Okay. In February 2014, I was sitting in my um remote office in Stanford in Lincolnshshire in the English countryside. [Music] I was told that the Nahm 3 was a 29man crew fishing vessel and the men have been taken ashore and held by Somali pirates. They were largely from developing countries. They weren't Europeans. They weren't westerners. No government was taking responsibility for them. There was no insurance available. And really they were left to rot and to die quite disgracefully really. And would I help on that? I specialize in kidnap negotiations particularly in Africa, the Middle East. And when the Somali piracy phase came along, I switched from uh normal kidnaps to ship hijacks. [Music] There were a lot of ships being held off the coast of Somalia. Any one time there were about 700 crew members being held on ships by Somali piracy. I was based in Mogadeshu as the head of the maritime security section of the UN political office for Somalia. We were monitoring all of these ships. Modern piracy isn't that different to the piracy of hundreds of years ago. Pirates go out to sea with a mother ship and usually with a couple of small skiffs equipped with small arms, AK-47s, RPGs. They go out to sea and they hunt for ships. They're going this part of the world was a significant choke point of international trade and because these sea lanes are pretty constricted uh you don't have to go terribly far to find a ship coming again. [Music] A lot of naval ships were deployed in the region to try and prevent this. But Somali's coastline is 3,200 nautical miles. The navies couldn't be there all of the time or in the right place when the pirates took a ship. And these navies have rules of engagement. They're capable of intervening while a pirate attack is going on, but their rules of engagement didn't allow them to intervene once the pirates were on board a ship. Ships would protect themselves going into that area in the early days by using razor wire, by using highpressure hoses to warn pirates off. And it wasn't really for a few years before ship owners became comfortable with hiring armed guards. for [Music] [Music] Foreign speech. Foreign speech. Foreign speech. [Music] [Music] I [Music] [Music] soon after the vessel was hijacked, the pirates directed the crew to steam into Somali waters. In Somali waters, the the pirates were close to home. They were close to supplies, and they were safe. [Music] [Music] a prudent ship owner would always enter the Gulf of Aiden with insurance. The time with the Naharm 3, we were working on three or four other cases. There were literally ships lined up and sometimes we would be arranging recoveries day after day, week after week, sometimes with the same pirate crews. One of the major problems we confronted with the Naham 3 was that there was no insurance, no kid for ransom insurance, no underwriter who would pay a kidnap for ransom policy. And governments do not pay ransoms. Governments do not negotiate with kidnappers. So there was simply no money and without money it's not possible to negotiate. When the owners first contacted us, our clear instructions were to assist their representative who was negotiating directly with the pirates. We were concerned about that because the owner's representative had no experience uh was not being advised by a professional uh first responder, a professional negotiator. And for many months, we expressed our concern to the owners that really they needed professional help. [Music] Fore! Foreign! Foreign! for they believed that they had reached the deal at one stage which the opposition reneged on negotiating with Malians is a very tricky operation. We were monitoring what was happening to them and we get information from a number of sources. Some from the military, some from the local community, some from sources I can't really uh talk about. The Nahm 3 was deteriorating though. The equipment on the ship was not working well and particularly the anchoring system. That was a major problem when the pirates are on dry land. Um, it's so much easier for them. Then it's a 9 to5 job for them and the guards go back to their wives and families, which they can't do when they're on board a ship. Now time was on their side. [Music] [Music] for [Music] [Music] [Music] The hijacking was in March 2012, and it wasn't really until early 2014 that the owners realized that things weren't going as well as they had hoped. A ship being held by pirates has a value, the cargo has a significant value, and the insurance pays up. But when a ship goes ground, it's usually a total loss. There's no cargo. There's no ship of any value. It's just these poor crewmen largely from uh Asian countries who become forgotten. Their countries forget about them. Um and they're just abandoned inside Somalia. Somebody had to do something about that. And so we created this hostage support program to get them free. [Music] We formed a crisis management team and put a plan in place and the crisis management team comprised John Ste. Well, my law firm and Liz Edwards, a professional negotiator. [Music] Somali are very tough