The Maritime Dimension of International Security: Terrorism, Piracy, and Challenges for the United States

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chalk, Peter.
    The maritime dimension of international security : terrorism, piracy, and
  challenges for the United States / Peter Chalk.
      p. cm.
    “The research presented here was sponsored within RAND’s Project AirForce
  (PAF) Strategy and Doctrine Program, as part of a wider effort exploring new
  concepts for joint U.S. air-naval operations”—Pref.
    Includes bibliographical references.
    ISBN 978-0-8330-4299-6 (pbk. : alk. paper)
    1. Merchant marine—Security measures—United States. 2. Security,
  International. 3. Shipping—Security measures. 4. Maritime terrorism—Prevention.
  5. Terrorism—Prevention. 6. Piracy—Prevention. 7. Unified operations (Military
  science)—United States. I. Title.

VK203.C48

2008

359'.030973—dc22

2008014133

iii

Preface

In today’s global environment, transnational security challenges—
so-called grey-area phenomena—pose serious and dynamic challenges
to national and international stability. These dangers, which cannot
be readily defeated by the traditional defenses that states have erected
to protect both their territories and populaces, reﬂect the remarkable
ﬂuidity that currently characterizes world politics—a setting in which
it is no longer apparent exactly who can do what to whom with what
means. The maritime realm is especially conducive to these types of
threat contingencies given its vast, largely unregulated, and opaque
nature. Two speciﬁc issues that have elicited particular attention are
piracy and seaborne terrorism. This monograph assesses the nature,
scope, and dimensions of these two manifestations of nonstate violence
at sea, the extent to which they are or are not interrelated, and their
overall relevance to U.S. national and international security interests.

The research presented here was sponsored within the RAND

Project AIR FORCE (PAF) Strategy and Doctrine Program as a part
of a ﬁscal year 2006 study, “Exploring New Concepts for Joint Air-
Naval Operations.” The monograph draws heavily on interviews with
maritime experts and intelligence and security analysts who, given the
sensitivity of the subject matter, requested that their comments and
insights be used on a not-for-attribution basis. Names and aﬃliated
organizations of these individuals have therefore been omitted from
the text.

Contents

Preface

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

iii

Figures

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vii

Tables

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Summary

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Acknowledgments

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xvii

Abbreviations

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

xix

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

CHAPTER TWO

Piracy

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Scope and Dimensions

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Factors Accounting for the Emergence of Piracy in the

Contemporary Era

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Dangers of Piracy

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

CHAPTER THREE

Maritime Terrorism

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

CHAPTER FOUR

A Piracy–Terrorism Nexus?

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

vi The Maritime Dimension of International Security

CHAPTER FIVE

Relevance to the United States

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Threat Priorities

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Principal Security Initiatives Spearheaded by the United States

. . . . . . . . . . .

CHAPTER SIX

Policy Recommendations

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

APPENDIX

Selected High-Proﬁle Maritime Terrorist Incidents, 1961–2004

. . . . . . .

References

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Summary

Maritime Piracy

Scope and Dimensions

A total of 2,463 actual or attempted acts of piracy were registered
around the world between 2000 and the end of 2006. This represents
an annual average incident rate of 352, a substantial increase over the
mean of 209 recorded for the period of 1994–1999.

The concentration of pirate attacks continues to be greatest in

Southeast Asia, especially in the waters around the Indonesian archi-
pelago (including stretches of the Malacca Straits that fall under the
territorial jurisdiction of the Jakarta government), which accounted for
roughly 25 percent of all global incidents during 2006.

Factors Accounting for the Emergence of Piracy in the
Contemporary Era

Seven main factors have contributed to the general emergence of
piracy in the contemporary era. First and most fundamentally, there
has been a massive increase in commercial maritime traﬃc. Combined
with the large number of ports around the world, this growth has pro-
vided pirates with an almost limitless range of tempting, high-payoﬀ
targets.

Second is the higher incidence of seaborne commercial traﬃc that

passes through narrow and congested maritime chokepoints. These
bottlenecks require ships to signiﬁcantly reduce speed to ensure safe
passage, which dramatically heightens their exposure to midsea inter-
ception and attack.

xii The Maritime Dimension of International Security

Third, and speciﬁcally relevant to Southeast Asia, has been the

lingering eﬀects of the Asian ﬁnancial crisis. Not only did this event
exert a stronger “pull factor” on piracy—with more people (including
members of the security forces) drawn to maritime and other crime—
it also deprived many littoral states of the necessary revenue to fund
eﬀective monitoring regimes over their coastlines.

Fourth, the general diﬃculties associated with maritime surveil-

lance have been signiﬁcantly heightened as a result of the events of Sep-
tember 11, 2001, and the concomitant pressure that has been exerted
on many governments to invest in expensive, land-based homeland
security initiatives.

Fifth, lax coastal and port-side security have played an important

role in enabling low-level piratical activity, especially harbor thefts of
goods from ships at anchor.

Sixth, corruption and emergent voids of judicial prerogative have

encouraged oﬃcial complicity in high-level pirate rings, which has
impacted directly on the “phantom ship” phenomenon.

Seventh, the global proliferation of small arms has provided pirates

(as well as terrorists and other criminal elements) with an enhanced
means to operate on a more destructive and sophisticated level.

The Dangers of Piracy

The dangers associated with contemporary piracy are complex and
multifaceted. At the most basic level, attacks constitute a direct threat
to the lives and welfare of the citizens of a variety of ﬂag states. Piracy
also has a direct economic impact in terms of fraud, stolen cargos, and
delayed trips, and could potentially undermine a maritime state’s trad-
ing ability.

Politically, piracy can play a pivotal role in undermining and

weakening regime legitimacy by encouraging corruption among
elected government oﬃcials. Finally, attacks have the potential to
trigger a major environmental disaster, particularly if they take place in
crowded sea-lanes traversed by heavily laden oil tankers.

The

phantom ship

phenomenon involves the outright hijacking of oceangoing vessels and

their reregistration under ﬂags of convenience for the purposes of illicit trade.

Summary xiii

Terrorism

Over the past six years, there has been a modest yet highly discern-
ible spike in high-proﬁle terrorist attacks and plots at sea. These vari-
ous incidents have galvanized fears in the West that terrorists, espe-
cially militants connected with the international jihadist network, are
moving to decisively extend operational mandates beyond purely ter-
ritorially bounded theaters.

Five main factors explain the presumed shift in extremist focus to

water-based environments. First, many of the vulnerabilities that have
encouraged a higher rate of pirate attacks also apply to terrorism.

Second, the growth of commercial enterprises specializing in

maritime sports and equipment has arguably provided terrorists with a
readily accessible conduit through which to gain the necessary training
and resources for operating at sea.

Third, maritime attacks oﬀer terrorists an alternate means of caus-

ing mass economic destabilization. Disrupting the mechanics of the
contemporary “just enough, just in time” cargo freight trading system
could potentially trigger vast and cascading ﬁscal eﬀects, especially if
the operations of a major commercial port were curtailed.

Fourth, sea-based terrorism constitutes a further means of inﬂict-

ing mass coercive punishment on enemy audiences. Cruise ships and
passenger ferries are especially relevant in this regard because they
cater to large numbers of people who are conﬁned in a single physical
space.

Finally, the expansive global container-shipping complex oﬀers

terrorists a viable logistical conduit for facilitating the covert move-
ment of weapons and personnel in two critical respects. First, because
much of the maritime trading system is designed to be as accessible
and ﬂexible as possible (to keep costs low and turnover high), there
is no strong incentive to enact a stringent (and disruptive) regime of
security measures. Second, the highly complex nature of the container-
ized supply chain, combined with the ineﬀectiveness of point-of-origin
inspections, creates a plethora of openings for terrorist inﬁltration by
providing extremists with numerous opportunities to “stuﬀ” or other-
wise tamper with boxed crates.

xiv The Maritime Dimension of International Security

A Terrorism–Piracy Nexus?

The presumed convergence between maritime terrorism and

piracy remains highly questionable, however. To date, there has been
no credible evidence to support speculation about such a nexus emerg-
ing. Just as importantly, the objectives of the two actors remain entirely
distinct.

That said, the possibility of a possible conﬂation between piracy

and terrorism has informed the perceptions of governments, interna-
tional organizations, and major shipping interests around the world.
There have been persistent reports of political extremists boarding ves-
sels in Southeast Asia in an apparent eﬀort to learn how to pilot them
for a rerun of 9/11 at sea. Indeed, such a specter was a principal factor in
driving the Lloyd’s Joint War Council to brieﬂy designate the Malacca
Straits as an area of enhanced risk in 2005.

Relevance to the United States

The United States has been at the forefront of several moves to upgrade
global maritime security over the last ﬁve years, including

the Container Security Initiative
the International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code
the Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI)
the Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism.

In addition to these measures, the United States has been instru-

mental in instituting regional maritime security initiatives and capacity
building in areas recognized as vital to U.S. counterterrorism strategy.

•
•
•
•

Summary xv

On the positive side, these initiatives have helped to lend a degree

of transparency to what has hitherto been a highly opaque theater. On
the negative side, these programs suﬀer from three critical shortfalls as
presently conﬁgured:

They are limited in scope.
They are largely directed at strengthening the security “wall”
around commercial seaborne traﬃc, paying scant attention to
contingencies that do not involve containerized cargo.
With particular reference to the ISPS Code, there is still no deﬁn-
itive means of eﬀectively auditing how well extant measures are
being implemented by participating states or, indeed, to gauge
their overall utility in terms of dock-side security.

Policy Recommendations

At the policy level, there are at least four major contributions that
the United States could make to better safeguard the global oceanic
environment, including the following: (1) helping to further expand
the nascent regime of post-9/11 maritime security; (2) informing the
parameters of bilateral and multilateral maritime security collabora-
tion by conducting regular and rigorous threat assessments; (3) assist-
ing with redeﬁning mandates of existing multilateral security and
defense arrangements to allow them to play a more eﬀective and inclu-
sive role in countering maritime (and other transnational) threats; and
(4) encouraging the commercial maritime industry to make greater use
of enabling communication and defensive technologies and accept a
greater degree of transparency in its corporate structures.

In more speciﬁc terms, U.S. funds and support could be usefully

directed at (1) boosting the coastal monitoring and interdiction capa-
bilities of states in areas of strategic maritime importance; (2) actively
supporting the International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting center
in Malaysia; (3) augmenting port security management; and (4) spon-
soring research into cost-eﬀective initiatives for better securing ships
and oceanic freight.

•
•

•

xix

Abbreviations

AER

area of enhanced risk

AFC

Asian ﬁnancial crisis

ATTF

Antiterrorism Task Force (Phillipines)

CBP

Coast Guard and Border Protection

CSI

Container Security Initiative

CTF-150

Combined Task Force-150

C-TPAT

Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism

DoD

Department of Defense

FoC

ﬂag of convenience

GAO

Government Accountability Oﬃce

GFS

Global Fleet Station

GPS

Global Positioning System

IDSS

Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies

IMB

International Maritime Bureau

ISPS

International Ship and Port Facility Security

Jemaah Islamyya

JWC

Joint War Council (Lloyd’s)

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the European communist
eastern bloc in 1991, it was conﬁdently assumed that the international
system was on the threshold of an era of unprecedented peace and sta-
bility. Politicians, academics, and diplomats alike increasingly began to
forecast the imminent establishment of a new world order that would be
managed by liberal democratic institutions and would develop within
the context of an integrated global economy based on the principles of
the free market.

As this unprecedented interstate structure emerged

and took root, destabilizing threats to national and international secu-
rity were expected to decline commensurately.

However, the initial euphoria evoked by the end of the Cold War

has been systematically replaced by a growing sense that global stabil-
ity has not been achieved, and has in fact been decisively undermined
by transnational security challenges, or “gray-area” phenomena. These
threats, which cannot be readily defeated by the traditional defenses
that states have erected to protect both their territories and populaces,
reﬂect the remarkable ﬂuidity that currently characterizes international
politics—a setting in which it is no longer exactly apparent who can
do what to whom with what means. Moreover, it has become increas-
ingly apparent in the contemporary era that violence and the readiness

See, for example, The International Monetary Fund,

World Economic Outlook

, Washing-

ton, D.C., 1991, pp. 26–27.

2 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

to kill are being used by the weak to create identity, rather than simply
express it.

Stated more directly, the geopolitical landscape that presently

confronts the global community lacks the relative stability of the linear
Cold War division between East and West. Indeed, many of today’s
dangers are qualitatively diﬀerent from classical security threats of
overt military aggression stemming from a clearly deﬁned sovereign
source. Rather, security, conﬂict, and general threat deﬁnition have
become far more opaque, diﬀuse, and amorphous.

