In the first episode of The Dark Side Of, host Alex Blumberg talks to a man who was kidnapped by Somali pirates and held hostage for more than two years. He talks about what it was like to be held hostage, and what it's like to finally be free. Alex also discusses his new book, The Desert and the Sea, about his experience being held hostage by Somali Pirates, and how he managed to get back home to his family and return to his job as a journalist in the U.S. after being held captive in Somalia for almost a year. He also talks about how the pirates got hold of him, and why he decided to write a book about it. Alex also explains why he thinks Somali Pirates are a problem in Africa and why they need to be dealt with the way they are. And he talks about why he doesn t think Somali Pirates should even be called pirates at all. This episode is brought to you by Survival, a production of Gimlet Media. Subscribe to Survival on Podchaser.fm and leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe on iTunes Learn more about your ad choices. We're trying to make the podcast better, faster, more personalized, and more engaging. Please rate, review and subscribe to our podcast so we can improve the quality of our episodes. Thank you for listening and review the podcast. Thank you so much for supporting the podcast! - Tom and Sarah for making great episodes. <3 - Tom for the podcast, Sarah and Sarah - Thank you, Sarah for the book, Sarah, for the cover photo, and for the song "The Desert and The Sea" by Sarah's Song of the podcast "The Sea, The Sea, the podcast by Tom's Backyard" by Alex Blume and for all the hard work she did it, Sarah's back in the book "The desert and the sea, The Desert And the Sea" by Sarah, the book and much more! - Tom's back from Somalia, Sarah is a big thanks to Sarah for all her time in Mogadishu, thank you for letting me out there, and she's back home in the valley, and I'm looking forward to all the love and thanks you for all your support, and all the good vibes, thanks to you, thanks for listening out for all of the love, bye bye, bye, Sarah. - Sarah, Sarah & the sea.
00:01:06.000I was working in Berlin at the time and I had followed the very long trial of 10 Somali pirates in Germany.
00:01:12.000In Hamburg for about a year, all of 2011. And before that, I had already thought about going to Somalia because the pirate story was interesting in all sorts of ways that I thought other writers weren't getting to.
00:01:25.000And I had met another journalist, a documentary maker named Ashwin Rahman, who also wanted to go to Somalia for his own project.
00:01:34.000And so we talked about going for a long time.
00:01:36.000And by the end of 2011, in the middle of the trial, all our plans came together and we wound up going in January of 2012. And we had about 10 days of good research.
00:01:52.000And we were in a part of Somalia where other journalists had gone.
00:01:55.000So we weren't doing something that was totally off the map, you know.
00:01:58.000And on the 10th day, Ashwin flew off to Mogadishu and I went with him to the airport.
00:02:06.000We saw him off, and it was on the way back from the airport that a truck was waiting for our car.
00:02:12.000And the truck, which was actually a technical, so a battle wagon with a cannon in the back, stopped us, aimed the cannon through the windshield, overpowered my guard, and 12 guys with Kalashnikovs pulled me out of the car.
00:02:27.000So they put me in another car, and we drove off.
00:02:31.000So from that moment on, I was a captive.
00:04:19.000And so that's a very important premise in the book.
00:04:24.000There are fishing communities on the coast and they're being hard hit definitely by illegal ships that come in to steal the fish.
00:04:34.000But that's a problem up and down Africa.
00:04:36.000And because of that problem, Once Somalia had no government, there was no navy to defend the coastline, local sort of clan leaders would send out boats with militiamen and hold fishing boats for,
00:04:53.000you know, $50,000 ransoms over 24-hour periods, you know, really nothing very much, and they called it a license fee.
00:05:01.000And that's how you did business in Somalia in the 90s.
00:05:45.000So what role does this stuff called CAT, K-H-A-T, this is...
00:05:53.000It's a plant that they chew and it has like a stimulant effect.
00:05:57.000Yeah, it's a little bit like coca leaf, but I think actually it's a narcotic.
00:06:00.000It gets you high at first and then you crash and you wake up depressed and you need more.
00:06:06.000But these guys, every single pirate I met was addicted and they wound up having to sit in front of these piles of cut every afternoon just to get high enough.
