Sea Control - Sea Control 252 - Bordering on Crisis with Brian Wilson and Nora Johnson

Episode Date: May 23, 2021

Links1. "Bordering on Crisis: Overcoming Multiagency Crisis Coordination Challenges," by Brian Wilson and Nora Johnson, New York University Press, 2021.2. The Jump3. "The Defection of Simas Kudirka," by Tom Dunlop, Martha's Vineyard Magazine, December 1, 2005.4. "China explosions: what we know about what happened in Tianjin," BBC, August 17, 2015. 5. MV Sun Sea6. "Lemons Caught in a Squeeze," by Paul Blustein and Brian rnes, The Washington Post, September 10, 2004. 

Hey folks, Jared here. I've talked about our feed. I'm going to keep talking about it. There are two existing Sea Control feeds out there. The current feed is labeled simply Sea Control and includes the phrase Simsex Flagship Podcast in its description. That's Sea Control Simsex Flagship Podcast. That's where you want to be. So please subscribe, rate, and review. Well, time has gone away from us and we've somehow managed to record more than 100 episodes since relaunching in January 2020. This is an opportunity to thank the team of editors and co-hosts that we built here. You hear their names most every week, but I want to highlight them again, specifically in the intro here. First, though, I want to thank SimSec President Jimmy Drennan

and Editor-in-Chief Dmitry Filippov for agreeing to let us get this back off the ground. My co-hosts Walker Mills, Anna McNeil, Andrea Howard, and John Frerichs for offering different perspectives and their collective brainpower to the project, and possibly most importantly, our editing staff, which is, I'm just going to call them all overqualified. They're incredible. Dr. Ed Salo, Jonathan Selling, Keegan Ingersoll, Taylor Fairless, David Sujita. David, please send me an angry email if I've managed to follow up your name once again. William McQuiston, Marie Williams.

It would not be possible to cover as much ground as we've covered without someone willing to plow through each episode and edit out all the verbal pauses, non sequiturs, and gaffes. So there is a very short list of episodes I wrote down as must when I was pitching the relaunch to SimSec, and this is one of those. When I was on the joint staff, I was fortunate to get introduced to the U.S. government's Maritime Operational Threat Response, or MOTR, which is a staffing process designed to coordinate whole-of-government responses to maritime threats. It's led by a cell based in the Department of Homeland Security. That process has a Canadian equivalent known as

Maritime Event Response Protocol, or MERP. Today, we're going to hear from Brian Wilson, discussing motor, and Nora Johnson, discussing MERP. And really, this is all based on an excerpt in a book that they contributed to entitled Bordering on Crisis. This episode was edited and produced by Keegan Ingersoll. Please check out everything going on over at the main website, simsec.org. We've partnered with Transcom for a call for articles related to strategic sea lift. If you want to get your idea in front of some flag officers, this is your chance. For more information, check out our website, simsec.org. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps.

You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of Iron Brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. On that note, I'll turn it over to Kimber's men. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Hello Hashimates and welcome back aboard Sea Control. Today I'm joined by an old friend Brian Wilson as well as Nora Johnson and the two of them have co-authored a chapter entitled Bordering on Crisis Overcoming Multi-Agency Crisis Coordination Challenges. That chapter appears in Crisis Lawyering Effective Legal Advocacy in Emergency Situations. This is really just an excuse to get into one of my favorite topics that I've ever been associated with in

Uniform, and that is Maritime Operational Threat Response, or MOTOR, which is a sort of a multi-agency response to crisis resident within the United States government. We'll talk in detail about that, its Canadian counterpart, and how those two interlink, interweave today. So Brian and Nora, thank you so much for joining me. And Nora, I'd like to start with you. Could you tell the listeners a little bit about your background, please? Yeah, sure. And thanks so much, Jared, for having Brian and I on Sea Control today. We're really excited to be here. My name is Nora Johnson. I'm the Director of the Office of Incident Management at Transport Canada. So a little bit about my background. Well, I've spent, I guess, about the last 20 years or so of my career in the

