15 Freighters Believed to Be Linked To Al Qaeda
U.S. Fears Terrorists at Sea; Tracking Ships Is Difficult
washingtonpost.com
By John Mintz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 31, 2002; Page A01
washingtonpost.com
U.S. intelligence officials have identified approximately 15 cargo freighters around the world that they believe are controlled by al Qaeda or could be used by the terrorist network to ferry operatives, bombs, money or commodities over the high seas, government officials said.
American spy agencies track some of the suspicious ships by satellites or surveillance planes and with the help of allied navies or informants in overseas ports. But they have occasionally lost track of the vessels, which are continuously given new fictitious names, repainted or re-registered using invented corporate owners, all while plying the oceans.
As they scramble to keep tabs on the largely unregulated and secretive global maritime industry, U.S. officials have no end of worries about how nautical terrorists could attack U.S. or allied ports or vessels, officials said. They cite such scenarios as al Qaeda dispatching an explosives-packed speedboat to blow a hole in the hull of a luxury cruise ship sailing the Caribbean Sea or having terrorists posing as crewmen commandeer a freighter carrying dangerous chemicals and slam it into a harbor.
Concerned about the vulnerabilities of American shipping since Sept. 11, 2001, U.S. officials have started paying more attention than ever to what cargo is loaded onto ships entering U.S. waters, and to who serves on crews, as well as to stowaways and individuals who appear to be surveying U.S. ports.
In addition, U.S. intelligence agencies have set up large databases to track cargo, ships and seamen in a search for "anomalies" that could indicate terrorists on approaching ships, said Frances Fragos-Townsend, chief of Coast Guard intelligence.
"If all you do is wait for ships to come to you, you're not doing your job," she said. "The idea is to push the borders out."
Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda's leader, and his aides have owned ships for years, some of which transported such commodities as cement and sesame seeds. But one vessel delivered the explosives that al Qaeda operatives used to bomb two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998, U.S. officials said.
Since September 2001, the U.S.-maintained list of al Qaeda mystery ships has varied from a low of a dozen to a high of 50. Some are ships up to 400 feet long that do not need to refuel on extended journeys, and therefore are less likely to draw scrutiny. U.S. officials do not know precisely how each of these "ships of concern" is being used, except that some are generating profits for al Qaeda. Any of them could be used in an attack anywhere in the world, officials fear.
As Western societies have "hardened" their facilities on land against terrorist attack, al Qaeda has escalated its attempts to launch assaults at sea because it believes waterborne targets are easier, terrorism experts said. Starting with the suicide bombing of the USS Cole off Yemen in 2000 by al Qaeda men in an inflatable dinghy, a strike that killed 17 sailors, U.S. officials have discerned a steady increase in nautical attacks, some of which were aborted by the planners or uncovered by authorities at the last moment. The latest attack came in October, when the hull of the French oil tanker Limburg was blasted by a speedboat off Yemen, causing a widespread oil spill.
Cruise ships are another worry. The concern is not so much that al Qaeda would hijack hundreds or thousands of passengers while making political demands, as Palestinian terrorists did with airliners in the 1970s, and the Italian Achille Lauro cruise ship off Egypt in 1985. The most feared scenario is that terrorists in speedboats or a cargo vessel would pull up alongside a cruise ship and blow a hole in it.
But cruise industry executives point out that their vessels can outpace most ships in the water, and that they are designed to be so secure and ride so high above the waves that a sea-level blast is unlikely to sink any cruise ship -- and in any case would explode far from passengers. Security at cruise ship terminals is as tight as it is at any airport, industry sources said.
For decades, U.S. intelligence focused on foreign shipping only sporadically. Soviet vessels were the main target for years, and later U.S. officials traced ships concealing cocaine and Chinese missiles. But after Sept. 11, U.S. officials realized the danger of terrorists attacking from the sea, and rushed to gain expertise about the world's commercial shipping industry.
Now Navy and Coast Guard intelligence have the unenviable job of sorting through the corporate papers of the world's 120,000 merchant ships, many of which hide their ownership under layers of corporate subterfuge -- a centuries-old practice in a trade that thrives on lax regulation and independence from governments. U.S. intelligence officers also must collate the names and mariner's license numbers of tens of thousands of seamen from around the world, a sizable percentage of whom carry fake documents and use pseudonyms because of criminal pasts.
"This industry is a shadowy underworld," said a senior U.S. government official knowledgeable about the effort. "After 9/11, we suddenly learned how little we understood about commercial shipping. You can't swing a dead cat in the shipping business without hitting somebody with phony papers."
But U.S. government officials said they have made up for lost time in the past 15 months. Working out of its headquarters in Suitland, Navy intelligence has struck data-sharing agreements with dozens of allied navies, and enlisted tipsters among port managers across the globe, as well as shipping agents, crew manning supervisors and seafarers unions.
Within weeks after Sept. 11, the Coast Guard established new rules for medium- and large-size ships. Ninety-six hours before reaching a U.S. port, they now must provide data about their cargo, the names and passport numbers of the crew, the ship's corporate details and recent port calls. This information is fed into computers at a new intelligence facility in West Virginia, and merged with other data, such as satellite photos of ships or ports.
