Hezbollah (29 page)

While Thai intelligence at the time named two Iranian nationals as the prime suspects in the case, they arrested only one person, an Iranian, whom the court referred to as Mr. S., who was charged with being “a member of an extremist Islamic group … whose goal was to carry out acts of terrorism and sabotage.”
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The man identified in media wires as Hossein Shahriarifar (alias Hossein Dastgiri) was convicted of murder, robbery, possession of explosives, and attempted sabotage by the Southern Bangkok Criminal Court and sentenced to death.
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Shahriarifar was ultimately acquitted on appeal by the Supreme Court of Thailand, which ruled that conflicting eyewitness testimony failed to demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that he was the bomb-laden truck’s driver.
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In retrospect, authorities recognized that the Bangkok truck bomb closely resembled those employed by Hezbollah in other attacks like the 1983–84 Beirut bombings and the 1992 bombing of the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires. In Bangkok, the failed truck bombing led to a massive, joint covert operation involving the Philippines Directorate for Intelligence and its Israeli counterpart, among others,
called Operation CoPlan Pink Poppy. None of this became public, however, until a fortuitous arrest in 1999.
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Within minutes after stepping off Philippine Airlines flight 126 from Zamboanga City, in the southern Philippine island of Mindanao, to Manila in November 1999, Pandu Yudhawinata was approached by customs officials with drug-sniffing dogs and arrested for drug possession. The customs officials had no way to know, but their arrest interrupted an ongoing counterterrorism intelligence investigation centered on Pandu. But intelligence officials were focused on his activities related to Hezbollah, not drugs.

Philippine intelligence had launched Operation CoPlan Pink Poppy in October 1998, targeting Filipinos who were in telephone contact with al-Qaeda fixer Zayn al-Abidin Mohammad Hussein, better known by his nom de guerre Abu Zubaida. A Pakistan-based gatekeeper for new recruits stopping at al-Qaeda boarding houses en route to the group’s Afghan training camps, Zubaida was originally thought to be the organization’s number-three leader. US officials would later reassess him to be much lower down on the group’s totem pole, but he was still purportedly a key liaison between al-Qaeda and many of the graduates of the group’s training camps.
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Operation CoPlan Pink Poppy was launched, more broadly, in response to a request by the French to uncover overlapping terrorist networks tied to al-Qaeda and Hezbollah.
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Terminated for lack of funds in 2000, the operation regained momentum after the September 11 attacks under the name Operation Kamikaze. But before it was shut down, what started as a search for global jihadists tied to al-Qaeda and an effort to keep tabs on local militant Islamist groups like the Moro Islamic Liberation Front inadvertently led investigators to uncover Hezbollah’s Southeast Asian network.
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For the record, Hezbollah had already demonstrated its operational capability in Thailand as early as 1988 by orchestrating the hijacking of Kuwait Airways flight 422 seized en route from Bangkok to Kuwait. But until Pandu’s arrest in 1999, authorities had no idea just how developed Hezbollah’s Southeast Asian network had become.

Born Krisna Triwibawa in 1958 in the city of Pontianak in Kalimantan, the Indonesian portion of the island of Borneo, Pandu Yudhawinata was an unlikely but impressively accomplished Hezbollah operative.
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His case became public after his November 1999 arrest in Manila, on his return from the island of Mindanao, the home of a long-running Islamist insurgency.
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But Pandu was no stranger to counterterrorism officials. Within weeks after his arrest, the Philippines Directorate for Intelligence informed the chief of the Philippines National Police that Mr. Yudhawinata “was a subject of [a] covert operation by [the] Directorate and Israeli counterparts.”
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Israeli counterterrorism officials confirmed that a joint operation led officials to a number of local cell members across Thailand who, when questioned in October 1999, provided key information that uncovered information about the
failed 1994 bombing plot and exposed Pandu and his network. An Israeli intelligence report summarized the breakthrough:

