The Grey Man (29 page)

We gave a final debrief to our guys and over the next week they made their way out of the country. We joked that if we were ever having problems with an operation in the future we would say, ‘That's nothing. You should have been in Cambodia.' They were a good group with a good sense of humour, and they needed it.

One of our operatives, a western female we nicknamed Domino, after the real-life kick-arse bounty hunter played by Keira Knightley in the movie of the same name, stayed behind in Cambodia to follow up with the NGOs on the information we'd left behind. She met with one of the organisations that was famous worldwide for rescuing children, but the country director told her he felt it was too dangerous for their people to follow up on Rong. Why, I wondered, were our people risking themselves, going undercover in pursuit of criminals who had no respect for the lives of children? Domino had ten times the balls of any of them.

Just before I'd left Cambodia I spoke with Geraldine Cox, founder of the Sunrise Children's Village orphanages. Geraldine had been wonderful to us in Cambodia and we were impressed by her work. She said that she hoped we would come back to operate permanently in Cambodia.

‘To be honest, Geraldine, I don't think we will ever come back,' I replied, rashly as it turned out. The reality was there was too much work to do in Cambodia for us to truly let it go and I was pissed off with the way we'd been treated.

The only thing that had kept me sane in Cambodia was talking to Misao on the phone every few nights. It was time for me to go home and lick my wounds.

FOURTEEN

The Future

As the aircraft reached the halfway point between Cambodia and Thailand I walked back to Tony, shook his hand and said, ‘We made it!' I had been afraid with all the bullshit that we had encountered that someone would ask the police to stop us at the airport. Other Grey Man people had already slipped out of the country by various means.

The Cambodian operation had been pretty much a disaster from start to finish. We didn't save any kids; we didn't end up with an MOU or working relationship with IJM; and we didn't get the true story about what happened in Cambodia on the
Sunday Night
program. Still, I was impressed and heartened by the attitude of the volunteers we took up to Phnom Penh, all on their first trip with us. To a man, their attitude was ‘Shit happens' and ‘Better luck next time'. All of them said that despite the lack of success they would be keen to be involved in more operations.

Just before we left the city I contacted our go-between tuk tuk driver, Cousin, and arranged to meet him at a bar on the waterfront. Over an Angkor beer I told him who we really were and that we were in the business of rescuing kids from the sex trade. He had a young family of his own and I asked him how he would feel if someone had trafficked his little daughter or sold her for sex. I told him how close he'd come to being caught in a police operation and I warned him that if I ever heard of him procuring or facilitating the trade of children for sex I would report him to the cops in a heartbeat. Cousin was suitably chastened and he agreed to act as a sleeper for us.

Even though I was sick of Cambodia by then I guess I knew we would be back there one day. I'd said to Tony before leaving Australia that even if it all went pear-shaped – as indeed it did – we would learn some lessons. We did.

The fact that at such short notice we were able to order so many underage kids told us that despite our botched beginnings in Cambodia we really did need to try again there. After we got back to Australia, Russell and I made contact with the Cambodian embassy in Canberra and received a very positive reception from the ambassador and his right-hand woman. The embassy was way out in the back blocks of the national capital and at the end of our meeting Russell and I asked the ambassador if there was someone in his office who could call us a cab back to the airport. He said there was no need for that, and summoned his personal driver to take us instead. It was a great sign.

We have since begun negotiations to get our own MOU with the Cambodian government to start operating there with the police in our own right, and we've made arrangements with Geraldine Cox's Sunrise Children's Villages so there will be somewhere for us to place any kids we rescue.

After the Cambodian fiasco I sent a letter to IJM asking for an explanation of their decision not to proceed with the MOU with us, on the basis of spurious information. Their director of operations replied, saying that he had passed my letter on to their lawyers and PR people. This was an eye opener for me, suggesting that they were as concerned with their public image as they were with the law.

