Hezbollah Read online

  It was that summer, between June and July 1999, that Pandu was told “to collect operational intelligence on the U.S. [sic] in Jakarta as well as on U.S. diplomats residing in the city.”123 At some point that year Abu al-Ful and his operatives also collected intelligence on a synagogue in Manila. Perhaps in support of these operations, that same year the network procured and cached weapons in Manila and Bangkok.124

  But operational planning within Southeast Asia was only one item on the network’s agenda that summer and fall. Having successfully infiltrated operatives into Israel through Lebanon and Europe in 1996 and 1997, using operatives with foreign passports and nationalities, Hezbollah found it could use the tactic to either execute attacks or collect intelligence for future use.

  Pandu and al-Ful planned to send operatives to Australia at some point, where they would stay long enough to acquire legitimate Australian passports. Later, when flying to Israel, they would appear less suspicious traveling on documents from a Western country friendly to Israel. An alternative notional plan, which was never acted upon, involved “the entry of three Indonesian members to Australia for [a] possible attack on American and Jewish targets during the Olympics 2000.”125

  The core plan was to get operatives into Israel through Australia, like Zainal bin Talib, who had already entered Israel undetected twice, in 1999 and 2000.126 Three others were working-class Indonesians—a porter, a truck driver, and a farmer—recruited by Pandu for this specific mission. He wanted to send them to Lebanon for training first, then to Australia, and ultimately to Israel.127

  The summer before his arrest, Pandu worked frenetically to see this plan through. In August 1999, he met Abu al-Ful in Singapore. Using the name Walid Rahal, Abu al-Ful transferred funds to Pandu’s account to cover his projected expenses during his upcoming extended stay in the Philippines.128 That same month, the two traveled to the southern Philippines, where they visited Talib Tanjil in their quest for “clean” passports. Registering at their hotel, Pandu used the name Martin Yutti while Abu al-Ful called himself Idris Charac.129 Pandu remained in Zamboanga City until he obtained the passports for his recruits. In October, Pandu withdrew $1,000 (exchanged to 39,000 pesos) from a money transfer from Lebanon. While Abu al-Ful provided him funds to cover his expenses in the Philippines, the 39,000 pesos appear to have been intended to pay for the passports, which cost Pandu a total of 24,904.26 pesos.130

  By November, Pandu had collected several passports bearing the names Rumar Catalon Merafuentes, Noel Ahay Gani, Rodney Salazar Ortega, Benjamin Mintan Lipada, and Ismael Balagting Dimson. The assumption is that the first four of these five passports, using Christian-sounding names, were intended for the Hezbollah recruits. The application for Ismael Dimson, investigators later determined, was for a renewal rather than a new passport. The intended destination for the upcoming travel listed on the application for Dimson was Malaysia. “It is quite possible,” a Philippine report later concluded, “that he is part of the Hezbollah group that will operate in Malaysia.”131 On November 4, 1999, police confiscated these passports when they arrested Pandu on drug charges as he landed in Manila en route to Kuala Lumpur via Singapore to provide the passports to Abu al-Ful.132 Of course, with the arrest, the plans never came to fruition.

  The arrest disrupted Hezbollah’s activities in the region, but the impact may have been only temporary. The CIA aggressively combated the group’s activities as well, quietly arresting forty-five Hezbollah members in Southeast Asia in fall 1999.133 Referring to “detainees”—in the plural—Israeli authorities suggested Pandu was not the only Hezbollah operative arrested and interrogated for information on Hezbollah activities in the region.134

  In March 2000, a Philippine report stated—in the present tense—that “terrorist activities are being planned to be carried out by members of suspected Hizballah cells in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, Myanmar, Philippines, Singapore and Australia.” Authorities at the time suspected Hezbollah of plotting bombings of US embassies in Jakarta, Kuala Lumpur, and Makati City, Philippines. According to officials, Israeli embassies and companies as well as synagogues and Jewish communities also topped Hezbollah’s list of targets. Intelligence further suspected the group of continuing to plot maritime attacks, especially against American and Israeli military or merchant vessels traveling through the Singapore Strait and the Strait of Malacca. Last, authorities believed the group had plans to attack the El Al Airlines office in Thailand along with vacation spots frequented by American and Israeli nationals.135

