Did Israel hijack a ship to stop missile shipment?

There has been considerable speculation in the media over the last week as to the true course of events surrounding the piracy of the Russian cargo ship Arctic Sea. The ship, officially bound from Finland for Algeria with a cargo of wood was first intercepted in the Baltic Sea on July 24, by eight men dressed as Swedish customs officers, who claimed to be part of an anti-drug trafficking unit. They detained the crew and searched the ship for twelve hours, before supposedly leaving, and allowing the Arctic Sea to resume her voyage. Four days later, on the 28th July the ship had its last radio communication with British coastguard officials as it sailed through the English Channel, before vanishing from radar screens on the 29th, when she was in the Atlantic off the coast of Portugal.

After a further week of no contact or sightings of the ship, Russia dispatched a force of warships, led by the frigate Ladny to search for her in the Atlantic. It was at this point that speculation began to grow that pirates had seized her, the first time that such a thing had happened in European waters for well over two hundred years.

On August 14, the Russian defense ministry reported that the Ladny and her task-force, were heading to Cape Verde, an independent republic, located in the North Atlantic off the West Africa, opposite Senegal. Politically, Cape Verde is non-aligned, therefore Russia, by using this nation as a base for its recovery operation, neatly avoided any potential political entanglements with the European Union which could have arisen if the Canary Islands had been chosen instead.

On August 17, it was announced that the Finnish owners of the Maltese-flagged cargo ship had received a $1.5 million ransom demand, approximately the value of the Arctic Sea’s cargo. The next day, August 18, Russian news agencies announced that the crew of the Ladny had found the ship, arrested the hijackers without a shot being fired. Russia's defense minister, Anatoly Serdyukov reported to Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that a speed boat carrying four Estonians, two Latvians and two Russians had approached the Arctic Sea in the Swedish territorial waters on July 24. "The hijackers boarded the Arctic Sea, threatened the crew with weapons and demanded that their orders be followed. The Arctic Sea was en route to Africa with all of its communications and navigation equipment shut down, as ordered by the hijackers," the minister said.

At first sight this appeared to be an open and shut case; a Finnish owned bulk carrier had been hijacked in a straightforward case of criminal piracy by a mixed group of Baltic nationals. The Russian navy having dispatched a naval task force to the North Atlantic, managed to locate the ship after some time, arrest the pirates, and rescue both crew and ship without any bloodshed. Hurrah for the heroic Russian navy, valiantly protecting its timber exports! Yet shortly after the episode was concluded rumors began to circulate that indicated that perhaps all was not as it appeared to be.

Media outlets around the world began querying whether the ship, far from transporting wood to Algeria, had in fact been carrying a deadly cargo of Russia’s latest and most sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles, the S-300 and X-55, to Iran. Revelations that the S-300 missile advanced defense system was a pivotal barrier to any potential Israeli attack of Iran’s nuclear facilities was first exclusively reported by The Cutting Edge News in July 2008 by investigative reporter Edwin Black. Considered one of the world’s most versatile radar-missile systems, Russia’s S-300 batteries can simultaneous track hundreds of semi-stealth cruise missiles, long range missiles and aircraft, including airborne monitoring jets. As many as ten intruders can be simultaneously engaged by the S-300’s mobile interceptor missile batteries, military sources say. As such, the S-300 is a major threat to the long-range weapons in the Israeli arsenal. These include Israel’s long-range 1,500 km. nuclear-capable Jericho IIB missiles; unmanned missile-equipped long-range drones; Israel’s F-16s, F-15Es; long range heavy-payload F151s and F161s; and even its three new Gulfstream G550 business jets boasting a range of 6,750 nautical miles, newly outfitted with nuclear-tracking electronics and designed to loiter over or near Iranian skies for hours. The S-300 can compromise everything Israel has.

At present the cargo remains little more than speculation, since apart from a few openly quoted sources, only “unnamed maritime and military experts” have expressed an opinion on the mystery. But the Russian daily Kommersant cited a senior Kremlin source, also unnamed, who claimed the ship was indeed carrying missiles to Iran, that Israel’s intelligence agency Mossad, found out about the deal, and gave the Kremlin time and space to prevent delivery and effect a cover up in order to save face. Israel’s Mossad, in a wide global net, has been secretly intercepting shipments to Iran that intersect Teheran’s nuclear program. However, Russia's foreign minister vehemently denied all such allegations, promising “full transparency” in a forthcoming investigation into the affair, though this “transparency” does not appear to extend to those charged in Moscow with the hijacking. The accused have been banned from speaking about the incident in public.