Canadian government supporting these whole government coordination constructs really in one capacity or another. And I actually started out as a customs officer, boarding and rummaging vessels and leading joint force operations before I jumped ship to become a marine security inspector, ensuring compliance with the ISPS code. I then, you know, did a little bit of a shift again and I moved on to national headquarters to take on a role of chief of crisis and emergency management for marine safety and security at transport. And I really focused there on coordinating various national and international multi-agency responses and had a lot of great opportunities to facilitate international capacity building workshops on drills and exercises. And together with Brian

and other great colleagues within the Global Motor Coordination Center, co-leading the development of collaborative international multi-agency constructs. Thank you so much. And Brian, long-time listener, first-time interviewee, Really excited to get you on here today. Would you mind introducing yourself? Yeah, thanks, Jared. And greetings to you as well, Nora. Big fan of the show. And I actively listen to every new episode, and I consider it a privilege to get to chat with you again. I served on active duty in the United States Navy in the JAG Corps, serving on aircraft carriers in Antarctica, in the Pentagon, and in different legal offices. I am now a civilian attorney in the United States Coast Guard in an office where our

sole mission is to coordinate for multiple agencies involved in maritime threat responses. So my focus is on the water and how do we integrate different agencies that operate under different chains of command and different authorities. I also enjoy teaching Law of the Sea and writing about it as well. So this is a privilege to talk about our chapter and the important elements that Noor and I have distilled in that. Well, thanks again for coming on today, Brian. Excited to talk about this, as I mentioned earlier. So you've written a chapter in a larger edited volume. What's the overarching theme of the edited volume? And then where's your chapter fit within that theme?

Sure. The focus of Eric Stern and Ray Brescia's book, they served as editors, is about crises. And they wanted to focus on how do attorneys train, how do they become ready, and how are they prepared for addressing a crisis which are coming with increasing frequency and severity. And they define the threat to core interests, uncertainty, time pressure, and potentially multiple governments and tremendous media and social interests. Our focus, Noor and I's, chapter is on maritime. But there's someone who wrote a chapter from the New York Times about what it's like to be an editor during a crisis. There's so many talks about airlines, flash floods, climate change, training students at Yale, and how does another government, the Swedes, approach training? And that's why I loved the theme of this book when Noor and I were approached a couple of years ago. And I thought it's a wonderful book that it is, according to the editors, an underappreciated, understudied, and not well understood area.

So while it is for attorneys, it really is more broadly about the holistic approach to a crisis. Thank you. Now, then what prompted the emergence of whole-of-government maritime response networks, which per your chapter began in 2005? There was mishandled events. In the United States, we can trace our current process back to 1970 and a mishandled event because really there wasn't a process to share information, to coordinate activities between different agencies and recognition that there has to be a better way. There has to be a better way to coordinate elements within a government, and that intersection from maritime to land. And we're struggling. We struggle with that, and we see this struggle continually on activities on the water with that impact on land. And we've seen it repeatedly with piracy and drug trafficking and other events on how do we ensure a case prosecution, stopping activities, and that's the origins of our U.S. process. And we've seen it in several other countries, Indonesia with BACAMLA, United Kingdom with another long acronym, National Maritime Information Center, Canada with MERC, which Nora will discuss. And what I found very interesting is every country's process has been different. We see with Georgia on the Black Sea, their Joint Maritime Operations Center.

But at its core, we sought to distill some of those key elements. in different processes. And I will note the mishandled event from 1970 was just the subject of a documentary in the past year called The Jump that had interviews with the commanding officer of the U.S. Coast Guard cutter. And it also had the interviews with Seamus Kuderka, the person who jumped. So it's interesting that an event that happened 50 years ago still has resonance and clips from Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon that I had never seen before. So a certainly dated event from more than 50 years ago that has that continuing traction. So you're both involved in our national maritime responses, the Canadian version, which I think you mentioned, Maritime Event Response Protocol, or MERC, the U.S. variant, Maritime Operational Threat Response.

So how and why did Motor Company exist? And I think you can start with Seamus Kederka, probably. Sure. So in 1970, fisheries stocks were being held between, at the time, the Soviet Union. and the United States to discuss the catches from Soviet fishermen. And this had been a discussion, a diplomatic engagement that had taken years, years. They finally came together in November 1970 off the coast of Martha's Vineyard. And with a lot of crises or mishandled events, it always begins with relatively innocuous data points. And then it starts to spiral a bit out of control. In Seamus Kuderka's case, which again, I hope will encourage Jared to send a link for

this movie. It's a wonderful documentary. Seamus Kuderka threw a crumpled note across the bow of his ship onto the U.S. cutter, asserting that he was going to jump. Thus the name of the movie. And that began a cascade of events on both who in the government responds. Is this simply a search and rescue, the Coast Guard officers at the time had framed it as a, do we beat the Soviets to the rescue in our territorial sea? Or is this a diplomatic event? And with that misunderstanding, it went and it took approximately three to five hours, and this depends on whom you ask, to identify even a point of contact at our Department of State. And that became part of the challenge of what was the issue, what was the request, and who was overseeing. At this point,

it was just a note that was thrown overboard. Later in the day, Seamus didn't just throw another note, he jumped. But if we think it's 1970, no cell phones, no pagers, no BlackBerrys, really different environment for communication, belief for many that it would not be productive to, again, go back to Washington, D.C., and a decision was made locally, again, with Seamus now on a Coast Guard cutter to give Seamus, to return him to the Soviets, and thus began about 45 minutes of chasing throughout a Coast Guard cutter, which is a warship, where Seamus had his head thrown against a wall. Coast Guardsmen have stated that there was blood dripping throughout passageways, complete loss of control of the warship.

