Classic: About Pirates

This is a crowd podcast. Well, hello everyone and today's classic.

really is a classic in the truest sense of the word so. Joe and I talked to Colin Freeman. Colin Freeman is one of the world's great storytellers, which helps because he was once taken hostage by Somali pirates. He is a former chief foreign correspondent at the Daily Telegraph. He was held captive for five weeks by pirates who demanded $3 million for his release. Those are the headlines that you might have found in the telegraph.

but there is so much more to go at. Enjoy. Our guest today has been held hostage by Somali pirates. His name is Colin Freeman. Welcome. We are just normal people. We haven't coached you into a secret Somali hostage situation again. And I'm looking at you now. I'm pretty sure you could handle us anyway.

We are stuck in a sort of dank basement, though. Why not dank here? It's obediently, oh god, I've been telling you. It's a bit hostages, yes. Small dark room, yes. I'm used to spending lots of time in small dark chambers with men I've not met before. Right, so this, as an opening statement, you were kidnapped by Somali pirates. How the fuck did that happen?

Yeah, I was a reporter for the Sunday Telegraph, Chief Foreign Correspondent indeed, and my job was traveling around the world, covering stories as they broke, et cetera, et cetera. And in about 2008, the Somali piracy crisis started, where Somali pirates were going out attacking shipping, and I think later that year they hijacked a big oil tanker.

worth about a hundred million dollars which was their equivalent of hijacking a sort of Spanish galleon full of gold would have been in the old days. So the office said can you go to Somalia and find out a bit about how these pirates operate and what the local people think of them so on and so forth. So off we went and did you buy his hand off right when he said yeah of course I'd love to go to Somalia.

I mean, it was part of the job was going to sort of, you know, either dangerous places or, you know, kind of front-air kind of places, if you see what I mean. I used to enjoy doing it. And I've been there once before, although not to the pirate area. The pirate area is in the north of Somalia. And the fact that I've been there once made me the office expert on Somalia.

I'd been there. Oh, yeah, Somalia, you've got Colin going down there, yeah. Yeah, Cole's been there before, and he, yeah, get him down there. Yeah, so the idea was we would go to this town called Bassasso, which was a town on the northern Somali coast, where you won't see Long John Silver wandering down the road with his parrot on his shoulder, but you're close to the city. You're on the pirate coast, and there are pirate camps up and down the coastline on this very long, empty remote coastline, where there's not much law and order.

And in Bassasso itself, which is quite a poor run down port town, you see evidence a bit of pirate money. You sort of get a sense that things are going on. And so what you do is you stop yourself getting kidnapped, you hire bodyguards, usually through your local translator or fixer.

As you do, yeah. These are not SAS bodyguards. These are not sort of highly trained men. They are kind of usually your fixers, Klansman, or your fixers, cousins, or your fixers, cousins, friends, or your fixers, friends, cousins, seven or eight guys, all with Kalashnikovs. You pay them about 20 bucks a day each, and you have to hope that they will

you know, be enough to kind of keep other people at bay. It's a bit like the scarecrow principle basically. If you've got enough armed men hanging about, most people will think twice about doing anything. Or another way of putting it is it's a bit like when you used to go to football games in the old days, you get the kids sort of saying, mind your car for you, Mr.

You can either say, yep, here you go and pay the money, or you can say, no, no, I'll be fine on my own. Thank you. I don't need that sort of protection. Then you'll come back and find your car scratched. And so if you don't pay somebody to look after you, there's a chance that somebody might, you know, you might find yourself getting kidnapped after all.

So your bodyguards, Colin, you're trusting them, but not totally trusting them, which, as it turns out, is the right approach. Yes, we were there for about seven days. Didn't meet any pirates at that point. Driving to the airport, so we're in one pickup truck, the bodyguards and another one, driving behind us.

Then all of a sudden, as we're driving through a kind of town square somewhere on the outskirts of Bassasso, their pickup truck shoots ahead of us, blocks our path, two of the bodyguards jump out. I remember seeing one of them grabbing his gun, big snarl on his face.

And they argue it. They start shouting at our driver. This is me and my fellow hostage, a guy called Jose, who you might hear about more later, a photographer from Spain. They start shouting at the driver in Somalia. I'm thinking maybe they're just having an argument about which way to go or... Traffic, that's why he's got his gun.

Yeah, and just making the point rather emphatically, then they open the doors of the car and they ordered us out and I could tell they were being a bit aggressive, feet at the floor, still wondering a bit about what's going on. And then when they opened the boot of the car,

My fellow hostage said, ah, shit. And I suddenly realized, yeah, we are getting kidnapped. This must have been planned all along. And that was the moment that it all started, really.

Now, this may seem like a strange question, but bear in mind you've just described your line of work. It was your job to go out and discover these sort of stories in these places. At that moment, was there a small part of you that was actually cool? This will make a good story. Or was it just completely overwhelmed with, oh, fucking hell, I'm not making out of this one.

A bit of both, actually, yeah. Maybe not at that moment, at that initial moment, you just look, oh no, you know. Running is not an option. All that thought of like, you know, all this fun, glamorous, going around the world, you know, going to Iraq or Afghanistan or going to war zones and stuff, and then coming back and telling, right in the stories and the paper, and also the pop stories and other than Elsevier who did this to that, you know.

All sounds fun, and then you suddenly think, oh no, I've bitten off a little bit more than I can chew. And quite apart from the fears for your own safety at that point, and what is going to happen, you suddenly think, all right, shit, I've now dragged everybody else into it, because this is going to mean my parents are going to be worried sick.

My girlfriend is going to be worried sick. Everybody who knows me is going to be worried sick. And the office, my employers are going to be worried sick, you know, and I've now dragged them into this as well. So you actually think like you selfish tit. I love the fact that you've got a bloke with a colastic of point at your face and your first thought is, are you selfish?