Oddities in the data stoke officials' suspicions -- a fishing vessel reporting it caught fish not found in waters it has visited, for example, or a port visit that is unlikely given its cargo. Ships that cause concern may be boarded at sea, or police may be asked to tail a crewman when he disembarks.
Sometimes the evidence is misleading. In September, Coast Guard officers spent a day searching a 700-container ship in New Jersey because it had taken on cargo at two ports deemed a concern -- in Pakistan and Iran -- and because officers' radiation-detectors buzzed when they boarded. But the radiation came from ceramic tiles, not a nuclear weapon.
At times the Coast Guard has underreacted. In October, a 50-foot wooden freighter, undetected by the Coast Guard, ran aground near downtown Miami and its 220 undocumented Haitian passengers clambered ashore. Some U.S officials expressed concern that al Qaeda fighters could infiltrate the country via the same route.
"If the Coast Guard can't stop 200 people on a freighter from coming into the port of Miami, how can they stop a terrorist with a dirty bomb?" asked Bruce Stubbs, a former Coast Guard captain and now a security consultant.
Dozens of Navy and allied ships are scouring the Arabian Sea in search of al Qaeda ships and fighters, in one of the largest naval seahunts since World War II. Members have boarded and searched hundreds of ships, and issued hundreds more "challenges" by radio asking for information.
In that part of the world, U.S. naval officers suspect they are as likely to find terrorists aboard a 300-foot freighter as they are aboard a dhow, the small sailing vessel common along the coasts of the Indian Ocean. U.S. officials believe traders sailing small craft have been bribed for months to help al Qaeda fighters escape from Pakistan to Yemen and other countries.
U.S. efforts to track al Qaeda's activities at sea received a boost last month with the capture of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, an alleged mastermind of al Qaeda's nautical strategy who officials say is now cooperating with U.S. interrogators.
U.S. officials say they are on alert for signs that al Qaeda would use exotic craft to launch underwater attacks -- small submarines and "human torpedoes," underwater motor-propelled sleds that divers use. Sri Lanka's Tamil Tiger terrorist movement has been developing such equipment for years, said Tanner Campbell, vice president of private Marine Intelligence Group, which consults for shipping interests.
Captured al Qaeda operative Omar al-Faruq has told interrogators that he planned scuba attacks on U.S. warships in Indonesia, Campbell said. Apparently as a result of his confessions, U.S. officials recently visited hundreds of scuba shops nationwide asking about suspicious visitors.
The alarming scenario of al Qaeda operatives infiltrating freighter crews and seizing the cargo ships -- which range in size from 100 feet in length to more than 1,000 -- has led Navy and Coast Guard intelligence analysts to pore over the student lists of hundreds of seaman's academies worldwide. Diplomas from these schools are needed for work on most ships, and trade in fake certificates is brisk in many port cities.
Another new preoccupation for U.S. intelligence is the thousands of merchant ships worldwide that are registered in "flag of convenience" nations, some of which ask for almost no information from shipping firms that "flag" their vessels with them. Belize allows companies to register vessels online, for example, and countries such as Comoros, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines -- and even landlocked Bolivia -- barely keep track of their ships, U.S. officials said.
Flag-of-convenience vessels are notorious for catching fire and running aground, and their operators frequently abandon crews in foreign ports without pay. Scores of these ships have been found illegally running guns and drugs.
Navy officials say al Qaeda has used one shipping fleet flagged in the Pacific island of Tonga to transport operatives around the Mediterranean Sea. The firm -- which is called Nova and is incorporated in Delaware and Romania -- has for years engaged in smuggling illegal immigrants, U.S. and Greek officials said. Its ships also frequently change names and countries of registry, officials said.
Last February, eight Pakistani men jumped ship off one of its freighters, the Twillinger, at the Italian port of Trieste after a trip from Cairo. U.S. officials say they determined that the men -- who lied about being crewmen and carried false documents and large sums of money -- had been sent by al Qaeda. With the help of Romanian intelligence, U.S. officials began an investigation of the firm and a search for its vessels, according to accounts by the Romanian newspaper Ziua that European officials confirmed.
In August, the captain of another of Nova's freighters, the recently renamed Sara, radioed to maritime authorities in Italy that 15 Pakistani men whom the ship's owner had forced him to take aboard in Casablanca, Morocco, were menacing his crew. Although the 15 claimed they were crewmen when questioned by U.S. and Italian naval officers, the captain said they knew nothing about seafaring.
U.S. officials say they found tens of thousands of dollars, false documents, maps of Italian cities and evidence tying them to al Qaeda members in Europe, and concluded that they, too, were possibly on a terrorist mission. The 15 were charged in Italy with conspiracy to engage in terrorist acts.
In October, European navies set up a dragnet for another Nova freighter, the oft-renamed Cristi, which Navy sailors eventually located and boarded in Greek waters. Nothing amiss was found on board, U.S. officials said.
Greek merchant marine minister George Anomeritis told reporters then that besides the Cristi, NATO also has been looking for 24 other ships suspected of terrorist ties.
"These companies and strange ships change flags," he said. "With all those peculiar names, they create much confusion."
Staff writer Douglas Farah contributed to this report. |
