Hezbollah (30 page)

Sometime after his arrest, Pandu conceded to investigators that while working with Iranian intelligence in the 1980s he had met Yutipum Sakatisha, described as “the most prominent activist in the Thai [Hezbollah] group,” planting the seeds for his own membership and activism on behalf of the group. Yutipum may have served as a reference for Pandu, but his actual recruitment by Hezbollah was facilitated by an individual whom Pandu knew as Abu Mourtada. Abu Mourtada introduced Pandu to a Hezbollah operative named Hisham and to another named Bassam.
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According to Philippine intelligence, Bassam is “possibly a [Hezbollah] apparatus activist who operated around Latin America and Australia.”
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An Israeli intelligence report stated that Bassam is Lebanese and credited him and another operative with carrying out preoperational surveillance of the Israeli embassy in Bangkok prior to the failed 1994 plot targeting the embassy.
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But the more interesting figure is Hisham.

Philippine intelligence identified Hisham as the leader of the Hezbollah network in Southeast Asia and Pandu’s case officer. According to one report, “a certain Hisham was identified as the leader of the Islamic Jihad [Organization], a special attack unit of Hezbollah in Southeast Asia.”
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At one point Philippine officials tied him to a Brazilian passport issued in Beirut in 1997 with the name Mahmud Idris Charafeddine, a Spaniard born in 1961. According to their files, he fit the bill: Fair skinned with European features, he speaks some English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish.
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Israeli intelligence provides a richer picture of a man known by many names, including Jaafer, Mustafa, and Abu al-Ful, along with Hisham.
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By this account, the man we shall call Abu al-Ful is a senior operative within the IJO overseeing Hezbollah’s Southeast Asian networks. Based in Lebanon, he traveled to the region frequently—particularly Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines—using a variety of names and passports. To cover the true reasons for this travel, he engaged in business in the region selling religious books and clothing. He met with local recruits personally, providing them funds to cover logistical and operations costs, and assigning their missions. Hezbollah leadership dispatched operatives to procure authentic and forged passports, explosives, and other equipment; rent safe houses; and spot potential new recruits.
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Philippine authorities concurred with the Israeli assessment, noting that Hezbollah “is set to carry out terrorist attacks in the region.” Operatives used Philippine passports to facilitate their entry into the target countries, and new recruits used them to expedite travel to Lebanon for training.
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As for Pandu, he admitted to Philippine authorities that he was recruited by and worked for Iranian intelligence in Malaysia. For several years his efforts were overseen by intelligence officers from Iran’s MOIS station in Malaysia before he was turned over to Hezbollah. His first handler, according to Philippine reporting on
Pandu’s interrogation, was Reza Afshar Moghadam, who served as a first secretary at the Iranian embassy in Kuala Lumpur. Moghadam, Pandu informed officials, “handled a group of Islamic activists, some of whom were from Zamboanga [on the island of Mindanao in the Philippines], that arrived at the Kuala Lumpur airport on 25 Oct. 1998. The group was to perpetrate a terrorist attack during the APEC [Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation] Summit held in Malaysia.” In time, Pandu reported, Moghadam was replaced by an officer named Hidri, who also served as Pandu’s next handler.
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Looking back, Philippine investigators determined that both Moghadam and Hidri had traveled to Manila in the mid-1990s for unknown reasons. Arriving on January 21, 1995, Moghadam stayed in the Philippines for three days before returning to Kuala Lumpur.
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While the particular reasons for his trip are unknown, it coincided with operational surveillance activity by Hezbollah agents in Singapore and followed efforts to recruit new Hezbollah operatives in the region before sending them to Lebanon and Iran for training. All this occurred following the botched attempt to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok in March 1994.
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Hidri, for his part, was found by authorities to have traveled to the Philippines at least twice in 1997, arriving on January 15 and July 4. Both times, he later stopped in Bangkok (on January 24 and July 10) before returning to Kuala Lumpur.
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This travel occurred at a time when Iranian agents and proxies were known to be conducting surveillance of American diplomatic facilities across the world. In 1997, the Clinton administration sent a “strong message” to Tehran demanding that Iran stop such activities immediately. The surveillance included noting where Americans parked their cars and which routes they traveled to and from work, and was especially prevalent in the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, and the Balkans. According to one official it was beyond “the normal spy vs. spy stuff” and could have been used to prepare attacks targeting Americans.
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These trips also coincided with a variety of Hezbollah activities in the region. Pandu Yudhawinata, for example, traveled to Lebanon for intelligence and military training in 1994 and again in 1997. According to Philippine authorities, “in between and after these trainings, Yudhawinata carried out smaller missions for the Hizballah,” including arms and passport procurement, recruitment of new members, and surveillance of possible terrorist targets.
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According to Israeli officials, investigators uncovered a “direct connection” between the local Hezbollah recruits and Hezbollah operatives in Lebanon, Iran, and Iranian embassies in Thailand and the Philippines.
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Meanwhile another local recruit ran a parallel Hezbollah network, this one in Singapore.

