Sea Control - Sea Control 441 - Russia's Dark Tanker Fleet with Christiaan Triebert

Episode Date: July 2, 2023

Links1. "Fake Signals and American Insurance: How a Dark Fleet Moves Russian Oil," by Christiaan Triebert, Blacki Migliozzi, Alexander Cardia, Muyi Xiao, and David Botti, The New York Times, May 30, 2023.2. Sea Control 380 - Underwriters of the United States with Dr. Hannah Farber, by Jared Samuelson, CIMSEC, September 15, 2022.

Hey folks, it's Jared. My guest today is New York Times journalist Christiane Trever. We're discussing his article on how Russia is using a series of tankers to move oil and avoid detection. This episode was edited and produced by Jonathan Selling. Once again, looking for audio editors, so if you're interested in learning how we put these podcasts together and think you're able to learn some basic editing skills, we'll teach you. Drop us a note at seacontrol at simsec.org. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, egypt singapore france new york india or the caribbean chances are there's a simsec local chapter near you you can find a full listing of our local chapters and contact information on the

website simsec.org so if you're interested please reach out and get involved 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 podcast and with that Kim Risman. You're listening to Sea Control, hosted by the Center for International Maritime Security. Aloha, shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is Christian Trevera, a journalist with the New York Times. We're going to be discussing his article, Fake Signals in American Insurance, How a Dark Fleet Moves Russian Oil. So, Christian, welcome. Could you start by telling the listeners a little bit more about your background, please?

Sure. Thanks so much for having me on the show, Jared. It's a great honor to be in the industry podcast, you know, because, yeah, my name, because that's what I've been doing the past half a year, basically going very deep into shipping activity and the oil, crude oil trade. But yeah, my name is Christian Trebert, and I work as a visual investigative reporter at the New York Times. It's a team, kind of a small team around eight reporters, and we kind of focus on anything that has to do with visual evidence. It's kind of like a new form of accountability journalism where we either investigate U.S. police departments or airstrikes in Afghanistan or Ukraine or Israel and Palestine. or Syria and basically what happened is that in in earlier this year in January I think one of my editors was like you know there's all this talk about like the dark fleet ghost fleet ghost armada you've seen the terminology flying around and was like Chris can you can you take a closer look at it and see what you can find well thank you again for joining us as a reminder to listeners all

opinions they are our own and not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. I will timestamp this for listeners too. We're recording this Tuesday, June 13th. So if you publish something between now and when we actually go out with this, the reason we're not talking about it is because you haven't written it yet. So it may have happened. You may be actively working on it here, but we don't have the new information yet to go public with. So if that's the case, of course, we'll link to that story as well, though. So you talked a little bit about this how did you get on to this story i know your your editors uh handed it to you but how did you go about sort of the research behind it okay so like how do they get on to this story

well you know we we as a team you know we we we don't really have a beat which some reporters have right they focus on a specific topic or specific region we focus on basically anything that is that is both visual and we can reveal something and um you know of course in december The price cap was installed by many Western nations, including the United States, European Union, United Kingdom, and on Russian crude oil, kind of as a punitive measure to bring down the revenue that the Kremlin is earning on exporting its crude oil, but also keep the Russian oil flowing, right, to all the corners of the world. because it would cause a lot of trouble and economic upheaval around the world if there would be a complete stop on Russian oil. So in the wake of that price cap announcement, there was all the talk about Russia maybe amassing a ghost fleet, a dark fleet,

a ghost armada of ships to basically ship its crude oil around the world. And that was interesting. Those were headlines around the world. And I think there were a lot of numbers flying around. It may have been 600 ships. It may be just a double dozen of ships. And it was just intriguing. Right. I mean, we have focused as a team before on sanctioned innovations related to North Korea. It includes a lot of shipping, too. And my editor was kind of like, hey, Chris, you know, can you can you take a look at that? Can you can you find out something more? And that's when we embarked on a journey together with colleagues around the newsroom at The New York Times, including our graphics department to kind of see, OK, can we can we find something more here?

