Dedication
To the men and women of the
Royal Australian Navy and their families
Contents
Dedication
Glossary
Preface
Prologue
The mission 1. Leaving Dar es Salaam
2. Cauldron of conflict
3. At the captain’s table
4. A close call
5. Boardos
Piracy 6. Skulls and crossbones
7. Under the not-so-Jolly Roger
Hash highway to smack track 8. Seizing hash and saving lives
9. Not just coffee
10. The River Phoenix
11. Eye on the prize
Making it work 12. Tonnes of guns
13. Dunnies, drains and dinners
14. Beating the blues
15. Birdies
The smack track 16. Truckies of the ocean
17. Jackpot
18. More smack on the track
The end game 19. Catch and release
20. Chasing the Golden Crescent
21. Bringing them home
Acknowledgements
Appendix: RAN Middle East deployments 1990–2017
Photos Section
About the Author
Also by Ian McPhedran
Copyright
Glossary
2IC
second in command
AB
Able Seaman
ABOT
Al Basrah Oil Terminal
ADFA
Australian Defence Force Academy
AFP
Australian Federal Police
AIC
air intercept controller
ANZAC
Australian and New Zealand Army Corps
Birdies
aviation department
Buffer
Chief Boatswain (‘bosun’)
CAG
Central Arabian Gulf
CAOC
Combined Air Operations Centre
CDF
Chief of the Defence Force
Chippy
shipwright
CIWS
Close-in weapons system (pronounced ‘Sea Whiz’)
CMF
CN
Chief of the Royal Australian Navy
CO
Commanding Officer
CPO
Chief Petty Officer
CTF
Combined Task Force
DC
damage control
DEA
(US) Drug Enforcement Agency
DSM
Distinguished Service Medal
EBC
Enhanced Boarding Capability
EOD
explosive ordnance disposal
FFG
guided missile frigate
FGS
Federal German Ship
FNS
French Navy Ship
Greenies
electrical or ‘green steam’ department
Head
toilet or bathroom
HMAS
Her Majesty’s Australian Ship
HMS
Her Majesty’s Ship
HQJOC
Headquarters Joint Operations Command
HUET
helicopter underwater escape training
IRGCN
Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy
IRTC
Internationally Recognised Transit Corridor
ISIS
Islamic state of Iraq and Syria
JTF
Joint Task Force
KAAOT
Khor Al Amaya Oil Terminal
Killick
navy slang for a Leading Seaman
LHD
landing helicopter dock
LS
Leading Seaman
Mess
place to eat, live and relax
MEAO
Middle East Area of Operations
MER
Middle East Region
MFU
major fleet unit
MOAS
Mine and obstacle avoidance sonar
MV
Motor Vessel
NAG
Northern Arabian Gulf
NATO
North Atlantic Treaty Organisation
NCIS
(US) Naval Criminal Investigative Service
NVD
night vision device
OpsO
Operations Officer
OPV
offshore patrol vessel
PAG
Pirate Action Group
Pipes
public address system
PO
Petty Officer
PT
physical training
PTSD
Post-traumatic stress disorder
Pusser
Maritime Logistics (supply) Officer
PWO
Principal Warfare Officer
Rack
bed or bunk
RAAF
Royal Australian Air Force
RAN
Royal Australian Navy
RAS
replenishment at sea
RAST
recover, assist, secure and traverse
RHIB
rigid hull inflatable boat
ROE
rules of engagement
RPG
rocket-propelled grenade
SAG
Southern Arabian Gulf
SASR
Special Air Service Regiment
Scab lifter
medical assistant
Scribes
writers or clerks
Sky
pilot chaplain
SOLAS
safety of life at sea
SOPs
standard operating procedures
SPO
Systems Project Office
SQT
system qualifying trial
Stick
members of a boarding party
Stokers
engineers
Storbys
stores department
Chief Coxswain
SWO
Ship’s Warrant Officer
Tiff
artificer or skilled navy mechanic
TS
training ship
TTPs
tactics techniques and procedures
UN
United Nations
UNCLOS
United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea
USS
United States Ship
VERTREP
Vertical replenishment
Wardroom
the officers’ mess
WEEO
Weapons Electrical Engineering Officer
XO
Executive Officer
Preface
Landing in a helicopter on the rolling and pitching deck of a warship at sea for the first time can be a white-knuckle experience, even for veteran flyers.
Sitting in a rigid hull inflatable boat alongside a navy boarding party as it bounces across the open ocean is a different type of wild ride, but when these two things happen on consecutive days they have a major impact.