In the early 1990s, five Singaporeans, recruited by a Hezbollah spotter, were tasked with collecting preoperational surveillance of the US and Israeli embassies and a local synagogue. Typical of Hezbollah’s business model, a local operative focused
on recruiting individuals with local citizenship and passports. The new cell was a bonanza for Hezbollah, given that the cell consisted completely of local citizens who blended in easily with the rest of society in the city-state.
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The initial promise fizzled quickly. Afraid of getting caught, the recruits backed out.
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Hezbollah operatives, however, were undeterred and conducted the surveillance themselves, later plotting attacks targeting American and Israeli ships either docked in Singapore or traversing the Singapore Straits or the Straits of Malacca.
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“Among other things,” a Singaporean official noted, “they went to a seafood restaurant in Pasir Gudang in Malaysia for the purpose of capturing video images of the Singapore coastline.”
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In June 2002, Singaporean intelligence released details of the Hezbollah network’s activities in Singapore, acknowledging the activity had begun in the early 1990s and continued at least through 1998.
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The following month press reports mentioned in passing a joint intelligence operation in which the Singaporean and South Korean services “uproot[ed] a Hezbollah operation misidentified publicly as exclusively al Qaeda.”
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Like the 1994 plot to bomb the Israeli embassy in Bangkok, however, this story has much deeper roots.

Once he had spotted and approached the five Singaporeans he hoped to enlist in Hezbollah, Ustaz Bandei introduced his recruits to an important figure in his own chain of command—an Iranian. Authorities never revealed the Iranian’s identity, which they may not have even known, but they were closely focused on his role in the radicalization and recruitment of local Muslims to Hezbollah. It was the Iranian, officials confirmed, who “made [the recruits] pledge loyalty to Allah and obey instructions given to them, which included going to war.”
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From its inception, the Hezbollah cell in Singapore was the brainchild of Iranian intelligence.

The parallels between Iran’s recruitment of Pandu Yudhawinata and Ustaz Bandei, both Indonesian radical Islamists, are noteworthy. Neither was Shi’a, but both left their early affiliations with radical Sunni elements in favor of operating first as Iranian agents and later as key Hezbollah operatives in Southeast Asia. Both spotted and recruited other Southeast Asian Muslims for Iran and Hezbollah, and both participated in Hezbollah plots in the region.

The story of one plot in which Bandei was involved takes us to the ninth-century Borobudur Buddhist temple in Magelang, in the center of the Java island, one of Indonesia’s most visited tourist attractions. Abandoned in the fourteenth century with the decline of the island’s Buddhist and Hindu kingdoms, the magnificent temple was buried under jungle growth and volcanic ash for decades. Rediscovered in 1814, it underwent several renovations over many years and was reopened to the public in 1983 after an eight-year, $20 million renovation.
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In January 1985, Islamic extremists targeted the site in a bombing, claiming this “symbol of Java’s pre-Islamic traditions” represented the worst kind of pagan, infidel influence amid the world’s most populous Muslim country.
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For Ustaz Bandei and his co-conspirators, the temple, located about 250 miles east of Jakarta, was also an apt target for retribution against the government.

