Floating Arsenals Help Battle Pirates on High Seas
Armories on the Edge of the Indian
Ocean Ferry Guns and Guards to Passing Vessels
By Sarah Kent and Cassie Werber in the Wall
Street Journal
ON THE GULF OF OMAN—Before dawn one
morning in November, four men on the deck of the MNG Resolution lifted cases of
guns and body armor out of shipping containers and heaved them into a waiting
speedboat.
The team zipped across the water to
a tanker, where the crew pulled aside razor wire and hoisted the weapons
aboard. The four men clambered up a rope ladder, and the speedboat raced back.
The 141-foot Resolution, built 30
years ago to service offshore oil platforms, has a new job: She is a floating
armory and bunkhouse for contract security forces. At least a half dozen such
boats ply the Gulf of Oman.
The oceangoing armories are the
byproduct of global trade, high-seas piracy and national arms restrictions.
Shippers traversing the dangerous waters off Somalia want armed guards to
protect their cargo and crews, but most countries won’t let private
security forces bring guns into their ports.
So ships like the Resolution have appeared to cache weapons offshore for
security companies and ferry their guns and guards to vessels needing
protection.
The shipping industry once regarded
armed guards on vessels as too dangerous. But a spate of Somali pirate attacks
several years ago changed that thinking. Every month now, thousands of weapons
pass through the Indian Ocean and hundreds of security teams rotate on and off
ships in the Gulf of Oman. A similar trade goes on in the Red Sea and off Sri
Lanka.
Sovereign Global, a U.K.-based
security company, can accommodate 200 people in the armory it operates off the
coast of Djibouti on the Horn of Africa. The MV Mahanuwara, a 40-year-old
supply ship that works off the southern Sri Lankan port of Galle, can hold a
thousand guns and the ammunition needed to use them.
The international shipping industry spent around $1 billion
on armed guards and equipment in the Indian Ocean in 2013, according to Oceans Beyond Piracy, a nonprofit group based
in Colorado. Attacks in the high-risk area have fallen precipitously in the
last two years. The last hijacking and ransom of a merchant vessel by Somali
pirates was in 2012.
The proliferation of armory ships is
fanning concerns. There is no official record of how many armories exist or who
operates them. Nor are there any regulatory bodies overseeing such enterprises
in international waters. International standards for private-security firms
don’t address floating armories. In theory, the ships are overseen by the
nations whose flags they carry, but some in the industry say vessels don’t
always declare they are armories.
The regulatory environment allows
“companies whose operators may not be licensed to use or transfer weapons and
ammunition to act with impunity,” said a December report by the Omega Research
Foundation, a British nonprofit group focused on the arms industry. The report
raised concerns about how
armories store and account for the weapons they hold.
“We saw floating armories were being
done mostly quite badly and largely illegally, and we felt we could do better,”
says Mark Gray, co-founder of the company that operates the Resolution, MNG
Maritime Ltd.
Critics say the armories themselves
could be targets for attack by pirates or terrorists. India, fearful that
armories present a security risk, is pushing the International Maritime
Organization, a United Nations agency, to develop guidelines for regulating the
industry. In a 2012 report, the U.N. Security Council committee on Somalia and
Eritrea said that the armory business was “uncontrolled and almost entirely
unregulated, posing additional legal and security challenges for all parties
involved.”
In October 2013, the MV Seaman Guard
Ohio, an armory operated by Washington, D.C.-based AdvanFort International
Inc., drifted into Indian waters. Indian authorities seized the vessel and
arrested its crew and passengers. Onboard were 35 assault rifles and 5,680
rounds of ammunition, Indian officials said. Last July, AdvanFort said the
charges against the 35 men on board had been dropped after eight months. AdvanFort
couldn’t be reached for comment.
Mr. Gray says he favors greater
oversight of the industry. MNG Maritime has an arms-export license from the
British government. “At the bottom end of a market, all you need is a ship,” he
says. “There were, and are, some real bucket shops.”
Mr. Gray is a former colonel in the
U.K.’s Royal Marines. In 2010, he spent three months patrolling the coast of
Somalia in command of a naval task group. When he retired, he says, he thought
about setting up a maritime-guard service but saw greater opportunities in
running an armory.
He teamed up with a university
friend, Nicholas Holtby, a former investment banker prone to seasickness but
eager to deploy his risk-management skills in a new venture. In November 2013,
they launched their first vessel, the Sea Patrol. Months later, they upgraded
to the Resolution.
The company says it plans to expand
further. Whenever a new booking comes in to the cramped office aboard the
Resolution, the computer chirps: “You’re gonna need a bigger boat!”—a line from
the movie “Jaws.”
Getting on board the Resolution
requires an 18-hour boat ride from the Emirati port of Sharjah, around the spur
of Oman, to a spot 25 miles off the coast.
Once aboard the armories, most
guards can’t wait to get off. They are employed not by the armories, but by
separate security companies, which often pay them at a lower rate, or not at
all, for time spent before boarding a tanker or cargo ship passing through the
high-risk area.
“I’ve been in lots of hideous
places,” said Neal Fearn, a former Royal Marine and maritime-security guard who
now drives the speedboat that shuttles guards to and from the Resolution. “One
armory, I don’t know who was running it, but it wasn’t pretty. There was no air
conditioning, no communications. It was dirty.”