The maritime realm is particularly conducive to these types of

threat contingencies because of its vast and largely unregulated nature.
Covering 139,768,200 square miles,

most of this environment takes

the form of high seas that lie beyond the strict jurisdiction of any one
state, constituting an area that is, by deﬁnition, anarchic. These “over
the horizon” oceans are fringed and linked by a complex lattice of ter-
ritorial waters, estuaries, and riverine systems. These bodies of water
are often poorly monitored and, according to internationally recog-
nized jurisprudence, exist as entirely distinct and independent entities.

Combined, these various traits and practices have imbued the planet’s
aquatic expanse with the type of unpredictable and lawless qualities
that Thomas Hobbes once famously wrote made life “nasty, brutish,
and short.”

Two speciﬁc threats that have been particularly highlighted are

piracy and maritime terrorism. This monograph assesses the nature,
scope, and dimensions of these two manifestations of armed violence
at sea, the extent to which they are or are not interrelated, and their
overall relevance to U.S. national and international security interests.

“Terrorism and the Warfare of the Weak,”

The Guardian

, October 27, 1993.

Peter Chalk,

Non-Military Security and Global Order: The Impact of Extremism

Violence

and Chaos on National and International Security

, London: Macmillan, 2000, pp. 1–2.

This equates to approximately 2.42 times the planet’s terrestrial surface area.

Rupert Herbert-Burns, “Terrorism in the Early 21st Century Maritime Domain,” in

Joshua Ho and Catherine Zara Raymond, eds.,

The Best of Times

the Worst of Times: Mari-

time Security in the Asia-Paciﬁc

, Singapore: World Scientiﬁc Publishing, 2005, p. 157.

Introduction 3

For the purposes of the analysis, the following two deﬁnitions will be
used:

Piracy

is an act of boarding or attempting to board any ship with

the apparent intent to commit theft or any other crime and with
the apparent intent or capability to use force in furtherance of
that act.

Maritime

terrorism

refers to the undertaking of terrorist acts

and activities (1) within the maritime environment, (2) using or
against vessels or ﬁxed platforms at sea or in port, or against any
one of their passengers or personnel, (3) against coastal facili-
ties or settlements, including tourist resorts, port areas and port
towns or cities.

This deﬁnition is the one used by the International Maritime Bureau (IMB). It is wider

than the conceptualization adopted under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law
of the Sea (UNCLOS), which restricts its focus only to attacks that take place on the high
seas (which is problematic, because the majority of piratical incidents occur in territorial
or coastal waters). The IMB deﬁnition also abolishes the traditional two-ship requirement,
meaning that attacks from a raft or even the dockside would be counted as an act of piracy.
See, for instance, Derek Johnson, Erika Pladdet, and Mark Valencia, “Research on Southeast
Asian Piracy,” in Derek Johnson and Mark Valencia, eds.,

Piracy in Southeast Asia

, Singa-

pore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2005, pp. xi–xii. Also see Commercial Crime
Services, “International Maritime Bureau—Overview,” Web page, 2007.

This deﬁnition is used by the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Paciﬁc Work-

ing Group on Maritime Terrorism. Although relatively broad, it captures the essential quali-
ties of the phenomenon in question. See Graham Ong, “Ships Can Be Dangerous Too: Cou-
pling Piracy and Terrorism in Southeast Asia’s Maritime Security Framework,” in Johnson
and Valencia (2005), pp. 61–62; Sophia Quentin, “Shipping Activities: Targets of Maritime
Terrorism,”

MIRMAL

, Vol. 2, January 20, 2003; and Metaparti Prakash, “Maritime Terror-

ism: Threats to Port and Container Security and Scope for Regional Co-operation,” paper
presented at the 12th Meeting of the Council for Security Cooperation in the Asia Paciﬁc
Working Group on Maritime Co-operation, Singapore, December 10–11, 2002, p. 1.

CHAPTER TWO

Piracy

Scope and Dimensions

Three main types of piracy currently occur in global waters. At the
low end are anchorage attacks mounted against ships at harbor. This
form of piracy has exploited the relatively relaxed security proce-
dures employed at many ports around the world. The IMB describes
these types of assault as low-level armed robbery: opportunist attacks
mounted close to land by small, high-speed craft crewed by maritime
“muggers” normally armed with knives. Their purpose is typically to
seize cash and portable high-value personal items with an average haul
of $5,000–15,000.

A more serious manifestation of piracy is the ransacking and rob-

bery of vessels on the high seas or in territorial waters. This style of
attack, if carried out in narrow sea-lanes, has the potential to seriously
disrupt maritime navigation (especially in instances where vessels run
amok because the crew is kidnapped, detained, or thrown overboard).
The IMB describes these assaults as medium-level armed robbery: vio-
lent thefts involving serious injury or murder by well-organized gangs

Chalk, 2000, p. 58; Edward Fursdon, “Sea Piracy—or Maritime Mugging?”

INTERSEC

Vol. 6, No. 5, May 1996, p. 166; Stanley Weeks, “Law and Order at Sea: Paciﬁc Cooperation
in Dealing with Piracy, Drugs and Illegal Migration,” in Sam Bateman and Stephen Bates,
eds.,

Calming the Waters: Initiatives for Asia-Paciﬁc Maritime Cooperation

, Canberra: Strate-

gic and Defence Studies Centre, 1996, p. 44.

6 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

who usually operate from a “mother ship” and are equipped with
modern weaponry.

At the high end of the spectrum are assaults involving the out-

right theft of ships and their subsequent conversion for the purposes of
illegal trading (although ship owners are also known to have arranged
such attacks in order to defraud hull insurers). Often referred to as the
“phantom ship” phenomenon, this form of piracy follows a typical pat-
tern. A vessel is ﬁrst seized and its cargo oﬄoaded into lighters at sea.
The ships are then renamed and reregistered under ﬂags of convenience
(FoCs)

and issued with false documentation to enable them to take on

fresh payloads. The new cargo, which is never delivered to its intended
destination, is taken to a designated port where it is sold to a buyer who
is often a willing participant in the venture. The IMB describes these
assaults as major criminal hijacks that are well-resourced and meticu-
lously planned, employing highly trained and heavily armed syndicates
working in conjunction with land-based operatives and brokers.

A total of 2,463 actual or attempted acts of piracy were regis-

tered around the world between 2000 and the end of 2006.

This rep-

resents an annual average incident rate of 352, a substantial increase
over the mean of 209 recorded for the period of 1994–1999 (see

Chalk, 2000,

pp. 58, 123; Fursdon, 1996, p. 66; Mark Valencia, “Piracy and Terrorism in

Southeast Asia: Similarities, Diﬀerences and Their Implications,” in Johnson and Valencia,
2005, pp. 80–81.

Ships are generally reregistered with shipping bureaus in Panama, Liberia, the Bahamas,

Malta, Cyprus, or Bermuda because their registration requirements are neither expensive nor
stringent. See, for example, Catherine Meldrum, “Murky Waters: Financing Maritime Ter-
rorism and Crime,”

Jane’s Intelligence Review

, June 2007, pp. 36–39.

Chalk, 2000, pp. 58, 62. For a good overview of the mechanics of the phantom ship

phenomenon, see Jayant Abyankar, “Phantom Ships,” in Eric Ellen, ed.,

Shipping at Risk

London: International Chamber of Commerce, 1997, pp. 58–75.

International Maritime Bureau,

Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships: Annual Report

2006

, London, 2007, p. 3; International Maritime Bureau,

Piracy and Armed Robbery Against

Ships: Annual Report 2005

, London, 2006, p. 4. It should be noted that this global ﬁgure

masks signiﬁcant regional variations in the annual incident rate of piracy during this period.
While some parts of the world were severely aﬀected (for example, Southeast Asia and the
seas oﬀ the Horn of Africa), others remained largely free of attacks (for example, North
America and Western Europe).

Piracy 7

Figure 2.1).

The actual problem of piracy in global waters is undoubt-

edly far greater than these ﬁgures suggest, since a number of attacks—
possibly as many as 50 percent—are not reported. Oﬃcials with the
IMB in Kuala Lumpur assert that most ship owners are reluctant to
alert authorities about attacks on their vessels, largely because subse-
quent investigations and delays result in costs that the ship compa-
nies themselves must bear.

Exacerbating this reluctance is the fear that

reporting incidents will merely raise maritime insurance premiums by
forcing owner-operators to acknowledge that they were not practic-
ing basic security measures (such as maintaining a regular antipiracy
watch).

The combined magnitude of losses associated with reporting

incidents would, in most cases, greatly outweigh those resulting from a
piracy attack; in instances of low-level theft, ransacking, and hostage-
taking, for example, costs tend to represent only two to ten percent of
the value of the targeted boat and its cargo.

While the overall lethality of piracy has dropped in recent years,

violence continues to be a principal characteristic of many assaults. In
the 515 attacks between 2005 and 2006, for instance, the IMB docu-
mented a total of 826 serious transgressions against ship crews and
passengers, including 628 hostage takings, 90 kidnappings for ransom
(KFR), and 54 deaths and injuries (see Table 2.1). The 440 hostage-
takings in 2005 remains the highest annual ﬁgure on record.

The concentration of pirate attacks continues to be greatest in

Southeast Asia, especially the waters around the Indonesian archi-

International Maritime Bureau, 2006,

p. 4.

According to analysts in Malaysia, the losses incurred by delays to onward journeys

(known as demurrage costs) hurt ship owners the most. These losses, which can reach
$20,000–30,000 per day, are especially severe in countries where police authorities lack eﬃ-
ciency or professionalism, both of which can result in investigations that take weeks or even
months to complete. Author interviews with maritime analysts and IMB oﬃcials, Kuala
Lumpur, August 26, 2006.

While maintaining a vigilant antipiracy watch is probably one of the best ways to preempt

a pirate attack, many ship owners do not do this because it entails hiring extra crew (which
would elevate overall operating costs and therefore reduce proﬁts).

Author interviews with IMB staﬀ and maritime analysts, Kuala Lumpur, August, 2006.

International Maritime Bureau, 2007,

p. 9.

8 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

pelago (including stretches of the Malacca Straits that fall under the
territorial jurisdiction of the Jakarta government), where roughly 21
percent of all global incidents during 2006 occurred. Other high-risk
zones included the coasts and territorial seas around Nigeria, Somalia,
the Gulf of Aden/Red Sea, Tanzania, Peru, Bangladesh, and Malaysia,
which, collectively, accounted for half of the year’s attacks (see Figure
2.2).

The high incidence of piracy in these areas reﬂects a range of

factors, including growing volumes of trade, insuﬃcient coastal/port
surveillance, corruption, a lack of adequate marine policing resources,
and ready access to weaponry.

Because these variables are directly rel-

evant to the general surge in piracy over the last ﬁfteen years, they are
discussed in more detail below.

International Maritime Bureau, 2007, p. 5.

Author interviews with IMB staﬀ, Kuala Lumpur, August 2006.

Figure 2.1
Actual and Attempted Acts of Piracy, 1994–2006

100

200

300

400

500

1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006

SOURCE: International Maritime Bureau, 2007.

RAND

MG697-2.1

ctual

and

tempte

y 9

Table 2.1
Types of Violence to Crew and Passengers, 1995–2006

Type

1995

1996

1997

1998

1999

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

Taken hostage

320

193

419

244

402

202

210

191

359

148

440

188

KFR

Threatened

119

Assaulted

Injured

Killed

Missing

Total for year

410

293

643

485

473

480

331

327

644

401

509

317

SOURCE: International Maritime Bureau, 2007

10 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

Factors Accounting for the Emergence of Piracy in the
Contemporary Era

Seven main factors have contributed to the emergence of piracy in
the contemporary era. First has been the massive increase in commer-
cial maritime traﬃc. Today, roughly 80 percent of all global freight is
transshipped by sea; 12 million to 15 million containers are estimated
to be on the world’s oceans at any one time. In 2002, this included
5.9 billion metric tons of oil and bulk commodities as well as gen-
eral cargo packed in containers.

Combined with the large number of

ports around the world—there are some 6,591 terminals currently in

Michael Richardson,

A Time Bomb for Global Trade

, Singapore: Institute of Southeast

Asian Studies, 2004, p. 3. See also Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Develop-
ment,

Security in Maritime Transport: Risk Factors and Economic Impact

, Paris, July 2003,

p. 3.

Figure 2.2
Pirate Incident Locations, 2006

SOURCE: International Maritime Bureau, 2007.

