I was watching a documentary a decade ago on History Channel I think about real life covert ops missions.
There was one story they told which I can’t find verification of on the internet but interested me greatly. Basically the story went post 9/11 the US was tracking a shipment of nuclear materials out of Pakistan. A cargo ship left a Pakistani port under constant US surveillance and upon reaching international water a US special forces team (think US Navy SEALs) stealthily boarded the ship, found the nuclear cargo in a container, and since they couldn’t extract it they put some mines in the side of the ship and sank it making it look like an accident. The story was classified until 10 years later.
I only bring this up now because the first episode of the new season of Jack Ryan has an incredibly similar premise and I knew I saw it somewhere else.
It was a game section in call of duty : modern warfare 4 (2007 /8 release) which was basically the same plot, spec ops ( SAS in this case) board a ship carrying nuclear material, you get on but just escape as unknown forces skink the vessel before you can secure the cargo.
That’s the only place I have heard that story before for what it is worth
This part seems rather unbelievable.
Surely the Pakistani forces would have had some alert guards with this shipment? If the US forces are able to come alongside undetected, board the ship and gain control of it (so quickly that nobody can send a radio distress call) … but then “couldn’t extract if” – why not?
How was it going to be unloaded when the ship reached its intended destination? It was most likely loaded in a standard shipping container (just to avoid attracting attention when it was loaded, if for nothing else). If the US forces had watched it being loaded, they knew how it was packaged, and surely would have brought along the appropriate shipping cranes, etc. needed to transfer it.
This story doesn’t make sense.
And if they did sink the ship with mines, what happened to the crew? Did they kill them all and dump the bodies elsewhere? Pretty suspicious for there to be no bodies found on the sunken ship. And no survivors in lifeboats – ships don’t sink instantaneously. A ship containing a valuable cargo like this suddenly disappearing would get quite a bit of attention.
…and if it was declassified, it would have been one of the biggest news stories of the decade. Pakistan exporting nuclear materials? Look at how we reacted to North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and Libya trying to get nukes. There’s no way we would have just let this slide.
It was Al-Qaeda or a similar group who loaded it so no actual Pakistani military. It was in a shipping container and the SEALS found it via Geiger counter. The mines put a slow leak into the side of the cargo ship so the crew had plenty of time to abandon ship.
And yes I’m aware of the Modern Warfare 1 mission but the fact it was so similar to the story makes me think it also took inspiration from that event. I know Modern Warfare came out in 2007ish but I knew of the event when I played Modern Warfare, and MW isn’t shy about stealing from real world events for it’s missions.
So you have a cite? This is factual questions, so I have to ask. And yes I know you are looking for conformation, but its been days and no one is finding this.
This sounds more like a BS story made up by the Busch administration to justify the fear they wanted us to feel
If your source is a History Channel “documentary” you saw a decade ago, it’s just as likely that the documentary got its inspiration from the video game.
After the fiasco of finding no nuclear material in Iraq, if the Bush administration had credible evidence of Al fuckin’ Qaeda having its hands on nuclear materials, we would never have heard the end of it. Whatever it is you think you remember, in the absence of any confirmation, the conclusion must be that you’re misremembering the episode.
It appears that the New Yorker reported on a cargo ship in 2005, departing from Sri Lanka, set off a radition detector but left port before it could be examined.
They seached four ships headed to ports in North America and Europe and found nothing. The fifth ship had scrap metal heading to Asia. It was examined and found to just be mislabeled radioactive waste, not nearly enough for a dirty bomb.
If anything, the history channel turned this into a more sensational story than it actually was in order to draw viewers in. Imagine that.
I remember seeing the same show. It’s pretty much as the OP describes, but it’s not a documentary. It’s an ex special forces guy describing and acting out how his unit would have handled a series of hypothetical missions.
I’m more concerned, now that I’ve started watching the new Jack Ryan, why they are talking about Russia moving more troops into Ukraine without mentioning a war. Was the writing team making an assumption based on last summer?
Yes, they wrote the script last year, though the plot only makes sense in the context of an ongoing Ukraine War already being a thing thus increasing West/East tensions to a flashpoint.