The Customs and Immigration officers were blunt. They told us to vacate our boat and to take nothing with us but the clothes we were wearing. The skipper of the 46-foot sloop we were on repeated that he had contacts at CNN—a major cable news channel based in the United States—who knew where he was, and he could reach them by satellite phone if we needed help. My wife and I and an Eritrean cook in her early 20s stepped over the side of the boat and climbed into the officers’ inflatable craft. The skipper followed.
My wife and I lived on a sailboat in San Francisco, where the skipper was from, and had signed on to help crew his boat through the Middle East, then on to Asia. We now found ourselves unexpectedly held up near the Ethiopian border.
After we’d traveled 15 minutes at top speed, the officers delivered us to the Port Authority in Assab, Eritrea, where we were escorted to a mostly vacant building. The skipper and our cook followed the agents to a room, where a naval commander waited to interview them. In the early ’90s, when our cook was a teenager, she had served as an Eritrean Freedom Fighter against Ethiopia. A border clash between the two countries had started again in May 1998. It was now February 1999 and we had been cautiously following the war’s development on the radio as we headed south from Eritrea.
