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Sept. 18, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
51:24
Edition 664 - Stephen Davis
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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast.
My name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, change of the seasons looking out the window now, bit of a breeze blowing.
The trees are still green, but I think before long they're going to be turning brown because it's getting cooler.
Definitely this morning as I'm recording these words, I'm recording this at half past nine in the morning, there's a bit of a chill in my apartment where I'm doing these recordings.
So that, I think, is a sign of things to come.
And I know that in the southern hemisphere, got many listeners in places like New Zealand, Australia, South Africa.
You're going to be getting the change there, too.
I think it's moving from very rainy conditions for you to something warmer, as you will know.
So we had our long, hot summer, and now who knows what the winter will bring.
It's enough weather talk.
This edition of The Unexplained is a conversation that I recorded for my radio show when I did it from the very place that I'm sitting right now when the show was three hours long and very different from what it is now as a TV show.
It is the story of a maritime disaster.
A terrible one.
One of the worst in European history.
The sinking of the ferry the MS Estonia.
Wednesday, the 28th of September, 1994.
Very early in the morning, about 10 to 1 in the morning, between then and 10 to 2 in the morning, this whole thing unfolded.
The ship was crossing the Baltic from Tallinn in Estonia to Stockholm in Sweden.
The sinking is recorded in all of the books as being one of the worst maritime disasters and up there with the likes of Titanic.
A lot of people died, 852.
And questions about how and why this happened are still being asked all these years on.
Guest on this edition of The Unexplained then is that conversation that was originally broadcast on the radio, I think something like 18 months or so ago, with Stephen Davis, New Zealand-based investigative journalist who spent a lot of his time investigating this subject.
Stephen Davis is a man very well known around the world and indeed in his native New Zealand.
He's based in Dunedin.
And I think you'll find what he has to tell you on this edition of The Unexplained, the kind of material that will trigger questions in your mind.
We can't come to any definitive conclusions about this, but anybody around the world is at liberty to ask questions, and Stephen Davis is.
Thank you to Webmaster Adam for his work on this.
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It makes it easier for me since I'm now booking my own shows and finding that a bit of a challenge because it's never administration.
As those who know me, admin is not my thing.
And never really has been, I have to say.
You know, I may be good at some things, I don't know, but administration, I'm lousy at.
And I'm the first one to admit it.
Okay, let's hear this conversation now.
Stephen Davis is in Dunedin, New Zealand, and we're talking about the sinking of the ferry Estonia in September 1994.
After midnight, the kind of conversations we have can be a little more expansive, and we can go into areas that perhaps we wouldn't go into at the beginning of the show, which tends to move a little faster.
We're going to talk about something now which could be called a conspiracy theory, although the person I'm going to be speaking with, I think, would probably refute that claim.
But this particular story in this particular case seems to abound with conspiracy theories.
There are many loose ends about this tragedy.
It's the sinking of the ferry, the MS Estonia.
It sank as it was crossing from a place called Tallinn to Stockholm in September 1994, killing 852 people.
An enormous loss of life, a terrible maritime tragedy in Europe.
An investigation in 1997 found the ship's bow door locks had failed in a storm, but there is new underwater footage that they found of this wreck that appears to show a previously unrecorded four-meter hole in the hull of the ship.
Why was that there?
How could that happen?
There have been various theories, and there are a lot of people who will not let this story lie, even though it's 27 years.
They feel that answers are deserved.
Investigative journalist and campaigner against misinformation and disinformation, Stephen Davis in New Zealand, is online to us now.
He wrote a book about this, and his research into what really happened with the Estonia is ongoing.
Stephen, thank you very much indeed.
Hello, Howard.
How are you?
I'm very good, and thank you for coming on, Stephen.
As I said, the Estonia case is replete with conspiracy theories, isn't it?
Yes, and Estonia is a very interesting example of a modern trend where state actors deliberately generate and spread conspiracy theories to obscure and hide an actual conspiracy.
And this is a perfect example of that.
Of course, where information is incomplete, in any accident or disaster or happening, sometimes the gap or the void is filled by people who put in their own claims.
Absolutely.
I've studied conspiracy theories for a number of years and misinformation and disinformation for a book, for a new course I'm teaching here at the University of Otago.
