A welcome voice in a sea of chaos

NOEL CHOONG was working late the night he got the distress call: Just off the Malaysian coast in the darkness, a Japanese tugboat and barge were being attacked by a dozen pirates armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers.

The 154-man crew aboard the barge Kuroshio was frantic. As the vessel churned slowly northward through choppy waters of the Strait of Malacca, headed for Myanmar, it had suddenly been surrounded by three fishing boats.

The armed men stormed the little tug. Shots were fired. The captain and two others were taken hostage. The desperate barge crew plotted a rescue mission to free their shipmates, who were being held with guns to their heads.

A slender, tough-to-ruffle figure in his mid-40s, Choong urged the crew not to try anything stupid. “The pirates had high-powered weapons,” he said later. “We told them: ‘You’re unarmed. You can’t fight guns.’ ”

As his staff radioed for help from Malaysian marine police, Choong stayed on the phone with the terrified seamen. Pirates may be oceangoing desperadoes driven by poverty or greed, he assured them, but they usually are not killers.

Unless, that is, they were cornered or provoked.

“For that crew, this was a night from hell,” Choong recalled. “I was just trying to be their friendly voice of reason.”

Choong is a pirate catcher, a maritime crisis negotiator who handles the high-anxiety drama of modern-day pirate attacks in real time. He’s also a detective, a high-seas sleuth with a host of shadowy shipping industry informants he uses to run down hijacked ships.

In the outlaw Strait of Malacca, whose waters are considered the most pirated in the world, his services as director of the International Maritime Bureau’s Piracy Reporting Center are in near-constant demand.

The 550-mile-long channel, flanked by Singapore and Malaysia to the east and the Indonesian island of Sumatra to the west, is one of the world’s most strategic international waterways and its busiest shipping lane. Each year, 60,000 vessels, the equivalent of nearly half the world’s entire merchant fleet, negotiate the funnel-shaped shortcut between the Pacific and Indian oceans. They range from mammoth supertankers as large as city skyscrapers to tugs and barges.

Such seaborne commercial traffic attracts a sophisticated brand of piracy that has moved far beyond the scabbards and cutlasses of the 17th century.

Many are opportunists, Choong said, impromptu gangs of poor fisherman who can’t resist the allure of lumbering, unarmed vessels laden with cash and goods: “They realized that robbing unarmed sailors is a lot easier than robbing a bank.” Others are more ambitious and well-organized, professionals who plunder ships for crime syndicates, warlords, corrupt government officials and even regional terrorist groups.

IN recent years, Choong says, emboldened pirates have become more sophisticated. They forge passports and other documents to turn working maritime vessels into slave- and drug-running ships. They use satellite phones and global positioning systems.

With high-speed fiberglass boats, they creep up from behind, using the cover of the ship radar’s blind spot. With grappling hooks and expert climbing skills, they scale the vessel’s mooring ropes and overpower isolated and vulnerable crews.

The pirates don’t just use the cover of darkness. They also take advantage of national sovereignty laws.

Knowing that marine police must observe territorial boundaries, flotillas of fishermen from such places as Sumatra or freelance commandos from the Indonesian navy ambush ships and then race back to the safety of their sovereign waters, often just a few miles away.

In a trick from centuries ago, pirates may disguise themselves to approach wary vessels. Some pose as marine police, uniforms and all, doing routine checks.

Shippers have retaliated: In the Strait of Malacca, vessels use powerful water hoses to blast would-be boarders off the deck or to swamp the boats below. Some post mannequins dressed in overalls and hard hats to give the impression of a larger crew. Captains of smaller boats spread carpet tacks on their decks at night, hoping to slow pirates, who often attack barefoot to give themselves a better grip and to minimize sound.

Bigger boats illuminate decks with floodlights and travel in a zigzag to create a wake to sink small boats. Day and night, the more watchful captains use closed-circuit TV to monitor the water around them. Some hire armed commandos for security, because in the anarchy and take-care-of-your-own credo of the high seas, isolated ships in jeopardy know they cannot expect help from another unarmed craft.

Many pirate attacks are hit-and-run robberies. In others, crew members are kidnapped for ransom, even tortured and killed. Countless vessels have been hijacked, their nameplates and paperwork swiftly changed, and turned into ghost ships used by syndicates for drug and slave smuggling.

Authorities estimate that only 10% to 30% of pirate attacks are reported. Still, in the last five years, 195 attacks on seaborne vessels in the Strait of Malacca have been logged, including 49 kidnappings and seven deaths. More than $1 million in ransom was paid last year by owners of ships transiting the passageway, statistics show.

BY 2005, the shipping gantlet had become so dangerous that Lloyd’s of London declared the strait a high war-risk area for insurance purposes, citing its “war, strikes, terrorism and related perils.” The advisory was lifted this year after Singapore and Indonesia began coordinated air and sea patrols.