As the industry grows, competition
is pushing up standards.
The Resolution has Wi-Fi, and there
is a gym and shaded relaxation area on top of the locked shipping containers
holding the guns. A sign pinned to a crate of weights outlines the latest crew
challenge: the Resolution 1000, a punishing series of 10 exercises to be
repeated 100 times.
The security guards sleep six to
nine in a cabin, stacked in narrow bunk beds three high. Luggage is stored in
racks out on deck. Toilet seats were brought aboard as a concession to female
visitors.
At 4:00 in the morning of Nov. 19,
Mr. Fearn was at the helm of the speedboat to ferry a team of guards to a
liquefied-natural-gas carrier lighted up in the distance.
The crew ran six trips that morning,
shuttling guards and weapons to and from tankers and container ships traveling
in and out of the high-risk area.
The labor is physical. A box of
weapons and ammunition can weigh 66 pounds, boxes of body armor and other
equipment even more. In the summer, temperatures can soar above 100 degrees
Fahrenheit, and during the monsoon season the seas can be rough.
Armories typically charge between
$1,500 and $5,000 to run a shuttle to a passing ship, and sometimes charge
extra for room and board.
“There’s been days when we’ve had 10
or 12 transfers,” said Robert “Bones” Henzell, who was on the Resolution’s
bridge at the start of a midnight shift standing watch. “It’s pretty much a
24-hour job.” Although the Resolution floats outside of the area seen as at
high risk from pirates, the four-man security team—all veterans of the British
military—keeps a round-the-clock watch.
For the guards rotating on and off
the armory, there are plenty of idle hours. The following morning, several men
passed time fishing for dorado and flying fish. The boatswain, a Filipino
sailor with a mohawk and soul patch, was the only one catching anything. No one
in the group has ever had an encounter with pirates.
Aboard the MNG Resolution, a
floating armory in the Gulf of Oman, ship security officer Mark Roberts
describes how the crew would respond in the event of a piracy attack. Photo:
Niki Blasina/The Wall Street Journal
A few weeks earlier, the crew had
spotted a small boat speeding toward it. The security team scrambled to the
bridge, pulled on their body armor and held their weapons above their heads as
a warning signal.
“It was four guys and a girl in a
bikini with 10 fishing lines off the back,” recalled Paul Mutter, who leads the
security team and is in charge of inspecting and maintaining the weapons.
Mr. Mutter said the armory inspects
each weapon when it arrives, then logs it into the company’s computer database.
Practices vary across the industry,
partly because of the lack of oversight. Sitting in international waters, the
armories have mostly existed in “a horrible gray area,” says one shipping
lawyer.
Even within the industry, some
people acknowledge that more needs to be done to improve transparency and
oversight.
“I think globally there is a huge
regulatory gap,” says Paul Gibson, director at the Security in Complex
Environments Group, a U.K.-based industry body focused on working with
government to develop standards for the private-security sector. “There’s a
complete lack of transparency about a number of floating armories being
operated.”
MNG Maritime’s Mr. Gray says the
lack of oversight sometimes creates problems, including getting visas for
security guards to pass through the region’s ports. “About twice a month we
have issues, and you have no recourse to anyone,” he says.
Standing on the deck of the
Resolution, hours after finishing an assignment that took him from India to the
Persian Gulf, security guard Jason Cunningham recalled being stuck on an armory
for three weeks after the port of Khor Fakkan in the United Arab Emirates was
closed to security guards last year.
Jason Cunningham talks about the
life of a maritime security guard. Photo: Niki Blasina/The Wall Street Journal
“Some floating armories should
really be sunk to the bottom of the ocean,” he said. “We don’t ask for much: a
gym, some Wi-Fi, decent food.” He said the armory he was stuck on had none of
those things, and at times was so overcrowded that guards had to find places to
sleep out on the deck.
The governments of some coastal
nations are wary of armories off their shores. Restrictions imposed by some
port cities are the reason that crew members have to travel all the way around
the tip of Oman to reach the armory ships.
The decline in attacks over
the past two years has generated some uncertainty in
the budding industry.
Security guards, for their part, say
they believe pirates still pose a threat. Rajiv Upadhyay, a 37-year-old
security guard staying on the Resolution in November, recounted how a ship he
was stationed on was followed for about 10 miles off the coast of Somalia last
January. It wasn’t clear whether the pursuers were pirates.
Last May, a liquefied-petroleum-gas
carrier that security guard Ashok Kumar was helping to guard en route from Sri
Lanka to Saudi Arabia was approached at high speed by another vessel, prompting
Mr. Kumar to brandish his gun. Again, it wasn’t known whether they were
pirates.
Piracy is becoming a problem in
other areas. Data from the International Maritime Bureau, an affiliate of the
International Chamber of Commerce, show that sea attacks now are more common
off oil-rich West Africa than off the Somali coast. The data also show that the
hijacking of vessels to siphon off fuel cargoes is on the rise in the waters
near Indonesia.
But armed guards can’t operate in
those areas, partly because the trade routes pass closer to land, giving
coastal nations more territorial jurisdiction.
So for now, the armory business is
confined to the waters off Somalia—and useful only as long as the shipping
industry remains fearful of attacks, crews held hostage or killed, and ransom
demands.
Mr. Gray says even the industry’s
optimists wonder: “If there are no attacks for six months to a year, where is
the industry going to be?”
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