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university. i started to come around to that way of thinking for my career path and every journalist i spoke to said that if you want to get ahead in today's, you know, really, quiet struggling journalist market and especially if you want a job doing international journalism when bureaus are shrinking around the world, you should just come up there and write freelance. i went to an independent region in somalia write ended up going and covering elections that was supposed to happen in march, 2009. those elections never happened. but as it turned out i found a better opportunity that certainly had a better chance of getting my name in print and it worked out. >> your interest in somalia is fairly long-standing.

it goes back to college? >> yeah, i studied -- i found the country extreme fascinating because it's one of these -- i did study in college. it's the closest you get to as abusive state of nature and where you get to see how people are react when faced with anarchy. and there's no such thing as state of anarchy when you get into somalia you start learning a little bit about it and you learn local little statelets have cropped up everywhere and, you know, people don't like anarchy. and so semi function regions have pulled together and who have functioned to a greater or lesser extent and i grew up in one of these territories like i mentioned due to the eve of the first election in four years and it was a complete turnover of and our it was a very interesting time and i think somalia the way it's presented glazes over the fact there's some interesting dynamics going on in the country, clan

dynamics, islamist dynamics, busy traditional federal government in the south which is a collection of ex-warlords thwarted by the international communities. i think it's one of the interesting countries in the world. >> host: when you were deciding to go over there, did your parents and your girlfriend and others say this is a totally crazy thing to do. you have no idea what it's going to be like to work in a place like that, do not do it? >> guest: actually, no. well, a lot of my friends were telling my girlfriend to talk me out of it. and so i had this sort of fifth column working behind my back to get to me through her, she never did. i don't know why. my parents were very supportive. they were sort of taciturn about it it. they never did anything to dissuade me because i needed to borrow a little money. >> host: i assume you tried to get the mail, the national post, american papers, cbc, somebody

to give you an assignment to go there so that you would know you had somebody to write for when you got there? >> guest: i actually didn't because i went there originally with the intention of writing the book. this was actually the goal. i actually thought it was completely realistic. it may sound arrogant and naive but i really thought i would gate book and in the meantime i thought well, if it doesn't work out, my fallback plan i'll sell some freelance articles because those major news agencies are so happy when there's any freelancer willing to take peanuts for being in a place they can't send their own people due to insurance companies as well as major newspaper companies rarely send somebody to somalia. i had nobody having access to my work especially talking to somali pirates. for a book proposal you write a sample chapter and i ended up selling that sample chapter in a

condensed version to the london times so my first piece shortly after i got back in march, 2009, was featured in the london times which was pretty cool. >> host: when i was your age, when i was 27 i was a young foreign correspondent, and i worked for the hearst newspapers and back in those days they had quite a few newspapers and they sent me to northern ireland to cover the terrorism the differences between then and so now is when i went to northern ireland i figured -- and i think rightly at that point, everybody would want to talk to me and no one would want to harm me. they needed me to tell my sorry. one of the things that's changed particularly among terrorists and others who are violent that they no longer quite need to you tell the story in the same way, for example, if they can cut off your head and put it on videotape and post-it on the internet, they've kind of told the story their way utilizing you. >> guest: sure. >> host: so it's a more dangerous environment out there if you're going to cover people

like that. this obviously occurred to you. i think you dealt with it resourcefully what you decided to do in terms of security? >> guest: my plan was to get to somaliaa on my own, fly in ask for directions on the coast and talk my way of the good graces of the pilot group and i thought, you know, they would think i was so touched or, you know, just crazy or mad that they would take pity on me or either that or they would, you know, be blown away by my bravery, you know, that wasn't the best plan, but, yeah, i had this vision of -- i looked at al in google earth, al is the pirate capital. >> host: ewl. >> guest: yeah. and so i was zooming in and out looking all over the place and i noticed on the edge of town, a small building and it was labeled pirate checkpoint. [laughter]

>> guest: so i thought okay. this is easy. i just have to get to this pirate checkpoint and ask to see the pirates and, you know, i'll become one of them and sit around with them and chew cuts. but, you know, but this plan is a little harebrain there was no pirate checkpoint and i made contact with a local journalist and he had run -- >> host: and you made contact by the way through email or -- >> guest: email and he emailed me back within five minutes. >> host: you were looking for journalists who were residents in any part of somalia. >> guest: yeah. >> host: yeah. >> guest: and i just sent him an email. i got a response in five minutes. and he called me the next day, probably as early as he thought i might be up. so he called at 7:00 am. i wasn't up. but i spoke to him. and it was clear he was very eager. >> host: why do you think he was eager. why do you think he wanted you to come?

