S2 Bonus: Let’s go below the surface with host Ian Urbina

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Hi, I'm Damon Fairless.

I'm the senior producer and one of the story editors on season two of the Yellow Ocean.

Now, I've been a part of a lot of production teams, and I've done a fair share of reporting on some difficult topics, including child sexual abuse for the series Hunting Warhead.

So I'm not a stranger to bad actors and gut-wrenching stories.

But I came to the series after all the reporting was done.

So it was new to me when I was listening to it.

And as I was going through the audio that Ian and his team had gathered, honestly I was blown away.

The reporting is just next level.

It's wild, it's ambitious, and in some cases, it's death-defying.

And so the whole time we were making it, I kept thinking, how the hell did these guys manage to get these stories?

So once production was done, I asked Ian.

What you're about to hear is a conversation he and I had before the launch of this season.

It originally ran on the Hunting Warhead feed.

But now that season two's over, we thought maybe you'd appreciate a little insight into what makes Ian and his team tick.

So here's my conversation with Ian Urbina, the host of the Ala Ocean, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and a friend of mine.

So Ian, I'm kind of stuck somewhere between envy and admiration, I think, when it comes to your reporting.

So there's kind of half of me that looks up to you doing this Indiana Jones style reporter stuff you're doing.

And then the other half of me is like, dude, are you insane?

You take these crazy risks from like jumping aboard random ships in the middle of the high seas to hiking across a stretch of Antarctica

and

getting taken captive by a militia in Libya and you kind of consistently pick fights with global superpowers and so on.

So you're really doing, in my view, this extremely extreme stuff.

I know you're not actually insane.

You know, we work on this stuff together, kind of the nuts and bolts of putting a thing together, but I've never really gotten the chance to ask you, like, what drives you to do this?

Why do you take these risks to get these stories?

Well, first of all, I think you may be wrong about the you're not crazy part.

I've been told enough times by my family that I am that I'm starting to believe it.

Why do I do it?

I think I do it for a convoluted, dark, guilt-laden reason, which is that the more you see, the more you feel obligated to continue sort of

trying to do the work, you know, trying to make a small dent in the dark stuff you see by

reporting on it.

And so it's a sort of weird, negative, almost Catholic, you know, guilt feedback loop that I'm in, where whenever I get back home, I'm haunted by

the thought that, you know, I'm not doing enough and why am I living back in my lap of luxury?

And shouldn't I be out there trying to do what I can to land more stories and do something about the stuff that now I know exists?

Aaron Ross Powell, you know, so I've been doing reporting of this type kind of my whole career.

And I think phase one of investigative reporting writ large was powered by the same strange fuel.

This guilt-laden fuel of the world is a flawed place, and you should try to fix it to the extent you can.

If you win win the lottery of birth and you have the opportunity to do things, then you owe it back.

Phase two of my career was the Owl Ocean and the first stint of it at the New York Times.

It was time spent in reporting in Thailand and specifically on the issue of sea slavery and a lot of time in, you know, on ships where there were you know, trafficked Cambodian boys

and then also on land encountering other forms of bondage.

So sex-trafficked Burmese and Laitian and Cambodian women being used to trap men.

And, you know, so

five weeks of intensive reporting in that space kind of opened my eyes to a darker corner of the planet than I had ever encountered.

And I couldn't really ever go home after that, emotionally, if you will.

And that's, I think, you know, one of the reasons I'm still doing the Owla Ocean because it's such a huge space and there's so little journalism and there's so much urgency out there that it, it's just the gift that keeps giving, even if it means

not always the most pleasant experience in going for it.

Okay, so that's kind of the perfect segue because I want to talk about a not-so-pleasant experience you had.

So I'm talking about you and your team being in Libya and Tripoli, and I want to get into what happened to you guys there.

But before I go there, can you kind of lay out what it was you guys were investigating?

What brought you to Libya in the first place?

The Mediterranean.

I mean, it's one of the most intense,

important stories.

And it's the story of migrants coming from all over the place, but a lot of them sub-Saharan Africa, but also the Middle East, desperately fleeing poverty, war, terrorism, what have you, and trying to make their way to a place where they could try their hand at that lottery, you know, and maybe have a better life, i.e.

Europe.

So they're crossing the Med, right?