Although the last 12 months have brought an uneasy hiatus, Choong says recent incidents suggest piracy may be back -- with an ominous new wrinkle.

In July, armed attackers boarded two United Nations-chartered vessels carrying tsunami relief supplies. In the first incident, six men in military fatigues brazenly stormed the ship before noon, one of the first reported daylight raids.

The next day, a dozen heavily armed men claiming to be attached to the Free Aceh Movement, an Indonesian separatist group, commandeered another U.N. ship. The same week, a gang of 35 pirates with machine guns and rocket launchers seized a fully loaded gasoline tanker and kidnapped its captain. He was later released with the vessel.

Choong and others believe such instances suggest the possibility of a major terrorist attack in the Strait of Malacca, which slices through the heart of a region rife with political and religious unrest.

International security experts also fear that militants might commandeer a giant crude oil tanker for use as a floating bomb.

JUST a mile and a half wide at its narrowest point, the strait is a crucial maritime choke point. Experts say terrorists could sink a huge tanker at a narrow juncture, wreaking environmental havoc and bringing international maritime commerce to a halt.

Though experts differ on its likelihood, some say the idea is not farfetched.

“If someone in 2000 said people could hijack planes and fly them into the World Trade Center, critics would have said, ‘Oh, that’s not going to happen.’ But some incidents suggest terrorists are looking at the Malacca Strait,” said John Brandon, director of the Asia Foundation, which monitors U.S.-Southeast Asia relations.

“Pirates recently hijacked and tried to learn to steer an oil tanker in the Malacca Strait. That raises a troubling question: Why do they want to learn to steer?”

Choong has given briefings to global investigative agencies such as Interpol and to anti-terrorism officials from numerous countries, including the United States.

His assessment is troubling.

“Singapore is vulnerable -- it’s very pro-West and surrounded by Muslim nations,” he said. “Militants could cause environmental damage and cripple the world economy. What more could a terrorist ask for? Everything is there.”

Choong came to the piracy reporting center in 1997, no stranger to the sea. As a former chief officer and merchant marine, the soft-spoken Chinese-Malay, who grew up here, knows the fear that pirate attacks inspire.

A religious man who doesn’t drink or smoke, he maintains a coolly professional anger against sea robbers and bandits who torture, kidnap and kill his fellow seamen. His employer, the International Maritime Bureau, is part of the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce, whose fight against piracy is mandated by the United Nations.

From his 35th-floor office in a Kuala Lumpur high-rise 100 miles from the choppy waters of the strait, Choong keeps a bunkered-down mentality, always ready for the next pirate attack. The walls of his reception area are covered with world maps that bear red pins to mark the latest plunders.

Choong’s purview is worldwide, from the troubled waters off Somalia and Bangladesh to the ungoverned South China Sea, but the Strait of Malacca is his most constant headache.

His role is not to make arrests or conduct criminal post-mortems after attacks. Rather, he runs a sort of 911 service for seaborne vessels under siege. Through daily situation reports, his agency offers vessels an early-warning system, giving crews a heads-up that they are entering waters with recent pirate activity.

He has also developed a network of informants, shipyard workers and fishermen who peddle tips to help track down hijacked ships. Many contacts are criminals, so Choong takes precautions: He’s never photographed. Some family members do not know his job. He changes his route to work.

In delving into Asian organized crime syndicates, he and his team meet shadowy characters in big-city airports and dense jungles.

He wants information and he’s willing to pay, money that comes from ship owners and insurers. “We tell our informants we can’t guarantee their safety -- and some do get killed. There’s nothing we can do about that,” he said.

“We don’t get personal with them. That way we can live with it if they die.”

Choong has been threatened. One source told him he could have anyone killed for $500. “I knew what he meant, and it scared me,” he said. “But I tell these people that if you kill us, new people will be hired. If you bomb our headquarters, a new one will be built. You can’t close us down.”

Despite such threats, Choong’s war against piracy goes on. Some battles end better than others.

ON that night in March 2005, when bandits attacked the Japanese tugboat Idaten and its construction barge, the Kuroshio, Choong urged the barge crew by phone to take pictures of the pirate vessels for evidence.

For nearly an hour, the pirates held the tugboat’s captain, chief engineer and a crewman at gunpoint. Then, sometime before midnight, the armed invaders fled with the three men. As Malaysian marine police escorted the tug and barge to port, Choong alerted the ship owner to begin the delicate task of negotiating the release of the hostages.

Over the next few days, the owners, along with Japanese government officials, kept up a dialogue with the pirates.

Meanwhile, the hostages were spirited among fishing boats, and finally taken to the jungles of southern Thailand.

After the ship owners paid an undisclosed ransom that Choong described as “way above market value,” the men were released, but the pirates escaped. The saga made headlines -- with scant mention of Choong. And that’s the way he likes it.

“This time nobody died,” he said. “Still, it’s a dangerous game.”

john.glionna@latimes.com