>> guest: his father actually ended up getting elected as president in the region about a week before i got there, january, 2009. and i just heard his father was one of 16 candidates in an indirect election. and he gained something like 75% of the vote. so he was a massive favorite. when i heard this i just filed it into the back of my mind and thought well, it's probably not going to happen. but i ended up getting -- because of his father's position, i ended up getting great access not only to bureaucrats and politicians, but also his family was the same subclan as a lot of the pirates from ewl. all the original figures who had started out fighting against foreign fishing back in the early '90s were the same subclans. so they were happy to talk to me because i was a guest of basically the de facto head of their clan. >> host: and why do you think he wanted you to come?

did he have a message he wanted -- that he hoped that you would get out about their clan, about his father? was he doing real journalism, would you say? >> guest: well, it's certainly a progovernment website. there's no doubt about it. but it is a very high quality website. it's not propaganda. it's a very, very high quality for a product that's coming out of somalia with very little funding, great quality. definitely progovernment. there's no doubt about that. for his father, the president, his mission was to rehabilitate the clan's mission on the international stage and the previous government had been run in the ground. and in 2008, they had the money for the security forces which is one of the factors that led to the piracy at the time. so, yeah, he wanted -- he wanted the book to be, i guess, sort of

a travelogue about punt land and i guess he wanted a speaks of propaganda and it didn't turn out and i had to be conscious that i was under the wing of the government and everything was being filtered through that lens. everyone who spoke to me assumed or rightly or wrongly that what they were telling me was going to get back to the president or his son. and in the book i had to be very careful to provide a balanced view. and actually some of the reviews have actually criticized -- what's been criticized is some people said it's too balanced. i don't know if that's a bad thing but something i was very conscious of. >> host: in this phone call and subsequent phone calls, you know what? come over. we'll have somebody meet you when you get over here. we'll take care of you. we'll provide some security and, sure, you can do some reporting here. we'd love to see you. that's basically how it went? >> guest: he also wanted the book. i pitched him with the idea of a

book and also maybe just thought it had already happened essentially in the book. and i was kind of chagrinned when i told him i'd gotten the book published he acted like, well, yeah, don't we have a book? isn't that what we were doing all along so that was the plan. and he provided -- yeah, i had security guards with all me at all times. >> host: we should probably tell a little bit how you got there 'cause it's not quite like going to the airport and taking a plane. it's a little bit of a difficult transition. >> guest: the most common way to go there is to go dubai and go to terminal 2 which is the -- i call it the pariah airline hub of dubai international because it flies, you know, to north korea. it flies to pyongyang and then djibouti and then once you get on djibouti you get on a 1970s

prop plane flown by quite visibly drunken ukrainians. they're very contanks are slamming with sledgehammers and. i compare these ukrainians in the book to people who had just been forgotten about and were just condemned to this neglected route forever. but anyway, that's how you get there. >> host: and you ended up -- the last plane you were on, not a lot of foreigners, certainly not a lot of people look like you. >> guest: none, yeah. it was shocking because i went over there expecting to meet a lot of foreign journalists. this is when the story really exploded. it was after -- it was after the oil tanker had been captured carrying 100 million in crude oil.

that really ignited the newspaper headlines and i expected to find a lot of journalists. i made two troops. the first trip was for six weeks and during that time, i saw -- >> host: 2009. >> guest: beginning of 2009. and i saw during that entire time one group of foreigners and it was an australian camera crew that was flying in on my final day in the country so we were just literally passing each other in the airport. so it was shocking. i mean, i got there and i said i kind of have this marked cornered and i think i do. [laughter] >> host: all right. you get there. happily you get to the tarmac, security is provided for you. you have guests. you have a place to stay that they provided for you. and then it's a matter of they're going to hopefully start putting new contact with pirates who are going to hopefully tell you their story? >> guest: right. >> host: and why -- talk about your first interview with the pirates? >> guest: well, i was taken some

days -- i asked where's the pirates? bring me the pirates. >> host: it's several days. >> guest: you know, pirates -- it was very obvious at that time who they were. they were just driving around in these vehicles. i call it the baby land cruiser. it's a land cruiser with portions all shrunk. it's obvious who they are. the license plate had 18 for the commencing digits. if you saw a young kid driving around in a toyota serf with 18 on the license plate that's a pilot. i mean, there's no -- you know, 95% you got a pirate and i asked them and go up to these people and start talking to them and he immediately laughed, no, no, you can't do that. you'll immediately start getting watched or they might just attack you. like i said everything in somalia starts with a clan. and he start with the central