RAND

MG697-2.2

Indonesia

21%

Bangladesh

20%

Nigeria 5%

Malacca

Straits

Somalia

Malaysia 4%

Tanzania 4%

Peru 4%

Gulf of Aden/Red Sea

Rest of world

29%

Piracy 11

operation—this has provided pirates with an almost limitless range of
tempting, high-payoﬀ targets.

Second is the heavy use by seaborne commercial traﬃc of narrow

and congested maritime chokepoints near areas of endemic maritime
criminal or nonstate activity, such as the Malacca Straits, the Strait of
Bab el-Mandab, the Hormuz Straits, the Suez Canal, and the Panama
Canal. All of these bottlenecks require ships to signiﬁcantly reduce
speed to ensure safe passage (in the Bosphorus Straits, for instance,
at least six accidents occur every 1 million transit miles), which dra-
matically heightens their exposure to mid-sea interception and attack.
Exacerbating this vulnerability has been the growing tendency of
many shipping companies to replace full staﬃng complements with
skeleton crews—sometimes numbering no more than a half dozen
personnel—as a cost-cutting device. Although this has helped lower
operating costs, it has also made hijacking much easier.

Third, and speciﬁcally relevant to Southeast Asia, has been the

lingering eﬀects of the Asian ﬁnancial crisis (AFC) that ﬁrst broke with
the forced devaluation of the Thai baht in mid-1997. This unprece-
dented event exerted a stronger “pull factor” on piracy, drawing more
people (including members of national security forces) into maritime
and other crime due to falling wages, higher food prices, and job losses.
It also deprived many littoral states of the revenue required to fund
eﬀective monitoring over their coastlines.

These eﬀects were particu-

larly evident in Indonesia, an enormous archipelagic state that suﬀered
acutely from the aftermath of the AFC. Indeed, since 1997, this coun-

Herbert-Burns, 2005, p. 157; Joshua Sinai, “Future Trends in Worldwide Maritime Ter-

rorism,”

Connections: The Quarterly Journal

, Vol. 3, No. 1, March 2004, p. 49; and “Mari-

time Security Measures to Amplify Cost for Shipping,”

Transport Security World

, July 29,

2003.

Author interviews with government oﬃcials, intelligence analysts, and maritime security

experts, Singapore, London, and Amsterdam, September 2005. See also Ali Koknar, “Mari-
time Terrorism: A New Challenge for NATO,”

Energy Security

, January 24, 2005.

Chalk, 2000, p. 61.

12 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

try’s territorial waters have consistently ranked as the most pirate-prone
in the world.

Fourth, the general diﬃculties associated with maritime surveil-

lance have been signiﬁcantly heightened as a result of the events of Sep-
tember 11, 2001 and the concomitant pressure that has been exerted on
many governments to invest in expensive land-based homeland security
systems. In the case of governments that have consistently struggled to
secure their sovereign waters (e.g., the Philippines, Indonesia, Turkey,
Eritrea, and Kenya), these external demands have negatively aﬀected
already limited resources designated for underwriting oﬀshore moni-
toring systems.

Policy analysts contend that the resultant void has

been of particular beneﬁt to pirate syndicates, providing them with an
operational environment that is now highly conducive to their tactical
and material designs.

Fifth, lax coastal and port-side security have played an important

role in enabling low-level piratical activity, especially harbor thefts of
goods from ships at anchor. This problem has been especially acute
at terminals in Nigeria, oﬀ the Horn of Africa, and across South and
Southeast Asia. In many cases, there is either no functioning mari-
time police presence at all, or the units that are in place lack adequate
staﬀ, boats, equipment, and training. The IMB remains particularly
concerned about the level of lawlessness in Somali waters (which cur-
rently rank as the most dangerous part of the world in terms of pirate
violence) to the extent that it has declared all stretches within 50 miles

Indonesia controls roughly three million square kilometers of archipelagic waters and

territorial seas, plus an additional three million square kilometers of continental shelf. It has
been estimated that Jakarta would require more than 300 vessels to eﬀectively protect and
monitor this expansive maritime space (as well as human resources and technology dedicated
to that purpose). However, the country has only 115 vessels at its disposal, of which only 25
are ﬁt for operating at sea at any one time. Author interviews with IMB staﬀ, Kuala Lumpur,
August 2006. See also Hasjim Djalal, “Combating Piracy: Co-operation, Needs, Eﬀorts and
Challenges,” in Johnson and Valencia, 2005, p. 145.

Author interviews with intelligence oﬃcials and maritime security analysts, Singapore

and London, September 2005.

Author interviews with maritime analysts, intelligence oﬃcials. and security experts,

Washington, D.C., Singapore, London, and Amsterdam, August–September 2005.

Piracy 13

of the shore as an eﬀective no-go area for maritime traﬃc.

The lack

of concerted port security in Bangladesh has also caused considerable
consternation, prompting several major international shipping orga-
nizations to take up the issue directly with government authorities on
a number of occasions.

Although the country has pledged to rectify

the situation, a signiﬁcant reduction in attacks has yet to occur. In
2003, for instance, Bangladesh recorded its highest annual piracy ﬁg-
ures (58 incidents) since 1992. Although numbers for 2004 dropped to
17, 2005 saw a 25 percent increase by the year’s end.

Sixth, corruption and dysfunctional systems of national criminal

justice have encouraged oﬃcial complicity in high-level pirate rings,
which has directly aﬀected the phantom ship phenomenon. According
to the IMB, in the Philippines, Indonesia, China and Thailand—all
states where syndicates enjoy direct or at least partial access to co-opted
or bribed members of the administration and bureaucracy—ships can
be hijacked “to order” for approximately $300,000.

These insiders

not only provide invaluable information about activities taking place
in the maritime commercial market, they also ensure that gangs are
kept abreast of actions that industry or law enforcement are taking to
counter their activities.

Finally, the global proliferation of small arms has provided pirates

(as well as terrorists and other criminal elements) with enhanced means
to operate on a more destructive and sophisticated level.

The vari-

Author interviews with IMB staﬀ, Kuala Lumpur, August 2006. See also International

Maritime Bureau,

Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships: Report for the Period 1 January—

30 September 2005

, London, November 8, 2005, p. 23.

International Maritime Bureau,

Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships: Report for the

Period 1 January–30 June 2006

, p. 20; Chalk, 2000, p. 74. Similar concerns about the

security at Bangladeshi ports were expressed to the author during interviews with security
analysts in Bangkok, September 2006.

International Maritime Bureau, 2006, p. 5.

See Abyankar, 1997, pp. 69–70.

Overviews of the dynamics of the contemporary light arms trade can be found in Aaron

Karp, “Small Arms—The New Major Weapons,” in Jeﬀrey Boutwell and Michael T. Klare,
eds.,

Lethal Commerce: The Global Trade in Small Arms and Light Weapons

, Cambridge,

Mass.: American Academy of Sciences, 1995; Michael T. Klare, “An Avalanche of Guns:

14 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

ety of weaponry currently available on global black markets is truly
enormous. Originating from sources in Africa, Asia, and Europe, it
includes anything from pistols, light/heavy machine guns, and auto-
matic assault riﬂes to antiship mines, handheld mortars, and rocket-
propelled grenades (RPGs).

Most commentators agree that ready

access to these munitions—most of which are readily transportable,
easy to handle, cheap, and durable—is one of the main factors contrib-
uting to the growing level of violence that has come to typify piracy
in recent years. As the current director of the IMB’s oﬃce in Kuala
Lumpur, Noel Choong, remarks: “Five to six years ago, when pirates
attacked, they used machetes, knives, and pistols. Today, they come
equipped with AK-47s, M-16s, riﬂe grenades, and RPGs.”

The Dangers of Piracy

The dangers associated with contemporary piracy are complex and
multifaceted, having direct implications for human, political, eco-
nomic, and environmental security. At the most basic level, attacks
constitute a direct threat to the lives and welfare of the citizens of a
variety of ﬂag states. As noted above, strikes are frequently violent and
can be expected to involve casualties. Disturbingly, there has been a
marked rise in physical assaults, with the 440 hostage takings in 2005

Light Weapons Traﬃcking and Armed Conﬂict in the Post-Cold War Era,” in Mary Kaldor
and Basker Vashee, eds.,

New Wars: Restructuring the Global Military Sector

, London: Pinter,

1997; Andrew Latham, “The Light Weapons Problem: Causes, Consequences and Policy
Options,” in Andrew Latham, ed.,

Multilateral Approaches to Non-Proliferation: Proceedings

of the 4

Canadian Non-Proliferation Workshop

, Toronto: Centre for International and Secu-

rity Studies, 1996; Anthony Davis, “Tracing the Dynamics of the Illicit Arms Trade,”

Jane’s

Intelligence Review

, September 2003; Paul Eavis, “Awash with Light Weapons,”

The World

Today

, April 1999; Chris Smith, “Light Weapons Proliferation: A Global Survey,”

Jane’s

Intelligence Review

, July 1999; and Klare, “The Kalashnikov Age,”

Bulletin of the Atomic Sci-

entists

, Vol. 55, No. 1, January/February 1999.

Chalk, 2000, pp. 65–66.

Author interviews with IMB staﬀ, Kuala Lumpur, August 2006. See also P. Mukundan,

“The Scourge of Piracy in Southeast Asia: Can Any Improvements be Expected in the Near
Future?” in Johnson and Valencia, 2005, p. 39.

Piracy 15

remaining the highest ﬁgure on record. Although the overall number of
these incidents dropped in 2006, they were still signiﬁcant at a total of
188.

As one senior member of the United Kingdom’s National Union

of Maritime, Aviation and Shipping Transport Oﬃcers (NUMAST)
remarks: “The necessities of normal diplomacy should not obscure the
fact that British nationals are being threatened with extreme violence.
The present intolerable situation should be approached by the UK gov-
ernment just as ﬁrmly as if British tourists were being attacked whilst
[taking a holiday] in a [foreign] country.”

Quite apart from the risk of death and physical injury, many sea-

farers who have been subjected to a pirate attack have suﬀered consid-
erable mental trauma. Many of those who do not fully recover never
go to sea again. Despite this, the human cost involved in modern-day
piracy is seldom recognized, largely because assaults tend to be directed
against “less than visible” targets. Again, NUMAST remarks: “If you
had civilian aircraft being threatened or bazookas being ﬁred at train
drivers, there would be a public outcry. Because it is shipping, it’s out
of sight, out of mind, and nothing is done.”

Piracy also has a direct economic impact in terms of fraud, stolen

cargos, delayed trips, and higher insurance premiums. In addition, it
could potentially undermine a maritime state’s trading ability.

As pre-

viously noted, ship owners are often required to pay their own legal
expenses for postattack investigations, and they always have to bear the
costs of cancelled or interrupted onward journeys. The costs of major
criminal hijackings can be particularly exorbitant; on a number of
occasions, consignees have had to shoulder the entire loss from phan-

International Maritime Bureau, 2007, p. 9.

NUMAST Telegraph

, Vol. 25, No. 7, Piracy Supplement, July 1992, p. i.

Captain Graeme Hicks, secretary of NUMAST, as cited in “For Those in Peril on the

Sea,”

The Economist

, August 9, 1997.

It should be noted that no systematic study of the overall cost of piracy has ever been

undertaken, particularly in relation to expenses incurred as a result of suppression. More-
over, the impunity of many attacks makes accurate records of losses diﬃcult to gather, while
analysts only infrequently disclose the contents of any given calculation. See Martin Murphy,

Contemporary Piracy and Maritime Terrorism: The Threat to International Security

, London:

International Institute for Strategic Studies, Adelphi Paper 338, 2007, p. 19.

16 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

tom ship frauds.

Moreover, a reputation for piracy has the potential

to damage the international standing of a trading country and could
lead to a boycott of its port facilities. This became a major concern for
Hong Kong in the mid-1990s, when many shipping companies threat-
ened to boycott the territory’s port facilities as a result of the frequency
of attacks in what had become known as the Hainan–Luzon–Hong
Kong terror triangle.

More recently, similar problems have beset ter-

minals in Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia, and the Horn of Africa.

Overall, the IMB estimates that piracy costs the shipping industry
anywhere from $1 billion to $16 billion a year.

Although this ﬁgure

might appear unacceptable, it is generally viewed as an inevitable cost
of doing business that, when measured against the annual value of
maritime commerce—which in 2005 totalled $7.8 trillion

—is not,

in fact, prohibitively onerous.