And the launching spot to cross the Mediterranean is typically Libya because it's a lawless state, it's a failed state, it's run by militias, therefore the state post-Qadhafi falling in 2011 really doesn't border control and prevent them.

And so they can pay traffickers, human carriers, to cross the Mediterranean.

So tens of thousands every month are going to Libya and trying to make it across to Italy, which is Greece or Spain.

Okay.

So what we wanted to focus on is the bigger story of how is the EU trying to use Libya to build an invisible wall across the Mediterranean and stop folks from making that journey?

And what are the consequences for those people, those migrants, when they get captured by the Libyan Coast Guard on the water and sent back to these

militia-run prisons, this gulag of detention centers in Libya?

Horrific stuff is happening there.

So let's take a team to Libya.

Let's put one team on some boats, Doctors Without Borders boats, and cover the waterfront of it where they're rescuing migrants at sea.

And let's take another team into Libya and investigate that gulag, that prison system, and what's happening to the migrants.

It's hard to get in Libya.

It's hard to even be allowed to get into the country.

And it's hard to navigate in the country and survive as a Westerner, much less a journalist.

So it took about a year to set up that trip, but then we finally found a way in.

And you guys landed on the story of one guy in particular, a guy named Aliu Conde from Guinea-Bissau.

Can you kind of take me through briefly his story and what you found as a result of pursuing it?

Yeah, I mean, Aliu was a sort of poster child climate migrant,

came from a very, very remote farming village in Guinea-Bissau, dirt poor.

You know, the land was not producing anymore.

His cows were so emaciated they couldn't produce milk.

He had kids.

he had a wife, he had family.

He was the young male who could leave.

His two brothers had already made the journey to Europe, and one was in Spain, one was in Italy.

So Ali was next up to try to make his way to Europe and then hustle a life that he could send some funds back to his pregnant wife.

So he makes his way to Libya.

He finds someone willing to get him in a boat to cross the Mediterranean.

He makes it out.

He gets captured at sea by the Libyan Coast Guard with EU EU help and taken back to Libya and put in what at the time was the most notorious of all the detention centers, a place called Al-Mabani, which is the buildings in Arabic.

And this was a famously dark site.

A lot of bad stuff was reputedly happening there.

And Aliu is held there.

But he was a really worthy sort of protagonist for a story about this because A, he was in the facility that folks had most wanted to know something about.

And B, kind of his journey was fairly typical.

And therefore we wanted to kind of recreate it and piece it together.

His story is amazing.

And it's really hard to sum up.

what happened to him in a, you know, well, you need to listen to the whole series.

But there were two things that really stood out about his story that I was totally unaware of until you brought it to us.

There's the issue of the EU's role, which is ⁇ I don't think I'm overstating to say they're colluding with Libya in keeping migrants out of Europe.

I think you literally say Libya is doing the EU's dirty work, right?

Aaron Powell, 100%.

Yeah.

I mean, it's not a good idea.

Can you explain that a bit?

Because I think that's a really important thing for people to understand.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: Yeah, so this is a global phenomena, right?

Australia does it in Papua New Guinea.

The U.S.

is doing it in Mexico originally under Obama and now in El Salvador and even considering Libya.

This is not a new phenomena where wealthy global north countries are trying to get typically poorer global south countries to stop migrants before they reach Europe or American soil, where they will be afforded under normal administrations, lots of rights.

And so if you can keep them elsewhere, then you don't have to deal with journalists and lawyers and advocates, etc.

So

what the EU is doing, and Italy especially, is trying to stop these migrants from reaching European soil by blocking them on the water in the Mediterranean and holding them in Libya.

Basically, if you think of this metaphorically, think of it as a war on migration, right?

So the Air Force in this war is an entity called Frontex.

That's the European border control.

They put up 24-7 drone and winged planes flying over the Mediterranean to monitor for any migrant boats trying to cross.

And when they spot them, they call the coordinates in indirectly to the Libyans, and the Libyans go grab them, right?

Right.

That's the Air Force.

And it's the Libyan Coast Guard, right?

Which is ostensibly protecting Libyan citizens in Libyan waters.

But that's not what's happening.

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: Right.

Yeah.

So the Air Force metaphorically is Frontex.

The Navy in this war on migration is the so-called Libyan Coast Guard, which normally coast guards are basically trying to stop boats from entering a country's shores, right?

