On the menu today: The X post from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi looks like the trailer for some upcoming Ridley Scott thriller — helicopters close in on an oil tanker and hover above the vessel, ropes drop down, and heavily armed U.S. forces in military uniforms rapidly slide down and scatter across the deck. The United States of America is not quite at war with the regime in Venezuela, but what the video shows is that the U.S. government is willing to use the threat of violence to disrupt the flow of illicit oil-smuggling revenues that fuel the status quo in that country. A lot of folks in Washington are treating the news as the Trump administration recklessly escalating hostilities with Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro. But this was just a dramatic demonstration of something the U.S. government has done before and will hopefully do more often. A robust effort to disrupt the global oil-smuggling networks that make life easier in Caracas, Tehran, Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang is long overdue. Read on.
The Skipper Will Not Be Returning from This Three-Hour Tour
Shortly after 5 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Bondi announced that the U.S. government had seized a crude-oil tanker used to transport sanctioned oil from Venezuela and Iran.
In a twist of fate that is likely to set up a lot of Gilligan’s Island jokes, the oil tanker is named The Skipper.
According to MarineTraffic.com, The Skipper is sailing under the flag of Guyana, and its most recent reported location is in between Saint Vincent and the Grenadines to its west and Barbados to its east. But keep in mind, a New York Times analysis of satellite imagery and photographs found the ship “may have been trying to conceal its whereabouts by broadcasting falsified location data,” and “from late October to at least Dec. 4, the ship was actually hundreds of miles away off Venezuela. A satellite image captured on Nov. 18 shows the tanker docked at the country’s José oil terminal while its transponder showed that it was elsewhere.”
The ship is 1,092 feet long and 197 feet wide. At the White House yesterday, President Trump boasted, “We’ve just seized a tanker on the coast of Venezuela, a large tanker, very large, the largest one ever seized, actually. . . . I assume we’re going to keep the oil.”
The Times reported that photos of The Skipper at the José oil terminal in Venezuela show the vessel “sits low in the water, suggesting that it was weighed down after taking on a significant amount of cargo — about 1.8 or 1.9 million barrels of oil, according to TankerTrackers.com.” The Times also reported that, thankfully, “there was no resistance from the crew and no casualties.’
Back in 2022, the tanker now called The Skipper was called The Adisa. The U.S. Department of the Treasury identified Adisa as part of a far-reaching network that smuggled oil out of Iran, blended it with oil from India, and then sold it as Indian oil:
As of mid-2022, a Gulf-based network of individuals and companies were blending and exporting Iranian oil in support of Hizballah and the IRGC-QF. Viktor Artemov, Edman Nafrieh, Rouzbeh Zahedi, and Mohamed El Zein leveraged dozens of companies under their control to conduct the network’s illicit activities. The network used storage units in the Port of Sharjah in the United Arab Emirates, and blended products of Indian origin with Iranian oil to obfuscate the Iranian origin. The companies then modified or created counterfeit certificates of origin and quality for the blended oil, which was then transferred for sale abroad.
The U.S. Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated members of an international oil smuggling network that facilitated oil trades and generated revenue for Hizballah and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps-Qods Force (IRGC-QF). The network being designated today includes several key individuals and numerous front companies and vessels involved in blending oil to conceal the Iranian origins of the shipments and exporting it around the world in support of Hizballah and the IRGC-QF.
Pontus Navigation Corp. and Triton Navigation Corp. are subsidiaries of Centrum Maritime and are also companies Artemov uses to arrange ownership of oil vessels. Artemov served as director of Pontus Navigation Corp. and Triton Navigation Corp., which owned the Nolan and Adisa, respectively. Artemov’s company Rising Tide Shipping served as the commercial manager of the Nolan and Adisa.
This morning, you can find lefties sneering, “I predict we will continue waiting for evidence that shows this oil tanker was supporting foreign terrorist organizations.” Dude, we got the evidence back in 2022, under the Biden administration. Try to keep up.
The mission was launched from the USS Gerald R. Ford, an aircraft carrier that has been in the area for weeks as part of a broader buildup of U.S. forces in the region, the sources told CBS News.
It involved two helicopters, special operations forces, 10 members of the U.S. Coast Guard and 10 Marines, the sources said. The boarding team was composed of the Coast Guard’s Maritime Security and Response Team, an elite maritime interdiction unit based in Chesapeake, Virginia.
