Distress (Page 14)

Iran and the Houthis have been tapping into the Automated Tracking System (AIS) to locate and attack ships in the Red Sea and since December 23 ships in the Indian Ocean. 

Where AIS lacks information on military ships, Iranian radars do the job of finding them. The entire operation is sophisticated and is managed in real-time, requiring significant assets to identify targets. There is no doubt that Iran and the Houthis are working together.

AIS is a system onboard ships that reports their name, location, position, course and speed. The AIS system is linked to the ship’s gyro compass, rate of turn indicator and GPS. 

The resulting information is received by other ships, sent to coastal relay stations and can also be transmitted to AIS-enabled satellites. Around 99% of commercial ships worldwide use the AIS system. The system is mandated by the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea or SOLAS.  

SOLAS has a number of other requirements all designed to enhance sea safety. For example. it requires ships to be equipped with Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacons (EPIRBs) and Search and Rescue Transponders (SARTs). 

Ships at sea are obligated to offer assistance to those in distress. SOLAS also specifies the use of life-saving signals with specific requirements regarding danger and distress messages. US military ships also have AIS systems but don’t always turn them on.  

Military ships have collision-avoidance radars that can be used to help avoid accidents, especially in areas around ports and heavily used channels. In addition, US Navy ships always have 24-hour watches by trained sailors. 

AIS only covers ships over 300 tons, so many small fishing and tourist boats do not have the system. Radars are not always effective, especially against wooden vessels or in bad weather.

On June 17, 2017, the USS Fitzgerald, a guided missile destroyer like those now operating in the Red Sea, collided with the merchant ship ACX Crystal 80 nautical miles (150 kilometers; 92 miles) southwest of Tokyo, Japan. Seven sailors died in the incident. The Fitzgerald was not using its AIS system.

A few months after the Fitzgerald accident, the US Navy decided to use AIS in high-traffic areas. Some commercial ships turn off their AIS in areas where there is either a threat of attack or hijacking. However, doing so in high-traffic areas like the Red Sea invites the chance of a serious accident and compromises insurance policies for ships and cargo.  

There are a number of online, public AIS trackers that cover civilian and military ships. One of them, Cruising Earth, features a separate section to track military ships from many nations, including the United States. 

Checking on the US ships that have been identified as involved in Red Sea operations, the USS Carney, USS Mason and, most recently, the USS Laboon (all Arleigh Burke-class AEGIS-equipped destroyers) reveals that none of them have their AIS system operating.  

The USS Mason was last reported on AIS on November 30th in the Gulf of Aden. There are no reports since that date and the vessel is listed as “out of range.” The USS Carney’s last reported AIS location was on December 12, 2022, on the east coast of the United States. 

The USS Laboon, which just shot down two Houthi missiles, was last reported in the Sea of Azov on June 18, 2021. What this means is neither the Iranians nor the Houthis can use AIS to track US warships.

However, that limitation does not apply to other methods of finding US warships and certainly does not protect commercial ships using AIS which can be actively tracked, by name, by the Iranians and Houthis. 

By reading ship registration records, Iranian intelligence can figure out which ships have all or partial Israeli or other foreign ownership, and tag them so that when they enter an area within reach of drones or missiles, they can be attacked. 

The Iranians may also have access to non-public records, although exactly what they are and how they are accessed is not yet known.

Those attacks now include the Indian Ocean and the attack on December 23 by an Iranian drone against the Chem Pluto, a “Liberia-flagged, Japanese-owned, and Netherlands-operated” chemical tanker was hit “by a one-way attack drone fired from Iran” some 200 nautical miles (370km) off the coast of India, according to the US Defense Department. 

A British maritime security firm, AMBREY, however, says the Chem Pluto has some Israeli affiliation. It is not clear as to the source of Ambrey’s information. 

The public record on the ship shows it is owned by S S Offshore Pvt Ltd, a small firm in Mumbai, India. Maritime Tracker shows that the ship (as of this writing) is off the west coast of India and is not under command, meaning it is under tow.

The above suggests that culling intelligence on ship ownership requires considerable effort. The Iranians have put a significant effort into picking out the targets, going well beyond easily obtained information.