So they're facing outward.

The Libyan Coast Guard faces inward.

What its job is, it's basically defending European shores from migrants leaving Libya.

And those boats are essentially paid for, fueled by, usually donated by the Europeans, given intel by, trained by the Europeans, so as to stop not external incursions by invaders, if you will, but rather external departures from Libya.

And so, they're working on behalf of the Europeans.

And then, so there's the Air Force, there's the Navy, and then the metaphoric army are the guys with guns, boots on the ground, on land.

Who's that?

Those are the militias that run the gulags.

And all of those three armed forces are funded by the Europeans.

So, this is entirely a European mission.

It's just in Libyan uniform.

And the army, the guys with the boots on the ground, the militias.

That kind of brings me to the other thing I didn't know about.

So in these prisons too, like these are essentially, you know, fairly well-organized shakedown systems, like extortion systems.

The Libyans, the militias there are basically using the migrants that they capture for shakedown scenarios, right?

Yeah, if you think of the business that is a detention facility in Libya, imagine it's just a business.

It has three main sources of income.

Number one is the aid funds that come in, right, from the Europeans.

That's one way that

the business makes some money.

It gives 80% of the funding that came in from the Europeans to the actual purpose, buy waters and blankets or whatever, and the 20% gets pocketed.

The second big money maker is using the detainees as labor.

And this is entirely legal in Libya.

You can rent these migrants out for a farm, for construction project, even for militias to help prepare for some fight.

All these things well documented.

That's the second money maker for the detention facilities.

The third and biggest money maker for the detention facilities is extortion.

So you are Ali Ukande or one of the tens of thousands of others of detainees.

You get caught, you get locked up, you're put there.

The only way you're getting out is if you call someone, a loved one, a friend, someone with a wallet, and say, hey, I need you to wire X amount of dollars to

this account.

And that's the only only way they'll release me.

And if you don't have, if you're dirt poor and you don't have that, then you're probably going to stay there indefinitely and might get sold off at some point to a different detention facility or a different work system

until they just decide you've

served your purpose and they might just dump you out.

So, okay, so this is, I mean, you report on this.

This is what a huge chunk of the Libyan stories in the new season are about.

But then

you became what I think you hate to become, which is part of the story in a way, right?

Like you were this, this getting back to the danger that you faced, right?

You were at the end of your reporting trip, you and your team, and then you got a knock on your hotel room door.

Can you take me through what happened then?

Yeah, so the team, just to step back for a second, consisted of my editor from the New York Times, who had since left, and I hired him at my organization, a guy named Joe Sexton.

He was there helping me report.

A guy named Pierre Qatar, photographer who I'd worked with on a bunch of missions before.

And then a young woman named Mea Doles, a documentary filmmaker from the Netherlands, who was making a film about the work we do.

So this was the team.

We were all there.

We had been doing quite well, honestly.

Journalistically,

we had spent a week.

We had landed a bunch of amazing interviews.

We'd put a drone up over Al Mabani.

We had gone to Gargaresh, which is the migrant kind of neighborhood.

It's

a ghetto, essentially, where all the migrants live, and it's very hard to get into.

We pulled that off.

Anyway, we had about,

I think, 24-48 hours left in our reporting trip before we were going to head for the next phase of reporting to Niger.

The rest of the team decided they were sort of going stir crazy in the hotel, wanted to go out for dinner.

I had work.

I wanted to call my wife, want to stay in the hotel.

The three of them went out.

They have armed security with them, head to a restaurant.

I stayed at the hotel.

Knock on my doors.

This is a Sunday night.

I'm actually on the phone with my wife just debriefing on the day.

And I assumed it was one of the three of them coming back to talk shop or whatever, planned out the next day, open the door.

About a dozen, dozen and a half uniformed militia screaming Arabic, English, gun to head, push me back in the room, tell me to get on the floor.

The first thing they said, interestingly, was, where's your tracking device?

These little things you put on your belt so that folks outside your zone can keep an eye on you.

And these guys knew we had one, so clearly they had eyes in the room and were surveilling us very closely.

There was a hidden camera turned out later in the smoke detector, very cliche.

And so I said, it's over there on the desk.

They then hood me and then begins a beating, which felt like it took forever,

but stomping and kicking and just sort of

kicking the shit out of me.