May the first few first few minutes actually not quite that this came in within about 10 15 minutes was as we're getting driven away what was the first few minutes thoughts first few minutes thought is like the point in a gun at me shit we are getting kidnapped should have seen this one coming it was bound to happen sooner or later oh dear and then basically you do i just did exactly what i was told i mean you know with hindsight you sort of thought or maybe i should have.

We're still in a relatively built up area. Maybe you should have run away. If you'd made a sprint for it, I'm fairly fit. You could perhaps, shouting and screaming, you could have maybe attracted a crowd, a commotion and perhaps the gunman would have, you know, lost their nerve and put a scar put or whatever.

or they could have shot you or more likely to just got a gun barrel in the face and you'd have had a, you know, a black, a nasty black eye and a bit of trauma to add to what else was going on. And also, frankly, when someone's pointing a gun at your stomach, it's just like, yep, yep.

Yeah, I'll just do whatever you say, you know, sort of like that. And they could have told us to change the tire on the car and, you know, kind of pump up the tires a bit and wash the windscreen before it's off. I'd have been fine, you know, I don't know if it's fine. You can put your guns down, no problem, yeah. So when we drove out the town, we were in the back of their pickup truck now, for them's pointing a gun at me, Jose, my colleagues sat in the car as well, and then there's five or six of them in the back of the pickup truck.

pickup truck picks up speed. You can tell they've either done this before or they know what they're doing because as we drove out of town, you go into this sort of desert air. It's full of big sand dunes, you know, almost like a, you know, kind of beach side. And the car was zooming over these sand dunes, you know, like the guys like a rally driver doing 40, 50 miles an hour. If it had been me, we'd have crashed, you know, but he clearly knew what he was doing. Marginally fun. Not

Not really coming to mind about that. Maybe on another day, if we thought that pre-kidnap would have been quite fun. Pre-kidnap things were a lot more fun. Yeah, and you can sense that we're getting away further out of town, and like they're kind of like, yeah, we've pulled it off like a bunch of bank robbers.

That's the kind of point at which you start getting a bit introspective and thinking, this is not, you know, I'm just balls of stuff for myself. This is serious stuff for everybody back home. And the guilt starts kicking in.

And you actually think, like, if this goes on for any length of time, if I'm stuck for, you know, days, months, weeks, whatever, then this has been, my parents were in their sixties at the time. This is the kind of thing that, you know, this is what stress really is. This is where stress can have a serious physical effect. I could get home and get told, sorry, mom had a heart attack while you were out there and there'd be no doubt why that was, you know, why that happened. So, yeah, it was, it was not pleasant, should we say, yeah.

The gang leader is called Musa. Is that right? What was he like? How did you... Most of it had you get to know him, which makes it sound like you're sitting down having a nice chat with social niceties rather than having a cushiony cough put in your face. But did you get to know him? Not really, no. They were all... None of them spoke English, apart from a few words, very few words. They spoke a bit of Arabic, which is a language that is used in that part of the world a bit. I speak a little bit, just kind of, you know, conversation, not even conversational, taxi Arabic and stuff like that.

So we had very little proper conversation with him at all, which was a shame in a way, because it would have helped past the time and it would have been interesting to have known a bit more about them. But he was, Musa was the leader of the gang, he didn't say, he was a man of few words even by these standards. He didn't say much big fella, looked like he could handle himself, but he generally, you know, he never threatened us, he never mistreated us, and he ran a pretty tight ship.

He had a sort of sidekick who was the other guy and a guy called Yusuf who, again, was reasonably friendly. I used to give him lessons in English to start off with one of us trying to make piles of them. You teach us where it was? No, we were tempted to sort of teach him like, you know, hello, the way of saying hello in English was kind of, you know, I am a stupid Somali kidnapper. But we didn't for some reason. Just in case he did speak English and I'd realize. What did you just start there, guys?

This is how you say earlier, I'm a twat. That means your great chief, your great king and all this lot. And then turn around and go, as you fucking idiot, I've been speaking English the whole time. But at least you had the last official laugh, if that was the case, before not being able to laugh anymore.

Yeah. It's possible that they would have had somebody who spoke English and who might well have kept himself very, very quiet purely so that they could listen into what we were saying. I mean, I would have considered doing that if I'd been them, you know.

What was your relationship like with them? I immediately picture you've been kidnapped, you're going to be locked up, you get bare minimum food because I'm guessing I'd want to keep you alive for a ransom or whatever. Bare minimum food, but then you've just said you sat there and gave them English lessons.

Yeah, so they were pretty business-like and very professional. The first time we realised they were going to keep us alive was that after this drive through the desert they'd car sort of drove up into a mountain range, a very remote area, looked a bit like Arizona or Utah National Park, lots of kind of wind swept mountains and stuff like that.

And we got the point where we could go no further, we started walking up this hill at gunpoint, and then they stopped us in a clearing. And I thought at that point, maybe they're going to kill just kill us here. And then one of them pulled out a rucksack, delved into the rucksack and pulled out Mars bars and bottles of water and shoved them in.

and shove them out so they eat, eat, you know, it's like being on a Boy Scout March, you know, time for break. And at that point we realised they were clearly going to keep us alive and then they, they sort of marched just more or less non-stop for the next two days, like a kind of army yomp or whatever you call it.

and got to this cave. And then that was the first of several caves that we spent time in. Some were proper caves, some were just overhangs. But most of the time they just sort of left us, you know, to our own devices. We had a campfire. They would make tea. We ate goat meat and rice three times a day. Sometimes it was spaghetti, sometimes the rice got a bit monotonous, but the food was okay, I suppose you could say.

