The Mumbai Maritime Twist

When it comes to maritime ops, terrorists regardless of motive or backer have been pretty inept. Yes there was the hijacking of the cruise ship Achille Lauro (and the subsequent murder of Leon Klinghoffer). And Hezbollah has made repeated attempts to attack Israel from the sea. More often than not these attacks failed.

The Mumbai attacks apparently started with the hijacking of a merchant ship that in turn became a mother ship for launching the attackers in zodiacs, which took them to shore where the attacks commenced. This is not a common tactic and has rarely been used with much success. Odds are that the hijacked ship had been surveilled prior to the execution of the attacks and was not just a random choice.

This means the people who carried out this op had some support in the port of Mumbai. I see this as further circumstantial proof of an ISI role. It would be natural for ISI to have intel assets in the Mumbai port.

Piracy not terrorism has been a bigger concern in the seas around India. So this operation is unique and worthy of concern. Previously only Israel has faced a sustained maritime threat. There is an excellent paper that provides a good summary of the various maritime ops that have been carried out against Israel. Here are some relevant paragraphs. Look familiar?

On June 24, 1974, the first of such attacks was perpetrated by three terrorists in Naharia. Having set sail from Lebanon, the team landed on the Naharia beach, seizing several hostages in a nearby apartment building. Before being killed in a gun battle with Israeli security forces, the terrorist succeeded in killing four and wounded eight more.[27] As an immediate response, the Israeli security forces and especially the navy, increased their security measures on the northern border to prevent further infiltration, by setting up not only a radar station and lookouts at Rosh Hanikra, but also introducing security zones in which no civilian shipping and swimming was allowed. Moreover, Israel’s navy increased the number of patrol boats stationed near the northern border to three. These security measures successfully prevented most of the attempts to cross directly from Lebanon into Israel.[28] The last successful attack (attempts still occur) that made use of this tactic, was the murder of the Haran Family in Naharia on the night of April 22, 23, 1979. Four terrorists from Abu Abbas’s Palestine Liberation Front (PLF), landed on the beach in a rubber boat killing a policeman and attacking an apartment building. Capturing a father and his four-year-old daughter, the terrorists killed both when the police arrived. Attempting to conceal her second daughter from the terrorists, the mother accidentally smothered her. Abu Abbas later stated that the attack was a protest against the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty.[29]

B. 1970th – The use of Mother Ships by Palestinian Terrorist Groups

Following the implementation of tougher security measures on Israel’s northern border, the Palestinian terrorist organization changed their tactics in order to circumvent these measures. The terrorist organizations resorted to a tactic already conceived in 1972 – the use of mother ships. The idea was to circumvent the heavily defended northern border and launch smaller attack dinghies from a mother ship outside Israeli territory. Once launched, these fast dinghies would travel east in Israel’s blind spot, in order to land “out of nowhere”, at Israel ‘s major metropolitan cities.

The first such attack occurred on March 5, 1975[30] when eight terrorists landed on the Tel Aviv beach and attacked the Savoy hotel. Barricading themselves together with thirteen hostages, the terrorists threatened that if the Israelis did not release 20 Palestinian prisoners within four hours, the hostages would be killed. In the morning, the Israeli commando unit Sayeret Matkal stormed the hotel, killing seven terrorists and capturing one. Five hostages were freed and eight were killed. Three soldiers were also killed. A few hours later, the mother ship which had transported the terrorists, was captured by the Israeli navy on its way to Cyprus. The timing of the terrorist attack was clearly aimed to coincide with the visit of the U.S. Secretary of State, Dr. Kissinger, who intended to promote a political settlement between Egypt and Israel. Panic-stricken, the PLO hoped that by carrying out a terrorist attack they would sabotage Dr. Kissinger’s mission.[31] Moreover, the attack was designed to kill Jews and non-Jews, in order to enhance Arafat’s prestige in the eyes of his supporters and coalition partners.[32] Established after the Yom Kippur war, the Fatah naval arm was linked operationally to its special reconnaissance and intelligence unit, lead by the head of Fatah’s military wing, Abu Jihad. Fatah’s naval arm underwent basic training, including diving instruction, in Egypt, Libya, Algeria and Syria. In mid-January, 1975, the group which was comprised of Hader Muhammed, Musa Juma El-Tallka, Muhammed El Masri, Muhammed Mashala, Ahmed Hamid, Ziad Talk El Zrir, Musa Awad and Abu El Lel, commenced training as a team at the Fatah training base at Duma. At the end of the month, the group was transferred to a training base of the naval arm in Latakiye, before being transferred in February to a Fatah base in southern Lebanon. Here the group received final instructions in the art of bargaining for human lives.[33] The group also received instructions on how to conduct the mission. According to the original plan, the group was to split up and operate as two separate units, barricading themselves together with the hostages. They would threaten to blow themselves up if their demands were not fulfilled. Furthermore, the group was given prepared propaganda that would further their aim in preventing a peaceful settlement between Egypt and Israel, by making claims which would incriminate Egypt, thus drawing Israel into a reprisal that would make Dr. Kissinger’s efforts worthless (if caught) or, if the mission was successful, the group would claim that it was a Fatah cell from the Israeli-held territories; thereby increasing Arafat’s prestige in these areas. In both cases the propaganda was to conceal the involvement of both Lebanon and Syria.[34] Reality, however, proved otherwise; not only was the operational execution of the plan insufficient, as the group stayed together, but the propaganda stories were discovered and the crew of the mother ship was taken prisoner. While the defense establishment swore that any terrorist penetrating Israel “should pay the full price for this savage and crazy method”[35], the general Israeli population was struck with anxiety, as the feeling prevailed that there was no place within Israel that would be safe from terrorist attacks. Moreover, the immediate result of the Savoy attack was that Israel’s hotel industry had many cancellations of bookings made by foreign guests and delegations such as the Vienna Burgtheater, which canceled its show which was to take place in Israel on March 13, 1975.