And one of the things is that where there are disasters or major events, we expect to know everything about them, But actually, we never do.
And there are always gaps in our knowledge.
And in those gaps, conspiracy theories thrive.
You know, in a major disaster like this, a shipping disaster, where it was an incredibly stressful and dangerous situation, people are scrambling to try and save their lives.
If you interview multiple people about what happened on the ship, you're going to get multiple and often contradictory accounts.
It doesn't mean anybody's lying.
It just means that's the way it is.
You know, Howard Police will tell you that eyewitness testimony is the least reliable form of testimony, and that's true.
So what happens in these disasters is there's horror, and then there's a call to find out what happened, and there are gaps in testimony, there are disputes among experts, engineers, etc.
There are different political considerations.
And in that, two sets of things happened with the Estonia.
One was that all sorts of conspiracy theories flourished.
And also, I believe strongly it enabled governments to bury the actual truth.
Okay, but overlying all of this and underlying all of this is what is a terrible human tragedy.
I mentioned the figure at the top of this conversation, 852 people, is a staggering loss of life.
Yes, it's interesting to look at the coverage of this story.
This was the worst shipping disaster in Europe since the Titanic and one of the major disasters of the century.
And yet it did not receive the coverage that it should have done in much of the Western media because in Britain, for instance, there was one British survivor and one Britain among the dead.
There were no dead Americans.
And most of the dead were Swedes.
For Swedes, it's their 9-11 and other Scandinavians.
So in a way, it turned out to be an uncovered story or an undercovered story.
And that's one of the things that made me interested in it when I started investigating it.
It was the most appalling disaster.
And of course, the Estonia sank very quickly.
It sank more quickly than any roll-on, roll-off ferry has ever sunk.
Just for your listeners who are not familiar with it, the events was at sea, it was stormy.
The bow door came off, the water flooded into the car deck, and it went down very quickly.
Very few survivors, everybody trapped below decks more or less died.
And even if you jumped into the water, the water was so cold that your survivability was just three or four minutes.
I mean, we have to say, Stephen, that this was September.
And I think if listeners are in America or in the United Kingdom, we would think, oh, well, the sea conditions would be quite good and the water would be relatively warm because heat from the summer would be retained.
But this is the Baltic.
Absolutely.
The Baltic, which is stormy and survivability in the water was about three to four minutes, even for a strong swimmer.
And even if you made, some people who actually made the lifeboats ended up dying of hypothermia as well.
So it was a truly appalling tragedy.
And, you know, that's why I became interested in investigating it.
Can you talk to me then about this route and this vessel and that particular voyage?
I think people need to know about this.
This was kind of a bus shuttle, wasn't it, for the region?
Yes, it was.
I mean, the Scandinavians love their ferries, and it was used, for instance, by many Swedes to go to Estonia for weekends, to buy cheap booze on board, to have holidays in the Baltic countries for Estonia, which of course was a new nation arising out of the old Soviet Union.
It was a symbol of pride, a fairy serving the name of the country.
And it used to make the journey back and forth across the Baltic.
And it was, you know, the example I use is the Scandinavians love their fairies as Germans love their cars on the Autobahn.
And because of that, it was, of course, a very symbolic target as well.
Target is an interesting word.
Yes, so I take you back to that era.
The Soviet Union had broken up.
And one of the things I've done a lot of reporting on intelligence services and so forth.
And one of the things that happened when the Soviet Union broke up is there was a rush of officers from Russian intelligence to offer things to the West, secrets, etc., to ensure their future.
It became a bit like the Wild West, and things began to be smuggled out of Russia into the West.
Right, so that's an important part of the backdrop.
That's a very, very important part of the backdrop.
And of course, we have to remember that this is 1994.
The Soviet Union collapsed only a few years before that, and it was a bit of a free-for-all, as you say.
I want to get into that in the next segment of our conversation because that's absolutely crucial to what we're talking about.
But just getting back to the vessel, so we have it clear, you know, this is a kind of shuckle.
As you say, people in Scandinavia love to use ferries.
They're very convenient.
They're very useful.
And that's why a lot of people use them for regular, you know, workaday things.
