The Pirates of Somalia_ Inside Their Hidden World - Jay Bahadur [24]
Nor is there any evidence of the rivalries and turf wars one would expect in an organized crime environment. While isolated cases of gang infighting have resulted in deaths, no pirate organization maintains a standing “hit squad,” and inter-group conflict has been virtually non-existent. There seem to be plenty of cargo ships to go around.
Pirate money certainly passes back and forth across international borders, but this movement is not necessarily extralegal. The Somali diaspora is one of the most interconnected and interdependent in the world, and the international exchange of funds should be viewed as family finances, rather than the monetary trail of a transnational criminal cartel.
MYTH #4: PIRATE GROUPS EMPLOY HIGHLY SOPHISTICATED INTELLIGENCE NETWORKS
Accompanying the claims of transnational pirate crime networks have been numerous media reports suggesting that pirate organizations are being fed vital shipping data enabling them to pick and choose targets from the tens of thousands of vessels charting the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden each year. In May 2009, for instance, Spanish media cited a European military intelligence report claiming that pirates were targeting specific ships identified by a team of “well-placed advisers” in London. “These consultants,” the report read, “are in constant satellite telephone contact with pirate commanders on land, who can then pass details of the layout of the vessel, its crew, route and cargo to their colleagues at sea.” The article went on to insinuate that the passing of such information, if true, represented a major intelligence failure on the part of the UK government: “It was unclear why leaks of such sensitive details appear to be coming from Britain.”7
In reality, these so-called sensitive details are practically public knowledge, available to anyone with an Internet connection and access to an online maritime tracking service, such as Lloyd’s Marine Intelligence Unit. By paying a subscription fee, users—such as these hypothetical “consultants”—are able to continually monitor the course and position of virtually any commercial shipping vessel in the world, as well as its cargo, crew manifest, and other details of interest to pirates (such as freeboard and maximum speed). But it is not clear that such information would be particularly useful; even with access to a maritime tracking service, intercepting a vessel on the open sea is not nearly as easy as it may seem. For security reasons, the vessels’ exact coordinates are delayed by at least five or six hours, and plotting an intercept course using the commercially available GPS device a pirate attack group is likely to possess is an extremely formidable task. Even missing a pre-selected target by as little as half an hour would put a vessel moving at ten knots out of visual range, exposing its now-aimless pursuers to an increased risk of being picked up by international naval patrols, or even dehydration, starvation, and death. In myopically chasing a single target, moreover, the pirates would probably have to pass over a host of other perfectly suitable ships.
Roger Middleton voiced his own reasons for rejecting the existence of a sophisticated pirate intelligence network: “Why on earth would you need intelligence to hijack a ship in the Gulf of Aden? Spend half an hour googling and you can find where the shipping lanes are and therefore where the best targets are likely to be. You go north, and maybe left a little bit, and then you just wait.” Middleton conceded that the vast Indian Ocean presented them with a greater navigational challenge, but argued that their basic strategy had remained unchanged. “If there were a certain ship sailing through the Indian Ocean and you wanted to catch it, then of course you’d need intelligence. But that’s not the nature of this crime … it’s not an intelligence-led crime—it’s opportunistic. It’s like walking down the street looking through windows: you see one that has