The Israel Defense Forces’ (IDF) response to the Savoy attack was to increase naval activities, including the use of missile boats along Israel’s Mediterranean and the Lebanese coasts. Moreover, the IDF used aircrafts to search the Mediterranean for suspicious ships and established coastal observation points, artillery batteries and used reconnaissance units to patrol the beaches in order to prevent further infiltrations from the west. While these security measures prevented some attempts by the Palestinian groups to copy the Savoy operation and led to the surrender of a speed boat team at the Tel Aviv Marina (September 1976) and the capture of mother ships such as the Ginan (March 1979) and Stephanie (March 1979), it did not prevent one of the major terrorist attacks in the history of the State of Israel.

The Coastal Road attack on March 11, 1978 killed a total of 37 Israelis and injured more then 70. Orchestrated by Abu Jihad (Fatah), thirteen terrorists set sail on March 8, 1978 from Tyre, Lebanon on board a mother ship. The plan was for the terrorists to land in two dinghies on the shores of Tel Aviv, taking hostages in order to free five imprisoned terrorists. However, as the captain of the mother ship was afraid of being caught by the Israeli navy approaching Israel, he made the terrorists disembark onto their smaller dinghies further away from the shore then planned. The Captain of the mother ship exploited the navigational ignorance of the terrorist group, in order to secure his own safety.[36] Furthermore, the stormy sea on that day complicated the navigation and caused the death of two of the terrorists. Eventually, eleven terrorists, led by Dalal al-Maghrabi,[37] landed on the Maagan Michael beach, killing six people whom they encountered on the way. After stopping two buses and herding the passengers together into one bus carrying over 70 hostages, most of them women and children, the terrorists headed south towards Tel Aviv, firing at passing cars.[38] Determined to prevent the bus from entering Tel Aviv, the police blocked the road just north of the city and succeeded in halting the vehicle. In the resulting gun battle between the police and terrorists the bus caught fire due to a terrorist grenade. Nine terrorists involved in the attack were killed and two captured. As the Israeli security forces did not know the fate of all the terrorists, for the first time since 1968, they imposed a curfew[39] over the population area between northern Tel Aviv and Nethanya, while thousands of troops and police searched for terrorists thought to be still at large. The curfew was called off the following evening, when it became clear that none had escaped.

Following the Coastal Road attack, Israel launched a wide scope of military actions, in order to prevent Palestinian terrorism from Lebanon.[40] On March 14, 1978, Israel launched Operation Litani. During the seven day offensive, the IDF first captured a belt of land approximately 10 kilometers deep with the aim of pushing Palestinian militant groups, particularly the PLO, away from the border with Israel. The operation was later expanded in order to occupy all the territory, with the exception of Tyre, up to the Litani River. However, despite the superiority of the IDF and the high casualties on both sides, the operation did not destroy the Palestinian terror infrastructure in Lebanon. Israel’s invasions into Lebanon also resulted in UN Resolution 425 and Resolution 426 calling for the withdrawal of Israeli forces from Lebanon and the establishment of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL) with the mandate to restore peace and sovereignty to Lebanon. As a result of the Litani operation, the terrorist groups were driven out of the immediate border area with Israel, making it more difficult for the terrorist organizations to infiltrate Israel by land. This increased the motivation to enhance the development and education of the terrorists in maritime terror tactics. [41]

You can read the complete paper here. It is worth your time.