  Hezbollah’s off-the-shelf planning persisted in the region over the next decade. According to media reports, Israel informed Thai authorities in late 2011 that three Hezbollah operatives holding Swedish passports entered the country with the intention of carrying out attacks against Israeli targets.136 In early 2012, Thai police arrested a suspected Hezbollah operative and seized a large cache of chemical explosives in a storage facility outside Bangkok.137 Then, in February 2013, the Bulgarian government concluded that a bus bombing there the previous summer was carried out by Hezbollah, and that one of the operatives carried an Australian passport.138

  Southeast Asian Afterword: Diplomats, Diamonds, and Saudi Hezbollah in Thailand

  Pandu Yudhawinata’s activities in Saudi Arabia hardly constitute the whole story of the connection between the group’s Southeast Asian and Saudi wings. As far back as the late 1980s, Hezbollah was implicated in the murders of several Saudi diplomats in Thailand. These murders can be traced to the September 30, 1988, beheading of four members of Saudi Hezbollah on charges of subversive activity in the oil-rich Eastern Province.139 To avenge these deaths, Saudi Hezbollah “declared war” on anyone employed by “the House of Saud,” a reference to the Saudi government.140

  In October 1988, the terror began when the second secretary at the Saudi embassy in Turkey, Abdel Gahni Bedewi, was shot dead as he returned to his apartment in Ankara, with Saudi Hezbollah claiming responsibility for the attack from Beirut.141 Two months later, in late December, another diplomat, Ahmed al-Amri, the second secretary at the Saudi mission in Karachi, Pakistan, was seriously wounded by a gunshot.142

  Finally, Hezbollah’s Saudi affiliate claimed responsibility for another murder on January 4, 1989. The victim, Saleh Abdullah al-Maliki, the third secretary at the Saudi embassy in Bangkok, was shot outside his home in the Soi Pipat neighborhood. The crime was never solved. Two factions of Saudi Hezbollah claimed responsibility for the murder in statements released in Beirut under the names Soldiers of Justice and Holy War Organization in Hejaz. The statements said the attack was part of a coordinated campaign targeting Saudi diplomats abroad in retaliation for the execution of four of the group’s members in September 1988.143

  But the story gets more complex. Reportedly, Maliki, Bedewi, and al-Amri—the three Saudi diplomats targeted in Thailand, Turkey, and Pakistan—were Saudi intelligence operatives working under diplomatic cover.144 Such intelligence logically suggested that Saudi Hezbollah had somehow infiltrated Saudi intelligence. According to one report, this forced the government “to overhaul its entire security services after apparent infiltration by a new alliance of terrorist groups which resulted in the assassination of two senior intelligence officers.”145

  In February 1990, matters turned bizarre when the murders of four more Saudis were tied to a case involving the theft of some 200 pounds of jewels from the palace of a Saudi prince. The audacious robbery—dubbed “the Great Jewelry Caper” by one publication—led not only to the murders of the Saudi diplomats in Thailand but also to the murder of a Thai jeweler’s family and a diplomatic row that continues today. It involved such bizarre characters as a corrupt Thai police officer convicted of robbery and murder who led an Elvis-style jailhouse rock band while on death row and, oddly enough, helped shape one of Hezbollah’s first operational forays into Southeast Asia. While this case did not immediately lead authorities to Hezbollah, evidence surfaced much later that the group was intimately involved in the cover-up.
/>
  In 1989, around a quarter million Thai foreign laborers worked in Saudi Arabia. One of them, Kriangkrai Techamong, was employed as a gardener at the palace of Saudi Prince Faisal, the son of King Fahd. One day that summer, Kriangkrai snuck into the palace through a second-story window while the prince was on vacation; broke open a safe with a screwdriver; disabled the electronic alarm; and stole 200 pounds of jewels. He stuffed jewels “the size of chicken eggs” into a vacuum cleaner bag. Among them, reportedly, was a nearly flawless 50-carat blue diamond, although the stone was never found or its existence proven. The statistics cited would make the gem larger than the Hope Diamond and one of the largest in the world.146

  There is no debate, however, about the heist itself. The thief shipped the loot by airmail to his home address in the town of Phrae in northern Thailand, then boarded a flight to Thailand. Converting the stones to cash, however, presented a problem. Not only did the Saudi government quickly inform Thai officials of the theft and tip them off to Kriangkrai, but the thief apparently had no sense of the value of the gems he had stolen. Back home, he sold some of the priceless stones to Santi Srithanakhan, a local jeweler, for $30 apiece before being arrested by Thai police in January 1990. He was sentenced to five years in jail, and most of the jewels were recovered.147 But they were not immediately returned to the Saudi prince.