They never generally harmed us, really. It was in a rather beautiful place. The sort of thing, if you were a backpacker, you would have paid, you know, a hundred quid a day for that experience of being in this authentic kidney nose man with experience. Yeah. And I did at one point say to the art when we finally established.

sort of contact with the office back home i said to try and make them think that you know everything was okay i said actually you know if it would it would be you know it's a really beautiful place was stuck in you know beautiful mountains it would be like having an adventure holiday if we weren't actually kidnapped at which point the kidnappers they did have an interpreter a negotiator who was listening in on the call some are the guy who was there sort of

ally and he scolded us afterwards and said, don't start saying stuff like that. Don't start making out like you're on holiday. You think it's a holiday because the guys all get cross about that. So that was me told. But yeah, it was, it was, you know, it could have been a lot worse, you know, changed with a radiator in a darkened room or something like that. So what did you do then? Did you just spend all your time talking to Jose?

Pretty much. Yeah. Typically, they had a mat for us, like a raffia mat where we sat most of the time. It was like the size of an average picnic rug or as we joked to double bed. And we slept on that, we ate on that, and we sat around during the day on that. So I got to know Jose, my fellow hostage, very, very well, very, very quickly, because he was the only other person I could talk to.

Also, I was keen to get an idea of how he felt about things, because it had been my idea to go on this trip. He was a freelancer for the telegraph at the time. He knew that part of the world, the Horn of Africa, quite well.

as we would go with photographers who knew the area rather than somebody from the office. As we got driven away, I remember thinking, what if, like, he tries to escape from these guys? What's he going to be like dealing with them? Is he going to be too timid? Is he going to be too aggressive? Might he freak out? Might he blame me for all this? Yeah, I'll see you up. Fucking fault. If it was me and Tom, that's exactly the end of what I'm going for.

Tom, it was his fault. Take him first. You'd be worth more because they'd be thinking you've got a measure of celebrity. They'd be thinking, all right, if you, all right, it's a few times a year, they're minty. Oh, yeah, they are. If you were going to fork out for me, are they? And what do you think? I really would be in the RFU's relationship over the years. Yeah, that's going to go down really, really.

If they'd found out that you were a kind of prominent sporting hero, then yes, your stock would have been raised considerably. There's a possibility they would have done a kind of no offense, but they might have done a deal. You would have been sort of thrown in free, assuming they are.

assuming the RFU were willing to pay for the two of you. If they were, they don't want to pay for me. They don't want to pay for me, right? They don't fucking pay for you. They would have said, we want the two of you. I'm the Bogoff part of this, am I? Yeah. Well, eventually they did, these guys did demand money for both of us. And they did it individually. And they said, for you, $3 million, not me. I thought it was quite large. Decent.

And they said, and for you, they turned the house in with a slightly different tone of voice. I thought they were going to say like, you know, 500,000 or something. And they said, three million as well. So they're at least now. Yeah. What sort of conversation would that be? If they go, Jose, you're five million and you go, what the fuck is he two million more than me?

Mark, then it causes tension between you two and your first thought is, hang on a minute, hang on, let's work this one out. Just for the benefit of your listeners, if you ever find yourself in this situation, whoever is charged with doing the negotiations will do. It's a golden rule that you never negotiate just for one.

personal time, you always say, right, it's the whole job lot or nothing. The thing that will worry me about Jose, Colin, would be if he started behaving towards the kidnappers in a way that I didn't want him to behave.

He didn't really, he was a little bit more assertive with them than I was. I was Mr Nice, kind of teaching the kidnap gang leader use of a bit of English and things like that. And he was Mr, not quite so nice, Mr sort of slightly more assertive. And I think on the, on about the first or second night as we were being marched through the mountains, well at one point we got very, very thirsty. They ran out of water and it was hot weather.

We're both getting quite dehydrated and eventually he turned around and said to them, fuck you, I'm not walking another fucking step, unless I get some water. And one of them, this guy, an old fella called Miro, also known as the old bastard, for reasons that will become apparent.

He pulled his gun on him and, like, so it was like, you know, you just get fucking moving. Jose just sat down, I think, and said, I'll pull your fucking gun and shoot it, shoot me if you want. I need water. And then there was a sort of murmur amongst them, like, and I think we dimly heard the word fuck mentioned as if they were a bit like shocked that he didn't. He swore at us. Maybe one of them would say, actually, Jose's got a valid point there. It's really hot and baking.

don't really know what happened, but anyway, off, uh, someone went, um, and these mountains were like, I think it must have been the dry season, but I mean, everywhere was dried up with her beds. It was as bone driers anywhere I've ever seen, but someone went off and duly returned with a full cherry can of water, which we then sipped in the dark.

And I had a big long draft of it, and then passed over to Hosey, who then also had a big long draft of it, and then suddenly choked. And then like sort of spat someone out into his hand. What? And I said, what's that mate? And someone's shot on a torch. It was a dead lizard.

Oh, for fuck's sake. They're trying to fuck how they're able to be and paint the arse. No, I think it was just they'd start the water in the stream, in this pool, which is possibly a bit stagnant, and there was a dead lizard in there, and it was dark, and nobody really noticed. I know it was deliberate, but I don't... Eat the short straw, that would be it. I don't do that lovely refreshing glass of water, and then he's eating a fucking dead lizard.

But also being English to the last, I sort of had a bit more work and then felt obliged to offer it round to everybody else. Actually, the people who have been present here. Go on lads. They were there with our finder, we don't need any. But yeah, he was a little bit more sort of assertive, but it would have been a real problem, and I can guess it probably is, if you have two people of very different characters, one wants to kind of give the kidnappers

Jip and so on, you know, because there's a risk that that will then come back on both of you, you know But you do have to be trying to establish certain boundaries so that you get treated reasonably way It might not be too what would be too sort of passive as it were. I would very much like to hear more about this old bastard. I'll ask you about that old bastard after this little ad break

You mentioned this mirror, this old bastard, this old guy. Was he literally old? He was, yeah, he was about, I mean, it's hard to tell him. I would have put him at about 50, 55 or something. He looked like a grandpa, he was bald. I think his job was basically to

try and make it clear, you know, sort of act as an enforcer every now and again. And from fairly early on, they made contact with our office, the telegraph in London, and they were demanding money. I'm not sure they were getting anywhere with that. The office made it fairly clear, no, we're not paying mansims for journalists, et cetera, et cetera.