So it was in 2007 when I joined the Anzac Class frigate HMAS Toowoomba on patrol in the Arabian Gulf for a brief visit and a taste of an Australian navy deployment in the Middle East.
As the RHIB sped across the oily waters of the Gulf, a dot appeared on the horizon. Soon that dot grew into a 300,000-tonne supertanker, and before I knew it I was following the agile young sailors several storeys high, up the ship’s ladder and onto her vast deck. The boardi
ng team, under the command of an officer who looked twenty years old, went about the business of searching the vessel and quizzing the Indian captain and his crew with a professionalism that belied their years.
The navy’s three-decade-long Middle East story has been largely overlooked because of the higher profile and more immediate media access offered by the army and air force, but after a second visit aboard warships in the Gulf I knew that this terrific Australian story needed to be told.
Almost a decade later I was fortunate to join the guided missile frigate HMAS Darwin in Dar es Salaam harbour in May 2016 as she embarked on a two-week Indian Ocean patrol between Tanzania and the Seychelles. It was the ship’s seventh and final Middle East deployment, and her prime targets were drugs and weapons smugglers on what Australian sailors have dubbed ‘the smack track’.
The so-called war against terrorism has gone through many phases since it began on 11 September 2001, but one aspect has remained constant. That is the presence in and around the Gulf region of warships from the Royal Australian Navy, which has had vessels patrolling the waters of the Middle East, South Asia and East Africa almost constantly since 1990.
Over sixty-four rotations of twenty major fleet units, many thousands of Australian officers and sailors have forged their own stories in the calm seas of the Arabian Gulf or the wilder waters off the Horn of Africa and deep in the western Indian Ocean.
This book tells part of their story.
Ian McPhedran, Sydney 2017
Prologue
The young male and female sailors scramble down a rope ladder and into the bucking rigid hull inflatable boat that is tethered to the side of the Australian warship.
With the frigate steaming at fourteen knots in the open ocean, this is not a job for the faint hearted. In a dangerous sea-state four, with a buffeting wind and three-metre waves, the armed and fully kitted-out members of HMAS Darwin’s ‘red’ boarding team are dropping into a maelstrom.
It is 11.25 a.m. on Saturday, 21 May 2016, and we are in the Indian Ocean, several hundred kilometres to the east of Tanzania and north of Madagascar, hunting drug smugglers on the smack track. For one young woman, the conditions are just too severe and she is quickly replaced. Upper body strength is vital under these extremes.
Once the first group of boarders have made it safely into the RHIB it is set free and speeds away towards a suspect fishing dhow that is wallowing about a kilometre away under the watchful eye of the guided missile frigate.
Viewing the operation from the safety of Darwin’s deck it is clear that my wish to board a smuggling dhow is unlikely to be granted unless the sea calms down an awful lot. Sea-state four is at the upper limit for a water-based boarding by the Royal Australian Navy. As the RHIB approaches, the suspect dhow rolls through an alarming-looking forty degrees, and boarding officer Lieutenant James Hodgkinson deems it too risky to continue.
Climbing down into the RHIB from a moving 4000-tonne warship is one thing for these skilled and athletic sailors, but scrambling up a rope and onto a twenty-metre wooden dhow that is bucking about like an angry rodeo bull could be deadly. In addition, the team’s radios have become waterlogged and communication with the ship is lost.
Just before noon they turn and speed back towards Darwin, but suddenly their radio crackles back to life and the skipper, Commander Phill Henry, orders the team to have another go.
The inflatable boat turns back to the dhow. This time its captain is instructed, via hand signals, to turn his vessel down sea to make conditions a little easier for boarding. Transferring sailors to the dhow is all about timing. In such a high sea-state the two vessels are almost level at the top of each swell. The boarders can therefore avoid using the rope ladder but must risk leaping directly from the RHIB onto the dhow.
Once safely on board, their first job is to herd the crew forward into the forecastle area and to secure the vessel while the RHIB returns to Darwin to collect the rest of the boarding party, along with the American NCIS agent Paul Lerza and his interpreter to interview the captain and crew. Time is of the essence.
It is soon clear that the skipper’s story about why such a small coastal fishing boat is operating so far south of its home – on the Makran coast between Pakistan and Iran – and so far from land is ridiculous. The vessel is not flying a valid flag, her fishing nets have not even been deployed and the paperwork contains some major inconsistencies.