Politically, piracy can play a pivotal role in undermining and

weakening regime legitimacy by encouraging corruption among elected
government oﬃcials. This has been a recurrent problem in Indonesia,
where numerous shipping associations and maritime bodies decry the
complicity of government oﬃcials and members of the security forces

One noteworthy case concerned the 1995 seizure of the

Anna Sierra

, which, when even-

tually discovered at the port of Bei Hei, was registered under the name

Arctic Sea

. By the

time the vessel was released, losses from cargo theft, the imposition of a “ﬁnder’s fee” by
Chinese authorities, and post-incident investigations had run into the millions of U.S. dol-
lars. All costs were ultimately borne by the ship’s rightful owners. See International Mari-
time Bureau,

Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships: Special Report

, London: International

Chamber of Commerce, 1997, pp. 33–39.

See, for instance, Robert Beckman, Carl Grundy-Warr, and Vivian Forbes, “Acts of Piracy

in the Malacca Straits,”

Maritime Brieﬁng

, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1994; Kazuo Takita and Bob Cout-

tie, “ASEAN Pressured to Act Against Pirates,”

Lloyds List

, May 29, 1992, p. 3; and Michael

Pugh, “Piracy and Armed Robbery at Sea: Problems and Remedies,”

Low Intensity Conﬂict

and Law Enforcement

, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1993, p. 11.

Author interviews with IMB staﬀ, Kuala Lumpur, August 2006.

See, for example, Joshua Ho, “Security of Sea-Lanes in Southeast Asia,” unpublished

paper, Indian Observer Research Foundation, Workshop on Maritime Counterterrorism,
New Delhi, November 29–30, 2004.

Murphy, 2007,

p. 21; World Trade Organization,

International Trade Statistics 2006

Table 1.3, November 2006, p. 15.

Piracy 17

who participate in, arrange, or otherwise facilitate both low- and high-
end attacks.

Although Jakarta has pledged to crack down on mani-

festations of state complicity in piracy, it lacks the resources to do so on
a comprehensive basis.

Attacks also have the potential to trigger a major environmental

disaster, particularly if they take place in crowded sea-lanes traversed
by heavily laden oil tankers. The nightmare scenario is a major crash
taking place between an unmanned rogue vessel and an oil tanker.
The resulting discharge of petroleum would cause irreparable damage
to maritime life and other oﬀshore resources. If left to drift, the slick
could also seriously degrade large tracts of fertile coastal lowland, which
could seriously aﬀect any state that relies on the ocean as a primary
source of protein for domestic consumption or regional export.

In the

opinion of the IMB, it is only a matter of time before pirates trigger an
environmental disaster of this sort.

Author interviews with IMB staﬀ and maritime analysts, Kuala Lumpur, August 2006.

See, for example, Greg Chaikin, “Piracy in Asia: International Co-operation and Japan’s

Role,” in Johnson and Valencia (2005), p. 127; and Abyankar, “Piracy and Ship Robbery: A
Growing Menace,” in Hamzah Ahmad and Akira Ogawa, eds.,

Combating Piracy and Ship

Robbery

, Tokyo: Okazaki Institute, 2001.

Valencia, “Piracy and Politics in Southeast Asia,” in Johnson and Valencia, 2005, p. 114.

CHAPTER THREE

Maritime Terrorism

Historically, the world’s oceans have not been a major locus of terrorist
activity. Indeed, according to the RAND Terrorism Database, strikes
on maritime targets and assets have constituted only two percent of
all international incidents over the last 30 years. To be sure, part of
the reason for this relative paucity has to do with the fact that many
terrorist organizations have neither been located near coastal regions
nor possessed the means to extend their physical reach beyond purely
local theaters. There are also several problems associated with carry-
ing out waterborne strikes which have, at least historically, helped to
oﬀset some of the tactical advantages associated with esoteric maritime
environments outlined in Chapter Two. Most intrinsically, operating
at sea requires terrorists to have mariner skills, access to appropriate
assault and transport vehicles, the ability to mount and sustain opera-
tions from a non-land–based environment, and certain specialist capa-
bilities (for example, surface and underwater demolition techniques).

Limited resources have traditionally prevented groups from accessing
these options.

Very much related to this is the fact that terrorists are inherently

conservative when it comes to choosing attack modalities. Precisely
because they are constrained by ceilings in operational ﬁnance and

Author interviews with Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies (IDSS) staﬀ, Singapore,

September 2005. See also Paul Wilkinson, “Terrorism and the Maritime Environment” and
Brian Jenkins, Bonnie Cordes, Karen Gardela, and Geraldine Petty, “A Chronology of Ter-
rorist Attacks and Other Criminal Actions Against Maritime Targets,” both in Eric Ellen,
ed.,

Violence at Sea

, Paris: International Chamber of Commerce, 1986.

20 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

skill sets, most groups have chosen to follow the path of least resistance.
They adhere to the tried and tested methods that are known to work,
that oﬀer reasonably high chances of success, and whose consequences
can be relatively easily predicted. Stated more directly, in a world of
ﬁnite human and material assets, the costs and unpredictability associ-
ated with expanding to the maritime realm have typically trumped any
potential beneﬁts that might be garnered from initiating such a change
in operational direction.

A further consideration has to do with the nature of maritime tar-

gets themselves: Because they are out of sight, they are generally out of
mind (this is particularly true of commercial vessels). Thus, an attack
on a ship is less likely to elicit the same publicity—either in scope
or immediacy—as a strike on land-based targets, which, because they
are ﬁxed and typically located near urban areas, are far more media-
accessible (although, as argued below, this point may not apply with
respect to contingencies involving heavily-laden cruise liners and fer-
ries).

This consideration is important because terrorism, at root, is a

tactic that can only be eﬀective if it is able to

visibly

demonstrate its

salience and relevance through the propaganda of the deed.

Rather

like the philosopher’s tree silently falling in the forest, if no one observes
the event, does it have any reason for being?

In spite of these considerations, there has been a modest yet highly

discernible spike in high-proﬁle terrorist incidents at sea over the past
six years, the more notable of which are described in the appendix
to this monograph. In addition, there has been a spate of signiﬁcant
maritime terrorist plots that have been preempted before execution.
These planned strikes, most of which have been directly connected to
al Qaeda and its aﬃliates,

included an aborted attack against the USS

Wilkinson, 1986, p. 34; Jenkins et al., 1986, p. 65.

For a discussion on this aspect of the terrorist phenomenon, see Peter Chalk,

West Euro-

pean Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism: The Evolving Dynamic

, London: Macmillan, 1996,

Chapter One.

Most of al Qaeda’s planned maritime attacks were the brainchild of Abdel Rahim al-

Nashiri (colloquially known as Ameer al Bahr, or “Prince of the Seas”). Arrested in 2003, he
admitted to being the mastermind behind the bombings of the USS

Cole

and M/V

Limburg

as well as the chief architect of al Qaeda’s maritime terror agenda. His strategy involved four

Maritime Terrorism 21

The Sullivans

in January 2000,

additional bombings of U.S. naval

ships sailing in Singaporean, Malaysian, and Indonesian waters, sui-
cide strikes against Western shipping interests in the Mediterranean,
small boat rammings of supertankers transiting the Straits of Gibraltar,
and attacks on cruise liners carrying Israeli tourists to Turkey.

Combined, these various incidents have galvanized fears in the

West that terrorists, especially militants connected with the interna-
tional jihadist network, are moving to decisively extend operational
mandates beyond purely land-based theaters. These concerns have been
particularly evident in the United States, which has been at the fore-
front of attempts to strengthen the global maritime security regime in
the post-9/11 era.

Five main factors seem salient in rationalizing the presumed

shift in extremist focus to water-based environments. First, many of
the vulnerabilities that have encouraged a higher rate of pirate attacks
also apply to terrorism, including inadequate coastal surveillance, lax
port security, a profusion of targets, the overwhelming dependence of
maritime trade on passage through congested chokepoints (where ves-
sels are exposed to attacks), and an increased tendency to staﬀ vessels
with skeleton crews. Because these gaps and weaknesses persist at a
time when littoral states are devoting more resources to land-based

main components: ramming ships with explosive-laden Zodiacs as a ramming device (i.e.,
the same sort of attack that was used against the

Cole

and

Limburg

); detonating medium-

sized vessels and trawlers near warships, cruise liners, or ports; crashing planes into large car-
riers such as supertankers; and employing suicide divers or underwater demolition teams to
destroy surface platforms. See Eric Watkins, “Security—Al’Qa’eda Suspect Admits Role in
Limburg,”

Lloyd’s List

, January 21, 2003; Valencia, 2005a, p. 83; and “Al Qaeda Has Multi-

Faceted Marine Strategy,” Agence France Press, January 20, 2003.

The aborted strike on

The

Sullivans

was carried out as part of the 2000 millennium terror-

ist plots. The plan called for the detonation of a small suicide boat as it pulled alongside the
U.S. vessel. The attack craft was so overloaded with explosives, however, that it sank, causing
the operation to be called oﬀ.

Bronson Percival,

Indonesia and the United States: Shared Interests in Maritime Security

Washington, D.C.: United States-Indonesia Society, June 2005, p. 9; Richardson, 2004,
p. 19; Ong, 2005, p. 51; Murad Sezer, “Turkish Court Charges Suspected al-Qaeda Mil-
itant,” Associated Press, August 10, 2005; and “Security Fears Keep Israeli Ships from
Turkey,”

The New York Times

, August 9, 2005.

22 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

security structures (as discussed above), they are amplifying—in rela-
tive terms—the attractive qualities of what is already a highly opaque
operational setting. In other words, these gaps and weaknesses provide
extremists with an opportunity to move, hide, and strike in a manner
that is not possible in a terrestrial theater.

Second, the growth of commercial enterprises specializing in

maritime sports and equipment has arguably provided terrorists with
a readily accessible conduit through which to avail themselves of the
necessary training and resources for operating at sea.

In the south-

ern Philippines, for example, members of the Indonesian-based

Jemaah

Islamyya

(JI) network are known to have enrolled in scuba courses run

by commercial or resort diving companies. Members of the local secu-
rity forces widely believe that the main purpose for taking these lessons
has been to facilitate underwater attacks against gas and oil pipelines
oﬀ the coast of Mindanao.

Third, maritime attacks oﬀer terrorists an additional means of

causing economic destabilization. One common scenario expressed by
analysts and government oﬃcials is an attack designed to shut down a
port or block a critical sea-lane of communication (SLOC) in order to
disrupt the mechanics of the “just in time, just enough” global mari-
time trade complex.

Indicative of this line of thinking is the follow-

ing commentary made by Michael Richardson, a senior analyst with
the Institute of Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore:

The global economy is built on integrated supply chains that
feed components and other materials to users just before they

Author interviews with maritime analysts and intelligence oﬃcials, Washington, D.C.,

Singapore, London, and Amsterdam, August–September 2005.

See, for instance, Jenkins et al., 1986, p. 67.

Author interviews with intelligence and law enforcement personnel, Manila, May 2005

and Singapore, September 2005. What appears to have particularly attracted the attention of
regional authorities is that the alleged JI members actively sought training in deep-sea water
diving but exhibited little or no interest in decompression techniques.

Author interviews with Control Risks Group and Lloyd’s, London and Amsterdam, Sep-

tember 2005. See also Catherine Zara Raymond, “Maritime Terrorism, A Risk Assessment:
The Australian Example,” in Ho and Raymond, 2005, p. 179.

Maritime Terrorism 23

are required and just in the right amounts. That way, inventory
costs are kept low. [However, because these supply chains have no
excess capacity,] if they are disrupted, it will have repercussions
around the world, profoundly aﬀecting business conﬁdence.

Although it is true that very little redundancy (in the form of

surplus supply) is built into the contemporary international trading
system, it would be extremely diﬃcult to decisively disrupt its opera-
tion through a campaign of terrorism. Major ports such as Rotterdam,
Vancouver, Singapore, New York, and Los Angeles are both expan-
sive and highly secure, making them extremely diﬃcult to fully close
down. Even if an attack did result in the wholesale suspension of all
loading/oﬄoading functions, ships could be fairly easily diverted (albeit
at a cost) to alternative terminals, thus ensuring the continued integ-
rity of the inter-modal transportation network. Successfully blocking
a SLOC to all through traﬃc would be similarly diﬃcult, not least
because it would require a group to scuttle several large vessels at the
same time—a formidable and technically demanding undertaking.

Moreover, very few maritime choke points are truly nonsubstitutable
for ocean-bound freight. Bypassing the Malacca Straits in Southeast
Asia (one of the world’s busiest maritime corridors), for instance, would
require only an extra three days of steaming, and other than oil and
certain perishable goods, most commodities would not be unduly
aﬀected by short delays in delivery.

