Port police in the Italian city of Gioia Tauro heard an unusual noise coming from a cargo container. On opening it they discovered a well-dressed man drilling ventilation holes. He was equipped with a bed, a toilet, water supply, satellite phone, laptop computer, cameras and maps. He also had security passes to various airports.
?Container Bob,? as police dubbed him, was obviously up to no good, but as an Egyptian-born Canadian citizen he knew his way around and hired a smart lawyer. He was freed on bail and promptly disappeared, possibly headed for some kind of terrorist action.
His container, while unusually luxurious, writes correspondent William Langewiesche, is one of many millions that are shipped around the world each year that could hold almost anything, including a nuclear device. Because inspection of a container can take hours, only two percent are opened, though some can be scanned by x-ray machines or checked for faulty paper work.
This is made to order for terrorists, says Mr. Langewiesche, and al-Qaida has moved into the business. Osama bin Laden is said to own or control up to 20 freighters, which may carry explosives amid seeds and cement. In 1998, one of his vessels, looking like an ordinary merchant ship, delivered the bombs used against the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
There is no shortage of regulations to deal with all of this, says Mr. Langewiesche. The International Maritime Organization, a U.N. agency based in London, has issued hundreds of safety rules that then seem lost at sea. ?The ship owners are reacting with I think legitimate skepticism to many of the new regulations that are being imposed,? he says. ?They shrug their shoulders, raise their eyebrows, roll their eyes and say, ?Oh well, more paper work. We are used to this ? that?s for sure. And so they do the paper work.?
This gap between fantasy and reality, says Mr. Langewiesche, is what drove him to write his article filled with graphic accounts of vulnerable ships imperiled by storms, terrorists and piracy. ?I was doing another piece on ship scrapping in India and Bangladesh of all things,? he says, ?and became aware of the disconnect between regulation and reality on the high seas. I found that disconnect to be pretty interesting and sort of significant of other disconnects that go on in life. So I decided to look into it. It became nearly a one-year project.?
It is little understood, he writes, that the ships rarely come from the homeports printed on their sterns. These so-called ports can even be located in landlocked Bolivia or the Mongolian desert. Required to register under the flag of a sovereign nation, ship owners tend to look for one with lower fees and less scrutiny.
A ship full of would-be terrorists was captured by Italians in the Mediterranean. It had been renamed five times in three years. It was flagged in Tonga and owned by a Greek who operated it through a company based in Romania and the U.S. State of Delaware. Try following that.
This complexity - the vastness of the problem - has deterred people from coming to grips with it, says Mr. Langewiesche.
?For the most part,? he says, ?people are not aware of it because the ocean is so big. You stand on the shoreline and you see about three miles out. Beyond that lies much of the world and it is out of sight, and as I say in this piece, it is largely out of control.?
No question terrorists will soon be going to sea, says Neil Livingstone, Chairman of Global Options, an international risk-management firm and author of nine books on security and terrorism. His firm represents the so-called Liberian fleet with over 700 ships and headquartered in the U.S. State of Virginia: ?Terrorists are always going to look for the soft target and as we close up the vulnerabilities at airports around the world, as we take additional steps to make it more difficult to strike at other vital transportation nodes, the terrorists are going to see that there is a real problem with shipping today, that it is too vulnerable, that cargoes can be diverted, ships can be attacked, and they are going to go after them.?