negotiators. They live in a very hostile environment. Uh, and they're used to tough dealing. They will exploit any weakness you show to them. If you give away what you're likely to be able or willing to pay, there's no going back. One of the key rules in negotiation is that you don't negotiate with money you do not have. The owners themselves only had limited funds and therefore we looked to certain charities and it was through those anonymous charitable donations that we were able to assemble uh certainly at the beginning a fighting fund to at least start the negotiation with the opposition. Before any call is made, you should prepare a script of what you're trying to achieve and the main points during the call. So, and I will have a written script, um, glass of water, appointed time, uh, we'll wait for them to to call in and and we will make their first communication. Typically, Somali pirates will phone the negotiator and ask him to ring back so that they do not have to pay for the call. Uh Somali pirates generally don't speak English so they normally appoint a freelance representative. He might be a teacher or a tradesman or he might have worked with an NGO and he'll often be under pressure from the pirates uh and under pressure from us. The first pirate representative who was talking to us was a chap called Abd Resc. He was acting as a translator and freelance negotiator. When you're talking to Somali pirates, you've got to adopt a onetoone tone uh and be robust and bold, but not necessarily antagonistic. The crew must be treated well. We know how this works. We're prepared to pay something what we can. Um but the crew must remain alive. Let's talk again in a few days time. The impression you're trying to give is that you know what you're doing and there will be cooperation and something will be paid but not necessarily what they're asking. Typically uh the height of the piracy incidents in about 2010 2011 uh a vessel might go for anywhere between two and and $4 million. And in this particular case, Abdul Risak was asking on behalf of the pirates for about six or seven times what we thought the going rate was going to be. I think uh in the past unofficially some governments may have paid money for pirates. So from a pirates point of view, they might think they were going to get lots of money. And after the initial demands, it's important that you create some time and space. Well, I shall pass that on to the charity or I shall pass that on to the ship owners or the family. And that usually gives you time to come back with a measured response to the demand. So, we knew we didn't have enough money. There was absolutely no chance of the ransom money coming from families themselves. and John and I scraped around uh searching dollar after dollar to try and raise a sufficient amount of money. [Music] Meanwhile, the key priority was to ensure that our hostages were safe at all times and the easiest way to do that is to require proof of life. Proof of life is critical because in purely commercial terms you want to ensure that you are getting what you are bargaining for. Early in 2014 we received a YouTube video by a Somali television network. [Music] My government I know my government is my government is beautiful for but we asking for your help. We dying here for what? For nothing. We just want only to work in the ship to gain money for our families. And we worked very closely through intermediaries with the families of the hostages to identify each hostage in the photograph. We were able to determine from that video that there were 26 live hostages. One Chinese died because of sickness and another again in when he when we are in in the forest another crew again died. The Chinese miss boy and the Indonesian sailor passed away of untreated disease, illness, dehydration, a lack of care. The Somali, I'm I'm sad to say, treated the hostages like they treat their goats. They'll happily let crew die. They're quite they're let crew die. If it's a small crew, they they'll be reluctant to let people die. But if it's a crew of 26, would it matter if to to the pirates if three more died? No. They' probably still get roughly the same amount money. So, I like to come back with a reasonable opening offer. Not not a huge amount, but enough to make the the lives of the the crew worth something to the pirates. The same in a kidnap case, like to put value on the hostages. [Music] At first, Abdac seemed like quite a a reasonable negotiator. As time went on, he became more and more ingratiating and kept calling me his best friend. He kept demanding small amounts of money for expenses. You need to think of of piracy as a business. It has a series of key investors who put up the money that sends these pirates out to sea. The investor, like any other business, wants a return on his money. And the hierarchy of Somali gangs is unlike kidnap gangs in the rest of the world where there might be a few head honchos. Somali pirate gangs are much more democratic. The pirates will sit down under an acacia tree. They will drink tea. They will examine how much the ship is worth, how much