00:06:19.000And then, like I said, they would crash at night and then do it again.
00:06:24.000In my case, there were guards 24 hours a day, which meant there was also a shift that slept during the day to crad at night and then crash in the morning.
00:08:26.000I found out, I'm the person that proved that on the route between Somalia to Libya, some former pirate bosses were active in moving people.
00:08:37.000So in other words, Somalis who want to go to Libya will put themselves in the hands of some traffickers and some of those traffickers might be ex-pirates.
00:08:46.000But go there as far as just being transported willingly?
00:09:24.000So in other words, okay, where the Somalis are involved up to the Libyan border is one story, and that's the story I've covered.
00:09:36.000What happens in Libya is a different story.
00:09:38.000The clans and the roots that migrants take through Libya, the clans they put themselves in the hands of, are still the same as the clans and the roots that were used during the slave trade.
00:09:51.000So there's a historical memory there of what went on, and it's the same thing happening.
00:10:01.000So I suspect a lot of migrants don't quite know how bad it can get.
00:10:06.000The route up until Libya is probably easier than Libya itself.
00:10:13.000Libya itself sounds like a horror show for the migrants.
00:10:17.000Well, it's particularly – it's one of those bizarre things.
00:10:20.000We have a horrible dictator like Muammar Gaddafi and you say, well, it's probably a good thing to get rid of that guy, right?
00:11:08.000When you were there, when you decided to take 10 days and you'd done all this research, what did you expect when you went there and what was different?
00:11:19.000Well, so we were careful about finding security.
00:11:21.000We found a Somali elder in Berlin who could offer the protection of his clan in Somalia.
00:11:29.000And he had done it with another journalist, a German journalist.
00:11:34.000And he took us out from Galkayo, which is a town in central Somalia, out to the coast, to Hobyo, which is a pirate town you might have heard of.
00:12:01.000I mean, when you say it's like a pirate town, so the pirates are essentially in control, but like, What else is going on there if you've got pirates in control?
00:12:08.000No, normal Somali life is going on there, but let's say the police force would be pirates.
00:15:51.000I was in a, the first, first they took me to a bush camp.
00:15:54.000Then they took me, with a couple of other hostages, to a prison house.
00:15:59.000And yeah, I had my wrist in a sling and it just was painful and it was confusing.
00:16:09.000I really didn't know what was going on.
00:16:11.000And then slowly they brought a doctor in to look at the wrist and then slowly they took us out into the bush and then finally they put me on the phone.
00:16:18.000So you got medical treatment for your wrist?
00:16:23.000He was probably a livestock doctor, but the guy was a very sympathetic older man, but he said, your wrist is not broken, and he put a splint on it, and that was it.
00:17:50.000They said that right away because by the time the phone call had happened, the raid for Jessica Buchanan and Paul Tisted had already happened too.
00:18:00.000So they even mentioned that to me and, of course, I had no idea what they were talking about.
00:19:39.000Especially when they put me on the ship, I felt like any progress the military had made in finding my location would have been completely reset.
00:19:50.000I was terribly depressed when they first put me on the ship.
00:20:22.000So five of them were from the Philippines and we got along with them really good.
00:20:27.000Everyone else we had to get to know somehow and the ship, they couldn't speak to each other either because it was like a Tower of Babel on the ship.
00:20:36.000And so they developed their own pigeon, which is what sailors have done for centuries.
00:20:40.000It was a pigeon mixture of English and Chinese and a few other words.
00:22:01.000And it was nice for the guys, too, because they were obviously confused.
00:22:04.000There was nothing but very well-meaning but completely anonymous people around them, you know.
00:22:08.000And then they kind of came out of the terminal in Nairobi and they were obviously still sort of a little bit confused and I tapped one of them on the shoulder and he recognized me and it was pandemonium.
00:22:56.000They were holding on for like I think they went down to four or five million or something like that and then at the very end they came down to what was on offer.
00:24:23.000I can kill a few guys, but it would be suicidal.
00:24:27.000But I went through various scenarios in my head all the time.