While long-term or widespread disruption to the global econ-

omy is unlikely, it is certainly possible that temporary, localized ﬁscal
damage could result from an act of terrorism. The suicide strike on the
M/V

Limburg

in 2002 is a case in point. Although the incident only

Richardson, 2004, p. 7.

Sinking any sizeable vessel with a high waterline would require the perpetrating group to

have access to a large quantity of explosives, the time and means to transport this material,
and the expertise to know where to place bombs to cause a critical hull breach. Overcoming
these logistical and knowledge barriers would be very diﬃcult for a single attack, much less
an assault that targeted two or three ships.

Author interviews with maritime experts and intelligence analysts, Singapore, London,

and Amsterdam, September 2005.

24 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

resulted in three deaths (including the two bombers), it directly con-
tributed to a short-term collapse of international shipping business in
the Gulf, led to a 48 cent per barrel hike in the price of Brent crude oil,
and due to the tripling of war risks premiums levied on ships calling at
Aden, resulted in a 93-percent drop in container terminal throughput
that cost the Yemeni economy an estimated $3.8 million a month in
port revenues.

It is also worth bearing in mind that maritime terrorism, to the

extent that it does have at least a residual disruptive economic poten-
tial, resonates with the underlying operational and ideological rationale
of al Qaeda and the wider global jihadist “nebula.” Indeed, attacking
key pillars of the Western commercial, trading, and energy system is
a theme that, at least rhetorically, has become increasingly prominent
in the years since 9/11, and that is viewed as integral to the Islamist
war on the United States and its major allies. Portraying the attacks
on the World Trade Center and Pentagon as a single deﬁning point in
exposing the fallacy of American (ﬁnancial) power,

Bin Laden and

his chief “lieutenant,” Ayman al-Zawahiri, have both squarely put the
thrust of their continuing campaign against Washington in the con-
text of economic war.

This was made explicitly apparent in a video

See Ben Sheppard, “Maritime Security Measures,”

Jane’s Intelligence Review

, March 2003,

p. 55; Richardson, 2004, p. 70; Herbert-Burns, 2005, p. 165; Valencia, 2005b, p. 84; and
Vivian Ho, “No Let Down in Global Pirate Attacks by Pirates,” Kyodo News Service, July
24, 2003.

For more on the ﬁnancial fallout of the 9/11 attacks, see Lloyd Dixon and Robert T.

Reville, “National Security and Compensation Policy for Terrorism Losses,” in

Catastrophic

Risks and Insurance: Policy Issues in Insurance

, Paris: Organization for Economic Co-opera-

tion and Development, 2006; Lloyd Dixon and Rachel Kaganoﬀ Stern,

Compensation for

Losses from the 9/11 Attacks

, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-264-ICJ, 2004;

and Peter Chalk, Bruce Hoﬀman, Robert T. Reville, and Anna-Britt Kasupski,

Trends in

Terrorism: Threats to the United States and the Future of the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act

, Santa

Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-393-CTRMP, 2005.

In 2004, Bin Laden speciﬁcally referred to a “bleed to bankruptcy strategy” aimed at

inﬂicting an unsustainable cost burden on the United States and its allies. It is unclear
whether the intent to cause economic disruption is more rhetorical than substantive in
nature. For additional details concerning al Qaeda’s presumed emphasis on (asymmetric)
economic targeting, see Matthew Hunt, “Bleed to Bankruptcy,”

Jane’s Intelligence Review

January 2007, pp. 14–17.

Maritime Terrorism 25

statement released by the al Qaeda emir in December 2004, when he
reﬂected on a guerrilla conﬂict in Afghanistan that had “bled Russia
for ten years until it went bankrupt,” aﬃrming that al Qaeda is “con-
tinuing in the same policy to make the US bleed profusely to the point
of bankruptcy.”

Fourth, sea-based terrorism constitutes a viable means of inﬂict-

ing “mass coercive punishment” on enemy audiences. Cruise ships and
passenger ferries are especially relevant in this regard, largely because
they cater to large numbers of people who are conﬁned in a single
physical space

(which, like aircraft, makes them ideal venues for car-

rying out assaults aimed at maximizing civilian casualties), sail accord-
ing to set and publicly available schedules (which provides transpar-
ency in preattack planning), are characterized by variable standards
of dock-side security (something that is particularly true of ferries),

remain vulnerable to post-departure interception (at least compared to
civil aviation), and, in the case of passenger ferries, have certain design
features that make them susceptible to cataclysmic assault (vehicle fer-
ries, for instance, are notoriously easy to capsize because they lack sta-
bilizing bulkheads on their lower car/truck decks).

Moreover, because

Bin Laden, as cited in Hunt, 2007, p. 16; Douglas Jehl and David Johnston, “In Video

Message, bin Laden Issues Warning to U.S.”

New York Times

, October 30, 2004.

This is especially true of ferries in the developing world, which often operate at full or

more than full capacity.

While the absence of dock-side security is most acute in resource-depleted developing lit-

toral states, questions have also been raised with respect to advanced maritime states. In the
United States, for instance, relative spending on port security has been criticized as wholly
insuﬃcient to contemporary needs. Various audits carried out at the federal level have shown
that while Washington has invested upwards of $18 billion in safeguarding the nation’s air-
ports from terrorist attack, only $630 million has been allocated for augmenting security at
major maritime terminals. See Robert Block, “Security Gaps Already Plague Ports,”

The Wall

Street Journal

, February 23, 2006.

Interviews with maritime security analysts and intelligence oﬃcials, Singapore, London,

and Amsterdam, September 2005. For an in-depth discussion of the vulnerabilities of pas-
senger shipping and their relative vulnerability to terrorist attack, see Michael Greenberg,
Peter Chalk, Henry Willis, Ivan Khilko, and David Ortiz,

Maritime Terrorism: Risk and

Liability

, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, MG-520-CTRMP 2006, Chapters

Five and Six.

26 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

cruise ships cater to rich, middle-class American and European tour-
ists, these vessels provide the type of high-prestige, iconic target that
would likely resonate with extremist Islamist intent

and elicit consid-

erable media attention if decisively struck.

The bombing of the

SuperFerry 14

in the Philippines graphically

underscores how easily mass casualties could result from a concerted
attack against passenger shipping. The operation, which left more
than 116 people dead, involved a total planning cycle of only a couple
months, was executed with a very crude improvised explosive device—
16 sticks of dynamite secreted in a hollowed-out television set—and
cost no more than PS19,000 (approximately $400) to pull oﬀ. As one
senior oﬃcial with the Philippine Anti-Terrorism Task Force (ATTF)
remarked, the incident demonstrated the acute vulnerability of ferries to
sabotage—one that could realistically spark copycat strikes by groups
intent on maximizing civilian damage with minimal expenditure.

Finally, the expansive global container-shipping complex oﬀers

terrorists a logistical channel that favors the covert movement of weap-
ons and personnel. Most commentators generally agree that terrorist
contingencies involving this class of vessel are more likely to involve
exploitation of the cargo supply chain than attacks directed against
carriers themselves. Merchant craft are not only large, they also have a
high waterline, which means that a considerable quantity of explosives
would be needed to cause a critical breach. Even if suﬃcient quanti-

The fact that cruise ships cater to a mostly American and European customer base may

also mean that attacks against these vessels carry relatively little risk of negatively aﬀecting
wider Arab/Asian Islamic interests. This is not necessarily the case with land-based venues, as
bombings of Western embassies in Kenya and Tanzania (1998), tourist resorts in Bali (2002
and 2005), and hotels in Jakarta and Amman (2003 and 2005 respectively)—all of which
resulted in high casualty rates for local Muslims—clearly demonstrated.

Indeed, as the November 2005 assault against the

Seaborne Spirit

oﬀ the Horn of Africa

demonstrates, even comparatively small-scale events have the potential to elicit consider-
able international media attention and interest. The liner, which was en route from Egypt
to Mombassa with 302 passengers and crew, was strafed with machine gun ﬁre and RPGs
while sailing 70 nautical miles oﬀ the Somali coast. Although no one was seriously hurt in
the attack, the incident caught the headlines of major newspapers around the world, many of
which speciﬁcally focused on the fact that the vessel was carrying mostly Western tourists.

Author interview with ATTF, Manila, November 2005.

Maritime Terrorism 27

ties could be smuggled aboard hidden in a container, there would be
no way of ensuring that the targeted crate would be loaded and placed
in a position that could allow a bomb to be detonated with maximum
eﬀect.

By contrast, leveraging container carriers for logistical purposes

is not only viable, but also relatively easy. This is largely because the
international trading system is deliberately designed to be as open and
accessible as possible (to keep costs low and turnover high), which nec-
essarily means minimizing the disruptive impact of any security mea-
sures thereby instituted. Reﬂecting this, only two to ﬁve percent of
containers shipped around the world are physically inspected at their
port of arrival.

Simply put, the statistical probability of successfully

smuggling a weapon or bomb is much greater than the probability of
intercepting one.

Just as importantly, the highly complex nature of the container-

ized supply chain creates a plethora of openings for terrorist inﬁltra-
tion. Unlike other cargo vessels that typically handle payloads for a
single customer loaded at port, container ships deal with commodi-
ties from hundreds of companies and individuals that, in most cases,

It should also be noted that there would be little immediate impact associated with sink-

ing a commercial carrier, either in terms of attracting mass-media attention or eliciting
public concern (let alone terror) by triggering major economic externalities.

John Fritelli,

Port and Maritime Security: Background and Issues for Congress

, Washington,

D.C.: Congressional Research Service, December 30, 2004, p. 4; Raymond, 2005, p. 187.

It should be noted that certain commentators believe that the heightened focus on con-

tainerized shipping will, by default, cause terrorists and criminals to opt for other, more
secure maritime smuggling and weapon delivery methods. Options that have been high-
lighted include welding arms cases and/or bombs to a vessel’s hull (mimicking methods that
are known to have been used by drug cartels to smuggle narcotics) and traﬃcking weapons
in craft that are unlikely to draw suspicion (such as ﬁshing trawlers). Another scenario is
the disbursement of consignments via a piggy-backed “two-ship” ejection approach, which
essentially involves dispatching a weapons-laden speedboat below the waterline from the
submersed stern of a tug. According to security oﬃcials, as long as the vessel carrying the
munitions has been properly sealed, it would ﬂoat to the surface without damage. Author
interviews with security analysts, Bangkok, September 2006.

28 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

are received and transported from inland warehouses.

Each point of

transfer along this spectrum of movement is a potential source of vul-
nerability for the overall integrity of the cargo and provides extrem-
ists with numerous opportunities to “stuﬀ” or otherwise tamper with
boxed crates.

Compounding the situation is the highly rudimentary

nature of the locks that are used to seal containers, the bulk of which
consist of little more than plastic ties or bolts that can be quickly cut
and then reattached using a combination of superglue and heat.

Underscoring all of these considerations is the ineﬀectiveness of

point of origin inspections. Many littoral states fail to routinely vet
dock workers,

do not require that truck drivers present valid iden-

tiﬁcation before entering an oﬄoading facility,

and frequently over-

For even a standard consignment, numerous parties and agents would be involved,

including the exporter, the importer, the freight forwarder, a customs broker, excise inspec-
tors, commercial trucking/railroad ﬁrms, dock workers, possibly harbor feeder craft, and the
ocean carrier itself.

Fritelli, 2004, p. 9.

Author interviews with Department of Homeland Security Liaison oﬃcials, Singapore

and London, September 2005. See also Greenberg et al., 2006, p. 4. Most commercial ship-
ping companies have been reluctant to develop more robust seals given the costs involved,
and because even newer systems cannot oﬀer anything approaching 100 percent infallibility.
A standard (plastic) lock can be purchased for a few cents if ordered in bulk, whereas more
resistant versions might cost several hundreds of dollars. Moves to develop so-called “smart
boxes” equipped with GPS transponders and radio frequency identiﬁcation devices that emit
warning signals if they are interfered with have run into similar problems and had not, at
the time of writing, been embraced with any real degree of enthusiasm by the international
maritime industry.

This is true of both small and large terminals. Privacy regulations in the Netherlands, for

instance, preclude the option of comprehensive security vetting for dock workers without ﬁrst
gaining their permission. In the words of one Dutch expert: “I would be amazed if harbor
employees at Rotterdam, Antwerp, or Amsterdam were required to undergo any mandatory
criminal background check.” Author interview with Control Risks Group, Amsterdam, Sep-
tember 2005.

Again, these problems are not unique to the developing world. In the United States, some

11,000 truck drivers enter and leave the Long Beach terminal in Los Angeles with only a
standard driver’s license. Singapore, which runs arguably one of the world’s most sophisti-
cated and well-protected commercial maritime ports, does not require shipping companies
to declare goods on their vessels if they are only transiting through the city-state’s territorial
waters (largely due to a fear that if this was made mandatory, the resulting red tape would

CHAPTER FOUR

A Piracy–Terrorism Nexus?