The authorities at headquarters in Bahrain authorise a search and the arduous task of checking every square centimetre of the vessel begins. Just before 5 p.m. a member of the dhow’s crew secretly lets on that there are drugs on board, stashed beneath the ‘snow’ in the ice hold.
Rather than go directly to the spot, give the game away and potentially endanger the informant’s life, the team continues to chip away at the edge of the ice before moving to the centre of the hold where they eventually find a suspect hatch hidden below the frozen sheet.
Able Seaman Eddie Tomsana, from Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, is used to living rough on small boats, but even he is shocked by the conditions on board the dhow.
As he and his shipmate Pete Irvine get down and dirty, urgently searching the rancid fish hold, their only company are rats nesting deep in the boat’s bilge. Even the cockroaches swarming in the galley area up top don’t venture down into this dark, filthy, frozen world.
The men use a crowbar to remove the hatch cover, and bingo – there is a stash of white bags underneath. Tomsana gets down on his belly and crawls into the stinking, rat-infested hiding place.
At first, he pulls out five, then another seven and finally dozens of bags containing an incredible 512 kilograms of heroin – a cache with an estimated street value of more than half a billion dollars that will no longer fund terrorist organisations and criminal syndicates.
THE MISSION
1
Leaving Dar es Salaam
The timber fishing dhows beached outside the bustling fish market frame a huge crowd of Africans undertaking their daily ritual of haggling over the catch. This colourful scene at the entrance to Dar es Salaam harbour plays out under the watchful eyes of Royal Australian Navy sailors who are manning fifty-calibre machine guns mounted high above the bridge of the guided missile frigate HMAS Darwin.
The warship’s 228-strong company is embarking on a two-week patrol of the southern Indian Ocean in pursuit of a much more insidious catch – heroin and hashish grown and processed deep in the valleys of Afghanistan, and weapons bound for terrorist groups plying their evil trade somewhere on the troubled African continent. Darwin will be operating between Tanzania and the holiday paradise of the Seychelles islands, a smuggling hotspot.
A mere mention of the names Tanzania and the nearby island of Zanzibar conjures up images of darkest Africa and the slave trade. Dar es Salaam, the capital of Tanzania, is a port city that sits about halfway down the east coast of the African continent. It has been a key Indian Ocean trading hub for centuries, and not just for the exotic spices carried on the ancient maritime routes by the favourable trade winds. During the 1800s, Zanzibar was the centre of the world’s slave trade and more than 50,000 people were sold each year in its notorious market to buyers from America and the Middle East.
Large-scale human trafficking has long since given way to other destructive and highly lucrative trades in human misery. The waters off the east African coast are awash with fishing and cargo dhows attempting to land smuggled drugs – mainly hashish and heroin – or weapons. From this strategic staging post the guns are bound for trouble spots such as Somalia, Yemen and Sudan. The drugs will travel further afield – by air, using passengers as mules; by charter flights; or overland in trucks or cars, driving south through Mozambique and South Africa or northeast through Kenya and onwards to the wealthy criminal markets in Europe and beyond. In the post-9/11 era, the narcotics trade is one of the primary sources of funding for terrorist organisations.
The illicit drugs come from the ‘Golden Cres
cent,’ an opium-growing belt that stretches from Iran through Afghanistan and into northern Pakistan. Most of the opium is grown in Afghanistan, and heroin from the crescent supplies markets in Europe and the United States. The ‘Golden Triangle’ of Myanmar (Burma), Laos and Thailand feeds markets in Australia, the US and Asia.
Although engines have long since replaced sails, little has changed over the centuries for the men who work on board the fleet of timber dhows that are beached outside the busy fish market. Whatever meagre amount the smugglers get paid by drug barons to transport their lethal cargoes will far outstrip their poor income from fishing.
It is 8 a.m. and the crew of HMAS Darwin is on ‘defence watch’ and at high alert. The fighting ship moves away from her berth just forward of the German frigate FGS Bayern and slips slowly down the narrow harbour towards the Indian Ocean. Each gunner is in radio contact with the PWO – the Principal Warfare Officer – who relays warnings and commands from his armour-plated bunker. The PWO, Lieutenant Brett Schulz, and his staff monitor a suite of powerful electronic sensors inside the ship’s locked and darkened operations room. These hi-tech tools of trade include radars, cameras and infrared equipment that scan the surroundings constantly. The most sensitive pieces of equipment are well hidden in a corner behind a heavy black curtain at the rear of the ‘ops’ room that is out of bounds to anyone without a security clearance.