It's fine mate, Avam. We've got another coming through. Let's obviously lay on his deadlines. And so about a fortnight in, what had previously been a fairly cordial atmosphere with the games of chess and everything else, slightly began to change. And you know, your office isn't doing what it should do. And at this point, this guy, the old bastard, Miro, he's attitude began to change.

And he used to spend this entire time eyeballing me from the far side of the cave. Every time I looked up, he'd be sat in a different spot where he was, but he'd always be like, sometimes from a far off, sometimes kind of quite close, just doing a bit of psychological intimidation.

And then we had a phone call back to the office, one of these proof-of-life phone calls that we would make every five days, which was in the kidnap, as interest. This is their way of proving, you know, we were in there, you know, that they had us. And it also proved to the office that we were still alive. And so we would chat to somebody at the other end of the phone for five minutes or something, just saying, yeah, hi, yeah, we're still here. Anyway, on one of these calls about a fortnight in, they would make them from a top of a mountain where they get a decent mobile phone reception.

And just before I was handed the phone, the old bastard, he started cooking his rifle, his colashnikov in a very sort of theatrical fashion, you know, sort of drawing the bolt back like this. And that is very much ready for when I get on the phone, he's going to do something nasty.

And I'm thinking, oh Christ, he's either gonna fire the gun in my ear, or I'm always gonna belt over the face or something like that, so that I'm screaming down the phone. Just get me the fuck out of here, pay him the fucking money, whatever.

And on that occasion, nothing happened. In fact, his mates then came up and dragged him off while he was stood in front of me. Come on, you old bastard. Leave me alone. He's phoning home. And then they sort of dragged him down the hillside out of sight. And so I had a brief conversation with the officer.

I knew that they had one of their, their translator was the pirate translator, was listening in. So I was a bit careful about what I said, but I think things are getting a bit heated here, you know, they're sort of threatening me a little bit and so on. And then we got back to the cave and then this guy, the old bus was that by then was sitting happily rather campfire joking with the other two.

So we couldn't quite work out what was going on, whether they'd genuinely worried that he was getting carried away, or whether the whole idea was to have a bit of theatre to us. So it's like, look, we dragged him off this time, but seriously, people around here are getting a bit annoyed at your office, so just try and get things resolved before folk get carried away, and we can't be responsible for them. It was all a bit confusing, but it was bloody frightening.

And from that moment onwards, I was like, you know, if this doesn't work out, these guys may well start torturing us. And every time I looked at the bloke from that point, you know, every time he was within view, which was most of the time, it's just like, oh, Jesus Christ.

They don't need to torture you to put the fear of God in you, basically. That was the kind of the atmosphere that prevailed for the last few weeks of the whole thing. So that was with your office. Those conversations have been happened, say, the office is aware of what's happened to you. You've been kidnapped. They're asking for a ransom. What about your family? What about your friends and family? No, I spoke to them. So did the office tell them? Yeah.

And then they would relay it back, yeah. That is a standard procedure in these cases, is that what they tend to do is bring in professional hostage negotiators and one of the things is that there's only one line of communication with us, them and the kidnappers and you. The calls are pretty business-like. You get occasional messages from families saying, you know, I hope you're okay with thinking of you. You can pass one back to something brief.

But the idea is that if they generally keep families in the dark largely as to what is going on, there's very much a limited information flow. For example, my family didn't find out anything at the time about the threats that we were getting. And the idea of that is really just that it keeps the job of negotiation simple.

And it also avoids any potentially very stressful situations for the family if they're ringing you and they hear that you're in very difficult emotional circumstances. And families find it hard being in the dark, but in the situation is probably somewhere better to be in the dark than that should be actively involved in it. Because if they knew what was going on at some other time, it would have just done their head even more. So it's not much of a choice either way.

It's part of me that when I watch films and stuff like that and in these situations, I'll be like, if moves his point in a clash to comfort me, I'll go, yeah, fucking, I'm just going to take, I'm going to flip it, flip it, like Jackie Chan in Rush Hour, you know, when he does that gun move, where you point the gun.

and it's back at him. I'll be like, well, obviously you fuck it. Why is he not grabbing the gun? Why didn't you grab the gun? Obviously you grab it and then be like, yeah, who's in charge now motherfuckers? But that's what I think when I watch situations like that. That's what I do. Now I've actually met someone who's been in that situation. You've described that situation to me. I go, there's no fucking way I'm doing any of that. I'm just gonna go, yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir. You want me to polish your shoes? Want me to wipe your own ass?

I'll do anything for you, because I'd be scared shitless. What about you? I find myself wondering, Colin, how you pass a tie. That's what I asked about what the conversations you have with Josay. Of all the emotions you think you'd have when you were a kid in that, you wouldn't think about boredom. You think about abject terror. But were you bored at times?

Yes, I mean, as I said, really, really bored. The first few days, like Jose and I sort of spent bonding, really, it was like a classic sort of buddy bonding movie sort of thing, where you chat a bit and you know, you sort of say, right, we're in a bit of a weird situation. How did you get into journalism? How did you notice? How did you do that? And we had a sort of bonding moment. I think we were talking about people we various colleagues in

foreign news journalism that we knew and stuff and the real breakthrough actually came across when we were talking about some other photographer who we both realized was a right pompous twat. It's not like bitching about finding somebody you can bitch about to sort of bring out the laughter and there was lots of room for aerodyte conversation. We'd also talk about our sex lives.

our lives, our parents, blah, blah, you know, basically everything and anything under the sun. And then as time went on, though, you start the ration conversation a bit. So we came across something interesting, like, you know, we're talking about a Western movies or something like that. We were both quite fans of Western, we said, well, hang on, we'll stop. We won't talk about Westerns now. We'll save that for this evening. We'll have a Western night. A Western night.