Simas was ultimately captured by the Soviets, and that began the odyssey of, and he was returned to the Soviet ship, and he was subsequently prosecuted in the Soviet Union for betrayal of the motherland, and he himself has written a book, Simas Kudurka, and from that event, Congress held eight hearings about what happened. Why? Why was there such a misconnect between national policy and a local response? And there has been critical examination of this event where we need to do a better job on communication, but there's no process. That's what came out in these hearings. There's no documented process when a threat response may eclipse the authorities of one agency. And there's a wonderful article written about a decade ago by Michael Roberto, who said the title of his piece was Why Making Decisions the Right Way Decision. And there was no process in this case. And there is a predecessor process to motor maritime operational threat response that dealt with a non-military incidents and from Seamus, where we had different chains of command and different authorities, different responsibilities, struggling on what's the right way forward. And that's why the SEAMIS event is as continuing resonance and traction that became a presidential directive and now is comprised within the Maritime Operational Threat Response Plan.

So, Brian, then in addition to motor, your chapter also lists the Global Motor Coordination Center, which is where you work. How does that add to the process? Sure. GMCC, because we're really big on acronyms and Global Motor Coordination Center, is an office within the Coast Guard that works on behalf of Homeland Security to support the process. So we provide a level of consistency and stability and will chronicle cases throughout the United States that support the motor process. And we also have an opportunity to collaborate with partner nations, including Canada. And that's why, so we are full-time, it's a small office of five people. And our full-time job is to support the interagency. As you and I had an

opportunity, Jared, my job when you were on the joint staff was to support joint staff and to communicate and to collaborate. And that's where GMCC fits in. So we don't own the process. We support the process. Yeah. And we'll talk in a little bit about how that process actually functions. But Nora, I want to get to some of your story, some of your origin story now. Where did MERP come from and how did that process develop? Yeah, thanks, Jared. The MERP, or the Maritime Event Response Protocol, much like the motor, it emerged from lessons learned. And the particular lesson came to a Dutch-flagged Sea Shepherd Conservation Society-controlled research vessel that had publicly declared that it was deploying to the Canadian east coast to obstruct our lawfully

authorized seal hunt activity. And the vessel, it was sensationally adorned with skulls and crossbones and the names of all of the vessels that it had either rammed or it had sunk over the years. So upon arrival of the vessel, what we found is the vessel just willfully was ignoring orders to depart Canadian waters. It was jockeying back and forth between Canada's territorial sea and the EEZ, claiming that the navigational freedoms allowed it to take such action. So the vessel ultimately grazed or ran into a Canadian Coast Guard ship twice and just consistently came perilously close to people and boats and really threatening their safety. So ultimately, law enforcement ended up boarding and seizing the vessel and two crew members were

arrested. It was at this time when the situation started to evolve from an incident more into a crisis, where the vessel's owner made inaccurate public assertions that the seizure of the vessel was in fact an act of war. And this started to bring in the diplomatic community. And also in protest, using the power of the media, the vessel's owner delivered to a Canadian courthouse It's 2,500 Canadian $2 coins in order to obtain the release of the master and the first officer. And, you know, making assertions to the press that, you know, to the tune of since they're going to board our vessel at gunpoint on the high seas and take all of our property, well, then they're pirates and we're going to give them a pirate's ransom. So this was playing out in the press. There was a lot of rhetoric.

And, of course, this is a socially divisive issue, right? So it was really garnering a lot of attention. But ultimately, the two crew members were ultimately deported. So inquiries that followed the event did conclude that response actions were reasonable and necessary and consistent with laws and regulations. But the interesting thing is that the case didn't end there. it was really just kind of the beginning of a drawn out case that was years because following the seizure of the vessel it was later auctioned but then there was a failed bid the government ended up selling it for scrap and then when the new owner attempted to tow that vessel away for