This particular vessel, from what I read, was built in 1980.
It was built in Germany to very high standards, so it wasn't an old vessel.
As far as you were aware through your researches, had there been any happenings, incidents on that route or with that vessel Before this happened?
No, well, of course, one of the points of dispute in the investigation afterwards was the state of the vessel.
It was built by a German company to a very high standard.
It was a roll-on, roll-off ferry, so there was a certain potential instability in that, in that obviously there's a huge car deck, and when open to the sea, the sea can quickly wash up and down the vessel.
A story that I covered for the Sunday Times in London, which you will recall, was the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise in Zabuga.
Which was 17 years, I think, before this happened, wasn't it?
Seven years rather, 1987.
And we were all shocked in this country, the speed with which that ferry went down with the ingress of water.
It was because they hadn't closed the bow doors properly.
And so once that happens, of course, water washes in and these ferries become quickly unstable and then they turn over and then they sink.
The thing is, though, that in the whole history of this type of ship, when they have got into trouble, most of the time they have floated for quite a long time.
There was a Polish one in the Baltic which floated for several days.
And the interesting thing about the Estonia is it sank in less than 40 minutes.
And in the maritime history, boats that sink that quickly are boats that have been mined or submarined or otherwise have a large hole in their side.
So, as you said, it was built to high standards.
When the investigation came along, they pointed the finger at a faulty bow door and that the hinges had come off in the rough seas.
It was travelling quite fast.
And once it came off, the sea rushed in and the catastrophe happened.
But as I said, no ship of that kind has ever sunk that quickly.
And that was one of the things early on that really made me think there was something wrong with the official version of events.
Certainly something that was impressed upon me when I was reporting news in London and doing this story all those years ago.
The weather conditions were, by our standards here in London, were very, very bad.
Could that have been a contributory factor to the vessel going down so fast?
The official version of events says, basically to sum up a very long and complex report, a combination of a faulty bow door, a combination of rough weather, a combination of the crew failing to react quickly enough to the disaster, and also it was traveling too fast for the weather.
That is the set of official explanations.
But in the entire history of maritime disasters and engineering, nothing explains something going down that quickly, even with that combination of circumstances.
We have less than two minutes in this segment, but I want to ask you this before we get into the next one and really unpick this.
How soon after this happened did people begin to ask questions?
After the shock wore off, quite a lot of questions were asked.
There was, for instance, a whole almost an amazing sub-story about a man who was a captain on the ship and was reported as one of the ones who'd gone down with the ship, although he was later seen among the rescued.
Early on, the German company that made the Bowdoers adamantly defended its maintenance standards.
Of course, they would in the circumstances.
But the thing that most worried people early on was the speed at which it sank.
And so within a few months, people started asking questions.
And it was only about a year after that that I was told some very interesting things by an intelligence contact, which made me start a very long investigation into the sinking.
And we have to say, before we get into that in the next segment, this was something that you didn't mean to get into.
This was something that came to you.
It was completely accidental, actually.
I was interviewing an MI6 officer about other matters, and he suddenly turned to me and he showed me a cutting about the sinking of the Ferry Estonia, and he said, do you know about this?
And I said, oh, well, I recall the story.
It was very bad.
And he said, well, there's more to it than meets the eye.
And the UK government is involved.
And he said a very interesting thing.
He said, there's a treaty being signed called the Baltic Treaty, which covers the area of water in international waters where the ferry went down.
And he said, look at the people who signed it.
And I said, okay, and let's go through that.
And one of the countries that signed it was Britain.
And Howard, anybody looking at a map of the Baltic can tell you that Britain is not a Baltic nation.
So that accidental conversation started me on the road to
But before the new regime came in, there was a long period of instability, and a lot of people who had been a key part of the old Soviet regime in Moscow and elsewhere found themselves with nothing much to do and having to find something new to do.
And you say that all of that plays into this somehow?
Absolutely.
It's important to understand the role of Estonia, the country, in this.
So after the collapse of the Soviet Union, ex-Soviet intelligence officers were literally walking into British and American embassies all over the world saying, we've got secrets.
Would you like to buy some?
You know, it was a kind of Wild West operation.
