging posts. Wherever there is money, goods of all kinds will travel, not just drugs.
‘The guys that were being picked up told us about the discipline that they had in moving these goods,’ he says. ‘You can apply it across to the other crime types, in that these truck drivers will take it a certain way and then there’ll be others picking it up and going the other way, so you have that discipline in movement that they’re not knowing where it’s going to – they’re just truck drivers.’
As well as in trucks and containers, the heroin can also cross into Pakistan on camels or packhorses because many border crossings are unregulated.
‘They’ll know where they can come through, whether they’re paying a lot of money or whether they come through on the informal crossings. And because there’s so many people moving backwards and forwards who legitimately can be in Pakistan because they’re ethnic, they’re refugees, [it] just makes it so difficult.’
Some drugs are also stockpiled up country. In poor countries such as Pakistan, inevitably, money talks. Few transactions take place without cash changing hands all the way along and up the line.
He says the Pakistani military is highly disciplined. ‘Of course they have to be on their toes because it’s now not just a narco issue, it’s a terrorism issue. They’re fighting for their lives. So when you had big massacres like the December 2014 massacre in Peshawar with 150 school kids, it was pretty much a line in the sand that the military guys drew then and they said, “Right, we want to take this to its natural consequence.” In other words, “Gloves are off and we are going to go in after you hard,” and that’s why they went into Waziristan [a lawless tribal zone between northern Pakistan and Afghanistan] and found all those bomb-making factories.’
Baluchistan, the transit area for heroin to the Makran coast, not only has its own nationalist movement but its own social system. ‘Tribes and kinship, that’s their first line of loyalty. If you control an area, if you’re a Baluchi, you’re not going to do anything that’s contrary to that. So the movement of goods is going to still be relatively straightforward.’
The consequence is that a shipment of heroin can travel from the processing plant in Afghanistan to a port in Baluchistan without any proper law-enforcement exposure and, from there, down the smack track.
‘They were back-trading in charcoal,’ da Re recalls. ‘Some smart Alec suggested we should call it “Al Kebab” because the charcoal is going back to Dubai to make the kebabs with coal.’
He expects the heroin trade to persist into the future and to continue to fund terrorism, and says that while piracy is under control for now the problem still has to be solved properly. But he warns that the situation could change. ‘If these things start to make a big dent on them they will reinvent themselves somehow or another because they are clever people. They’ve survived for hundreds and hundreds of years against the odds. So it will continue whilst there’s a demand and in places like Iran and Africa there’ll be a probable growing consumption issue of their own. We have started to see already, that they’ll change their product to methamphetamine because they know that’s going to be the product in demand and its going through to Malaysia.
‘You can track these things and you can see the developments. But you really need to have your intelligence on the ground because the locals know it better than any of us smart Alecs that come in from the West. They know. When we were giving management training to the Pakistanis for terrorism – we have designated programs – 95 per cent of the presenters were the locals from each of the areas, who all gave an account of terrorism amongst themselves. No point bringing someone from Australia to start teaching them about terrorism, they’re fighting for life and death. They know the Baluchi area, they know the Peshawar area, they know all the areas. The method I adopted was “indigenise, indigenise”, so if you’re going to run any courses up there get the locals to run it and they can facilitate it.’
On his first posting he dealt with his own informants and paid them directly, which can be very dangerous for agents. By the time he returned in 2010 the system had changed and they had to go through the local agencies. It became a reward-based system rather than cash up front. Informants knew that if they could get information to a Western drug liaison officer through official channels they were likely to get a far greater reward.
‘That was a satisfactory arrangement for us. It [also] gave us the protection in the country, because you’re diplomats as well.’
One of the difficulties with human intelligence is continuity of contacts. While he was in Pakistan for nearly five years on his last posting, the Americans were more likely to be there for twelve months. ‘You get a relationship in twelve months if you’re lucky. We talk about “three cups of tea” or “ten cups of tea” before you’re even doing business. So the poor old Americans on a twelve-month posting are getting nowhere and even on a two-or three-year posting they knew that there was another person coming. The Pakistanis are also being moved around, so your relationship with the head guy would change as well.’
As to the navy patrols, da Re says, ‘It’s like I guess any massive problem, whether it’s in Australia or elsewhere. You’ve got to attack it from all angles. If there’s a demand they’re going to keep supplying it. So whilst there’s a demand there, there’s got to be enforcement. If you’re on the ground you’re going to understand the situation a hell of a lot more than from a distance.’
Catching the kingpins is another matter. That involves not just chasing the product but following the money with international law-enforcement cooperation through the great money-laundering centres in the world. Australia has strong restraint laws such as the proceeds of crime legislation making it is possible to freeze assets. In other countries that is not the case.