  In March 1990, Thai police handed loads of jewels back to Saudi authorities in a public ceremony aimed at demonstrating the efficiency and professionalism of the Thai police investigation and shoring up ties with the kingdom, which employed so many Thai laborers. But when the Saudis inspected the jewels, they found that 80 percent were missing. Worse still, some had been replaced by crude fakes. By one account, “most of those that had been given back were paste.”148

  In June 1991, Saudi pressure led Thai authorities to reopen the dormant investigation into the heist. Quickly, more of the stolen jewels were found, but not all. Some $127,000 worth of jewels was returned to the Saudis and four people were charged with receiving stolen property, but no actual perpetrators were arrested. Riyadh issued protest after protest, but to no avail.149

  It turns out the policeman who tracked Kriangkrai down, Chalor Kerdthes, had gone rogue. A decade and a half later, in 2006, he would be convicted of conspiring with several other Thai police officers to steal the Saudi jewels. By that time he was in jail impersonating Elvis, sitting on death row for the August 1994 kidnapping and killing of Santi Srithanakhan’s wife and fourteen-year-old son. Chalor apparently thought Santi, the jeweler who had initially bought gems from the thief, still had more jewels in his possession.150

  Meanwhile, the Saudis sent several officials—widely assumed to have been intelligence agents—to Thailand to investigate. Within weeks they were killed. On February 1, 1990, the Saudi consul in Bangkok, Abdullah al-Besri, was shot execution-style in front of the Sriwattana Apartments on Yen Akar Road in the Sathon district.151 Minutes later, two more Saudi diplomats—attaché Fahad Az Albahli and telex operator Ahmed Alsaif—were killed in similar fashion at another location. Two days later, a Saudi businessman, Mohammad al-Ruwaili, was kidnapped and never seen again.152 By one account, Ruwaili was tortured, killed, and buried in a rice field.153 According to another Saudi official sent to investigate the murders and the missing jewels, the three diplomats were shot after learning the names of the people who had stolen the gems from the original thief.154

  Over time, rumors persisted of wives of senior Thai government bureaucrats seen at a charity gala wearing diamonds very similar to those stolen from the Saudi prince.155 Coming after the murders of the Saudi investigators sent to probe the missing gems, the Saudis were none too pleased. Bilateral Thai-Saudi relations plunged, with the Saudi mission to Bangkok being downgraded from ambassador to chargé d’affaires. Riyadh stopped issuing visas to Thai laborers, and the number of Thais working in the kingdom plummeted to a mere 20,000—costing Thailand an estimated $14 billion in lost remittances.156

  Despite its toll on Thailand, the investigation languished. In 2008, the Thai minister of justice personally visited Chalor, the police general who had turned death row inmate, seeking information on other corrupt police officials who may have been involved in the murders of the four Saudis.157

  It took nearly twenty years, but in 2009 the Thai Department of Special Investigation (DSI) issued an arrest warrant for a vaguely described Arab man named Abu Ali. Believed to be “a citizen of a Middle East country,” Abu Ali—likely a pseudonym—was accused of killing only al-Besri.158 Asked to issue an international arrest warrant for its suspect, Interpol informed the Thai government it would first need more complete personal information.159 Even today, investigators suspect the same gang was behind all three murders. According to the DSI director-general, Police Colonel Tawee Sodsong, “officials believed the murders could have resulted from conflicts between Saudi Arabia and other countries in the Middle East,” a veiled reference to Saudi Hezbollah’s track record of targeting Saudi officials.160 According to an Iranian opposition group, the Foundation for Democracy in Iran, the 1990 murders were the work of Iranian-sponsored hit squads.161

  But there is no doubt that corrupt police officers and possibly other criminal elements were also involved in the 1989–90 murders. In January 2010, prosecutors finally arrested five policemen and charged them with the murder of Mohammad al-Ruwaili, the Saudi businessman who disappeared in February 1990 just days after the murder of his three colleagues, the Saudi diplomats.162

