The Daily Telegraph
Sunday August 20, 2017
IAN McPHEDRAN
IN A new book, Ian McPhedran joins the Navy as they chase down gun runners, terrorists and drug smugglers on the high seas.
THE young male and female sailors scramble down a rope ladder and into the bucking rigid hull inflatable boat that is tethered to the side of the Australian warship.
With the frigate steaming at fourteen knots in the open ocean, this is not a job for the faint hearted. In a dangerous sea-state four, with a buffeting wind and three-metre waves, the armed and fully kitted-out members of HMAS Darwin’s ‘red’ boarding team are dropping into a maelstrom.
It is 11.25am on Saturday, 21 May 2016, and we are in the Indian Ocean, several hundred kilometres to the east of Tanzania and north of Madagascar, hunting drug smugglers on the smack track. For one young woman, the conditions are just too severe and she is quickly replaced. Upper body strength is vital under these extremes.
Once the first group of boarders have made it safely into the RHIB it is set free and speeds away towards a suspect fishing dhow that is wallowing about a kilometre away under the watchful eye of the guided missile frigate.
Viewing the operation from the safety of Darwin’s deck it is clear that my wish to board a smuggling dhow is unlikely to be granted unless the sea calms down an awful lot. Sea-state four is at the upper limit for a water-based boarding by the Royal Australian Navy. As the RHIB approaches, the suspect dhow rolls through an alarming-looking forty degrees, and boarding officer Lieutenant James Hodgkinson deems it too risky to continue.
Climbing down into the RHIB from a moving 4000-tonne warship is one thing for these skilled and athletic sailors, but scrambling up a rope and onto a twenty-metre wooden dhow that is bucking about like an angry rodeo bull could be deadly. In addition, the team’s radios have become waterlogged and communication with the ship is lost.
Just before noon they turn and speed back towards Darwin, but suddenly their radio crackles back to life and the skipper, Commander Phill Henry, orders the team to have another go.
The inflatable boat turns back to the dhow. This time its captain is instructed, via hand signals, to turn his vessel down sea to make conditions a little easier for boarding. Transferring sailors to the dhow is all about timing. In such a high sea-state the two vessels are almost level at the top of each swell. The boarders can therefore avoid using the rope ladder but must risk leaping directly from the RHIB onto the dhow.
Once safely on board, their first job is to herd the crew forward into the forecastle area and to secure the vessel while the RHIB returns to Darwin to collect the rest of the boarding party, along with the American NCIS agent Paul Lerza and his interpreter to interview the captain and crew. Time is of the essence.
It is soon clear that the skipper’s story about why such a small coastal fishing boat is operating so far south of its home — on the Makran coast between Pakistan and Iran — and so far from land is ridiculous. The vessel is not flying a valid flag, her fishing nets have not even been deployed and the paperwork contains some major inconsistencies.
The authorities at headquarters in Bahrain authorise a search and the arduous task of checking every square centimetre of the vessel begins. Just before 5pm a member of the dhow’s crew secretly lets on that there are drugs on board, stashed beneath the ‘snow’ in the ice hold.
Rather than go directly to the spot, give the game away and potentially endanger the informant’s life, the team continues to chip away at the edge of the ice before moving to the centre of the hold where they eventually find a suspect hatch hidden below the frozen sheet.
Able Seaman Eddie Tomsana, from Thursday Island in the Torres Strait, is used to living rough on small boats, but even he is shocked by the conditions on board the dhow.
As he and his shipmate Pete Irvine get down and dirty, urgently searching the rancid fish hold, their only company are rats nesting deep in the boat’s bilge. Even the cockroaches swarming in the galley area up top don’t venture down into this dark, filthy, frozen world.
The men use a crowbar to remove the hatch cover, and bingo — there is a stash of white bags underneath. Tomsana gets down on his belly and crawls into the stinking, rat-infested hiding place.
At first, he pulls out five, then another seven and finally dozens of bags containing an incredible 512 kilograms of heroin — a cache with an estimated street value of more than half a billion dollars that will no longer fund terrorist organisations and criminal syndicates.
FOR Agent Paul Lerza the field of one-kilogram bags of heroin spread across the flight deck is the highlight of his latest deployment on an Australian navy ship hunting narcotics smugglers. The sheer volume of the booty from the successful boardings is staggering. Surveying the haul, he says he knows US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) agents who would not see such a quantity of heroin during their entire careers.
‘Any DEA agent would love to see this much heroin,’ he says as he poses for photographs among the bags of drugs.