‘So that’s the bigger issue in terms of whether you are going to stop it. Whilst the kingpins aren’t getting prosecuted, whilst there’s a demand, it’s going to keep flowing.’
Australian Federal Police Detective Superintendent Anthony Fox spent the first ten years of his life in the Middle East Region when his father worked in Qatar as general manager of one of the Sheikh’s construction companies. In 2016 he was back there, based in Dubai as one of two AFP liaison officers. The other officer is his wife, Kate, a sergeant. He had not learnt Arabic as a child. ‘But in saying that, I did some language training for this posting and picked it up pretty quickly. I think that’s because subconsciously, as a child, you probably pick it up.’
Educated in Toowoomba, Fox, or ‘Foxy’ as he is known, did a variety of jobs, including running in partnership a security and investigation business in
Brisbane, before joining the AFP at the age of twenty-six in 2000. A year later, 9/11 hit.
‘And that’s when it all started,’ he says. For the next eight years he was deployed out of the Sydney office to jobs including the bombing of the Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004; investigations in Asia, Europe and the Solomon Islands; and Project Wickenby (the Australian whole-of-government taskforce targeting international tax fraud and money laundering). In 2010, based in Canberra, he became the AFP’s national coordinator for people smuggling, which involved a close working relationship between the AFP and the navy, Customs and Defence.
This led to his posting to Dubai in January 2014. However, in July he was suddenly sent to the Ukraine to investigate the shooting down of Malaysian Airlines MH-17 on 17 July. All 283 passengers and 15 aircrew died. He was the first AFP member to deploy to the terrible crash site.
After some weeks he returned to the Middle East to his position as senior police liaison officer, which involves quite a lot of travel.
‘The main crimes of interest here at post are terrorism, which includes terrorism funding; organised crime; and money laundering. So they’re the three big hitters for us in this region,’ he explains.
Narcotics smuggling crosses all those categories and Dubai, being a major international transport and financial centre, is also a convenient meeting point for key organisers.
‘Whether it’s the CT [counter-terrorism] targets we’re looking at, or organised crime or the money launderers, it’s a convenient nexus point,’ he says. ‘Some guy jumps on a flight from Australia, guys jump on a flight from Africa, from the UK, from the US and everyone is here within a day, they have a meeting and then they organise the shipment and the money and everything else. Two days later they all fly off. Targeting organised crime and terrorism, particularly where the local jurisdiction may not have the legislation to support what you need, is a challenge.’
With terrorism funding so heavily tied up with the heroin trade there is a big focus on the smuggling of drugs from the Makran coast. Fox says his job involves liaising with the Gulf Cooperation Council countries – Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Oman and the UAE – Yemen and Iran, and the Horn of Africa and central African countries Djibouti, Eritrea, Chad, Sudan, South Sudan and Somalia. The officers stationed in Islamabad look after Pakistan and Afghanistan.
‘One of the roles here is information and intelligence exchange,’ Fox says. ‘So that’s with a range of partners, whether it’s law enforcement – security agencies – or sources in the community or people [who] just have information they want to pass on.’
Other countries, including Australia’s ‘five eyes’ partners – the US, UK, Canada and New Zealand, plus the Netherlands, Germany, France as well as foreign law enforcement agencies, pass on information relevant to Australia and vice versa. ‘So that information can come from anywhere.’
Generally, intelligence about a drug load is received at the point when it is being transported towards or away from the Makran coast. The ability to track a load depends on where it is going. Some countries are more proactive than others in cooperation and targeting narcotics trafficking.
But success has mainly come from well-connected sources inside the smuggling chain. Usually it is broad information, such as a tip that a certain vessel is carrying narcotics.
Sometimes they know the name of the vessel or the captain. ‘But it’s never as simple as having all of the information in one hit [so] that you can go, “Right, that’s the boat.” It needs that analysis behind it and to start feeding in with other intelligence coming in from other sources and other areas.’
They conduct analysis and gather as much information as they can from their sources before passing it to the Australian navy people in Bahrain. ‘Then they throw that into their systems and they see what information seeds they have that connect with it, and then if it’s enough they will go, “Right, let’s have a crack at this boat – we think it’s this one, let’s go and board it, let’s have a go.”’
Sometimes the intelligence is just not enough. The ships can’t be everywhere and they are patrolling a large ocean. ‘They have to go for whatever the best result looks like, and sometimes it isn’t the information we pass; they have to make that decision based on other information they have.’
