Expatriates (17 page)

“The backbone of surprise is fusing speed with secrecy.”

– Carl von Clausewitz

A
s the Jeffords and Navarros settled into their new lives in Australia, larger events were in motion that would soon change things for all Australians.

Seven years before the Crunch, an Indonesian plan had called for 750 sleeper agents to infiltrate Australia. The Indonesian State Intelligence Agency—the Badan Intelijen Negara (BIN)—began training a cadre of sleeper agents bound for Australia and Papua New Guinea. Most of these agents came into the country as legal immigrants. A few of the higher-level operatives came in under diplomatic cover and then switched identities. The embassy later faked exits from the country for their original identities, listing them on passenger manifests for flights on Indonesian aircraft.

The sleeper agents were mostly bachelors in their late twenties and early thirties, but included a few married couples. Each agent was given detailed targets and instructed to find work and move as close to their respective targets as possible. Their coded instructions, communication equipment, explosives, detonators, incendiary igniters, timers, and chemical weapons were smuggled into Australia via diplomatic pouch. The term
pouch
is an antiquated term. In modern times it meant entire shipping containers on board cargo aircraft that carried diplomatic seals and were therefore exempt from any inspections by Australian authorities. Similar abuses of diplomatic mail privileges had become widespread in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

To get this materiel into the hands of the sleeper agents, the Indonesians used their embassy and six consulates that were scattered across the country. Over the course of five years, more than six thousand kilograms of materiel and packets of currency were surreptitiously distributed to the sleepers.

The sleeper agents slipped into the population of eighty thousand Indonesian immigrants already living in the country. A few Timorese tried to warn Australian police, intelligence, and tax compliance agencies of their suspicions of the newcomers. They reported that many of the recent immigrants appeared to have wealth that didn't match their incomes. However, their warnings were largely ignored. There were eventually three raids on immigrant apartments, but the searches revealed no evidence and official apologies were made.

The original plan had been to train and infiltrate 750 sleepers. However, before he signed off on the plan, the Indonesian Armed Forces chief of staff—a devout Muslim—intervened. He ordered an increase in the number of sleepers to 786 and renamed Project 750 to the 786 Heroes Plan. The 786 figure was based on the Islamic mystical significance of the number 786. Eventually, 763 of their trained agents did successfully infiltrate the country.

The training of the Heroes agents was done in five separate groups on five different islands. This maintained a compartmentalized organization. The agents, and even their trainers, did not know the size of the overall program or of the existence of the other groups. Thus, those trained to destroy aircraft with thermite charges had no knowledge of other groups that were being trained to destroy communications equipment. For all they knew, the plan was only to disrupt their particular segment of the Australian infrastructure. By keeping them ignorant of the larger plans, the agents could not reveal the enormity of the overall operation in the event that they were arrested and interrogated.

Coded message activation orders were sent out redundantly via e-mail as Internet greeting cards, and shortwave radio messages on Voice of Indonesia (VOI) at 9.525 MHz. Most of the messages were birth announcements for a baby girl named Ayesha. The coded messages all indicated that February 5th would be Heroes Night.

Many of the sleepers got jobs with Tidy Services Group, a contracting company that had dozens of military contracts in Australia and New Zealand. This was a large company that did building maintenance, janitorial services, laundry and linen, mess hall catering, painting, trash hauling, and even some site security. The legions of Tidymen, who often wore optic yellow uniform shirts, had become ubiquitous on Australian military bases since the 1990s.

In the end, only 712 of the agents carried out their orders. The remainder had become so accustomed to their comfortable new lives in Australia that they ignored their activation orders. They would later claim they never received any orders.

The news of the attacks came to Rhiannon after Peter had already left for work. As she was scrambling some eggs for breakfast, Rhiannon turned on the radio and heard the alarming developments. She immediately picked up her phone and hit the preset button for Peter's mobile phone. When he answered, all she said to him was, “Turn on the radio in your truck, right now!”

Even the initial news reports made it clear that the attacks on RAAF aircraft were a devastating blow. The full tally didn't come until several days later: Sixty-eight of the RAAF's seventy F/A-18Bs, twenty-three of their twenty-four F/A-18Fs, and sixteen of their fleet of eighteen AP-3C Orion maritime patrol aircraft (two had already grounded indefinitely in the United Arab Emirates) were destroyed. The thermite attacks also wiped out all fourteen of the RAAF C-130s in the country (six others were grounded in Afghanistan, for lack of spare parts) and all six of their C-17s. Even though Boeing had decades of commercial operations in Australia, there was not any chance to get parts for the F-18s or the C-17s after the Crunch—the aircraft were indefinitely redlined. One of the most expensive hits was the destruction of all fourteen of the RAAF's newly operational F-35A multirole fighters, which had cost $125 million each.

Meanwhile, on Army bases, ninety-two of the Australian Army's 105 helicopters were destroyed. Two of their CH-47s were also stranded in Afghanistan. The only operational aircraft spared were planes that were either in flight or at remote landing fields during the three-hour window in which the saboteurs emplaced the thermite bombs.