the crew they worth, what countries they're from, and they will come out with a target price, and they will work out how much each man will get, and then they will try and get much more than that as they possibly can. In most kidnap and hijack cases, the key issues are time and money and how much of each. And in the Nahm 3 case, the Somali pirates seem to have all the time in the world. We didn't have very much money. As a consequence, the the case lasted a long time. [Music] The crisis management team met regularly by telephone conference. Les would report his latest range of conversations that he had with the pirates. Often I would be speaking three or four times a week to pirates. Abdul Reac called me on my mobile telephone. Sometimes he'd have to call me on my house telephone. Sometimes my teenage children would answer the call or I'd be in the garden. And Abdul Reac would say something like, "Uh, hello. Can I speak to Mr. Leslie? He's my best friend. I want to talk to him. The thing and the children would say, "It's your best friend, daddy. It's Abdul Rack." Yeah. He set a number of time deadlines to try and persuade us to reach agreement on high amounts of money. But he said that um crew were either going to die of illness or they were crew were threatening to commit suicide because the case was taking so long. So you've got to try and neutralize any threats or pressures straight away. If someone dies, it's going to make it very difficult and complicated for us to persuade the donors to pay you any money at all. If you ignore deadlines, you call their bluff and it means the next threat they make is is weaker. But it's it's a fine line. You have to know who you're dealing with. [Music] Ensuring that pirates kept looking after our crew. That was the key challenge. We had to find a way of buying medical aid, getting food, and paying people to deliver them to the hostages. not quite as straightforward as it sounds because obviously the pirates were extremely nervous about being located or where they were holding the hostages. So they didn't want doctors visiting and um NOS's turning up with boxes of food. So my role was to gather information about what's happening, make contacts with people on the ground, use my contacts, the people that I know, and then through those contacts, particularly with local communities and with religious elders, find out where these people were. And we got them to build trust with the pirates and we used them as intermediaries to deliver the aid or get medical support or bring in a doctor. [Music] The pirates passed on a demand for a reasonable amount of money that we thought we could achieve. We slowly built up to it over a period of months and then we actually uh had a verbal agreement on it after a pirate meeting and lunch that was organized by uh Abdac in the middle of June 2015. In fact the 12th of June which was my wedding anniversary. We had reached an understanding of the pirates. [Music] We started making arrangements for extraction, for passports, for logistics, for airflight. We had provided them with a letter of understanding, a memorandum of understanding. We were met with some silence. And then we discovered that they had renecked on the understanding that we thought we had reached. [Music] It was a major setback. Simply they wanted more money. They wanted more money. and we reported it to the owners and the charities who had donated money to the cause. And a further blow followed when one of the charities pulled out a substantial amount of money. Sometimes when major blows hit you, you have to you have to make the most of them. And actually, we were able to turn that around on the pirates and say to them, look, this is now what has happened. We've lost our funding and our offer can only now be a significantly reduced amount. They made a new but lower demand than they had previously [Music] and then it went back up again. [Music] Then it came down again to half the original figure and I was pretty frustrated. There was some brutal, brutal conversations between the pirates and myself. They should have normal standards of morality and ethical behavior. It was intolerable that they'd had allowed 26 fishermen with wives, children, grandparents, cousins, families at home to be held for three and a half years in their midst. And why didn't they release them? And I was told they didn't regard all the fishermen as worth more than the life of a single Somali and that I should never forget this. I took away the fact that the normal standards of morality and ethics did not apply. I wrote a summary of the situation and sent that round to the crisis management team and George came back quite rightly and said, "Look, we're in for a long wait now." We decided that we were in for the long haul and this was going to be a war of attrition. So we cut off communication. I was seriously worried that someone would die from that 26 crew. This is a risk business. Any decision in a kidnap or hijack involves risk. Even doing nothing involves risk. When you're dealing with Somali pirates in a negotiation, you've got to show