And things were being smuggled out: electronics, secrets, bits of weapons.
And the easiest way, the easiest smuggling route by far was to take them out of Russia through Estonia and put them on a ferry to Stockholm where they could then be shared with the West.
This was a very common thing.
Estonia became like Berlin was at the height of the Cold War, kind of a place where it was full of spies from all sorts of different countries and full of smugglers.
And of course, there was organized crime.
And that's the context, that's the background for what actually happened to the ferry.
Right.
So there was something, I hesitate to use the word murky, but there was something murky going on apart from the day trippers.
Yes, absolutely.
And very interestingly, my original source said to me, look, the MI6, which by the way, MI6, the British Overseas Intelligence Service, helped to set up the Estonian Intelligence Service and had a very ongoing and close relationship with them, still does, were using them to smuggle things out of Russia through Estonia to Sweden.
So it was a joint British-Swedish-Estonian operation smuggling things on the ferry on a regular basis.
Right.
And even in 1994, it strikes me that surely if you wanted to get a little microfiche or whatever full of secrets out of Russia, you could just put it in a can of pickled herrings, couldn't you, and put somebody on a plane with it?
It was actually easier to put it on a train and take it through Estonia on the ferry than try and fly it out of an airport from Russia, where the level of security, of course, at airports is still pretty high.
And also because of the frequency of travel through Estonia and between Scandinavia and Russia through Estonia, you know, it became an easy route to use.
And also there's something in the fact that, and I've had this in Howard in stories I've done before, such as an investigation I did in a British Airways fight 149, which landed in Kuwait at the start of the Gulf War.
I've got a book coming out on that later this year.
It is the case that intelligence services will often use public transport where there are lots of people on board, thinking it's a safe way to move things around, that you're not likely to be the victim of any attack or retaliation if you've put something on a ferry where there are 900 people on board.
Okay.
So you had a briefing, and this is how you came quite by chance to investigate this.
Talk to me about that briefing, how it ties in.
So first off, the idea of the Baltic Treaty that Britain had signed, and I couldn't understand why it had signed it, and it's not a Baltic nation.
And the treaty itself, by the way, which basically prohibited exploration of the wreck in international waters, is probably not legal because the wreck's in international waters.
And bear in mind also, when I started investigating this, we had the extraordinary thing that's important for your viewers to understand that when the Estonia went down, the Swedish government said it would leave no stone unturned to bring it to the surface, which was possible.
It's not at a very great depth.
But instead of fulfilling their promise of bringing it to the surface, they had done exactly the opposite, which was bury it, attempt to bury it in concrete, which is in itself a tremendously suspicious action.
So I began by, you know, why had Britain sign this treaty?
Maybe it's a mundane explanation, which I'm unaware of.
So I simply filed some Freedom of Information Act requests to the Foreign Office and others saying, more or less, asking for papers leading to the decision to sign the Baltic Treaty and was given the runaround and never got a satisfactory answer.
And of course, for an investigative reporter at that moment, you start to think, ah, these are people with something to hide.
And that was the start of it.
I then enlisted a couple of Russian journalists in my investigation.
It was very dangerous for them to ask questions about this.
And actually, one had to drop out after his life was threatened.
But I persisted.
I'm a fairly stubborn individual, and I kept going till I'm pretty sure I ended up with what was the real version of what happened.
Which it's important to stay at this point, Howard, that my investigation, the most recent iteration of it, which is a five-part documentary series, which is being broadcast worldwide by Discovery Channel, I worked alongside some terrific Norwegian journalists who did an enormous amount of the work and found enormous amounts of interesting stuff on their own.
So mine was merely one part of it.
Right.
So are you saying here, is your assertion that somebody wanted this trade in secrets stopped, hence the ferry was in some way attacked?
Yes.
So the first point is very clear that after the Wild West moment where Russian intelligence officers, as I said, were literally knocking on embassy doors saying, please pay me some money and I'll give you some secrets, a group of hardliners in Russia decided to put a stop to it.
And they formed a group called the Felix Group, which among other things assassinated a prominent Russian banker.
And one of the early members of it was a rather low-level KGB man in St. Petersburg called Vladimir Putin, who later made a bit of a name for himself.