The successful attacks at the airfields were later attributed to the infiltration of on-base concession workers, tipper truck drivers, fuel truck drivers, and contract office janitors. All of the saboteurs were later identified as being Indonesian-born, and all had been New Australians for just a few years.

The simultaneous detonations on the Royal Australian Navy ships were even more devastating. These bombs destroyed forty-one of the navy's fory-two commissioned warships. Forty-one ships were afloat, and one was in dry dock when the time bombs exploded. Unlike the attacks on parked RAAF aircraft, the ship time bombs caused tremendous loss of life. The only ship to escape the bombings was HMAS
Melville
, a 71-meter hydrographic survey vessel, but only because its monitor boxes had been inadvertently delivered to the frigate HMAS
Melbourne
. All six of the charges that had been intended for the
Melville
were still stacked up and forgotten in a paint locker on the
Melbourne
when they exploded.

Launched in 1998 and originally painted white, the
Melville
was pressed into part-time duty in border protection operations starting in 2001. She was then repainted gray.
Melville
was equipped with two .50 caliber machine guns—her only armament.

The fact that the
Melville
had been spared from the bombing attack provided some important evidence about the ship bombings.

Chuck Nolan was interested to learn that the offices of AOGC and several other oil exploration and mining companies in the Top End would soon be visited by ASIO field agents. Most of their questions were about whether or not any explosives had gone missing. Once it became clear that there had not been any explosives thefts, then their questions shifted toward conjecture on how the bombs might have been constructed. This led to several round table meetings.

As an explosives expert, Chuck was called into one of these meetings. The almost unanimous conclusion they reached was that the bombs had been assembled in Indonesia rather than in Australia. As Chuck put it to the ASIO agents, “Modern timer circuitry could have been used to program the devices to detonate several
decades
into the future, and they would have simultaneously done their job. There was no need to assemble or even program the devices here in Australia. In the plastic hard cases they've been describing, the bombs would have been just about idiot-proof. For all we know, they could have been built several years ago. My suspicion is that this is exactly what happened.”

—

T
he Australian prime minister was absolutely livid when she learned that the Australian Navy had been reduced to one ship, which had a primary fitting of just seafloor sonars.

The news of the simultaneous attacks on so many airplanes and ships was astounding. Australians were glued to their televisions and smartphones, eager for updates. While the authorities did not immediately pin any blame, Peter and Rhiannon were already convinced that it was the Indonesians who were responsible.

The government of New Zealand quickly donated one of their two frigates, the HMNZS
Te Kaha
, to aid in Australia's defense. The media at first mocked the donation of the 118-meter frigate, with one left-wing newspaper headlining that New Zealand's generosity had “doubled the size of the RAN.” There was a public campaign to rename the frigate the
Revenge
, but in the end, her original
Te Kaha
stuck, with just her HMNZS forename changed to HMAS. Both the
Melville
and the
Te Kaha
had senior captains put in command.

In the two years before the Crunch, the Royal Australian Navy had accelerated sales of their older generation warships and transports to meet carbon emission standards that were arbitrarily set by the Canberra government. This reduced the RAN's fleet from fifty-four ships to just forty-two. Most of the surplus ships were sold to Indonesia and Malaysia, some of them complete with armaments and fire control systems. Ironically, these would soon be used to bring Indonesian and Malaysian invasion forces to the Philippines, East Timor, Papua New Guinea, and finally Australia.

Right before the Crunch, Indonesia had also bought up as many surplus landing craft as they could find. They bought three Landing Craft, Vehicle Personnel (LCVPs) from Australia, two Landing Craft Utility (LCUs) from the United States, four
Czilm
class hovercraft from Russia, and seven 1990s-vintage 25-ton Landing Craft Mechanized (LCM) from the U.S., and even three aging WWII-vintage LCMs from Cambodia. Their finest landing craft purchases, however, were two Landing Craft Air Cushions (LCAC) through the U.S. Foreign Military Sales (FMS) office and another nearly identical one that came from the Japanese Defense Force.

In his visit to Indonesia in 2010, President Obama announced the gift of twenty-four former USAF F-16s—multirole fighter aircraft—as a sign of friendship to the Muslim world. The gift was building on his first inaugural address, in which he said of other hostile nations, “We will extend a hand if you will just unclench your fist.” Two years later, the Australian government sold four C-130H transport planes to the Indonesian Air Force. And in 2013, Indonesia received six Sukhoi Su-30 Mk 2 multirole fighter planes purchased from Russia in a $470 million deal. This increased their fleet of Su-30s to twenty-nine planes.

Indonesia's many acquisitions fit into their strategic goal of territorial expansion and jihad. Without all this new transport, their large armed forces wouldn't have been able to be used offensively. Their capability to project force over long distances was unprecedented. Because they had acquired equipment from so many far-flung sources, the aggregation of the new transport was ignored by all but a few Western intelligence analysts. Even then, they did not raise the alarm about the full strategic implications. Indonesia and Malaysia had built a war machine, and the world was too distracted to notice.