Russian investigators searching the ship have so far said that they have found nothing except timber, although the head of the Russian prosecutors’ investigation committee, Alexander Bastrykin, has admitted that Russian authorities are not ruling out the possibility of a secret. Israel has also officially dismissed the story, though former deputy defense minister Ephraim Sneh said, "There is something fishy about this whole story, no doubt about it," before cryptically adding, "But I can't comment further on this."

Several other sources are also not convinced by the official story, including Admiral Tarmo Kouts, a former commander of the Estonian armed forces who now heads the European Union’s piracy watch, and a growing number of other anonymous military and intelligence sources, both in Russia and Israel. Admiral Kouts said in a recent interview with Time Magazine that, "there is the idea that there were missiles aboard, and one can't explain this situation in any other way."

Mikhail Voitenko, a Russian journalist, and the editor of Bulletin-Sovfracht, an online maritime journal, who is also an expert in piracy, was one of the first to suggest that the Arctic Sea had been carrying weapons bound for Iran. That position resulted in him receiving threatening telephone calls warning him that, “Mikhail, you made a big mistake when you made your announcement on Aug. 8." Voitenko has not taken these threats idly, but rather has fled Russia for Turkey, from where he has refused to discuss the Arctic Sea case further with journalists who have managed to contact him, stating instead that, "I know more than I can say, but you know what, I am afraid." In his article posted on August 11, Voitenko said the only viable explanation for the ship's disappearance was that it was carrying "very valuable or dangerous material," and it appeared that "some third party, having seized the ship, was determined at all costs not to allow the cargo to reach the intended receiver."

The mystery deepens even further with reports that at the time of the discovery of the Arctic Sea Russia dispatched several heavy lift aircraft to Cape Verde, prompting further speculation that any missiles she may possibly have been carrying could have been quietly flown back to Russia immediately before the public announcement of finding the ship. Stories that appeared last week alleging a secret trip by Israel’s Prime Minister, Binyamin Netanyahu to Russia have greatly heightened speculation that the Arctic Sea story involves something far more sophisticated than simple piracy for ransom. At first the Prime Minister’s office denied that any such trip had taken place, and that Netanyahu was visiting a “secret IDF installation.”

However on September 11, a senior Kremlin official confirmed that Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu did indeed make a clandestine trip to Russia on Monday. Commenting on his visit, the official said, "this development could only be related to new and threatening information on Iran's nuclear program." Possibly this “new information” could be the discovery by Mossad that a shipload of Russia’s most sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles had been intercepted on their way to Iran; a cargo that had it arrived would have been a serious upgrade to Iran’s defense capability, making Iranian nuclear facilities some of the best defended sites in the world, and ensuring that should the need arise for military intervention to prevent Iran developing a nuclear bomb, that such a venture would be extremely costly, and might possibly even fail.

It seems extremely unlikely that the full facts of this case will ever emerge; especially since Israel is also following the official Russian line that this was a simple case of criminal piracy. However, the facts do not fit. The ship was not Russian owned, but rather Finnish, and the cargo was valued at just over $1.5 million dollars. This seems a trifling sum to dispatch three warships to the Atlantic, as well as the cost of chartering a tug to tow the Arctic Sea back to a Russian port, and the no doubt substantial fees that must be paid to her Finnish owners for the time she spends languishing in a Russian port during subsequent investigations and trials. Combined with the first denied, and then admitted secret visit by Prime Minister Netanyahu to Russia this last week, and the frightened flight of a Russian journalist, maritime and piracy expert to Turkey in fear of his life, after claiming the Arctic Sea was carrying a secret cargo, it seems that on the balance of probabilities that this case is anything but routine.

What will undoubtedly never be known, and is possibly the most frightening aspect of this whole affair, is, if a secret and illegal arms deal was intercepted by Mossad, whether such a deal was conducted with the full knowledge and connivance of the Russian government, or rather by criminals working with rogue elements within Russia’s military. The other possibility, mentioned by some reports on the affair, is that the cargo, far from being anti-aircraft missiles, which Russia has already openly sold to Iran, was in fact nuclear.

Adam Wallace follows international issues as the London correspondent of The Cutting Edge News.