The Pirates Side.. Yeah Riiiiteee
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By Robyn Hunter
BBC News |
“No information today. No comment,” a Somali pirate shouts over the sound of breaking waves, before abruptly ending the satellite telephone call.
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 They wed the most beautiful girls; they are building big houses; they have new cars; new guns  Garowe resident Abdi Farah Juha
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He sounds uptight – anxious to see if a multi-million dollar ransom demand will be met.
He is on board the hijacked Ukrainian vessel, MV Faina – the ship laden with 33 Russian battle tanks that has highlighted the problem of piracy off the Somali coast since it was captured almost a month ago.
But who are these modern-day pirates?
According to residents in the Somali region of Puntland where most of the pirates come from, they live a lavish life.
Fashionable
“They have money; they have power and they are getting stronger by the day,” says Abdi Farah Juha who lives in the regional capital, Garowe.
The crew on MV Faina are reportedly being well-looked after
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“They wed the most beautiful girls; they are building big houses; they have new cars; new guns,” he says.
“Piracy in many ways is socially acceptable. They have become fashionable.”
Most of them are aged between 20 and 35 years – in it for the money.
And the rewards they receive are rich in a country where almost half the population need food aid after 17 years of non-stop conflict.
Most vessels captured in the busy shipping lanes of the Gulf of Aden fetch on average a ransom of $2m.
This is why their hostages are well looked after.
The BBC’s reporter in Puntland, Ahmed Mohamed Ali, says it also explains the tight operation the pirates run.
They are never seen fighting because the promise of money keeps them together.
Wounded pirates are seldom seen and our reporter says he has never heard of residents along Puntland’s coast finding a body washed ashore.
Given Somalia’s history of clan warfare, this is quite a feat.
It probably explains why a report of a deadly shoot-out amongst the pirates onboard the MV Faina was denied by the vessel’s hijackers.
Pirate spokesman Sugule Ali told the BBC Somali Service at the time: “Everybody is happy. We were firing guns to celebrate Eid.”
Brains, muscle and geeks
The MV Faina was initially attacked by a gang of 62 men.
BBC Somalia analyst Mohamed Mohamed says such pirate gangs are usually made up of three different types:
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- Ex-fishermen, who are considered the brains of the operation because they know the sea
- Ex-militiamen, who are considered the muscle – having fought for various Somali clan warlords
- The technical experts, who are the computer geeks and know how to operate the hi-tech equipment needed to operate as a pirate – satellite phones, GPS and military hardware.
The three groups share the ever-increasing illicit profits – ransoms paid in cash by the shipping companies.
A report by UK think-tank Chatham House says piracy off the coast of Somalia has cost up to $30m (£17m) in ransoms so far this year.
The study also notes that the pirates are becoming more aggressive and assertive – something the initial $22m ransom demanded for MV Faina proves. The asking price has apparently since fallen to $8m.
Calling the shots
Yemen, across the Gulf of Aden, is reportedly where the pirates get most of their weapons from.
A significant number are also bought directly from the Somali capital, Mogadishu.
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Enlarge ImageObservers say Mogadishu weapon dealers receive deposits for orders via a “hawala” company – an informal money transfer system based on honour.
Militiamen then drive the arms north to the pirates in Puntland, where they are paid the balance on delivery.
It has been reported in the past that wealthy businessmen in Dubai were financing the pirates.
But the BBC’s Somali Service says these days it is the businessmen asking the pirates for loans.
Such success is a great attraction for Puntland’s youngsters, who have little hope of alternative careers in the war-torn country.
Once a pirate makes his fortune, he tends to take on a second and third wife – often very young women from poor nomadic clans, who are renowned for their beauty.
But not everyone is smitten by Somalia’s new elite.
“This piracy has a negative impact on several aspects of our life in Garowe,” resident Mohamed Hassan laments.
He cites an escalating lack of security because “hundreds of armed men” are coming to join the pirates.
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 They don’t call themselves pirates. They call themselves coastguards Garowe resident Abdulkadil Mohamed
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They have made life more expensive for ordinary people because they “pump huge amounts of US dollars” into the local economy which results in fluctuations in the exchange rate, he says.
Their lifestyle also makes some unhappy.
“They promote the use of drugs – chewing khat [a stimulant which keeps one alert] and smoking hashish – and alcohol,” Mr Hassan says.
The trappings of success may be new, but piracy has been a problem in Somali waters for at least 10 years – when Somali fishermen began losing their livelihoods.