Are that excellent idea? It's kind of, yeah, tonight's western night. Yeah. It's where I would do a crime thriller. Yeah, it was, yeah, it was like, it was like, not unlike you two in a podcast. Yeah, you know, and then you'd have, okay, and then tomorrow night, then we had an evening with Quentin Tarantino, so on and so forth. So you ration your conversation, but the problem is that after a while, I mean,

We sustain this for about a fortnight and you know got to know each other very well and I realize that this guy is actually you know far from just being a tolerable kidnapping companion is actually a really really nice fella are making a friend for life here something really special actually which actually you know kept you going through all this other grimness that this is something that we can take out this but after you know fortnight and three weeks and the conversation begins to lag and that is when it gets

a bit scary because you start spending hours in the morning, you don't have the effort to converse, that's when time starts slowing down, a minute seems like an hour, a day and so on and so forth. And you daydream quite a lot, you think about things in your, you think about sort of

School your old teachers at school girls used to fancy at school things you've done in your life stories You've done anything else whatever but you know even that becomes difficult after a bit and that's when it I suppose it begins to feel a bit like being in solitary confinement Without any distractions because your companion is no longer really kind of entertaining you and you've got nothing to occupy your mind with and that's why you sort of start thinking like I

How much longer can I deal with this before I start going to do lally? Yeah. I found myself wondering, Colin, if you could play, this is a ridiculous question. If you could play any games, you might be like, right, let's see who can hit that rock with these stones.

Yeah, we did about that. So we had to start off with about day three, we made a chess set out of bits of cigarette foil and pebbles. Didn't look like a proper chess set. So you wrap the stones in cigarette pipes. You take a little tiny pebble, then you wrap some cigarette foil around it, one light.

Pawn's a lot of spot, a little kind of wispy smile, and then you make a hook out of the bit of cigarette and foil for some other pieces. I'm really disappointed, actually. Andy do frame in fucking Shawshank. He managed to make... You must have had loads of rocks available to you. Did you not have a rock hammer?

No, carve it. I didn't think about it much. You think I'm sure, Shank. So we made a chess set, but I mean, I think that there was a bit of a sort of bird man of Alcatraz trying for an adversity sort of thing. But after a few games of chess, it got us started getting bored. We did used to do it just to sort of bit of men all. It was better. Well, that was the other thing. He was better.

I think he quite enjoyed it, but of course he did, after a bit. Imagine what he was saying about you. He was like, I'm going to have to let him win a couple now. I can see him chalking up on the inside of the cave wall with a tally chart. How many wins he'd got? After a bit, we then did a whole load of letters on bits of cigarette floor, and I thought we'll do countdown instead.

So I thought that would work really well. One of the captors to do the theme music. Well, I did do the theme music. I just said that you get 30 seconds. I thought, well, I gave it some minutes just to make it a bit longer.

Oh, let's treat ourselves. Let's have an extra minute or so. He was like, you know, I'm going to put on his accent. He was like, oh, what the fuck is this? You play this as a game on TV in Britain. What the fuck is boring, man? What the fuck? What is this? And you're going, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam.

All right, yeah. So yeah, I'll count down on Lee, like it took a long time to get the letters done. Your captors must, they must have told me to go, no one to know what's the fucking paper I'm talking about, he should have lives and then not.

And then I think we got about two games out of it, and that was it, unfortunately. Countdown was not a success. We had a press-ups competition with the kidnappers. I beat the old bastard. Now this explains why he's in a heavy stroke.

where we were sort of crazy golf, where we got sticks and whacked to a lime, like a lime, as in a lemon, but not a lemon, have you sure what I mean? So we just had some limes, I don't know where they came from. The description of that lime was fantastic. So you've just said, so yeah, we had like a lime, you know, like a lemon, but like a lime. So you read a lime.

Otherwise you would have wanted to know where did the limes come from. And the truth is I can't remember. Because it was basically goat meat, rice and limes. So yeah, we'd kind of hit the limes around the kind of cave. It wasn't...

It didn't really work very well. What was the path? What was the path? What was the path? I don't know, it wasn't very easy. I think it was whatever you chose to make it. And then I think games-wise, that was about it really. Sing songs. Sing songs, no. They wouldn't allow it or? No. And then the other thing was talking about football with the kidnappers, which was the only thing that they

had any kind of our only lingua friend. You know, I suppose. That's going to say, oh my. No, Arsenal. Arsenal. So on about the fourth day, our first proper conversation with one of the kidnappers, a guy called Pfizer, he was a young kid about 18, 19, and he came up to us and he said, you, from where are you? Ah, we turn. We turn good.

Manchester United, David Beckham, T.R.E.R.E.R.E. And I was like, oh, boy, this guy knows football. So I thought, well, we'll try and build up a rapport here. So I will try and show my knowledge of football. Unfortunately, I know sod all about football, more of a snooker person. So I went...

Have you heard of Ronnie O'Sullivan? Or Terry Griffiths? Steve Davis? He's a DJ now, I think. He is, yeah. So, I said to Mark, Tia Rionri, Tia Rionri Arsenal. And his face sort of clouded over, over said, you know, he said, ah, no, Tia Rionri Barcelona.

And my colleague, Jose, said, yeah, he's right, teary on where you transferred to Barcelona last year. So suddenly, you're sort of in this situation where you've got a kidnapper in the mountains of Somalia, correcting you on your knowledge of the transfer market, yeah. And there's no nice way to say this. Then you would go off and have to wipe your ass on a stone.