Exactly how the Iranians and Houthis knew about Chem Pluto’s possible Israeli ownership is not clear but Chem Pluto was certainly broadcasting its location using AIS (as the current tracker shows). 

The ship was hit by a drone, reportedly a KAS-04 made by Iran’s Kimia Part Sivan Company (KIPAS). This drone is both a surveillance drone and a loitering munition. It has long range but is slow flying, using a single pusher propeller. 

US Central Command believes that the Houthis are assisted by Iran in locating US warships in the Red Sea. The Iranians have positioned a spy ship (masquerading as a civilian ship), the MV Saviz. 

According to US government sources, the MV Saviz is equipped with intelligence domes and antennas. The ship carries 3 speedboats which provide untraceable communications with Yemen.

MV Saviz has been on station for a number of years and Israel has tried to destroy it. At one time, Yemen had high-end coastal radars (made by Italy’s Finmeccanica, now Leonardo), but these were apparently destroyed by US Tomahawk missiles in 2016 after the Houthis overtook the Red Sea coastal area.

The liquidation of these radars means that it would be impossible for the Houthis to locate US warships without additional help. That means the MV Saviz is very important because it has high-end radars and can intercept communications from US warships.

Clearly, the Houthi-Iran effort is not something ginned up on the spur of the moment. 

It seems the attack on both commercial ships and US warships is part of a highly planned and well-coordinated effort, the collection of information not always readily available (such as a ship’s ownership) and the ability to coordinate AIS tracking with radar-derived and communications intelligence.

Sooner or later, the US and its partners will need to deal with the threat to commercial and military ships, in the Red Sea and now also the Indian Ocean. Furthermore, Iran has announced it may extend the threat to the Strait of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean Sea.

Stephen Bryen, who served as staff director of the Near East Subcommittee of the
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee and as a deputy undersecretary of defense
for policy, currently is a senior fellow at the Center for Security Policy and the Yorktown Institute.

This article was originally published on his Weapons and Security Substack. It is republished with kind permission.

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Budapest’s Opera House completed years of restoration in 2022 and now stands in its original 1884 glory, one of the grandest and most elaborately decorated structures of the 19^th century. With only 1,700 seats, fewer than the Vienna State Opera’s 2,200 or La Scala’s 1,800, it is an intimate theater with no bad seats and preternaturally transparent acoustics.

The connection between musicians and the audience in the Budapest theater has an immediacy that I have felt nowhere else in sixty years of opera-going, and the Hungarian Ensemble made the most of it.

Hungary has a grand musical tradition; its conductors bestrode the podiums of the world two generations ago. The Second World War and Soviet occupation took a heavy toll on Hungary’s musical capacity but failed to extinguish the distinctly Magyar dialectic of passion and intelligence that informs Hungarian interpretation at its best.

Conductor Levente Török gave an electrifying reading of Puccini’s score, a reminder that Puccini is too good to be left to the humdrum Italian music directors who usually take the baton in Tosca. The cast featured no names that would draw crowds at New York’s Metropolitan Opera or Covent Garden, but they all sang extremely well. More than that: They formed an ensemble and made the whole greater than the sum of the parts.

Mark Twain quipped that Wagner’s music is better than it sounds. The reverse is true of Puccini, who contributed four works to the standard operatic repertoire: His music is worse than it sounds. In the care of the right conductor, it sounds ravishing. Puccini used enormous skill in spinning out musical phrases to tease listeners’ expectations.

Timing is everything in a Puccini opera, and there is something to be said for a Mitteleuropäische interpretation. This style requires as much attention to metrical variation as Mozart. Puccini’s repertoire of musical tricks is smaller, but no less demanding; it’s harder for a comedian to make people laugh at a bad joke than a good one.

Puccini, moreover, was the least Italian of Italian composers. His mature operas – La Boheme, Madame Butterfly, and Tosca – borrow from late Romantic chromaticism, but always in the melodic service of the drama. The orchestra has its own contribution to the dramatic flow, in the fashion of the best film scores.