And so there was a clampdown.
There was a clampdown and there were warnings and assassinations and threats of assassinations led by the Felix Group, but elsewhere.
And at some stage, warnings were communicated to Western intelligence agencies to stop using the Estonia to transport what the Russians said were stolen goods, stolen secrets from Russia.
That's absolutely clear that happened.
But wouldn't you target the carriers?
Wouldn't you target the people rather than the vessel carrying the people if you were going to do something like that?
Well, you assumed that they knew who the people were, which if Western intelligence were doing their job, of course they wouldn't.
That is, the people who were carrying these things from Russia through Estonia to Sweden were obviously doing so undercover.
And the other context for this is Estonia the ferry and Estonia the country.
The other point to understand about this warning is this was also part of a Russian campaign against the new country Estonia, which of course had been part of the Soviet bloc for so long and which the Russians definitely didn't want to turn into a pro-Western country and still don't.
By the way, Estonia is still the subject of enormous Russian pressure, misinformation, disinformation campaigns.
So threatening the country through the pride of the country, its ferry, was also, I'm absolutely confident, part of the tactics.
And if that is the case, if that is the case, then the people who were behind this would almost be guilty, surely, in some interpretations of an act of war.
Oh, I think the sinking of the ferry, Estonia could easily be interpreted as an act of war.
And when we discuss the circumstances of what happened, I think most people out there will agree with me.
And obviously those who've critiqued what you've said have said that what you've done is that you've retrofitted a theory to the circumstances, not that the circumstances scream that this is what happened.
What would you say to them?
Yes, that's interesting, the idea of retrofitting.
As it happens, the story that made worldwide headlines last year, which was the journalism, Norwegian journalist who I was working with, mounted an expedition to the WEC and found a hole in the side, which the official account says there shouldn't have been a hole in the side.
A startling revelation which made worldwide headlines.
Well, as it happened, Howard, I reported this in an exclusive for the New Statesman magazine in the year 2005.
So, no, I can't be accused of retrofitting.
Actually, all recent events have done, I think, is justify my initial New Statesman investigation.
And, you know, just to back up what you said there, the revelation that made all of the media was only at the back end of last year, wasn't it?
Yes, it was.
And this was the documentary which I appear and part of on camera and which I was a consultant for.
And the point is, let's go back to the official explanation.
The official explanation is there are heavy seas, there was a bow door which is weakened through faulty maintenance, so it blasts off in the heavy seas, the ship's going too fast, fills with water, sinks, terrible tragedy.
But it sank at a speed which is not explainable by that official version of events.
And the Swedish government has stuck to that official version of events year after year, even though it does not explain the speed at which the Estonia went down.
I'll tell you what does explain the speed at which the Estonia went down, the discovery of a hole in the side.
Ships which are hauled by a mine or a torpedo or other device can sink very quickly.
When, by the way, a seaman called Lind was doing his rounds of the car deck just before the sinking, he heard a bang.
He heard a loud bang, which he thought came from the side of the ferry.
His account was discounted in the official investigation, but actually now, of course, makes sense once you know there's a hole in the side of the sunken ferry Estonia.
What about the theories that the ship hit a submarine?
Yeah, I mean there's all sorts of conspiracy theories surrounding this and it's important to understand where these conspiracy theories came from.
As part of my research for this story and as part of my extensive studies for a new course I'm teaching at the University of Otago, I've looked at case histories where essentially conspiracy theories were generated and spread rapidly to kind of confuse events.
In other words, say I, Stephen Davis, a journalist investigating the sinking of the fairy Estonia, what I think is an actual conspiracy to hide the truth.
And if you look Estonia fairy sinking online Now you find eight or nine different theories, and you, Howard, might say, Oh, come on, Stephen, yours is just one of many conspiracy theories.
What a successful way to hide some actual wrongdoing.
In the case of the Estonia, the most amazing conspiracy theories have been circulated.
The Felix Group, which I referred to previously, for instance, actually published a report which put the blame on groups of gangsters.
The gangsters they were blaming happened to be, interestingly enough, Chechens, which Russia was at war with, and Estonia.