“Someday, we'll go to war over rice.”

—
The Dogs of War,
screenplay by Gary DeVore and George Malko, based on the novel by Frederick Forsyth

P
iecing together the details of the coordinated attacks, ASIO and the Australian news media slowly gathered more information about the naval time bombs. The bombing plot was so devious, so dastardly, that it seemed almost unimaginable. The simultaneous death of so many Australian sailors was hard for most Australians to accept. For Ava, who had a cousin in the RAN who was on the Missing List, the emotional impact was much greater than losing her grandfather, who had insulin-dependent Type I diabetes.

The time bombs were shaped charges in 252 magnetically attached gray plastic boxes 9 inches square and 2.5 inches thick. Each bomb contained three pounds of pure crystalline RDX explosive in a shallow cone-shaped charge, with a coating of paraffin phlegmatizer around their edges. This made the charges less fragile in rough handling. The charges each had two electric blasting caps for redundancy.

The labels on the plastic cases were marked
ENVIRONMENT PROTECTION AUTHORITY (EPA) AIR QUALITY MONITOR
and had detailed instruction labels. They looked very convincing. Their labels described them as carcinogen air sampling monitors. If their Quick Check codes were scanned with a cell phone or PDA scanner laser, the correct URL for the Australian EPA, “Australia's Air Quality Monitoring Program” website would be brought up. This legitimate website even had a mission statement: “Implementing the requirements of the Ambient Air Quality National Environment Protection Measure (Air NEPM), and building data for State of the Environment (SoE) reporting.”

The monitors' labels also included a phone number that during business hours connected callers directly to a smooth-talking Indonesian-born agent in Canberra with a perfect Australian accent. He had a variety of carefully worded scripts close at hand, to assuage any doubts or concerns about the monitors. These scripts quoted actual NEPM rules and URLs for real Australian EPA web pages. He also had detailed lists of the monitor serial numbers, so that if asked, he could say, for example, “Our records indicate that the monitor in question is on board HMAS
Bathurst
, is that correct?”

What looked like angled air vents in the face of the cases were actually dummy slots. The plastic outer cases were actually hermetically sealed. Both the devices themselves and the website had stern “antitampering” warnings, threatening a $10,000 fine for any individual who might “remove, destroy, or tamper” with a monitor. A single green LED status light showed that each mine was operational.

The Collection Date markings for retrieval of the monitors were all three to eleven months after they were timed to explode.

The clamshell plastic bomb boxes were epoxied shut, making them truly tamperproof. They had been assembled at a factory in Malang, on Java, using crystalline RDX explosives. The RDX had been made by PT Dahana in the city of Bogor, twelve miles south of Jakarta. The powerful alnico-type magnets were unwittingly supplied by an industrial magnet maker in New Taipei City, Taiwan. The five-year-life lithium manganese dioxide batteries for the bombs were sourced from mainland China.

In Malang, the employees who installed the RDX explosives were told that bombs were being built under contract for the Russian FSB for use against “radical Christian separatists.” Strict “need to know” compartmentalization kept almost everyone involved in the dark about the real destination of the mines. The exterior adhesive labels were printed by a separate company in Banjarmasin, in Kalimantan on the island of Borneo. These labels were not attached to the faces of the boxes until
after
the bombs had arrived in Australia. An all-Indonesian cell within the Australian EPA handled all of the paperwork and distribution to Australia's east and west naval bases.

Always sticklers for working “by the book,” Royal Navy maintenance duty rosters were updated to include checking the status lights on the monitors, once every thirty days.

The monitor boxes were attached by powerful alnico permanent magnets, built in to the bottoms of the boxes around the perimeter. These magnets were so strong that the stacks of monitors had to be separated with sheets of Teflon so each box could be slid off of a stack. Even with the Teflon, it took considerable effort to slide the boxes apart.

The instructions printed on the labels dictated “. . . because many airborne contaminants are heavier than air, this monitor should be mounted directly on the inside of the ship hull, as low as possible but above the bilge line. Monitors should be spaced approximately twenty meters apart on both sides of each vessel.”

The beauty of the plan was that modern electronics allowed the detonator timers to be set months or even years in advance. Every mine and thermite device was timed to be activated at precisely the same time: 1:15
A.M
. Western Indonesia Time (Waktu Indonesia Barat or WIB) on February 5th. This day was the Birth of the Prophet, a national holiday in Indonesia. It was also known as
Rabi' al-awwal
12 in the Islamic calendar. WIB was one hour behind Western Australia time and three hours behind eastern Australia time. The planners also had to take into account the three-hour difference between eastern and western Australian time zones.

It was a RAN maintenance officer who immediately thought of the EPA monitors when he saw the pattern of explosions in press photographs following the ship bombings. His theory was later proved to be true.

The explosions took place at 2:15
A.M.
in Western Australia, and 5:15
A.M
. in eastern Australia just as dawn was breaking.