The Pirate Whisperer

Sayyid Azim / AP Photo Somali pirates were just paid $3.5 million—the largest ransom ever—for the release of a ship off East Africa. In an exclusive interview with the Daily Beast, negotiator Andrew Mwangura reveals the secrets of the murderers he does business with.

Andrew Mwangura has the underground world of African piracy wired. Somali pirates trust him. Warlords respect him. And human-rights activists admire him for putting his neck on the line to keep sailors safe on the lawless high seas. “Andrew gets vital first-hand intelligence,” says Cyrus Mody, who runs the London-based Maritime Bureau of the International Chamber of Commerce. “If a ship is running low on food or there’s been some disaster, he often knows about it first.”

Unfortunately for Mwangura, an ex-journalist who lives in a shack without running water on the beach in Mombasa, the Kenyan government doesn’t see him as a hero. On February 4, prosecutors put the 45-year-old Mwangura on trial for exposing the secret of a Ukrainian freighter that was hijacked last fall while carrying $30 million in Russian arms. Although the shipment was part of a secret, back-channel deal to arm Sudan in violation of a United Nations arms embargo, Mwangura is the one accused of breaking the law. The government has charged him with releasing “alarming information.” Says the activist, “They have no evidence. What I said was the truth.”

The pirate took a phone and gave it to another crewman. He said, “OK, call home. Call your wife and say that they have started killing us.”

Mwangura works for an East African nonprofit group dedicated to seeking the safety of sailors along the Gulf of Aden, one of the world’s busiest shipping lanes. The alarming rise in hijackings in the region—pirates are estimated to have made $50 million last year from 46 seizures—has led to the creation of a security corridor that is being patrolled by international warships. Still, the pirates still keep coming. At least three ships are currently being held, among them a German ship carrying liquid petroleum that was hijacked on January 29 with 13 sailors aboard.

In an exclusive interview with The Daily Beast, Mwangura revealed how much worse things can get for sailors in the Gulf—and for him.

How did you get to this line of work?

In the 1980s, I studied maritime engineering in Kenya and South Africa and was lucky enough to get good paying jobs. I’ve been to 47 countries. But every time I came back to Kenya, I saw that people who were working here were underpaid. So I began writing and talking about it for underground newspapers.

And I started to hear stories of sailors who had gone missing. The ship owners were quiet, and the government was also keeping quiet, too. I have documentation of 38 seamen who have gone missing in the last ten years. It turns out that many of them were involved in drug trafficking and gun running. But my main concern is security for the sailors [who are innocents]. People do not only call me if there is a ship hijacking or a hostage taking. They call if there is a ship fire, or a ship is going down.

Is it fair to say then that within hours of a ship being hijacked you know about it?

Sometimes seconds.

When you make contact, how do you figure out exactly who you’re dealing with?

There are seven pirate clans in Somalia, and they do not go into each other’s areas. So the location of the ship tells us much about which group we were dealing with. As soon as I figure out the group, I try to link up with its leader through our contacts in Somalia. That's how we operate. Sometimes they call us before we call them.