The MV Faina, a Ukrainian-owned merchant ship, was hugging
the coastline of Somalia as it steamed toward Mombasa, Kenya, in September
2008. But it would not reach its final port of call. As it navigated a
particularly treacherous stretch of water, more than a dozen armed men swarmed
the ship in motorized skiffs, taking the crew hostage. When they went down into
the ship's hold, the pirates couldn't believe their luck: The ship was carrying
a clandestine cargo of 33 Russian T-72 tanks, dozens of boxes of grenades, and
an arsenal of antiaircraft guns. The pirates had no way of knowing it, but the
cargo had been part of a secret effort by Kenya's government to arm militias in
southern Sudan in their fight against the government in Khartoum -- a violation
of a U.N. arms embargo. The Somali pirates had become experts in setting
ransoms based on the value of their cargo, and soon after the ship's capture
they began demanding as much as $35 million for a safe release of the crew, the
ship, and its sensitive cargo.
American Navy vessels surrounded the ship within days, but the hostage negotiations dragged on for weeks as the Ukrainian ship owners refused to cave to the pirates' demands. The pirates decided they wanted a new mediator for the negotiations, and scrawled a message onto a white sheet they draped over the Faina's railing.
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The message was just one word long: AMIRA.
Within days, Michele "Amira" Ballarin, a flamboyant West Virginian heiress, was at the center of the tense hostage negotiations with a group of pirates holding a ship full of Russian tanks. By the time the pirates made their demand, Ballarin had already been working with a group of Somali clan elders to negotiate the ransom and end the standoff, although she would later deny that she had any financial interest in the negotiations. Her interest was purely humanitarian, she said, providing satellite phones so that pirates could communicate with Somali elders on shore and so the Faina's crew could communicate with their families. But the ship's Ukrainian owners grew angry about the meddling of this strange woman from West Virginia. Hers was an unwanted presence; they figured she was only driving up the price of getting their crew and cargo released. "She has to understand that offering criminals a huge amount of money, which by the way she doesn't have -- she is only giving them false hope," said a company spokesman.
Ukraine's government even intervened. In early February 2009, just weeks after the Obama administration took office, Ukraine foreign minister Volodymyr Ohryzko wrote a letter to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton about the woman who, he said with a flourish, had "become an intermediary of the sea corsairs." Ballarin's actions, the Ukrainian minister went on, "incite the pirates to the groundless increase of the ransom sum," and he asked Clinton "to facilitate the exclusion of [her] from the negotiation process with the pirates."
Hillary Clinton would have had no reason to know who Michele Ballarin was before receiving the letter from the Ukrainian minister, but plenty of other American officials did. By the time President Obama came into office, Ballarin had been given a contract with the Pentagon to gather intelligence inside Somalia, just one of the myriad projects for which she had tried to gain the approval of the United States government, with varying degrees of success.
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Since 2006, Ballarin had been trying to organize a Sufi resistance to fight Wahhabi militant groups in Somalia. After several trips to the region in which she met with the leaders of the country's feckless Transitional Federal Government, the wealthy American heiress had developed something of a cult following in some sectors of the Somali political class. She claimed to train and breed Lipizzaner stallions -- the famous white horses that performed dressage -- and wore her wealth wherever she went. She traveled with Louis Vuitton bags, expensive jewelry, and Gucci clothing. If the idea was to dazzle the residents of one of the world's poorest countries, it had the intended effect. Somalis began referring to her by a one-word moniker, the Arabic word for "princess." They called her "Amira."
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