The scope of Hizballah’s infrastructure in South East Asia … became evident with the questioning of the organization collaborators, mostly local recruits, in Thailand and the Philippines. The initial questionings were made in October 1999 in Thailand in three different areas of the country where there is a Shiite infrastructure—in Bangkok, the area west of Bangkok, and in the south of the country. The questioning in the Philippines and Thailand led, among other things, to the exposure of the fact that Hizballah, with the assistance of Iranian intelligence, was responsible for an abortive attack on the Israeli embassy in Thailand on 11 March, 1994.
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But that was not all. According to the Israeli intelligence report, the interrogation of the suspected Hezbollah operatives revealed that the group was planning other attacks targeting Israeli and US interests not only in Southeast Asia but in Europe as well.
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This revelation appears to have picked up the pace of the joint operation to expose Hezbollah operational activities. Among active Hezbollah plots in both Southeast Asia and Europe—beyond conducting surveillance of potential targets in these two regions—were efforts to infiltrate operatives to execute attacks and collect intelligence in Israel.
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Philippine intelligence reports do not reveal the source of the information that led them to Pandu, but according to a memo marked “Reference: ODI COPLAN Pink Poppy,” they received information on October 14, 1999, more than five years after the attempted attack, indicating that “an unidentified foreign national connected to Hezbollah” was staying in room 202 at the Hermosa Hotel in Zamboango City. The report added, somewhat mysteriously and offering no further context, that “two leaders of the group were expecting something very important from Pandu to accomplish in Mindanao.” The Regional Intelligence and Investigation Division followed the tip that same day and confirmed that an individual they suspected was Pandu had checked into the hotel on the afternoon of September 29, using a Malaysian passport under the name P Yudha W. Only four days later, when he applied for an extension of his visa using his true Indonesian passport, did police confirm his real identity. From that time until his arrest at Manila’s domestic airport, he was under intensive surveillance.
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Philippine police had arrested Pandu, however, not on charges related to terrorism or other security offenses but for drug possession. The plan, it seems, had been to follow him and collect further intelligence on his activities and accomplices, not to arrest him at the airport. Philippine police intimated the sudden change of plans in a report they filed the following day for the office of the prosecutor—the discovery of drugs in Pandu’s checked luggage by a K-9 unit, the report said, had led to his “incidental” arrest.
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What the drug-sniffing dogs homed in on in Pandu’s luggage was an undetermined quantity of Shabu, a street name for methamphetamine hydrochloride in Asia.
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A full inspection of Pandu’s checked luggage revealed a variety of documents with names and telephone numbers of individuals and organizations. These included five Philippine passports in the names of different people, a photocopy of a sixth Philippine passport, and bio-data for five more persons. In time, investigators found that one of Pandu’s areas of specialization was procuring false passports for Hezbollah operatives. They quickly learned that Pandu had traveled extensively, including trips in 1993 to Johor Bahru, a city in Malaysia near Singapore, for the purpose of “trading/human smuggling” and to the Philippines for “processing passports.” They also learned he had traveled to the Philippines for this very purpose at least twice in August and September in the weeks leading up to his arrest in November.
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The urgency, they discovered, was operational. According to Philippine investigators, Pandu reportedly “was on a mission in the country to buy Philippine passports through the assistance of his local collaborators in Zamboanga City. These passports were intended to be used by [the] Lebanon-based international terrorist group known as Hezbollah (Party of God) for an impending terrorist attack at [a] still undetermined country in the Middle East.”
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Pandu’s own use of multiple fraudulent passports prompted Philippine police to request that the court defer his arraignment until they could provide the court with these other identities.
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The day after his arrest, police turned him over to the Bureau of Immigration pending deportation—apparently before local law enforcement officials knew of the ongoing intelligence investigation into his activities on behalf of Hezbollah—but the very next day he made a failed attempt to escape custody and, because of this, was transferred to the custody of the Philippine National Police Criminal Investigation and Detection Group. Between the attempt to escape and the matter of his multiple passports, officials correctly surmised Pandu posed a significant flight risk. Once the interagency memos made their way through the Philippine bureaucracy and it became clear a senior Hezbollah operative had inadvertently been locked up, the focus shifted to questioning the suspect to determine the full scope of his activities and accomplices.
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What officials found was that Pandu played a major role in the failed 1994 truck bombing five years earlier and that he had been an active Hezbollah operative until his arrest—along with serving as a recruiter and document procurer for the group. Within days, Pandu admitted to maintaining arms caches in both Bangkok and metro Manila. Based on the information he provided, Philippine police uncovered a cache on the afternoon of November 23, 1999, including a submachine gun, two semiautomatic pistols, and ammunition. On the same day the weapons cache was found, the revelation that Pandu and his cohorts were planning current operations led to still wider information sharing among intelligence services. Referring to Hezbollah’s Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), Philippine intelligence officials reported that “tri-lateral cooperation with U.S. and Israeli counterparts is being worked out by this Directorate to monitor and neutralize the activities of members of the Islamic Jihad in Southeast Asia.”
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The more these services learned about Hezbollah’s Southeast Asian pursuits, the more they realized just how much they had been missing. Much to their surprise, authorities discovered that such activities
on the part of Iran and Hezbollah were nothing new in the region. As for Pandu Yudhawinata’s journey as a Hezbollah operative, it had begun almost twenty years earlier.