Complicating the maritime threat picture is growing speculation that a
tactical nexus could emerge between piracy and terrorism. One of the
main concerns is that extremist groups will seek to overcome existing
operational constraints in sea-based capabilities by working in conjunc-
tion with or subcontracting out missions to maritime crime gangs and
syndicates. Various scenarios have been postulated, including the pos-
sible employment of pirates to seize and deliver a liqueﬁed-natural-gas
carrier that is then used as a ﬂoating bomb, scuttle a large oceangoing
vessel in a narrow SLOC either to disrupt maritime trade or precipitate
a major environmental disaster, or hijack a freighter and reregister it
under an FoC as a phantom ship.

The presumed convergence between maritime terrorism and

piracy remains highly questionable, however. To date, there has been
no credible evidence to support speculation about this nexus.

More-

over, the objectives of the two actors remain entirely distinct. The busi-
ness of piracy is directly dependent on a thriving and active global ship-
ping industry and is aimed at proﬁt. In contrast, terrorists—at least in
the context of the contemporary jihadist network—are assumed to be
seeking the destruction of the global maritime trade network as part
of their self-deﬁned economic war against the West.

As Young and

Valencia note, piracy is predicated on ﬁnancial gain while terrorism is

Author interview with IMB, Kuala Lumpur, August 2006.

Author interviews with maritime experts and intelligence oﬃcials, Singapore, London,

and Amsterdam, September 2005.

32 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

motivated by political goals beyond the immediate act of attacking a
maritime target; the former will eschew attention and aim to sustain
their trade while the latter will court publicity and inﬂict as much
damage as possible.

The above considerations notwithstanding, the possibility of a

nexus emerging between piracy and terrorism has certainly informed
the perceptions of governments, international organizations, and major
shipping interests around the world. There have been persistent, though
unveriﬁed, reports of political extremists boarding vessels in Southeast
Asia in an apparent eﬀort to learn how to pilot them for a rerun of 9/11
at sea.

One such alleged case involved the seizure of the

Dewi Madrim

in 2003. Although the exact circumstances surrounding the incident
remain unclear, it is known that the raiding party steered the comman-
deered ship for nearly an hour before escaping with some equipment
and technical documents. The oﬃcial position of the IMB is that the
attack was a pure act of piracy and that any connection to terrorism
was a product of media misrepresentation and sensationalism.

How-

ever, various other analysts reject this interpretation and insist that the
takeover was a training exercise designed to hone the navigation and
sailing skills of terrorists intent on ramming an ocean-going vessel into
a very large crude carrier, a major port such as Singapore, or an oﬀshore
petrochemical facility.

Adam Young and Mark Valencia, “Piracy and Terrorism Threats Overlap,”

The Washing-

ton Times

, July 7, 2003; Young and Valencia, “Conﬂation of Piracy and Terrorism in South-

east Asia: Rectitude and Utility,”

Contemporary Southeast Asia

, Vol. 25, No. 2, August 2003,

p. 267.

Murphy, “Maritime Terrorism: Threat in Context,”

Jane’s Intelligence Review

, February

2006, p. 23.

Author interviews with IMB, London, September 2005.

Author interviews with IMB, Kuala Lumpur, August 2006. See also Percival,

2005, p. 10,

and Rommel Banaloi, “Maritime Terrorism in Southeast Asia,”

Naval War College Review

Vol. 58, No. 4, Autumn 2005, p. 65. According to the IMB in Malaysia, the skills needed to
undertake an operation of this sort are not particularly daunting, particularly since modern
carriers are equipped with autopilot and navigation systems. As one oﬃcial remarked:
“Within two months any competent terrorist could master the fundamentals involved in
seizing and steering a ship to be used as a weapon.”

A Piracy–Terrorism Nexus? 33

The specter of a pirate-terrorism nexus attracted some political

controversy in 2005 when the Lloyd’s Joint War Council (JWC) des-
ignated the Malacca Straits as an area of enhanced risk (AER). This
determination was made by the JWC on the basis of a threat assess-
ment conducted by the U.K.-based Aegis Group, which expressly
considered anticipated links between regional Islamist militants—
speciﬁcally those connected to the JI network—and maritime crimi-
nals operating from Indonesian waters.

The designation was vociferously rejected by all three Malacca

states, who argued that the Aegis group has no recognized presence in
the region, that the assessment was not aligned with the empirical risk
of attack (terrorist or pirate) in the Malacca Straits (especially in light
of a comparison between the number of incidents that have occurred
and the volume of traﬃc passing through the Straits), and that the
report itself oﬀered no solid evidence of even marginal links emerging
between piracy and terrorism in the region.

However, Lloyd’s backed

the credibility of the Aegis assessment, pointing out that it was hardly
surprising that Indonesia, Malaysia, and Singapore would reject the
ﬁndings given the added costs that could be legitimately imposed on
ships using the waterway (and thus spur commercial vessels to seek
cheaper corridors).

Author interviews with Lloyd’s, IDSS, Raytheon (ASEAN) International, and Glenn

Defense Marine (Asia), London, and Singapore, September 2005.

Author interviews with maritime experts, Singapore, September 2005.

Author interviews with Lloyd’s, London, September 2005. The designation of the

Malacca Straits as an AER allows maritime insurance companies to levy a war surcharge on
ships transiting the waterway up to 0.10 percent of the total value of their cargo; this is over
and above the 0.05 percent baseline premium that is routinely imposed on seaborne freight.
The Straits were removed from the Lloyd’s list in mid-2006, ostensibly on the grounds that
the percentage of attacks had dropped enough to warrant the reinstatement of the waterway’s
status as safe conduit for maritime trade. Author interviews with maritime analysts and IMB
oﬃcials, Kuala Lumpur, August 2006.

CHAPTER FIVE

Relevance to the United States

As one of the globe’s principal maritime trading states, account-
ing for nearly 20 percent (measured in metric tons) of all interna-
tional sea-borne freight in any given year, the United States has a
direct, vested interest in securing the world’s oceanic environment.
Commercial carriers transport more than 95 percent of the country’s
non–Northern American trade by weight and 75 percent by value.
Commodities shipped by sea currently constitute a full quarter of
U.S. gross domestic product, more than double the ﬁgure recorded in
1970.

Besides economic considerations, the marine transportation

system plays an important role in U.S. national security. The Depart-
ments of Defense and Transportation have jointly designated 17
American ports—13 of which also act as commercial trading hubs—as
strategic because they are necessary to expedite major military deploy-
ments.

In the view of the Government Accountability Oﬃce, if these

terminals were decisively attacked, “not only could … civilian casual-
ties be sustained, but DoD [Department of Defense] could also lose
precious cargo and time and be forced to rely heavily on its [already]
overburdened airlift capabilities.”

During Operation Desert Storm, for instance, 90 percent of all military equipment and

supplies used in the operation were shipped from designated strategic ports in the United
States. Frittelli, 2004, p. 6.

Government Accountability Oﬃce,

Combating Terrorism

Actions Needed to Improve Force

Protection for DoD Deployments Through Domestic Seaports

, Washington, D.C., GAO-03-15,

October 2002.

36 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

Threat Priorities

In terms of speciﬁc maritime threats, piracy and terrorist contingen-
cies involving containerized freight, passenger ferries, and cruise liners
are most relevant to U.S. security considerations. Piracy already costs
U.S. businesses several millions of dollars a year in lost cargo, delayed
trips, damaged vessels, and fraudulent trade, and there is little indica-
tion of the situation improving any time soon. In terms of national
assets, U.S.-ﬂagged vessels have been frequently targeted, with more
than 30 incidents taking place between 2003 and 2005.

The ﬁgure

for 2005 represented a 36 percent rise over 2003’s total and was more
than double the number of attacks recorded for 2004.

Just as problem-

atic are high and ongoing rates of global pirate activity, the eﬀects of
which continue to fall disproportionately on the United States simply
by virtue of the extensive seaborne trade that the country engages in
with industrialized maritime nations.

Terrorist contingencies involving containerized freight have also

been consistently highlighted as particularly relevant to U.S. national
security. One scenario that has been repeatedly played out because of
the volume of (unchecked) containers shipped to U.S. shores is the use
of a boxed crate to hide a radiological dispersal device that is then deto-
nated on land.

Although the eﬀects of such an attack would depend

on the size and sophistication of the dirty bomb employed, it would
cause at least localized contamination of the immediate surround-
ing area (often referred to as “ground shine”) and could reasonably

See “Narration of Attacks” sections in International Maritime Bureau,

Piracy and Armed

Robbery Against Ships: Annual Report 2003

, London: 2004; International Maritime Bureau,

Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships: Annual Report 2004

, London: 2005; and Interna-

tional Maritime Bureau, 2006. Only German, Greek, Japanese, and South Korean carriers
suﬀer from a higher incident rate.

See International Maritime Bureau, 2006, p. 14.

More than six million containers enter U.S. ports every year, which accounts for roughly

half of the world’s present inventory. Of these, only about 10 percent can be expected to
have undergone some form of scrutiny. See Sinai, 2004, p. 49; “Maritime Security Measures
to Amplify Costs for Shipping,” 2003; Block, 2006; Frittelli, 2004, p. 4; and Australian
Department of Foreign Aﬀairs and Trade,

Global Issues on Economic Costs of Terrorism

, Can-

berra: Department of Foreign Aﬀairs and Trade Analytical Unit, April 7, 2003.

Relevance to the United States 37

be expected to elicit mass public panic of radiological fallout if deaths
actually occurred.

Finally, attacks against a rapidly growing cruise industry—in

2004, 78 percent of all passengers vacationing on luxury liners were
from North America

—need to be taken seriously, not least because

they could expose the country to a new form of highly damaging ter-
rorism. A decisive attack against a fully laden passenger ship could
be expected to result in a casualty count of several hundred or more.

Quite apart from the widespread physical suﬀering and psychologi-
cal trauma that this would necessarily engender, it could also have
genuinely disruptive political and ﬁscal eﬀects. Critics, albeit with the
beneﬁt of hindsight, would undoubtedly demand to know why the
sector was left exposed and why the intelligence services in the relevant
ﬂag nation failed to foresee that an attack was imminent. In an age
where counterterrorism has emerged as one of the state’s most press-
ing responsibilities, such a reaction could easily precipitate a chain of
events that, if not carefully managed, could erode popular perceptions
of governing credibility and legitimacy (as it did in Spain following the
catastrophic commuter train bombings of 2004).

The economic fallout could be every bit as serious, especially given

the highly concentrated character of the cruise business and the fact that
this mode of transportation is not integral to an individual’s day-to-day

Chalk et. al, 2005, p. 34. See also Richardson, 2004, pp.

51–52; Stephen Flynn, “The

Neglected Homefront,”

Foreign Aﬀairs

, September/October 2004; and Peter Zimmerman,

“‘Dirty Bombs’: The Threat Revisited,”

The Back Page

, Vol. 13, No. 3, March 2004.

Over half of this traﬃc was concentrated in the Caribbean and Alaska. In addition to pas-

sengers, two U.S. companies, Royal Caribbean and Carnival, dominate ownership of cruise
ships currently in operation. For further details, see William Ebersold, “Industry Overview:
Cruise Industry in Figures,”

Touch Brieﬁngs

, 2004.

An average liner typically caters to at least 200–500 passengers, although several vessels

are able to accommodate thousands of guests. While sinking these vessels, which are con-
structed with safety as a foremost consideration, would be extremely diﬃcult, several less
dramatic and more feasible attack options could still result in a large number of fatalities or
injuries, including onboard bombings, arson, shootings, and food contamination.

Author interviews with U.K. Customs and Excise, Raytheon International, Glenn

Defense Marine Asia, the Maritime Intelligence Group, and Lloyd’s, London, Singapore,
and Washington, D.C., August and September 2005.

38 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

life, travel needs or, indeed, leisure pursuits.

As one maritime security

analyst in London put it: “If a major cruise liner was hit, the industry
will be in big trouble. People just won’t sail anymore—either with the
company owning the vessel or with one of its [few] competitors.”

the United States, this could result in considerable losses, jeopardizing
not only approximately $16.2 billion in direct monetary beneﬁt but
also the revenue base of major tourist ports—notably Miami, Galves-
ton, Canaveral, New York, Los Angeles, Honolulu, Tampa, Seattle,
and (assuming a post-Katrina recovery) New Orleans—as well as some
330,000 full- and part-time jobs.