The bombing of the Borobudur temple was carried out on January 21, 1985, by a group of radical Sunni Muslims. Eleven bombs were placed among the temple’s
seventy-six domes, nine of which exploded in the middle of the night.
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No injuries were reported, but Abdulkadir Ali Alhabsyi and three others were promptly arrested for the attack. After a quick trial, Abdulkadir and another conspirator were sentenced to twenty years in prison; another participant was sentenced to thirteen years.
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Six years later, in 1991, Abdulkadir Ali Alhabsyi’s brother, the blind Muslim cleric Husein Ali Alhabsyi, would be sentenced to life in prison for his role in the series of bombings in 1984 and 1985, including the Borobudur temple attack. Husein, who was arrested in 1989, was ultimately convicted for subversion, the bomb plots, inciting unrest, and undermining the government and national ideology (he was pardoned in 1999 and released from prison). An advocate for the establishment of an Islamic state in Indonesia, Husein chanted “Allah Akbar” upon hearing his sentence.
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Interestingly, Husein denied the accusations against him while on trial, insisting that the Borobudur temple bombing was the work of Muhammad Jawad, who went by the name Ibrahim and assembled the homemade bombs. According to Husein’s brother, Abdulkadir, Jawad invited Abdulkadir and three other friends to go camping near the temple, and only then persuaded them to bomb the Buddhist shrine in response to the September 1984 shooting of Muslim protesters at Tanjung Priok. Jawad, Abdulkadir insisted, assembled the eleven bombs, each made up of two sticks of dynamite taped together and linked to a timer. Abdulkadir and the others, he insisted, merely placed the devices and pushed a button to activate the timer. Jawad remains a fugitive.
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Just a month after the September 11 attack in the United States, Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong of Singapore revealed that another militant Islamist was still wanted by Indonesian authorities for the Borobudur bombing. In a public address he said this militant recruited several Singaporeans into a terrorist cell.
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At the time, the prime minister’s listeners had no way to know the prime minister was referring to Ustaz Bandei.

The following year, Singapore’s Internal Security Department (ISD) released more detailed information. ISD’s suspicions were stoked in the early 1990s with “a few Hezbollah operatives recruiting a group of Muslims through religious classes in Singapore.” Hezbollah leaders spotted and selected five Singaporeans for special classes, some of which were held in Singapore and some in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, located about fifteen miles north of the city-state. Then, the ISD reported, “they met a teacher, known as Ustaz Bandei, who was wanted by Indonesian authorities for the 1985 bombing of the Borobudur temple in Indonesia.”
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When and how Ustaz Bandei was recruited to Hezbollah is not known, though he “and three other Hezbollah operatives continued to be active in 1998,” according to a senior Singaporean official and the ISD report.
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Other sources, however, noted that senior Hezbollah operations manager Abu al-Ful, also known as Hisham, actively vetted potential Hezbollah recruits on his trips to Indonesia from Lebanon. The report that Bandei, once recruited as a Hezbollah operative himself, brought
several of his potential recruits to Johor Bahru, Malaysia, fits the common pattern of recruitment. Abu al-Ful’s other senior operative, Pandu Yudhawinata, was also Indonesian and brought several recruits to meet Abu al-Ful in Jakarta. According to Philippine information, “Yudhawinata revealed that he was asked by Hisham, leader of the Hizballah Special Attack Apparatus, to recruit additional activists to the organization.”
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Perhaps, following the crackdown after the Borobudur temple bombing, Bandei tired of attacking Buddhist and Christian targets in Indonesia and yearned to engage in jihad with a more global, substantial reach. Pandu had a similar experience, participating in local bomb plots in Indonesia in 1985–87 before returning to Iran for several years.
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By the time he returned to the region, Pandu was working full time for Hezbollah. In Bandei’s case, around the time his co-conspirator and spiritual guide Husein Ali Alhabsyi was sentenced to life in prison, Bandei made the shift from local Islamist militant to regional Hezbollah recruiter and operative. The fact that he, a radical Sunni, would be working with a radical Shi’a organization closely aligned with Shi’a Iran does not appear to have dissuaded Bandei in the least. The final stage of his recruits’ indoctrination into Hezbollah involved their pledging loyalty to the group and to holy war before an unknown Iranian national.
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