Their traditional fishing methods were no match for the illegal trawlers that were raiding their waters.
Piracy initially started along Somalia’s southern coast but began shifting north in 2007 – and as a result, the pirate gangs in the Gulf of Aden are now multi-clan operations.
But Garowe resident Abdulkadil Mohamed says, they do not see themselves as pirates.
“Illegal fishing is the root cause of the piracy problem,” he says.
“They call themselves coastguards.”
Oil capture spotlights Somali pirates’ reach
A supertanker hijacking helped boost the price of oil early this week.
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| Super Tanker: Somali pirates hijacked the Sirius Star, which can carry a fourth of Saudi Arabia’s daily oil output. Daewoo Shipbuilding and Marine Engineering/Reuters |
November 19, 2008
Johannesburg, South Africa – By hijacking a Saudi oil tanker – the largest ship ever taken – Somali pirates this week may have guaranteed their biggest ever haul of ransom.
The capture of the Sirius Star, which can carry more than one-fourth of Saudi Arabia’s daily oil output, helped send prices above $58 a barrel. And the fact that it was nabbed 450 miles off Kenya’s coast is a sign of growing sophistication and reach by the pirates, who have tended to stay closer to the Gulf of Aden, a pinch point for sea traffic routed through the Suez Canal.
The news also raises concern from some Western analysts that the pirates’ spoils could help fund a growing Islamist insurgency in Somalia, although there is little evidence of that so far.
“What this attack represents is a fundamental shift in the pirates’ ability to carry out attacks,” said Lt.
Nathan Christensen, deputy spokesman for the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet in Bahrain. It took place “almost double the distance [off shore from previous attacks].”
Somali pirates also hijacked a 26,000-ton Iranian cargo carrier on Tuesday, according to the US Navy.
Pirate gangs have certainly become more sophisticated, operating large “mother ships,” often former Russian trawlers, which follow their targeted ship with GPS devices. When they are close enough, they offload smaller dinghies or speedboats that move in for the capture.
“They just come up to the stern, throw up their hook and ladder, and once you are on board, the ship is yours, because no one is going to mess with a man with an RPG [rocket propelled grenade launcher],” says Richard Cornwell, a senior researcher at the Institute for Strategic Studies in Tshwane, as Pretoria is now called. “Once [they're on board], it’s over in 10 to 15 minutes. Unless you have a warship in the immediate area, and crucially, with a helicopter, you’ve got no chance of stopping them.”
The attack of the Saudi oil tanker had occurred closer to Islamist bases in southern Somalia than to northern pirate bases, but most Somali experts say they haven’t seen concrete evidence of Islamists cooperating with pirates.
After all, during the Islamists’ brief six-month reign last year, piracy in Somalia was banned, and no pirate attacks occurred.
Yet the sheer size of the pirates’ haul has shaken the maritime world and shown that Somalia’s instability has spread far from its borders.
“I swear it’s not the Islamists, and if anything, it’s the Transitional Federal Government, because if you’re not getting what you ask for from the international community, you’ll go and nick it some other way,” says Mr. Cornwell.
This hijacking does serve as a warning, particularly since the Sirius Star was nowhere near the usual piracy areas, and was planning to take the longer safer route around the southern tip of Africa.
“The question is, what if they had taken a ship of [liquid natural gas]?” says Cornwell. “Then you’re really looking at a possible terrorist threat. If they blow that up off a harbor, you’ll flatten the place. People are talking about 50 Hiroshimas.”
Mustafa Alani, director of the Center for Counter-Terrorism at the Gulf Research Center, a Dubai-based think tank, said in a phone interview that his center has been working since the beginning of the year on a report about piracy, which is due out within weeks.
Their research so far, he says, has found “no evidence” of any connection between the pirates, who are mostly Somalis, and any terrorist or political organization. “We found no evidence of any terrorist group helping” the pirates, Mr. Alani says.
Alani says that there is a part of Somalia – Puntland – where the pirates operate from and that the leader of that area is “taxing those pirates.” The leader of Puntland denies any involvement with the pirates, Alani says, but adds: “You can’t do these activities without political protection.”
Several ships hijacked previously off the Somali coast – including a Ukrainian freighter carrying 33 former Soviet T-72 tanks bound for Kenya – remain in the Somali port of Eyl under pirate control. While many hijacked ships have been released peacefully after a payment of ransom, a few have been taken back by force by international warships patrolling the Gulf of Aden. Given the size of the ship, the value of the cargo, and the closeness to port, such a use of force in the case of the Sirius Star is deemed unlikely.