And

my wife was still on the phone for some of it.

And at some point, they said,

turn off the phone.

I sort of lifted up my hood.

I tapped the phone.

She hung up.

She couldn't hear what was going on.

I found out later, but she could hear screaming and yelling and knew something bad was going on, but she couldn't make out what it was.

But that immediately cued her that we had an emergency situation and some a plan was

kind of launched in motion.

Okay, so from there, what happened?

We were taken by this militia to an unknown black site, which was near their headquarters, and it was a jail where they took their people.

And

we, I didn't, you know, I was taken out of the hotel in pretty bad shape

after the beating,

still hooded, but I could tell where I was being kind of carried, put in a car, and taken to this location.

The rest of the team had a similar experience.

They weren't beaten, but they were abducted in the middle, in a very kind of surgical coordinated assault in the middle of an intersection.

You know, several trucks rammed their car.

The militia pulled the armed security out of their vehicle, beat those guys pretty badly in the middle of an intersection, hooded those three, put them in a van, and drove them to the same turns out, you know, I didn't know at the time, to the same facility.

And then I was put in an isolation cell,

and the other three, Maya, was put in a solitary cell of her own, and then Pierre and Joe were put in a cell together.

And turns out later, when we pieced it all together and figured out what happened, this was just a facility that they had for their own own intelligence detainees.

And that's where we were held for the next week.

And then the State Department got involved, and obviously you made your way out.

But

what was that waiting period like for you?

Well, it didn't feel like waiting.

You know, I'll say, and I know what you mean, but

what was that like?

It was,

you know, like nothing I'd experienced before.

I was fairly convinced these guys were probably going to kill us.

There were little signs that gave me hope, like, you know, in the beginning when they took us in, they were asking sort of admin type questions, which implied kind of almost like a clipboard, you know, kind of bureaucracy, which gave me a weird sense of hope that if these guys

were

one kind of militia that didn't have any concern about sort of protocol and officialdom, they planned it on just making a decapitation video, to put it bluntly, then they wouldn't be doing intake.

You know what I mean?

Like, so clearly these guys had some worry about

rules.

So that, but bottom line is, for the first 2448, I didn't know what happened to the others and whether the others were even taken.

At some point, after tapping on the wall and sort of trying to see if anyone was near me, I realized that Pierre and Joe were near because they tapped back and then we started sort of calling through the wall and we realized, oh, we're in the same cell block, essentially.

We were individually all being taken out of our cells at different times of the day and cross-examined and it very quickly became apparent that they were very angry at, you know, A, they had the sense of the hierarchy, like I was the boss and these folks work for me.

So they were very focused on me.

And the others said that they were, most of their questioning

was trying to gather, to get them to admit that I was a spy.

So the militia was asking Joe and Pierre and May a thousand different ways of, you know, Ian is actually a spy because it was clear they wanted to cut those guys loose, but keep me on espionage charges.

And what's funny is, you know,

at the time we were all saying the truth, which is, no, you know, Ian's not a spy.

We're not here for espionage.

We're doing doing journalism.

In retrospect, you realize that journalism is a cousin.

It is a form of espionage in a country like this.

So it's not a defense.

It's a crime.

But all we could do is tell the truth.

And they had this intense layers upon layers of proof, air quotes there, that I was a spy.

And ultimately, I had to sign a 20-page document in Arabic that confessed to being a spy so as to gather the country.

But they were very angry that we were there doing journalism and going to make Libya look bad and were very convinced that we were not there just as journalists, but we were working on behalf of the CIA to destabilize the country.

So after you guys got back, after you got out and negotiated your release, you published these these findings on Al Mabani, the prison that you were investigating.

You know, since you wrote that piece and then since we made this series, you know, looking back at that, it's like eerily prophetic.

It's not that the U.S.

wasn't deporting migrants before this, but since the second Trump administration has come in, this has really ramped up.

So we've got the U.S.

deporting non-U.S.

citizens to El Salvador and other countries throughout Central and South America.

What I'm curious is, what's it like for you to be thinking about this reporting

and then seeing it happening at this kind of amplified rate in your own country.

It feels Sisyphian.

You know, it feels like the boulder up the hill, back down again.

Well, what else are you going to do?

You've got to keep pushing the boulder up the hill.