character in his book. >> host: that's not his real name. >> guest: but every somali, every single one goes by a nickname because the names are obviously overlapped. there's a lot of mohammed and so on. so the names are so common everyone goes by a nickname. i was taken to meet boya at an abandoned farm outside of the capital city and immediately i got to know my partner very well and i thought we were going to be ambushed why are we going to meet him 15 minutes outside of the city in an abandon field. >> host: this is your somali partner. >> guest: yeah, my partner. >> host: the journalist, right? >> guest: he explained that he was worried about tuberculosis. because he apparently had tuberculosis. i don't actually think he had it but, boy, he was extremely emaciated so mohammed had this

pa -- paranoia. first of all, he was gigantic. i'm 6'5" and he's 6'8". he didn't even looked at me when he shook my hand. he sat grumling and looking out at the sun and the day was almost over. he was quite disdainful and afterwards i realized -- after mohammed -- after we finished the interview, mohammed came up to him and gave him $100 -- so he gave him drug money. >> but i embedded with him and his gang and i got to know more and more of them over the course of a few months. >> host: you're working through translators. most folks were not english-speaking but there were plenty of enough who spoke english good enough to

translate. >> guest: mohammed. like most of the ex-pats who run the country really he's lived -- >> host: you mean people who have gone abroad and come back. >> guest: the former -- the somali community the diaspora who lives abroad runs everything, business, because they're the only ones as you mentioned -- no local people speak english. >> host: they have foreign languages and they can do better -- the president spent 20 years in australia so he probably did quite good english. >> guest: and his son, so, yeah, and the president spoke six languages, i think. but at the very -- at the base level somali diaspora, members of diaspora are going to speak english and arabic and they run the entire government, and have the best business opportunities so, yeah, there were plenty of people. everyone i spoke to in holding a position in government spoke english. but for the pirates it was yeah

universally translated in somali. there's a really strong tensions between the levels of somali activity those who paid and suffered the brunt of the war and those who have been able to escape and have lives outside. it's interesting. there's a really sharp divide in somali society. >> host: one of the things you learned from boya which i found quite fascinating maybe not surprising but fascinating but he doesn't see himself as a pirate. the pirates don't call themselves pirates. >> guest: yeah, they know the word. they use the word. >> host: they find it slightly offensive. >> guest: yeah, it's sort of like a slight racial slur. if you use slight a racial slur they might react to it the same way. >> host: well, they see themselves as they call it saviors of the sea or coast guards and they have a legitimate grievance that they say they are trying to address. in other words, they have a rather sophisticated public

relations pitch. >> guest: they do. they have -- i felt at times it was actually an official machine that was releasing a -- even if a guy step food within site of the fishing boat in his life the first words out of his mouth were, you know, we're doing this because of fishing, because of illegal fishing. >> host: in other words, foreign illegal fishing. their claim is the foreign fishing boats aim into their waters, depleted their waters, destroyed their reefs, took away their livelihood and so they were going to do something to stop this because the international community was not coming to their defense? >> guest: yes. and that was -- that was true -- that's a partial explanation that was true for very, very few men. boya and his gang had been fishing. and had really suffered a lot of on foreign ships often european french and spanish are very

common. mostly it's south asian ships, korean, taiwanese and when they were fishing close to shore for lobster mainly, for rock lobster which is what boya and his colleagues used to fish for, they would come in to conflict with local fishermen and their accounts -- i didn't just take everything that boya was saying as god's truth but there were third-party accounts that these foreign fishers arm themselves with antiaircraft guns. they destroy local gear. they -- i heard one story from the townspeople of ewl who -- two drivers had been swept up by a trawler net and drowned and they ended up destroying local stocks of lobsters through drag fishing. so one of the reasons that i found boya and his men so compelling and their story kind of the -- the thread of their story runs through my book is because they had a

justification. it was easier to humanize them and make -- and, you know, make them sympathetic characters, i guess, in the story and that's -- i think that's partly the advantage i had was offering, you know, an inside look into their lives and portraying them more -- more than just the thugs you see on the news with heads wrapped in turbines and machine guns. >> host: so you are convinced there is a legitimate grievance that perhaps they gave birth to this at one point and now i'll just go on for a second and you can address it but what happened starting, i guess, in the 1990s, they started attacking the foreign fishing boats. but as they developed their skills, they started to go after commercial vessels as well and eventually even world food programs, ships bringing in food aid and eventually almost anything that came into their path was fair game including, obviously, not that long ago aiat with two american couples who were retired and

distributing bibles to far-flung churches and schools who were ended up killed, murdered as you say as negotiations for their release were underway. they started to defending their territory and ended up saying anything is fair game to us. is that reasonable to say? >> guest: yeah, it's complex because -- and i'm trying tomorrow morning of a way to summarize this very quickly. but boya, yes, they started out in the early '90s attacking illegal fishing ships. that being said, the somalis -- the current business model which is essentially kidnapping at sea. you go out and capture ships and you bring them to the -- to your local base and you demand a rans ransom. it's not different in taliban in afghanistan and bringing them to a cave or the factor taking people to the jungle and holding them hostage. you know, the common ground is