So in other words, the villains of the peace in this conspiracy theory were people who the Russians wanted to discredit internationally.
So as they say, the easiest place to hide a book is in a library.
Absolutely.
That's a very good way of putting it.
And so, you know, if your viewers out there look at this, okay, this is interesting.
Estonia sinking.
They'll find my reporting.
They'll find the Scandinavian reporting, but they'll find a lot of other weird and wacky stuff.
And who are they to tell the difference between one and the other?
Stephen Davis, a New Zealand investigative journalist, were talking about the sinking of the ferry Estonia.
The year is 1994.
The seas were rough.
There was a problem with the bow doors.
The official explanation said, and this ship went down really fast.
But as Stephen Davis has been telling us, there may be much more to it than meets the eye.
So Stephen, we hovered around the various conspiracy theories.
I think we need to give them a little bit of time now and see where we stand in relation to them.
Yes, it's interesting to look at the conspiracy theories and then to ask yourself, what's the purpose of spreading these?
The rather sinister Felix Group, in its report, said there were two illicit cargoes on board.
One was heroin and one was cobalt.
And cobalt, of course, being a highly radioactive source, they say that the captain was involved in the drug smuggling.
They say there was a gang involved.
They say at one stage the illicit cargo had to be got rid of.
So they opened the bow door and accidentally sank the vessel, which in itself is a crazy idea.
But if you look at the list of villains in this conspiracy theory, you will find they are all ones the Russian state wanted to blacken the names of.
They bring in the Chechens.
And then this led to a whole other lot of craziness.
You know, there's always, in any international conspiracy theory, there's one that the Israelis did it, usually spread by anti-Semites.
Why anybody would think the Israelis want to sink a ferry in the Baltic is beyond me.
There are anti-Muslim ones that the Arabs did it.
There are ones that there are drug smugglers, etc., etc.
And over the years, it has become difficult for proper investigative reporters to tackle the Estonia sinking and be taken seriously just because it's now surrounded by all this murk.
And yet if there wasn't some degree of openness, then why at the back end of last year did Estonia, Sweden and Finland say that, quote, they would assess new information which could contradict the official explanation?
They wouldn't be going there at all, would they?
Well, they're only going there, by the way, because of the Discovery Channel investigation, because of the bravery of my colleague, Henrik Evertson, a Swedish journalist, by the way, who the Swedes attempted to prosecute for the crime of covering the story.
He went out there and led the dive.
So they're only going there because they were forced into it by investigative journalism.
Why do you think it's in the interests of maybe both sides for this to be completely covered up?
You know, if there was an attack on a ship, if I owned a ferry and somebody decided to attack it and sink it or damage it in some way, and I had a pretty good idea of who did this, then I would be screaming to the rafters about it.
Well, would you, Howard, if you'd been secretly, this is a very good question, by the way, would you, Howard, if you'd been secretly using the ferry to smuggle things, putting at risk the people who were traveling on the ferry in every journey?
No, I think you might be inclined to cover up as well.
Well, that's what I presume I would say.
I mean, if it was my ferry, sorry to jump in, I would probably say they're claiming that we were using the ferry for X, Y, and Z. They're wrong.
They just attacked my ferry.
Well, you're talking about the ferry owners, but I'm talking about countries here.
One interesting thing said to me by another intelligence contact is, you know, Stephen, this is one of those rare occasions where nobody wants the truth to come out.
Britain, Sweden, Estonia, and Russia all have an interest in covering it up.
Imagine the horror and the questions asked in the United Kingdom if MI6 admitted that they had been essentially using the Estonia ferry as a Trojan horse for smuggling operations, the same with Swedish intelligence, the same with Estonian intelligence.
Imagine the anger of the relatives that the people on that ferry were the cover, you know, the human shield for the smuggling.
So, no, I think everybody and the Russians in particular, but everybody else has a good reason for covering it up.
The wreck was covered up, which a lot of people, including yourself, have said was quite wrong.
You know, there was no need to do this.
This wreck could have been raised, and then all of the questions could have been really easily answered.
The Herald of Free Enterprise, admittedly, it was in a harbour in Zebrugge.
That was brought up, and it was towed back to the UK, I think, or to Holland, and it was examined there.