But yes, the current moment we're living in is one in which we've gone backwards since we published that.

Italy and the EU have only increased their funding to this type of outsourcing migration control to Libya.

More migrants are held in Libya now than before when we reported it.

Equal numbers are dying in the passage itself.

But more worrisome is Tunisia, Senegal, other countries are now considering getting in a similar relationship with the EU where they essentially do the dirty work for the EU and hold these folks.

That's really scary.

And look at what's happening in the U.S.

I mean, it's just taking this and putting it on steroids.

It was happening to some degree before, but the Trump administration said it was pondering deporting migrants that are here in the U.S., not just to the super prison in El Salvador, but considering perhaps also sending them to Libya.

So it's kind of like the U.S.

is like, oh, that's another option.

We could send them there as well.

So now, the only thing that I do think

proves

maybe you could view this as a journalistic success is one of the core points of the investigation we made is that what we're seeing here in Libya is going to be replicated and expanded as climate causes more and more desperation and extreme conditions globally.

We are going to have a sort of World War Z level apocalypse, you know, sort of movement of desperate people.

And the wealthy global north countries are going to

if they are administered and governed stupidly and short-sightedly, going to embrace this sort of idea more and more because it's cheap and politically convenient, hold them out elsewhere.

So, this story is worth watching because it might grow.

That was a prediction in the piece, and I think we're already seeing it way sooner and way darker than I expected.

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I'm going to move on because, you know, this is just a third or so of the new season.

I want to move on and talk about China.

As enthralling and ambitious and wild as the Libyan reporting was,

the stuff you did on China and the Chinese seafood fleet and production is crazy ambitious.

And the scope of it is hard to take in like geographically and from like an investigative perspective.

It's a crazy amount of research and work.

Like

what were the main questions you were trying to answer when you started to investigate the Chinese fishing fleet?

So

if you think of, just to start at a simple level, like Seafood is a product, much like a Nike shoe is a product or an iPhone is a product or the shirt on your back is a product.

It's a category of product that is pretty unusual.

A lot of it, half of it worldwide, comes from

the sea, and the other half comes from fish farms, right, on land.

But as a product, it's crossing a huge terrain, and it's coming from a place that is very dark, it's very opaque.

Not many people, reporters, others are out there.

Okay.

Now,

As this market globally exists for seafood of all sorts, there is one country in the world that is the superpower, and that's China.

More ships, more processing capacity, more consumption, more export, more everything.

China is

bigger in this product, in selling it to others, and processing it for others, and consuming it itself in every way.

Okay.

So if we're going to be the outlaw ocean and we're going to have, as part of what we do, looking at things that happen on the water, we got to reckon with that 800-pound gorilla that is China.

It's also attractive because it's unusually opaque, journalistically.

It's really hard to figure out what's going on in that black box that is China.

Okay, so very worthy target.

Our goal was: okay, a lot of seafood is caught by Chinese ships.

They have a bigger fleet than anyone else in the world by a factor of five.

It's even stuff coming off of US and Canadian and French ships is getting processed in China and then exported.

You guys focused on China's squid fleet, and you did some really audacious stuff to get on some of those boats.

So, why the squid fleet?

And then,

how did you actually get aboard?

The squid fleet was really attractive because there are a lot of them.

There are a lot of those ships.

They're also in really interesting different places around the world.

So, we thought, okay,

this type of product, sub-product, has a bunch of ships in lots of places that could allow us to tell a global story.

Squid produces a thing that everyone knows, Calamari, right?

It's a globally known end product.

So that's attractive.

And that means we probably have U.S., European name brands involved in this supply chain.

Lastly, the ships stay at sea for a long time.

And that matters because the conditions for workers on vessels tend to fall off a cliff they get worse and worse the longer a ship is at sea what they're eating how they're treated etc the likelihood of human trafficking is much greater the longer a ship is at sea and squid vessels stay at sea sometimes two three years right

so so you you got on these boards by like

throwing like literally throwing messages in bottles right tell me about that

yeah you can't get on aboard one of these vessels without permission.

So you have to convince the captain to let you on board.

Most often,

first you've got to get out to the fishing grounds.

So that's a week, week and a half, perhaps long journey to get far, far from land to the high seas place where all these vessels are

concentrated.