00:24:32.000That was a very big temptation because the guns just lay around like junk.
00:24:40.000And that was a dark period because the question was not just, can I blast my way out and live, but also, should I just take care of it and kill myself now?
00:24:51.000Because I knew that I was causing a whole lot of trouble for my family at home, and there were probably military plans to come get me, which would put SEALs at risk or special operators at risk.
00:25:01.000And so maybe it's better to just check out.
00:25:07.000Often, especially during the second year.
00:25:10.000Were they sympathetic characters in any way?
00:25:14.000I mean, did you, when you were around them for long periods of time and you're taking into consideration this life that's been thrust upon them, this is the environment they grew up in and this is their, I mean, you had to have at least in some way gotten to know them.
00:26:11.000Kat comes from highlands, so it has to be grown in the mountains of Ethiopia or Kenya and flown in fresh.
00:26:17.000It can't be grown in a flat, hot desert region like Somalia or Yemen, but that's where it's popular, especially among Muslims who can't drink alcohol.
00:26:26.000So there's a whole trade in that region of the world.
00:26:42.000But the trade, it just flows like water in Somalia and the Arabian Peninsula.
00:26:49.000So the voluntary Coast Guard of Somalia, what we've been led to believe that this is how it all started out, how did that narrative get established?
00:26:57.000So once they started to capture big ships, they fell back on that story, which had been true up till then.
00:27:04.000Which is defending our coastline from fishing ships.
00:27:28.000There were actual – it's been sort of uncovered by Italian journalists.
00:27:33.000But the Italian mafia had found a way to bring waste for a certain amount of money down to some place where they thought nobody would see it again.
00:27:44.000And that, some of it washed ashore in 2004 with the Indonesian tsunami that actually reached that part of East Africa.
00:27:55.000So some of those big things that the Italians dumped over the side of their boats wound up on the beach in Somalia.
00:28:03.000Oh, so an actual physical vat or something that they could see what it was?
00:31:39.000What was it like to see them watching their story being depicted on the other side of the planet?
00:31:45.000Well, that's what was weird, is that they were so fascinated by it.
00:31:52.000Otherwise, they didn't necessarily like to talk about bad news for pirates.
00:31:57.000Like I said, when the hostages were released or rescued in the first few days of my captivity, I kept hearing that the hostages had been killed.
00:32:09.000So they like to spin things in a good way for pirates in general.
00:32:14.000So I just would have assumed they would just ignore Captain Phillips because it ends so badly.
00:33:24.000My immune system had started to fall apart, so I don't go into detail too much about this in the book, but I had a staph infection in my skin and some other kind of infection in my ear, and I was just something in my lungs.
00:35:23.000Hyper-vigilance, I mean, out in public, too many people around, you know, like you hear with vets.
00:35:29.000And I was aware of that as a symptom, and I felt at first when we were out in public in Nairobi, and I turned to this FBI psychologist who was with me, and I said, you know, am I hyper-vigilant?
00:38:19.000But one of the doctors who tested me said, well, you have a protein deficiency.
00:38:25.000And once I started to take care of that and I went consciously to the gym and made sure I got stronger and also put on more muscle, the mental things sort of took care of themselves too.
00:38:35.000So that body-mind connection was really important.
00:38:39.000And when they're telling you this, that you have a protein deficiency, that you should exercise and take care of your body, and this is improving, are they giving you guidelines?
00:38:52.000Like, this is probably a good idea to try to do this.
00:38:57.000I mean, are there any strategies that people have to deal with coming out of long-term incarceration?
00:39:06.000I think it was clear to everyone that I was easily overwhelmed.
00:39:10.000So, you know, at one point my family sat down with me with all the paperwork that had to be taken care of, and I could only deal with that for like an hour at a time.
00:42:06.000Now, your situation now is that you said you still have a hard time sleeping.
00:42:13.000And is it a nightmare issue or is it an anxiety issue?
00:42:18.000No, not nightmares, but for some reason when it gets...
00:42:21.000So, in Somalia, when it came time to go to bed, at least for a long period, they would chain up my feet and I would have to lie on a mattress under a mosquito net.