Yes. Well, not stone, as it happened. There was, as you would have imagined in these... How have you got... Have you segued from that to that? Fuck's sake, Tom. So, yeah, we're out in the middle of... Literally, in the middle of Norway, you know, in these caves, in these mountains, there was clearly no toilets. So, you had to go and do your business sort of in sort of a convenient spot around the corner from the cave.

And the first time we went, we sort of said, look, we need to shit. What do we do? And they just put one of them, sort of poked up our rock and said, yeah, use that for whatever. It was like, I'm not using a rock. And so we said, have you got any tissue? And they turned out they had. I tried using a rock. Well, it didn't really work. And you don't really want to go. Well, what you actually do is you get a bit of water and then you just stick it in your hand. Like it rains.

But I mean, yeah, so you get very used to the sight of your own, you know, stuff and your friends, you know, products as well. Tell us about this gunfight, Colin.

Not long, I think it was about the day after the old bastard had kind of given the threats down the phone. The next day, a couple of other fellas, other sort of Somali guys came to the cave. And we used to get people dropping in every now and again, you know, and they'd come in and they'd have a quick gawk at us, you know, like the sort of animals in the zoo. And then they'd head off. And we never really knew any of these people were. Our guess was that they were probably local

Klansman or herders or something like that who owned or whose territory we were on, and whom the kidnappers were perhaps paying a certain amount of money to rent a cave. And to turn a blind eye. But we never really knew. And sometimes the atmosphere would be friendly and tea would be poured. So I come in here.

other times on this occasion it was notable, there was no tea poured here and everybody was like, okay, right? And there was a sort of, it was a bit of a kind of conversation between these two guys and our fellas, you know, it was about a dozen of our guys there. Then suddenly we heard the voices getting raised and then there was a bit of pushing and shoving and then somebody, I can't remember with us a lot or the other lot, pulled a pistol.

fired into the roof of the cave. Caves are not good places to fire guns into, because of the ricochet risk. This bullet went parallel like that. Ricochet around the place grazed the mattress where Jose and I were sitting. Not the mattress. Then there was further kerfuffle, and these two guys got shoved out of the cave.

and told to, you know, leave. And we couldn't really see what was happening at that point, but they were chased out the cave, and then, like, about five seconds later, we had sort of several gunshots. And I think we somehow tweeted that it was a lot of chasing this lot away. It wasn't like they were actually, you know, you couldn't hear screaming or anything. They don't mean shot dead. It was kind of like, you know, handbags that do on a bit, but it was still a bit, you know, like, this is getting a bit out of hand.

And then a few minutes later from the top of a sort of a ridge, a mountain ridge that overlooked the mouth of our cave, which was quite wide. It was more just an overhang in the rocks. We saw two other fellas pointing down with guns who started shooting down into the cave, clearly mates of the guys who've just been told to clear off. And so at that point, that sort of bullets are coming up. It's just like one of those wild west movies you see where people are shooting each other in a valley. So you did the bullet noises while Colin tells the story.

You were calling the bullet noises were really good. I was just about saying fucking out. He's perfected them. Now, that was a cat. Was there a cat in the cave? No, I'll ignore that one then. This sort of thing. It's good to see you taking it seriously. It's normal, yeah. Of course, Tom, he's telling the story. I'm not doing piano.

Anyway, so at that point, we're sort of thinking, shit, this is getting a bit out of hand. Not so much because I thought we were about to get shot at any minute. But if they're fighting with another clan, whatever time they're going to have for negotiating with us, it's going to be put on hold.

for the time being. Also, who is to say that this other clan haven't come to try and steal us off them? We don't know what they were arguing about, but it was clearly about us, because when they were arguing every note, again, they would point to us as if to sort of say, yeah, it's all their fault or something or whatever. So then, for some reason, while we were sort of tucked in one side of the wall of the cave, the gang decided it would be better if we were, for some reason, if we were out of the cave, ready to escape if necessary. So one fellow who had a big sort of

belt-fed machine gun you know in his arms and like bullets wrapped round his shoulders like Rambo took us out of the cave and then made us hide in a rock or just behind a big sort of clump of boulders which also happened to be the spot where we'd been shitting for the last three weeks and then said and he said it just pointed without looking too close he said get down in that ditch there or pointed get down there which was literally the spot you're sort of saying lie down amongst your own shit

because there's bullets whizzing overhead. So it was a choice of either lie down in your own poo and other people's or sort of stand up and just getting your head blown off. Easy choice. It's fair to say that was a low point. This is the whole thing really. And that was kind of, you know, we may end up dying here. You know, this is bad. You know, there's a gunfight going on and Christ knows what else.

Anyway, these people then duly disappeared and we never saw them again. And I do remember thinking, I was kind of cheering our guys on at that point. I said, yeah, you know, go on. And the old bastard was doing his thing. He was directing the guys. I was like, yeah, you know, we're beating these fellas off, you know, coming up a go, if you're thinking hard enough.

We never found out what it was about. They didn't tell us. Again, they were very calm about it. Once these fellas disappeared off, rather than all having a massive go at each other, they all just sat down, counsel of war, very calm and very quiet, chatted about.

What what was clearly what was going on, but there was no sort of you know, it was all your fault or you know, why didn't you do this or that you know, no panic absolutely nothing Which is quite impressive. I mean, if you'd been guarded by a bunch of you know professional bodyguards in this country And something like that that ever happened you'd have expected heated voices not a race voice in the room

We've made a lot of jokes and made light of a pretty serious situation because I guess it's an easy way to deal with it. You've already spoken about the sort of stuff you did while you were being held captive in order to pass the time and the thing and you think, well, why aren't you just sitting there, shitting yourself the whole time and being scared? Because actually you've got to keep your mind going somehow. You've got to keep your mate going somehow. So you make light of it.