Principal Security Initiatives Spearheaded by the United
States

Reﬂecting the relevance of a safe and stable oceanic environment
to U.S. interests, Washington has been at the forefront of moves to
upgrade global maritime security over the last ﬁve years. Among the
more notable international initiatives that the Bush administration has
sponsored are

The Container Security Initiative (CSI), which involves a series of
bilateral, reciprocal accords that, among other things, allow for
the forward deployment of U.S. Coast Guard and Border Protec-
tion (CBP) oﬃcers and their foreign counterparts to prescreen
container ships bound for and departing from U.S. shores. As of
July 2004, the CSI was operational at 20 overseas ports.

See, for instance, ADM James M. Loy, “Seaports, Cruise Ships Vulnerable to Terrorism,”

guest commentary, PoliticsOL.com, July 28, 2001.

Author interview with Control Risks Group, London, September 2005.

Figures are for 2005, and are derived from International Council of Cruise Lines, “The

Cruise Industry 2005 Economic Summary,” undated.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, “Keeping Cargo Safe: Container Security Initia-

tive,” undated; Frittelli, 2004, pp.

12–13; Government Accountability Oﬃce,

Summary of

Challenges Faced in Targeting Oceangoing Cargo Containers for Inspection

, Washington, D.C.,

GAO-04-557T, March 31, 2004.

•

Relevance to the United States 39

The International Ship and Port Facility Security (ISPS) Code,
which was adopted by the International Maritime Organisation
at its December 2002 conference and outlines minimum security
procedures that all ports and ships above 500 tons must meet
to improve overall maritime security. Relevant authorities at the
destination terminal can turn away a vessel which does not meet
the requirements, or which leaves from a port that does not meet
the requirements. Stipulations in the code are based on those
embodied in the U.S. Maritime Transport Security Act (MTSA)
of 2004.

The Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), which aims to combat
the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction by sanctioning
the right to stop, board, and, if necessary, seize a vessel on the high
seas if its is suspected of smuggling chemical, biological, radiolog-
ical, or nuclear materials. At the time of writing, eleven countries
had adopted the PSI: Australia, France, Germany, Italy, Japan,
the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom,
and the United States.

The Customs-Trade Partnership Against Terrorism (C-TPAT),
which oﬀers international importers expedited processing of
cargo if they comply with U.S. CBP guidelines for securing their
entire supply chain. Thus far, over 45,000 companies have agreed
to participate in C-TPAT.

In addition to these measures, Washington has also been instru-

mental in instituting regional maritime security initiatives and capac-

International Maritime Organisation, “What is the ISPS Code,” 2002; Sheppard, 2003,

p. 55. The MTSA was passed by the U.S. Congress in 2002. The legislation requires U.S. fed-
eral agencies, ports, and vessel owners to take numerous steps to upgrade maritime security,
and requires the CBP to develop national and regional plans to secure ocean-based trans-
portation systems. It also requires ports, waterfront terminals, and certain types of vessels to
institute their own incident response protocols that must then be submitted to and approved
by the Coast Guard. Frittelli,

2004, pp.

14–15.

U.S. Department of State, “State Department Fact Sheet Outlines Proliferation Security

Initiative,” April 18, 2005; Richardson, 2004, pp. 97–108.

Frittelli, 2004, p. 13.

•

40 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

ity building in areas that are recognized as vital components of Ameri-
can overall counterterrorism strategy. A good example was the 2002
establishment of the Combined Task Force-Horn of Africa, which has
a remit to secure the total air, land, and sea space of Djibouti, Ethiopia,
Eritrea, Kenya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen.

The initiative includes

an international maritime component, the Combined Task Force-150
(CTF-150), which essentially acts as a counterterrorism patrol unit for
the Red Sea, Gulf of Aden, and northwestern Indian Ocean. The CTF-
150 has an explicit mandate to deter terrorists from using the maritime
environment for planning and conducting attacks, and has conducted
tens of thousands of shipping inquiries and hundreds of boardings to
this end.

Other parts of the globe that have received similar attention

include West Africa—especially Nigeria and the wider Gulf of Guinea
(which over the coming decade is estimated to account for up to 20
percent of U.S. oil imports)—and the Malacca Straits, particularly the
waters that fall under the jurisdiction of the Indonesian government.

Finally, the U.S. has advanced a number of collaborative mea-

sures to address transnational maritime security threats. In 2005, for
instance, Admiral Michael Mullins proposed a global partnership to
tackle issues such as sea-based terrorism and piracy. His idea was to
establish common agreement among a “coalition of the willing”

the best ends, ways, and means of facilitating information ﬂows and
intelligence exchanges to enhance overall awareness of the maritime
domain. Although no deﬁnitive agreement had, at the time of writing,
been instituted, it is a concept that continues to be actively debated
in the United States and by the international shipping community in

Clive Schoﬁeld, “Horn of Africa Conﬂicts Threaten U.S. Anti-Terrorism Eﬀorts,”

Jane’s

Intelligence Review

, June 2004, p. 46; Meldrum, 2007, p. 39.

Clive Schoﬁeld, “Plaguing the Waves: Rising Piracy Threat oﬀ the Horn of Africa,”

Jane’s

Intelligence Review

, July 2007, p. 47.

Mullins actually referred to a “1,000-ship navy”; however, this terminology was changed

to mitigate the perception that Washington was advocating the formation of a U.S.-led naval
force that would be employed to establish and underwrite U.S. hegemony at sea.

Relevance to the United States 41

general.

Washington has also instituted a so-called Global Fleet Sta-

tion (GFS) initiative aimed at raising maritime security standards in
regions deemed to be of strategic or critical importance. A pilot version
of the program, launched in April 2007, involved a six-month deploy-
ment of the High Speed Vessel-2

Swift

to the Caribbean and waters oﬀ

Central America. The

Swift

served as a single platform for transporting

American military instructors to conduct training with regional civil
and naval services from seven countries.

A full discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of these mea-

sures is beyond the scope of this monograph. However, a few prelimi-
nary observations can be made. On the positive side, the initiatives
have conferred a degree of transparency to what has, hitherto, been
a highly opaque theater. Speciﬁcally, they lay the parameters for reg-
ulated interstate action in the maritime realm, both by enumerating
rules, principles, and attendant responsibilities for international coop-
eration and, more importantly, by providing a common framework
in which to further develop and reﬁne joint policies over the medium
to long term. This type of contextual foundation simply did not exist
prior to 9/11.

On the negative side, the programs outlined above suﬀer from

three critical shortfalls as presently conﬁgured:

They are limited in scope. The U.S. initiatives are largely conﬁned
to a narrow set of like-minded allies, while the ISPS precludes
the vast bulk of littoral countries, many of which simply lack the
resources to comply fully with its requirements. (Signiﬁcantly,
this has had the inadvertent eﬀect of further increasing the expo-

Author interviews with a U.S. Coast Guard oﬃcial, Asia Paciﬁc Center for Security Stud-

ies, Honolulu, August 2007.

For more on GFS and the pilot program in the Caribbean and Central American waters,

see MCS1(SW) Cynthia Clark, “Global Fleet Station Deployment Begins,” Navy.mil, April
27, 2007.

See, for instance, Stephen Flynn, “On the Record,”

Government Executive Magazine

October 1, 2003.

•

42 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

sure to potential terrorists of what are already vulnerable ports
and facilities.)

The initiatives are largely directed at increasing the security “wall”
around commercial seaborne traﬃc, paying scant regard to con-
tingencies that do not involve containerized cargo (such as ferry
bombings) or modalities designed to counter the root source of
threats to the oceanic environment, or terrorist organizations
themselves.
With particular reference to the ISPS Code, there is still no
deﬁnitive means to eﬀectively audit how well extant measures are
being implemented by participating states or, indeed, to gauge
their overall utility in terms of dockside security. As one maritime
analyst summed up with respect to Rotterdam—the world’s busi-
est terminal for oceangoing freight—while the facility is compli-
ant on paper and relatively secure compared to most other inter-
national ports, the whole veriﬁcation procedure remains weak,
constituting not much more than “a tick in the box exercise.”

Moreover, there are presently 43,000 vessels in the global shipping
industry that weigh 500 tons or more. This means that roughly
130 ships will need to be certiﬁed each day—a task that Lord
Westbury, the chief executive oﬃcer of Global Marine Security
Systems, believes would put a number of smaller companies and
ports out of business.

Author interviews with IMB, Kuala Lumpur, August 2006.

Author interviews with maritime security analysts, Control Risks Group, Amsterdam,

September 2005.

Sheppard, 2003, p. 55.

•

CHAPTER SIX

Policy Recommendations

The maritime environment will likely remain a favorable theater for
armed violence, crime, and terrorism given its expanse, lack of regula-
tion, esoteric character, and general importance as a critical conduit
for international trade. There is no quick ﬁx or easy remedy for reduc-
ing this openness, and any attempt to institute total security is nei-
ther tenable nor desirable. The best that can be hoped for is the ratio-
nal management of threats within acceptable boundaries. The United
States is well placed to facilitate such an eﬀort by virtue of its resources
and global inﬂuence. At the policy level, there are at least four major
contributions that Washington could make, all of which are variously
highlighted in the 2005 U.S.

National Strategy for Maritime Security

First, the United States could help further expand the nascent regime
of post-9/11 maritime security, both in terms of pressing littoral states
to sign multilateral protocols and instituting eﬀective structures for
measuring and ensuring compliance with their stipulations. To add
credence to this eﬀort, the United States should immediately ratify
UNCLOS, one of the key international legal instruments governing
sovereign rights at sea.

Second, the United States could inform the

For a full version of this document see The White House,

The National Strategy for Mari-

time Security

, Washington, D.C., September 2005.

The United States has not ratiﬁed UNCLOS largely due to the objections of a small

number of senators who oppose the Convention on the grounds that it runs counter to U.S.
national interests and undercuts the country’s sovereignty. There has, however, been strong
domestic pressure to ratify the agreement as part of the overall eﬀort to institutionalize a
more thorough regime of maritime security post-9/11, with President Bush speciﬁcally rais-

44 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

parameters of bilateral and multilateral maritime security collabora-
tion by conducting regular and rigorous threat assessments that are
aimed at delineating high probability risk scenarios and quantifying
their costs. Third, the United States could help redeﬁne mandates of
existing multilateral security and defense arrangements to allow them
to play a more eﬀective and inclusive role in countering maritime (and
other transnational) threats. Fourth, the United States could encour-
age the commercial maritime industry to make greater use of enabling
communication and defensive technologies and accept a greater degree
of overall transparency in its underlying corporate structures.

In more speciﬁc terms, U.S. funds and support could be usefully

directed at

Boosting the coastal monitoring and interdiction capabilities
of states in areas of strategic maritime importance or endemic
pirate activity through the provision of surveillance assets, train-
ing, and technical support.

The GFS initiative described above

may be particularly relevant in this regard.
Actively encouraging the IMB’s anti-piracy center in Malay-
sia—the international system’s main non-governmental organi-
zation for monitoring manifestations of armed violence at sea—
to expand its current (limited) reporting role to one that has a
more explicit investigative function.

ing the issue in March 2007. Author interview, United Coast Guard oﬃcial, Asia Paciﬁc
Center for Security Studies, Honolulu, August 2007.

Because many littoral states in need of coastal surveillance support also suﬀer from high

rates of corruption (e.g., Nigeria, the Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Kenya), the provision
of material, as opposed to ﬁnancial, assistance is generally regarded as preferable.

Since its initial inception in 1992, the IMB’s reporting center in Kuala Lumpur has played

an integral role in identifying operational and geographic patterns of armed violence at sea
and in transmitting real-time warnings and updates to mariners traveling in or near pirate
“hot spots.” The center has also served as a central conduit for information exchange between
shipping associations and companies located in Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Middle East.
A new Information Sharing Center established in Singapore in 2006 has a similar mandate,
but it is not yet apparent whether this institution is meant to supplement or supplant the
IMB body.

Policy Recommendations 45

Augmenting port security management by underwriting dili-
gent screening protocols and systems aimed at vetting the “bona
ﬁdes” of arriving and departing vessels, the crews that staﬀ these
ships, and the companies that own and run them.

Sponsoring public-private sector partnerships for further devel-
oping monitoring and protective initiatives such as ShipLoc (an
inexpensive satellite tracking system that has been endorsed by
the IMB),

Secure-Ship (a non-lethal perimeter electric fence

designed to prevent unauthorized boardings),

and so-called

“smart” containers that can emit warnings if their contents are
disturbed after being sealed.
Promoting greater openness in the international maritime
industry as a whole by, for example, oﬀering incentives aimed
at encouraging shipping companies to register their vessels
through traditional ﬂag states (as opposed to FoCs) and to
accept a fundamentally more transparent ownership disclosure
system.