While security experts say piracy has gotten more sophisticated in recent years, they do not believe that pirates are anything more than high-rolling criminals with an eye for making easy cash.
Links to global terrorist groups have yet to be made, but they’re also not hard to imagine.
“It should be emphasized that to date, there is no firm evidence of this happening,” says a report published last month by Chatham House, which conducts research on public policy and international affairs and is based in London. “However, in a region that saw the attacks on the USS Cole, seaborne terrorism needs to be taken very seriously.”
But even if piracy has yet to turn into a full-blown moneymaking operation for global terrorist networks such as Al Qaeda, it has grown into a serious business. Piracy off the coast of Somalia has more than doubled this year, with 60 ships hijacked, according to the Chatham House report. And profits are up.
Ransoms that used to be in the tens of thousands of dollars a few years ago can now be a few million dollars. And this has been a good year for pirates: Total ransom payments for 2008 could top $30 million, the report says.
“Shipping firms, and sometimes governments, are prepared to pay these sums since they are relatively small compared with the value of a ship, let alone the life of crew members,” the report says.
The International Maritime Organization, a “UN of the seas” operates in an area that is more than 1.1 million square miles, with ships from countries like Russia, the US, and other NATO countries patrolling these areas.
That presence alone has helped to reduce the number of successful pirate attacks, from 53 percent in August to 31 percent in October, according to the US Navy. American defense officials familiar with the issue say it’s hard to protect tankers and other ships from the skiffs.
Some skiffs are legitimate, and the ones with ill intent move so fast it is hard to ward them off before they attack. And the pirates are increasingly operating in what navies refer to as “blue water” – far offshore – by using other, larger boats from which the skiffs are launched to attack boats at sea.
The Sirius Star, the largest ship ever to be hijacked, was also the farthest from shore, some 450 miles off the coast of Kenya.
American officials would like to prevent more attacks, but are emphatic in their view that it is an international problem in need of an international solution.
Simply remanding the hijackers to their native country – Somalia, which lacks any formal criminal justice system – would be pointless, American defense officials say.
That leaves few options.
“There is no international stomach for us to go back 200 years and bind the hands and feet of these pirates and send them into the briny deep,” says one American Navy official.
• Gordon Lubold and Caryle Murphy contributed from Washington; and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Pirates’ Daring Attack ‘Stuns’ U.S. Navy
allAfrica.com – 18 November 2008
By Adiel Ismail
Somali pirates have “stunned” the United States’ top military leader by seizing a supertanker three times as big as an aircraft carrier hundreds of nautical miles off the Kenya coast.
Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Monday that he was surprised both by the size of the vessel the pirates had hijacked and by its distance from the shore.
“What strikes me about this particular supertanker is how far away from Africa it was. As I understand it, it’s about 450 miles south east of Kenya,” he told a Pentagon briefing in Washington, DC. “That’s the longest distance I’ve seen for any of these incidents.”
The BBC quoted a naval spokesman as saying the tanker, the Sirius Star, was headed for the Somali coast, where it was “nearing an anchorage point” at Eyl, a port in Puntland which is popular with Somali pirates.
The Sirius Star is the biggest ship to have been seized by Somali pirates so far. It has 25 crew members aboard and was heading to the U.S. via the Cape of Good Hope.
The Combined Maritime Forces (CMF) of the U.S.-led military coalition which patrols the Red Sea, the Arabian Gulf and the Indian Ocean have recorded a reduction in successful piracy attacks from 53 percent in August to 31 percent in October.
However, Mullen noted that despite the drop in the proportion of attacks that succeeded, “we’ve seen an extraordinary rise in the overall numbers.”
The Liberian-flagged vessel is operated by the Dubai – based company, Vela International. Al Jazeera reported that it was carrying almost U.S. $100 million worth of oil. In the past, such hijackings have usually been followed by ransom demands issued by the pirates to ship owners.
Somalia Pirates Capture Tanks and Global Notice
NAIROBI, Kenya — For a moment, the pirates must have thought that they had really struck gold — Somalia-style.
The gun-toting, seafaring thieves, who routinely pounce on cargo ships bobbing along on the Indian Ocean, suddenly found themselves in command of a vessel crammed with $30 million worth of grenade launchers, piles of ammunition, even battle tanks.