There's plenty of time for shooting yourself, anyway. Literally and metaphorically, yeah. Surely there were points where you were genuinely terrified and thought, I ain't getting out of this. As it dragged on, to certainly say, you kind of go into a survival mode and you don't let yourself dwell on that too much because if you do, then you start unraveling.

It's a bit like the surface, they say that if you're caught in really bad surf and you get dragged under the water by a big wave, you've just got to kind of relax and eventually you hope that you will float to the surface. If you start to fight and scramble to get to the surface, you'll run out of oxygen very quickly because you'll be using what oxygen your body has. So you just have to kind of go with the flow a little bit.

I don't think there were any moments of utter panic and terror, particularly partly, I think, because we knew these guys were after money. They weren't intending to kill us. If it had been in Iraq or somewhere where I had worked previously and we'd been kidnapped, that would have been a very different situation. You'd have been expecting

that you would have got executed in all likelihood. That would have been much, much, much, much worse. So in terms of the sort of, the gravity of these things, it was at the lesser end of what it could be really. What did you miss most? Booze, decent food, my girlfriend being at home. That was number three at the list. Was that the official list you gave him when you got back?

Haven't you haven't eaten goats since then, I'm imagining. No, no, no, no. Actually, that faux pas with my girlfriend, that's not the worst kidnapping faux pas there has ever been. I remember meeting her, I interviewed a sea captain, a British sea captain, who was on her, whose ship was hijacked. He had a Russian crewman.

who was asked three proof-of-life questions at one point. The first one was, what was the address of the house where you first lived with your wife? The second one was, where did you go on your wedding anniversary? And the third one was, what is the name of your wife's first friend? He could not answer any of those requests.

You're in the clear, there's always someone worse. Yes, exactly, yeah. So when did you first think that you might be rescued or you might escape? Well, so we had these occasional phone calls home and then, you know, sometimes it was like, I'm sorry, we're, you know, we're not getting very far and they wouldn't really tell you what they were doing. And then later was like, yeah, there's reasons to be optimistic. You might not have to be there much longer, which is about three weeks in or so.

then at the right of the end where they hold up they said there was a deal had been reached to get us released and then it wasn't and the kid that was suddenly said no we've had an argument in our gang and we will hold you for another year which was a bit of a down point.

We had no idea why this was and we had my hostage negotiated. The guy from London was like on the phone and kind of go, what the fuck is this? If he's getting wound up, it's clear. Things are not clearly not going well. The very next day though, some day I was like, no, it's fine. It's all back on. Kidnap is all grinning, et cetera, et cetera. So that was the, it really is one of these things you expect a lot of false starts.

So it wasn't until the moment where you could sort of see there was a change in the mood music that we were finally sort of told, right, you were going to go home tomorrow and there's a plan to get you released. And then you said, my god, I may have a life still yet to lead. There is sort of life, a second chance, it's like being reborn almost.

What did the actual handover approach, how did that actually look? So there's always a bit of a fraught moment with any, I think any kidnapper really because it's the moment where the kidnappers have to show themselves and therefore it's the moment where they might get trapped by the police or whatever. So they tend to be very jumpy. They're also worried about getting ripped off about handing you over and then not getting whatever it is that they were wanting back in return. So it's a bit like being in a major league drug deal.

and you are the drugs as it were, there's every chance that someone can go wrong, lots of people with it, she did a very trigger happy, very jumpy. So on that day, I think a dawn, we were sort of shuffled off, we'd totally leave the cave and we

Drove to some spot or walk to some spot where we then had a rendezvous with some other guys. Our guys fired their Kalashnikov three times and then heard somebody else doing the same thing on the other side of a valley and we were like, oh, what's going on here? They said, no, I don't want it to signal. Then all of a sudden, about 50 of their mates turned up. So there's a gang of about 50, 60 guys.

rocket-propelled grenades, trucks mounted with machine guns, all that sort of thing, small army, basically. They then drove us up to the top of a mountain pass, where down at the bottom there was a group of clan elders who, from another clan, who were going to kind of act as intermediaries to pick us up. I don't know why they, you know, what the dynamics of that were, but

And they said, walk down to those guys down there, down that mountain pass, and they will take you back to Bassasso, the town where we were first nabbed. So off we went, and they said, put your hands up like that, don't do anything stupid, and we're walking right behind you. So you're sort of walking down this pass, you've got all these armed guys on one side, God knows who, like, waiting down at the bottom, and you're thinking, like, some policeman is going to, you know,

fire a sniper shot at any minute at one of the kidnappers, it's all going to end up in a bloodbath. Luckily it didn't. They got us down at the bottom and they handed us over and then this old fella sort of clown elder of some sort in a suit, wearing a suit and trainers said

You're welcome. You're free to go. Come with us. And I think I sort of said, have you got a fag? Luckily he did. And then that was it, really, yeah. We drove off. There was a little bit at the end just where you sort of think, right? So this is it. You know, I turned to Musa, the gang leader. I thought, you know, is he going to sort of say anything? I mean, what do you say? Do you sort of say, like, well, thank you for having me.

It's been interesting or something. Yeah, or whatever. Yeah, you know, you've been very professional with, you know, we're not minus anything because it already is like those sort of people you read about in the movies or whatever. And he just, you know, as I was sort of debating the protocols of this sort of unfamiliar situation, he just turned away and walked up the hill and, you know, not so much as a remote, you know, socially awkward.

Yeah, yeah, I think it was in Paris maybe. And then that was that and we then sort of drove back into town and back to Basas and then we sort of picked up by the Spanish ambassador, no less, who, because Jose was Spanish, he flew in on a plane that I think he borrowed from the EU actually, from Nairobi and picked us up.

in a jet or private jet where you could smoke in the jet. I don't smoke anymore, but I did for the duration of the kidnapping. Understandable. Yeah. And so you suddenly go to like rock star level. Did you get shit face on the flight? No. I had a tuna sandwich, which was amazing after six weeks of goat meat and rice, just basically tuna sandwich with a bit of mayo days on it and it tasted like something that Heston Blumenthal had created. It was just this amazing sort of

Flavors star-busting in your mouth. Tune the sandwich. But we did get drunk when we got back, but the office made me write a story first about what that was. 300 words of blast for the front, double page spread inside. Can we turn it around in a couple of hours, please call in that sort of chat? It wasn't quite like that, but it wasn't 800 words for, it was going to be 1500 words for the following day.