Possible inducements might include prioritization for

oﬀshore anchor releases, expedited freight clearance procedures,
and cheaper docking fees.

The general issue of port security management has also been raised with respect to the

United States. In 2006, this became an especially hot topic after Dubai Ports World, a com-
pany owned and operated out of the United Arab Emirates, purchased the Peninsular and
Oriental Steam Navigation Company of the United Kingdom, giving it the right to over-
see major operations at terminals in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Baltimore, New
Orleans, and Miami. Although the takeover was approved, Dubai Ports eventually pulled
out of the deal after members of Congress raised concern over the potential ramiﬁcations it
might have for port security given the United Arab Emirates’ alleged role in funding the al
Qaeda network. For more on the incident, see Neil King and Greg Hitt, “Dubai Ports World
Sells U.S. Assets,”

The Wall Street Journal

, December 11, 2006.

ShipLoc allows shipping companies to monitor the exact location of their vessels any-

where in the world on a 24/7, 365-day per year basis via Internet access. For more on the
system, see “ShipLoc,” homepage, undated.

For further details on this initiative, see Secure Marine, “Secure-Ship,” Web page, 2002.

For analysis of the shipping industry’s reluctance to accept greater transparency in terms

of vessel ownership and operation, see Meldrum, 2007, pp. 36–39.

46 The Maritime Dimension of International Security

In whatever capacity the United States chooses to support or pro-

mote anti-piracy and terrorism measures, coordinating initiatives with
other concerned littoral states and international organizations needs
to be emphasized as much as possible.

Not only will this allow Wash-

ington to oﬀset some of the cost of its assistance programs, it would
also help to reduce latent perceptions that the general issue of mar-
itime security is exclusively tied to U.S. strategic priorities.

Just as

importantly, working with or through partner countries and organiza-
tions will give the U.S. government greater ﬂexibility and latitude in
developing indigenous capabilities in sensitive areas and regions where
strictly unilateral action would be diﬃcult (or impossible)—a potential
reality in many parts of the Middle East, Persian Gulf, and South and
Southeast Asia.

An example of local multilateral cooperation is the “Eye in the Sky” initiative inaugurated

in 2005 among Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand. The idea—which reportedly
developed in reaction to Lloyds’ designation of the SLOC as an AER risk—ostensibly aims
to provide limited airborne surveillance over the Malacca Straits and builds oﬀ the earlier
Malaysia-Singapore-Indonesia (MASLINDO) accord. Under the initiative, each participat-
ing country will make two planes available, and commit to ﬂying two sorties a week over
the Straits. Therefore, for every seven days there will be at least 16 hours of continual cover-
age over the waterway. The Philippines has expressed active interest in future iterations of
the agreement, and both Japan and Australia have pledged to provide additional resources
so that a more extensive system of surveillance can evolve. Author interview, IMB, Kuala
Lumpur, August 2006.

In 2004, for instance, various entities suggested that the U.S. Navy might provide armed

escorts for ships transiting the Malacca Straits. Indonesia and Malaysia, however, vigorously
rejected this idea on the grounds that it would represent a wholly unjustiﬁed expansion of
U.S. inﬂuence in areas close to their territorial waters. Even Singapore expressed reservations
about the strategic and political implications of a concerted American presence in the Straits.
Comments made during the International Cooperation in the War Against Terror in the
Asia-Paciﬁc Region with a Special Emphasis on the Malacca Straits Conference, Mississippi
State University, March 8–9, 2006.

e M

D
im

f I

l S
e

Table A.1
Selected High-Proﬁle Maritime Terrorist Incidents, 1961–2004

Incident

Group

Deaths

Remarks

Hijacking of

Santa

Maria

(1961)

Portuguese and
Spanish rebels

The

Santa Maria

, a 21,000-ton cruise ship owned by Companhia Colonial of

Lisbon, was hijacked by a group of 70 men led by Captain Henriques Galvao
(a Portuguese political exile) to bring global attention to the Estado Novo in
Portugal and a related fascist regime in Spain. The vessel was on a holiday
cruise in the southern Caribbean and its more than 600 passengers were held
for 11 days before Galvao formally surrendered to the Brazilian Navy. The
incident constitutes the ﬁrst modern-day hijack at sea.

Use of a Cypriot-
registered coaster,

Claudia

, to

transport weapons
to Ireland (1973)

Provisional Irish
Republican Army

Claudia

was intercepted by the Irish Navy while attempting to land a

consignment of weapons intended for the Provisional Irish Republican Army
(PIRA). On board were ﬁve tons of munitions that included 250 Soviet-made
assault riﬂes, pistols, mines, grenades, and explosives. The vessel was owned
by Gunther Leinhauser, a West German arms dealer who said that PIRA had
given him a “shopping list” of required material and that the “order” had
been ﬁlled by Libya.

Hijacking of

Achille

Lauro

(1985)

Palestine Liberation
Front

The

Achille Lauro

, a cruise ship, was hijacked in an attempt to coerce

the release of 50 Palestinians being held in Israel. The perpetrators were
eventually detained in Sicily. One person was killed in the incident: Leon
Kling-Hoffer, a wheelchair-bound German tourist, was killed and then
pushed overboard.

Targeting of cruise
ships on the Nile
River (1992–1994)

Al-Gama’a al-
Islamyya

The group targeted at least four cruise ships during these two years as part of
its general effort to undermine the Egyptian tourist sector (a key contributor
to the country’s economy).

H
ig

-P

ro
ﬁl

e M

st I
n

, 1
9

–

4 4

Incident

Group

Deaths

Remarks

Hijacking of a
Turkish passenger
ferry in the Black
Sea (1996)

Chechen rebels

Nine rebel gunmen held 255 passengers hostage for four days during which
they threatened to blow up the captured ferry in order to bring international
attention to the Chechen cause. The abductors eventually sailed the vessel
back to Istanbul, where they surrendered.

Suicide bombing of
the USS

Cole

(2000)

Al Qaeda

The bombing took place while the

Cole

was refueling at the Port of Aden.

The assault involved 600 pounds of C4 explosives that were packed into the
hull of a suicide attack skiff. Seventeen U.S. sailors and two terrorists were
killed, and another 39 sailors were injured.

Suicide bombing of
the M/V

Limburg

(2002)

Al Qaeda

The attack involved a small, ﬁberglass boat packed with 100–200 kg of TNT
that was rammed into the tanker as it prepared to begin a pilot-assisted
approach to the Ash Shihr Terminal off the coast of Yemen. The

Limburg

was lifting 297,000 barrels of crude oil at the time of the strike, an estimated
50,000 of which spilled into the waters surrounding the stricken vessel. One
crewman and two terrorists were killed.

Use of the

Karine A

transport weapons
for anti-Israeli
strikes (2002)

Palestinian Authority

The

Karine A

, a 4,000-ton freighter, was seized in the Red Sea on January

3, 2002. The vessel was carrying a wide assortment of Russian and Iranian
munitions, including Katyusha rockets (with a range of 20 km), antitank
missiles, long-range mortar bombs, mines, sniper riﬂes, ammunition, and
more than two tons of high explosives. The weapons consignment, estimated
at $100 million, was linked directly to Yassir Arafat and was allegedly to be
used for attacks against Jewish targets in Israel and the Occupied Territories.

Table A.1—Continued

e M

D
im

f I

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e

Incident

Group

Deaths

Remarks

Hijacking of the
M/V

Penrider

a fully laden oil
tanker en route
from Singapore to
Penang (2003)

Gerakan Aceh
Merdeka

The M/V

Penrider

, a fully-laden oil tanker, was seized while en route from

Singapore to Penang in northern Malaysia. The incident was one of the few
cases where Gerakan Aceh Merdeka openly took responsibility for a maritime
attack (the group has been linked to several hijackings and maritime
assaults off the coast of Aceh). The group’s three hostages (the master, chief
engineer, and second engineer) were released upon payment of a $52,000
ransom.

Use of the

Abu

Hassan

to transport

weapons and
training manuals
to assist militant
strikes in Israel
(2003)

Lebanese Hezbollah

The owner of the

Abu Hassan

, an Egyptian-registered ﬁshing trawler, was

recruited by Hezbollah and speciﬁcally trained to carry out maritime support
missions. The vessel, which Israeli Navy commandos intercepted 35 nautical
miles off the coast of Haifa, was being used to ferry a complex weapons
and logistics consignment consisting of fuses for 122-mm Qassam rockets,
electronic time-delay fuses, a training video for carrying out suicide missions,
and two sets of CD-ROMs containing detailed bomb-making information.

Attacks against the
Khor al-Amaya and
Al-Basra offshore
oil terminals in Iraq
(2004)

Jamaat al-Tawhid
(Unity and Jihad
Group)

The attacks were claimed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as a follow up to the
2000

Cole

and 2002

Limburg

strikes. The operation led to the closure of both

facilities at an estimated cost of $40 million and are generally considered to
be part of a concerted strategy aimed at the economic destabilization of the
post-Hussein administration in Baghdad.

Table A.1—Continued

H
ig

-P

ro
ﬁl

e M

st I
n

, 1
9

–

4 5

Table A.1—Continued

Incident

Group

Deaths

Remarks

Bombing of the
Philippine

SuperFerry 14

(2004)

Abu Sayyaf,
combined with
elements from the
Rajah Soliaman
Movement and
Jemaah Islamyya

116

The attack involved 20 sticks of dynamite that were planted in a hollowed-
out television set. The bomb set off a ﬁre that rapidly spread throughout the
ship due to the lack of an effective sprinkler system. The incident has been
listed as the most destructive act of terrorism in maritime history and the
fourth most serious attack since 9/11.

Suicide attacks
against the Port
of Ashdod in Israel
(2004)

Hamas, al-Aqsa
Martyr’s Brigade

The attack, which was jointly executed by a combined Hamas/al-Aqsa
Martyr’s Brigade team, left ten people dead and involved two Palestinian
terrorists who had been smuggled to the terminal inside a commercial
container four hours before the operation. Some speculate that al Qaeda
assisted with the logistics of the strike.

SOURCE: Adapted from Greenberg et al., 2006, pp. 20–24.

Jenkins et al., 1986, p. 69. The hijacking was also known as “Operation Dulcinea” by the hijackers.

Wilkinson, 1986, pp. 39.

The Palestine Liberation Front’s original intention was to seize the

Achille Lauro

and then ram the vessel into an Israeli oil terminal

at Ashod. However, the attack was discovered before this operation could be put into effect, forcing a change in plan. Author
interview with security and terrorism analyst, Monterrey, California, November 2006.

Sinai, 2004, p. 50; John Sitilides, “US Strikes Expose Emerging Regional Threats,”

The HR-Net Forum: The Washington Monitor

August 28, 1998.

Sinai, 2004, p. 50; Stilides, 1998; Koknar, 2005; “Hostage Taking Action by Pro-Chechen Rebels Impairs Turkey’s Image,”

People’s

Daily

(China), April 24, 2001.

e M

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im

f I

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e

Table A.1—Continued

For more on this incident, see Raphael Perl,

Terrorist Attack on the USS Cole: Background and Issues for Congress

, Washington,

D.C.: Congressional Research Service, RS20721, January 30, 2001. Although it was directed against a warship, this attack has been
designated a terrorist strike because the

Cole

was no actively deployed at the time of the bombing.

The M/V

Limburg

has since been renamed and now operates under the designation M/V

Maritime Jewel

Herbert-Burns, 2005, p. 164; Valencia, 2005b, p. 84; Ho, 2003; “Investigators to Board Yemen tanker,”

BBC Online News

, October 9,

2002.

“IDF Seizes PA Weapons Ship,” Jewish Virtual Library, January 4, 2002.

Herbert-Burns, 2005, pp. 167–168; Kate McGeown, “Aceh Rebels Blamed for Piracy,”

BBC Online News

, September 8, 2003;

International Maritime Organisation,

Reports on Acts of Piracy and Armed Robbery Against Ships

, London: September 4, 2003.

Herbert-Burns, 2005, p. 166.

Mirelle Warouw, “The Threat Against Maritime Assets: A Review of Historical Cases, Operational Patterns and Indicators,”

unpublished paper, Institute of Defense and Strategic Studies, Singapore, 2005, p. 12. Also see Koknar, 2005.

Peter Chalk, “The SuperFerry 14 Bombing, 2004,”

Jane’s Terrorism and Insurgency Center

, Case Study No. 5, 2006.

Koknar, 2005.

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