But this time, they might have gotten far more than they bargained for. Unlike so many other hijackings off the Somali coast that have gone virtually unnoticed — and unpunished — the attack Thursday evening on the Faina, a Ukrainian vessel bringing military equipment to Kenya, has provoked the wrath of two of the most powerful militaries on the planet.
The United States Navy was in hot pursuit of the ship on Friday. And the Russians were not far behind.
“This is really getting out of control,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “You see how many countries are involved now? These pirates aren’t going to get away with this.”
Somalia’s 1,880-mile coastline is crawling with pirates, a serious problem given that so much of the country is dependent on emergency food aid, which comes mostly by ship.
The pirates are highly organized. They work in teams. There is even a pirate spokesman (who could not be reached for comment on Friday).
They seem to strike with increasing impunity, grabbing everything from sailing yachts to oil tankers. They then usually demand millions of dollars in ransom for the ships and their crews.
And people usually pay — a response that Somali and Western officials say is fueling the problem. This year is one of the worst on record, with more than 50 ships attacked, 25 hijacked and at least 14 currently being held by pirates. The waters off Somalia are now considered the most dangerous in the world. As for the Faina, it may have looked like the kind of slow-moving, easy prey that pirates have hit time and time again. But its booty is not the kind that can be easily pawned off at port.
Each Soviet-designed T-72 tank weighs more than 80,000 pounds. The pirates would need special know-how, not to mention special equipment, to unload them — assuming, of course, that they could make it to port with the Navy on their tail.
Somalia’s pirates are typically former fishermen who have turned to the more lucrative work of plying the seas with binoculars and rocket-propelled grenades. They travel in light speedboats, deployed from a mother ship far out at sea, and they have attacked tankers as far as 300 miles from the coast. Pirates even tried to attack an American naval supply ship this week. The ship fired warning shots at them. The pirates sped away.
“These pirates are getting bolder ever day,” said Andrew Mwangura, the program coordinator of the Seafarers’ Assistance Program in Kenya, which tracks pirate attacks.
Somali officials say the pirates are growing in numbers, with more than 1,000 gunmen at their disposal, and they have evolved into a sophisticated organized crime ring, with their headquarters along the rocky shores of northern Somalia.
An official close to the Somali government described the pirates as an oceanic “mafia” and said they had netted millions of dollars, which they use to buy fancy cars and big houses.
“Paying the ransoms is just making this worse,” said the official, who said he was not authorized to speak publicly.
Mr. Mohamed, the Somali diplomat, said: “This is not a Somali problem. This is an international problem. Shipping across this entire region is imperiled by this.”
Western countries have tried to crack down on piracy, with different navies patrolling the waters and escorting United Nations-chartered ships transporting much-needed food to Somalia. Twice this year, French commandos battled with pirates who hijacked French yachts.
On Friday, Kenyan and Western officials said that an American warship was steaming toward the hijacked ship to intercept it, and the Russian Navy announced that it, too, was sending a warship, the Dauntless. This could lead to a showdown with the pirates in the middle of the Indian Ocean. With nearly two dozen hostages aboard a floating ammunition depot, things could get complicated.
The $30 million in Ukrainian arms were bought by the Kenyan government, one of America’s closest allies in Africa.
“This is a big loss for us,” said Alfred Mutua, a spokesman for the Kenyan government.
But, Mr. Mutua was quick to add, since the ship had not reached Kenya yet, the cargo was still the Ukrainians’ responsibility.
The ship, registered in Belize, was supposed to pull into port in Mombasa, Kenya, this coming Monday. But on Thursday around 5 p.m., when the Faina was about 200 miles offshore, it was surrounded by three speedboats, according to Interfax, the Russian news service. Communication was suddenly cut off. It was a typical pirate tactic.
According to the Ukrainian Foreign Ministry’s Web site, 21 people were aboard: 17 Ukrainians, 3 Russians and a Latvian. An official at the Mombasa port said the ship was carrying 2,320 tons of “project cargo,” a term usually used to describe heavy machinery.
But according to diplomats and Interfax, the cargo included 33 refurbished T-72 tanks, “quite a significant amount of ammunition” and grenade launchers. The supplier was a state-owned Ukrainian company. Ukrainian and Kenyan officials emphasized that the arms deal was perfectly legal.