decommissioning the tow line snapped and so it was moved under the cover of darkness to a small community wharf and it was abandoned and it ended up taking up you know the wharf space of this of this community that relied upon that upon that that wharf space you know for tourism and and other requirements so you know the saga kind of continued the vessel it sank it was leaking it eventually caught fire and uh and the the new owner was arrested for contempt of court for not you know kind of moving that that vessel where it it should be and finally it was you know towed away uh when it was finally declared in imminent uh you know pollution and threat to to the environment and so lessons learned from this event really you know we found that the remediation and

the disposition and and the vessel recovery costs you know they they exceeded you know million a a million dollars. And this played out in our courts for nearly 10 years. So what we found most interestingly during the kinetic phase of the response, much like any maritime event, there's really no single department that possesses the sufficient authorities, mandate, resources, or information to deal with this type of event. And while there were planning and discussions and legal consultations, you know, occurring within various safety and security and environmental and SAR diplomatic and law enforcement and border and even military organizations kind of within these silos in support of their own internal mandates, what we found is

that these efforts led to the development of very fragmented and not necessarily aligned recommendations to senior agency officials. And, you know, building upon the best practices of the motor, we really saw a significant opportunity for dealing with complex cases like this to develop a whole of government process for integrating information, for coming together and planning, and particularly for dealing with the media when we're dealing with really sensitive issues. And we really looked to that motor process for inspiration, among other best practices.

Thanks, Nora. Brian, I'm going to insert a question here if I can. But what we haven't really discussed is like how you get activated at the GMCC and then just a generic description of what the process actually is. Could you explain that briefly, how that works? Sure. In the United States, our process is, well, first of the motors predicated that a network community will make better decisions than single agency decisions when it involves multiple agencies, and that's been generally when our process is triggered, when more than one agency

is involved. So if we think a pirate on the deck of a ship, that may involve a Navy boarding team, a Marine Corps boarding team, but decisions regarding prosecution are within the Department of Justice. Diplomatic engagements, if the United States does not prosecute, may be with our state department, if there's medical issues, if there are transportation issues and investigative issues. So as to your question, when there is more than one agency involved in that maritime response spectrum, our process would be activated. And in the past year, it was activated every day, but I think five. So it's an actively used process for drug trafficking, illegal fishing, piracy, cyber events, and others.

But it's, in that regard, an agency, Department of Defense, Department of Homeland Security, Department of State, Department of Justice would trigger or activate this process. Thank you. Nora, back to you. Are there critical differences between the two processes as you look at the Canadian versus the U.S. response? Yeah, for sure, Jared.

The MERP, like the motor, was really designed to better coordinate and integrate multi-level response structures to respond to threats and events by establishing that lead department. And also those kind of prerequisite and predetermined triggers that Brian just spoke about for that trigger coordination. So those are well defined in advance and people are familiar and comfortable with them and use the process. And it also includes the communication procedures for how the protocol is initiated, as well as for how we come together to establish desired national outcomes and strategic courses of action. So in many ways, the MERP is very similar to the motor in that regard. But where it differs is that the plan reflects really the government to Canada's approach to emergency management, which is whole of government and it's all hazards. So the protocol is used to address and coordinate responses not only to marine security threats, but really to any type of maritime incident that's in the national interest that implicates more than one organization. So whether that be a significant marine safety issue, such as a major casualty or salvage operation or a spill or a health threat, for example.

And the other key difference between the two processes is that the Canadian process outlines a collaborative interdepartmental planning process that is used to develop options not only in response to an event, but also in the pre-planning stage of incident response. Thank you. Brian, anything to add on critical differences from your perspective? I would state that there's about 15 that have emerged globally. And as Nora said, Canada is different. And what I really find gratifying is every country has a different focus. And you'd expect that with whole of government. And part of the challenge is that there are consistent themes, but every country that Nora and I have discussed with is that the recognition that the perfect foresight doesn't exist, good fortune may be unreliable, but you can inject structure into sometimes the chaos. And that's what we seek to do with the process.

And we've seen about 15 of these across the globe, but there's not one definition. There's not one model that needs to be followed. And there's a U.S. ambassador who famously called the interagency a mysterious beast. But we've sought to inject a little bit some of that structure into maritime threat response. So that would be my addition. Thanks, then, Brian. What's the MERT Motor Strategic Protocol? It's an agreement between the United States and Canada to collaborate between our whole-of-government offices and processes with one another. And so when Canada's MERP is activated or the United States and Motor, they are separate processes for each government, but they can communicate. And this MIRT motor strategic protocol provides a platform to exchange information, and it's predicated on having familiarity with each other's process and building some trust and trusting what's the request, what's the information, but that we can do better. And when we share information in a trusted network, the acknowledgement that there's a tremendous amount of collaboration between the United States and Canada, which would likely benefit from multiple podcasts, Jared, on all of the different frameworks, but there wasn't a connective thread that we saw for certain maritime events. So we had Canadian Customs with Customs and Border Protection, the U.S. Coast Guard and Canadian Coast Guard, the RCMP and FBI.

