Hezbollah (32 page)

Nor was Abu al-Ful averse to recruiting non-Shi’a Muslims, despite Hezbollah’s explicit Shi’a self-identification. While preferring Shi’a recruits, an Israeli report concluded, “Hizballah does not hesitate to recruit activists from among Sunni populations as well, despite the differences between the two Muslim religious groups—the Shiite and the Sunni. This was especially prominent in Southeast Asia, where the spotting pool is mostly Sunni and Hizballah’s Islamic Jihad apparatus operated there very intensively.”
⁹⁹

In tandem with their recruitment efforts, Abu al-Ful’s Southeast Asian networks developed into a logistics hub with particular expertise in the procurement of forged and altered travel documents. The importance of such documents for a group like Hezbollah cannot be overstated. In Pandu’s case, he confessed under questioning to “using different passports whenever he carried out different missions for the Hezbollah Special Attack Apparatus.” By the time of his arrest in 1999, Pandu conceded, he had used Indonesian, Malaysian, Nigerian, Pakistani, and Philippine passports.
¹⁰⁰

In 1999, Pandu and Abu al-Ful traveled to Zamboanga City, Mindanao, to procure passports, but their “usual contact,” Philip, was out of the country.
¹⁰¹
In his absence they turned to Talib Tanjil, another of Pandu’s sources for false documents, who agreed to provide the necessary passports.
¹⁰²
Tanjil too was more of a collaborator than a member of the Hezbollah network, but he was certainly sympathetic to its mission. In the 1990s, Tanjil reportedly went to Iran “to study Islam and its dissemination,” and later he accepted tasks from Abu al-Ful such as spotting recruits and procuring weapons, above and beyond his standard services procuring passports for the group.
¹⁰³

Tanjil provided Pandu with at least five passports on that visit and was in the process of procuring six more at the time of Pandu’s November 1999 arrest. Philippine police seized the five passports on Pandu’s person that Tanjil had already provided. But signs suggest Tanjil did not approach his work with optimal stealth, involving both his wife and his girlfriend in his passport procurement business. According to Pandu, payment for the eleven passports was to be sent to Tanjil’s wife’s bank account. And yet at one point that same year, “Tanjil tried to procure three passports with the help of his girlfriend, Arlene ‘Popsy’ Abuda.” That effort failed, however, after authorities detected “irregularities” in the applications, such as multiple birth certificates with the same serial numbers and documents that had clearly been subject to tampering. These included true data and photographs for the intended recipients, but with fictitious names. One of these flagged applications was for a passport bearing the name Diosdado Castro Galvez with the picture and identifying information for Zainal bin Talib, the Malaysian Hezbollah operative, who later did travel to Israel undetected in 1999 and 2000.
¹⁰⁴

In other cases, instead of applying for authentic passports for false identities, Tanjil would buy passports for 2,500 Philippine pesos (about $50) each from anybody willing to sell their authentic passport.
¹⁰⁵
Other procurement agents worked with Tanjil to obtain false documents, such as Zainal Abedin Tan, a Chinese convert to Islam living in the Philippines who drove a three-wheeled cab for a living but moonlighted in the passport business and even helped procure weapons for the Hezbollah network in 1992.
¹⁰⁶
Weapons procurement and storage was an ongoing theme in Hezbollah’s Southeast Asian network. Philippine authorities recovered a variety of weapons and ammunition stored in Manila in 1999. And an assortment of people were enlisted to procure these weapons, including Tanjil’s brother-in-law, Salim Mesilam.
¹⁰⁷

By 1997, Abu al-Ful’s networks were itching to attempt another round of attacks against Israeli, American, and Jewish targets in the region. While Pandu, Zainal bin Talib, Norman Basha, and Salim Mesilam traveled to Lebanon and Iran for various types of training, Abu al-Ful and several of his key lieutenants oversaw operations, primarily from Indonesia and Malaysia. According to investigators, these lieutenants included someone referred to as Haj Zein as well as two key players in the 1994 Bangkok plot: Ibrahim and Osama.