Somalia’s pirates tend to hide their captured ships in isolated coves, ferrying people and cargo back and forth in dinghies, which are not exactly built for transporting 40-ton pieces of solid-steel military equipment.
“If there are tanks on board,” said one Western diplomat in Kenya, “I don’t think there’s a chance in hell they can get them unloaded.”
More worrisome, he said, was the prospect of the small arms, like the grenade launchers, falling into the hands of insurgents.
In the past week, insurgents linked to Somalia’s ousted Islamist movement have waged withering attacks on Somalia’s transitional government forces in the capital, Mogadishu. Dozens of civilians have been cut down in the cross-fire, and thousands are fleeing the bullet-pocked city once again.
Somalia has been enmeshed in chaos for 17 years, since the central government collapsed and clan warlords carved the country into fiefs. The fighting, however, has intensified since December 2006, when Ethiopian troops invaded the country and overthrew a grass-roots Islamist movement that controlled much of Somalia.
Ethiopian and American officials said the Islamists were sheltering Qaeda terrorists, and the American military helped the Ethiopians hunt down Islamist leaders.
The United Nations World Food Program has said that the conflict and recent drought have pushed millions of Somalis to the brink of famine. More than three million people, nearly half the population, need emergency food to survive. Pirates have threatened the pipeline of food into the country because of the constant hijackings on the high seas.
Michael Schwirtz contributed reporting from Moscow, and a Somali journalist from Mogadishu, Somalia.
Somali Pirates Tell Their Side: They Want Only Money
Somali pirates in small boats hijacked the arms-laden Ukrainian freighter Faina on Thursday.
NAIROBI, Kenya — The Somali pirates who hijacked a Ukrainian freighter loaded with tanks, artillery, grenade launchers and ammunition said in an interview on Tuesday that they had no idea the ship was carrying arms when they seized it on the high seas.
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“We just saw a big ship,” the pirates’ spokesman, Sugule Ali, said in a telephone interview. “So we stopped it.”
The pirates quickly learned, though, that their booty was an estimated $30 million worth of heavy weaponry, heading for Kenya or Sudan, depending on whom you ask.
In a 45-minute interview, Mr. Sugule spoke on everything from what the pirates wanted (“just money”) to why they were doing this (“to stop illegal fishing and dumping in our waters”) to what they had to eat on board (rice, meat, bread, spaghetti, “you know, normal human-being food”).
He said that so far, in the eyes of the world, the pirates had been misunderstood. “We don’t consider ourselves sea bandits,” he said. “We consider sea bandits those who illegally fish in our seas and dump waste in our seas and carry weapons in our seas. We are simply patrolling our seas. Think of us like a coast guard.”
The pirates who answered the phone call on Tuesday morning said they were speaking by satellite phone from the bridge of the Faina, the Ukrainian cargo ship that was hijacked about 200 miles off the coast of Somalia on Thursday. Several pirates talked but said that only Mr. Sugule was authorized to be quoted. Mr. Sugule acknowledged that they were now surrounded by American warships, but he did not sound afraid. “You only die once,” Mr. Sugule said.
He said that all was peaceful on the ship, despite unconfirmed reports from maritime organizations in Kenya that three pirates were killed in a shootout among themselves on Sunday or Monday night.
He insisted that the pirates were not interested in the weapons and had no plans to sell them to Islamist insurgents battling Somalia’s weak transitional government. “Somalia has suffered from many years of destruction because of all these weapons,” he said. “We don’t want that suffering and chaos to continue. We are not going to offload the weapons. We just want the money.”
He said the pirates were asking for $20 million in cash; “we don’t use any other system than cash.” But he added that they were willing to bargain. “That’s deal-making,” he explained.
Piracy in Somalia is a highly organized, lucrative, ransom-driven business. Just this year, pirates hijacked more than 25 ships, and in many cases, they were paid million-dollar ransoms to release them. The juicy payoffs have attracted gunmen from across Somalia, and the pirates are thought to number in the thousands.
The piracy industry started about 10 to 15 years ago, Somali officials said, as a response to illegal fishing. Somalia’s central government imploded in 1991, casting the country into chaos. With no patrols along the shoreline, Somalia’s tuna-rich waters were soon plundered by commercial fishing fleets from around the world. Somali fishermen armed themselves and turned into vigilantes by confronting illegal fishing boats and demanding that they pay a tax.
“From there, they got greedy,” said Mohamed Osman Aden, a Somali diplomat in Kenya. “They starting attacking everyone.”