they have somewhere safe and inaccessible where they can hold and supply themselves while the ransom negotiations are carried out. that business model was not invented by the fishermen. it was invented by a man whose name a nickname named big mouth. but he was not a businessman. he was a former ex-pat who lived in central somalia and who had returned to the country and just figured out that shipping companies were going to pay these ransoms and once he figured that model and started kidnapping ships and even though there were 5 meters of fishing skiff that they would use for fishing and they started tow the skiffs and go 100 miles out to the ocean. that was a key development. once he figured that out and as you mentioned he started

attacking world food program ships which is against the pirate p.r. mantra we're only doing to this protect our land when they were literally stealing food from their own people. once that was -- that model was invented, it just spread up and down the coast. and, you know, boya and his men well, look at this. foreign fishing ships are really a hassle to attack because they shoot back at us but we're already very experienced in route navigation, obviously, and boarding operations and we know the coastline. so they essentially started traveling up and down the coasts working with the men training future pirates. and so it was -- it's a very incestuous history. i call it a very interbred incestuous history how pirates actually develop. but to say it wouldn't have happened had there been no illegal fishing is completely off-base. if no fishing ships close to

somali waters, it eventually would have happened. someone needed to figure it out and someone did. >> host: well, this can lead us in its good context. you had a breakdown in somalia. it became a collapsed state and i think you make an interesting distinction. a collapsed state is not the same as a failed state. a failed state is total anarchy. a failed state can mean what's happened here which is that you have, i think, as you describe it enclaves of foreign particular maybe subenclaves, each controlled essentially by a specific clan or a couple of clans who that's sort of their territory and they're developing their own sort of mini government within that -- within that enclave and these areas. and that gave rise at least to the ability for these pirates to begin to organize and actually you make it out like a good

point that it's easier for them to organize where there was less chaos because they wouldn't get caught walking in the crossfire and they didn't have a lot of people to have pay off. >> guest: right. that's exactly why it explodes at the epicenter of the whole piracy crisis. there's been change in the south but as youluted to there's tons of competing interests in the south, islamists, warlords, the transitional government. and what these pirates are -- they're just businessmen. they're operating in a business environment, a very low barrier entry, high turnover, great mobility of capital, obviously. it's a free market -- really a free market enterprise and these businesses need to operate in an environment and security and punt land provided that. as i said the government -- there's a government there. and it does function. it does employ security forces.

but these security forces are confined barracks on one side of the road. there's no roads in the coastal areas. there's no way to deploy troops in any quicker or effective manner. i mean, it took -- when i went out there it took 7 hours to cross 200 kilometers. so they were essentially, you know, at arm's length from the central government. but like i said, there wasn't those competing interests in the south who would rip them off. if you're operating in an area where a warlord is reigning or where you have islamic militants, they're going to demand money and they're going to demand a cut just like a mop would in punt land that wasn't the same thing. and coming up in the business model in 2005. when the islamic courts union, this is the home grown islamist

movement in the country that took over the south of the country in 2006, they took over the area that they were operating from and they just went north to punt land. so it relocated north punt land in 2006 and concentrated, i guess, all the pirate forces in ewl and as i mentioned in early 2008 when the government, you know, went from barely functioning to not functioning at all and ran out of money to pay security forces. there were tons of men with guns and not much to do who provided, you know, great recruitment material. >> host: it takes some financing to put together a pirate operation as you describe. you have any sense -- were you able to report at all on whether or not some of that financing was coming from outside the country? >> i think that's a difficult question. to answer it simply, i think that when you have a is -- i've seen lists provided by journalists working standards of

about 30 key financiers. and these are the men that provide the money permission and it's not that much money. they're invariably local businessmen who are move in and out of the country just like a lot of somali government and they spend money in their adopted homeland and six months to their home country who have money to finance this. this is like some international crime syndicate and i heard ludicrous suggestions that american businessmen are financing it as if somalis need american businessmen to supply $50,000 permission. not only is there plenty of that kind of money in somalia it's somewhat patronizing that they couldn't do it themselves. they need american corporate backing to get this done. there's not that much money

involved. and the local businessmen, i think, are the face of the transnational somali piracy crime sinned accounts which sometimes the media seems to portray. i've seen no direct evidence that there are established non-somali foreigners financing any of this. there's not one shred of evidence. >> host: we're going to take a very quick break. when we come back among the things i want to discuss, jay, the role played by groups like al-shabaab which is the al-qaeda affiliated jihadist group and, of course, what solutions may or may not be to this problem so we're back right after this.