And we thought it would be, you know, maybe a couple of weeks that we will work on this. But it turned out to be nearly nearly half a year, not in the last place, because it is it is a murky business. it's it's hard to find exactly what's going on the price cap is is is is not necessarily the sanctions on russian crude oil are not as clear as for example as with iran or venezuela for that matter um so yeah we we kind of followed a lot of tankers were kind of dead ends not entirely clear what's going on and but eventually we started getting closer to uh to some interesting tankers how did you identify the three tankers you found and what were they doing so um that's very interesting so we started talking to a lot of experts and um um we initially started looking

a lot of the export of of urals right like one of the blends of crude oil that russia exports um from its uh from its baltic seaports we looked at the black seaports too and then a very good contact of mine that i've known for years i used to work before at the group called bellingcat investigative group and i knew um this guy from before samir madani who run tankertrackers.com which is a website that basically tracks um mostly crude oil tankers around the world and um we were talking back and forth we had looked at some other tankers and then he was like well you should take a look at cosmino the russian pacific port of cosmino where they export the um espo blend which is um trading it seems way above the price cap like around 70

dollars above that and the price cap is on 60 dollars and he said like i think i've seen some some interesting ships there um and i think i've identified um two ships the cathay phoenix and the eternal peace which are crude oil tankers um and on satellite imagery but they're not broadcasting their location on ais so we started looking further into that right like we've got some high resolution satellite imagery and we're pretty confident that the assessment of samir was was correct right like the ai signal was in the middle of the sea of japan or the ec um very far away hundreds of miles away from um the port of cosmino and i was like this is very interesting why are these ships faking their location it seems while picking up russian oil they were at loading oil

at a russian terminal so that's when i started just looking further into it and you know monitoring it with satellite imagery but high resolution satellite image is really what you want because like the measurements of a ship you know it's approximately the same on medium resolution but it's a bit pixelated the colors look the same but you really want to have like you want to go a little bit deeper right so i started going through a lot of social media and eventually i found this um this uh tuck boat operator and he used that hashtag tuck life not with an h but t-u-g and um he was basically documenting each and every ship that they were bringing into port in cosmino and i remember one night i was just scrolling through and it's like

wow wait a second one of the ship was called the cathay phoenix and he filmed the cathay phoenix going into port going out of port and did it again and again and again because this ship entered and picked up oil in cosmino multiple times and i was like wow it's like we have air like visual evidence now as if the satellite images weren't enough we have like visual evidence there and the interesting thing is he um filmed other ships too and one of them was the alma and um i looked up quickly um okay what what what is the alma uh doing uh and who is it insured by That is very, very important and was also insured by or, you know, insurance coverage by the American P&I Club. And this is where this is interesting, right?

The price cap, basically, you can touch Russian oil. If you're a Western company, if you're a Western P&I Club, right, that provides insurance coverage to ships, you can be involved in this. It's not a problem as long as you know that the oil isn't trading above $60. the the price cap and all these ships that i just mentioned why are they interesting um they're only of interest to the price cap because they have the american club as an insurer like the ships are owned by hong kong companies the ships are owned by uh operated by mostly by hong kong companies i should say um you know the flag states are liberia and and and hong kong and so on but it's really where the insurer comes in that's where it gets interesting and and that's

So that's how we really identified those three crude oil tankers that made multiple journeys to Cosmino while picking up Russian oil. Last but not least, the Alma, the ship that I discovered through the social media page and then later on in satellite imagery, actually I first noticed it on an Instagram page from the tugboat operator, but then I also found a crew member on board posting, And he did not only reveal that the ship was picking up crude oil in Cosmino, but actually also in the Baltic Sea. So that was pretty interesting.

So you mentioned spoofing as part of this here. They're showing their location out sort of in the middle of the Sea of Japan. What made this spoofing different than what you might normally see? So we talked to a lot of experts about this, maritime experts, shipping experts, like what exactly is going on? And we were told, like, well, the kind of spoofing that you see is kind of, you know, it's sophisticated. So what we're looking at is basically, in some instances, a ship that is mimicking a route, an actual route. So, you know, back in the day, I think, you know, when you wanted to fake that or, you know, you wanted to hide that you're doing something as a ship, you could just switch off your AIS and you would go dark, right?