By the early 2000s, many of the fishermen had traded in their nets for machine guns and were hijacking any vessel they could catch: sailboat, oil tanker, United Nations-chartered food ship.
“It’s true that the pirates started to defend the fishing business,” Mr. Mohamed said. “And illegal fishing is a real problem for us. But this does not justify these boys to now act like guardians. They are criminals. The world must help us crack down on them.”
The United States and several European countries, in particular France, have been talking about ways to patrol the waters together. The United Nations is even considering something like a maritime peacekeeping force. Because of all the hijackings, the waters off Somalia’s coast are considered the most dangerous shipping lanes in the world.
On Tuesday, several American warships — around five, according to one Western diplomat — had the hijacked freighter cornered along the craggy Somali coastline. The American ships allowed the pirates to bring food and water on board, but not to take weapons off. A Russian frigate is also on its way to the area.
Lt. Nathan Christensen, a Navy spokesman, said on Tuesday that he had heard the unconfirmed reports about the pirate-on-pirate shootout, but that the Navy had no more information. “To be honest, we’re not seeing a whole lot of activity” on the ship, he said.
In Washington, Geoff Morrell, the Pentagon press secretary, declined to discuss any possible American military operations to capture the ship.
“Our concern is right now making sure that there’s a peaceful resolution to this, that this cargo does not end up in the hands of anyone who would use it in a way that would be destabilizing to the region,” Mr. Morrell told reporters at the Pentagon. He said the United States government was not involved in any negotiations with the pirates. He also said he had no information about reports that the pirates had exchanged gunfire among themselves.
Kenyan officials continued to maintain that the weapons aboard were part of a legitimate arms deal for the Kenyan military, even though several Western diplomats, Somali officials and the pirates themselves said the arms were part of a secret deal to funnel weapons to southern Sudan.
Somali officials are urging the Western navies to storm the ship and arrest the pirates because they say that paying ransoms only fuels the problem. Western diplomats, however, have said that such a commando operation would be very difficult because the ship is full of explosives and the pirates could use the 20 crew members as human shields.
Mr. Sugule said his men were treating the crew members well. (The pirates would not let the crew members speak on the phone, saying it was against their rules.) “Killing is not in our plans,” he said. “We only want money so we can protect ourselves from hunger.”
When asked why the pirates needed $20 million to protect themselves from hunger, Mr. Sugule laughed and said, “Because we have a lot of men.”
Mohammed Ibrahim contributed reporting from Mogadishu, Somalia, and Eric Schmitt from Washington.
Blackwater: We’ll Fight Somalia’s Pirates
October 16, 2008 – Wired.com
Security analysts and the Somali government are publicly flirting with the idea of hiring mercenaries to stop the pirates that are terrorizing east Africa. Now, the notorious guns-for-fire at Blackwater are responding to the call, with a resounding arrrr!!!!!
“Blackwater Worldwide today announced that its 183-foot ship, the McArthur, stands ready to assist the shipping industry as it struggles with the increasing problem of piracy in [Somalia's] Gulf of Aden,” the firm says in a statement. “As a company founded and run by former Navy SEALs, with a 50,000-person database of former military and law enforcement professionals, Blackwater is uniquely positioned to assist the shipping industry.”
Somali pirates have hit commercial vessels 100 times, just in this year. The U.S. Navy and its allies have admitted than they don’t have a big enough fleet to ensure every ship’s safety. So ship owners are now reaching out to Blackwater for protection, according to Executive Vice President Bill Matthews.
It’s not eactly a brand-new idea. Mercenaries have been battling pirates for a good eight centuries, off and on. Back in 2005, the Somali government tried to hire a U.S. security contractor for maritime protection — only to have the company fall victim to scandal. This June, there were conflicting reports that a French security outfit had won a $150 million deal to take the American firm’s place. One U.S. admiral even joined in the pirate-fighting mercenary chorus, allegedly. But it “raises more legal issues than anyone could possibly count.”
Meanwhile, Blackwater is looking for new income streams, as its business protecting diplomats and executives in Iraq looks increasingly fragile. Blackwater employees are protecting missile interceptors in Japan, schooling Taiwan’s secret police, and rescuing blondes in Kenya. The company is assembling a private fleet of airplanes, helicopters, and spy blimps. And let’s not forget about Blackwater’s work after Katrina in New Orleans. Maybe the company will get a chance to follow up another mess.
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