>> host: jay bahadur is the author of the pirates of somalia and their world. the pirates -- i wouldn't call them sophisticated but they're well organized in the sense that you have apprenticeship programs for young pirates. you have the kind of elite pirates who attack and seize the vessel. you have the holders who stay with them. they even have their own cook they bring on board. the mothership and then you have the various skiffs. you have negotiators. you have translators, you have accountants. it has gotten to be a fairly organized enterprise. not sophisticated but organized. yeah, there's these structures that have been developed very efficiently on land to provide for the crew to handle these negotiations. these negotiations are often

freelancers like i was. they hire themselves out. in fact, one gang, specifically, that i was interviewing holding a ship called the victoria he had come on board from another gang two days after he finished his latest assignment. so these good negotiators were in demand. they had logistics officers who brought them food, who organized, transport, who brought the drugs, that was the toughest thing and this was all done on credit. when the ship was awaiting the ransom delivery, the backers -- the backer might not even have enough money to provide -- pay for the supplies up front because the supplies just a couple months might runs into the hundreds of thousands of dollars mainly because of the cuts which is very especially which is $20 a milligram which

is what an addict is using. they would front money to gang members who say you're an attacking member of the crew who had just come back from a successful hunt and you get on shore you don't want to stay on the ship anymore. you want to go out and start buying a car. you want to get a new woman. and they don't have the money. so the accountant basically takes care of that for them. he's like their backer. >> host: the credit bureau. >> guest: he's the underwriter. he doesn't extend the credit personally but anyone who wants -- anyone the pirate wants to deal with, he wants to buy a car for someone that guy will come to the accountant and the accountant will say, okay, it's on me. i got it and he'll be the backer and so they won't deal directly with the pirates themselves. the accountant take that and he they end up paying double. >> host: because they charge interests. >> guest: even though most

ransom is paid it's a riskilition you get an i.o.u. which is worth 50 cents on the dollar. they essentially have to pay like i said double the price, 100% interest on all their purchases. so they go on shore and start spending immediately. so that's one way that's sophisticated. another way they adopt very well to what the international navies have thrown at them. they're clever. they adapt well. once the international navy came into the gulf of aden and created a transit corridor, they immediately shifted to even more use of mother ships and went over 1,000 miles into the indian ocean. another tactic that has been tried has been state points on a ship. if the ship is boarded the crew barricades themselves in the engine room where they're provided with food and water and communications to the outside and wait for rescue. now, when the pirates started learning about this, there have been reports of pirates being

plastic explosives onto the ship so they're very well versed in the sense they monitor the internet. they even have people on the outside who tell them what happened, you know, other somalis living abroad who might inform them of the trends that are going on but they know everything that's going on. >> host: we should probably say a thing about this. it's a remarkable phenomenon because -- i mean, it's a plant not similar from, say, marijuana, i guess a stimulant or an intoxicant. and it's very popular not just in somalia but a lot of the red sea area, i guess, you would say around the horn of africa. basically, many of them if not most of the pirates and a lot of people in somalia are essentially addicted to it. they chew it and they chew it for hours and hours on end and spend a lot of their income on this, right. >> guest: it blew my mind. i mean, it's not even grown in somalia. this is the thing. yemen, i think they are even addicted. they take their families out to cot.

somalis would never bring their wife and child to chew cot but yemen grows this. and somali, which is -- you know, up there in the poorest countries of the earth, obviously, is spending so much of its foreign exchange to import cot from kenya and ethiopia has a climate much more suited for cultivation this is one of the reasons the former dictator tried to stamp out cot in the 1970s and '80s, not because he was concerned about the health or well-being of his people but because so much of the money was flowing out of the country into antagonistic governments into the hands of countries that, you know, somalia was at times at war with. and he saw this as funding his enemies and rightfully so. so but cot has been since then -- since the outbreak of the civil war has exploded. and this is exclusively, i'd

say, crisis. and it's what they spend their money on. >> host: you tried it and wow, i can see the appeal and why people would spend their lives highjacking ships having chewed cot on their farms. >> guest: it has to be chewed fresh. by the time it somalia it comes 6:30 every day. to go see to the capital by noon. it's trucked like station wagons and they come screaming in. they go through checkpoints. the soldiers essentially help themselves to bundle it and the whole city comes alive. children follow the -- follow the transport and steel leaves off the back. i even saw goats go nuts for it. as soon as they hear the cots van they run out and try to get their own pickings off the back of the shipments. so, yeah, i tried it a couple times. i found it was a great