The response I finally received was that we had operated illegally in Cambodia in January 2010, when we had first rescued the Vietnamese girls, and again in May. It was a rather circuitous argument. We had worked successfully with IJM in January and if they'd had any reservations, why had they agreed to work with us again in May? Ironically, the only reason we ended up working illegally in May was after IJM removed its support for us. I still have the original emails from IJM giving us the go-ahead. If this is the behaviour of a Christian organisation, I'd rather work with pagans any day.

We'd plumped for an easy way out with IJM in Phnom Penh and it had blown up in our faces, so by doing all the legwork in advance ourselves we're hoping for a better result next time.

We're still operating in Thailand, though our focus has moved away from Chiang Mai, and we've changed the way we do things, for the better I think.

We replaced Panom with an Australian guy, Craig, who reported to Tony as the overall director of operations. We've made some bad choices in the past with people we've accepted as volunteers or appointed to jobs, but Tony, Russell and I are all agreed that Craig was a good choice, and his record in Thailand is bearing that out. In three months his team has rescued eleven trafficked, underage sex workers, and he was still very new to Thailand.

Craig's an ex–police officer who contacted us after the
Australian Story
program and ended up joining us as a volunteer in Cambodia. He was still keen to help out, even after seeing the chaos of Cambodia first hand. His business took a big hit after the global financial crisis and he had to wind things up. He was at a loose end and asked if he could keep working for us as a volunteer. He told us he could spend bursts of two to three months at a time in Thailand.

We agreed and Craig hit the ground running. We'd shifted our focus to the beachside area of Pattaya, where the Swedish and British paedophiles had been arrested in the joint Thai and Swedish police operation, and Craig made some excellent contacts there. As a result of his hard work and good attitude, we gave Craig the part-time paid job of our director of investigations in Thailand. Craig set up a mini investigations team, consisting of himself; a former US military Special Forces guy, Steven, who had served in Iraq and had worked with us in Cambodia; and Mick, a former Victorian police officer who visits Thailand during his annual leave.

The guys weren't having much luck in Pattaya due to the high level of local police corruption so I authorised them to head northeast on a bit of a scouting exercise, at Craig's suggestion. They struck gold at Aranyaprathet, on the border of Cambodia and Thailand.

Aranyaprathet is a well-known crossing point for illegal immigrants and trafficked labourers and sex workers. The guys hit a brothel there and the mamasan offered to procure underage girls for them. Craig had got a line on a police unit we hadn't worked with before, the Anti-Human Trafficking Division (AHTD), and one of our contacts in Thailand, a police colonel, smoothed the way with an introduction. Although they were a national unit, we'd heard they were very under-resourced with something like six people and two cars, and were partly funded by the US government.

As it turned out, AHTD was a good organisation and relatively well-funded. They agreed to work with us in a sting to catch some traffickers who had promised to bring fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls across the border from Cambodia for our guys. About twenty officers showed up for the operation. Our guys had installed six covert cameras in a hotel room they had rented for the delivery of the Cambodian kids. However, the trafficker who was supposed to bring the girls got cold feet. While our guys and the police waited in the hotel room, Craig kept calling the guy but his phone kept ringing out.

Craig had shown the police covert video he'd shot earlier of a brothel with the mamasan making a deal for underaged girls and the police decided they would raid the brothel and see what they turned up. Our three guys went in first, taking their covert filming gear with them again, and met with the mamasan. They paid for the young girls then Craig sent a signal to the AHTD unit commander and they raided the place. Three Cambodian girls and one Vietnamese girl, all aged between fourteen and fifteen, were rescued in that operation and taken to a Thai government shelter. The AHTD guys were very professional – almost like the Thai ‘untouchables'. It was an outstanding success and a new way of operating for us, working with a national unit that was motivated, flexible and professional. Astoundingly, when Craig offered to pay for some of the unit's expenses, such as transport and accommodation, they refused. I told Craig to take them all out to dinner after the Aranyaprathet operation, which he did, but at the end of the meal the colonel in charge refused to let Craig pay the bill and covered it himself! These cops were just happy to be working with our people. We put a further three Grey Man teams into the field in late 2010 and the result was a raid on a western bar and the release of three young girls. Craig and Steve coordinated the teams' efforts and everyone gained valuable experience.