According to Israeli sources, Osama, a Lebanese member of Hezbollah, worked closely with Abu al-Ful to build a network of operatives in Southeast Asia and carry out operations there. He traveled to Indonesia and Malaysia with Abu al-Ful to meet with local recruits and participated in casing potential targets in Indonesia and Singapore.
¹⁰⁸
He also helped develop Pandu into a trained and trusted Hezbollah operative. In a sign of the increasingly significant role Pandu played for Hezbollah in Asia, when Pandu was in Lebanon in 1997 Osama provided him contact numbers for other members of Hezbollah’s terrorist wing, which Pandu entered into his address book in code.
¹⁰⁹
Upon examination, investigators found that Pandu’s address book contained several numbers of particular interest. One was a “trunk line” provided only to members of Hezbollah’s terrorist wing through which they could be connected to one another. This line, investigators noted, “has been associated to the Hezbollah special attack apparatus.”
¹¹⁰
Other telephone numbers of interest included those of Iranian MOIS operatives in Malaysia and several of Pandu’s Hezbollah recruits.
¹¹¹

Ibrahim, the other aide who accompanied Abu al-Ful to the region, maintained direct communication with Imad Mughniyeh. According to one report, Ibrahim “was with Abu Ful and Haj Zein in the Far East in 1997. There are traces of calls he made to Immad Mughaniya.”
¹¹²

Perhaps as part of the planning for Hezbollah’s “Five Contingency Attacks,” and leading up to a series of operations planned for 1998, Abu al-Ful’s network accelerated its operational tempo in summer 1997. In June of that year, Abu al-Ful acquired a new Brazilian passport issued in Beirut under the name Mahmud Idris Charafeddine, which he would soon use for operational travel to the Philippines.
¹¹³
The following month Pandu’s contact in Iranian intelligence, MOIS agent Hidri, traveled to Manila from his station in Kuala Lumpur. It was his second trip to the Philippines in six months and fit an established modus operandi of MOIS support to Hezbollah operatives.
¹¹⁴

In retrospect, investigators would recognize the increased activity as preoperational preparations for a surge in attacks. In Singapore, Ustaz Bandei was joined by several other Hezbollah operatives, including Abu al-Ful, who collected intelligence for a maritime bombing plot targeting US Navy and Israeli merchant ships either docking in Singapore or sailing through the Malacca Straits. According to Singaporean officials, “Ustaz Bandei and three other Hezbollah operatives continued to
be active in 1998.” “The plan,” investigators in Singapore determined, “was to use a small boat packed with explosives and ram it into the target vessel.”
¹¹⁵

Dissatisfied with their rudimentary surveillance in 1995, when they videotaped Singapore’s coastline from a restaurant across the Johor Strait in Malaysia, they now actively searched for a site from which they could launch their attacks. To this end, they took a boat from Johor Bahru, Malaysia, just across the Johor Strait from Singapore, along the coastline and across the Singapore Strait to the Malaysian island of Batam.
¹¹⁶
One island in particular off the coast of Singapore was deemed an especially promising launching point for their explosives-laden skiffs.
¹¹⁷
One of the operatives involved in this plot may have been Zainal bin Talib, the Malaysian who trained in Lebanon with Pandu and who also conducted preoperational surveillance of a synagogue in Singapore around this time.
¹¹⁸
More interesting is that according to Israeli intelligence, Abu al-Ful and his lieutenant Osama both participated in this surveillance operation.
¹¹⁹

Nothing came of the surveillance of the synagogue, possibly because the network was exposed in 1999 or perhaps because circumstances never demanded that the contingency planning be acted upon. Pandu did, in fact, share the plot with his interrogators. According to one report dated December 1999, Pandu “revealed the Hezbollah’s intention to attack Israeli/Jewish targets in Singapore. To this end, operational intelligence was collected about the local synagogue and this assignment was levied on one of the Malaysian recruits in the past year.”
¹²⁰
Singaporean officials took the threat very seriously, however, and developed contingency planning of their own to thwart maritime terror attacks. In 2004, officials from the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Singapore met ahead of a joint military exercise aimed at combating “non-conventional security threats to the maritime environment.”
¹²¹

Meanwhile, Pandu’s network remained active. Pandu made his first trip to the Philippines to procure passports for members of his network in late 1998 using a Malaysian passport. In August 1999, he returned, this time using an Indonesian passport, though he traveled frequently in his pursuit of “clean” passports, including stops in Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.
¹²²

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