interviewing aid because -- i wouldn't compare it to marijuana but the cocoa leaf and it causes mild euphoria and makes you very tense and very talkative and brimming with energy. so i chewed it, i think, six or seven times. it's just -- it's filthy because by the time it gets there it's just wilted and it's very bitter. and so bitter they have to chew very sugared tea in order to counteract the taste. it absolutely blew my mind how essentially any somali that could afford it was chewing cot in plain sight. >> host: that's part of the other thing they make this money from what we described as an organized enterprise of seizing these ships and taking hostages and getting ransoms in the millions of dollars we should point out then they kind of blow their money as you say on cars, on women, on cot. maybe they'll buy a house but that's it. they're not putting their money

in 401ks or financing their way through dental hygiene school. >> guest: nor is the money going into the somali economy itself. it's going -- it's recycled back into international market. so it's almost as if the ransom could be paid in tons of cot and land cruisers because that's ultimately what it ends up going to and you could, you know, avoid the transaction fees along the way. it just blew my mind. this money is not going to help the local community. the local people hate them because exactly that. not only do they not fund local economies, put money into local causes but they drive up local prices but not only for cot, for food, water and they're seen un-islamic because they drink and do cot and fornicate and so on. it's insane how they blow their money. and to add one more thing,

people who talk about somali piracy being this international crime syndicate and talk about pirate money going to finance buildings in nairobi and buying property of nairobi have not met pirates. they have no concept of money and nor would they think of money having to steal your bank. they would never trust the banker in a million years. they view it really just as something that will get me a land cruiser. >> host: it's not much in their habits. >> guest: we're going out and we're heading to the ocean to get a land cruiser. there's going to be an intermediary step to get us some money. people talk about a lot but it's really a land cruiser in the cot we want. >> host: we spent a few minutes on the victims and you went to romania to interview some of the victims. not only are they taking the ships they have taken the crews.

the impression from you is that they don't look to kill anybody because they want to make it clear that if you pay the ransom you'll get people back alive. there have been instances of torture. and i've seen some discussion of whether that's increasing. my impression again from you is that they don't necessarily -- they don't torture for pleasure on the other hand they're not terribly solicitous to make sure their hostages are well-taken care of. they feed them and give them some water. they can take what they can steal from them personally. that's all accurate that we need to add on? >> guest: yeah, i would say that they're definitely getting more sadistic. that's partially because it's not fishermen anymore. it's now -- a lot of these guys are inland militia men and not fishing by any means. it's from their own personal backgrounds, they're a lot more violent. they have more experience using

violence. and the ransom money is going up and this is causing increased tensions on both sides because international forces are a lot more willing to use violence themselves as an option of paying ransoms that have topped $10 million. >> host: 10 minutes, was the record 9.5 last november -- >> guest: yes. and now there's been 13.5 paid earlier this year, several months ago. so that -- i mean, that's an outlier. and average ransoms are not much more, about 5 million still. but clearly the money is going up. there have been -- there have been increased numbers of rescue attempts and successful rescues still unsuccessful and the pirates know this and they're responding by using torture as a means to pressure shipping companies to show that they're serious. so things like -- they've thrown hostages in freezers, tied up

their genitals. they've used them as human shields, beatings, mock executions, these kinds of things. and that's something that was not going on even, you know, 1.5 -- definitely not two years ago. so i think it's a product of, a, like i said a meaner class of pirate and, b, i mean, the game -- the stakes are getting higher. it's as simple as that. >> host: right. when people hear about -- i at least want to touch on this. they may focus on particularly al-shabaab which is a terrorist group, a jihad group that is officially affiliated with al-qaeda. i guess to cut to the chase, you argue that there's no evidence, whatsoever, of strategic alines between the pirates and al-shabaab, though, what may be, i guess, alliances of convenience. you also report on al-shabaab telling the pirates -- and you

may want to explain what this means. take care of the somali people and must take care of their interests and interests of al-shabaab interests relieving pirates of right hand somes and weapons. it's an odd relationship we're seeing here. maybe you can bring some light to bear on it. >> guest: this is a very complex issue that i'll try to summarize as quickly as possible. but in 2008 and especially in early 2009, a lot of these accusations started coming out that shabaab and pirates were the same. and, frankly, i think there's so many agendas at work in the war on terror and so on. and a lot of people -- to benefit from somalia becoming a new hot spot on the war on terror as it has become really and so i took everything with a grain of salt. one of the early reports had shabaab training pirates in shooting in exchange for marine navigation lessons.