According to Reuters, if the U.S. government wants to pull off a similar operation on another ship, it has no shortage of potential targets:
More than 30 U.S.-sanctioned oil vessels doing business in Venezuela could face punishment by Washington after the Coast Guard seized a supertanker carrying Venezuelan crude for export, according to shipping data.
Previous sanctions on Venezuela-related vessels or oil flows have left a swirl of loaded tankers waiting for weeks and even months to depart to avoid conflicts. On Wednesday, more than 80 vessels loaded or waiting to load oil were in Venezuelan waters or near its coast, including more than 30 under U.S. sanctions, according to data compiled by TankerTrackers.com.
The global shadow fleet includes 1,423 tankers, of which 921 are subject to U.S., British or European sanctions, according to analysis from maritime data specialist Lloyd’s List Intelligence. They are typically old, their ownership opaque and they sail without top-tier insurance cover to meet international standards for oil majors and many ports.
The ships mostly transport sanctioned oil from Russia, Iran and Venezuela to Asian destinations, according to vessel monitoring data. Many have made separate voyages carrying Iranian or Venezuelan oil and then Russian cargoes.
The Venezuelan government is, as you would expect, screaming bloody murder and calling the operation an “act of piracy.” (The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea defines “piracy” as “illegal acts of violence or detention, or any act of depredation, committed for private ends by the crew of the passengers of a private ship or a private aircraft.” Vessels of the U.S. Coast Guard and U.S. Navy are not private ships, and enforcing anti-smuggling laws and sanctions are not private ends.)
Nor was this seizure all that unprecedented; it was just more dramatically revealed to the world than usual. Back in August 2020, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that “with the assistance of foreign partners,” it had seized a multimillion-dollar fuel shipment by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps bound for Venezuela. The U.S. confiscated the cargo from four vessels — The Bella, The Bering, The Pandi, and The Luna — totaling approximately 1.116 million barrels of petroleum.
There are a lot of aspects of the Trump administration’s policies toward Venezuela to object to or feel wary about, but seizing a tanker smuggling oil and helping the regimes in Venezuela and Iran is not one of them.
Just about every heinous regime on the planet has their hands in the oil-smuggling business in one way or another — Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela — and a whole bunch of unsavory characters in non-sanctioned regimes are cashing in along the way. The shadow fleets involved in this are a pox on the world, enriching some of the world’s most revolting individuals and regimes and financing acts of aggression, terror, and oppression in both hemispheres. And for many years, attempts to enforce the laws against these networks were laughably, embarrassingly insufficient.
In an in-depth investigation of Iran’s vast smuggling networks, The Economist reported back in October 2024:
With patchy enforcement, determination and help from a greedy partner, a country under a de facto global embargo can end up flouting it on a cosmic scale. Many of Iran’s tactics are reminiscent of those a drug cartel would use to market products and recycle proceeds into other dark enterprises, often via seemingly legitimate businesses. Iran’s subterranean oil system is governed by rules as much as by threats. The task is to construct an elaborate charade that will dupe sanctions-enforcers.
In a country that lacks hard currency, crude is an alternative form of liquidity. Iran’s budget last year allowed the armed forces to sell $4.9 billion worth of oil. Allocations also reward loyalists: in 2022 individuals vetted by the regime were offered a combined $3.6 billion of petroleum. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), the regime’s praetorian guard, also receives a great deal of oil, often off-book. A former Iranian official says that the Quds Force, the IRGC’s foreign wing, earned $12 billion from such sales in 2022.
More than 100 front companies exist to procure tankers, says a source. Many are decades-old ships flagged in Panama, a permissive harbor, and renamed to confuse trackers. The vessels start by picking up oil at one of Iran’s export terminals. To avoid attention, they often lend transponders to other ships circling the area, or use software to make it look like they are elsewhere. The ships then sail to Iraq or Oman, where their cargo may be transferred to a new vessel. Another transshipment may occur off Malaysia or Singapore, after which the cargo heads to China.
Oil smuggling is a huge business, empowering the worst regimes in the world, and the U.S. government ought to be disrupting it in every way possible.
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, the New York Times has run its most insufferable, soft-focus, reputation-washing profile of an odious figure since. . . well, I guess the Olvia Nuzzi profile, which wasn’t that long ago on November 14. This time around, the newspaper showcases Jennifer Welch, an interior designer and former Bravo reality TV star, who has co-hosted a podcast since 2022. If you see a mainstream publication touting some commentator as the Next Big Thing, there is an excellent chance that the person being profiled will rank among the dumbest, most unhinged, and least informed people you have ever encountered.