There's frequent discussions every day. What we saw, Nora and I, with a couple of our colleagues, was to draft a protocol that could provide that connective thread to identify when there are significant events that warrant communication across different agencies and collaborative processes. So it didn't supplant or replace any of the wonderful cooperation we have. It just complemented it. Thanks. Thanks. So, Nora, then we'll get into like a little bit more of what I think is the meat of this episode and talk about some specific examples here. And the first one is really the biggest call that I was involved in. And I don't know if it's the same for the two of you. You can both speak to that.

This is the 2015 explosion in the port of Tianjin in China. And then the whole of government response to that from both the U.S. and Canada. Nora, how was the strategic protocol used to respond to that explosion? Yeah, thanks so much, Jared. This is just such an exciting case to have the opportunity to speak about. So in 2015, you'll recall that there were a series of devastating explosions in the port of Tianjin, China. And the first explosion reportedly had a power equivalent to three tons of TNT detonating. And then the second explosion being even more devastating with the equivalent of about 21 tons. With area residents kind of stating that the blast felt like an atomic bomb had hit. The blast ended up killing 173 people and injured nearly 800.

and from what we read in the press caused just extensive infrastructure damage to the tune of about a billion dollars and in these explosions from what we understand there were more than 700 tons of sodium cyanide that reportedly exploded and what we learned was that the substance that when it's dissolved or burned, it releases a poisonous gas and exposure to it can be rapidly fatal. And as we know, the port of Tianjin is the 10th largest container facility in the world. So following the blast, questions immediately arose whether the containers and ships that were birthed in or near the port that were now underway en route around the world, well, were they contaminated? And did they represent a threat to the countries that they were en route to?

So we found that government officials really around the globe were individually assessing how best to approach this safety and security challenge. And each organization, each government had access to different information. And they were using different risk methodologies to assess the situation. So when it was determined that we had vessels en route to both Canada and the United States triggered under the MIRP motor, because we had those pre-established triggers in place, right? Any incident that is in the national interest of both countries, right, or could represent a shared risk or threat. So we quickly stood up the MIRP motor coordination process. And those immediate priorities, of course, were sharing information and trying to determine the risk of this potential contamination.

So remarkably, we saw more than 100 U.S. and Canadian officials come together very rapidly from, I think there were more than 15 different departments and agencies that simultaneously came together to assess the impacts, discuss courses of actions, and talk about opportunities to align our approaches, right? It's really important that we find ways to mitigate the risk of potential delays, right, that could be associated if each of our countries took independent approaches, right, requiring different examination in multiple points of parts of call. Just because of that inherent connectedness, of course, of the maritime transportation supply system. So the use of the motor protocol for Tianjin really reinforced the value of having that kind of pre-existing framework.

And, you know, a documented agreement that allowed us to bring together a networked response, you know, with those predetermined 24-7 points of contact. And most importantly, we had a predefined, pre-agreed-to ability to share legal policy and regulatory information. And it allowed us to come together as binationally to quickly make decisions. and i guess really for me that the this this example of the explosion is just a just fantastic demonstration of the power of multinational collaboration and the value of a defined known process from preparedness thank you uh brian before i move down our question list here Is there anything you want to contribute to sort of the narrative description of the way that the Tianjin response unfolded from the U.S. side in particular? I would add and compliment Noor's comment, and she's absolutely correct that without this process, I think it would have been episodic, the response.

There would have been discussions north and south of the border, and I'm not so sure there would have been that holistic approach, which was tremendously beneficial on our side to have this kind of candid discussion with about 100 participants. And so then, Brian, this chapter and the entire volume is really, it's written from the lawyer's perspective. Why do you think lawyers were critical to the motor response, particularly in 2015? The attorneys help shape the issues for policy and operational commanders to make decisions or implement. There's a bevy of issues regarding what can be asked of vessels inbound to a country on an advance notice of arrival. There are privacy information considerations about what can be shared. There could be criminal considerations. Having attorneys participate in the calls helped frame the issues very effectively for decisions by senior officials and also where there's gaps, where there may not be clarity in decision making.