And that's where the term dark fleet maybe comes from. You just switch it off. No one sees where you are. But that's pretty, you know, suspicious. So then now ships start spoofing their location. So they're like, while they're at one location, the AIS signal actually pretends that they're somewhere else. Now, we often see like very straight lines or like, you know,

just like activity that immediately when you zoom in on a ship's AIS path, you would notice that this is, you know, something is off. This doesn't look like a natural course of how a ship would go. But what we saw with some of the ships that we were tracking is that they had a very, very sophisticated path. If you would look, you know, at first sight at the AS path, nothing would look off, you know. It would just look like a genuine path between China and Japan, for example.

We even had one ship that wasn't a crude oil thinker, but an oil product tanker, so like fuel oil or something like that, that did the same thing. And it basically spoofed its way to a berth, to a loading berth, an oil loading berth in the port of Niigata in Japan, while it was in Russian waters. So you have to imagine when you zoom in on that AI spat, it's literally just a signal that goes from China to Japan.

And it docks at the oil terminal, not for crude oil, but for oil products, and just goes back to China. That's what makes this spoofing different than what we have seen before, where it's slightly more obvious. And that's pretty striking. So I'm about 10 years removed from putting my hands on an AIS unit myself. But I did have a follow-up question for you regarding, like, how do you tell it's spoofing rather than just incompetence? But you've laid it out pretty clearly. It's like you can't just accidentally put in that track there. I've seen plenty of people have incorrect information in AIS.

It was just obviously somebody hadn't started. They were still showing they were at anchor, and I could see them driving at 20 knots alongside me. And this is definitely not the case when you're describing that. Did you talk to any of the experts about how long it would take to actually program what you're talking about, program it into an AIS unit? because that sounds to me like a data entry kind of nightmare when you're talking about all those individual points that have to be plugged in.

Yeah, so this is very interesting, Jared. Actually, maybe you and me should talk about it after the podcast even more. No, we are not entirely clear whether this happens on the software end, whether this happens on the hardware end. We did notice that there is a company, I believe it's a Turkish company that sells

um as transponders that can very easily manipulate or not maybe very easily but like they they they they how do you say they advertise their their hardware as like you know this has the spoofing capability we are not sure on the ship's ends what they're doing um but it's a very interesting question you're asking because it's really something and maybe even some of the listeners may be like oh maybe i have an idea what's going on like please do reach out either to jared or to me because i think it's very interesting to learn more about this and and why am i saying this is because if we look at for example the three ships that we looked at the crude oil tankers and then we have three other ships that were petroleum products tankers they all kind of fit the same

pattern but we have not found any relationship to ownership structures and so on but they do use the same kind of method they all or most of them they basically spoof in the middle of the sea of japan or the ec um and they kind of like mimic a pattern sometimes basically at when they are in at the true location they're loading oil um they're mimicking a pattern of being at anchorage in the spoofing mechanism and these are sometimes hundreds of data points and they all go from like a center like a center point in the middle and then they like basically go around it and you know it seems like they it almost seems like i don't know but it almost seems like these the people that are spoofing and are they either manually or like automated something in there

because like the hundreds like like every minute a signal like i can't believe that somebody's doing that manually um they do the same kind of things at the same kind of location so it's almost like they had a chat with each other and like hey this is a good place to spoof and what we also often see is that uh you know i mentioned the example of going literally inside a port like the fake signal goes inside a port but many of the other ships they basically exactly where um the contiguous zone of japan starts so where japan has like more jurisdiction um they stop and that's where they're pretending to be a vanquish we don't know exactly how this is how how the spoofing happens meaning like are they are they programming it are they doing it manually we we don't know but

it's very interesting to see so the ships and the imo numbers of our ships are public in our story kata phoenix eternal peace the alma um so anyone that that that is that is that is that is fascinated by this um definitely take a look at their ais spots it's very interesting to to to zoom in and and see what they're doing when they're spoofing. All right. Well, for the listeners, if that's you and you're interested in that or you have some theories there, please reach out to Christian. I'm not going to be able to do anything with it,

but Christian is the journalist working this story, so go ahead and reach out. For the listeners, I would direct you to, before I ask the next question, see Control 380 with Dr. Hannah Farber. Her book Underwriters of the United States is all about sort of the development of the insurance industry or the maritime insurance industry and the role it played in the founding of the U.S., but there's a lot of stuff in there that's going to be pertinent to the next part of this discussion.

