Pirates don't like loud noises

Nick Davis says he can scare off the pirates plaguing the coast of Africa without firing a shot. So far, so good -- except for that little incident last week.

By Vincent Rossmeier

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Read more: Politics, News, Africa

Reuters/Specialist 2nd Class Jason R. Zalasky-U.S. Navy

The crew of the Ukrainian merchant vessel the MV Faina seized by pirates on Sept. 25. A Somali pirate spokesman says his group will release the ship and its crew members within the next two days.

Dec. 3, 2008 | Ships pillaged for their booty, hostages held for exorbitant ransoms and hand-to-hand battles on the high seas -- recently, pirates operating out of Somalia have returned the east coast of Africa to the era of the legendary 18th-century Barbary pirates. Governments around the world are now sending warships into the Gulf of Aden, between Somalia and Yemen, to combat the pirates. Meanwhile, outside mercenary contractors like Blackwater are also offering armed protection services for tankers and freighters traveling in the area.

Blackwater has vowed to use lethal force. Last week, Salon spoke with Nick Davis, a former British Army pilot, who now heads a firm that addresses piracy by non-lethal means. Davis, founder and CEO of the U.K.-basedAnti-Piracy Maritime Security Solutions (APMSS), argues that the Somali pirates are far less aggressive than their image in the media would suggest, and that the best way to counteract them is via high-tech audio, not guns. Recent events, however, may undermine Davis' business plan: On Nov. 28, three days after this interview, and after Davis insisted the non-lethal strategy was effective, a three-man crew from his firm had to jump into the ocean to escape from pirates who had overwhelmed a tanker they had been hired to protect. Davis' team was rescued by a German naval helicopter; the tanker's crew of 25 was still being held hostage at press time. Salon spoke with Davis by phone.

Your company emphasizes a non-lethal solution to combating piracy. How is a non-lethal response even possible?

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We have ex-Marines and Special Forces that are grouped into three-man teams that board the [merchant] ships to protect them. We travel on board the ship. We don't have vessels that shadow a ship. We actually put supplementary deck security teams on board vessels. They board in Salalah [a city in Oman] or in Aden [a city in Yemen], depending on which way the ships are going through the MSPA, the Maritime Security Protection Area, that the coalition forces have designated as a safe corridor.

Our teams embark with equipment, which will either be the Long Range Acoustic Device [LRAD] or the Magnetic Audio Device [MAD], and these two pieces of equipment are effective. They are sort of parabolic dishes that are loud hailers. Now they transmit warning sounds and tones as well as voice communications at very, very, very high volumes over a distance of approximately 1,000 meters. The pain threshold for a human for noise is around 120 decibels. These transmit at 150 decibels. It's fairly considerable excruciating pain when you get within 200 to 300 meters of this noise. That coupled with the ship going at full speed and zigzagging and water cannons, barbed wire and grease and various other bits and pieces on the back of the ship all basically amount to a fairly effective deterrent for what is basically from the pirate's capabilities a fairly primitive way of boarding, i.e., throwing a grappling hook onto the back of the ship and climbing up a rope ladder.

So you never engage the pirates with more violence than that? You never use any type of weaponry to attack them physically?

No. If in the unlikely event that they might actually get on board, these ex-Marines and Special Forces are all trained in close quarters combat. They will all have their own personal knives on them and obviously it will probably end up in fatalities of the pirates if they did try to board the vessel. Because, while our crews don't have firearms, they don't necessarily need firearms to be able to look after themselves in self-defense mode.

The main goal then is deterrence?

Absolutely. It's earlier identification and vigilance to identify the threat action and prevent the boarding of that threat and then to repel the pirates away from the vessel.

Could you expand on how the LRADs and the MADs work?

Basically, they use a satellite dish hooked up to an MP3 player playing at 150 decibels that has prerecorded tones, warnings and messages. Obviously, you can record any voice message in any language you like, plug it in to the MP3 player, and then as these speedboats get closer, it's a full pan and tilt and the operator then lets them know that they've been seen and it's very, very effective.

How far away are the pirates when this type of warning is activated?

We start it all off at one nautical mile.

Did you see this outbreak of piracy coming before it happened?

Absolutely. It's been mushrooming and becoming visible since spring of this year when we set the company up. I never envisioned it was going to be as busy as what we have been, but obviously I'm extremely grateful that we are. It's great. But at the same time, it is a problem that the U.N. and politicians and the world at large are going to need to address. I don't think that the solution is with coalition forces and firepower. I think the solution is with the U.N. and peacekeeping and reinvestment and regeneration of Somalia.

What is your experience combating these pirates? Have your men been out on the water in the Gulf of Aden recently?

We currently have 10 three-men teams embarked on ships in the Gulf of Aden right now, today. We ourselves have almost daily encounters with the pirates. The last sort of definitive, what we'd call a combat indicator of an attempted attack and boarding was last Thursday [Nov. 20]. The ship had to fully comply with the procedures to avoid hijacking -- attempted pira-hijacking. Put the ship on high speed, zigzagging, water cannons on full power, our teams obviously got them mad with the MAD. We're pretty successful. And to be honest with you, the pirates aren't interested in close quarters combat. They're not interested in ships that have additional deck security because they're completely unaware of whether we're armed or not. And they're not trained to deal with ex-Marines and Special Forces, so they will typically then divert to the next vessel, which ideally for them won't have deck security on board, in which case they've got their ticket.

Generally, do the pirates fire on you? Do they attack you?

They quite often fire weapons. They fire their AK-47s as sort of a warning, a deterrent, to get you to stop the vessel. They never actually normally direct it at any personnel. They direct it at the ship. At the ship's hull, the ship's superstructure. They're not into getting you between the cross hairs and trying to take you out. They're purely after scaring you and getting you to stop the vessel so that they can board.

Have you spoken with any of them or have you been in tense situations that you've had to manage your way out of?

Yeah, we've got sort of tense situations almost daily with the teams that we've got embarked. The only time we speak to the pirates really is over the telephone or over the loud hailing system. They don't come up to the vessel to come up for a chat, that's for sure. And we wouldn't let them get that close because we're employed by the ship's owners to ensure that they do not get close to the vessel. So our actual interaction with them is fairly limited, although we do have fairly extensive intelligence and in-country people who can help us with communicating with them and trying to understand and trying to help them to find the solution, because it's not in our interest really to maintain the offensive towards the pirates and the Somali people. It would certainly be my sort of desire to find a solution and to help broker that solution.

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