And that's where the attorneys really identified what can be shared, what should be shared, and again, ensuring a compliance with both the law and where it is clear and where it is not clear. Thanks. Before I move down to listen, can you describe sort of the resolution of the Tangent incident? Either or. Nora, if you want to take that or Brian. Brian, why don't you take that one? Sure. So in Tianjin, there was tremendous tension from our vessels inbound to Canada, the United States, and really across the globe at risk for a contagion or a biologic agent or chemicals from that explosion. And by sharing information, we were able to identify more effectively and more rapidly the threats. And as it turned out, because of the distance in time from Tianjin, sea state conditions and weather, minimal testing was conducted, but no disruption to economic or trade. And that was the difference.

Because for decision makers, you may think it's easier just to deny entry to all ships, but that would impact the economies, and that may not be prudent or warranted. So with Tianjin and that explosion, because of the communication between Canada and the United States, and this is unfolding in other countries as well, we were able to identify and mitigate the threat. And there's some risk assessment involved. And that decision, that process and that collaboration helped inform decisions by senior officials and port officials as well. Thanks, Brian. Then part of the aftermath of the Tianjin response was the strategic arrangement. So can you tell me what's what is the strategic arrangement consist of? So it's modeled on the effectiveness and the success of U.S. and Canada engagement that we have with strategic protocol. And the strategic protocol with the United States and Canada has been exercised every year and used frequently. And Noren and myself and several of our colleagues recognized there's benefit.

And Tianjin was a catalyst for that, that we can do better sharing with comparable offices that have whole of government responsibilities in Australia, in New Zealand and the United Kingdom. So with these five countries, we now have a platform to share information, which we have almost on now a daily basis, on how do we collaborate. So it takes the principles from the MERP motor, and I apologize for the acronyms, strategic protocol, and we've now expanded it with five countries. And that's been additionally beneficial. And Nora, author of the operational protocols to this agreement, which was fantastic on providing the fidelity to not just an agreement, but how will it be meaningfully used and how will it have impact? And that, to me, was important. And much like the motor strategic protocol started slow and when the trust was built, it started to expand in its use and its application, its benefit. Thanks, Todd. There were a couple other examples provided that were illustrative of the value of these processes. So, Nora, could you tell us what happened in the case of the Sunsea? So in 2010, the Sunsea, which was a derelict cargo ship, arrived off of the coast of British Columbia in Canada. And it was carrying, I think, close to about 500 Sri Lankan migrants.

And somehow it miraculously completed its transit from the Gulf of Thailand through the Indian and Pacific Oceans, despite being in such a dilapidated state. And all of the passengers made refugee claims upon arriving in Canada due to the violence in Sri Lanka and the Sri Lankan civil war that had been raging for many years. So en route, the vessel had been tracked by many countries because at first, the final destination of the vessel wasn't apparent and wasn't known. And prior to arriving in Canada, the journey really sparked a lot of media interest. The media was following this ship avidly, and there were initial inquiries to the U.S. Coast Guard in Hawaii as well regarding the scope of U.S. search and rescue obligations, right? Because it was thought that this was really going to end up as a SAR case. The Sunsea, fortunately, didn't require assistance at sea, but the response absolutely involved multiple organizations and multiple nations. Because in advance of the Sunsea's arrival, of course, that initial concern was that there were passengers on board that were gravely ill.

or that they had suffered injury. And of course, there were significant concerns, as I noted, about the seaworthiness of the vessel. But what really amped up this situation from an incident into a crisis was that right before the vessel arrived in Canada, The public safety minister at the time announced that the government believed that there were passengers on Sunsea that were suspected human smugglers or terrorists. So, of course, this really attracted a lot of media attention and drew in a lot of different organizations and countries, quite honestly, into the response and information sharing. So the response to this case was particularly complex because it needed to integrate security, law enforcement, health, regulatory, SAR, immigration, and of course, our diplomatic community, as well as private industry and port authorities. Because, you know, where were we going to put this vessel? There were a lot of people on board. How were we going to get them safely off? How were we going to deal with their health concerns? Plus, of course, the whole, you know, security question that had been brought to the surface.

So the community, the Canadian medical community actually ended up publishing a report about some of those significant challenges around, you know, the fact that this was just, it was a dynamic situation. It was multifaceted. And there was always and there is always that rub or that challenge between, you know, that duty to maintain secrecy versus the duty to notify and bring in into the circle of trust the people that absolutely need to know in order to respond. And it was a situation as well that was without precedent in Canada. So there was the need to innovate and bring together non-traditional groups to align decision making and coordinate responses. So the Sun-Sea Affair was one of these situations that, again, really highlighted the value and gave Canada an opportunity to test the maritime event response protocol that had been forged after the situation that we spoke about earlier with the seal hunt. And it really underlined and underscored the value as well of the MERP motor and how departments and nations really need to come together to coordinate actions and develop solutions and integrate the private sector. And particularly, we found that, of course, response communities, they're organized based on their distinct authorities and responsibility. And, of course, that makes sense, right, for most events, because the mission for SAR can be really substantively different than the priorities and the mission, of course, for a health contagion or a fuel spill or a criminal investigation or, you know, for diplomacy. And this case had all of those. So bringing those groups together and navigating all of those equities was really, really challenging.