So why not for this ferry that was in deeper water, but it was not beyond the bounds of technical possibility?
I was looking at a paper by somebody called Hugo Tieberg.
I don't know who he is, but he'd written some kind of academic paper before I started doing this.
And I'm quoting from him now.
It appears then that the possibilities of pursuing legal remedies against the covering up of the wreck have been practically exhausted.
In other words, it seems that any attempt to stop this or maybe try to reverse this, I don't know how you might do that, are impossible now.
Actually, I don't think they are.
As it happens, the Swedish government's attempt to bury it in concrete has not succeeded.
I mean, they've not managed to bury it.
And it's pretty clear that if they wanted to, it could be brought to the surface still.
Okay, I have this wrong then.
It hasn't even been partially covered.
It's still there to be examined.
Yeah, they started covering it.
But of course, as my Norwegian and Swedish colleagues discovered, when they went down to the dive, they still managed to get access to the side and to see the hole and to take samples.
So the attempt to bury it all in concrete failed and has been abandoned.
What do you think will happen now then?
Since we know there's a hole in the side of the ship and what's that doing there, some access to the wreck has been given.
What do you think will happen and what should happen?
There should clearly be a whole new inquiry.
The Swedish government, in the initial burst of publicity after the discovery documentary, sort of said, we'll have a look at it.
And I know rather ominously they've gone quiet now, as happens when they think the public pressure is eased.
It's too huge a disaster to be left with an incomplete explanation.
You know, one of the best things the Americans did after 9-11 was have a full proper commission which examined everything and every mistake and published its report.
They did.
But of course, people are still questioning, and here I am jumping in again, forgive me, people are still asking questions about that, and people want another one.
Of 9-11.
Yeah, they do.
But I have to say, having read the original report, it is pretty comprehensive.
It's certainly the problem with the Estonia is they seized on an explanation early on and then discounted all other possibilities year after year.
Now, maybe they did that because they were incompetent.
I personally think that somebody from the Swedish intelligence service went and knocked on the Prime Minister's door and said, you know, you'll promise to bring the ferry up.
We suggest you don't, you know, because it's a secret that they want kept buried.
And presumably, if through some legal means or other means, it was possible to further examine the wreck or even bring it up, then you would want to ensure that the people who did the investigation were totally independent, probably from a completely different country.
They would have to be completely independent with, yes, some kind of UN import international commissioners, and they'll discover what has been there to be discovered.
You know, when I did the New Statesman piece all those years ago, one of my contacts, he's sadly just died as the new documentary was coming out, an amazing man called Greg Bemis, an American whose claim to fame was he owned the WEC Lusitania.
He had mounted a dive down to the ferry Estonia and he discovered the hole and he took samples and they clearly, clearly showed traces of use of an explosive device.
That's the kind of thing that should be looked at by an international inquiry now.
In the meantime, two things that militate against all of this are happening.
Number one, we have an ongoing global pandemic.
Number two, the wreck is in an inhospitable place, rusting and rotting.
It is, but apparently, I've talked to some of the experts in the field.
If there's an explosion, which I believe definitely was the cause, blew a hole in the side, the evidence will still be there, despite all the time it's been in the water.
Have you ever felt at any risk asking the questions that you've been asking?
Because they are fairly pointed questions.
Yeah, the question of risk is interesting.
You know, Howard, in my career as an investigative reporter, the group who have threatened me most often and taken me to court several times to try and suppress my stories, I'm afraid, is your government, Howard.
I've had them take me to court about my attempt to tell the story about the real Bravo 20.
They tried to suppress my interview with the former MI6 agent, Richard Tomlinson.
They tried to suppress another story which I was telling about the SAS.
They've tried to suppress my investigation into British Airways Flight 149.
But the idea of risk and threats pales into comparison with the risk taken by my Russian colleagues.
To give you one telling example, I had a Russian journalist working with me on the story and he was warned and finally he said to me, Stephen, you know, I have a family, I'm sorry, I have to stop.
And I said, do, because, you know, Putin murders journalists he doesn't like.
A colleague of this man was given a tip-off that there was some, he was investigating the connection between the Russian military and organized crime, and he was told there were some documents in a left luggage locker in the Moscow underground.