As Darwin’s XO, Tina Brown supervises the display and disposal of the drugs. The ship’s crew is allowed onto an area above the flight deck to see the fruits of their hard labour.
Numerous photos are taken to record the massive haul for posterity, with the odd personal shot, including one of Commander Phill Henry with a broad smile. Then it is time to clear the decks so that the disposal team can get to work disposing of the drugs over the stern of the ship.
* * *
BEFORE the navy had begun seizing narcotics, the hierarchy had taken steps to ensure that sailors could safely dispose of the high-value contraband by donning protective suits and pouring it over the side of the ship. That was fine for ‘small’ quantities — a hundred kilograms here and there — but a huge haul of 1032 kilograms captured by HMAS Darwin back in 2014 was a game-changer. With more than a tonne of heroin to get rid of, there had to be a better method.
Navy learnt the hard way on the eve of Anzac Day in 2014.
The chain of custody is vital when it comes to narcotics. The drugs have to be recorded, weighed, photographed and tested prior to disposal.
As Darwin’s then XO, it was one of James Lawless’s jobs to process the drugs once they had left the dhow. He and two navy divers set about cutting open and shaking out more than 1000 bags of coarse powder in the desperate forty-five-degree heat. It took more than six hours standing on the steaming steel deck plates in full protective equipment including an S10 respirator (a military grade gas mask), disposable plastic overalls, gloves and boots. Dehydration and dizziness were the constant companions of the disposers as they proceeded to dissolve almost $1 billion worth of high-grade heroin in the Indian Ocean.
‘We took the bags of powder to the flight deck where they were cut open with a knife and emptied into the turbulence created by the ship’s propeller,’ Lawless recalls. ‘Unfortunately, a byproduct was that occasionally the powder would get thrown up and coat us and the flight deck. It wasn’t always visible and was like a fine dusting of icing sugar. I went to the front of the flight deck to get some water and took off my mask and ingested the powder.’
Fortunately, the ship’s doctor had all the necessary remedies on board, including Narcan, in case the effects had to be reversed. It was not needed. According to the then captain of HMAS Darwin, Terry Morrison, the ship’s doctor said Lawless’s ingestion of heroin was a relatively minor dose, similar to the effects from a large dose of Panadeine Forte.
‘But it was but still enough for us to say, “Whoa, we need to analyse this,”’ Morrison says.
So Morrison went to the ship’s engineers and said, ‘I’ve got an engineering challenge for you. I want you to make me some sort of trough that I can pour heroin in to make it wet so that it doesn’t blow back.’
It was Chief Petty Officer Tony Walsh who came up with the original idea for a heroin disposal unit.
Walsh’s eventual design was inspired by the concept of a water-jet eductor, to mix and dispose of solids and liquids inside a casing. He had the casing in the form of [a] wheelie bin, and he used galvanised steel tubing with holes drilled into it and fixed to the inside of the bin about thirty centimetres below the top, connected by a fire hose connector to a water supply. He also made a stand to hold it on the stern of the ship.
The creation took an entire day to put together.
Tony Walsh originally named the unit the ‘River Phoenix’ after the American actor who died from a heroin overdose. Later versions came to be called the ‘Garbinator’ and during Darwin’s 2016 deployment the ship’s chippy, Chief Andrew ‘Goonga’ Sims, further modified and improved Walsh’s invention. It then became the ‘Goonganator’.
Whatever it is called, the simple, low-cost solution has been central to the disposal of billions of dollars worth of heroin in the Indian Ocean.
* * *
BY May, 2016 the disposal unit has become standard equipment.
Each bag is cut open and the contents emptied into the bin where water jets suck it down and wash it out of the bottom and into the sea below. The drugs leave a slight caramel coloured stain in the ship’s wake as they mix with the seawater.
The plastic bags and other wrappings are stored and disposed of later and do not go into the ocean.
It takes many hours for the team to get rid of the heroin. As each bag dissolves in the sea that means about a million dollars less for the terrorists and criminals behind the evil trade and fewer caps of smack on the streets of London or New York.
Even the most junior sailors on board Darwin take great pride in the fact that the months of hard slog and the sacrifices of their loved ones back at home have had a tangible impact.
They also know that somewhere in the world there is a syndicate of criminals who will be deeply unhappy that such a huge chunk of ill-gotten cash is literally dissolving in their wake.
* This is an edited extract from The Smack Track by Ian McPhedran (HarperCollins), available on from Monday in all good bookstores and online.