Bangkok File

Liberty Crossing, McLean, Virginia

Liberty Crossing, McLean, Virginia

T

he news from official agencies and covert intelligence operatives in Southeast Asia was—as usual—a mixed bag. There was a good side that said authorities were finally getting a handle on pirates raiding commerce in the Straits of Malacca. And then there was the bad side contained in reports that the raiders had moved their operations into the Gulf of Thailand where seagoing commerce—particularly oil shipments—was getting hammered to the tune of about ten billion dollars yearly at last estimate. And that decidedly unwelcome news was causing ominous rumbles in Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The red flags were flying at the Pentagon and catching the attention of White House officials who were more than a little concerned about world oil supply and America’s ongoing struggle for independence in the turbulent energy markets. The last thing the current administration needed was another turd in the oil-market punchbowl, and the pirates operating in Southeast Asia were increasingly focused on ripping off oil tankers traversing the Gulf of Thailand.

The man who calls himself Bayer shrank the compilation of field reports from the 16 Federal intelligence agencies who shared information with his boss, the Director of National Intelligence, and called up the memo he was writing on the subject. As a veteran of service in one capacity or another with most of those agencies before he landed the consultant gig at ODNI, he was less constrained than most beltway bureaucrats and relatively free to speak truth to power. That was likely the main reason the piracy basket of crap got dumped in his lap for an opinion on appropriate action.

He read through the statistics that indicated nearly half—41% to be precise—of all the world’s pirate attacks were now suffered by shipping outfits working into or out of Thailand, Vietnam, or Cambodia. Somali pirates operating in the Arabian Sea were suddenly the five-and-dimers in the rip-offs at sea game. He highlighted the information about 15 oil-siphoning attacks on tanker vessels in the Gulf of Thailand in the last month. Then he scrolled down to the conclusions area where he’d stopped writing earlier.

These bastards are like cockroaches. You stomp on one and see three more in another corner of the room. It’s bad, getting worse, and not likely to stop unless we—read the U.S. in one capacity or another—do something to put a stop to it. And I don’t mean filing official complaints or sending more money to locals which will promptly be siphoned off as bribes or skimmed by bureaucrats. And I don’t mean upping the pressure on the Thais or Cambodians to do something about what’s happening in their own backyards. We’ve tried that to no avail. I mean we need to convince POTUS to do a little gunboat diplomacy and send in some warships…assuming the Navy has got one or two that can sink pirates instead of each other…

He highlighted that last snarky comment and deleted it. Whipping on the Navy and their rash of collisions at sea or poor seamanship in general wouldn’t be helpful at this point. They were up to their Navy-blue asses in alligators already and trying to retain a little dignity in the face of various scandals.

He kicked back in his chair and stared out a window at a batch of dark summer rainclouds gathering in the east. Even if the President ordered American warships into the Gulf of Thailand on “freedom of navigation” voyages or ordered up a couple of the Coast Guard’s vaunted high-endurance cutters into the area with their anti-piracy expertise—something he so far seemed loathe to do—they’d need direction. The Gulf of Thailand that spilled into the South China Sea was at least 120,000 square miles of open water. To fight this infestation, they’d need to locate the cockroach nests. The Thais had some success raiding around their own offshore islands, but they were just playing whack-a-mole—too little and too late. And the piracy scourge now extended well beyond Thailand’s territorial waters.

Somehow, at some crucial point below international radars, the Cambodians were complicit in all this. The man who calls himself Bayer was sure about that, he sensed it with the instincts he’d honed during a lifetime of intelligence work. They were touchy as hell about any type of military or para-military operations off their coast, and with the big Chinese hammer backing them, no one was eager to transgress, especially the sob-sisters at the State Department. They pitched a massive b***h every time the National Security Council urged POTUS to act in the Gulf. It was Korea and Vietnam all over again. Whatever else you do, don’t do anything that might piss off Beijing and bring the great yellow hordes into the situation.

Of course, this oil-thievery thing was a new twist and might provide some useful leverage. The last time the DNI briefed the President and the NSC some of the Wobblies had gone soft on direct action. What was needed as a spur was some kind of direct physical threat to the U.S. Maybe something like kidnapping American citizens or shooting up a U.S.-flagged ship…but there were damn few of those operating in gulf waters. The damage pirates were doing to American interests in the international oil flow was just too tenuous.

He turned back to his laptop and pulled up a report from a classified CIA asset operating out of Phnom Penh that he’d skimmed earlier. The source was a senior bureaucrat on the Royal Cambodian Navy staff who claimed the five patrol boats the Chinese gave the Cambodians with much fanfare as a deterrent to piracy, remained tied up at docks near Sihanoukville. The report said only two of the boats had ever left the pier and that was just for a press cruise around the harbor. Why was that if the wheel-horses in Phnom Penh weren’t giving the pirates an intentional pass?

The man who calls himself Bayer reached for his phone, opened the contact list and selected the one that simply said SHAKE.