So he went and collected them, and he brought them back to his office, and he opened the suitcase, and he was killed instantly by an explosion.
So when I think of any risks that I'm taking, I really put it into context because it's nothing like, you know, the risks that those people take to get stories.
How is the story playing at the moment in Estonia, Sweden, and Finland?
Oh, it was a huge story.
And, you know, one of the ways of judging a cover-up is to look at Denials issued by governments and how they are subsequently proved to be true.
A classic, you know, the Swedish government maintained for a long time there was no smuggling operation.
There was no smuggling operation involving British intelligence.
Sorry, Swedish intelligence.
My British intelligence source had told me there was, and six years later the Swedes had to admit, yes, there was.
And so there's a lot of public pressure from the relatives of the victims, from the survivors.
I think it needs more journalists internationally to take an interest in the story, to bring outside pressure.
Because the simple truth is, Howard, that it seems clear to me that through some mechanism, whether it's the placing of a mine on the side or other means, the Russians attempted to disable Estonia as a warning to the West.
Now, it's important to say, of course, that doesn't mean they attempted to sink it.
You know, I'm a great believer in the cock-up theory, if you'll excuse me, of history, as well as conspiracy, some conspiracies.
It's possible that it was intended as a warning to disable the Estonia and force it to return to port as a way of, you know, take us seriously, guys, when we say you should stop this.
But a combination of that and the speed and the high seas and perhaps some weakening of the bow door, a combination of those things led to a catastrophe.
But at the moment, all you have is a set of evidence and you have a theory, a set of assertions.
Is that frustrating to you?
You clearly want more than this.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, I'm one of these people that my British Airways 149 story I've been at for 29 years now and still going, and the Estonia I've been at for a long time.
I like a conclusion, and that's because, you know, Howard, you talk to people who lost loved ones on the Estonia.
You talk to people who were survivors, like the amazing Paul Barney, an Englishman who survived in remarkable circumstances, who I've interviewed a couple of times.
And the pain doesn't go away.
The doubts don't go away.
The questions don't go away.
And that's what drives me on.
They deserve a response.
And the simple fact is that even though it's costly and difficult and potentially embarrassing, the Swedish government should announce a new inquiry.
It should have independent figures, new people, and they should bring the fairy to the surface so it can be examined by UN-approved investigators.
I've interviewed people around 9-11 many, many times.
I was at Ground Zero for the first and second anniversary.
I covered the events of that terrible day from London.
It's very much a part of my life.
A lot of people who lost loved ones in the tragedy of the Twin Towers have said to me, we want the stories to stop.
We want the raking of this over to stop because it just brings the hurt back up every time we do this.
You must have heard that in relation to this.
I have, but I have to say, at least in my experience, it's a minority as far as the Estonia goes.
There are people who just want to leave well enough alone, but there is a very active and vigorous survivors association and relatives' association who want the truth to come out.
The other important thing about pursuing stories like this is to add to our knowledge of the world, to hold governments accountable.
After all, Western democracies, who we kind of expect to act better than sometimes they do, I think it's important that we don't forget stories like this.
I'm teaching this new course at the University of Otago here, and one of the sessions is on the Estonia, and these are 21, 22-year-olds, very bright kids, and they've never heard of it.
And so actually keeping the story alive and keeping the memory alive, I think, is an important part of it.
Otherwise, questions disappear and they just become murmurs in the corner of the hall.
Stephen Davis, thank you very much indeed.
If you have a website or you want to promote the book, whatever, please do that now.
That's fine.
Absolutely.
Well, I've got, it's a work in progress, but I'll soon be making available stephenaviswriter.com, which will go online and which has stuff about many of my investigations.
And hopefully, Howard, I might return to you in a few months to discuss my new book, which trust me is going to make the British government and its intelligence services very angry indeed.
Well, I'd be very interested to speak with you about that, Stephen.
Thank you so much.
And have a good night.
Your thoughts, as ever, welcome on this edition of The Unexplained, an archive conversation, originally broadcast on my radio show, Stephen Davis, in New Zealand, about the Estonia case.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the home of the unexplained online.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
Please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And of course, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
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