so you have this comical image of tush bin islamists instructing pirates and then taken out to sail. it was so comical because, a, you don't need to be anything of a marcusman to become a pirate. your job is not to, you know, storm a ship like a commando and use your weapon, you know, and you're fighting -- or you're opposed with unarmed crew members. so being trained as a marksman. and every somali knows how to use a gun to an adequate degree that you could become a pirate. and al-shabaab has not shown itself to have any sort of naval presence, whatsoever. and so that was one -- that was one claim that there was no actual evidence to support that. it was something really, really

a stretch to believe the scenario. but when another event that sparked speculation when the ukrainian ship carrying tanks destined for southern sudan was captured, it was immediately -- it was taken to an area that was controlled partially by shabaab. and what happened was you had u.s. forces surrounding the ship. you had the pirates on board the ship and the cohorts on the ship and you had shabaab waiting from what they could not only from the ransom they wanted the weapon. there's no way to offload tanks outside of mogadishu. so there's no way there's any port facilities in somalia that would be capable of offloading the tanks but there's immediately the idea that the shabaab was the tanks like it could be used in somalia. the soviet tanks from decades ago are not going to be much

help to islamist group fighting an insurgency, right. this is not how modern war is fought but there's immediately this idea that pirates was on line to shabaab and they were trying to get them the tanks so those are wrote ideas that stuck in analysts minds and was used as fodder for why the pirates needed to be treated like terrorism. and other than that there's very little evidence that there's any sort of real linkages between the two groups. now, recently that does look like -- and i do mention very briefly in the book how that may be changing. and for a very good reason. because shabaab actually has pushed north into areas that the pirates operate out of. so then we can start thinking that maybe pirates might have to pay protection money. it's logical, right? >> host: shabaab has got to get money from somewhere but it has donors in particular. >> guest: sure, right. shabaab has officially declared privacy forbidden religiously but that's really not an issue

when it comes to -- as someone put it to me, you know, anything -- or nothing is bad if it supports the insurgency. you've seen in recent times that shabaab has gone into the one of the southern bases of operations. yeah, this is south of punt land and what you saw is the pirates simply left. most of them left. >> host: they didn't want to deal with shabaab. >> guest: why would you? there's no reason to be in that specific area. you can just relocate very easily. find another safe harbor. and you're gone. >> host: yeah. >> guest: there's no pirate infrastructure. these aren't pirate towns where they have a fancy supply chains that will require the infrastructure of the town or anything like that. they can move simply. there are -- i have seen -- the only evidence i've actually seen of shabaab getting paid off is now a list from informants inside the country that have just been a total of 1 million paid through shabaab in amounts

between 5 and 10% of a few. and this is compared to what the pirates this is absolutely nothing. >> host: uh-huh. like i say in the book it's not a systemic relationship at all. >> host: well, sometime discuss responses and solutions and i know your epilogue you have policy recommendations and some that will occur to most people when they hear about pirates and fighting pirates you talk about the foreign fishermen and they have arms on their ship and they could be pretty violent themselves and they become difficult targets all it takes to have weapons on board the ship held by the crew, a lot of people are going to think well, if you're a tanker or a cargo ship, have some guards or have some crew members with weapons and you can do the same thing. as the fishing vessels can do and just resist and you fight back and they won't be able to succeed and that's -- wouldn't

that solve the problem? >> guest: no. that's one response i get very frequently. why can't we just arm merchant mariners, the merchant marines. and the simple answer to that, a, you would have to pay them. i mean, your crew and costs would double. you would immediately -- you have to train them. you would have to pay for them to be trained, right? and then essentially what the big worry is is that provoking an incident that might lead to massive loss of life -- you mentioned a tanker or a loss of a tanker's cargo would be as devastating as the combined total of all the right hand some paid to date. >> host: in other words, you shoot at the pirates they use our pg's and put a hole in the tanker and suddenly the tanker is going down. >> guest: you can't really blow a hole in a double-hull tanker with an rpg but recently what

happened was that pirates pursued i believe it was an oil tanker. hit it with rpg's and set it on light. if you set a fire on deck that could be cause damage if it reaches the engine room right and it's not inconceivable and it's not inconceivable but more to the point if you end up -- a crew must be, a multiple crew members end up losing their lives you're going to end up paying more for their families through p & i clubs, you could end up paying as much or more to the members of those crew's family not to mention you would have a terrible pr nightmare on your hands and say why are you putting your sea fairers out here if they're not soldiers, why are they fighting, you know, men with superior weapons and rpg's and rocket-feld grenades

and another things mare inner's unions would be opposed to that idea. >> host: even though their members are being held hostage under terrible situations and terrible dangers? >> guest: there's only -- only been seven instances where pirates have actually executed hostages and four of these were these american yachters which was a terrible incident and there was an escalation of the incident. so escalations of incidents that people want to avoid. and when i spoke to -- i spoke to marine insurers in london and what they told me is that there's a very good chance that if you put a security team on board -- forget even arming the crew which would be the worst train than the poorest trained security force that could raise the premiums so many private security firms are popping up around the gulf of aden. their backgrounds is not known. it's not known really what effect it will have on the