00:42:56.000Now, this book that you wrote, The Desert and the Sea, how difficult was it to sit down in front of a computer and sort of recapture these thoughts?
00:43:09.000Yeah, well, so that was also sort of blood and sweat.
00:43:13.000The research was blood, sweat, and tears, and so was the writing.
00:43:17.000But I did know at least the facts of the story.
00:43:22.000So I put those down first, and then we went back and did how it felt.
00:43:28.000So putting everything down, which a writer likes to do, you know, all at once in one sort of great act of creation, That would have been a little overwhelming.
00:47:00.000Obviously, she was on my mind, and all my friends and family were on my mind while I was in Somalia.
00:47:05.000And just to see somebody that I'd been thinking about all this time in a sort of hypothetical way, again, in, you know, real life, in a way that I really thought I wouldn't, was overwhelming.
00:47:48.000So it's a group of Palestinians who like to surf, but who don't have enough surfboards.
00:47:53.000And so they organized into a club, first to share a couple of surfboards that they had found and managed to buy, and also to receive donations from a group of surfers in Tel Aviv who thought these guys should have boards.
00:48:09.000And so a relationship grew up between a group in Tel Aviv called Surfing for Peace and the Gaza Surf Club.
00:48:15.000So Jews in Tel Aviv are donating surfboards...
00:48:26.000You know, it's been going on for years now.
00:48:27.000But one of the eloquent things that the leader of the Surfing for Peace group said was, you know, we're not getting anywhere on an official level, so we better do something on sort of a grassroots level.
00:49:37.000What did you hope to get out of this trip to Somalia?
00:49:39.000Well, so one thing that I noticed while I was watching the trial in Hamburg was this clash between...
00:49:50.000A modern liberal state, which is what Germany is, and so is America, by the way, and an archaic crime.
00:49:58.000And Germany, in fact, is newer than the United States in the sense that its constitution was written in 1949 when nobody was thinking about piracy.
00:50:07.000So the laws against piracy are extremely lenient in German law in a way that they're not in Spanish or American law.
00:50:14.000We have laws that date back to when it was a capital crime.
00:50:19.000And basically the Germans didn't know how to deal with these guys.
00:50:21.000And I thought it was fascinating in the first place that this ancient crime had revived after a couple centuries of relative quiet.
00:50:31.000And so that tension on its own was interesting and that was worth the book because nobody was quite approaching it that way.
00:50:40.000So that tension is still interesting and that tension is still alive.
00:50:44.000So there are certainly threats to modern liberal states going on around the world.
00:51:25.000In Europe in general, but especially in Germany, I think there's actually a law against shipping them back to Somalia because it's considered not a safe place.
00:52:14.000I asked one of my guards what would happen if a pirate went and got thrown into jail in some other country and then came back and tried to set up friendships again with his old pirate buddies or whatever.
00:55:54.000As it turns out, they're not very good at it.
00:55:56.000So pirates are in the kidnapping business, but they don't always know what they're doing.
00:56:01.000The bosses, I think, got used to demanding a lot of money from shipping companies and finding out that if you hold a ship stubbornly for a long time, you get a lot of money from the insurance company or whatever.
00:56:16.000That calculation doesn't work with human beings.
00:56:19.000So, in other words, everyone else on Earth who negotiates for a human being expects the person's price to go down as the time wears on.
00:56:29.000And it took a while for pirates to understand that.
00:56:36.000When you're dealing with all this, what is it like on your psyche when you're getting two years in, two and a half years in, and you have some sort of light at the end of the tunnel?
00:56:52.000Well, I didn't know there was light at the end of the tunnel.
00:56:55.000So two years in, that's where it was either forgive the guards or self-destruct.
00:57:05.000By then, I had also deliberately given Let go of having any kind of hope.
00:57:12.000So that was the second survival strategy.
00:57:15.000I had to not hope that I was going to get out because hoping had a downside.
00:57:23.000That cycle of hope and despair was extremely damaging to my mental well-being.
00:57:29.000So after going through that cycle a few times, I'm like, well, I have to find a different way.