Following the Iranian revolution, the new Islamic Republic of Iran proactively sought to export its version of Shi’a Islam beyond its national borders. Without this ideological underpinning, former president Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani warned, Iran might become nothing more than “an ordinary country.”
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Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, formulated the fundamental belief in this idea and enshrined it in the constitution of the Islamic Republic. So perhaps it should not surprise that two years after the 1979 revolution, Iran was already actively recruiting Islamist firebrands all over the world to study in Iran. An ideal such recruit was Pandu Yudhawinata.

According to a Philippine intelligence report dated December 8, 1999, Pandu traveled to Iran in 1981 “to take part in prayer activities in mosques. He and other participants proceeded to India to attend an Islamic conference for their indoctrination into the Islamic causes. After which, they went to Mecca for the Hajj.”
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But as the investigation into Pandu’s activities grew, so did authorities’ knowledge base on the genesis of his relationship with Iran. Just three months later, an updated intelligence report concluded that Pandu’s relationship with Iran was less benign than originally thought: “Subject’s involvement with the Islamic extremist group [Hezbollah] can be traced back as early as 1981 when he went into hiding in Iran after his expulsion from the university for his Islamic activism in Indonesia.”
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Whatever precipitated his trip to Iran, these and other reports are unanimous on his path after his arrival. Over two years, Pandu received “military, ideological and language training.” He reportedly submitted a request to his Iranian trainers to stay and fight in the Iran-Iraq War, but they denied him on the grounds that Iran already had too many volunteers for the war at home. What his trainers wanted was to send him back home, where he was to function as an agent of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence and Security (MOIS) station operating out of the Iranian embassy in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. So, once his training was complete, “he returned to Indonesia in 1983 and participated full time in mainstream activism and demonstrations against the Indonesian government.”
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Investigators soon found more skeletons in Pandu’s closet, including links to a series of attacks in the mid- to late 1980s: “He also formed a bomb squad with other members of the Indonesian cell of Hizballah. The squad was involved in several attacks in 1985 and 1986. In 1987, the group attempted another bomb attack on two discotheques but one of the bombs accidentally went off prematurely and a member was captured. [Pandu] went back to Iran after this incident and stayed there for four to five years.”
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In retrospect, this group appears to have been more of an Iranian-trained cell of local Islamist militants than a full-fledged Hezbollah cell, at the time.
The members subsequently became Hezbollah activists, raising funds, procuring false documents, conducting preoperational surveillance, and executing attacks on behalf of Hezbollah. This fits an established pattern, whereby Iran established Hezbollah cells not only to serve as a model for jihad against Israel and the West but also as “a proxy for Iranian efforts to export [the] revolution to other Muslim countries.”
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