And ultimately, this case brought up really important questions in Canada about non-refoulement of asylum seekers and the requirements to protect personal information. You know, brought up, you know, challenges with prosecuting smugglers. And really then how do we balance among all of that, ensuring that we protect the information, protect the environment, and deal effectively with the mooring and disposition of the vessel. So all of that to say is this case ended up concluding with substantial changes to Canadian law and really sparked the requirement and the need for us to have good, close collaboration and information sharing between Canada and the United States. Thank you. And then, Brian, if you could tell us a little bit about the Rio Pueblo and Lemongate. Sure. I can start with Lemongate, which was a vessel that was carrying containers of lemons in five containers, along with a thousand other containers, inbound to the United States, to the port of New York and Newark. And the United States received an anonymous complaint that these lemons were biologically spiked and that it was going to cause massive damage to United States people, people within the United States, as well as businesses that the entire country, because it would be the further shift out of New York, Newark to the country and to Canada. And the question began in Lemongate, and not a good sign that it's called anything with gate.

When the media began hearing this, they referred to it as who would accuse innocent fruit of harboring weapons of mass destruction? And another initially called this pinning anti-terror tactics with a free flow of trade. But really, this was a question about what's the response? Do you deny entry on an anonymous complaint? Do you let it in deport? How do we integrate different agencies for the response? And with Lemongate, which existed before, which occurred before the motor process was signed, there was coordination challenges.

More than 40 different agencies participated in the response to the ship with Lemongate that had those potentially contaminated lemons. But there was different boardings by the U.S. Navy, by the Coast Guard, by the FBI, by the Department of Energy, sequentially over several days. And we began to examine it. The ship ultimately was let into port. But examinations after pinned the enforcement costs at $1.3 million and damage to the company exceeded $1.5 million on an anonymous complaint. And it raised challenges of what's the role of an attorney? How will information be shared? How will the response be coordinated?

So LemonGate has continuing relevance in what we do, because when you put yourselves in a crisis situation, it's not always by choice. And information will flow quickly. And what Noor and I chronicled in our chapter at the end, which I will not jump ahead to, were at least recommendations and best practices from different response considerations. And Palermo Senator is not that different. So another container ship that was sought to moor in New Jersey and was held six miles offshore for two days when low levels of radiation were detected by a U.S. Coast Guard boarding team. And initial questions were, is this a dirty bomb? Are we letting in a vessel that is going to cause massive damage to the area? Or do we ultimately not let the ship in?

And that's U.S. Coast Guard authorities. But now how are we going to intersect investigators, diplomats, partner nations that may have shipments coming from the same vessel? And in Palermo, Senator, it turned out they were ceramic tiles, which those that work with containers and dosimeters recognize that that will transmit low levels of radiation. So much like with Lemongate, we start with almost three premises, which is the incomplete information, some level of risk, and some uncertainty. And we seek to inject a bit of process, consistent process of whose lead agency is their compulsory information sharing, what are courses of action, and how do we speak as one voice? And that's, as Nora mentioned correctly, about that strategic messaging, engagements. When is it time and that singular voice for threats that are unfolding? Thanks. Nora, you closed with a recommendation on rules for crisis lawyering in a multi-agency response environment. I don't think we have time to cover every single one of them, but can you pick a few that you think are the most important and tell us the why for those rules were selected? And there's an opportunity here for a back and forth between the two of you if you want to pick your favorites.

Great. Thanks so much, Jared. So within the book, well, there's actually 20 rules in the book chapter, and they're framed as rules for crisis lawyering. But they're equally applicable, I'd say, to any situation that requires overcoming multi-agency coordination challenges. So the set of rules that Brian and I distilled were from our firsthand experiences and from drafting these multinational information sharing arrangements and managing and studying multi-agency crises over the years, some of which, of course, were well managed and, well, others not so much. And also from just from a survey that Brian and I drafted to identify challenges to multi-agency collaboration and to information sharing and trying to determine whether or not sufficient guidance and training exists. And ultimately, so that we would be able to demonstrate in a quantifiable way that multi-agency collaboration is necessary and it actually works. So in more than two years, Brian distributed this survey to over 500 government officials in more than 100 countries. So we got some really great data and information from that.