Then you're looking at maybe three, four hundred vessels, mostly intensely fishing at night, very brightly lit vessels, working hard in the night.

They're spread out maybe by a mile between them.

And you're going to roll up on them and very carefully approach, make radio contact bridge to bridge.

I had Ed O, an amazing videographer who speaks Chinese with me, so he did all the translation.

So he begins the sort of charm process where he gets on the radio, calls the captain of the other ship, and says, Hey, we're not here to mess with you.

We're not going to get in your way.

We're not law enforcement.

We're journalists, and we just want to capture this work that you're doing that the world doesn't know about, what it's like.

So just, you know, know that we're going to be around for the next days or weeks.

And that's sort of stage one.

Often those squid vessels will run at that moment.

Either they see us coming or when we make radio contact, they bolt because they just don't want any, it's so weird to have anyone out in those waters that's not a

fisherman.

Are they thinking you're like a pirate or like, why are they so squiddish?

I think they just don't know.

Like we could be advocates, Greenpeace Sea Shepherd, and there to mess with them.

We could be journalists and that's not good if you're on a vessel that is probably going to have a negative story about them.

You just don't know.

And it's just easier to pull up and relocate and get away from these guys than wonder what they're going to do.

And they also often see, often we're on a vessel that's flagged to a European country, sometimes even the U.S.

on some of our trips.

That's also more worrisome.

These guys just don't want to be in a fight and a volatile, a seemingly volatile big guy just walked around.

So it's like you get your drink and move to the other side of the bar.

So, but you know, three out of 10,

the captain says, fine, you know, and maybe two out of ten, the captain actually engages and answers some questions.

You know, how's it been?

How long have you been out here?

Anyone sick on board?

How's catch?

Et cetera, et cetera.

And that begins a sort of courting, a courtship process where we keep our distance, but just make radio contact.

Second phase is, well, if they do bolt, then we immediately immediately go to plan B.

And plan B is chase them, which is also dodgy because sometimes they have armed security and you got to be careful.

They may open fire on you.

Yeah.

So you got to be mindful of that.

And if you see anyone pull up on deck with a...

you know, a semi-automatic weapon, then you back off.

Yeah, that's always a pretty sure sign.

You should not pursue that.

That's definitely.

But most often they don't, and you chase them, you tuck in behind them.

You're in probably a fast boat, a skiff, an outboard motor, kind of four-person speedboat, if you will.

You tuck in their wake.

And this is where we would resort to bottle throwing, which is a real hail mary kind of old school approach.

We would take a water bottle.

We would write a note.

Most of these ships are crewed, meaning the labor on board.

It's all Chinese officers.

And then the deck hands are typically Chinese or Indonesian.

So we would write a note that would be in Chinese, Bahasa, so Indonesian and English.

And it would just say, here's who we are.

We just have some basic questions, you know, nothing too elaborate.

Put it in a bottle.

The bottles weighted down with rice.

We'd put some hard candies and some cigarettes, because everyone smokes.

We'd put a little makeshift buoy of styrofoam around the neck, put the cap on, and then we'd have a bunch of those in the skiff as we're chasing them.

And we'd get close enough and throw the bottles onto the back of the vessel if we could get close enough safely, which was a big if.

And if the winds were right, et cetera, et cetera, and if my arm wasn't hurting that day and I could make the close the gap,

oftentimes the deck hands come to gawk at us and they come to the back of the vessel.

The captain's facing forward because he's piloting the ship and he's running.

The deck hands aren't doing anything, they're just standing around.

So they come back to see what's up and they see us.

The bottle comes across, they grab it, they open it up, they see there's a pen in there, they read the questions, and in some cases they respond.

They put it back in,

they cap it up, they toss it overboard, and then we go fetch it.

And again, it's ridiculous.

Like it seems insane and never gonna work, and yet it did, you know.

And we got good answers, sometimes phone numbers for people back home, so we could call their family.

Much of those families had never heard, hadn't heard from those guys since they had left shore two years earlier.

We were happy to know they were still alive.

Sometimes they just had sort of poignant answers in those written responses.

The other scenario was plan A, which is we hang around, we spend day one just sort of lingering, and then we move to, we get a little closer, we get off the big ship that we're on and into a skiff, and we get closer, we film, we put a drone up, we wave, they make visual contact, and the sort of final let's seal the deal phase is we get on a handheld radio in contact with the captain and say, hey, is there any chance we could come on board and break bread with you?