Well, no, the day after, they generally said, you don't have to file this for the following day because it's already, you missed first edition. But for the following day, can you do 1500 words?

Yeah, alright, you know. And then they said also for the weekend we'd like a nice, you know, big long piece. So, oh, Jesus, yeah, alright. Listen, I've got to get on the plane by the way, because we're just, you know, it's about to leave. While it was a bit like, you know, I want to just get fucking pissed for the next week.

It was actually quite a good idea because you'd had everybody looking after you and busting their balls for you in the office for six weeks. And then suddenly you could do something in return. It was very good for the cat's paws because during the day, rather than sitting around, just getting maudling and so on, I had to actually sort of get my head down. I hope it was cat for the buck's paws.

What is it? Butter for the cat's paws. Do you know what it means? No. Do you know? No. If you move a cat from one house to another, cats don't like being moved from one place and they get distressed. So you put butter on the cat's paws. The cat then, when it gets to the new house, it licks, spans all the time licking the butter off its paws.

And it gets so preoccupied doing that, that it forgets that it's in this new house. And then by the time it's finished licking the butter off its pores, it feels like the house is the new normal. I thought you meant because with butter on its pores, you couldn't grip the floor. So you could remove it from one property.

I thought it's a common saying. Your explanation of that saying is brilliant and I love that saying now. What you've just done of the reason they put butter on the cat's paws is so they could drag it out of the hat. It can't grip. It's got greasy paws. Why would that apply to my... I mean, I didn't want to be... Why is he buttering his hands on a plane?

It was like they had to track me out of the talent points, yeah. Well, I'm back to the right fucking idiot. I think you're slightly sidetracked there. Yeah. There's a little bit of catharsis, but as I say, it was more just a good sort of bridging exercise between coming down, coming back and feeling very elated to be freed, but also a little bit kind of this may all be a little bit weird to be back and sort of

Then spending the next few days not really thinking about anything other than getting it all down on paper and then after that, you get the rush of meeting a deadline and you stuff in the paper and then that was that really. It doesn't strike me that you have nightmares about it.

No, I don't have any PTSD at all. There's reasons for that. We weren't held for that long. We weren't tortured. I had company, so the boredom and the isolation didn't get too oppressive. If you vary any of those things, then that's when you start getting into your PTSD.

I've got two possibly three final questions, if that's okay Tom. Please Jay. I wasn't able to get any of these in earlier. I was going to know the button with the cat's paws. That actually is fantastic. I've never had it before. Have you heard of Hope, Doth, Butterno, Parsonips?

I don't know what it means anyway, so it's really pointless to be saying that. Did any of your captors have an eye patch? No, none of them. Did any of them have a missing leg? Is your real name Colin Freeman?

Yes, because it just strikes me that like someone who's held by pirates, that is then subsequently released and you become a free man. It's just very convenient. No, there has been a lot of comments over the years of the free one, a good name for being all that. Yes, that's always been your name. That's always been my... From the birth of you to the day that you live now. Yes, and it is much commented.

It's funny actually, whenever I go travelling around the world, there's a lot of countries in the world where people, passport, you know, a guy at passport, can say, oh, free man, is that, that is your name, yes. It's a name that clearly in some parts of the world, you know, people sort of, it has a certain amount of significance. It's genuinely what you're going to say. I go all around the world and people look at my passport and they go, Freeman, are you related to Morgan? No.

Oh, so that's probably why my questions were left till the end, because had they been put in it all, I'm pretty sure Colin would have stopped speaking to us and left immediately. Quite rightly so. Thank you for answering my questions at the end there. You're welcome. But more importantly, thank you for coming in and talking to us about being kidnapped. No, thank you very much. Sure. Thank you for showing interest, et cetera, et cetera.

Colin, you've written two fantastic books. One is called Kidnapped, Life as a Somali Pirate Hostage, which is about your story, and you've written another called Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea, which is another extraordinary story. What is that one about?

Basically it's about what happens when you get caught by Somali pirates and there is no one to come and bail you out and rescue you. It's a story of three ship crews who all from separate ships, they're all hijacked separately and their owners did not have any money to pay the ransoms and so these poor sailors were stuck in captivity not for six weeks like me but for between three and five years.

And also, they were, quite a few of them were tortured, in some cases, very badly. One or two were executed and about eight of them starved to death. And then a very brave and public-spirited man called John Steed, who used to be a colonel in the British Army, who worked for the UN in counter-piracy in Kenya, took it upon himself to rescue them. And the book is sort of really an account of the

various obstacles and thrills and spills that he had to go through in order to do that. It was not the straightforward case of just passing a tin around a few millionaires and getting them to raise money for a ransom. It was a lot more complicated than that. Joe, that sounds fantastic to me. Fucking hell. I don't know if I want to delve into that one.

Yeah, well, I wrote it partly because it looked like, you know, this makes what we've just been talking about look like. I think it was the right decision to make that the second book. Yeah. So I think if you've done that as the first book, then your stories. Yes. Yes. Meanwhile. Yeah. Carly, thank you so much, mate. You're welcome.

See there you go, I told you that Colin was a great storyteller and you could probably tell by Joe's reaction and my reaction that we were absolutely blown away by how matter of fact he was about what an extraordinary experience that was. If you would like to listen to another classic, simply search the back catalogue away to week and we'll put another one right at the very top of your podcast feed for you. See you then.

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