So if I had to pick a couple of, say, my favorite rules, so to speak, I would say foundationally, we always need to approach a significant crisis with the expectation that it's going to involve more than one organization and potentially more than one nation. And this is so apparent in the maritime realm. And this was affirmed by our survey with 98% of those maritime government officials agreeing that there's the absolute need to bring in multiple organizations to effectively respond to a crisis so in this context in this multi-organizational context it's really important that of course that we have 24 7 contact information for the colleagues both within our own organization and others and that we spend the time cultivating those relationships

right so that those folks are actually going to pick up the phone at two and the two o'clock in the morning now of course this sounds super basic and it is and it's absolutely foundational and it's really interesting how often this isn't done and so by establishing and regularly testing these points of contact and having and maintaining that informal network of our trusted colleagues that's really what we find makes the difference between a timely and delayed response and you know, also because this book, you know, the rules feature in crisis lawyering, and not only because that, but I'd say that involving lawyers soonest is absolutely critical, because they help us frame the art of what's possible when we're developing our courses of action. And they can

help us negotiate those impasses that sometimes come up between organizations, right, particularly when they come to the table with potentially overlapping authorities or capabilities. So it's important to advocate to bring them in to the tent as quickly as possible and to ensure that the decision-making process is really clear and understood. But what I'd say for me, the mainstay of crisis response, in particular the multi-agency response is developing and documenting that process for collaboration because collaboration in our experience it isn't accidental and it's certainly not a given and even when we see participants come together with shared common outcomes it really is a deliberate practice

and one that has to be designed into our organizational cultures because goodwill goes a really long way as we know but it doesn't go all the way and particularly during a significant crisis with numerous organizations with their own mandate priority policies you know cultures and particularly when dealing in a time-constrained, high-stakes environment. And we found that this crisis coordination is best supported by that predefined process because it helps us iron out our inefficiencies in information exchange and decision-making. That is so important, and it can help us align the way that we think through our problems And how we come together to frame our solutions in a repeatable manner. So as Brian said, so that's no longer just episodic. And having the right people at the table is absolutely imperative.

And the process really needs to engineer space for those different organizations to give voice to contradictory views, right, particularly when we're dealing with complex situations, so we can avoid making those assumptions and we can think through to how is this really going to end. And so we can avoid those unintended consequences, which, as we know, is absolutely crucial in the maritime realm, right, where impacts to our supply chains can immediately have consequences in far-flung economies. and finally I would say that process isn't everything the real and not so secret ingredient I would say as Brian had said it's trust right trust in the process that's generated by training and exercising and generating a sense of comfort with the process but we also foundationally need to trust the people that we're responding with so we need to invest that time and energy into personal relationships and it will help us to overcome the hesitation of picking up the phone particularly off hours because if the process because the process will never work if it isn't

triggered and one of the things that we've heard over and over again from from multi-agency responses is that people pause and they ask themselves, is this important enough to wake up somebody in the middle of the night? And so we need to cultivate that bias towards action and encourage people that if they're asking themselves that question, to just pull the trigger. Because we don't know what we don't know. And that one piece of information that we may be holding on to could be that single piece of the missing puzzle that another organization is working on. Thank you, Nora. Brian, I know I said I was going to come back to you, but man, that was strong, and I would really like to close with that as the last one. So that is all the time

that we have for today, but I'd really like to thank my guests, Nora Johnson and Brian Wilson. Nora, where can we find you online, and what are you working on next? Any other writing projects or places that we can find you? Yeah, thanks, Jared. I'm on LinkedIn. You can find me there, Nora Johnson. For next projects for me, well, we're in the midst of the biggest unprecedented

global crisis of our time. And, you know, it's rife with examples and really reinforces the need for multi-organization and multinational collaboration mechanisms. And so I really want to take the time to examine those mechanisms that are working and learn from them and adapt our processes so that we're better prepared to rapidly come together and make effective decisions of such enormous importance and consequence.

Yeah, and you and I had discussed offline, I think there are going to be a lot of different communities reaching out to you to talk about the processes that the two of you have managed to establish and how those can be translated over to other areas of government. Brian, where can we find you online and what's your next project? I am on LinkedIn as well. And I just finished a book chapter on maritime cyber security collaboration. So seeking to draw both authorities in the maritime environment for reporting events, monitoring events, and preventing events in a maritime environment that involve electronic systems. and separately models for collaboration across the globe on different threat responses.

Well, that sounds excellent. And, you know, hopefully we can talk about that maybe in a separate episode later on. But I want to thank you both again for coming on today. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. © transcript Emily Beynon