We'd just like to talk with you and see what your workplace is like.

And most often they say, Absolutely not.

But once in a while, they said,

Sure, you know, now we've got to figure out how you can get on board because the side of the ships are very tall and it's a very perilous thing to try to climb on a ship when it's going up and down by 20 feet.

But you said that's, I think I remember you saying that's actually like the scariest thing you've ever done, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah, that is that

is, I think, genuinely the most dangerous thing that we do at sea is

trying to climb onto these boats because imagine the high seas are no joke, right?

Like even on a calm day, the swells are going up 15 feet, you know, so you have a massive ship.

It's the side of these squid jiggers

are sometimes 15, 20 feet, so two stories tall before the rail, right?

And so they throw a rope ladder over, and the only place you can enter, because the jigs are these metal arms, of which there are about 60 or 80 of them, jutting out the sides of the vessel.

So you can't enter the vessel from the sides.

You have to come around back.

And the ship is bouncing up and down.

You're in a tiny little skiff, which is also bouncing up and down.

And they put a rope ladder that's two stories tall, and you have to essentially jump from the skiff at just the right moment onto the rope ladder.

If you miss, you'll fall between the skiff and the ship.

And when it goes up and down, you're basically going to be pushed underwater, you know, by a 20-ton piece of equipment.

You're goner, you know, so you cannot.

You're trying to see why your family thinks you're actually crazy.

I don't describe that to them.

Yeah.

It sounds like threading a needle on like a rodeo bowl.

Right.

It's crazy.

Well put.

Wow.

Okay.

So you get on board, and what do you find?

What are the conditions there like?

They're as you would expect.

I mean, but there are always surprises.

This is the beauty of, you know, go-there journalism, right?

You know, like

the subtle things are the ones that most

allow for vibrant kind of

rendering.

The sort of thousand-mile stare of those guys, the skin tone that implies a certain level of unhealth, you know, the sort of crushed

soul that you see of someone who's spent two years doing a kind of work that's brutal and monotonous and lonely, the uncertainty as it weighs on those guys emotionally as to whether they'll ever make it home, these things you see in them in a way that you can't capture by radio or whatever, by phone calls when they get home.

The vessel itself is also just this weird place.

It's like you've climbed, not to be gross, but it's like you've climbed into a giant's nostril and the giant giant has a cold.

You know, like there is this mucus layering.

It's almost an inch thick.

The deck floor, every surface, because when squid inks, when it squirts ink, it coalesces.

It's very sticky and it sticks to whatever it hits.

And then it solidifies into this ooze.

And they never clean it.

So you're dealing with years of ink buildup everywhere.

So everything is skating rink, slippery.

And their living conditions, how small are the rooms, what are they eating,

what do the bathrooms look like.

And on rare occasions, as happened,

you're always put with a minder, right?

So the captain usually puts one of his officers to trail you and listen to what anyone says to you.

But if you play your cards well, there's one minder and two or three of you.

So you split up and the minder has to choose who to follow.

And so you sort of head fake him to follow one guy, and that's not the guy that's going to ask the hard questions.

And the hard question guy goes and goes looks for the crew who seem.

And how do you read this?

It's their, it's the way they look at you.

It's something hard, it's an art, not a science, right?

But you're looking for the workers who shoot you a glance that seems to imply they may have something to say if you could make them feel safe saying it.

And in our case, we found a couple of those guys, and they immediately opened up and said, We're being held against our will.

They took our passports.

Can you rescue us and get us off the ship?

And these are Chinese workers

who said this.

Well, and so in addition to like captive labor or

slave labor might be a fair term too, right?

You've also got

like you've got high mortality rates on these boats too.

Yeah, it's a dangerous work.

You know,

fishing is the most dangerous profession, statistically, of any job in the world.

And what's interesting on these vessels, which are distant water vessels, meaning the ones that are on the high seas and stay away from Fort for a long time, is that one of the dangers is it's a sort of Dickensian 19th-century workplace where you've got these

big, you know, kind of sharp machinery, tackle and spinning winches and taut cables that if they snap and hit you, it's going to slice right through that flesh, et cetera.