00:57:35.000One of the things that I've gotten out of travel is I think your view of the world changes when you see the way people are living in different places.
00:58:03.000As being a captive in Somalia, your spectrum is massive.
00:58:11.000I mean, your view of the world being entrenched in that life and being with those people while they're chewing this narcotic and carrying around Kalashnikovs and yelling at each other in a foreign language and watching fistfights and realizing,
00:58:26.000like, they don't have anything either.
00:58:30.000How much has that changed you as a human being and your view of human life on earth?
00:59:22.000But I resisted learning it from the guards.
00:59:25.000When I was there, I thought about it like in Berlin, you realize that a lot of East Germans during the Communist era were taught Russian in school, and a lot of them hated it.
00:59:38.000And I was not in a mood to learn Somali once I was a captive.
00:59:46.000I learned a few words, but I never had a good teacher.
00:59:52.000And of course, when I was a journalist, I was relying on translators.
00:59:56.000I would imagine that as a writer, that spectrum, the expansion of the spectrum, although there's no way you would ever barter it off or bargain to have those experiences to broaden your spectrum, it has to have changed the way you put pen to paper and view the world and your ability to describe things.
01:00:20.000Yeah, I think you realize that each individual has certain boundaries, you know, and certain self-definitions.
01:00:53.000Just that contrast between this world that you were so deeply entrenched in for two years and eight months, that has got to change the way you look at human life.
01:01:09.000Yeah, because the gulf in wealth is so enormous.
01:01:13.000I mean, they can't imagine the amount of money it takes to live in Bel Air.
01:01:16.000And the other way around, I mean, I think it's very difficult for someone in California to imagine how little you can get by on and how close to the earth most people on the planet live.
01:01:28.000There's a statistic that I read once that I repeat all the time because it still baffles me, that if you make more than $34,000 a year, you're in the 1% of the world.
01:01:48.000I mean, it's very, you know, in some ways, although they want money all the time, especially if they're criminals, the money that we're used to sort of greasing our path through life around here is just not available.
01:02:23.000So the pirates had great cell phones, expensive SUVs, weapons that they had bought from abroad and maybe a weapons bazaar in Mogadishu or something like that.
01:04:21.000I think some of the guards, some of the lower-ranking and maybe some of the gentler guards, the ones who got along with me, Did not necessarily want to be gangsters for the rest of their lives.
01:04:31.000So I think for some people the plan was get a bunch of money and get out.
01:04:38.000But as an operation, yeah, there was no limit to the money they needed or wanted.
01:04:46.000So in the end, the real motivation is not illegal fishing but greed.
01:05:04.000I'm going to have a mansion in the hills.
01:05:06.000Yeah, so I think individually they do.
01:05:08.000And some bosses get a mansion and a big compound and live large and then they try and hire younger pirates and that kind of thing.
01:05:17.000The thing about piracy and also terrorism, so Al-Shabaab...
01:05:21.000It's the Al-Qaeda-aligned group in Somalia.
01:05:25.000Al-Shabaab and pirates are the two main corporate structures in Somalia.
01:05:31.000So in other words, if you're a young man and you know how to use a gun, those are the places you join up with if you want to be upwardly mobile.
01:05:37.000If you want to impress somebody and get promotions and make money and marry a wife, Those were the most available options.
01:05:48.000Otherwise, you know, you had scarce jobs, maybe some frustrating sheep herding or fishing.
01:05:57.000More interesting jobs in the cities, but not very many.
01:06:00.000And then maybe a pretty well-paid UN job, you know, if you're lucky.
01:06:04.000So these things are very tempting for young Somalis.
01:06:08.000And even if the pirate bosses are no longer capturing ships on the water, it's fallen off.
01:06:15.000They've still got other businesses going on including, like I said, human smuggling and gun smuggling.
01:06:20.000Does anybody have aspirations to get out?
01:06:23.000Did you run into anybody that understands that the rest of the world, like there are opportunities to live in a place where you don't have this kind of systemic violence and crime?
01:07:56.000He was one of the easiest people to forgive.