ship's security. the chance of escalating an incident are not known that well because it hasn't happened yet. it's difficult to calculate all the variables. but insurers are very wary about this. and what one of them said to me that could easily raising your premium and training your crew -- coming back to training the crew would have the same repercussions that an insurer might look at this and say well, you know, you're probably just risking -- you're risking the chance that some pirates could open, you know -- blast a hole in your hull or try to and we're going to have to end up paying hull insurance damages on that and so we're going to double your hull insurance. so there's a lot of different reasons why it's not feasible. >> host: when a ship is taken and seized it has to be held either at anchor fairly close to the shore so they can resupply it that means it's not that hard to know where every ship that is -- that has been highjacked -- where the pirates

have it. once you know that, you would think there would be some way to say, okay, we've located these three ships. we're going to take them back. we're going to take them back by sending in tugs and towing them away or by sending in commandos at night and they're getting on the ship. we're not going to let -- just because there's some holders on board with some weapons we're not going to let them have that ship. we know that ship is. we're taking it back. >> guest: well, they could do that at sea before the ship even gets to port -- >> host: i understand that it's hard -- when it's under attack unless you're very close you can do that but once it's sitting in shore for three weeks three months you could have plenty of time to plan? >> guest: i see what you're saying so you could plan out a commando mission. double thumbs with that. there's been a few -- there's been relatively few instances of actual commando missions. and most of those missions have occurred -- i mentioned earlier that there's safe zones that the

crew sometimes barricades themselves in the engine. most of the commando missions occurred after the crew is safely out of the line of fire. there's one mission -- the french tried to take back a yacht. they did. they stormed a yacht, a french yacht that had been captured and ended up killing the captain out of -- his family on board and i think 1 out of 4 hostages died in that case. you had another commando mission re-enforces carried out a successful issue of the ship which is a massive oil tanker which is something that had really high stakes in involved. the captain ended getting shot critically but did not die which is considered -- he was extremely lucky actually he was shot multiple times, 3 or four times and then you have the american yacht where all four captors died because two pirates panicked and unilaterally decided to execute the hostages. and i believe that was a big

disaster. and that was, you know, due to the pirates panic because they saw u.s. forces loading into attack boats. i don't think you can expect that commando missions would result in death. not because -- a logical person would say, okay, they called the bluff. they're coming, let's surrender and go -- you know, go to a cushy prison somewhere, but that's not the way these pirates think. they're often jacked up on cot, and i don't think it's a stretch to say there would be a massive loss of life if for your standards mission that's one point and the second point you start manning commando missions and they're going to start taking the crews on board and skutting on ships and that's another issue or murdering them and we'll take them to a cave in afghanistan and we'll destroy your $25 million ship. that's a very undesirable

outcome. and one more quick point i'll add, very briefly, is all these commandos they're probably going to be forces, british forces maybe who can plan a coherent rescue operation, right, south koreans, they're -- they don't care -- they're not going to care about foreign citizens. they carry out these missions if their own ships are involved or their own citizens; otherwise, they're going to defer to the wishes of ship owners who say universally back off, let us pay the ransom so you have the people owning the ship don't want them to get involved generally for free of escalation. so there's a number of reasons that's probably -- >> we're down to our last couple minutes i'm afraid and there's also difficulties -- you go and arrest these -- the pirates. you can identify them. you could arrest them on shore and you could do that but if you brought them back to, say, the u.k., unless you had good evidence as they would be going into a civilian court you wouldn't be able to convict them and if you did convict them and they say you wanted to

deimportant them they would say well, you can't execute them in other words they're less likely once in the u.k. to end up hanged than they are in public housing and on welfare. >> guest: right. >> host: there's many more complexes they could -- basically, let's just get to the very end of here which is you say it's probably -- it's probably not possible to eradicate piracy but it can be mitigated and why give the last minute or so we have and talk about a few of the policies you're recommending which i think myself may not be the entire solution but could be the start of a furious policy discussion which i don't think we've had for this issue yet. >> guest: yeah. i mean, the usual response op-ed writers -- op-ed writers insert in their piece it needs to be solved on land. it has to be solved on land clearly but a lot of people, commentators beat the idea of rebuilding somalia and

rebuilding a coherent state as a possible solution to piracy. people have been trying to do that for 20 years. i talk about mitigation in the book and i think what you need to do -- i mentioned earlier there are no coastal roads in punt land. a very easy thing to do would be to install coastal garrison's of police and build some very short lands of coast leading to a handful of pirate launching sites and pirate holding sites. have a pirate hotline. i told you the local people hate the pirates. you need to act as a resource and if someone looks out their window and sees a pirate to launch up in the indian ocean you want them to call up and 100 to $50 and have your coastal garrison's respond and arrest them before they are pushed to the sea. those are a few specific suggestions. general what i think you need to do is start giving direct aid and direct assistance to these mini states we talked