In his later works, Girl of the Golden West (1910) and Turandot (1925), Puccini drew on French Impressionism in an original way, slowing harmonic motion to create suspense. Maestro Török made the orchestra a full partner in the drama, in one of the best readings I have heard.

Zsuzsanna Ádám as Tosca has a beautifully produced dramatic soprano, and wielded it fearlessly in all registers. László Boldizsár as her lover Caravadossi has a dark-hued instrument with a sheen in the upper register. Peter Kálmán’s Scarpia was dark and menacing; the baritone is the best-known among the three leaders.

I didn’t hear a false note among the three leads, who are also persuasive actors, Ms. Ádám in particular. It’s quite possible to place superstar singers in major roles and produce dismal music; the major houses do it all the time.

And it’s most unusual to cast a major operatic production entirely with local talent. Classical music is the most globalized of businesses, throwing together musicians with vastly different training and traditions. The advantage, as the Budapest troupe demonstrated, is that musicians who trained in the same school and have worked together for years can mount large and complex works with the intimacy and precision of chamber music.

All of these virtues of the Budapest musicians played to the strengths of the house. The intimate setting and the forward position of the orchestra allow the singers to be heard without bellowing—although all the lead singers could summon operatic volume when required. Some moments that tend to be lost in the cavernous space of modern opera houses, for example, the lovers’ tiff and flirtation between Tosca and Cavaradossi during Act I.

In general, I dislike modern-dress productions of operas set in other centuries, but the Budapest “Tosca” is an exception. General Director Szilveszter Ókovács mixed images and themes from Hungary’s tragic 1956 Revolution into Puccini’s story, set in the Roman revolution of 1800.

The French playwright Victorien Sardou’s creaky 1887 melodrama, a vehicle for Sarah Bernhardt, was a huge commercial success, portraying Italian allies of the French Republic fighting against the clerical reaction. Puccini’s musical adaptation premiered in 1900 and survived Sardou’s long-forgotten play, which glorifies republican resistance to clerical reaction.

The plot is easily updated: A political prisoner escapes. A prominent painter hides him. The chief of the secret police tricks the painter’s jealous lover, the soprano Tosca, into helping him track the fugitive.

The painter is tortured within earshot of his lover, who in her distress reveals the prisoner’s location. The secret police chief offers to free the painter in return for the singer’s sexual favors; she murders him rather than submit. Her lover is murdered in turn, and Tosca kills herself rather than be captured when her crime is uncovered.

In the present Budapest version, the police wear modern uniforms and carry machine guns. The painter Cavaradossi is taken inside a tank to be tortured—a reminder of the Soviet tanks that rolled into Budapest to crush the rebellion. Rather than leap to her death, the heroine shoots herself offstage. Giant images of the 1956 rebellion are projected while the secret police do their dirty work.

I doubt this production would travel well, but it has deep significance for Hungarians, who have long memories and painful wounds. Washington encouraged the Hungarians to rise against the Russians with light weapons and stood by while Russian armor crushed the rebels.

It is a reminder of why Hungarians never will trust the United States. A prominent Hungarian diplomat who attended the same performance told me, “We expected you Americans to turn up, and you didn’t. We won’t forget that.” Puccini usually falls on the lighter side of operatic entertainment. This was an opportunity to take him in deadly earnest.

All of the Budapest Opera’s December performances and most of January are sold out, in contrast to the Metropolitan Opera, which now fills only 60% of its seats in a city four times the size of the Hungarian capital. Visitors should book tickets as far in advance as possible.

Asian tourists, who before Covid comprised a fifth of the Metropolitan Opera’s audience, do not appear to have discovered Budapest, although they have long flocked to the Vienna State Opera just two hours away. Vienna is a grand and venerable opera stage, but Budapest offers a different kind of experience.

East Asia is now the epicenter of support for Western classical music; I suspect that when Asians find out about Budapest, they will come in strength. Our experience of the classics degrades over time, and the Hungarian ensemble offers the closest thing to the original experience of 19^th-century opera to be found in any theater I know.

David P Goldman is Asia Times’ Business Editor and Tablet Magazine’s classical music critic.

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