01:07:59.000He was never obnoxious or violent towards me, except for belonging to this violent gang.
01:08:08.000I think he was personally never as obnoxious as some of the other guards could be.
01:08:14.000Did you try to communicate to him that the rest of the world is different?
01:08:20.000Did you try to communicate to him what it's like where you grew up and that your experience as a human being is so wildly different than his?
01:08:31.000No, that wasn't our topic of conversation.
01:08:35.000Did you ever think of introducing that?
01:08:40.000I got some of that information from him.
01:11:07.000If I didn't have paper and pen to write with, which I didn't for at least a year and a half, I had to sort of write in my head.
01:11:15.000I mean, I actually composed paragraphs in my head and went through them and memorized them, and eventually I had a two-hour routine in the morning where I just lay still and went through these words in my head.
01:12:02.000And so you sat down there and when you were going over the material, this was a purposeful strategy in order to keep your sanity and give yourself some order.
01:13:40.000I'm working on the novel and I'm following a story, a couple of stories in the meantime, too, some journalism.
01:13:47.000I work for Hostage US at the moment too, which is a good non-profit that supports families that might have somebody in captivity somewhere.
01:13:58.000The US government, as it turns out, helps families in really good ways.
01:14:05.000But in the ways that they can't, in terms of just letting the families know what to expect and what might be going on with their people, a hostage U.S. can step in and help.
01:14:18.000I think your story is really important, and I think it's not just important in terms of the fact that you've had an incredibly deep view of what it's like to live there, but that you got your life back.
01:14:34.000And in this experience of no hope and sorrow and captivity and all the various struggles that you went through, you've experienced something that just very, very few human beings, even in the seven billion people on this planet and all their struggles and trials and tribulations,
01:14:57.000What small handful have been held captive by Somali pirates and then managed to live?
01:15:05.000Well, there's a network of former captives, and that's what Hostage US is about.
01:15:10.000How many people have been held captive?
01:15:14.000But several of us are still alive, and so the best people for me to talk to when I first got out was other people who had been captive.
01:15:25.000David Rode, who was held hostage by the Taliban when he was working for the New York Times, was also on the board of the Pulitzer Center when I got captured.
01:16:49.000But it fell off in 2013, maybe even a little earlier, late 2012, partly because the bosses shifted their focus to other businesses and they found it less profitable to hold people, probably also because of my case.
01:17:32.000The naval teams that still cruise off Somalia, it's a very important formality, but I don't think they practically stop individual cases the way an armed team does.
01:17:43.000And there was a lot of fear about that beforehand, a lot of fear about putting weapons on a civilian cargo ship or a merchant ship.
01:17:53.000A few people thought there would be like an arms race in the water.
01:17:56.000And then pirates would come on with heavier weapons or whatever.
01:18:02.000Now, what did the bosses shift their attentions to?
01:18:06.000Like I said, probably some human smuggling, drug and weapon smuggling.
01:18:11.000You know, they have portfolios, they have other businesses, and they just roll it over into something else if piracy becomes too difficult.
01:18:19.000And that's what the precautions that the shipping industry now takes have been enough to make it too difficult for the bosses.
01:18:27.000Did you take any consideration or did you anticipate in any way a cure for what ails them?
01:18:35.000In fact, that was another idea, you know, that sent me there.
01:18:38.000I wanted to investigate the possibility of just ginning up legitimate business in Somalia because America went through the same cycle 300 years ago.
01:18:50.000When we were colonials, we had pirates, very savage ones, who sailed from the eastern seaboard out to Africa, actually out to the Horn of Africa.
01:19:13.000You turn it into something illicit and give people jobs, they're not going to be pirates anymore.
01:19:20.000And there are ways to do that, and I think slowly people who have power in Somalia are figuring that out.
01:19:27.000But it's still a lot of criminals that have too much power in Somalia.
01:19:33.000Well, listen, Michael, I didn't want to touch your book until I met you.
01:19:37.000I wanted to somehow or another have a fresh conversation and get your perspective on this, but I think your view of the world is very valuable, and it's just very, very different, and I'm so happy that you got out, and I'm so happy you wrote this book,