Of Darwin’s three heroin seizures in May 2016, Fox’s office provided information in relation to only one. ‘Once a vessel has come south past Somalia and they’re on a certain bearing, there’s not really any fishing grounds there. But these dhows’ saying, “We’re down here for fishing, that’s what we’re going down there for,” doesn’t quite stack up. So that’s where they’ve had most of their success.’
Where dhows used to leave directly from a port along the Makran coast loaded with narcotics, they are now more likely to rendezvous with a mother ship in the waters forty or fifty kilometres off the coast.
‘The smaller dhows come up and they’ll offload there and then they’ll all have a go,’ Fox says. ‘And that’s really for the syndicates. Instead of having that one big load, the risk of having one big load busted, they now have five or six boats and if two get caught well, who cares – the other four get through.’
Fox isn’t prepared to offer a view about the role played by corrupt officials at senior levels and at the borders in enabling narcotics cargo to reach the ports. But he observes, ‘It’s pretty rough terrain where it’s coming from. It is the bad lands, from Afghanistan to Pakistan [and] Iran through those mountains. There’s not a lot of control from the military or law enforcement up there. The effectiveness and commitment seems to vary but there is commitment at some levels. As an example, a colleague visited the Iranian counter-narcotics police college and museum and they actually have a wall of honour there with the names of the officers who’ve been lost in the line of duty. And I think it’s over 4000 they’ve lost combating the narcotics trade. When they get into a gun battle [it is] pretty fierce and some of the stuff that has been seized includes heavy machine guns, automatic weapons, armoured vehicles. That sort of stuff is what the narcos have.’
The terrain also makes it especially difficult to monitor what is coming through. And Pakistan’s many internal security issues take up their resources.
Some dhows drop into ports on the way down the Gulf but that is mainly to deliver and collect legitimate cargo before heading south. ‘I don’t think we’ve seen any information to suggest that there’s narcotics coming directly in here [Dubai].’
The main drug that is causing problems in the Gulf region itself is the psycho-stimulant Captagon that is often taken by insurgent fighters going into battle. It comes mainly from Lebanon and also from Iran.
The difficulties of putting together counter-narcotics teams in developing countries are well known. ‘Trying to get a vetted team, out of a team of twenty guys you might have nineteen who are committed and you might have one corrupt guy, and that just brings the whole show down. That’s the difficulty you’re always going to face, particularly with the developing countries. But the majority of law enforcement officers are committed and the support given to them by law enforcement agencies from developed countries in training them up has been phenomenal. But again, it’s just trying to keep resourcing that, keep them trained, keep them committed.’
Nearly three-quarters of the successful boardings have been conducted by RAN ships, followed by the Canadian and then New Zealand, Saudi, German and French navies. Fox is not sure why the Australian ships do so well. ‘I think experience has a lot to do with it but I think there’s a fair bit of commitment there. Australians are always ready to have a fair crack. All the work I’ve ever done with the navy, whether people smuggling or over here, they’ll always give their utmost, always have a crack or always let it run and see what comes out of it.’
He believes that the AFP’s close relationship with the navy was forged on the people-smuggling taskforce back in Australia. ‘I think all those agencies now understand that no
one can do a task on their own in this environment, whether it’s in Australia or whether it’s offshore.’
After arriving in Dubai in 2014 he set about augmenting that relationship, building up informants and working with local law enforcement. It is now at the point where they know who to call. ‘When we get information we can just pick up the phone straight away and say, “This is what we’ve got and we’ll do more analysis on it, but just to give you a heads up,” so that they can pre-plan to have vessels in the area, that type of thing. If it starts looking good, well then, it might look towards a boarding. And vice versa – they’ll give us a ring and say they have information, they’re looking at a boarding saying, “Hey, we’re about to do this boarding,” or, “We’re looking at this boat, you got anything on it?”’
The intelligence provided by his office is just one element that goes into the counter-smuggling operations. ‘But when we get information, it’s usually pretty good, it’s fairly reliable.’
As for the war on drugs, he says, ‘The way I look at it is that every seizure is a win. It might be a little win but if you didn’t seize it what would happen? That might be a million, two million hits on the street and really that’s the way that you need to look at it. It’s a hard game, really hard game over here just because of the environment. It is nothing like executing an official warrant in Australia where we can put protections in place to increase our safety when kicking in a warehouse door or a house. You can’t move into Iran or in the highlands of Afghanistan or Pakistan and do the same thing! They’re just places you can’t get to, so you can only be effective at certain points along the chain.’
He says Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan have formed a useful counter-narcotics unit to target drugs in the border region. ‘As an example, a few years ago there was information passed to the Iranians from a law enforcement country here, and as a result of that they seized seven tonnes of heroin in a cement truck in Iran.’
The Smack Track Page 24