It was more by accident than design that I first went to Thailand to try to do something about the problems of child trafficking and prostitution. There are other parts of Asia where the scale of the problem is as bad or worse, and we're trying to branch out into some of them.

On the other hand, there are some particularly notorious trafficking hubs that we just can't feasibly operate in yet. The Philippines, for example, is a hotbed of child prostitution and slavery, but it's also a country awash with guns and violent crime and the government is involved in suppressing an insurgency by the Moro Islamic Liberation Front We've got a member who lives in the Philippines, an ex–1 Commando Regiment member who's married to a local girl. He has helped us gather information on an Australian paedophile who lives in the Philippines – ironically, a former president of a service club – whose stated aim in life is to have sex with a thousand children before he dies. We've been able to pass this intelligence on to the authorities, and that guy is now on the run, but our resources are stretched and the Philippines is simply too dangerous for us to take a more active interest in at the moment.

Likewise, we know that the port of Johor Bahru in Malaysia, just across the causeway from Singapore, is a major hub for the movement of children for sex out to other parts of Asia and as far afield as the Middle East. Children are worth around US$25,000 to their captors but the trade is run by the Chinese Triads, and The Grey Man is not equipped to tackle them. We will leave them up to the police. We have, however, been able to make a start on child rescue elsewhere in Malaysia.

After the
Australian Story
program I was contacted by a businessman in Brisbane named Dennis, who is part Sri Lankan and married to a Malaysian woman. Dennis was moving to Malaysia with his family and wanted to volunteer. Dennis had a finger in many different companies and was a real wheeler-dealer on the stock market, but he also had a strong altruistic streak, having been involved in the set-up of several Hear and Say centres for deaf kids, including a branch in Brisbane. I initially had him in mind as a sleeper who might make some contacts for us in Malaysia and just be ready to help out if and when we eventually decided to make a move into that country, but as it turned out we had a job for him sooner rather than later.

Kru Ngaow, who ran the Childlife shelter in Mae Sai, contacted us and asked if we could help with the repatriation of a Burmese boy from Malaysia. He was a long way from home and his tale shed light on a facet of child trafficking and abuse that was as surprising as it was shocking.

The boy, Dula, now aged sixteen, had been sold into slavery several years earlier, as a crewman on a Malaysian fishing boat. Dula first came to Kru Ngaow's attention in 2003 when he was just ten years old. He'd been begging on the streets of Mae Sai and Kru Ngaow had taken him into his shelter. The boy came and went from the facility over the next few years and when he was fifteen he left for the bright lights of Bangkok in search of work.

Kru Ngaow next heard from Dula in 2009. ‘He told me that while he was sitting by the side of the road in Bangkok, two years earlier, a car stopped and a man offered him a job which paid 6000 baht a month and he agreed,' Kru Ngaow told us. The man took Dula to a village near the town of Maha Chai Muang where he was told that he would be collected by the owner of a fish farm. If Dula was having second thoughts about the soundness of his decision, he could do nothing about it. For two weeks he was kept locked in a small room with a guard outside. His meals and water were passed to him, but he wasn't allowed out. Eventually, he was told that all of the jobs at the fish farm were taken, but another job had been found for him. He was loaded into a van with several other young boys and taken to a coastal village in Songkhla province in southern Thailand, near the Malaysian border.

Kru Ngaow didn't have all the details of what happened to Dula on the boat, but I did some research on the fishing trade and learned enough to piece together a pretty terrible picture. According to reports I've read, children from Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia are press ganged into working on these vessels and some are literally worked to death. There are horror stories of kids seeing their fellow crewmen tossed overboard if they become too weak to work. They slaved long days and nights, seven days a week.