On a chilly October night in 1964, the shipping forecast warned of fog on the Thames. Just after midnight, an East German freighter, the MV Magdeburg, slipped out of her Dagenham dock near London and headed slowly down river. On deck were 42 Leyland buses bound for Cuba.
Coming the other way was the Yamashiro Maru, a Japanese ship, sailing empty. The ships met at 1:52am. The Magdeburg was making the tight turn around Broadness Point when the Yamashiro Maru ploughed into her starboard side at more than 10 knots (18km per hour), holing her below the waterline and pushing her across the river.
“It was an accident, an act of God,” said Keith Toms, a tug crewman on the Thames that night.
And that was the conclusion. No one was killed, there was no inquiry, no one was accountable and only Leyland Motors, forced to replace the buses, suffered.
Now a historian has found documents that add weight to the suspicions of academics that the ship was rammed at the behest of the CIA — as part of an effort to sabotage anyone breaking the US embargo on Cuba.
With the US threatening to blacklist any shipowner breaking the “transportation blockade,” Leyland Motors decided to use an East German ship. It was in the maritime archives of the former German Democratic Republic that academic John McGarry found evidence given by Gordon Greenfield, the British pilot of the Magdeburg, stating that the Japanese ship broke international law by navigating the wrong way and giving misleading signals. The captain and pilot of the Yamashiro Maru refused to speak.
McGarry believes a crime was committed.
“I felt that the question of CIA involvement might be resolved by an examination of the pilots’ logs, which were supposed to be stored at Trinity House and in the Port of London Archives. They cannot be found. The East German papers show Greenfield was deceived by someone on the Yamashiro Maru who sounded a single siren blast before the collision, an intention to pass port to port,” he said.
Greenfield said in his statement: “The Yamashiro Maru appeared to sail towards the south of the middle channel, but I interpreted her exchange of signals to mean that she was about to turn to starboard in order to pass me on her port side. At this time there seemed to be no danger of a collision.”
Tracked down 44 years later, Greenfield said: “Given the atmosphere of the day, I suppose it’s not surprising people read something into what happened, but there’s no truth in it. There was no blame attached.”
He said that despite reports of thick fog, visibility was so good that the two ships saw each other well before Broadness Point.
In 1975, Washington Post reporters Jack Anderson and Les Whitten cited sources who claimed that a British wiretap on Cuban offices in London gave the CIA the ship’s movements.
Harold Elletson, director of the New Security Foundation in Berlin, said: “It would be naive to think that the CIA wouldn’t dare sink an East German ship in the vital estuary of a NATO ally. They were under pressure to get results and they had a huge budget for sabotage.”
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