  Despite the warrant from DSI for Abu Ali, no one has been arrested for the diplomats’ murders. But clues exist. An Israeli intelligence report, for example, concluded that even before the failed 1994 bombing targeting the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, some of the same Southeast Asian Hezbollah recruits were involved in “contract liquidations” and were suspected “of involvement in the murder of three Saudi diplomats in Bangkok in February 1990.”163 A CIA report from 1990 came to similar conclusions some thirteen years before the Israeli report. In an apparent reference to the Saudi diplomats killed in Thailand in 1989 and 1990, the CIA report concluded, “It is possible that the Islamic Jihad Organization (IJO), a Hizballah element headed by Imad Mughniyah, carried out these assassinations.”164

  Through leaders like Ustaz Bandei and Pandu Yudhawinata, Hezbollah successfully established itself in new territory far from Lebanon. This is especially impressive since most Southeast Asian recruits came from communities of Sunni Muslims. What many view as a regional conflict between Israelis and Arabs had expanded across the continent, reaching even Sunni Muslims on the Pacific Rim. Hezbollah’s reach, however, extends in many directions, including deep into the large Lebanese diaspora in North America, where Hezbollah supporters would engage in a broad scope of financial and logistical support activity for the group.

  Notes

  1. Buenos Aires, Argentina, Investigations Unit of the Office of the Attorney General, Office of Criminal Investigations: AMIA Case, report by Marcelo Martinez Burgos and Alberto Nisman, October 25, 2006 (hereafter cited as Burgos and Nisman).

  2. Ibid., 48.

  3. Ibid., 48–50.

  4. Ibid., 48–49.

  5. Philippine intelligence report, “TIR on Pandu Yudhawinata aka Yudha/Abu Muhammad; Reference: ODI COPLAN PINK POPPY,” December 8, 1999, 6 (hereafter cited as TIR on Pandu Yudhawinata); Burgos and Nisman, 49–50.

  6. Burgos and Nisman, 49; Buenos Aires, Argentina Judicial Branch, AMIA Indictment, Office of the National Federal Court No. 17, Criminal and Correctional Matters No. 9, Case No. 1156, March 5, 2003 (hereafter cited as AMIA indictment).

  7. Agence France Presse, “Death Sentence on Embassy Bomb Suspect Upheld,” June 10, 1997; Reuters, “Thailand Upholds Death Sentence on Iranian Terrorist,” Xinhua News Agency (China), June 10, 1997.

  8. US Department of State, Patterns of Global Terrorism 1998, Washington, DC, April 1999; AMIA indictment, 207–8.

  9. Burgos and Nisman, 49; Philippine intelligence memorandum, Chief of t
he Philippines National Police to the Director for Intelligence, “Development Report re Arrest of Suspected Foreign Terrorist,” November 23, 1999.

  10. Ressa, Seeds of Terror, 129–32; US Department of Defense, Military Commission Proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, “Detainee Biographies: Zayn al-Abidin Abu Zubaydah,” public release, undated; Peter Finn and Julie Tate, “CIA Mistaken on ‘High Value’ Detainee, Document Shows,” Washington Post, June 16, 2009.

  11. Ressa, Seeds of Terror, 129–32.

  12. Ibid.

  13. Philippine intelligence report, “Subject: Pandu Yudhawinata,” March 13, 2000.

  14. Philippine National Police memorandum, Acting Assistant Director for Intelligence to the City Prosecutor regarding the arrest of Mr. Pandu Yudhawitana, November 5, 1999.

  15. Philippine intelligence memorandum, “Development Report re Arrest of Suspected Foreign Terrorist.”

  16. Israeli intelligence report, “Hizballah World Terrorism,” undated, received by the author August 5, 2003.

  17. Ibid.

  18. Statement of Matthew Levitt, Islamic Extremism in Europe.

  19. Philippine intelligence report, “TIR on Pandu Yudhawinata,” 1.

  20. Philippine National Police memorandum, regarding the arrest of Mr. Pandu Yudhawinata, November 5, 1999.

  21. Karl Taro Greenfeld, “The Need for Speed,” Time, March 4, 2001.

  22. Philippine intelligence report, “TIR on Pandu Yudhawinata,” 1, 3, 9–10.

  23. Philippine intelligence memorandum, Director for Intelligence to the Officer-in-Charge, Philippine National Police, “Development Report re: Apprehension of a Suspected Foreign Terrorist,” November 10, 1999.