So, Christian, what is the insurance side of this story? You mentioned the company a little bit here and sort of the price cap piece, but what's the insurance side of the story? Because this is the piece that I think we've seen continue development just in the last couple of days as well as far as where they're cutting off insurance coverage for these vessels. Yeah. Yeah, so it's a good question.

What is the motive? We already, you know, we said, like, it's pretty, you know, sophisticated way of spoofing. It's really mimicking an actual route. Usually this route goes to Japan. That route to Japan from China is basically the same distance as when you would go to, excuse me, that distance of the route from China to Japan, to the specific port in Japan, Niigata. um to the russian port of cosmino where they're actually loading oil it's kind of the same distance so that's already interesting as well so yeah we were we were wondering what is the

reason because the ships are owned mostly by um chinese shell companies ships are owned and operated basically by folks that are not subject to these western price caps right but who is subject to that is of course um pni clubs and i think you know that the sanctions were designed to um you know to have an effect because many of the world pni clubs are of course based in the west um and these pni clubs can provide insurance coverage to these ships as long as the oil is trading under or at 60 a barrel now when we look at the port of cosmino we can see that on average this price of crude oil there is is way above the price cap around 70 75 dollars it's kind of like going in between there so that's the first reason it's like okay something may be going on something

may be related like they're spoofing because they're picking up russian oil and not only that they all have uh insurance from the american club which is uh the american pni club um so what is the motive now i can of course not look into the minds of the people that decided to spoof we have contacted we have reached out to the owners of the ships um only one got back to us and said that they weren't aware that the ship was spoofing um but um we think um the motive is to maintain their insurance coverage basically because without that insurance coverage they cannot operate in most major ports including the port in china there was even coverage by 24 7 splash like industry media that chinese ports are worried about um the ships that are entering their

ports um because of what's going on related to the price cap so the only insurers that are financially able to cover uh those tankers are mostly based in the west as i said and bound by the sanctions for that reason so you know if a client you know a ship was to carry oil sold above the price cap um above the price limit the western insurers in this case the american club would be in violation of the sanctions right and must drop its coverage and i think that's what's going on here these ships are trying to hide the fact that they're picking up russian oil because that russian oil is probably selling above the price cap but these ships also want to maintain their western insurance so they can just like operate um more freely in the ports where they're uh offloading

their oil as we talk actually um the insurance of the three tankers that we found spoofing in the picked up crude oil um the insurance coverage has all been dropped by the american club so the alma is the only ship i think it runs out in uh in the early july but it was supposed to be only in 2024 and the two other ships the eternal peace and the cathay phoenix um if you search for them on the American Clubs website, they're gone, basically. Well, I'm sorry. That's all that we have time for today. I'd like to thank my guest, Christiane Tribert. Christiane, where can we find you online and what are you working on next besides continuing to follow this? So you can find me online. You can just type in New York Times Visual Investigations. All what we do is

teamwork. I'm just one of the reporters. As I said at the beginning, we cover a wide range of topics um i'm also on twitter which is uh just my name christian treebird but also uh it's a trbrtc is my nickname there um but um yeah we cover kind of everything so we're we're we're maybe we're doing follow-ups related to the maritime industry so again for listeners feel free to to reach out and it has been very helpful to talk to people that know a lot about this kind of stuff and know where to look but it could also be that we're looking next to investigating

maybe something in Sudan or in Senegal or in Colombia or in Venezuela, who knows but let's see what we investigate next Well thank you again for joining us, to the listeners thanks for tuning in, we'll see you next time © transcript Emily Beynon

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