portsmouth, uk —
When a ship comes under attack in the Strait of Hormuz and calls for help, the black telephone in the corner of the office rings. It’s nothing special. It’s just an ordinary office phone, a holdover from the 1990s.
But when a phone call comes in, three people working in this small office on the outskirts of Portsmouth on England’s south coast suddenly find themselves at the center of the current Middle East conflict.
That’s because it’s home to the UK Maritime Trade Operations Center (UKMTO), the Royal Navy’s arm that oversees shipping in the Red Sea, Persian Gulf and northern Indian Ocean.
And the number of emergency calls UKMTO receives has soared since Iran effectively closed the Strait of Hormuz more than two months ago in response to US and Israeli attacks on the country.
Commander Joe Black, UKMTO’s head of operations, said the first moments after a call “can be extremely stressful”. “The ship may be under active attack. You may hear alarms and sirens in the background. Sometimes you can even hear gunshots,” she told CNN.
Commercial ships passing through the Strait of Hormuz face all sorts of threats as the Iranian government seeks to take control of the vital waterway, through which a significant portion of the world’s oil, gas and fertilizer supplies flow, in response to military action by the United States and Israel. Some ships were targeted by Iranian missile fire, others were attacked by drones, and others were surrounded by fast attack craft.
As the war enters its third month, Black noted that the nature of Iran’s threat in the Straits is changing.
“At the beginning of March, we saw quite a bit of military action.…More recently, it seems to be shifting towards police action, with ships approaching the Strait of Hormuz being challenged, interrogated, claims verified and, in unfortunate cases, ships actually seized,” she said.
When a vessel reports such an attack, the UKMTO office takes urgent action. The staff, known as lookouts, can talk to the ship’s crew or contact other nearby ships to warn them of danger and ask if they can help or provide more information. They will also contact affected shipping companies, local coastguards, and military forces in the area who may be able to assist as well.
The team is run by a team of just 18 people who work 12-hour shifts. This means there are three observers on duty at all times, sometimes supported by analysts.
“If you call the UKMTO, you’ll get a response,” Mr Black said. “While we cannot guarantee that the international community will be able to respond directly, we will ensure that your information is shared with the widest possible audience to facilitate a response.”
The agency has recorded 44 incidents classified as ship damage, close combat, near misses, etc. since the Iran war began. Black said 10 sailors were killed in these incidents.
She added that even though they may be thousands of miles away and only connected to a crisis by a phone line, it can be stressful for the on-call personnel who are “dealing with a highly emotional situation” and often develop trusting relationships with the crew.
Despite the frenzied reaction when the phone rings, “a typical day is actually relatively calm,” Black said. The TV screen displays various maps of the area and the traffic of ships passing through it. One map zooms in on the strait itself, showing red boxes demarcating “danger zones” that may contain Iranian mines and those that ships may be avoiding.
Observers spend much of their time sifting through the 2,500 emails a day they receive from ships, and they also voluntarily share their location, contact details and information about nearby ships.
Such monitoring often allows teams to continue tracking vessels even when the automatic tracking system, AIS data, is turned off. And the group’s relationship with military institutions provides another source of verification of the incident.
“We put a lot of effort into quickly and efficiently verifying the information we receive,” Black said. The initial report, posted on the X and UKMTO websites, “gives us a general location of the incident and then overlays it with updates so that we can begin to verify that information through additional sources.”
With the media picking up on these reports, the war has shined a spotlight on the normally under-the-radar UKMTO. Black has grown accustomed to giving interviews.
Why would a ship under attack call this tiny office?
UKMTO was first established in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks when shipping companies struggled to cope with the rise in piracy and began working with the Royal Navy to find ways to deal with the threat. As an island nation, Britain’s interest in securing sea routes coincided with the interests of the shipping companies themselves.
And the country’s colonial heritage and long maritime history meant that its navy was uniquely able to take on such a role, even in the early 21st century. French authorities, in cooperation with European allies and the UKMTO, are also supporting and monitoring shipping in the Gulf of Guinea off the coast of West Africa.
Over the past quarter century, UKMTO has also responded to other shipping crises, including in the late 2000s when Somali piracy was at its most active, and in 2023 when Yemen’s Houthi rebels stepped up attacks on ships transiting the Red Sea. But Black said none of this has happened, even though the office is receiving about the same volume of calls as it was at the height of the Houthi threat.
“This particular situation is more difficult because there are so many different threats and the geopolitical landscape is changing,” she said.
The instructions to the ship seem to change almost every week. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly called for ships to pass through the strait and briefly launched an operation to assist the vessel before suspending it within 48 hours at the request of a Pakistani mediator. Similarly, Iran has adopted a variety of strategies to tighten its control over the waterway, recently enacting a new set of rules for ships seeking safe passage.
All of this has left around 850 major commercial vessels and 20,000 seafarers stranded in the Gulf, and the main issue for them is “uncertainty,” Black said. “What does the future hold? When will they next be able to go home and see their families? What will their contracts and crew rotations look like?”
In these uncertain times, seafarers have come to rely on the work of UKMTO, located thousands of miles away on a ridge. From there, you can see the ruins of Dwight Eisenhower’s D-Day headquarters on one side and the bustling Portsmouth Harbor on the other.