strength. You cannot show weakness because they will exploit it. There's nothing else to be done. They've rejected our offers and there was no uh ground to be made and we wanted to show that we were not coming to them and they had to phone us and reinitiate contact. Fore! Foreign! Foreign! [Music] [Music] They would line them up and then fire an empty AK-47 so that the there was just the click on an empty magazine. Psychological torture. All to put pressure on the negotiations. They use the crew to phone families and embassies to put pressure on the governments to pay more money. I want to go home please. I have family. We don't want to stay here for a long time because how we stay here very hard and none of the governments would pay money because it's against their national policy. Please around the world to the UN sir. Madame, we needed your help. They phoned the UN, they phoned the Red Cross, they phoned everyone they could. And we spent quite a lot of time talking to those entities to persuade them not to get involved because there can only be one clear channel of communication during a kidnap negotiation for uh hostages. In January, they made contact again. They blinked first. Um, we didn't have to do anything. We just kept quiet. But we didn't want to carry on using Tabsi Resack. In Somali cases, when you've been talking to a pirate negotiator for six months or so, um you may not trust each other completely, but you have a certain working respect and you have built up a um a working relationship. There was a certain amount of rapport with Abdul Reac, but there's always something difficult or schemy about him. And that's one of the reasons that uh we sacked Abdi Resack. I had a lot of ingratiating rather creepy calls from him reminding me that I was his best friend [Music] and I had to flatten him. Tell him no. you have to take some risks. You have to break some rules. Otherwise, you'd never get a result. So, my I'm I'm the guy on the ground. I'm closest to where the action is um to gather intelligence, find out who the key players are. At that time we learned that we were dealing with 38 investors who were owed money by the pirates or who had invested in the that particular piracy out threat from the start. So 38 investors were part of the community. Local communities often support pirate gangs providing supplies and fuel and cars to the pirates on credit. They're a vital part of the of the business and the support mechanism, but lending to pirates is a high-risisk activity. And the reason is that some of the pirates don't come back because they get they drown at sea or they run out of food, water, or they get shot up by the international naval forces. So they will usually mark up the costs of those things by 100% to cover their their risk. So as these things become drawn out, the bills start to mount up as well and they have to get a solution that enables them to pay their debt. By that time, they'd already been held for about 4 and 1/2 years. The community was owed a lot of money. Shortly after that, we had a breakthrough. We're approached by a community spokesman put in touch by one of John Steed's good contacts in Somalia and he was representing a community and religious leader from the local clan, same clan as the pirates. [Music] He decided to introduce me to the local shake Abduli. Shake Abdueli. He was a leader of the community that were owed a lot of money by the pirates. I had a long conversation with the shake. So he it was his interest to be involved in a resolution so that the local community would get their money and thus his esteem and influence would be uh increased and they would have this nasty rubbing saw in their midst removed. And as a result of that, the shake said he he would do all he could to put pressure on the pirates to settle. [Music] It was a lovely summer's evening in England and I was at my home in the countryside in Lincolnshire. I was involved in a pirate conference call and eventually we got agreement that night. I then had a letter prepared, an agreement letter or contract if you like that I sent to the pirates laying down the exact terms, the amount of money. Of course, it has no legal standing at all. They're not they can't I we can't take them to court if they disagreed. But I asked it to be witnessed by the chief pirates and by also one representative from each nationality of the crew. The purpose of getting so many people to witness the agreement was so that if they went back on the agreement, there would be quite a large degree of loss of face that they had acted as honorable men. And we actually use that word in the agreement. We are negotiating as men one to another in honor. There's a sort of sense of honor among thieves and that we'd reached an agreement. We were acting to create a win-win. And they came back very quickly with the proof of life. Um it was a good photograph. Every man was holding a code word. a series of letters on a piece of paper issued by the home team so that we know when the photograph was taken after the date that we issued the code word. Once we got the proof of life with