AT FIVE MINUTES PAST TWO on the morning of May 1, when darkness was reaching its greatest intensity over the sea, the American frigate Lafayette was exactly fifty miles to the west of the Pride of Corsica and on a bearing of thirty-nine degrees. The engines were now idle and rubber boats were being lowered from stanchions on the deck into the calm waters. In each boat there were eight marine commandos and there were five boats in all. Four helicopters waited, with airborne commandos milling around them, waiting themselves for orders to board. They would leave when the boats were well on their way.
The majority of the boats were manned by British Special Boat Service teams and it was the British who had the command of the operation in a compromise between Moscow and Washington. One boat was under the individual control of Russian special forces and another under American control, but the operation was planned by the British and all were agreed that the British should command the assault, from the sea and the air. At sixty knots—which it was agreed could be achieved in the calm waters—the boats would reach the Pride of Corsica in just under an hour. The helicopters’ departure was timed to be ten minutes before the boats reached the target vessel and the assault would come from the sea and air simultaneously. Three boats were to approach the starboard side of the target, drawing any fire in the priceless seconds before they boarded. The other two would remain out of sight and below radar and approach the port side as the choppers swooped in. The plan was to split the defenders’ attention three ways.
The boats began their rapid passage across the black waters, planing at speeds that sometimes went over the required sixty knots and sometimes under, but always maintained as close to the average they were aiming for as possible. When they judged they were within ten minutes of the strike, there would be a radio call to the Lafayette and the helicopters would leave.
The British teams were made up mainly of M Squadron members, the SBS maritime counterterrorism squadron, of whom the Black Group provided one officer and three men and there were two members of 14 Intelligence Unit, briefed on what to look for, assuming the assault was successful. They were all trained in multiple weapons use and hand-to-hand fighting at the highest level and were all practitioners of Brazilian jujitsu.
It was two days after the new moon, and the darkness and below-the-radar approach of the rubber boats enabled them to reach within two hundred yards of the Pride of Corsica before anyone onboard the ship saw them. The boats swerved violently in seesaw motions over the remaining distance to avoid providing a steady target, and as soon as they’d drawn aside—so far without a shot being fired—pulleyed abseil equipment was fired over the decks of the vessel and the first four-man team shot to the deck level. The other two boats attacked simultaneously from the port side and then the helicopters were heard and the deck was suddenly flooded with intense spotlights that blinded the defenders and left the attackers for the moment in shadow.
Lines fell from the helicopters and marines abseiled down in seconds. The defenders had drawn towards the bow of the ship, up towards the bridge, when the helicopter and boat teams opened an intense burst of fire that ripped the night apart. “It was like a firing squad,” an SBS officer was quoted later as saying. “They were up against the white steel wall of the bridge, spotlights on them, in a row and hands over their faces. Some had their hands in the air. They were surrendering. They had no guns that we could see, there was no return of fire.”
After a minute of firing, one of the helicopters landed on a deck space cleared by the assault teams. Then all fell silent as the other choppers flew to stand off the ship and await instructions.
Above the silence came the groans of the wounded.
Two teams of four descended steps into the ship’s belly and began a section-to-section search. The captain was turfed out of bed and a few bemused crewmen were similarly awakened who hadn’t already heard the firing. All were brought to the deck, hands strapped in plastic cuffs behind them. It was a scratch crew, only five in all. The rest of the ship’s occupants—twelve in all—were on the deck and all but two were dead. As the SBS teams and their American and Russian counterparts stripped masks from the faces of the few who had managed to don them in time, and looked at the unmasked dead and wounded, there was a stunned silence, the occasional shout of a man’s name, curses and swearing that rose in anger and distress as the identities of the defenders who had put up no defence were revealed. In each case, faces were recognised by the British and the Americans as former colleagues in their own special forces, in one or two cases, friends. It was a massacre of their own. There were no Russians among the defenders. And it was noted later that none of the Russian spetsnaz present bothered to look at the faces of the dead and wounded.
The captain of the Pride of Corsica was interrogated in a chair on the deck while the teams searched the vessel and brought up five wooden crates from the hold. The captain repeated over and over that there was no cargo of a dangerous nature.
“Why the missile system? Why the helicopter?” The SBS interrogators were not sensitive in their methods. The captain was weeping, and repeating the same phrases over and over. The Russian special forces stood back and watched.
It was said by the captain and his crew that the bodyguards were a defence against pirates. But he didn’t know, none of them knew, why they were there, why any defence against pirates was needed.
Eventually the SBS got tired of asking the same questions and the Americans moved in, without getting any more from the stricken captain than that he was a Filipino with five children back in Mindanao; that his crew was a scratch collection of individuals from a shipping agency. They finally finished with roughing him up as the crates were opened carefully with jemmies.
Inside the crates were boxes and the boxes contained bubble wrap and the bubble wrap contained nothing. Nothing at all. The Pride of Corsica was void of incriminating material. All it contained after the assault were five crew members, the assault team, and ten dead colleagues of the British and American assault force. Two others were saved.
Later, at the enquiry at which Theo Lish was the principal defender, it was asked why British and American special forces teams had been induced by the Russians to kill their own kind—albeit former colleagues—and why nothing was found on the Pride of Corsica that pointed to a terrorist or any other plot. Lish was able to come up with no adequate answer. Burt Miller, called as a witness, explained that he’d informed the CIA head that he believed the Pride of Corsica had been a bluff all along, that he’d tried to warn Lish, in fact. Miller regretted the loss of life—and the tragic mistake made on the morning of May 1. But the central question to which Lish continued to flounder under questioning from the Senate Intelligence Committee, was why on Russian evidence alone the assault had been made at all.