You've got lots of that stuff going on with none of the protective gear on you or it.

You also also have a ship sort of that's shifting side to side, going up and down.

You're working 20-hour shifts, and your most intense work time is in the dead of night.

So that adds to it.

And so a lot of guys fall overboard, are hit by things, machinery, they get wounds, those get infected, and they die that way, okay, or they get knocked overboard.

But a fair number of guys are dying from kind of slow-motion, utterly avoidable, ridiculous threats like malnutrition.

So, beri-beri is this disease that's sort of a cousin of scurvy.

You know, scurvy is a lack of vitamin C.

Beriberi is a lack of vitamin B.

Ages ago, we figured out how to prevent it and how to reverse it.

You can reverse beriberi in 24 hours if you get vitamin B on board quickly, you know, through an IV drip or a supplement, a tablet, right?

But on these vessels, these guys are staying at sea for so long and they tend to rely on foodstuffs like white rice and pasta, you know, white pasta, so ramen, if you will, like the cheap stuff that lasts and you can bulk supply are what they're eating for months and months and months.

These tend to be unsupplemented with B1, and these guys get berry berry.

And berry berry is an awful way to die, and it's fatal after enough time.

But you slowly start ballooning and retaining water.

And again, totally avoidable and ridiculous, but sort of an indicator of slow-motion criminal neglect that happens on these ships.

So what's come out of your reporting on this?

I mean, like,

I hate to admit this.

Maybe I shouldn't even admit this, but, you know, like,

I bought shrimp the other day at the grocery store, and

I I was like, oh, Anne's going to think I'm a lesser human being for this.

But this is the thing is, is that if you're going to eat seafood,

you're kind of part of this.

So, I mean,

and you obviously know that.

You've reported on this.

But

what kind of change can come out of this?

How do I not become implicated in this network of

forced labor and

egregious breaches of human rights?

Aaron Ross Powell, Jr.: I mean, look, I don't pass judgment on anyone about their buying choices of anything.

I think the bigger,

easier question to answer is, so what came out of the reporting and how does that hint at some solutions?

One thing that came out of the reporting in general is that the seafood industry writ large, globally, pretends that it knows

its supply chain and that it can reassure the public that the supply chain is free of crime and other things.

And that's not true.

Like that is definitively shown as to they don't actually know their supply chain, especially the portions that go through China.

And even those brands that were relying on these private third-party certification, kind of we're the good guy brand, you know, kind of stamp that says, hey, we've been extra vetted by this organization, Aquaculture Stewardship Council or

Marine Trust or whatever.

There are a whole variety of them.

Even those folks turned to the certifiers and said, wait, how is this guy and his team showing us these things?

And you didn't.

And they realized, oh, you guys are only looking at a little piece of the elephant.

You're not actually truly telling us the whole elephant is tame.

You're just saying, oh, this part of the elephant's okay.

And we're taking that out to public as a reassurance about the whole elephant.

And these guys are saying, oh, there's a lot more you're missing.

So I think that's caused a reckoning within seafood that they really got to figure out.

So you've made a couple seasons of a podcast.

You've written a book, tons of articles, tons of online stuff at your Outlook Ocean Project site, animation.

musicals based on your reporting.

You've got all of these outlets for trying to express

the magnitude of what's going on at sea,

the intensity of a lot of the crimes at sea, and just, I think, trying to convey

the amazing wild territory that you've kind of staked out as your beat.

What's next for the ocean?

Just a lot of creative, weird things.

You know, we take the stories and, as you said, convert them into odd other creatures, you know, animation, rap albums, comedy.

You know, we're working with the John Oliver Show, like lots of weird, interesting transformation plays happening, a video game project.

But at the root, the kind of nuclear reactor at the center of all this is the core investigative journalism, the written filmed piece.

And we have a couple of big investigations.

We're two and a half years in on one

about more crimes at sea, fishing vessels, captive labor, where the stuff is processed, ties to militias and arms trafficking, some very well-documented murders that we now got connected to key players, you know, so things like that.

Ian, it's awesome to talk to you.

Thanks so much for the chat.

Thanks for having me, and thanks for all the help you've given to this reporting.

That was my conversation with Ian Urbina.

He's the host of the Outlaw Ocean and the founder of the Outla Ocean Project.

For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca/slash podcasts.