the code word and the agreement letter, we were confident that we had a binding agreement. It was quite an exciting time. It was the end of a journey. You know, we were finally we could see the end in sight. But there was then a delay of approximately 6 weeks caused by clan fighting over camels. They were stealing each other's camels. Occasionally they'd fire artillery shells at each other. Made traveling difficult across clan boundaries. And we had to take people across clan boundaries to get them out of Somalia. [Music] The final phase of any kidnap or hijack resolution is always complicated. You've got an agreement. You're sending money. You don't know for certain whether you're going to get the hostages back. We all assembled in Nairobi for this final final phase. We were running this operation out of my back bedroom at home, maps everywhere, charts. It was like planning a military operation. We had to concentrate on two things. The first was delivery of what the pirates wanted and recovery of the crew. In order to arrange for the drop of the money to take place, you have to be very specific about where the money is going to be dropped. We sent detailed written instructions to the pirates and we sent cartoon diagrams of how they should set up a drop zone. Our drop specialist was in the air and I was getting reports regularly from the aircraft about the time over the the target for the drop and the pilots are given very clear instructions about when to light the bonfire, when to light the flares and I was talking to the pirates on the ground. I signal through to the pirates. It's 3 hours to drop off. The plane is 3 hours away. Are you on site now? To which the pilots replied, "Yes, yes. You want us to light the bonfires now." Said, "No, no, no. They're still 3 hours away. Don't do anything yet." [Music] Then we gave them an update of 2 hours, 1 hour, and then about every 10 minutes. And each time they ask, "Shall we like the flare? Shall we light the flares? You could feel the tension in the air. You could hear the pirates in the background shouting. The only place I wanted to be was on that drop site. It was so exciting. At about 10 minutes to go, the aircraft came over very low and we said, "Light the bonfires. Light the flares. [Music] [Applause] [Music] Foreign [Music] speech. Foreign speech. We sent money, quite a lot of money for the local community to organize an armed escort. They turned up with six vehicles, openbacked pickup truck with a large machine gun placed on the back and an armed crew to give protection. And then the third part was to get to get an aircraft and take it from Kenya, from Nairobi um into Somalia into this strip south of Galao. That strip was not somewhere that was actually very safe. The recovery aircraft was going to have to go into a very sensitive part of Somalia. We went early in the morning. I went with the aircraft into Somalia with another colleague um and somebody from the UN. Using a UN aircraft was much much safer than using a a commercial commercial aircraft. I can I can tell you that um there was a degree of intrepidation about this. There had been conflict the day before in Galao. We'd briefed the pilot that he he had to fly into the strip, turn, maneuver himself so that he could take off immediately if there was something wrong. We arrived um midm morning. It's just a a dirt strip with a tiny hut. Was met by the community guy that we was working with us. Good morning, John. And I walked with him hand in hand across this airirst strip um to the hut. [Music] We went into the door of the hut and um these faces just lit up. Um and somebody said, "Are you John?" Um and I I I said, "I'm John. I'm here to take you home." Um these guys just hugged me. They were they around the waist, round my legs. People were crying. I'm I'm sorry. I I can still feel the emotion now. Um how you Mr. Shane, we'll get it treated again when we get to Nairobi just to make sure you're okay. Okay. It was a fantastic moment. Uh it just extraordinary. And then we got in the plane and took off. The captain announced that as we passed over the Somali Kenyan border, you're now entering Kenya. I was a huge cheer and it really was over. They were free. George and I then went to the airport uh to find a large international reception committee and there were 26 very ragged, short, skinny looking fellas and they all look like school boys. I've been looking at photographs of these men on my office walls for the last 18 months and suddenly to see them in real life was um extraordinary. They all look much smaller than I imagined. The diplomats and the embassies and the media suddenly took over and we suddenly became onlookers at our own kidnap operation. I realized we'd done the job and all my responsibility and decision decision-m had now ceased and you realize that you have to fade back into the background and that's fine. We're happy with that. I've done some crazy things in my army life, but giving somebody back their life, you can't do better in life than that. Probably the best thing I've ever done in my life. [Music] [Music] [Applause]