Taipei, Taiwan – When Taiwan seized a Chinese-crewed cargo ship suspected of deliberately severing one of its undersea telecom cables last month, authorities pledged to “make every effort to clarify the truth” of what happened.
Taiwan’s Coast Guard Administration said it could not rule out the possibility that China had deployed the Togo-flagged Hong Tai 58 as part of a “grey area intrusion”.
Recent cases of damage to submarine cables around the island and in Europe suggest that proving sabotage, much less holding anyone accountable, may be no easy task.
Since 2023, there have been at least 11 cases of undersea cable damage around Taiwan and at least 11 such incidents in the Baltic Sea, according to Taiwanese and European authorities.
Taiwanese and European authorities have identified China or Russia – allies that share increasingly strained relations with the West and its partners – as the likely culprits in a number of incidents, though they have attributed several others to natural causes.
In January, NATO launched Baltic Sentry to step up surveillance of suspicious activities by ships in the Baltic Sea.
But so far, authorities have not announced specific retaliatory measures against Beijing or Moscow, though the European Commission has unveiled a roadmap calling for the enforcement of sanctions and diplomatic measures against unnamed “hostile actors and the ‘shadow fleet’”.
Authorities have also yet to criminally charge any individuals or companies despite detaining a number of vessels and crew, including the Hong Tai 58, which was seized near Taiwan’s outlying islands on February 25.
Beijing and Moscow have denied any involvement in sabotaging undersea cables.
“This is what the entire grey zone is about. It’s about being deniable,” Ray Powell, the director of Stanford’s Sea Light project, which monitors Chinese maritime activity, told Al Jazeera.
“You just have to be just deniable enough so that even though everybody knows it’s you, they can’t prove it’s you.”
Subsea cables – which crisscross the globe carrying 99 percent of intercontinental digital communications traffic – regularly suffer damage due to age, environmental changes and marine activities like fishing.
Cable faults are so common – numbering between 100 and 200 each year, according to telecommunications data provider TeleGeography – that industry practice is to build subsea networks with built-in redundancies to ensure ongoing connectivity if one cable breaks down.
These characteristics also make subsea cables a prime target for “hybrid warfare” or “grey zone activities” – low-grade coercive acts that are often opaque and conducive to plausible deniability – according to security analysts.
Telltale signs of sabotage
“Most cable breaks are the result of accidents… anchors may be unintentionally dropped in rough seas or left out for longer than intended. Cables may also break when fishing nets are dragged in the wrong location. What’s more, a ship may not realise it has broken a cable,” Kevin Frazier, a Tarbell fellow at the nonprofit Lawfare, told Al Jazeera.
“The simplest way for a bad actor to break a cable is to make it look like one of the accidents that commonly cause such breaks. Anchors being dragged across a cable is one such cause.”
Barbara Keleman, an associate director at London and Singapore-based intelligence firm Dragonfly, said that the spate of recent cable breakdowns featured tell-tale signs of sabotage despite the relatively large number of failures each year in non-suspicious circumstances.
“If you just look at the data, like how often these incidents are now occurring and how many cables are suddenly damaged at the same time, and you include into that the proximity of some of those ships near those cables, you have statistical deviation which suggests that there is something else going on,” Keleman told Al Jazeera.
The incident involving the Hong Tai 58 came just weeks after Taiwanese authorities briefly detained the Cameroon-flagged Shun Xing 39 on suspicion of dragging its anchor over a section of the Trans-Pacific Express cable, which connects Taiwan with the United States West Coast.
Coastguard officials said they were unable to board the vessel due to bad weather and the vessel sailed on to South Korea.
Industry publication Lloyd’s List said the Chinese freighter turned its automatic identification system (AIS) on and off and broadcast as many as three separate identities.
Enforcing the law at sea is notoriously difficult for not only practical reasons but legal ones as well, including conflicting claims of jurisdiction.
Under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, ships sailing in international waters are generally subject to the legal jurisdiction of the country under whose flag they are registered.
Within a state’s territorial waters, defined as 12 nautical miles (22km) from shore, vessels are subject to the jurisdiction of that country.
Authorities can, however, exer